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SCRIBNER'S J
 
MAGAZINE 


PUBLISHED MONTHLY 
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
VOLUME LXXVIII 
JULY-DECEMBER 


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 -- .---. 
",(, 
 1925 /:;./ 
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CHARLES SCRIBNER:s SONS NEW YORK 
7 BEAK STREET. LONDON. ENGLAND 



!/JJ!Ol(6- 
X 1..4--1 8 


COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



CONTENTS 


OP 


SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE 


YOLUl\IE LXXYIII 


JULy-DECEMBER, IH25 


ACTREHSES, MEMORIES OF . 
Al\IERICA
IZATION, THROV"GH THE MILL OF 


BRANDER 1\1 '-TTHE\\ 8 


PAGE 
497 


ST ANI8LA W A. GUTO\\ SKI 


71 


ANDREWS, MARY R. S. Autumn Roses 
ANTELOPE. Spc ('hasing Autf'lopt' on the Great Mongolian 
Plateau. 


626 


ANTIQrE HABIT, THE. 
Illustrations by 'V. G. Thomas. 


CAROLINE CAMP. 


91 


AXTIQrE-sÌIoP LAl\IEXT, THE. 


CAROLINE CAMP. 


315 


AS I LIKE IT. (Department) . 
(See also other volumes) 


" ILLI.'-M LYON PHELP8 
97, 209, 323, 433, 545, 658 


AUSTRALIA. See The MiuimUIIl Standards of Australia. 


AUTGl\1N ROSES. (A STORY) . 
Illustrations by H, van Buren Kline 


l\L'-RY R. S. ASDREW8 


626 


BARROWS, l\IARY ALICE Hearlbreak Dana 


50.', 


RATTLEHHIP I
 ACTIoN, A . 
IlhL,>tratlons from photographs. 


PO\\ F.R
 :-!YMI"IOTON . 


;1li7 


HELLOW:'!, CiEORCiK See TIlt' Fit-Iù of .\rt. 


BIRD TAXIDER:\IY. See Mastf'rpief'f's of \Ult'l'il'an Bil'ù 
Taxiderm)'. 


BIT OF NEW EKULA
D CHARACTER A
D ColiN 
TRY, A. With noH>s hy tlw Artist. 


OEOR.:r \\ RWHT 


!}77 


ßLACK, 1\L\TTHK\\ \\
ILH()
. BOilS fll/tlP,wlry 5:-iS 


BLANC MONT, 1\IARlXES AT .JOII/lr \\. TIIO\H"OS, JR. 227 


BOK, EDWARD W. You 
BOrRDELLE, E:\IILE-AXTOIi\E. Src The Field of .\rt. 


358 


nOYD, TIIo:\L\s. An Ohin Puh!r fi5:{ 


BOYD, wnODW.\H.D. ,<)(/11111 :
;,o 


B()Y
 AXD pnETHY 
IATTHEW WILBON BLACK. 5:iS 


BREAD .\SD SToYES CAROL PARK. 64.9 


JiRTTIRIT L.\BOH. HTEPS .\ITE.\D-ITs INFrXE
("g 
ON LABnl{ IX THE I-XI TED HTATEH ED\\I:". W. IIULJ.lSGEH 400 


BROKEX :\1EATR, (A STOR1.) , 


GORDON HALL GEROULD 


525 


BROOKS, GEORGE S. Twelve to Eight 
B( nnE
, WILLIAM DOUGLAS. Chasing .1.nll'1npr on Ihr 
Crt'at .\Iullgolian J>!alf'Ull 


ßlü 


5.') 


C.\:\IP CI\H.OII
F { Til,' .lTlI
que Ilabit. . . 
. ,. .... Til,' AnI/que-Shop I.amnlt . 


91 
:31,. 


(' \P'
 (jlTILI.EI
 LI:-;Tl'
:,\'B IX. (.\ :'ITOHY) 
Jllust.rations hy La\Hf'nf'f' Barnes. 


TORREY FORI) 


4-1 



IV 


CONTENTS 


('II \J{.\('TER A
O slTl- \TIo'\ I;\I THE :\OYEL 


EDITH'VH'-RTON 


PAOli: 
394 


CII.\:-:I<:. },L\RY ELLEX. 1'111' Gamunl af Praisl' 
CH.\:'H'\r. X'\TELOPE 0:\ THE UREAT :\[O
liOLL\1\' 'VILLIAIII DOITGLAS BunDE" 5!j 
PLATE.\C 
Illustrations from photographs h) th(' Author. 


422 


('HIXESE REX.\ISSAXCE, THE ELLf-I\\ORTH HrXTlXGTOX 2.'j3 
Illustratious from photographs 


CHITTEXDE
. GERALD. Mrs. Riddle 
CL \RI 
 \ Y AL " [ :\. { A 'Woman of Yo Imaginatiun 
. \., 
\ " Enter Ere . 


243 


129 
-t76 


CLOSED ROADS. (-\. STORY) . 
Illustrations by Edy,ard HOPlw[". 


.J. Ih \ TT [Juw 'i '''G 


un 


COE, GEORGE A. Youth and Peacl' 
{ "I Went to College." 
COLLEGE. See President Vergilius Alden Cook of Har- 
monia College. 


8 


COLLEGES A
D W \R, THE OLIVER LA F ARGE 


13 


COXKLIX, EDWlX GRAXT. Scicnce and Ihl' FOlth of the 
lU odern 


451 


CORTISSOZ, ROY.\L. The l<'ield of Art. (Department) . 


105, 217, 32H. 440. 553. 665 


CRI":\IE AXD SE
TDIEXTALITY 


.J '- 
ER L, PORD 


407 


(TRTISS, PHILIP. The Elixir of Lies 



72 


D\XC'E, HEARTBREAK 
DAXL'BE _\S PEACE":\IAI\:ER, THE 
Illustrations from photographs. 


1\1 \It\ ALI('E HHtHU\\'" 


!i05 


('H \HLES If SIIEIIHII.I. 


!ill 


DAl'":\IIER, HOXORf,;. See The Field of -\.rt. 


DEA D VOTE O}<' THE SOUTH, THE 


<TER.'-LD ", JOHNSON 


38 


DODGE, LOI-Ix. 'Wentworth's .Uaslerpim 


2S0 


DOTTIE. (A STORY) . 
Illustrations by Ethel Plummer. 
DOWXIXG, J. HYATT. Closed Roads 


.:\ICCREADY HUSTON. 


115 


191 


J)R. 'Wl
GS . S.. { K('\\ England ('haraeh'I' ani I Country. 
e'- 
 lC \'enke, 


DREA:\IS. 8rr The Stuff That Dreams \.rp 1\Taflp On 


E \
T I,' '1 f llrrctlity and SI'I . . . . . . 
. , ... . 1 Heredily-The .\la:;lrr llitlrllr /If 8rif'll(,(' 
EATO
, WALTER PUJ('lIAHD. Lord /If 111(' Wild('TIJ(,:;.
 
ELI'\:IR OF LIES. THE. (A STORY) PHILIP CURTIS8 
lllw,trations by J. H, F)"fe. 
E
TER EVE. (\ STORY) V AUlA CLARK 
Illustrations by George Wright. 
FAITH OF THE :\IODEUX, SC'IEXCE AXD THE EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN 
FIELD OF ART, THE. (Department.) lllustratt'd. ROYAL CORTISSOZ 

Iari
ll(? Fortuny and His Tradition of Dexterity in 
Pamtmg . . . . . . '" . 
lIonorê Daumler: The Satirist as Artist 
Uaphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 
George Bellows and Ilis Americanism " 
Emile-Antoine Bourdelle and the Rel1ovation of FI'ench 
Sculpture. . . . . . . , . . 
Still Uff' and the Author of .. As I Like It.. .. 


114 
1 


2H 


372 


476 


VB 


105 
217 
328 
440 


553 
665 



CONTENTS 


FoHD. JA1\IBS L. Crime amI $,'nlimclIlalily 


FORD, TORREY. Cap'n Quiller Listen!) In 


FORTUNY, 
[-\RL\
O. Se(' Thc FiPld of .\rt, 
FI J \ ....n E .., { Th(' Social Upset in Francc After the War. 
".L'n. . uee FrOlll a Little French ,\\Tindow. 


FREE:\L\
, DO{TGLA
, Lee and the [Jodies, (Two parts) 


FRO:\I A LITTLE FREN('H WI
DOW 
Illustrations by (', H. 'Vct'd, 


GALSWORTHY, JoHN. The Silver S/1(Jun, (S I-: HL\ I.) 
(See also \'01. LXXIX.) 


v 


PAUl': 
407 


44 


339, t59 



[O'\'"IWI-: DOtJGL\." ROßI"ISON 29n 


GEROULD, GORDON JL\LL. Ðrok('n .\f('([t,
 


G<\.Rl\1ENT OF PRAISE, THE, (A 
I'ORY) l\IARY ELLE'I ('H.'''t; 
Illustrations hy L. 1<'. ,\\Tilford, 


GII,KYSOX, 'V ALTER. Second ,Uarriaqp 


GOLDEN CALF, THE. (A :'hOR\) 
Illustrations by the Author. 
GOODLOE, ABBIE C'_-\RTER. The ,,\fadness of Gamaliel 
Saenoaks . 


GUTOWSKI, STAXIHLA\\ \. Through the :\Iill of Ameri- 
canization . 


ED\\ '-RD ::;HENTO"" 


51il 


4:!
 


525 



97 


517 


lRO 


HARDY, HUD
ON, HO{ H
L\N GEOIWB 
r.-Lt;AN H.'RPER 151 


71 


HEARTBRE
K DANCE. 
Decorations hy 1\larg.u'!': F......man. 


HARPER, GEORnE 
[/LE -\.X llardy, 1Illll,
'm, lIollsmall 151 


:;0;' 


HEUEDITY -THE l\IAHTER f{l DULE of S('I EX('g 
HEREDITY AND SEX . 


HORXADAY, WILLIAM T, 1I11l
tt'fpit;cls vJ A/III:rÎCIln flirt! 
Taxidermy 


HFDSON, H01;::;l\IAN, HARDY 
HULLINGER, ED'VIN W BTiti.
h Labor Steps .<'llu'ad 


{ The Chinese Renaissance 
HFNTIXGTON, ELLSWORTH. The lIfinimu,rn Standards 
of .Jlustrolw . 


111. -
' rO "'T :\ 1 ,(' R .... \ 1> Y { Dottie . . . . 
. 
",
 I r,. . !lfr,"..lrrwl(['...Smil,' 
I N" () 1.\, Scr) I a SSHn of ',en hwJ..
' , 


:'or '-In -\',ICt: B "'RRO\\ H . 
E. \1. E .."'T 
K .\1. E ..,..T 


J -1-1 


:!IÎI 


(; 
:U"UB 
h:L
: "'N H U(PI:;R, 1'-,1 


400 


253 


412 


II.'') 
G:m 


I,\;TERYIEW WITH \ NI<;W('O\"';H I
 
I';\\ ,oHh. 
A"\! . S 1'1''\1(1' 1'. 
11Jo;1!\1" '\ (ill I 


"I WEN 1.' 1'0 COLLI<;t.ìl<;" .h;"''''t; LnwH \\ /I.I.IA\!" I.
 


JOHKSON, GERALD 'V. Thl' nt'ad \. IIt(. IIf thr Smtth 
KATAHDIN. See Lord of the Wlldprm-'ss. 


:J
 


FREDERICK PETt:RSOX. 1\l.D. 534 


KENTUCKY, MASSON OF 
KKOWLTO
, C'LARKE. The Lost :::3tury 
LABOR. See British Labor Steps Ahcad. 
LA FARGE, OLI\-ER. The Colleges amI War 
LEE AND THE LADlE:-;-U
prBLl
HED LE'n'EHs 
OF ROBERT E. LEE. (Two Parts) Doua...,., FRt;DIH. . 
Illustrations from photographs and paintings, 


LIBRAHIES. See The Public Libraries of Amerka. 


lì:i 


13 


;JJ
I, 4;)9 



VI 


CONTENTS 


Lln<; "IIILI<
 YOI 1.1\'1<; 
I.ORD of THE" lLl)ER'\ESS 
Illustrations Irom Jlhoto
raJlhs. 


LOST SToRY, THK (\ Srn",) 
JIlII...tratio!ls h
 (ira("l' J)ra
.ton. 


PAGE 
LEE RUSSELL 273 


\\' ALTER PRICHARD EATON. 28 


('LARKE KNO\\ LTON . 173 


:\I..LE.\ ,\, :\1.\IUiH \RITE Fl
IlER 


WI'st uf llo1l/(11ICl' !í!I:1 


\BBIE CARTER GOODLOE 


IRO 


\10:\ KEY ::\IE.\T. (.\ STOR') 
Illu..trations hy'thl' .\uthol'. 
\IRs. .UC\OLD'S s'lILI<:. (A STOR') 
IIIu<;trations by John S. Curry. 
MHS RlI>DLF - \ FRA(ì:\IEXT OF BIOGRAPHY. (A 
STOIO') (j ERALD C' HITTENDEN 243 
Illustrations hy Harr
' Townsend, 


:\E\\('O::\IEH 1
 XEW YORK, AN INTERYIEW VdTH 
A STUART P. SHERMAN 
'\'E\\ EXGL.\
n CH \R \CTER AKD COl

TRY, A 
BIT OF .., . GEORGE WRIGHT 
'\E\\ '\I<:SS OF '\1<:\\ ZI':.\L.\:--;O, TilE . Ih:Nln VA=" D.n.t: 
Illustrations from JlhotlJ
rallhs h
 ('Iar", Hotm'uit, X. Z. 
'\O\"EJ.. See ('haral'tpr and Situation in thl' i\O\1'1. 


'I\O'\'ESS OF (ì\'I.\LlI<:I. SEVI<;KO\KS, THE. (<\. 
STORY) 
I1lustrdtions hy Harry TO\\ nSl'nd, 
:\L\RI'\'ES AT BL\
C :\IO'\'T-\:\' EPISODE IN THE 
JlISToRl OF TIll<; SECO'\D A
lERICAN 01V1- 

IO'\ 
'\ïth pil'turps b
 Ow \uthor. 
:\1 \RRL\ÎiE. 
I<:C()'\' n 
:\L\RYI=", F. H. \'lniCl -7'11(' Noisf'l('ss City 
:\L\SSO
 OF KEXTl'('KY-1'HE STORY OF .\N .. IRRE- 
CL.\DL\BLE YA(ìABO'\'D" \\HO BECAME A 
PO\\ ER I:'\: 1:'\DI.\ 
::\IASTERPIECE, WEXT"ORTH'S 
'I \STERPlECES OF A::\IERICAX BIRD TAXIDER:\IY 
Illustration" from photographs. 


::\L\TTHE\\ S. ßRAXDER. l.Iemuries of Actresses 
::\IE::\IORIES OF ACTRESSES 
'II '\ nll:\1 ST.\:'\: lH.RDS OF AnnRALIA, THE 
Illustrations from photographs. 


'HTCH ELL, .)()H
 .\IALC'OL::\1. The Public U1Jrarips of 
. \maica 


\IO,\(iOLI \:\ PLAT":.\P Sf'(' Chasill
 \ntt-loJlP cm tht' 
(.rf'at \1{)II
olian Platt'ilU. 


OHIO F.\BLE. .\:--;. (A HTOH1) 
o lH i.\ '\ I Z.\ T J 0:'\ . '-':".c What I'rÍl'C' Orgalliza t ion? 
{ Hread and Stunes. . 
"\RI\:, C.\JH)J.. Presidcnt \"I.roilills.\ldmCookoflIårm'uni;t 
Clllll'UC . . . . 
PEACE, YOl:"TII A:-..D 
PERFECT SERL-\ ,T. THE. (A HTOR") 
J lIustratiuns h
 Dt'n
's \\ ortman, 
1'1-;'1'1<: I{SO '\. FH E DEI{ 1("". \/rISSfllt IIf lÚ Illucky 
PHELPS. "11.1.1.\:\1 I.YO'\. \s I U"c'lt. COt'partmt'IIt) 
pO":Tln. BOYS A '\)) 
PRESH)E:\T \ ER(iILIt H AI.DEX ('001\: (W II \H- 
\IO
IA ('OLLE(iE \ STITHY 1:\ STILL LIFE. 


JOHN 'V. THOMASON, JR. 227 
\V ALTER GILKYSON 297 
167 
FREDERICK PETERsON,1\:LD. 534 
LOUIS DODGE 280 
\\TILLIAJ\I T. HORNADAY. 261 
497 
BRANDER l\IATTHEWS 497 
ELLSWORTH HUNTINGTON 412 


:n9 


JOHN 'V. THOMASON, JR. 


4R9 


l\ICCRE'-DY HUSTON. 


tia9 


601 


577 


.)
2 


T"O
IAf; Bcn II 


ti,,:1 


(;-19 


249 


GEORGE A. COE . 


8 
1
 


I<
LEANOR HTUART 


534 
97, 20U, :
2:1. 43a. "-It,, tifiS 


1\1 \TTIU:W \VII,SON Br.H'K 


,,:IS 


CARor. PARK. 


24!) 



CONTENTS 


PHY('JIOLOCòY. Sf'I' Qua("J,.pry and [Is Ps
("Jiol()g
, 


PROFESSOl{ .\ '\: D 'PHE 1'1 
h. LADY, 1'111<:. (\ S "II In ) Flu
uf:u((,,, \\ IIIn: 
ll1ustl'alÎolls hy (.ol'(lon SIt'\ I'llson. 


pnu,J(' LfBHAHH;S of<' \:\TERI('.\, TIm 
QlT-\.<.'KERY .\ND ITs PHY('UOLO(.y 
RAPHAEL. See The Field of Art. 


RECOULY, RAYl\fOND. The SuciaT Upsct in Frcmæ ...tfter 
thc War 


UELJGIOLTS 'I'E \CHING, THE ST.\TE Ai'- J) . 


HOBTNHON. l\IO;'l.lROE j)O{f(; LAS. Frum a UtilI' I<'rI'1I,'" 
Window 


RCRSELL, LEE. LÙ'c WhiT,' lllll Lire 
f-; "-LON. (A STORY) 
Illustration by H. "\an Burt'u Klint". 

('IE:\"('E -\ND THE 'FAITH OF THE MODERN 


HE('(I
 D MARRIAGE, (.\ HTOR\) 
Illustrations by Etht'l PlumnU'r, 



E!'JTll\lENTALITY, CIUl\II<; ANI> 
SERVANT, THE PERFECT 
SEX, HEREDITY AND 
SHENTON, EDWARD. The Golden Calf 


.r fIll" ,r A (.COI III 'I [n'I[E 1.1. 


I';UGAR .lAlliEI'! SWIFT 


HIo:!o.ln 
OIlLJo: Hln.H\\OOD 


\\ OODW ARD HOl'D 


ED" IN U RANT CONKLIN 


"'AI,TJo:R GILKl'RO' 


J AlliES L. FORD 


ELEANOR STUART 


E. M. EAST 


SHER
IAN. STFART P. An Interview u'ith a KeU'comcr in 
Kew York. 
SHERRILL, CHARLER H. The Danube as Peacemaker 
SHERWOOD, HENRY 
OBLE. The State and Religious 
Teaching . 
SILVER SPOON, THE. (SERIAL) Part I, Chapters I-V . JOHN GALSV.ORTHY 
(See also Vol. LXXIX.) 
SOCIAL UPSET IN FRANCE AFTER THE WAR, THE RAYMOND RECOULY . 
SOFTH. See The Dead Vote of thf' South. 
SPRAG UE, .TERRIE RA INSFOR n. What PriCt' Organization? 
SPROUL, 11, C. The Stuff That Dreams Are ,\fade On 
STATE AND RELIGIOUS TEACHIXG, THE 
STEWART, :1\-1. B. Youngsters vs. Oldstcrs 


STILL LIFE. See The Field of Art. 
HTUART, ELEANOR. The Perfect Servant 
HTlTFF 'J'H.\T DRE.-\1\fH \JH'
 l\L\DE ON, TIn: . 
HWIFT, EDGAR JAMES. QllGckcrll alld Its PSl/cllnT'JOIl 
RYl\IlNGTON, POWERS. A. Battleship in Actinn 
THOl\IASON JOH "'T W JR . { /lIarim's at BTa1l< \I"1I 1 
, l)O., '/lIonk"y-
If!at . 
(See alsu Vol. LXXVII.) 
THROUGH THE MILL OF Al\IEIUCANrZ \ TlO;... 
TORGERSON, EDWIK D. Treed! 
TREED r (A STORY) . 
Illustrations by :Margarct Freeman. 
TWELVE TO EIGHT. (A STORY) . 
Illustrations by E. M. Ashe. 
UNCHARTED COURSE, AN. (A STORY) 
Illustrations by Capt. John W. Thomason, Jr. 


HENRY NOBLE HIIER\\ OOD 


II. ('. SI'I((I{I, 


STA]I,[8L\W \, C;"HI\\BKI 


EDWIN DIAL 'Ioma;n"ON 


GEORGE S. BROOl...s 


HARRIET 'YELLES 


vii 
PAOE 
Ii 1 
:n!l 
:1 S!j 
liO!) 
2U
 
:wo 
273 
350 
151 
2!17 
.- 407 
18 
144 
517 
601 
511 
202 
51H 
609 


309 


31i
 
202 


125 


18 




c.:
 


3Slt 


367 
227 
I
q 


71 


XO 
:-'0 


tH6 


158 



Vlll 


CONTENTS 


,
'\ DYh1<:. IIE:\I{Y. 1'1". .V'lnIlS:OÖ IIf X, II' ZI'fIIIlIHI 


, E,\; H'E- 'I'll E '\;OISELESS ('I'I'Y 
I<:i
ht I )r'a \\ ill
s. 


'IITF IIF TIII
 SOl 'I'U 'I'll E DE \ J) 


"\H. 8,. '1"... ('ollI'JWs alld \Var. 
WELLES, 11 \UHlET. In C.;"c1wrlt'd Course 
WEXT" ORTH'S ::\L\STERPIECE. (A STOR1.) 
Illustrations U!' J. S('ott \\ïlliams. 


WEST OF HO'L\
CE. (\. STOIIY) 
J lIustral iuns h! I.. 1<'. \Yilford. 
\\ H \RTO:-", EDITII, ('lwnIclrr (lml ....illlali,m ill IlIr XIII'I'[ 


"H \T PH ICE OHlal\ IZ.\TH\N":' 
\\ BITE, ....REDERICK. Tile P"(I(r1<1'II,. (l1It/lllr 1'ink l,ud" 
\\ïLDEHl\"E::-;S, LORI> OF THE 
\, ILLI.\:\JS, JESSE LY1'('1I "[ Weill III Cuff,'!"," 
\\ 0\1 \
 OF XO (i\J Hi 1l\.\TIO;\!, .\, (A ST/I'I1) . 
lIIu"trations h
' (;l'or
1' \\'"ri
ht. 
\\ HHalT, (;EORUE. .\ Bit (If 
\f'W Eltfllflllfl Clwracla alld 
Counlry 
\\ RITIKG OF FICTION, THE. See Character and Situa- 
tion in the N Oycl. 
(See also Vols. LXXVI and LXXYII,) 


YOU 
YOr
GsTERS VS. OLDSTERS 
YOrTH AXD PEACE 


POETRY 


THE AD:\IIRAL S_\JLS 
THE H-\PPY DK\D . 
THg TWO SELVES . 
Decoration by Garth .Toncs. 


WORDS . 
::\IY LITTLE TOW:-./' 
HED (;.ER.\l\"Il'i\IS 
FTHEFLmS 
D('coralilJn h
 .J. ("{'.ld/anIIN, 


J A"'D-
I(,K 
PJERROT AT FIFTY 
Decoration Þy Emilia Benda. 


TENE:\IEKT PICTURES 
Decoration hy 'Villi am BpJ1[ p r. 
\....0 YET 
O FAR 1 
ESCAP"
 . 
FRO'\I THE C.\STELLO. 
Illustration from a photograph, 
GIFTS 
"A SLIM YOCTH CALI.ED SHELIÆY" 
THE HOLV....EARTH . 


PAGE 
fiX::! 


.... II. \1 \tHIN 


Hi7 


(i t.Jt \ 1.11 \\. ,I I) tI N '"'0:11 


:
x 


1.')8 


LOUIS DODGE 


2
O 


l\1 \n';II!1.IIITI
 1<'ISHER 
'\ T ..T Æ \ N 


5!J3 


:
91 


.I 1-;1'1:'1': H \lNRFORlJ SPRAr.I'E. 309 


fH 


\\ ALrt'H PRllH\RD EATON 


28 


-172 


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577 


EDWARD W. BOK 
1\-1. B. STEW ART 
GEORGE A. COE 


358 


125 


8 


PAGE 
l\IARY R. S. ANDREWS . 322 


KARLE WILSON BAKER. 399 
ELSA RARKER fi92 


NATHALIE SEDGWICK COLBY 475 
l\IAIIY EDGAR COMSTOCK 252 


ELIZABETH DILLINGHAM 190 


LOITlRt: n IUSI'OI,L 208 


"
BEo,; J) FINNE! 90 
THEOI'JOf't>\. G \RRISON 128 


CAROl, H 
YNE8 576 


('HARLES F. LUM1\IIR 516 
\-IRraNIA l\IooItE 43 
("'OIUNNE RUIH!EVELT ROB- 
INSON 496 
(
OUNELIA OTIS SKINNER 615 
NANCY B1.RI> TURNER . 60 
JOHN HALL WHEELOCK. 656 



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TIlE MOORISH KNIFE-GRINDER. 
From the painting by Fortuny. 


-See .. The Field of Art," page IOS. 



\ 
SCRIBNER"S 


VOL. LXXVIII 


'- 



 1 
.MAGAZINE 


JULY, 1925 


NO. 1 


Heredity-The Master Riddle 
of Science 


BY E. M. EAST 
Professor at Harvard University; Author of "!vfankind at the Crossroads" 


Ä
"'o..

 HIS is a courtesy title 

M like that of the retired 

 ITJ a army officer. Heredi- 

 ." T 
 
' ty had been until late- 
ly the master riddle of 
- science. Twenty-five 


 years ago it was a syn- 
onym for mystery and 
a text for discourses on the unknowable. 
Not so to-day. In a quarter of a century 
laws of heredity have been formulated as 
definite and precise as those of physics and 
chemistry. The mechanics of the two tiny 
cells which unite to hand the spark of life 
from generation to generation in our world 
of animals and plants have been analyzed 
with a clear-cut accuracy hardly to be ex- 
pected when dealing with such entangled 
phenomena. 
Without overstepping fact one may 
say that genetics, the science of descent, 
has been the most profitable branch of 
twentieth-century biology. The term 
profitable refers primarily to the world's 
intellectual advancement and not to fi- 
nancial gain, but even with the latter 
meaning in mind one can make some 
rather broad claims legitimately. 
Genetics has made possible better 
strains of livestock. :Meat production is 
more rapid. Food utilization is more 
efficient. Disease is less to be feared be- 
cause of resistant stocks. :Milk yields are 
increasing steadily. Both sheep and goats 
produce longer and stronger wool, or finer 
and more glossy wool, according to the 
heritage allotted them. 
Among plants there is the same story. 


New types specialized for different pur- 
poses are constantly being created. Novel 
varieties appear in increasing numbers 
year by year, and though the great ma- 
jority of them are probably little better 
than the older types they are designed 
to replace, here and there a strain stands 
out whose inherent merits make it worth 
millions. In fact, if one studies the chief 
varieties of farm crops now grown, he 
finds scarcely a single one which was 
known to the world fifty years ago, so 
rapid has been the man-made evolution of 
the vegetable kingdom. 
All of this is very interesting and im- 
portant, no doubt. A dinner, a pair of 
shoes, and an overcoat are matters of 
moment to the shivering wretch at the 
rôtisserie window; and those who make 
them easier to obtain deserve our grati- 
tude in lieu of the royalties we do not 
pay on their discoveries. But no biolo- 
gist likes to feel that the true goal of genet- 
ic work lies in adding loaves of bread and 
bales of wool to the world's supply. He 
fervently hopes to aid those functions of 
mankind which rate somewhat higher 
than alimentation, believing as he does, 
with Anatole France, that food ingestion 
is a humiliating process which might well 
bave been relegated to a larval stage 
after the manner of the insects. 
Inscribed on the Delphic oracle were 
the words "Know thyself," and this, 
says Cervantes, "is the most difficult les- 
son in the world." Here is a motto 
twenty-five hundred years old which, like 
most aphorisms of its kind, bas been im- 


VOL. LXXVIII.-I 


Copyrighted in 1925 in United States, Canada, and Great Britain by Charles Scribner's Sons. Printed in 
:K ew York. All rights reserved. 



2 HEREDITY-THE l\IASTER RIDDLE OF SCIENCE 


possible of realization. On
y in the 
twentieth century has mankmd begun 
to peer behind the veil which shrouded 
his inmost nature. How can one know 
himself when in ignorance of the endow- 
ments which make him what he is? The 
indi çidual is wholly and solely the prod- 
uct of his heredity and the environment 
in which he finds himself, and unless he 
endeavors to learn what he can regarding 
the limitations and the possibilities thus 
allotted, he does no justice either to him- 
self or to his posterity. 
\Ve may rebel against a statement 
which assigns to free will a narrow choice, 
we may poke fun at what many have 
called "Calvinistic predestination in sci- 
entific guise"; but the facts remain. Let 
us think a moment, however, before we 
scoffingly pass judgment. Is a feeble- 
minded child likely to become President 
of the United States? \Vill the boy with a 
club-foot win medals at the stadium? Can 
the individual with a cleft palate become 
an orator of note? Of course they cannot 
do these things. Their heredity circum- 
scribes their world. Is it strange, therefore, 
that there should be bounds for each one 
of us beyond which we cannot pass? 
Yet this idea is the homologue of pre- 
destination only in part, and therein lies 
hope. "'hat genetics tells us is that 
heredity allots to each certain possibili- 
ties; whether these possibilities are ful- 
filled wholly or in part depends upon cir- 
cumstances, The only sure prescription 
for a tall and stately mien is a proper 
ancestry; but if one wishes to make the 
best of the bargain after having had his 
ancestors chosen for him, he should look 
to his food, his rest, his recreation, and 
his habits. A child will not become great 
unless he has greatness in his make-up, 
but he will not become great under any 
circumstances if his talents are kept rolled 
up permanently in the proverbial napkin. 
It is unlikely that a time will ever come 
when the expert can predict with accuracy 
what will be the outcome of each and 
every human mating. Certainly no one 
wishes to try to select parents or to for- 
bid parentage except in rare cases where 
the legacy to the next generation is prac- 
tically certain to be a terrible thing. But 
even now one has the opportunity to 
learn much regarding his or her genetic 
possibilities by interpreting their ances- 


tral histories in modern genetic terms. 
One can predict absolutely whether a cer- 
tain union will or will not produce numer- 
ous dominant abnormalities which are 
only too common in the human race. 
He can predict with relative accuracy- 
that is to say, he can calculate the chances 
for and against-whether this same union 
will produce mental and physical defec- 
tives of the recessive type-the type which 
can lie hidden for a series of 'genera- 
tions. Such information is useful, and it 
is to be hoped that more and more persons 
will come to use it for tre sake of their 
own happiness. The good of the race will 
be promoted thereby, but this need not 
enter into their consideration. Individual 
selfishness can here act as a stimulus to 
racial betterment. 
There is, however, a use to which ge- 
netic knowledge may be put which prob- 
ably has even greater social significance 
than the one just mentioned. The pro- 
cesses by which hereditary traits are 
handed on cannot be described with the 
simplicity and elegance of the law of 
gravitation. Being somewhat complex, 
and disturbed by many conditions not 
easily controlled, they can often be dealt 
with more easily by considering averages 
only. In this they are a good deal like 
life insurance, where calculations which 
give very accurate results when large 
numbers are concerned, are relatively use- 
less for individual cases. In the same 
manner, the generalized findings of ge- 
netics have possibly their most pertinent 
application to problems of social welfare. 
They may not often give us an immediate 
solution to the difficulties which our com- 
plex society finds at every turn, but with 
them in mind one does have the ques- 
tions involved sharply defined. 
Are you a lawyer? Genetics gives you 
a better conception of where human re- 
sponsibility begins-and ends. Are you 
a minister? It shows how variable are 
the needs of spirit and of body among 
different individuals. Are you a physi- 
cian? It enlarges your opportunities for 
successful treatment of all the various 
human ills, for the hereditary endowment 
of each one of us looms large in every 
pathological condition. If you are none 
of these, if you are one of the millions of 
citizens whose vocations seem to imply 
about as much usefulness for this type of 



HEREDITY-THE l\IASTER RIDDLE OF SCIENCE 3 


biological knowledge as for training in 
the integral calculus, do not forget that 
you live in a democracy and have a vote. 
You will be called upon time and again to 
make a personal decision as to the merits 
or demerits of various proposals relating 
to marriage and divorce, to education, to 
immigration, to conditions of living which 
affect the public health, and to various 
other matters which concern the welfare 
of this and of future generations. And, 
as \Yiggam says, "one can approach very 
few of such problems intelligently without 
some knowledge of heredity, because he 
is then in total ignorance of one of the 
largest forces that enter every moment 
into human life, human character, and 
social destiny." . 
So much for our plea that a public hear- 
ing be accorded to genetic results. It is 
the outgrowth of such a sincere convic- 
tion that it would need no apology even 
if the statements were emphasized again 
and again; but it is a cardinal point in 
advertising one's wares to shift to an 
actual demonstration of merits before 
the prospect is quite bored to tears by 
exultant panegyrics. Unfortunately, this 
latter task is beset with difficulties. One 
must admit it even though such a frank 
avowal is the height of rashness. The 
primary intention in this article is to give 
an outline of genetic philosophy, to put 
down in as few words as possible the essen- 
tials of the general conception of heredity 
which has grown out of the fifty thousand 
or more original researches on the subject 
that have been published during the past 
quarter of a century. And there's the 
rub. One is all at sea in any science with- 
out a grasp of the generalizations; and 
generalizations, though easy enough to 
understand, are far from being entertain- 
ing. Specific illustrations, how sex is in- 
herited, what makes one man tall and 
another dwarf, how inbreeding uncovers 
the defects that are the only really genu- 
ine family skeletons, these are interesting 
enough to divert the weary; but the 
trouble is, they cannot be appreciated 
properly without a little preliminary 
drudgery on principles. The reader is 
invited, therefore, to consider this essay 
in the light of an initiatory training de- 
signed to show whether he is worthy to 
become a repository of the esoteric secrets 
of the crut. 


The visitor to the genetic laboratory, 
wishing to appear sophisticated, often 
says, "Oh ! you are studying the Mendel- 
ian Law," a remark which wearies the 
professional host more than a week of 
hard labor. With as much justice one 
might ask the chemist if he is studying 
the Daltonic hypothesis or the physician 
if he is applying Galen's rules. Yet there 
is this to be said: the beginning of the 
study of heredity as an exact science 
does date from the first real appreciation 
of Mendel's experiments on the garden pea 
carried out in the tiny monastery garden 
of the 
Ioravian town called Brünn; and 
this was only twenty-five years ago. 
Genetics was born and christened be- 
cause of Gregor Mendel, not because he 
was such an intellectual giant that he 
could analyze and codify the complex 
results which had bamed his predecessors 
in hybridization work, but because he had 
the really brilliant idea of simplifying 
his experiments to the point where he 
was dealing with only one or two varia- 
bles at a time. Where heretofore botan- 
ists had crossed plants differing by hun- 
dreds of characters and had been be- 
wildered at the apparent chaos of their 
data, 1Iendel used varieties which differed 
by one single character. This lone char- 
acter he followed through generation 
after generation with the carefulness of 
a master workman, and obtained results 
so simple that he was able to give them 
their correct interpretation. Only when 
he was satisfied that he knew what hap- 
pened when one character was under con- 
sideration, did he try to steer his way 
through the maze of complications pro- 
duced when varieties differing by two or 
three characters were used. 
We have passed far down the road since 
then, but on looking backward we see 
that lVlendel's work was merely the first 
clearly carved milestone and not the be- 
ginning of the highway. The immense 
amount of study of the results of carefully 
controlled matings among both animals 
and plants all has pointed to a single type 
of cell mechanics as the basic feature of 
heredity. It is the same for man, mon- 
keys, mosquitoes, and melons, Sexually 
reproducing animals and plants, what- 
ever their type, wherever their habitat, 
varied as may be their manner of living, 
behave in the same way as regards inheri- 



4 HEREDITY-THE rvlASTER RIDDLE OF SCIENCE 


tance. The controlling agents of heredity 
are the cell organs known as chromo- 
somesc The universe of genetic affairs is 
the universe of activity of bodies so small 
that one must magnify them some 
twelve hundred times to be able to see 
them at all. But when one does follow 
their cyclical history through m.odem 
high-powered lenses, he finds .theIr be- 
havior as regular as the revolutIOn of the 
planets. And what they do is what con- 
trolling agents of heredity ought to do as 
judged by the results from thousands of 
controlled matings in the breeding pen 
and garden. Of the comings and goings 
of these little heredity machines we knew 
a great deal long before Mendel's time, 
but we had to wait until long after his 
time to learn the connection between the 
phenomena. 
1\ ow what are the chromosomes, and 
how do they behave? Recall first that 
animals and plants are structures, like 
housesc Their bricks and stones are the 
cells, their growth is by cell division. The 
real, worth-while, active portion of the 
cell is the nucleus, a globular world bust- 
ling with the business of life. The rest of 
the cell, including the cell-wall which 
looks so important under the microscope, 
is the mere by-product of this business. 
The directors of the nuclear activities are 
the chromosomes, so called because they 
stain easily with aniline dyes. When a 
cell is ready to divide, each entity of this 
cohort takes up a definite position and 
splits longitudinally into two parts, thus 
giving the two daughter cells the same 
number of chromosomes possessed by the 
parental unit. 
Since the cells of each living species are 
characterized by a particular number of 
these bodies, and since every new indi- 
vidual, in the ordinary course of events, 
is produced by the union of two cells, it 
is clear that unless some provision were 
made for reducing chromosome numbers, 
there would soon be nothing but chromo- 
somes in the world. In fact, 'Veismann, 
the great German zoologist, who was the 
first to appreciate the importance of the 
chromosomes, predicted long before the 
process was discovered, that such a re- 
duction division is both a physical and 
logical necessity. 
\\nat actually takes place is this: 
'''"hen the germ-cells-eggs or sperms- 


are formed, the chromosomes line up in 
pairs and only one of each pair passes to 
a daughter cell. One member, and only 
one member, of each pair-it is a matter 
of mere chance which-goes to take up 
residence in each of the new domiciles. 
Perhaps they draw straws, who knows. 
At any rate, in species where the chromo- 
somes differ among themselves in size and 
shape, one can actually see that there is a 
pair of each type and that the mature 
germ-cells possess one complete set. The 
fertilized egg, which becomes the new 
organism, is therefore a machine with a 
double quantity of parts. 
It is not difficult to see that in this ar- 
rangement there is a complete basis for a 
theory of heredity. Assume in the first 
place that each chromosome is compara- 
ble to a string of freight cars loaded with 
mysterious substances which determine 
the various characters possessed by the 
individual. The organism, then, has at 
its disposal two complete sets of these 
determiners, one of which has been re- 
ceived from the father and one from the 
mother. When this creature, whatever it 
may be, becomes an adult and produces 
eggs or sperms, they will have only one 
complete set of these trains freighted with 
character determiners. Any particular 
egg or sperm will possess one representa- 
tive of the first pair of trains, and it will 
be a matter of chance whether it came 
from the father or from the mother; simi- 
larly, this same germ-cell will have a 
representative of the second train, which 
also may have originated in either father 
or mother; and so on through the whole 
series. Thus there is a definite orderly 
means by which characters pass from one 
generation to another, and generally 
speaking this process is one by which any 
given germ-cell receives one and only one 
character determiner from pairs of such 
determiners which have come from the 
maternal and from the paternal side of 
the house. 
Unfortunately for those who want a 
royal road to learning but fortunately for 
evolutionary progress, the actual affairs 
of life are a little more complicated than 
we have made out in the above descrip- 
tion. It will have occurred to the reader 
th
t if each. chromosome is really a train 
freIghted wIth character possibilities and 
that if each one of these trains is carried 



HEREDITY-THE l\1ASTER RIDDLE OF SCIENCE 5 


over bodily to a germ-cell, the whole of 
the possibilities with which this train is 
loaded must come from either the father 
or the mother, as the case may be. But 
such an eventuality would not have suited 
Mother Nature, who wants great varia- 
bility among her children in order to 
evolve better strains. For this reason, 
that is to say to provide for maximum 
diversity, there is a point when the germ- 
cells are maturing when each pair of 
freight trains may exchange cars. Train 
number one can exchange only with its 
homologue, the second train number one 
from the other side of thehouse,and the ex- 
change must take place in a definite man- 
ner; but experiment has determined that 
it does take place, and many of the laws 
of this exchange have been worked out. 
In more concrete language, then, the 
character determiners contained in a pa- 
ternal chromosome may sometimes be 
linked together in inheritance because 
they are all carted over to the germ-cell 
by this carrier appointed for the duty; 
but in other cases breaks in the linkage 
occur because of an exchange of contents 
between the two carriers which form a 
homologous pair. 
If now one gets clearly in mind that the 
characters of an organism are fixed by 
numerous germ-cell determiners or genes 
except as their development may be pro- 
moted or retarded by enviromental con- 
ditions, that each body-cell possesses a 
pair of each of the genes, one contributed 
by the father and one by the mother, 
tha t these genes are unchanged by their 
close association yet work together in 
developing the tissues and organs, that 
the two genes forming a pair of homo- 
logues may be unlike and therefore may 
function differently, that there may be 
any combination of the choice of one out 
of each pair of genes in making up the ge- 
netié constitution of each germ-cell, and 
tha t fertilization is a chance affair and 
does not occur more frequently because 
of a particular germ-cell constitution, he 
is then acquainted with the operation of 
the more important machines in the 
heredity workshop and is ready to take up 
the consideration of their output. Two 
simple cases of inheritance will show what 
happens. 
The body-cells of man contain forty- 
eight chromosomes, thereby giving oppor- 


tunity for a most extraordinary recombi- 
nation of the characters by which the 
parents differ; but for our purposes here 
all but four can be disregarded if we 
remember that the other chromosomes 
may contain genes which to some extent 
modify the development of the charac- 
ters controlled primarily by the four 
chromosomes used in the illustrations. 
Suppose we consider first a pure brown- 
eyed person, let us say a native of the 
south of Italy. 'Where does he get his 
brown eyes? And why do we say he is a 
pure brown? Why are not his eyes blue? 
As a matter of fact his eyes are blue. 
Everyone has blue eyes except albinos. 
We simply don't see the blue because it is 
covered up by the brown. He is a brown 
because in addition to the genes for blue 
eyes he has genes for brown. And he is 
pure for brown because each member of 
one of his pairs of chromosomes contains 
the gene for brown. Thus he can transmit 
only the brown condition to his children 
for all his germ-cells possess this power. 
Similarly a blue-eyed person transmits 
only blue eyes because neither member of 
the pair of chromosomes controlling that 
type of eye color possesses the gene for 
brownness. 
What happens, now, if this pure brown- 
eyed son of Italy marries a blue-eyed 
daughter of the Northland? All their 
children will be brown-eyed, though not 
so deeply brown-eyed as their father. 
The brown color is the dominating color, 
and it is produced as usual even though 
the determiner for it came from only one 
side of the family. 
This fact does not seem odd, but the 
next step in the series, the result when 
children from this cross marry children 
from a similar cross, is a little more aston- 
ishing. Generally speaking, that is to say 
if we have a large family with which to 
deal, three-fourths of the children are 
brown-eyed and one-fourth are blue- 
eyed. The blue-eye trait, recessive as it 
is called, has appeared again. 
For explanation of this occurrence we 
must remember the behavior of the 
freight train gene carriers. The hybrid 
children in each case are hybrid for 
browneye-blueeye because one chromo- 
some gives a brown-eye and one a blue- 
eye inheritance. When their germ-cells 
are formed one-half possesses genes for 



6 HEREDITY-THE l\IASTER RIDDLE OF SCIENCE 


brown eyes and one-half genes for blue 
cyes. The problem of what occurs at the 
u
ion of two such individuals, therefore, 
is simply the problem of the union of fe- 
male germ-cells which we may regard as 
half brown and half blue with male germ- 
cells that are half brown and half blue. 
And we may work out for ourselves the 
possibilities by a very simple experiment. 
Take a soft hat to represent the father 
and place in it 100 marbles, half of them 
brown and half of them blue. Then take 
one of those bedecked creations of the 
modem milliner and place in it yet an- 
other 100 marbles, half brown and half 
blue. This represents the mother. The 
next step is to draw one marble from each 
hat. This represents the first-born. Con- 
tinue thus until you have a large family 
and you will find that about one-fourth 
of the time two brown balls have been 
drawn, about one-half of the time one 
brown and one blue ball have appeared, 
while the remainder of the drawings have 
given two blue balls. Three-fourths of 
our make-believe family are brown-eyed 
because that color dominates, but genetic- 
ally there are two types with different en- 
dowments to hand on. 
Our second illustration will be of a very 
different character, but the results we 
will find to be similar. It has to do with 
defective mentality. Feeble-mindedness 
is a group term which includes various 
kinds of abnormality. For practical 
purposes, however, one may consider 
that there are only two types, one the re- 
sult of disease or injury, the other due to 
defective germ-cells. Probably seventy- 
five per cent of all cases of mental defect 
is hereditary due to abnormality in a 
definite gene. It has an effect recessive to 
normal. If two normal germ-cells unite 
to produce a child, one can rest assured 
that that child will never show defective 
mentality except as disease or injury may 
intervene; and in the latter case the de- 
fect will not be transmitted by the pos- 
sessor. So also the little one whose heri- 
tage is one defective and one normal 
germ-cell will be of normal mentality. 
I>ossibly he or she will not be as well pro- 
vided with brains as a "pure" normal 
but true feeble-mindedness will never b
 
in e\idence, for the defect is recessive to 
the normal. For these reasons also two 
such cross-bred persons, though appar- 


ently normal themselves, will produce 
feeble-minded children occasionally. 
Roughly about twenty-five per cent will 
be thus characterized. Furthermore two 
feeble-minded persons, since they possess 
no genes for normal mentality, will give 
rise only to feeble-minded offspring. 
Suppose now we combine these two 
specimens of heredity. What happens if 
the cross is a blue-eyed normal person 
with a brown-eyed defective? As one 
might expect, there is nothing excep- 
tional in the first generation. Each domi- 
nant character manifests itself in the man- 
ner already described. But let two such 
cross-breds mate and a new phenomenon 
presents itself. Recombination, that key- 
stone of the whole genetic structure, oc- 
curs. Since each germ-cell must contain 
one of each pair of genes, normal or de- 
fective and brown or blue, and since there 
is equal opportunity for forming each 
combination, four germ-cell types will be 
produced in equal numbers, viz. brown- 
eyed normal, brown-eyed defective, blue- 
eyed normal and blue-eyed defective. 
The problem of what takes place in 
matings where such germ-cells have the 
opportunity of meeting at the mating of 
two similarly constituted hybrids of this 
kind can be solved by marking half of the 
brown and half of the blue marbles used 
in the first experiment with an N for 
Normal and the other half with a D for 
Defective, and again drawing pairs from 
the two hats and recording the result. 
Experinlentation of this kind is not silly 
and leads to an appreciation of the laws of 
probability hardly to be gained in any 
other way; but there is an easier method: 
merely to work out an answer to the 
questions set. Since there is equal oppor- 
tunity of each of the four types of germ- 
cells produced by the female in this make- 
believe mating to meet the four types pro- 
duced by the male, just write down those 
combinations. 'Vhen they are totalled up 
it will be found that there are nine brown- 
eyed normals, three brown-eyed defec- 
tives, three blue-eyed normals, and one 
blue-eyed defective. And an examination 
of the records with regard to whether the 
dominant characters come from only one 
side or from both sides of the house will 
show how these individuals will transmit 
their respective heritages. 
Perhaps this brief introduction to the 



HEREDITY-THE l\fASTER RIDDLE OF SCIENCE 7 


mechanics of heredity will seem to be a 
sandy foundation for a genetic philos- 
ophy, but it is not. It forms a solid basis 
for a new social outlook. 
Just as chemically we are a collection of 
molecules, genetically we are a combina- 
tion of more or less independently in- 
herited characters whose germ-cell repre- 
sentatives are the genes. The genes are 
self-perpetuating bodies which grow and 
divide through long periods of racial his- 
tory, yet retain their individuality and do 
not vary in the functions they perform. 
Yet in rare cases they may change. They 
may take on new constitutions. And 
when they do, a new variation, a new 
trait, appears. In fact this is the only 
means by which something really differ- 
ent can appear, the only raw material 
for the hand of Evolution. 
In spite of this queer arrangement for 
descent, however, we are not put to- 
gether like a mosaic pavement. One 
gene usually affects many characters, and 
one character is presumably the effect of 
many genes. Such a provision was a par- 
ticularly wise scheme on the part of N a- 
ture. It provides for variant combina- 
tions in a way which no other plan free 
from intricacy could possibly have done. 
It is the complementary device which 
allows the simple mechanical method of 
inheritance to provide unending variety. 
A change in a single gene, for example, 
and defectives are produced when the 
changed genes are received from both 
sides of the family; but there are probably 
hundreds of genes which shift the grade of 
defectiveness higher or lower, just as 
there are hundreds of genes which make 
for various grades of normal mentality. 
The genes, one may say, are the silver 
bromide and the rays of sunlight which, 
acting together, provide the opportuni- 
ties for an endless series of pictures; 
environment is the developer which 
makes or mars the result. It is foolish, 
therefore, to discuss whether heredity or 
environment plays the greater rôle in life. 
One might as well ask whether food or 
water is more important to the individual. 
Both are indispensable, but their func- 
tions are different. Our heritage is Na- 
ture's gift, closing some channels, opening 
others; the conditions or influences which 
surround us, the education we are offered, 
is opportunity stationed ready to measure 


what we do with our endowments with 
Einsteinian yardsticks which vary with 
the case in hand. 
These features of heredity lead one to 
a sympathetic understanding of human 
frailty and incompetence as different from 
that current in the nineteenth century as 
day from night. They give us what the 
mathematicians call the proper "set-up" 
of our social problems. Not necessarily 
do they remove all harshness from our 
dealings in society. To understand all is 
merely to forgive all, not to condone all. 
But with a clear insight as to what is 
needful for settlement we ought to go far 
toward the solution of our difficulties. A 
short time ago we cast aside the belief 
that every individual who thought dif- 
ferently or acted differently from our- 
selves was possessed. of evil spirits, but we 
still expect golden deeds from every hu- 
man goose. 
To know one's problem clearly is half 
the battle, but what about the other half? 
With this part we can, at least, make a 
beginning, thanks to the discoveries re- 
garding the mechanics of heredity. Con- 
sider feeble-mindedness. We certainly 
stand in a good strategic position with 
regard to it and can see just what results 
various methods of procedure will give. 
We now realize, for example, that feeble- 
mindedness can never be bred out, for 
normal mentality does not dilute it. De- 
fective germ-cells may be carried through 
several generations by normal people who 
are hybrid for the gene, yet these defec- 
tive genes will remain just as effective as 
if they were produced in the bodies of ab- 
normal individuals. Let two of them 
come together, whatever the type of mat- 
ing, and a defective child will be the re- 
sult. By cutting off the reproduction of 
these social unfits, therefore, we can go so 
far and no fartherc Thus if we are really 
to find the way out, it must be by the 
development of a eugenic conscience in 
the normal carriers of defectiveness, who 
are the true social menace. 
Other object lessons in the practical 
application of our genetic philosophy 
might be given endlessly. But we will 
withstand the temptation. If this article 
is to serve its purpose, the reader must 
outline his own particular pet problem 
and by applying genetic principles try to 
find the solution. Seek and ye shall find. 



