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HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
THE DAUGHTER
OF THE STORAGE
AND OTHER THINGS
IN PROSE AND VERSE
W. D. HOWELLS
HARPER 6- BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
Copyright, 191 5, 1916, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published April, 1916
D-Q
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 3
II. A PRESENTIMENT 45
III. CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP 67
IV. THE RETURN TO FAVOR 81
V. SOMEBODY'S MOTHER 93
VI. THE FACE AT THE WINDOW 107
VII. AN EXPERIENCE 117
VIII. THE BOARDERS 127
IX. BREAKFAST Is MY BEST MEAL 141
X. THE MOTHER-BIRD 151
XI. THE AMIGO 161
XII. BLACK CROSS FARM 173
XIII. THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE 185
XIV. A FEAST OF REASON 227
XV. CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL 243
XVI. TABLE TALK 253
XVII. THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER 269
XVIII. SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY 285
XIX. THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS 319
333929
THE DAUGHTER OF
THE STORAGE
HTHEY were getting some of their things out to
••• send into the country, and Forsyth had left
his work to help his wife look them over and decide
which to take and which to leave. The things
were mostly trunks that they had stored the fall
before; there were some tables and Colonial
bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mir
rors and decorative odds and ends, which they
would not want in the furnished house they had
taken for the summer. There were some canvases
which Forsyth said he would paint out and use
for other subjects, but which, when he came to
look at again, he found really not so bad. The
rest, literally, was nothing but trunks ; there were,
of course, two or three boxes of books. When they
had been packed closely into the five-dollar room,
3
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and can
vases and decorative odds and ends put carefully
on top, the Forsyths thought the effect very neat,
and laughed at themselves for being proud of it.
They spent the winter in Paris planning for the
summer in America, and now it had come May, a
month which in New York is at its best, and in
the Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Ware
house is by no means at its worst. The Constitu
tional Storage is no longer new, but when the
Forsyths were among the first to store there it
was up to the latest moment in the modern per
fections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was
strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick- walled,
iron-doored corridors, with their clean concrete
floors, branching from a central avenue to the tall
windows north and south, offered perspectives
sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped
with arriving or departing household stuff.
When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice
young fellow from the office had gone with them;
running ahead and switching on rows of electrics
down the corridors, and then, with a wire-basketed
electric lamp, which he twirled about and held
aloft and alow, showing the dustless, sweet-
smelling spaciousness of a perfect five-dollar room.
He said it would more than hold their things;
and it really held them.
4
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
Now, when the same young fellow unlocked the
iron door and set it wide, he said he would get
them a man, and he got Mrs. Forsyth a gilt arm
chair from some furniture going into an adjoining
twenty-dollar room. She sat down in it, and ' * Of
course," she said, "the pieces I want will be at
the very back and the very bottom. Why don't
you get yourself a chair, too, Ambrose? What
are you looking at?"
With his eyes on the neighboring furniture he
answered, "Seems to be the wreck of a million
aire's happy home; parlor and kitchen utensils
and office furniture all in white and gold."
"Horrors, yes!" Mrs. Forsyth said, without
turning her head from studying her trunks, as
if she might divine their contents from their
outside.
"Tata and I," her husband said, "are more
interested in the millionaire's things." Tata, it
appeared, was not a dog, but a child; the name
was not the diminutive of her own name, which
was Charlotte, but a generic name for a doll, which
Tata had learned from her Italian nurse to apply
to all little girls and had got applied to herself
by her father. She was now at a distance down
the corridor, playing a drama with the pieces of
millionaire furniture; as they stretched away in
variety and splendor they naturally suggested
5 '
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
personages of princely quality, and being touched
with her little forefinger tip were capable of enter
ing warmly into Tata's plans for them.
Her mother looked over her shoulder toward
the child. "Come here, Tata," she called, and
when Tata, having enjoined some tall mirrors to
secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran
to her, Mrs. Forsyth had forgotten why she had
called her. "Oh!" she said, recollecting, "do you
know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show
mamma? Can you put your hand on it ?"
The child promptly put her hand on the end of a
small box just within her tiptoe reach, and her
mother said, "I do believe she knows everything
that's in it, Ambrose! That trunk has got to be
opened the very first one!"
The man that the young fellow said he would
send showed at the far end of the corridor, smaller
than human, but enlarging himself to the average
Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given in
structions and obeyed with caressing irony Mrs.
Forsyth's order to pull out Tata's trunk first, and
she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and
opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything
recognized by the owner : doll by doll, cook-stove,
tin dishes, small brooms, wooden animals on feet
and wheels, birds of various plumage, a toy piano,
a dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog's-eared linen
6
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
Mother Goose books, and the rest. Tata had been
allowed to put the things away herself, and she
took them out with no apparent sense of the time
passed since she saw them last. In the changing
life of her parents all times and places were alike
to her. She began to play with the things in the
storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she
saw them last in the flat. Her mother and father
left her to them in the distraction of their own
trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread over the
space toward the window and their lids lifted and
tried to decide about them. In the end she had
changed the things in them back and forth till she
candidly owned that she no longer knew where
anything at all was.
As she raised herself for a moment's respite
from the problem she saw at the far end of the
corridor a lady with two men, who increased in
size like her own man as they approached. The
lady herself seemed to decrease, though she re
mained of a magnificence to match the furniture,
and looked like it as to her dress of white picked
out in gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar
room next the Forsyths'. In her advance she had
been vividly played round by a little boy, who
ran forward and back and easily doubled the
length of the corridor before he came to a stand
and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata.
7
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered
dreamily above the things in her trunk.
The two mothers began politely to ignore each
other. She of the twenty-dollar room directed the
men who had come with her, and in a voice of
authority and appeal at once commanded and
consulted them in the disposition of her belongings.
At the sound of the mixed tones Mrs. Forsyth
signaled to her husband, and, when he came within
whispering, murmured: "Pittsburg, or Chicago.
Did you ever hear such a Mid- Western accent!"
She pretended to be asking him about repacking
the trunk before her, but the other woman was not
deceived. She was at least aware of criticism in
the air of her neighbors, and she put on greater
severity with the workmen. The boy came up and
caught her skirt. "What?" she said, bending
over. "No, certainly not. I haven't time to
attend to you. Go off and play. Don't I tell
you no? Well, there, then! Will you get that
trunk out where I can open it? That small one
there," she said to one of the men, while the other
rested for both. She stooped to unlock the trunk
and flung up the lid. " Now if you bother me any
more I will surely — ' But she lost herself short
of the threat and began again to seek counsel and
issue orders.
The boy fell upon the things in the trunk, which
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
were the things of a boy, as those in Tata's trunk
were the things of a girl, and to run with them,
one after another, to Tata and to pile them in gift
on the floor beside her trunk. He did not stop
running back and forth as fast as his short, fat
legs could carry him till he had reached the bottom
of his box, chattering constantly and taking no
note of the effect with Tata. Then, as she made
no response whatever to his munificence, he began
to be abashed and to look pathetically from her to
her father.
"Oh, really, young man," Forsyth said, "we
can't let you impoverish yourself at this rate.
What have you said to your benefactor, Tata?
What are you going to give him?"
The children did not understand his large
words, but they knew he was affectionately mock
ing them.
"Ambrose," Mrs. Forsyth said, "you mustn't
let him."
"I'm trying to think how to hinder him, but it's
rather late," Forsyth answered, and then the
boy's mother joined in.
"Indeed, indeed, if you can, it's more than I
can. You're just worrying the little girl," she said
to the boy.
"Oh no, he isn't, dear little soul," Mrs. Forsyth
said, leaving her chair and going up to the two
9
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
children. She took the boy's hand in hers.
"What a kind boy! But you know my little girl
mustn't take all your playthings. If you'll give
her one she'll give you one, and that will be
enough. You can both play with them all for
the present." She referred her suggestion to the
boy's mother, and the two ladies met at the
invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from
the twenty-dollar room.
"Oh yes, indeed," the Mid-Westerner said,
willing to meet the New-Yorker half-way. ' ' You're
taking things out, I see. I hardly know which
is the worst: taking out or putting in."
"Well, we are just completing the experience,"
Mrs. Forsyth said. "I shall be able to say better
how I feel in half an hour."
"You don't mean this is the first time youVe
stored? I suppose we've been in and out of
storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse
exactly; we've never been here before."
"It seems very nice," Mrs. Forsyth suggested.
"They all do at the beginning. I suppose if
we ever came to the end they would seem nicer
still. Mr. Bream's business is always taking him
away" (it appeared almost instantly that he was
the international inspector of a great insurance
company's agencies in Europe and South America),
"and when I don't go with him it seems easier
10
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
to break up and go into a hotel than to go on
housekeeping. I don't know that it is, though,"
she questioned. "It's so hard to know what to
do with the child in a hotel."
"Yes, but he seems the sort that you could
manage with anywhere," Mrs. Forsyth agreed
and disagreed.
His mother looked at him where he stood beam
ing upon Tata and again joyfully awaiting some
effect with her. But the child sat back upon her
small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in
her trunk and made no sign of having seen the
heaps of his gifts.
The Forsyths had said to each other before this
that their little girl was a queer child, and now
they were not so much ashamed of her apparent
selfishness or rude indifference as they thought
they were. They made a joke of it with the boy's
mother, who said she did not believe Tata was
anything but shy. She said she often told Mr.
Bream that she did wish Peter — yes, that was his
name; she didn't like it much, but it was his
grandfather's; was Tata a Christian name? Oh,
just a pet name! Well, it was pretty — could be
broken of his ridiculous habit; most children —
little boys, that was — held onto their things so.
Forsyth would have taken something from
Tata and given it to Peter; but his wife would
ii
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
not let him; and he had to content himself with
giving Peter a pencil of his own that drew red
at one end and blue at the other, and that at
once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter, on
the pavement. He told Peter not to draw a boy
now, but wait till he got home, and then be care
ful not to draw a blue boy with the red end. He
helped him put his things back into his trunk,
and Peter seemed to enjoy that, too.
Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels,
watched the restitution with her dreamy eyes;
she paid no attention to the blue boy on the pave
ment; pictures from her father were nothing new
to her. The mothers parted with expressions of
mutual esteem in spite of their difference of accent
and fortune. Mrs. Forsyth asked if she might
not kiss Peter, and did so; he ran to his mother
and whispered to her; then he ran back and
gave Tata so great a hug that she fell over
from it.
Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in
thought which she could not break from, and that
night, after she had said her prayers with her
mother, her mother thought it was time to ask
her: "Tata, dear, why did you act so to that
boy to-day? Why didn't you give him some
thing of yours when he brought you all his things?
Why did you act so oddly?"
12
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
Tata said something in a voice so low that her
mother could not make it out.
"What did you say?"
"I couldn't tell which," the child still whis
pered; but now her mother's ear was at her
lips.
"How, which?"
"To give him. The more I looked," and the
whisper became a quivering breath, "the more I
couldn't tell which. And I wanted to give them
all to him, but I couldn't tell whether it would be
right, because you and papa gave them to me for
birthday and Christmas," and the quivering
breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the
mother had to catch the child up to her heart.
"Dear little tender conscience!" she said, still
wiping her eyes when she told the child's father,
and they fell into a sweet, serious talk about her
before they slept. "And I was ashamed of her
before that woman! I know she misjudged her;
but we ought to have remembered how fine and
precious she is, and known how she must have
suffered, trying to decide."
"Yes, conscience," the father said. "And tem
perament, the temperament to which decision is
martyrdom."
"And she will always have to be deciding!
She'll have to decide for you, some day, as I
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose — she
gets it from you."
ii
The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want
to offer Peter some gift in reparation the next
morning, and her father was quite ready, if she
said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with
her to the Constitutional Storage, which was the
only address of Mrs. Bream that he knew. But
the child had either forgotten or she was contented
with her mother's comforting, and no longer felt
remorse.
One does not store the least of one's personal
or household gear without giving a hostage to
storage, a pledge of allegiance impossible to break.
No matter how few things one puts in, one never
takes everything out; one puts more things in.
Mrs. Forsyth went to the warehouse with Tata
in the fall before they sailed for another winter
in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked
up at farm-houses in their country drives, and
they filled the room quite to the top. She told
her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit
of putting back her trunk of playthings with the
hope of seeing it again in the spring; and she
added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
room without consulting him, or else throw away
the things they had brought home.
During the ten or twelve years that followed,
the Forsyths sometimes spent a whole winter in
a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes
they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was
ample, they took almost everything out of stor
age; once they got down to a two-dollar bin, and
it seemed as if they really were leaving the stor
age altogether. Then, if they went into a flat
that was nearly all studio, their furniture went
back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse,
where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room,
would not dam the overflow.
Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name,
and was called Charlotte because her mother
felt she ought to be, always went with her to the
storage to help look the things over, to see the
rooms emptied down to a few boxes, or replenished
to bursting. In the first years she played about,
close to her mother; as she grew older she ven
tured further, and began to make friends with
other little girls who had come with their mothers.
It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitu
tional Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs.
Forsyth fearlessly chanced acquaintance with these
mothers, who would sometimes be there whole
long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or
15
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
putting them in. With the trunks set into the
corridors and opened for them, they would spend
the hours looking the contents over, talking to
their neighbors, or rapt in long silences when
they hesitated with things held off or up, and,
after gazing absently at them, putting them back
again. Sometimes they varied the process by
laying things aside for sending home, and receipt
ing for them at the office as "goods selected."
They were mostly hotel people or apartment
people, as Mrs. Forsyth oftenest was herself, but
sometimes they were separate - house people.
Among these there was one family, not of great
rank or wealth, but distinguished, as lifelong New-
Yorkers, in a world of comers and goers of every
origin. Mrs. Forsyth especially liked them for a
certain quality, but what this quality was she
could not very well say. They were a mother
with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on
the way to it, and there was very intermittently
the apparently bachelor brother of the girls; at
the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her conjecture
that he was some sort of minister. One could
see they were all gentlefolks, though the girls
were not of the last cry of fashion. They were
very nice to their mother, and you could tell that
they must have been coming with her for years.
At this point in her study of them for her
16
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
husband's amusement she realized that Charlotte
had been coming to the storage with her nearly
all her life, and that more and more the child had
taken charge of the uneventual inspection of the
things. She was shocked to think that she had
let this happen, and now she commanded her
husband to say whether Charlotte would grow
into a storage old maid like those good girls.
Forsyth said, Probably not before her time; but
he allowed it was a point to be considered.
Very well, then, Mrs. Forsyth said, the child
should never go again; that was all. She had
strongly confirmed herself in this resolution when
one day she not only let the child go again, but
she let her go alone. The child was now between
seventeen and eighteen, rather tall, grave, pretty,
with the dull brown hair that goes so well with
dreaming blue eyes, and of a stiff grace. She
had not come out yet, because she had always
been out, handing cakes at her father's studio
teas long before she could remember not doing it,
and later pouring for her mother with rather a
quelling air as she got toward fifteen. During
these years the family had been going and com
ing between Europe and America; they did not
know perfectly why, except that it was easier
than not.
More and more there was a peculiarity in the
2 17
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
goods selected by Charlotte for sending home,
which her mother one day noted. "How is it,
Charlotte, that you always send exactly the
things I want, and when you get your own things
here you don't know whether they are what you
wanted or not?"
"Because I don't know when I send them. I
don't choose them; I can't."
"But you choose the right things for me?"
"No, I don't, mother. I just take what comes
first, and you always like it."
"Now, that is nonsense, Charlotte. I can't
have you telling me such a thing as that. It's
an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I
don't know my own mind?"
"I don't know my mind," the girl said, so per
sistently, obstinately, stubbornly, that her mother
did not pursue the subject for fear of worse.
She referred it to her husband, who said : ' ' Per
haps it's like poets never being able to remember
their own poetry. I've heard it's because they
have several versions in their minds when they
write and can't remember which they've written.
Charlotte has several choices in her mind, and
can't choose between her choices."
"Well, we ought to have broken her of her
indecision. Some day it will make her very
unhappy."
18
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
44 Pretty hard to break a person of her tem
perament," Forsyth suggested.
"I know it!" his wife admitted, with a certain
pleasure in realizing the fact. "I don't know
what we shall do."
in
Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in
rare instances there was a man who must have
been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of
their disability. Then the man came hastily,
with a porter, and either pulled all the things
out of the rooms so that he could honestly say
he had seen them, and that the thing wanted
was not there; or else merely had the doors
opened, and after a glance inside resolved to wait
till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come.
He agreed in guilty eagerness with the workmen
that this was the only way.
The exception to the general rule was a young
man who came one bright spring morning when all
nature suggested getting one's stuff out and going
into the country, and had the room next the
Forsyths' original five-dollar room opened. As
it happened, Charlotte was at the moment visit
ing this room upon her mother's charge to see
whether certain old scrim sash-curtains, which
19
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
they had not needed for ages but at last simply
must have, were not lurking there in a chest of
general curtainings. The Forsyths now had
moms on other floors, but their main room was
at the end of the corridor branching northward
from that where the five-dollar room was. Near
this main room that nice New York family had
their rooms* and Charlotte bad begun the morning
in their friendly neighborhood, going through some
chests that might perhaps have the general cur
tainings In them and fo** scrim curtains among the
rest. It had not, and she had gone to what the
Porsyths called their old ancestral five-dollar
room, where that New York family continued to
project a sort of wireless chaperonage over her.
Bat the young man had come with a porter, and,
with her own porter, Charlotte could not feel that
even a wireless chaperonage was needed, though
the young man approached with the most beam
ing face she thought she had ever seen, and
said he hoped he should not be in her way. She
answered with a sort of helpless reverberation
of his glow, Not at all; she should only be a
moment. She wanted to say she hoped she
would not be in his way, but she saved herself
in time, while, with her own eyes intent upon
the facade of her room and her mind trying to
lose itself in the question which curtain -trunk
20
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
the scrims might be in, she kept Hie sense of Ms
f "•-.-.: :he :::erne5: eyes she ':\:.i eve: s-e-er..
effulgent with good-will and apology and rever
ent admiration. She Mnshed to think it admira
tion, though die liked to think it so, and she did
not snub him when Hie young man jumpM about,
Defecting his own storage, and divining the right
moments for his c^Fers of help. She saw that he
was a fitlle shcHter tlian herself , that he was very
light and quick on his feet, and had a round,
rr:-,-r. hue. :le;,r. -5h;.ver. ;.r.i ;. r:.::.i :r:— .
head, dose shorn, from which In the seal of his
a::e:::-:::5 :: her he ::.ii she! his r.r;.-- h.i: :r.::
the window-sul. He fonxied a strong contrast to
the contents of his store-nxxn, which was loll,
. c: :::.\s?:ve --hi:e :-.
gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had
been there, ciff and on, since long before he could
.".: :::c^e ~ ;ri5 .ir.
vague, inexplicable, deepeaed in Charlotte's
mincL.
"Motho-," she said, for die had now disused
the earlier "mamma** in drfeteuoe to modem
usage, "how old was I when we first took that
five-dollar mm?'
She .isked :h:s rue^:-;:: .u":-:r >he h.ii fh;-- :he
<cr::" ru.r:.ii::s she h.ii :h v.:.i ^:.d rr;-.:ch: hrrr.e
with her
21
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
"Why? I don't know. Two or three; three
or four. I should have to count up. What makes
you ask?"
"Can a person recollect what happened when
they were three or four?"
"I should say not, decidedly."
"Or recollect a face?"
"Certainly not."
"Then of course it wasn't. Mother, do you
remember ever telling me what the little boy was
like who gave me all his playthings and I couldn't
decide what to give him back?"
"What a question! Of course not! He was
very brown and funny, with the beamingest little
face in the world. Rather short for his age, I
should say, though I haven't the least idea what
his age was."
"Then it was the very same little boy!" Char
lotte said.
"Who was the very same little boy?" her
mother demanded.
"The one that was there to-day; the young
man, I mean," Charlotte explained, and then she
told what had happened with a want of fullness
which her mother's imagination supplied.
"Did he say who he was? Is he coming back
to-morrow or this afternoon? Did you inquire
who he was or where?"
22
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
"What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, group
ing the several impossibilities under one head in
her answer.
' ' You had a perfect right to know, if you thought
he was the one."
"But I didn't think he was the one, and I don't
know that he is now; and if he was, what could
I do about it?"
"That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But
it's very disappointing. I've always felt as if
they ought to know it was your undecidedness
and not ungenerousness."
Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she
only said, "Really, mother!"
Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains.
"Well, these are not the scrims I wanted. You
must go back. I believe I will go with you.
The sooner we have it over the better," she added,
and she left the undecided Charlotte to decide
whether she meant the scrim curtains or the young
man's identity.
It was very well, for one reason, that she de
cided to go with Charlotte that afternoon. The
New-Yorkers must have completed the inspection
of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their
failure to do so was the more important because
the young man had come back and was actively
superintending the unpacking of his room. The
23
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
palatial furniture had all been ranged up and
down the corridor, and as fast as a trunk was got
out and unlocked he went through it with the
help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a
note-book with a number, and then transferred
the number and a synopsis of the record to a tag
and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put
back into the room.
When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken
scrim curtains, he interrupted himself with apolo
gies for possibly being in their way; and when
Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way,
he got white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and
Charlotte and put them so conveniently near the
old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely
needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte
restore the wrong curtains and search the chests
for the right ones. His politeness made way for
conversation and for the almost instant exchange
of confidences between himself and Mrs. Forsyth,
so that Charlotte was free to enjoy the silence
to which they left her in her labors.
"Before I say a word," Mrs. Forsyth said,
after saying some hundreds in their mutual in
culpation and exculpation, "I want to ask some
thing, and I hope you will excuse it to an old
woman's curiosity and not think it rude."
At the words "old woman's" the young man
24
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
gave a protesting "Oh!" and at the word "rude"
he said, "Not at all."
"It is simply this: how long have your things
been here? I ask because we've had this room
thirteen or fourteen years, and I've never seen
your room opened in that whole time."
The young man laughed joyously. "Because
it hasn't been opened in that whole time. I was
a little chap of three or four bothering round here
when my mother put the things in; I believe it
was a great frolic for me, but I'm afraid it wasn't
for her. I've been told that my activities con
tributed to the confusion of the things and the
things in them that she's been in ever since, and
I'm here now to make what reparation I can by
listing them."
"She'll find it a great blessing," Mrs. Forsyth
said. "I wish we had ours listed. I suppose you
remember it all very vividly. It must have been
a great occasion for you seeing the things stored
at that age."
The young man beamed upon her. "Not so
great as now, I'm afraid. The fact is, I don't
remember anything about it. But I've been told
that I embarrassed with my personal riches a
little girl who was looking over her doll's things."
"Oh, indeed!" Mrs. Forsyth said, stiffly, and
she turned rather snubbingly from him and said,
25
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
coldly, to Charlotte: "I think they are in that
green trunk. Have you the key?" and, stooping
as her daughter stooped, she whispered, ''Really!"
in condemnation and contempt.
Charlotte showed no signs of sharing either,
and Mrs. Forsyth could not very well manage
them alone. So when Charlotte said, "No, I
haven't the key, mother," and the young man
burst in with, "Oh, do let me try my master-
key; it will unlock anything that isn't a Yale,"
Mrs. Forsyth sank back enthroned and the
trunk was thrown open.
She then forgot what she had wanted it opened
for. Charlotte said, "They're not here, mother,"
and her mother said, "No, I didn't suppose they
were," and began to ask the young man about
his mother. It appeared that his father had died
twelve years before, and since then his mother
and he had been nearly everywhere except at
home, though mostly in England; now they had
come home to see where they should go next or
whether they should stay.
"That would never suit my daughter," Mrs.
Forsyth lugged in, partly because the talk had
gone on away from her family as long as she
could endure, and partly because Charlotte's in
decision always amused her. "She can't bear
to choose."
26
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
"Really?" the young man said. "I don't
know whether I like it or not, but I have had to
do a lot of it. You mustn't think, though, that
I chose this magnificent furniture. My father
bought an Italian palace once, and as we couln't
live in it or move it we brought the furniture
here."
"It is magnificent," Mrs. Forsyth said, look
ing down the long stretches of it and eying and
fingering her specific throne. "I wish my hus
band could see it — I don't believe he remembers
it from fourteen years ago. It looks — excuse me !
— very studio."
" Is he a painter ? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter ?"
"Yes," Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but
wondering how he should know her name, with
out reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed
it and that she had acquired his by like means.
1 ' I like his things so much, ' ' he said. ' ' I thought
his three portraits were the best things in the
Salon last year."
"Oh, you saw them?" Mrs. Forsyth laughed
with pleasure and pride. "Then," as if it neces
sarily followed, "you must come to us some
Sunday afternoon. You'll find a number of his
new portraits and some of the subjects; they
like to see themselves framed." She tried for
a card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she
27
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
said, "Have you one of my cards, my dear?"
Charlotte had, and rendered it up with a severity
lost upon her for the moment. She held it tow
ard him. "It's Mr. Peter Bream?" she smiled
upon him, and he beamed back.
"Did you remember it from our first meeting?"
In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, "I don't know
whether he's what you call rather fresh or not,
Charlotte, and I'm not sure that I've been very
wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so glad to
be asked."
Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent
severity came to the surface of her mother's con
sciousness so painfully that it was rather a relief
to have her explode, "Mother, I will thank you
not to discuss my temperament with people."
She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her
mother was so happy in being able to say, "I
won't — your temper, my dear," that she could add
with sincere apology: "I'm sorry I vexed you,
and I won't do it again."
IV
The next day was Sunday; Peter Bream took
it for some Sunday, and came to the tea on Mrs.
Forsyth's generalized invitation. She pulled her
mouth down and her eyebrows up when his card
28
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
was brought in, but as he followed hard she made
a lightning change to a smile and gave him a hand
of cordial welcome. Charlotte had no choice but
to welcome him, too, and so the matter was simple
for her. She was pouring, as usual, for her
mother, who liked to eliminate herself from set
duties and walk round among the actual portraits
in fact and in frame and talk about them to the
potential portraits. Peter, qualified by long so
journ in England, at once pressed himself into the
service of handing about the curate's assistant;
Mrs. Forsyth electrically explained that it was
one of the first brought to New York, and that
she had got it at the Stores in London fifteen years
before, and it had often been in the old ancestral
room, and was there on top of the trunks that
first day. She did not recur to the famous in
stance of Charlotte's infant indecision, and Peter
was safe from a snub when he sat down by the
girl's side and began to make her laugh. At the
end, when her mother asked Charlotte what they
had been laughing about, she could not tell; she
said she did not know they were laughing.
The next morning Mrs. Forsyth was paying for
her Sunday tea with a Monday headache, and
more things must be got out for the country.
Charlotte had again no choice but to go alone
to the" storage, and yet again no choice but to be
29
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
pleasant to Peter when she found him next door
listing the contents of his mother's trunks and
tagging them as before. He dropped his work
and wanted to help her. Suddenly they seemed
strangely well acquainted, and he pretended to
be asked which pieces she should put aside as
goods selected, and chose them for her. She hinted
that he was shirking his own work; he said it
was an all-summer's job, but he knew her mother
was in a hurry. He found the little old trunk
of her playthings, and got it down and opened it
and took out some toys as goods selected. She
made him put them back, but first he catalogued
everything in it and synopsized the list on a tag
and tagged the trunk. He begged for a broken doll
which he had not listed, and Charlotte had so much
of her original childish difficulty in parting with
that instead of something else that she refused it.
It came lunch-time, and he invited her to go
out to lunch with him; and when she declined
with dignity he argued that if they went to the
Woman's Exchange she would be properly chap
eroned by the genius of the place; besides, it
was the only place in town where you got real
strawberry shortcake. She was ashamed of liking
it all ; he besought her to let him carry her hand
bag for her, and, as he already had it, she could
not prevent him; she did not know, really, how
30
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
far she might successfully forbid him in anything.
At the street door of the apartment-house they
found her mother getting out of a cab, and she
asked Peter in to lunch ; so that Charlotte might
as well have lunched with him at the Woman's
Exchange.
At all storage warehouses there is a season in
autumn when the corridors are heaped with the
incoming furniture of people who have decided
that they cannot pass another winter in New
York and are breaking up housekeeping to go
abroad indefinitely. But in the spring, when the
Constitutional Safe-Deposit offered ample space
for thoughtful research, the meetings of Charlotte
and Peter could recur without more conscious
ness of the advance they were making toward the
fated issue than in so many encounters at tea
or luncheon or dinner. Mrs. Forsyth was insist
ing on rather a drastic overhauling of her stor
age that year. Some of the things, by her com
mand, were shifted to and fro between the more
modern rooms and the old ancestral room, and
Charlotte had to verify the removals. In decid
ing upon goods selected for the country she had
the help of Peter, and she helped him by inter
posing some useful hesitations in the case of things
he had put aside from his mother's possessions to
be sold for her by the warehouse people.
31
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
One day he came late and told Charlotte that
his mother had suddenly taken her passage for
England, and they were sailing the next morning.
He said, as if it logically followed, that he had
been in love with her from that earliest time
when she would not give him the least of her
possessions, and now he asked her if she would
not promise him the greatest. She did not like
what she felt ''rehearsed" in his proposal; it was
not her idea of a proposal, which ought to be
spontaneous and unpremeditated in terms; at
the same time, she resented his precipitation,
which she could not deny was inevitable.
She perceived that they were sitting side by
side on two of those white-and-gold thrones, and
she summoned an indignation with the absurdity
in refusing him. She rose and said that she must
go; that she must be going; that it was quite
time for her to go; and she would not let him
follow her to the elevator, as he made some offer
of doing, but left him standing among his palatial
furniture like a prince in exile.
By the time she reached home she had been
able to decide that she must tell her mother at
once. Her mother received the fact of Peter's
proposal with such transport that she did not
realize the fact of Charlotte's refusal. When this
was connoted to her she could scarcely keep her
32
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
temper within the bounds of maternal tenderness.
She said she would have nothing more to do with
such a girl ; that there was but one such pearl as
Peter in the universe, and for Charlotte to throw
him away like that! Was it because she could
not decide? Well, it appeared that she could
decide wrong quickly enough when it came to the
point. Would she leave it now to her mother?
That Charlotte would not do, but what she did
do was to write a letter to Peter taking him back
as much as rested with her; but delaying so long
in posting it, when it was written, that it reached
him among the letters sent on board and sup-
plementarily delivered by his room steward after
all the others when the ship had sailed. The best
Peter could do in response was a jubilant Mar-
conigram of unequaled cost and comprehensiveness.
His mother had meant to return in the fall,
after her custom, to find out whether she wished
to spend the winter in New York or not. Before
the date for her sailing she fell sick, and Peter
came sadly home alone in the spring. Mrs. Bream's
death brought Mrs. Forsyth a vain regret; she
was sorry now that she had seen so little of
Mrs. Bream; Peter's affection for her was beau
tiful and spoke worlds for both of them ; and they,
the Forsyths, must do what they could to com
fort him.
3 33
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
Charlotte felt the pathos of his case peculiarly
when she went to make provision for goods se
lected for the summer from the old ancestral
room, and found him forlorn among his white-
and-gold furniture next door. He complained
that he had no association with it except the touch
ing fact of his mother's helplessness with it, which
he had now inherited. The contents of the
trunks were even less intimately of his experience;
he had performed a filial duty in listing their
contents, which long antedated him, and con
sisted mostly of palatial bric-a-brac and the varied
spoils of travel.
He cheered up, however, in proposing to her
that they should buy a Castle in Spain and put
them into it. The fancy pleased her, but visibly
she shrank from a step which it involved, so that
he was, as it were, forced to say, half jokingly,
half ruefully, "I can imagine your not caring for
this rubbish or what became of it, Charlotte, but
what about the owner?"
"The owner?" she asked, as it were somnam-
bulantly.
1 'Yes. Marrying him, say, sometime soon."
"Oh, Peter, I couldn't." "
"Couldn't? You know that's not playing the
game exactly."
"Yes; but not — not right away?"
34
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
"Well, I don't know much about it in my own
case, but isn't it usual to fix some approximate
date? When should you think ?"
"Oh, Peter, I can't think."
"Will you let me fix it? I must go West and
sell out and pull up, you know, preparatory to
never going again. We can fix the day now or
we can fix it when I come back."
"Oh, when you come back," she entreated so
eagerly that Peter said:
"Charlotte, let me ask. you one thing. Were
you ever sorry you wrote me that taking-back
letter?"
"Why, Peter, you know how I am. When I
have decided something I have undecided it.
That's all."
From gay he turned to grave. "I ought to
have thought. I haven't been fair; / haven't
played the game. I ought to have given you
another chance; and I haven't, have I?"
"Why, I suppose a girl can always change,"
Charlotte said, suggestively.
"Yes, but you won't always be a girl. I've
never asked you if you wanted to change. I ask
you now. Do you?"
"How can I tell? Hadn't we better let it go
as it is? Only not hurry about — about — marry
ing?"
35
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
" Certainly not hurry about marrying. I've
wondered that a girl could make up her mind to
marry any given man. Haven't you ever wished
that you had not made up your mind about me?"
"Hundreds of times. But I don't know that
I meant anything by it."
He took her hand from where it lay in her lap
as again she sat on one of the white-and-gold
thrones beside him and gently pressed it. "Well,
then, let's play we have never been engaged. I'm
going West to-night to settle things up for good,
and I won't be back for three or four months,
and when I come back we'll start new. I'll ask
you, and you shall say yes or no just as if you
had never said either before."
"Peter, when you talk like that!" She saw his
brown, round face dimly through her wet eyes,
and she wanted to hug him for pity of him and
pride in him, but she could not decide to do it.
They went out to lunch at the Woman's Exchange,
and the only regret Peter had was that it was so
long past the season of strawberry shortcake, and
that Charlotte seemed neither to talk nor to
listen; she ought to have done one or the other.
They had left the Vaneckens busy with their
summer trunks at the far end of the northward
corridor, where their wireless station had been
re-established for Charlotte's advantage, though
36
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
she had not thought of it the whole short morn
ing long. When she came back from lunch the
Vaneckens were just brushing away the crumbs
of theirs, which the son and brother seemed to
have brought in for them in a paper box; at
any rate, he was now there, making believe to
help them.
Mrs. Forsyth had promised to come, but she
came so late in the afternoon that she owned she
had been grudgingly admitted at the office, and
she was rather indignant about it. By this time,
without having been West for three months, Peter
had asked a question which had apparently never
been asked before, and Charlotte had as newly
answered it. "And now, mother," she said,
while Mrs. Forsyth passed from indignant to
exultant, "I want to be married right away, be
fore Peter changes his mind about taking me West
with him. Let us go home at once. You always
said I should have a home wedding."
"What a ridiculous idea!" Mrs. Forsyth said,
more to gain time than anything else. She added,
"Everything is at sixes and sevens in the flat.
There wouldn't be standing-room." A sudden
thought flashed upon her, which, because it was
sudden and in keeping with her character, she
put into tentative words. "You're more at home
here than anywhere else. You were almost born
37
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
here. You've played about here ever since you
were a child. You first met Peter here. He pro
posed to you here, and you rejected him here.
He's proposed here again, and you've accepted
him, you say — "
1 "Mother!" Charlotte broke in terribly upon
her. "Are you suggesting that I should be mar
ried in a storage warehouse? Well, I haven't
fallen quite so low as that yet. If I can't have a
home wedding, I will have a church wedding, and
I will wait till doomsday for it if necessary."
"I don't know about doomsday," Mrs. For-
syth said, "but as far as to-day is concerned,
it's too late for a church wedding. Peter, isn't
there something about canonical hours? And
isn't it past them?"
"That's in the Episcopal Church," Peter said,
and then he asked, very politely, "Will you ex
cuse me for a moment?" and walked away as if
he had an idea. It was apparently to join the
Vaneckens, who stood in a group at the end of
their corridor, watching the restoration of the
trunks which they had been working over the
whole day. He came back with Mr. Vanecken
and Mr. Vanecken's mother. He was smiling
radiantly, and they amusedly.
" It 's all right, ' ' he explained. ' ' Mr. Vanecken is
a Presbyterian minister, and he will marry us now."
38
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
1 'But not here!" Charlotte cried, feeling herself
weaken.
"No, certainly not," the dominie reassured her.
"I know a church in the next block that I can bor
row for the occasion . B ut what about the license ? ' '
It was in the day before the parties must £>oth
make application in person, and Peter took a
paper from his breast pocket. "I thought it
might be needed, sometime, and I got it on the
way up, this morning."
