Alexander's bridge

University of California • Berkeley

WILLA GATHER COLLECTION

Gift of
MRS. ROBERTON E WILLIAMS

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

BY

WILLA SIBERT GATHER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
fitoetfibe pre^ Cambri&ge
1912

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY WILLA SIBERT GATHER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published April 79/2

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

CHAPTER
I

LATE one brilliant April afternoon Professor
Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut
Street, looking about him with the pleased air
of a man of taste who does not very often get
to Boston. He had lived there as a student,
but for twenty years and more, since he had
been Professor of Philosophy in a Western uni-
versity, he had seldom come East except to
take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson
was standing quite still, contemplating with a
whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn
paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses,
and the row of naked trees on which the thin
sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the
1

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

river at the foot of the hill made him blink a
little, not so much because it was too bright
as because he found it so pleasant. The few
passers-by glanced at him unconcernedly, and
even the children who hurried along with their
school-bags under their arms seemed to find it
perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman
should be standing there, looking up through
his glasses at the gray housetops.

The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had
faded from the bare boughs and the watery
twilight was setting in when Wilson at last
walked down the hill, descending into cooler ,
and cooler depths of grayish shadow. His nos-
tril, long unused to it, was quick to detect the
smell of wood smoke in the air, blended with
the odor of moist spring earth and the saltiness
that came up the river with the tide. He crossed
Charles Street between jangling street cars and
shelving lumber drays, and after a moment of
uncertainty wound into Brimmer Street. The

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

street was quiet, deserted, and hung with a thin
bluish haze. He had already fixed his sharp
eye upon the house which he reasoned should be
his objective point, when he noticed a woman
approaching rapidly from the opposite direc-
tion. Always an interested observer of women,
Wilson would have slackened his pace any-
where to follow this one with his impersonal,
appreciative glance. She was a person of dis-
tinction he saw at once, and, moreover, very
handsome. She was tall, carried her beautiful
head proudly, and moved with ease and cer-
tainty. One immediately took for granted the
costly privileges and fine spaces that must lie
in the background from which such a figure
could emerge with this rapid and elegant gait.
Wilson noted her dress, too, — for, in his way,
he had an eye for such things, — particularly
her brown furs and her hat. He got a blurred
impression of her fine color, the violets she
wore, her white gloves, and, curiously enough,
3

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

of her veil, as she turned up a flight of steps in
front of him and disappeared.

Wilson was able to enjoy lovely things that
passed him on the wing as completely and de-
liberately as if they had been dug-up marvels,
long anticipated, and definitely fixed at the end
of a railway journey. For a few pleasurable
seconds he quite forgot where he was going, and
only after the door had closed behind her did
he realize that the young woman had entered
the house to which he had directed his trunk
from the South Station that morning. He
hesitated a moment before mounting the steps.
"Can that," he murmured in amazement, —
"can that possibly have been Mrs. Alexander ? "

When the servant admitted him, Mrs. Alex-
ander was still standing in the hallway. She
heard him give his name, and came forward
holding out her hand.

" Is it you, indeed, Professor Wilson ? I was
afraid that you might get here before I did. I
4

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

was detained at a concert, and Bartley tele-
phoned that he would be late. Thomas will show
you your room. Had you rather have your tea
brought to you there, or will you have it down
here with me, while we wait for Bartley?"

Wilson was pleased to find that he had been
the cause of her rapid walk, and with her he
was even more vastly pleased than before. He
followed her through the drawing-room into the
library, where the wide back windows looked
out upon the garden and the sunset and a fine
stretch of silver-colored river. A harp-shaped
elm stood stripped against the pale - colored
evening sky, with ragged last year's birds' nests
in its forks, and through the bare branches the
evening star quivered in the misty air. The
long brown room breathed the peace of a rich
and amply guarded quiet. Tea was brought in
immediately and placed in front of the wood
fire. Mrs. Alexander sat down in a high-backed
chair and began to pour it, while Wilson sank
5

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

into a low seat opposite her and took his cup
with a great sense of ease and harmony and
comfort.

"You have had a long journey, haven't
you ? " Mrs. Alexander asked, after showing
gracious concern about his tea. "And I am
so sorry Bartley is late. He's often tired when
he's late. He flatters himself that it is a little
on his account that you have come to this
Congress of Psychologists."

"It is," Wilson assented, selecting his muffin
carefully; "and I hope he won't be tired to-
night. But, on my own account, I'm glad to
have a few moments alone with you, before
Bartley comes. I was somehow afraid that my
knowing him so well would not put me in the
way of getting to know you."

"That's very nice of you." She nodded at
him above her cup and smiled, but there was a
little formal tightness in her tone which had not
been there when she greeted him in the hall.
6

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Wilson leaned forward. "Have I said some-
thing awkward ? I live very far out of the
world, you know. But I did n't mean that you
would exactly fade dim, even if Bartley were
here."

Mrs. Alexander laughed relentingly. "Oh,
I 'm not so vain ! How terribly discerning you
are."

She looked straight at Wilson, and he felt
that this quick, frank glance brought about
an understanding between them.

He liked everything about her, he told him-
self, but he particularly liked her eyes; when
she looked at one directly for a moment they
were like a glimpse of fine windy sky that may
bring all sorts of weather.

"Since you noticed something," Mrs. Alex-
ander went on, "it must have been a flash of
the distrust I have come to feel whenever I
meet any of the people who knew Bartley when
he was a boy. It is always as if they were
7

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

talking of some one I had never met. Really,
Professor Wilson, it would seem that he grew
up among the strangest people. They usually
say that he has turned out very well, or remark
that he always was a fine fellow. I never know
what reply to make."

Wilson chuckled and leaned back in his chair,
shaking his left foot gently. "I expect the fact
is that we none of us knew him very well, Mrs.
Alexander. Though I will say for myself that
I was always confident he'd do something
extraordinary."

Mrs. Alexander's shoulders gave a slight
movement, suggestive of impatience. "Oh, I
should think that might have been a safe pre-
diction. Another cup, please ?"

" Yes, thank you. But predicting, in the case '
of boys, is not so easy as you might imagine,
Mrs. Alexander. Some get a bad hurt early
and lose their courage; and some never get a
fair wind. Bartley " — he dropped his chin on
8

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

the back of his long hand and looked at her
admiringly — "Hartley caught the wind early,
and it has sung in his sails ever since."

Mrs. Alexander sat looking into the fire with
intent preoccupation, and Wilson studied her
half-averted face. He liked the suggestion of
stormy possibilities in the proud curve of her
lip and nostril. Without that, he reflected, she
would be too cold.

"I should like to know what he was really
like when he was a boy. I don't believe he
remembers," she said suddenly. " Won't you
smoke, Mr. Wilson ? "

Wilson lit a cigarette. "No, I don't suppose
he does. He was never introspective. He was
simply the most tremendous response to stimuli
I have ever known. We did n't know exactly
what to do with him."

A servant came in and noiselessly removed
the tea - tray. Mrs. Alexander screened her
face from the firelight, which was beginning to
9

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

throw wavering bright spots on her dress and
hair as the dusk deepened.

"Of course," she said, "I now and again hear
stories about things that happened when he
was in college."

"But that is n't what you want." Wilson
wrinkled his brows and looked at her with the
smiling familiarity that had come about so
quickly. " What you want is a picture of him,
standing back there at the other end of twenty
years. You want to look down through my
memory."

She dropped her hands in her lap. " Yes, yes;
that's exactly what I want."

At this moment they heard the front door
shut with a jar, and Wilson laughed as Mrs.
Alexander rose quickly. "There he is. Away
with perspective! No past, no future for
Bartley; just the fiery moment. The only mo-
ment that ever was or will be in the world !"

The door from the hall opened, a voice called
10

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

" Winifred ? " hurriedly, and a big man came
through the drawing-room with a quick, heavy
tread, bringing with him a smell of cigar smoke
and chill out-of-doors air. When Alexander
reached the library door, he switched on the
lights and stood six feet and more in the arch-
way, glowing with strength and cordiality and
rugged, blond good looks. There were other
bridge-builders in the world, certainly, but it
was always Alexander's picture that the Sun-
day Supplement men wanted, because he looked
as a tamer of rivers ought to look. Under his
tuinbled sandy hair his head seemed as hard
and powerful as a catapult, and his shoulders
looked strong enough in themselves to support
a span of any one of his ten great bridges that
cut the air above as many rivers.

After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his
study. It was a large room over the library,
and looked out upon the black river and the
11

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

row of white lights along the Cambridge Em-
bankment. The room was not at all what one
might expect of an engineer's study. Wilson
felt at once the harmony of beautiful things
that have lived long together without obtru-
sions of ugliness or change. It was none of
Alexander's doing, of course; those warm con-
sonances of color had been blending and mel-
lowing before he was born. But the wonder
was that he was not out of place there, — that
it all seemed to glow like the inevitable back-
ground for his vigor and vehemence. He sat
before the fire, his shoulders deep in the cush-
ions of his chair, his powerful head upright, his
hair rumpled above his broad forehead. He
sat heavily, a cigar in his large, smooth hand,
a flush of after-dinner color in his face, which'
wind and sun and exposure to all sorts of
weather had left fair and clear-skinned.

"You are off for England on Saturday,
Bartley, Mrs. Alexander tells me."

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"Yes, for a few weeks only. There's a meet-
ing of British engineers, and I'm doing another
bridge in Canada, you know."

"Oh, every one knows about that. And it
was in Canada that you met your wife, was n't
it?"

"Yes, at Allway. She was visiting her great-
aunt there. A most remarkable old lady. I
was working with MacKeller then, an old
Scotch engineer who had picked me up in Lon-
don and taken me back to Quebec with him.
He had the contract for the Allway Bridge, but
before he began work on it he found out that
he was going to die, and he advised the com-
mittee to turn the job over to me. Otherwise
I'd never have got anything good so early.
MacKeller was an old friend of Mrs. Pember-
ton, Winifred's aunt. He had mentioned me to
her, so when I went to Allway she asked me to
come to see her. She was a wonderful old lady."

"Like her niece ?" Wilson queried.
13

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Bartley laughed. "She had been very hand-
some, but not in Winifred's way. When I
knew her she was little and fragile, very pink
and white, with a splendid head and a face like
fine old lace, somehow, — but perhaps I always
think of that because she wore a lace scarf on
her hair. She had such a flavor of life about
her. She had known Gordon and Livingstone
and Beaconsfield when she was young, — every
one. She was the first woman of that sort I 'd
ever known. You know how it is in the West,
— old people are poked out of the way. Aunt
Eleanor fascinated me as few young women
have ever done. I used to go up from the works
to have tea with her, and sit talking to her for
hours. It was very stimulating, for she could n't
tolerate stupidity."

"It must have been then that your luck be-
gan, Bartley," said Wilson, flicking his cigar
ash with his long finger. "It's curious, watch-
ing boys," he went on reflectively. "I'm sure
14

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

I did you justice in the matter of ability. Yet I
always used to feel that there was a weak spot
where some day strain would tell. Even after
you began to climb, I stood down in the crowd
and watched you with — well, not with confi-
dence. The more dazzling the front you pre-
sented, the higher your facade rose, the more I
expected to see a big crack zigzagging from top
to bottom," — he indicated its course in the
air with his forefinger, — "then a crash and
clouds of dust. It was curious. I had such a
clear picture of it. And another curious thing,
Bartley," Wilson spoke with deliberateness
and settled deeper into his chair, "is that I
don't feel it any longer. I am sure of you."

Alexander laughed. "Nonsense! It's not
I you feel sure of; it's Winifred. People often
make that mistake."

"No, I'm serious, Alexander. You've
changed. You have decided to leave some birds
in the bushes. You used to want them all."
15

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Alexander's chair creaked. "I still want a
good many," he said rather gloomily. "After
all, life does n't offer a man much. You work
like the devil and think you 're getting on, and
suddenly you discover that you've only been
getting yourself tied up. A million details drink
you dry. Your life keeps going for things
you don't want, and all the while you are being
built alive into a social structure you don't care
a rap about. I sometimes wonder what sort of
chap I 'd have been if I had n't been this sort; I
want to go and live out his potentialities, too.
I have n't forgotten that there are birds in the
bushes."

Bartley stopped and sat frowning into the
fire, his shoulders thrust forward as if he were
about to spring at something. Wilson watched
him, wondering. His old pupil always stimul-
ated him at first, and then vastly wearied him.
The machinery was always pounding away in
this man, and Wilson preferred companions
16

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

of a more reflective habit of mind. He could
not help feeling that there were unreasoning
and unreasonable activities going on in Alex-
ander all the while; that even after dinner,
when most men achieve a decent imperson-
ality, Bartley had merely closed the door of
the engine-room and come up for an airing.
The machinery itself was still pounding on.

Bartley 's abstraction and Wilson's reflections
were cut short by a rustle at the door, and
almost before they could rise Mrs. Alexander
was standing by the hearth. Alexander brought
a chair for her, but she shook her head.

"No, dear, thank you. I only came in to
see whether you and Professor Wilson were
quite comfortable. I am going down to the
music-room."

"Why not practice here? Wilson and I are
growing very dull. We are tired of talk."

"Yes, I beg you, Mrs. Alexander," Wilson
began, but he got no further.
17

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"Why, certainly, if you won't find me too
noisy. I am working on the Schumann 'Car-
nival,' and, though I don't practice a great
many hours, I am very methodical," Mrs.
Alexander explained, as she crossed to an
upright piano that stood at the back of the
room, near the windows.

Wilson followed, and, having seen her seated,
dropped into a chair behind her. She played
brilliantly and with great musical feeling.
Wilson could not imagine her permitting her-
self to do anything badly, but he was surprised
at the cleanness of her execution. He wondered
how a woman with so many duties had man-
aged to keep herself up to a standard really
professional. It must take a great deal of time,
certainly, and Bartley must take a great deal
of time. Wilson reflected that he had never
before known a woman who had been able, for
any considerable while, to support both a per-
sonal and an intellectual passion. Sitting be-
18

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

hind her, he watched her with perplexed admir-
ation, shading his eyes with his hand. In her
dinner dress she looked even younger than in
street clothes, and, for all her composure and
self-sufficiency, she seemed to him strangely
alert and vibrating, as if in her, too, there were
something never altogether at rest. He felt
that he knew pretty much what she demanded
in people and what she demanded from life,
and he wondered how she squared Bartley.
After ten years she must know him; and how-
ever one took him, however much one admired
him, one had to admit that he simply would n't
square. He was a natural force, certainly, but
beyond that, Wilson felt, he was not anything
very really or for very long at a time.

Wilson glanced toward the fire, where Bart-
ley's profile was still wreathed in cigar smoke
that curled up more and more slowly. His
shoulders were sunk deep in the cushions and
one hand hung large and passive over the arm
19

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

of his chair. He had slipped on a purple velvet
smoking-coat. His wife, Wilson surmised, had
chosen it. She was clearly very proud of his
good looks and his fine color. But, with the
glow of an immediate interest gone out of it,
the engineer's face looked tired, even a little
haggard. The three lines in his forehead,
directly above the nose, deepened as he sat
thinking, and his powerful head drooped for-
ward heavily. Although Alexander was only
forty-three, Wilson thought that beneath his
vigorous color he detected the dulling weari-
ness of on-coming middle age.

The next afternoon, at the hour when the
river was beginning to redden under the de-
clining sun, Wilson again found himself facing
Mrs. Alexander at the tea-table in the library.

"Well," he remarked, when he was bidden
to give an account of himself, "there was a long
morning with the psychologists, luncheon with
20

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Bartley at his club, more psychologists, and
here I am. I Ve looked forward to this hour all
day."

Mrs. Alexander smiled at him across the
vapor from the kettle. "And do you remember
where we stopped yesterday?"

"Perfectly. I was going to show you a pic-
ture. But I doubt whether I have color enough
in me. Bartley makes me feel a faded mono-
chrome. You can't get at the young Bartley ex-
cept by means of color." Wilson paused and
deliberated. Suddenly he broke out: "He was
n't a remarkable student, you know, though he
was always strong in higher mathematics. His
work in my own department was quite ordin-
ary. It was as a powerfully equipped nature
that I found him interesting. That is the most
interesting thing a teacher can find. It has the
fascination of a scientific discovery. We come
across other pleasing and endearing qualities
so much oftener than we find force."
21

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"And, after all," said Mrs. Alexander, "that
is the thing we all live upon. It is the thing
that takes us forward."