Youth and Peace 


BY GEORGE A. COE 
Author of" A Social Theory of Religious Education" and "What Ails Our Youth?" 


HY is it that, though 
the whole world de- 
sires peace, the road 
thereto remains undis- 
covered? Tha t the 
peoples of the earth do, 
as a matter of fact, 
prefer a peaceful exist- 
ence is clearer to-day than ever before. 
The naïveté that classifies some nations 
as "good" and others as unscrupulous 
trouble-breeders is becoming impossible. 
It is put out of countenance, for one thing, 
by investigations of the origins of the 
Great \Var. This catastrophe was not 
manufactured out of whole cloth by one 
or more rascally powers; it grew, as a 
cancer grows, out of and upon a system 
of conduct, domestic and foreign, that was 
accepted by the nations as normal. 
The theory, moreover, that the real 
cause of our recurrent explosions is the 
underground machinations of "big busi- 
ness" is turning out to be too simple. 
\Yhatever be true of a few makers of mu- 
nitions, capital as a whole does not look 
upon armed conflict with satisfaction. 
It is true that the" go-getters" risk stir- 
ring up war, and that they conduct them- 
selves in ways that lead on to it. Yet they 
accept it as a necessary evil; it involves 
an expense-if you please-that they 
would like to save. 
Even the active defenders of war, who 
place military preparedness in the front 
rank of national policy-even they, as a 
rule, deplore the necessity. As for the 
few persons who find in fighting a normal 
and desirable part of conduct, it is fair 
to sunnise that this finding of theirs is a 
rationalization of one's military occupa- 
tion, or of militaristic attitudes, or of 
the conduct of the nation that they love. 
Why, then, since we really aspire to 
peace, do we not govern ourselves accord- 
ingly? This desire is not like that of an 
infant who reaches for the moon. the 
hindrances are within ourselves. A
e we 
8 


tempted to explain that "the other fel- 
low" won't co-operate with us, won't even 
meet us half-way? But we now know that 
he is like us, and that he thinks we are 
"the other fellow." 
Shall we say, finally, that peace delays 
because of inferior statesmanship in prac,,:, 
tically all the nations? Possibly this 
judgment upon our leaders has some justi- 
fication; but even so, why is it that the 
people keep in power men who are so 
inefficient in procuring for the people 
what they want? There is no resisting 
the conclusion that, on the whole, the 
rulers really represent the ruled, and that 
the great obstacle to peace, whatever 
this obstacle may be, is not foisted upon 
us by any special agency, whether fire- 
eating nations, or an economic class, or 
unwise statesmanship. 
What, then? Is some maliciously 
sportive devil making game of us? Cer- 
tainly the view is coming to be held by 
an ominously large number of persons 
that, undesirable-horrible-as war is, it 
cannot be prevented because we are es- 
sentially fighting animals. Strange to 
relate, however, this notion is spreading 
at the precise juncture in the history of 
psychology when the least scientific sup- 
port for it can be adduced. The instinc- 
tive pugnacity to which war is so often 
ascribed probably does not exist in the 
sense supposed. Evidence at hand indi- 
cates that fighting throughout the animal 
kingdom is primarily protective, and that 
it becomes aggressive only as an incident 
of efficient defense. We men are pugna- 
cious from habit and tradition rather 
than from instinct. What is instinctive 
is the angry rejection of simple noxious 
objects and conditions. The extension 
of this kind of simple reaction to the com- 
plexities of international relations takes 
place only through secondary incitements 
such. as propaganda, with its oversimpli- 
ficatIon of facts. In short, our pugnacious 
attributes do not create our international 



YOUTH AND PEACE 


strains and breaks; in war our capacity 
for pugnacity comes into the employ of 
other interests. We drift into hostilities 
as an incident of types of conduct that we 
take for granted. Just so, peace will 
arrive as an incident of some type of 
social conduct that at present we do not 
take for granted. 
Peace and war, then, are incidental to 
something else-strictly and literally inci- 
dental. It is not clear how we can effec- 
tively choose between them per se, for 
they are symptoms and consequences 
rather than real alternatives. Two girls 
sidled along the show windows of a city 
street, eagerly eying the jewels and the 
finery that were on display. "I will buy 
you this diamond ring," said one. "And 
I will present you with this satin gown," 
responded the other. But neither of them 
had a dollar. No more can we present 
ourselves with peace, or create a war- 
preventing mechanism, by merely :fixing 
our desires upon them. 
Far be it from me to belittle the possi- 
bilities that allure us in an association of 
the nations, a world court, and the out- 
lawry of war. They can get us forward 
both directly-by postponements, second 
thoughts, the composition of differences, 
a habit of co-operation-and indirectly 
by continually bringing to the surface the 
real causes and alternatives with which 
we finally must reckon. This indirect 
service will prove to be the major service. 
For juristic devices do not of themselves 
reverse ancient and accepted customs, 
nor create the motive forces that are es- 
sential for the required new types of con- 
duct. To attain permanent peace by any 
mechanism that human wit can devise is 
likely to be as difficult as to stop the 
traffic in alcoholic liquors by constitu- 
tional fiat. Is it credible that we can pre- 
vent war while the economic causes of 
conflict remain in full bloom? Or without 
dealing with the problem of surplus popu- 
lations? Or without achieving new atti- 
tudes and habits with respect to racial 
contacts? A mixed drink made up of the 
nationalisms that we know is hardly a 
promising prescription for a "head" pro- 
duced by the same beverages taken sepa- 
rately. "There, in our juristic schemes, 
are the motives that will stand the strain 
when a major crisis occurs, or even when 
a nation of first-class strength desires to 


9 


h
ve its own way with a people of insig- 
mficant strength? Already we have dis- 
turbing evidence on these points. 
The reason that we do not find the 
pathway to peace is that our hearts are 
set upon ends that are inherently incom- 
patible with it; we shall attain it only 
when we are devoted to activities, worth- 
while in themselves, that automatically 
include it. A shift in our every-day valu- 
ations-something resembling a conver- 
sion-experience-is required. It is re- 
quired not as a private, esoteric illumina- 
tion, but as a reversal of the forces that 
keep men in interaction even in domestic 
affairs. It will take the form, not chiefly 
of deeper appreciation of the horrors of 
war or the beatitudes of peace, but rather 
of a determination to make the piping 
times of peace less like a madhouse or a 
bull-pen. Suppose, for example, that we 
should take it into our heads that nothing 
on earth is more to be desired than the 
welfare of all children everywhere-that 
they should have enough to eat, that 
they should enjoy conditions favorable 
to health and growth, and that each 
should have the privilege of an education 
proportioned to his powers. Suppose, I 
say, that we believed this with all our 
hearts, so that it was an axiomatic "busi- 
ness proposition"; is it not clear that we 
then should be on the highway to peace? 
Such a conversion within the common- 
place might come to pass either slowly or 
rapidly. It might possibly be accom- 
plished by a gradual seepage of idealism 
into business and politics. \Ve educators 
like to think of social progress as a suc- 
cession of smooth transitions and painless 
learnings. Yet the new experience might 
make a thunderous entrance because of 
a long antecedent repression of con- 
science. \Ve might some day wake up to 
discover that the presuppositions of 
statesmanship had been reversed over- 
night, and we might witness the miracle of 
international law filled with a victorious, 
obstacle-spurning spirit of friendliness. 
But where, one will ask, is the capacity 
for this creative up-thrust through the 
crust of custom? There is an answer to 
this question, and there is only one an- 
swer: The creative spirit that shall renew 
and make glorious the daily task, the 
common round, will use the soul of youth 
rather than of age as its organ and instru- 



10 


YOUTH AND PEACE 


mente For we have to transcend prece- 
dent, to dare, to take risks, to scorn indi- 
vidual and class advantage. From of old, 
when statesmen have found themselves at 
the end of their rope, when something be- 
yond calculation and the weighing of ad- 
vantages was required, youth have been 
mustered out, and then even war has 
ÌJeen made morally sublime by their reck- 
less devotion. The same reckless devo- 
tion is required for the moral ennobling 
of our common day. Old men cannot 
supply it; they cannot go over this top 
any more than they could have gone over 
Vimy Ridge. The reason is not merely 
that they are old and stiff in the joints, 
either; their specific habits, formed under 
a set of contrary presuppositions, make 
them too contented with present valua- 
tions, too intent upon security, too reliant 
upon mere calculation. Our elder states- 
men lose life by seeking to save it; the 
paradox of saving life by not seeking to do 
so is a secret of youth. 
A rational expectation of early peace, 
bound up as it is with a rational expecta- 
tion of nobler thinking and acting in daily 
occupations, must rest, then, upon evi- 
dence that the youth of the world, or at 
least the youth who are destined for 
leadership, are ready, or getting ready, to 
reweigh our conventional values, and to 
act upon the findings. If our youth drift 
instead of rowing up-stream, we shall not 
have peace-or, for that matter, domestic 
decency-all the wisdom of the older gen- 
eration notwithstanding. The resources 
of youth, nothing less, can assure us the 
victory. 
How, then, are the youth of America 
taking life, particularly those who are 
likely to be the leaders twenty years 
hence? If we were to judge by what most 
strikes the eye and the ear in our colleges, 
we should infer that at least the young 
men have no horizon beyond an existence 
so stupidly conventional that bizarre 
enterprises and enjoyments must be de- 
vised as a relief from it. On the one hand, 
rigid social trivialities such as class cus- 
toms and costumes de rigueur, sometimes 
actually approved by the college adminis- 
tration and enforced by official or semi- 
official councils; the nonsensical social 
distinctions between classes, and between 
fraternity and non-fraternity men; the 
degenerative inbreeding within each fra- 


ternity; the apotheosis of the athlete; the 
mob-silliness that goes for loyalty to the 
team or to alma mater-this on the one 
hand, and on the other, the pitiful stretch- 
ing out, for achievement and for enjoy- 
ment, toward non-intellectual, and non- 
educative enterprises-this is the picture 
that regularly confronts us. 
The extremes to which college spirit 
sometimes goes-the rare blossoms that 
spring-help us to classify the plant. 
An alumni club, summoning its members 
and the professors to a "harvest home 
and jamboree," thus expatiates upon 
what makes a university: "If you are the 
wise guy we think you are, you know 
how. . . [the university] has come to 
life: Football, Spirit, Endowment-a live- 
wire Prexy, regular fellows for trustees-a 
corking good Men's Club, peppy student- 
athletes. . . and we are going to have a 
bunch at the dinner-we're all lining up 
for it. Read what Jack and Bill say: 
'Gosh! Sounds sort of interesting! 
How much?' 'Oh, that's easy. Two- 
fifty per. Gonna have the team 'n' the 
coach, th' band, 'n' a lot of High School 
fellows there. Some night, believe me.'" 
Here is an instance of student enter- 
prise: An announcement, circulated by an 
intercollegiate organization, says: "Sev- 
enty-five male students take part in the 
. . . opera . . . which is being produced 
at a cost of approximately $75,000, and 
which is perhaps the most extravagant 
and elaborate amateur theatrical ever at- 
tempted. The plot of the show concerns a 
Cinderella-type of girl named Susan who 
is very poor, but a most attractive artist's 
model. 1\1. N., who takes this part. . . 
is praised highly by critics over the coun- 
try. He will go on the stage in female per- 
sonation after graduation, and has his 
limbs insured against disablement for 
$25,000." 
What rôle in the world will be taken by 
students in whose academic experience 
athletics, fraternities, "proms," and "in- 
cidental college enterprises" are the "high 
spots," while intellectual pursuits and 
care about the tragic concerns of con- 
temporary society are the "low spots"? 
Here, for the majority, is habituation to 
mass-action of certain types, and to the 
following of leaders with a loyalty that 
often is intense and persistent, and some- 
times is blind. There is no occasion to 



YOUTH AND PEACE 


slur the values of such group-attach- 
ments; but against these values must be 
set a habit of partisanship (our team, our 
"frat," our college), passive acquiescence 
in conventional standards, and failure to 
do one's thinking for oneself. 
For the few, this sort of college life pro- 
vides training in and for leadership of two 
kinds. One can hardly imagine a more 
effective general training for merely ex- 
ecutive posts than the organized strenu- 
osity that is demanded of student man- 
agers of college enterprises of many sorts. 
On the other hand, there is training in the 
fashioning and manipulation of crowds. 
Note the cheer-leader at the game-what 
masterly technic in evoking simultaneous 
mass-emotion! Note, at the enthusiasm- 
meeting that precedes the game, the 
equally skilful transformation of an 
audience into a crowd. 
On both sides-the leaders and the led 
-this is preparation for a way of life that 
automatically makes for war. On the one 
hand, the mass, habituated to crowd- 
action on behalf of uncriticised loyalties; 
on the other hand, the leaders, driving 
themselves and their fellows through 
without any independent weighing of the 
costs and the results. Here we see our 
favored youth getting ready to conduct 
business upon the dog-eat-dog basis; the 
the church upon the sectarian basis; "our 
set" or " our class" upon the basis of privi- 
lege; our political affairs upon the basis of 
partisanship; our foreign commerce upon 
the basis of imperialism; our international 
relations upon the basis of national self- 
sufficiency, pride, and arrogance. 
As preparation for maintaining war in 
its status quo, specific military training in 
the colleges is a feeble aside as compared 
with this pervasive moulding of a war- 
producing mind, The significance of the 
R. O. T. C. itself does not lie chiefly in 
military drill and the teaching of military 
science. The military drill-masters and 
teachers are not getting on very much 
better, in respect to student interest, than 
the professors of language, history, and 
the sciences. Where the drill is elective, 
it is languishing and dying; where it is re- 
quired it sometimes keeps up a front by 
magnifying student officers, promoting 
intercollegiate competition, making much 
ado over dress and decorations, enlisting 
feminine interest (how old and familiar 1) 


11 


in uniforms and supposititious heroes and 
in general by lavish use of the spot-Iightc 
Here we see the military interest, not as 
a reasoned conviction and devotion, but 
as another of the conventional college en- 
terprises. It is no secret that students 
generally find the drill irksome, and that, 
of those who elect the advanced military 
courses, many are moved thereto by the 
very material pay that the government 
provides. Paid to take courses that al- 
ready are rewarded by being counted 
toward a degree! 
All this, however, is an external shell. 
The core of the corps is not in the drill or 
in the instruction, but in the habituation 
of the student mind to the orthodox view 
of national interest and policy. The 
constant use of certain unchallenged as- 
sumptions; the uncontested reasonings 
about preparedness; the unrebuked crea- 
tion of prejudices, the glamour already 
referred to, and the sanctification of the 
whole as loyalty-this is a real force-a 
force, certainly, that does not make for 
any affirmative purpose or mode of life 
that ever would rid us of war! Rather, 
this is education by propaganda that at 
most gets us ready to win wars and does 
nothing to replace present customs that 
automatically produce them. 
But this is not the whole truth about 
our academic youth. Many a student, 
though for convenience he outwardly 
conforms, never bends the knee of his 
spirit to these gods of shallowness. More- 
over, a cloud" as small as a man's hand " 
has appeared in our parched academic 
sky-rather, several of themc From both 
administrative offices and student halls 
"something different" begins to show 
upon the horizon. Here and there a col- 
lege president, as yet a rara avis, detaches 
himself from our social orthodoxy suffi- 
ciently to stimulate social criticism among 
students-yes, the free criticism both of 
the college society and of the great society 
that may entail rejection of even basal 
valuations of the present order. In the 
women's colleges there is a quiet ferment 
of thought that will make of the emanci- 
pation of women something more positive 
and contentful than we have foreseen. 
At many academic centres a creative urge 
is manifesting itself in the form of poetry, 
fiction, drama, and the independent re- 
ordering of thought and purpose. In my 



12 


YOUTH AND PEACE 


opinion, there is more readiness to look 
at actualities through one's own eyes than 
at any period since, as a freshman, I began 
to get acquainted with college situations. 
Let us see how this freshness of spirit 
bears upon the problem of world peace. 
Here are students-not a few of them, 
now-who, feeling that the academic 
atmosphere is stuffy, insist upon opening 
the windows of criticism. The curricu- 
lum as a whole now becomes an object of 
study, and prior questions are raised: 
What are we in college for? What are the 
major problems that we shall have to face 
after graduation? What do we need to 
know and think about now? Wherever 
such inquiries have been prosecuted by 
students in groups or committees, the re- 
sulting proposals for curriculum improve- 
ment appear to be entirely worthy to 
stand alongside the opinions of presidents, 
deans, and professors. Now, can anyone 
doubt that the raising of such questions 
even by callow youths tends to the dis- 
coveryof the real and permanent values 
of society? 
When several score students of a large 
institution, in conference assembled, sol- 
emnly resolve that the financial depen- 
dence of universities upon private wealth 
involves a danger; demand that professors 
shall be allowed to express their own opin- 
ions freely, and insist that students have 
a right to hear all sides of controverted 
questions-when youngsters carryon like 
this, what shall one think? Certainly we 
cannot with a whiff or a sneer put their 
questions into prison! These eager young 
spirits will deal with them in a manner 
more fundamental than that of my gener- 
ation. And this approach-this caution 
toward Mammon, and this insistence 
upon seeing all sides-is one of the things 
that a war-making régime cannot stand. 
Many-colored, as yet unfocalized, are 
these new rays. If for this reason we have 
not as yet, as some say, an American 
Youth Movement, nevertheless there is 
a manifest awakening of youth. Read for 
a year The New Student. Its news of do- 
ings and stirrings in many colleges; its 
judgments upon leaders and traditions; 
its scepticism of established standards; 
its touch of disillusionment (we know- 
all-about- it-and - it-doesn't-amount- to- 
much); its preference for the off side; its 
unblushing frankness-much of this will 


disturb us of the older generation, but it 
must be taken as incidental to an inde- 
pendent appreciation of life's values. On 
the other hand, read The Student Chal- 
lenge, conducted by students who, con- 
vinced that Jesus leads the way toward 
the deepest fulfilments, but that this way 
is blocked by the customs of society and 
of the churches, are encouraging the most 
drastic criticism of the ministry, the 
church, the college, the economic and the 
politicalorderc We shall smile, probably, 
when a poet among these enthusiasts 
sings to youth: 
"In you the Past inheres, on you the Future 
waits; 


All waits upon you . . . If you fail, God fails!" 
Yet, can there be any surer sign that God 
is not to fail than just such awakenings as 
this among the youths of our time? 
On two occasions great intercollegiate 
conventions of students* have dealt with 
race-relations, our economic sickness, and 
war itself with a poised seriousness that 
has not been excelled by any of our more 
adult assemblies. That they were con- 
ventions called in the name of religion, 
and closely conscious of institutional 
bonds, makes them all the more signifi- 
cant. We are going to have a "show- 
down" in the ecclesiastical world. If the 
churches continue to carry water on both 
shoulders their youthful members will see 
to it that there is less naïveté in the com- 
promise. What is more important is that 
their very youth makes for action, not 
mere contemplation. The number will 
increase of those who refuse to gauge their 
steps by the ultracautious. If this means 
that they will refuse belligerent service, 
they will do it, not because they shrink 
from hardship, or are unready to pay the 
cost of security, but rather because they 
are willing to pay now and in full. Even 
if the conscience of the extreme pacifist be 
a too stark and severe one, nevertheless 
his self-sacrificing stand performs an in- 
dispensable service in that it compels us to 
face the question of our ultimate valua- 
tions. In the presence of even a handful 
of sturdy young people who without 
whimpering take the " ragging" of a 
whole college on behalf of peace, we find 


*The Student Volunteer Convention at Indianapolis, and 
the Convention of Methodist Students at Louisville. 



THE COLLEGES AND 'VAR 


it less easy to dodge in and out among 
diplomatic schemes which, though they 
alleviate our woe, avoid paying the final 
cost of eradicating it. 
The spirit of our civilization has been 
fashioned to the tools with which it works 
-to machinery, compulsion, contracts, 
management-until we have forgotten 
what all this paraphernalia is good for. 
A great mill is our civilization. Hear it 
hum ! Yes, but what, in the last analysis, 
is the grist? "Because thou sa yest, I am 
rich, and have gotten riches, and have 
need of nothing; and knowest not that 
thou art the wretched one and poor and 
blind and naked." Sooner or later, in 
one form or another, the final alternatives 
between which we shall have to choose 
will be the simple human values toward 
which the critical youth of our time are 
lifting up their eyes. 
Peace waits for youth to find something 


13 


that! in youth's own judgment, is so 
preCIOUS that one must sell all that one 
has in order to possess it. \Ve of the 
older generation have not found any such 
pearl; we have not sold all that we have 
but instead we have endeavored to mak
 
ourselves secure in all that we have. As 
a result we have brought war upon our- 
selves, and are even now preparing for 
more of this old-man's-folly. "Old men 
for council; young men for war" (under 
the orders of the old men)? No. this is 
the philosophy of yesterday. It i
 a false 
philosophy, as the young have begun to 
see. \Ve shall be saved from its bale- 
ful influence by their clearer vision of 
what is worth while. 
leantime, we of 
the older generation could give no better 
proof that some remnant of wisdom 
abides in us than by stimulating youths 
everywhere to weigh for themselves our 
conduct of daily affairs, 


The Colleges and War 
BY OLIVER LA FARGE 
Author of "The Human Boy and the Microscope" 


n-Q

O"C'"-\W 
 these ?ays and t
es 


x the commg generatIOn, 
ill and especially that 
part of it which goes to 
.":& I college,advertised well 

 and often by ourselves 
Ä
7Çl and by our elders, ap- 
pears always to be a 
welcome topic for discussion. Not the 
least of our acts that have brought praise 
and blame impartially upon us have 
been those connected with future wars. 
Our activity or our lack of interest in 
R. O. T. C.'s and training-camps, the atti- 
tude of our college liberal clubs, above all, 
the oath of non-resistance taken at the 
Indianapolis conference last year and its 
consequences, all have become matters of 
considerable interest outside of our own 
groups. 'Ve ourselves-some of us-have 
declaimed passionately on all sides of all 
questions relating to war. 
Now it is time that some one of us at- 
tempted to sum up our own divergent aims 
and views, the ideas of men in colleges 
since the war, themselves not veterans, 


concerning warfare; and that the present 
writer intends to do, however incomplete- 
ly. He does not intend to take sides; this 
article is exposition, not argument. 
To follow us at all, it is necessary -to 
comprehend two fundamental theses from 
which both pacifists and non-pacifists de- 
rive their differing opinions, and which 
give us a certain unity, for all our dis- 
agreement. The first and greatest of 
these is our idea of the next war-a deep 
and very real horror of what it will bring, 
and a perception of it as something not 
vaguely and unreally in the far future, 
but imminent, actual, and most impor- 
tant. It may be that those of our years 
are more imaginative than our elders, or 
read the rotogravure sections of the papers 
more attentively, or are more credulous; 
at any rate, one finds universally, when 
the next war is discussed, that boys in 
college gasp at the terrible things our 
elders are busy inventing and preparing 
for our delectation. There is, for in- 
stance, the much-hailed zeppelin, a crea- 
ture of infinite possibilities. Again, it 



14 


THE COLLEGES AND \VAR 


seems sure that in a decade the long-range 
gun, shooting seventy-five-odd miles, will 
be a common possession of all nations- 
for the gun that was used to frighten 
Paris was as surely and much more im- 
mediately prophetic as was the little can- 
non used at Agincourt "to frighten the 
horses "-and that means that you could 
shdl Boston from off Newport, or Brus- 
sels from Germany. Gases have been 
perfected since 1918, and air-plane bombs 
"improved" until they hold two tons of 
T. N. T., a quantity sufficient to flatten 
several city blocks. Above all these, one 
marvels that the human race should haye 
been capable of being actually willing to 
invent anything as incredibly horrible as 
the acid fire of the new phosphorus bomb. 
These things exist, they are being stead- 
ily "improved," it is unsafe for any coun- 
try not to do so-a nice commentary on 
our civilization. 
There can be little doubt that the next 
great conflict will see a mobilization of 
industry as well as of fighting men on a 
large scale. In the last war the countries 
at large, as well as their armies, were ac- 
tive participants; in the next, blows 
struck behind the lines will be as impor- 
tant and as tactically correct and neces- 
sary as blows struck against the forces in 
the field. This means that no civilian, 
however remote from the front, will be 
safe. It means that the destruction of 
cities will be, not like the relatively fee- 
ble · German bombing of London, a stunt 
to cow the populace, but an act of con- 
crete and defensible military value. In 
the last war what few laws of war civili- 
zation had evolved were either outgrown 
or frankly ignored. And now we are pro- 
viding, in long-range guns, aircraft, gases, 
and bombs, the means of just such de- 
struction as this freedom from restraints 
allows us. 
In view of all these things, most of us 
feel that, at the end of the next first-class 
war, victor or vanquished, we shall find 
ourselves equally wrecked; that the next 
war will be, in fact, civilization's own sui- 
cide. That is not merely a resounding 
phrase, we mean it and we visualize it 
dearly. To follow the statements of 
opinions that this article contains, the 
reader must take time to make that next- 
war picture vivid for himself. It is in all 
our minds and it is essential. 


Secondly, we are disillusioned and a 
little bitter concerning the nature and vir- 
tue of war itself. We who were too young 
to fight did most of our growing up under 
war's shadow. We learned early to read 
the newspapers, following war's course. 
For four years, more or less, those of us 
especially who lived in the East made lit- 
tle plan for a career, little choice of a pro- 
fession, except this, that when we were 
old enough we should go and figh t. We 
did not see the war through our own eyes, 
but through the eyes of well-meaning peo- 
ple. We were told, and we believed, that 
this war, while it was terrible, was never- 
theless only the birth-pangs of a new 
heaven and a new earth. A world safe for 
democracy-no more wars or armies-a 
host of young men purified by fire- 
statesmen not devoted to self Of nation, 
but to mankind-we believed all that. 
Then, when we moved out into the rela- 
tive independence of college, the first 
beauty of the peace began to dawn upon 
an expectant world. 
Let it be here understood that the 
writer sincerely believes we did right to 
enter the war, and admires the sacrifice of 
the men who fought in it. But the world 
was very abrupt in its manner of teach- 
ing us that our elders' talk of Crusades and 
Galahads was untrue. To us at school, 
the soldiers were heroes, men of a new 
stamp and mould, for whom we must try 
to be worthy, since fate decreed that we 
could not join them. We discussed how 
we must change ourselves before they 
came back. Then they did come back, 
and we found that they were only men, 
some of them toughened, some refined, by 
war, most of them unchanged, with men's 
vices and failings, and an earnest craving 
for a few good celebrations before settling 
down. Some of us feel that the war hurt 
them more than it helped them; most of 
us that the good and evil balanced, and 
that it was proven once again that man is 
by nature a fighter, that there is needed no 
earth-shaking change to turn a tailor into 
a soldier or a soldier back into a tailor. 
As for the present state of the world- 
the imminence of many small wars, tinder 
for great ones, the corruption of states, the 
competition in armaments-the world has 
changed not one whit. The Great \Var 
was merely a great war, a large-scale 
prophet of worse to come, and nothing 



THE COLLEGES AND WAR 


more. The cause was righteous, most of 
us believe, but our old idea of the armies 
of Christ and Antichrist arrayed has dis- 
appeared. In its place has come the con- 
ception of that struggle as an abominable 
necessity. We study history eagerly these 
days, and reading it, considering the pres- 
ent news, we foresee the next war, now 
distant, becoming some day just such an- 
other necessity, made so by man's stu- 
pidity, unless the world change greatly. 
What, then, do we intend to do about 
it? That is where the split comes. 
Roughly, there are two schools of thought: 
the complete, absolute pacifists and the 
non-pacifists. The name of the second 
group is negative, but so in large measure 
is their doctrine. 
First, then, for that much-discussed 
group, the complete pacifists. They star- 
tled us last year at the Indianapolis con- 
ference, a meeting connected with the 
Inter-Church World Movement; there 
some four hundred of them took a solemn 
oath never, in any circumstances, to en- 
gage in war or any occupation furthering 
a war. They swore it and they meant it. 
Since then the movement has continued 
and grown to some degree, particularly 
in the Western colleges. It is a new 
Quakerism that may well become, what 
it intends to be, a power to give pause to 
bellicose statesmen. 
It is a matter of interest that whereas 
in France pacifism is very radical in its 
associations, and so also to some degree in 
Germany, here it begins as a church 
movement, and the church to-day votes 
rousingly Republican in most States and 
Democratic in the solid South. The ar- 
gument by which they urge the almost 
categoric duty of their oath is that no one 
can call himself a Christian who is will- 
ing to fight. Which, as a matter of fact, 
is absolutely true. 
In its mass, and in the manner of its 
initiation, this movement does smack of 
the unfortunate animal emotion associ- 
ated with a certain type of revivalist ef- 
fort, and some of its older leaders are 
noted religious spellbinders. The more 
intelligent men who have joined it, how- 
ever, are serious and carefully advised. 
Although they are in a church move- 
ment, they subscribe to the aim and 
method, but often are not interested in 
the particularly Christian argument. 


15 


Nothing is worse than war, they say- any 
s
crifìce is worthy if it will help avert that 
dIsaster. And if that is admitted, they 
ask, what else can they do? 
Someone, they say, must make a be- 
ginning, else we shall stand still forever. 
That beginning has been already over- 
long delayed. There are pacifists in Eng- 
land; on the Continent is the Youth 1\love- 
ment, international, pacifist, and capable 
of growth. Now is time to start a snow- 
ball here too, that it may gather weight 
and grow to a tremendous size. So they 
begin, knowing that their few numbers 
can do nothing, but with the intent that 
some day their numbers shall not be few. 
Those men have courage. 
They are not to be confused with peo- 
ple who wish merely to avoid unpleasant- 
ness; the road of the pacifist was not easy 
in the last war, probably it will not be in 
the next. Weare developing a new type 
of slacker nowadays, a very wise fellow. 
He is, often, charmingly frank. In the 
last war he went to Leavenworth-or he 
knows men who did. Either he wants to 
save his skin, or he is a real conscientious 
objector, but admits to not being of the 
"blood of martyrs." So he goes to the 
R. O. T. C. and prepares himself for a 
berth in the adjutant-general's office or 
the personnel department. One cannot 
like such a man, but he will be useful, 
being intelligent, and will release a more 
eager fellow for the front. No shirker 
wants to go to Leavenworth. They know 
better now. 
There is one thing that must be said 
concerning the complete and sincere 
pacifists before we leave them. There is 
no half-way in their movement; either it 
must be a complete success or it will be a 
dismal failure. Either they must demili- 
tarize not one country, or one group of 
countries, but the whole world, or they 
will, by half success and localized success, 
bring forth not peace, but war. They well 
may weaken a nation seriously, while still 
leaving it enough of a fightmg force. to 
maintain a serious and harmful defensIve 
war, though with sure defeat at the end. 
Therefore, and if they mean what they 
say that nothing is worse than war, they 
sho
ld abandon all things to make them- 
selves missionaries of a new gospel; they 
must devote themselves day and night to 
rolling their snowball. You cannot save 



16 


THE COLLEGES AND WAR 


the world in the intervals of selling bonds 
or of attending classes. 
Opposed to these thorough pacifists is a 
far larger group, ill-defined, unsure of it- 
self, and divided, for which there is no 
better name than the non-pacifists. A 
member of it said recently that if every 
country in the world was joining the 
pacifists at the same rate per cent of its 
arm-bearing population, he too would 
join them gladly, but since they weren't, 
he felt it his duty to know how to handle 
a rifle, and to hold himself free to serve. 
They subscribe in full to the two funda- 
mental theses-the barrenness and horror 
of war-that the writer has laid down. 
But they say also that there are condi- 
tions under which life is insupportable. 
More than that, in certain circumstances 
it is better that the country be laid waste 
than lose its soul. This is reminiscent, 
perhaps, of Belgium, and the brave words 
of Albert in the early, black days of 1914. 
With him, they say that it is better to go 
down fighting, lose prosperity, art, free- 
dom in battle, than sell the freedom to 
keep the rest in shame. High talk if you 
choose, and involving a terrible sacrifice 
for an intangible thing, but to many of 
them the principle behind it is one main 
and important reason why they are still 
ready, however reluctantly, to bear arms. 

10re practically, they argue the dan- 
ger to the world that has been already 
mentioned here, of the pacifist movement 
at this time. The world is unregenerate 
and full of warring nations. Some, like 
France, for all her Communists, latently 
aggressive because they are weak and 
afraid; others, like Japan, because they 
are new, cramped, full of vitality, with 
their way yet to carve in the world. 
Many of them, whatever their views on so- 
cial questions, see in Russia a potent factor 
for trouble, with her semi-peaceful pene- 
tration of Soviet republics, her govern- 
ment supported in no small degree by an 
army, the mass of which is actuated by 
the peculiarly deadly aggressiveness of 
fanatic belief in a gospel. War, with its 
attendant suffering and unrest, is meat 
for Russia. Most of them have been, 
recently, profoundly shocked by the news 
of secret armament in Germany. That 
nation has made them feel that she could 
not be trusted. Not that that feeling is, 
in itself, a judgment either way on the 


rights and wrongs of Germany's cause 
since or before the war. But they felt 
once that if any nation in Europe was 
going to be indefinitely peaceful, it was 
Germany. They feel that no longer. 
At the same time, our dearly beloved 
Balkan states have expanded to occupy 
most of southeastern Europe, and have 
new neighbors, the whole group forming 
combinations even more competent to 
stir up international trouble than the old 
gang of 1912-13. 
Again, many hold that the Monroe 
Doctrine is the expression of a serious 
duty that we owe to Latin America, and 
that, while there are still left any body- 
snatching nations in the world, we have 
no choice but to stand ready to protect 
our neighbors. 
In the face of all this, the non-pacifist 
group cannot agree that it is serving the 
cause of peace to swear non-resistance. 
They have some confidence in the peaceful 
nature of this country and in its now unde- 
veloped poten tialities for good; they in tend 
to enforce its peacefulness and do what 
they can to make it use its powers well; 
therefore they think it should be well 
armed. This country, to them, may be- 
come in some measure a policeman, using 
persuas
onand at times threats to maintain 
international equity-even as when, for in- 
stance, the threat of our fleet prevented the 
invasion of Venezuela by European forces. 
It is up to them, then, by their power with- 
in the country, to see that our strength 
is not misused, but their best intentions 
would come to naught if this country's 
man-power was completely pacifist. 
More than all, they think that prob- 
ably, when a goodly portion-say fifty per 
cent-of our young men had taken the 
pledge, we should find ourselves at war. 
Those who had turned pacifist then would 
have to stand by and see their brethren 
fight-which would be intolerable-or 
else break their oath; in which case it is 
the same as if they never had taken it. 
This last argument is one to which they 
can see no answer. If we could, by law, 
abolish utterly in this country all armed 
forces of every kind, the matter might be 
debatable, but while any men offer to 
fight for them, none of them can stand 
aside and watch. However much they 
mayor may not approve of the actions 
of our troops in certain small, tropical 



THE COLLEGES A;..J"D \\'AR 


countries, they would hate, having sworn 
pacifism, to receive protection from our 
Marines during an uprising in, say, 
Guatemala City. Therefore, again, they 
will not swear to non-resistance while 
they know that one soldier stands ready 
to protect their pacifism. The situation, 
the act, is inconceivable. 
What then does this group intend to do 
about preventing the next war? That 
war should concern them greatly, since 
they have made it their own funeral, in a 
literal and rather ghastly sense. They 
intend to make it as obvious as they can 
to our politicians that internationál re- 
lations and prevention of war concern us 
now, to-day, as vitally as any domes- 
tic problem. The old, much-battered, 
League of Nations, the \V orld Court- 
they want to make of them a beginning, 
just as the pacifists are making their be- 
ginning. They think little or nothing of 
the Disarmament Conference, since it 
seems to them that a lot of men who will 
be very old or dead when the next war 
breaks out, glorified themselves by limiting 
the construction of an obsolescen t, if not 
already obsolete, type of war-machine. 
The non-pacifists wish to bring the 
family of. nations to the point where it 
would be safe, not alone for themselves, 
but for all the world, if they joined the 
pacifists. Now, they think, they do far 
more for peace by staying on the active 
list, just as a policeman is more efficient if 
he has a club. \\'ith the pacifists they 
form a group which will make it increas- 
ingly difficult, as they grow older, for 
this country to engage in war of any kind 
unless they are convinced that the cause 
is not only just, but worth the price. 
Unfortunately, in the non-pacifist but 
anti-militarist group is found, not only a 
certain number who are thinking, but 
also the great and inert majority of boys 
at college to-day. The truth is, that be- 
tween the horror of the next war and our 
disgust with the last, most of us have 
come not to think about war at all. l\lost 
boys a t college accept the general thesis 
that war is an abomination, that they 
detest it, and that they will fight only 
when desperately necessary; beyond that 
they do not go. They repeat words, but 
do not meditate at all. 
Should there bë one serious war scare, 
VOL. LXXYIII.-2 


17 


to shake them out of their present atti- 
tude that war is remote and unthinkable 
there will be a great change. If it i
 
brought home to them how actual and 
important a matter is that maintenance of 
peace which they have now accepted aca- 
demically and without feeling, then that 
body of our elders who control our foreign 
relations will receÌ\oe a serious jolt. They 
repeat the sense of this article now; it is 
not. a matter of persuading them; only, 
theIr minds turn away from the matter. 
\Ve do not care to read war stories; we 
discuss war very rarely; yet even now war 
is being forced upon our attention, with 
the result in the one group of a slight 
movement into training-camps of boys 
who loathe the military life and loathe it 
more the more they see of it, and, in the 
other, of the new non-resistant pacifism. 
In time this awakened interest may seri- 
ously affect the political parties because, 
for instance, no one who really dreads and 
clearl y foresees the next war can hold 
with our policy of spicndid isolation. 
This article reads in part like an assault 
on all the works of our elders; and it is 
true that many of us feel that they are 
the villains on the world's stage. Partly, 
that is inevitable; it would be hard for 
them to rebuild their whole world anew to 
suit our conceptions. .Moreover, for them 
the next war may well seem distant; it will 
pass them by. They have been, always, 
concerned with domestic matters, they 
were born and bred in Splendid Isolation. 
But we grew up among Allies- u Glori- 
ous Allies" -from very early our eyes 
were turnecl across the Atlantic; we took 
sides. and saw the whole country tak- 
ing sides, in an affair that seemed purely 
European, and yet concerned us near- 
ly. \Yhile our voices were changing and 
our first beards growing, American troop
 
fought in Europe and an America
 domi- 
nated a great European peace. \\ e hayc 
learned to think of this country as bound 
in the fate of the world; we cannot in our 
minds conceÌ\oe of it all alone, unrelated 
to any other. Yearly the ocean is less of 
a barrier; we grow steadily nearer. to 
others in time of travel and commul1lca- 
tion. The time has come when the e\"er- 
recurrent cyclones of Europe may engulf 
this country too; we cannot help but 
think internationally. 



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With one voice they chanted in Swahili: "Who will come to the wedding of our Master Rustporti?"-Page 19. 


The' Perfect Servant 


BY ELEANOR STUART 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY DENYS \VORTMAN 


. . 
it:. ." HE news of Adrian 
, --- I ,'. Rustport's a ppoin t- 
ment as assistant com- 
i T AI nùssi?ner of the L>;ke 
...
 I 
 ProvInce came to hIm, 
__' as to the dwellers on 
· 

 the western shore of 
the Great Nyanza, just 
three days before his actual induction to 
office. 
His father will be recalled as the Nimrod 
of the nineties who first exploited Uganda, 
and who pioneered in the magazines as 
well, recording sporting ,\irica, which is 
to-day's commonplace but was then an 
adventure rivalling arctic romance. 
Thus his son had sought Uganda at the 
war's close, as a pious Arab visits his 
father's tomb, and had there received a 
telegram from the Colonial Office tender- 
ing him the position of assistant admin- 
istrator under Sir Batham Doyle. He 
18 


accepted, with wonder that his existence 
was known to those exalted persons who 
appoint and disappoint servants of the 
Crown in far places. 
After the runner had delivered his 
weighty message, which he had brought 
from Kampala in the cleft of a forked 
stick, he consumed a pint of those big ants 
-uncooked-which form the fashionable 
midday meal of the \Vaganda, before he 
slept on the ground for an hour, and de- 
parted over a too green hill to the rank foli- 
age bordering a tumbling, muddy stream. 
Adrian could have pushed him from his 
camp gladly, so eager was he to have his 
acceptance on its way. But he was wise, 
a thoughtful, cautious, courageous young 
man, and knew that in the strange social 
fabric of the world he was called to govern 
such deeds spring from native mouths to 
English ears, creating the terrible force 
called prejudice. 



THE PERFECT SERVA
T 


He watched his messenger trotting off 
on the far side of the river, his cleft stick 
held out before him as Hermes might have 
carried his twisted, stiffened serpents, and 
in less than an hour after he had started 
on the trail, Adrian's safari was following 
him to Kampala, tents folded, skins and 
trophies packed. 
Nine men preceded him and seven more 
were at his back, but with one voice they 
chanted in Swahili: 


"Who will come to the wedding of our :\laster 
Rustporti? 
Bwana Roosiavelti? 
No, for he is dead. So who will come to the 
wedding of our master? 
The Gondokoro? 
No, for he is not a brother to white men. So 
who will come to the wedding of our'mas- 
ter? 
Who but this safari, who will ask money and a 
goat and much rice from him in his glad- 
ness." 


The new commissioner grinned. 
"Cheeky devils, they'll be choosing the 
lady next," he whispered to himself. 
Girls meant nothing to him but things 
that danced and ate ices, spent money, 
and wilted at a job of work. 
He brought the eyes of possession to the 
three ensuing days of travel-new eyes to 
discern the spirit of his porters, and to 
study the unfolding hills of waving green, 
spattered with many lakes and criss- 
crossed with the flight of blue birds, blue 
butterflies. And the ground he walked 
on was criss-crossed too with those pa- 
thetic trails made by black feet from time 
immemorial, leading from water-hole to 
water-hole, from lake shore to lake shore. 
On every side of him smiled blue flowers 
of lucid beauty, and on the petals of the 
loveliest of these, he saw sometimes a 
fearsome beetle, sometimes a loathsome 
creeping thing that. made him sick, as 
when at Cambridge he had seen the big- 
gest bounders in the university dance with 
girls who were remote in their loveliness 
as these blue flowers of this strange way- 
side. At the noon rest he read his pam- 
phlets on "sleeping sickness," feeling that 
a commissioner should be informed about 
the scourge of his countryside, and when 
he raised shocked eyes to the pearl-gray 
sky above him, he prayed that he might 
leave this tumbling mass of hills a little 
better than he had found it. 
He was met by a motorcycle and a 


19 


white messenger from Sir Batham after 
which he travelled with rapidity O\
er the 
smooth, foot-trodden paths into Kam- 
pale:. He admired its golf course, drank 

ea III 
he best of its houses, waited upon 
Its natIve ruler, and started by motor to 
Entebbe, where Sir Batham received him 
with a courteous vacuity. 
"Ruling in Africa," he said, "is like 
playing the violin. It can only be done 
by doing it. Young men come here with 
theories, with aspirations, with books at 
their hacks and dreams in their heads but 
h ' ' 
t ey.re no good. They're as green as 
EnglIsh June. Study the native-you'll 
never know him-but study him, and here 
and there you'll get just a glimmer that 
lights you through." 
"Thank you, sir," Adrian answered. 
"Those I had with me seemed decent fel- 
lows, clean, courteous, and not shirkers." 
"You didn't have to cross them, Rust- 
port. That's where they are like chil- 
dren. If you cross them they turn nasty, 
and just when you are congratulating 
yourself that you're able to go on pleasing 
them, by Gad, they get bored and turn 
sour on your hands. You can have this 
room across from mine for your office, and 
come to me whenever you choose for ad- 
vice. Oh, there's an old fellow here who 
served your father. Ever since I gave 
out that you were to come herè as deputy, 
he's been knocking around waiting for 
you. I hear his voice under the window 
now. You had better see him. I hear 
he's a good old fellow and a good valet to 
boot. He speaks Swahili, and they tell 
me you know that too." 
"I can speak it a little, but I'm hanged 
if I can understand it when it pours out of 
the mouths of the natives." 
Sir Batham hit a gong on the table be- 
side him and told the man who answered 
its summons to allow N'sib bin Tippoo to 
come in. A moment Of two passed in si- 
lence before the teak door swung inward 
for the stately approach of an aging man, 
splendid in calm dignity, black as to face, 
bare as to feet, the white turban of an 
Arab luminous above his sweeping blue 
joho, bound in silver, which left his wide 
shoulders with the set and fit of a Bond 
Street tailor's paddock coat. Beneath 
this garment he wore a loose nightshirt of 
very fine cotton-the kanzu of the Co- 
rnaro boy. 