"Oh, how thoughtful of you, Peter!" Mrs.
Forsyth moaned in admiration otherwise inex
pressible, and the rest laughed, even Charlotte,
who laughed hysterically. At the end of the cor
ridor they met the Misses Vanecken waiting for
them, unobtrusively expectant, and they all went
down in the elevator together. Just as they were
leaving the building, which had the air of hurry
ing them out, Mrs. Forsyth had an inspiration.
"Good heavens!" she exclaimed, and then, in
deference to Mr. Vanecken, said, "Good gracious,
I mean. My husband! Peter, go right into the
office and telephone Mr. Forsyth."
"Perhaps," Mr. Vanecken said, "I had better
go and see about having my friend's church
opened, in the meanwhile, and — "
"By all means!" Mrs. Forsyth said from her
mood of universal approbation.
39
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
But Mr. Vanecken came back looking rather
'queer and crestfallen. "I find my friend has
gone into the country for a few days; and I
don't quite like to get the sexton to open the
church without his authority, and — But New
York is full of churches, and we can easily find
another, with a little delay, if — "
He looked at Peter, who looked at Charlotte,
who burst out with unprecedented determination.
"No, we can't wait. I shall never marry Peter
if we do. Mother, you are right. But must it
be in the old ancestral five-dollar room?'*
They all laughed except Charlotte, who was
more like crying.
"Certainly not," Mr. Vanecken said. "I've
no doubt the manager — "
He never seemed to end his sentences, and he
now left this one broken off while he penetrated
the railing which fenced in the manager alone
among a group of vacated desks, frowning im
patient. At some murmured words from the
dominie, he shouted, "What!" and then came out
radiantly smiling, and saying, "Why, certainly."
He knew all the group as old storers in the Con
stitutional, and called them each by name as he
shook them each by the hand. "Everything else
has happened here, and I don't see why this
shouldn't. Come right into the reception-room."
40
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
With some paintings of biblical subjects, un
claimed from the storage, on the walls, the place
had a religious effect, and the manager signifi
cantly looked out of it a lingering stenographer,
who was standing before a glass with two hat
pins crossed in her mouth preparatory to thrust
ing them through the straw. She withdrew,
visibly curious and reluctant, and then the man
ager offered to withdraw himself.
"No," Charlotte said, surprisingly initiative in
these junctures, "I don't know how it is in Mr.
Vanecken's church, but, if father doesn't come,
perhaps you'll have to give me away. At any
rate, you're an old friend of the family, and I
should be hurt if you didn't stay."
She laid her hand on the manager's arm, and
just as he had protestingly and politely consented,
her father arrived in a taxicab, rather grumbling
from having been obliged to cut short a sitting.
When it was all over, and the Vaneckens were
eliminated, when, in fact, the Breams had joined
the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride's
father had given them at Delmonico's and had
precipitated themselves into a train for Niagara
("So banal," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but I suppose
they had to go somewhere, and we went to Niagara,
come to think of it, and it's on their way West"),
the bride's mother remained up late talking it
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
all over. She took credit to herself for the whole
affair, and gave herself a great deal of just praise.
But when she said, "I do believe, if it hadn't been
for me, at the last, Charlotte would never have
made up her mind," Forsyth demurred.
"I should say Peter had a good deal to do with
making up her mind for her."
"Yes, you might say that.'1
"And for once in her life Charlotte seems to
have had her mind ready for making up."
"Yes, you might say that, too. I believe she
is going to turn out a decided character, after all.
I never saw anybody so determined not to be mar
ried in a storage warehouse."
A PRESENTIMENT
II
A PRESENTIMENT
our coffee in the Turkish room Minver
was usually a censor of our several foibles
rather than a sharer in our philosophic specula
tions and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to
disable me as one professionally vowed to the
fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with the ro
mantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in
fact so little in keeping with the gross super
abundance of his person, his habitual gluttony,
and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very
well that Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and
would willingly do any kind action that did not
seriously interfere with his comfort, or make too
heavy a draft upon his pocket. His self-indul
gence, which was quite blameless, unless surfeit
is a fault, was the basis of an interest in occult
themes, which was the means of even higher di
version to Minver. He liked to have Rulledge
approach Wanhope from this side, in the invin-
45
A PRESENTIMENT
cible persuasion that the psychologist would be
interested^ these themes by the law of his science,
though he had been assured again and again that
in spite of its misleading name psychology did
not deal with the soul as Rulledge supposed the
soul; and Minver's eyes lighted up with a pre
science of uncommon pleasure when, late one night,
after we had vainly tried to hit it off in talk, now
of this, now of that, Rulledge asked Wanhope,
abruptly as if it followed from something be
fore:
"Wasn't there a great deal more said about
presentiments forty or fifty years ago than there
is now?"
Wanhope had been lapsing deeper and deeper
into the hollow of his chair; but he now pulled
himself up, and turned quickly toward Rulledge.
"What made you think of that?" he asked.
"I don't know. Why?"
"Because I was thinking of it myself." He
glanced at me, and I shook my head.
"Well," Minver said, "if it will leave Acton
out in the cold, I'll own that I was thinking of it,
too. I was going back in my mind, for no reason
that I know of, to my childhood, when I first
heard of such a thing as a presentiment, and when
I was afraid of having one. I had the notion that
presentiments ran in the family."
46
A PRESENTIMENT
"Why had you that notion?" Rulledge de
manded.
"I don't know that I proposed telling," the
painter said, giving himself to his pipe.
"Perhaps you didn't have it," Rulledge re
taliated.
"Perhaps," Minver assented.
Wanhope turned from the personal aspect of
the matter. "It's rather curious that we should
all three have had the same thing in mind just
now; or, rather, it is not very curious. Such
coincidences are really very common. Something
must have been said at dinner which suggested
it to all of us."
"All but Acton," Minver demurred.
"I mightn't have heard what was said," I ex
plained. "I suppose the passing of all that sort
of sub-beliefs must date from the general lapse
of faith in personal immortality."
"Yes, no doubt," Wanhope assented. "It is
very striking how sudden the lapse was. Every
one who experienced it in himself could date it
to a year, if not to a day. The agnosticism of
scientific men was of course all the time under
mining the fabric of faith, and then it fell in
abruptly, reaching one believer after another as
fast as the ground was taken wholly or partly
from under his feet. I can remember how people
47
A PRESENTIMENT
once disputed whether there were such beings
as guardian spirits or not. That minor question
was disposed of when it was decided that there
were no spirits at all."
"Naturally," Minver said. "And the decay of
the presentiment must have been hastened by the
failure of so many presentiments to make good."
"The great majority of them have failed to
make good, from the beginning of time," Wan-
hope replied.
"There are two kinds of presentiments," Rul-
ledge suggested, with a philosophic air. "The
true and the untrue."
"Like mushrooms," Minver said. "Only, the
true presentiment kills, and the true mushroom
nourishes. Talking of mushrooms, they have a
way in Switzerland of preserving them in walnut
oil, and they fill you with the darkest forebodings,
after you've filled yourself with the mushrooms.
There's some occult relation between the two.
Think it out, Rulledge!"
Rulledge ignored him in turning to Wanhope.
"The trouble is how to distinguish the true from
the untrue presentiment."
"It would be interesting," Wanhope began, but
Minver broke in upon him maliciously.
"To know how much the dyspepsia of our
predecessors had to with the prevalence of pre-
48
A PRESENTIMENT
sentimentalism? I agree with you, that a better
diet has a good deal to do with the decline of the
dark foreboding among us. What I can't under
stand is, how a gross and reckless feeder, like
Rulledge here, doesn't go about like ancestral
voices prophesying all sorts of dreadful things."
"That's rather cheap talk, even for you, Min-
ver," Rulledge said. "Why did you think pre
sentiments ran in your family?"
"Well, there you have me, Rulledge. That's
where my theory fails. I can remember," Min-
ver continued soberly, "the talk there used to
be about them among my people. They were
serious people in an unreligious way, or rather
an unecclesiastical way. They were never spirit
ualists, but I don't think there was one of them
who doubted that he should live hereafter; he
might doubt that he was living here, but there was
no question of the other thing. I must say it
gave a dignity to their conversation which, when
they met, as they were apt to do at one another's
houses on Sunday nights, was not of common
things. One of my uncles was a merchant, an
other a doctor; my father was a portrait-painter
by profession, and a sign-painter by practice. I
suppose that's where I got my knack, such as it
is. The merchant was an invalid, rather, though
he kept about his business, and our people merely
4 49
A PRESENTIMENT
recognized him as being out of health. He was
what we could call, for that day and region — the
Middle West of the early fifties — a man of un
usual refinement. I suppose this was tempera
mental with him largely; but he had cultivated
tastes, too. I remember him as a peculiarly gentle
person, with a pensive cast of face, and the melan
choly accomplishment of playing the flute."
"I wonder why nobody plays the flute nowa
days," I mused aloud.
* ' Yes, it's quite obsolete, ' ' Minver said. ' ' They
only play the flute in the orchestras now. I al
ways look at the man who plays it and think of
my uncle. He used to be very nice to me as a
child; and he was very fond of my father, in a
sort of filial way; my father was so much older.
I can remember my young aunt; and how pretty
she was as she sat at the piano, and sang and
played to his fluting. When she looked forward
at the music, her curls fell into her neck; they
wore curls then, grown-up women; and though
I don't think curls are beautiful, my aunt's beauty
would have been less without them; in fact, I
can't think of her without them.
"She was delicate, too; they were really a pair
of invalids; but she had none of his melancholy.
They had had several children, who died, one
after another, and there was only one left at the
50
A PRESENTIMENT
time I am speaking of. I rather wonder, now,
that the thought of those poor little ghost-cousins
didn't make me uncomfortable. I was a very
superstitious boy, but I seem not to have thought
of them. I played with the little girl who was
left, and I liked going to my uncle's better than
anywhere else. I preferred going in the daytime
and in the summer-time. Then my cousin and I
sat in a nook of the garden and fought violets, as
we called it ; hooked the wry necks of the flowers
together and twitched to see which blossom would
come off first. She was a sunny little thing, like
her mother, and she had curls, like her. I can't
express the feeling I had for my aunt ; she seemed
the embodiment of a world that was at once very
proud and very good. I suppose she dressed
fashionably, as things went then and there; and
her style as well as her beauty fascinated me. I
would have done anything to please her, far
more than to please my cousin. With her I used
to squabble, and sometimes sent her crying to
her mother. Then I always ran off home, but
when I sneaked back, or was sent for to come
and play with my cousin, I was not scolded for
my wickedness.
"My uncle was more prosperous than his
brothers; he lived in a much better house than
ours, and I used to be quite awe-struck by its
51
A PRESENTIMENT
magnificence. He went East, as we said, twice
a year to buy goods, and he had things sent back
for his house such as we never saw elsewhere;
those cask-shaped seats of blue china for the
verandas, and bamboo chairs. There were cane-
bottom chairs in the sitting-room, such as we had
in our best room; in the parlor the large pieces
were of mahogany veneer, upholstered in black
hair-cloth ; they held me in awe. The piano filled
half the place; the windows came down to the
ground, and had Venetian blinds and lace cur
tains.
"We all went in there after the Sunday night
supper, and then the fathers and mothers were
apt to begin talking of those occult things that
gave me the creeps. It was after the Rochester
Knockings, as they were called, had been exposed,
and so had spread like an infection everywhere.
It was as if people were waiting to have the fraud
shown up in order to believe in it."
"That sort of thing happens," Wanhope agreed.
"It's as if the seeds of the ventilated imposture
were carried atmospherically into the human
mind broadcast and a universal crop of self-
delusion sprang up."
"At any rate," Minver resumed, "instead of
the gift being confined to a few persons — a small
sisterhood with detonating knee-joints — there were.
A PRESENTIMENT
rappings in every well-regulated household ; all the
tables tipped; people went to sleep to the soft
patter of raps on the headboards of their beds;
and girls who could not spell were occupied in
delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin
and Shakespeare. Besides the physical demon
strations, there were all sorts of psychical in
timations from the world which we've now
abolished."
"Not permanently, perhaps/' I suggested.
"Well, that remains to be seen," Minver said.
' ' It was this sort of thing which my people valued
above the other. Perhaps they were exclusive in
their tastes, and did not care for an occultism
which the crowd could share with them; though
this is a conjecture too long after the fact to have
much value. As far as I can now remember, they
used to talk of the double presence of living per
sons, like their being where they greatly wished
to be as well as where they really were; of clair
voyance ; of what we call mind-transference, now ;
of weird coincidences of all kinds; of strange ex
periences of their own and of others; of the par
ticipation of animals in these experiences, like the
testimony of cats and dogs to the presence of
invisible spirits; of dreams that came true, or
came near coming true; and, above everything,
of forebodings and presentiments.
53
A PRESENTIMENT
"I dare say they didn't always talk of such
things, and I'm giving possibly a general impres
sion from a single instance; everything remem
bered of childhood is as if from large and repeated
occurrence. But it must have happened more
than once, for I recall that when it came to pre
sentiments my aunt broke it up, perhaps once
only. My cousin used to get very sleepy on the
rug before the fire, and her mother would carry
her off to bed, very cross and impatient of being
kissed good night, while I was left to the brunt of
the occult alone. I could not go with my aunt
and cousin, and I folded myself in my mother's
skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an
anguish of drowsy terror. The talk would pass
into my dreams, and the dreams would return
into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double
nightmare, waking and sleeping."
"Poor little devil!" Rulledge broke out. "It's
astonishing how people will go on before children,
and never think of the misery they're making for
them."
"I believe my mother thought of it," Minver
returned, "but when that sort of talk began, the
witchery of it was probably too strong for her.
'It held her like a two years' child'; I was eight
that winter. I don't know how long my suffer
ing had gone on, when my aunt came back and
54
A PRESENTIMENT
seemed to break up the talk. It had got to pre
sentiments, and, whether they knew that this was
forbidden ground with her, or whether she now
actually said something about it, they turned to
talk of other things. I'm not telling you all this
from my own memory, which deals with only a
point or two. My father and mother used to
recur to it when I was older, and I am piecing
out my story from their memories.
"My uncle, with all his temperamental pensive-
ness, was my aunt's stay and cheer in the fits of
depression which she paid with for her usual
gaiety. But these fits always began with some
uncommon depression of his — some effect of the
forebodings he was subject to. Her opposition
to that kind of thing was purely unselfish, but
certainly she dreaded it for him as well as herself.
I suppose there was a sort of conscious silence in
the others which betrayed them to her. 'Well/
she said, laughing, 'have you been at it again?
That poor child looks frightened out of his wits/
"They all laughed then, and my father said,
hypocritically, 'I was just going to ask Felix
whether he expected to start East this week
or next.'
"My uncle tried to make light of what was
always a heavy matter with him. 'Well, yester
day,' he answered, 'I should have said next week;
55
A PRESENTIMENT
but it's this week, now. I'm going on Wednes
day.'
"'By stage or packet?' my father asked.
'"Oh, I shall take the canal to the lake, and
get the boat for Buffalo there,' my uncle said.
"They went on to speak of the trip to New
York, and how much easier it was then than it
used to be when you had to go by stage over the
mountains to Philadelphia and on by stage again.
Now, it seemed, you got the Erie Canal packet
at Buffalo and the Hudson River steamboat at
Albany, and reached New York in four or five
days, in great comfort without the least fatigue.
They had all risen and my aunt had gone out
with her sisters-in-law to help them get their
wraps. When they returned, it seemed that they
had been talking of the journey, too, for she said
to my mother, laughing again, 'Well, Richard
may think it's easy; but somehow Felix never
expects to get home alive.'
"I don't think I ever heard my uncle laugh,
but I can remember how he smiled at my aunt's
laughing, as he put his hand on her shoulder; I
thought it was somehow a very sad smile. On
Wednesday I was allowed to go with my aunt and
cousin to see him off on the packet, which came
up from Cincinnati early in the morning; I had
Iain awake most of the night, and then nearly
56
A PRESENTIMENT
overslept myself, and then was at the canal in
time. We made a gay parting for him, but when
the boat started, and I was gloating on the three
horses making up the tow-path at a spanking trot,
under the snaky spirals of the driver's smacking
whip-lash, I caught sight of my uncle standing on
the deck and smiling that sad smile of his. My
aunt was waving her handkerchief, but when she
turned away she put it to her eyes.
4 'The rest of the story, such as it is, I know,
almost to the very end, from what I heard my
father and mother say from my uncle's report after
ward. He told them that, when the boat started,
the stress to stay was so strong upon him that
if he had not been ashamed he would have jumped
ashore and followed us home. He said that he
could not analyze his feelings ; it was not yet any
definite foreboding, but simply a depression that
seemed to crush him so that all his movements
were leaden, when he turned at last, and went
down to breakfast in the cabin below. The stress
did not lighten with the little changes and chances
of the voyage to the lake. He was never much
given to making acquaintance with people, but
now he found himself so absent-minded that he
was aware of being sometimes spoken to by
friendly strangers without replying until it was
too late even to apologize. He was not only
57
A PRESENTIMENT
steeped in this gloom, but he had the constant dis
tress of the effort he involuntarily made to trace
it back to some cause or follow it forward to some
consequence. He kept trying at this, with a mind
so tensely bent to the mere horror that he could
not for a moment strain away from it. He would
very willingly have occupied himself with other
things, but the anguish which the double action
of his mind gave him was such that he could not
bear the effort; all he could do was to abandon
himself to his obsession. This would ease him
only for a while, though, and then he would suffer
the misery of trying in vain to escape from it.
"He thought he must be going mad, but in
sanity implied some definite delusion or hallucina
tion, and, so far as he could make out, he had none.
He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding.
Something dreadful was to happen, but this was
all he felt ; knowledge had no part in his condition.
He could not say whether he slept during the two
nights that passed before he reached Toledo,
where he was to take the lake steamer for Buffalo.
He wished to turn back again, but the relentless
pressure which had kept him from turning back
at the start was as strong as ever with him. He
tried to give his presentiment direction by talking
with the other passengers about a recent accident
to a lake steamer, in which several hundred lives
58
A PRESENTIMENT
were lost; there had been a collision in rough
weather, and one of the boats had gone down in
a few minutes. There was a sort of relief in that,
but the double action of the mind brought the
same intolerable anguish again, and he settled
back for refuge under the shadow of his im
penetrable doom. This did not lift till he was
well on his way from Albany to New York by
the Hudson River. The canal-boat voyage from
Buffalo to Albany had been as eventless as that
to Toledo, and his lake steamer had reached
Buffalo in safety, for which it had seemed as if
those lost in the recent disaster had paid.
"He tried to pierce his heavy cloud by argu
ment from the security in which he had traveled
so far, but the very security had its hopelessness.
If something had happened — some slight accident
— to interrupt it, his reason, or his unreason,
might have taken it for a sign that the obscure
doom, whatever it was, had been averted.
4 'Up to this time he had not been able to con
nect his foreboding with anything definite, and
he was not afraid for himself. He was simply
without the formless hope that helps us on at
every step, through good and bad, and it was a
mortal peril, which he came through safely while
scores of others were lost, that gave his presenti
ment direction. He had taken the day boat from
59
A PRESENTIMENT
Albany, and about the middle of the afternoon the
boat, making way under a head- wind, took fire.
The pilot immediately ran her ashore, and her
passengers, those that had the courage for it,
ran aft, and began jumping from the stern, but
a great many women and children were burned.
My uncle was one of the first of those who jumped,
and he stood in the water, trying to save those
who came after from drowning; it was not very
deep. Some of the women lost courage for the
leap, and some turned back into the flames, re
membering children they had left behind. One
poor creature stood hesitating wildly, and he
called up to her to jump. At last she did so, al
most into his arms, and then she clung about
him as he helped her ashore. 'Oh/ she cried out
between her sobs, 'if you have a wife and children
at home, God will take you safe back to them;
you have saved my life for my husband and little
ones.' 'No,' he was conscious of saying, 'I shall
never see my wife again,' and now his foreboding
had the direction that it had wanted before.
"From that on he simply knew that he should
not get home alive, and he waited resignedly for
the time and form of his disaster. He had a sort
of peace in that. He went about his business in
telligently, and from habit carefully, but it was
with a mechanical action of the mind, something,
60
A PRESENTIMENT
he imagined, like the mechanical action of his
body in those organs which do their part without
bidding from the will. He was only a few days
in New York, but in the course of them he got
several letters from his wife telling him that all
was going well with her and their daughter. It
was before the times when you can ask and answer
questions by telegraph, and he started back,
necessarily without having heard the latest news
from home.
"He made the return trip in a sort of daze,
talking, reading, eating, and sleeping in the calm
certainty of doom, and only wondering how it
would be fulfilled, and what hour of the night
or day. But it is no use my eking this out; I
heard it, as I say, when I was a child, and I am
afraid that if I should try to give it with the full
detail I should take to inventing particulars."
Minver paused a moment, and then he said: "But
there was one thing that impressed itself indelibly
on my memory. My uncle got back perfectly
safe and well."
"Oh!" Rulledge snorted in rude dissatisfaction.
"What was it impressed itself on your mem
ory?" Wanhope asked, with scientific detachment
from the story as a story.
Minver continued to address Wanhope, without
regarding Rulledge. "My uncle told my father
A PRESENTIMENT
that some sort of psychical change, which he could
not describe, but which he was as conscious of as
if it were physical, took place within him as he
came in sight of his house — "
"Yes," Wanhope prompted.
"He had driven down from the canal-packet in
the old omnibus which used to meet passengers
and distribute them at their destinations in town.
All the way to his house he was still under the
doom as regarded himself, but bewildered that he
should be getting home safe and well, and he was
refusing his escape, as it were, and then suddenly,
at the sight of the familiar house, the change within
him happened. He looked out of the omnibus
window and saw a group of neighbors at his
gate. As he got out of the omnibus, my father
took him by the hand, as if to hold him back a
moment. Then he said to my father, very quietly,
4 You needn't tell me: my wife is dead.' "
There was an appreciable pause, in which we
were all silent, and then Rulledge demanded,
greedily, "And was she?"
"Really, Rulledge!" I could not help protesting.
Minver asked him, almost compassionately and
with unwonted gentleness, as from the mood in
which his reminiscence had left him: "You sus
pected a hoax? She had died suddenly the
night before while she and my cousin were getting
62
A PRESENTIMENT
things ready to welcome my uncle home in the
morning. I'm sorry you're disappointed," he
added, getting back to his irony.
''Whatever," Rulledge pursued, "became of the
little girl?"
"She died rather young; a great many years
ago; and my uncle soon after her."
Rulledge went away without saying anything,
but presently returned with the sandwich which he
had apparently gone for, while Wanhope was re
marking : ' ' That want of definition in the presenti
ment at first, and then its determination in the new
direction by, as it were, propinquity — it is all very
curious. Possibly we shall some day discover a
law in such matters."
Rulledge said : * ' How was it your boyhood was
passed in the Middle West, Minver? I always
thought you were a Bostonian."
"I was an adoptive Bostonian for a good while,
until I decided to become a native New-Yorker,
so that I could always be near to you, Rulledge.
You can never know what a delicate satisfaction
you are."
Minver laughed, and we were severally restored
to the wonted relations which his story had in
terrupted.
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S
LAST TRIP
Ill
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
TT was against the law, in such case made and
* provided,
Of the United States, but by the good will of
the pilots
That we would some of us climb to the pilot
house after our breakfast
For a morning smoke, and find ourselves seats
on the benching
Under the windows, or in the worn-smooth arm
chairs. The pilot,
Which one it was did not matter, would tilt his
head round and say, "All right!"
When he had seen who we were, and begin, or
go on as from stopping
In the midst of talk that was leading up to a
story,
Just before we came in, and the story, begun or
beginning,
Always began or ended with some one, or some
thing or other,
67
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
Having to do with the river. If one left the
wheel to the other,
Going off watch, he would say to his partner
standing behind him
With his hands stretched out for the spokes that
were not given up yet,
"Captain, you can tell them the thing I was
going to tell them
Better than I could, I reckon," and then the
other would answer,
"Well, I don't know as I feel so sure of that,
captain," and having
Recognized each other so by that courtesy title
of captain
Never officially failed of without offense among
pilots,
One would subside into Jim and into Jerry the other.
It was on these terms, at least, Captain Dunn
relieved Captain Davis
When we had settled ourselves one day to listen
in comfort,
After some psychological subtleties we had in
dulged in at breakfast
Touching that weird experience every one knows
when the senses
Juggle the points of the compass out of true
orientation,
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
Changing the North to the South, and the East
to the West. "Why, Jerry, what was it
You was going to tell them?" "Oh, never you
mind what it was, Jim.
You tell them something else," and so Captain
Davis submitted,
While Captain Dunn, with a laugh, got away
beyond reach of his protest.
Then Captain Davis, with fitting, deprecatory
preamble,
Launched himself on a story that promised to be
all a story
Could be expected to be, when one of those
women — you know them —
Who interrupt on any occasion or none, inter
rupted,
Pointed her hand, and asked, "Oh, what is that
island there, captain?"
"That one, ma'am?" He gave her the name,
and then the woman persisted,
"Don't say you know them all by sight!" "Yes,
by sight or by feeling."
"What do you mean by feeling?" "Why, just
that by daylight we see them,
And in the dark it's like as if somehow we felt
them, I reckon.
Every foot of the channel and change in it, wash
out and cave-in,
69
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
Every bend and turn of it, every sand-bar and
landmark,
Every island, of course, we have got to see them,
or feel them."
"But if you don't?" "But we've got to." "But
aren't you ever mistaken?"
"Never the second time." "Now, what do you
mean, Captain Davis?
Never the second time." ."Well, let me tell you
a story.
It's not the one I begun, but that island you
asked about yonder
Puts me in mind of it, happens to be the place
where it happened,
Three years ago. I suppose no man ever knew
the Ohio
Better than Captain Dunlevy, if any one else
knew it like him.
Man and boy he had been pretty much his whole
life on the river:
Cabin-boy first on a keelboat before the day of
the steamboats,
Back in the pioneer times; and watchman then
on a steamboat;
Then second mate, and then mate, and then pilot
and captain and owner —
But he was proudest, I reckon, of being about
the best pilot
70
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
On the Ohio. He knew it as well as he knew his
own Bible,
And I don't hardly believe that ever Captain
Dunlevy
Let a single day go by without reading a chapter."
While the pilot went on with his talk, and in
regular, rhythmical motion
Swayed from one side to the other before his
wheel, and we listened,
Certain typical facts of the picturesque life of
the river
Won their way to our consciousness as without
help of our senses.
It was along about the beginning of March, but
already
In the sleepy sunshine the budding maples and
willows,
Where they waded out in the shallow wash of
the freshet,
Showed the dull red and the yellow green of their
blossoms and catkins,
And in their tops the foremost flocks of black
birds debated
As to which they should colonize first. The in
dolent house-boats
Loafing along the shore, sent up in silvery spirals
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
Out of their kitchen pipes the smoke of their
casual breakfasts.
Once a wide tow of coal-barges, loaded clear
down to the gunwales,
Gave us the slack of the current, with proper
formalities shouted
By the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed
the black barges before her,
And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade
from her paddles.
Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the
barges had hidden,
River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden
jump forward the pilot
Dropped his whole weight on the spokes of the
wheel just in time to escape it.
"Always give those fellows," he joked, "all the
leeway they ask for;
Worst kind of thing on the river you want your
boat to run into.
Where had I got about Captain Dunlevy? Oh
yes, I remember.
Well, when the railroads began to run away from
the steamboats,
Taking the carrying trade in the very edge of
the water,
72
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
It was all up with the old flush times, and Cap
tain Dunlevy
Had to climb down with the rest of us pilots till
he was only
Captain the same as any and every pilot is
captain,
Glad enough, too, to be getting his hundred and
twenty-five dollars
Through the months of the spring and fall while
navigation was open.
Never lowered himself, though, a bit from cap
tain and owner,
Knew his rights and yours, and never would
thought of allowing
Any such thing as a liberty from you or taking
one with you.
I had been his cub, and all that I knew of the
river
Captain Dunlevy had learnt me ; and if you know
what the feeling
Is of a cub for the pilot that learns him the river,
you'll trust me
When I tell you I felt it the highest kind of an
honor
Having him for my partner; and when I came
up to relieve him,
One day, here at the wheel, and actu'lly thought
that I found him
73
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
Taking that island there on the left, I thought
I was crazy.
No, I couldn't believe my senses, and yet I
couldn't endure it.
Seeing him climb the spokes of the wheel to
warp the Kanawha,
With the biggest trip of passengers ever she
carried,
Round on the bar at the left that fairly stuck
out of the water.
Well, as I said, he learnt me all that I knew of
the river,
And was I to learn him now which side to take
of an island
When I knew he knew it like his right hand from
his left hand?
My, but I hated to speak! It certainly seemed
Hke my tongue clove,
Like the Bible says, to the roof of my mouth!
But I had to.
1 Captain,' I says, and it seemed like another
person was talking,
'Do you usu'lly take that island there on the
eastward?'
'Yes,' he says, and he laughed, 'and I thought I
had learnt you to do it,
When you was going up.' 'But not going down,
did you, captain?'
74
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
'Down?' And he whirled at me, and, without
ever stopping his laughing,
Turned as white as a sheet, and his eyes fairly
bulged from their sockets.
Then he whirled back again, and looked up and
down on the river,
Like he was hunting out the shape of the shore
and the landmarks.
Well, I suppose the thing has happened to every
one sometime,
When you find the points of the compass have
swapped with each other,
And at the instant you're looking, the North
and the South have changed places.
I knew what was in his mind as well as Dunlevy
himself did.
Neither one of us spoke a word for nearly a
minute.
Then in a kind of whisper he says, 'Take the
wheel, Captain Davis!'
Let the spokes fly, and while I made a jump
forwards to catch them,
Staggered into that chair — well, the very one
you are in, ma'am.
Set there breathing quick, and, when he could
speak, all he said was,
'This is the end of it for me on the river, Jim
Davis/
75
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
Reached up over his head for his coat where it
hung by that window,
Trembled onto his feet, and stopped in the door
there a second,
Stared in hard like as if for good-by to the things
he was used to,
Shut the door behind him, and never come back
again through it."
While we were silent, not liking to prompt the
pilot with questions,
"Well," he said, at last, "it was no use to argue.
We tried it,
In the half-hearted way that people do that
don't mean it.
Every one was his friend here on the Kanawha,
and we knew
It was the first time he ever had lost his bearings,
but he knew,
In such a thing as that, that the first and the
last are the same time.
When we had got through trying our worst to
persuade him, he only
Shook his head and says, 'I am done for, boys,
and you know it,'
Left the boat at Wheeling, and left his life on
the river —
Left his life on the earth, you may cay, for I
don't call it living,
76
CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
Setting there homesick at home for the wheel
he can never go back to.
Reads the river-news regular; knows just the
stage of the water
Up and down the whole way from Cincinnati to
Pittsburg;
Follows every boat from the time she starts out
in the spring-time
Till she lays up in the summer, and then again
in the winter;
Wants to talk all about her and who is her cap
tain and pilot;
Then wants to slide away to that everlastingly
puzzling
Thing that happened to him that morning on the
Kanawha
When he lost his bearings and North and South
had changed places —
No, I don't call that living, whatever the rest
of you call it."
We were silent again till that woman spoke up,
"And what was it,
Captain, that kept him from going back and
being a pilot?"
"Well, ma'am," after a moment the pilot pa
tiently answered,
"I don't hardly believe that I could explain it
exactly."
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
IV
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
HE never, by any chance, quite kept his word,
though ^ there was a moment in every case
when he seemed to imagine doing what he said,
and he took with mute patience the rakings which
the ladies gave him when he disappointed them.
Disappointed is not just the word, for the
ladies did not really expect him to do what he
said. They pretended to believe him when he
promised, but at the bottom of their hearts they
never did or could. He was gentle-mannered and
soft-spoken, and when he set his head on one
side, and said that a coat would be ready on
Wednesday, or a dress on Saturday, and repeated
his promise upon the same lady's expressed doubt,
she would catch her breath and say that now she
absolutely must have it on the day named, for
otherwise she would not have a thing to put on.
Then he would become very grave, and his soft
tenor would deepen to a bass of unimpeachable
6 81
U
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
veracity, and he would say, "Sure, lady, you
it."
he lady would depart still doubting and slight
ly sighing, and he would turn to the customer
who was waiting to have a button sewed on, or
something like that, and ask him softly what it
was he could do for him. If the customer offered
him his appreciation of the case in hand, he
would let his head droop lower, and in a yet deep
er bass deplore the doubt of the ladies as an
idiosyncrasy of their sex. He would make the
customer feel that he was a favorite customer
whose rights to a perfect fidelity of word and
deed must by no means be tampered with, and
he would have the button sewed on or the rip
sewed up at once, and refuse to charge anything,
while the customer waited in his shirt-sleeves in
the small, stuffy shop opening directly from the
street. When he tolerantly discussed the pe
culiarities of ladies as a sex, he would endure to
be laughed at, "for sufferance was the badge of
his tribe," and possibly he rather liked it.
The favorite customer enjoyed being there when
some lady came back on the appointed Wednes
day or Saturday, and the tailor came soothingly
forward and showed her into the curtained alcove
where she was to try on the garments, and then
called into the inner shop for them. (The shirt-
82 J
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
sleeved journeyman, with his unbuttoned waist
coat-front all pins and threaded needles, would
appear in his slippers with the things barely basted
together, and the tailor Would take them, with
an airy courage, as if they were perfectly finished,
and go in behind the curtain where the lady was
waiting in a dishabille which the favorite cus
tomer, out of reverence for the sex, forbore to
picture to himself/^ Then sounds of volcanic fury
•*•„ , ^~> • 1—^ t I!—../
wouTcT issue from the alcove. "Now, Mr. Mor
rison, you have lied to me again, deliberately lied.
Didn't I tell you I must have the things perfectly
ready to-day? You see yourself that it will be
another week before I can have my things."
"A week? Oh, madam! But I assure you — '
''Don't talk to me any more! It's the last
time I shall ever come to you, but I suppose I
can't take the work away from you as it is.
When shall I have it?"
"To-morrow. Yes, to-morrow noon. Sure!"
"Now you know you are always out at noon.
I should think you would be ashamed."
"If it hadn't been for sickness in the family I
would have finished your dress with my own hands.
Sure I would. If you come here to-morrow noon
you find your dress all ready for you."
"I know I won't, but I will come, and you'd
better have it ready."
83
THE 'RETURN TO FAVOR
"Oh, sure."
The lady then added some generalities of
opprobrium with some particular criticisms of
the garments. Her voice sank into dispassionate
murmurs in these, but it rose again in her re
newed sense of the wrong done her, and when
she came from the alcove she went out of the
street door purple. She reopened it to say,
"Now, remember!" before she definitely dis
appeared.
""" ' rRather a stormy session, Mr. Morrison," the
customer said.
"Something fierce," Mr. Morrison sighed.
But he did not seem much troubled, and he had
one way with all his victims, no matter what
mood they came or went in.
One day the customer was by when a kind
.creature timidly upbraided him. "This is the
third time you've disappointed me, Mr. Morri
son. I really wish you wouldn't promise me un
less you mean to do it. I don't think it's right
for you."
"Oh, but sure, madam! The things will be
done, sure. We had a strike on us."
"Well, I will trust you once more," the kind
creature said.
"You can depend on me, madam, sure."
When she was gone the customer said: "I
84
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
wonder you do that sort of thing, Mr. Morrison.
You can't be surprised at their behaving rustily
with you if you never keep your word."
"Why, I assure you there are times when I
don't know where to look, the way they go on.
It is something awful. You ought to hear them
once. And now they want the wote." He re
arranged some pieces of tumbled goods at the
table where the customer sat, and put together
the disheveled leaves of the fashion-papers which
looked as if the ladies had scattered them in
their rage.
One day the customer heard two ladies waiting
for their disappointments in the outer room while
the tailor in the alcove was trying to persuade a
third lady that positively her things would be
sent home the next day before dark. The cus
tomer had now formed the habit of having his
own clothes made by the tailor, and his system
in avoiding disappointment was very simple. In
the early fall he ordered a spring suit, and in the
late spring it was ready. He never had any
difficulty, but he was curious to learn how the
ladies managed, and he listened with all his might
while these two talked. ^
— -*1! always wonder we keep coming," one of
them said.
"I'll tell you why," the other said. "Because
85
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
he's cheap, and we get things from a fourth to a
third less than we can get them anywhere else.