Wilson thought she spoke a little wistfully.
"Exactly," he assented warmly. "It builds
the bridges into the future, over which the feet
of every one of us will go."

"How interested I am to hear you put it
in that way. The bridges into the future —
I often say that to myself. Bartley's bridges
always seem to me like that. Have you ever
seen his first suspension bridge in Canada, the
one he was doing when I first knew him? I ,
hope you will see it sometime. We were mar-
ried as soon as it was finished, and you will
laugh when I tell you that it always has a
rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest
river, with mists and clouds always battling
about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb
hanging in the sky. It really was a bridge into
the future. You have only to look at it to feel
22

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

that it meant the beginning of a great career,
But I have a photograph of it here." She
drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. "And
there, you see, on the hill, is my aunt's house."

Wilson took up the photograph. "Bartley
was telling me something about your aunt last
night. She must have been a delightful per-
son."

Winifred laughed. "The bridge, you see, was
just at the foot of the hill, and the noise of the
engines annoyed her very much at first. But
after she met Bartley she pretended to like it,
and said it was a good thing to be reminded
that there were things going on in the world.
She loved life, and Bartley brought a great deal
of it in to her when he came to the house.
Aunt Eleanor was very worldly in a frank,
Early-Victorian manner. She liked men of
action, and disliked young men who were care-
ful of themselves and who, as she put it, were
always trimming their wick as if they were
23

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

afraid of their oil's giving out. MacKeller,
Bartley's first chief, was an old friend of my
aunt, and he told her that Bartley was a wild,
ill-governed youth, which really pleased her
very much. I remember we were sitting alone
in the dusk after Bartley had been there for
the first time. I knew that Aunt Eleanor had
found him much to her taste, but she had n't
said anything. Presently she came out, with
a chuckle: * MacKeller found him sowing wild
oats in London, I believe. I hope he did n't
stop him too soon. Life coquets with dashing
fellows. The coming men are always like that.,
We must have him to dinner, my dear.' And
we did. She grew much fonder of Bartley
than she was of me. I had been studying in
Vienna, and she thought that absurd. She was
interested in the army and in politics, and she
had a great contempt for music and art and
philosophy. She used to declare that the Prince
Consort had brought all that stuff over out of
24

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Germany. She always sniffed when Bartley
asked me to play for him. She considered that
a newfangled way of making a match of it."

When Alexander came in a few moments
later, he found Wilson and his wife still con-
fronting the photograph. "Oh, let us get that
out of the way," he said, laughing. "Winifred,
Thomas can bring my trunk down. I've de-
cided to go over to New York to-morrow night
and take a fast boat. I shall save two days."

CHAPTER
II

ON the night of his arrival in London, Alexan-
der went immediately to the hotel on the Em-
bankment at which he always stopped, and in
the lobby he was accosted by an old acquaint-
ance, Maurice Mainhall, who fell upon him with
effusive cordiality and indicated a willingness
to dine with him. Bartley never dined alone
if he could help it, and Mainhall was a good
gossip who always knew what had been going
on in town; especially, he knew everything that
was not printed in the newspapers. The nephew
of one of the standard Victorian novelists,
Mainhall bobbed about among the various
literary cliques of London and its outlying sub-
urbs, careful to lose touch with none of them.
He had written a number of books himself;
among them a "History of Dancing," a "His-
26

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

tory of Costume," a "Key to Shakespeare's
Sonnets," a study of "The Poetry of Ernest
Dowson," etc. Although MainhalPs enthusi-
asm was often tiresome, and although he was
often unable to distinguish between facts and
vivid figments of his imagination, his imper-
turbable good nature overcame even the people
whom he bored most, so that they ended by
becoming, in a reluctant manner, his friends.
In appearance, Mainhall was astonishingly
like the conventional stage - Englishman of
American drama: tall and thin, with high,
hitching shoulders and a small head glistening
with closely brushed yellow hair. He spoke with
an extreme Oxford accent, and when he was
talking well, his face sometimes wore the rapt
expression of a very emotional man listening
to music. Mainhall liked Alexander because he
was an engineer. He had preconceived ideas
about everything, and his idea about Ameri-
cans was that they should be engineers or
27

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

mechanics. He hated them when they pre-
sumed to be anything else.

While they sat at dinner Mainhall acquainted
Bartley with the fortunes of his old friends in
London, and as they left the table he proposed
that they should go to see Hugh MacConneH's
new comedy, "Bog Lights."

"It's really quite the best thing MacCon-
nelPs done," he explained as they got into a
hansom. "It's tremendously well put on, too.
Florence Merrill and Cyril Henderson. But
Hilda Burgoyne's the hit of the piece. Hugh's
written a delightful part for her, and she,'s
quite inexpressible. It's been on only two
weeks, and I 've been half a dozen times already.
I happen to have MacConnell's box for to-
night or there 'd be no chance of our getting
places. There's everything in seeing Hilda
while she's fresh in a part. She's apt to grow
a bit stale after a time. The ones who have
any imagination do."

28

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"Hilda Burgoyne!" Alexander exclaimed
mildly. " Why, I have n't heard of her for —
years."

Mainhall laughed. "Then you can't have
heard much at all, my dear Alexander. It's
only lately, since MacConnell and his set have
got hold of her, that she 's come up. Myself, I
always knew she had it in her. If we had one
real critic in London — but what can one ex-
pect? Do you know, Alexander," — Mainhall
looked with perplexity up into the top of the
hansom and rubbed his pink cheek with his
gloved finger, — "do you know, I sometimes
think of taking to criticism seriously myself.
In a way, it would be a sacrifice; but, dear me,
we do need some one."

Just then they drove up to the Duke of
York's, so Alexander did not commit himself,
but followed Mainhall into the theatre. When
they entered the stage-box on the left the
first act was well under way, the scene being
29

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

the interior of a cabin in the south of Ire-
land. As they sat down, a burst of applause
drew Alexander's attention to the stage. Miss
Burgoyne and her donkey were thrusting their
heads in at the half door. "After all," he
reflected, "there's small probability of her
recognizing me. She doubtless has n't thought
of me for years." He felt the enthusiasm of the
house at once, and in a few moments he was
caught up by the current of MacConnell's irre-
sistible comedy. The audience had come fore-
warned, evidently, and whenever the ragged
slip of a donkey-girl ran upon the stage there
was a deep murmur of approbation, every one
smiled and glowed, and Mainhall hitched his
heavy chair a little nearer the brass railing.

"You see," he murmured in Alexander's ear, •
as the curtain fell on the first act, "one almost
never sees a part like that done without smart-
ness or mawkishness. Of course, Hilda is Irish,
— the Burgoynes have been stage people for
30

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

generations, — and she has the Irish voice. It 's
delightful to hear it in a London theatre. That
laugh, now, when she doubles over at the hips
— who ever heard it out of Galway? She saves
her hand, too. She 's at her best in the second
act. She's really MacConnell's poetic motif,
you see ; makes the whole thing a fairy
tale."

The second act opened before Philly Doyle's
underground still, with Peggy and her battered
donkey come in to smuggle a load of potheen
across the bog, and to bring Philly word of
what was doing in the world without, and of
what was happening along the roadsides and
ditches with the first gleam of fine weather.
Alexander, annoyed by MainhalFs sighs and
exclamations, watched her with keen, half-
skeptical interest. As Mainhall had said, she
was the second act; the plot and feeling alike
depended upon her lightness of foot, her light-
ness of touch, upon the shrewdness and deft
31

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

fancifulness that played alternately, and some-
times together, in her mirthful brown eyes.
When she began to dance, by way of showing
the gossoons what she had seen in the fairy
rings at night, the house broke into a prolonged
uproar. After her dance she withdrew from the
dialogue and retreated to the ditch wall back of
Philly's burrow, where she sat singing "The
Rising of the Moon" and making a wreath of
primroses for her donkey.

When the act was over Alexander and Main-
hall strolled out into the corridor. They met
a good many acquaintances; Mainhall, indeed,
knew almost every one, and he babbled on
incontinently, screwing his small head about
over his high collar. Presently he hailed a tall,
bearded man, grim-browed and rather bat-
tered-looking, who had his opera cloak on his
arm and his hat in his hand, and who seemed
to be on the point of leaving the theatre.

"MacConnell, let me introduce Mr. Bartley
32

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Alexander. I say ! It 's going famously to-night,
Mac. And what an audience! You'll never
do anything like this again, mark me. A man
writes to the top of his bent only once."

The playwright gave Mainhall a curious look
out of his deep-set faded eyes and made a wry
face. "And have I done anything so fool as
that, now? " he asked.

"That 's what I was saying," Mainhall
lounged a little nearer and dropped into a tone
even more conspicuously confidential. "And
you'll never bring Hilda out like this again.
Dear me, Mac, the girl could n't possibly be
better, you know."

MacConnell grunted. "She '11 do well enough
if she keeps her pace and does n't go off on us
in the middle of the season, as she 's more than
like to do."

He nodded curtly and made for the door,
dodging acquaintances as he went.

"Poor old Hugh," Mainhall murmured.
33

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"He's hit terribly hard. He's been wanting
to marry Hilda these three years and more.
She does n't take up with anybody, you know.
Irene Burgoyne, one of her family, told me in
confidence that there was a romance somewhere
back in the beginning. One of your country-
men, Alexander, by the way; an American stu-
dent whom she met in Paris, I believe. I dare
say it's quite true that there's never been any
one else." Mainhall vouched for her constancy
with a loftiness that made Alexander smile, even
while a kind of rapid excitement was tingling
through him. Blinking up at the lights, Main-
hall added in his luxurious, worldly way: "She's
an elegant little person, and quite capable of
an extravagant bit of sentiment like that.
Here comes Sir Harry Towne. He's another
who 's awfully keen about her. Let me introduce
you. Sir Harry Towne, Mr. Bartley Alexander,
the American engineer."
Sir Harry Towne bowed and said that
34

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

he had met Mr. Alexander and his wife in
Tokyo.

Mainhall cut in impatiently.

"I say, Sir Harry, the little girl's going
famously to-night, is n't she?"

Sir Harry wrinkled his brows judiciously.
"Do you know, I thought the dance a bit
conscious to-night, for the first time. The fact
is, she 's feeling rather seedy, poor child. West-
mere and I were back after the first act, and we
thought she seemed quite uncertain of herself.
A little attack of nerves, possibly."

He bowed as the warning bell rang, and Main-
hall whispered: "You know Lord Westmere, of
course, — the stooped man with the long gray
mustache, talking to Lady Dowle. Lady West-
mere is very fond of Hilda."

When they reached their box the house was

darkened and the orchestra was playing "The

Cloak of Old Gaul." In a moment Peggy was

on the stage again, and Alexander applauded

35

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

vigorously with the rest. He even leaned for-
ward over the rail a little. For some reason he
felt pleased and flattered by the enthusiasm of
the audience. In the half-light he looked about
at the stalls and boxes and smiled a little con-
sciously, recalling with amusement Sir Harry's
judicial frown. He was beginning to feel a keen
interest in the slender, barefoot donkey-girl
who slipped in and out of the play, singing, like
some one winding through a hilly field. He
leaned forward and beamed felicitations as
warmly as Mainhall himself when, at the end
of the play, she came again and again before the
curtain, panting a little and flushed, her eyes
dancing and her eager, nervous little mouth
tremulous with excitement.

When Alexander returned to his hotel — he
shook Mainhall at the door of the theatre —
he had some supper brought up to his room,
and it was late before he went to bed. He had
not thought of Hilda Burgoyne for years; in-

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

deed, lie had almost forgotten her. He had last
written to her from Canada, after he first met
Winifred, telling her that everything was
changed with him — that he had met a woman
whom he would marry if he could; if he could
not, then all the more was everything changed
for him. Hilda had never replied to his letter.
He felt guilty and unhappy about her for a
time, but after Winifred promised to marry him
he really forgot Hilda altogether. When he
wrote her that everything was changed for him,
he was telling the truth. After he met Winifred
Pemberton he seemed to himself like a different
man. One night when he and Winifred were
sitting together on the bridge, he told her that
things had happened while he was studying
abroad that he was sorry for, — one thing in
particular, — and he asked her whether she
thought she ought to know about them. She
considered a moment and then said: "No, I
think not, though I am glad you ask me. You
37

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

see, one can't be jealous about things in general;
but about particular, definite, personal things,"
— here she had thrown her hands up to his
shoulders with a quick, impulsive gesture —
"oh, about those I should be very jealous. I
should torture myself — I could n't help it."
After that it was easy to forget, actually to
forget. He wondered to-night, as he poured
his wine, how many times he had thought of
Hilda in the last ten years. He had been in
London more or less, but he had never hap-
pened to hear of her. "All the same," he lifted
his glass, "here's to you, little Hilda. You've
made things come your way, and I never
thought you 'd do it.

"Of course," he reflected, "she always had
that combination of something homely and
sensible, and something utterly wild and daft.
But I never thought she'd do anything. She
had n't much ambition then, and she was too
fond of trifles. She must care about the theatre
38

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

a great deal more than she used to. Perhaps
she has me to thank for something, after all.
Sometimes a little jolt like that does one good.
She was a daft, generous little thing. I'm glad
she's held her own since. After all, we were
awfully young. It was youth and poverty
and proximity, and everything was young and
kindly. I should n't wonder if she could laugh
about it with me now. I should n't wonder —
But they 've probably spoiled her, so that she 'd
be tiresome if one met her again."
Bartley smiled and yawned and went to bed.

CHAPTER
III

THE next evening Alexander dined alone at a
club, and at about nine o'clock he dropped in
at the Duke of York's. The house was sold
out and he stood through the second act. When
he returned to his hotel he examined the new
directory, and found Miss Burgoyne's address
still given as off Bedford Square, though at a
new number. He remembered that, in so far
as she had been brought up at all, she had been
brought up in Bloomsbury. Her father and
mother played in the provinces most of the
year, and she was left a great deal in the care of
an old aunt who was crippled by rheumatism
and who had had to leave the stage altogether.
In the days when Alexander knew her, Hilda
always managed to have a lodging of some sort
about Bedford Square, because she clung tena-
40

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

ciously to such scraps and shreds of memories
as were connected with it. The mummy room
of the British Museum had been one of the chief
delights of her childhood. That forbidding pile
was the goal of her truant fancy, and she was
sometimes taken there for a treat, as other chil-
dren are taken to the theatre. It was long since
Alexander had thought of any of these things,
but now they came back to him quite fresh, and
had a significance they did not have when they
were first told him in his restless twenties. So
she was still in the old neighborhood, near
Bedford Square. The new number probably
meant increased prosperity. He hoped so.
He would like to know that she was snugly
settled. He looked at his watch. It was a
quarter past ten; she would not be home for a
good two hours yet, and he might as well walk
over and have a look at the place. He remem-
bered the shortest way.
It was a warm, smoky evening, and there
41

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

was a grimy moon. He went through Co vent
Garden to Oxford Street, and as he turned into
Museum Street he walked more slowly, smiling
at his own nervousness as he approached the
sullen gray mass at the end. He had not been
inside the Museum, actually, since he and Hilda
used to meet there; sometimes to set out for
gay adventures at Twickenham or Richmond,
sometimes to linger about the place for a while
and to ponder by Lord Elgin's marbles upon
the lastingness of some things, or, in the mummy
room, upon the awful brevity of others. Since
then Bartley had always thought of the British
Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality,
where all the dead things in the world were
assembled to make one's hour of youth the
more precious. One trembled lest before he got
out it might somehow escape him, lest he might
drop the glass from over-eagerness and see it
shivered on the stone floor at his feet. How
one hid his youth under his coat and hugged it !
42

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

And how good it was to turn one's back upon
all that vaulted cold, to take Hilda's arm and
hurry out of the great door and down the
steps into the sunlight among the pigeons —
to know that the warm and vital thing within
him was still there and had not been snatched
away to flush Caesar's lean cheek or to feed the
veins of some bearded Assyrian king. They in
their day had carried the flaming liquor, but
to-day was his ! So the song used to run in his
head those summer mornings a dozen years ago.
Alexander walked by the place very quietly, as
if he were afraid of waking some one.