20 


THE PERFECT SERVANT 


He bent his supple body in greeting- 
his face lovable, if pock-marked, vanished 
in the process; but when he stood erect 
again Adrian was drawn by the look of 
intense admiration bent upon him. 
After Sir Batham's quick word of per- 
mission, N'sib spoke, and in English. "I 
come," he began, "to take up my duty in 
faithfulness for the son, as I did always 
for his father, for which he gave me these 
photographs and money, and two letters 
by his hand, no machine-made letters, 
after he went home, two months before 
his dying. I ha\"e also your picture when 
you were a little child in England. Ah!!J 
the man cried in delight, "you were a 
fierce child, l\I'kali sana-very fierce, in- 
deed, no nurse, no teacher could come 
near to you." 
Adrian was surprised at this rendering 
of an innocuous childhood, but Sir Bat- 
ham explained to him parenthetically that 
this statement was but the routine of well- 
bred compliment. 
N'sib was unfolding a handkerchief of 
Manchester manufacture and hellish pat- 
tern. He produced from it photographs 
and letters exactly corroborating his state- 
ments, with the exception of the sub-com- 
missioner's infantile ferocity. 
Adrian stood face to face with his for- 
mer self in long clothes, in a sailor suit, 
and later as he had appeared in his second 
term at Eton. His father's pictures in- 
terested him immensely. He had never 
seen them before; they had been taken in 
Zanzibar, in white clothes, as a souvenir 
of the hospitality he had received there. 
His eyes moistened as he looked at these 
things. He read the letters, N'sib's rec- 
ommendation, instructions as to luggage 
being forwarded, before he said with deci- 
sion: "I will try you as my servant and 
hope for the satisfaction which my father 
expressed with what you did for him." 
"I begin from this hour," N'sib an- 
swered quietly. 
No story of Africa can be told without 
a registry of that scene in which a master 
chooses the servant who suits him. To 
those for whom the strange life of the 
Dark Continent has charms, the body-ser- 
vant-the bearer-becomes an interpret- 
er of all that life offers; whether of happi- 
ness, or of grief, of comfort, or of material 
dissatisfaction. 
In the days that followed, N'sib never 


spoke, except when he was spoken to; he 
was never a moment late, or a minute 
early; his quiet voice was the first sound 
Adrian heard in the morning. His" kwa- 
heri" (for happiness) was the last sound 
he heard at night. Often he caught him 
running his dark hand, with unspeakable 
satisfaction, o\"er his evening coat, as it 
hung from the back of a chair; often he 
found him standing by the uncurtained 
window of his bedroom darning his silk 
socks with the beautiful smoothness and 
regularity which amazed him. 
He was not, however, skilled in the re- 
placing of buttons, which he sewed so flat 
against the fabric that they could not be 
forced through the buttonhole. A curi- 
ous sense of protection came to him from 
this man's service, and he often congratu- 
lated himself that N'sib did not concern 
himself with any part of his life but his 
wants at the table, the condition of his 
wardrobe, and the amount of assistance 
he required in dressing. For Adrian had 
not the knack of conversing lightly with 
servants. 
His social life was a very serious part 
of the work of administration. Night 
after night he dined out, or gave dinners, 
as the case might be. His hours in office 
were long, the questions they presented 
were ofttimes perplexing, but the case of 
Pedro Coutinho y Pes was the most diffi- 
cult thing that he, or Sir Batham, had to 
handle. 
Involving stolen lands, considerable 
profits in cotton, an old government sanc- 
tion to a scheme little understood, and 
but partially recorded, he often spent an 
hour recapitulating what might be real 
evidence or mere perjury. It was in the 
midst of his investigation and the doubts 
that grew from it that Coutinho, himself, 
came to Entebbe, and with him Anda- 
lusia, his eldest daughter. They had not 
been in the town half an hour before the 
news of her beauty was received at Sir 
Batham's table at tiffin. The eight men 
at the top of the local government were 
discussing the curry, with yellowed forks, 
and gamboge gravy steaming in their deep 
plates, when l\Ir. l\larsden, the mission- 
ary, observed in his quiet way that Pe- 
dro's daughter had affected him a little 
like the "l\loonlight Sonata." General 
Bates, dictator of the King's African 
Rifles, had laughed in forthright fashion, 



THE PERFECT SERV:\
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"I come," he hegan, "to take up my duty in faith- 
fulness for the son, as I did ,tlways for 
his father."-Page 20. 


declaring that he had seen her anrl asked 
her to dance with him as much as she 
possibly could on the ensuing evening. 
"If a girl like that," he added, "should 
get to London with 
anv kind of an in- 
tróduction at all, 
she would upturn 
empires. She can 
sing like a witch- 
she can play the 
piano very nicely 
indeed, and if she 
looks like the 
'Moonlight Sona- 
ta' I would like to 
photograph that 
work, if the copy- 
right permits." 
A slow feeling of 
disgust came over 
Adrian. He knew 
what these beau- 
ties in the back- 
waters of barbar- 
ism always looked 
like. Hè knew in- 
stinctively. A line 
of G i I be r t ' s re- 
curred to him, de- 
scribing some fe- 
male in the 'Bab 
Ballads': "Her 
principal feature 
was eve and her 
staple 
 accomplish- 
ment gush." He 
put the whole mat- 
ter from his mind 
until tea-time, 
when Pedro called, 
with Andalusia at 
his side. 
Pedro was 
strong, well-knit, 
merr\'. His hard 
hand
 gripped with 
friendly pressure, his wicked dark eyes 
rolled conceitedly in a bullet head covererl 
with waving white hair. His was a 
strange, cat-like distinction. One felt he 
gloried in himself and sympathized with 
him in his satisfaction. 
But Andalusia was cast in a mould of 
perfection; her hair was fine and \'ery 
black, her pallor inclined rather to gray 
than to cream, her strange eyes were 


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faultless-their expression of brooding 
tenderness lured. all upon whom they 
gazed to some reClpr
)Cal, some answering, 
endearment. Her httle feet carried her 
slender height to 
conquest. If her 
clothes were in 
advance of the de- 
mands of the wil- 
derness, one ac- 
cepted them as the 
outward and visi- 
hIe sign of pater- 
nal pride. 
She had not 
been seated in Sir 
Batham's pretty 
drawing-room for 
ten minutes before 
the entire person- 
nel of his govern- 
ment was sitting 
there too. 
Adrian felt his 
heart rise in a 
strange, slow 
surge. He did not 
walk home with 
her, only because 
he was not quick 
enough. He was 
appalled at the 
feeling which en- 
gulfed him. Slow- 
ly, regretfully al- 
most, he went to 
his bedroom, 
standing at the 
window where 
N'sib so often 
sewed, watching 
the gay party in 
its progress along 
the road to the 
lake. 
General Tru- 
man, inspector of 
colonies, arrived that evening by steamer 
from Kisumu, and a bedroom was assigned 
to him, whose veranrla and bath he shared 
with Adrian. His sen'ant was a )Iadras- 
see, and in the unspoken tyranny e
er- 
cised bv an Indian o\'er the negroid Arab, 
N'sib ''''as soon waiting upon this gentle- 
man's gentleman when not actually occu- 
pied with his own master. 
The two borly-servants had more than 


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22 


THE PERFECT SERVA
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one language in common, and their voices 
might often have been heard in what 
seemed a toneless monologue, except for a 
quick and occasional question. Their 
masters became friends with less rapidity, 
but equal firmness, so that two absorbing 
sympathies dawned in Adrian's soul-the 
one for a wonder-woman, the other for an 
old soldier who had served his coun try well. 
Andalusia's music meant nothing to 
him. He would sit in a corner of the bo- 
raza at tea-time while she played her gui- 
tar and sang the dance-songs of remote 
Spanish districts. He never understood 
her voice, for here and there it developed 
a dry, cackling qua1ity which offended his 
critical faculty, but her hands, her face, 
and the turn of her glorious shoulders en- 
slaved him pleasantly. She talked but 
little, but laughed a good deal; the even 
line of perfect teeth surprising him again 
and again with their flash and brilliancy. 
He indulged in dreams of his power to 
dissuade her from the use of strong ma- 
genta and challenging yellows, of fantas- 
tic patterns and of perfumes so strong 
that he reçoiJed from them. He also pic- 
tured her in the house that he would one 
day inherit from his uncle, and knew her 
to be lovelier than any lady there, repre- 
sented by some dozen portraits from the 
master hands of generations now no more 
than names and the humble dust. 
He was able to clear away aspersions 
and sinister indications in the matter of 
Pedro's land and cotton interests. The 
whole thing began to look more like care- 
lessness and less like dishonor. He worked 
with steady intensity and deep satisfac- 
tion, establishing a reputation for industry 
and acumen, and as a reward he drew near- 
er to the girl whose father he had benefited. 
Pedro saw it with delight, but he was 
a Latin and never let a situation with any 
woman alone for a single instant. 
Adrian, however, was a cautious man, 
and the more the father's desire became 
apparent, the slower he was to publish 
his own. Not that he was any the less 
impressed with Andalusia, but that curi- 
ous Scotch attribute of withholding what 
is sought, suspended him in the act of 
choice. Dignity and a habit of keeping 
his own counsel preven ted gossip. Every 
man in the government, the merchants 
and railway officials from Kampala-in 
fact, every male who possessed the entrée 


to Pedro's house and garden-admired 
Andalusia so frankly that Adrian's prefer- 
ence was screened. 
One evening in late November Sir Bat- 
ham gave a dinner, with music and danc- 
ing to follow, and by a strange exercise of 
ingenuity Adrian inrluced Andalusia to 
look at a collection of beetles with him- 
a collection which had been sent to Gen- 
eral Truman in the hope that, as he was 
something of a naturalist, he might give 
advice as to its disposal and sale. Glass- 
covered boxes were placed upon tables in 
a darkened room, while with a flashlight 
the couple moved froIIl insect to insect. 
It was an entrancing hour to Adrian, and 
Andalusia's laughter floated softly through 
the shadowy space, and as his torch illu- 
minated a hideous insect, it would also 
light up a bit of her beauty, her hand, her 
throat, her cloud of blue-black hair. Their 
interview prolonged itself. It was General 
Truman's voice,' in the corridor, which 
brought them to a sen!?e of other places, 
but when he entered w.ith Pedro, Adrian 
saw at a glance that the lively Latin was 
about to make a prete:pse of displeasure. 
He spoke to his daughter with visible 
acerbi ty and was as m.enacing to Adrian 
himself as he dared to .be. 
General Truman pressed the young 
man's arm with a very cryptic smile be- 
fore Pedro took his daughter, himself, to 
the room where the guests were dancing, 
and Adrian, shocked out of his reflective 
satisfaction, moved into the open air and 
paced up and down before the long house 
with its brightly lighted windows. Half 
an hour afterward he entered the dancing 
room, going at once to Andalusia and ask- 
ing her to dance with him. 
"My father is too terribly angry with 
me," she began piteously. "I'm sorry 
the beetles interested me so much that I 
forgot time as it passed us." 
Involuntarily he held her a little closer. 
"He'll forget all about it in the morning," 
he said lightly, "when he reflects how per- 
fectly safe I am and how well disposed to 
him. " 
"I know," she answered, "he will not 
fight with you, but he will punish me. 
Portuguese men have a rigid sense of pro- 
priety-for Portuguese women." 
A little sense of injustice ruffled Adri- 
an's serenity-not of an injustice toward 
Andalusia, but toward himself, He felt 



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1< r011l a drawiJlg by Denys Wortman, 
He \\ould sit in a corner of the boraza . ' ,while she played her guitar and sang the d,mc. ,"onj:'i 
of remote Spanish districts.-Pagc 22. 


..!3 



24 


THE PERFECT SERVANT 


a lack of sincerity. The scene was 
trumped-up, factitious, cheap. But for 
this he might have declared himself 
frankly. Instead, and in silence, they 
gave their young strength to the music 
and turned and trod as the dance tune 
dictated and the space permitted. 
He did not say good-night to Pedro, but 
smoked with General Truman, an amused 
sense of the pomposity of Latin civiliza- 
tion diverting him as he listened to com- 
ments on the scene before him. He was 
determined to withhold his proposal for 
Andalusia no longer than the next after- 
noon. He watched her depart with her 
father, believing that life with him would 
be a great relief to her, and in the early 
morning a new care came up in the gov- 
ernment world, which called upon him for 
incessant labor till past ten o'clock. 
Crossing the hall with a memorandum 
for his chief, he met General Truman com- 
ing in from his morning saunter. 


"Pedro," the old gentleman cried mer- 
rily, "has sent his girl off to Naivasha to 
visit some woman. She left for Kampala 
to join Captain Merriman and his wife; 
they are to go direct to Kisumu, and Mrs. 
Merriman is to convoy the beauty down 
the line and get the trip free as her re- 
ward. l\1rs. Belling has told me all this 
news from her bedroom window, her 
classic brow darkened wi th a boudoir cap." 
Adrian was inexpressibly shocked. 
"How un just!" he cried. "How terri- 
ble! Poor girl, she was having a delight- 
ful time here." 
"Well, she will there, too," Truman 
answered lightly. "Beéiutifulladies, pro- 
vided they like admiration, always do 
have a good. time." 
His memorandum delivered, Adrian 
rushed to his room, wrote a formal dec- 
laration, coupled with an offer of mar- 
riage, and then turned gravely to N'sib, 
who was mending a blue sock with purple 
cotton, in his usual place at the window. 
"N'sib," he said gravely, "I want you 
to hire a motor and, taking this letter, 
start at once for Kampala. I want you 
to give the letter in to the hand of l\1iss 
Coutinho and tell her that, if she likes 
what I say in it, she is to telegraph from 
Kisumu. You understand?" 
"I understand," N'sih answered faintly. 
He folded his work and passed from the 


room, drooping a little, as it seemed to his 
master, 
His attitude at parting haunted Adrian 
through hours emptied suddenly of their 
chief interest and foremost comfort. He 
recalled the old woman in the fairy-tale 
who rolled a second cheese down the hill- 
side to bring the first one back. 
. General Truman drove wi th him to a 
naturalist's bungalow far from the town, 
and he lost himself for a little while in dis- 
cussions of the eternal plan to turn papy- 
rus profitably into material from which- 
like wood pulp-paper can be made. On 
the return drive General Truman slept 
comfortably and Adrian was left with his 
mind like a parade-ground upon which 
warlike thoughts manæuvred. By the 
time they had regained Entebbe, he had 
decided to go to Pedro with his demand 
in form, but his chauffeur, one of those 
Scots who swing back and forth from al- 
coholism to inspiration, told him that 
Pedro was still in Kampala, so that the 
telephone seemed the simplest method of 
approach, except for the capricious pub- 
licity which sometimes attends its use. 
Waiting is the'world's hardest work, but 
Adrian did wait day after day with anx- 
iety about his servant and the annoyance 
of a new valet to offset his blank surprise 
that Andalusia had not answered him. 
On the evening of the day following 
N'sib's departure, a messenger had ap- 
peared at Government House with a con- 
servative report of N'sib's illness and 
presence in Nemerembi Hospital. Early 
next morning his master obtained speech 
with one of the staff, to learn that N'sib 
was really very ill with pneumonia. 
"He is very delirious," the doctor said, 
"and as we have known him for a long 
time and are very fond of him, he has 
been put into a private room and has spe- 
cial nursing. He is a dear old man, and 
we all hate to see him suffer." 
Adrian fought depression manfully, but 
Sir Batham saw that he was blue and 
tired, and General Truman attempted to 
entertain him as if he had been a child. 
On the fourth day of N'sib's illness, he 
proposed their going on the lake in a 
motor-boat for a change of scene and oc- 
cupation. It had rained two or three 
times in the twenty-four hours, in incon- 
sequent Uganda fashion, and the sky was 
still pearl-gray, the earth steaming. Heat 



THE PERFECT SERVANT 


encompassed one like a sticky paIJ while 
yet a wind blustered unexpectedly' blow- 
ing steadily from no quarter. ' 
They took with them food and a bottle 


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': \Ve have to," Adrian an
wereù with 
a sIgh. "The validity of his title 'to all 
those cotton lands involved our honor 
or the intelligence of our predecessors. 


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.\drian's own sorrow, his Own "holme, left him as he loo\...ed do\\n on the f,!Cling man \\ho..e olle idea. 
\\as scnoice. -Page 27. 


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of wi?e and left the land's green glow for 
the Island-dotted waters of the Great 
Nyanza. The general wanted to see hip- 
pos at home, with no thought of killing 
them, so they ran down the shore toward 
Jinja, where the boatman said he had but 
lately seen a hippo family. 
It was as they returned from this quest 
that General Truman, in his quiet \"oice, 
began to speak of Pedro and expressed a 
certain guarded surprise that the govern- 
ment had taken him so seriously. 



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Those things make or break the influence 
of people like us in a land like t hi.;." 
Truman drew a long sigh. c'l first met 
that fellow Pedro," he observed. "in Indo- 
China twenty years ago. His wife was 
with him then-the only beautiful Indian 
I ever saw." 
Adrian said nothing, but his knee
 
seemed suddenh' to unlock. He felt as if 
he sprawled, faM1Íng on fate, praying to 
be sparerl the hlow that had fallen. 
"And was this Indian woman," he 



26 


THE PERFECT SERV:\
T 


asked manfully, "the mother of the inimi- 
table Andalusia?" 
"Oh, yes," Truman answered, "and 
Andalusia suggests her. That was why I 
was thankful to see that you knew your 
way about when Pedro tried to force your 
hand the night of the dance. His grand- 
children, his son's family that is, I saw in 
Colombo three years ago. They're In- 
dians, little Baboos, who had never been 
in the East until that winter. Their Eng- 
lish education was called 'being brought 
up at home,' and yet you would see such 
brats in any native compound in the 
length and breadth of India. The mother 
is half French, half Austrian, and a blonde 
at that." 
Adrian shuddered, and a vision of the 
acres of his coming inheritance sickened 
his soul as if an undeniable reproach had 
been spoken in the voice he most loved. 
'.1 felt rather sorry," Truman contin- 
ued, "for that young
fellow Blakely, that 
railway chap from Kampala. He really 
loved that girl, of all you young men who 
enjoyed her beauty. Gad! The merging 
of race and race is a bitter process for 
those to whose lot it falls, and old Pedro 
was a wicked old man when he offered a 
native girl marriage." 
"Do people know?" 
"Yes," Truman replied. "Sir Batham 
tells me he had his wife in 
Iombosa one 
season. " 
"I didn't know it was generally known," 
Adrian observed stiffly. "I, myself, have 
never mentioned it to anyone." He 
would not confess that he had never 
guessed or heard this literally dark secret. 
"I think you should. Things of that 
sort should not be hid. They complicate 
life too tragically." 
Silence fell upon them, and the little 
boat nosed into the darkened shore while 
Adrian's mind, sickened and confused, 
prayed heartily that Andalusia's answer 
might be "no." He no longer loved her. 
He pitied her with all his soul, but he 
knew that he would never even try to go 
through with his bargain. He would 
rather tell her frankly that he had not 
known her origin, that he could not im- 
pose her strain upon his descendants, and 
that the sense of native blood in an equal 
had made her detestable to him. He felt 
physically sick as he thought of his chil- 
dren as cousins of those Baboos of Cey- 


Ion. Like some marauding cur pelted 
with refuse, he dodged the missiles of his 
thoughts. 
A government runner gave him two 
written messages on his arrival, copies of 
telephoned words. Nemerembi Hospital 
had twice called him and asked in turn 
that he call them. In less than fifteen 
minutes he was hearing that N'sib could 
not last another twenty-four hours-that 
his mind was cl
ar, and that he wanted to 
look upon and to speak with his master 
and the son of his master before he left 
this battered body to recapture youth in 
the garden of the Prophet he had senTed. 
"Now if you are coming to Kampala," 
Doctor Cook's kind yoice continuerl, 
"make it soon, and give this old hero a 
treat. He is living for you as he li\"ed for 
your father. In my mind's eye I can see 
those two splendid examples of different 
races walking up l\lengo Hill in their dig- 
nity and friendliness-it must be twenty- 
five years ago." 
" Cook," Adrian cried eagerly, "I'm 
getting into a motor as soon as I can get 
through a little work here. I'll be with 
you before morning." 
"I thought you'd come," the doctor 
said quietly. 
When Adrian set out, the rough and 
wearying wind had died down. Stars 
pricked through the night's velvet, and 
native drums throbbed in its heavy cur- 
tain, beating out from hill to hill a mes- 
sage of the day's doings. As the motor 
scuttled along the road, white-clad na- 
tives hummed obsequious greeting-a 
greeting no other part of the planet has 
ever conceived. 
The flash-lights of wild and feline eyes 
floated through his misery as shooting 
stars floated above his consciousness when 
he raised his eyes from time to time to the 
upper regions of an oppressive night. 
Streams tinkled as the motor slowed down 
for a soft bit in the road. He saw a silver 
cloud, invaded by the light of a late moon, 
empty shining rain into the lake's dark 
surface. He could not sleep. A sense of 
degradation had supervened, the wicked- 
ness of Pedro's silence, the wistfulness of 
his daughter. His own self-sufficiency 
and utter downfall chastised him with 
each turn of the motor's wheel. 
He arrived at the hospital only as the 
gray gleams of day's beginning-the false 



THE PERFECT SERVA
T 


morning of the Oriental poets-picked out 
the wet places in the serried trees to his 
right. Peace and order, watchers in the 
night, the stillness of a precinct dedicated 
to repose, unnerved him with a message 
of successful plans, of sound schemes, 
stoutly adhered to. The disorder of this 
present hour in his own life stabbed him 
afresh. The memory of .\ndalusia was 
like a horrible emeÜc. He hated her. 
His hot hands were groping their way to 
her father's throat. He was unworthy of 
himself, of his strain. Even a wolf or a 
hyena knows its own genus. 
Limp, mortified, he followed the trim, 
starched figure of the night nurse who had 
received him to the room where N'sib lay. 
She hlew out the lamp as they entered 
and passed beyond intoa bathroom, where 
she turned off an electric light. The dawn 
had widenerl without, and in its glowing 
light he saw the old face, clean shorn, ex- 
cept for the scimitar curves of its wide 
mustache, smiling among its wrinkles. 
His turban sat shapely upon a chair at the 
bed's head, and very slowly the old hand 
crept out to it, to cover the head that han 
gleamed baldly but a moment before. 
"

hat news, master of masters?" he 
inquired in a little thread of voice that 

ssued from a region of convulsive chok- 
mg. 
"Good news," Adrian replien, in the 
fashion of the people he gO\'erned, for they 
seek the omen alwavs. 
A confession of bad news brings more 
sorrow. 
"The great master," N'sib returned 
pleasantly, "father of the master of mas- 
ters, called me his perfect sen'ant for the 
manner of eggs I always brought him, on 
and off for seventeen vears, and never one 
morning a dishonorable egg. 'A perfect 
servant,' he called me. 'Bringer of per- 
fect eggs for the breakfast of a hunter.' 
Son of my master, write me a chit, a rec- 
ommendation, that the mes
enger who 
stands here now to take me to the 
Prophet may read that the son also calls 
me 'his perfect servant.'" 
N'sib was persuasÌ\'e, not dramatic, and 
by the light of a day full grown with tropic 
suddenness, Adrian wrote the recommen- 
dation on the nurse's chart beside him, 
reading it aloud to the quiet face that 
seemed to listen with more than ears, to 
hear with more than intelligence, The 


27 



rinkled hand fumbled under the sheets 
It fingered incessantly, and produced at 
this last meeting, what _\drian had 'not 
seen since their first, the handkerchief of 
l\fanchester make and demoniac design. 
. "In 
,hi
," the weakening voice per- 
sIsted, wIll be found the laun(lry list. 
Also the account of the forty-two rupee
 
you owe to the tailor. l\Iy chits, too, are 
here, and I ask you to burn those, lest 
some servant steal them. Having stolen 
my honor, he might take his chance to 
cheat a good master, and I ask you when 
a wet day comes in England, and, like 
your father, you look about for a hook to 
chase the dull hours away-I ask vou to 
think of N'sib instead and to say, tr hon- 
ored him. J came to him at his death 
like a son.'" 
Adrian's own sorrow, his own shame, 
left him as he looked down on the fading 
man whose one idea was sen'ice. It 
ceased as he seized the strange brown 
hand nervously occupied with the white 
edge of his blanket, and a sob struggled in 
him for a moment. He could not have 
told why; he who had seen so many men 
die. The nurse tapped him cheerfully on 
the shoulder, and a young doctor hurried 
calmly in. They pushed Adrian from the 
room, and he walked to and fro in the 
freshness of the morning. Fifteen min- 
utes later the doctor passed him. 
"Is he anv better?" Adrian asked. 
"He has fust died," the young man an- 
swered calmlv. "Dear old fellow, I'm 
sending a hoý down to tell his son." 
Adrian raised his eyes to the pearl-gray 
sky and dropped them again to the ver- 
dant tiers of the hills his father had trod 
with N'sib beside him. He felt as if that 
stout soul paused for a last look at him 
before he passed on forever with the mes- 
senger of whom he had spoken. 
The package wrapped in t?e gay ham!- 
kerchief which he was carrymg under hI'; 
arm ca
aht his eve and he opened it. 
\\ïtÌlin w
re his wa
h list, his father's pho- 
tographs and his own, his tailor's account, 
two doctors' prescriptions for which he 
had had need at Entebbe, and under these 
his own letter to Andalusia, unopened 
and, of course, God be prabed, undeli,'- 
ered. In its upper left-hand corner was 
penned in N'sib's strange writing: "Very 
speecial. Sahib's servant's privde-edgc. 
Not give letter to lady tra,'eIler." 



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Katahdin from Slaughter Pond. 


Lord of the Wilderness 


BY \VALTER PRICHARD EATO:N 


ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 


Ä
'IIo.

 HEN Thoreau poled 

 
X 
 up the \Vest Branch of 
I W 1 the Penobscot in r846 
I and climbed beside 
i Abol Stream and over 

 - j 
 the timber-line spruce 
Ä
7Ç1Ä to the table-land of 
Katahdin (which he 
spelled, as is now again the fashion, 
Ktaadn), he commented on the fact that 
while he seemed to be penetrating into 
the virgin wilderness, actually the lumber- 
men had been before him and culled out 
the largest pine. A great storage-dam 
now spans the West Branch at Ripogenus 
Gorge, and Thoreau would hardly recog- 
nize Chesuncook Lake, so high are its 
waters raised. Yet such is the wonder of 
28 


renewal in this forest that almost as in 
his day you can wander for miles and 
miles through its trails and tote-roads, or 
carry your canoe by the rocky footpath 
around Pockwockamus Falls (if you have 
the strength and the knack to heave up 
a canoe on your shoulders), and feel your- 
self still in the virgin wilderness. 
There are two approaches to Katahdin, 
the superiority of either depending on 
what you are after. If you seek the im- 
mediate sight of its sternest aspect and a 
try at its most difficult line of ascent, you 
will go in from the east, coming at once 
into the Great Basin, a mile in diameter, 
ringed on three sides by 2,ooo-foot walls, 
and seeing at once the famous chimney 
(famous, at least, among Yankee moun- 



LORD OF T
 
taineers, who can boast of no more diffi- 
cult rock climb). But if you seek the 
feeling of the wilderness, the soothinO' ob- 
livion of the virgin forest-for it should 
not he forgotten that most of the hard- 
wood stands in the l\laine woods are virain 
timber-the thrill of poling up swift r
p- 
ids and paddling through silent dead wa- 
ters, and then the long grind up Katah- 


\YILDER
ESS 


29 


BraI1c.n a
'we pòkd ann paddled and por- 
taged our way up-stream one recent Sep- 
teI?her. The weather was warm, the sun 
brIght, and the rampart of Katahdin 
ahead 0'; our right, gold and green till the 
gray of Its naked granite beaan was like 
. .. _ b , 
an mvItatIOn. 1\othing is morc lovely 
than the 
Iaine woods in autumn, because 
of the peculiar richness of thcir color. 



 .... 


.... 


fI 


It. 


Site of Thoreau's camp at the mouth of Abol Stream. The white streak on the side of K.atahdin is Abol Slide. 
Thoreau climbed some distance to the right. 


din's shoulder and the mile walk over the 
subarctic table-land, till the precipices of 
the Great Basin at last burst upon you as 
a climax at the summit, then approach the 
mountain from the west; and if you have 
the time, take three davs for the ascent, 
spending two nights at the cabin by Abol 
Slide. A night on Katahdin, above the 
moonlit forest, and the lakes like chains of 
quicksih-er yanishing into mystery, with 
the mountain bulk behind you climbing 
upward to the stars, is a night not soon 
forgotten, though not easily attained. 


The fires of autumn were beginning to 
flare all along the banks of the 'Vest 


There are innumerable soft maples which 
turn every shade of reó, from vi\'id scarlet 
to deep claret, and these colors alternate 
evervwhere with the golds of the rock ma- 
ples; birches, and lower shrubs, and are 
intensified by the dYid greens of the 
young spruces and balsams (sometimes, 
indeed, the balsams are almost as blue as 
a Colorado spruce), which push up their 
shapely spires in every inch of a \"ailable 
space, and by the more sombre green 
of the scattered hemlocks and, now and 
then, an aged pine, veteran of the forest 
that has gone, towering fifty feet above 
all the other trees. The dark, still reaches 
of the Penobscot, where we glided close 



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Lilypad Pond, ringed \\ith a ghost forest and solemn blue mountains. 


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The Katahdin tahle.land, a mile high, the last spot in 
laine where caribou were seen. 


3 0 



LORD OF TI IE \VILDERXESS 


inshore to avoid the pull of the midstream 
current, mirrored the glory of the banks 
and ahead of us, up this lovely lane, 
 
great blue heron saIled on placid wings 
while a little flotilla of black ducks swa
 
anrl dove in the current, and each stretch 
of river was patrolled by a kinafisher. 
The only visible token of man ;as the 
pulpwood lodged along the shore, or bob- 


31 


was beacned there, its overhanging, point- 
ed bow and stern curved gracefully up- 
ward, and it might have been the ghost of 
the craft that brought Thoreau to the 
spot. Soon after our poles began to ring 
on the rocks, as the guides, standing in 
the. sterns of the canoes, fought up the 
raplrls
 n.ow finding bottom at a plunge, 
now hIttmg a submergerl rock off which 


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The brown water came chattering out of a vista that framed the pyramid of Double Top. 


bing down-stream to the mill that would 
chew it up into paper, whereon to print 
the silly doings of the world we had left 
behind. 
I insisted on carrying my canoe around 
Pockwockamus Falls. Perhaps insisted 
is hardly the word, since my guide offered 
no convincing opposition. . I demonstrat- 
ed that I could do it, but I also proved 
conclusively to myself that I possessed 
two shoulder-blades insufficiently protect- 
ed by fleshy covering. \Ve passed, on 
the water, the mouth of Abol Stream, 
where Thoreau camped for a night before 
beginning his attack on the then pathless 
mountainc An old bateau, gray with age, 


the shod pole slipped while the canoe 
quivered and seemed fated to slide back 
on the rush of the current. A Penobscot 
boatman "r-eading water," holding his 
canoe, up stream or down, free of the 
rocks and logs, using to his adyantagc 
every eddy and backwater, and fighting 
easilv with his two arms and a slender 
spruce-pole the downrush of a river, is as 
pretty an illustration of physical co-ordi- 
nation and applied skill as the sports of 
man afford. The ring of his iron-shod 
pole amid the white rapids, and echoed 
from the walls of the forest, is an added 
music to the roar of the waterfall. 
\Ve left our canoes bottom side up in 



32 


LORD OF THE \YILDERXESS 


the bushes where Sourdnahunk Stream out a drop right into the deep ravines and 
pours down the ledges into the West peaked granite of old Katahdin's flanks. 
Branch, and followed a moist and rough The whole tmvering and massive bulk of 
foot trail for three miles up that conver- Katahdin was flushed amethvst with the 
sational tributary till it became suddenly sunset, and looking upward to its battle- 
quiet behind the rotting ramparts of an ments day yet seemed bright. But look- 
old log dam, and we reached the outlet of ing downward again into the ghost forest 
Lilypad Pond. It was past sunset now, around the black pond, we could feel 
the west aglow with rose and gold, as we night creep from the shadows. The 
pushed out in the canoes awaiting us world was utterly still, utterly lonely, and 


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Looling across the Great Basin of Katahdin to the Knife Blade ridg-e, The chimney, most difficult rock 
climb in !\ew England, can he plainly seen just to the left of the centre of the picture. 


there, upon the almost jet-black tarn. 
The old dam had flooded back enough to 
kill the trees for some distance around 
Lilypaò, and what remained of them now 
stood up from the sedges like gray ghosts 
of a forest. As we slipped noiselessly ou t 
upon the molten black enamel, the whole 
mountain prospect about us, invisible for 
several miles back because of the forest, 
burst suddenly on our sight, under the 
flush and mystery of dying day. To the 
north rose the sharp cone of Double Top, 
rippling away in lower summits to the 
west, and in color an exquisite gun-metal 
blue. Just east of that was a dusk-filled 
gorge, and then the steep side of Oji went 
up, coming southward on our right with- 


beautiful beyond speech. Yet it found 
adequate speech as we were making the 
last half-mile portage beyond Lilypad. 
A belated whitethroat fluted his song 
through the twilight, and across the dim 
trail two barred owls called to each other 
softly, like the verv voice of the forest. 
O{lr final paddle was toward the 
friendly lights of Hunt's Camp across 
Kidney Pond, and the welcome whang of 
the supper-bell came to us over the dark 
water before our keels beached. That 
night, as we climbed to bed in the snug 
log cabins, the loons were laughing out on 
the lake, and we knew we were camped 
in the north woods at last. He who does 
not thriJl to the lonely night laughter of 



LORD OF THE \VILDERNESS 


a loon is not :fit to associate with the wil- 
derness. 
The next day we made seven or eight 
miles over an old tote-road, to the base of 
the Abol Trail, before luncheon, and three 
miles more in the afternoon, carrying our 
dunnage up a thousand feet or more to 
the cabin. At the very start the road 
crossed Sourdnahunk Stream at a point 
where the banks were lined with great 
elms like a village street, and the brown 
water came chattering southward out of 
a vista that framed the blue pyramid of 
Double Top. For two or three miles the 
road led through a cutting only twelve 
years old, but already renewing itself with 
a myriad small balsams and spruces. For 
the rest of the way, it passed over the 
black, rich mould of the ancient forest 
floor, where every fallen and rotted log, 
every decayed stump of a pine (cut, per- 
haps" before Thoreau's day), was an ex- 
quisite and tiny garden of lichens and 
plumed or tree moss, and tight-growing 
winter snowberry-vines, and twin flower- 
vines, and six-inch-tall spruce and bal- 
sam and birch seedlings, almost like the 
trees in a Japanese dwarl garden. Look- 
ing into the forest, to be sure, we saw few 
large evergreens, but everywhere the 
great trunks of yellow birches, white 
birches, sometimes beeches and elms and 
maples, went up with that columnar maj- 
esty of virgin timber. 
In the black mud of the tote-road, too, 
was a record of the wilderness inhabitantsc 
In a single spot, made ideal for tracking 
by a light rain two days before, I saw the 
deep print of a moose's hoof, the track 
where a fox had trotted leisurely down the 
road, the track of a wildcat, also travel- 
ling along the road, the curious paw print 
of a porcupine, with its little pebbled 
markings, and the print of a deer which 
had crossed the trail at right angles. A 
little farther on a bear had used the trail, 
a partridge had scratched, and a skunk 
had dug for grubs. This may be a tote- 
road for the few men who use or inhabit 
the wilderness, but they are not numer- 
ous enough upon it to prevent its use as 
a game trail, too. Not much farther on 
we picked up a second bobcat's tracks, 
smaller than the first. At least two cats, 
then, had been along since the shower, 
about their secret business. A varying 
VOL, LXXVIII,-3 


33 


hare, or snow-shoe rabbit, so unused to 
man th
t he seemed tame, actually sat in 
the traIl and looked at us till we were 
within ten feet of him. 
The first two miles up the mountain 
to Abol cabin leads through timber which 
has never been cu t. The path ascends 
without oppressive steepness over that 
indescribable soft carpet of black mould 
and moss and rotted wood which is the 
floor of the virgin forest, and everywhere 
to right and left, in the gloom of th
 
spruces, you cannot see a rock or a patch 
of ground which is not dank green with 
the moist mosses. The path crosses al- 
most a dozen brooks, the largest being 
Abol Stream itself, up which Thoreau 
ascended. On this trail we not only saw 
where a bear had been pawing open a 
bee's nest in a stump, and the six-inch- 
deep hoof-prints of a moose, but in the 
thick bushes and blow-downs to one side 
we heard a big animal crashing away 
from us. 
The last mile to the cabin is through a 
thinner, dwarfed forest, up the lower 
gravel and rocks of the big slide, and 
though moose tracks abounded, and we 
could see where the animal had nipped 
shoots off the balsams, we were mostly 
paying strict attention to the job of toting 
up our hot and heavy packs, the straps 
cutting harder and harder into our shoul- 
ders. When we reached the cabin at last, 
we were fully prepared to appreciate the 
old gentleman who at the age of sixty- 
seven had built it, hauling up on his own 
back not only two bedsprings and a sheet- 
iron cook-stove, but all the hemlock 
planks with which it was floored. 
He was, however, as you will soon 
agree, a most remarkable man in many 
ways. Appointed a fire-warden, he had 
to build his own cabin and lookout up 
here on the side of Katahdin. The look- 
out was a simple matter, any rock on the 
slide lifting him above timber. But it is 
not so easy to build an 18 x 16 foot cabin 
of peeled spruce logs, roof it with white- 
cedar splits worked out in the swamp a 
thousand feet below and hauled up on 
one's back and floor it with hemlock 
, . 
planks toted up an equal dIstance. :l\Iore- 
over he had to descend to the tote-road 
at le
st once a week and carry up his kero- 
sene and provisions, which were brought 



34 


LORD OF THE WILDERNESS 


in to him on a Rangeley buckboard. But 
his earlier life had prepared him for such 
hardy labors. As we ate our supper of 
beans and bacon and tea, cooked on his 
rusty stove (Frank Sewall is dead now, 
and his cabin in the balsams on Katahdin 
is abandoned to mountain-climbers like 
ourselves), one of our guides told us of the 
old man's most famous exploit. 
"He was working on old Number One 
cutting," said the guide, pulling medita- 
tively on his pipe, "and he had a pet cat 
at the camp. The old man was fond of 
cats. Well, one night a cat-owl killed his 
cat, and he was pretty sore. He said he'd 
revenge that cat, and revenge it good. 
About two days later, in the daytime, too, 
he seen that old owl sittin' right up on the 
roof of the camp, so he says to Charlie 
White, who was workin' in the shop, 
'Temper me some eel-grass quick!' he 
says. So Charlie grabbed out some eel- 
grass from that little swampy place and 
tempered it, and old Sewall he sprung up 
on the roof and began to fight the owl. 
The old owl he fit back, too, they say, 
some thin' terrible. Frank he kept pierc- 
in' the owl through and through with the 
tempered eel-grass, and Charlie he kep' 
temperin' more and handin' it up, and the 
owl he kep' tearin' and peckin' at Frank. 
Well, finally the owl had enough, and 
started up the tote-road toward Sourdna- 
hunk Lake, and old man Sewall after him. 
The rest of 'em followed, and they picked 
up Frank two mile away, and brought 
him back and give him medical attention, 
and he got well in a week. You couldn't 
see no scars, even. But the owl he didn't 
get no medical attention, and he died." 
" Could you temper eel-grass?" we 
asked the guide. 
He tested the water to see if it was hot 
enough for the dishes. 
"Not except in a coal fire," he replied. 
"Charlie White, he was the only man who 
could temper eel-grass in wood coals." 
There being no coal nearer than fifty 
miles, we had to let it go at that! So we 
went out on Frank Sewall's observation 
platform to look down on the wilderness 
under the moon, and to look up the white 
scar of the slide above us till it met the 
pinnacle rocks, which seemed phosphor- 
escent in the moonlight. It was a sur- 
prisingly warm and still night for late 


September, so instead of sleeping in the 
cabin I rolled up in my blanket on a bed 
of boughs some recent camper had made 
near byc But at two o'clock I woke 
chilled, and rose to stir up my fire. Once 
up, I felt curiously wide awake, and went 
out on the lookout. There was a slight 
murmur of, wind along the towering moun- 
tainside, and no other sound in all the 
world. A white, silvered mist was form- 
ing over the lakes far below me, like 
streaks of pale snow. The moon rode 
high above the forest, and old Orion, a 
stranger since last winter, was striding up 
the sky. I felt a lonely atom in an im- 
mensity of wilderness. 
The next morning Moosehead, fifty air- 
line miles away, looked like the Mer de 
Glace, and every nearer lake was a streak 
or puff of cotton batting on the green car- 
pet of the forest. The summit of the 
slide was under, too, and we waited till 
ten before we had confidence that the 
cloud was going to lift. The delay was 
annoying, for we had two women in our 
party, and there are few women who can 
either ascend or descend Abol Slide with 
speed. For half a mile it is a bare streak 
of loose gravel and stones alternating with 
boulders, inclined at forty-five degrees at 
first, and growing much steeper at the top. 
The slide ceases before you reach what 
here appears to be the summit, and you 
climb for another quarter of a mile, per- 
haps, over a huge rock-pile of granite al- 
most precipitous, crawl through a hole 
called the Needle's Eye, and emerge on 
the great Katahdin table-land to see the 
true summit still a mile beyond you. It 
took us three hours to reach the table- 
land, and we ungallantly abandoned our 
womenfolk at that point, and hastened 
across desolation to the peak. 
Yet desolation is not the word to apply 
to this subarctic plateau of many hun- 
dreds of acres, raised up almost a mile in 
naked isolation above the wilderness of 
Maine. Thoreau says the top of Katah- 
din looks as if nature had rained rocks, 
but Thoreau saw it under a drenching 
cloud, Boulder-strewn it is, incredibly 
so, and there is no living thing upon it 
higher than your knee, and few so high as 
that. Yet on this clear, mild September 
day when we emerged upon it, it was al- 
most as warm with autumn colors as the 



LORD OF THE \VILDERNESS 


forests below. The predominant vegeta- 
tion, which clothes it everywhere till it 
heaves up to the final naked cones of tum- 
bled granite, consists of stunted blueberry- 
bushes, now wine-red and still holding 
ripe but sometimes frozen fruit, innu- 
merable clusters of oval-leaved diapensia 
lapponica, in rounded clumps like red 
pincushions (closely resembling what is 
caned pixy-moss), many Alpine bearberry 
shrubs, Labrador tea, staghorn moss and 
lichens. These plants clothed some boul- 
ders all over; on others they huddled 
under the south side. Between rocks 
they made a yielding carpet for the feet, 
a carpet of tapestried color. Here, two 
generations ago, over this storm-swept 
upland, so like, I imagine, Greenland or 
Labrador in aspect, the caribou used to 
graze in herds of a hundred head, they 
say. The last two caribou seen in !vlaine 
were seen on the Katahdin table-land 
about eighteen or twenty years ago. Oc- 
casionally still, our guide said, you may 
stumble on a caribou bone. 
Across this strange country we hastened 
for a mile, scrambled up the last naked 
boulder heaps on its eastern edge-and 
stood on the summit of Katahdin, 5,273 
feet above the sea, ringed to the far hori- 
zon by the red and green and gold wilder- 
ness-and confronted by the most spec- 
tacular mountain-drop east of the Rock- 
ies. 
Into the east face of the granite moun- 
tain is cut a huge horseshoe basin, a mile 
in diameter and something over a mile to 
the open end. At the bottom is a small 
pond, all that is left of the departed gla- 
cier. Beyond that is the unbroken forest. 
The head wall of this basin rises in a sheer 
precipice of upended gray granite slabs 
for more than 2,000 feet, to the summit 
peak. The northern arm of the horse- 
shoe is less precipitous, being chiefly a 
vast dump of broken stone, but the south- 
ern arm is in most places but a few de- 
grees off the perpendicular, and curves 
around like a jagged knife-blade. It is 
called, indeed, the Knife-Blade, and is 
dangerous to traverse in a high wind. 
Well around on this arm lies the famous 
Chimney, a crack or gully in the dark, for- 
bidding granite wall up which it is possible 
to climb, and down which we had planned 
to descend, part way at least, and had tot- 


35 


ed along an Alpine rope for that purpose. 
But, alas! the prospect of getting our 
womenfolk down Abol Slide before dark 
confronted us, and the Chimney climb 
had to be postponed till another season. 
Viewed from above, its difficulties seemed 
to us a trifle exaggerated, although the 
danger of falling rock is ever present, be- 
cause the Katahdin granite appears to be 
rapidly disintegrating. But perhaps it is 
well to exaggerate them. Few Eastern 
Americans know anything about rock- 
climbing, and if Katahdin were more ac- 
cessible, the Chimney would certainly be- 
fore now have taken its toll of life. 
We came back reluctantly over the 
Knife-Blade and the colof tumbled boul- 
ders between the peaks, finding even on 
this ridge-pole of storm-swept granite two 
or three little gardens, autumn-tinted, 
of blueberries, moss, and Labrador tea, 
stuffed our names into the Appalachian 
Club cylinder, and looked our last out 
over the wilderness of forests and lakes 
to the northeastward, before crossing the 
table-land once more. Near the western 
side a precipitous and rock-strewn gulch 
plunges down for a thousand feet before it 
reaches timber. It was down this gulch 
that the two boys who were lost on the 
table-land in the summer of 1923 crawled 
during the second day of their wander- 
ings, and where they were discovered by 
one of the searchers five days later, when 
the clouds lifted. They were without 
food, without blankets, without fire; they 
had taken off their shoes and could not 
get them on again, and one boy had de- 
veloped gangrene in his feet, and was 
found hardly an hour too soon. A party 
of :Maine guides carried those boys on 
stretchers up that thousand feet of rock, 
across the table-land and down Abol Slide 
to the cabin, and some of the guides had 
themselves been searching for two or three 
days without sleep. The meagre ac- 
counts the newspapers printed at the time 
made no mention of what these men did. 
But we who had just climbed Abol Slide, 
and who were looking now down that 
pathless incline of heaped, chaotic boul- 
ders, took off our hats. . . . 
My Alpine rope was put 
o IgnOmInIOUS 
use in the descent of the slIde. One end 
was carried ahead by hundred-foot stages 
as a railing for the women to cling to as 



36 


LORD OF THE \YILDERNESS 


they came down over the rocks and grav- 
el. But it facilitated the descent so much 
that we were at the cabin an hour before 
we had expected to be, and might have 
had time, after all, for an expedition down 
the top of the Chimney. It is well, al- 
ways, however, to leave some part of a 
mountain unexplored. Then it calls you 
back again with a lure that is irresistible. 
The Katahdin Chimney is now my Car- 
cassonne. 
That evening the guide informed us, in 
reminiscent mood, that he once gave Ka- 
tahdin away. 
"I give it to a woman from Buffalo," he 
said. "I was taking her down the West 
Branch, and when we come opposite Pit- 
man's it was one of those nice, clear days 
when it stood up there big and handsome, 
and she says: 'My goodness, I never seen 
nothing so beautiful; I wish I had it in my 
back yard at home!' I was feeling sort 
of generous that morning, so I said: 
'Lady, take it right along. It's the big- 
gest pile 0' rocks we got in Maine, but if 
you want it you can have it. We boys'll 
get together this fall and pile up another 
one.' " 
He poked his pipe. " She's been kinder 
dilatory about takin' it," he added. 
But don't suppose that the whimsical 
or the rough humor of the Maine woods- 
man, the true woodsman whose father or 
grandfather came into this wilderness be- 
fore him, and who stays here not from 
necessity but choice, is what he lives by. 
He lives neither by it-though it helps !- 
nor by any fancied blood-lust for game 
and fish. It is your city "sportsman" 
who has the lust to kill. What he lives bv 
is a deep and often quite inexpressive lov"e 
for the wilderness. His occasional at- 
tempts to express it are sometimes quaint, 
but they have a ring of sincerity, a flavor 
of poetry, that is denied to more sophisti- 
cated speech. 
Paddling across Kidney Pond late one 
afternoon a loon rose and circled low 
around the lake three times, flying di- 
rectly over the canoe and displaying for 
us his immaculate shirt-front. On his 
third trip he cried loudly, and from far off 
somewhere in the woods came a faint an- 
swering call. Tilting his wings, with a 
wild, ringing note that said "I'm com- 
ing !" he slid down the air and over the 


tree-tops in the direction of his matc. The 
guide watched the whole performance in 
silence, but with a half-smile on his face. 
I recalled that he had recently left two 
men he was guiding twenty miles from 
camp, and come back in alone, giving as 
his only excuse that one of them shot a 
loon, and he wouldn't guide anybody who 
shot a loon. Of course it is against the 
law to shoot a loon, but I knew well 
enough that wasn't his reason. Curious 
to hear how he would phrase it, I asked 
him pointblank for the explanation. 
He was silent for a long moment, as if 
feeling for words. "\Vell, it's the same 
with a goose," he finally replied. "There's 
no law against shootin' geese in season, 
but I wouldn't guide anybody who did. 
When a gray goose comes skimmin' down 
the pond, or you hear 'em honkin' up in 
the sky, it's just like that loon there- I 
mean it's kind 0' the spirit 0' the woods. 
It's sorter like shootin' somebody in your 
own family. Hell, I can't say it!" 
I told him I thought I understood, and 
it was the most gratifying compliment I 
ever received when he answered deliber- 
ately and with no trace of insolence: "Yes, 
I think you do." 
Another and older guide, whose grand- 
father first pushed up into the woods from 
Portland, through Bangor, almost a cen- 
tury ago, explained to me one morning 
more about the early pioneers of America 
than I ever learned from text-books. Our 
party had come upon a big new camp, re- 
cently erected by a wealthy man so that 
he could come up here to shoot and fish 
without sacrificing his material comforts. 
The caretaker was going to show us over 
it. "Aren't you coming too?" I asked 
this guide, when I saw him hanging back 
by the river. 
He shook his head, glancing at me with 
his pale-blue woodsman's eyes. 
"There's some folks," he said, "would 
rather see somethin' a man has made than 
they would a growin' thing, and the more 
it cost, the more they hanker to see it. 
But I'd rather see somethin' green and 
growin'-like a tree. I was always funny 
that wayc" 
The last sentence was quite without 
sarcasm. It was merely a recognition of 
the gulf between him and his twentieth- 
century fellows, and of the fact that he 



LORD OF THE WILDERNESS 


was a hopeless minority. But it ex- 
plained his grandfather. 
To say that all guides are thus sensitive 
would be, of course, a ridiculous over- 
statement, but that most of them, how- 
ever inarticulate, are more sensitive to the 
spell of the forest than the majority of 
those they guide I think is not far from 
the truth. Since Thoreau penetrated the 
:Maine wilderness three-quarters of a cen- 
tury ago, there have not been any vast 
number of men and women like him to 
follow-like him, that is, in sensitive ap- 
preciation of wilderness charm and sensi- 
tive curiosity about wilderness life, which 
leads to loving observation, not slaughter 
and the axe. Such canoe trips as that 
down the Allegash, to be sure, are tempt- 
ing more and more people each year into 
these woods purely for recreational pur- 
poses, and mountaineers are turning more 
and more to Katahdin. But all northern 
Maine is still, primarily, at the mercy of 
the lumberman's commercial exploitation, 
and still exists for those intent on pleasure 
chiefly as a "sportsman's paradise." 
Those who go into the Maine woods with 
fishing-rods and guns still vastly outnum- 
ber those who go in with cameras or 
botany tins, or with nothing at all but a 
blanket, a knapsack, and a seeing eye. 
The average American man's idea of a 
good time in the woods is to get a shot at 
some beautiful wild woodland creature, 
and bring it bloody to the earthc That 
this creature, whether a noble moose or an 
exquisite leaping deer or a silky-eared, 
timid-eyed brown hare, is an integral part 
of the wilderness charm, as essential to 
the spell of the forest as trees and brown 
water, he does not in the least realize. 
He is insensitive to any such refinement. 
Thanks to him, of course, the caribou 
have gone, the moose are going, all our 
wild life everywhere is diminishing in 
number, even the fish in the streams are 
becoming fewer and fewer. The time will 
come, and relatively soon, too, when the 
l\tlaine woods will be practically gameless, 
when old Katahdin will lord it over a land 
without subjects, even as now he no 
longer feeds the caribou upon his rocky 
uplands. 