The quality is first rate, and he's absolutely honest.
And, besides, he's a genius. The wretch has
touch. The things have a style, a look, a hang!
Really it's something wonderful. Sure it iss,"
she ended in the tailor's accent, and then they
both laughed and joined in a common sigh.
"Well, I don't believe he means to deceive
any one."
"Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to
do everything he says. And one can't help liking
him even when he doesn't."
rle's a good while getting through with her,"
the first lady said, meaning the unseen lady in
the alcove.
"She'll be a good while longer getting through
with him, if he hasn't them ready the next time,"
the second lady said.
But the lady in the alcove issued from it with
an impredicable smile, and the tailor came up
to the others, and deferred to their wishes with
a sort of voiceless respect.
He gave the customer a glance of good-fellow
ship, and said to him, radiantly: "Your things
all ready for you, this morning. As soon as I — "
"Oh, no hurry," the customer responded.
"I won't be a minute," the tailor said, pulling
86
I him '
U— - -i
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
the curtain of the alcove aside, and then there
began those sounds of objurgation and expostula
tion, although the ladies had seemed so amiable
before.
The customer wondered if they did not all en
joy it; the ladies in their patience under long
trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of practising
•upojxjtfBut perhaps he did believe in the
things he promised. He might be so much a
genius as to have no grasp of facts; he might
have thought that he could actually do what
he said.
The customer's question on these points found
answer when one day the tailor remarked, as it
were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his
business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who
used to come in his shirt-sleeves, with his vest-
front full of pins and needles, bringing the basted
garments to be tried on the ladies who had been
promised them perfectly finished.
"He will do your clothes all right," he explained
to the customer. "He is a first-rate cutter and
fitter; he knows the whole business."
"But why — why — " the customer began.
"I couldn't stand it. The way them ladies
would talk to a person, when you done your best
to please them; it's something fierce."
"Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it,
87
V-.WU1
*4^ no (
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
from the way you always promised them and
never kept your word."
"And if I hadn't promised them?" the tailor
returned with some show of feeling. "They
wanted me to promise them — they made me—
they wouldn't have gone away without it. Sure.
Every one wanted her things before every one.
You had got to think of that."
"But you had to think of what they would
say."
"Say? Sometimes I thought they would hit-
me. One lady said she had a notion to slap me
once. It's no way to talk."
"But you didn't seem to mind it."
"I didn't mind it for a good while. Then I
couldn't stand it. So I sold."
e shook his head sadly; but the customer had
no comfort to offer him. He asked when his
clothes would be done, and the tailor told him
when, and then they were not. The new pro
prietor tried them on, but he would not say
just when they would be finished.
' ' We have a good deal of work already for some
ladies that been disappointed. Now we try a new
way. We tell people exactly what we do."
"Well, that's right," the customer said, but
in his heart he was not sure he liked the new
way. -*— '
88
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
The day before his clothes were promised he
dropped in. From the curtained alcove he heard
low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor
and the voice of some lady trying on, and being
severely bidden not to expect her things at a time
she suggested. "No, madam. We got too much
work on hand already. These things, they will
not be done before next week."
"I told you to-morrow," the same voice said
to another lady, and the new proprietor came
out with an unfinished coat in his hand.
"I know you did, but I thought you would be
better than your word, and so I came to-day.
Well, then, to-morrow."
"Yes, to-morrow," the new proprietor said,
but he did not seem to have liked the lady's joke.
He did not look happy.
A few weeks after that the customer came for
some little alterations in his new suit.
In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs
of trying on, much cheerfuller murmurs than be
fore; the voice of a lady lifted in gladness, in
gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, "Oh,
sure, madam."
Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt
sleeves and slippers, with his waistcoat-front full
of pins and needles, just like the new proprietor
in former days.
89
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
"Why!" the customer exclaimed. "Have you
bought back?"
"No. I'm just here like a journeyman already.
The new man he want me to come. He don't
get along very well with his way. He's all right;
he's a good man and a first-class tailor. But,"
arid the former proprietor looked down at the
basted garment hanging over his arm, and picked
off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get
along better with the ladies."
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
V
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
r"PHE figure of a woman sat crouched forward
•*• on one of the lowermost steps of the brown-
stone dwelling which was keeping a domestic
tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and
small restaurants and local express-offices. The
house was black behind its closed shutters, and
the woman remained sitting there because no one
could have come out of its door for a year past
to hunt her away. The neighborhood policeman
faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The
three people who came out of the large, old-
fashioned hotel, half a block off, on their way
for dinner to a French table d'hote which they had
heard of, stopped and looked at the woman.
They were a father and his son and daughter, and
it was something like a family instinct that con
trolled them, in their pause before the woman
crouching on the steps.
It was the early dusk of a December day, and
the day was very chilly. "She seems to be sick or
93
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or
asleep."
The three looked at the woman, but they did
nothing for a moment. They would rather have
gone on, but they waited to see if anything would
happen to release them from the spell that they
seemed to have laid upon themselves. They were
conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn, and it
was from no apparent motive that the son wore
evening dress, which his unbuttoned overcoat
discovered, and an opera-hat. He would not have
dressed so for that problematical French table
d'hote; probably he was going on later to some
society affair. He now put in effect the father's
impulse to go closer and look at the woman.
"She seems to be asleep," he reported.
"Shouldn't you think she would take cold?
She will get her death there. Oughtn't we to do
something?" the daughter asked, but she left it
to the father, and he said:
"Probably somebody will come by."
"That we could leave her to?" the daughter
pursued.
"We could do that without waiting," the son
commented.
"Well, yes," the father assented; but they did
not go on. They waited, helplessly, and then
somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very
94
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
definite in the dusk, except that she was unmis
takably of the working class; she was simply
dressed, though with the New York instinct for
clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to
stay her involuntarily, and after a glance in the
direction of their gaze she asked the daughter:
''Is she sick, do you think?"
"We don't know what's the matter. But she
oughtn't to stay there."
Something velvety in the girl's voice had made
its racial quality sensible to the ear; as she went
up to the crouching woman and bent forward
over her and then turned to them, a street lamp
threw its light on her face, and they saw that she
was a light shade of colored girl.
"She seems to be sleeping."
"Perhaps," the son began, "she's not quite — "
But he did not go on.
The girl looked round at the others and sug
gested, "She must be somebody's mother!"
The others all felt abashed in their several
sorts and degrees, but in their several sorts and
degrees they all decided that there was something
romantic, sentimental, theatrical in the girl's
words, like something out of some cheap story-
paper story.
The father wondered if that kind of thing was
current among that kind of people. He had a
95
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
sort of esthetic pleasure in the character and
condition expressed by the words.
"Well, yes," he said, "if she has children, or
has had." The girl looked at him uncertainly,
and then he added, "But, of course — "
The son went up to the woman again, and
asked: "Aren't you well? Can we do anything
for you? It won't do to stay here, you know."
The woman only made a low murmur, and he
said to his sister, "Suppose we get her up."
His sister did not come forward promptly, and
the colored giil said, "I'll help you."
She took one arm of the woman and the son
took the other, and they lifted her, without her
connivance, to her feet and kept her on them.
Then they walked her down the steps. On the
level below she showed taller than either of them;
she was bundled up in different incoherent wraps;
her head was muffled, and she wore a battered
bonnet at an involuntary slant.
"I don't know exactly what we shall do with
her," the son said.
"We ought to get her home somehow," the
daughter said.
The father proposed nothing, but the colored
girl said, "If we keep walking her along, we'll
come to a policeman and we can — '
A hoarse rumble of protest came from the
96
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
muffled head of the woman, and the girl put her
ear closer. ' ' Want to go home ? Well, the police
man will take you. We don't know where you
live, and we haven't the time."
The woman seemed to have nothing to say
further, and they began walking her westward;
the colored girl supported her on one hand, and
the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on
the other.
The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but
the father went along, enjoying the anomaly, and
happy in his relish of that phrase, "She must be
somebody's mother." It now sounded to him
like a catch from one of those New York songs,
popular in the order of life where the mother
represents what is best and holiest. He recalled
a vaudeville ballad with the refrain of "A Boy's
Best Friend is his Mother," which, when he heard
it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery
floor under the applauding feet of the frenzied
audience. Probably this colored girl belonged to
that order of life; he wished he could know her
social circumstance and what her outlook on the
greater world might be. She seemed a kind crea
ture, poor thing, and he respected her. "Some
body's mother" — he liked that.
They all walked westward, aimlessly, except
that the table d'hote where they had meant to dine
7 97
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
was in that direction; they had heard of it as an
amusingly harmless French place, and they were
fond of such mild adventures.
The old woman contributed nothing to the
definition of their progress. She stumbled and
mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and
Eighth she stubbornly arrested her guardians.
"She says" — the colored girl translated some ob
scure avowal across her back — "she says she
wants to go home, and she lives up in Harlem. "
"Oh, well, that's good," the father said, with an
optimistic amiability. "We'd better help walk
her across to Ninth Avenue and put her on a car,
and tell the conductor where to let her off."
He was not helping walk her himself, but he
enjoyed his son's doing it in evening dress and
opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the
other side of the mother; the composition was
agreeably droll. The daughter did not like it,
and she cherished the ideal of a passing policeman
to take the old woman in charge.
No policeman passed, though great numbers of
other people met them without apparently find
ing anything noticeable in the spectacle which
their group presented. Among the crowds going
and coming on the avenues which they crossed
scarcely any turned to look at them, or was moved
by the sense of anything odd in them.
98
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
The old woman herself did nothing to attract
public notice till they were midway between
Seventh and Eighth avenues. She mumbled
something from time to time which the colored
girl interpreted to the rest as her continued wish
to go home. She was now clearer about her
street and number. The girl, as if after question
of her own generous spirit, said she did not see
how she could go with her; she was expected at
home herself.
"Oh, you won't have to go with her; we'll just
put her aboard the Ninth Avenue car," the father
encouraged her. Pie would have encouraged any
one; he was enjoying the whole affair.
At a certain moment, for no apparent reason,
the mother decided to sit down on a door-step.
It proved to be the door-step of a house where
from time to time colored people — sometimes of
one sex, sometimes of another — went in or came
out. The door seemed to open directly into a
large room where dancing and dining were going
on concurrently. At a long table colored people
sat eating, and behind their chairs on both sides
of the room and at the ends of the table colored
couples were waltzing.
The effect was the more curious because, ex
cept for some almost inaudible music, the scene
passed in silence. Those who were eating were not
99
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
visibly incommoded by those revolving at their
backs; the waltzers turned softly around and
around, untempted by the table now before them,
now behind them. When some of the diners or dan
cers came out, they stumbled over the old woman
on the door-step without minding or stopping to
inquire. Those outside, when they went in, fell
over her with like equanimity and joined the
strange company within.
The father murmured to himself the lines,
"Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody — '"
with a remote trouble of mind because the words
were at once so graphic and yet so imperfectly
applicable. The son and daughter exchanged a
silent wonder as long as they could bear it; then
the daughter asked the colored girl:
"What is it?"
"It's a boarding-house," the girl answered,
simply.
"Oh," the daughter said.
Sounds of more decided character than before
now came from the figure on the door-step.
"She seems to be saying something," the
daughter suggested in general terms. "What is
she saying?" she asked the colored girl.
The girl stooped over and listened. Then she
answered, "She's swearing."
1 00
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
" Swearing ; V."r.=.: about? Whom is she swear
ing at?"
"At me, I reckon. She says, why don't I take
her home."
"Well, why doesn't she get up, then?"
"She says she won't."
"We can't cany her to the car," the daughter
noted.
"Oh, why not?" the father merrily demanded.
The daughter turned to her brother. They were
both very respectful to their father, but the son
agreed with his sister when she said: "Papa would
joke about anything. But this has passed a joke.
We must get this old thing up and start her off."
Upon experiment they could not get the old
thing up, even with the help of the kind colored
girl. They had to let her be, and the colored girl
reported, after stooping over her again, "She says
she can't walk."
" She walked here well enough ," the daughter said.
"Not very well," the father amended.
His daughter did not notice him. She said to
her brother: "Well, now you must go and find
a policeman. It's strange none has gone by."
It was also strange that still their group re
mained without attracting the notice of the
passers. Nobody stopped to speak or even stare;
perhaps the phenomena of that boarding-house
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
had ceased to have surprises for the public of the
neighborhood, and they in their momentary rela
tion to it would naturally be without interest.
The brother went away, leaving his sister with
their father and that kind colored creature in
charge of the old woman, now more and more
quiescent on the door-step; she had ceased to
swear, or even to speak. The brother came back
after a time that seemed long, and said that he
could not find a policeman anywhere, and at the
same moment, as if the officer had been following
at his heels, a policeman crossed the street from
just behind him.
The daughter ran after him, and asked if he
would not come and look at the old woman who
had so steadfastly remained in their charge, and
she rapidly explained.
"Sure, lady," the policeman said, and he
turned from crossing the street and went up to
the old woman. He laid his hand on her shoul
der, and his touch seemed magical. "What's the
matter? Can't you stand up?" She stood up
as if at something familiar in the voice of au
thority. "Where do you live?" She gave an
address altogether different from that she had
given before — a place on the next avenue, within
a block or two. "You'd better go home. You
can walk, can't you?"
102
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
"I can walk well enough," she answered in a
tone of vexation, and she made her word good
by walking quite actively away in the direction
she had given.
The kind colored girl became a part of the
prevalent dark after refusing the thanks of the
others. The daughter then fervently offered them
to the policeman.
"That's all right, lady," he said, and the in
cident had closed except for her emotion at seeing
him enter a police-station precisely across the
street, where they could have got a dozen police
men in a moment.
"Well," the father said, "we might as well go
to our French table d'hote now."
"Oh," the son said, as if that reminded him,
"the place seems to be shut."
"Well, then, we might as well go back to the
hotel," the father decided. "I dare say we shall
do quite as well there."
On the way the young people laughed over the
affair and their escape from it, especially at the
strange appearance and disappearance of the kind
colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the
instant compliance of the old woman with the
suggestion of the policeman.
The father followed, turning the matter over
in his mind. Did mere motherhood hallow that
103
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
old thing to the colored girl and her sort and
condition? Was there a superstition of mother
hood among such people which would endear this
disreputable old thing to their affection and rev
erence? Did such people hold mothers in ten
derer regard than people of larger means ? Would
a mother in distress or merely embarrassment
instantly appeal to their better nature as a case
of want or sickness in the neighborhood always
appealed to their compassion ? Would her family
now welcome the old thing home from her aberra
tion more fondly than the friends of one who had
arrived in a carriage among them in a good street ?
But, after all, how little one knew of other people!
How little one knew of one self, for that matter !
How next to nothing one knew of Somebody's
Mother! It did not necessarily follow from any
thing they knew of her that she was a mother at
all. Her motherhood might be the mere figment
of that kind colored girl's emotional fancy. She
might be Nobody's Mother.
When it came to this the father laughed, too.
Why, anyhow, were mothers more sacred than
fathers? If they had found an old man in that
old woman's condition on those steps, would that
kind colored girl have appealed to them in his
behalf as Somebody's Father?
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
VI
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
HE had gone down at Christmas, where our
host
Had opened up his house on the Maine coast,
For the week's holidays, and we were all,
On Christmas night, sitting in the great hall,
About the corner fireplace, while we told
Stories like those that people, young and old,
Have told at Christmas firesides from the first,
Till one who crouched upon the hearth, and
nursed
His knees in his claspt arms, threw back his head,
And fixed our host with laughing eyes, and said,
"This is so good, here — with your hickory logs
Blazing like natural-gas ones on the dogs,
And sending out their flicker on the wall
And rafters of your mock-baronial hall,
All in fumed-oak, and on your polished floor,
And the steel-studded panels of your door—
I think you owe the general make-believe
Some sort of story that will somehow give
107
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
A more ideal completeness to our case,
And make each several listener in his place —
Or hers — sit up, with a real goose-flesh creeping
All over him — or her — in proper keeping
With the locality and hour and mood.
Come!" And amid the cries of "Yes!" and
"Good!"
Our host laughed back; then, with a serious air,
Looked around him on our hemicycle, where
He sat midway of it. "Why," he began,
But interrupted by the other man,
He paused for him to say: "Nothing remote,
But something with the actual Yankee note
Of here and now in it!" "I'll do my best,"
Our host replied, "to satisfy a guest.
What do you say to Barberry Cove? And would
Five years be too long past ?" " No, both are good.
Go on!" "You noticed that big house to-day
Close to the water, and the sloop that lay,
Stripped for the winter, there, beside the pier?
Well, there she has lain just so, year after year;
And she will never leave her pier again;
But once, each spring she sailed in sun or rain,
For Bay Chaleur — or Bay Shaloor, as they
Like better to pronounce it down this way."
Cl
I like Shaloor myself rather the best.
But go ahead," said the exacting guest.
108
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
And with a glance around at us that said,
"Don't let me bore you!" our host went ahead.
"Captain Gilroy built the big house, and he
Still lives there with his aging family.
He built the sloop, and when he used to come
Back from the Banks he made her more his
home,
With his two boys, than the big house. The two
Counted with him a good half of her crew,
Until it happened, on the Banks, one day
The oldest boy got in a steamer's way,
And went down in his dory. In the fall
The others came without him. That was all
That showed in either one of them except
That now the father and the brother slept
Ashore, and not on board. When the spring
came
They sailed for the old fishing-ground the same
As ever. Yet, not quite the same. The brother,
If you believed what folks say, kissed his mother
Good-by in going; and by general rumor,
The father, so far yielding as to humor
His daughters' weakness, rubbed his stubbly
cheek
Against their lips. Neither of them would speak,
But the dumb passion of their love and grief
In so much show at parting found relief.
109
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
"The weeks passed and the months. Some
times they heard
At home, by letter, from the sloop, or word
Of hearsay from the fleet. But by and by
Along about the middle of July,
A time in which they had no news began,
And holding unbrokenly through August, ran
Into September. Then, one afternoon,
While the world hung between the sun and
moon,
And while the mother and her girls were sitting
Together with their sewing and their knitting, —
Before the early-coming evening's gloom
Had gathered round them in the living-room,
Helplessly wondering to each other when
They should hear something from their absent
men, —
They saw, all three, against the window-pane,
A face that came and went, and came again,
Three times, as though for each of them, about
As high up from the porch's floor without
As a man's head would be that stooped to stare
Into the room on their own level there.
Its eyes dwelt on them wistfully as if
Longing to speak with the dumb lips some grief
They could not speak. The women did not start
Or scream, though each one of them, in her
heart,
no
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
Knew she was looking on no living face,
But stared, as dumb as it did, in her place."
Here our host paused, and one sigh broke from
all
Our circle whom his tale had held in thrall.
But he who had required it of him spoke
In what we others felt an ill-timed joke:
''Well, this is something like!" .A girl said,
"Don't!"
As if it hurt, and he said, "Well, I won't.
Go on!" And in a sort of muse our host
Said: "I suppose we all expect a ghost
Will sometimes come to us. But I doubt if we
Are moved by its coming as we thought to be.
At any rate, the women were not scared,
But, as I said, they simply sat and stared
Till the face vanished. Then the mother said,
'It was your father, girls, and he is dead.'
But both had known him; and now all went on
Much as before till three weeks more were
gone,
Wrhen, one night sitting as they sat before,
Together with their mother, at the door
They heard a fumbling hand, and on the walk
Up from the pier, the tramp and muffled talk
Of different wind-blown voices that they knew
For the hoarse voices of their father's crew.
in
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
Then the door opened, and their father stood
Before them, palpably in flesh and blood.
The mother spoke for all, her own misgiving:
'Father, is this your ghost? Or are you living?'
'I am alive!' 'But in this very place
We saw your face look, like a spirit's face,
There through that window, just three weeks
ago,
And now you are alive!' 'I did not know
That I had come; all I know is that then
I wanted to tell you folks here that our Ben
Was dying of typhoid fever. He raved of you
So that I could not think what else to do.
He's there in Bay Shaloor!'
"Well, that's the end."
And rising up to mend the fire our friend
Seemed trying to shun comment; but in vain:
The exacting guest came at him once again;
"You must be going to fall down, I thought,
There at the climax, when your story brought
The skipper home alive and well. But no,
You saved yourself with honor." The girl said,
"Oh,"
Who spoke before, "it's wonderful! But you,
How could you think of anything so true,
So delicate, as the father's wistful face
Coming there at the window in the place
112
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
Of the dead son's! And then, that quaintest
touch,
Of half -apology — that he felt so much,
He had to come! How perfectly New England!
Well,
I hope nobody will undertake to tell
A common or garden ghost-story to-night."
Our host had turned again, and at her light
And playful sympathy he said, "My dear,
I hope that no one will imagine here
I have been inventing in the tale that's done.
My little story's charm if it has one
Is from no skill of mine. One does not change
The course of fable from its wonted range
To such effect as I have seemed to do:
Only the fact could make my story true."
AN EXPERIENCE
VII
AN EXPERIENCE
OR a long time after the event my mind
dealt with the poor man in helpless con
jecture, and it has now begun to do so again
for no reason that I can assign. All that I ever
heard about him was that he was some kind of
insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine in
surance I never found out, and I am not sure
that I tried to find out.
There was something in the event which dis
charged him of all obligation to define himself
of this or that relation to life, He must have had
some relation to it such as we all bear, and since
the question of him has come up with me again
I have tried him in several of those relations —
father, son, brother, husband — without identify
ing him very satisfyingly in either.
As I say, he seemed by what happened to be
liberated from the debt we owe in that kind to
one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever.
I ^cannot say what errand it was that brought
117
AN EXPERIENCE
him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate
open room, where several of us sat occupied with
different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me
now, by only a provisional right to the place.
Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial
business was of temporary assignment; I was
there until we could find a more permanent office.
The man had nothing to do with me or with the
publishers; he had no manuscript, or plan for
an article which he wished to propose and to talk
himself into writing, so that he might bring it
with a claim to acceptance, as though he had
been asked to write it. In fact, he did not even
look of the writing sort; and his affair with some
other occupant of that anomalous place could
have been in no wise literary. Probably it was
some kind of insurance business, and I have been
left with the impression of fussiness in his con
duct of it; he had to my involuntary attention
an effect of conscious unwelcome with it.
After subjectively dealing with this impression,
I ceased to notice him, without being able to give
myself to my own work. The day was choking
hot, of a damp that clung about one, and forbade
one so much effort as was needed to relieve one
of one's discomfort; to pull at one's wilted collar
and loosen the linen about one's reeking neck
meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it
118
AN EXPERIENCE
was less suffering to suffer passively than to
suffer actively. The day was of the sort which
begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a falling
breeze, decays into mere swelter. To come in
doors out of the sun was no escape from the
heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley
where the air was damper without being cooler
than the air within.
At last I lost myself in my work with a kind
of humid interest in the psychological inquiry of
a contributor who was dealing with a matter
rather beyond his power. I did not think that
he was fortunate in having cast his inquiry in the
form of a story; I did not think that his contrast
of love and death as the supreme facts of life was
what a subtler or stronger hand could have made
it, or that the situation gained in effectiveness
from having the hero die in the very moment of
his acceptance. In his supposition that the
reader would care more for his hero simply be
cause he had undergone that tremendous catas
trophe, the writer had omitted to make him in
teresting otherwise; perhaps he could not.
My mind began to wander from the story and
not very relevantly to employ itself with the ques
tion of how far our experiences really affect our
characters. I remembered having once classed
certain temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and
119
AN EXPERIENCE
/
others as the stuff of comedy, and of having found
a greater cruelty in the sorrows which light natures
undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them.
Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious
natures; when it befell the frivolous it was more
than they ought to have been made to bear; it
was not of their quality. Then by the mental
zigzagging which all thinking is I thought of my
self and whether I was of this make or that. If
it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than
frivolous, though I had no agency in choosing, I
asked myself how I should be affected by the
sight of certain things, like the common calamities
reported every day in the papers which I had
hitherto escaped seeing. By another zigzag I
thought that I had never known a day so close
and stifling and humid. I then reflected upon the
comparative poverty of the French language,
which I was told had only that one word for the
condition we could call by half a dozen different
names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky, reeking,
sweltering, and so on. I supposed that a book of
synonyms would give even more English adjec
tives ; I thought of looking, but my book of syno
nyms was at the back of my table, and I would
have to rise for it. Then I questioned whether
the French language was so destitute of adjectives,
after all ; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.
120
AN EXPERIENCE
With no more logic than those other vagaries
had, I realized that the person who had started
me in them was no longer in the room. He must
have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the
street pushing about, crowded hither and thither,
and striking against other people as he went and
came. I was glad I was not in his place; I be
lieved I should have fallen in a faint from the
heat, as I had once almost done in New York on a
day like that. From this my mind jumped to
the thought of sudden death in general. Was it
such a happy thing as people pretended? For
the person himself, yes, perhaps ; but not for those
whom he had left at home, say, in the morning,
and who were expecting him at home in the eve
ning. I granted that it was generally accepted as
the happiest death, but no one that had tried it
had said so. To be sure, one was spared a long
sickness, with suffering from pain and from the
fear of death. But one had no time for making
one's peace with God, as it used to be said, and
after all there might be something in death-bed
repentance, although cultivated people no longer
believed in it. Then I reverted to the family un
prepared for the sudden death: the mother, the
wife, the children. I struggled to get away from
the question, but the vagaries which had lightly
dispersed themselves before clung persistently to
121
AN EXPERIENCE
the theme now. I felt that it was like a bad
dream. That was a promising diversion. Had
one any sort of volition in the quick changes of
dreams? One was aware of finding a certain
nightmare insupportable, and of breaking from
it as by main force, and then falling into a deep,
sweet sleep. Was death something like waking
from a dream such as that, which this life largely
was, and then sinking into a long, restful slumber,
and possibly never waking again?
Suddenly I perceived that the man had come
back. He might have been there some time with
his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of un
welcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that
he stood at the half-open door with the knob of
it in his hand looking into the room blankly.
As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed
it across his forehead as if in a sort of daze from
the heat. I recognized the gesture as one very
characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my
hand across my forehead on a close, hot day like
that. Then the man suddenly vanished as if
he had sunk through the floor.
People who had not noticed that he was there
noticed now that he was not there. Some made
a crooked rush toward the place where he had
been, and one of those helpful fellow-men who
are first in all needs lifted his head and mainly
122
AN EXPERIENCE
carried him into the wide space which the street
stairs mounted to, and laid him on the floor.
It was darker, if not cooler there, and we stood
back to give him the air which he drew in with
long, deep sighs. One of us ran down the stairs
to the street for a doctor, wherever he might be
found, and ran against a doctor at the last step.
The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate
figure and felt its pulse, and put his ear down to
its heart. It, which has already in my telling
ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long sus-
pirations which seemed to search each more pro
foundly than the last the lurking life, drawing it
from the vital recesses and expelling it in those
vast sighs.
They went on and on, and established in our
consciousness the expectation of indefinite con
tinuance. We knew that the figure there was
without such consciousness as ours, unless it was
something so remotely withdrawn that it could
not manifest itself in any signal to our senses.
There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it
had a surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure
was saying something to the life in each of us
which none of us would have words to interpret,
speaking some last message from the hither side
of that bourne from which there is no returning.
There was a clutch upon my heart which tight-
123
AN EXPERIENCE
ened with the slower and slower succession of
those awful breaths. Then one was drawn and
expelled and then another was not drawn. I
waited for the breathing to begin again, and it
did not begin. The doctor rose from kneeling
over the figure that had been a man, and uttered,
with a kind of soundlessness, "Gone," and me
chanically dusted his fingers with the thumbs of
each hand from their contact with what had now
become all dust forever.
That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over
the face, and the rest of us went away. It was
finished. The man was done with the sorrow
which, in our sad human order, must now begin
for those he loved and who loved him. I tried
vaguely to imagine their grief for not having been
uselessly with him at the last, and I could not.
The incident remained with me like an experi
ence, something I had known rather than seen.
I could not alienate it by my pity and make it
another's. They whom it must bereave seemed
for the time immeasurably removed from the
fact.
THE BOARDERS
VIII
THE BOARDERS
HTHE boarder who had eloped was a student
* at the theological seminary, and he had
really gone to visit his family, so that he had a
fairly good conscience in giving this color to the
fact that he was leaving the place permanently
because he could not bear it any longer. It was
a shade of deceit to connive with his room-mate
for the custody of his carpet-bag and the few socks
and collars and the one shirt and summer coat
which did not visibly affect its lankness when
gathered into it from his share of the bureau-
drawers; but he did not know what else to do,
and he trusted to a final forgiveness when all the
facts were considered by a merciful providence.
His board was fully paid, and he had suffered long.
He argued with his room-mate that he could do
no good by remaining, and that he would have
stayed if he could have believed there was any
use. Besides, the food was undermining his
health, and the room with that broken window
127
THE BOARDERS
had given him a cold already. He had a right to
go, and it was his duty to himself and the friends
who were helping him through the seminary not
to get sick.
He did not feel that he had convinced his
room-mate, who took charge of his carpet-bag
and now sat with it between his feet waiting the
signal of the fugitive's surreptitious return for it.
He was a vague-looking young man, presently in
charge of the "Local and Literary" column of the
one daily paper of the place, and he had just
explained to the two other boarders who were
watching with him for the event that he was not
certain whether it was the supper, or the anxiety
of the situation, or just what it was that was
now affecting his digestion.
The fellow-boarders, who sat on the edge of
the bed, in default of the one unbroken chair
which their host kept for himself, as easier than
a mattress to get up from suddenly, did not take
sides for or against him in his theories of his dis
comfort. One of them glanced at the broken
window.
"How do you glaze that in the daytime? You
can't use the bolster then?"
"I'm not in, much, in the daytime."
It was a medical student who had spoken, but
he was now silent, and the other said, after they
128
THE BOARDERS
had listened to the twitter of a piano in the parlor
under the room, "That girl's playing will be the
death of me."
"Not if her mother's cooking isn't," the medi
cal student, whose name was Wallace, observed
with a professional effect.
"Why don't you prescribe something for it?"
the law student suggested.
"Which?" Wallace returned.
"I don't believe anything could cure the play
ing. I must have meant the cooking."
"You're a promising young jurist, Blakeley.
What makes you think I could cure the cooking?"
"Oh, I just wondered. The sick one gets
paler every day. I wonder what ails her."
"She's not my patient."
"Oh! Hippocratic oath. Rather fine of you,
Wallace. But if she's not your patient — "
" Listen !" their host interrupted, sharply. After
a joint silence he added: "No. It must have
been the sleet."
"Well, Briggs," the law student said, "if it
must have been the sleet, what mustn't it have
been?"
"Oh!" Briggs explained, "I thought it was
Phillips. He was to throw a handful of gravel
at the window."
"And then you were to run down with his bag
9 I29
THE BOARDERS
and help him to make his escape from a friendless
widow. Well, I don't know that I blame him.
If I didn't owe two weeks' board, I'd leave my
self — though I hope I shouldn't sneak away. And
if Mrs. Betterson didn't owe Wallace, here, two
weeks' board, we'd walk off together arm-in-arm
at high noon. I can't understand how he ever
came to advance her the money."
Wallace rose from the bed, and kicked each leg
out to dislodge the tight trousers of the middle
eighteen-fifties which had caught on the tops of
his high boots. "You're a tonguey fellow, Blake-
ley. But you'll find, as you live long, that there
are several things you can't explain."
"I'll tell you what," Blakeley said. "We'll
get Mrs. Betterson to take your loan for my
debt, and we'll go at once."
"You can propose something like that before
the justice of the peace in your first pettifogging
case."
"I believe Wallace likes to stay. And yet he
must know from his anatomical studies, better
than the animals themselves, what cuts of meat
the old lady gives us. I shouldn't be so fastidious
about the cuts, if she didn't treat them all with
pork gravy. Well, I mustn't be too hard on a
lone widow that I owe board to. I don't suppose
his diet had anything to do with the deep damna-
130
THE BOARDERS
tion of the late Betterson's taking off. Does that
stove of yours smoke, Briggs?"
1 'Not when there isn't a fire in it."
"I just asked. Wallace's stove smokes, fire or
no fire. It takes advantage of the old lady's in
debtedness to him. There seem," he added,
philosophically, "to be just two occupations open
to widows who have to support themselves:
millinery business for young ones, boarding-
housing for old ones. It is rather restricted.
What do you suppose she puts into the mince-
pies? Mince-pies are rather a mystery at the
best."
Wallace was walking up and down the room
still in some difficulty with his trousers-legs, and
kicking out from time to time to dislodge them.
"How long should you say Blakeley had been
going on?" he asked Briggs.
"You never can tell," Briggs responded. "I
think he doesn't know himself."
"Well said, youthful scribe! With such listen
ers as you two, I could go on forever. Consider
yourselves clapped jovially on the back, my gentle
Briggs; I can't get up to do it from the hollow
of your bed here. As you were saying, the won
der about these elderly widows who keep boarding-
houses is the domestic dilapidation they fall into.
If they've ever known how to cook a meal or
THE BOARDERS
sweep a room or make a bed, these arts desert
them in the presence of their boarders. Their
only aim in life seems to be preventing the escape
of their victims, and they either let them get into
debt for their board or borrow money from them.
But why do they always have daughters, and just
two of them: one beautiful, fashionable, and de
voted to the piano; the other willing to work, but
pale, pathetic, and incapable of the smallest
achievement with the gridiron or the wash-board ?
It's a thing to make a person want to pay up and
leave, even if he's reading law. If Wallace, here,
had the spirit of a man, he would collect the
money owing him, and — "
"Oh, stop it, Blakeley!" Wallace stormed. "I
should think you'd get tired of your talk yourself."
"Well, as you insist — "
Blakeley began again, but Briggs jumped to his
feet and caught up Phillips's carpet-bag, and
looked wildly around. "It's gravel, this time."
"Well, take your hat, Briggs. It may be a
prolonged struggle. But remember that Phillips's
cause is just. He's paid his board, and he has a
perfect right to leave. She has no right to prevent
him. Think of that when the fray is at its worst.
But try to get him off quietly, if you can. Deal
gently with the erring, while you stand firm for
boarders' rights. Remember that Phillips is
132
THE BOARDERS
sneaking off in order to spare her feelings and has
come pretty near prevarication in the effort.
Have you got your shoes off? No; it's your rub
bers on. That's better."
Briggs faltered with the carpet-bag in his hand.
"Boys, I don't like this. It feels — clandestine."
"It looks that way, too," Blakeley admitted.
"It has an air of conspiracy."
"I've got half a mind to let Phillips come in
and get his bag himself."
"It would serve him right, though I don't know
why, exactly. He has a right to spare his own
feelings if he's sparing hers at the same time. Of
course he's afraid she'll plead with him to stay,
and he'll have to be inexorable with her; and if
I understand the yielding nature of Phillips he
doesn't like to be inexorable."
There came another sharp rattle of small pebbles
at the window.
"Oh, confound him!" Briggs cried under his
breath, and he shuffled out of the room and crept
noiselessly down the stairs to the front door.
The door creaked a little in opening, and he left
it ajar. The current of cold air that swept up
to the companions he had left behind at his room
door brought them the noise of his rush down
the gravel walk to the gate and a noise there as
of fugitive steps on the pavement outside.
THE BOARDERS
A weak female tread made itself heard in the
hallway, followed by a sharp voice from a door
in the rear. "Was it the cat, Jenny?"
"No; the door just seems to have blown open.
The catch is broken."
Swift, strong steps advanced with an effect of
angry suspicion. "I don't believe it blew open.
More likely the cat clawed it open."
The steps which the voice preceded seemed to
halt at the open door, as if falling back from it,
and Wallace and Blakeley, looking down, saw by
the dim flare of the hall lamp the face of Briggs
confronting the face of Mrs. Betterson from the
outer darkness. They saw the sick girl, whose
pallor they could not see, supporting herself by
the stairs-post with one hand and pressing the
other to her side.
"Oh! It's you, Mr. Briggs," the landlady said,
with a note of inculpation. "What made you
leave the door open?"
The spectators could not see the swift change
in Briggs's face from terror to savage desperation,
but they noted it in his voice. "Yes — yes! It's
me. I just — I was just — No I won't, either!
You'd better know the truth. I was taking
Phillips's bag out to him. He was afraid to come
in for it, because he didn't want to see you, the
confounded coward! He's left."
THE BOARDERS
"Left? And he said he would stay till spring!
Didn't he, Jenny?"