He crossed Bedford Square and found the
number he was looking for. The house, a com-
fortable, well-kept place enough, was dark
except for the four front windows on the second
floor, where a low, even light was burning be-
hind the white muslin sash curtains. Outside
there were window boxes, painted white and
full of flowers. Bartley was making a third
43

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

round of the Square when he heard the far-
flung hoof -beats of a hansom-cab horse, driven
rapidly. He looked at his watch, and was as-
tonished to find that it was a few minutes after
twelve. He turned and walked back along the
iron railing as the cab came up to Hilda's num-
ber and stopped. The hansom must have been
one that she employed regularly, for she did not
stop to pay the driver. She stepped out quickly
and lightly. He heard her cheerful "Good-
night, cabby," as she ran up the steps and
opened the door with a latchkey. In a kw
moments the lights flared up brightly behind
the white curtains, and as he walked away he
heard a window raised. But he had gone too
far to look up without turning round. He went '
back to his hotel, feeling that he had had a good
evening, and he slept well.

For the next few days Alexander was very
busy. He took a desk in the office of a Scotch
engineering firm on Henrietta Street, and was
44

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

at work almost constantly. He avoided the
clubs and usually dined alone at his hotel.
One afternoon, after he had tea, he started
for a walk down the Embankment toward
Westminster, intending to end his stroll at
Bedford Square and to ask whether Miss Bur-
goyne would let him take her to the theatre.
But he did not go so far. When he reached the
Abbey, he turned back and crossed Westminster
Bridge and sat down to watch the trails of
smoke behind the Houses of Parliament catch
fire with the sunset. The slender towers were
washed by a rain of golden light and licked by
little flickering flames; Somerset House and the
bleached gray pinnacles about Whitehall were
floated in a luminous haze. The yellow light
poured through the trees and the leaves seemed
to burn with soft fires. There was a smell of
acacias in the air everywhere, and the labur-
nums were dripping gold over the walls of the
gardens. It was a sweet, lonely kind of sum-
45

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

mer evening. Remembering Hilda as she used
to be, was doubtless more satisfactory than
seeing her as she must be now — and, after all,
Alexander asked himself, what was it but his
own young years that he was remembering ?

He crossed back to Westminster, went up to
the Temple, and sat down to smoke in the
Middle Temple gardens, listening to the thin
voice of the fountain and smelling the spice of
the sycamores that came out heavily in the
damp evening air. He thought, as he sat there,
about a great many things: about his own
youth and Hilda's; above all, he thought of
how glorious it had been, and how quickly it
had passed; and, when it had passed, how little
worth while anything was. None of the things '
he had gained in the least compensated. In the
last six years his reputation had become, as the
saying is, popular. Four years ago he had been
called to Japan to deliver, at the Emperor's re-
quest, a course of lectures at the Imperial Uni-
46

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

versity, and had instituted reforms throughout
the islands, not only in the practice of bridge-
building but in drainage and road-making.
On his return he had undertaken the bridge at
Moorlock, in Canada, the most important piece
of bridge-building going on in the world, — a
test, indeed, of how far the latest practice in
bridge structure could be carried. It was a
spectacular undertaking by reason of its very
size, and Bartley realized that, whatever else
he might do, he would probably always be
known as the engineer who designed the great
Moorlock Bridge, the longest cantilever in
existence. Yet it was to him the least satis-
factory thing he had ever done. He was
cramped in every way by a niggardly commis-
sion, and was using lighter structural material
than he thought proper. He had vexations
enough, too, with his work at home. He had
several bridges under way in the United States,
and they were always being held up by strikes
47

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

and delays resulting from a general industrial
unrest.

Though Alexander often told himself he had
never put more into his work than he had done
in the last few years, he had to admit that he
had never got so little out of it. He was paying
for success, too, in the demands made on his
time by boards of civic enterprise and commit-
tees of public welfare. The obligations imposed
by his wife's fortune and position were some-
times distracting to a man who followed his
profession, and he was expected to be interested
in a great many worthy endeavors on her
account as well as on his own. His existence
was becoming a network of great and little
details. He had expected that success would
bring him freedom and power; but it had
brought only power that was in itself another
kind of restraint. He had always meant to
keep his personal liberty at all costs, as old Mac-
Keller, his first chief, had done, and not, like
48

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

so many American engineers, to become a part
of a professional movement, a cautious board
member, a Nestor de pontibus. He happened
to be engaged in work of public utility, but he
was not willing to become what is called a
public man. He found himself living exactly
the kind of life he had determined to escape.
What, he asked himself, did he want with these
genial honors and substantial comforts? Hard-
ships and difficulties he had carried lightly;
overwork had not exhausted him; but this dead
calm of middle life which confronted him, —
of that he was afraid. He was not ready for
it. It was like being buried alive. In his youth
he would not have believed such a thing possi-
ble. The one thing he had really wanted all
his life was to be free; and there was still some-
thing unconquered in him, something besides
the strong work-horse that his profession had
made of him. He felt rich to-night in the pos-
session of that unstultified survival; in the
49

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

light of his experience, it was more precious
than honors or achievement. In all those busy,
successful years there had been nothing so good
as this hour of wild light-heartedness. This feel-
ing was the only happiness that was real to him,
and such hours were the only ones in which he
could feel his own continuous identity — feel the
boy he had been in the rough days of the old
West, feel the youth who had worked his way
across the ocean on a cattle-ship and gone to
study in Paris without a dollar in his pocket.
The man who sat in his offices in Boston was
only a powerful machine. Under the activities of
that machine the person who, at such moments
as this, he felt to be himself, was fading and
dying. He remembered how, when he was a .
little boy and his father called him in the morn-
ing, he used to leap from his bed into the full
consciousness of himself. That consciousness
was Life itself. Whatever took its place, action,
reflection, the power of concentrated thought,
50

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

were only functions of a mechanism useful to
society; things that could be bought in the
market. There was only one thing that had an
absolute value for each individual, and it was
just that original impulse, that internal heat,
that feeling of one's self in one's own breast.

When Alexander walked back to his hotel,
the red and green lights were blinking along the
docks on the farther shore, and the soft white
stars were shining in the wide sky above the
river.

The next night, and the next, Alexander re-
peated this same foolish performance. It was
always Miss Burgoyne whom he started out to
find, and he got no farther than the Temple
gardens and the Embankment. It was a pleas-
ant kind of loneliness. To a man who was so
little given to reflection, whose dreams always
took the form of definite ideas, reaching into
the future, there was a seductive excitement in
renewing old experiences in imagination. He
51

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

started out upon these walks half guiltily, with
a curious longing and expectancy which were
wholly gratified by solitude. Solitude, but not
solitariness; for he walked shoulder to shoulder
with a shadowy companion — not little Hilda
Burgoyne, by any means, but some one vastly
dearer to him than she had ever been — his
own young self, the youth who had waited for
him upon the steps of the British Museum that
night, and who, though he had tried to pass
so quietly, had known him and come down and
linked an arm in his.

It was not until long afterward that Alex-
ander learned that for him this youth was the
most dangerous of companions.

One Sunday evening, at Lady Walford's,
Alexander did at last meet Hilda Burgoyne.
Mainhall had told him that she would probably
be there. He looked about for her rather
nervously, and finally found her at the farther
52

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

end of the large drawing-room, the centre of a
circle of men, young and old. She was appar-
ently telling them a story. They were all laugh-
ing and bending toward her. When she saw
Alexander, she rose quickly and put out her
hand. The other men drew back a little to let
him approach.

"Mr. Alexander! I am delighted. Have you
been in London long?"

Bartley bowed, somewhat laboriously, over
her hand. "Long enough to have seen you
more than once. How fine it all is!"

She laughed as if she were pleased. "I'm
glad you think so. I like it. Won't you join
us here?"

"Miss Burgoyne was just telling us about a
donkey-boy she had in Galway last summer,"
Sir Harry Towne explained as the circle closed
up again. Lord Westmere stroked his long
white mustache with his bloodless hand and
looked at Alexander blankly. Hilda was a good
53

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

story-teller. She was sitting on the edge of her
chair, as if she had alighted there for a moment
only. Her primrose satin gown seemed like a
soft sheath for her slender, supple figure, and
its delicate color suited her white Irish skin and
brown hair. Whatever she wore, people felt the
charm of her active, girlish body with its slender
hips and quick, eager shoulders. Alexander
heard little of the story, but he watched Hilda
intently. She must certainly, he reflected, be
thirty, and he was honestly delighted to see
that the years had treated her so indulgently.
If her face had changed at all, it was in a slight
hardening of the mouth — still eager enough to
be very disconcerting at times, he felt — and in
an added air of self-possession and self-reliance.
She carried her head, too, a little more reso-
lutely.

When the story was finished, Miss Burgoyne
turned pointedly to Alexander, and the other
men drifted away.

54

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"I thought I saw you in MacConnell's box
with Mainhall one evening, but I supposed you
had left town before this."

She looked at him frankly and cordially, as
if he were indeed merely an old friend whom
she was glad to meet again.

"No, I've been mooning about here."

Hilda laughed gayly. "Mooning! I see you
mooning! You must be the busiest man in the
world. Time and success have done well by
you, you know. You're handsomer than ever
and you've gained a grand manner."

Alexander blushed and bowed. "Time and
success have been good friends to both of us.
Are n't you tremendously pleased with your-
self?"

She laughed again and shrugged her shoul-
ders. "Oh, so-so. But I want to hear about
you. Several years ago I read such a lot in the
papers about the wonderful things you did in
Japan, and how the Emperor decorated you.
55

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

What was it, Commander of the Order of the
Rising Sun? That sounds like 'The Mikado.'
And what about your new bridge — in Canada,
is n't it, and it 's to be the longest one in the
world and has some queer name I can't re-
member."

Hartley shook his head and smiled drolly.
"Since when have you been interested in
bridges? Or have you learned to be interested
in everything? And is that a part of success? "

"Why, how absurd! As if I were not always
interested!" Hilda exclaimed.

"Well, I think we won't talk about bridges
here, at any rate." Bartley looked down at
the toe of her yellow slipper which was tapping
the rug impatiently under the hem of her gown.
"But I wonder whether you'd think me im-
pertinent if I asked you to let me come to see
you sometime and tell you about them?"

"Why should I? Ever so many people come
on Sunday afternoons."
56

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"I know. Mainhall offered to take me. But
you must know that I've been in London sev-
eral times within the last few years, and you
might very well think that just now is a rather
inopportune time — "

She cut him short. "Nonsense. One of the
pleasantest things about success is that it makes
people want to look one up, if that 's what you
mean. I 'm like every one else — more agree-
able to meet when things are going well with
me. Don't you suppose it gives me any pleas-
ure to do something that people like?"

"Does it? Oh, how fine it all is, your coming
on like this! But I did n't want you to think
it was because of that I wanted to see you."
He spoke very seriously and looked down at
the floor.

Hilda studied him in wide-eyed astonishment

for a moment, and then broke into a low,

amused laugh. "My dear Mr. Alexander, you

have strange delicacies. If you please, that is

57

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

exactly why you wish to see me. We under-
stand that, do we not?"

Bartley looked ruffled and turned the seal
ring on his little finger about awkwardly.

Hilda leaned back in her chair, watching him
indulgently out of her shrewd eyes. "Come,
don't be angry, but don't try to pose for me,
or to be anything but what you are. If you
care to come, it's yourself I'll be glad to see,
and you thinking well of yourself. Don't try
to wear a cloak of humility; it does n't become
you. Stalk in as you are and don't make ex-
cuses. I'm not accustomed to inquiring into
the motives of my guests. That would hardly
be safe, even for Lady Walford, in a great house
like this."

"Sunday afternoon, then," said Alexander,
as she rose to join her hostess. "How early
may I come?"

"I'm at home after four, and I'll be glad to
see you, Bartley."

58

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

She gave him her hand and flushed and
laughed. He bent over it a little stiffly. She
went away on Lady Walford's arm, and as he
stood watching her yellow train glide down the
long floor he looked rather sullen. He felt that
he had not come out of it very brilliantly.

CHAPTER
IV

ON Sunday afternoon Alexander remembered
Miss Burgoyne's invitation and called at her
apartment. He found it a delightful little place
and he met charming people there. Hilda lived
alone, attended by a very pretty and compe-
tent French servant who answered the door
and brought in the tea. Alexander arrived
early, and some twenty-odd people dropped in
during the course of the afternoon. Hugh Mac-
Connell came with his sister, and stood about,
managing his tea-cup awkwardly and watching
every one out of his deep-set, faded eyes. He
seemed to have made a resolute effort at
tidiness of attire, and his sister, a robust, florid
woman with a splendid joviality about her,
kept eyeing his freshly creased clothes appre-
hensively. It was not very long, indeed, before
60

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

his coat hung with a discouraged sag from his
gaunt shoulders and his hair and beard were
rumpled as if he had been out in a gale. His
dry humor went under a cloud of absent-
minded kindliness which, Mainhall explained,
always overtook him here. He was never so
witty or so sharp here as elsewhere, and Alex-
ander thought he behaved as if he were an
elderly relative come in to a young girl's party.
The editor of a monthly review came with his
wife, and Lady Kildare, the Irish philanthro-
pist, brought her young nephew, Robert Owen,
who had come up from Oxford, and who was
visibly excited and gratified by his first intro-
duction to Miss Burgoyne. Hilda was very
nice to him, and he sat on the edge of his chair,
flushed with his conversational efforts and mov-
ing his chin about nervously over his high collar.
Sarah Frost, the novelist, came with her hus-
band, a very genial and placid old scholar who
had become slightly deranged upon the subject
61

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

of the fourth dimension. On other matters he
was perfectly rational and he was easy and
pleasing in conversation. He looked very much
like Agassiz, and his wife, in her old-fashioned
black silk dress, overskirted and tight-sleeved,
reminded Alexander of the early pictures of
Mrs. Browning. Hilda seemed particularly
fond of this quaint couple, and Bartley himself
was so pleased with their mild and thoughtful
converse that he took his leave when they did,
and walked with them over to Oxford Street,
where they waited for their 'bus. They asked
him to come to see them in Chelsea, and they
spoke very tenderly of Hilda. "She's a dear,
unworldly little thing," said the philosopher
absently; "more like the stage people of my
young days — folk of simple manners. There
are n't many such left. American tours have
spoiled them, I 'm afraid. They have all grown
very smart. Lamb would n't care a great deal
about many of them, I fancy."
62

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Alexander went back to Bedford Square a
second Sunday afternoon. He had a long talk
with MacConnell, but he got no word with
Hilda alone, and he left in a discontented state
of mind. For the rest of the week he was
nervous and unsettled, and kept rushing his
work as if he were preparing for immediate de-
parture. On Thursday afternoon he cut short
a committee meeting, jumped into a hansom,
and drove to Bedford Square. He sent up his
card, but it came back to him with a message
scribbled across the front.

So sorry I can't see you. Will you come
and dine with me Sunday evening at half-past

seven ?

H. B.

When Bartley arrived at Bedford Square on

Sunday evening, Marie, the pretty little French

girl, met him at the door and conducted him

upstairs. Hilda was writing in her living-room,

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ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

under the light of a tall desk lamp. Bartley
recognized the primrose satin gown she had
worn that first evening at Lady Walford's.

"I'm so pleased that you think me worth
that yellow dress, you know," he said, taking
her hand and looking her over admiringly from
the toes of her canary slippers to her smoothly
parted brown hair. "Yes, it's very, very pretty.
Every one at Lady Walford's was looking at it."

Hilda curtsied. "Is that why you think it
pretty? I've no need for fine clothes in Mac's
play this time, so I can afford a few duddies for
myself. It's owing to that same chance, by the
way, that I am able to ask you to dinner. I
don't need Marie to dress me this season, so she
keeps house for me, and my little Galway girl
has gone home for a visit. I should never have
asked you if Molly had been here, for I remem-
ber you don't like English cookery."

Alexander walked about the room, looking at
everything.

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ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"I have n't had a chance yet to tell you what
a jolly little place I think this is. Where did you
get those etchings? They're quite unusual,
are n't they?"