37 


There is one way this sad end could be 
averted, but there is small likelihood of 
its being taken. The l\tlaine wilderness 
with its thousands of lakes, its clear swift 
rivers, and its lordly granite mou
tain 
could be set apart as a National Park 0: 
a National Forest. Under proper restric- 
tions,. and 
ith annual replanting, the 
p
lp mdustrles could go on cutting, and 
stIll the people of the northeastern United 
States could have a wilderness playground 
quite different from any in the 'Vest, but 
in its way quite as fine, for their perpetual 
refresh
ent and for a perpetual reminder, 
as our hfe grows more hasty, more me- 
chanical, more artificial, of the brooding 
forest into which our ancestors plunged to 
make a nation. All this, however, is but 
a foolish dream, and any practical man 
can tell me why. l\tleanwhile the slaugh- 
ter of the forest and of the forest-folk will 
go on to the inevitable end. 
Katahdin, however, will endure. Its 
storm-bitten granite lifts far above the 
timber desired of man, its boulder-strewn 
gorges and glooming precipices repel the 
feet of any but those hardy men and wo- 
men who find joy in the primitive con- 
quest of a mountain. Nothing can be 
taken away from it, for long ago the re- 
ceding ice and the winter storms stripped 
it naked. Remote, inaccessible, it rises 
from the green inland ocean like an eter- 
nal symbol of the rock on which man and 
all his works are based. It is the earth 
crust breaking through. It is the solemn 
grandeur of elemental things. It is the 
brooding spirit of a continent before the 
dawn. Some day, perhaps, man will 
make it possible to reach the base of Ka- 
tahdin in a motor-car; some day there 
may even be a motor road to the summit. 
But before that day comes I trust that I 
shaH have poled down my last rapids and 
been swept out on the nameless deep. 
Every time a motor road is built up a 
mountain the world loses some of its won- 
der' every time it is made easy for man 
to 
onquer the last remaining: symbol.s of 
a primitive conti.nent, so
ething precIous 
is lost of our natIOnal hentage. May old 
Katahdin always remain the lord of a 
lonely wilderness! 



The Dead Vote of the South 


BY GERALD \V. JOHNSON 
Author of "The Battling South" 


. m. .'
 N 19 12 the Honorable 
William Howard Taft, 
I L!JI AI candidatefor tltepresi- 
YT,i:/ 
 dency of the United 

 
 States, received only 
eight electoral votes, 
W
 and nobody was much 
, surprised. But Mr. 
Taft was a mere Republican. If the 
Honorable John \Villiam Davis, Demo- 
cratic candidate in 1924, had not received 
136 electoral votes, practical politics in 
this country would have received the news 
as a veritable thunder-stroke. 
On the face of these facts it would ap- 
pear that Mr. Davis was an extraordina- 
rily strong candidate, for the number 
necessary to elect is 266, and it was gen- 
erally admitted before the returns were in 
that he would have 136. Apparently he 
was more than half-elected before the 
ballots were cast. As a matter of fact, 
however, Mr. Davis was not a strong can- 
didate. The 136 electoral votes that he 
received were not his. They belonged to 
the Democratic party, not to the candi- 
date. They were the votes of twelve 
Southern States which are always con- 
ceded to the Democrats before the elec- 
tioneering starts. These votes are 
counted in the Democratic column, and 
would have been counted there by prac- 
tical politicians no matter what name the 
candidate might have borne. They 
would certainly have been conceded to 
William G. J\1:cAdoo, or to Alfred E. 
Smith, had either been named by the New 
York convention; yet the political ideas 
of 1\fcAdoo and Smith are so strongly 
antipathetic that partisans of the two 
candidates fought each other to the death. 
Each faction committed political suicide 
rather than permit the other to name the 
candidate. 
The 'Vest was mainly for McAdoo, and 
it was understood from the beginning that 
had Smith been nominated he would have 
been slaughtered at the polls in the West. 
.38 


The East was equally strong for Smith, 
and had McAdoo been named the massa- 
cre of the Democratic ticket at the polls 
in the East would have been sickening. 
But the whole strategy on both sides was 
based on the assumption that the South 
would cast 136 votes for McAdoo, 136 
votes for Smith, 136 votes for anybody, 
for Simple Simon, or a yellow dog or the 
devil, provided only that the candidate 
bore the Democratic label. By the for- 
tune of war, the South actually had pre- 
sented to it a candidate for whom it could 
vote with a clear conscience, and it ac- 
cordingly cast 136 votes for Davis. But 
that happy outcome was purely fortui- 
tous, without relation to any fear on 
the part of party leaders that the South 
would vote against a less desirable can- 
dida te. The South had a record of having 
voted, without turning a hair, for Wil- 
liam J. Bryan, Alton B. Parker, William 
J. Bryan, and Woodrow Wilson in succes- 
sion. By comparison with those ex- 
tremes, Smith and McAdoo are as close 
together as the Siamese Twins. No fear 
existed that a section that had been 
swung successfully from Bryan to Parker 
and back again would fail of adherence 
to either. 
Now the fear of the people is the begin- 
ning of political wisdom in a democracy. 
It is the element that gives vitality to the 
democratic theory. Let it fail, and your 
democracy inevitably ceases to function 
as a democracy. It dies. Its organs are 
locked in rigor 1nortis. In time, putre- 
faction sets in. 
In so far as the twelve Southern States 
which voted for Davis are concerned, fear 
of the decision of the people at the polls 
has been banished from poli ticians' minds. 
That vote has already been counted be- 
fore the conventions assemble. There- 
fore, it has little or no weight in the selec- 
tion of the candidate or the drafting of the 
platform. The Democrats have no fear 
of loss in those States. The Republicans 



THE DEAD VOTE OF THE SOUTH 


have no hope of gain there. That vote is 
always counted and never counts. It is 
dead. 
But this is serious. These twelve 
States are inhabited by more than 26,- 
000,000 people, almost exactly one-fourth 
of the population of the United States. 
\\'hen democracy dies in these States, the 
democracy of the nation will be one quar- 
ter dead. It may continue to function in 
that condition, but it must inevitably 
function with decreased efficiency. \Ve 
are fond of regarding our political system 
as an organism endowed with a vitality 
much resembling biological life, but in 
the light of this condition the analogy 
becomes an uncomfortable one. An or- 
ganism one-fourth dead inevitably fills 
the least imaginative mind with thoughts 
of gangrene. 
Yet in the South itself therp is no lack 
of phenomena that may be cited in sup- 
port of this grisly conclusion. In the 
State of South Carolina, to select the 
most conspicuous example, for every 
voter who went to the polls in 1924, more 
than fourteen stayed away. Democracy 
is not a living, effective force where people 
do not vote; it follows that the democracy 
of South Carolina, in so far as the selec- 
tion of Presidents is concerned, is more 
than 83 per cent ready for the undertaker. 
There were in South Carolina in 1920 
776,969 citizens of the United States more 
than twenty-one years old. There is a 
larger number now, for the State has been 
growing steadily. Yet in 1924 the com- 
bined vote cast for Coolidge, Davis, and 
La Follette totalled less than 51,000 in 
South Carolina, which is 16,000 less than 
the total vote cast in 1920. Even if one 
accepts the South Carolina view and 
agrees that the 389,000 negroes included 
in the population figures only think they 
are citizens, still one !s faced with the fact 
that only about one white voter in seven 
took the trouble to cast a ballot in a presi- 
dential election. Nine votes in the elec- 
toral college were cast for John W. Davis 
in behalf of the people of South Carolina, 
nominally, but really in behalf of 5 0 ,13 1 
individuals who did all the voting. The 
world laughed when the three tailors of 
Tooley Street began their proclamation 
with the words "We, the people of Eng- 
land. . . ," but South Carolina seems to 


39 


be :progr
sÏI:g steadily toward the poin tat 
whIch a sImilar proclamation on the part 
of a handful of her citizens would be no 
laughing matter, but sober truth. Al- 
ready 50,000 people exercise, in national 
affairs, the sovereignty of the State. 
When 3 per cent only of the people of a 
State exercise its sovereignty, it is absurd 
to call that State a democracy. 
But note carefully the qualification- 
it is in national affairs only that democ- 
racy is dead in South Carolina, and in 
other Southern States where a similar, if 
less fully developed, situation exists. In 
the conduct of local affairs democracy is 
alive in South Carolina, and not barely 
alive, either, but vehement and frequently 
uproarious. The spring of this same year 
1924, in which only 50,000 South Caro- 
linians out of 1,600,000 went to the 
polls to cast a vote for the next 
President of the United States, was 
made notable by a contest for the Demo- 
cratic nomination for the United States 
Senate. The nomination was won by an 
individual named Coleman Livingston 
Blease, who is one of the most curious 
products of American politics. Cole 
Blease is intellectually honest, and he 
was never more so than on the occasion 
when, being then governor of South Caro- 
lina, he roared into fame at a governors' 
conference by saying fervently, "To hell 
with the Constitution!" He does not 
straddle, or compromise, or evade. He 
defends his ideas on the stump, and his 
remark about the Constitution is mild in- 
deed by comparison with the general 
tenor of his utterances concerning the 
political characters and reputations of his 
enemies in the State. Consequently, his 
campaign for the Senate, far from being 
an apathetic, moribund affair, was of a 
nature to curl the hair on a cast-iron 
monkey. Every citizen of voting age who 
could by any means drag himself there, 
or who had friends who could be induced 
to carry him there, went to the polls to 
cast a vote for or against Cole Blease, and 
charges are not wanting that enthusiastic 
partisans swe!led the tr
me
dous total by 
voting felons m the pemtentIary and dead 
men in their graves. Cole Blea
e was not 
nominated by 50,131 people actl?g for the 
rest of the State. He was nommated by 
a majority of all the voters who could po=:,- 



40 


THE DEAD VOTE OF THE SOUTH 


sibly vote. Democracy functioned in that 
primary, not magnificently, perhaps, but 
at any rate prodigiously. 
But when the primary was over, it was 
all over. J\-fen who developed an almost 
incredible intensity of excitement over 
who should represent South Carolina in 
the Senate would not even go to the polls 
to vote for a President of the United 
States. Why should they waste their 
time? There was no suspense in that 
election, therefore no interest. Their de- 
cision was for Davis, not on a political 
question, over which there might be dis- 
agreement, with excitement and interest, 
but on a social question, regarding which 
all white South Carolinians think alike. 
They all had to vote the Democratic 
ticket, because the Democratic party is 
the party that is bound by every consid- 
eration of interest and by all its traditions 
to keep hands off the settlement of that 
social question. 
There is a fairly wide-spread impression 
in the North and West that it is silly of 
South Carolinians and of Southerners 
in general to subordinate every political 
consideration to a social question. I do 
not think so, but perhaps it is. But even 
if it is silly, what of that? It is a trait 
that seems to be ineradicable in human 
nature, or at least in American nature. 
Recently we have seen California stirred 
to a tremendous pitch of excitement over 
exactly the same question. On that ques- 
tion California would listen neither to 
threats nor to cajoleries. Not only would 
she tolerate no interference with her set- 
tlement of it, but upon it she unhesitat- 
ingly took action that held the possibility 
of plunging the United States into a terri- 
fic war, a war which it is conceivable that 
this country might have lost, and which 
would certainly have cost it hundreds of 
thousands of lives and billions of dollars. 
The excitement in that case was due to 
the presence in California of 71,952 Japa- 
nese. Suppose the number of Japanese 
in California, instead of 71,952, had been 
864,719. \Vhy, the California National 
Guard would have gone to war without 
waiting for the United States army. Sup- 
pose, then, that the number of whites to 
face this other race in California had been, 
not 3,200,000, but barely a fourth of that 
number. The State, it is reasonable to 


believe, would have proceeded from hys- 
teria to raving madness, and Hiram J ohn- 
son would have bitten himself and died in 
horrible agony. Yet this is the situation 
that South Carolina has faced for gen- 
erations, with the difference that the bio- 
logical distinction between a white Cali- 
fornian and a Japanese is by no means as 
conspicuous, and therefore by no means 
as strong an excitant of antagonism, as 
the biological distinction between a white 
South Carolinian and a negro. 
It is certainly arguable that the white 
man's violent objection to danger, even 
remote, of domination by another race is 
unjustifiable and even wicked. But that 
is beside the point. The point is that that 
objection exists. In California it is strong 
enough to make the State take reckless 
chances of involving the country in a ter- 
rible war. Is it any wonder that in South 
Carolina it is strong enough to make men 
vote the Democratic ticket, regardless of 
their personal preferences? 
J\tly point is that in this particular the 
South is not a free agent, but the victim 
of forces beyond her control, as they were 
apparently beyond the control of Cali- 
fornia, and as I think they are beyond the 
control of any group of white men simi- 
larly situated. Before this social question 
was injected into the situation to over- 
shadow all political considerations, the 
South was the battle-ground of fiercely 
contending ideas. There is no reason to 
doubt that, were the social question re- 
moved, it would once more become such 
a battle-ground; but that cannot be until 
the bond that holds its white population 
in an enforced and artificial political 
solidarity is dissolved. 
It would be idle to deny that the dis- 
solution of that bond is dependent in some 
measure, as is the removal of every psy- 
chological inhibitio::l, upon the efforts of 
the bound. But it is not altogether de- 
pendent upon that. The South cannot 
free herself of her fear of negro domina- 
tion merely by an effort of will; she must 
in addition have some objective evidence 
that her fears are really groundless. Let 
it be written in the record here as the 
testimony of a Southern witness that the 
negro himself is doing much to furnish 
that sort of evidence. He is, in fact, do- 
ing much more than the white North and 



THE DEAD VOTE OF THE SOUTH 


the white West are doing to allay the fears 
o(the white South. The negro's standard 
of living is steadily on the up-grade. His 
economic efficiency is tigh tening. His 
race pride is increasing, His intellectual 
activity is expanding and strengthening. 
In brief, what Doctor Odum would call 
his "social adequacy" is steadily rising. 
All this means that he is becoming less 
and less a menace to civilization as he 
proceeds farther and farther from the 
status of a slave. But the Japanese a 
thousand years ago reached a cultural 
plane probably superior to that of the 
modern negro, which does not materially 
abate the Californian objection to the 
threat of Japanese domination. The 
South cannot handle this problem alone, 
even with the assistance which the negro 
admittedly is giving. 
It is useless, however, to expect any 
section to take a lively and intelligent in- 
terest in any problem which is not pecu- 
liarly its own. All of us have too many 
troubles now to go out seeking others. Un- 
less my reasoning is wholly at fault, how- 
ever, there is nothing distinctively South- 
ern about this problem, in its larger 
aspects. The South is one-fourth of the 
whole country, and no problem that vi- 
tally affects an entire quarter of the na- 
tion can be of no significance to the rest. 
Indeed, these figures refer only to the 
twelve Southern States that supported 
Davis; but the condition is only less acute 
in such great border States as Maryland, 
Kentucky, and 1lissouri. If they are 
added to the South, the proportion comes 
closer to one-third than to one-fourth. 
But adhering strictly to the original 
area of the twelve Davis States, we are 
confronted with the fact that here are 
26,000,000 people living nominally under 
a democracy, but contributing little or 
nothing to the decisions which that de- 
mocracy is constantly being called upon 
to make. The whole theory of democracy 
rests upon the assumption that the collec- 
tive wisdom, courage, and integrity of the 
people are greater than their collective 
folly, cowardice, and dishonesty. If that 
theory is sound, the loss of the effective 
participation of the South in the nation's 
councils is a net loss. If that theory is 
sound, deadening the interest of one- 
fourth of your democracy in res publicæ 


41 


is a process bound to result in injury to 
the republic. 
But let us abandon theory and turn to 
an examination of the practical effect 
upon American politics of fettering the 
South to the Democratic party. In the 
first place, it assures to that party a de- 
gree of immunity which is, to say the 
least, of questionable value from the 
standpoint of the country. As long as 
the South remains solid, the Democratic 
p
rty as a political entity cannot be 
kIlled. No length to which it might pro- 
ceed in stupidity or villainy would suffice 

o destroy an organization that, despite 
Its blunders and its crimes, still retained 
command of more than half enough votes 
to elect a President of the United States. 
On more than one occasion, as a matter 
of historic fact, the Democratic party 
has repudiated every single principle it 
had professed to hold sacred four years 
earlier, and yet has survived. William J. 
Bryan and Alton B. Parker were no more 
of the same political school than were 
Nicholas Romanoff and Nicholas Lenine, 
and the fact that both were run by the 
same party in successive campaigns 
proves only that a party with 136 elec- 
toral votes safely in its possession has no 
indispensable need of an unalterable set 
of principles. 
This block of Southern electoral votes 
is a potential menace to the rest of the 
country and to the South itself in that it 
may be at any time the decisive factor 
whereby the nation may have forced upon 
it a President whose principles are abhor- 
rent to a heavy majority of the American 
people. Merely to illustrate the point, 
let us assume that the preponderance of 
opinion in this country is in favor of the 
eighteenth amendment. It certainly is in 
the South, and apparently it is in the 
West. Yet in 1924 the supporters of 
Smith believed that if they could capture 
the nomination it would be entirely feasi- 
ble, by combining the vote of the wet 
East and that of the dry, but handcuffed, 
South to elect a wet President in a dry 
country. Suppose the \Vest were swept 
by some mania as fantastic as Ku Kl\.L.'Iì:- 
ism-bolshevism, for example, or poly- 
andry. It would be necessary only to 
capture the convention and nominate a 
\Vestem candidate, for the raving \Vest 



42 


THE DEAD VOTE OF THE SOUTH 


and the reluctant, but helpless, South to 
force upon the country a President who 
said his prayers to the shade of Lenine, or 
who held up the celebrated Mrs. Dennis- 
toun as the very model of feminine pro- 
priety. Indeed, an analogous procedure 
has been preven ted on several occasions 
only by the much-be-damned two-thirds 
ruie in the Democratic National Conven- 
tion. As long as the South remains solid 
under any and all circumstances, that 
rule is one of the bulwarks of the liberties 
of the people. 
Less direct and obvious, but certainly 
as mischievous in the long run, is the 
encouragement that such a condition 
offers to parochialism in politics. It is 
more than encouragement; parochialism is 
made inevitable and inescapable, the very 
sine qua non of Southern statecraft. The 
only channel left unblocked in which 
Southern political preferences, prejudices, 
and enthusiasms may run is the channel 
of local politics. The South Carolinian is 
permitted to become excited only over 
contests for Democratic nominations 
within the State. Naturally, he becomes 
doubly excited over them, and as natural- 
ly tends to refer every phase of politics to 
the particular phase in which he finds 
real interest and excitement. By exces- 
sive concentration on intrastate affairs 
he becomes progressively less capable of 
adopting a national view-point on any- 
thing. The strong tendency present in 
all of us to regard whatever seems good 
for our own localities as good for the 
whole country is intensified when there is 
no counterbalance in a vivid and effective 
interest in national affairs. Thus it be- 
comes easy for Southern Democrats in 
the Senate to vote for high protective 
tariffs on sugar and lumber without hav- 
ing their Democracy questioned by their 
constituents. So the service that the 
South pays to the causes for which the na- 
tional Democracy fights becomes largely 
lip-service, as President Wilson found to 
his cost. The administration champion 
during the League of Nations fight was 
not one of the veteran senators from the 
Democratic stronghold, but Hitchcock, 
from the wavering State of Nebraska. 
Indeed, when that fight waxed furious, a 
number of Southern senators turned tail 
and bolted from the field, while the State 


of Georgia elected Thomas E. Watson to 
the Senate on a platform of avowed hos- 
tility to Woodrow Wilson and all his 
works. The South will vote for the 
Democratic nominee, but there is no as- 
surance whatever that the South will sup- 
port his programme after his election in 
the only effective way; that is, by punish- 
ing Southern members of Congress who 
sink their knives into that programme. 
It would be interesting and perhaps 
profitable to inquire to what extent this 
narrowing of the range of political think- 
ing has narrowed the whole range of the 
South's intellectual activity, to what ex- 
tent the ordination of a Sacred Cow in the 
shape of the Democratic party is respon- 
sible for the existence of other Sacred 
Cows in the realms of morals, religion, 
education, and manners. But that in- 
quiry is not within the scope of this arti- 
cle. What is within its scope is some sug- 
gestion of the vast, pernicious influence 
upon the political morality of the rest of 
the country that must be exerted by the 
presence within the country of 26,000,000 
people who are frankly bearing in mind 
some other consideration than the highest 
interest of the nation when they go to the 
polls on presidential election day. This 
influence cannot be measured exactly, but 
it cannot fail to be immense. Its power 
is hinted in the fact that practical poli- 
ticians in the Republican forces admit, 
in their franker moments, that the Solid 
South is an asset of immense value to 
them in many parts of the North and 
West, where it is constantly used as a 
bugaboo to scare wabbling Republicans 
into line, thereby causing them to vote 
against their convictions, and so encour- 
aging the spread of political insincerity. 
I do not pretend to assert that if the 
negro question were settled to-morrow the 
South would promptly go Republican. I 
doubt that it would do anything of the 
sort, for the doctrine of Thomas Jefferson 
still has a vast number of thoughtful and 
intelligent adherents below the Potomac. 
But I do assert that the Democratic vote 
of the South under present conditions is 
not a vital, wholesome expression of con- 
fidence in the principles and policies of 
the Democratic party. I do assert that 
if the South were politically free, out of 
more than sixteen hundred thousand 



Sou th Carolinians there would be more 
than 1,123 who would vote the Repub- 
lican ticket. The vote that was cast for 
]\;lr. Davis in the electoral college was 
no more vital and wholesome than one 
of the corpses which, according to the 
charges already referred to, were voted in 
the South Carolina primaryc It was a 
dead vote. 
Lest I be accused of purely destructive 
criticism, let me declare, in conclusion, 
that the answer to the question that the 
dead vote of the South presents is at hand 
and may be stated with seductive ease. 
All that is necessary to remedy the whole 
situation is to expel the ancient frauds 
that infest our national politics and face 
the facts as they exist. Simple, isn't it? 
We need only make over our history, par- 


ESCAPE 


43 


ticularly that of the last seventy years 
hang all the demagogues in the land, bur
 
all the lying text-books of history, and 
cut out the tongues of all the ignorant and 
prejudiced teachers. Just a trifling re- 
construction of human nature will do the 
business. 
But while we await the completion of 
that operation, it will do no harm for 
thoughtful men of all sections to give the 
problem some attention. It does not 
help, and it will not help, to dismiss the 
whole business as merely an inexplicable 
idiosyncrasy of Southerners. Twenty- 
six million people do not have inexplica- 
ble idiosyncrasies. When tbey act to- 
gether in a certain way, the explanation 
of their action is always easy to find if 
anyone seeks it. 


Escape 
BY VIRGINIA MOORE 


PRESENTLY I shall go with the plovers, 
Shatter this wall with the weight of my wing; 
I shall have nothing to do with braggarts, nothing to do with lovers; 
I shall fly. in a fiery ring. 
I shall nest with the gold and the black-bellied plovers 
In catalpas that do not exist; 
I shall not care for curses, I shall not care for covers, 
I shall pierce an impersonal mist. 
The lapwing will know me, the sandpiper plover, 
The dotterel rummaging reaches of rain,- 
Perhaps in an orgy of crusading beaks I'll discover 
The magic that makes things plain. 
I shall lariat stars with the prescient plovers, . 
Fling a noose for the loveliness they will be' plymg- 
Curl up, corral claws: I am no
 one who hovers 
Indecisive, when plovers are flymg. 
Presently I shall go with the 'plovers 
\Vith never a cry for our cabm together- 
And you will remember the luminous year we were lovers 
And stoop to a fallen feather. 



Cap'n Quiller Listens In 
BY TORREY FORD 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAWRENCE BARNES 


rÎ 
 
?p,
ecQ


eratt:
 
';t T 
' stowed away the last 
. 
 .g. mouthful of apple pie 

I 
 he pushed back his 
'W'

W chair and arose ab- 
XU" 'l{JI" o.ux ruptIy. 
"Little late to-night, 
l\tla. Mind if I shove off?" 
There was abject apology in Cap'n 
Quiller's voice, sheepishness in his man- 
ner, but as the hands of the ship's clock 
on the mantel pointed to five minutes 
after seven the Cap'n felt that he could 
well afford any humility rather than be 
detained longer by mere food. 
From her half-finished pie Mrs. Quiller 
glanced up at her husband and sighed 
audibly-a theatrical, trumped-up-for- 
the-occasion sigh. She did her best to 
assume a long-suffering air. Her eyes 
travelled rapidly from her husband's 
eager face to the clock and back to her 
husband again. 
"Drat your old radio," she said. 
"'Fore that dumb thing came into the 
house you allus took two helps 0' apple 
pie. Now-" 
"But there's somethin' special on to- 
night, Ma-pet." The Cap'n always called 
his wife "Ma-pet" when five minutes 
past seven found him absent from his 
radio. 
"I'd jess like to see one night come 
along when there wasn't nothin' special 
on. I never heard nothin' yet that 
sounded special to me-jess talkin' and 
music playin' and singin'. All right if you 
like it but I don't like it." 
Miranda Quiller snapped her jaws to- 
gether firmly to indicate that the argu- 
ment was quite finished. Skilfully the 
Cap'n edged toward the doorway, back- 
ing cautiously until he reached a point 
where he could turn and bolt for the 
stairs that led gloriously up to his radio 
room. 
44 


When he had gone Mrs. Quiller prompt- 
ly dropped her masque of stern austerity 
and a broad, satisfied smile spread across 
her countenance. Her wizened-up eyes 
actually twinkled. For she was glad- 
gladder than she could possibly express 
by smiles or twinkles-that there was 
something left in the world that could 
interest her husband to the extent of 
drawing him away from his favorite deep- 
dish apple pie. 
Up-stairs the Cap'n adjusted his spec- 
tacles and viewed with supreme pride all 
five tubes of his radio receiving set, a set 
such as no man in seven counties could 
ma tch or even aspire to match. The set 
had been professionally conceived, pro- 
fessionally made, and professionally in- 
stalled. The Quillers had a son in the 
profession, so to speak; at least, Hank 
Quiller was rated as chief radio operator 
on board the S. S. Omega plying between 
New York and the West Indies. On his 
last trip home Hank had presented his 
father with the receiving set, hooked the 
thing up casually, given a few words of 
instruction, and departed. 
Having already missed out on seven 
minutes of the evening programme Cap'n 
Quiller lost few moments in gazing idly 
at his proud possession. Industriously 
he went abo.ut the intricate business of 
lighting up the tubes, plugging in the ear- 
phones, whirling the tickler into place 
and moving the detector dial to the exact 
spot where he knew Station WCOR 
would be on the air. The Cap'n lighted 
his pipe and concentrated on the voice 
coming over the radio. 
"Live-stock market: Steers, fair to 
prime, 100 pounds. . . $9.50 and $10.40; 
Live Lambs, fair to prime, 100 pounds 
. . . $14.0 0 and $14.75; Hogs. . ." 
Over these figures the Cap'n nodded 
appreciatively. Wonderful mechanism 
the radio-sit right at home and know 
what's going on in all parts of the world. 



CAP'N QUILLER LISTENS IN 


The radio voice began to talk about the 
grain market. The Cap'n took two puffs 
from his pipe and turned the dials to 
WRAN. Yes, the Bedtime Story was 
going full blast. 
'''Who are you, may I ask?' said the 
little boy. 'I'm a nephew of the sand- 
man,' said the other little boy, 'and I 
have to go to bed every night at eight 
o'clock just the same as you.'" 
The Cap'n grunted satisfaction. 
"Workin' swell," he mumbled. 
Once more the dials moved to wind- 
ward as RQAP boomed in on the high 
note of a soprano solo with the faint echo 
of a jazz orchestra in the background. A 
touch on the tickler and the jazz orchestra 
faded out giving full play of the air to the 
lady soloist. 
The Cap'n puffed contentedly. All 
the local stations were working O. K. 
Now for distance, a complicated but 
thrilling diversion. One night the Cap'n 
had picked up Davenport, Iowa, as plainly 
as New York. He might get it again- 
and there was still San Francisco to be 
heard from. He set to it with a boyish 
gleam of unbridled excitement. 
You would never have recognized the 
Captain Quiller at his radio as the same 
man who two months earlier had been 
nothing more than a fireside brooder. 
Not that the Cap'n had so much to brood 
about, but what little he did have he en- 
larged upon and magnified until he worked 
up a case of despondency that began to 
approach melancholia nolum dementia, as 
the village doctor quaintly put it. 
The main trouble with the Cap'n was 
that he considered himself still a young 
man and had nothing to do. After forty- 
five years of excitement on the high seas 
he found himself settled down in a sleepy 
little South Jersey fishing village with 
the years dragging slowly on toward noth- 
ing in particular. If the Cap'n had re- 
tired voluntarily, things might have been 
different; for then he could have gathered 
around him other old salts of Bay town 
and lived over and over again his years 
in command of the finest sailing vessels 
on the coast, his later years on steam 
craft. But the Cap'n had not retired 
voluntarily. Retiring was about the last 
thing in the world he would have con- 
sidered. 


45 


"Only lazybones retire," he grumbled 
"Others go on and on." . 
At sixty-three the Cap'n looked for- 
wa
d to nearly a score more years of 
actIv
 duty. 
ut when he mistook Jupi- 
ter LIght for FIre Island, not to mention 
the time he went cruising down the coast 
forgetting completely to stop off at Sa- 
vannah and pick up a cargo bound for 
Buenos Ayres-well, to put the matter 
mildly, the Consolidated Shipping Lines 
decided it was time Captain Quiller went 
on the inactive list. 
The Cap'n retired to his fireside and 
his brooding while :Miranda Quiller faced 
the impossible task of evolving distrac- 
tions that might prod him into the least 
semblance of enthusiasm for carrying on 
with life as he found it. 
Summers were not so bad, for then the 
Cap'n could potter around the yard mess- 
ing with the few rows of vegetables and 
nursing the flowers, or he could go down 
the bay fishing when the weakfish were 
running, or he could amble down to the 
store to do errands artfully invented by 
Mrs. Quiller throughout the day. The 
winters, however, were terrific ordeals 
both for the Cap'n and for :Mrs. Quiller 
until-blessed be the day-the broad- 
casting bug bit deep in the Cap'n's tough 
hide. 
Which explains, perhaps, why Mrs. 
Quiller smiled to herself after the Cap'n 
had walked out on her half-finished meal 
and why she looked forward with no great 
pleasure to the day when the radio would 
cease to number among its victims her 
adored but frequently irascible mate. 
That day seemed quite remote just now 
with the Cap'n having successfully tuned 
in on a church service one thousand miles 
from Bay town. The Cap'n was at the 
head of the stairs caIling excitedly. 
" JVliranda ! Miranda QuiUer I AU 
hands on the top deck. I've got St. Louis 
on the loud speaker. Come quick I" 

Irs. Quiller refused to get excited. 
"'Ve can hear it all right down here. 
Rozie Brown is over talkin' and settin' 
with me." 
"Ah, Ma, come on up. Bring Rozie 
along. I want her to hear a loud speaker 
as is a loud speaker." 
"All right, Uncle Lyman. We're com- 
ing this very minute." 



46 


CAP'N QUILLER LISTENS IN 


It was Rozie who made the decision. 
Rosamund Brown lived next door, a 
comely, rosy-cheeked girl in her early 
twenties who wasn't too stuck up to come 
in and talk with old folks. Besides, there 
was something or other between Rozie 
and Hank Quiller; neither the Cap'n nor 
:Mrs. Quiller knew just what. Rozie had 
many beaux and Hank might be just one 
of the long string. At any rate, when 
Hank was ashore he had first call on 
Rozie's dates. 
"Isn't it perfectly wonderful 1" Rozie 
enthused as she took a seat in the radio 
room that echoed with "Nearer, My God, 
To Thee" as chorussed by the entire con- 
gregation of the First M. E. Church in St. 
Louis, Mo. 
The Cap'n gestured magnificently to- 
ward his five-tube set. "Ain't it unbe- 
lievable ? " 
Mrs. Quiller sniffed. " You're the one 
that's unbelievable, Lyman. The Lord 
knows I've tried hard enough to git you 
inside of a church here to home." 
The hymn in St. Louis swelled to a fin- 
ish; the" Amen," amplified to the last 
unit of capacity in Cap'n Quiller's set, 
filled the room. 
"Let us pray," said the St. Louis pas- 
tor. 
Mrs. Quiller and Rosamund bowed 
their heads reverently. The Cap'n, 
blushing furiously, bent over the radio 
not knowing whether to submit himself 
frankly to reverence or to pretend the 
second stage of amplification needed 
slight readjustment. The prayer droned 
on leaving the Cap'n undecided. When it 
came to an end the choir sang a Gloria 
response, a soft-toned harmony that sent 
the thrills chasing up and down the spines 
of the three listeners. 
The Cap'n was the first to lift his head. 
"Now let's have a little jazz." 
He proceeded by degrees and notches 
on the dials toward jazz. Along the way, 
there burst from the loud speaker a 
symphony orchestra in full volume. 
"Oh, a symphony 1 Do let us hear 
some of that, Uncle Lyman." 
"Anything to oblige a lady." With 
deft fingers the Cap'n tuned the sym- 
phony in-tuned it out a couple of times 
by mistake and finally brought it in 
closer and closer until you could almost 


hear the swish of the conductor's baton. 
"How's that for a little old hand-made 
set? " 
"Marvellous 1 Beautiful 1" 
"Real nice music," said Mrs. Quiller, 
nodding over her sewing and struggling to 
beat time with her foot to a Sonata that 
followed none of the accepted rilles of 
music as she knew it. 
"High-toned stuff, all right." The 
Cap'n pulled at his pipe. Personally he 
preferred a different brand of entertain- 
ment, but there was no accounting for 
tastes. He sat back contentedly and 
watched Rozie. 
The symphony ran its smooth course, 
dipping into peaceful valleys where only 
soft strings could be heard, mounting to 
joyous peaks with horns, cellos, harps, 
and drums. . . . At last came the finale 
-a terrific finale with the kettles boom- 
ing and the cymbals crashing. The loud 
speaker vibrated with a low thunder. 
"They're applaudin' now," explained 
the Cap'n. 
Rosamund joined in the applause. 
"Encore 1 Encore I" she shouted gaily. 
The encore came, more Sonata perhaps 
or somebody's Melody in E :Minor. 
Rosamund smiled happily while Mrs. 
Quiller nodded almost to slumberland. 
The Cap'n eyed them both curiously. 
He wondered if there really was anything 
between Hank and Rozie and, if there 
was, why couldn't Miranda get Rozie to 
tell her all about it. 
Whir 1 Click 1 Bang 1 
The Cap'n jumped from his repose to- 
ward the dials. Before he could reach ou t, 
a husky voice spoke through the hornc 
"The air 1 The air! For God's sake, 
give us the air!" Then came more whir- 
ring, more clicking, followed by a dead 
silence. 
"Well, I'll be hog-swoggled," exclaimed 
the Cap'n. "Ain't that queer 1" He 
turned the dials this way and that. Noth- 
ing came. 
Mrs. Quiller woke up with a start. 
"Quit monkeyin', Lymanc That was 
nice music." 
"Sure it was nice but it's faded dead 
out on us now. Can't get nothin'. Must 
be somethin' wrong." 
"Don't you want me to call Willie, 
Uncle Lyman? He's a good fixer." 



CAP'N QUILLER LISTENS I
 


"No, thanks, Rozie. Don't want to 
bother the boy. Had him over last 
night." The Cap'n whirled dials franti- 
cally but vainly. 
Mrs. Quiller was disturbed. "Do call 
Willie, Rosamunçl. He'll just get it all 
out of whack without Willie." 
Rosamund went to the window and 
called across to where her brother had his 
makeshift set hooked up. After a mo- 
ment Of so he responded. "Come over a 
minute," called Rosamund. "Uncle 
Lyman's set has stopped working." 
" 'S'all right," came Willie's shrill re- 
ply. "They just announced there's an 
S 0 S signal in the air and all broadcasting 
has been discontinued. Didn't you hear 
the government man askin' for the air? 
'S'all right. They'll start up again in a 
little while." 
The Cap'n received the news glumly. 
What rotten luck! The one night in the 
week he had gathered a fair-sized audience 
in front of his radio, some ship had to go 
and get in trouble and stop all his fun. 
He sat back gloomily in his chair and let 
his pipe go out. He was thoroughly an- 
noyed. 1vlrs. Quiller and Rosamund 
didn't take the interruption quite so much 
to heart. They rather enjoyed the ex- 
citement of an S 0 S in the air. It was 
different and therefore thrilling. 
A half-hour later the radio party was 
still in a position of status quo-no music 
floated through the air, no singing, no 
talking, a dull evening. Suddenly the 
front door flew open with a crash and up 
the stairs came \Villie Brown three steps 
at a time. He arrived red-faced and 
breathless, struggling to say something 
but only puffs and blows coming from his 
mouth. 
"Well, Willie," said Rosamund, with 
the customary sisterly sarcasm to younger 
brothers. "What's it all about?" 
\Villie manæuvred his lips into a posi- 
tion where words were possible. "Hank! 
Hank's ship!" 
"\Vhat about Hank's ship?" 
"It's him sendin' the S 0 S. I heard it 
awful faint-KDP, KDP. That's Hanle" 
The Cap'n collapsed completely. All 
his life he had faced dangers like this, but 
with the boy it was different. He was too 
young, too inexperienced, too unschooled 


47 


in the ways of the sea to be tossed reck- 
lessly into a real crisis. What would the 
boy be saying, what would he be thinking 
what would he be doing? No, no-it 
couldn't be. 
Mrs. QuilIer, slower to understand, 
watched her husband's collapse before she 
realized what \Villie's message meant. A 
dull moan was the only sign she gave. She 
took off her spectacles and sat back white 
and silent. Something had happened to 
Hank-something mysterious and terrible. 
To Rosamund fell full responsibility. 
\Vith trembling lips she began to inter- 
rogate Willie. 
" You don't know it's Hank's ship, do 
you, \Villie ? Nobody told you, did they? 
You just guessed it, didn't you?" 
WilIie, frightened by the seriousness 
with which his announcement had been 
received, wished he hadn't said anything. 
"I ain't sure, of course. But I know 
Hank's signal, KDP, and it sounded just 
like it to me. Awful faint but I've heard 
it lots and lots when he's been near Kew 
York." 
The Cap'n lifted his head. He had a 
ray of hope. "Hank's down off Cuba 
now, more'n a thousand miles away. 
That set of yourn only receives a few hun- 
dred miles, don't it, Willie?" 
"That's all, Uncle Lyman. I might 'a' 
been mistaken." 
The Cap'n got up and comforted his 
wife. "There, there, l\Ia. Don't take on 
so. It ain't Hank's boat. \\ïllie made 
a mistake." 
Mrs. QuilIer continued to sob softly. 
"I'm afraid he is right, Lyman. I have 
a feelin' the boy's in danger." 
" Oh tu t, tu t. Can't be, l\Ia. Jess to 
satisfy 'you though we'll let "Tillie tune in 
and see what he can hear." 
\Villie brightened. "If there is any- 
thing to hear, we ought to get it on your 
set, U ncle Lyman." 
"Go to it, boy." 
Willie approached the radio with a pro- 
fessional air. He swung the dials round 
to where he could receive the commercial 
wave lengths. Instantly the loud sp.eaker 
vibrated with staccato screeches, Impa- 
tient, imperative demands spelled out in 
telegraphic language. . 
"That's a government statIOn 
end- 
ing," announced 'Villie. ,. Gee, I ,nshed 



48 


CAP'N QUILLER LISTENS IN 


I knew what they was saying." More 
screeches followed in a different key. 
"Another government station." 
There came a silence that seemed omi- 
nous to the intent little group gathered in 
front of the radio. The Cap'n suggested 
a slight turn on the Vernier, but \Villie ve- 
toed the suggestion. There was nothing 
to do but wait, and as they waited the 
Cap'n's spirits returned and Mrs. Quiller 
became less afraid. Rosamund was more 
ready to cry at this particular moment 
than at any time before-cry or laugh, 
she couldn't decide just which. 
'Villie was the first to hear it, a feeble 
far-off wail-click-click, cluck, click; 
click-click, cluck, click. 
"Listen I" breathed Willie hoarsely. 
" That's Hank." 
Again it came, faintly-dick-click, 
cluck, click; click-click, cluck, dick. 
Cap'n Quiller paled. "Sounds like 
what Hank told me to listen for. But I 
can't be sure." 
"I'm sure," dedared Willie. "Sure 
as anything. I've heard KDP too often 
not to know it now." 
A long series of faint clicks stammered 
through the horn, mystic, maddening 
clicks that meant nothing to those who 
listened but that might mean life and 
death to those who were sending hundreds 
of miles away. Cold sweat stood on the 
Cap'n's brow. Never before had he felt 
so helpless with tragedy pending. 
"We gotta do somethin'," he kept 
mumbling. " We can't jess set here and 
wonder what's goin' on. We gotta know 
what he's sayin', whoever it is that is 
sayin' somethin'." 
"Mr. Billings can read it slicker'n but- 
ter," suggested 'Villie. 
h Ed Billings, the telegraph operator?" 
"That's him. He knows lots of the 
wireless codes. He had a bunch of us 
boys over to Sam's the other night readin' 
all the ship talk and everything." 
"Think you can git ahold of him to- 
night? " 
" You bet I kin. Have him up here in 
a jiffy." 
\Villie left on the run. The Cap'n 
paced the room impatiently, stopping now 
and then in front of the horn to listen to 
the faint dicks, to the loud staccato 
screeches, to the whirs and whistles of the 


ever-present static. Mrs. Quiller, hud- 
dled in her chair, watched the Cap'n's 
face eagerly, reading there every worry 
he felt and sharing them with him. 
Rosamund hovered about, wringing her 
hands nervously and trying to think. of 
something to relieve the tension. 
"Can't I make you a nice hot cup of 
tea, Aunt Miranda?" 
"No, thanks, child. I'm all right. I 
wisht Ed Billings would hurry up and 
come. " 
"He's acomin'," said the Cap'n from 
the window. "I can see his lantern bob- 
bin' up and down. Willie's got him run- 
nin'." 
Ed Billings didn't often run. He was a 
slow-moving type who saved his efforts 
for calamitie
 and catastrophies. When 
Willie burst in on him, at the Bay town 
Pool & Billiard Emporium, he had appar- 
ently been able to convince Mr. Billings 
that the moment for action had come. 
By the time 
lr. Billings arrived at the 
Quiller household he was completely ex- 
hausted and quite out of breath. He 
climbed the stairs slowly and laboriously. 
"What's this about Hank's ship bein' 
in trouble?" he managed to inquire. 
"Dunno, Ed. May be Hank and may 
not. Sounds like him but we can't tell. 
Set over here near the horn and see what 
you can make out." 
Mr. Billings sank into the Cap'n's 
chair in front of the radio. As a new se- 
ries of sharp notes came from the horn, 
he wrinkled his brow and listened closely. 
He took out a crumpled telegraph blank 
and a stub pencil, but made no notes. 
"Key West sendin'," he said. "Code 
word for' Who are yer and where are yer.' " 
The sharp notes ceased. Soon the faint 
clicking began. Mr. Billings cocked his 
right ear and began writing slowly with 
his pencil. " Gettin' anything, Ed? " 
asked the Cap'n. 
Mr. Billings frowned. "Nothing but 
C. S. L" C. S. L." 
Cap'n Quiller gasped. " Consolidated 
Shipping Lines. Go on listenin', Ed." 
"S. S. Omega. Is that Hank's ship?" 
"Yup." The Cap'n's head was bowed. 
"Lying forty miles south of Pedro 
Keys. " 
"My God I South 0' Jamaicy. Don't 
I know them Keys." The faint clicking 



CAP'N QUILLER LISTF
S I
 


went on rapidly. "\Vhat's he sayin' now, 
Ed?" 
J ) 
"Been. . . in . . . collision." ]\;lr. Bil- 
lings spelled out the words as he wrote 
them down. ," \Vith : . : unknown . 


'--'II, 
-- " 


.. 



 


49 



adi?-room. The messages were still com- 
mgm. 
I. Key West sendin' again," \\?illie in- 
formed him. 
"They're askin' for verification of posi- 


, 



 

 


.. 


)
 



 


The sharp notes ceased, Soon the faint clicking began. 1\[r. Billings cocked hi" right car., .- Page 4 8 . 


a. ""'.$ 


I 
I 
I 
___J 


tramp. . .. Hole. . stove . . . in . . . 
port .. side . . . aft . . . of . . . for' cas- 
tle. . '. Heavy... list. . . to. . . port. . . 
taking. . . in . . . water. . . fast. , . pumps 
. . . working. . . ." 
A dull thud on the floor interrupted 
the receiving. .l\1rs. Quil1er had fainted. 
The Cap'n picked her up ,gently and car- 
ried her across the hall to a bedroom. 
Rosam und was close behind. 
"Give her a drink of brandy when she 
comes to," he whispered to Rosamund. 
I, You'll finù it in a ílask in mv left-hand 
bureau drawer." He tiptoed back to the 
YOLo LXX\"III.-4 


tion and name of ship," .:\lr. Bil1ings con- 
fided bet\veen dots and dashes 
"Fortv miles south of Pedro Kevs 
ought tö" be plain enough for any land- 
lubber. .Bouteight hours out from Kings- 
ton in fair weather." The Cap'n shook 
his head dolefully. I, Bad place to be. 
Ain't much travel that way these days." 
\\ hen the faint clicking began again, 

Ir. Billings started writing but stopped 
after a moment. I. He's giving his posi- 
tion again same as before, only this time 
he says S. S. Omega in command of Cap- 
tain Peters." 