"I don't remember — " the girl weakly gasped,
but her mother did not heed her in her mounting
wrath.
"A great preacher he'll make. What 'd he say
he left for?"
"He didn't say. Will you let me up-stairs?"
"No, I won't, till you tell me. You know well
enough, between you."
"Yes, I do know," Briggs answered, savagely.
"He left because he was tired of eating sole-
leather for steak, and fire-salt pork, and tar for
molasses, and butter strong enough to make your
nose curl, and drinking burnt-rye slops for coffee
and tea-grounds for tea. And so am I, and so are
all of us, and — and — Will you let me go up
stairs now, Mrs. Betterson?"
His voice had risen, not so high but that an
other voice from the parlor could prevail over it:
a false, silly, girl voice, with the twitter of piano-
keys as from hands swept over the whole board
to help drown the noise of the quarrel in the hall.
"Oh yes, I'll sing it again, Mr. Saunders, if you
sa-a-a-y."
Then this voice lifted itself in a silly song, and
a silence followed the voices in the hall, except for
the landlady's saying, brokenly: "Well, all right,
THE BOARDERS
Mr. Briggs. You can go up to your room for all
me. I've tried to be a mother to you boys, but
if this is what I get for it!"
The two at the threshold of Briggs 's room re
treated within, as he bounded furiously upon
them and slammed the door after him. It started
open again, from the chronic defect of the catch,
but he did not care.
"Well, Briggs, I hope you feel better now,"
Blakeley began. "You certainly told her the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
But I wonder you had the heart to do it before
that sick girl."
"I didn't have the heart," Briggs shouted.
"But I had the courage, and if you say one word
more, Blakeley, I'll throw you out of the room.
I'm going to leave! My board's paid if yours
isn't."
He went wildly about, catching things down
here and there from nails and out of drawers.
The tears stood in his eyes. But suddenly he
stopped and listened to the sounds from below —
the sound of the silly singing in the parlor, and
the sound of sobbing in the dining-room, and the
sound of vain entreating between the sobs.
"Oh, I don't suppose I'm fit to keep a boarding-
house. I never was a good manager; and every
body imposes on me, and everything is so dear,
136
THE BOARDERS
and I don't know what's good from what's bad.
Your poor father used to look after all that."
"Well, don't you cry, now, mother! It '11 all
come right, you'll see. I'm getting so I can go
and do the marketing now; and if Minervy would
only help a little — "
"No, no!" the mother's voice came anxiously
up. "We can get along without her; we always
have. I know he likes her, and I want to give
her every chance. We can get along. If she was
on'y married, once, we could all live — " A note
of self-comforting gradually stole into the mother's
voice, and the sound of a nose violently blown
seemed to note a period in her suffering.
"Oh, mother, I wish I was well!" The girl's
voice came with a burst of wild lamenting.
"'Sh, 'sh, deary!" her mother entreated. "He'll
hear you, and then — "
"'Hazel Dell'?" the silly voice came from the
parlor, with a sound of fright in it. "I can sing
it without the music." The piano keys twittered
the prelude and the voice sang:
"In the Hazel Dell my Nelly's sleeping,
Nelly loved so long ! "
Wallace went forward and shut the door. "It's
a shame to overhear them! What are you going
to do, you fellows?"
THE BOARDERS
" Fm going to stay," Briggs said, " if it kills
me. At least I will till Minervy's married. I
don't care what the grub's like. I can always
get a bite at the restaurant."
"If anybody will pay up my back board, I'll
stay, too," Blakeley followed. "I should like to
make a virtue of it, and, as things stand, I can't."
4 'All right," Wallace said, and he went out and
down the stairs. Then from the dining-room be
low his heavy voice offering encouragement came
up, in terms which the others could not make out.
"I'll bet he's making her another advance,"
Blakeley whispered, as if he might be overheard
by Wallace.
"I wish I could have made to do it," Briggs
whispered back. "I feel as mean as pursley.
Would you like to kick me?"
"I don't see how that would do any good. I
may want to borrow money of you, and you can't
ask a loan from a man you've kicked. Besides,
I think what you said may do her good."
BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
IX
BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
BREAKFAST is my best meal, and I reckon
it's always been
Ever since I was old enough to know what break
fast could mean.
I mind when we lived in the cabin out on the
Illinoy,
Where father had took up a quarter-section when
I was a boy,
I used to go for the cows as soon as it was
light;
And when I started back home, before I come
in sight,
I come in smell of the cabin, where mother was
frying the ham,
And boiling the coffee, that reached through the
air like a mile o' ba'm,
141
BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
'N' I bet you I didn't wait to see what it was
that the dog
Thought he'd got under the stump or inside o'
the hollow log!
But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-
joints cracked — you know
That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows
make when they go —
And I never stopped to wash when I got to the
cabin door;
I pulled up my chair and e't like I never had e't
before.
And mother she set there and watched me eat,
and eat, and eat,
Like as if she couldn't give her old eyes enough
of the treat;
And she split the shortened biscuit, and spread
the butter between,
And let it lay there and melt, and soak and soak
itself in;
And she piled up my plate with potato and ham
and eggs,
Till I couldn't hold any more, or hardly stand
on my legs;
And she filled me up with coffee that would float
an iron wedge,
And never give way a mite, or spill a drop at
the edge.
142
BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
ii
What? Well, yes, this is good coffee, too. If
they don't know much,
They do know how to make coffee, I will say
that for these Dutch.
But my — oh, my! It ain't the kind of coffee my
mother made,
And the coffee my wife used to make would throw
it clear in the shade;
And the brand of sugar -cured, canvased ham
that she always used —
Well, this Westphalia stuff would simply have
made her amused!
That so, heigh? I saw that you was United
States as soon
As ever I heard you talk; I reckon I know the
tune!
Pick it out anywhere; and you understand how
I feel
About these here foreign breakfasts: breakfast is
my best meal.
in
My! but my wife was a cook; and the break
fasts she used to get
The first years we was married, I can smell 'em
and taste 'em yet:
BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
Corn cake light as a feather, and buckwheat thin
as lace
And crisp as cracklin'; and steak that you
couldn't have the face
To compare any steak over here to; and chicken
fried
Maryland style — I couldn't get through the bill
if I tried.
And then, her waffles! My! She'd kind of slip
in a few
Between the ham and the chicken — you know how
women '11 do —
For a sort of little surprise, and, if I was running
light,
To take my fancy and give an edge to my appetite.
Done it all herself as long as we was poor, and
I tell you
She liked to see me eat as well as mother used to do ;
I reckon she went ahead of mother some, if the
truth was known,
And everything she touched she give a taste of
her own.
IV
She was a cook, I can tell you! And after we
got ahead,
And she could 'a* had a girl to do the cookin'
instead,
144
BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
I had the greatest time to get Momma to leave
the work;
She said it made her feel like a mis'able sneak
and shirk.
She didn't want daughter, though, when we did
begin to keep girls,
To come in the kitchen and cook, and smell up
her clo'es and curls;
But you couldn't have stopped the child, what
ever you tried to do —
I reckon the gift of the cookin' was born in Girly,
too.
Cook she would from the first, and we just had
to let her alone;
And after she got married, and had a house of
her own,
She tried to make me feel, when I come to live
with her,
Like it was my house, too; and I tell you she
done it, sir!
She remembered that breakfast was my best
meal, and she tried
To have all I used to have, and a good deal more
beside;
Grape-fruit to begin with, or melons or peaches,
at least —
Husband's business took him there, and they had
went to live East —
10 145
BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
Then a Spanish macker'l, or a soft-shell crab on
toast,
Or a broiled live lobster! Well, sir, I don't want
to seem to boast,
But I don't believe you could have got in the
whole of New York
Any such an oyster fry or sausage of country
pork.
v
Well, I don't know what-all it means; I always
lived just so —
Never drinked or smoked, and yet, here about
two years ago,
I begun to run down ; I ain't as young as I used to be ;
And the doctors all said Carlsbad, and I reckon
this is me.
But it's more like some one I've dreamt of, with
all three of 'em gone!
Believe in ghosts? Well, I do. I know there
are ghosts. I'm one.
Maybe I mayn't look it — I was always inclined
to fat;
The doctors say that's the trouble, and very
likely it's that.
This is my little grandson, and this is the oldest one
Of Girly's girls; and for all that the whole of
us said and done,
146
BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
She must come with grandpa when the doctors
sent me off here,
To see that they didn't starve him. Ain't that
about so, my dear?
She can cook, I tell you; and when we get home
again
We're goin' to have something to eat; I'm just
a-livin' till then.
But when I set here of a morning, and think of
them that's gone —
Mother and Momma and Girly — well, I wouldn't
like to let on
Before the children, but I can almost seem to
see
All of 'em lookin' down, like as if they pitied me,
After the breakfasts they give me, to have me
have to put up
With nothing but bread and butter, and a little
mis'able cup
Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can't tell how
you feel,
But it fairly makes me sick ! Breakfast is my
best meal.
THE MOTHER-BIRD
X
THE MOTHER-BIRD
OHE wore around the turned-up brim of her
^ bolero-like toque a band of violets not so
much in keeping with the gray of the austere
November day as with the blue of her faded
autumnal eyes. Her eyes were autumnal, but it
was not from this, or from the lines- of maturity
graven on the passing prettiness of her little face,
that the notion and the name of Mother-Bird
suggested itself. She became known as the
Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the
earliest, if not the latest, of her friends, because
she was slight and small, and like a bird in her
eager movements, and because she spoke so in
stantly and so constantly of her children in Dres
den: before you knew anything else of her you
knew that she was going out to them.
She was quite alone, and she gave the sense
of claiming their protection, and sheltering her
self in the fact of them. When she mentioned her
THE MOTHER-BIRD
daughters she had the effect of feeling herself
chaperoned by them. You could not go behind
them and find her wanting in the social guarantees
which women on steamers, if not men, exact of
lonely birds of passage who are not mother-birds.
One must respect the convention by which she
safeguarded herself and tried to make good her
standing ; yet it did not lastingly avail her with
other birds of passage, so far as they were
themselves mother-birds, or sometimes only maid
en-birds. The day had not ended before they
began to hold her off by slight liftings of their
wings and rufflings of their feathers, by quick,
evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her
approach, which convinced no one but themselves
that they had not seen her. She sailed with the
sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one
shares on a ship leaving port, when people are
confused by the kindness of friends coming to
see them off after sending baskets of fruit and
sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are
doing or saying. But when the ship was abreast
of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone over the
side, these provisional intimacies of the parting
hour began to restrict themselves. Then the
Mother-Bird did not know half the women she
had known at the pier, or quite all the men.
It was not that she did anything obvious to
152
THE MOTHER-BIRD
forfeit this knowledge. Her behavior was if any
thing too exemplary ; it might be thought to form
a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unsea
sonable band of violets around her hat-brim;
perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her dress;
perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes,
which presumed while they implored. A mother-
bird must not hover too confidently, too appeal-
ingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she does
not share. It might have been her looking and
dressing younger than nature justified; at forty
one must not look thirty; in November one must
not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May
if one would have others believe in one's devotion
to one's children in Dresden; one alleges in vain
one's impatience to join them as grounds for
joining groups or detached persons who have
begun to write home to their children in New
York or Boston.
The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give
security by the mention of well-known names, to
offer proof of her social solvency by the eager cor
rectness of her behavior, created reluctance around
her. Some would not have her at all from the
first; others, who had partially or conditionally
accepted her, returned her upon her hands and
withdrew from the negotiation. More and more
she found herself outside that hard woman-
THE MOTHER-BIRD
world, and trying less and less to beat her way
into it.
The women may have known her better even
than she knew herself, and it may have been
through ignorance greater than her own that the
men were more acquiescent. But the men too
were not so acquiescent, or not at all, as time
passed.
It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far
harder the moment, when the Mother-Bird began
to disappear from the drawing-room and to ap
pear in the smoking-room, or say whether she
passed from the one to the other in a voluntary
exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten
law. Still, from time to time she was seen in
their part of the ship, after she was also seen
where the band of violets showed strange and sad
through veils of smoke that were not dense enough
to hide her poor, pretty little face, with its faded
blue eyes and wistful mouth. There she passed
by quick transition from the conversation of the
graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of
two birds of prey who became her comrades, or
such friends as birds like them can be to birds
like her.
From anything she had said or done there was
no reason for her lapse from the women and the
better men to such men; for her transition from
i54
THE MOTHER-BIRD
the better sort of women there was no reason ex
cept that it happened. Whether she attached
herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by
that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to
know themselves of a feather remained a touch
ing question.
There remained to the end the question whether
she was of a feather with them, or whether it was
by some mischance, or by some such stress of the
elements as drives birds of any feather to flock
with birds of any other. To the end there re
mained a distracted and forsaken innocence in
her looks. It was imaginable that she had made
overtures to the birds of prey because she had
made overtures to every one else; she was always
seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance
with them was as deplorable as her refusal by
better birds. Often they were seen without her,
when they had that look of having escaped, which
others wore; but she was not often seen without
them.
There is not much walking-weather on a No
vember passage, and she was seen less with them
in the early dark outdoors than in the late light
within, by which she wavered a small form through
the haze of their cigars in the smoking-room, or
in the grill-room, where she showed in faint eclipse
through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or
iS5
THE MOTHER-BIRD
through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The
birds of prey were then heard laughing, but
whether at her or with her it must have been
equally sorrowful to learn.
Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal
fondness which she had used for introduction to
the general acquaintance lost almost in the mo
ment of winning it. She seemed not to resent
their laughter, though she seemed not to join
in it. The worst of her was the company she kept ;
but since no better would allow her to keep it,
you could not confidently say she would not have
liked the best company on board. At the same
time you could not have said she would; you could
not have been sure it would not have bored her.
Doubtless these results are not solely the sport
of chance; they must be somewhat the event
of choice if not of desert.
For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-
Bird would have liked to be as good as the best.
But since it was not possible for her to be good
in the society of the best, she could only be good
in that of the worst. It was to be hoped that the
birds of prey were not cruel to her; that their
mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery.
The cruelty which must come came when they
began to be seen less and less with her, even at
the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars
156
THE MOTHER-BIRD
and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the
vapors of the hot whiskies. Then it was the
sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering up
and down the ship's promenades, or leaning on
the rail and looking dimly out over the foam-
whitened black sea. It is the necessity of birds
of prey to get rid of other birds when they are
tired of them, and it had doubtless come to that.
One night, the night before getting into port,
when the curiosity which always followed her
with grief failed of her in the heightened hilarity
of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the
ship's run were making, it found her alone beside
a little iron table, of those set in certain nooks
outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one
near, where the light from within fell palely upon
her. The boon birds of prey, with whom she had
been supping, had abandoned her, and she was
supporting her cheek on the small hand of the
arm that rested on the table. She leaned for
ward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the
violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vi
brations of the machinery. She was asleep, poor
Mother-Bird, and it would have been impossible
not to wish her dreams were kind.
THE AMIGO
XI
THE AMIGO
LJIS name was really Perez Armando Aldeano,
* * but in the end everybody called him the
amigo, because that was the endearing term by
which he saluted all the world. There was a
time when the children called him "Span-yard"
in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Span
ish, and though he came from Ecuador, and was
no more a Spaniard than they were English, he
answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever
he heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun,
and all the more eagerly if there was a hope of
mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning spirits,
he was always the amigo, for, when he hailed you
so, you could not help hailing him so again, and
whatever mock he put upon you afterward, you
were his secret and inalienable friend.
The moment of my own acceptance in this
quality came in the first hours of expansion fol
lowing our getting to sea after long detention in
ii 161
THE AMIGO
the dock by fog. A small figure came flying
down the dock with outspread arms, and a joy
ful cry of "Ah, amigo!" as if we were now meeting
unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogota;
and the amigo clasped me round the middle to
his bosom, or more strictly speaking, his brow,
which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was
clad in a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-
pants, and under the peak of his cap twinkled
the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a
smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was
more and more, with the thinness of his small
black legs, and his habit of hopping up and down,
and dancing threateningly about, with mischief
latent in every motion, like a crow which in being
tamed has acquired one of the worst traits of
civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in
Spanish, and took my hand for a stroll about the
ship, and from that time we were, with certain
crises of disaffection, firm allies.
There were others whom he hailed and adopted
his friends, whose legs he clung about and im
peded in their walks, or whom he required to toss
him into the air as they passed, but I flattered
myself that he had a peculiar, because a primary,
esteem for myself. I have thought it might be
that, Bogota being said to be a very literary
capital, as those things go in South America, he
162
THE AMIGO
was mystically aware of a common ground be
tween us, wider and deeper than that of his other
friendships. But it may have been somewhat
owing to my inviting him to my cabin to choose
such portion as he would of a lady-cake sent us
on shipboard at the last hour. He prattled and
chuckled over it in the soft gutturals of his parrot-
like Spanish, and rushed up on deck to eat the
frosting off in the presence of his small com
panions, and to exult before them in the exploita
tion of a novel pleasure. Yet it could not have
been the lady-cake which lastingly endeared me
to him, for by the next day he had learned pru
dence and refused it without withdrawing his
amity.
This, indeed, was always tempered by what
seemed a constitutional irony, and he did not
impart it to any one without some time making
his friend feel the edge of his practical humor.
It was not long before the children whom he gath
ered to his heart had each and all suffered some
fall or bump or bruise which, if not of his inten
tion, was of his infliction, and which was regretted
with such winning archness that the very mothers
of them could not resist him, and his victims dried
their tears to follow him with glad cries of "Span-
yard, Span-yard!" Injury at his hands was a
favor; neglect was the only real grievance. He
163
THE AMIGO
went about rolling his small black head, and dart
ing roguish lightnings froitTunder his thick-fringed
eyes, and making more trouble with a more en
ticing gaiety than all the other people on the
ship put together.
The truth must be owned that the time came,
long before the end of the voyage, when it was
felt that in the interest of the common welfare,
something must be done about the amigo. At the
conversational end of the doctor's table, where he
was discussed whenever the racks were not on,
and the talk might have languished without their
inspiration, his badness was debated at every
meal. Some declared him the worst boy in the
world, and held against his half-hearted defenders
that something ought to be done about him; and
one was left to imagine all the darker fate for him
because there was nothing specific in these con
victions. He could not be thrown overboard,
and if he had been put in irons probably his worst
enemies at the conversational end of the table
would have been the first to intercede for him.
It is not certain, however, that their prayers
would have been effective with the captain, if
that officer, framed for comfort as well as com
mand, could have known how accurately the
amigo had dramatized his personal presence by
throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a
164
THE AMIGO
foot in front of his small stomach, and making a
few tilting paces forward.
The amigo had a mimic gift which he liked to
exercise when he could find no intelligible language
for the expression of his ironic spirit. Being for
bidden visits in and out of season to certain state
rooms whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he
represented in what grotesque attitudes of sono
rous slumber they passed their day, and he spared
neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When
age refused one day to go up on deck with him
and pleaded in such Spanish as it could pluck
up from its past studies that it was too old, he
laughed it to scorn. "You are not old," he said.
"Why?" the flattered dotard inquired. "Be
cause you smile," and that seemed reason enough
for one's continued youth. It was then that the
amigo gave his own age, carefully telling the Span
ish numerals over, and explaining further by
holding up both hands with one finger shut in.
But he had the subtlety of centuries in his nine
years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere
with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief
always in the interest of the good-fellowship which
he offered impartially to old and young; and if
it were mere frolic, with no ulterior object, he did
not care at all how old or young his playmate was.
This endeared him naturally to every age; and
165
THE AMIGO
the little blond German-American boy dried his
tears from the last accident inflicted on him by
the amigo to recall him by tender entreaties of
"Span-yard, Span-yard!" while the eldest of his
friends could not hold out against him more than
two days in the strained relations following upon
the amigo' s sweeping him down the back with a
toy broom employed by the German-American
boy to scrub the scuppers. This was not so
much an injury as an indignity, but it was resented
as an indignity, in spite of many demure glances
of propitiation from the amigo' s ironical eyes and
murmurs of inarticulate apology as he passed.
He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and
truest of amigos; then his weird seizure came, and
the baby was spilled out of the carriage he had
been so benevolently pushing up and down; or
the second officer's legs, as he walked past with
the prettiest girl on board, were hit with the stick
that the amigo had been innocently playing shuffle-
board with; or some passenger was taken un
awares in his vanity or infirmity and made to
contribute to the amigo' s passion for active amuse
ment.
At this point I ought to explain that the amigo
was not traveling alone from Ecuador to Paris,
where it was said he was to rejoin his father.
At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was
166
THE AMIGO
seen to be in the charge of a very dark and very
silent little man, with intensely black eyes and
mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to the
delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather
shoes. With him the amigo walked gravely up
and down the deck, and behaved decorously at
table; and we could not reconcile the apparent
affection between the two with a theory we had
that the amigo had been found impossible in his
own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador
by a decree of the government, or perhaps a vote
of the whole people. The little, dark, silent man,
in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of
conveying a state prisoner into exile, and we
wondered in vain what the tie between him
and the amigo was. He might have been his
tutor, or his uncle. He exercised a quite mystical
control over the amigo, who was exactly obedient
to him in everything, and would not look aside
at you when in his keeping. We reflected with
awe and pathos that, as they roomed together, it
was his privilege to see the amigo asleep, when
that little, very kissable black head rested inno
cently on the pillow, and the busy brain within it
was at peace with the world which formed its
pleasure and its prey in waking.
It would be idle to represent that the amigo
played his pranks upon that shipload of long-
167
THE AMIGO
suffering people with final impunity. The time
came when they not only said something must
be done, but actually did something. It was
by the hand of one of the amigo' s sweetest and
kindest friends, namely, that elderly captain, off
duty, who was going out to be assigned his ship
in Hamburg. From the first he had shown the
affectionate tenderness for the amigo which was
felt by all except some obdurate hearts at the
conversational end of the table; and it must
have been with a loving interest in the amigo's
ultimate well-being that, taking him in an ecstasy
of mischief, he drew the amigo face downward
across his knees, and bestowed the chastisement
which was morally a caress. He dismissed him
with a smile in which the amigo read the good
understanding that existed unimpaired between
them, and accepted his correction with the same
affection as that which had given it. He shook
himself and ran off with an enjoyment of the joke
as great as that of any of the spectators and far
more generous.
In fact there was nothing mean in the amigo.
Impish he was, or might be, but only in the sort
of the crow or the parrot; there was no malevo
lence in his fine malice. One fancied him in his
adolescence taking part in one of the frequent
revolutions of his continent, but humorously, not
1 68
THE AMIGO
homicidally. He would like to alarm the other
faction, and perhaps drive it from power, or over
set it from its official place, but if he had the say
there would be no bringing the vanquished out
into the plaza to be shot. He may now have
been on his way to France ultimately to study
medicine, which seems to be preliminary to a
high political career in South America; but in the
mean time we feared for him in that republic of
severely regulated subordinations.
We thought with pathos of our early parting
with him, as we approached Plymouth and tried
to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor
and pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as
to consent, but he insisted on wearing a pair of
glasses which had large eyes painted on them,
and on being taken in the act of inflating a toy
balloon. Probably, therefore, the likeness would
not be recognized in Bogota, but it will always
be endeared to us by the memory of the many
mockeries suffered from him. There were other
friends whom we left on the ship, notably those
of the conversational end of the table, who thought
him simply a bad boy; but there were none of
such peculiar appeal as he, when he stood by the
guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical
adieu, and looking smaller and smaller as our
tender drifted away and the vast liner loomed
169
THE AMIGO
immense before us. He may have contributed
to its effect of immensity by the smallness of his
presence, or it may have dwarfed him. No mat
ter; he filled no slight space in our lives while
he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was
he really a bad little boy, merely and simply?
Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys
from bad.
BLACK CROSS FARM
XII
BLACK CROSS FARM
(To F. S.)
A?TER full many a mutual delay
My friend and I at last fixed on a day
For seeing Black Cross Farm, which he had long
Boasted the fittest theme for tale or song
In all that charming region round about:
Something that must not really be left out
Of the account of things to do for me.
It was a teasing bit of mystery,
He said, which he and his had tried in vain,
Ever since they had found it, to explain.
The right way was to happen, as they did,
Upon it in the hills where it was hid;
But chance could not be always trusted, quite,
You might not happen on it, though you might;
Encores were usually objected to
By chance. The next best thing that we could do
Was in his carryall, to start together,
And trust that somehow favoring wind and
weather,
BLACK CROSS FARM
With the eccentric progress of his horse,
Would so far drift us from our settled course
That we at least could lose ourselves, if not
Find the mysterious object that we sought.
So one blithe morning of the ripe July
We fared, by easy stages, toward the sky
That rested one rim of its turquoise cup
Low on the distant sea, and, tilted up,
The other on the irregular hilltops. Sweet
The sun and wind that joined to cool and heat
The air to one delicious temperature;
And over the smooth-cropt mowing-pieces pure
The pine-breath, borrowing their spicy scent
In barter for the balsam that it lent!
And when my friend handed the reins to me,
And drew a fuming match along his knee,
And, lighting his cigar, began to talk,
I let the old horse lapse into a walk
From his perfunctory trot, content to listen,
Amid that leafy rustle and that glisten
Of field, and wood, and ocean, rapt afar,
From every trouble of our anxious star.
From time to time, between effect and cause
In this or that, making a questioning pause,
My friend peered round him while he feigned a gay
Hope that we might have taken the wrong way
At the last turn, and then let me push on,
Or the old horse rather, slanting hither and yon,
BLACK CROSS FARM
And never in the middle of the track,
Except when slanting off or slanting back.
He talked, I listened, while we wandered by
The scanty fields of wheat and oats and rye,
With patches of potatoes and of corn,
And now and then a garden spot forlorn,
Run wild where once a house had stood, or where
An empty house yet stood, and seemed to stare
Upon us blindly from the twisted glass
Of windows that once let no wayfarer pass
Unseen of children dancing at the pane,
And vanishing to reappear again,
Pulling their mother with them to the sight.
Still we kept on, with turnings left and right,
Past farmsteads grouped in cheerful neighbor
hoods,
Or solitary; then through shadowy woods
Of pine or birch, until the road, grass-grown,
Had given back to Nature all her own
Save a faint wheel-trace, that along the slope,
Rain-gullied, seemed to stop and doubt and
grope,
And then quite ceased, as if 't had turned and fled
Out of the forest into which it led,
And left us at the gate whose every bar
Was nailed against us. But, "Oh, here we are!'*
My friend cried joyously. "At last, at last!"
And making our horse superfluously fast,
BLACK CROSS FARM
He led the way onward by what had been
A lane, now hid by weeds and briers between
Meadows scarce worth the mowing, to a space
Shaped as by Nature for the dwelling-place
Of kindly human life: a small plateau
Open to the heaven that seemed bending low
In liking for it. There beneath a roof
Still against winter and summer weather-proof,
With walls and doors and windows perfect yet,
Between its garden and its graveyard set,
Stood the old homestead, out of which had
perished
The home whose memory it dumbly cherished,
And which, when at our push the door swung wide,
We might have well imagined to have died
And had its funeral the day before:
So clean and cold it was from floor to floor,
So lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill
Of hours when life and death encountered still
Passionate in it. They that lay below
The tangled grasses or the drifted snow,
Husband and wife, mother and little one,
From that sad house less utterly were gone
Than they that living had abandoned it.
In moonless nights their Absences might flit,
Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit
Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose
And lily in the neglected garden close;
176
BLACK CROSS FARM
But they whose feet had borne them from the
door
Would pass the footworn threshold nevermore.
We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs,
With lighter melancholy than the glooms
Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence
Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense
Suggestion of a mystical dismay,
As in the brilliance of the summer day
We faced the vast gray barn. The house was old,
Though so well kept, as age by years is told
In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast,
Stood new and straight and strong — all bat
tened fast
At every opening; and where once the mow
Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing
now
A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man,
Aslant from left to right, athwart the span,
And painted black as paint could make it.
Hushed,
I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed
To this point and to that point, and then burst
In the impotent questionings rejected first.
What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell.
Who put it there? That was unknown as well.
Was there no legend? My friend knew of none.
No neighborhood story? He had sought for one
12 177
BLACK CROSS FARM
In vain. Did he imagine it accident,
With nothing really implied or meant
By the boards set in that way? It might be,
But I could answer that as well as he.
Then (desperately) what did he guess it was:
Something of purpose, or without a cause
Other than chance? He slowly shook his head,
And with his gaze fixed on the symbol said:
"We have quite ceased from guessing or sur
mising,
For all our several and joint devising
Has left us finally where I must leave you.
But now I think it is your part to do
Yourself some guessing. I hoped you might bring
A fresh mind to the riddle's unraveling.
Come!"
And thus challenged I could not deny
The sort of right he had to have me try;
And yielding, I began — instinctively
Proceeding by exclusion: "We agree
It was not put there as a pious charm
To keep the abandoned property from harm?
The owner could have been no Catholic;
And yet it was no sacrilegious trick
To make folks wonder; and it was not chance
Assuredly that set those boards askance
In that shape, or before or after, so
Painted them to that coloring of woe.
178
BLACK CROSS FARM
Do you suppose, then, that it could have been
Some secret sorrow or some secret sin,
That tried to utter or to expiate
Itself in that way: some unhappy hate
Turned to remorse, or some life-rending grief
That could not find in years or tears relief?
Who lived here last?"
"Ah," my friend made reply,
"You know as much concerning that as I.
All I could tell is what those gravestones tell,
And they have told it all to you as well.
The names, the dates, the curious epitaphs
At whose quaint phrase one either sighs or
laughs,
Just as one's heart or head happens to be
Hollow or not, are there for each to see.
But I believe they have nothing to reveal:
No wrong to publish, no shame to conceal."
"And yet that Cross!" I turned at his reply,
Fixing the silent symbol with my eye,
Insistently. "And you consent," I said,
"To leave the enigma uninterpreted?"
"Why, no," he faltered, then went on: "Suppose
That some one that had known the average woes
Of human nature, finding that the load
Was overheavy for him on life's road,
Had wished to leave some token in this Cross,
Of what had been his gain and been his loss,
179
BLACK CROSS FARM
Of what had been his suffering and of what
Had also been the solace of his lot?
Whoever that unknown brother-man might be,
I think he must have been like you and me,
Who bear our Cross, and when we fail at length,
Bow down and pray to it for greater strength."
I mused, and as I mused, I seemed to find
The fancy more and still more to my mind.
"Well, let it go at that! I think, for me,
I like that better than some tragedy
Of clearer physiognomy, which were
In being more definite the vulgarer.
For us, what, after all, would be the gain
Of making the elusive meaning plain?
I really think, if I were you and yours,
I would not lift the veil that now obscures
The appealing fact, lest I should spoil the charm
Deeding me for my own the Black Cross Farm."
"A good suggestion! I am glad," said he,
"We have always practised your philosophy."
He smiled, we laughed; we sighed and turned
away,
And left the mystery to the summer day
That made as if it understood, and could
Have read the riddle to us if it would:
The wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass
Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and
pass;
180
BLACK CROSS FARM
The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing
Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing
Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon,
Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune
Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds,
Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words,
Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane
That to our coming feet had been so plain,
And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth,
And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath,
Amidst the wilding loveliness to stray,
And spend, if need were, looking for the way,
Whole hours ; but blundered into the right course
Suddenly, and came out upon our horse,
Where we had left him — to our great surprise,
Stamping and switching at the pestering flies,
But not apparently anxious to depart,
When nearly overturning at the start,
We followed down that evanescent trace
Which, followed up, had brought us to the place.
Then, all the wayside scenes reversing, we
Dropped to the glimpses of the distant sea,
Content as if we brought, returning thus,
The secret of the Black Cross back with us.
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
XIII
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
IT had long been the notion of Frederick Erlcort,
who held it playfully, held it seriously, accord
ing to the company he was in, that there might be
a censorship of taste and conscience in literary
matters strictly affiliated with the retail com
merce in books. When he first began to propose
it, playfully, seriously, as his listener chose, he
said that he had noticed how in the great depart
ment stores where nearly everything to supply
human need was sold, the shopmen and shop-
women seemed instructed by the ownership or the
management to deal in absolute good faith with
the customers, and not to misrepresent the qual
ity, the make, or the material of any article in
the slightest degree. A thing was not to be called
silk or wool when it was partly cotton; it was not
to be said that it would wash when it would not
wash, or that the color would not come off when
it would come off, or that the stuff was English
or French when it was American.
185
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
When Erlcort once noted his interest in the fact
to a floor-walker whom he happened to find at
leisure, the floor- walker said, Yes, that was so;
and the house did it because it was business, good
business, the only good business. He was instant
ly enthusiastic, and he said that just in the same
way, as an extension of its good faith with the
public, the house had established the rule of taking
back any article which a customer did not like,
or did not find what she had supposed when she
got it home, and refunding the money. This was
the best sort of business; it held custom; the
woman became a customer for life. The floor
walker laughed, and after he had told an anxious
applicant, "Second aisle to the left, lady; three
counters back," he concluded to Erlcort, "I say
she because a man never brings a thing back when
he's made a mistake; but a woman can always
blame it on the house. That so?"
Erlcort laughed with him, and in going out he
stopped at the book-counter. Rather it was a
bookstore, and no small one, with ranks of new
books covering the large tables and mounting to
their level from the floor, neatly piled, and with
shelves of complete editions and soberer-looking
volumes stretching along the wall as high as the
ceiling. "Do you happen to have a good book —
a book that would read good, I mean — in your
186
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
stock here?" he asked the neat blonde behind the
literary barricade.
"Well, here's a book that a good many are
reading," she answered, with prompt interest and
a smile that told in the book's favor; it was a
protectingly filial and guardedly ladylike smile.
"Yes, but is it a book worth reading — worth the
money?"
"Well, I don't know as I'm a judge," the kind
little blonde replied. She added, daringly, "All
I can say is, I set up till two last night to finish
it."
"And you advise me to buy it?"
"Well, we're not allowed to do that, exactly.
I can only tell you what I know."
"But if I take it, and it isn't what I expected,
I can return it and get my money back?"
"That's something I never was asked before.
Mr. Jeffers! Mr. Jeffers!" she called to a floor
walker passing near; and when he stopped and
came up to the counter, she put the case to him.
He took the book from Erlcort's hand and
examined the outside of it curiously if not critically.
Then he looked from it to Erlcort, and said, "Oh,
how do you do again ! Well, no, sir; I don't know
as we could do that. You see, you would have
to read it to find out that you didn't want it, and
that would be like using or wearing an article,
187
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
wouldn't it? We couldn't take back a thing that
had been used or worn — heigh?"
"But you might have some means of knowing
whether a book is good or not?"
"Well, yes, we might. That's a point we have
never had raised before. Miss Prittiman, haven't
we any means of knowing whether a book's some
thing we can guarantee or not?"
"Well, Mr. Jeffers, there's the publisher's
advertisement."
"Why, yes, so there is! And a respectable
publisher wouldn't indorse a book that wasn't the
genuine article, would he now, sir?"
"He mightn't," Erlcort said, as if he felt the
force of the argument.
"And there are the notices in the newspapers.
They ought to tell," Miss Prittiman added, more
convincingly. "I don't know," she said, as from
a sensitive conscience, "whether there have been
any about this book yet, but I should think there
would be."
"And in the mean time, as you won't guarantee
the book so that I can bring it back and get my
money if I find it worthless, I must accept the
publisher's word?" Erlcort pressed further.
"I should think you could do that," the floor
walker suggested, with the appearance of being
tired.
188
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
"Well, I think I will, for once," Erlcort relented.
"But wait! What does the publisher say?"
"It's all printed on this slip inside," the blonde
said, and she showed it as she took the book from
him. "Shall I send it? Or will you—"
"No, no, thank you, I'll take it with me.
Let me—"
He kept the printed slip and began to read it.
The blonde wrapped the book up and laid it with
a half-dollar in change on the counter before Erl
cort. The floor- walker went away; Erlcort heard
him saying, "No, madam; toys on the fifth floor,
at the extreme rear, left," while he lost himself
in the glowing promises of the publisher. It ap
peared that the book he had just bought was by
a perfectly new author, an old lady of seventy
who had never written a novel before, and might
therefore be trusted for an entire freshness of
thought and feeling. The plot was of a gripping
intensity; the characters were painted with large,
bold strokes, and were of an unexampled virility;
the story was packed with passion from cover to
cover; and the reader would be held breathless
by the author's skill in working from the tragic
conditions to an all-round happy conclusion.