"Lady Westmere sent them to me from
Rome last Christmas. She is very much inter-
ested in the American artist who did them.
They are all sketches made about the Villa
d'Este, you see. He painted that group of
cypresses for the Salon, and it was bought
for the Luxembourg."

Alexander walked over to the bookcases.
"It 's the air of the whole place here that I like.
You have n't got anything that does n't belong.
Seems to me it looks particularly well to-night.
And you have so many flowers. I like these
little yellow irises."

"Rooms always look better by lamplight —

in London, at least. Though Marie is clean —

really clean, as the French are. Why do you

look at the flowers so critically? Marie got

65

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

them all fresh in Covent Garden market yes-
terday morning."

" I 'm glad," said Alexander simply. " I can't
tell you how glad I am to have you so pretty
and comfortable here, and to hear every one
saying such nice things about you. You Ve got
awfully nice friends," he added humbly, pick-
ing up a little jade elephant from her desk.
"Those fellows are all very loyal, even Main-
hall. They don't talk of any one else as they
do of you."

Hilda sat down on the couch and said seri-
ously: "I've a neat little sum in the bank,
too, now, and I own a mite of a hut in Gal-
way. It 's not worth much, but I love it. I Ve
managed to save something every year, and
that with helping my three sisters now and then,
and tiding poor Cousin Mike over bad seasons.
He 's that gifted, you know, but he will drink
and loses more good engagements than other
fellows ever get. And I Ve traveled a bit, too."
66

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Marie opened the door and smilingly an-
nounced that dinner was served.

"My dining-room," Hilda explained, as she
led the way, "is the tiniest place you have ever
seen."

It was a tiny room, hung all round with
French prints, above which ran a shelf full of
china. Hilda saw Alexander look up at it.

"It's not particularly rare," she said, "but
some of it was my mother's. Heaven knows
how she managed to keep it whole, through all
our wanderings, or in what baskets and bundles
and theatre trunks it has n't been stowed away.
We always had our tea out of those blue cups
when I was a little girl, sometimes in the queer-
est lodgings, and sometimes on a trunk at the
theatre — queer theatres, for that matter."

It was a wonderful little dinner. There was

watercress soup, and sole, and a delightful

omelette stuffed with mushrooms and truffles,

and two small rare ducklings, and artichokes,

67

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

and a dry yellow Rhone wine of which Bartley
had always been very fond. He drank it ap-
preciatively and remarked that there was still
no other he liked so well.

"I have some champagne for you, too. I
don't drink it myself, but I like to see it behave
when it 's poured. There is nothing else that
looks so jolly."

"Thank you. But I don't like it so well as
this." Bartley held the yellow wine against the
light and squinted into it as he turned the glass
slowly about. "You have traveled, you say. ,
Have you been in Paris much these late years? "

Hilda lowered one of the candle-shades care-
fully. "Oh, yes, I go over to Paris often.
There are few changes in the old Quarter.
Dear old Madame Anger is dead — but per-
haps you don't remember her?"

"Don't I, though! I'm so sorry to hear it.
How did her son turn out? I remember how
she saved and scraped for him, and how he
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ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

always lay abed till ten o'clock. He was the
laziest fellow at the Beaux Arts; and that 's
saying a good deal."

"Well, he is still clever and lazy. They say
he is a good architect when he will work. He 's
a big, handsome creature, and he hates Ameri-
cans as much as ever. But Angel — do you
remember Angel?"

"Perfectly. Did she ever get back to Brit-
tany and her bains de mer ?"

"Ah, no. Poor Angel! She got tired of
cooking and scouring the coppers in Madame
Anger's little kitchen, so she ran away with a
soldier, and then with another soldier. Too
bad! She still lives about the Quarter, and,
though there is always a soldat, she has be-
come a blanchisseuse de fin. She did my
blouses beautifully the last time I was there,
and was so delighted to see me again. I gave
her all my old clothes, even my old hats,
though she always wears her Breton head-
69

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

dress. Her hair is still like flax, and her
blue eyes are just like a baby's, and she has
the same three freckles on her little nose,
and talks about going back to her bains de

Bartley looked at Hilda across the yellow
light of the candles and broke into a low, happy
laugh. "How jolly it was being young, Hilda!
Do you remember that first walk we took to-
gether in Paris? We walked down to the Place
Saint-Michel to buy some lilacs. Do you re-
member how sweet they smelled?"

"Indeed I do. Come, we '11 have our coffee in
the other room, and you can smoke."

Hilda rose quickly, as if she wished to change
the drift of their talk, but Bartley found it
pleasant to continue it.

"What a warm, soft spring evening that

was," he went on, as they sat down in the study

with the coffee on a little table between them ;

"and the sky, over the bridges, was just the

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ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

color of the lilacs. We walked on down by the
river, didn't we?"

Hilda laughed and looked at him question-
ingly. He saw a gleam in her eyes that he re-
membered even better than the episode he was
recalling.

"I think we did," she answered demurely.
" It was on the Quai we met that woman who
was crying so bitterly. I gave her a spray of
lilac, I remember, and you gave her a franc.
I was frightened at your prodigality."

" I expect it was the last franc I had. What a
strong brown face she had, and very tragic. She
looked at us with such despair and longing, out
from under her black shawl. What she wanted
from us was neither our flowers nor our francs,
but just our youth. I remember it touched me
so. I would have given her some of mine off
my back, if I could. I had enough and to spare
then," Bartley mused, and looked thought-
fully at his cigar.

71

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

They were both remembering what the
woman had said when she took the money:
"God give you a happy love!" It was not in
the ingratiating tone of the habitual beggar : it
had come out of the depths of the poor crea-
ture's sorrow, vibrating with pity for their
youth and despair at the terribleness of human
life; it had the anguish of a voice of prophecy.
Until she spoke, Bartley had not realized that
he was in love. The strange woman, and her
passionate sentence that rang out so sharply,
had frightened them both. They went home
sadly with the lilacs, back to the Rue Saint-
Jacques, walking very slowly, arm in arm.
When they reached the house where Hilda
lodged, Bartley went across the court with her,
and up the dark old stairs to the third landing;
and there he had kissed her for the first time.
He had shut his eyes to give him the courage,
he remembered, and she had trembled so —

Bartley started when Hilda rang the little
72

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

bell beside her. "Dear me, why did you do
that ? I had quite forgotten — I was back
there. It was very jolly," he murmured lazily,
as Marie came in to take away the coffee.

Hilda laughed and went over to the piano.
"Well, we are neither of us twenty now, you
know. Have I told you about my new play?
Mac is writing one; really for me this time.
You see, I'm coming on."

" I Ve seen nothing else. What kind of a part
is it? Shall you wear yellow gowns? I hope

so."

He was looking at her round, slender figure,
as she stood by the piano, turning over a pile of
music, and he felt the energy in every line of it.

"No, it is n't a dress-up part. He does n't
seem to fancy me in fine feathers. He says I
ought to be minding the pigs at home, and
I suppose I ought. But he's given me some
good Irish songs. Listen."

She sat down at the piano and sang. When
73

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

she finished, Alexander shook himself out of a
reverie.

"Sing 'The Harp that Once/ Hilda. You
used to sing it so well."

"Nonsense. Of course I can't really sing,
except the way my mother and grandmother
did before me. Most actresses nowadays learn
to sing properly, so I tried a master ; but he
confused me, just!"

Alexander laughed. "All the same, sing it,
Hilda."

Hilda started up from the stool and moved ,
restlessly toward the window. " It 's really too
warm in this room to sing. Don't you feel it? "

Alexander went over and opened the window
for her. "Are n't you afraid to let the wind
low like that on your neck? Can't I get a
scarf or something?"

"Ask a theatre lydy if she 's afraid of drafts ! "
Hilda laughed. "But perhaps, as I'm so warm
— give me your handkerchief. There, just in
74

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

front." He slipped the corners carefully under
her shoulder-straps. "There, that will do. It
looks like a bib." She pushed his hand away
quickly and stood looking out into the deserted
square. "Isn't London a tomb on Sunday
night?"

Alexander caught the agitation in her voice.
He stood a little behind her, and tried to steady
himself as he said: "It's soft and misty. See
how white the stars are."

For a long time neither Hilda nor Bartley
spoke. They stood close together, looking out
into the wan, watery sky, breathing always
more quickly and lightly, and it seemed as if
All the clocks in the world had stopped. Sud-
denly he moved the clenched hand he held
behind him and dropped it violently at his side.
He felt a tremor run through the slender yellow
figure in front of him.

She caught his handkerchief from her throat
and thrust it at him without turning round.
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ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"Here, take it. You must go now, Bartley.
Good-night."

Bartley leaned over her shoulder, without
touching her, and whispered in her ear: "You
are giving me a chance?"

"Yes. Take it and go. This is n't fair, you
know. Good-night."

Alexander unclenched the two hands at his
sides. With one he threw down the window
and with the other — still standing behind her
— he drew her back against him.

She uttered a little cry, threw her arms over
her head, and drew his face down to hers.
"Are you going to let me love you a little,
Bartley?" she whispered.

CHAPTER
V

IT was the afternoon of the day before Christ-
mas. Mrs Alexander had been driving about
all the morning, leaving presents at the houses
of her friends. She lunched alone, and as she rose
from the table she spoke to the butler : " Thomas,
I am going down to the kitchen now to see
Norah. In half an hour you are to bring the
greens up from the cellar and put them in the
library. Mr. Alexander will be home at three
to hang them himself. Don't forget the step-
ladder, and plenty of tacks and string. You
may bring the azaleas upstairs. Take the white
one to Mr. Alexander's study. Put the two
pink ones in this room, and the red one in the
drawing-room."

A little before three o'clock Mrs. Alexander
went into the library to see that everything was
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ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

ready. She pulled the window shades high, for
the weather was dark and stormy, and there
was little light, even in the streets. A foot of
snow had fallen during the morning, and the
wide space over the river was thick with flying
flakes that fell and wreathed the masses of
floating ice. Winifred was standing by the
window when she heard the front door open.
She hurried to the hall as Alexander came
stamping in, covered with snow. He kissed her
joyfully and brushed away the snow that fell
on her hair.

"I wish I had asked you to meet me at the
office and walk home with me, Winifred. The
Common is beautiful. The boys have swept
the snow off the pond and are skating furiously.
Did the cyclamens come?"

"An hour ago. What splendid ones! But
are n't you frightfully extravagant?"

"Not for Christmas-time. I'll go upstairs
and change my coat. I shall be down in a
78

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

moment. Tell Thomas to get everything
ready."

When Alexander reappeared, he took his
wife's arm and went with her into the library.
"When did the azaleas get here? Thomas has
got the white one in my room."

"I told him to put it there."

"But, I say, it's much the finest of the lot!"

" That 's why I had it put there. There is too
much color in that room for a red one, you
know."

Bartley began to sort the greens. "It looks
very splendid there, but I feel piggish to have
it. However, we really spend more time there
than anywhere else in the house. Will you
hand me the holly?"

He climbed up the stepladder, which creaked
under his weight, and began to twist the tough
stems of the holly into the framework of the
chandelier.

"I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from
79

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Wilson, this morning, explaining his telegram.
He is coming on because an old uncle up in Veiv
mont has conveniently died and left Wilson a
little money — something like ten thousand.
He 's coming on to settle up the estate. Won't
it be jolly to have him?"

"And how fine that he's come into a little
money. I can see him posting down State
Street to the steamship offices. He will get a
good many trips out of that ten thousand.
What can have detained him? I expected him
here for luncheon."

"Those trains from Albany are always late.
He'll be along sometime this afternoon. And
now, don't you want to go upstairs and lie down
for an hour? You Ve had a busy morning and I
don't want you to be tired to-night."

After his wife went upstairs Alexander

worked energetically at the greens for a few

moments. Then, as he was cutting off a length

of string, he sighed suddenly and sat down,

80

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

staring out of the window at the snow. The
animation died out of his face, but in his eyes
there was a restless light, a look of apprehension
and suspense. He kept clasping and unclasping
his big hands as if he were trying to realize
something. The clock ticked through the min-
utes of a half -hour and the afternoon outside
began to thicken and darken turbidly. Alex-
ander, since he first sat down, had not changed
his position. He leaned forward, his hands be-
tween his knees, scarcely breathing, as if he
were holding himself away from his surround-
ings, from the room, and from the very chair in
which he sat, from everything except the wild
eddies of snow above the river on which his
eyes were fixed with feverish intentness, as
if he were trying to project himself thither.
When at last Lucius Wilson was announced,
Alexander sprang eagerly to his feet and hur-
ried to meet his old instructor.
"Hello, Wilson. What luck! Come into the
81

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

library. We are to have a lot of people to din-
ner to-night, and Winifred 's lying down. You
will excuse her, won't you ? And now what
about yourself? Sit down and tell me every-
thing."

"I think I'd rather move about, if you don't
mind. I 've been sitting in the train for a week,
it seems to me." Wilson stood before the fire
with his hands behind him and looked about
the room. "You have been busy. Bartley, if
I'd had my choice of all possible places in
which to spend Christmas, your house would
certainly be the place I 'd have chosen. Happy
people do a great deal for their friends. A
house like this throws its warmth out. I felt
it distinctly as I was coming through the
Berkshires. I could scarcely believe that I was
to see Mrs. Bartley again so soon."

"Thank you, Wilson. She'll be as glad to
see you. Shall we have tea now? I'll ring for
Thomas to clear away this litter. Winifred
82

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

says I always wreck the house when I try to do
anything. Do you know, I am quite tired.
Looks as if I were not used to work, does n't
it?" Alexander laughed and dropped into a
chair. "You know, I'm sailing the day after
New Year's."

"Again? Why, you've been over twice since
I was here in the spring, have n't you?"

"Oh, I was in London about ten days in
the summer. Went to escape the hot weather
more than anything else. I shan't be gone
more than a month this time. Winifred and I
have been up in Canada for most of the au-
tumn. That Moorlock Bridge is on my back
all the time. I never had so much trouble with
a job before." Alexander moved about rest-
lessly and fell to poking the fire.

"Have n't I seen in the papers that there is
some trouble about a tidewater bridge of yours
in New Jersey?"

"Oh, that does n't amount to anything. It's
83

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

held up by a steel strike. A bother, of course,
but the sort of thing one is always having to put
up with. But the Moorlock Bridge is a con-
tinual anxiety. You see, the truth is, we are
having to build pretty well to the strain limit
up there. They've crowded me too much on
the cost. It's all very well if everything goes
well, but these estimates have never been used
for anything of such length before. However,
there's nothing to be done. They hold me to
the scale I 've used in shorter bridges. The last
thing a bridge commission cares about is the
kind of bridge you build."

When Bartley had finished dressing for
dinner he went into his study, where he
found his wife arranging flowers on his writ-
ing-table.

"These pink roses just came from Mrs. Hast-
ings," she said, smiling, "and I am sure she
meant them for you."

84

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Bartley looked about with an air of satisfac-
tion at the greens and the wreaths in the win-
dows. " Have you a moment, Winifred? I have
just now been thinking that this is our twelfth
Christmas. Can you realize it?" He went up
to the table and took her hands away from the
flowers, drying them with his pocket handker-
chief. "They've been awfully happy ones, all
of them, haven't they?" He took her in his
arms and bent back, lifting her a little and giv-
ing her a long kiss. "You are happy, aren't
you, Winifred? More than anything else in
the world, I want you to be happy. Some-
times, of late, I've thought you looked as if
you were troubled."

"No; it's only when you are troubled and
harassed that I feel worried, Bartley. I wish
you always seemed as you do to-night. But
you don't, always." She looked earnestly and
inquiringly into his eyes.

Alexander took her two hands from his shoul-
85

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

ders and swung them back and forth in his
own, laughing his big blond laugh.

"I'm growing older, my dear; that's what
you feel. Now, may I show you something?
I meant to save them until to-morrow, but I
want you to wear them to-night." He took
a little leather box out of his pocket and
opened it. On the white velvet lay two long
pendants of curiously worked gold, set with
pearls. Winifred looked from the box to Bart-
ley and exclaimed: —

"Where did you ever find such gold work,
Bartley?"

"It 'sold Flemish. Is n't it fine?"