50 


CAP'N QUILLER LISTENS I
 


The Cap'n nodded. "Buck Peters, 
used to second mate fer me. Knows the 
sea all right but don't know the Omega 
much. Ain't but his second trip aboard 
her. Gosh, I wish I was aboard. Per- 
haps I don't know the Omega. Had her 
fourteen trips running when she was 
spankin' new." 
Key \Yest boomed in with a brief stut- 
tering phrase. 1\lr. Billings translated it 
as it came. 
"S. S. Omega. . . . How... long. . . 
will . . . you . . . 110a t ? " 
There was some dela V before the an- 
swering faint clicks trièkled in. "God 
. . . willing. . _ we . . . should. . . keep. . , 
heads. . . above. . . water. . . four. . . to 
. . _ six . . . hours. , . ." 
"Hell!' 'commented the Cap'n vehe- 
mentlv. "\Vhat's the matter with Pe- 
ters! - \Vith a hole stove clear through 
the Omega he ought to keep her floatin' 
longer than that. Ain't a trimmer ship 
on the coast." 
ilIr. Billings put his fingers to his lips. 
"Key \Vest again. 'Keep... up . . . cour- 
age. . . Omega. . . . \Varning... all . . . 
ships. . . to . . . watch. . . out. . . for. . . 
you. . .. Trying... to . . . get . . . in . . . 
touch . . . with . . . Kingstonc . . . Hope 
. . . to . . . start . . . rescue . . . ship . . . 
from. . . there. . .. Stand... by' . . ." 
Rosamund touched the Cap'n on the 
elbow. "Aunt 1\Iiranda is feeling better 
again. She wants to know what you have 
heard from Hank." 
"What we've heard, eh?" The Cap'n 
looked up in a daze, his lips trembled as 
he tried to form words. "Y ou tell 
Ii- 
randa Hank's all right-gettin' along 
fine. And tell her Hank jess sent his par- 
ticular love to his .:\Iama and-and to 
you, Rozie." 
Rosamund flushed and choked back 
the sobs. "Oh, Uncle Lyman, do tell me 
if you think Hank is in terrible danger." 
" Danger? Tut, tut! 'Course he 
ain't. Jess havin' a little mite of a close 
shave. Don't you worry none, Rozie, 
Hank's comin' through with flyin' colors." 
"I hope so hard he is, Uncle Lyman. 
He's just the sweetest, dearest friend I've 
got in the world and I love him." 
After she had gone out of the room, the 
Cap'n remarked: "\
/ish we could broad- 
cast that little speech to Hank. 1\1ight 


chirk him up somec A feHar can feel aw- 
fullonely on the sea when there's nothin' 
between him and Davey Jones' locker but 
a few thin strips of boards with holes in 
'em." The Cap'n drummed impatiently 
on the table with his pipe. "Why ain't 
any thin' comin' in now, Ed?" 
"Guess Key \Vest is sendin' out on a 
different wave-length. \Ve better hold on 
here where we know we can pick up the 
Omega. " 
The Cap'n staggered to his feet and 
wandered aimlessly about the room. He 
went in to see 1\Irs. Ouiller for a few mo- 
ments but was back 'shortly with a wan, 
forlorn expression. 
"Any thin' more, Ed?" 
"Nothing yet, Lyman." 
\Villie Brown had not opened his mouth 
once since the arrival of .:\Ir. Billings. 
\Vith eyes glued to the radio, he sat 
curled up in a chair, motionless, expres- 
sionless, taking in every detail of the 
tragedy but offering no comment or sug- 
gestions. Now, however, Willie had 
something on his mind. 
"Uncle Lyman." 
" Yes, boy." The Cap'n did not lift his 
head. 
"\Vasn't them blue-prints you was 
showing me last year the plans of Hank's 
ship? " 
"Guess they was, \Villie. I don't re- 
member exactly. \Vhat about 'em." 
Willie faltered. "Nothing. Nothing 
particular. Thought you might figure 
out on 'em about where she's stove in." 
The Cap'n grasped at the idea. It pro- 
vided a means of relief from the strain of 
inactivity. He pulled out the lower 
drawer of his desk and pawed over a mass 
of papers until he came to a long roll of 
blue-prints that had a large." S. S. Omega" 
scrawle'd across the back. He spread the 
plans out on the desk and bent over them 
with \Villie peering over his shoulder. 
"Aft of the for'castle. Lemme see 
now. Port side." The Cap'n's finger 
wavered as he pointed to the spot. 
"About there I reckon is where she's 
stove. Ain't so bad there. Lots worse 
places she might ha' been hit. 
o, sir, 
ain't so bad there. Looks like-no, 
couldn't be, couldn't be." 
"Looks like what, U nde Lyman?" 
"Looks like she might be hit in num- 



CAP'N QlTILLER LISTENS I
 


ber eight hold but couldn't be there. No 
if 'twas there, Buck Petcrs would c1os
 
them XV doors and she'd be tight as a 
drum. " 
The radio broke in abruptly. It was a 
long message from the Key \Vest station. 


31 


. . . badly. . . :vater . . . in " en
ine... 
roo:n . . . gettmg . . . deeper. . .. Deck- 
engmcs. . . may. , . help. . . with pumps 
. .. Heavy... sea. . . running. . .. All 
. . cheerful. . . so long' . . ." 
Back at his desk the Cap'n studied the 


'..)!' , 


G 


.. 


't<- 



 J 


,
 


San Francisco hadn't gone to bed yet. Why should he:>- Page 5-t. 


11r. Billings waited until the end before 
he interpreted it. 
"Key \Yest says the only boat under 
steam in the Kingston harbor is tHe Ara- 
bella, a privately owned pleasure-craft. 
She's headin' out of the harbor now with 
eyerythin' wide open and expects to make 
the Omega in six to seven hours. Key 
'Vest asks the Omega to get in touch with 
the .1rabella. Sounds promisin', don't it, 
Lvman? " 
-., Promisin', sure. If Buck Peters can 
only keep afloat that long." 
J\Ir. Billings leaned toward the horn. 
"Here comes Hank in again: 'Thank . , . 
God. . . for. . . Arabella. . . . Hope. . . 
we . . . can. . . hold. . . out. . .. Listing 


blue-prints of the Omega. He was puz- 
zled. \\That was Buck Peters wurrying 
about keeping afloat fur when his first re- 
port had been that the damage was aft of 
the for'castle? If the XV doors wouldn't 
shut out the main leak, what about the 
nx doors thirty-foot astern? The Cap'n 
tapped the desk with a pencil. Something 
W3.S mighty darn queer. 
Suddenly it came to him. He t umed 
and pounded \\ïIlie Brown on the back 
excitedly. 
., I got it, boy! 'Cause he ain't got the 
XY doors shet. He don't e\'en know 
about 'em. There's a gal1ey been built in 
there right in front of them doors. . \11 
he's got to do is tear out a bea\'er-board 



52 


CAP'N QUILLER LISTENS I
 


wall, close them XY doors, fill up number 
seven hold on the starboard, and she'll 
float until Hell freezes over." 
The Cap'n pounded the desk as he 
talked. Ed Billings stared at him open- 
mouthed. 
"Wa-al, Lyman, what are you goin' to 
do about it?" 
Cap'n Quiller slumped again. "That's 
the ketch. Here I am on dry land fìggerin' 
out what Buck Peters should be doin' off 
Pedro Keys. 'N I may be wrong at that. 
Gosh but I'd like to know if Buck knows 
about them XY doors." 
Willie had a suggestion. "You might 
wire Kev 'Yest to ask him." 
Ed BÌllings shook his head. "They 
wouldn't pay no attention to a private 
message. But say, Lyman, why couldn't 
you call up the company in New York 
and have them wire Key \Vest to shoot 
out a few words of advice com in' straight 
from headquarters?" 
It was the Cap'n's turn to shake his 
head dubiously. He had a mental pic- 
ture of some fresh young night clerk in 
the office of the Consolidated Shipping 
Lines chuckling over the phone at his 
idea of broadcasting advice to the Omega. 
Still, if he could catch Old :Man Snyder in 
the office he might be able to convince 
him that even an ex-captain on the retired 
list might know something or other about 
the Omega. 
As it happened Old l\Ian Snyder was at 
his desk when the Cap'n's 'phone call 
came in. It was a hectic night in the 
offices of the Consolidated Shipping 
Lines. There were none of the smiles, 
jokes or idling groups that customarily 
went with an evening session-only grim, 
determined faces, frowns, and high- 
pitched voices. The Omega, pride of the 
Lines, was in trouble. Nearly every man 
in the office had a friend or kin on board 
the Omega. As general manager and 
directing genius of the Lines, Old :Man 
Snyder had more friends and more kin on 
board the Omega than any of the others. 
Buck Peters was his wife's own nephew. 
It was a bad night for the old 
man. 
A clerk poked his head in Snyder's door. 
"There's a Captain Quiller on the phone 
wants to speak to you, sir." 
Old l\lan Snyder waved a protest. 


"Got a son on board, hasn't he? Can't 
talk with him. Connect him with 
Hayes." 
A few minutes later the clerk was back. 
"He says he doesn't want to ask about 
his son. Says he's got a private message 
he must deliver to you personally." 
"Oh, well." Snyder picked up the tele- 
phone. "Give me that call from Cap- 
tain Quiller. . .. Hello-Quiller. Sure. 
All right, let it come. Galley in number 
eight hold. What about it? Hold on 
there. Say that again. Don't shout. I 
can hear you all right. Now let it come 
slowly. . .. Tear out galley in num- 
ber eight. Yes, yes, go on. Close XY 
and BX doors. Fill number seven on 
starboard. Is that all? Thanks. Thanks 
a lot. You ought to know if anybody 
does. We'll get busy on that right away. 
G'bye." Snyder turned to the clerk. 
"Get that Key West Government Sta- 
tion on the long distance at once. Send 
Bixby and Steele in here on the run." 


Less than a half-hour later Cap'n 
Quiller sitting in his Bay town radio-room 
heard Key West sending out into the air 
his advice to Captain Peters on board the 
Omega. Ed Billings was more excited 
about it than the Cap'n. 
"They're sendin' it out jest as you told 
'em, Lyman." 
The Cap'n groaned. "Yup. Jess as I 
told 'em. An' I may be so dead wrong 
they'll be laughin' at me on all of the 
seven seas. But godfrey! with a boy on 
board it ain't goin' to hurt me none to 
make a fool of myself when there's a 
chance it may help." 
Breathlessly they waited for a response 
to the message from Hank. At last it 
came. 
"Advice . . . received . . . Captain 
Peters. . . sends. . . thanks. . . to . . . C. 
S. L. . . . Investigating. . . XY doors 
. . . BX doors. . . closed. . . immediately 
. . . after . . . collision. . .. In... com- 
munication . . . with. . . Arabella. . . . 
Hope. . . she. . . arrives. . . in . c . time. 
. .. Settling... fast. . . to. . . port. . . ." 
From the ship's clock in the dining- 
room came the sharp chiming of four 
bells. Through the village echoed the 
striking of ten o'clock from the tower of 
the First Baptist Church. The Cap'n 



CAP'N QUILLER LISTENS I
 


bowerl his head humbly. He was praying 
for Hank. 


The big window to the east that had 
loomed inky-black all night suddenly be- 
gan to take on a grayish blue. The gray 
faded out as the blue came in stronger 
and stronger. Somewhere a cock crowed. 
Another and still another cock. It was 
dawn in Bavtown. 
:Mrs. QuiÍler stirred uneasily on the 
couch. Rosamund reached over and 
patted her reassuringly. By the window 
Cap'n Quil1er stared out hollow-eyed- 
the night had made him an old man. Ed 
Billings dozed in his chair. \Villie Brown 
stood guard by the radio. 
The last message had come in around 
two-thirty. It told briefly of an attempt 
to launch a life-boat, of the loss of four- 
teen men, of the others waiting bravely 
on board for the inevitable. The Arabella 
had not been sighted. Earlier there had 
been a private message from Captain 
Peters: a farewell and his regrets that he 
had not known about the XY doors in 
time to do more good. There had also 
been a private message from Hank: 
,. Good-by and love to all, including 
Rozie;" Rosamund had wept on :Mrs. 
Quil1er's shoulder when this came in, the 
only time during the long night that she 
gave any indication of breaking down. 
\Vith the first rays of light Rosamund 
got up stiffly and stole quietly down- 
stairs. There were sounds of a fire in the 
making, later the pungent aroma of coffee. 
Apparently the smell of coffee penetrated 
to l\Ir. Billings's nostrils for he woke up 
and looked expectant. Rosamund called 
for Willie to carry up the tray. Besides 
the pot of coffee there were doughnuts 
and thinly sliced pieces of buttered toast. 
Cap'n Quiller thanked Rozie but could 
take nothing. He tried a mouthful of 
coffee, gulped, and put the cup down 
quickly. 
"Sticks in my throat," he said. 
,. Thanks jess the same, girlie." 
As Mrs. Quiller was still asleep, Ed 
Billings and \Villie Brown shared the 
breakfast. After the fourth doughnut 
lVIr. Billings sighed contentedly and dozed 
off again. This pleased \Villie, for sleepy- 
eyed as he was he en joyed the importance 
oÎ being official guardian of the radio. 


53 


At te.n ,?inutes o
 five the telephone 
began fll).gmg. long Impetuous rings in- 
tenrled to rouse a sleeping household if 
necessary. I 1 woke 
Irs. Quiller and Eel 
Billings, and kept on ringing. Koone 
made a move toward answering it. Each 
looked at the olher, awed, fearful. The 
Cap'n lifted appealing eyes to Rosamund. 
"Probably somebody has the wrong 
number," she said and tripped out of the 
room. \Vhen she came back her lips were 
trembling, all the color had left her face. 
Her voice faltered. "A )'lr. Snyder in 
New York wants to speak to you, Uncle 
Lyman." 
. "Old 1\1an Snyder, eh?" The Cap'n's 
Jaw dropped. "\\'hat's he want in' this 
time 0' mornin'?" 
Slowly Cap'n Quiller got up and sham- 
bled wearily out, each stair creeking as he 
made his way down to the telephone. A 
deathlike stillness came over the radio- 
room broken only by soft sobbing from 
Rosamund who had hidden her head on 
1\lrs. Quiller's bosom. She was breaking 
under the strain. 
The Cap'n's crackling voice, raised to 
a telephone pitch, floated up the stairs, 
"What's that? Yup. This is Quiller. 
. .. \Vhaddye say? No, no. \Ve ain't 
heard nothin' since 'bout two-thirty. . . . 
Safe? Thank God!" The Cap'n was 
halfway up the stairs. "Hank's safe! 
Safe 'n well 'n happy. \Vhoopee! Wait 
until I hear more and I'll tell yer." 
:Mrs. Quiller and Rosamund both cried, 
unashamed. \Villie executed a jig that 
threatened momentarily to damage be- 
yond repair the best radio receiving set 
in seven counties. Ed Billings gawped 
foolishly at the proceedings, wanting to 
join in the celebration but not knowing 
just where to begin. Finally he compro- 
mised by eating another doughnut. Ko 
one tried to overhear the rest of the 
Cap'n's conversation: Hank was safe and 
that was all that really mattered. 
Some time elapsed before the Cap'n 
finished talking with Old )lan Snyder. 
When he reappeared in_the radio-room, he 
was no longer hollow-eyed. He w

 a 
young man again. There was a :POSltl\'C 
swagger to his walk as he came In. He 
went over and kissed his wife and patted 
Rosamund fondly before he told his news, 
"The boy's safe. Had a narrow squeak 



5.,t 


CAP'
 Ql TILLER LISTENS I
 


but he come through all right jess as I 
knowed he would all along. The Con- 
solidated had a message relayed through 
Kingston tellin' all about it. The Ara- 
bella-she was the boat that put out 
from Kingston-got there after the Omega 
had gone down. She picked up forty-six 
men floatin' around on rafts and pieces of 
wreckage. Hank was among 'em they 
know sure because he was doin' the 
sendin' from the A. rabella. They're 
puttin' back to Kingston now and 
n 
ship home on a passenger-liner. The boy 
ought to be here sometime next week. 
Guess we'll have to stage a welcome-home 
party for him, eh, l\Ia-pet? 
"'N say, Willie, we was right about 
them XY doors. Old 1\Ian Snyder says 
so himself. Only it was too late when 
they got our message. _ Helped some, 
Snyder said, but not enough. Snyder 
said a lot more but it wouldn't concern 
you folks." 
The Cap'n smiled enigmatically. Ap- 
parently he was cherishing a secret that 
pleased him immensely. 
Later Cap'n Quiller found himself out 
on the beach striding up and down close 
to the waves. He was dog-tired, but not 
too tired to walk and gaze out at the sea. 
He could think better that way, especially 
when he had a lot to think about. Old 
:Man Snyder had offered him his old berth 
with the Consolidated. He was to be a 
full-fledged captain again in good stand- 
ing. Besides this, he could take his pick 
of the Consolidated fleet to command. It 
was a tempting offer to a young man of 
sixty-three. 
Still, there were two sides to the ques- 
tion. If he went back to seafaring, it 
would mean leaving :Miranda alone again. 
l\Iiranda was getting on-not old to be 
sure, but not as spry as she used to be 
and less adaptable to getting along by 
herself. And even if he did refuse Sny- 
der's offer, he could consider himself 
legitimately a retired sea captain. There 
would be no taint to his retirement. It 
would be of his own volition. He could 
join in with the old sea-dogs in the Bay- 
town General Store without a blush or 
blemish to his career. Yes, there was 
considerable room for debate as to just 
what he should do. In all, however, a 
pleasant debate. 
The Cap'n had not made up his mind 


one way or the other when he got back to 
the house. He found Rosamund and ,Mrs. 
Quiller on the steps, both with happy 
smiling faces. l\1rs. Quiller's eyes gleamed 
with excitement. 
"I've got a secret to tell you, Lyman." 
" Secret! \Vell, I swan. Jess in the 
mood for secrets, I am." 
"It's about Rozie. She just told me." 
"Oh, about Rozie. That's easy. I 
only need one guess: she's goin' to marry 
Ed Billings." 
They all laughed. 
"Guess again." 
"She ain't goin' to marry our Hank, is 
she? " 
Rozie put both arms around the 
Cap'n's neck. "That's what, Uncle Ly- 
man, and isn't it too wonderful! He 
asked me when he was home the last 
time and I am to give him my answer 
when he comes back. Oh, but I'm so re- 
lieved he is coming back, for I had my 
mind made up all along." 
The Cap'n kissed her. ,. Good for you, 
girlie. I'm tickled pink about it. This 
fake uncle stuff between you and me never 
was jess right. I'd lots rather try and be 
a father to you. And :Miranda here' won't 
make such a bad mother, will she?" 
- "Simply wonderful," breathed Rosa- 
mund ecstatically. 


Up-stairs again the Cap'n should have 
gone straight to bed. Instead he wan- 
dered in to his radio, lighted the tubes 
and plugged in the ear phones, Presently 
he heard the faint strains of a dance or- 
chestra. A touch on the Vernier and the 
music swelled to its full proportion. The 
station was announced: RNOW, San 
Francisco, California. The Cap'n grinned 
triumphantly. San Francisco hadn't 
gone to bed yet. Why should he? l\Iore 
dance music came in broadcasted direct 
from the ballroom. 
"Workin' swell," mumbled the Cap'n 
and reached for his pipe. 
Which meant, if you understood it 
correctly, that the Cap'n had made up 
his mind about Old :Man Snyder's offer. 
Cap'n Quiller had definitely 
etired from 
the sea. But there were no tears about 
his retirement-not a one. \Vith a front- 
row seat in the radio audience he was safe 
and happy and still a young-old man. 
What more could any man ask? 



, 


.I' 
I 
I 


A i\long"l \ illage. 


Chasing Antelope on the Great 
Mongolian Plateau 
BY \YILLIAl\l DOUGLAS BURDEN 


ILLUSTRATIONS FRO!>.I PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR 


&:it ASO
 SEARS and I 

 I travelled together in 
L M j1 thC Far East in 19 22 . 

 \\Thile in Peking we 

 ! 
 heard much talk of 
, - -- -- l\longolia and the 

 WW Gobi desert. There 
were stories of gold 
and bandits, of men who had gone" l\Ion- 
golia mad," of wild rides on the trail of 
the antelope herds, of Urga and of the 
Hutukhtu-the living god of all the l\Ion- 
gols. 
\Ve had a few days to spare after return- 
ing from an extensive hunting expedition 
in North Shansi and determined there- 
fore to make a short trip into the Gobi 
desert. 
Early one morning in November we 
swung off the train at Kalgan. Beyond 


the great walls of this ancient border city 
l\Iongolia stretches away into the unsccñ 
distances. Kalgan is old and worn and 
tiered as if it were holding the weight of 
centuries upon its shoulders, but the 
breath of the frontier lurks about its 
grand old walls. Dusty, hoof-worn trails 
that have been travelled for thousands of 
years lead away northward into a vast 
wilderness-the wilderness of Ghenghis 
and Kublai Khan. 
It was a country of romance and adven- 
ture, I thought, and the heart of 
Iongolia 
was still to me the heart of mystery, the 
heart of the unknown. But what wa5 
this talk of motor-cars on the Gobi des- 
ert? Could it be true that motor-cars 
were crossing ::\Iongolia? \\rhat an out- 
rage to the beauty of the desert and how 
terribly incongruous! 


55 



56 CHASIXG A
TET,OPE ON THE l\IOXGOLL\
 PLATEAU 


The next day we went up into 
Ion- 
golia and we went, I am ashamed to say 
it, in a Ford motor-car. Visions of griffin 
ponies and long hard rides on the open 
plains were dispelled, for the great steppes 


, 


I 
T 


1 


, , 
"1 -'t.. 
., ft,' 



 


The sheepskin coat worn by the Mongolians with a yurt in 
the background. 


had been invaded by the detestable 
motor-car. 
And now let me describe the journey 
from Kalgan out through the west gate 
and up over Hannopa Pass. A Chinese 
driver was at the wheel. Chinee man 
"catch plenty face" driving fast, so we 
soon found out it was a waste of time try- 
ing to make him go sluwly. The trail 
that we followed is the great caravan 
route between Central Asia and China. 
It was as crowded as Fifth Avenue. All 
the camel caravans frum Crga, all the 
shepherds driying their flocks, all Chinese 
from the inner 
Iungolian Plains with 
their mule-teams, their ox-carts, and their 
horses must pass between the narrow walls 


of the west gate. The jams of traffic at 
this point I have never seen the equal of. 
It is bedlam let loose, to begin with, and the 
effect that one wretched little Ford pro- 
duces makes it just ten times as bad. 
Horses, frightened by the roar of the 
engine, are rearing, kicking, and 
breaking loose from their harness, 
while stru
gling Chinamen hang on 
to the animals' heads and hold caps 
over their eyes. A flock of fat- 
tailed sheep and lung-horned goats 
break and spread h eIter-skel ter 
through the streets, some dashing 
into houses and open shops, others 
disappearing up side alleyways. 
\ 
donkey rears, its pack tumbling to 
the ground and grain spilling all over 
the street; but no one offers a help- 
ing hand and the traffic continues 
over the spilled grain. An ox 
struggles up an embankment, a 
Chinaman hanging to his head. The 
overloaded cart crashes against a 
rock, a wooden wheel breaks, and 
the goods slide into the ditch. The 
old man surveys .his demolished out- 
fit, surveys the Ford, and doesn't 
say a word, And an the while the 
strange shouts of Chinese drivers, 
the cracking of whips and the bark- 
ing of dogs fill the air. Up on the 
high wall abuve the gate some one 
hundr<:>d Chinese squat on their 
haunches and gaze serenely clown 
upon the scene of turmoil. 
The soldiers* accept our pass, and 
we are outside of the gates. A rem- 
nant of the great outer wall of China, 
built two hundred years before the Chris- 
tian Era, stands on the sky-line. Only 
the stalwart blockhouses hold their own 
against the 
Iongolian winds. There is 
no road up Hannopa Pass and the Ford 
smashes and bangs up the stony riyer-bed, 
our Chinese driver shouting instructions 
to all who are in his path. Here corne a 
hundred griffin ponies. They halt, look 
restlessly at the Ford with ears pricked 
up, then turn and gallop up the mountain- 
side. One lonely red-faced 
longol, in 
pointed purple hat, up-turned boots, and 
yellow covering to sheepskin coat, gives a 
wild cry and gallops furiously up around 
· .\n American. Mr. Charles Coltman, of the Mongolian 
Trading Company, was shot and killed by Chines
 soldiers 
j list a month later at this very spot. 



CHASIXG :\XTELOPF OX THE :\IO'\GOI J -\X PLA TEAll 57 


and turns them back. A camel caravan is 
winding down the river-bed, a :l\longol in 
the lead, giving easily at the waist to the 
curious undulating motion of the camel's 
walk. X ose to tail they are at tached in 
a seemingly endless line. At our ap- 
proach several startled beasts slip _ 
loose their nose-fasteniul!" and stray 
out over the ri\'er-bottonl. The unf- 
--- 
formity of the caravan is broken and 
there is work for the quiet :\longols. 
 
 
On and on up the rÏ\"er-bed we go, 
smashing and rattling on the rocks 
and creating havoc all along the line. 
Sears aqd I are hurled back and forth 
in the rear seat and my aggravation 
with motor-cars increases. Snarling 
dogs pursue us, and Chinese children 
-little bits of roosters-throw stones 
at us. Finallv we come to the end 
of the river-b
d. Bevond there is a 
gorge and a mountainside. It is 
called the ,bad part of Hannopa Pass. I 
Our driver stops and three strong 1.\ 
horses are hitched up to the car. \Ye 
get out and walk, and then, to the 
tune of panting horses, shouting Chi- 
namen, 10!ld crackings 'of --the whip, 
and buzzing of the engine, our car as- 
cends the pass. For a mile and a half 
the Ford goes up over the rocks and 
boulders till fmallv we stand on the 
rim of the great l\Iongolian IJlateau. 
Beyond is the endless elevated plateau 
land of Central Asia and below at our 
feet lies China, ever gnawing back 
into the :\longolian rim that gi\ es 
way, inch by inch, year by year, to 
the forces of erosion. F or a long time I 
stand looking down onto China. There 
below me stretches a sea of mountain
 and 
gnarled ridges and weather-worn slopes, 
the whole forming a great jumble of 
broken-down land masses that are tor- 
t ured and twisted with cam'on and ravine. 
The lights and shadmvs that decurate the 
velvet slopes spread over the far-tiung 
battle-line until in the distance I can see 
the remains of the great wall stretching 
over the mountains, away into the South 
like some endless crawling serpent. 
Then we turn back and climb into the 
Ford, and for the rest of the day we rattle 
and bump over Inner :\IongoIÍa. 
It was a long time before we left the 
f::rm land behind, for the Chinese, disre- 


garding the boundary line of the gre.lt 
wa
l, have occupied the edges of the 
Ion- 
gohan Plateau and culti\'ated the fertile 
soil of the plains. The result of this has 
been a mixing of breeds, so that the 
l()n- 


............. 
....... 


JtI .... 
" 
a, 


'" 
""\ 


...... 


)Ii'u:d blood of Lower )Iongolia. 


gol, native to the country we were now 
passing through, is a very different speci- 
men from the full-blooded, picturesque, 
wild-looking 
Iongol that comes down 
with the camel caravans from Outer 

Iongolia. The former are a degenerate 
type; the latter are the true descendants 
of a great people that had unce ruled a 
large part of the world. They are the 
greatest nomads of the earth. people to 
be admired for their courage. hardihood. 
and endurance. and Im'ed for their child- 
ish human wa\'s. I liked the :\longols 
th
 verv first time I saw them, and the 
more :\Íongols I saw. the more my liking 
grew. fheyare. surely, the most pictur- 
esque people on the face of the globe. 
Xow, it is sad to relate that a dwindling 



58 CHASIXG ANTELOPE O
 THE l\10XGOLIA
 PL"-TEAU 


population of two million is the only rem- 
nant of a once great people. 
Some time after sunset we drew up 
alongside of three yurts that looked as 
though they had been dumped there to- 
gether on the floor of the prairie. A 
yurt is as good an example of adaptation 
to enyironment as is the Eskimo igloo 
of the Arctic. A bitter cold wind was 
sweeping over the steppes, and seyeral 
grassy ponds that we had passed on the 
way. were frozen up tight. Yet when a 
few minutes after our arrival we were 
sitting before an argol fire inside the yurt, 
we were as comfortable and warm as 
could be. Not a bit of draft crept through 
the felt walls, and there was no smoke 
such as there is in Indian tepees to smart 
your eyes. 
A 
Iongol family live in three yurts, 
placed side by side. One yurt is a kitchen; 
another the bedroom, and the third is the 
dining-room and parlor combined. The 
interior of the parlor is elaborately orna- 
mented with colored felt, little glass paint- 
ings, and bits of bright ribbon. The open 
fireplace is very carefully and neatly ar- 
ranged in the centre of the room. Furni- 
ture stands along the wall and consists of 
red-colored boxes of all sizes that are 
beautifully fitted out with brass trap- 
pings. · 
Just as we were beginning to get thawed 
out after our cold ride, a lVIongol stepped 
in through the lO'.Y_"7þ
ng entrançe -and 
served us cheese and .1\Iongol wine, or 
cumel, which is thè {eì
eÌ1ted milk of 
mares. After that we enjoyed a more sub- 
stantial supper and then before" n
tidng 
we sat around for a while snug å'hd warm 
before the bright blaze, listening to the 
north wind that came howling down over 
the Gobi from the Siberian steppes be- 
yond. 
The next morning we went hunting. I 
had heard that great herds of antelope, 
one and two thousand strong, roamed the 
plains. I had heard also that these ante- 
lopes could travel at a speed of sixty miles 
an hour, which would make them the fast- 
est-running animals in the world. To all 
these stories I had answered nothing, but 
here, now, was the chance to see for my- 
self. 
The idea as Sears and I understood it 
was to chase the antelope in a motor-car, 


so we picked up our 9.5 mm. l\lannlicher 
rifles, which we had been using in the 
Shansi l\Iountains, and jumped into the 
Ford. 
For a couple of hours we rattled along 
and then as we topped a rise of ground I 
saw there before us on the flat steppes 
something that would have made an old 
plainsman's eyes glisten. Hundreds upon 
hundreds upon hundreds of antelopes 
were grazing in all directions over the 
basin. In the distance they looked like 
little yellow, moving specks, here bunched 
together and there straggling out in a 
long line and covering several square 
miles of country. I could just begin to 
picture what it must have been in the 
early buffalo days on our own Western 
prairies. Afterward we estimated the 
number of antelopes seen at about one 
thousand five hundred, and I am sure the 
figure is not far from the mark. For a 
few minutes' we ,enjòyed a good look at 
them through field-glasses and then set 
out at full speed down the slope. I was 
watching the antelope very carefully 
and- I saw the nearer ones moving rest- 
lessly back and forth, unable to make up 
their minds just what to do in face of this 
new'; strañge enemy that came rolling 
toward them. \Ve headed for the middle 
of the herd, and as we drew up close they 
separated and .galloped leisurely off, some 
of the little fellows jumping, spring-buck 
fashiön,'high ínto' the air
 There now took 
place something' that was quite beyond 
my.uñderstanding. We had hardly 
changed Dur course at all, and the herd 
that :ha.d turned to the right, instead of 
headmg away at, right angles, now 
bunched up and jogged along parallel to 
us. They must have been a good four 
hundred yards off, but they held their 
course parallel to ours-a very strange 
manæuvre on their part, I thought. Our 
driver put on more speed. The antelope 
correspondingly put up their pace a little. 
Indeed some of the leaders were gaining 
on us, so our driver gave himself over to 
the excitement of the chase and opened 
the throttle wide. I was somewhat ner- 
vous, as I had been told that many cars 
had been wrecked while doing just this 
very thing. The speedometer read forty 
miles per hour and Sears and I were being 
thrown all over the back seat. At this 



(,HASI
G AXTELOPE O
 THF \10'\GOIJ -\ 
 PI -\TE:\P 


59 


point the antelope got down to work. big buck an
elope in particular. He real- 
They weren't straining themseh'es as yet. ly exerted hlmsel
, and he was the only 
They were just s.imply covering country. one I saw that (hd. His legs worked as 
As the leaders gamed on u
 I noticerl that smoothly and as beautifull _ v as P istons . 
they began to swing across our bow. 'T 11 h 
_'<lever cou ( anyt ing move more grace- 



1 


The mountainous country on the border of the \Iongolian pldteau. 


They seemed to be consumed bv some in- 
sane desire to cross in ahead of us. Roy 
Andrews says that they act as though 
drawn by some powerful magnet, and 
that is just the way to describe it. Very 
soon it became evident that the antelope 
were tiring of our company and they got 
down to the business of running in real 
earnest. Keyer have I seen anything so 
beautiful. Their bodies dropped lower 
and lower, so that they were skimming the 
plains 'lXlltre à terre, I remember one 


fully than did that fine old buck. He 
was on wings and simply shot ahead of 
the rest of the herd, swung across in front 
of us, and got safely away. It was the 
most spectacular exhibition of running 
that I ever hope to see. "If a horse could 
run like that," said Sears, "I would spend 
my life going to horse-races." 

 ow we called to the driyer to throw on 
the brakes, and before we had come to a 
stop we jumped out, one on either side of 
the car, and opened fire. I saw a 
purt 



60 


(( A SLIl\J YOUTH CALLED SHELLEY" 


of dust below another fine old buck, but 
before I had time to put up the four- 
hundred-yard sight the animals were out 
of range. 
For a large part of the day we repeated 
these manæuvres. one bombardment fol- 
lowing close upon another, untill realized 
that we were futilely wasting our very 
precious ammunition. One needs flat, 
trajectory rifles for this sort of work, and 
that is exactly what 9.5 mm. :l\Iann- 
lichers are not. 
However, I was very much annoyed at 
being so thwarted by the game and de- 
termined to try different tactics. 
Forthwith I left the motor-car and set 
out on foot, a yery discouraging occupa- 
tion because of the great distances and 
the endless plains. First I took careful 
account of the undulating rise and fall of 
ground and then I studied the yarious 
little herds of antelope which were now 
scattered out in every direction. Pres- 
ently I noticed that one rather large 
herd was headed back into a more steeply 
rolling section of country, so I hid behind 
a little undulation of the prairie and 
started at a jog-trot to head them off. 
1\1 y manæuvre was successful, and after 
waiting about ten minutes the whole herd 
ambled leisurely by in front of me, not a 
hundred yards from where I was lying 
down, Due to the remarkably clear at- 


mosphere, I thought that I had probably 
been underestimating the distances, so 
now my first shot was too high. Immedi- 
ately the whole herd bolted, but at the 
second crack of the rifle a fine buck came 
to the ground. 
So ended my first antelope hunt. 
That evening as I was walking alone 
o\'er the prairie, I sat down on a rise of 
ground to look around. The sun had 
just gone down into a crimson sky. Be- 
fore me, as far as the eye could carry, a 
broad, open valley lay in the shadow of 
the evening, a valley surrounded by low, 
rolling, velvet hills, and there in the purple 
distance three yurts were dumped to- 
gether on the valley floor, a column of 
smoke rising perfectly straight into the 
still air. A camel caravan was wending 
its way over a distant ridge. Below me 
on the plain antelope were grazing. Then 
I looked beyond the valley and the yurts 
and the rolling, yelvet hills where a light 
was gleaming. It was the glow of a reel 
sun on distant mountain peaks and gray 
rock cliffs, but it might for all the world 
have been the stately pleasure domes of 
Xanadu, glistening there to remind the 
weary traveller that l\Iongolia has not 
forgotten its old ruler, KublaiKhan, and 
that perhaps there is still left something 
of the enchantment and mystery of by- 
gone days, 


"A Slim Youth Called Shelley" 
BY NANCY BYRD TURNER 


HIS name was Hogg. North countryman, he carne 
Stodgy and staid, to learn at Oxford town, 
But studied most to have his muffins brown, 
His bitter tea well brewed, and blinked at fame. 
Kor dimly dreamed his shabby door would frame 
A bright impetuous angel, that his hearth, 
Ashen, unkempt, would kindle for all the earth 
And all the winds of time a quenchless flame. 


Yet often, as the hour drew late and stark, 
He saw his threshold tremble, sudden alight 
And wrote, heart shaken, when the years grew chill: 
"I used to hear him running ill tlie dark 
Across tlle old quadrangles, tlirough the night" 
Adding, "I scem to lIear those footsteps still." 



:""" 


-- 


. 
I 


The Professor a
d Ithe 


ink Lad)' 


BY FREDERICK '''BITt 
.\uthor of "J. Smith, Spicklefishcrman," .. He Could Catch Trout," etc. 


ILLUSTRATIOXS B'\ GORDOX STEVEXSOX 


".i. 
 : .i. OOKS on fishing," 

 'I ' '- I 
 - said Professor Bar- 
I stow, "should, in mv 

B opinion, have a plaë'e 
. 
 ", on every reading list. 
a --
 
 The literature of an- 
Ä
 )( gling, apart from its 
technical side, has a 
literary value and a philosophy all its 
own." 
The professor was standing before the 
fireplace in the living-room of the Brant- 
waters Club. Above his head, back of the 
massive stone mantel, a four-pound 
brown tlOut, swelling lustily from its 
mounting-board, was flanked on either 
side by colored sketches of almost equally 
impressive fish. 
Young Thorpe, who was whipping a 
sprung mashie, looked up. ,. You dry-fly 
people are all balmy," he said with a 
laugh. ,. I can't see anything in fishing 
which is not found in other forms of sport 
-golf, for instance." 
Professor Barstow winced. Thorpe's 
contrm"ersial attitude always irritated 
him, and then there was ano"ther reason, 
and the other reason had just entered the 
room. 
.Miss Dorothy Cummings was reason 
enough for any man, even at the profes- 
sor's advanced age of thirty-eight, to 
feel a certain irritation at her evident 
interest in anyone but himself. She 
nodded to the professor but went straight 
to Thorpe. 
"Greetings, Jim. 'Vhat's the cause of 
the riot this morning? Did I hear some- 
thing about golf?" 
.. Golf versus fishing," Thorpe replied. 
"Professor Barstow would have it that 
fishing, as a sport, stands on a pinnacle 
by itself. I denied it." 
" You go too fast, James," said the pro- 
fessor. "::\Iy statement had to do only 
with the literature of fishing. You inter- 


polated what I might have thought but 
refrained from saying." 
"Please say it, professor," :\Iiss Cum- 
mings broke in. ,. I lo\"e to hear vou 
talk." 
 
There was a glint of mischief in her 
eyes, and it roused in the profcssor a feel- 
ing of revol t. 
"I will," he said, almost grimly. "Golf 
is a sport only, while angling-I refer to 
dry-fly casting for trout-is not only a 
sport but an institution, containing many 
of the elements which enter into the phi- 
losophy of life. I refer to determination 
and patience, the successful handling of 
a difficult situation and swift and sure 
decision in an emergency." 
"You're dead right, professor!" Judge 
Holcombe boomed from the doorwaL 
., Join me on the links and we'll shów 
these youngsters the principles of angling 
as applied to golf." 
The professor smiled at his supporter 
but shook his head. "Xot for mc. judge, 
thank you. I'm going down-stream." 
"Afraid to put your theories into prac- 
tice?" Thorpe asked quickly. 
The professor's tanned cheek flushcd. 
"X'ot exactly afraid," he sairl, "but I 
prefer to hit a li\"c trout in swift water 
rather than a merely lh"cly ban on dead 
grass. " 
"'Vow!" Thorpe cjaculated, as the 
tall, lean figure strode from thc room, 
"I'd like to sec the old duffer missing a 
few." 
.. He's not an old duffer, he's an old 
dear," Dorothy Cummings laughed. 
Judge Holcombe lookcd from the 
stocky young man to the slender girl in 
her trim leggings and riding-brceches. ,. I 
wonder," he said, .. at what age a man 
may safely be called an old duffer-or an 
old dear? Professor Barstow is about as 
husky an individual and as young at heart 
as a 'inan at his best has any right to bc. " 
61 



62 


THE PROFESSOR A
U THE PI
K L-\DY 


"Profs are always old," Thorpe as- 
serted. "The older they get the more 
opinionated they become, and I enjoy 
taking a whack at them now I'm out of 
their clutches." 
"\Yatch out that you don't get 
whacked," said the judge, as he turned 
away. Dorothy called after him: "\Vell, 
anyway, he's an old bachelor, judge, 
dear; you must admit that." 
Judge Holcombe wheelerl around and 
shook an admonitory finger. "A darned 
well-seasoned one," he warned, "and too 
good a man to waste on a self-sufficient 
and scoffing generation-including you, 
young lady." 
" Now, will yoU be good!" Thorpe 
charged when i:Í1ey were alone again. 
"\\That did he mean by that?" 
"Search me. But you're all right with 
me, anyway, and I love you a Jot when 
you get all pink and peachy-looking. 
Come on and play golf." 
He seized the ends of the silk tie that 
held together the wide collar of her blouse 
and drew her to him. The girl resisted, 
grasping his hands but laughing as they 
scuffled about the room. 
" Excuse me." The professor was 
standing in the doorway looking embar- 
rassed. "I came back for my pipe," he 
explained. "Sorry to interrupt." 
The girl had thrown herself into a low 
chair, her face as pink and rosy as the dis- 
arranged tie she was smoothing with 
brown, capable hands. 
"Jim's a bear," she said, with a toss of 
her curly bobbed head. 
"Treat 'em rough, professor," Thorpe 
laughed; "it's the only way to handle 'em 
and they like it." 
"Do you like it?" 
There was a queer, almost eager, in- 
tensity about his sudden question, and 
Dorothy's eyes fell. 
"\Vhy-why, I can take care of my- 
self. I would have had him down in a 
minute. His wrists are not as strong as 
mine." 
"Are they as strong as this?" 
He pulled back the sleeve from a sinewy 
forearm and placed a coin back of the 
wrist. \Vith a quick contraction of his 
fingers a bulging muscle leapt into play 
and the coin shot into the air. With a 
!lashing movement the professor caught 


it in his open palm anrl replaced it in his 
pocket. 
"That's a good trick!" Thorpe ex- 
claimed, and Dorothy cried: "How do 
you do it? \\'hat made it jump?" 
The professor looked at her for a long 
moment through his shell-rimmed glasses. 
"Twenty years of fly-casting," he said, 
and left them standing in unusual and 
surprised silence. 
Thorpe was the first to speak. " Gee! " 
he said in a tone of unwilling admiration, 
"I'd hate to have that bird set his talons 
into me." 
Dorothy's eyes were full of puzzled 
wonderment. "'Vhy, Jim!" she cried, 
,. he's strong and human. I don't believe 
he's as old as-we think he is." 
"The older they get the tougher they 
are." Thorpe grinned. "Come on and 
play with some one whose heart is still 
tender and who can give you a half-stroke 
a hole and beat the puttees off your sturdy 
if well-formed extremities." 
" Jim!" She hurled a cushion at him, 
and as he ducked anrJ ran from the room 
she called after: "\Vait till I get my 
clubs and we'll see who'll do the beat- 
ing." Then, turning with a very serious 
face, she said to the empty, gaping fire- 
place: "I wonder if you are too young at 
heart to be called an old dear-safely. 
Perhaps I'll take up fishing, seriously, 
and "-an irrepressible smile twisted her 
red lips-"and find out." 


II 


DOWN-STREAì\I the professor sat on a 
rock with the cool water rippling about 
his long legs. He had just raised a heavy 
trout under the high, rhododendron-clus- 
tered bank opposite, and he was giving the 
fish time to settle down before presen ting 
another and, he hoped, more acceptable 
fly for his inspection. 
Something like a tiny yacht with twin 
upright sails bobbed down to him on the 
ripples,and with cupped hand he snatched 
it from the water. " Pink Lady!" he ex- 
claimed. "The first I've seen this season." 
Snapping open his fly-box, he drew out 
a drab-wing, pink-bodied fly and com- 
pared it with the draggled shape on his 
coat sleeve. "Pink Lady," he repeated, 
and then, struck by a sudden thought, 



THE PROFESSOR A
D THE PI
K L\DY 


"Damn. that pink necktie," he mut- 
tered. "I wonder if she likes to be tugged 
around? " 
"Not by a condemned schoolmaster," 
he gloomily decided, and turned back to 
the task at hanel. 
Having preened the Pink Lady fly to 
his satisfaction, with cautious steps he 
quartered across the stream and. standing 
just beyond casting distance, flipped the 
rly into the air and began a series of gradu- 
ally lengthening false casts. 
Extending over the water stretched a 
protecting hemlock branch. The Pink 
Lady, f10ating at the extremity of gossa- 
mer leader and tapered line, flirted dan- 
gerously with the green entanglement, 
brushed a drouping twig, checked, and 
dropped lightly on the water. Riding 
high, with wings cocked, it drifted slowly 
down at the extremity of a half-circle of 
almost invisible leader. 
The big trout rose in an explosion of 
flying spray. Then, with the rod bowing 
under the impact of sharp steel in firm 
flesh, the fish lunged forward with a rush 
which carried him out into the sun-shot 
ripples. 
In midstream the trout sought shelter 
behind a sunken rock, and the professor, 
reeling in, cau tiously approached and 
peered down at the spot indicated by the 
taut leader. 
"'That his sharp eyes discovered evi- 
oently did not please him, for he swore 
softly and kicked forward against the 
loose river gravel. 
Again the trout shot away, circled 
under the spring of the rod, and swung 
back flapping the surface vigorously. 
\Vith a quick motion the professor un- 
snapped his landing-net and made a deft, 
sweeping lunge. 
"Some lucky swipe that," he grinned, 
and splashed over to an exposed boulder 
near shore, where he laid the fish still en- 
tangled in the dripping meshes. 
"Too bad," he muttered; "probably 
two pounds," and. through the restrain- 
ing meshes, he carefully worked the fly 
from the tough skin of the fish's shoulder. 
For a moment he hesitated; then he low- 
ered the net into the water. The big 
trout was tired, but not too tired to lum- 
ber over the rim and move slowly away. 
From the bank came a long-drawn 


63 


"O-o-h," and the professor whirled 
around. Against the background of lea\"es 
Dorothy Cur:nmings's f,:ce and flowing tie 
showed as pmk and whIte as the framing 
rhododendron blooms themseh-es. 
"Hello," he called, "what are you do- 
ing here?" 
"J came to watch you fish. I'\'e nen
r 
been so thrilled; but why did you let him 
go ? " 
The professor waded around the rock 
and leaned against it. "I had to." he 
said slowlv. "He was not taken fairh" 
foul hookéd." 
 , 
"Xot fairly! I don't understand." 
"V ou see," the professor explained, 
"trout-fishing to-day is an art. and satis- 
factory results may only be obtained 
through the observance of certain ethical 
rules of conduct. The fish is raised by 
presenting a replica of the living insect, 
and is given an opportunity to take it in a 
natural manner-by way of the mouth- 
or reject it. This fish, either through in- 
tent or clumsiness, missed the fly, and r 
snagged him outside, in the shoulder." 
"But you got him," she persisted. 
"Ves," he said slowly. "r got him- 
by accident. I'll get him right some day." 
She looked at him wonderingly. "I'm 
beginning to understand," she said. "It 
is more than a game, isn't it?" 
"It's a philosophy of life--" the pro- 
fessor began. He broke off and stamped 
his foot. "I will not preach," he said 
with deci
ion; "it's getting to be a habit." 
He splashed across the intervening 
stretch and, reversing his rod, forced his 
way through the branches, 
"Give you a hand up the bank," he 
said, suppressing an absurd desire to sei7e 
the flowing ends of the pink tie and drag 
her after him. 
She gave him a firm, boyish grip. and 
he helped her up the slope and through 
the bordering underbrush to the road. 
The fly had become loosened from. the 
reel brace and he stopped to secure It. 
"Is that the fly you caught him on?" 
she asked. "Isn't it pretty and-alive. 
\"hat do you call it? ,. 
"Pink Lady," he confessed. 
She glanced up at him. ""'hat's the 
matter? \"hy did you look so queer 
when you said' Pink Lady'?" . 
Something, starting at the professor s 



t 
 
'
 \ 
,'; 
.. 


.. 4 


:"\. 


I 


_f 


"..,- 
./
 


"It's all right," he assured her. ., He won't bother you again."-Page 66. 


damp shoes, rippled upward through his 
tall frame in a tingling wave and culmi- 
nated in a burst of elaring. 
"Because," he said, "she reminds me 
of you-pink and pretty and alive. A 
comparison," he hastened to explain, 
"inspired by a beautiful bit of craftsman- 
ship and with no suggestion of a possible 
64 


basis of similarity between you and any 
insect, however attractive." 
The girl's eyes reflected a sort of tender 
mirthfulness. Impulsively, she raised her 
hands and placed them on the professor's 
shoulders. 
"Professor," she said, "you're per- 
fectly priceless. I just love being named 



THE PROFESSOR AND THE PINK LADY 


after the Pink Lady, even if she is an in- 
seet." 
The professor's fingers toyed for an in- 
stant with the flowing tie ends. He man- 
aged to cast temptation from him and 
pull away, but the effort cost him his men- 
tal poise. 
"Hell's bells!" he exclaimed roughly. 
"\Vhat do you think I am-a jelly- 
fish? " 
For a moment she looked at him in 
hurt amazement. Then her lips twitched. 
"\Vhy, professor," she drawled, "I do 
believe you'd be an octopus-if you 
dared. " 
"Octopus!" he repea ted. He looked 
down at his long, muscular arms. "Is 
that a challenge to exercise the well- 
known proclivity of that predatory crea- 
ture ? " 
Then she, too, lost her poise; angry at 
herself for offering the opening-angry at 
him for turning it againsl her. 
"Y ou know it isn't!" she cried, press- 
ing her hands to her hot cheeks. "I may 
look pink and you may think of me as a 
pink lady, but I know I'm not!" 
"l\ly dear child-" the professor pro- 
tested in a shocked voice. " \Vell, I'll be 
jiggered! " 
The last muttered exclamation was ad- 
dressed to the world in general, for the 
"dear child," with three almost tearful 
"damn-damn-damns !" punctuated by 
three stamps of a small if sensible sport 
shoe, had turned and, light-footed as a 
young doe, was running down the road. 