From time to time Erlcort heard the gentle
blonde saying such things as, "Oh yes; it's the
best-seller, all right," and, "All I can say is I set
189
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
up till two o'clock in the morning to finish it,"
and, "Yes, ma'am; it's by a new writer; a very
old lady of seventy who is just beginning to write;
well, that's what I heard."
On his way up-town in the Subway he clung to
the wonted strap, unsupported by anything in the
romance which he had bought; and yet he could
not take the book back and get his money, or
even exchange it for some article of neckwear or
footwear. In his extremity he thought he would
try giving it to the trainman just before he reached
his stop.
1 1 You want to give it to me ? Well, that's some
thing that never happened to me on this line be
fore. I guess my wife will like it. I — loopth
Street! Change for East Brooklyn and the Bronx!"
the guard shouted, and he let Erlcort out of the
car, the very first of the tide that spilled itself
forth at the station. He called after him, " Do
as much for you some time."
The incident first amused Erlcort, and then it
began to trouble him; but he appeased his re
morse by toying with his old notion of a critical
bookstore. His mind was still at play with it
when he stopped at the bell-pull of an elderly girl
of his acquaintance who had a studio ten stories
above, and the habit of giving him afternoon
tea in it if he called there about five o'clock. She
190
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
had her ugly painting-apron still on, and her
thumb through the hole in her palette, when she
opened her door to him.
"Too soon?" he asked.
She answered as well as she could with the
brush held horizontally in her mouth while she
glared inhospitably at him. "Well, not much,"
and then she let him in, and went and lighted her
spirit-lamp.
He began at once to tell her of his strange ex
perience, and went on till she said: "Well, there's
your tea. I don't know what you've been driv
ing at, but I suppose you do. Is it the old thing?"
"It's my critical bookstore, if that's what you
call the old thing."
" Oh ! That! I thought it had failed 'way back
in the dark ages."
"The dark ages are not back, please; they're
all 'round, and you know very well that my critical
bookstore has never been tried yet. But tell me
one thing : should you wish to live with a picture,
even for a few hours, which had been painted by
an old lady of seventy who had never tried to
paint before?"
"If I intended to go crazy, yes. What has all
that got to do with it?"
"That's the joint commendation of the publisher
and the kind little blonde who united to sell me
191
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
the book I just gave to that poor Subway train
man. Do you ever buy a new book?"
"No; I always borrow an old one."
"But if you had to buy a new one, wouldn't you
like to know of a place where you could be sure
of getting a good one?"
"I shouldn't mind. Or, yes, I should, rather.
Where's it to be?"
"Oh, I know. I've had my eye on the place
for a good while. It's a funny old place in Sixth
Avenue — "
"Sixth Avenue!"
"Don't interrupt — where the dearest old codger
in the world is just going out of the house-furnish
ing business in a small way. It's kept getting
smaller and smaller — I've watched it shrink — till
now it can't stand up against the big shops, and
the old codger told me the other day that it was
no use."
"Poor fellow!"
"No. He's not badly off, and he's going back
up-state where he came from about forty years
ago, and he can live — or die — very well on what
he's put by. I've known him rather a good while,
and we've been friends ever since we've been
acquainted."
"Go on," the elderly girl said.
Erlcort was not stopping, but she spoke so as
192
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
to close her mouth, which she was apt to let hang
open in a way that she did not like; she had her in
timates pledged to tell her when she was doing it,
but she could not make a man promise, and she
had to look after her mouth herself with Erlcort.
It was not a bad mouth; her eyes were large, and
it was merely large to match them.
"When shall you begin— open shop?" she
"My old codger's lease expires in the fall," he
answered, "but he would be glad to have me take
it off his hands this spring. I could give the sum
mer to changing and decorating, and begin my
campaign in the fall— the first of October, say.
Wouldn't you like to come some day and see the
old place?"
"I should love it. But you're not supposing
I shall be of the least use, I hope? I'm not
decorational, you know. Easel pictures, and small
ones at that."
"Of course. But you are a woman, and have
ideas of the cozy. I mean that the place shall be
made attractive."
"Do you think the situation will be — on Sixth
Avenue?"
"It will be quaint. It's in a retarded region
of low buildings, with a carpenter's shop two doors
off. The L roars overhead and the surface cars
13 i93
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
squeal before, but that is New York, you know,
and it's very central. Besides, at the back of the
shop, with the front door shut, it is very quiet."
The next day the friends lunched together at
an Italian restaurant very near the place, and
rather hurried themselves away to the old codger's
store.
"He is a dear," Margaret whispered to Erlcort
in following him about to see the advantages of
the place.
"Oh, mine's setting-hen's time," he justified his
hospitality in finally asking them to take seats
on a nail-keg apiece. "You mustn't think you're
interruptin'. Look 'round all ye want to, or set
down and rest ye."
"That would be a good motto for your book
store," she screamed to Erlcort, when they got
out into the roar of the avenue. ' ' ' Look 'round all
ye want to, or set down and rest ye.' Wasn't he
sweet? And I don't wonder you're taken with
the place : it has such capabilities. You might as
well begin imagining how you will arrange it."
They were walking involuntarily up the avenue,
and when they came to the Park they went into
it, and in the excitement of their planning they
went as far as the Ramble, where they sat down
on a bench and disappointed some squirrels who
supposed they had brought peanuts with them.
194
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
They decided that the front of the shop should
be elaborately simple; perhaps the door should be
painted black, with a small-paned sash and a
heavy brass latch. On each side should be a
small-paned show-window, with books laid inside
on an inclined shelving; on the door should be
a modest bronze plate, reading, "The Critical
Bookstore." They rejected shop as an affectation,
and they hooted the notion of "Ye Critical
Bookstore" as altogether loathsome. The door
and window would be in a rather belated taste,
but the beautiful is never out of date, and black
paint and small panes might be found rococo in
their old-fashionedness now. There should be a
fireplace, or perhaps a Franklin stove, at the rear
of the room, with a high-shouldered, small-paned
sash on each side letting in the light from the
yard of the carpenter-shop. On the chimneypiece
should be lettered, "Look 'round all ye want to,
or set down and rest ye."
The genius of the place should be a refined
hospitality, such as the gentle old codger had
practised with them, and to facilitate this there
should be a pair of high-backed settles, one under
each window. The book-counter should stretch
the whole length of the store, and at intervals
beside it, against the book-shelving, should be set
old-fashioned chairs, but not too old-fashioned.
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
Against the lower book-shelves on a deeper shelf
might be stood against the books a few sketches in
water-color, or even oil.
This was Margaret Green's idea.
"And would you guarantee the quality?" Erl-
cort asked.
"Perhaps they wouldn't be for sale, though if
any one insisted — "
"I see. Well, pass the sketches. What else?"
"Well, a few little figures in plaster, or even
marble or bronze, very Greek, or very American;
things in low relief."
"Pass the little figures and low reliefs. But
don't forget it's a bookstore."
"Oh, I won't. The sketches of all kinds would
be strictly subordinated to the books. If I had
a tea-room handy here, with a table and the backs
of some menus to draw on, I could show you just
how it would look."
"What's the matter with the Casino?"
"Nothing; only it's rather early for tea yet."
"It isn't for soda-lemonade."
She set him the example of instantly rising, and
led the way back along the lake to the Casino,
resting at that afternoon hour among its spring
flowers and blossoms innocent of its lurid after-
dark frequent ation. He got some paper from the
waiter who came to take their order. She began
196
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
to draw rapidly, and by the time the waiter came
again she was giving Erlcort the last scrap of
paper.
"Well," he said, "I had no idea that I had
imagined anything so charming! If this critical
bookstore doesn't succeed, it Jll be because there
are no critics. But what — what are these little
things hung against the partitions of the shelves?"
"Oh — mirrors. Little round ones."
"But why mirrors of any shape?"
"Nothing; only people like to see themselves in
a glass of any shape. And when," Margaret
added, in a burst of candor, "a woman looks up
and sees herself with a book in her hand, she will
feel so intellectual she will never put it down.
She will buy it."
"Margaret Green, this is immoral. Strike out
those mirrors, or I will smash them every one!"
"Oh, very well!" she said, and she rubbed them
out with the top of her pencil. "If you want
your place a howling wilderness."
He looked at the ruin her rubber had wrought.
"They were rather nice. Could — could you rub
them in again?"
"Not if I tried a hundred years. Besides, they
were rather impudent. What time is it?"
"No time at all. It's half -past three."
"Dear me! I must be going. And if you're
197
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
really going to start that precious critical book
store in the fall, you must begin work on it right
away."
"Work?"
"Reading up for it. If you're going to guar
antee the books, you must know what's in them,
mustn't you?"
He realized that he must do what she said;
he must know from his own knowledge what was
in the books he offered for sale, and he began
reading, or reading at, the new books immediately.
He was a good deal occupied by day with the ar
rangement of his store, though he left it mainly
with the lively young decorator who undertook
for a lump sum to realize Margaret Green's ideas.
It was at night that he did most of his reading
in the spring books which the publishers were will
ing to send him gratis, when they understood he
was going to open a bookstore, and only wanted
sample copies. As long as she remained in town
Margaret Green helped him read, and they talked
the books over, and mostly rejected them. By the
time she went to Europe in August with another
elderly girl they had not chosen more than eight
or ten books; but they hoped for better things
in the fall.
Word of what he was doing had gone out from
Margaret, and a great many women of their rather
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THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
esthetic circle began writing to him about the
books they were reading, and commending them
to him or warning him against them. The circle
of his volunteer associates enlarged itself in the
nature of an endless chain, and before society
quite broke up for the summer a Sympathetic Tea
was offered to Erlcort by a Leading Society
Woman at the Intellectual Club, where he was
invited to address the Intellectuals in explanation
of his project. This was before Margaret sailed,
and he hurried to her in horror.
"Why, of course you must accept. You're not
going to hide your Critical Bookstore under a
bushel; you can't have too much publicity."
The Leading Society Woman flowed in fulsome
gratitude at his acceptance, and promised no one
but the club should be there; he had hinted his
reluctance. She kept her promise, but among the
Intellectuals there was a girl who was a just be
ginning journalist, and who pumped Erlcort's
whole scheme out of him, unsuspicious of what she
was doing, till he saw it all, with his picture, in
the Sunday Supplement. She rightly judged that
the intimacy of an interview would be more popu
lar with her readers than the cold and distant re
port of his formal address, which she must give,
though she received it so ardently with all the
other Intellectuals. They flocked flatteringly, al-
199
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
most suffocatingly, around him at the end. His
scheme was just what every one had vaguely
thought of: something must be done to stem the
tide of worthless fiction, which was so often shock
ing as well as silly, and they would only be too
glad to help read for him. They were nearly all
just going to sail, but they would each take a
spring book on the ship, and write him about it
from the other side; they would each get a fall
book coming home, and report as soon as they
got back.
His scheme was discussed seriously and satiri
cally by the press; it became a joke with many
papers, and a byword quickly worn out, so that
people thought that it had been dropped. But
Erlcort gave his days and nights to preparation
for his autumnal campaign. He studied in careful
comparison the reviews of the different literary
authorities, and was a little surprised to find,
when he came to read the books they reviewed,
how honest and adequate they often were. He
was obliged to own to himself that if people were
guided by them, few worthless books would be
sold, and he decided that the immense majority
of the book-buyers were not guided by the critics.
The publishers themselves seemed not so much
to blame when he went to see them and explained
his wish to deal with them on the basis of a critical
200
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
bookseller. They said they wished all the book
sellers were like him, for they would ask nothing
better than to publish only good books. The
trouble, they said, lay with the authors; they
wrote such worthless books. Or if now and then
one of them did write a good book and they were
over-tempted to publish it, the public united in
refusing to buy it. So he saw? But if the book
sellers persisted in selling none but good books,
perhaps something might be done. At any rate
they would like to see the experiment tried.
Erlcort felt obliged to read the books suggested
to him by the endless chain of readers who vol
unteered to read for him, on both sides of the
ocean, or going and coming on the ocean. Mostly
the books they praised were abject rubbish, but
it took time to find this out, and he formed the
habit of reading far into the night, and if he was
very much vexed at discovering that the book
recommended to him was trash, he could not
sleep unless he took veronal, and then he had a
ghastly next day.
He did not go out of town except for a few brief
sojourns at places where he knew cultivated people
were staying, and could give him their opinions
of the books he was reading. When the pub
lishers began, as they had agreed, to send him
their advance sheets, the stitched but unbound
2OI
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
volumes roused so much interest by the novelty
of their form that his readers could not give an
undivided attention to their contents. He fore
saw that in the end he should have to rely upon
the taste of mercenaries in his warfare against
rubbish, and more and more he found it neces
sary to expend himself in it, to read at second
hand as well as at first. His greatest relief was
in returning to town and watching the magical
changes which the decorator was working in his
store. This was consolation, this was inspiration,
but he longed for the return of Margaret Green,
that she might help him enjoy the realization of
her ideas in the equipment of the place; and he
held the decorator to the most slavish obedience
through the carpenters and painters who created
at his bidding a miraculous interior, all white, or
just off-white, such as had never been imagined
of a bookstore in New York before. It was ac
tually ready by the end of August, though smelling
a little of turpentine still, and Erlcort, letting him
self in at the small-paned black door, and ranging
up and down the long, beautiful room, and round
and round the central book-table, and in and out
between the side tables, under the soft, bright
shelving of the walls, could hardly wait the arrival
of the Minnedingdong in which the elderly girl
had taken her passage back. One day, ten days
202
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
ahead of time, she blew in at the front door in a
paroxysm of explanation; she had swapped pas
sages home with another girl who wanted to come
back later, while she herself wanted to come back
earlier. She had no very convincing reason for
this as she gave it, but Erlcort did not listen to
her reason, whatever it was. He said, between
the raptures with the place that she fell in and
out of, that now she was just in time for the fur
nishing, which he never could have dared to under
take alone.
In the gay September weather they visited all
the antiquity shops in Fourth Avenue, and then
threw themselves frankly upon reproductions,
which they bought in the native wood and ordered
painted, the settles and the spindle-backed chairs
in the cool gray which she decided was the thing.
In the same spirit they bought new brass fire-
irons and new shovel and tongs, but all very tall
and antique-looking, and then they got those little
immoral mirrors, which Margaret Green attached
with her own hands to the partitions of the shelv
ing. She also got soft green silk curtains for the
chimney windows and for the sash of the front
door; even the front windows she curtained, but
very low, so that a salesman or a saleswoman could
easily reach over from the interior and get a book
that any customer had seen from the outside.
203
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
One day when all this was done, and Erlcort had
begun ordering in a stock of such books as he had
selected to start with, she said: "You're looking
rather peaked, aren't you?"
"Well, I've been feeling rather peaked, until
lately, keeping awake to read and read after the
volunteer readers.'*
"You mean you've lost sleep?"
"Something like that."
"Well, you mustn't. How many books do
you start with?"
"About twenty-five."
"Good ones? It's a lot, isn't it? I didn't sup
pose there were so many."
"Well, to fill our shelves I shall have to order
about a thousand of each."
"You'll never sell them in the world! You'll
be ruined."
"Oh no; the publishers will take them back."
"How nice of them! But that's only what
painters have to do when the dealers can't sell
their pictures."
A month off, the prospect was brilliant, and
when the shelves and tables were filled and the
sketches and bas-reliefs were stuck about and the
little immoral mirrors were hung, the place was
charming. The chairs and settles were all that
could be asked ; Margaret Green helped put them
204
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
about; and he let her light the low fire on the
hearth of the Franklin stove; he said he should
not always burn hickory, but he had got^twenty-
four sticks for two dollars from an Italian in a
cellar near by, and he meant to burn that much.
She upbraided him for his extravagance while
touching the match to the paper under the kin
dling; but October opened cold, and he needed
the fire.
The enterprise seemed rather to mystify the
neighborhood, and some old customers of the old
codger's came in upon one fictitious errand and
another to see about it, and went away without
quite making it out. It was a bookstore, all
right, they owned in conference, but what did he
mean by "critical"?
The first bonafide buyer appeared in a little girl
who could just get her chin on the counter, and
who asked for an egg-beater. Erlcort had begun
with only one assistant, the young lady who
typed his letters and who said she guessed she
could help him when she was not working. She
leaned over and tried to understand the little girl,
and then she called to Erlcort where he stood with
his back to the fire and the morning paper open
before his face.
"Mr. Erlcort, have we got a book called The
Egg-beater?"
205
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
"The Egg-beater?" he echoed, letting his paper
drop below his face.
"No, no!" the little girl shouted, angrily. "It
ain't a book. It's a thing to beat eggs with.
Mother said to come here and get it."
"Well, she's sent you to the wrong place, little
girl. You want to go to a hardware-store," the
young lady argued.
"Ain't this No. 1232?"
"Yes."
"Well, this is the right place. Mother said to
go to 1232. I guess she knows. She's an old
customer."
"The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!" the blithe
young novelist to whom Erlcort told the story
repeated. He was still happy in his original suc
cess as a best-seller, and he had come to the
Critical Bookstore to spy out the stock and see
whether his last novel was in it; but though it
was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance
with Erlcort which had begun elsewhere. "The
Egg-beater? What a splendid title for a story of
adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability
to the last word, or perhaps never reveal it at all,
and leave the reader worrying. That's one way;
makes him go and talk about the book to all the
girls he knows and get them guessing. Best ad.
in the world. The Egg-beater! Doesn't it suggest
206
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
desert islands and penguins* nests in the rocks?
Fellow and girl shipwrecked, and girl wants to
make an omelette after they've got sick of plain
eggs, and can't for want of an egg-beater. Heigh ?
He invents one — makes it out of some wire that
floats off from the wreck. See? When they are
rescued, she brings it away, and doesn't let him
know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They keep
it over his study fireplace always."
This author was the first to stretch his legs
before Erlcort's fire from his seat on one of the
reproductions. He could not say enough of the
beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit
there and watch for the old codger's old cus
tomers coming to buy hardware. There might
be copy in it.
But the old customers did not come so often as
he hoped and Erlcort feared. Instead there came
bona fide book-buyers, who asked some for a book
and some for a particular book. The first were
not satisfied with the books that Erlcort or his
acting saleslady recommended, and went away
without buying. The last were indignant at
not finding what they wanted in Erlcort's se
lection.
"Why don't you stock it?" they demanded.
"Because I don't think it's worth reading."
"Oh, indeed!" The sarcastic customers were
207
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
commonly ladies. * 'I 'thought you let the public
judge of that!"
"There are bookstores where they do. This is
a critical bookstore. I sell only the books that I
think worth reading. If you had noticed my
sign-"
"Oh!" the customer would say, and she, too,
would go away without buying.
There were other ladies who came, links of the
endless chain of volunteer readers who had tried
to help Erlcort in making his selection, and he
could see them slyly looking his stock over for
the books they had praised to him. Mostly
they went away without comment, but with heads
held high in the offense which he felt even .more
than saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had
not stocked her chosen book, and he had to say,
"Well, when I came to go through it carefully,
I didn't think it quite—"
"But here is The Green Bay Tree, and The
Biggest Toad in the Puddle, and — "
' * I know. For one reason and another I thought
them worth stocking."
Then another head went away high in the air,
with its plumes quivering. One afternoon late a
lady came flying in with all the marks, whatever
they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.
"I'm just through the customs, and I've mo-
208
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
tored up here the first thing, even before I went
home, to stop you from selling that book I recom
mended. It's dreadful; and, horrors! horrors!
here it is by the hundreds ! Oh, Mr. Erlcort ! You
mustn't sell that dreadful book! You see, I had
skipped through it in my berth going out, and
posted my letter the first thing; and just now,
coming home, I found it in the ship's library and
came on that frightful episode. You know!
Where — How could you order it without read
ing it, on a mere say-so? It's utterly immoral!"
"I don't agree with you," Erlcort answered,
dryly. "I consider that passage one of the finest
in modern fiction — one of the most ennobling and
illumining—
"Ennobling!" The lady made a gesture of
horror. "Very well! If that is your idea of a
critical bookstore, all I've got to say is — "
But she had apparently no words to say it in,
and she went out banging but failing to latch the
door which let through the indignant snort of her
car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and
his assistant to a common silence, but he imagined
somehow a resolution in the stenographer not to
let the book go unsearched till she had grasped
the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its
ennobling force. He was not consoled when an
other lady came in and, after drifting unmolested-
*4 209
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
ly about (it was the primary rule of the place not
to follow people up), stopped before the side shelf
where the book was ranged in dozens and scores.
She took a copy from the neat ranks, and opened
it ; then she lifted her head by chance and caught
sight of her plume in one of the little mirrors.
She stealthily lifted herself on tiptoe till she could
see her face, and then she turned to the assistant
and said, gently, * ' I believe I should like this book,
please," and paid for it and went out.
It was now almost on the stroke of six, and
Erlcort said to his assistant: "I'll close the store,
Miss Pearsall. You needn't stay any longer."
"All right, sir," the girl said, and went into the
little closet at the rear for her hat and coat. Did
she contrive to get a copy of that book under her
coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?
When she was gone, he turned the key in the
door and went back and sat down before the fire
dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was
not a very cheerful moment with him, but he
could not have said that the day had been unprofit
able, either spiritually or pecuniarily. In its ex
periences it had been a varied day, and he had
really sold a good many books. More people than
he could have expected had taken him seriously
and even intelligently. It is true that he had
been somewhat vexed by the sort of authority
210
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
the president of the Intellectual Club had shown
in the way she swelled into the store and patronized
him and it, as if she had invented them both, and
blamed him in a high, sweet voice for having so
many old books. "My idea was that it would
be a place where one could come for the best of
the new books. But here! Why, half of them I
saw in June before I sailed!" She chided him
merrily, and she acted as if it were quite part of
the joke when he said that he did not think a
good book could age much in four months. She
laughed patronizingly at his conceit of getting in
the fall books by Thanksgiving; but even for the
humor of it she could not let him say he should
not do anything in holiday books. "I had ex
pected to get all my Christmas books of you, Mr.
Erlcort," she crowed, but for the present she
bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the
gratitude, almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she
was a lady !) who had come that day, bringing her
daughter to get a book, any book in his stock,
and to thank him for his enterprise, which she had
found worked perfectly in the case of the book
she had got the week before; the book had been
an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of
heightened self-respect with her: that book of
the dreadful episode.
He wished Margaret Green had been there;
211
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
but she had been there only once since his open
ing ; he could not think why. He heard a rattling
at the door-latch, and he said before he turned to
look, "What if it should be she now?" But when
he went to peer through the door-curtain it was
only an old fellow who had spent the better part
of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book.
Erlcort went back to the fire and let him rattle,
which he did rather a long time, and then went
away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one of
a number of customers who had acted on the half
of his motto asking them to sit down and rest
them, after acting on the other half to look round
all they wanted. Most of them did not read,
even ; they seemed to know one another, and they
talked comfortably together. Erlcort recognized
a companionship of four whom he had noticed in
the Park formerly; they were clean-enough-look
ing elderly men, but occupied nearly all the chairs
and settles, so that lady customers did not like
to bring books and look over them in the few places
left, and Erlcort foresaw the time when he should
have to ask the old fellows to look around more and
rest them less. In resuming his own place before
the fire he felt the fleeting ache of a desire to ask
Margaret Green whether it would not be a good
plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece.
He would not have liked to do it without asking
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THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
her; it had been her notion to put it there, and
her other notion of the immoral mirrors had cer
tainly worked well. The thoughtful expression
they had reflected on the faces of lady customers
had sold a good many books; not that Erlcort
wished to sell books that way, though he argued
with himself that his responsibility ought strictly
to end with the provision of books which he had
critically approved before offering them for sale.
His conscience was not wholly at peace as to
his stock, not only the books which he had in
cluded, but also those he had excluded. Some of
these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one
case an author came and personally protested.
This was the case of a book by the ex-best-seller,
who held that his last book was so much better
than his first that it ought certainly to be found
in any critical bookstore. The proceeds of his
best-seller had enabled him to buy an electric
runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort's door in
it to argue the matter with him. He sat down in
a reproduction and proved, gaily, that Erlcort
was quite wrong about it. He had the book with
him, and read passages from it; then he read
passages from some of the books on sale and de
fied Erlcort to say that his passages were not just
as good, or, as he put it merrily, the same as. He
held that his marked improvement entitled him
213
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
to the favor of a critical bookstore; without this,
what motive had he in keeping from a reversion
to the errors which had won him the vicious pros
perity of his first venture ? Hadn't Erlcort a duty
to perform in preventing his going back to the
bad? Refuse this markedly improved fiction, and
you drove him to writing nothing but best-sellers
from now on. He urged Erlcort to reflect.
They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller
went away in high spirits, prophesying that Erl
cort would come to his fiction yet.
There were authors who did not leave Erlcort
so cheerful when they failed to see their books on
his shelves or tables. Some of them were young
authors who had written their worthless books
with a devout faith in their worth, and they went
away more in sorrow than in anger, and yet more
in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had
been all their lives acceptably writing second-rate
books and trying to make them unacceptably first-
rate. If he knew them he kept out of their way,
but the dejection of their looks was not less a
pang to him if he saw them searching his stock
for their books in vain.
He had his own moments of dejection. The in
terest of the press in his enterprise had flashed
through the Sunday issues of a single week, and
then flashed out in lasting darkness. He won-
314
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
dered vaguely if he had counted without the
counting-house in hoping for their continued favor;
he could not realize that nothing is so stale as old
news, and that no excess of advertising would
have relumed those fitful fires.
He would have liked to talk the case over with
Margaret Green. After his first revolt from the
easy publicity the reporters had first given him,
he was aware of having enjoyed it — perhaps
vulgarly enjoyed it. But he hoped not quite
that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity he
had cared for his scheme rather than himself.
He had really believed in it, and he liked having
it recognized as a feature of modern civilization,
an innovation which did his city and his country
credit. Now and then an essayist of those who
wrote thoughtful articles in the Sunday or Satur
day-evening editions had dropped in, and he had
opened his heart to them in a way he would not
have minded their taking advantage of. Secretly
he hoped they would see a topic in his enterprise
and his philosophy of it. But they never did,
and he was left to the shame of hopes which had
held nothing to support defeat. He would have
liked to confess his shame and own the justice of
his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed
the only friend who never came near. Other
friends came, and many strangers, the friends to
215
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason
to complain of his sales; the fame of his critical
bookstore might have ceased in New York, be
cause it had gone abroad to Chicago and St.
Louis and Pittsburg ; people who were clearly from
these commercial capitals and others came and
bought copiously of his criticized stock, and they
praised the notion of it in telling him that he
ought to open branches in their several cities.
They were all women, and it was nearly all
women who frequented the Critical Bookstore,
but in their multitude Margaret Green was not.
He thought it the greater pity because she would
have enjoyed many of them with him, and would
have divined such as hoped the culture implicated
by a critical bookstore would come off on them
without great effort of their own ; she would have
known the sincere spirits, too, and could have
helped direct their choice of the best where all
was so good. He smiled to find that he was in
voking her help, which he had no right to.
His longing had no effect upon her till deep in
January, when the weather was engaged late one
afternoon in keeping the promise of a January
thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the
winter. Then she came thumping with her um
brella-handle at his door as if, he divined, she were
too stiff -handed or too package-laden to press the
216
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in,
but saved herself by spilling on the floor some
canvases and other things which she had been
getting at the artist 's-materials store near by.
"Don't bother about them," she said, "but take
me to the fire as fast as you can," and when she
had turned from snow to rain and had dripped
partially dry before the Franklin stove, she asked,
"Where have you been all the time?"
"Waiting here for you," he answered.
"Well, you needn't. I wasn't going to come —
or at least not till you sent for me, or said you
wanted my advice."
"I don't want your advice now."
"I didn't come to give it. I just dropped in
because if I hadn't I should have just dropped
outside. How have you been getting along with
your ridiculous critical bookstore?"
"Well, things are rather quiet with us just now,
as the publishers say to the authors when they
don't want to publish their books."
"Yes, I know that saying. Why didn't you
go in for the holiday books?"
"How did you know I didn't?"
"Lots of people told me."
1 ' Well, then, I'll tell you why. I would have had
to read them first, and no human being could do that
— not even a volunteer link in an endless chain,"
217
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
"I see. But since Christmas?"
"You know very well that after Christmas the
book market drops dead."
"Yes, so I've been told." She had flung her
wet veil back over her shoulders, and he thought
she had never looked so adorably plain before; if
she could have seen herself in a glass she would have
found her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as
if his thinking had put her in mind of them, and
she said, "Those immoral mirrors are shameful."
"They've sold more of the best books than
anything else."
"No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I
shall take them down."
"Very well. I didn't put them up." He laid
a log of hickory on the fire. "I'm not doing it
to dry you quicker."
"Oh, I know. I'll tell you one thing. You
ought to keep the magazines, or at least the Big
Four. You could keep them with a good con
science, and you could sell them without reading;
they're always good."
"There's an idea in that. I believe I'll try it."
Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she
rose and removed the mirrors. In doing this she
noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a good
many of his best books, and she said: "Well! I
don't see why you should be discouraged."
318
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
''Who said I was? I'm exultant."
"Then you were exulting with the corners of
your mouth down just now. Well, I must be
going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to
the Subway with me?" While Erlcort was tele
phoning she was talking to him. "I believe the
magazines will revive public interest in your
scheme. Put them in your window. Try to get
advance copies for it."
"You have a commercial genius, Margaret
Green."
"When it conies to selling literature, I have.
Selling art is where I fall down."
"That's because you always try to sell your
own art. I should fall down, too, if I tried to
sell my own literature."
They got quite back to their old friendliness;
the coming of the taxi gave them plenty of time.
The electric lights were turned brilliantly on, but
there, at the far end of the store, before the Frank
lin stove, they had a cozy privacy. At the mo
ment of parting she said :
"If I were you I should take out these settles.
They simply invite loafing."
"I've noticed that they seem to do that."
"And better paint out that motto."
" F ve sometimes fancied I ' d better. That invites
loafing, too; though some nice people like it,"
319
THE CRITICAL, BOOKSTORE
"Nice people? Why haven't some of them
bought a picture?" He perceived that she had
taken in the persistent presence of the sketches
when removing the mirrors, and he shared the
indignation she expressed: " Shabby things!"
She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and
he asked what she was going to do with them, as
he followed her to the door with her other things.
' * Put them around the studio. But you needn't
come to see the effect."
1 'No. I shall come to see you."
But when he came in a lull of February, and he
could walk part of the way up through the Park
on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:
"I suppose you've come to pour out some more
of your griefs. Well, pour away! Has the maga
zine project failed?"
"On the contrary, it has been a succh fou.
But I don't feel altogether easy in my mind about
it. The fact is, they seem to print much more
rubbish than I supposed."
"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the
breath in their nostrils."
She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut
and getting very close to her picture. He had
never thought her so plain; she was letting her
mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so
charming; but when she stepped back rhythmi-
220
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
cally, tilting her pretty head this way and that,
he saw why : it was her unfailing grace. She sud
denly remembered her mouth and shut it to say,
"Well?"
4 'Well, some people have come back at me.
They've said, What a rotten number this or that
was ! They were right ; and yet there were things
in all those magazines better than anything they
had ever printed. What's to be done about it?
I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck be
cause it comes bound up with essays and stories
and poems of the first quality."
"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting
up to her picture again, "don't you tear the bad
out, and sell the good?"
Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot
be spelled in English. "Do you know how de
fiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the
magazines? They're wired together, and you
could no more tear out the bad and leave the
good than you could part vice from virtue in
human nature."
"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no
further, and she had to let him go disconsolate.
After waiting a decent time she went to find him
in his critical bookstore. It was late in an after
noon of the days that were getting longer, and
only one electric was lighted in the rear of the
221
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Frank
lin stove, so busy at something that he scarcely
seemed aware of her.
"What in the world are you doing?" she de
manded.
He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you!
Why, I'm merely censoring the truck in the May
number of this magazine." He held up a little
roller, as long as the magazine was wide, blacked
with printer's ink, which he had been applying
to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from
the way the Russian censorship blots out seditious
literature before it lets it go to the public."
"And what a mess you're making!"
' ' Of course it will have to dry before it's put on
sale."
"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick
Erlcort: you're going crazy."
"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with con
ceit and vanity and arrogance. Who am I that
I should set up for a critical bookstore-keeper?
What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A
vast, benevolent, generous democracy, where one
may have what one likes, or a cold oligarchy where
he is compelled to take what is good for him ? Is
it a restricted citizenship, with a minority repre
sentation, or is it universal suffrage?"
"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talk-
222
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
ing sense. Why didn't you think of this in the
beginning?"
"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on,
"where the weeds mostly outflourish the flow
ers, or is it a wretched little florist's conservatory
where the watering-pot assumes to better the in
struction of the rain which falls upon the just and
the unjust? What is all the worthy family of
asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them?
Because the succulent fruits and nourishing
cereals are better for the finer organisms, are the
coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made
a mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is
the expression of the gross, the fatuous, and the
foolish, and it is the pleasure of the gross, the
fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression
and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect.
Let the multitude have their truck, their rubbish,
their rot; it may not be the truck, the rubbish, the
rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by
natural selection become to certain of them. But
let there be no artificial selection, no survival of the
fittest by main force — the force of the spectator,
who thinks he knows better than the creator of
the ugly and the beautiful, the fair and foul, the
evil and good."
"Oh, now if the Intellectual Club could hear
you!" Margaret Green said, with a long, deep,
223
THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
admiring suspiration. "And what are you going
to do with your critical bookstore?"
"I'm going to sell it. I've had an offer from
the author of that best-seller — I've told you about
him. I was just trying to censor that magazine
while I was thinking it over. He's got an idea.
He's going to keep it a critical bookstore, but the
criticism is to be made by universal suffrage and
the will of the majority. The latest books will
be put to a vote ; and the one getting the greatest
number of votes will be the first offered for sale,
and the author will receive a free passage to
Europe by the southern route."
: ' The southern route !" Margaret mused. "I've
never been that way. It must be delightful."
''Then come with me! I'm going."
"But how can I?"
"By marrying me!"
"I never thought of that," she said. Then,
with the conscientious resolution of an elderly girl
who puts her fate to the touch of any risk the
truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! I have.
But I never supposed you would ask me." She
stared at him, and she was aware she was letting
her mouth hang open. While she was trying for
some word to close it with he closed it for her.
A FEAST OF REASON
XIV
A FEAST OF REASON
FJLORINDO and Lindora had come to the end
*• of another winter in town, and had packed
up for another summer in the country. They were
sitting together over their last breakfast until the
taxi should arrive to whirl them away to the sta
tion, and were brooding in a joint gloom from the
effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house
of a friend the night before, and, "Well, thank
goodness," she said, "there is an end to that sort
of thing for one while."
"An end to that thing," he partially assented,
"but not that sort of thing."
"What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly,
almost resentfully.
"I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the
dinner, and that in the country we shall begin
lunching where we left off dining."
1 ' Not instantly, ' ' she protested shrilly. ' ' There
will be nobody there for a while — not for a whole
month, nearly."
227
A FEAST OF REASON
"They will be there before you can turn round,
almost; and then you women will begin feeding
one another there before you have well left off
here."
"We women!" she protested.
"Yes, you — you women. You give the dinners.
Can you deny it?"
"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."
"In the country you can; and so you will give
the lunches."
"We would give dinners if it were not for the
distance, and the darkness on those bad roads."
"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying
you."
"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it.
No sense. How tired of it all I am! And, as
you say, it will be no time before it is all going
on again."
They computed the number of dinners they
had given during the winter; that was not hard,
and the sum was not great: six or seven at the
most, large and small. When it came to the
dinners they had received, it was another thing;
but still she considered, "Were they really so
few? It's nothing to what the English do. They
never dine alone at home, and they never dine
alone abroad — of course not! I wonder they can
stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept
228
A FEAST OF REASON
kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup,
if there aren't oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon,
and the fish, and the entree, and the roast and
salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody
touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and cigars
—how I hate it all!"
Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed des
perately with the fragment of bacon on her plate.
"And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm
about the first dinner of autumn, after you've
got back."
"Oh, yes," she assented; "it's like a part of
our lost youth. We think all the dinners of the
winter will be like that, and we come away beam
ing."
"But when it keeps on and there's more and
more of our lost youth, till it comes to being the
whole—"
"Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended
that he was not going to have said it, and she
resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes
it so detestable as the winter goes on."