"They are the most beautiful things, dear.
But, you know, I never wear earrings."

"Yes, yes, I know. But I want you to wear
them. I have always wanted you to. So few
women can. There must be a good ear, to
begin with, and a nose" — he waved his hand
— "above reproach. Most women look silly
86

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

in them. They go only with faces like yours
— very, very proud, and just a little hard."

Winifred laughed as she went over to the
mirror and fitted the delicate springs to the
lobes of her ears. "Oh, Bartley, that old fool-
ishness about my being hard. It really hurts
my feelings. But I must go down now. Peo-
ple are beginning to come."

Bartley drew her arm about his neck and went
to the door with her. "Not hard to me, Wini-
fred," he whispered. " Never, never hard to me."

Left alone, he paced up and down his study.
He was at home again, among all the dear famil-
iar things that spoke to him of so many happy
years. His house to-night would be full of
charming people, who liked and admired him.
Yet all the time, underneath his pleasure
and hopefulness and satisfaction, he was con-
scious of the vibration of an unnatural ex-
citement. Amid this light and warmth and
friendliness, he sometimes started and shud-
87

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

dered, as if some one had stepped on his grave.
Something had broken loose in him of which
he knew nothing except that it was sullen and
powerful, and that it wrung and tortured him.
Sometimes it came upon him softly, in enervat-
ing reveries. Sometimes it battered him like
the cannon rolling in the hold of the vessel.
Always, now, it brought with it a sense of
quickened life, of stimulating danger. To-night
it came upon him suddenly, as he was walking
the floor, after his wife left him. It seemed im-
possible; he could not believe it. He glanced
entreatingly at the door, as if to call her back.
He heard voices in the hall below, and knew that
he must go down. Going over to the window,
he looked out at the lights across the river. '
How could this happen here, in his own house,
among the things he loved? What was it that
reached in out of the darkness and thrilled him?
As he stood there he had a feeling that he would
never escape. He shut his eyes and pressed his
88

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

forehead against the cold window glass, breath-
ing in the chill that came through it. "That
this," he groaned, "that this should have
happened to me I "

On New Year's day a thaw set in, and during
the night torrents of rain fell. In the morning,
the morning of Alexander's departure for
England, the river was streaked with fog and
the rain drove hard against the windows of the
breakfast-room. Alexander had finished his
coffee and was pacing up and down. His wife
sat at the table, watching him. She was pale
and unnaturally calm. When Thomas brought
the letters, Bartley sank into his chair and ran
them over rapidly.

"Here's a note from old Wilson. He's safe
back at his grind, and says he had a bully time.
*The memory of Mrs. Bartley will make my
whole winter fragrant.' Just like him. He will
go on getting measureless satisfaction out of
89

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

you by his study fire. What a man he is for
looking on at life! " Bartley sighed, pushed the
letters back impatiently, and went over to the
window. "This is a nasty sort of day to sail.
I 've a notion to call it off. Next week would be
time enough."

"That would only mean starting twice. It
wouldn't really help you out at all," Mrs.
Alexander spoke soothingly. " And you 'd come
back late for all your engagements."

Bartley began jingling some loose coins in his
pocket. "I wish things would let me rest.-
I 'm tired of work, tired of people, tired of trail-
ing about." He looked out at the storm-
beaten river.

Winifred came up behind him and put a hand
on his shoulder. "That 's what you always say,
poor Bartley! At bottom you really like all
these things. Can't you remember that? "

He put his arm about her. "All the same,
life runs smoothly enough with some people,
90

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

and with me it 's always a messy sort of patch-
work. It's like the song; peace is where I am
not. How can you face it all with so much
fortitude? "

She looked at him with that clear gaze which
Wilson had so much admired, which he had felt
implied such high confidence and fearless pride.
"Oh, I faced that long ago, when you were on
your first bridge, up at old Allway . I knew then
that your paths were not to be paths of peace,
but I decided that I wanted to follow them."

Bartley and his wife stood silent for a long
time; the fire crackled in the grate, the rain
beat insistently upon the windows, and the
sleepy Angora looked up at them curiously.

Presently Thomas made a discreet sound at
the door. "Shall Edward bring down your
trunks, sir?"

"Yes; they are ready. Tell him not to for-
get the big portfolio on the study table."

Thomas withdrew, closing the door softly.
91

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Bartley turned away from his wife, still holding
her hand. "It never gets any easier, Winifred."
They both started at the sound of the car-
riage on the pavement outside. Alexander sat
down and leaned his head on his hand. His
wife bent over him. "Courage," she said gayly.
Bartley rose and rang the bell. Thomas brought
him his hat and stick and ulster. At the
sight of these, the supercilious Angora moved
restlessly, quitted her red cushion by the fire,
and came up, waving her tail in vexation at
these ominous indications of change. Alex?
ander stooped to stroke her, and then plunged
into his coat and drew on his gloves. His wife
held his stick, smiling. Bartley smiled too,
and his eyes cleared. "I'll work like the devil,
Winifred, and be home again before you realize
I've gone." He kissed her quickly several
times, hurried out of the front door into the
rain, and waved to her from the carriage win-
dow as the driver was starting his melan-
92

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

choly, dripping black horses. Alexander sat
with his hands clenched on his knees. As the
carriage turned up the hill, he lifted one
hand and brought it down violently. "This
time" — he spoke aloud and through his set
teeth — "this time I'm going to end it!"

On the afternoon of the third day out,
Alexander was sitting well to the stern, on the
windward side where the chairs were few, his
rugs over him and the collar of his fur-lined
coat turned up about his ears. The weather had
so far been dark and raw. For two hours he
had been watching the low, dirty sky and the
beating of the heavy rain upon the iron-colored
sea. There was a long, oily swell that made
exercise laborious. The decks smelled of damp
woolens, and the air was so humid that drops of
moisture kept gathering upon his hair and mus-
tache. He seldom moved except to brush them
away. The great open spaces made him pas-

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

sive and the restlessness of the water quieted
him. He intended during the voyage to de-
cide upon a course of action, but he held all
this away from him for the present and lay in
a blessed gray oblivion. Deep down in him
somewhere his resolution was weakening and
strengthening, ebbing and flowing. The thing
that perturbed him went on as steadily as his
pulse, but he was almost unconscious of it. He
was submerged in the vast impersonal grayness
about him, and at intervals the sidelong roll of
the boat measured off time like the ticking of a
clock. He felt released from everything that
troubled and perplexed him. It was as if he had
tricked and outwitted torturing memories, had
actually managed to get on board without them. •
He thought of nothing at all. If his mind now
and again picked a face out of the grayness,
it was Lucius Wilson's, or the face of an old
schoolmate, forgotten for years; or it was the
slim outline of a favorite greyhound he used
94

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

to hunt jack -rabbits with when he was a
boy.

Toward six o'clock the wind rose and tugged
at the tarpaulin and brought the swell higher.
After dinner Alexander came back to the wet
deck, piled his damp rugs over him again, and
sat smoking, losing himself in the obliterating
blackness and drowsing in the rush of the gale.
Before he went below a few bright stars were
pricked off between heavily moving masses of
cloud.

The next morning was bright and mild, with
a fresh breeze. Alexander felt the need of exer-
cise even before he came out of his cabin. When
he went on deck the sky was blue and blinding,
with heavy whiffs of white cloud, smoke-colored
at the edges, moving rapidly across it. The
water was roughish, a cold, clear indigo break-
ing into whitecaps. Bartley walked for two
hours, and then stretched himself in the sun
until lunch-time.

95

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

In the afternoon he wrote a long letter to
Winifred. Later, as he walked the deck through
a splendid golden sunset, his spirits rose contin-
ually. It was agreeable to come to himself
again after several days of numbness and tor-
por. He stayed out until the last tinge of violet
had faded from the water. There was literally
a taste of life on his lips as he sat down to din^
ner and ordered a bottle of champagne. He was
late in finishing his dinner, and drank rather
more wine than he had meant to. When he
went above, the wind had risen and the deck
was almost deserted. As he stepped out of the
door a gale lifted his heavy fur coat about his
shoulders. He fought his way up the deck with
keen exhilaration. The moment he stepped, al-
most out of breath, behind the shelter of the
stern, the wind was cut off, and he felt, like a
rush of warm air, a sense of close and intimate
companionship. He started back and tore his
coat open as if something warm were actually
96

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

clinging to him beneath it. He hurried up the
deck and went into the saloon parlor, full of
women who had retreated thither from the
sharp wind. He threw himself upon them.
He talked delightfully to the older ones and
played accompaniments for the younger ones
until the last sleepy girl had followed her
mother below. Then he went into the smok-
ing-room. He played bridge until two o'clock
in the morning, and managed to lose a con-
siderable sum of money without really noticing
that he was doing so.

After the break of one fine day the weather
was pretty consistently dull. When the low sky
thinned a trifle, the pale white spot of a sun
did no more than throw a bluish lustre on the
water, giving it the dark brightness of newly
cut lead. Through one after another of those
gray days Alexander drowsed and mused,
drinking in the grateful moisture. But the
complete peace of the first part of the voyage
97

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

was over. Sometimes he rose suddenly from his
chair as if driven out, and paced the deck for
hours. People noticed his propensity for walk-
ing in rough weather, and watched him curi-
ously as he did his rounds. From his abstrac-
tion and the determined set of his jaw, they
fancied he must be thinking about his bridge.
Every one had heard of the new cantilever
bridge in Canada.

But Alexander was not thinking about his
work. After the fourth night out, when his will
suddenly softened under his hands, he had been
continually hammering away at himself. More
and more often, when he first wakened in the
morning or when he stepped into a warm place
after being chilled on the deck, he felt a sudden
painful delight at being nearer another shore.
Sometimes when he was most despondent,
when he thought himself worn out with this
struggle, in a flash he was free of it and leaped
into an overwhelming consciousness of himself.

.

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

On the instant he felt that marvelous return
of the impetuousness, the intense excitement,
the increasing expectancy of youth.

CHAPTER
VI

THE last two days of the voyage Bartley found
almost intolerable. The stop at Queenstown,
the tedious passage up the Mersey, were things
that he noted dimly through his growing impa-
tience. He had planned to stop in Liverpool;
but, instead, he took the boat train for London.

9

Emerging at Euston at half -past three o'clock
in the afternoon, Alexander had his luggage
sent to the Savoy and drove at once to Bedford
Square. When Marie met him at the door,
even her strong sense of the proprieties could
not restrain her surprise and delight. She
blushed and smiled and fumbled his card in her
confusion before she ran upstairs. Alexander
paced up and down the hallway, buttoning and
unbuttoning his overcoat, until she returned
and took him up to Hilda's living-room. The
100

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

room was empty when he entered. A coal fire
was crackling in the grate and the lamps were
lit, for it was already beginning to grow dark
outside. Alexander did not sit down. He stood
his ground over by the windows until Hilda
came in. She called his name on the threshold,
but in her swift flight across the room she felt
a change in him and caught herself up so deftly
that he could not tell just when she did it. She
merely brushed his cheek with her lips and put
a hand lightly and joyously on either shoulder.

"Oh, what a grand thing to happen on a raw
day! I felt it in my bones when I woke this
morning that something splendid was going to
turn up. I thought it might be Sister Kate
or Cousin Mike would be happening along. I
never dreamed it would be you, Bartley. But
why do you let me chatter on like this? Come
over to the fire; you're chilled through."

She pushed him toward the big chair by the
fire, and sat down on a stool at the opposite
101

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

side of the hearth, her knees drawn up to her
chin, laughing like a happy little girl.

"When did you come, Bartley, and how did
it happen? You have n't spoken a word."

"I got in about ten minutes ago. I landed at
Liverpool this morning and came down on the
boat train."

Alexander leaned forward and warmed his
hands before the blaze. Hilda watched him
with perplexity.

"There's something troubling you, Bartley.
What is it?"

Bartley bent lower over the fire. "It's the
whole thing that troubles me, Hilda. You
and I."

Hilda took a quick, soft breath. She looked .
at his heavy shoulders and big, determined
head, thrust forward like a catapult in leash.

"What about us, Bartley?" she asked in a
thin voice.

He locked and unlocked his hands over the
102

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

grate and spread his fingers close to the bluish
flame, while the coals crackled and the clock
ticked and a street vendor began to call under
the window. At last Alexander brought out one
word : —

"Everything!"

Hilda was pale by this time, and her eyes
were wide with fright. She looked about des-
perately from Bartley to the door, then to the
windows, and back again to Bartley. She rose
uncertainly, touched his hair with her hand,
then sank back upon her stool.

"I'll do anything you wish me to, Bartley,"
she said tremulously. "I can't stand seeing
you miserable."

"I can't live with myself any longer," he
answered roughly.

He rose and pushed the chair behind him
and began to walk miserably about the room,
seeming to find it too small for him. He pulled
up a window as if the air were heavy.
103

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Hilda watched him from her corner, trem-
bling and scarcely breathing, dark shadows
growing about her eyes.

"It ... it has n't always made you miser-
able, has it?" Her eyelids fell and her lips
quivered.

"Always. But it's worse now. It's unbear-
able. It tortures me every minute."

"But why now?" she asked piteously, wring-
ing her hands.

He ignored her question. "I am not a man
who can live two lives," he went on feverishly.
"Each life spoils the other. I get nothing but
misery out of either. The world is all there,
just as it used to be, but I can't get at it any
more. There is this deception between me and '
everything."

At that word "deception," spoken with such
self -contempt, the color flashed back into Hil-
da's face as suddenly as if she had been struck
by a whiplash. She bit her lip and looked
104

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

down at her hands, which were clasped tightly
in front of her.

" Could you — could you sit down and talk
about it quietly, Hartley, as if I were a friend,
and not some one who had to be defied?"

He dropped back heavily into his chair by
the fire. "It was myself I was defying, Hilda.
I have thought about it until I am worn out."

He looked at her and his haggard face soft-
ened. He put out his hand toward her as he
looked away again into the fire.

She crept across to him, drawing her stool
after her. "When did you first begin to feel
like this, Bartley?"

"After the very first. The first was — sort
of in play, was n't it?"

Hilda's face quivered, but she whispered:
"Yes, I think it must have been. But why
did n't you tell me when you were here in the
summer?"

Alexander groaned. "I meant to, but some-
105

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

how I could n't. We had only a few days, and
your new play was just on, and you were so
happy."

"Yes, I was happy, was n't I?" She pressed
his hand gently in gratitude. "Weren't you
happy then, at all?"

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath,
as if to draw in again the fragrance of those
days. Something of their troubling sweetness
came back to Alexander, too. He moved un-
easily and his chair creaked.

"Yes, I was then. You know. But after-
ward . . ."

"Yes, yes," she hurried, pulling her hand
gently away from him. Presently it stole back
to his coat sleeve. "Please tell me one thing, •
Bartley. At least, tell me that you believe I
thought I was making you happy."

His hand shut down quickly over the ques-
tioning fingers on his sleeves. "Yes, Hilda; I
know that," he said simply.
106

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

She leaned her head against his arm and
spoke softly : —

"You see, my mistake was in wanting you to
have everything. I wanted you to eat all the
cakes and have them, too. I somehow believed
that I could take all the bad consequences for
you. I wanted you always to be happy and
handsome and successful — to have all the
things that a great man ought to have, and,
once in a way, the careless holidays that great
men are not permitted."

Bartley gave a bitter little laugh, and Hilda
looked up and read in the deepening lines of
his face that youth and Bartley would not
much longer struggle together.

"I understand, Bartley. I was wrong. But
I did n't know. You've only to tell me now.
What must I do that I've not done, or what
must I not do?" She listened intently, but she
heard nothing but the creaking of his chair.
"You want me to say it?" she whispered.
107

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"You want to tell me that you can only see me
like this, as old friends do, or out in the world
among people? I can do that."

"I can't," he said heavily.

Hilda shivered and sat still. Bartley leaned
his head in his hands and spoke through his
teeth. "It's got to be a clean break, Hilda.
I can't see you at all, anywhere. What I mean
is that I want you to promise never to see me
again, no matter how often I come, no matter
how hard I beg."

Hilda sprang up like a flame. She stood over
him with her hands clenched at her side, her
body rigid.