III 


THE professor was late for luncheon. 
When he took his place at the small table 
he shared with Judge Holcombe, the latter 
inquired: 
"Have any luck, George?" 
"No," said the professor absently. "I 
messed things up." 
"Lose a big one?" 
The professor stared at the judge and 
over the judge's shoulder to the table 
where :Miss Dorothy Cummings sat with 
her mother. "Oh, the fish ? Yes, I hit a 
good one but he--escaped." 
"Too badc \Vhat fly did he come 
to ? " 
. "P-pink Lady," the professor faltered, 
VOL. LXXVIII.-s 


63 


for, to him, it seemed that .:\Iiss Cum- 
mings's back registered interest. 
"Pink Lady, eh! Kever had any use 
for her myself. Always distrust these 
new creations." 
"Times change," the professor re p lied. 
" I ' 
a so manners and customs. \Vhy not 
trout-flies? " 
"Lord !" the judge exclaimed. " You're 
turning radical-as radical as your darned 
Pink Lady." 
This time the silken shoulders quivered 
and the wavy bobbed head bent table- 
ward. 
"She's not my Pink Lady," the pro- 
fessor protested nervously. "But I'll 
tell you this. She was actually on the 
stream this morning-the living imago." 
"Humph!" the judge snorted. "Didn't 
know there was any such thing in nature." 
"I can assure you," said the professor 
deliberately, "that the Pink Lady is a 
natural; as alluring and colorful as her 
name. " 
"George," said his perturbed friend, 
"don't let yourself get mushy like some 
of these near-nature writers. You're not 
cut out for that sort of thing." 
He stood up. So did l\Irs. Cummings 
and her daughter. l\Irs. Cummings 
waited to speak to a friend, but Dorothy 
turned and slipped her arm into that of 
the judge. 
"Judge, your honor," she said, "why 
do you disapprove of the Pink Lady? I 
could not help but overhear." 
"Eh, what? So you heard Barstow's 
hymn of praise to the one wild oat of an 
otherwise blameless existence. He's been 
vamped by a trout-fly. Do you wonder 
I disapprove?" 
She laughed into the professor's worried 
eyes as frankly as if the little drama of 
the morning had never been. 
"So it was only a trout-fly," she said. 
"I'm disappointed." 
Again that strange, pervading thrill 
quivered along his spine. He got to his 
feet, knowing that she was mak.!ng 
port 
of him yet somehow not resentmg It. 
"I'll' gladly run the risk of being 
vamped for the sake of meeting her 
again," he said calmly. 
"Come away, young. woman," t
e 
judge ordered. "The man's shameless m 
his infatuation." 



66 


THE PROFESSOR AND THE PINK LADY 


Only the professor saw the thoughtful 
look in the girl's eyes as the judge led her 
away. There was a disturbing definite- 
ness about the professor-" well sea- 
soned," she remembered the judge had 
called it-although, as he talked, his face 
had been surprisingly young-confident- 
ly, boldly young. 
Outside, the judge and Dorothy were 
joined by Jim Thorpe. 
"Feel better?" the latter asked with 
an expansive grin. 
"Lots. A cigarette will complete the 
cure." She took a cigarette from his case 
and accepted a light from the judge's 
cigar. 
"I beat her up this morning," Thorpe 
explained. "She got mad after nine 
holes and left me flat. You wouldn't be- 
lieve, judge, what a temper that girl con- 
ceals behind her pleasing features." 
" No, I would not," declared the judge 
loyally. "She's good enough for me." 
"She's good enough for me, too, with 
all her faults," Thorpe said seriously. 
"Only I can't make her believe I mean 
it." 
"Don't be such a kid, Jim," she ex- 
claimed, tossing away her half-smoked 
cigaret te. 
"The frankness of you young people 
is appalling," the judge scolded. "You 
don't take anything seriously." 
"Oh, yes we do, judge, dear," she said 
quickly. "We may play with serious 
things, but in the end we take them so- 
berly enough." 
"Then I hope this is the beginning of 
the end," he chuckled, and with a "bless- 
you-my-children" gesture he stumped 
away. 
There was a moment of silence. Then 
Thorpe asked: "Want to end it now, 
Dot? I'm leaving to-morrow." 
She shook her head. "I'm afraid it 
can't be done, Jim. Sorry." 
"I'm not through yet," he said hope- 
fully. " You promised to go for a spin, 
up-river, to-night." 
"All right. We can drop in at the 
Powerses'; I want to see Evelyn." 
"Not while I'm at the wheel," he de- 
clared. "I don't want to see anybody 
but you." . 
"Piggy!" she laughed, as she turned 
away. " You certainly have a one-way 


mind, and sometimes I almost love you 
for it." 


Late that evening Professor Barstow 
sat alone before the dead fireplace in 
the living-room. His empty pipe was 
clutched between his strong, white teeth 
and an open book lay neglected on the 
table beside him. The hall-clock struck 
twelve and he stood and stretched his 
long arms. Believing himself to be the 
last one up, he switched off the light and 
wandered out-of-doors for a look at the 
weather before turning in. 
In order to obtain an unobstructed 
view of the sky he crossed the lawn and 
stood beside the six-foot hedge bordering 
the road. 
Within the almost completed circle of 
the moon the girl's tilted head stood 
out, mistily clear, and the reflection from 
a passing cloud cast a distinctly pink 
glow over her familiar face and shoulders. 
Almost at once he was aware of voices 
on the other side of the hedge. He heard 
Dorothy Cummings say: "I'm sorry, 
Jimmy, dear, but I-can't. Please take 
your arm away." 
And then Thorpe, pleading: "Just one 
kiss-for good-by. You might-at least 
-after turning me down." 
"I-I-can't. I don't want to hurt 
you but I will-I'll scratch! Stop! Let 
me go-!" 
The girl's voice was tense-angry- 
and the hedge trembled. 
The professor, at first horrified at the 
thought of being an eavesdropper, was 
conscious of a red mist before his eyes 
which quickly faded into the white light 
of angerc One leap and his long right 
arm shot over the hedge and his sinewy 
fingers sank into Thorpe's shoulder. He 
had a glimpse of Dorothy's startled face 
as the hands that clutched her relaxed 
and beat aimlessly in the air. Then he 
heaved Thorpe's thrashing form through 
the hedge and flung it on the grass. 
At the sound of a sobbing breath be- 
hind him he turned and saw Dorothy 
scrambling through the yawning gap. 
"It's all right," he assured her. "He 
won't bother you again." 
To his surprise she ran over to Thorpe 
and, sinking to her knees, raised his head. 
Thorpe managed to sit up and began to 



THE PROFESSOR AND THE PI
K LADY 


rub his shoulder. "\Vhat happened?" he 
stammered. 
"That!" she cried, pointing to the be- 
wildered professor. 
Dawning comprehension glimmered 
through Thorpe's dulled brain. "Let me 
up," he muttered; "give me a crack at 
him," 
"No! no, Jim!" the girl protested as he 
struggled to his feet. " You can't fight- 
I won't have it. Tell him he can't fight," 
she appealed to the professor, who seemed 
almost as dazed as Thorpe himself. 
"Fight," he repeated. "Who wants to 
fight?" 
"I do!" Thorpe blustered. " You 
can't sneak up on a man that way and 
get away with it." 
The professor looked at Dorothy: "I 
hope you understand. Certainly, you 
were in distress-the circumstances war- 
ranted interference--and, as for fighting, 
I can assure you that, never before, have 
I laid hands on a man in anger." 
"Y ou'll have a chance to try it again t" 
Thorpe broke in. 
"Jim, be still!" 
Her voice was steady and, if she trem- 
bled a little, she dominated the difficult 
situation as she faced the professor. 
"I told you once before that I can take 
care of myself. It's my affair-and Jim's. 
Please go away and-forget it." 
He had the sinking feeling of a very 
young man who, with the best intentions, 
has blundered into a social error. With 
an almost apologetic gesture he bowed 
gravely and turned away. 
"Good night," she said softly. 
He whirled around. Her head was 
raised and t4e moon girl's pink glow 
tinted her face and neck. Also, it seemed 
to him that she smiled. 
He stared at her for a long moment and 
over her tilted shoulder at the silent but 
glowering Thorpe. 
"Good night!" was the bewildered 
reply that seemed forced from his lips 
and, wheeling about, he walked rapidly 
across the grass and disappeared in the 
shadows beneath the trees. 
The girl sighed, and turned to Thorpe. 
"Jimmy," she said, "I won't see you in 
the morning. Good-by, and thank you 
for--everything. " 
Quite coolly she grasped his arms at 


67 


the elbow and, holding them impotent in 
her firm grip, kissed him. 
There was more of resignation than of 
perplexity in Thorpe's response: 
"Good night 1" he ejaculated with 
hopeless finality. 


IV 
FOR a week Professor Barstow had 
been unable to fish successfully. His 
thoughts drifted from the task at hand 
into new and strange waters, and his eyes 
constantly wandered from circumscribed 
areas of stream surface to hopeful vistas 
of flowering meadow and green-bulked 
hillside. 
Thorpe had gone. Dorothy Cummings 
remained, courteously yet hopelessly 
elusive despite the professor's somewhat 
inapt efforts to discover just where he 
stood after the blundering episode ending 
in that baffling" good night." She did 
not avoid him-sometimes her look 
seemed almost an invitation-but when 
they were together he found himself curi- 
ously unable to introduce the intimate 
and personal note. Finally, perplexed 
and worried, he confided his predicament 
to Judge Holcombe. 
"Do you mean me to understand that 
you are seriously in love with this girl?" 
the astonished judge demanded. 
"I must be. Loss of appetite and flop- 
ping around half the night might be any- 
thing, but when I can't fish it's-it is seri- 
ous." 
" Nonsense t Better forget the whole 
thing." His eyes softened: "I'd hate to 
see you get hurt, George." 
"I can't help it if I do get hurt. I'll 
admit that I may have bungled-snarled 
things up-but I can't help hoping." 
"George," the judge said so
erl
, "y
u 
always have been overconsCientIous III 
observing the age limit for fish. \\11y 
pick on this girl ? You're twice her age." 
For a moment the professor looked con- 
fused. He frowned as a man docs while 
working on a difficult mental problem. 
" Not twice" he muttered. "She's 
over twenty 
nd I'm only thirty-eight. 
Another twenty years and the difference 
will be less than one-third." 
"Have a heart," the judge urged. 
A new light came into the professor's 
eyes. "That's why I must give myself a 



68 


THE PROFESSOR AND THE PINK LADY 


chance," he said quietlyc "If she can't 
see it, I'll let her go and take my hurt 
away where it won't bother her." 
The judge stared at him thoughtfully. 
"I can't help being impressed by that 
last statement," he coniessedc "Better 
end the suspense, but, for the love of Pete, 
when your opportunity comes, try to real- 
ize that landing a girl requires more tact 
than skill, and treat her like a human 
being and not as if she were a cold-blooded 
fish." 
"I mean to do that," said the professor 
earnestly. "You know I haven't had 
much except my work and fishing; but, 
somehow, I feel that if I'm lucky enough 
to get her safely creeled, I'll be a changed 
man. " 
"You bet you will," the judge declared 
rather grimly. "And if you insist onfish- 
ing this thing through, take a last word of 
advice. I've known that young woman 
long enough to respect her good sense in 
spite of all this modern folderol, and 
there's just one fly, tested and tried, not 
brilliant, but bright enough in spots, with 
which you may hope to interest her." 
" \\Tha t' s that?" 
"The professor." 
And with this tribute to friendship and 
common sense he stumped away, leaving 
the problem of presenting the professor 
to the Pink Lady in the necessary en- 
vironment still unsolved. 
Fortunately, nature, deprecating inac- 
tion and recognizing the dilemma of a 
worthy and appreciative son, stepped in 
and prepared the way. 
That night it rained as if the clouds, 
heavy with moisture and impatient to be 
gone on pleasanter business, had up tilted 
and spilled water as from Brobdingnagian- 
lipped buckets, and in a few hours the 
Brant was running bank-high with yellow 
flood-water. 
Morning found the stream still dis- 
colored, but in the early afternoon the 
water began to clear. The professor set 
up a stiff fly-rod, soaked a heavy leader, 
and set out for a meadow, up-stream, 
where, in time of spate, an eddy made in 
against the bank, and large trout, lying 
watchfully on the edge of the fast water, 
might sometimes be persuaded to lunge 
at a sizable fly, fished wet. 
It was not the highest type of angling 


art, and the professor seldom practised it, 
but to-day he felt restless-almost bru- 
tally active-and the thought of harrying 
a heavy fish in that swirling water some- 
how appealed to him. 
Before leaving the rod-room he looked 
over his seldom-used wet flies, and among 
them he found one fly, a professor, tied 
on a barbless hook. Its speckled wings, 
yellow body, and scarlet wisp of tail 
brought a queer, almost startled, look to 
his eyes, but, despite a muttered" non- 
sense," he secured it to the leader end. 
The meadow stretch, ordinarily, was a 
slow-moving run of peaceful water. To- 
day, the water swirled and tumbled al- 
most bank-high and ominous in its threat 
of ruthless might. At the lower end of 
the eddy a noble elm, its riverside sup- 
port undermined, had fallen across the 
water and lay with draggled upper 
branches swept by the current. 
The professor walked along the mead- 
ow, marking several danger-spots where 
the underwashed top soil made caution in 
approaching the brink advisable. He be- 
gan fishing at the head of the eddy, drop- 
ping his fly on the edge of the current, 
and working it deep as it swept down with 
freely given line into the less-disturbed 
water inshore. 
Intent upon his work, he fished the 
hundred-yard stretch until the sweep of 
the fly threatened to foul the struggling 
branches of the fallen elm. Then he 
reeled in, intending to return to his start- 
ing-point. 
Up-stream, a slender, boyish figure 
stood above the rushing flood, tranquil 
but for a lazily fluttering tie with a telltale 
touch of color. 
His first thought was: "She's here- 
alone!" His second: "She's too near the 
bank. That's a danger-spot!" 
For a moment he hesitated. He wanted 
to cry out, but he feared the result of a 
startled move. With almost a groan of 
apprehension, he began to walk. rapidly 
along the bame 
Her cry of distress and his heart-wrung, 
profane appeal were synchronous with the 
sinking of the section of treacherous bank 
upon which she stood. For a moment she 
poised with balancing armsc Then, as the 
sod-topped mass tilted, she leaped clear, 
in to the flood below. 



THE PROFESSOR AND THE PINK L-\DY 


The professor wavered for an instant. 
Dully, he recognized the folly of attempt- 
ing to plunge to her assistance. Equally 
hopeless it was to follow along the bank 
in the hope of finding less-turbulent water 
below. 
Then, in a flash, it came to him-"tlze 
swift and sure decision in an emerge1lcy"- 


...
......- 


,
,
 


/" 


,
I 'I, 


69 


checked and set firmly in her shoulder 
under the spring of the powerful rod. 
For an ins
ant the line held dangerously 
t
ut; then YIelded slowly from the reel as 
hIs reluctant fingers relinquished the 
precious inches and yards that held her 
above the sodden elm-branches that 
marked the limit of the eddy. 


IP. 


I" 


I 
I 


t 


.. 


\ 
r., 


..... . . 


,., 


- ;.
t,- 


The fly fell as she passed under the leader and he struck I 


the one chance, born of the training of his 
fishing years. 
One straining glance he gave to the 
bravely struggling figure whirling down 
to him. Then, with set lips, he faced the 
river, and the powerful rod sprang into 
play, shooting the fly far out over the 
water with each forward thrust. 
He had the distance as the girl came 
abreast of him, and a coolly calculated 
cast sent the fly hovering above the white 
face and flashing arms. The fly fell as 
she passed under the leader and he struck 1 
Not even the sharp cry of pain above 
the angry voice of the river lessened his 
sense of grateful satisfaction as the hook 


He had her swinging toward the bank, 
bu t the arc of safety was lengthening. It 
was a matter of seconds, and either she 
would gain the outer branches or be swept 
down along the edge of the current, trail- 
ing with her a useless, broken line. He 
yelled, "Strike out! Kick!" and gave 
the straining rod the last ounce of re- 
sistance he dared exert. Instinctively 
she obeyed him, and together they fought 
for an agonizing instant. Her head and 
shoulders crossed the danger-line and her 
outflung hands clutched a yielding branch 
and held desperately against the hungry 
drag that tore at her relaxed limbs. 
The professor flung down the rod and 



70 


THE PROFESSOR AND THE PINK LADY 


dashed for the fallen tree. Grasping a 
bough end, he leaped into the eddy and, 
clinging to the branches, worked along, 
waist-deep and shoulder-deep, until, with 
the water at his chin, he swung out and 
managed to seize the girl's arm. For a 
moment he hung there, content in the 
realization that he held her safe. 
"Let go," he gasped, "I'll pull you in." 
She obeyed him, and the muscles of 
his casting arm knotted as he drew her 
away from the last clutch of the foiled 
torren t. 
"Now hang onto something while I get 
a new grip," he ordered. 
There were branches brushing against 
her but she circled his neck with her 
clasped arms. 
Somehow, he managed to secure a 
fresh hold nearer shore and stood breast- 
deep in the still water of the eddy, sup- 
porting the clinging girl with his free arm. 
Then he said: "I would not sell that rod 
for a thousand dollars. You must weigh 
one hundred and twenty pounds." 
She shivered against him, and a loop of 
slack line fell from her shoulder. He saw 
the soaked fly set in the soft white flesh 
beneath the clinging silk of her blouse. 
A look of pity, which she could not see, 
came into his eyes, Spreading his feet, 
he released his hold on the branch, and 
with his free hand he cautiously felt for 
the fly and gen tl y worked it out." Thank 
God, it's a barbless," he muttered, and, 
bending his head, he touched his lips to 
the spot where the fly had been. 
Straightening up, he found her eyes 
:fi'{ed on him expectantly, and the clasp 
of her hands about his neck tightened. 
His opportunity had come, but he was still 
so obsessed by the marvel of his greatest 
fishing feat that he blundered again. 
"I'm off barbed hooks forever," he 
announced. "That barbless held under 
phenomenal conditions, and it came away 
without causing the slightest mutilation." 
There was a warmth in her eyes now, 


contrasting curiously with the wanness of 
her white face. Her body stiffened and 
she tried to push away from his encircling 
arm. 
"Let me go I" she cried. "Just be- 
cause I did not bite that fly and you 
hooked me in the shoulder, I suppose you 
want to put me back I-like that other fish." 
For a moment the professor stared at 
her as she struggled with feeble hands. 
A great light dawned upon him, clearing 
his mind of the fad-ridden past, the dull- 
ing sense of recent danger, and leaving 
only a live, human longing for the girl 
who meant to him all that was new and 
vital and inexpressibly beloved. 
"lVly dear, my dear," he whispered, 
"now that I have you at last, I'll never 
let you go." 
He drew her to him, unresisting, and 
his eager kiss brought an answering glow 
to her trembling lips and water-wan face. 


Judge Holcombe picked up the dis- 
carded rod, recognized it, and with a 
worried glance at the turgid stream shook 
his head. 
A movement in the fallen elm below 
attracted his attention. Dorothy Cum- 
mings, sitting on a projecting branch with 
slim legs submerged, snuggled comfort- 
ably against the professor, who, standing 
waist-deep, supported her with long and 
capable arms. 
The judge's face registered astonish- 
ment and then indignation, followed by 
a half-humorous concern. Then he 
stepped quietly back from the bank and 
replaced the rod 011 the turf where he had 
found it. 
"He's right," he muttered. "It's more 
than a sport-it's a gift. \Vhatever hap- 
pened out there, I'll bet he fished it 
through, and any man who can make 
love to a girl in four feet of water and 
make her like it-well-he's more than 
a skilful angler, he's full-size chunk of 
all right-God bless him." 



( 
, 


Through the Mill of Americanization 
BY STA
ISLAW A. GUTO\VSKI 
Formerly Captain in the United States Army; Author of "An Immigrant at the Crossroads" 



m .'- URI
G my first five 
years in America I 
b-'.h seemed to learn every- 
D
 
 thing except English. 

 \Vhy was it that it 
took me five years to 
realize the necessity of 
learning the language? 
\Vell, there were several reasons, which in 
fact were no reasons at all. But whatev
r 
these were, they were certainly responsi- 
ble for my negative state of mind toward 
America and everything American, save 
American dollars. 
First of all, for a long time after coming 
to this country I was unable to secure 
work of any kind whatsoever, and was 
therefore 
ompelled to starve, tramp, and, 
consequently, to despise American life. 
This reason alone was to my mind 
quite sufficient to make me avoid the 
trouble of studying English. Then I saw 
110 vital necessity for knowing English. 
The kind of work I was then qualified for 
did not require any knowledge of the lan- 
guage. And being broke habitually, I had 
small occasion for shopping, though if it 
so happened that I had to buy something, 
I could get along easily with my Polish or 
Russian in any Jewish store. 
But, above all, I was too sensitive not 
to appreciate the humiliating position of 
an immigrant who, both directly and in- 
directly, was given to understand that he 
was accepted and tolerated in America as 
a necessary evil. 
\Vas it to be wondered at then that I 
had resigned myself to my fate in Amer- 
ica and had given up every hope for a 
brighter future? :Man, like a spirited 
horse, can be clubbed into submission and 
harnessed tigh tly to the chariot of cir- 
cumstances regardless of their nature, 
It is rather unpleasant to confess now 
that for five long years I was so helpless a 
victim of unfortunate circumstances, the 
sad result of which was that I saw nothing 
but defects in the whole structure of 


American life, about which I seemed to 
know so much, despite the fact that I was 

nable t
 borrow books from the public 
hbrary wIthout the help of an interpreter. 
After five years of wasteful living in 
America I received my first knock on the 
head from a man who caì
ed my attention 
to the fact that my ide",s about America 
were all wrong; that, .:fter all, America 
owed me nothing; and that if I had come 
here to hamletize, I had better pack up 
my belongings and go back to Poland. 
He was a Pole, too, and later on became a 
very good friend of mine. 
He suggested that I ought to go to the 
American International College at Spring- 
field, l\Iass" to learn English and get a 
more accurate idea of America. 
It was easier to make this wonderful 
suggestion than to put it into practice. 
The idea that in America a young man is 
usually able to work his way through col- 
lege was totally foreign to my mind. I 
knew that in Poland, at that time, edu- 
cation was an expensive luxury, and I 
thought it was the same here. Informed, 
however, that tuition, board, and room at 
the American International College would 
cost me only one hundred and fifty dollars 
a year and that, moreover, I could re- 
duce this total by one-third if I cared to 
perform some work right in the college, I 
figured day and night on how to get to this 
wonderful place. It was necessary to 
have at least seventy-five dollars to start 
with. So much money I had never had in 
America in a lump sum. I began to 
worry anew. 
M: y mother had noticed the serious 
change in me and asked for the cause of 
it. She worried because I did. This made 
me remember that I was her only son and 
practically the only object of her love and 
source of support. How could I even 
have entertained such an impossible idea 
as was this idea of going away to study? 
So my wonderful dream of going through 
college and then through life as a man of 
7 1 



72 THROeGH THE MILL OF AMERICANIZATION 


ambition and knowledge burst like a col- 
orful bubble. Tenderly I drew my good 
mother into my arms and offered my 
apology for worrying over the impossibil- 
ity of continuing my education. 
The next day upon returning from work 
I noticed that mother was in a rather ex- 
cited mood. Immediately after dinner 
she asked me to another room, so that we 
might be alone, and beaming with a 
mother's divine smile, she slipped into my 
hand the seventy-five dollars necessary 
to cover the first semester at college. She 
had borrowed the money. 
It was decided that I should go to 
Springfield in the very next few days, as 
the school term had already begun. 
My fellow immigrants thought I was 
crazy. Some of them had even expressed 
the idea that only lazy fellows, who were 
afraid of honest labor in a factory, would 
waste their time at school. My friend 
Joe, however, in spite of being illiterate 
himself, took a different stand. 
"It is true," said Joe, "that he won't 
become President of the United States, 
yet after getting some knowledge of Eng- 
lish he might run a saloon or a grocery- 
store and show you fellows that not all 
immigran ts are fools, slaving for barely 
enough to live on." 
The day I was leaving for Springfield 
my mother seemed to be the happiest 
woman in the world. So sure and proud 
was she of my good qualities and abilities 
that I began to fear lest I should be unable 
to equal the task and justify her belief in 
my success. 
Upon my arrival in Springfield I was 
much depressed by the gloomy darkness 
of a rainy day. I took it for a bad omen 
in my new start. \Vith a grip in my hand 
I looked about me, not knowing where to 
go. In fact, I was somewhat afraid to go 
to the college. I imagined that the build- 
ings, professors, and students of the in- 
stitution were as stern, cold, and indif- 
ferent as was the dreary weather of that 
day. So I wandered through the misty 
streets of the city for some time before I 
finally decided to start for my ultimate 
destination. 
When I reached the college my disil- 
lusions seemed to have no end. I expected 
to find magnificent edifices, huge towers 
climbing proudly into the skies, and the 


bee-like life of a great body of studentsc 
In fact, I had hardly noticed a small and 
quiet group of houses along the street, 
consisting of two red brick buildings and 
two shabby-looking frame cottages, which 
were all the evidence there was of the 
external magnificence of the American 
International College. 
Doubting very much that the muse of 
knowledge could dwell in such an obscure 
and insignificant place, I brushed aside 
my fear and uncertainty and walked into 
the office with apparent nonchalance and 
self-confidence. I began, however, to lose 
my ground when all I could say in Eng- 
lish was my own name and it proved nec- 
essary to have an in terpreter in order to 
get further information from me. 
I was really ashamed to admit that I 
was twenty-four years of age and that I 
had been living in America for five years. 
It appeared to me that everybody in the 
office listening to my answers was greatly 
surprised at my remarkable stupidityc 
However, everybody was extremely nice 
to me, and I was told to feel as a member 
of the college family. Two appointments 
were given me immediately: one as a stu- 
dent in the academy, the education I had 
obtained in Poland having been recog- 
nized, and the other as a janitor on one of 
the floors of the dormitory. 
A small but comfortable room was as- 
signed to me, in which I found, among 
other things, an oil-lamp instead of elec- 
tricity-which led me to believe that the 
college must be very conservative since 
it had not kept pace with the general 
progress of things in America. 
On the next morning I was one of the 
first to appear in the dining-room; this 
being the sort of punctuality that I usu- 
ally observed without fail. Never before 
in my life had I seen such a complete 
mosaic of races as was this body of about 
one hundred and fifty students gathered 
in the dining-room. If I remember cor- 
rectly there were at my table twelve stu- 
dents, representing ten different nation- 
ali ties. 
Here was a dark-skinned Turk sitting 
next to a fair-skinned Finn. A blue-eyed 
and dreamy Slav next to a dark-eyed and 
alert Italian. In front of me sat a woman 
teacher, who acted as the head of the 
table. On my left was a husky, red-eyed 



THROUGH THE MILL OF AMERICA
IZATION 73 


Armenian with his face hardly visible 
from beneath a mass of curly hair. On 
my right I had a Pole, who also acted as 
my cicerone in this tower of Babel. 
My Polish neighbor, with an air of 
self-conscious superiority, advised me to 
stop gazing around and to pay more at- 
tention to the food, which, indeed, was 
disappearing with tremendous speed. 
However, I could not help watching 
and studying this picturesque interna- 
tional gathering. I asked my Polish 
friend if the teachers of the college were 
also foreigners, and received my answer in 
the form of a most indignant look. 
One hour later I was in the English 
class. It might just as well have been a 
Chinese class, so far as its members were 
concerned, including myself. It appeared 
to me that all that the students had gath- 
ered from what the teacher said to them 
was that he must surely have said it in 
English. The teacher, however, was so 
kind, human, and marvellously patient 
that we could not help listening to him 
with equal kindness and patience. At the 
end of the hour I was very much discour- 
aged to find that not only did the stu- 
dents fail to understand the teacher, but, 
moreover, the students themselves could 
not understand each other. The lack of 
English, however, was not the only ob- 
stacle in the way of their mutual under- 
standing. There were also racial, reli- 
gious, and social differences. I wondered 
if, for instance, a Greek would be friendly 
toward a Turk. Or whether a Jew or 
Lithuanian could love a Pole. 
At ten o'clock in the morning all of the 
professors and students assembled in the 
college chapel for a fifteen-minute ser- 
vice. 
Upon entering the chapel my attention 
was immediately caught by some thirty 
or so picturesque small flags of different 
nations hanging around the walls. In the 
centre a large and majestic American flag 
was spread like a beautiful firmament full 
of bright stars spelling freedom for all 
who happened to be under their light. 
Below the American flag there was dis- 
played the image of Christ, whose face 
beamed with eternal love of the whole of 
humanity. 
My eye soon caught the red and white 
emblem of Poland, and I felt proud and 


grateful to thos
 Americans who respected 
what was best III the hearts of the immi- 
gran ts. 
This human and liberty-loving atmos- 
phere of the college chapel was doubtless 
the first stepping-stone in my subsequent 
acquisition of American ideals. 
There were about sixteen different 
racial g
oups in. the college. Among these, 
the Itahan, Pohsh, Greek, Armenian J ew- 
ish, and SYTian groups were the largest. 
The college was run more or less on a 
self-supporting basis. All manual work 
was done by the students, who, besides 
being students, were also printers, bak- 
ers, janitors, dish-washers, waiters, and 
whatever else you would have them be. 
The large and attractive college cam- 
pus "ras the common scene of debates and 
argumentations between representatives 
of different racial groups, yet to my best 
knowledge there was not a single case of 
racial antagonism or prejudice involved. 
On the contrary, all these differences were 
gradually disappearing, and the ties of 
mutual understanding and friendship 
were, more and more, uniting the entire 
student body. 
The relations between the faculty and 
the student body were most cordial and 
sympathetic. The teachers seemed to 
know thoroughly the psychology of every 
racial group and by their tactful and 
human attitude were accomplishing won- 
ders in the way of moulding a new type of 
Americans out of this comple.'\: and cha- 
otic body of foreigners. 
The situation was, however, consider- 
ably different in relation to the outside 
life of the students. The American Inter- 
national College was like an oasis in the 
great desert of ignorance of and indiffer- 
ence toward the foreigners on the part of 
the native-born Americans. 
In the streets, libraries, and other pub- 
lic places some fore
gn st
dents. were 
quite often made a circus-hke object of 
curiosity. Those students who came from 
Europe were more fortunate in thi
 .re- 
spect than their fellow students ha
mg 
from Asia, for instance. There p rev !llled 
a naïve idea among some of the Amencans 
in Springfield and vicinity that because 
many of these students looked dark and 
husky, they must, of course, be bar- 
barians. 



74 THROUGH THE MILL OF AMERICANIZATION 


On the other hand, there was a great 
deal of fun when it happened sometimes 
that some Americans, sincere in their in- 
tentions, would try their best to acquaint 
students who possessed college degrees 
from abroad, with the blessings of civili- 
zation. 
The kind-hearted New England folk 
liked to invite the students to their 
homes, so that they might learn some 
good manners. 
Once, soon after I had entered the col- 
lege, my friend, a very brilliant Polish 
student, and myself were invited to such 
an educational dinner by a socially prom- 
inent old lady. 
Having pressed our suits, which were 
considerably worn and of an indescrib- 
able color, as best we could, we left for 
the dinner. From the trolley-line to the 
residence of our hostess was a consider- 
able distance. We walked it in a funeral- 
like silence, hating even to think of what 
promised to be a most tedious ordeal. 
Upon nearing our hostess's beautiful 
mansion, built in faultless Colonial style, 
we had unconsciously slowed down some- 
what, as if being uncertain whether to go 
in or to retreat strategically. The queer 
situation brought to my memory a vivid 
reflection of my tramping days, and I was 
afraid of the possibility of misinterpret- 
ing my present rôle. 
An old and distinguished-looking butler 
opened the door and looked us over with 
suspicion and contempt. He must have 
been, however, apprised of our coming, 
for he did not even trouble himself to ask 
for our names. 
Soon we found ourselves in a large and 
very beautifully furnished drawing-room. 
To avoid possible social improprieties I 
had asked my friend whether we should 
kiss the lady's hand, but was advised that 
this sort of thing was not proper in 
America. 
In the meantime our hostess appeared. 
Of course we sprang to our feet as gra- 
ciously as we could, and while my friend 
nodded his head slightly by way of greet- 
ing, I made a very deep bowc This 
brought from my friend in an undertone 
the hope that I would break my back. 
After this I lost my sense of propriety al- 
together, and automatically imitated my 
more Americanized companionc 


As my friend was a senior in the acad- 
emy, he spoke English fluently, and there- 
fore made a very satisfactory impression 
upon the hostess. I, too, managed to an- 
swer two or three simple questions in 
English, but to the question as to how 
long I had lived in America, I answered 
in Polish: five months. Before my friend 
realized the jest on my part, he had re- 
peated it in English, and our hostess was 
surprised to find that I had learned so 
much English in such a very short time. 
The dinner, a typical American chicken 
dinner, was rather simple, so no serious 
complications arose as to our table man- 
ners. Shortly afterward we were dis- 
missed in a manner which left no doubt 
in our minds as to the fact that we were 
not expected to make an after-dinner 
call. 
Doubtless, our well-meaning hostess 
was fully satisfied with having added her 
bit to the Americanization of two ignorant 
immigrants. There was, however, no 
doubt in our minds that never again 
would we subject ourselves to this sort of 
Americanization. 
::My days at the college were passing by 
like a beautiful dream. In order to ap- 
preciate college life, during which a stu- 
dent can quietly study in a warm and 
clean room with no wolf at the door, one 
must have been hungry and cold; must 
have lived in ignorance without being ig- 
norant of the fact; must have longed for a 
better future without hope of ever realiz- 
ing it. I had passed through all this, and 
for this reason my years in the college 
were the happiest years of my life. 
\Vi thin three months from the time I 
had entered the college I managed to 
learn enough English to be able to pursue 
my other studies without any difficulty. 
At the end of the first year I felt my- 
self to be an entirely new man. I knew 
the English language fairly well. I suc- 
ceeded in getting not only a mere knowl- 
edge but also a thorough understanding 
of American history. As a result of my 
immediate contact with true and intelli- 
gent Americans the psychology of the 
American people was no longer obscured 
for me by a screen of ignorance and preju- 
dicec So, equipped with new knowledge 
and new ideas of America, I went home to 
spend my vacation in a factory. I could 



THROUGH THE MILL OF AMERICANIZATIO
 75 


not afford to waste a single day, for each 
day meant so many dollars toward the 
tuition for the next year. 
There was no difficulty for me in getting 
a job in the same machine-shop where I 
had worked before going to college. 11 y 
old foreman was astonished to hear me 
speak English, and, of course, gave me a 
better job. 11y fellow immigrants sud- 
denly became courteous to me and envi- 
ous of my rapid promotion. 
During vacation I spent many an eve- 
ning among the Polish immigrants, ex- 
plaining to them the history of the 
American people and the principles of the 
United States Government. Nly fellow 
immigrants used to like my talks and 
were reany to admit that my going to the 
school was not an altogether crazy idea, 
while my good friend Joe was now sure 
that with all the talents in my possession 
I could even reach the position of a 
clerk in some factory office. 
The next and last two years at the col- 
lege seemed to pass like lightning. It was 
very hard for me to part with the institu- 
tion which during the three years of my 
association with it had guided me toward 
the goal of knowledge and true Amer- 
icanism. 
The wisdom of the American Interna- 
tional College lay in that it had no fixed 
method of Americanization at all. Had 
the college established any rules which 
would prohibit the usage of foreign lan- 
guages, the subscription to foreign news- 
papers, or the division of the students into 
racial groups, the students most certainly 
would have resented and violated all such 
restrictions. 
Had the college favored the Nordic and 
discriminated against the southern races, 
the students would undoubtedly have 
protested with highest indignation. In- 
stead of a melting-pot, the college would 
then have become a boiling-pot with no 
good results for anybody. 
It was due, however, to the under- 
standing of human nature and to the 
knowledge of the psychology of the immi- 
brant students that the faculty of the col- 
lege had chosen the simple way of sym- 
pathy and liberty. 
Four months later I began to study law 
at Boston University Law School. 
l\ly life in Boston took on quite a dif- 


ferent aspect from that in Springfield. 
In the American International College 
tuition, board, and room cost me only one 
hundred dollars a year in real cash, So 
much I was able to earn during vacation 
and thereafter was relieved of all worrie
 
for an entire school year. In Boston on 
the other hand, it took more than 'two 
hundred dollars just to pay my tuition and 
buy the necessary law-books. 1Iy real 
problem, therefore, was not to study and 
get by in the law school but rather to see 
that I had a meal occasionally, a roof over 
my head, and some clothes to cover my 
body. Confronted with this by no means 
rosy situation, I had to look immediately 
for some sort of work which would yield 
enough money to enable me to continue 
my law study. 
Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, 
I had secured, through one of my former 
college professors, the position of a social 
worker in one of the well-known settle- 
ment houses in Boston. 
The settlement house I am speaking of 
was situated in the northern section of the 
old city of Boston. The narrow and zig- 
zag streets of that section of the city 
were full of dirt and garbage. 
The old houses, which had witnessed 
the birth of this nation and which in- 
spired many a generation with beautiful 
American traditions, were absolutely neg- 
lected, profaned with filth, and entirely 
inhabited by foreigners, who, generally 
speaking, knew nothing and cared less 
about the sacred value of these historical 
monuments. 
The purpose of the settlement house 
was to educate the foreigners so as to ele- 
vate them to the standard of American 
life and ideals. 
11y duty seemed to be very simple. All 
I was expected to do was to make the 
Polish immigrants come and enjoy the 
benefits of the settlement house. 
It was explained to me that heretofore 
neither the Polish immigrants nor, in 
fact, any other foreign gr<;>up, except the 
Jewish, seemed to care a bIt for the splen- 
did advantages offered by the settlement 
house. 
At the same time I was gravely warned 
that unless it could be indicated in 
monthly reports by substantial figures 
that all foreign groups were cm"ered by 



76 THROUGH THE l\IILL OF Al\1ERICANIZATION 


the activities of the house, the social 
philanthropists might refuse further ap- 
propriation of funds for the work. 
As to whether this warning was 
prompted by an anxiety to help the im- 
migrants or through fear of parting with a 
fair salary, I had no doubt in my mind. 
It took me less than a month to dis- 
cover that as in the past, so in the future, 
the settlement house would not be patron- 
ized by Polish immigrants. The reasons 
were simple. In the first place, those im- 
migrants who toiled hard ten hours a day 
were too tired to come in the evening and 
listen for almost two hours to a dry lec- 
ture on sanitation, while the more en- 
lightened immigrants had no use for the 
social workers and their methods of over- 
night Americanization. On the other 
hand, most of the social workers knew 
nothing of the psychology of these immi- 
grants. They, however, thought they 
knew all about it and would not accept 
from a foreigner any suggestion which 
might disturb their standardized system 
of Americanizationc After all, my job 
was to bring the foreigners to the settle- 
ment house, and the professional social 
workers were to do the job of American- 
ization. 
In spite of my utmost efforts I utterly 
failed. The foreigners would not attend 
the settlement house. The reports could 
not always be filled with imaginary fig- 
ures. The social philanthropists might 
dose their pockets. In a word, some- 
thing had to be done to save the salaries 
of the social workers. 
It was decided then to call a meeting of 
men and women prominent in the sphere 
of social work, in order to help in solving 
the problem. 
The gathering consisted of certain au- 
thors of books and pamphlets on im- 
migra tion, some society ladies, college 
girls, and, of course, professional social 
workers. 
The main point on the programme was 
to agree on some plan which would at- 
tract the foreigners to the settlement 
house. 
After a long and exhaustive discussion 
it was decided that the wives, sisters, and 
daughters of the foreign men should be 
invited to the settlement house once a 
week for tea. 


It was believed that the foreign women 
would come to the tea-parties and would 
influence the foreign men to attend the 
lectures on Americanizationc 
Strange to say, the idea of the five- 
o'clock tea for the foreign women was 
unanimously welcomed as an extremely 
sound one. So, under the circumstances, 
I thought it wise to withhold my opinion 
in the matter. 
The next thing on the programme was 
the question of cleanliness in the homes of 
the foreigners. The attractive and very 
cultured lady in charge of this branch of 
social work had described the conditions 
as most deplorable. 
The chairman asked me if I cared to 
offer my suggestion in regard to this mat- 
ter. I did. I advised that fire be set to 
each corner of that section of the city in- 
habited by foreigners so that everything 
be burned down to the ground except, of 
course, the foreigners, and that on the 
same site new modern houses be erected 
with plenty of light and fresh air, and 
that playgrounds be provided for the 
children. 
J\1y suggestion was indignantly over- 
looked. Instead, a committee was ap- 
pointed for the purpose of visiting the 
houses of the foreigners and studying the 
causes and possible remedies of their un- 
healthy conditions. 
The meeting was over and the gather- 
ing was congratulated upon making such 
far-reaching decisions. 
On the next day I was assigned to one 
of the members of the committee, who 
happened to be a society lady, to assist 
her in visiting the foreigners. This mis- 
sion reminded me of Dante's "Divine 
Comedy." J\.1y rôle of modern Virgil 
flattered me a great deal. 
I took the lady to the home of probably 
the most poverty-stricken foreign family 
in the neighborhood. A poor widow with 
four small children lived in one room next 
to a stable. The room was so enclosed by 
other structures in the back yard that no 
sun rays could pierce through its only 
small window. The closeness of the stable 
made the air in the room far from fresh 
and fragrant. 
The poor woman was sick that day. 
When well she used to go out washing. 
During her absence, she explained to us, 



THROCGH THE l\IILL OF Al\IERICA
IZ:\TIO
 


good God was taking care of her little 
ones. The visiting lady was very much 
depressed by the misfortune of the poor 
sick woman, and on the next day she sent 
her a nice bouquet of flowers. 
The first tea-party for the foreign 
women was lamentably unsuccessful. 
There was a charming American lady to 
serve tea. There was plenty of good Bos- 
ton tea to be served. There were, how- 
ever, no foreign women to serve it to. 
The idea of tea-parties, then, had to be 
abandoned. At the same time my stand- 
ing as a prospective good social worker 
went to perdition. A few months, how- 
ever, elapsed before I was politely asked 
to resign. 
Upon leaving the settlement house I 
was certain of two things. First, that if 
I had stayed in the house any longer I 
would have become un-Americanized; 
and, second, that the more aggressive 
the methods used by the social workers 
in their efforts to Americanize foreigners, 
the more these foreigners clung to their 
own life and ideas. 
The very word" Americanization" was 
hated by the foreigners, and the social 
workers were looked upon as American- 
iza tion scarecrows. 
"'.hen I speak of foreigners I exclude the 
Jews, for they had eXploited every oppor- 
tunity the settlement house had to offer. 
There was probably no other city in the 
United States that would have as many 
Americanization agencies of various types 
as Boston had at that time. Therefore, 
with my" experience" I had no difficulty 
in getting a new position as a social 
worker. This time I was engaged by a 
large organization which spread its activ- 
ities throughout New England. 
I have to grant that the head of that 
body was not only a highly patriotic 
American but also a very conscientious 
student of immigration. He had lib- 
erally devoted his time and money to 
making the organization successful. Its 
purpose was not so much the work of 
Americanizing as that of explaining to the 
foreigners the sacredness of Jaw and order, 
especially during acute strike situations. 
From the American point of view this 
organization was very rational and use- 
ful. The foreigners, however, looked 
upon it from an entirely different angle. 


77 


T
ey. considered it a spying system. In 
t
mkmg so, they were in many cases jus- 
tIfied by the stupidity and pigheadedness 
of most of the investigators or so-called 
raci
l sec
etaries, who. were active only 
dunng strikes, and as If they were in the 
service of the big factory employers. 
The financial existence of the organin- 
tion depended more on the reports of the 
secretaries than on their actual accom- 

lishments. Consequently, it put in mo- 
tIon unscrupulous competition among the 
secretaries in writing "good" reports. 
Those secretaries then who possessed a 
yivid imagination and some literary abil- 
Ity were the ones who made the organiza- 
tion "important" and "successful." On 
the strength of these reports contribu- 
tions were freely pouring in to the benetit 
and satisfaction of all concerned-except 
the foreigners. 
1\ly first report, I remember, was short 
and simple, as there was nothing much to 
report at that particular time. It was re- 
turned to me, however, with the friendly 
advice that I write a "better" one if I 
cared to gain some recognition. 'Vell, I 
had to eat from time to time to be able to 
study, so I stretched my imagination a 
bit, brought whatever literary faculty I 
had into full swing, and wrote another re- 
port, which was highly approved, thereby 
making my position secure for nearly a 
year and a half. 
During that time I came in contact with 
probably every Americanization agency 
that existed in Boston. I knew a multi- 
tude of social workers of both native and 
foreign stock. I studied their human 
qualities as well as the methods and the 
results of their work. I delivered over a 
hundred lectures before the Polish immi- 
g rants and I met thousands of them. 
, " 
And at the end of my career as a pro- 
fessional" social worker, which occurred 
at the time of my joining the colors upon 
our entry into the 'Vorld 
Var, I coul
 not 
help coming to the followmg conclusIOns: 
First, that practically the whole of the 
Americanization work was in the hands of 
apparently wel1-
eaning bu.t narro\\- 
minded and hystencal old maIds of both 
sexes; second, that the numerous Amer- 
icanization agencies have done more 
harm than good in the assimila
ion of the 
foreign elements, for the very sImple rea- 



78 THROUGH THE MILL OF A:\'lERICANIZATION 


son that all these agencies were acting in- 
dependently of each other with no co- 
ordinated system, the basis of which 
should be primarily the general education 
of the immigrant and not solely the super- 
ficial endeavor to Americanize him over- 
night; third, that all professional Amer- 
icanization workers who were paid for 
their wasteful work were, with mighty 
few exceptions, nothing but a social 
nuisance; and, fourth, that I had never 
met a single Polish immigrant who was 
truly Americanized by any of the above- 
described agencies. 
The war took me away from civilian 
life for nearly five years, including my 
service abroad during the last Polish- 
Russian 'Var. During that time great 
changes took place in the world. Old 
nations had fallen and new nations had 
risen from the ruins of the Great War. 
New ideas penetrated the lives of indi- 
viduals, communities, and nations. Amer- 
ica hurried to the assistance of the Old 
World in solving its sore problems. Yet, 
it must be noticed with great apprehen- 
sion that the obscure relations between 
the American community and the for- 
eign groups in America have remained ab- 
solutely unchanged; that the old Amer- 
icanization agencies with the obsolete and 
preposterous methods are making things 
even worse; that the same crowd of Amer- 
icanization workers is still at large doing 
everything to demoralize the immigrant. 
In other words, the great foreign popula- 
tion in the United States presents now, as 
much as ever before, an acute problem of 
national importance. 
To my mind the Americanization prob- 
lem should be handled in a manner en- 
tirely different from that which has here- 
tofore been followed. 
To begin with, there are two groups of 
foreigners subject to Americanization. 
The first comprises millions of immigrants 
without any education, and the second 
consists of thousands of young men and 
women who either have some education 
or are naturally inclined to study. 
These are the facts in respect to the im- 
migrants of the first group. They are 
mostly peasants with no education; prac- 
tically all of them are well advanced in 
age, which, together with the fact that 
they work hard long hours, make it im- 


possible for them to learn English; they 
live in their own communities, which are 
well organized and have no contact with 
the American community; they have 
their own spiritual and social leaders, 
whom they respect and follow, and so 
Americanization workers have no chance 
to approach them directly; and, finally, in 
spite of all this they truly love America, 
for she gives them bread and shelter. 
As to the immigrants of the second 
group, it is for the most part composed of 
men and women disillusioned by the life 
in America and dissatisfied with the con- 
ditions they live in. They came here with 
high hopes of getting an education and 
instead are laboring hard in coal-mines 
and factories. 
There are two ways of Americanizing 
these two groups of immigrants: One, 
through their love for America, and, an- 
other, through proper education. 
To love America it is not essential to 
speak English fluently, wear a white col- 
lar, or possess good manners. 'Vhy not, 
then, cultivate this love in the hearts of 
the immigrants of the first group? To do 
this is a very simple matter. First, don't 
use repressive measures in order to Amer- 
icanize them-this would make them hate 
America. Second, don't let the Amer- 
icanization workers annoy them-they 
should be approached by the leaders of 
the American community through the 
foreign leaders, organizations, and press. 
Let the leaders of both the American 
community and the foreign groups form 
some sort of association in each commu- 
nity and there discuss their mutual rela- 
tions. The foreign leaders speak English, 
are loyal to America, and, therefore, will 
gladly co-operate with the American 
leaders. Third, don't suppress the for- 
eign newspapers. The foreign press, 
which is generally loyal to America, is do- 
ing much good in the way of enlightening 
the immigrant regarding his rights and 
duties toward America. 
The foreign press should best be ap- 
proached through an institution like the 
Foreign Language Information Service in 
New York City. This organization was 
originally established by the government 
during the war. Strange to say, it was 
most properly developed by an American 
woman. 