"All customs are detestable, the best of them,"
he suggested, "and I should say, in spite of the
first autumnal dinner, that the society dinner was
an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with
china and glass, and silver and linen, and if people
could fix their minds on these, or even on the
229
A FEAST OF REASON
dishes of the dinner as they come successively on,
it would be all very well; but the diners, the
diners!"
"Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous,
certainly; and the young ones — I try not to look
at them, poking things into the hollows of their
faces with spoons and forks — "
"Better than when it was done with knives!
Still, it's a horror! A veteran diner-out in full
action is certainly a hideous spectacle. Often he
has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't
serve him perfectly. He is in danger of dropping
things out of his mouth, both liquids and solids:
better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his
head in the stress of mastication and deglutition;
his color rises and spreads to his gray hair or
over his baldness; his person seems to swell
vividly in his chair, and when he laughs — "
' * Don't, Florindo ! It is awful. ' '
"Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a
middle-aged matron tending to overweight and
bulking above her plate — "
"Yes, yes! That's dreadful, . too. But when
people are young — "
"Oh, when people are young!" He said this
in despair. Then he went on in an audible muse.
"When people are young they are not only in
their own youth; they are in the youth of the
230
A FEAST OF REASON
world, the race. .They dine, but they don't think
of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the diners,
and the grotesqueness of feeding in common.
They think — " he broke off in defect of other
ideas, and concluded with a laugh, "they think
of themselves. And they don't think of how
they are looking."
"They needn't; they are looking very well.
Don't keep harping on that! I remember when
we first began going to dinners, I thought it was
the most beautiful thing in the world. I don't
mean when I was a girl; a girl only goes to a
dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean
when we were young married people ; and I pinned
up my dress and we went in the horse-cars, or
even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it: the
finding who was going to take me in and who you
were; and the going in; and the hovering round
the table to find our places from the cards; and
the seeing how you looked next some one else,
and wondering how you thought I looked; and
the beads sparkling up through the champagne
and getting into one's nose; and the laughing and
joking and talking! Oh, the talking! What's
become of it? The talking, last night, it bored
me to death! And what good stories people used
to tell, women as well as men! You can't deny
it was beautiful.'*
231
A FEAST OF REASON
"I don't; and I don't deny that the forms of
dining are still charming. It's the dining itself
that I object to."
11 That's because your digestion is bad."
"Isn't yours?"
"Of course it is. What has that got to do
with it?"
"It seems to me that we have arrived at what
is called an impasse in French." He looked up
at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little jump
in her chair. "Oh, there's plenty of time. The
taxi won't be here for half an hour yet. Is there
any heat left in that coffee?"
"There will be," she said, and she lighted the
lamp under the pot. "But I don't like being
scared out of half a year's growth."
"I'm sorry. I won't look at the clock any
more; I don't care if we're left. Where were we?
Oh, I remember — the objection to dining itself.
If we could have the forms without the facts,
dining would be all right. Our superstition is
that we can't be gay without gorging; that society
can't be run without meat and drink. But don't
you remember when we first went to Italy there
was no supper at Italian houses where we thought
it such a favor to be asked?"
"I remember that the young Italian swells
wouldn't go to the American and English houses
232
A FEAST OF REASON
where they weren't sure of supper. They didn't
give supper at the Italian houses because they
couldn't afford it."
"I know that. I believe they do, now. But —
1 Sweet are the uses of adversity/
and the fasting made for beauty then more
than the feasting does now. It was a lovelier
sight to see the guests of those Italian houses
conversing together without the grossness of feed
ing or being fed — the sort of thing one saw at our
houses when people went out to supper."
"I wonder," Lindora said, " whether the same
sort of thing goes on at evening parties still — it's
so long since I've been at one. It was awful stand
ing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and
eating vis-d-vis with a man who brought you a
plate; and it wasn't much better when you sat
down and he stood over you gabbling and gob
bling, with his plate in one hand and his fork in
the other. I was always afraid of his dropping
things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws
champing as you looked up at them from below!"
"Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of
the grotesque in a bird's-eye view of a lady mak
ing shots at her mouth with a spoon and trying
to smile and look spirituelle between the shots."
Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on
233
A FEAST OF REASON
the back of her hand in the way Florindo thought
so pretty when they were both young. "Yes,"
she said, "awful, awful! Why should people want
to flock together when they feed? Do you sup
pose it's a survival of the primitive hospitality
when those who had something to eat hurried
to share it with those who had nothing?"
"Possibly," Florindo said, flattered into con
sequence by her momentary deference, or show of
it. "But the people who mostly meet to feed
together now are not hungry; they are already so
stuffed that they loathe the sight of the things.
Some of them shirk the consequences by frankly
dining at home first, and then openly or covertly
dodging the courses."
"Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of
high civilization, or social wisdom. I call it
wicked, and an insult to the very genius of hos
pitality."
"Well, I don't know. It must give the faster
a good chance of seeing how funny the feeders
all look."
"I wonder, I do wonder, how the feeding in
common came to be the custom," she said,
thoughtfully. "Of course where it's done for
convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses —
but to do it wantonly, as people do in society,
it ought to be stopped."
234
A FEAST OF REASON
"We might call art to our aid — have a large
tableful of people kodaked in the moments of in
gulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied
from guest to guest; might be reproduced as
picture postals, or from films for the movies.
That would give the ten and twenty cent au
diences a chance to see what life in the exclusive
circles was."
She listened in dreamy inattention. "It was a
step in the right direction when people began to
have afternoon teas. To be sure, there was the
biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn't
take them, and most women could manage their
teacups gracefully."
"Or hide their faces in them when they
couldn't."
"Only," she continued, "the men wouldn't
come after the first go off. It was as bad as
lunches. Now that the English way of serving
tea to callers has come in, it's better. You really
get the men, and it keeps them from taking cock
tails so much."
"They're rather glad of that. But still, still,
there's the guttling and guzzling."
"It's reduced to a minimum."
"But it's there. And the first thing you know
you've loaded yourself up with cake or bread-
and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner.
235
A FEAST OF REASON
No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if
we're going to be truly civilized. If people could
come to one another's tables with full minds in
stead of stomachs, there would be some excuse
for hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the prac
tice of the professional diner-out, and read up
at home as he now eats at home, and — No, I
don't see how it could be done. But we might
take a leaf from the book of people who are not
in society. They never ask anybody to meals if
they can possibly help it ; if some one happens in
at meal-times they tell him to pull up a chair — if
they have to, or he shows no signs first of going.
But even among these people the instinct of hos
pitality — the feeding form of it — lurks somewhere.
In our farm-boarding days — "
" Don't speak of them!" she implored.
"We once went to an evening party," he pur
sued, "where raw apples and cold water were
served."
"I thought I should die of hunger. And when
we got home to our own farmer's we ravaged the
pantry for everything left from supper. It wasn't
much. There!" Lindora screamed. "There is
the taxi!" And the shuddering sound of the
clock making time at their expense penetrated
from the street. ' ' Come !' '
"How the instinct of economy lingers in us,
236
A FEAST OF REASON
too, long after the use of it is outgrown. It's as
bad as the instinct of hospitality. We could easily
afford to pay extra for the comfort of sitting here
over these broken victuals — "
"I tell you we shall be left," she retorted; and
in the thirty-five minutes they had at the station
before their train started she outlined a scheme of
social reform which she meant to put in force as
soon as people began to gather in summer force
at Lobster Cove.
He derided the notion; but she said, "You will
see!" and in rather more time than it takes to
tell it they were settled in their cottage, where,
after some unavoidable changes of cook and
laundress, they were soon in perfect running
order.
By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide
of lunching and being lunched. The lunches were
almost exclusively ladies' lunches, and the ladies
came to them with appetites sharpened by the
incomparable air of those real Lobster Cove days
which were all cloudless skies and west winds,
and by the vigorous automobile exercise of getting
to one another's cottages. They seized every pre
text for giving these feasts, marked each by some
vivid touch of invention within the limits of the
graceful convention which all felt bound not to
transcend. It was some surprising flavor in the
237
A FEAST OF REASON
salad, or some touch of color appealing to the eye
only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or
some daring substitution of a native dish for it,
as strawberry or peach shortcake; or some bold
transposition in the order of the courses; or some
capricious arrangement of the decoration, or the
use of wild flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-
rue or field-lilies), for the local florist's flowers,
which set the ladies screaming at the moment
and talking of it till the next lunch. This would
follow perhaps the next day, or the next but one,
according as a new cottager's claims insisted or
a lady had a change of guests, or three days at
the latest, for no reason.
In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed
that Lindora had not given a lunch, and she had
so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment of
the others' lunches that she had half forgotten
her high purposes of reform, when she was sharply
recalled to them by a lunch which had not at all
agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have
the doctor, and many people had asked one an
other whether they had heard how she was.
Then she took her good resolution in both hands
and gave an afternoon, asking people by note or
'phone simply whether they would not come in
at four sharp. People were a good deal mystified,
but for this very reason everybody came. Some
238
A FEAST OF REASON
of them came from somebody's lunch, which had
been so nice that they lingered over it till four,
and then walked, partly to fill in the time and
partly to walk off the lunch, as there would be
sure to be something at Lindora's later on.
It would be invidious to say what the nature of
Lindora's entertainment was. It was certainly to
the last degree original, and those who said the
worst of it could say no worse than that it was
queer. It quite filled the time till six o'clock,
and may be perhaps best described as a negative
rather than a positive triumph, though what
Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly
achieved. Whatever it was, whether original or
queer, it was certainly novel.
A good many men had come, one at least to
every five ladies, but as the time passed and a
certain blankness began to gather over the spirits
of all, they fell into different attitudes of the
despair which the ladies did their best to pass off
for rapture. At each unscheduled noise they
started in a vain expectation, and when the end
came, it came so without accent, so without any
thing but the clock to mark it as the close, that
they could hardly get themselves together for
going away. They did what was nice and right,
of course, in thanking Lindora for her fascinating
afternoon, but when they were well beyond hear-
239
A FEAST OF REASON
ing one said to another: "Well, I shall certainly
have an appetite for my dinner to-night! Why, if
there had only been a cup of the weakest kind of
tea, or even of cold water!"
Then those who had come in autos gathered
as many pedestrians into them as they would hold
in leaving the house, or caught them up fainting
by the way.
Lindora and Florindo watched them from their
veranda.
"Well, my dear," he said, "it's been a wonder
ful afternoon; an immense stride forward in the
cause of anti-eating — or — "
"Don't speak to me!" she cried.
"But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn't it?"
"Hungry!" she hurled back at him. "I could
eat a — I don't know what!"
CITY AND COUNTRY IN
THE FALL
XV
CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
A Long-distance Eclogue
1902
Morrison. Hello! Hello! Is that you, Weth-
erbee?
Wetherbee. Yes. Who are you? What do you
want with me?
Morrison. Oh, nothing much. It's Morrison,
you know;
Morrison — down at Clamhurst Shortsands.
Wetherbee. Oh!
Why, Morrison, of course! Of course, I know!
How are you, Morrison? And, by the way,
Where are you? What! You never mean to say
You are down there yet? Well, by the Holy
Poker!
What are you doing there, you ancient joker?
Morrison. Sticking it out over Thanksgiving
Day.
I said I would. I tell you, it is gay
243
CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
Down here. You ought to see the Hunter's Moon,
These silver nights, prinking in our lagoon.
You ought to see our sunsets, glassy red,
Shading to pink and violet overhead.
You ought to see our mornings, still and clear,
White silence, far as you can look and hear.
You ought to see the leaves — our oaks and ashes
Crimson and yellow, with those gorgeous splashes,
Purple and orange, against the bluish green
Of the pine woods; and scattered in between
The scarlet of the maples; and the blaze
Of blackberry-vines, along the dusty ways
And on the old stone walls; the air just balm,
And the crows cawing through the perfect calm
Of afternoons all gold and turquoise. Say,
You ought to have been with wife and me to-day,
A drive we took — it would have made you sick:
The pigeons and the partridges so thick;
And on the hill just beyond Barkin's lane,
Before you reach the barn of Widow Payne,
Showing right up against the sky, as clear
And motionless as sculpture, stood a deer!
Say, does that jar you just a little? Say,
How have you found things up there, anyway,
Since you got back? Air like a cotton string
To breathe? The same old dust on everything,
And in your teeth, and in your eyes? The smoke
From the soft coal, got long beyond a joke?
244
CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
The trolleys rather more upon your curves,
And all the roar and clatter in your nerves?
Don't you wish you had stayed here, too?
Wetherbee. Well, yes,
I do at certain times, I must confess.
I swear it is enough at times to make you swear
You would almost rather be anywhere
Than here. The building up and pulling down,
The getting to and fro about the town,
The turmoil underfoot and overhead,
Certainly make you wish that you were dead,
At first; and all the mean vulgarity
Of city life, the filth and misery
You see around you, make you want to put
Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot.
Yet — there are compensations.
Morrison. Such as?
Wetherbee. Why,
There is the club.
Morrison. The club I can't deny.
Many o* the fellows back there?
Wetherbee. Nearly all.
Over the twilight cocktails there are tall
Stories and talk. But you would hardly care;
You have the natives to talk with down there,
And always find them meaty.
Morrison. Well, so-so.
Their words outlast their ideas at times, you know,
245
CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
And they have staying powers. The theaters
All open now?
Wetherbee. Yes, all. And it occurs
To me: there's one among the things that you
Would have enjoyed; an opera with the new —
Or at least the last — music by Sullivan,
And words, though not Gilbertian, that ran
Trippingly with it. Oh, I tell you what,
I'd rather that you had been there than not.
Morrison. Thanks ever so!
Wetherbee, Oh, there is nothing mean
About your early friend. That deer and autumn
scene
Were kind of you! And, say, I think you like
Afternoon teas when good. I have chanced to
strike
Some of the best of late, where people said
They had sent you cards, but thought you must
be dead.
I told them I left you down there by the sea,
And then they sort of looked askance at me,
As if it were a joke, and bade me get
Myself some bouillon or some chocolate,
And turned the subject — did not even give
Me time to prove it is not life to live
In town as long as you can keep from freezing
Beside the autumn sea. A little sneezing,
At Clamhurst Shortsands, since the frosts set in?
246
CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
Morrison. Well, not enough to make a true
friend grin.
Slight colds, mere nothings. With our open fires
We've all the warmth and cheer that heart desires.
Next year we'll have a furnace in, and stay
Not till Thanksgiving, but till Christmas Day.
It's glorious in these roomy autumn nights
To sit between the firelight and the lights •
Of our big lamps, and read aloud by turns
As long as kerosene or hickory burns.
We hate to go to bed.
Wetherbee. Of course you do!
And hate to get up in the morning, too —
To pull the coverlet from your frost-bit nose,
And touch the glary matting with your toes!
Are you beginning yet to break the ice
In your wash-pitchers? No? Well, that is nice.
I always hate to do it — seems as if
Summer was going; but when your hand is stiff
With cold, it can be done. Still, I prefer
To wash and dress beside my register,
When summer gets a little on, like this.
But some folks find the other thing pure bliss —
Lusty young chaps, like you.
Morrison. And some folks find
A sizzling radiator to their mind.
What else have you, there, you could recommend
To the attention of a country friend?
247
CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
Wetherbee. Well, you know how it is in Madi
son Square,
Late afternoons, now, if the day's been fair —
How all the western sidewalk ebbs and flows
With pretty women in their pretty clo'es:
I've never seen them prettier than this year.
Of course, I know a dear is not a deer,
But still, I think that if I had to meet
One or the other in the road, or street,
All by myself, I am not sure but that
I'd choose the dear that wears the fetching
hat.
Morrison. Get out! What else?
Wetherbee. Well, it is not so bad,
If you are feeling a little down, or sad,
To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park,
When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark,
And meet that mighty flood of vehicles
Laden with all the different kinds of swells,
Homing to dinner, in their carriages —
Victorias, landaus, chariots, coupe's —
There's nothing like it to lift up the heart
And make you realize yourself a part,
Sure, of the greatest show on earth.
Morrison. Oh, yes,
I know. I've felt that rapture more or less.
But I would rather put it off as long
As possible. I suppose you like the song
248
CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
Of the sweet car-gongs better than the cry
Of jays and yellowhammers when the sky
Begins to redden these October mornings,
And the loons sound their melancholy warnings;
Or honk of the wild-geese that write their A
Along the horizon in the evening's gray.
Or when the squirrels look down on you and bark
From the nut trees —
Wetherbee. We have them in the Park
Plenty enough. But, say, you aged sinner,
Have you been out much recently at dinner?
Morrison. What do you mean? You know
there's no one here
That dines except ourselves now.
Wetherbee. Well, that's queer!
I thought the natives — But I recollect!
It was not reasonable to expect —
Morrison. What are you driving at?
Wetherbee. Oh, nothing much.
But I was thinking how you come in touch
With life at the first dinner in the fall,
When you get back, first, as you can't at all
Later along. But you, of course, won't care
With your idyllic pleasures.
Morrison. Who was there?
Wetherbee. Oh — ha, ha! What d'you mean by
there?
Morrison. Come off!
249
CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
Wetherbee. What! you remain to pray that
came to scoff!
Morrison. You know what I am after.
Wetherbee. Yes, that dinner.
Just a round dozen: Ferguson and Binner
For the fine arts; Bowyer the novelist;
Dr. Le Martin; the psychologist
Fletcher; the English actor Philipson;
The two newspaper Witkins, Bob and John;
A nice Bostonian, Bane the archseologer,
And a queer Russian amateur astrologer;
And Father Gray, the jolly ritualist priest,
And last your humble servant, but not least.
The food was not so filthy, and the wine
Was not so poison. We made out to dine
From eight till one A.M. One could endure
The dinner. But, oh say! The talk was poor!
Your natives down at Clamhurst —
Morrison. Look ye here!
What date does Thanksgiving come on this year?
Wetherbee. Why, I suppose — although I don't
remember
Certainly — the usual 28th November.
Morrison. Novem — You should have waited
to get sober!
It comes on the nth of October!
And that's to-morrow; and if you happen down
Later, you'd better look for us in town.
250
TABLE TALK
XVI
TABLE TALK
'"THEY were talking after dinner in that cozy
•*• moment when the conversation has ripened,
just before the coffee, into mocking guesses and
laughing suggestions. The thing they were talk
ing of was something that would have held them
apart if less happily timed and placed, but then
and there it drew these together in what most
of them felt a charming and flattering intimacy.
Not all of them took part in the talk, and of those
who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with au
thority or finality. At first they spoke of the
subject as it, forbearing to name it, as if the
name of it would convey an unpleasant shock,
out of temper with the general feeling.
"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's
really so much commoner than it used to be. But
the publicity is more invasive and explosive.
That's perhaps because it has got higher up in
the world and has spread more among the first
circles. The time was when you seldom heard of
253
TABLE TALK
it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I re
member that when I went abroad, twenty or
thirty years ago, and the English brought me to
book about it, I could put them down by saying
that I didn't know a single divorced person."
"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured,
"a person of that sort must be single."
At first the others did not take the joke; then
they laughed, but the women not so much as the
men.
"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on
the right of the host inquired.
"Why, I don't know," he returned, thought
fully, after a little interval. "I don't just call one
to mind."
"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you.
If you moved in our best society you would cer
tainly know some of the many smart people whose
disunions alternate with the morning murders in
the daily papers."
"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low;
but I'm rather proud of the fact."
The hostess seemed not quite to like this arro
gant humility. She said, over the length of the
table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you know
some very nice people who have not been."
"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart
people? They're of very good family, certainly."
254
TABLE TALK
"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.
A husband on the right of the hostess wondered
if there were really more of the thing than there
used to be.
"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantita
tively, I'm not convinced," the host answered.
"In a good many of the States it's been made
difficult."
The husband on the right of the hostess was
not convinced, he said, as to the qualitative in
crease. The parties to the suits were rich enough,
and sometimes they were high enough placed and
far enough derived. But there was nearly always
a leak in them, a social leak somewhere, on one
side or the other. They could not be said to be
persons of quality in the highest sense."
"Why, persons of quality seldom can be," the
bachelor contended.
The girl opposite, who had been invited to
balance him in the scale of celibacy by the hostess
in her study of her dinner-party, first smiled, and
then alleged a very distinguished instance of di
vorce in which the parties were both of immacu
late origin and unimpeachable fashion. "No
body," she said, "can accuse them of a want of
quality. ' ' She was good-looking, though no longer
so young as she could have wished; she flung out
her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she ad-
255
TABLE TALK
dressed it to the host, and he said that was true;
certainly it was a signal case; but wasn't it ex
ceptional? The others mentioned like cases,
though none quite so perfect, and then there was
a lull till the husband on the left of the hostess
noted a fact which renewed the life of the dis
cussion.
"There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight
years ago, about it. I don't know whether the
agitation accomplished anything."
The host believed it had influenced legislation.
"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.
"Oh, against."
"But in other countries it's been coming in
more and more. It seems to be as easy in Eng
land now as it used to be in Indiana. In France
it's nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society
you meet so many disunited couples in a state of
quadruplicate reunion that it is very embarrass
ing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the
new relation themselves."
"It's very common in Germany, too," the hus
band on the right of the hostess said.
The husband on her left side said he did not
know just how it was in Italy and Spain, and no
one offered to disperse his ignorance.
In the silence which ensued the lady on the left
of the host created a diversion in her favor by
256
TABLE TALK
saying that she had heard they had a very good
law in Switzerland.
Being asked to tell what it was, she could not
remember, but her husband, on the right of the
hostess, saved the credit of his family by supply
ing her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious.
We heard of it when we were there. When peo
ple want to be put asunder, for any reason or
other, they go before a magistrate and declare
their wish. Then they go home, and at the end
of a certain time — weeks or months — the magis
trate summons them before him with a view to
reconciliation. If they come, it is a good sign;
if they don't come, or come and persist in their
desire, then they are summoned after another
interval, and are either reconciled or put asunder,
as the case may be, or as they choose. It is not
expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."
"It seems very sensible," the husband on the
left of the hostess said, as if to keep the other
husband in countenance. But for an interval no
one else joined him, and the mature girl said to
the man next her that it seemed rather cold
blooded. He was a man who had been entreated
to come in, on the frank confession that he was
asked as a stop-gap, the original guest having
fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse
their magnanimity, their condescension. They
17 257
TABLE TALK
think that being there out of compassion, and in
compliance with a hospitality that had not at
first contemplated their presence, they can say
anything; they are usually asked without but
through their wives, who are asked to "lend"
them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled
in eager acquiescence; and the men think it will
afterward advantage them with their wives, when
they find they are enjoying themselves, if they
will go home and report that they said something
vexing or verging on the offensive to their hostess.
This man now addressed himself to the lady at
the head of the table.
"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce
was an unquestionable evil?"
The hostess looked with a frightened air to the
right and left, and then down the table to her
husband. But no one came to her rescue, and
she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she
knew she had taken a liberty with this man's
wife), "Why, don't we?"
"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop
gap said.
"Oh !" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-
stricken voice which seemed not to interpret her
emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"
"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all,"
he returned, and the hostess smiled gratefully at
258
TABLE TALK
the girl for drawing his fire. But it appeared
she had not, for he directed his further speech at
the hostess again: really the most inoffensive
person there, and the least able to contend with
adverse opinions.
"No, I don't believe we do think it an unques
tionable evil, unless we think marriage is so."
Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended,
no doubt, and he "held them with his glittering
eye," or as many as he could sweep with his glance.
"I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at this
table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites to
gether, will not deny that marriage is the prime
cause of divorce. In fact, divorce couldn't exist
without it."
The women all looked bewilderedly at one an
other, and then appealingly at the men. None of
these answered directly, but the bachelor softly
intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan — he was of
that date:
"'A paradox, a paradox;
A most ingenious paradox!' "
"Yes," the stop-gap defiantly assented. "A
paradox; and all aboriginal verities, all giant
truths, are paradoxes."
"Giant truths is good," the bachelor noted, but
the stop-gap did not mind him.
259
TABLE TALK
He turned to the host: "I suppose that if
divorce is an evil, and we wish to extirpate it, we
must strike at its root, at marriage?'*
The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the
floor. I'm sure we all want to hear what you
have to say in support of your mammoth idea."
"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but
rather tremulously, as not knowing what might
be coming.
"Which do you mean? That all truth is para
doxical, or that marriage is the mother of di
vorce?"
"Whichever you like."
"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop
gap said, supplying himself with a small bunch
of the grapes which nobody ever takes at dinner;
the hostess was going to have coffee for the women
in the drawing-room, and to leave the men to
theirs with their tobacco at the table. "And you
must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a
bad thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its
parent. Or else there's nothing in heredity."
"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.
"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I
yield the word to you." But as the other went no
further, he continued. "The case is so clear that
it needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing
with the evil of divorce, if it is an evil, we have
260
TABLE TALK
simply been suppressing the symptoms ; and your
Swiss method — "
"Oh, it isn't mine,'1 the man said who had
stated it.
11 — Is only a part of the general practice. It is
another attempt to make divorce difficult, when
it is marriage that ought to be made difficult."
"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it
ought to be made impossible." The girl across
the table began to laugh hysterically, but caught
herself up and tried to look as if she had not
laughed at all.
"I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap re
sumed, "but as an inveterate enemy of divorce — "
An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision
chorused up ; but he did not mind it ; he went on
as if uninterrupted.
"I should put every possible obstacle, and at
every step, in the way of marriage. The attitude
of society toward marriage is now simply pre
posterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The
whole human framework in all its manifestations,
social, literary, religious, artistic, and civic, is
perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the
matter. Nothing is done to retard or prevent
marriage; everything to accelerate and promote
it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue
which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly
261
TABLE TALK
vulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who
enter into it. The blind and witless passion in
which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is
flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions,
and revered as if it were a celestial inspiration,
a spiritual impulse. But is it? I defy any one
here to say that it is/1
As if they were afraid of worse things if they
spoke, the company remained silent. But this
did not save them.
"You all know it isn't. You all know that it
is the caprice of chance encounter, the result of
propinquity, the invention of poets and novelists,
the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous
make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it
quickly wears itself out in marriage, and makes
way for divorce. In this country nine-tenths of
the marriages are love-matches. The old motives
which delay and prevent marriage in other
countries, aristocratic countries, like questions of
rank and descent, even of money/ do not exist.
Yet this is the land of unhappy unions beyond
all other lands, the very home of divorce. The
conditions of marriage are ideally favorable ac
cording to the opinions of its friends, who are all
more or less active in bottling husbands and wives
up in its felicity and preventing their escape
through divorce."
262
TABLE TALK
Still the others were silent, and again the stop
gap triumphed on. "Now, I am an enemy of
divorce, too; but I would have it begin before
marriage."
4 'Rather paradoxical again?" the bachelor alone
had the hardihood to suggest.
"Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have
it begin with the engagement. I would have the
betrothed — the mistress and the lover — come be
fore the magistrate or the minister, and declare
their motives in wishing to marry, and then I
would have him reason with them, and represent
that they were acting emotionally in obedience
to a passion which must soon spend itself, or a
fancy which they would quickly find illusory. If
they agreed with him, well and good; if not, he
should dismiss them to their homes, for say three
months, to think it over. Then he should summon
them again, and again reason with them, and dis
miss them as before, if they continued obstinate.
After three months more, he should call them
before him and reason with them for the last
time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he
should marry them, and let them take the con
sequences."
The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly,
and fixed the host with an eye of challenge. Upon
the whole the host seemed not so much frightened.
263
TABLE TALK
He said: "I don't see anything so original in all
that. It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of
divorce."
"And you see nothing novel, nothing that
makes for the higher civilization in the applica
tion of that law to marriage? You all approve
of that law because you believe it prevents nine-
tenths of the divorces; but if you had a law that
would similarly prevent nine-tenths of the mar
riages, you would need no divorce law at all."
"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor
said. "What about the one-tenth of the mar
riages which it didn't prevent? Would you have
the parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would
you forbid them all hope of escape? Would you
have no divorce for any cause whatever?"
"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess
asked (but his wife on the right of the host looked
as if she wished he had not mixed in), "wouldn't
more unhappiness result from that one marriage
than from all the marriages as we have them now?"
"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop
gap demanded. "I said, let the parties to the
final marriage take the consequences. But if
these consequences were too dire, I would not
forbid them the hope of relief. I haven't thought
the matter out very clearly yet, but there are one
or two causes for divorce which I would admit."
264
TABLE TALK
"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional
smile.
"Yes, causes going down into the very nature
of things — the nature of men and of women.
Incompatibility of temperament ought always to
be very seriously considered as a cause."
"Yes?"
"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept
the board with his eye, "difference of sex."
The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty
of perception and conditional approval went up.
The hostess rose with rather a frightened air.
"Shall we leave them to their tobacco?" she said
to the other women.
When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his
triumph to his wife. "I don't think she'll ask
you for the loan of me again to fill a place with
out you."
"Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't
suppose she'll think we live unhappily together?"
THE ESCAPADE OF A
GRANDFATHER
XVII
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
"\\TELL, what are you doing here?" the
* » younger of the two sages asked, with a
resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself
over the asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into
the seat beside the other in the Park. His senior
lifted his head and looked him carefully over to
make sure of his identity, and then he said :
"I suppose, to answer your fatuous question,
I am waiting here to get my breath before I move
on ; and in the next place, I am watching the feet of
the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes."
"How long do you think it will take you to get
your breath in the atmosphere of these motors?"
the younger sage pursued. "And you don't im
agine that these women are of the first fashion,
do you?"
"No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have
been calculating that their average heel is from
an inch and a half to two inches high, and touches
269
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-
cent piece. As you seem to be fond of asking
questions, perhaps you will like to answer one.
Why do you think they do it?"
"Wear shoes like that?'* the younger returned,
cheerily, and laughed as he added, "Because the
rest do."
"Mmm!" the elder grumbled, not wholly
pleased, and yet not refusing the answer. He
had been having a little touch of grippe, and was
somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He
said: "It's very strange, very sad. Just now
there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and
fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency,
as the daughter of a thousand years of bound-feet
Chinese women. While she tilted on, the nice
young fellow with her swept forward with one
stride to her three on the wide soles and low heels
of nature-last boots, and kept himself from out
walking her by a devotion that made him grit
his teeth. Probably she was wiser and better and
brighter than he, but she didn't look it; and I,
who voted to give her the vote the other day, had
my misgivings. I think I shall satisfy myself for
the next five years by catching cold in taking my
hat off to her in elevators, and getting killed by
automobiles in helping her off the cars, where I've
given her my seat."
270
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
"But you must allow that if her shoes are too
tight, her skirts are not so tight as they were. Or
have you begun sighing for the good old hobble-
skirts, now they're gone?"
"The hobble-skirts were prettier than I thought
they were when they were with us, but the
'tempestuous petticoat' has its charm, which I
find I'd been missing."
"Well, at least it's a change," the younger sage
allowed, "and I haven't found the other changes
in our dear old New York which I look for when
I come back in the fall."
The sages were enjoying together the soft
weather which lingered with us a whole month
from the middle of October onward, and the
afternoon of their meeting in the Park was now
softly reddening to the dim sunset over the west
ward trees.
"Yes," the elder assented. "I miss the new
sky-scrapers which used to welcome me back up
and down the Avenue. But there are more auto
mobiles than ever, and the game of saving your
life from them when you cross the street is madder
and merrier than I have known it before."
"The war seems to have stopped building be
cause people can't afford it," the other suggested,
"but it has only increased automobiling."
"Well, people can't afford that, either. Nine-
271
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
tenths of them are traveling the road to ruin, I'm
told, and apparently they can't get over the ground
too fast. Just look!" and the sages joined in the
amused and mournful contemplation of the dif
ferent types of motors innumerably whirring up
and down the drive before them, while they
choked in the fumes of the gasolene.
The motors were not the costliest types, except
in a few instances, and in most instances they
were the cheaper types, such as those who could
not afford them could at least afford best. The
sages had found a bench beside the walk where
the statue of Daniel Webster looks down on the
confluence of two driveways, and the stream of
motors, going and coming, is like a seething torrent
either way.
"The mystery is," the elder continued, "why
they should want to do it in the way they do it.
Are they merely going somewhere and must get
there in the shortest time, possible, or are they
arriving on a wager? If they are taking a pleas
ure drive, what a droll idea of pleasure they must
have! Maybe they are trying to escape Black
Care, but they must know he sits beside the
chauffeur as he used to sit behind the horseman,
and they know that he has a mortgage in his
pocket, and can foreclose it any time on the house
they have hypothecated to buy their car. Ah!"
272
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
The old man started forward with the involuntary
impulse of rescue. But it was not one of the peo
ple who singly, or in terrorized groups, had been
waiting at the roadside to find their way across;
it was only a hapless squirrel of those which used
to make their way safely among the hoofs and
wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages, and it
lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor.
"He's done for, poor little wretch! They can't
get used to the change. Some day a policeman
will pick me up from under a second-hand motor.
I wonder what the great Daniel from his pedestal
up there would say if he came to judgment."
"He wouldn't believe in the change any more
than that squirrel. He would decide that he
was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and
forgotten."
"Forgotten," the elder sage assented. "I re
member when his fame filled the United States,
which was then the whole world to me. And now
I don't imagine that our hyphenated citizens have
the remotest consciousness of him. If Daniel be
gan delivering one of his liberty-and-union-now-
and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they
wouldn't know what he was talking about."
The sage laughed and champed his toothless jaws
together, as old men do in the effort to compose
their countenances after an emotional outbreak.
18 273
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
"Well, for one thing," the younger observed,
"they wouldn't understand what he said. You
will notice, if you listen to them going by, that
they seldom speak English. That's getting to be
a dead language in New York, though it's still
used in the newspapers." He thought to hearten
the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to
him that the elder sage was getting sensibly older
since their last meeting, and that he would be
the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither
side of eighty can offer a man on the thither.
"Perhaps the Russian Jews would appreciate
Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them.
They're the brightest intelligences among our
hyphenates. And they have the old-fashioned
ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because
they've known so little of either."
His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior
much. "Ah, the old ideals!" he sighed. "The
old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle course
in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it's a
vertiginous whirl on an asphalted road, round and
round and round the Park till the victims stagger
with their brains spinning after they get out of
their cars."
The younger sage laughed. "You've been
listening to the pessimism of the dear old fellows
who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'd
274
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
believe them, all these people in the motors are
chauffeurs giving their lady-friends joy-rides.'*
"Few?" the elder retorted. " There are lots of
them. I've counted twenty in a single round of
the Park. I was proud to be in one of them,
though my horse left something to be desired in
the way of youth and beauty. But I reflected
that I was not very young or beautiful myself."
As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying
whirl of the motors they smoothed the tops of
their sticks with their soft old hands, and were
silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to
drowse off from the time and place, but he was
recalled by the younger saying, "It is certainly
astonishing weather for this season of the year."
The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense:
"Not at all. I've seen the cherries in blossom at
the end of October."
"They didn't set their fruit, I suppose."
"Well— no."
"Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the
sheep-pasture the other day. I could have put
out my hand and caught it. It's the soft weather
that brings your victorias out like the belated
butterflies. Wait till the first cold snap, and
there won't be a single victoria or butterfly left."
"Yes," the elder assented, "we butterflies and
victorias belong to the youth of the year and the
275
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
world. And the sad thing is that we won't have
our palingenesis."
"Why not?" the younger sage demanded.
"What is to prevent your coming back in two or
three thousand years?"
"Well, if we came back in a year even, we
shouldn't find room, for one reason. Haven't
you noticed how full to bursting the place seems?
Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue
used to be when the operatives came out of the
big shops for their nooning. The city's shell hasn't
been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has
multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the
hotels and houses and flats are packed. The
theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough,
swarm with spectators. Along up and down every
side-streets the motors stand in rows, and at the
same time the avenues are so dense with them
that you are killed at every crossing. There has
been no building to speak of during the summer,
but unless New York is overbuilt next year we
must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it.
But I've an idea that the victorias are remaining
to stay; if some sort of mechanical horse could
be substituted for the poor old animals that re
mind me of my mortality, I should be sure of it.
Every now and then I get an impression of per
manence in the things of the Park. As long as the
276
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I
sha'n't quite despair. And the other night I was
moved almost to tears by the sight of a four-in-
hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive.
There it was, like some vehicular phantom, but
how, whence, when? It came, as if out of the
early eighteen-nineties ; two middle-aged grooms,
with their arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's
the rumble), but of all the young people who ought
to have flowered over the top none was left but
the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box.