" No! " she gasped. " It's too late to ask
that. Do you hear me, Bartley? It 's too late. .
I won't promise. It's abominable of you to
ask me. Keep away if you wish; when have
I ever followed you? But, if you come to me,
I '11 do as I see fit. The shamefulness of your
asking me to do that! If you come to me,
108

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

I '11 do as I see fit. Do you understand? Bart-
ley, you're cowardly! "

Alexander rose and shook himself angrily.
"Yes, I know I 'm cowardly. I 'm afraid of my-
self. I don't trust myself any more. I carried
it all lightly enough at first, but now I don't
dare trifle with it. It's getting the better of
me. It's different now. I'm growing older,
and you've got my young self here with
you. It 's through him that I 've come to wish
for you all and all the time." He took her
roughly in his arms. "Do you know what I
mean? "

Hilda held her face back from him and began
to cry bitterly. "Oh, Bartley, what am I to do?
Why did n't you let me be angry with you?
You ask me to stay away from you because you
want me! And I've got nobody but you. I
will do anything you say — but that! I will
ask the least imaginable, but I must have
something! "

109

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Bartley turned away and sank down in his
chair again. Hilda sat on the arm of it and put
her hands lightly on his shoulders.

"Just something, Bartley. I must have you
to think of through the months and months of
loneliness. I must see you. I must know about
you. The sight of you, Bartley, to see you liv-
ing and happy and successful — can I never
make you understand what that means to me? "
She pressed his shoulders gently. "You see,
loving some one as I love you makes the whole
world different. If I 'd met you later, if I had n't
loved you so well — but that *s all over, long
ago. Then came all those years without you,
lonely and hurt and discouraged; those decent
young fellows and poor Mac, and me never
heeding — hard as a steel spring. And then
you came back, not caring very much, but it
made no difference."

She slid to the floor beside him, as if she were
too tired to sit up any longer. Bartley bent
110

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

over and took her in his arms, kissing her mouth
and her wet, tired eyes.

"Don't cry, don't cry," he whispered.
"We've tortured each other enough for to-
night. Forget everything except that I am
here."

"I think I have forgotten everything but
that already," she murmured. "Ah, your dear
arms!"

CHAPTER
VII

DURING the fortnight that Alexander was in
London he drove himself hard. He got through
a great deal of personal business and saw a great
many men who were doing interesting things
in his own profession. He disliked to think of
his visits to London as holidays, and when he
was there he worked even harder than he did
at home.

The day before his departure for Liverpool
was a singularly fine one. The thick air had
cleared overnight in a strong wind which
brought in a golden dawn and then fell off to a
fresh breeze. When Bartley looked out of his
windows from the Savoy, the river was flashing
silver and the gray stone along the Embank-
ment was bathed in bright, clear sunshine.
London had wakened to life after three weeks

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

of cold and sodden rain. Bartley breakfasted
hurriedly and went over his mail while the hotel
valet packed his trunks. Then he paid his ac-
count and walked rapidly down the Strand past
Charing Cross Station. His spirits rose with
every step, and when he reached Trafalgar
Square, blazing in the sun, with its fountains
playing and its column reaching up into the
bright air, he signaled to a hansom, and, before
he knew what he was about, told the driver to
go to Bedford Square by way of the British
Museum.

When he reached Hilda's apartment she met
him, fresh as the morning itself. Her rooms
were flooded with sunshine and full of the
flowers he had been sending her. She would
never let him give her anything else.

"Are you busy this morning, Hilda?" he
asked as he sat down, his hat and gloves in his
hand.

"Very. I've been up and about three hours,
113

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

working at my part. We open in February,
you know."

"Well, then you've worked enough. And so
have I. I've seen all my men, my packing is
done, and I go up to Liverpool this evening.
But this morning we are going to have a holi-
day. What do you say to a drive out to Kew
and Richmond? You may not get another day
like this all winter. It 's like a fine April day at
home. May I use your telephone? I want to
order the carriage."

"Oh, how jolly! There, sit down at the
desk. And while you are telephoning I '11 change
my dress. I shan't be long. All the morning
papers are on the table."

Hilda was back in a few moments wearing
a long gray squirrel coat and a broad fur hat.

Bartley rose and inspected her. "Why don't
you wear some of those pink roses?" he asked.

"But they came only this morning, and they
have not even begun to open. I was saving
114

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

them. I am so unconsciously thrifty !" She
laughed as she looked about the room. " You 've
been sending me far too many flowers, Bartley.
New ones every day. That's too often; though
I do love to open the boxes, and I take good
care of them."

"Why won't you let me send you any of
those jade or ivory things you are so fond of?
Or pictures ? I know a good deal about pictures."

Hilda shook her large hat as she drew the
roses out of the tall glass. "No, there are some
things you can't do. There's the carriage.
Will you button my gloves for me?"

Bartley took her wrist and began to button
the long gray suede glove. "How gay your
eyes are this morning, Hilda."

"That's because I've been studying. It
always stirs me up a little."

He pushed the top of the glove up slowly.
"When did you learn to take hold of your parts
like that?"

115

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

" When I had nothing else to think of. Come,
the carriage is waiting. What a shocking while
you take."

"I'm in no hurry. We've plenty of time."

They found all London abroad. Piccadilly
was a stream of rapidly moving carriages, from
which flashed furs and flowers and bright win-
ter costumes. The metal trappings of the har-
nesses shone dazzlingly, and the wheels were
revolving disks that threw off rays of light.
The parks were full of children and nurse-
maids and joyful dogs that leaped and yelped
and scratched up the brown earth with their
paws.

"I'm not going until to-morrow, you know,"
Bartley announced suddenly. "I'll cut off a
day in Liverpool. I have n't felt so jolly this
long while."

Hilda looked up with a smile which she tried
not to make too glad. "I think people were
meant to be happy, a little," she said.
116

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

They had lunch at Richmond and then
walked to Twickenham, where they had sent
the carriage. They drove back, with a glorious
sunset behind them, toward the distant gold-
washed city. It was one of those rare after-
noons when all the thickness and shadow of
London are changed to a kind of shining, puls-
ing, special atmosphere; when the smoky vapors
become fluttering golden clouds, nacreous veils
of pink and amber; when all that bleakness of
gray stone and dullness of dirty brick trembles
in aureate light, and all the roofs and spires,
and one great dome, are floated in golden haze.
On such rare afternoons the ugliest of cities
becomes the most beautiful, the most prosaic
becomes the most poetic, and months of sod-
den days are offset by a moment of miracle.

"It's like that with us Londoners, too,"

Hilda was saying. "Everything is awfully

grim and cheerless, our weather and our houses

and our ways of amusing ourselves. But we

117

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

can be happier than anybody. We can go mad
with joy, as the people do out in the fields on a
fine Whitsunday. We make the most of our
moment."

She thrust her little chin out defiantly over
her gray fur collar, and Bartley looked down
at her and laughed.

"You are a plucky one, you." He patted her
glove with his hand. "Yes, you are a plucky
one."

Hilda sighed. "No, I'm not. Not about
some things, at any rate. It does n't take pluck
to fight for one's moment, but it takes pluck to
go without — a lot. More than I have. I can't
help it," she added fiercely.

After miles of outlying streets and little
gloomy houses, they reached London itself, red
and roaring and murky, with a thick dampness
coming up from the river, that betokened fog
again to-morrow. The streets were full of
people who had worked indoors all through the
118

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

priceless day and had now come hungrily out
to drink the muddy lees of it. They stood in
long black lines, waiting before the pit en-
trances of the theatres — short-coated boys,
and girls in sailor hats, all shivering and chat-
ting gayly. There was a blurred rhythm in all
the dull city noises — in the clatter of the cab
horses and the rumbling of the busses, in
the street calls, and in the undulating tramp,
tramp of the crowd. It was like the deep vibra-
tion of some vast underground machinery, and
like the muffled pulsations of millions of human
hearts.

"Seems good to get back, does n't it? " Bart-
ley whispered, as they drove from Bayswater
Road into Oxford Street. "London always
makes me want to live more than any other
city in the world. You remember our priestess
mummy over in the mummy-room, and how we
used to long to go and bring her out on nights
like this? Three thousand years! Ugh!"
119

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"All the same, I believe she used to feel it
when we stood there and watched her and
wished her well. I believe she used to remem-
ber," Hilda said thoughtfully.

"I hope so. Now let's go to some awfully
jolly place for dinner before we go home. I
could eat all the dinners there are in London to-
night. Where shall I tell the driver? The Pic-
cadilly Restaurant? The music's good there."

"There are too many people there whom one
knows. Why not that little French place in
Soho, where we went so often when you were
here in the summer? I love it, and I 've never
been there with any one but you. Sometimes I
go by myself, when I am particularly lonely."

"Very well, the sole's good there. How
many street pianos there are about to-night!
The fine weather must have thawed them out.
We've had five miles of 'II Trovatore* now.
They always make me feel jaunty. Are you
comfy, and not too tired?"
120

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"I'm not tired at all. I was just wondering
how people can ever die. Why did you remind
me of the mummy? Life seems the strongest
and most indestructible thing in the world. Do
you really believe that all those people rushing
about down there, going to good dinners and
clubs and theatres, will be dead some day, and
not care about anything? I don't believe it,
and I know I shan't die, ever! You see, I feel
too — too powerful ! "

The carriage stopped. Bartley sprang out
and swung her quickly to the pavement. As he
lifted her in his two hands he whispered: "You
are — powerful ! "

CHAPTER

vm

THE last rehearsal was over, a tedious dress
rehearsal which had lasted all day and ex-
hausted the patience of every one who had to
do with it. When Hilda had dressed for the
street and came out of her dressing-room, she
found Hugh MacConnell waiting for her in the
corridor.

"The fog's thicker than ever, Hilda. There
have been a great many accidents to-day. It 's
positively unsafe for you to be out alone. Will
you let me take you home? "

"How good of you, Mac. If you are going
with me, I think I 'd rather walk. I Ve had no
exercise to-day, and all this has made me
nervous."

"I should n't wonder," said MacConnell
dryly. Hilda pulled down her veil and they

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

stepped out into the thick brown wash that
submerged St. Martin's Lane. MacConnell
took her hand and tucked it snugly under
his arm. "I'm sorry I was such a savage. I
hope you did n't think I made an ass of my-
self."

"Not a bit of it. I don't wonder you were
peppery. Those things are awfully trying.
How do you think it's going?"

"Magnificently. That's why I got so stirred
up. We are going to hear from this, both of
us. And that reminds me; I've got news for
you. They are going to begin repairs on the
theatre about the middle of March, and we are
to run over to New York for six weeks. Ben-
nett told me yesterday that it was decided."

Hilda looked up delightedly at the tall gray
figure beside her. He was the only thing she
could see, for they were moving through a dense
opaqueness, as if they were walking at the bot-
tom of the ocean.

128

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"Oh, Mac, how glad I am! And they love
your things over there, don't they?"

"Shall you be glad for — any other reason,
Hilda?"

MacConnell put his hand in front of her to
ward off some dark object. It proved to be
only a lamp-post, and they beat in farther
from the edge of the pavement.

"What do you mean, Mac?" Hilda asked
nervously.

"I was just thinking there might be people
over there you 'd be glad to see," he brought out
awkwardly. Hilda said nothing, and as they
walked on MacConnell spoke again, apologet-
ically: "I hope you don't mind my knowing
about it, Hilda. Don't stiffen up like that. No
one else knows, and I did n't try to find out
anything. I felt it, even before I knew who
he was. I knew there was somebody, and that
it was n't I."

They crossed Oxford Street in silence, feeling

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

their way. The busses had stopped running
and the cab-drivers were leading their horses.
When they reached the other side, MacConnell
said suddenly, "I hope you are happy."

"Terribly, dangerously happy, Mac," —
Hilda spoke quietly, pressing the rough sleeve
of his greatcoat with her gloved hand.

"You've always thought me too old for you,
Hilda, — oh, of course you've never said just
that, — and here this fellow is not more than
eight years younger than I. I've always felt
that if I could get out of my old case I might
win you yet. It's a fine, brave youth I carry
inside me, only he'll never be seen."

"Nonsense, Mac. That has nothing to do
with it. It 's because you seem too close to me,
too much my own kind. It would be like mar-
rying Cousin Mike, almost. I really tried to
care as you wanted me to, away back in the
beginning."

"Well, here we are, turning out of the
125

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Square. You are not angry with me, Hilda?
Thank you for this walk, my dear. Go in and
get dry things on at once. You'll be having a
great night to-morrow."

She put out her hand. "Thank you, Mac,
for everything. Good-night."

MacConnell trudged off through the fog,
and she went slowly upstairs. Her slippers and
dressing gown were waiting for her before the
fire. "I shall certainly see him in New York.
He will see by the papers that we are coming.
Perhaps he knows it already," Hilda kept
thinking as she undressed. "Perhaps he will
be at the dock. No, scarcely that; but I may
meet him in the street even before he comes
to see me." Marie placed the tea-table by
the fire and brought Hilda her letters. She
looked them over, and started as she came to
one in 'a handwriting that she did not often
see; Alexander had written to her only twice
before, and he did not allow her to write to
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ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

him at all. "Thank you, Marie. You may
go now."

Hilda sat down by the table with the letter
in her hand, still unopened. She looked at it
intently, turned it over, and felt its thickness
with her fingers. She believed that she some-
times had a kind of second-sight about letters,
and could tell before she read them whether
they brought good or evil tidings. She put
this one down on the table in front of her while
she poured her tea. At last, with a little shiver
of expectancy, she tore open the envelope
and read: —

BOSTON. February

MY DEAR HILDA: —

It is after twelve o'clock. Every one else is
in bed and I am sitting alone in my study. I
have been happier in this room than anywhere
else in the world. Happiness like that makes
one insolent. I used to think these four walls
127

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

could stand against anything. And now I
scarcely know myself here. Now I know that
no one can build his security upon the noble-
ness of another person. Two people, when they
love each other, grow alike in their tastes and
habits and pride, but their moral natures
(whatever we may mean by that canting ex-
pression) are never welded. The base one goes
on being base, and the noble one noble, to the
end.

The last week has been a bad one; I have
been realizing how things used to be with me.
Sometimes I get used to being dead inside, but
lately it has been as if a window beside me had
suddenly opened, and as if all the smells of
spring blew in to me. There is a garden out
there, with stars overhead, where I used to
walk at night when I had a single purpose and
a single heart. I can remember how I used to
feel there, how beautiful everything about me
was, and what life and power and freedom I
128

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

felt in myself. When the window opens I know
exactly how it would feel to be out there. But
that garden is closed to me. How is it, I ask
myself, that everything can be so different with
me when nothing here has changed? I am in
my own house, in my own study, in the midst
of all these quiet streets where my friends live.
They are all safe and at peace with themselves.
But I am never at peace. I feel always on the
edge of danger and change.

I keep remembering locoed horses I used to
see on the range when I was a boy. They
changed like that. We used to catch them and
put them up in the corral, and they developed
great cunning. They would pretend to eat
their oats like the other horses, but we knew
they were always scheming to get back at the
loco.

It seems that a man is meant to live only one
life in this world. When he tries to live a sec-
ond, he develops another nature. I feel as if a
129

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

second man had been grafted into me. At first
he seemed only a pleasure-loving simpleton,
of whose company I was rather ashamed, and
whom I used to hide under my coat when
I walked the Embankment, in London. But
now he is strong and sullen, and he is fighting
for his life at the cost of mine. That is his one
activity: to grow strong. No creature ever
wanted so much to live. Eventually, I suppose,
he will absorb me altogether. Believe me, you
will hate me then.

And what have you to do, Hilda, with this
ugly story? Nothing at all. The little boy
drank of the prettiest brook in the forest and
he became a stag. I write all this because I can
never tell it to you, and because it seems as if I
could not keep silent any longer. And because
I suffer, Hilda. If any one I loved suffered like
this, I'd want to know it. Help me, Hilda!

B. A.

CHAPTER
IX

ON the last Saturday in April, the New York
"Times" published an account of the strike
complications which were delaying Alexander's
New Jersey bridge, and stated that the en-
gineer himself was in town and at his office
on West Tenth Street.