THROUGH THE l\1ILL OF AMERICANIZATION 79 


This Information Service has about 
twenty bureaus of different nationalities, 
each conducted by a manager of foreign 
birth or descent. These bureaus trans- 
late or edit educational and informative 
government material into foreign lan- 
guages and release it to the foreign-lan- 
guage press. On the other hand, im- 
portant articles portraying the life and 
opinions of the immigrants regarding 
American questions are translated for the 
information of the American public. 
The Foreign Language Information 
Service is doing wonderful work, which 
should attract more attention. 
So much about the immigrants of the 
first group. 
As to the immigrants of the second 
group, they should be helped in obtaining 
proper education. That does not mean 
education through the grace of evening 
schools or settlement houses. It means 
regular grammar-school, high-school, and 
college education. There are thousands 
of immigrants who dream day and night 
of higher education, but they either don't 
know how to go after it or have no means 
to pursue it. 
To solve the problem, the American In- 
ternational College in Springfield, 11ass., 
or a like institution should have proper 
facilities for at least three thousand immi- 
grant students and not, as heretofore, for 
one hundred and fifty only. 
The purpose of such an educational in- 
stitution would be twofold: First, to edu- 
cate the foreigners and thus make of them 
good Americans; and, second, by having 


immigrants of different races associate 
and neutralize their racial religious and 
social differences. ' , 
There could be either one large insti- 
tution with introductory, academy, and 
college departments, or there could be 
several smaller colleges in the States hav- 
ing a large foreign population. 
If I understand correctly, the American 
Inten;ational Coll
ge is able at the pres- 
ent tIme to provIde one student with 
board, room, and tuition for three hun- 
dred dollars a year. 
Now, let us suppose that the average 
Americanization worker gets about one 
thousand five hundred dollars a year. 
For this money, paid out for nothing, five 
honest and ambitious young immigrants 
could study for one year. 
If we take into consideration, very mod- 
estly, that there are one thousand Ameri- 
canization workers, the total sum of their 
salaries would provide education for five 
thousand foreign-born students yearly. 
For one million six hundred thousand 
dollars, given recently to our friends 
across the Pacific Ocean, about one thou- 
sand three hundred young immigrants 
could study for four years and graduate 
as leaders for the direction of the great 
army of untrained foreigners in America. 
Finally, if half of the money spent for 
Americanizing foreigners in Turkey, 
China, and in other parts of the world 
were used for the schools in which to edu- 
cate the foreigners living in America, the 
problem of Americanization would be on 
its right and speedy way to solution. 



Treed! 


BY ED\YIN DIAL TORGERSON 
Author of "Letters of a Bourgeois Father to His Bolshevik Son" 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY 1\-1ARGARET FREEMAN 


n.Q
1II.
w ON'T ever marry a 

 

 
 x family that has much 
[Q] of a tree. 
It's bad enough to 
. 
 l D I have to marry a family 

 : at all, instead of just 
Ä

Ä one unencumbered 
wife, but when there's 
too much genealogical foliage in the pic- 
ture, it's worse than bad. 
My good friend O'Brien almost got 
hung on a family tree's the reason I'm 
warning you. 
You see, Jerry was just a plain, honest 
clod of the Ould Sod who knew he was 
descended from a long line of O'Briens, 
but he just guessed that much. His 
father fought in the Civil War, but as for 
the battle of Agincourt, or Poitiers- 
well, Jerry's family didn't even know who 
threw the first brick at those riots. 
But Jerry, by virtue of the fact that 
he owned a string of hotels, if not polo- 
ponies, and was well equipped with the 
green alpaca lining with dollar-marks on 
the selvage, as it were, married an aristo- 
cratic peach of a girl who had. nothing 
wrong with her except too many exclusive 
forebears. 
Adelaide Carstairs Wilks tone O'Brien, 
which was the full name she voted by 
after she and Jerry were unified, was de- 
scended from William the Conqueror on 
the one hand and Lorenzo the Magnif- 
icent on the other. A great, great many 
times ditto aunt of hers was named Poca- 
hontas, and perhaps that was why Ade- 
laide's mama was so mean to Jerry. She 
was all Indian. Her family crest had a 
motto something like" J\1ultum in par- 
venu," which Jerry said was Italian for 
" \Valloped, I rise for more." 
Mrs. Caroline Sumter-Slocum Wilk- 
stone-I often wondered why she didn't 
take Lorenzo's family name and call her- 
80 


self !vlrs. Magnificent-had only one 
great regret in life, and that was that 
Adelaide had thrown herself away by 
marrying Jerry. She never had quite got 
over it. Even the fact that she lived with 
Adelaide and Jerry in their Second Cru- 
sadean villa with the Gothic influence 
didn't change her conviction that Ade- 
laide had disgraced the family, including 
Aunt Abelina. Yes, Aunt Abelina lived 
with them, too, and she helped her sister 
to keep Jerry feeling smaller than a 
germ's little nephew. 
The fact that Jerry was "in trade" 
added anthracite to the flames. The 
idea that a Wilks tone had become matri- 
monially involved with a common hotel- 
keeper was simply more than Aunt Abe- 
lina and Adelaide's mother could bear, so 
they said, and many's the time Jerry told 
me he wished they would show they 
meant what they said, and get out from 
under the Gothic rooftree. But they en- 
joyed the suffering which this vulgar con- 
nection afforded, and didn't show any 
inclina tion whatever toward moving to 
more aristocratic surroundings. 
Jerry had me out, every now and then, 
just to show me the horrible consequences 
of marrying above one's class. He didn't 

ver regret having decorated Adelaide's 
finger with another solitaire, for Adelaide 
was a patrician plum, really, and her only 
two weaknesses were mother and Aunt 
Abelina. And she had stipulated that if 
she gave her life into the keeping of one 
Jeremiah Cormack O'Brien, Jerry would 
consent to having mother and Aunt Abe- 
lina live with them, Adelaide was hope- 
lessly under the influence of these two 
elderly anæsthetics. 
Only two things saved Jerry from 
suicide or worse. In the first place, he 
had an excuse to get out of town every 
now and then to look over the other knots 



, .\unt .\bclina li\ ed with them, too 
-Page 80. 


in his string of hotels, and in the second 
place, he was a good sport and enormously 
fond of Adelaide. 
But every time I got a peek into Jerry's 
mode of life, I was 
newly convinced 
that 
if there was a 
martyr left un- 
burned, he was he. 
The first time I 
went out, )'Irs. 
Caroline Sum ter- 
Slocum \Yilkstone 
pulled the bell-rope 
and called for the 
Lafayette goblets. 
Yes, she always 
pulled.a bell-rope 
instead of pressing 
a bu t ton; the push- 
button system she 
regarded as too 
modern and vulgar. 
Apropos of noth- 
ing at all to drink, 
l\Irs. \\ïlkstone dis- 
played these silver 
containers that had 
such noble possibili- 
ties in that direc- 
tion, anrl told me all 
about them. 
"During the 
l\Iarquis's second 
visit to America, in 
the eighteen-twen- 
ties," she volun- 
teered, in her aristo- 
cratic, cold-storage 
manner, "he was 
the guest of my 
grandfa ther and 
grandmother, Cor- 
nelius Sumter \\Tilk_ 
stone and l\Iaria 
Slocum \Vilkstone. 
These goblets are a 
memento of that 
happy occasion. They were presented by 
l\Iarquis de Lafayette to the \\ïlkstones 
in appreciation of their hospitality and 
friendship. " 
Then I had to rave over the faded e"e- 
ning gown that l\Iaria Slocum \\ïlkstone 
had worn when she danced with Lafay- 
ette, There were even a couple of rents 
VOL. LK.'CVIII,-6 


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TRFED! 


81 



 


in the hem that had been caused b, La- 
fayette's noble number eights, I Suppose, 
when he stepped on the lad v's dre
s. 
There was a long string of other anec- 
dotes, reaching back 
to Peter the Great 
Gusta YUS Adolphus: 
.:\Iarcus Aurelius 
and a bunch of 
others tha t I could- 
n't keep score on, 
but Lafayette was 
the family pet. The 
second and third 
and eyerv other 
time I we
t out to 
Jerry's, I had to 
listen to the story of 
that historic pres- 
entation. 
Poor Jerry winced 
every time the gob- 
lets were brought 
ou t and the mar- 
quis's name was 
dragged back into 
the familv circle. I 
couldn't blame him. 
It seemed to me a 
hundred years was a 
long enough time to 
make a fuss over the 
home-brew mugs, 
and it was about 
time for .:\Iother 
\\ïlkstone to tune in 
for another station. 
I could have re- 
placed the set for a 
hundred dollars, 
easily. and Jerry's 
wife had better 
ones, for that mat- 
ter, in the sih-er ser- 
yice Jerry had gÏ\-en 
her. But l\Iarie 
Joseph Paul Y,.es 
Roch Gilbert du 

Iotier, :i\Iarquis de Lafayette, had cast 
the spell of aristocracy on these particu.lar 
containers, and it wasn't any use hopmg 
l\Iother \\ïlkstone would reform. 
And e,-ery now and then in the course 
of a dinner she and Aunt .-\bclina slipped 
in a remark that had all the earmarks of 
a dirty dig, to the effect that no \\ïlk- 


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82 


stone had ever been" in trade." That 
was what made me want to light a fire 
under Jerry. How he could put up with 
these slams, all the time he was providing 
the sinews of luxury for these particular 
\Vilkstones, was more than I could under- 
stand. 
"Jerry," I told him, after resisting the 
temptation as long as I could, "I'm going 
to say something sharp and easy to re- 
member, one of these evenings, if you 
don't quit inviting me out to hear the 
new jokes on Lafayette and Charle- 
magne. It wouldn't be so bad if they 
didn't keep rubbing it in about your an- 
cestors being such a total loss." 
"Oh, well," said Jerry. He always said 
that. "They can't make me mad. If 
they get a lot of pleasure out of thinking 
what a fine lot of highway robbers their 
baron ancestors were, let 'em." 
" All right. If you don't say something, 
I will. That's all." 
"Easy on the whip, George. Don't 
start anything worse than there is be- 
tween me and my in-laws." 
I promised I wouldn't, but when they 
sprang that one about Aunt Molly Sum- 
ter, it was too good an opening to miss. 
General Tarleton, according to the 
story, was a first-class gentleman even if 
he did wear a red coat. One time when 
he tramped down with a couple of regi- 
ments on the Sumter branch of the Wilk- 
stone family, in Virginia, he did Aunt 
:Molly Sumter the honor of quartering his 
officers in her mansion, while Uncle Gen- 
eral Philip Sumter was busy up around 
Saratoga. 
Being a gentleman of noble birth and 
all that sort of thing, the general invited 
Aunt Molly to dine at the table with his 
officers, and Aunt l\Iolly coldly accepted. 
Then they drank a lot of Uncle General 
Philip Sumter's best l\Iadeira, and Gen- 
eral Tarleton asked Aunt l\lo11y to pro- 
pose a toast. Aunt J\Iolly waved a goblet 
toward the ceiling and orated: 


"0 Lord above, send down thy love 
With sharpest swords and sickles, 
And cut the throats of these red-coats 
For eating up my victuals." 


:l\Iother Wilkstone looked around for 
applause to follow that one, and I fur- 
nished it. 


TREED! 


"Good for Aunt Molly!" I burst out. 
"That's the way to talk to non-paying 
guests who don't appreciate what you do 
for them." 
There was a silence as dead as King 
Tut's favorite door-nail, and I could see 
it hadn't taken any time at all for this 
subtle, rapier-like thrust to dig in. 
Between the cold glares, I managed to 
slip in another wallop, when the talk 
drifted naturally back to William the 
Conqueror. 
"You know, Jerry," I observed, being 
careful not to alldress the ladies because 
I wasn't being spoken to, just then. "I 
was reading the other day about this fel- 
low Wilhelm the Conqueror, and it seems 
he was just a big Swede who couldn't read 
and write." 
"No!" sputtered Jerry, trying to keep 
from grinning. "That's wrong, isn't it, 
Mother Wilks tone ?" 
"How crassly absurd and ignorant! 
William the Conqueror was a N orman- 
French nobleman, the scion of a distin- 
guished line!" 
"Yes, but this fellow writing the article 
says the Norman-French were just hard- 
fisted Swedes that came down and took 
Normandy away from the Frogs." It 
was a glorious chance, and I had to use it. 
"Besides, they say \Villiam didn't stand 
so well in his own day, and slew a few 
thousand taxpayers because they kept 
talking about his birth and breeding." 
J\Iore silence, like the North Pole at 
2A.M. 
"Oh, he was a radical writer-one of 
these Bolsheviks who ought not to be al- 
lowed to write such things." Jerry 
kicked me under the table, but I couldn't 
resist the evil temptation. "He said 
Charlemagne never used soap and ate 
without a knife and fork. Just picked up 
half a cow and gnawed it, and then threw 
the bone forty feet across the hall to his 
pet mastiff." 
"How utterly disgusting!" l\1rs. Wilk- 
stone insulted my ancestors all the way 
back to Adam, with one withering look. 
"It certainly is true that it takes three 
generations to make a gentleman." 
"l\faybe Charley didn't have but two 
back of him," I suggested, like I thought 
she was talking about Charley, instead of 
me. 



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I could see I would be about as welcome 
in the O'Brien ménage thereafter as the 
bubonic plague at a lawn-party, but I 
felt like it was my duty to do something 
for poor old Jerry. 
"He also said "-there must be some 





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TREED! 


83 


away from his long line of ancestors-in- 
law was to leave town. 
"George, I know you meant well with 
those harsh words about Charlemagne 
and 'Villiam the Conqueror and Poca- 
hontas," said Jerry. "But don't do it 



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". . . l\Irs. Caroline Sumter-Slocum \\ïlkstone ., called for the Lafayette goblets. . :'-Page 81. 


Indian in me, too, I'm so relen tIess- 
" he also said Pocahontas was a greasy In- 
dian who never took a bath unless John 
Smith made her." 
"I really must ask to be excused," was 
Aunt Abelina's comeback, and she and 
1\Iother 'Yilkstone went up-stairs in a 
terrible huff. 
Even Adelaide was mad at me, but I 
escaped with a feeling of having done a 
noble thing for a friend. 
Poor Jerry didn't look at it that way 
at all. however. "'hen I saw him next 
day he was all packed up for a swing 
around the circle, and he carried a 
harassed look along with his baggage. 
The poor fellow's only chance to break 


any more. I beg of you as a friend on 
bended knees-don't do it any more. 
You got me deeper in Dutch than Rotter- 
dam." 
"You don't mean they took it out on 
you? " 
"\Vow! The lectures I got on having 
low-brow friends! George, why can't 
you be refined? If I ever ha,'e you out 
to the house again I'll ha,-e to spend the 
rest of my life swinging around the circle, 
that's all!" 
"Sure I'm a low-brow!" I'm alwa,'s 
glad to admit that semi-soft impeach- 
ment. "But I didn't mean to get you in 
trouble, Jerry, honest I didn't. I just 
figured you were leading a dog's life, 



84 


anyway, and a couple additional fleas 
wouldn't bother. Guess there's no way 
I can help you, if those remarks didn't 
work." 
"No way." George shook his head 
sadly. "There's just a few things money 
won't buy, and one of 'em's ancestors." 
"Rats," I assured him. "Nobody in 
this country's got any ancestors to rave 
about, yet these people keep you feeling 
low as a lizard's knuckles. What did the 
first settlers come to this country for, any- 
way? Because they were poor Britishers 
who couldn't make a living in England, 
mostly. The aristocrats stayed home and 
raked in the profits from the land the king 
gave them, didn't they? \Vhere do they 
get this ancestor stuff, anyway? The 
only true aristocracy, Jerry, is the aris- 
tocracy of brains-that's what you and I 
belong to ! " 
"Cheers, cheers," conceded Jerry, 
weakly. "But that doesn't get me any 
crest with three ostrich feathers in it, and 
Uncle William Slocum's writing a book 
about the family, and I've got to make a 
showing in it." 
"Uncle William-who's he?" This 
was one descendant I hadn't met yet. 
"Oh, he's one of the Sumter-Slocum- 
\Vilkstones. Got lots of time and money 
and a sense of humor, too, I gu"ss. He 
won't write 'memoirs,' because he says 
they're a sign of decadence, but he's de- 
cided to dig up all the facts about the 
family and send 'em down the ages bound 
in limp leather. The folks at home don't 
think much of Uncle William-they say 
he's the nearest thing to 'common' in the 
family, mainly because he's the only one 
with common sense, I think. The old fel- 
low likes me pretty well, but he can't 
write me up unless I give him something 
to say, can he?" 
"\Vell, Jerry, how much do you want 
to talk about, anyway? Don't you own 
the lion's majority of seven hotels?" 
"Yes, but that won't count. It's got 
to be something my ancestors did." 
Hard to beat, not? 
Just because his ancestors were nice 
peaceable folks who didn't make a name 
in history by swatting people over the 
head with broad-axes and stealing their 
land, Jerry had to take all this back-talk. 
I, for one, couldn't stand it any longer. 


TREED! 


"Jerry, when you get back from that 
rope of hotels of yours, you're going to 
ha ve a family tree," I promised. 
"'Vhat do you mean?" I could see, 
right off, Jerry was afraid I was going to 
do something rash again. 
"It's all right, don't worry. I'm going 
to trace you back to the King of Ireland, 
if necessary." 
"Ireland hasn't got any king," Jerry 
demurred. 
"Maybe it hasn't now, but it had, and 
his name was something like O'Brien. 
Just wait. We'll show these pikers some- 
thing classier than \Villiam the Slugger." 
"All right, only for Pete's sake ,be care- 
ful," Jerry begged. 
\Vell, sir, it took me a week and six 
bobbed-haired librarians to dig up the 
dirt of ages, but we got results. 
I found out one thing-most family 
trees are a lot of optimistic guesswork. 
There'd be a fëllow named Charles Augus- 
tus l\Iincemeat, for instance, who claimed 
kinship with a string of families decorat- 
ing the dust back to Edward the Con- 
fessor, with the names of Mincemete, 
Minsmat, Minnymoot, J\1ingecoop; and 
finally, by a running broad jump of the 
imagination, Charles Augustus would say 
the name was J\Iinge de J\Ietra vaille, be- 
fore his noble ancestors left France in the 
tenth century and settled in England. Of 
course, inasmuch as Louis Etienne Arthur 
Henri Georges Jean François Auguste 
Edouard Saint Remy, duc du Minge de 
J\Ietravaille, was a great-great left-handed 
grandson of Louis the First of France, 
everybody in the :l\1incemeat family could 
use the J\tIetravaille crest with the two 
prairie-chickens pecking at the Swiss 
cheese, or whatever it was they were 
pecking at. 
'When it came to a question of spelling 
the name wrong, I found the O'Brien 
family had it over the :Mincemeats like a 
circus tent over a microbe. 
O'Brian, O'Brann, O'Brawn, O'Bron- 
Brian-Brynn-Brann-Bron, without the 
Ü- and finally there was a nest of them 
just named" Brr !" The O'Grady family 
originated, I think, with a nobleman who 
had an Irish setter that constantly said 
" Grr ! " 
Along with my night-school course in 
pedigrology, of course, I had to learn a 




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lot about heraldry, too. It was necessary 
for Jerry to have a personal coat of arms 
if he was going to be a descendant of th
 
King of Ireland His hotels had them- 
one of them sported crockery with a lion 
and unicorn crest and the motto under 
it, "Je n'oublierai jamais," which was old 
French for" I shall never forget this beef- 
steak." A nice way to remind linguistic 
diners what a fine meal the hotel served. 


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TREED! 


85 


that there might be a donation forth- 
c
ming for his hungry department. "It 
wd.l be more fitting, however, to use the 
Brtan crest." 
"Brian-was he a king?" I didn't 
want any slip-up at the last minute. 
"Oh, yes," he assured me. "There 
were a great many native kings in Ireland 
before th
 English, under Henry II, se- 
cured theIr first foothold in the twelfth 


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. . . it took me a week and six bobbed-haired librarians to dig up the dirt of ages . .-Page 84. 


Personally, on the crest subject, I was 
in favor of a couple of Kilkenny cats sur- 
prised in the act of eating each other up, 
and for a motto I was going to get some 
good Gaelic scholar to translate into the 
original raw-material Irish the well- 
known and stirring expression, "Ireland 
forever at it." 
But the old gentleman in the Depart- 
ment of Archives and History vetoed 
that. His name was Professor Haralby, 
and he was recommended to me as a 
mighty fine fellow to enlist in a cause of 
this kind, because he personally had 
traced his family back to Harold Fairhair. 
"There is no doubt of your friend's 
aristocratic lineage," said the professor, 
after I had worked on his sympathy with 
filet mignon and flattery at Jerry's local 
hotel, and had also let fall a suggestion 


century. There was almost a king for 
every county, as now constituted.'" 
"That's the stuff-King O'Brien, of 
County Cork!" 
":Ko, I should say Donald O'Brien, 
King of Thomond, who was one of the 
last native kings in Ireland, is the most 
recent royal progenitor of the famous 
O'Brien familv. He it was who wa.; 
visited by Kill'g Henry II on the latter's 
initial excursion to Ireland." 
"Fine," I. applauded, for the professor 
certainly knew his stuff. " You don't 
suppose you could find me a family tree, 
too, while you're about it? Any .:\Iac- 
Dougalls in the Irish king list?" 
Professor Haralby Bashed me a scholar- 
ly smile over his truffles. 
"The .:\IacDougall family has quite an 
interesting origin," he replied. "The 



86 


l\lacDougalls and l\lacDowells trace their 
name to the Scandinavian invaders in Ire- 
land. The Viking incursions began in 
A. D. 795. The Norwegians, as you 
know, founded Dublin, \Vaterford, and 
Limerick. " 
"No, I didn't even suspect it." 
" Well, they did. The ancient Irish 
name for the Norwegians was' Findgaill,' 
or the 'white foreigners.' The Danes, 
who were a bit darker, were called the 
'DubgaiU,' or 'black foreigners.' The 
l\lacDougaH and l\lacDowell families are 
traceable to the Dubgaills, or Danes-the 
Fingall family, and perhaps the Finne- 
gans, to the Norwegians." 
"\Vell, shoot me for a Viking fish!" I 
exploded. "Then \\'illiam the Conqueror 
and I are both Scandihoovians!" 
The professor smiled again. 
"There were many kings, also, among 
the early Norse invaders of Ireland. 
Donoban, a l\lunster chieftain, married 
the daughter of a Scandinavian King of 
\Vaterford, and the Donovan and O'Don- 
ovan families may claim this royal de- 
scent. Donoban's daughter, on the other 
hand, married Ivar of \Va, terford and 
they founded the Donavan and O'Dona- 
van families." 
"Wait a second, professor, you're 
carrying me too fast! At the speed you're 
making, you'll soon have every Irishman 
a descendant of the nobility." 
"Ah, but King Donald O'Brien and 
King Donoban were comparatively re- 
cent," the professor went on. "It is quite 
likely that we may trace your friend's 
ancestry in an unbroken line back to 
Noah! " 
"Noah? Get off the earth, professor!" 
"\Vhimsical, but true," said the learned 
archiver and historian. " You see, Brian 
Boruma and King Donald O'Brien traced 
their descent from Ailill Aulom, and 
thence back to the originall\Iilesians, who 
came from Scythia to Ireland in the dawn 
of history. l\Iilesian tradition has built 
up a line of succession, through Fenius 
Farsaid, Goedel Glas, Eber Scot, and 
Breogan, that extends without interrup- 
tion actually back to Noah!" 
,. \Vell, professor, you're doing noble!" 
I had to gasp. "I didn't expect you to 
be that good a friend of Jerry's. 1\:1y 
kelly's off to the O'Briens henceforth. 


TREED! 


\Vhat's a few Charlemagnes and William 
the Conquerors, compared to a man with 
a family tree as old as Noah!" 
Of course, the thing to do was to put 
Professor Haralby next to Uncle \Villiam 
Slocum, so he could give Uncle William 
expert assistance in the compilation of 
the family book. There wasn't any 
doubt, now, that Jerry would outshine 
the Sumter-Slocum-\Vilkstones like a 
search-light arguing with a lightning-bug. 
Jerry had a perfect right to fix him up a 
crest with a picture of the ark on it, 
Noah's bunch of grapes on one side, a 
dove with a sprig of laurel on the other, 
and the ancient motto underneath: "It 
ain't gonna rain no more!" However, I 
left the coat-of-arms business to the pro- 
fessor. 
Gosh, wouldn't we crow over :l\Iother 
\Vilkstone and her disgustingly new gob- 
lets! 
Jerry came back, and I gave him some 
inkling of what we had accomplished, 
without telling him, however, the whole 
glorious truth about his ancestors. I 
thought we ought to break that to him 
with some sort of ceremony. 
" You don't get a peek at this book 
until it's formally presented," I warned 
him. "Uncle \\-ïlliam's going to give a 
banquet for that occasion, with all the 
Sumter-Slocum- Wilkstones and the new 
O'Brien au gratin admixture invited, in- 
cluding me, as a distinguished Dubgaill." 
"Dub-what?" says Jerry. 
"Oh, you're too ignorant to under- 
stand," I waved him off. "But just you 
wait till Uncle William and I finish that 
book." 
Jerry gave me to understand that he 
wasn't exactly as strong as arsenic with 
the home folks yet. They were still sore 
about the things I had said, and he made 
me promise that I wouldn't venture any 
remarks to arouse them again, on the oc- 
casion of the forthcoming banquet. I 
promised to stand on the side-lines and 
say nothing. Uncle William was to do 
most of the talking, with maybe a few 
remarks from Professor Haralbv. 
l\Irs. Caroline Sumter-Slonim \Vilk- 
stone was certainly primed for that his- 
toric evening when it did arrive. She 
must have sat up nights thinking up new 
methods of impressing the world with the 



family's importance. The evening gown 
that grandmother had worn when minu- 
etting with Lafayette was there all 
sealed up in a glass case so no v
lgar 
hands could touch it. The Lafayette 
goblets were there, too, and it was stipu- 
lated that nobody but the direct descen- 
dants of Cornelius and ]\-laria \Vilkstone 


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TREED! 


87 


pin. I don't know where the professor 
h
d dug up that picture, but the O'Brien 
hIghness was certainly all present with the 
good looks. 
I saw l\lot
1Cr \Yil
s
one hovering over 
that page wIth a dIstmct expression of 
surpnse and chagrin. She discussed it in 
excited whispers with Aunt Abelina and 


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"Professor Haralby and I have discovered a new and most interesting item. . ."-Page 88. 


could drink out of them. Jerry and I 
didn't mind, though. If we'd wanted to, 
we could have sprung a gourd and said it 
was Noah's original shaving-mug, but I 
didn't want to take advantage of the poor 
lady that way. 

t each place around the banquet 
board was a limp leather copy of Uncle 
\Villiam's epoch-making book. The 
printing and the paper were nice, but I 
couldn't rave over the pictures in it. An- 
cestors can't help looking that way, but 
they didn't have to have their pictures 
struck. 
Donald O'Brien, King of Thomond, 
wasn't in the class with the rest of the 
plug-uglies, however. Compared to 
Charlemagne and \Villiam the Conqueror, 
he was Apollo himself alongside Ben Tur- 


Adelaide. Probably it displeased her to 
have the O'Briens mixed up that way 
with her aristocratic forerunners. She 
was a little flushed and nervous all the 
time Uncle \Villiam was making his dig- 
nified prefatory remarks. I could see that 
she wanted to get the floor, but Lncle 
\VilIiam wouldn't let her have it until 
Professor Haralby had given us a scholar- 
ly lecture on the distinguished O'Brien 
family. 
All during this, Jerry was looking 
through his book with a bored e\.pression, 
like a guinea-pig at a clinic, and mum- 
bling to me. 
"'Vho wants to be tied up with these 
two-by-four kings?" he was grumbling. 
"None of them was as good a man as my 
uncle who was sheriff. And who do they 



88 


expect to believe all this junk about Noah? 
The boys at the club will ride me all the 
rest of in y life, if this gets to them!" 
I had to keep jabbing him. "Hush, for 
the love of l\Iike, Jerry, don't spoil every- 
thing," I begged him. 
Jerry was mad enough before l\Irs. 
\Vilkstone got up to speak, in her shrill, 



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TREED! 


rare it was to find a family that possessed 
such a precious keepsake from the distin- 
guished French nobleman, when Uncle 
\Villiam interrupted her. 
"In connection with these celebrated 
goblets," said C ncle \\ ïlliam, "Professor 
Phineas Haralby and I have discovered a 
new and most interesting item which 



 
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"It's not going to be any circle this time," snapped Jerry, throwing a pile of shirts across the room.-Page 89. 


shop-worn soprano. I could see he was 
on the verge of rising to a point of disorder 
and telling them all what he thought of 
descendan ts in general. 
l\Irs. Wilks tone didn't overlook any 
bets in referring to her family's distant 
historical kinfolks, but she put in a couple 
of mean prods to the effect that the most 
important ancestors, after all, were the 
comparatively recent ones, like the kind 
you have three or four generations back. 
Jerry was about to explode when she 
fetched up with the Lafayette goblets. 
l\.Irs. \'
ilkstone was waving one of them 
like it might have contained the real stuff 
instead of ice-water, and telling us how 


throws additional light upon their presen- 
tation to the \Yilkstone family. I think 
it would be peculiarly fitting, in view of 
his present-day connections, that l\lr, 
O'Brien read the passage in my modest 
little volume which has reference to this 
diverting subject. You will find it on 
page 124, :Mr. O'Brien. \Von't you be 
good enough to read it?" 
Jerry fumbled around until he found 
page 124, and I never saw a man's face 
change expression and color so fast as his 
did. 
Everybody else at the table, myself not 
excluded, turned to page 124 to see what 
the racket was. There were pictures of 



Cornelius Sumter Wilks tone and his wife 
Maria Slocum Wilks tone, along with that 
of Lafayette, and the sweet old story of 
the goblets, revamped. 
Jerry got up and read it, with his left 
hand pretty nearly demolishing the wood- 
work on the back of his chair. 


Cornelius Sumter Wilkstone, tiring of the un- 
remunerative practice of law, and in view of the 
crop failure in the early eighteen-twenties (said 
Uncle William's book), determined to establish 
a neatly appointed tavern in the capital city of 
St. Stephens. This he did, and, with the aid of 
his good and energetic wife, he attained marked 
success in his venture. 
It is a subject of great pride to all the descen- 
dants of Cornelius and Maria Wilks tone, that 
they had the rare honor of entertaining the Mar- 
quis de Lafayette upon the occasion of his visit 
to St. Stephens, no private homestead in the 
vicinity offering the exceptional accommodations 
that were to be found at the Wilks tone Tavern. 
So pleased was the marquis with the splendid 
and gracious hospitality offered him by Cornelius 
and Maria Wilkstone, that he presented them, 
upon his departure, with a set of handsome silver 
goblets, the finest procurable at the local silver- 
smiths, and had them fittingly inscribed: "To 
Cornelius and Maria Wilks tone, from Marie- 
Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du"- 


Jerry couldn't finish reading Lafay- 
ette's full name, he was that mad. He 
just sputtered and glared around the 
table, especially at Aunt Abelina and Mrs. 
Wilks tone, who were trying to look frigid 
and incredulous in spite of the fact that 
their complexions were on fire. 
"In trade, huh?" That's all Jerry 
could say, for a minute. "In trade! 
Is this information straight, Uncle Wil- 
liam ? " 
"Indubitably." Uncle William had 
the satisfied smile of the cat who ate the 
family goldfish. "Professor Haralby has 
the original documents in his possession 
that prove, beyond the shadow of a 
doubt-" 
" ,\7 ell, this is all I wan t to say." The 
O'Brien worm turned with a flop that 
could be heard for blocks. I never saw 
Jerry lose his temper like that before. 
"I've been hearing about this blue- 
blooded Sumter-Slocum- \Vilkstone family 
so long it's made me blue in the face. I 
haven't got anything against these two 
honest specimens that ran a hotel, but I 
want to say right now that a family that'll 
suppress the truth about its ancestors is a 
lot lower in my estimation than a family 
VOL. LXXVIII.-7 


TREED! 


89 


that hasn't got any ancestors at all! M: v 
grandfather laid bricks and I'm proud óf 
it.. And he didn't get any engraved gold 
b.flck from the Marquis de Lafayette, 
eIther. You can all take your gilt-edge 
ancestors and step straight to Hades. I 
may be d,escended from a cheap king, 
but I won t tell anybody if I am. Good 
nigh t! " 
Saying which, Jerry dashed out of the 
private dining-room like a motorized fire- 
engine, with me dashing after. 
I could see I'd put on the finishing 
touches, for fair. If ever a man was 
broken up wit? his family-in-Iaw, Jerry 
was now, and It was all my fault. 
Jerry taxied out to his Gothic villa and 
I taxied after as soon as I could get a cab. 
He was packing, still mad as a hornet, 
when I got there. 
" Another trip around the circle, 
Jerry?" I finally got breath enough to 
ask. 
"It's not going to be any circle this 
time," snapped Jerry, throwing a pile of 
shirts across the room. "It's going to be 
a straight line 1" 
"Now, Jerry, it's not so bad as that!" 
I saw it was my duty to remonstrate be- 
fore things went too far. "Don't blame 
your wife for all this foolishness. It's my 
fault, not Adelaide's." 
" I'm through 1 " Jerry bit off the 
words so I could tell he didn't mean may- 
be. "Adelaide won't come along. She's 
married to her ancestors, and I won't 
stand for them any more. And that in- 
cludes the two present exhibits." 
"Now, Jerry, what's the use of having 
a family row? You know Adelaide is too 
proud to follow after you." 
But Jerry wouldn't argue. He 
slammed the rest of his light-marching 
equipment into his bags and telephoned 
for a cab. 
And then I heard the front door open- 
ing and somebody came running up the 
stairs. It was Adelaide. 
"Jerry, Jerry, where are you going?" 
she palpitated. 
"OuL" 
"Out where, Jerry?" 
"Away out. Some place where they 
never talk. about Lafayette and ances- 
tors. You can stay if you want to, but 
I'm through-jillis-CURTAIX I" 



90 


LAND-SICK 


Adelaide looked at him for a full min- 
ute and I thought she was going to cry. 
But instead she burst out laughing. 
" Jerry, I'm going, too I" she an- 
nounced, gleeful as a schoolgirl. " Won't 
we have fun I" 
"But I'm serious-I mean it I" Jerry 
was trying his best to glare at her se- 
verely. "I didn't mean to be insulting, 
but a man can stand just so much, and 
then nature steps in I" 
"Jerry, I feel the same way about it," 
exclaimed Adelaide, with a twinkle in her 
eye. "I've been hearing about those silly 
goblets all my life, and all my life it's been 
thrown up to me how aristocratic Grand- 
mother 1\:1aria 'Vilkstone was, and it 
thrilled me to death to hear she was just 
a hotel-keeper, like my dear, brave, noble- 
ancestored Jerry. And now we're not 
ever going to hear anything more of those 
foolish keepsakes." 
"You can bet Charlemagne's boots 
we're not!" 


"Because mother's given them away- 
the goblets and the evening gown, too." 
"Given them away I" 
" Yes, sir-to that clever old Professor 
Haralby-a gift for the Department of 
Archives and History. Aren't you glad 
they're going to be tucked away in a dusty 
old museum?" 
"Professor Haralby?" A slow grin 
spread over Jerry's face. 
"Yesc He and mother are still at the 
hotel, talking ancestors. At last accounts 
they had figured it out that your forty- 
times-removed great uncle, King Donald 
O'Brien, was a seventh cousin of William 
the Conqueror's brother-in-law, so we're 
all kin I And you needn't ever expect to 
hear about those Lafayette goblets again. 
That branch of the family's buried for 
good !" 
"George, you poor son-of-a-Dubgaill," 
said Jerry, turning to me, "Adelaide and 
I are going for a little swing around the 
circle. Maybe we'll be back, after all!" 


Land-Sick 


BY EBEN D. FI
EY 


BACK on the arid prairie 
A thousand miles, or more, 
I still hear the grand old ocean 
Caressing a starlit shore;- 
And the ripples ride 
On the ebbing tide, 
As the sands turn o'er and o'er. 


The whispering wash of waters,- 
What else can that music be 
But the lullaby of the wind and sky, 
And the song of the blessed sea? 
Nay, 'tis only the breeze 
Through the mesquite-trees. 
Ah,-'tis more than that to me. 


And what is that salty fragrance 
That comes on the freshened air? 
'Tis the perfume blown from the sea- 
weed flats, 
Far sweeter than incense rare. 
Nay,-'tis only the dust 
From the sun-baked crust,- 
Or those cactus flowers there. 


Perhaps 'tis the moon on the prairie, 
But to me not so to-night. 
For the moon rides high in a silver sky, 
And the waves are flecks of light. 
'Tis the winds that pass 
Through the prairie-grass, 
Transformed in the radiance bright. 
Hark to that laughter eerie 
'Tis the voice of a lonely loon 
From far away on the silver bay, 
In the bright path of the moonc 
'Tis a screech-owl's call,- 
Ah,-that is all,- 
For day will be breaking soon. 
Oh, it may be a screech-owl calling 
To welcome a breaking day,- 
And it may be the breeze through the 
mesquite-trees 
That sounds like the song of the bay;- 
But the voice of the sea 
Comes back to me,- 
And my heart is away,-away. 



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Nothmg else came to light in the attic with the exception of a pair of iron andirons marked I762.-Page 94. 


The Antique Habit 
BY CAROLINE CAMP 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY \V. G. THOMAS 


, 'VENT to a dinner 
not long ago where the 
guests had uncon- 
sciously divided them- 
selves into two distinct 
f actions. One dis- 
cussed prohibition, the 
other antiques. The 
momentum of each subject slackened visi- 
bly at times, but a fresh auction expe- 
rience or a newly found bootlegger repeat- 
edly gave it new life. Incident followed 
incident in endless succession, and I found 
myself almost believing that these must 
be the only remaining topics of conversa- 
tion in this present-day United States. 
I am, therefore, quite loath to admit 


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that I am so plebeian as to be an enthusi- 
ast for either one; but being a New Eng- 
lander I feel compelled to tell you the 
truth. I am an antique fan; and I untir- 
ingly root for antiques in two senses of 
the word. 
Nearly every day from early spring to 
late fall I start out in a very rusty, very 
early American Ford, with a sandwich by 
my side, praying that a shower of low- 
boys or a cyclone of pewter plates and old 
glass will come my way. Sometimes my 
prayers are answered in part, but more 
often I trail back with a dejected expres- 
sion and nothing else, with the e"-ception, 
perhaps, of an experience of some sort. 
One day last summer I walked hope- 
9 1 



92 


THE ANTIQUE HABIT 


fully up to a door and knocked. To the 
woman who responded I made my usual, 
time-worn speech. "Have you any old- 
fashioned furniture that you would care 
to sell?" She had the answer on the tip 
of her tongue: "No, I ain't. I got some 
old furniture but no money could buy 
'em." I was politely attentive, with: 
"Have you really? Do you happen to 
have a lowboy? I would give anything 
for one." This time she looked fright- 
ened, and snapped out: "No! I just got 
a girl in high school." The door was 
closed. No, not closed, shut! As I 
drove away, I could see her peering at 
me from behind lace curtains. I am quite 
sure she is thinking to this day that I was 
a new process kidnapper. 
I drove on about three miles to the next 
house, where a bewhiskered individual 
was laying a cement walk. I halted and 
he advanced, armed with a trowel, de- 
manding to know why I was there. 
"Well, if you want somethin' old, I've 
got the oldest thing there is old-did you 
ever hear of Josephus-well, I s'pose you 
read the Bible-well, you come pretty 
near reading the Book of Josephus in- 
stead-they took a vote on to it which 
book should be handed down and the 
Bible got it by just one vote-yes, ma'am, 
one vote, and if it hadn't been for that 
there one vote you'd be readin' the Book 
of Josephus to-day instead of the Bible. 
I got the book, and it's the oldest thing 
you ever see-tells all about the Jews, and 
yes, ma'am, it's old all right, it's the 
first book that ever was, but I ain't got 
no time to show it to you to-day. I want 
to finish this 'ere walk before it gets dark, 
and the old woman ain't here anyway- 
and she's got it put up somewhere-but 
it's an awful old book-if it hadn't been 
for that one vote you'd be reading that 
there book to-day instead of the Bible- 
why, let me tell you, ma'am, that two 
thousand years ago that book-" 
Under the strain of such tirades my 
Ford becomes restless; so on we went. 
Antiques are difficult to find because it 
is next to impossible to gain admittance 
to people's houses. Very rarely I find a 
person who says: "Why, I don't know; 
you can come in and look around." 
When I do, I catalogue her as being an 
angel. She lets me wander from room to 


room; up in the attic, down in the cellar, 
and out in the barn. It is then that I find 
the things and enjoy buying them. These 
people grasp my offer with: "Land, yes, 
I'd take five dollars for it. I was going to 
throw it out the other day, but didn't get 
to it." I go away having rescued some- 
thing, and my angel is very pleased with 
the money. 
The men, as a rule, are easier to attack 
than the women. They tell me to come 
in and help myself to any old junk I can 
find. It is possible that women feel quite 
as hospitable, but they are always fearful 
of my seeing dust, and beds that are wait- 
ing to be made. They hold the door open 
exactly the width of their faces and insist 
that they have nothing. They tell me 
that they have had canning and sewing to 
do, that the baby has had the whooping- 
cough, and that they haven't had a min- 
ute for the house. You feel very sorry 
about this list of casualties, and you try to 
make them understand that your eyes 
always travel torpedo-like over a foot of 
dust and ten unmade beds to fasten on a 
Currier and I ves picture or a Stafford- 
shire dog. As a matter of fact, they are 
travelling all the time she is talking; try- 
ing to shoot past her immovable figure 
and light on some tangible antique. A 
crack in the door isn't much of a peri- 
scope, so I change the subject from an- 
tiques to the apple blightc TheJ crack 
widens a bit and she is cautiously affable. 
We go on from apples to tractors and then 
to the scarcity of help, and finally to 
flowers. She has a night-blooming cereus. 
I have never seen one. She feels that I 
have missed everything in life. The door 
is wide open and I am inside the house. 
It has been such an effort to get there 
that I feel exactly like lying down and 
dying. I am saved from this calamitous 
end, however, by suddenly catching sight 
of a stencilled tray in perfect condition. 
No, I don't forget the night-blooming 
cereus. I admire it from all angles. But 
I eventually get to the] tray, and shortly 
afterward it takes its first ride in an au- 
tomobile. 
I had had a run of bad luck for some 
time, and was lamenting the fact to a 
dealer that I knew. It was aggravating 
to hear in return that he had been mak- 
ing gorgeous finds. _ ,He confided that the 



THE ANTIQUE HABIT 


secret was to visit only the pretentious- 
looking houses in the towns, rather than 
stopping everywhere in the farming dis- 
tricts. This I had never done, but I re- 
solved to try it. I chose a good-sized 
vill
&e. about t
enty miles away for my 
actIvItIes. Bemg full of trepidation at 
first, I called at the meeker-looking places. 
At last, mustering up my courage, I 
stopped at a very good-looking house. An 


93 


fl,,!ent-Iooking house in quest of antiques 
wIthout much perturbation. 
Often people ask me how I know where 
to find old furniture. It is simply one 
endless canvass. A great many times I 
am sent from one house to another. "\Ve 
haven't anything, but 1\Irs. Barnes across 
the road has an old bookcase she wants to 
s
l
." I hasten over, filled with pleasant 
VISIons of a possible mahogany secretary. 