I've tried every evening since for that four-in-hand,
but I haven't seen it, and I've decided it wasn't a
vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past."
"Four-horse dream," the younger sage com
mented, as if musing aloud.
The elder did not seem quite pleased. "A
joke?" he challenged.
"Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless
prey of the rhyme."
"I didn't know you were a poet."
"I'm not, always. But didn't it occur to you
that danger for danger your four-in-hand was
more dangerous than an automobile to the passing
human creature?"
"It might have been if it had been multiplied
by ten thousand. But there was only one of it,
and it wasn't going twenty miles an hour."
277
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
" That's true," the younger sage assented.
"But there was always a fearful hazard in horses
when we had them. We supposed they were
tamed, but, after all, they were only trained
animals, like Hagenback's."
"And what is a chauffeur?"
"Ah, you have me there!" the younger said,
and he laughed generously. "Or you would have
if I hadn't noticed something like amelioration in
the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheap
er than they were, and I suppose something will
be done about the street traffic some time. They're
talking now about subway crossings. But I
should prefer overhead foot-bridges at all the
corners, crossing one another diagonally. They
would look like triumphal arches, and would
serve the purpose of any future Dewey victory
if we should happen to have another hero to win
one."
"Well, we must hope for the best. I rather
like the notion of the diagonal foot-bridges. But
why not Rows along the second stories as they
have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure
of always getting home alive if we had them.
Now if I'm not telephoned for at a hospital be
fore I'm restored to consciousness, I think myself
pretty lucky. And yet it seems but yesterday,
as the people used to say in the plays, since I had
278
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
a pride in counting the automobiles as I walked
up the Avenue. Once I got as high as twenty
before I reached Fifty-ninth Street. Now I
couldn't count as many horse vehicles."
The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble
laugh, but the younger tried to be serious. "We
don't realize the absolute change. Our streets
are not streets any more; they are railroad tracks
with locomotives let loose on them, and no signs
up to warn people at the crossings. It's pathetic
to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, es
pecially the poor, pretty, high-heeled women,
looking this way and that in their fright, and then
tottering over as fast as they can totter."
"Well, I should have said it was outrageous,
humiliating, insulting, once, but I don't any more;
it would be no use."
"No; and so much depends upon the point of
view. When I'm on foot I feel all my rights in
vaded, but when I'm in a taxi it amuses me to see
the women escaping ; and I boil with rage in being
halted at every other corner by the policeman with
his new-fangled semaphore, and it's "Go'1 and
"Stop" in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going
round all the time and getting me in for a dollar
when I thought I should keep within seventy
cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age
and sex ought to be killed."
279
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
"Yes, there's something always in the point of
view; and there's some comfort when you're
stopped in your taxi to feel that they often do get
killed."
The sages laughed together, and the younger
said: "I suppose when we get aeroplanes in com
mon use, there'll be annoying traffic regulations,
and policemen anchored out at intervals in the
central blue to enforce them. After all — "
What he was going to add in amplification can
not be known, for a girlish voice, trying to sharpen
itself from its native sweetness to a conscientious
severity, called to them as its owner swiftly ad
vanced upon the elder sage: "Now, see here,
grandfather! This won't do at all. You prom
ised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter,
and here you are away down by the Falconer, and
we've been looking everywhere for you. It's too
bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at all after
this. Why, it's horrid of you, grandfather! You
might have got killed crossing the drive.*'
The grandfather looked up and verified the
situation, which seemed to include a young man,
tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor
so many heads high as the young men in the ad
vertisements of ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled
down on the young girl as if he had arrived with
her, and were finding an amusement in her severity
280
THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
which he might not, later. She was, in fact, very
pretty, and her skirt flared in the fashion of the
last moment, as she stooped threateningly yet
fondly over her grandfather.
The younger sage silently and somewhat guiltily
escaped from the tumult of emotion which ignored
him, and shuffled slowly down the path. The
other finally gave an "Oh!" of recognition, and
then said, for all explanation and excuse, "I didn't
know what had become of you," and then they
all laughed.
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-
TRAGEDY
XVIII
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
M
MISS ISOBEL RAMSEY AND MISS ESTHER GARNETT
riSS RAMSEY: "And they were really un
derstood to be engaged?" Miss Ramsey is a
dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nearly the length
of two lady's umbrellas and the bulk of one closely
folded in its sheath. She stands with her elbow
supported on the corner of the mantel, her temple
resting on the knuckle of a thin, nervous hand,
in an effect of thoughtful absent-mindedness.
Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian in a cos
tume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a
low, thick figure, is apparently poising for depar
ture, as she stands before the chair from which
she has risen beside Miss Ramsey's tea-table and
looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey's absent
face. Both are very young, but aim at being
much older than they are, with occasional lapses
into extreme girlhood.
285
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Garnett: "Yes, distinctly. I knew you
couldn't know, and I thought you ought to." She
speaks in a deep conviction-bearing and convic
tion-carrying voice. "If he has been coming here
so much."
Miss Ramsey, with what seems temperamental
abruptness: "Sit down. One can always think
better sitting down." She catches a chair under
her with a deft movement of her heel, and Miss
Garnett sinks provisionally into her seat. "And
I think it needs thought, don't you?"
Miss Garnett: ' ' That is what I expected of you. ' '
Miss Ramsey: "And have some more tea.
There is nothing like fresh tea for clearing the
brain, and we certainly need clear brains for this."
She pushes a button in the wall beside her, and
is silent till the maid appears. "More tea, Nora."
She is silent again while the maid reappears with
the tea and disappears. ' ' I don't know that he has
been coming here so very much. But he has no
right to be coming at all, if he is engaged. That
is, inthatwa^."
Miss Garnett: "No. Not unless — he wishes he
wasn't."
Miss Ramsey: "That would give him less than
no right."
Miss Garnett: "That is true. I didn't think of
it in that light."
286
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Ramsey: ''I'm trying to decide what I
ought to do if he does want to get off. She said
herself that they were engaged?"
MissGarnett: "As much as that. Conny under
stood her to say so. And Conny never makes a
mistake in what people say. Emily didn't say
whom she was engaged to, but Conny felt that
that was to come later, and she did not quite feel
like asking, don't you know."
Miss Ramsey: "Of course. And how came she
to decide that it was Mr. Ashley?"
Miss Garnett: "Simply by putting two and two
together. They two were together the whole time
last summer."
Miss Ramsey: "I see. Then there is only one
thing for me to do."
Miss Garnett, admiringly: "I knew you would
say that."
Miss Ramsey, dreamily: "The question is what
the thing is."
MissGarnett: "Yes!"
Miss Ramsey: "That is what I wish to think
over. Chocolates?" She offers a box, catching it
with her left hand from the mantel at her shoulder,
without rising.
Miss Garnett: "Thank you; do you think they
go well with tea?"
Miss Ramsey: "They go well with anything.
287
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE -TRAGEDY
But we mustn't allow our minds to be distracted.
The case is simply this: If Mr. Ashley is engaged
to Emily Fray, he has no right to go round calling
on other girls — well, as if he wasn't — and he has
been calling here a great deal. That is perfectly
evident. He must be made to feel that girls are
not to be trifled with — that they are not mere
toys."
Miss Garnett: "How splendidly you do reason!
And he ought to understand that Emily has a
right-"
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, I don't know that I care
about her — or not primarily. Or do you say
primarily?"
Miss Garnett: "I never know. I only use it in
writing."
Miss Ramsey: "It's a clumsy word; I don't
know that I shall. But what I mean is that I
must act from a general principle, and that prin
ciple is that when a man is engaged, it doesn't
matter whether the girl has thrown herself at him,
or not — "
Miss Garnett: "She certainly did, from what
Conny says."
Miss Ramsey: "He must be shown that other
girls won't tolerate his behaving as if he were not
engaged. It is wrong."
Miss Garnett: "We must stand together."
288
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Ramsey: "Yes. Though I don't infer that
he has been attentive to other girls generally."
Miss Garnett: "No. I meant that if he has
been coming here so much, you want to prevent
his trifling with others."
Miss Ramsey: "Something like that. But it
ought to be more definite. He ought to realize
that if another girl cared for him, it would be
cruel to her, paying her attentions, when he was
engaged to some one else."
Miss Garnett: "And cruel to the girl he is en
gaged to."
Miss Ramsey: "Yes." She speaks coldly, vague
ly. "But that is the personal ground, and I wish
to avoid that. I wish to deal with him purely in
the abstract."
Miss Garnett: " Yes, I understand that. And
at the same time you wish to punish him. He
ought to be made to feel it all the more because
he is so severe himself."
Miss Ramsey: "Severe?"
Miss Garnett: "Not tolerating anything that's
the least out of the way in other people. Taking
you up about your ideas and showing where you're
wrong, or even silly. Spiritually snubbing, Conny
calls it."
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, I like that in him. It's so
invigorating. It braces up all your good resolu-
19 289
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
tions. It makes you ashamed; and shame is
sanative."
Miss Garnett: "That's just what I told Conny,
or the same thing. Do you think another one
would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway." She
takes another chocolate from the box. "Go on."
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, I was just wishing that I
had been out longer, and had a little more experi
ence of men. Then I should know how to act.
How do you suppose people do, generally?"
Miss Garnett: "Why, you know, if they find a
man in love with them, after he's engaged to an
other girl, they make him go back to her, it doesn't
matter whether they're in love with him them
selves or not."
Miss Ramsey: "I'm not in love with Mr. Ash
ley, please."
Miss Garnett: "No; I'm supposing an extreme
case."
Miss Ramsey, after a moment of silent thought :
"Did you ever hear of anybody doing it?"
Miss Garnett: "Not just in our set. But I
know it's done continually."
Miss Ramsey: "It seems to me as if I had read
something of the kind."
Miss Garnett: "Oh yes, the books are full of it.
Are those mallows? They might carry off the
effects of the chocolates." Miss Ramsey passes
290
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY 4
her the box of marshmallows which she has bent
over the table to look at.
Miss Ramsey: "And of course they couldn't get
into the books if they hadn't really happened.
I wish I could think of a case in point."
Miss Garnett: "Why, there was Peg Woffing-
ton— "
Miss Ramsey, with displeasure: "She was an
actress of some sort, wasn't she?"
Miss Garnett, with meritorious candor: "Yes,
she was. But she was a very good actress."
Miss Ramsey: "What did she do?"
Miss Garnett: "Well, it's a long time since I
read it; and it's rather old-fashioned now. But
there was a countryman of some sort, I remember,
who came away from his wife, and fell in love with
Peg Woffington, and then the wife follows him
up to London, and begs her to give him back to
her, and she does it. There's something about a
portrait of Peg — I don't remember exactly; she
puts her face through and cries when the wife
talks to the picture. The wife thinks it is a real
picture, and she is kind of soliloquizing, and asking
Peg to give her husband back to her; and Peg
does, in the end. That part is beautiful. They
become the greatest friends."
Miss Ramsey: "Rather silly, I should say."
Miss Garnett: "Yes, it is rather silly, but I
291
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
suppose the author thought she had to do some
thing."
Miss Ramsey: "And disgusting. A married man,
that way! I don't see any comparison with Mr.
Ashley."
Miss Garnett: "No, there really isn't any.
Emily has never asked you to give him up. And
besides, Peg Woffington really liked him a little —
loved him, in fact."
Miss Ramsey: "And I don't like Mr. Ashley at
all. Of course I respect him — and I admire his
intellect; there's no question about his being
handsome; but I have never thought of him for
a moment in any other way; and now I can't
even respect him."
Miss Garnett: " Nobody could. I'm sure Emily
would be welcome to him as far as / was con
cerned. But he has never been about with me
so much as he has with you, and I don't wonder
you feel indignant."
Miss Ramsey, coldly: "I don't feel indignant.
I wish to be just."
Miss Garnett: "Yes, that is what I mean. And
poor Emily is so uninteresting! In the play that
Kentucky Summers does, she is perfectly fas
cinating at first, and you can see why the poor
girl's fianc£ should be so taken with her. But
I'm sure no one could say you had ever given Mr.
292
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Ashley the least encouragement. It would be
pure justice on your part. I think you are grand !
I shall always be proud of knowing what you were
going to do."
Miss Ramsey, after some moments of snubbing
intention: "I don't know what I am going to
do myself, yet. Or how. What was that play?
I never heard of it."
Miss Garnett: "I don't remember distinctly, but
it was about a young man who falls in love with
her, when he's engaged to another girl, and she
determines, as soon as she finds it out, to disgust
him, so that he will go back to the other girl,
don't you know."
Miss Ramsey: "That sounds rather more prac
tical than the Peg Woffington plan. What does
she do?"
Miss Garnett: "Nothing you'd like to do."
Miss Ramsey: "I'd like to do something in such
a cause. What does she do?"
Miss Garnett: "Oh, when he is calling on her,
Kentucky Summers pretends to fly into a rage with
her sister, and she pulls her hair down, and slams
everything round the room, and scolds, and drinks
champagne, and wants him to drink with her, and
I don't know what all. The upshot is that he is
only too glad to get away."
Miss Ramsey: "It's rather loathsome, isn't it?"
293
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Garnett: "It is rather loathsome. But it
was in a good cause, and I suppose it was what an
actress would think of."
Miss Ramsey: "An actress?"
Miss Garnett: "I forgot. The heroine is a dis
tinguished actress, you know, and Kentucky could
play that sort of part to perfection. But I don't
think a lady would like to cut up, much, in the
best cause."
Miss Ramsey: "Cut up?"
Miss Garnett: "She certainly frisks about the
room a good deal. How delicious these mallows
are! Have you ever tried toasting them?"
Miss Ramsey: "At school. There seems an
idea in it. And the hero isn't married. I don't
like the notion of a married man."
Miss Garnett: "Oh, I'm quite sure he isn't mar
ried. He's merely engaged. That makes the
whole difference from the Peg Woffington story.
And there's no portrait, I'm confident, so that
you wouldn't have to do that part."
Miss Ramsey, haughtily: "I don't propose to do
any part, if the affair can't be arranged without
some such mountebank business!"
Miss Garnett: "You can manage it, if anybody
can. You have so much dignity that you could
awe him into doing his duty by a single glance.
I wouldn't be in his place!"
294
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Ramsey: "I shall not give him a glance.
I shall not see him when he comes. That will be
simpler still." To Nora, at the door: "What is
it, Nora?"
ii
NORA, MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT
Nora: "Mr. Ashley, Miss Ramsey."
Miss Ramsey, with a severity not meant for
Nora: "Ask him to sit down in the reception-
room a moment."
Nora: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
in
MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT
Miss Garnett, rising and seizing Miss Ramsey's
hands: "Oh, Isobel! But you will be equal to
it! Oh! Oh!"
Miss Ramsey, with state: "Why are you going,
Esther? Sit down."
Miss Garnett: "If I only could stay! If I could
hide under the sofa, or behind the screen! Isn't
it wonderful — providential — his coming at the very
instant? Oh, Isobel!" She clasps her friend con
vulsively, and after a moment's resistance Miss
Ramsey yields to her emotion, and they hide their
295
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
faces in each other's neck, and strangle their
hysteric laughter. They try to regain their com
posure, and then abandon the effort with a shud
dering delight in the perfection of the incident.
"What shall you do? Shall you trust to inspira
tion? Shall you make him show his hand first,
and then act? Or shall you tell him at once that
you know all, and — Or no, of course you can't
do that. He's not supposed to know that you
know. Oh, I can imagine the freezing hauteur
that you'll receive him with, and the icy indiffer
ence you'll let him understand that he isn't a
persona grata with ! If I were only as tall as you !
He isn't as tall himself, and you can tower over
him. Don't sit down, or bend, or anything; just
stand with your head up, and glance carelessly
at him under your lashes as if nobody was there!
Then it will gradually dawn upon him that you
know everything, and he'll simply go through the
floor." They take some ecstatic turns about the
room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as gentleman.
She abruptly frees herself.
Miss Ramsey: "No. It can't be as tacit as all
that. There must be something explicit. As you
say, I must do something to cure him of his fancy —
his perfidy — and make him glad to go back to her."
Miss Garnett: "Yes! Do you think he deserves
it?"
296
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Ramsey: "I've no wish to punish him."
Miss Garnett: "How noble you are! I don't
wonder he adores you. / should. But you won't
find it so easy. You must do something drastic.
It is drastic, isn't it? or do I mean static? One
of those things when you simply crush a person.
But now I must go. How I should like to listen
at the door ! We must kiss each other very quiet
ly, and I must slip out— Oh, you dear! How I
long to know what you'll do! But it will be per
fect, whatever it is. You always did do perfect
things." They knit their fingers together in
parting. "On second thoughts I won't kiss you.
It might unman you, and you need all your
strength. Unman isn't the word, exactly, but
you can't say ungirl, can you ? It would be ridicu
lous. Though girls are as brave as men when it
comes to duty. Good-by, dear!" She catches
Miss Ramsey about the neck, and pressing her
lips silently to her cheek, runs out. Miss Ramsey
rings and the maid appears.
IV
NORA, MISS RAMSEY
Miss Ramsey, starting: "Oh! Is that you,
Nora? Of course! Nora!"
Nora: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
297
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Ramsey: "Do you know where my brother
keeps his cigarettes?"
Nora: "Why, in his room, Miss Ramsey; you
told him you didn't like the smell here."
Miss Ramsey: "Yes, yes. I forgot. And has
he got any cocktails?"
Nora : " He's got the whole bottle full of them yet. ' '
Miss Ramsey: "Full yet?"
Nora: "You wouldn't let him offer them to the
gentlemen he had to lunch, last week, because
you said — "
Miss Ramsey: "What did I say?"
Nora: "They were vulgar."
Miss Ramsey: "And so they are. And so much
the better! Bring the cigarettes and the bottle
and some glasses here, Nora, and then ask Mr.
Ashley to come." She walks away to the window,
and hurriedly hums a musical comedy waltz, not
quite in tune, as from not remembering exactly,
and after Nora has tinkled in with a tray of glasses
she lights a cigarette and stands puffing it, gasp
ing and coughing a little, as Walter Ashley enters.
"Oh, Mr. Ashley! Sorry to make you wait."
v
MR. ASHLEY, MISS RAMSEY
Mr. Ashley: "The time has seemed long, but I
could have waited all day. I couldn't have gone
298
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
without seeing you, and telling you — " He
pauses, as if bewildered at the spectacle of Miss
Ramsey's resolute practice with the cigarette,
which she now takes from her lips and waves be
fore her face with innocent recklessness.
Miss Ramsey, chokingly: "Do sit down." She
drops into an easy-chair beside the tea-table, and
stretches the tips of her feet out beyond the hem
of her skirt in extremely lady-like abandon.
"Have a cigarette." She reaches the box to
him.
Ashley: "Thank you. I won't smoke, I be
lieve." He stands frowning, while she throws her
cigarette into a teacup and lights another.
Miss Ramsey: "I thought everybody smoked.
Then have a cocktail."
Ashley: "A what?"
Miss Ramsey: "A cocktail. So many people
like them with their tea, instead of rum, you
know."
Ashley: "No, I didn't know." He regards her
with amaze, rapidly hardening into condemnation.
Miss Ramsey: "I hope you don't object to
smoking. Englishwomen all smoke."
Ashley: "I think I've heard. I didn't know
that American ladies did."
Miss Ramsey: "They don't, all. But they
will when they find how nice it is."
299
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Ashley: "And do Englishwomen all drink cock
tails?"
Miss Ramsey: "They will when they find how
nice it is. But why do you keep standing? Sit
down, if it's only for a moment. There is some
thing I would like to talk with you about. What
were you saying when you came in? I didn't
catch it quite."
A shley : ' ' Nothing — now — ' '
Miss Ramsey: "And I can't persuade you to
have a cocktail? I believe I'll have another my
self." She takes up the bottle, and tries several
times to pour from it. "I do believe Nora's for
gotten to open it! That is a good joke on me.
But I mustn't let her know. Do you happen to
have a pocket-corkscrew with you, Mr. Ashley?"
Ashley: "No—"
Miss Ramsey: "Well, never mind." She tosses
her cigarette into the grate, and lights another.
"I wonder why they always have cynical persons
smoke, on the stage? I don't see that the two
things necessarily go together, but it does give
you a kind of thrill when they strike a match,
and it lights up their faces when they put it
to the cigarette. You know something good and
wicked is going to happen." She puffs violently
at her cigarette, and then suddenly flings it
away and starts to her feet. "Will you — would
300
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
you — open the window?" She collapses into her
chair.
Ashley, springing toward her: "Miss Ramsey,
are you — you are ill!"
Miss Ramsey: ' * No, no ! The window ! A little
faint — it's so close — There, it's all right now.
Or it will be — when — I've had — another cigarette."
She leans forward to take one; Ashley gravely
watches her, but says nothing. She lights her
cigarette, but, without smoking, throws it away.
"Go on."
Ashley: "I wasn't saying anything!"
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, I forgot. And I don't
know what we were talking about myself." She
falls limply back into her chair and closes her
eyes.
Ashley: " Sha'n't I ring for the maid ? I'm
afraid—"
Miss Ramsey, imperiously: "Not at all. Not
on any account." Far less imperiously: "You
may pour me a cup of tea if you like. That will
make me well. The full strength, please." She
motions away the hot-water jug with which he
has proposed qualifying the cup of tea which he
offers her.
Ashley: "One lump or two?"
Miss Ramsey: "Only one, thank you." She
takes the cup.
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Ashley, offering the milk: "Cream?"
Miss Ramsey: "A drop." He stands anxiously
beside her while she takes a long draught and
then gives back the cup. "That was perfect."
Ashley: "Another?"
Miss Ramsey: "No, that is just right. Now
go on. Or, I forgot. You were not going
on. Oh dear! How much better I feel. There
must have been something poisonous in those
cigarettes."
Ashley: "Yes, there was tobacco."
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, do you think it was the
tobacco? Do throw the whole box into the fire!
I shall tell Bob never to get cigarettes with
tobacco in them after this. Won't you have one
of the chocolates? Or a mallow? I feel as if I
should never want to eat anything again. Where
was I?" She rests her cheek against the side of
her chair cushion, and speaks with closed eyes, in
a weak murmur. Mr. Ashley watches her at
first with anxiety, then with a gradual change of
countenance until a gleam of intelligence steals
into his look of compassion.
Ashley: "You asked me to throw the cigarettes
into the fire. But I want you to let me keep
them."
Miss Ramsey, with wide-flung eyes: "You?
You said you wouldn't smoke."
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Ashley, laughing: "May I change my mind?
One talks better." He lights a cigarette. "And,
Miss Ramsey, I believe I will have a cocktail,
after all."
Miss Ramsey: "Mr. Ashley!"
Ashley, without noting her protest : " I had for
gotten that I had a corkscrew in my pocket-knife.
Don't trouble yourself to ring for one." He pro
duces the knife and opens the bottle; then, as
Miss Ramsey rises and stands aghast, he pours
out a glass and offers it to her, with mock devo
tion. As she shakes her head and recoils: "Oh!
I thought you liked cocktails. They are very
good after cigarettes — very reviving. But if you
won't — " He tosses off the cocktail and sets
down the glass, smacking his lips. "Tell your
brother I commend his taste — in cocktails and"
—puffing his cigarette — "tobacco. Poison for
poison, let me offer you one of my cigarettes.
They're milder than these." He puts his hand
to his breast pocket.
Miss Ramsey, with nervous shrinking: "No—
Ashley: "It's just as well. I find that I hadn't
brought mine with me." After a moment: "You
are so unconventional, so fearless, that I should
like your notion of the problem in a book I've
just been reading. Why should the mere fact
that a man is married to one woman prevent his
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
being in love with another, or half a dozen others;
or vice versa?"
Miss Ramsey: "Mr. Ashley, do you wish to in
sult me?"
Ashley: "Dear me, no! But put the case a
little differently. Suppose a couple are merely
engaged. Does that fact imply that neither has
a right to a change of mind, or to be fancy free
to make another choice?"
Miss Ramsey, indignantly: "Yes, it does. They
are as sacredly bound to each other as if they
were married, and if they are false to each other
the girl is a wretch, and the man is a villain ! And
if you think anything I have said can excuse you
for breaking your engagement, or that I don't
consider you the wickedest person in the world,
and the most barefaced hypocrite, and — and — I
don't know what — you are very much mistaken."
Ashley: "What in the world are you talking
about?"
Miss Ramsey: " I am talking about you and
your shameless perfidy."
Ashley: "My shameless perf — I don't under
stand! I came here to tell you that I love you — "
Miss Ramsey: "How dare you! To speak to
me of that, when — Or perhaps you have broken
with her, and think you are free to hoodwink some
other poor creature. But you will find that you
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
have chosen the wrong person. And it's no ex
cuse for you her being a little — a little— not so
bright as some girls, and not so good-looking.
Oh, it's enough to make any girl loathe her own
looks! You mustn't suppose you can come here
red-handed — yes, it's the same as a murder, and
any true girl would say so — and tell me you care
for me. No, Walter Ashley, I haven't fallen so
low as that, though I have the disgrace of your
acquaintance. And I hope — I hope — if you don't
like my smoking, and offering you cocktails, and
talking the way I have, it will be a lesson to you.
And yes! — I will say it! If it will add to your
misery to know that I did respect you very much,
and thought everything — very highly — of you,
and might have answered you very differently
before, when you were free to tell me that — now I
have nothing but the utmost abhorrence — and —
disapproval of you. And — and — Oh, I don't
see how you can be so hateful!" She hides her
face in her hands and rushes from the room, over
turning several chairs in her course toward the
door. Ashley remains staring after her, while a
succession of impetuous rings make themselves
heard from the street door. There is a sound of
opening it, and then a flutter of skirts and anxi
eties, and Miss Garnett comes running into the
room.
20 305
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
VI
MISS GARNETT, MR. ASHLEY
Miss Garnett, to the maid hovering in the door
way: "Yes, I must have left it here, for I never
missed it till I went to pay my fare in the motor-
bus, and tried to think whether I had the exact
dime, and if I hadn't whether the conductor would
change a five-dollar bill or not, and then it rushed
into my mind that I had left my purse somewhere,
and I knew I hadn't been anywhere else." She
runs from the mantel to the writing-desk in the
corner, and then to the sofa, where, peering under
the tea-table, she finds her purse on the shelf.
"Oh, here it is, Nora, just where I put it when
we began to talk, and I must have gone out and
left it. I— She starts with a little shriek, in
encountering Ashley. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! What
a fright you gave me! I was just looking for my
purse that I missed when I went to pay my fare
in the motor-bus, and was wondering whether I
had the exact dime, or the conductor could change
a five-dollar bill, and— She discovers, or af
fects to discover, something strange in his man
ner. "What— what is the matter, Mr. Ashley?"
Ashley: "I shall be glad to have you tell me —
or any one."
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Garnett: "I don't understand. Has Iso-
bel— "
Ashley: "Miss Garnett, did you know I was
engaged?"
Miss Garnett: "Why, yes; I was just going to
congrat — "
Ashley: "Well, don't, unless you can tell me
whom I am engaged to."
Miss Garnett: "Why, aren't you engaged to
Emily Fray?"
Ashley: "Not the least in the world."
Miss Garnett, in despair: "Then what have I
done? Oh, what a fatal, fatal scrape!" With a
ray of returning hope: "But she told me herself
that she was engaged ! And you were together so
much, last summer !" Desperately : ' ' Then if she
isn't engaged to you, whom is she engaged to?"
Ashley: "On general principles, I shouldn't
know, but in this particular instance I happen
to know that she is engaged to Owen Brooks.
They were a great deal more together last sum
mer."
Miss Garnett, with conviction: "So they were!"
With returning doubt: "But why didn't she say
so?"
Ashley: "I can't tell you; she may have had
her reasons, or she may not. Can you possibly
tell me, in return for my ignorance, why the fact
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
of her engagement should involve me in the
strange way it seems to have done with Miss
Ramsey?"
Miss Garnett, with a burst of involuntary can
dor: "Why, I did that. Or, no! What's she
been doing?"
Ashley: "Really, Miss Garnett—"
Miss Garnett: "How can I tell you anything, if
you don't tell me everything? You wouldn't wish
me to betray confidence?"
Ashley: "No, certainly not. What was the
confidence?"
Miss Garnett: "Well— But I shall have to
know first what she's been doing. You must see
that yourself, Mr. Ashley." He is silent. "Has
she — has Isobel — been behaving — well, out of
character?"
Ashley: "Very much indeed."
Miss Garnett: "I expected she would." She
fetches a thoughtful sigh, and for her greater
emotional convenience she sinks into an easy-
chair and leans forward. "Oh dear! It is a
scrape." Suddenly and imperatively: "Tell me
exactly what she did, if you hope for any help
whatever."
Ashley: "Why, she offered me a cocktail — "
Miss Garnett: "Oh, how good! I didn't sup
pose she would dare! Well?"
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Ashley: "And she smoked cigarettes — "
Miss Garnett: "How perfectly divine! And
what else?"
Ashley, coldly: "May I ask why you admire
Miss Ramsey's behaving out of character so much?
I think the smoking made her rather faint, and — "
Miss Garnett: "She would have let it kill her!
Never tell me that girls have no moral courage!"
Ashley: "But what — what was the meaning of
it all?"
Miss Garnett, thoughtfully: "I suppose if I got
her in for it, I ought to get her out, even if I be
tray confidence."
Ashley: " It depends upon the confidence. What
is it?"
Miss Garnett: "Why — But you're sure it's my
duty?"
Ashley: "If you care what I think of her — "
Miss Garnett: "Oh, Mr. Ashley, you mustn't
think it strange of Isobel, on my bended knees
you mustn't! Why, don't you see? She was just
doing it to disgust you!"
Ashley: "Disgust me?"
Miss Garnett: "Yes, and drive you back to
Emily Fray."
Ashley: "Drive me ba — "
Miss Garnett: "If she thought you were en
gaged to Emily, when you were coming here all
309
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
the time, and she wasn't quite sure that she hated
to have you, don't you see it would be her duty
to sacrifice herself, and— Oh, I suppose she's
heard everything up there, and — " She catches
herself up and runs out of the room, leaving
Ashley to await the retarded descent of skirts
which he hears on the stairs after the crash of
the street door has announced Miss Garnett's es
cape. He stands with his back to the mantel,
and faces Miss Ramsey as she enters the room.
VII
MISS RAMSEY, ASHLEY
Miss Ramsey, with the effect of cold surprise:
"Mr. Ashley? I thought I heard — Wasn't Miss
Garnett— "
Ashley: "She was. Did you think it was the
street door closing on me?19
Miss Ramsey: "How should I know?" Then,
courageously: "No, I didn't think it was. Why
do you ask?" She moves uneasily about the
room, with an air of studied inattention.
Ashley: "Because if you did, I can put you in
the right, though I can't restore Miss Garnett's
presence by my absence."
Miss Ramsey: "You're rather — enigmatical."
A ring is heard; the maid pauses at the doorway.
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
"I'm not at home, Nora." To Mr. Ashley: "It
seems to be very close — "
Ashley: "It's my having been smoking."
Miss Ramsey: "Your having?" She goes to
the window and tries to lift it.
Ashley: "Let me.11 He follows her to the win
dow, where he stands beside her.
Miss Ramsey: "Now, she's seen me! And you
here with me. Of course — "
Ashley: "I shouldn't mind. But I'm so sorry
if — and I will go."
Miss Ramsey: "You can't go now — till she's
round the corner. She'll keep looking back, and
she'll think I made you."
Ashley: "But haven't you? Aren't you send
ing me back to Miss Fray to tell her that I must
keep my engagement, though I care nothing for
her, and care all the world for you? Isn't that
what you want me to do?"
Miss Ramsey: "But you're not engaged to her!
You just —
Ashley: "Just what?"
Miss Ramsey, desperately: "You wish me to
disgrace myself forever in your eyes. Well, I
will; what does it matter now? I heard you
telling Esther you were not engaged. I overheard
you."
Ashley: "I fancied you must."
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Ramsey: "I tried to overhear! I eaves
dropped! I wish you to know that."
Ashley: "And what do you wish me to do
about it?"
Miss Ramsey: "I should think any self-respect
ing person would know. I'm not a self-respecting
person." Her wandering gaze seems to fall for
the first time upon the tray with the cocktails
and glasses and cigarettes; she flies at the bell-
button and presses it impetuously. As the maid
appears : ' ' Take these things away, Nora, please !"
To Ashley when the maid has left the room:
"Don't be afraid to say what you think of me!"
Ashley: "I think all the world of you. But I
should merely like to ask — "
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, you can ask anything of
me now!"
Ashley, with palpable insincerity: "I should
like to ask why you don't respect yourself?"
Miss Ramsey: "Was that what you were going
to ask? I know it wasn't. But I will tell you.
Because I have been a fool."
Ashley. "Thank you. Now I will tell you
what I was really going to ask. Why did you wish
to drive me back to Miss Fray when you knew
that I would be false to her a thousand times
if I could only once be true to you?"
Miss Ramsey: "Now you are insulting me!
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
And that is just the point. You may be a very
clever lawyer, Mr. Ashley, and everybody says
you are — very able, and talented, and all that,
but you can't get round that point. You may
torture any meaning you please out of my words,
but I shall always say you brought it on yourself."
Ashley: "Brought what on?"
Miss Ramsey: "Mr. Ashley! I won't be cross-
questioned."
Ashley: "Was that why you smoked, and
poured cocktails out of an unopened bottle ? Was
it because you wished me to hate you, and re
member my duty, and go back to Miss Fray?
Well, it was a dead failure. It made me love you
more than ever. I am a fool too, as you call it."
Miss Ramsey: "Say anything you please. I
have given you the right. I shall not resent it.
Go on."
Ashley: "I should only repeat myself. You
must have known how much I care for you,
Isobel. Do you mind my calling you Isobel?"
Miss Ramsey: "Not in the least if you wish to
humiliate me by it. I should like you to trample
on me in every way you can."
Ashley: "Trample on you? I would rather be
run over by a steam-roller than tread on the least
of your outlying feelings, dearest. Do you mind
my saying dearest?"
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SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Ramsey: "I have told you that you can
say anything you like. I deserve it. But oh, if
you have a spark of pity —
Ashley: "I'm a perfect conflagration of com
passion, darling. Do you object to darling?"
Miss Ramsey, with starting tears: "It doesn't
matter now." She has let her lovely length trail
into the corner of the sofa, where she desperately
reclines, supporting her elbow on the arm of it,
and resting her drooping head on her hand. He
draws a hassock up in front of her, and sits on it.
Ashley: "This represents kneeling at your feet.
One doesn't do it literally any more, you know."
Miss Ramsey, in a hollow voice: "I should
despise you if you did, and" — deeply mur
murous — "I don't wish to despise you."
Ashley: "No, I understand that. You merely
wish me to despise you. But why?"
Miss Ramsey, nervously : ' ' You know. ' '
Ashley: "But I don't know — Isobel, dearest,
darling, if you will allow me to express myself so
fully. How should I know?"
Miss Ramsey: "I've told you."
Ashley: "May I take your hand? For good-
by!" He possesses himself of it. "It seems to
go along with those expressions."
Miss Ramsey, self -contemptuously : " Oh yes."
Ashley: "Thank you. Where were we?"
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Miss Ramsey, sitting up and recovering her
hand: "You were saying good-by — "
Ashley: "Was I? But not before I had told
you that I knew you were doing all that for my
best good, and I wish — I wish you could have seen
how exemplary you looked when you were trying
to pour a cocktail out of a corked bottle, between
your remarks on passionate fiction and puffs of the
insidious cigarette! When the venomous tobacco
began to get in its deadly work, and you turned
pale and reeled a little, and called for air, it made
me mentally vow to go back to Miss Fray in
stantly, whether I was engaged to her or not, and
cut out poor old Brooks — "
Miss Ramsey: "Was it Mr. Brooks? I didn't
hear the name exactly."
Ashley: "When I was telling Miss Garnett? I
ought to have spoken louder, but I wasn't sure at
the time you were listening. Though as you were
saying, what does it matter now?"
Miss Ramsey: "Did I say that?"
Ashley: "Words to that effect. And they have
made me feel how unworthy of you I am. I'm
not heroic — by nature. But I could be, if you
made me — by art — "
Miss Ramsey, springing to her feet indignantly:
"Now, you are ridiculing me — you are making
fun of me."
SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
Ashley, gathering himself up from his hassock
with difficulty, and confronting her: "Do I look
like a man who would dare to make fun of you?