On Sunday, the day after this notice ap-
peared, Alexander worked all day at his Tenth
Street rooms. His business often called him
to New York, and he had kept an apartment
there for years, subletting it when he went
abroad for any length of time. Besides his
sleeping-room and bath, there was a large
room, formerly a painter's studio, which he
used as a study and office. It was furnished
with the cast-off possessions of his bachelor
days and with odd things which he sheltered
131

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

for friends of his who followed itinerant and
more or less artistic callings. Over the fire-
place there was a large old-fashioned gilt mir-
ror. Alexander's big work-table stood in front
of one of the three windows, and above the
couch hung the one picture in the room, a
big canvas of charming color and spirit, a
study of the Luxembourg Gardens in early
spring, painted in his youth by a man who had
since become a portrait-painter of interna-
tional renown. He had done it for Alexander
when they were students together in Paris.

Sunday was a cold, raw day and a fine rain
fell continuously. When Alexander came back
from dinner he put more wood on his fire,
made himself comfortable, and settled down at
his desk, where he began checking over es-
timate sheets. It was after nine o'clock and he
was lighting a second pipe, when he thought he
heard a sound at his door. He started and list-
132

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

ened, holding the burning match in his hand;
again he heard the same sound, like a firm,
light tap. He rose and crossed the room quickly.
When he threw open the door he recognized the
figure that shrank back into the bare, dimly lit
hallway. He stood for a moment in awkward
constraint, his pipe in his hand.

"Come in," he said to Hilda at last, and
closed the door behind her. He pointed to a
chair by the fire and went back to his work-
table. "Won't you sit down?"

He was standing behind the table, turning
over a pile of blueprints nervously. The yellow
light from the student's lamp fell on his hands
and the purple sleeves of his velvet smoking-
jacket, but his flushed face and big, hard head
were in the shadow. There was something
about him that made Hilda wish herself at her
hotel again, in the street below, anywhere but
where she was.

"Of course I know, Hartley," she said at
133

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

last, "that after this you won't owe me the
least consideration. But we sail on Tuesday.
I saw that interview in the paper yesterday,
telling where you were, and I thought I had
to see you. That's all. Good-night; I'm go-
ing now." She turned and her hand closed on
the door-knob.

Alexander hurried toward her and took her
gently by the arm. "Sit down, Hilda; you're
wet through. Let me take off your coat —
and your boots; they're oozing water." He
knelt down and began to unlace her shoes,
while Hilda shrank into the chair. "Here, put
your feet on this stool. You don't mean to say
you walked down — and without overshoes!"

Hilda hid her face in her hands. "I was
afraid to take a cab. Can't you see, Bartley,
that I 'm terribly frightened? I Ve been through
this a hundred times to-day. Don't be any
more angry than you can help. I was all right
until I knew you were in town. If you 'd sent
134

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

me a note, or telephoned me, or anything! But
you won't let me write to you, and I had to see
you after that letter, that terrible letter you
wrote me when you got home."

Alexander faced her, resting his arm on the
mantel behind him, and began to brush the
sleeve of his jacket. "Is this the way you
mean to answer it, Hilda?" he asked un-
steadily.

She was afraid to look up at him. "Did n't
— did n't you mean even to say good-by to
me, Bartley? Did you mean just to — quit
me? " she asked. "I came to tell you that I'm
willing to do as you asked me. But it 's no use
talking about that now. Give me my things,
please." She put her hand out toward the
fender.

Alexander sat down on the arm of her chair.
"Did you think I had forgotten you were in
town, Hilda? Do you think I kept away by

accident? Did you suppose I did n't know you
135

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

were sailing on Tuesday? There is a letter for
you there, in my desk drawer. It was to have
reached you on the steamer. I was all the
morning writing it. I told myself that if I
were really thinking of you, and not of myself,
a letter would be better than nothing. Marks
on paper mean something to you." He paused.
"They never did to me."

Hilda smiled up at him beautifully and put
her hand on his sleeve. "Oh, Bartley! Did
you write to me? Why did n't you telephone
me to let me know that you had? Then I
would n't have come."

Alexander slipped his arm about her. "I
did n't know it before, Hilda, on my honor I
did n't, but I believe it was because, deep down
in me somewhere, I was hoping I might drive
you to do just this. I've watched that door all
day. I've jumped up if the fire crackled. I
think I have felt that you were coming."
He bent his face over her hair.
136

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"And I," she whispered, — "I felt that you
were feeling that. But when I came, I thought
I had been mistaken."

Alexander started up and began to walk up
and down the room.

"No, you weren't mistaken. I've been up
in Canada with my bridge, and I arranged not
to come to New York until after you had gone.
Then, when your manager added two more
weeks, I was already committed." He dropped
upon the stool in front of her and sat with his
hands hanging between his knees. "What
am I to do, Hilda?"

"That's what I wanted to see you about,
Bartley. I'm going to do what you asked
me to do, when you were in London. Only
I'll do it more completely. I'm going to
marry."

"Who?"

"Oh, it does n't matter much! One of them.
Only not Mac. I 'm too fond of him."
137

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Alexander moved restlessly. "Are you jok-
ing, Hilda?"

"Indeed I'm not."

"Then you don't know what you're talking
about."

"Yes, I know very well. I've thought about
it a great deal, and I 've quite decided. I never
used to understand how women did things like
that, but I know now. It 's because they can't
be at the mercy of the man they love any
longer."

Alexander flushed angrily. "So it's better
to be at the mercy of a man you don't love?"

"Under such circumstances, infinitely!"

There was a flash in her eyes that made
Alexander's fall. He got up and went over to-
the window, threw it open, and leaned out.
He heard Hilda moving about behind him.
When he looked over his shoulder she was
lacing her boots. He went back and stood
over her.

138

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

"Hilda, you'd better think a while longer
before you do that. I don't know what I ought
to say, but I don't believe you'd be happy;
truly I don't. Are n't you trying to frighten
me?"

She tied the knot of the last lacing and put
her boot-heel down firmly. "No; I'm telling
you what I've made up my mind to do. I
suppose I would better do it without telling
you. But afterward I shan't have an oppor-
tunity to explain, for I shan't be seeing you
again."

Alexander started to speak, but caught
himself. When Hilda rose he sat down on the
arm of her chair and drew her back into it.

"I would n't be so much alarmed if I did n't
know how utterly reckless you can be. Don't
do anything like that rashly." His face grew
troubled. "You wouldn't be happy. You
are not that kind of woman. I'd never have
another hour's peace if I helped to make you
139

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

do a thing like that." He took her face between
his hands and looked down into it. "You
see, you are different, Hilda. Don't you know
you are?" His voice grew softer, his touch
more and more tender. "Some women can do
that sort of thing, but you — you can love as
queens did, in the old time."

Hilda had heard that soft, deep tone in his
voice only once before. She closed her eyes;
her lips and eyelids trembled. " Only one, Bart-
ley. Only one. And he threw it back at me
a second time."

She felt the strength leap in the arms that
held her so lightly.

"Try him again, Hilda. Try him once
again."

She looked up into his eyes, and hid her face
in her hands.

CHAPTER
X

ON Tuesday afternoon a Boston lawyer, who
had been trying a case in Vermont, was stand-
ing on the siding at White River Junction when
the Canadian Express pulled by on its north-
ward journey. As the day-coaches at the rear
end of the long train swept by him, the lawyer
noticed at one of the windows a man's head,
with thick rumpled hair. "Curious," he
thought; "that looked like Alexander, but
what would he be doing back there in the day-
coaches?"

It was, indeed, Alexander.

That morning a telegram from Moorlock
had reached him, telling him that there was
serious trouble with the bridge and that he was
needed there at once* so he had caught the first
train out of New York. He had taken a seat
141

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

in a day-coach to avoid the risk of meeting any
one he knew, and because he did not wish to
be comfortable. When the telegram arrived,
Alexander was at his rooms on Tenth Street,
packing his bag to go to Boston. On Monday
night he had written a long letter to his wife,
but when morning came he was afraid to send
it, and the letter was still in his pocket. Wini-
fred was not a woman who could bear disap-
pointment. She demanded a great deal of her-
self and of the people she loved; and she never
failed herself. If he told her now, he knew,
it would be irretrievable. There would be no
going back. He would lose the thing he valued
most in the world; he would be destroying
himself and his own happiness. There would
be nothing for him afterward. He seemed to
see himself dragging out a restless existence
on the Continent — Cannes, Hyeres, Algiers,
Cairo — among smartly dressed, disabled men
of every nationality; forever going on journeys

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

that led nowhere; hurrying to catch trains that
he might just as well miss; getting up in the
morning with a great bustle and splashing of
water, to begin a day that had no purpose and
no meaning; dining late to shorten the night,
sleeping late to shorten the day.

And for what? For a mere folly, a masquer-
ade, a little thing that he could not let go. And
he could even let it go, he told himself. But he
had promised to be in London at midsummer,
and he knew that he would go. ... It was
impossible to live like this any longer.

And this, then, was to be the disaster that
his old professor had foreseen for him: the
crack in the wall, the crash, the cloud of dust.
And he could not understand how it had come
about. He felt that he himself was unchanged,
that he was still there, the same man he had
been five years ago, and that he was sitting
stupidly by and letting some resolute offshoot
of himself spoil his life for him. This new force
143

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

was not he, it was but a part of him. He would
not even admit that it was stronger than he;
but it was more active. It was by its energy
that this new feeling got the better of him. His
wife was the woman who had made his life,
gratified his pride, given direction to his tastes
and habits. The life they led together seemed
to him beautiful. Winifred still was, as she had
always been, Romance for him, and whenever
he was deeply stirred he turned to her. When
the grandeur and beauty of the world challenged
him — as it challenges even the most self-ab-
sorbed people — he always answered with
her name. That was his reply to the question
put by the mountains and the stars; to all the
spiritual aspects of life. In his feeling for his .
wife there was all the tenderness, all the pride,
all the devotion of which he was capable. There
was everything but energy; the energy of youth
which must register itself and cut its name be-
fore it passes. This new feeling was so fresh,
144

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

so unsatisfied and light of foot. It ran and was
not wearied, anticipated him everywhere. It
put a girdle round the earth while he was going
from New York to Moorlock. At this moment,
it was tingling through him, exultant, and live
as quicksilver, whispering, " In July you will
be in England."

Already he dreaded the long, empty days at
sea, the monotonous Irish coast, the sluggish
passage up the Mersey, the flash of the boat
train through the summer country. He closed
his eyes and gave himself up to the feeling of
rapid motion and to swift, terrifying thoughts.
He was sitting so, his face shaded by his hand,
when the Boston lawyer saw him from the
siding at White River Junction.

When at last Alexander roused himself, the
afternoon had waned to sunset. The train was
passing through a gray country and the sky
overhead was flushed with a wide flood of clear
color. There was a rose-colored light over the
145

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

gray rocks and hills and meadows. Off to the
left, under the approach of a weather-stained
wooden bridge,, a group of boys were sitting
around a little fire. The smell of the wood
smoke blew in at the window. Except for an
old farmer, jogging along the highroad in his
box-wagon, there was not another living crea-
ture to be seen. Alexander looked back wist-
fully at the boys, camped on the edge of a little
marsh, crouching under their shelter and look-
ing gravely at their fire. They took his mind
back a long way, to a campfire on a sandbar in
a Western river, and he wished he could go
back and sit down with them. He could re-
member exactly how the world had looked then.
It was quite dark and Alexander was still
thinking of the boys, when it occurred to him
that the train must be nearing Allway. In
going to his new bridge at Moorlock he had
always to pass through Allway. The train
stopped at Allway Mills, then wound two miles
146

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

up the river, and then the hollow sound under
his feet told Bartley that he was on his first
bridge again. The bridge seemed longer than
it had ever seemed before, and he was glad
when he felt the beat of the wheels on the solid
roadbed again. He did not like coming and
going across that bridge, or remembering the
man who built it. And was he, indeed, the
same man who used to walk that bridge at
night, promising such things to himself and to
the stars? And yet, he could remember it all
so well: the quiet hills sleeping in the moon-
light, the slender skeleton of the bridge reach-
ing out into the river, and up yonder, alone on
the hill, the big white house; upstairs, in Wini-
fred's window, the light that told him she was
still awake and still thinking of him. And after
the light went out he walked alone, taking the
heavens into his confidence, unable to tear him-
self away from the white magic of the night,
unwilling to sleep because longing was so sweet
147

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

to him, and because, for the first time since
first the hills were hung with moonlight, there
was a lover in the world. And always there was
the sound of the rushing water underneath,
the sound which, more than anything else,
meant death; the wearing away of things under
the impact of physical forces which men could
direct but never circumvent or diminish. Then,
in the exaltation of love, more than ever it
seemed to him to mean death, the only other
thing as strong as love. Under the moon, under
the cold, splendid stars, there were only those
two things awake and sleepless; death and
love, the rushing river and his burning heart.
Alexander sat up and looked about him.
The train was tearing on through the dark- .
ness. All his companions in the day-coach were
either dozing or sleeping heavily, and the
murky lamps were turned low. How came he
here among all these dirty people? Why was
he going to London? What did it mean —
148

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

what was the answer? How could this happen
to a man who had lived through that magical
spring and summer, and who had felt that the
stars themselves were but flaming particles in
the far-away infinitudes of his love?

What had he done to lose it? How could he
endure the baseness of life without it? And
with every revolution of the wheels beneath
him, the unquiet quicksilver in his breast told
him that at midsummer he would be in London.
He remembered his last night there: the red
foggy darkness, the hungry crowds before the
theatres, the hand-organs, the feverish rhythm
of the blurred, crowded streets, and the feel-
ing of letting himself go with the crowd. He
shuddered and looked about him at the poor
unconscious companions of his journey, un-
kempt and travel-stained, now doubled in un-
lovely attitudes, who had come to stand to
him for the ugliness he had brought into the
world.

149

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

And those boys back there, beginning it all
just as he had begun it; he wished he could
promise them better luck. Ah, if one could
promise any one better luck, if one could as-
sure a single human being of happiness! He
had thought he could do so, once; and it
was thinking of that that he at last fell
asleep. In his sleep, as if it had nothing fresher
to work upon, his mind went back and tor-
tured itself with something years and years
away, an old, long-forgotten sorrow of his
childhood.

When Alexander awoke in the morning, the
sun was just rising through pale golden ripples
of cloud, and the fresh yellow light was vibrat-
ing through the pine woods. The white birches,
with their little unfolding leaves, gleamed in
the lowlands, and the marsh meadows were
already coming to' life with their first green,
a thin, bright color which had run over them
like fire. As the train rushed along the trestles,
150

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

thousands of wild birds rose screaming into
the light. The sky was already a pale blue and
of the clearness of crystal. Bartley caught up
his bag and hurried through the Pullman
coaches until he found the conductor. There
was a stateroom unoccupied, and he took it
and set about changing his clothes. Last night
he would not have believed that anything could
be so pleasant as the cold water he dashed over
his head and shoulders and the freshness of
clean linen on his body.

After he had dressed, Alexander sat down at
the window and drew into his lungs deep
breaths of the pine-scented air. He had awak-
ened with all his old sense of power. He could
not believe that things were as bad with him
as they had seemed last night, that there was
no way to set them entirely right. Even if he
went to London at midsummer, what would
that mean except that he was a fool? And he
had been a fool before. That was not the reality
151

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

of his life. Yet he knew that he would go to
London.

Hah* an hour later the train stopped at Moor-
lock. Alexander sprang to the platform and
hurried up the siding, waving to Philip Horton,
one of his assistants, who was anxiously looking
up at the windows of the coaches. Bartley took
his arm and they went together into the station
buffet.

"I'll have my coffee first, Philip. Have you
had yours? And now, what seems to be the
matter up here? "

The young man, in a hurried, nervous way,
began his explanation.

But Alexander cut him short. "When did
you stop work?" he asked sharply.

The young engineer looked confused. "I
haven't stopped work yet, Mr. Alexander.
I did n't feel that I could go so far without
definite authorization from you."

"Then why did n't you say in your telegram
152

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

exactly what you thought, and ask for your au-
thorization? You'd have got it quick enough."

"Well, really, Mr. Alexander, I could n't be
absolutely sure, you know, and I did n't like
to take the responsibility of making it public."

Alexander pushed back his chair and rose.
"Anything I do can be made public, Phil.
You say that you believe the lower chords are
showing strain, and that even the workmen
have been talking about it, and yet you've
gone on adding weight."

" I 'm sorry, Mr. Alexander, but I had counted
on your getting here yesterday. My first tele-
gram missed you somehow. I sent one Sunday
evening, to the same address, but it was re-
turned to me."

"Have you a carriage out there? I must
stop to send a wire."

Alexander went up to the telegraph-desk
and penciled the following message to his
wife: —

153

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

I may have to be here for some time. Can
you come up at once? Urgent.

HARTLEY.

The Moorlock Bridge lay three miles above
the town. When they were seated in the car-
riage, Alexander began to question his assistant
further. If it were true that the compression
members showed strain, with the bridge only
two thirds done, then there was nothing to do
but pull the whole structure down and begin
over again. Horton kept repeating that he
was sure there could be nothing wrong with the
estimates.

Alexander grew impatient. "That's all true,
Phil, but we never were justified in assuming
that a scale that was perfectly safe for an
ordinary bridge would work with anything of
such length. It's all very well on paper, but
it remains to be seen whether it can be done
in practice. I should have thrown up the job
154

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

when they crowded me. It's all nonsense to
try to do what other engineers are doing when
you know they're not sound."

"But just now, when there is such competi-
tion," the younger man demurred. "And cer-
tainly that's the new line of development."

Alexander shrugged his shoulders and made
no reply.

When they reached the bridge works, Alex-
ander began his examination immediately. An
hour later he sent for the superintendent. "I
think you had better stop work out there at
once, Dan. I should say that the lower chord
here might buckle at any moment. I told the
Commission that we were using higher unit
stresses than any practice has established, and
we've put the dead load at a low estimate.
Theoretically it worked out well enough, but
it had never actually been tried." Alexander
put on his overcoat and took the superintend-
ent by the arm. "Don't look so chopfallen,
155

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Dan. It's a jolt, but we've got to face it. It
is n't the end of the world, you know. Now
we '11 go out and call the men off quietly.
They're already nervous, Horton tells me,
and there's no use alarming them. I'll go
with you, and we'll send the end riveters in
first."

Alexander and the superintendent picked
their way out slowly over the long span. They
went deliberately, stopping to see what each
gang was doing, as if they were on an ordinary
round of inspection. When they reached the
end of the river span, Alexander nodded to the
superintendent, who quietly gave an order to
the foreman. The men in the end gang picked
up their tools and, glancing curiously at each
other, started back across the bridge toward
the river-bank. Alexander himself remained
standing where they had been working, looking
about him. It was hard to believe, as he looked
back over it, that the whole great span was
156

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

incurably disabled, was already as good as
condemned, because something was out of line
in the lower chord of the cantilever arm.

The end riveters had reached the bank and
were dispersing among the tool-houses, and the
second gang had picked up their tools and were
starting toward the shore. Alexander, still
standing at the end of the river span, saw the
lower chord of the cantilever arm give a little,
like an elbow bending. He shouted and ran
after the second gang, but by this time every
one knew that the big river span was slowly
settling. There was a burst of shouting that
was immediately drowned by the scream and
cracking of tearing iron, as all the tension work
began to pull asunder. Once the chords began
to buckle, there were thousands of tons of iron-
work, all riveted together and lying in midair
without support. It tore itself to pieces with
roaring and grinding and noises that were like
the shrieks of a steam whistle. There was no
157

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

shock of any kind; the bridge had no impetus
except from its own weight. It lurched neither
to right nor left, but sank almost in a vertical
line, snapping and breaking and tearing as it
went, because no integral part could bear for
an instant the enormous strain loosed upon it.
Some of the men jumped and some ran, trying
to make the shore.

At the first shriek of the tearing iron, Alex-
ander jumped from the downstream side of
the bridge. He struck the water without injury
and disappeared. He was under the river a
long time and had great difficulty in holding
his breath. When it seemed impossible, and his
chest was about to heave, he thought he heard
his wife telling him that he could hold out a
little longer. An instant later his face cleared
the water. For a moment, in the depths of
the river, he had realized what it would mean
to die a hypocrite, and to lie dead under the
last abandonment of her tenderness. But once
158

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

in the light and air, he knew he should live to
tell her and to recover all he had lost. Now, at
last, he felt sure of himself. He was not startled.
It seemed to him that he had been through
something of this sort before. There was
nothing horrible about it. This, too, was life,
and life was activity, just as it was in Boston
or in London. He was himself, and there was
something to be done; everything seemed per-
fectly natural. Alexander was a strong swim-
mer, but he had gone scarcely a dozen strokes
when the bridge itself, which had been settling
faster and faster, crashed into the water behind
him. Immediately the river was full of drown-
ing men. A gang of French Canadians fell
almost on top of him. He thought he had
cleared them, when they began coming up all
around him, clutching at him and at each other.
Some of them could swim, but they were either
hurt or crazed with fright. Alexander tried to
beat them off, but there were too many of
159

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

them. One caught him about the neck, another
gripped him about the middle, and they went
down together. When he sank, his wife seemed
to be there in the water beside him, telling him
to keep his head, that if he could hold out the
men would drown and release him. There was
something he wanted to tell his wife, but he
could not think clearly for the roaring in his
ears. Suddenly he remembered what it was.
He caught his breath, and then she let him
go.

The work of recovering the dead went on
all day and all the following night. By the next
morning forty-eight bodies had been taken out
of the river, but there were still twenty missing.
Many of the men had fallen with the bridge
and were held down under the debris. Early
on the morning of the second day a closed car-
riage was driven slowly along the river-bank
and stopped a little below the works, where the
160

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

river boiled and churned about the great iron
carcass which lay in a straight line two thirds
across it. The carriage stood there hour after
hour, and word soon spread among the crowds
on the shore that its occupant was the wife of
the Chief Engineer; his body had not yet been
found. The widows of the lost workmen, mov-
ing up and down the bank with shawls over their
heads, some of them carrying babies, looked at
the rusty hired hack many times that morning.
They drew near it and walked about it, but
none of them ventured to peer within. Even
half -indifferent sight-seers dropped their voices
as they told a newcomer: "You see that car-
riage over there? That's Mrs. Alexander. They
have n't found him yet. She got off the train
this morning. Horton met her. She heard it
in Boston yesterday — heard the newsboys
crying it in the street."

At noon Philip Horton made his way through
the crowd with a tray and a tin coffee-pot from
161

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

the camp kitchen. When he reached the car-
riage he found Mrs. Alexander just as he had
left her in the early morning, leaning forward
a little, with her hand on the lowered window,
looking at the river. Hour after hour she had
been watching the water, the lonely, useless
stone towers, and the convulsed mass of iron
wreckage over which the angry river contin-
ually spat up its yellow foam.

"Those poor women out there, do they blame
him very much?" she asked, as she handed the
coffee-cup back to Horton.

"Nobody blames him, Mrs. Alexander. If
any one is to blame, I 'm afraid it 's I. I should
have stopped work before he came. He said
so as soon as I met him. I tried to get him here
a day earlier, but my telegram missed him,
somehow. He did n't have time really to ex-
plain to me. If he'd got here Monday, he'd
have had all the men off at once. But, you see,
Mrs. Alexander, such a thing never happened

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

before. According to all human calculations,
it simply could n't happen."

Horton leaned wearily against the front
wheel of the cab. He had not had his clothes
off for thirty hours, and the stimulus of violent
excitement was beginning to wear off.

"Don't be afraid to tell me the worst, Mr.
Horton. Don't leave me to the dread of finding
out things that people may be saying. If he is
blamed, if he needs any one to speak for him,"
— for the first time her voice broke and a flush
of life, tearful, painful, and confused, swept
over her rigid pallor, — "if he needs any one,
tell me, show me what to do." She began to
sob, and Horton hurried away.

When he came back at four o'clock in the
afternoon he was carrying his hat in his hand,
and Winifred knew as soon as she saw him that
they had found Bartley. She opened the car-
riage door before he reached her and stepped to
the ground.

163

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Horton put out his hand as if to hold her
back and spoke pleadingly: "Won't you drive
up to my house, Mrs. Alexander? They will
take him up there."

"Take me to him now, please. I shall not
make any trouble."

The group of men down under the river-bank
fell back when they saw a woman coming, and
one of them threw a tarpaulin over the
stretcher. They took off their hats and caps
as Winifred approached, and although she had
pulled her veil down over her face they did not
look up at her. She was taller than Horton,
and some of the men thought she was the tall-
est woman they had ever seen. "As tall as
himself," some one whispered. Horton mo-
tioned to the men, and six of them lifted the
stretcher and began to carry it up the embank-
ment. Winifred followed them the half-mile
to Horton's house. She walked quietly, with-
out once breaking or stumbling. When the
164

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

bearers put the stretcher down in Horton's
spare bedroom, she thanked them and gave
her hand to each in turn. The men went
out of the house and through the yard with
their caps in their hands. They were too much
confused to say anything as they went down
the hill.

Horton himself was almost as deeply per-
plexed. "Mamie," he said to his wife, when he
came out of the spare room half an hour later,
"will you take Mrs. Alexander the things she
needs? She is going to do everything herself.
Just stay about where you can hear her and
go in if she wants you."

Everything happened as Alexander had fore-
seen in that moment of prescience under the
river. With her own hands she washed him
clean of every mark of disaster. All night he
was alone with her in the still house, his great
head lying deep in the pillow. In the pocket
of his coat Winifred found the letter that he
165

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

had written her the night before he left New
York, water-soaked and illegible, but because
of its length, she knew it had been meant for
her.

For Alexander death was an easy creditor.
Fortune, which had smiled upon him consis-
tently all his life, did not desert him in the
end. His harshest critics did not doubt that,
had he lived, he would have retrieved himself.
Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this accident
the disaster he had once foretold.

When a great man dies in his prime there is
no surgeon who can say whether he did well;
whether or not the future was his, as it seemed
to be. The mind that society had come to
regard as a powerful and reliable machine,
dedicated to its service, may for a long time
have been sick within itself and bent upon its
own destruction.

EPILOGUE

PROFESSOR WILSON had been living in London
for six years and he was just back from a visit
to America. One afternoon, soon after his re-
turn, he put on his frock-coat and drove in a
hansom to pay a call upon Hilda Burgoyne,
who still lived at her old number, off Bedford
Square. He and Miss Burgoyne had been fast
friends for a long time. He had first noticed
her about the corridors of the British Museum,
where he read constantly. Her being there so
often had made him feel that he would like to
know her, and as she was not an inaccessible
person, an introduction was not difficult. The
preliminaries once over, they came to depend
a great deal upon each other, and Wilson,
after his day's reading, often went round to
Bedford Square for his tea. They had much
more in common than their memories of a com-
167

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

mon friend. Indeed, they seldom spoke of him.
They saved that for the deep moments which
do not come often, and then their talk of him
was mostly silence. Wilson knew that Hilda
had loved him; more than this he had not
tried to know.

It was late when Wilson reached Hilda's
apartment on this particular December after-
noon, and he found her alone. She sent for
fresh tea and made him comfortable, as she
had such a knack of making people comfort-
able.

"How good you were to come back before
Christmas ! I quite dreaded the Holidays with-
out you. You Ve helped me over a good many
Christmases." She smiled at him gayly.

"As if you needed me for that! But, at any
rate, I needed you. How well you are looking,
my dear, and how rested."

He peered up at her from his low chair,
balancing the tips of his long fingers together
168

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

in a judicial manner which had grown on him
with years.

Hilda laughed as she carefully poured his
cream. "That means that I was looking very
seedy at the end of the season, does n't it ?
Well, we must show wear at last, you know."

Wilson took the cup gratefully. "Ah, no
need to remind a man of seventy, who has just
been home to find that he has survived all his
contemporaries. I was most gently treated —
as a sort of precious relic. But, do you know,
it made me feel awkward to be hanging about
still."

"Seventy? Never mention it to me." Hilda
looked appreciatively at the Professor's alert
face, with so many kindly lines about the
mouth and so many quizzical ones about the
eyes. "You've got to hang about for me, you
know. I can't even let you go home again.
You must stay put, now that I have you back.
You're the realest thing I have."
169

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Wilson chuckled. "Dear me, am I? Out
of so many conquests and the spoils of con-
quered cities ! You've really missed me? Well,
then, I shall hang. Even if you have at last
to put me in the mummy-room with the others.
You'll visit me often, won't you ? "

"Every day in the calendar. Here, your
cigarettes are in this drawer, where you left
them." She struck a match and lit one for him.
"But you did, after all, enjoy being at home
again? "

"Oh, yes. I found the long railway journeys
trying. People live a thousand miles apart.
But I did it thoroughly; I was all over the place.
It was in Boston I lingered longest."

"Ah, you saw Mrs. Alexander?"

"Often. I dined with her, and had tea there
a dozen different times, I should think. Indeed,
it was to see her that I lingered on and on. I
found that I still loved to go to the house. It
always seemed as if Bartley were there, some-
170

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

how, and that at any moment one might hear
his heavy tramp on the stairs. Do you know,
I kept feeling that he must be up in his study."
The Professor looked reflectively into the grate.
"I should really have liked to go up there.
That was where I had my last long talk with
him. But Mrs. Alexander never suggested it."

"Why?"

Wilson was a little startled by her tone, and
he turned his head so quickly that his cuff-
link caught the string of his nose-glasses and
pulled them awry. "Why? Why, dear me, I
don't know. She probably never thought of
it."

Hilda bit her lip. "I don't know what made
me say that. I did n't mean to interrupt. Go
on, please, and tell me how it was."

"Well, it was like that. Almost as if he were
there. In a way, he really is there. She never
lets him go. It's the most beautiful and digni-
fied sorrow I've ever known. It's so beautiful
171

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

that it has its compensations, I should think.
Its very completeness is a compensation. It
gives her a fixed star to steer by. She does n't
drift. We sat there evening after evening in
the quiet of that magically haunted room,
and watched the sunset burn on the river,
and felt him. Felt him with a difference, of
course."

Hilda leaned forward, her elbow on her knee,
her chin on her hand. "With a difference?
Because of her, you mean?"

Wilson's brow wrinkled. "Something like
that, yes. Of course, as time goes on, to her he
becomes more and more their simple personal
relation."

Hilda studied the droop of the Professor's
head intently. "You didn't altogether like
that? You felt it was n't wholly fair to
him?"

Wilson shook himself and readjusted his
glasses. "Oh, fair enough. More than fair.
172

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Of course, I always felt that my image of him
was just a little different from hers. No rela-
tion is so complete that it can hold absolutely
all of a person. And I liked him just as he was;
his deviations, too; the places where he did n't
square."

Hilda considered vaguely. "Has she grown
much older?" she asked at last.

"Yes, and no. In a tragic way she is even
handsomer. But colder. Cold for everything
but him. * Forget thyself to marble'; I kept
thinking of that. Her happiness was a happi-
ness a deux, not apart from the world, but actu-
ally against it. And now her grief is like that.
She saves herself for it and does n't even go
through the form of seeing people much. I'm
sorry. It would be better for her, and might
be so good for them, if she could let other
people in."

"Perhaps she's afraid of letting him out a
little, of sharing him with somebody."
173

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

Wilson put down his cup and looked up with
vague alarm. "Dear me, it takes a woman to
think of that, now! I don't, you know, think
we ought to be hard on her. More, even, than
the rest of us she did n't choose her destiny.
She underwent it. And it has left her chilled.
As to her not wishing to take the world into
her confidence — well, it is a pretty brutal
and stupid world, after all, you know."

Hilda leaned forward. "Yes, I know, I know.
Only I can't help being glad that there was
something for him even in stupid and vulgar
people. My little Marie worshiped him. When
she is dusting I always know when she has
come to his picture."

Wilson nodded. "Oh, yes! He left an echo.
The ripples go on in all of us. He belonged to
the people who make the play, and most of us
are only onlookers at the best. We should n't
wonder too much at Mrs. Alexander. She must
feel how useless it would be to stir about, that
174

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

she may as well sit still; that nothing can hap-
pen to her after Bartley."

"Yes," said Hilda softly, "nothing can hap-
pen to one after Bartley."

They both sat looking into the fire.

THE END

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