I am half a head shorter than you, and in moral
grandeur you overtop me so that I would always
have to wear a high hat when I was with you."
Miss Ramsey, thoughtfully: "Plenty of girls
are that way, now. But if you are ashamed of
my being tall— Flashingly, and with starting
tears.
Ashley: "Ashamed! I can always look up to
you, you can always stoop to me!" He stretches
his arms toward her.
Miss Ramsey, recoiling bewildered : ' ' Wait ! We
haven't got to that yet."
Ashley: "Oh, Isobel — dearest — darling! We've
got past it! We're on the home stretch, now."
THE NIGHT BEFORE
CHRISTMAS
XIX
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
A MORALITY
MR. AND MRS. CLARENCE FOUNTAIN
. CLARENCE FOUNTAIN, backing into
the room, and closing the door noiselessly
before looking round: "Oh, you poor thing! I
can see that you are dead, at the first glance. I'm
dead myself, for that matter." She is speaking
to her husband, who clings with one hand to the
chimney-piece, and supports his back with the
other; from this hand a little girl's long stocking
lumpily dangles; Mrs. Fountain, turning round,
observes it. "Not finished yet? But I don't
wonder! I wonder you've even begun. Well,
now, I will take hold with you." In token of the
aid she is going to give, Mrs. Fountain sinks into
a chair and rolls a distracted eye over the littered
and tumbled room. "It's worse than I thought it
319
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
would be. You ought to have smoothed the
papers out and laid them in a pile as fast as you
unwrapped the things; that is the way I always
do; and wound the strings up and put them one
side. Then you wouldn't have had to wade round
in them. I suppose I oughtn't to have left it to
you, but if I had let you put the children to bed
you know you'd have told them stories and kept
them all night over their prayers. And as it was
each of them wanted to put in a special Christmas
clause; I know what kind of Christmas clause I
should have put in if I'd been frank! I'm not
sure it's right to keep up the deception. One
comfort, the oldest ones don't believe in it any
more than we do. Dear ! I did think at one
time this afternoon I should have to be brought
home in an ambulance; it would have been a
convenience, with all the packages. I simply
marvel at their delivery wagons getting them
here."
Fountain, coming to the table, where she sits,
and taking up one of the toys with which it is
strewn: "They haven't all of them."
Mrs. Fountain: "What do you mean by all of
them?"
Fountain: "I mean half." He takes up a me
chanical locomotive and stuffs it into the stock
ing he holds.
320
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Mrs. Fountain, staying his hand: "What are
you doing? Putting Jimmy's engine into Susy's
stocking! She'll be perfectly insulted when she
finds it, for she'll know you weren't paying the
least attention, and you can't blame Santa Glaus
for it with her. If that's what you've been doing
with the other stockings — But there aren't any
others. Don't tell me you've just begun! Well,
I could simply cry."
Fountain, dropping into the chair on the other
side of the table, under the shelter of a tall Christ
mas tree standing on it : " Do you call unwrapping
a whole car-load of truck and getting it sorted,
just beginning? I've been slaving here from the
dawn of time, and I had to have some leisure for
the ghosts of my own Christmases when I was
little. I didn't have to wade round in the wrap
pings of my presents in those days. But it isn't
the sad memories that take it out of you; it's the
happy ones. I've never had a ghastlier half -hour
than I've just spent in the humiliating multiplicity
of these gifts. All the old birthdays and wedding-
days and Fourth of Julys and home-comings and
children's christenings I've ever had came troop
ing back. There oughtn't to be any gay anniver
saries; they should be forbidden by law. If I
could only have recalled a few dangerous fevers
and funerals!"
21 321
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Mrs. Fountain: " Clarence! Don't say such a
thing ; you'll be punished for it. I know how you
suffer from those gloomy feelings, and I pity you.
You ought to bear up against them. If I gave
way ! You must think about something cheerful in
the future when the happiness of the past afflicts
you, and set one against the other; life isn't all a
vale of tears. You must keep your mind fixed on
the work before you. I don't believe it's the
number of the packages here that's broken you
down. It's the shopping that's worn you out;
I'm sure I'm a mere thread. And I had been at
it from immediately after breakfast ; and I lunched
in one of the stores with ten thousand suburbans
who had come pouring in with the first of their un
natural trains: I did hope I should have some of
the places to myself; but they were every one
jammed. And you came up from your office about
four, perfectly fresh."
Fountain: " Fresh! Yes, quite dewy from a
day's fight with the beasts at Ephesus on the eve
of Christmas week."
Mrs. Fountain: "Well, don't be cynical, Clar
ence, on this, of all nights of the year. You know
how sorry I always am for what you have to go
through down there, and I suppose it's worse, as
you say, at this season than any other time of
year. It's the terrible concentration of every-
322
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
thing just before Christmas that makes it so kill
ing. I really don't know which of the places was
the worst ; the big department stores or the sepa
rate places for jewelry and toys and books and
stationery and antiques; they were all alike, and
all maddening. And the rain outside, and every
body coming in reeking; though I don't believe
that sunshine would have been any better; there'd
have been more of them. I declare, it made my
heart ache for those poor creatures behind the
counters, and I don't know whether I suffered
most for them when they kept up a ghastly cheer
fulness in their attention or were simply insulting
in their indifference. I know they must be all
dead by this time. 'Going up?' 'Going down?'
'Ca-ish!' 'Here, boy!' I believe it will ring in
my ears as long as I live. And the whiz of those
overhead wire things, and having to wait ages
for your change, and then drag your tatters out
of the stores into the streets! If I hadn't had you
with me at the last I should certainly have
dropped."
Fountain: "Yes, and what had become of your
good resolutions about doing all your Christmas
shopping in" July?"
Mrs. Fountain: "M;y good resolutions? Really,
Clarence, sometimes if it were not cruelty to
animals I should like to hit you. My good —
323
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
You know that you suggested that plan, and it
wasn't even original with you. The papers have
been talking about it for years; but when you
brought it up as such a new idea, I fell in with it
to please you — "
Fountain: "Now, look out, Lucy!"
Mrs. Fountain: "Yes, to please you, and to
help you forget the Christmas worry, just as I've
been doing to-night. You never spare me."
Fountain: "Stick to the record. Why didn't
you do your Christmas shopping in July?"
Mrs. Fountain: "Why didn't I? Did you ex
pect me to do my Christmas shopping down at
Sculpin Beach, where I spent the whole time from
the middle of June till the middle of September?
Why didn't you do the Christmas shopping in
July? You had the stores under your nose here
from the beginning till the end of summer, with
nothing in the world to hinder you, and not a
chick or a child to look after."
Fountain: "Oh, I like that. You think I was
leading a life of complete leisure here, with the
thermometer among the nineties nine-tenths of
the time?"
Mrs. Fountain: "I only know you were brag
ging in all your letters about your bath and your
club, and the folly of any one going away from the
cool, comfortable town in the summer. I sup-
324
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
pose you'll say that was to keep me from feeling
badly at leaving you. When it was only for the
children's sake! I will let you take them the next
time."
Fountain: " While you look after my office?
And you think the stores are full of Christmas
things in July, I suppose."
Mrs. Fountain: "I never thought so; and now
I hope you see the folly of that idea. No, Clar
ence. We must be logical in everything. You
can't get rid of Christmas shopping at Christmas
time."
Fountain, shouting wrathfully: ''Then I say get
rid of Christmas!"
ii
MR. FRANK WATKINS, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Watkins, opening the door for himself and
struggling into the room with an armful of parcels :
"I'm with you there, Clarence. Christmas is at
the root of Christmas shopping, and Christmas
giving, and all the rest of it. Oh, you needn't be
afraid, Lucy. I didn't hear any epithets; just
caught the drift of your argument through the
keyhole. I've been kicking at the door ever
since you began. Where shall I dump these
things?"
325
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Mrs. Fountain: "Oh, you poor boy! Here —
anywhere — on the floor — on the sofa — on the
table." She clears several spaces and helps Wat-
kins unload. "Clarence! I'm surprised at you.
What are you thinking of?"
Fountain: "I'm thinking that if this goes on,
I'll let somebody else arrange the presents."
Watkins: " If I saw a man coming into my house
with a load like this to-night, I'd throw him into
the street. But living in a ninth-story flat like
you, it might hurt him."
Mrs. Fountain, reading the inscriptions on the
packages: "'For Benny from his uncle Frank/
Oh, how sweet of you, Frank! And here's a kiss
for his uncle Frank." She embraces him with as
little interruption as possible. "'From Uncle
Frank to Jim.' Oh, I know what that is!" She
feels the package over. ' * And this is for ' Susy from
her aunt Sue.' Oh, I knew she would remember
her namesake. 'For Maggie. Merry Christmas
from Mrs. Watkins.' 'Bridget, with Mrs. Wat-
kins's best wishes for a Merry Christmas.' Both
the girls! But it's like Sue; she never forgets
anybody. And what's this for Clarence? I must
know! Not a bath-gown?" Undoing it: "I
simply must see it. Blue! His very color!"
Holding it up: "From you, Frank?" He nods.
"Clarence!"
326
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Watkins: "If Fountain tries to kiss me, I'll—"
Fountain: "I wouldn't kiss you for a dozen
bath-gowns." Lifting it up from the floor where
Mrs. Fountain has dropped it : "It is rather nice."
Watkins: "Don't overwhelm me."
Mrs. Fountain, dancing about with a long, soft
roll in her hand : " Oh, oh, oh ! She saw me gloat
ing on it at Shumaker's! I do wonder if it 2*5-."
Fountain, reaching for it : * * Why, open it —
Mrs. Fountain: "You dare! No, it shall be
opened the very last thing in the morning, now, to
punish you ! How is poor Sue ? I saw her literally
dropping by the way at Shumaker's."
Watkins, making for the door: "Well, she must
have got up again. I left her registering a vow
that if ever she lived to see another Christmas she
would leave the country months before the shop
ping began. She called down maledictions on all
the recipients of her gifts and wished them the
worst harm that can befall the wicked."
Mrs. Fountain: "Poor Sue! She simply lives
to do people good, and I can understand exactly
how she feels toward them. I'll be round bright
and early to-morrow to thank her. Why do you
go?"
Watkins: "Well, I can't stay here all night, and
I'd better let you and Clarence finish up." He
escapes from her detaining embrace and runs out,
327
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
in
MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Mrs. Fountain, intent upon her roll: "How
funny he is! I wonder if he did hear anything
but our scolding voices? Where were we?"
Fountain: "I had just called you a serpent."
Mrs. Fountain, with amusement: "No, really?"
Feeling the parcel: "If it's that Spanish lace scarf
I can tell her it was machine lace. I saw it at the
first glance. But poor Sue has no taste. I sup
pose I must stand it. But I can't bear to think
what she's given the girls and children. She
means well. Did you really say serpent, Clar
ence? You never called me just that before."
Fountain: "No, but you called me a laughing
hyena, and said I scoffed at everything sacred."
Mrs. Fountain: "I can't remember using the
word hyena, exactly, though I do think the way
you talk about Christmas is dreadful. But I take
back the laughing hyena."
Fountain: "And I take back the serpent. I
meant dove, anyway. But it's this Christmas
time when a man gets so tired he doesn't know
what he's saying."
Mrs. Fountain: "Well, you're good, anyway,
dearest, whatever you say; and now I'm going to
328
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
help you arrange the things. I suppose there'll be
lots more to-morrow, but we must get rid of these
now. Don't you wish nobody would do anything
for us? Just the children — dear little souls! I
don't believe but what we can make Jim and Susy
believe in Santa Glaus again; Benny is firm in
the faith; he put him into his prayer. I declare,
his sweetness almost broke my heart." At a
knock: " Who's that, I wonder? Come in! Oh,
it's you, Maggie. Well?"
IV
THE FOUNTAINS, FOUNTAIN'S SISTERS
Maggie: "It's Mr. Fountain's sisters just tele
phoned up."
Mrs. Fountain: "Have them come up at once,
Maggie, of course." As Maggie goes out: "An
other interruption! If it's going to keep on like
this! Shouldn't you have thought they might
have sent their presents?"
Fountain: "I thought something like it in
Frank's case; but I didn't say it."
Mrs. Fountain: "And I don't know why I say
it, now. It's because I'm so tired I don't know
what I am saying. Do forgive me! It's this ter
rible Christmas spirit that gets into me. But now
you'll see how nice I can be to them." At a tap
329
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
on the door: "Come in! Come in! Don't mind
our being in all this mess. So darling of you to
come! You can help cheer Clarence up; you
know his Christmas Eve dumps." She runs to
them and clasps them in her arms with several
half -open packages dangling from her hands and
contrasting their disarray with the neatness of
their silk-ribboned and tissue-papered parcels
which their embrace makes meet at her back.
"Minnie! Aggie! To lug here, when you ought
to be at home in bed dying of fatigue! But it's
just like you, both of you. Did you ever see any
thing like the stores to-day? Do sit down, or
swoon on the floor, or anything. Let me have
those wretched bundles which are simply killing
you." She looks at the different packages. " 'For
Benny from Grandpa.' 'For a good girl, from
Susy's grandmother.' 'Jim, from Aunt Minnie
and Aunt Aggie.' 'Lucy, with love from Aggie
and Minnie.' And Clarence! What hearts you
have got ! Well, I always say there never were such
thoughtful girls, and you always show such taste
and such originality. I long to get at the things."
She keeps fingering the large bundle marked with
her husband's name. "Not — not — a — "
Minnie: "Yes, a bath-robe. Unless you give
him a cigar-case it's about the only thing you can
give a man."
330
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Aggie: "Minnie thought of it and I chose it.
Blue, because it's his color. Try it on, Clarence,
and if it's too long — "
Mrs. Fountain: "Yes, do, dear! Let's see you
with it on." While the girls are fussily opening
the robe, she manages to push her brother's gift
behind the door. Then, without looking round
at her husband. "It isn't a bit too long. Just
the very— Looking: "Well, it can easily be
taken up at the hem. I can do it to-morrow."
She abandons him to his awkward isolation while
she chatters on with his sisters. "Sit down; I
insist! Don't think of going. Did you see that
frightful pack of people when the cab horse fell
down in front of Shumaker's?"
Minnie: "See it?"
Aggie: "We were in the midst of it! I wonder
we ever got out alive. It's enough to make you
wish never to see another Christmas as long as
you live."
Minnie: "A great many won't live. There will
be more grippe, and more pneumonia, and more
appendicitis from those jams of people in the
stores!"
Aggie: "The germs must have been swarm
ing."
Fountain: "Lucy was black with them when
we got home."
33i
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Mrs. Fountain: "Don't pay the slightest atten
tion to him, girls. He'll probably be the first to
sneeze himself."
Minnie: "I don't know about sneezing. I shall
only be too glad if I don't have nervous prostra
tion from it."
Aggie: "I'm glad we got our motor-car just in
time. Any one that goes in the trolleys now will
take their life in their hand." The girls rise and
move toward the door. "Well, we must goon
now. We're making a regular round; you can't
trust the delivery wagons at a time like this.
Good-by. Merry Christmas to the children.
They're fast asleep by this time, I suppose."
Minnie: "I only wish I was!"
Mrs. Fountain: "I believe you, Minnie. Good-
by. Good night. Good night, Aggie. Clarence,
go to the elevator with them! Or no, he can't
in that ridiculous bath-gown ! " Turning to
Fountain as the door closes: "Now I've done it."
v
MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Fountain: "It isn't a thing you could have
wished to phrase that way, exactly."
Mrs. Fountain: "And you made me do it.
332
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Never thanking them, or anything, and standing
there like I don't know what, and leaving the talk
all to me. And now, making me lose my temper
again, when I wanted to be so nice to you. Well,
it is no use trying, and from this on I won't.
Clarence!" She has opened the parcel addressed
to herself and now stands transfixed with joy and
wonder. "See what the girls have given me!
The very necklace I've been longing for at Planets',
and denying myself for the last fortnight! Well,
never will I say your sisters are mean again."
Fountain: "You ought to have said that to
them."
Mrs. Fountain: "It quite reconciles one to
Christmas. What? Oh, that was rather nasty.
You know I didn't mean it. I was so excited I
didn't know what I was saying. I'm sure nobody
ever got on better with sisters-in-law, and that
shows my tact; if I do make a slip, now and then,
I can always get out of it. They will understand.
Do you think it was very nice of them to flaunt
their new motor in my face? But of course any
thing your family does is perfect, and always was,
though I must say this necklace is sweet of them.
I wonder they had the taste." A tap on the door
is heard. "Come in, Maggie!" Sottovoce. "Take
it off." She snatches his bath-robe and tosses it
behind the door.
333
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
VI
WILBUR HAZARD, THE FOUNTAINS
Hazard: "I suppose I can come in, even if I'm
not Maggie. Catch, Fountain." He tosses a
large bundle to Fountain. "It's huge, but it
isn't hefty." He turns to go out again.
Mrs. Fountain: "Oh, oh, oh! Don't go! Come
in and help us. What have you brought Clarence !
May I feel?"
Hazard: " You can look, if you like. I'm rather
proud of it. There's only one other thing you
can give a man, and I said, 'No, not a cigar-case.
Fountain smokes enough already, but if a bath
robe can induce him to wash— He goes out.
Mrs. Fountain, screaming after him through the
open door : ' ' Oh, how good ! Come back and see
it on him." She throws the bath-robe over Foun
tain's shoulders.
Hazard, looking in again: "Perfect fit, just as
the Jew said, and the very color for Fountain."
He vanishes, shutting the door behind him.
VII
MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Mrs. Fountain: "How coarse! Well, my dear,
I don't know where you picked up your bachelor
friends. I hope this is the last of them."
334
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Fountain: " Hazard's the only one who has sur
vived your rigorous treatment. But he always
had a passion for cold shoulder, poor fellow. As
bath-robes go, this isn't bad." He gets his arms
into it, and walks up and down. "Heigh?"
Mrs. Fountain: "Yes, it is pretty good. But
the worst of Christmas is that it rouses up all
your old friends."
Fountain: "They feel so abnormally good, con
found them. I suppose poor old Hazard half
killed himself looking this thing up and building
the joke to go with it."
Mrs. Fountain: "Well, take it off, now, and
come help me with the children's presents. You're
quite forgetting about them, and it '11 be morning
and you'll have the little wretches swarming in
before you can turn round. Dear little souls! I
can sympathize with their impatience, of course.
But what are you going to do with these bath
robes? You can't wear four bath-robes."
Fountain: "I can change them every day. But
there ought to be seven. This hood is rather a
new wrinkle, though, isn't it? I suppose it's for
a voyage, and you pull it up over your head when
you come through the corridor back to your state
room. We shall have to go to Europe, Lucy."
Mrs. Fountain: "I would go to Asia, Africa,
and Oceanica, to escape another Christmas.
335
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Now if there are any more bath-robes — Come
in, Maggie."
VIII
MAGGIE, THE FOUNTAINS
Maggie, bringing in a bundle: " Something a
District Messenger brought. Will you sign for
it, ma'am?"
Mrs. Fountain: "You sign, Clarence. If I
know anything about the look and the feel of a
bundle, this is another bath-robe, but I shall soon
see." While she is cutting the string and tearing
the wrappings away, Fountain signs and Maggie
goes. Mrs. Fountain shakes out the folds of the
robe. "Well, upon my word, I should think there
was conspiracy to insult you, Clarence. I should
like to know who has had the effrontery— What's
on it?"
Fountain, reading from the card which had
fallen out of the garment to the floor: "'With
Christmas greetings from Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby.' '
Mrs. Fountain, dropping the robe and seizing
the card: "Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby! Well, upon
my word, this is impudence. It's not only im
pudence, it's indelicacy. And I had always
thought she was the very embodiment of refine
ment, and I've gone about saying so. Now I shall
336
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
have to take it back. The idea of a lady sending
a bath-robe to a gentleman! What next, I won
der! What right has Mrs. Gibby to send you a
bath-robe? Don't prevaricate! Remember that
the truth is the only thing that can save you.
Matters must have gone pretty far, when a woman
could send you anything so — intimate. What
are you staring at with that paper? You needn't
hope to divert my mind by — "
Fountain, giving her the paper in which the robe
came: "Seems to be for Mrs. Clarence Fountain."
Mrs. Fountain, snatching it from him: "What!
It is, it is! Oh, poor dear Lilly! How can you
ever forgive me ? She saw me looking at it to-day
at Shumaker's, and it must have come into her
head in despair what else to get me. But it was
a perfect inspiration — for it was just what I was
longing for. Why" — laughing hysterically while
she holds up the robe, and turns it this way and
that — "I might have seen at a glance that it
wasn't a man's, with this lace on and this silk
hood, and" — she hurries into it, and pulls it for
ward, looking down at either side — "it's just the
right length, and if it was made for me it couldn't
fit me better. What a joke I shall have with
Lilly, when I tell her about it. I sha'n't spare
myself a bit!"
Fountain: "Then I hope you'll spare me. I
22 337
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
have some little delicacy of feeling, and I don't
like the notion of a lady's giving me a bath-robe.
It's — intimate. I don't know where you picked
up your girl friends."
Mrs. Fountain, capering about joyfully: "Oh,
how funny you are, darling! But go on. I don't
mind it, now. And you may be glad you've got
off so easily. Only now if there are any more
bath-robes — " A timid rap is heard at the door.
"Come in, Maggie!" The door is slowly set ajar,
then flung suddenly wide open, and Jim and Susy
in their night-gowns rush dancing and exulting in.
IX
JIM, SUSY, THE FOUNTAINS
Susy: "We've caught you, we've caught you."
Jim: "I just bet it was you, and now I've won,
haven't I, mother?"
Susy: "And I've won, too, haven't I, father?"
Arrested at sight of her father in the hooded
bath-gown: "He does look like Santa Claus,
doesn't he, Jimmy? But the real Santa Claus
would be all over snow, and a long, white beard.
You can't fool us!"
Jim: "You can't fool us! We know you, we
know you! And mother dressed up, too! There
isn't any Mrs. Santa Claus, and that proves it!"
338
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Mrs. Fountain, severely: " Dreadful little
things! Who said you might come here? Go
straight back to bed, this minute, or — Will you
send them back, Clarence, and not stand staring
so? What are you thinking of?"
Fountain, dreamily: "Nothing. Merely won
dering what we shall do when we've got rid of our
superstitions. Shall we be the better for it, or
even the wiser?"
Mrs. Fountain: "What put that question into
your head? Christmas, I suppose; and that's
another reason for wishing there was no such
thing. If I had my way, there wouldn't be."
Jim: "Oh, mother!"
Susy: "No Christmas?"
Mrs. Fountain: "Well, not for disobedient chil
dren who get out of bed and come in, spoiling
everything. If you don't go straight back, it will
be the last time, Santa Claus or no Santa Claus."
Jim: "And if we go right back?"
Susy: "And promise not to come in any more?"
Mrs. Fountain: "Well, we'll see how you keep
your promise. If you don't, that's the end of
Christmas in this house."
Jim: "It's a bargain, then! Come on, Susy!"
Susy: "And we do it for you, mother. And for
you, father. We just came in for fun, anyway."
Jim: "We just came for a surprise."
339
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Mrs. Fountain, kissing them both: "Well, then,
if it was only for fun, we'll excuse you this time.
Run along, now, that's good children. Clarence!"
MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Fountain: "Well?" He looks up at her from
where he has dropped into a chair beside the table
strewn with opened and unopened gifts at the foot
of the Christmas tree.
Mrs. Fountain: " What are you mooning
about?"
Fountain: "What if it was all a fake? Those
thousands and hundreds of thousands of churches
that pierce the clouds with their spires; those
millions of ministers and missionaries; those
billions of worshipers, sitting and standing and
kneeling, and singing and praying; those nuns
and monks, and brotherhoods and sisterhoods,
with their ideals of self-denial, and their duties
to the sick and poor; those martyrs that died for
the one true faith, and those other martyrs of the
other true faiths whom the one true faith tortured
and killed; those masses and sermons and cere
monies, what if they were all a delusion, a mis
take, a misunderstanding? What if it were all
as unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing,
34°
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
as this pagan Christmas of ours is as unlike a
Christian Christmas?"
Mrs. Fountain, springing up: "I knew it! I
knew that it was this Christmas giving that was
making you morbid again. Can't you shake it
off and be cheerful — like me? I'm sure I have to
bear twice as much of it as you have. I've been
shopping the whole week, and you've been just
this one afternoon." She begins to catch her
breath, and fails in searching for her handkerchief
in the folds of her dress under the bath-robe.
Fountain, offering his handkerchief: "Take
mine."
Mrs. Fountain, catching it from him, and hiding
her face in it on the table: "You ought to help
me bear up, and instead of that you fling yourself
on my sympathies and break me down." Lift
ing her face: "And if it was all a fake, as you say,
and an illusion, what would you do, what would
you give people in place of it?"
Fountain: "I don't know."
Mrs. Fountain: "What would you have in
place of Christmas itself?"
Fountain: "I don't know."
Mrs. Fountain: "Well, then, I wouldn't set
myself up to preach down everything — in a blue
bath-gown. You've no idea how ridiculous you
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Fountain: "Oh, yes, I have. I can see you.
You look like one of those blue nuns in Rome.
But I don't remember any lace on them."
Mrs. Fountain: "Well, you don't look like a blue
monk, you needn't flatter yourself, for there are
none. You look like — What are you thinking
about?"
Fountain: "Oh, nothing. What do you sup
pose is in all these packages here ? Useful things,
that we need, that we must have? You know
without looking that it's the superfluity of naughti
ness in one form or other. And the givers of
these gifts, they had to give them, just as we've
had to give dozens of gifts ourselves. We ought
to have put on our cards, 'With the season's bit
terest grudges,' 'In hopes of a return,' 'With
a hopeless sense of the folly,' 'To pay a hateful
debt,' 'With impotent rage and despair.'"
Mrs. Fountain: "I don't deny it, Clarence.
You're perfectly right; I almost wish we had put
it. How it would have made them hop! But
they'd have known it was just the way they felt
themselves."
Fountain, going on thoughtfully: "It's the cap-
sheaf of the social barbarism we live in, the hideous
hypocrisy. It's no use to put it on religion. The
Jews keep Christmas, too, and we know what they
think of Christianity as a belief. No, we've got
342
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
to go further back, to the Pagan Saturnalia —
Well, I renounce the whole affair, here and now.
I'm going to spend the rest of the night bundling
these things up, and to-morrow I'm going to spend
the day in a taxi, going round and giving them
back to the fools that sent them."
Mrs. Fountain: "And I'm going with you. I
hate it as much as you do — Come in, Maggie!"
XI
MAGGIE, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Maggie: "Something the elevator-boy says he
forgot. It came along with the last one."
Mrs. Fountain, taking a bundle from her: "If
this is another bath-robe, Clarence! It is, as I
live. Now if it is a woman sending it — " She
picks up a card which falls out of the robe as she
unfolds it. "'Love the Giver,' indeed! Now,
Clarence, I insist, I demand — •"
Fountain: "Hold on, hold on, my dear. The
last bath-robe that came from a woman was for
you.'1
Mrs. Fountain: "So it was. I don't know what
I was thinking about; and I do beg your par —
But this is a man's bath-robe!"
Fountain, taking the card which she mechani
cally stretches out to him : "And a man sends it —
343
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
old Fellows. Can't you read print? Ambrose
J. Fellows, and a message in writing: 'It was a
toss-up between this and a cigar-case, and the
bath-robe won. Hope you haven't got any other
thoughtful friends.'"
Mrs. Fountain: ''Oh, very brilliant, giving me
a start like this! I shall let Mr. Fellows know —
What is it, Maggie? Open the door, please."
Maggie, opening: "It's just a District Mes
senger."
Fountain, ironically: "Oh, only a District Mes
senger." He signs the messenger's slip, while his
wife receives from Maggie a bundle which she re
gards with suspicion.
XII
MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Mrs. Fountain: "'From Uncle Philip for Clar
ence/ Well, Uncle Philip, if you have sent
Clarence — Clarence!" breaking into a whimper:
"It is, it is! It's another."
Fountain: "Well, that only makes the seventh,
and just enough for every day in the week. It's
quite my ideal. Now, if there's nothing about a
cigar-case — Hello!" He feels in the pocket of
the robe and brings out a cigar-case, from which
a slip of paper falls : " ' Couldn't make up my mind
344
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
between them, so send both. Uncle Phil.' Well,
this is the last stroke of Christmas insanity."
Mrs. Fountain: "His brain simply reeled under
it, and gave way. It shows what Christmas really
conies to with a man of strong intellect like Uncle
Phil."
Fountain, opening the case: "Oh, I don't know!
He's put some cigars in here — in a lucid interval,
probably. There's hope yet."
Mrs. Fountain, in despair: "No, Clarence,
there's no hope. Don't flatter yourself. The
only way is to bundle back all their presents and
never, never, never give or receive another one.
Come! Let's begin tying them up at once; it
will take us the rest of the night." A knock at
the door. "Come, Maggie."
XIII
JIM AND SUSY, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Jim and Susy, pushing in: "We can't sleep,
mother. May we have a pillow fight to keep us
amused till we're drowsy?"
Mrs. Fountain, desolately: "Yes, go and have
your pillow fight. It doesn't matter now. We're
sending the presents all back, anyway." She be
gins frantically wrapping some of the things up.
Susy: "Oh, father, are you sending them back?"
345
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Jim: "She's just making believe. Isn't she,
father?"
Fountain: "Well, I'm not so sure of that. If
she doesn't do it, I will."
Mrs. Fountain , desisting: "Will you go right
back to bed?"
Jim and Susy: "Yes, we will."
Mrs. Fountain: "And to sleep, instantly?"
Jim and Susy, in succession: "We won't keep
awake a minute longer."
Mrs. Fountain: "Very well, then, we'll see.
Now be off with you." As they put their heads
together and go out laughing: "And remember,
if you come here another single time, back go
every one of the presents."
Fountain: "As soon as ever Santa Glaus can
find a moment for it."
Jim, derisively: "Oh, yes, Santa Glaus!"
Susy: "I guess if you wait for Santa Glaus to
take them back!"
XIV
MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Mrs. Fountain: "Tiresome little wretches. Of
course we can't expect them to keep up the self-
deception."
Fountain: "They'll grow to another. When
they're men and women they'll pretend that
346
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Christmas is delightful, and go round giving peo
ple the presents that they've worn their lives out
in buying and getting together. And they'll work
themselves up into the notion that they are really
enjoying it, when they know at the bottom of
their souls that they loathe the whole job."
Mrs. Fountain: " There you are with your
pessimism again! And I had just begun to feel
cheerful about it!"
Fountain : ' ' Since when ? Since I proposed send
ing this rubbish back to the givers with our curse?"
Mrs. Fountain: "No, I was thinking what fun
it would be if we could get up a sort of Christmas
game, and do it just among relations and intimate
friends."
Fountain: "Ah, I wish you luck of it. Then
the thing would begin to have some reality, and
just as in proportion as people had the worst feel
ings in giving the presents, their best feeling would
be hurt in getting them back."
Mrs. Fountain: "Then why did you ever think
of it?"
Fountain: "To keep from going mad. Come,
let's go on with this job of sorting the presents,
and putting them in the stockings and hanging
them up on the tree and laying them round the
trunk of it. One thing : it's for the last time. As
soon as Christmas week is over, I shall inaugurate
347
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
an educational campaign against the whole Christ
mas superstition. It must be extirpated root and
branch, and the extirpation must begin in the
minds of the children; we old fools are hopeless;
we must die in it; but the children can be
saved. We must organize and make a house-to-
house fight; and I'll begin in our own house.
To-morrow, as soon as the children have made
themselves thoroughly sick with candy and cake
and midday dinner, I will appeal to their reason,
and get them to agree to drop it ; to sign the Anti-
Christmas pledge; to — "
Mrs. Fountain: ''Clarence! I have an idea."
Fountain: "Not a bright one?"
Mrs. Fountain: "Yes, a bright one, even if
you didn't originate it. Have Christmas con
fined entirely to children — to the very young
est — to children that believe firmly in Santa
Claus."
Fountain: "Oh, hello! Wouldn't that leave
Jim and Susy out? I couldn't have them left
out."
Mrs. Fountain: "That's true. I didn't think of
that. Well, say, to children that either believe
or pretend to believe in him. What's that?'1 She
stops at a faint, soft sound on the door. "It's
Maggie with her hands so full she's pushing with
her elbow. Come in, Maggie, come in. Come
348
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
in! Don't you hear me? Come in, I say! Oh,
it isn't Maggie, of course! It's those worthless,
worthless little wretches, again." She runs to the
door calling out, "Naughty, naughty, naughty!"
as she runs. Then, flinging the door wide, with
a final cry of "Naughty, I say!" she discovers a
small figure on the threshold, nightgowned to its
feet, and looking up with a frightened, wistful
face. "Why, Benny!" She stoops down and
catches the child in her arms, and presses him
tight to her neck, and bends over, covering his
head with kisses. "What in the world are you
doing here, you poor little lamb? Is mother's
darling walking in his sleep? What did you
want, my pet? Tell mudda, do! Whisper it in
mudda's big ear ! Can't you tell mudda? What?
Whisper a little louder, love! We're not angry
with you, sweetness. Now, try to speak louder.
Is that Santa Claus? No, dearest, that's just
dadda. Santa Claus hasn't come yet, but he will
soon. What ? Say it again. Is there any Santa
Claus? Why, who else could have brought all
these presents? Presents for Benny and Jim and
Susy and mudda, and seven bath-gowns for dadda.
Isn't that funny? Seven! And one for mudda.
What? I can't quite hear you, pet. Are we
going to send the presents back? Why, who ever
heard of such a thing? Jim said so? And Susy?
349
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Well, I will settle with them, when I come to
them. You don't want me to? Well, I won't,
then, if Benny doesn't want mudda to. I'll just
give them a kiss apiece, pop in their big ears.
What? You've got something for Santa Claus
to give them? What? Where? In your crib?
And shall we go and get it? For mudda too?
And dadda? Oh, my little angel!" She begins
to cry over him, and to kiss him again. "You'll
break my heart with your loveliness. He wants
to kiss you too, dadda." She puts the boy into
his father's arms; then catches him back and
runs from the room with him. Fountain resumes
the work of filling the long stocking he had be
gun with; then he takes up a very short sock.
He has that in his hand when Mrs. Fountain comes
back, wiping her eyes. "He'll go to sleep now, I
guess; he was half dreaming when he came in
here. I should think, when you saw how Benny
believed in it, you'd be ashamed of saying a
word against Christmas."
Fountain: "Who's said anything against it?
I've just been arguing for it, and trying to con
vince you that for the sake of little children like
Benny it ought to be perpetuated to the end of
the world. It began with the childhood of the
race, in the rejuvenescence of the spirit."
Mrs. Fountain: "Didn't you say that Christ-
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
mas began with the pagans? How monstrously
you prevaricate!'*
Fountain: "That was merely a figure of speech.
And besides, since you've been out with Benny,
I've been thinking, and I take back everything I've
said or thought against Christmas ; I didn't really
think it. I've been going back in my mind to
that first Christmas we had together, and it's
cheered me up wonderfully."
Mrs. Fountain, tenderly: "Have you, dearest?
I always think of it. If you could have seen
Benny, how I left him, just now?"
Fountain: "I shouldn't mind seeing him, and
I shouldn't care if I gave a glance at poor old
Jim and Susy. I'd like to reassure them about
not sending back the presents." He puts his arm
round her and presses her toward the door.
Mrs. Fountain: "How sweet you are! And
how funny! And good!" She accentuates each
sentiment with a kiss. "And don't you suppose
I felt sorry for you, making you go round with me
the whole afternoon, and then leaving you to
take the brunt of arranging the presents? Now
I'll tell you: next year, I will do my Christmas
shopping in July. It's the only way."
Fountain: "No, there's a better way. As you
were saying, they don't have the Christmas things
out. The only way is to do our Christmas shop-
351
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
ping the day after Christmas; everything will be
round still, and dog-cheap. Come, we'll begin
day after to-morrow."
Mrs. Fountain: "We will, we will!"
Fountain: "Do you think we will?"
Mrs. Fountain: "Well, we'll say we will."
They laugh together, and then he kisses her.
Fountain: "Even if it goes on in the same old
way, as long as we have each other — "
Mrs. Fountain: "And the children."
Fountain. "I forgot the children!"
Mrs. Fountain: "Oh, how delightful you are!"
THE END
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