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"Well, if you want somethin' old, I've got the oldest thing there is old- . . ."-Page 92. 


elderly woman was sitting on the porch. 
Somehow she looked familiar as I came 
nearer. I became embarrassed, so em- 
barrassed that I hadn't the sense to ask 
her if she could tell me where the Smiths 
lived. My same hackneyed question 
came bubbling forth. She smiled and in- 
quired my name. I couldn't think of an- 
other name, so that came out also. At 
once she was full of questions regarding 
the health of my family. She was an old 
friend of my mother's and father's, and 
my grandmother's and grandfather's! 
She was delightful. I stayed for luncheon 
and was shown all the antiques that I 
couldn't buy that day nor any other time. 
I crawled into my car and made haste for 
the byways. In spite of Mrs. Parker's 
cordiality I have never recovered from 
the book-agent feeling that I had that 
day, nor have I since approached an af- 


But it turns out to be really a bookcase 
and a modern atrocity at that. 
Clews are seldom anything but disap- 
pointments, but I followed one a short 
time ago, and have never been so re- 
warded. I had made inquiries at the 
post-office for "prospects," and had been 
told that the Gillettes might have some- 
thing. I was sceptical but open to con- 
viction, so I called. Not wishing to seem 
too acquisitive, I told 1\Irs. Gillette that 
I was looking for an old cord bed. 
As you doubtless already know, forty- 
nine such beds out of e,'ery fifty have 
been chopped up for kindling-wood. They 
are cordially hated by the average per- 
son. The remaining one was left, merely 
because the chopper had become weary of 
his task. 
There had been a very lazy man some- 
where in her family, as she said that she 



94 


THE ANTIQUE HABIT 


had three cord beds in the attic. At the 
foot of the attic stairs sat a comb-back 
Windsor chair. On the wall, opposite, 
hung a Chippendale mirror, and as far as 
I could see, hooked rugs everywhere. To 
say that I was astonished would be put- 
ting it mildly, but I maintained a calm 
exterior and went on to the beds in ques- 
tion. After much manæuvring and tug- 
ging we were able to drag them out from 
under the eaves. The chopper had been 
careless as well as lazy and had left only 
two posts to each bed, not to mention 
rutWessly chopping up every head board; 
so all our work was in vain. 
Nothing else came to light in the attic 
with the exception of a pair of iron and- 
irons marked I762. I tried to buy these, 
but Mrs. Gillette said that she wouldn't 
sell them for any amount of money. Im- 
mediately my hopes for the comb-back 
Windsor and Chippendale mirror sank 
into oblivion. I felt sure that she would 
have the same feeling about everything. 
Half-way down the attic stairs was a 
shelf filled with old books, papers, and 
cleaning cloths. I excavated two old bot- 
tles from this débris; one was a General 
Bragg and Washington, and the other had 
an eagle on either side. I bought both of 
them and felt a little more philosophical. 
Then I came back to the chair and mir- 
ror. They were soon mine also. 
l\lrs. Gillette was most gracious and 
took me into every room, up stairs and 
down. Each room held at least one cov- 
eted piece. I bought and bought. She 
told me that fifty years ago she wouldn't 
have dreamed of parting with anything; 
but only the day before her son had 
asked her if she wouldn't dispose of some 
things-"the house was so full of old 
stuff." That, and coming to the conclu- 
sion that she was getting too old to take 
care of so much, brought the matter to a 
climax. I had arrived at the crucial mo- 
ment. 
A butterfly table loomed up in one 
room, a Pembroke table with unusual 
stretchers was in the wood-shed, foster- 
ing tin cans and pails of paint. I found a 
swell-front bureau in another room. If I 
should tell you of everything you would 
immediately conclude that my imagina- 
tion was running riot. To prove your 
conclusion, I could add that all this hap- 


pened on the main street of one of our 
best-known Berkshire resorts. 
I became a little nervous as my bill rose 
higher and higher. I had just fifty dollars 
with me, My check-book was out in the 
car, but Mrs. Gillette didn't know me, 
nor had she ever heard of me; and, be- 
sides, I had bought more than any human 
Ford could take home on one trip. I 
hated to leave anything, as often I had 
done that, only to find on returning that 
the people had changed their minds about 
selling. At last I came to a standstill, and 
figured up what lowed. It was amazing. 
I stammered softly that I had only fifty 
dollars and waited for the crash. It was 
not forthcoming. This wonderful old 
lady said: "My dear, I would take your 
check for any amount. You look very 
honest." I almost wept. It didn't take 
me long to make out that check. I paid 
for everything and took one load with 
me, leaving the rest for another time. 
The next day was Sunday, so I didn't 
go back until Monday. Over the week- 
end I found myself continually visualiz- 
ing Mrs. Gillette as I expected to find her 
on the appointed day. There she stood, 
with tears in her eyes, saying: "Would 
you mind very much if I told you that I 
finally can't bear to see these things go?" 
And I could see myself, absolutely in the 
depths, but replying: "Of course not, I 
wouldn't want to take them if I weren't 
sure that you were quite willing to let me 
have them." 
I am glad to say that my pessimistic 
forebodings were all wrong. I went back 
on Monday afternoon and everything 
was serene. JYlrs, Gillette had unearthed 
other things for me to buy and hadn't 
even cashed my first check. 
It is a relief to find a trusting person 
once in a while. Several times I have 
been caught without enough money. 
Each time the people evidently thought 
that I looked not only a little dishonest 
but totally so. In each case I was obliged 
to drive a long distance to the nearest 
store or bank where I was known in order 
to get my check cashed. 
Speaking of people changing their 
minds, one day I was dumbfounded to 
find a curly-maple desk and a wing-chair 
with Dutch feet in the corner of an other- 
wise golden-oak room. You can guess 



THE A
TIQUE HABIT 


which pieces I wanted to buy. I labored 
some time and finally succeeded in getting 
the desk. The chair was absolutely not 
to be bougbt. I was very disappointed, 
as it was the only one I had ever found. 
Being a Pollyanna, however, I was glad 
to know that such a prize was at large. 
11y car already resembled a furniture- 
van, so I paid for the desk and left it 
saying that I would come for it the next 
day. The day came, and I returned to 
gather it up. I gathered up my roll of 
bills instead. They had changed their 
minds. This was another time that I was 
on the verge of weeping; but not for joy. 
Undaunted, I made another stab at the 
chair; but the woman was finn. My offer 
went up and up and up. Still she said: 
"No." When I started to leave, as one 
last resort, I asked her if she would name 
any price. To my utter surprise she 
named it most promptly. It was only 
two dollars more than I had offered. 'Why 
she had held out for that two dollars will 
always be a mystery. In any case, I have 
the chair, and I am sitting in it at this 
very moment. 
Have I given you the impression that it 
is a fairly simple matter to find butterfly 
tables and fireside chairs in the Berk- 
shires? If I have, I shall not spoil your 
dream. Nor must you let the following 
incident discourage you; it would be a joy 
to meet you one day driving your irksome 
way about. 
On a certain rainy day I had driven 
forty miles without a thing to show for it 
but a very modem nail which had been 
picked up by one of my rear tires. At 
last I found a candlestick with a milk- 
white base and blue-dolphin top. I was 
able to buy it, but I couldn't keep from 
wailing to the owner that I did so wish 
I had the mate to it. She said she knew 
where the other one was, and was sure 
that I could get it. A cousin of hers had 
it. I was agog! She gave me minute di- 
rections how to get there; it was seven- 
teen miles from her house. The directions 
were intricate, and my sense along that 
line being only embryonic, I knew that I 
never could make it. I suggested that she 
might drive over with me. She registered 
enthusiasm, but "had company coming 
and her cake wasn't made." I told her 
that I had expected "company" the day 


95 



efore and had made elaborate prepara- 
tI<:ms, only. to get a telegram at the last 
mmute saymg that they could not come. 
An unnecessary argument I think as the 
thou.ghts of having a ride and seeing her 
cousm were too much for her. 
" .1 waited twenty minutes while she 
Just changed her shoes and threw a coat 
over her old dress." 
As we drove along, she waved franti- 


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I go to auctions and more auctions.-Page 96. 


cally to her husband who was butchering 
a neighbor's pig, and rejoiced that he 
would wonder" who in kingdom come she 
could be out with." She told me the ins 
and outs of all the countryside doings. 
We went up hill and down dale, through 
mud-puddles and over rocks, but we got 
there. There were effusive greetings and 
long conversations on every subject but 
the right one. In the meantime I was 
sitting quietly on pins and needles. 
The candlestick was eventually men- 
tioned, and the grand finale masterfully 
rendered as folloV\-"S: "'Vhy, gracious sales 
alive, Lucy, I never had no such thing; 
what are you thinking of?" 
Well, that's all there was to it. Appar- 
ently it was just a mistaken idea on the 
part of my little friend. 
After half an hour more, I managed to 
tear the cousins away from each other, 



96 


THE ANTIQUE HABIT 


and we wended our way back over the 
same rocks and through the same mud- 
puddles. When we arrived at her house, 
she actually had a letter in the R. F. D. 
box saying that her guests were not com- 
ing. She heralded me as being psychic, 
and a good time was enjoyed by all, bar- 
ring one person. I reached home at nine 
o'clock. It was pitch-dark. I was cold 
and starved, and quite ready to sign up 
for the Old Ladies' Homec 
It is pleasant to read stories, written 
a few years ago, telling how the author 
dropped idly into a country auction and 
bought a Lowestoft cup and saucer for ten 
cents and a Sheraton sewing-table for a 
dollar. My experience in that line leads 
me to believe that those sunny days are 
over. I go to auctions and more auctions. 
Each time I solemnly swear that it shall 
be the last. An antique shop would blush 
to ask the prices that people fight to pay 
at an auction. They go insane. Chairs 
that would be relegated to the mustiest 
corner of the mustiest shop, and that the 
shopkeeper would almost give away, are 
bid for eagerly to the tune of ten dollars 
apiece. 
It is these auctions, I think, that have 
conduced to develop the average layman's 
exaggerated idea of values. He will point 
out a black-walnut bureau with a marble 
top and tell you that it is over two hun- 
dred years old and that he wouldn't take 
five hundred dollars for it. You are quite 
satisfied that he wouldn't. He turns down 
your very fair offer for a table or a clock 
and is under the impression that you are 
doing your level best to fleece him. As a 
matter of fact, I have overpaid for num- 
berless things, just for the satisfaction of 
taking them away from their Morris- 
chair environment. One hears on all 
sides about the robber-like instincts of the 
antique dealer. Do you ever stop to 
think of his intenninable search for desir- 
able things, the incurred expense, and of 
the money that is tied up in leisurely or 
never-moving stock? I can testify that my 
antique shop isn't the sheer delight that I 
am sure it looks to be. During the summer 
when the tourists are driving through by 
the thousands, in order to replenish one's 
stock, one has to buy everything that one 
can find. Suddenly you realize that the 
leaves are gone and the days are cold. 
The only car that comes along is the gro- 


cer's. The tourists have gone back to the 
city. The golf clubs are closed, the pic- 
nics and tennis-matches are over. The 
only thing left is the checker tournament 
which is in full swing at Perkins's Tonso- 
rial Parlors. Oh, yes, and a large supply 
of unsold antiques in your shop. 
Your only chance for car-fare out of 
town is to sell somehow those early Amer- 
ican treasures that you drove so many 
miles to find. After hours of deep think- 
ing you hit on the glorious idea that an 
advertisement in a New York paper would 
undoubtedly bring a dealer up on the next 
train, and that he would be glad of the op- 
portunity to buy your entire stock. You 
sink down at the desk and compose what 
lawfully has to be a bona-fide advertise- 
ment. You find it difficult. What can 
one possibly say when she has to adhere 
to the truth? l\rIinutes go by. I present 
to you the result: 
FOR SALE 
A large assortment of early American fur- 
niture, mostly in bad condition. Nicked. 
china, moth-eaten spreads, cracked bottles, 
broken mirrors, frayed hooked rugs, etc. 
Selling out at an enormous price to get back 
money on original investment. 
It would never do. Truth is relentless. 
For your own peace of mind you decide 
that, after all, a winter in the country 
isn't so awful, and you settle down to a 
real orgy of reading, walking, and sleeping. 
Spring really surprises you by coming 
so quickly. A New Jersey car rolls up to 
the shop and a woman eagerly alights. 
The moth-eaten spreads are exactly what 
she wants for motor-rugs. The first 
greenbacks you have seen in many 
months are in your hand. Your benefac- 
tor's car grinds into high; another season 
has opened. Your lost enthusiasm for an- 
tiquing returns by leaps and bounds. 
The Ford is fed oil and gas, and your mad 
search begins again with a vengeance. 
No, antiquing is not a profitable pas- 
time. Neither, I should judge, is it too 
remunerative to know an excellent boot- 
legger. 
Still, we continue on our beaten tracks 
and you are forced to listen to our rhap- 
sodies. If you are not one of us I can pic- 
ture your frenzy. We are not quite mo- 
rons, so please put us down as simply 
creatures of habit. Or will you be with 
Freud and fasten on us a complex? 



"Oh, to be in England 
Now that April's there I" 
S O wrote Robert Browning in Italy; 
so spoke Ethel Barrymore in New 
York. But neither of them was in 
Augusta, Georgia; if they had been, they 
would have been content with their en- 
vironment. Here we have April's laugh- 
ter without her tears. The sun shines 
emphatically every day. The birds sing 
gloriously, and even the crows talk with 
a soft Southern accent, quite unlike the 
raucous crows of Yankeeland. 
It is mid-April, and I have been in one 
hotel since the second of January, the 
longest stay I have made in any hostelry 
in the world. There is the best small 
string orchestra, under the direction of 
Harry Rudolph, that I have heard any- 
where away from concert-halls; they play 
everything well except jazz. One Sunday 
night :ßlr. Rudolph and the pianist gave 
an admirable performance of Beethoven's 
"Kreutzer Sonata"; and in listening to 
it, I marvelled again that so mighty a 
creative genius as Tolstoi should have 
written such rubbish about this master- 
piece. 
There have been a larger number of 
interesting men here than I have met on 
other pilgrimages; every morning for three 
months the Conversation Club, consisting 
of some five and twenty, conversed on 
divine, human, and diabolical topics from 
9. 1 3 to 10.59. When some went North, 
others arrived; for three months there was 
no cessation of good talk. A snap-shot 
of the group in late March appears in 
"Behind the Scenes with Scribner's Au- 
thors" in this issue. We were definitely 
organized; we had no President, but we 
had a King, that royal golfer Walter J. 
Travis. The Prime Minister was Sir 
Robert Borden, of Canada; Secretary of 
State, Nicholas Murray Butler, of New 
York; Treasurer, the Honorable Charles 
F. Brooker, of Ansonia. Then we. had 
the four Georges: George Crocker, the 


Iron Man and hole-in-one specialist. 
George Clapp, of Boston; George 11. Gray: 
of New York, crossword fiend, and George 
t
e Fourth was George Ade, who is still 
With us. The ::\Ianager was Daniel Froh- 
man, who made a permanent impression 
not only on the Club, but on the city of 
Augusta, because he produced three plays 
here in Augusta's Little Theatre Guild. 
We were not without funds; we possessed 
two golden Louis: Cheney, of Connecticut 
and Coolidge, of 
Iassachusetts. Frank 
\V. Hubbard, perhaps the youngest presi- 
dential elector, was here in March. Base- 
ball was represented by Judge Landis, and 
peaceful revolution by Harvey Firestone. 
Cabot 1forse, the son of the distinguished 
historian and biographer, John T. :l\Iorse, 
was with us three months, and his de- 
parture left an unfillable cavity. Ex- 
Governor Durbin of Indiana contributed 
conversation and cigars; John V. Farwell, 
of the Yale Corporation, and Frank L. 
Babbott, president of the Brooklyn Insti- 
tute, were among our most intellectual as- 
sociates; lawyers were here in Sidney 
Iil- 
ler and George J. Peet; bankers in James 
A. Blair and Jacob Farrand; railroads 
in Patrick Crowlay; the trustees of the 
University of Pittsburgh were represented 
by David Gillespie; critics by Clayton 
Hamilton; :McGill University, of l\Ion- 
treal; had a good exhibit in J. T. l\IcCall; 
the courts of Ohio in Judge Henderson 
of Columbus; among the great athletes 
were Joshua Crane, of :l\Iassachusetts; 
\Vesley Oler, Senior, of Connecticut; the 
Duke of Lancaster, from the Copley Plaza, 
and l\lr. Justice Thompson of Phila- 
delphia. One of the most interesting 
members was l\Iajor Black, eighty-four 
years old, a Confederate veteran; and 
thereby hangs a tale. 
One morning :l\Iajor Black-who is the 
finest of Southern gentlemen-was asked 
if during the war he penetrate? as fa! a:; 
Ohio. He remarked that he dId get mto 
Ohio, and became_the guest of the federal 
97 



98 


AS I LIKE IT 


government, which escorted him to a 
prison on Johnson's Island, at Sandusky. 
This drew an exclamation from Daniel 
Frohman. He and his brother Charles 
were born in Sandusky, and when Daniel 
was a small boy, he used to go near J ohn- 
son's Island, and there shout derisively at 
the Rebel prisoners. At that time he met 
:J\lajor Black and now met him again in 
the Conversation Club after an interval 
of sixty years! 
Our King, Walter J. Travis, was as in- 
teresting off the links as on the greens; 
my own game is a Tra visty on his. 
I have seen extraordinary weather here. 
During February and March there were 
practically no rain and no wind. One 
stilly cloudless day after another. But in 
January we had five days' continuous 
rain, which brought the Savannah River 
to the almost unprecedented height of 
thirty-seven feet. Hundreds flocked to 
the bridge every day to see the mad flood. 
And had it not been for the efforts of one 
man, who sits at the table next to mine in 
the hotel, the city would have been under 
water, and the loss of property gone into 
millions. This gentleman is ex-Mayor 
Barrett, who, in the year 1912, persuaded 
the citizens, and only with the greatest 
difficulty, to erect a levee, to save the 
town from possible future floods. In that 
year they began the levee, and in four 
years it was completed, reaching the 
height of fifty feet. 
Naturally enough, during this river- 
elevation of 1925, J\1r. Barrett became a 
hero. A statue is to be erected in his 
honor, though he says he cares for no 
memorial except the levee. 


Among the large number of distin- 
guished men who have been guests at this 
hotel in 1925, it has been my privilege to 
become acquainted with two philan- 
thropists, Nathan Straus and Adolph 
Lewisohn, both of whom are so genial and 
so full of ideas that one thinks primarily 
not of their good deeds but of their per- 
sonalities. As is well known, Mr. Straus 
has for many years given his wealth, his 
time, and himself to the pasteurization 
of milk, thereby saving the lives of thou- 
sands of children. Only a few weeks ago 
I found the following tribute to him in a 
French newspaper; after speaking of the 


appalling results of carelessness and ig- 
norance, the writer goes on to say 
Ce que cette infirmière a fait par négligence, 
bien des jeunes mères Ie font par ignorance. On 
ne saurait trop répéter que la mortalité infantile 
qui dépeuple notre pays baisserait dans d'énormes 
proportions si la pasteurisation (employée sur une 
grande échelle dans beaucoup de pays d'Europe 
et aux Etats-Unis, où M. Nathan Straus, Ie grand 
philanthrope, l'a introduit malgré certaines résis- 
tances tenaces) était enfin répandue jusque dans 
les hameaux les plus écartés. 
One day the all-star cast of "The 
Rivals" came to Augusta, and various 
members of the Conversation Club met 
them at a luncheon before the matinée, 
where speeches were made by Mrs. Fiske, 
Thomas A. 'Vise, Chauncey Olcott, James 
T. Powers, Daniel Frohman, and others; 
all being the guests of the Little Theatre 
Guild of Augusta. We went to the mati- 
née, and saw an excellent performance, 
which took me back to the year 1896, 
when I last saw this ever-living play pro- 
duced by a group of stars. Those who 
are interested in the theatre may like to 
look over the two casts. 


NEW HAVEN AUGUSTA 
MAY 8, 1896 APRIL I, 1925 
Sir Anthony Abso- 
lute.........., . William H. Crane Thomas A. Wise 
Captain Absolute. . Robert Taber Kenneth Thomson 
Faulkland....... . Joseph Holland Fred Eric 
Acres. ,.......... Joseph J efierson James T. Powers 
SÙ Lucius O'Trig- 
ger........,.. . Nat Goodwin Chauncey Olcott 
Fag,...., ......,. E. M. Holland Gerald Rogers 
David. . . . . . . . . . . . Francis Wilson George Tawde 
Mrs. Malaprop. . . . Mrs. John Drew Mrs, Fiske 
Lydia Languish. . . . Julia Marlowe Lola Fisher 
Lucy............. Fanny Rice Marie Carroll 
Thomas. . , , . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 'IHerbert Belmore 
Julia Me1ville. .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lotus Robb 


The beautiful Lola Fisher was unable 
to appear at the luncheon; so I went be- 
hind the scenes after the first act, and she 
gave me two photographs of her wonder- 
ful cat, which has a face like a Cimabue 
madonna. I was glad to find that Miss 
Fisher is, as all intelligent people should 
be, a devout Cattist. 
My remarks on \Villiam A. White's 
"Life of \V oodrow Wilson" brought the 
following interesting contribution from a 
gentleman in New England, whose testi- 
mony is accuratec 
Your reference to President Wilson in SCRIB- 
NER'S for March suggests that you may be amused 



AS I LIKE IT 


by the following incident, which strikes me as 
characteristic of the man. 
After he had begun to be talked about as a 
probable candidate for the democratic nomina- 
tion, I met him at a banquet of the Civic League 
of St. Louis and had a conversation with him last- 
ing five or ten minutes. He was very affable. 
After his nomination, I happened to meet him 
again, this time at a dinner of the Commercial 
Club of Davenport, Iowa, where he was, of course, 
the guest of honor. Again I had a short talk with 
him and again he was affable. 
Shortly following his election, I was crossing on 
the ferry from Jersey City to New York. The 
day was chilly. It was drizzling. 1\1ost of the 
passengers were in the cabin, but I was on the 
forward deck, where I noticed a man standing 
near the cabin door in the angle sheltered from 
the rain and reading a newspaper so held as to 
hide his face. After a while he lowered the paper 
and remained motionless gazing into infinity. It 
was Wilson. I approached, recalled the previous 
conversations, very briefly, and expressed my 
pleasure at the result of the election. He said, 
"I am engaged. I do not want to have to shake 
hands with a lot of people whom I shall never see 
again." He then raised his paper, spread out to 
full size, like a shield in front of him. I turned 
aside, making a mental record of the second snub 
direct of my life, and wondered what the effect of 
the habit of disregard of courteous forms would 
probably be upon his future political history. It 
seemed to me beyond question to be a Habit and 
not an intentional snub ad hominem. 


\Vhen Pope wrote a satire against Ad- 
dison, and, instead of drawing an accurate 
picture of his antagonist, succeeded only 
in making a perfect portrait of himself, he 
was the unconscious forerunner of \Vood- 
row \Vilson, who wrote the following 
paragraph about Jefferson Davis: 


He had the pride, the spirit of initiation, the 
capacity in business which qualify men for lead- 
ership, and lacked nothing of indomitable will and 
imperious purpose, to make his leadership effec- 
tive. What he did lack was wisdom in dealing 
with men, willingness to take the judgment of 
others in critical matters of business, the instinct 
which recognizes ability in others and trusts it to 
the utmost to play its independent part. 
He too much loved to rule, had too overweening 
a confidence in himself, and took leave to act as 
if he understood better than those did who were 
in actual command what should be done in the 
field. 
He sought to control too many things with too 
feminine a jealousy of any rivalry in authority. 


Walt Whitman is nominated for the Ig- 
noble Prize in the following letter by 
L. 1\1. This is interesting as showing, de- 
spite the enormous prestige of \vl1itman 
in the twentieth century, that there are 
still sceptics. 


99 


Here is the confession of confessions-icono- 
clasm's zenith. A wan pathctic smile creeps over 
my features at the thought of the ghastly sacri- 
lege I am about to perpetrate; a hideous remorse 
already abjurates me and devastatingly holds me 
in its horrid grip. I scarcely dare continue. I 
choke and desperately strive to pluck from the 
humming atmosphcre words that will clothe my 
thoughts !
 the more i!llmaculate 
f phraseology, 
thus to mItigate the hemousness of It all. In vain 
this attempted philological pedantry. God help 
me, the truth will out. I do therefore nominate 
for the Ignoble Prize "Leaves of Grass" and all 
other meretricious desecration of the memory of 
1\1t. Parnassus by the insidious pen of Walt Whit- 
man. He reminds me of a conceited octopus sit- 
ting on his pitifully lugubrious haunches, pawing 
the air with clammy complacency, confident that 
the turgid touch of his slimy tcndrils will inspire 
carnal elation in the human breast. Ah ! The 
cloud passes. I am free from the oppression of 
my erstwhile remorse. Life is once more its 
sweet self, I am incredibly happy! 
I have been reading three biographical 
works, which represent the range of hu- 
man personality, and for the life of me, I 
cannot tell which of the three I enjoyed 
the most. I heartily recommend them 
all. They are" The Roar of the Crowd," 
by James J. Corbett; the Autobiography 
of John Stuart Mill; "\Veber and Fields," 
by Felix Isman. The first is the autobi- 
ography of a prize-fighter; the second, of 
the nearest approach to pure intellect this 
crazy world has known; the third is the 
history of two superclowns. 

Ir. Corbett is perhaps the only prize- 
fighter clever enough to write a literary 
masterpiece; I call this a masterpiece be- 
cause its prose style is precisely fitted to 
accomplish its purpose. It is interesting 
from beginning to end, revealing its hero's 
faults as well as his virtues. I saw Cor- 
bett twice. Shortly after his victory over 
Sullivan in r892, he gave an exhibition in 
New Haven, and I should not have be- 
lieved such dexterity of hand, such pre- 
cision of eye, and such speed in footwork 
possible, had I not beheld the
. H.e was 
slender, agile, graceful, a
d mtellIgent; 
not at all like the old-fashIoned concep- 
tion of a slugger. About fifteen yca,fS 
ago, as I was dining in the Hotel Grune- 
wald, New Orleans, l\lr. Corbett entered 
the room and I remarked to my com- 
panion I'That's Jim Corbett!" Im- 
mediat
ly the head waiter, who overheard 
my remark, brought the great man to my 
table, and I e},.plained that I had merely 
ejaculated, 'Ve talked together a few 



100 


AS I LIKE IT 


moments, shook hands, and then, instead 
of squaring off, we separated. 
Nothing could illustrate better the 
growth in the dignity of prize-fighting 
than the fact that, when in 1897 some 
Yale students sent a Yale flag to Corbett, 
which he had with him in the ring when 
he fought Fitzsimmons, these students 
were within an ace of being expelled from 
the university. To-day I suppose that I, 
having never seen a prize-fight, am in a 
minority of American college teachers. 
John Stuart Mill's Autobiography I 
read in my childhood; but within a few 
months, two new editions have appeared; 
one, printed directly from the manuscript, 
contains passages hitherto unknown to 
the public; the other, with an introduc- 
tion by Harold Laski, contains some 
speeches never before printed. Carlyle 
called lVlill a logic-chopping engine; it is 
probable that no other human being lived 
so exclusively the life of reason. He 
never seems to have had a frivolous mo- 
ment. In nobility of aim, altruism, and 
purity of character, he went to the utmost 
height attainable without religion; and as 
every man needs religion, he found it in 
the worship of Mrs. Taylor, who became 
his wife. It is interesting to see the tricks 
love played with the mind of such a man 
as Mill, a man who hated exaggeration and 
emotional overstatements. Carlyle told 
John Morley that Mrs. Taylor" was full 
of unwise intellect, asking and re-asking 
stupid questions." Mill says of her in the 
Autobiography, "Ingeneral spiritual char- 
acteristics, as well as in temperament and 
organization, I have often compared her, 
as she was at this time, to Shelley; but in 
thought and intellect, Shelley, so far as his 
powers were developed in his short life, 
was but a child compared with what she 
ultimately became." 
I stood one day by the double grave at 
A vignon, where lie the pair; and as I read 
the inscription on her tomb, which was 
written by Mill, I marvelled. What 
would he have said if another man had 
written that of any human being? It ex- 
cels all the superlatives I have seen. 
When Herbert Spencer was left alone 
with one who was called an intellectual 
woman, his friends hoping that he might 
marry her, for he had expressed a willing- 
ness to marry any woman who had a 


sufficiently great mind, he emerged from 
the interview with the remark that she 
would not do at all. Instead of having 
a great mind, she had "a small mind in 
constant activity." 
Perhaps the same description would fit 
others; but how much better it is to wor- 
ship a woman than to worship nothing! 
Anyhow, l.fill had a great mind; and 
the record of his life is one of the great 
books of the nineteenth century. I do 
not see how anyone can read it without 
immense respect for the author. 
The third book, copiously illustrated, 
as is :J\1r. Corbett's, is the story of two of 
the funniest comedians in our generation. 
I take my hat off to Felix Isman, who has 
exhibited extraordinary talent as a bi- 
ographer. Everyone who ever saw or 
heard of 'Veber and Fields, will read this 
history with delight. Here is an exam- 
ple of Mr. Isman's style: 
The Bowery then was the Bowery, from the 
Civil War to the 1890's a sanctuary for the devil 
and his work, linked in the mouths of sailors with 
the Barbary Coast of old San Francisco, and with 
Port Said. New York, after the lapse of a gen- 
eration, inclines to think of it romantically. The 
glamour of its defiant diabolism is remembered, its 
vicious realities forgotten or sentimentalized. Its 
neighborhood shunned by the better class of trade, 
rents were cheap in its side streets, and the poor 
crept in to make a witches' caldron of bitter strug- 
gle and prosperous vice. 
Out of this sink, and using it as a springboard, 
came \Veber and Fields and other men and women 
to contribute unvarying decency to the American 
stage, and the sober honesty of their private lives 
to American society. The stubborn resistance of 
orthodox Jewish family life to its environment, 
the product of two thousand years of oppression, 
served them better than they knew. 
Following a suggestion that is sent to 
me by E. Channing Stowell, of Marlboro, 
New Hampshire, I now organize the 
Samuel Richardson Club. To become 
eligible, one must have read every word 
of Richardson's three novels. I assure 
my listeners that such a tremendous un- 
dertaking pays. Richardson was a genius 
of the first magnitude. I shall never for- 
get what the late Barrett Wendell told 
me. He attempted to reread" Clarissa," 
and was forced to desist, because he burst 
into tears so frequently that he dared not 
continue. 


:J\1rs. Elizabeth Case, the literary critic 
of the Hartford Courant, sends to me a 



AS I LIKE IT 


number of suggestions which I am sure 
will interest readers of these pages: 


What I have in mind is what I suppose you 
might call the fading away, the dimming, of the 
use of symbolism; when I give my instances of 
this, they will seem trivial illustrations of such a 
tall-sounding phrase. A few years ago Hot Cross 
buns were prepared and sold on Good Friday 
morning; I suppose that that was comparatively 
new in this country, as in old days it would prob- 
ablÝ have been considered a "Popish" custom; 
at all events they were sold at the proper time, 
and to people like me, who cherish every remnant 
of old English ways, they were welcome, even 
though they weren't shouted through the streets, 
as in the nursery rhyme. Now Hot Cross buns 
appear on Ash Wednesday, and are to be had all 
through Lent, indeed I am not sure that some 
enterprising bakeries, probably Hebrew bakeries, 
do not purvey them throughout the year; and 
there appears to be no general sense of the ab- 
surdity. Again, any sort of elaborate, spectac- 
ular entertainment, in which a lot of people take 
part, is called" a Mardi Gr<l;s"; I don't believe the 
man in the street has any Idea of what the term 
really means. 
Then there is the maddening misuse of the 
term bridesmaids, and the tearing to pieces of the 
real symbolism of their attendance on the bride; 
the fact that a bride was supposed to be attended 
by her maidens, in the literal se
se ?f th.e word, 
is unknown to the present-day gIrl, m this coun- 
try- I think they still do the thing properly in 
England-and a bride is surrounded by young 
married women, and the whole spirit of the cere- 
mony is lost. The same thing with the br!dal veil, 
either it should be worn over the face, or It should 
be discarded; the lifting of the bride's veil after 
the pair were pronounced man and wife was a 
beautiful piece of symbolism, but, now 
hat t
e 
veil is merely worn as an ornamental adjunct, It 
loses all significance. I hate to see the real mean- 
ing of things ignored and misunderstood; most 
customs have a basic reason, and it isn't so long 
ago that these reasons were realized, but that 
time is past. Of course I understand that our 
Freudian friends would say that many of these 
customs have original reasons which it is conven- 
tional to ignore. I know that, but without goi!1 g 
back to all the nastiness they like to wallow m, 
such customs as the bride being surrounded by 
her maidens and her veil covering her face until 
she is pron
unced a wife, have real traditional 
beauty and significance. 
Another thing occurs to me, as I write. Within 
a few days the newspapers have descanted on. the 
"true American hustle" displayed by the Pnnce 
of Wales, in travelling two hundred miles in a ?-ay 
in order to hunt with some favorite pack; this IS 
compared with the enthusiasm .of a golfer who 
readily goes fifteen or twenty mIles to play over 
a favorite course. But how about the "hustle" 
displayed by those good Victorians, Charles Dic
- 
ens and Anthony Trollope, the o
e in t
e purs,;ut 
of his vocation, the other in purs
It of hIS favorIte 
sport? All things, as we know wIth
mt he!p from 
Mr. Einstein, are relative; fast speClal.trams and 
high-powered motor cars rush the Prmce about 


101 


in our immediate day, but think of Dickens, well 
on to one hundred years ago, rushing through the 
night i
 a special. post:chaise, and transcribin
, 
by the hght of an mgcmously contrived lamp, his 
short-hand notes of political speeches delivered 
in some provincial town, in order to get them to 
his London newspaper in the morning. Think of 
Trollope, some forty or so years after, going 
twenty miles or more, three days out of the week, 
and after a strenuous morning at his Post Office 
work, for the sheer pleasure of a run with the 
hounds. Everything is relative, seen in propor- 
tion; Dickens's galloping post-chaise, and Trol- 
lope's short railway journey, are as full of "hus- 
tle," good old British determination to win 
through, as the daily two hundred miles of the 
Prince of Wales. 
I think Trollope's Autobiography is one of the 
best books ever written; I only wish it were more 
generally known; there isn't a page in it which 
isn't full of the essential stuff of life, I really 
love it. 
Jean de Reszké died at Nice, April 3, 
1925. Long editorials appeared in his 
memory in the Times, Herald Tribune, 
and World; the musical critics exalted his 
name, although, as l\Ir. W. J. Henderson 
said very wisely, it is impossible to ex- 
plain the art of Jean de Reszké to those 
born too late. I myself am often accused 
of over-enthusiasm for my idols, and of 
the use of superlatives. On this occasion 
therefore I will resolutely restrain my 
feelings. I will merely remark that if I 
am fortunate enough to get to Heaven, 
and if the angels there sing with the 
beauty of tone and with the intelligence 
and dignity of Jean and Edouard de 
Reszké, I shall be satisfied. 
The death of our beloved American 
novelist, George v.,1. Cable, 
eminds me 
of the worst case of stage-fnght I ever 
witnessed. It was in the early eighties 
when Cable invaded the North. He was 
to deliver an address in Unity Hal.l, Ha
t- 
ford, and on the stage I saw WIth hIDl 
Mark Twain, Charles Dudley 
Varner, 
and other notables. :Mark Twam made 
so felicitous an introduction that when 
Cable stood up to speak, the applause 
was deafening. But the mode?t South- 
erner was smitten with stage-fnght to so 
dreadful a degree that he could not .utter 
one word. He looked at 
he audIence, 
tried several times to open his mouth, but 
was like a man paralyzed. It was an 
embarrassing spectacle, and I cann
t 
imagine what would have happened if 
Mark Twain had not come to the rescue. 



102 


AS I LIKE IT 


Perceiving that Cable could not talk, and 
could not draw, although he had a black- 
board at hand, Mark Twain sprang to his 
feet, seized one of Cable's books that lay 
on the table, opened it at a certain chap- 
ter, thrust it into the lecturer's hand, and 
said "Read it!" 


The death of Gene Stratton-Porter last 
December was mourned more by her 
readers than by her critics. If not a 
great writer, she was at all events an ex- 
traordinary person. Nine million copies 
of her novels were sold, and the publish- 
ers reckon five readers to every copy. 
She therefore had a prodigious army of 
admirers. She was a naturalist, but her 
books on moths would not sell; she had 
the mistaken notion that she was a great 
poet, but no one cared for her verse. Yet 
her sentimental novels had a vogue paral- 
leled only by that of Harold Bell Wright. 
1\10st of her books I found too soft; but 
she produced one work of fiction which I 
am not ashamed to call a good book; and 
I am supported in this opinion by a dis- 
criminating and fastidious critic, who is 
an American novelist and a distinguished 
Judge. The novel I refer to is" A Daugh- 
ter of the Land," which has a good plot 
and characters, and is marred only by 
crudity of style. 
I never saw Gene Stratton-Porter, but 
I had a good many letters from her. She 
began the correspondence by asking me 
why the critics ridiculed her books. I 
attempted to evade the question by re- 
plying that if she had forty-five million 
readers, she ought not to worry about the 
critics. She was not satisfied. I then 
told her that her literary style was child- 
ish and crude. She sent me one of her 
books, asking me to mark the faults. I 
covered the first twenty pages with many 
corrections, and I think it a tribute to her 
character that our friendship survived it. 
She had a decidedly interesting person- 
ality, and I wish I had had the oppor- 
tunity to talk with her. 


\Villiam E. Barton's huge "Life of 
Abraham Lincoln," which I hope to re- 
view in a later issue, reminds me by con- 
trast of the composition on this subject 
written by a New Haven schoolboy. He 
said, "Lincoln lived to a green old age, 


and died in 1896. He is as famous in 
England as in America, Lincoll). Cathedral 
being named after him." Shortly after 
reading this original contribution to bi- 
ography, I stood in front of that magnifi- 
cent cathedral, and it seemed to say, 
Eljore Abraham was, I am. 


Adelaide Margaret Delaney, writing 
from Philadelphia, and WeUes Bosworth, 
writing from Cannes, disagree with me in 
my condemnation of Xmas,. early Chris- 
tian writings prove that the abbreviation 
is legitimate. But I am not talking about 
what was, but what is; and to-day Xmas 
is as jarring as it would be to abbreviate 
Job: 


When the a.ill, stars sang together. 
1\ly saying that F. P. A. was the first 
person to attack Xmas in print drew an 
editorial from the Herald of Pawnee, Colo- 
rado; "F. P. A. is the first only if he beat 
'v. L. Thorndyke, who in the Loveland 
(Colorado) Reporter twenty-five years ago 
wrote: 'Have enough respect for the 
Saviour of mankind to write it Christmas.' 
Thorndyke has been gone from Loveland 
these many years; but there are people 
there and throughout Colorado who still 
remember his trenchant writings." 
I lay a wreath on his grave. 
Lewis C. Grover of Brooklyn is a fel- 
low sufferer in the dark. "With the 
coming of darkness all my courage dis- 
appears, optimism gives way to fore- 
boding, and the least thing to be done on 
the morrow seems impossible." He thinks 
this can be eXplained by heredity, because 
his mother and her father suffered in like 
manner. But I think Mark Twain is 
correct in making it human. 
A brilliant defense of the dark, of the 
night, and of black weather comes from 
1\Ielissa Nash of Harrington, Maine. I 
envy her such nerves and such a con- 
science. She closes with a climax. "And 
for the worlds to come--, well, to be thor- 
oughly consistent, I should choose the 
outer darkness. I love dogs." It is really 
too bad that St. John the Divine ex- 
cluded dogs, but he was Biblically consis- 
tent. There is only one friendly allusion 
to dogs in the entire Bible, and that is in 
the Apocrypha. The Sanskrit books 



AS I LIKE IT 


treated our canicular friend more cour- 
teously. 


Doctor Horace Hart, of New Haven 
sends me a quotation from the late Emer
 
son Hough's" Out of Doors": 
Any man who goes into the wild regions ought 
to know how to use a compass. A study of it will 
introduce him to the psychology of getting lost. 
The truth is that we are made up largely of a 
subconscious survival-a bundle of doubts, fears, 
superstitions, and terrors hanè...:d down to us from 
the Stone Age. Given certain conditions, we 
dread the dark; we anticipate dinosaurs: and 
dragons: we cry aloud before the saber-toothed 
tiger. The subconscious mind governs us. We 
are indeed as a reed shaken with the wind. 


J\fy remarks on bootjacks caused a long 
and able editorial in the Indianapolis 
News of March 27. The writer thought 
it incredible that I had never seen a boot- 
jack, seeing that I was born in r865. My 
wife says there has been an antique boot- 
jack in my library for fifteen years, but I 
have not noticed it. It is true that my 
father wore heavy knee-boots, even in 
summer, with the trousers over them. 
But I cannot remember his using a boot- 
jack, though I do remember his language 
in pulling off this footwear. Father also 
wore on Sunday mornings a full-dress 
claw-hammer broadcloth coat, and he 
never owned a soft shirt. When a boy, 
I often wore leather boots with red tops 
and brass toes, but I stuck my pants into 
them. 
Men, women, and children are inter- 
ested in clothes. There has been no 
greater advance in comfort than in men's 
garments. I wear low shoes the year 
round, and, except in formal evening at- 
tire, I have not worn a stiff shirt for 
twenty years. Never do I wear sus- 
penders in the daytime, or a waistcoat in 
warm weather. And, as for the old- 
fashioned "heavies," no, not by a long 
shot. The advance of civilization is 
shown mainly in the discarding of super- 
fluous and therefore troublesome gar- 
ments, by both sexes. And a good thing 
it is. The human body in the temperate 
zone is freer than ever before. 
Look at the ancestral portraits, the 
" constipated" portraits, as Stevenson 
called them, and see how the men were 
wrapped up, with stocks around the neck, 
and huge boots around the ankle. 


103 


The most uncomfortable male attire 
to.-day is worn by American soldiers; high 
stIff coat-collars and stiff puttees must be 
the last word in human misery. The 
English officers looked more comfortable 
with their soft rolling collars. 
The best defense of uncut leaves that I 
have seen comes from Frances Chapman 
of Brookline. "To me, a book with uncut 
leaves always brings a little spirit of ad- 
venture, a sense of possession, as if the 
book were peculiarly my own. But above 
all is the delightful sense of unhurried 
leisure. Here is a book that invites me 
t
 take my time, and I can lay it aside 
wIthout book-mark or notation, for I cut 
as I read." She explains what I felt only 
subconsciously. 


In a recent number of SCRIBNER'S I 
called attention to 'Veekley's "Concise 
Etymological Dictionary." Let me also 
recommend the "Pocket Oxford Diction- 
ary," a book small enough to be easily 
carried in the pocket, yet clearly printed, 
and containing one thousand pages! It 
is called a dictionary of Current English, 
compiled by F. G, Fowler and H. 'V. 
Fowler. It is a marvel of condensation 
by the editors, and a triumph for the pub- 
lishers. 
The Public Library of the City of 
Coventry, England, has recently issued a 
bibliography of works by and about John 
Galsworthy, under the direction of Charles 
Nowell, City Librarian. This is a fine and 
useful undertaking, and all who are in- 
terested in studying the famous novelist 
may write to Coventry without being 
sent there. 
Rose J\lacaulay's "Orphan Island" I 
found disappointing, as I have found 
everything she has 'wTiUen since "Pot- 
terism." This is not to say that "Orphan 
Island" is a bad novel; she set so high a 
standard of accomplishment in "Potter- 
ism" that she has not yet been able to 
equal it. "Orphan Island ': is an att
mpt 
at satire where the effort IS too ObVIOUS. 
Should 
ny one doubt the astoundi
g 
genius of Swift, the doubt would be dIS- 
pelled by first reading "Orphan Island" 
and then" Gulliver's Travels." 
I divide all readers into two classes: 
those who read to remember, and those 'ùJlro 



104 


AS I LIKE IT 


read to forget. Unfortunately the second 
class is larger than the first. But there 
are times when everyone must read to 
forget: on a tedious railway journey, or 
during convalescence from illness, or un- 
der the shadow of grief. Let me there- 
fore recommend three new novels, which 
are so exciting that I will guarantee to 
all readers forgetfulness of environment, 
pain, and what is most difficult to forget, 
one's own self. These are" A Voice from 
the Dark," by Eden Phillpotts; "The 
1\Ions tel'," by "Harrington Hext"; and 
"Black Cargo," by J. P. Marquand. 
The last is much the best of the three, 
from the point of view of style and char- 
acterization; but all three are veritable 
thrillers. And there are times in every 
one's existence when a thriller is the only 
adequate remedy to prescribe. I am a 
literary physician; I can diagnose, and I 
can cure. 
An excellent novel is "The Doom Win- 
dow," by 1\1aurice Drake. This is an 
original and charming story, on a subject 
that I think has never before been treated 
in fiction-Stained Glass. I recommend 
it especially to my friend, General Charles 
H. Sherrill, of New York, who is an au- 
thority on cathedral windows. 
In "The Rector of Wyck," May Sin- 
clair has changed her ordinary writing 
fluid from vitriol to ink; I am grateful for 
the change. Readers will realize how 
great is the change when in this book 
there is actually a happy marriage and a 
good clergyman. 
I congratulate Sister M. Madeleva on 
her scholarly and delightful book, "Chau- 
cer's Nuns and Other Essays." She has 
made a contribution to Chaucerian schol- 
arship; and her treatment of the famous 
Priore sse, professionally equipped as she 
is, will be of marked assistance to many 
professors of English Literature. I cannot 
sufficiently commend the spirit of this 
little book, which is as beautiful as its 
criticisms are penetrating. One of the 
minor essays is devoted to Edna St. Vin- 
cent Millay-indicating the range of 
human interest displayed by Sister l\-la- 
dele va. 


1\1rs. Thomas B. Stowell, of Los An- 
geles, is welcomed into the Faerie Queene 
Club. How was it possible for her in such 
a climate to rea.d so long a book? Most 


of the intellectu8.1 work of the world has 
been accomplished in bad weather. 
Mrs. John C. \Vyman, of Newtonville, 
Massachusetts, enters the Faerie Queene 
Club with the following confession. "I 
read it all through in 1880-81. A promi- 
nent librarian in the Congressional Li- 
brary did not exactly dare me to do it, but 
spoke as though it would be an almost un- 
precedented feat to accomplish." She 
goes on to say that she became lost as in 
a labyrinth; and indeed it would take a 
marvellous memory to follow the trail. 


Miss 1\1ayone Lewis, of Pasadena, writes 
me an admirable and spirited defense of 
Burke's Speech on Conciliation, so that I 
am almost inspired to make another trial 
of it. She nominates Michael Angelo's 
"David" for the Ignoble Prize. She 
agrees with George Wright's opinion, given 
in the December SCRIBNER'S, that it is 
"bunchy." She continues: "Why is it 
that the man in the street knows this 
work of Michael Angelo's and only this, 
and has probably never heard of the en- 
trancing figure of 'Night' on the l\Iedici 
tomb?" I supposed that the reason 
"David" was so bunchy and muscle- 
bound was that old lVIichael tried to see 
what he could do with a block of insuffi- 
cien t length. 


I have met two dogs in Augusta. One 
is a huge Newfoundland, Don Hill, of 
Norwalk, and the other a Pomeranian, 
Jennie, of Brooklyn, I am not versed 
in zoology; but is there any other animal 
of such divergence of size? A Great 
Dane and a Porn are both dogs. How 
unlike man! The physical divergence 
in man is inconsiderable; the Chinese 
giant, eight feet four inches, was not 
nearly so far from Barnum's lVlidgets as 
the canine range. But when it comes to 
the consideration of character, it is quite 
the other way around. No dogs are vil- 
lains. But think of St. Francis and 
Cesare Borgia, St. Anthony and Casa- 
nova! 


I conclude this essay with a tribute to 
the marvellous Nurmi, one of the greatest 
athletes of all time. I do not hesitate to 
say that, while some of our native runners 
are best at the American style, Nurmi is 
best at the Finnish. 



T \VO or three months ago, on the 
death of Senator \V. A. Clark, it de- 
veloped that he had bequeathed his 
collections to the J\Ietropolitan l\Iuseum, 
subject to the condition that they be pre- 
served by themselves somewhere within 
the vast building in Central Park. The 
condition was in 
conflict with the 
policy of the mu- 
seum, and the gift 
was declined, wise- 
ly, I think, both in 
view of the policy 
aforesaid and be- 
cause the collec- 
tions, while con- 
taining many 
treasures, do not 
form precisely a 
unit. As I write, 
the alternate offer 
of them to the 
Corcoran Gallery 
is under considera- 
tion, and the deci- 
sion will probably 
be made before 
this number of 
the magazine is 
printed. It was 
natural while the 
subject was in the 
air to think over 
the collections and 
to find this or that 
reason for forming 
one's own opinion 
as to their disposi- 
tion. As I wen t 
over them in 
memory I could see how certain pieces 
would practically duplicate others in the 
l\Ietropolitan; how one old picture or an- 
other modern one might really enrich the 
museum or leave it not appreciably 
strengthened. The reader may be a lit
le 
puzzled by my own choice of the one pl
- 
ture which I hated to ha\'e the 
letropoh- 
tan miss. It was Fortuny's ,. Choice of 
VOL. LK.'XYIII.-8 


the l\lodel." I could perfectly under- 
stand anybody's being surprised by this 
selection, for if there is one tradition in 
painting that is nominally played out it is 
the tradition of Fortuny. Our modern 
ideas date peculiarly from the rediscovery 
of \' elasquez and Hals, and the demigods 
of our own time 
have been such fol- 
lowers of theirs as 

lanet and Sar- 
gent. But latter- 
day enthusiasm 
for technique has, 
if I may so express 
it, the defect of its 
quality; it is a 
little narrow, being 
all for bread th and 
the world well lost, 
\rhen Kipling 
wrote his ballad, 
"In the Xeolithic 
Age," he inserted 
in it two oft-quoted 
lines whose axio- 
maticwisdom may 
well commend it- 
self to the student 
of painting: 



 
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"There are nine and 
sixty ways of eon- 
s true ting tribal 
lays, 
And -every- single 
-one-of - them 
- is-right." 


One of the 
" righ t " ways of 
painting is thcway 
of 
1ariano José- 
J\Iaria Bernardo Fortuny. I like to gi,"c 
him his full Spanish style, if only for old 
sake's sake in memory of the day long ago 
when I wa
 all set to '\fite hi
 biography. 
In Paris I fell in with Philip Gilbert Ham- 
erton and hc asked me to write one of 
those' ,. Portfolio :Monographs," which he 
was editing in place of the old miscell
ne- 
ous "Portfolio." \Ve discussed subjects 


Fortuny. 
From his pen sketch after the bust of himself by Gemito. 


10 5 



106 


TI IE FIELD OF ART 


and had about decided on Canaletto, when himself gladly photograph a lot of the un- 
I said: "\Vhy not do a modern man who has published paintings that adorn the beau- 
not been done in English? \Vhy not do tiful old palazzo on the Grand Canal. As 
Fortuny?" Hamerton was delighted with can be imagined, I was well content. At 
the idea, and when, soon after, I went to Rome I hunted up Fortuny's only pupil, 
Venice, I found that it met with the cor- Simonetti, and learned that he also had a 
diallest approval of the artist's widow. sheaf of letters. In private collections in 
Neither of the publications by Yriarte Spain I looked at Fortunys that had 
and the Baron Davillier had exhaustively never before been reproduced, and in 
covered the ground, and repeatedly among Paris the late \Villiam H. Stewart readily 
her innumerable sketches, studies. and gave me access to that incomparable col- 
other souvenirs, 
Iadame Fortuny and I lection of Fortunv's works which was 
talked O\"er the book which was to be the afterward dispersë'd at auction in New 
final record of a brilliant life. \Ve were York. \Vhen I talked it all over with 
to go over the letters together. J\Iari- Hamerton again we were both more than 
ani to, the painter's son, was himself prac- pleased with the outlook; but when, in the 
tising a very different sort of art; he had following summer, I had renewed my ex- 
studied at ::\Iunich, and rumor had it that plorations and we returned to the project, 
he was painting huge \Vagnerian com- we were suddenly aware of another color 
positions. But he, too, was in the liveli- in our dream. It was a stern, practical 
est sympathy with my plan and would issue that put it there. It used to amuse 


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--- 



THE FIELD OF ART 


me t.o tot up, as I went along, the sums 
reqUIred for the purchase of documents 
copyright fees, and the manufacture of 
copperplates. By the time I had gone 
oyer the balance-sheet with Hamerton 
and with the publisher in 
London, we calculated 
that it would cost a good 
deal more to produce the 
book than would be re- 
turned by the complete t 
sale of a generous edition. 
\Yherefore the classical 
biography of Fortuny. as 
I had fondly imagined it 
would be. incontinentk 
went aglimmering. But, 
as the reader may sur- 
mise, the episode left me 
with a certain weakness 
for Fortuny. 

 
 
 


107 


the wandfather sent him to the academy 
presIded over by Domingo Soberano and 
t
er
 h
 made such progress that 
hile 
still In hIS teens he was fitted for the much 
more pretentious academy at Barcelona. 


I T isn't a ma tter of 
sentiment alone 
either. I wouldn't have 
launched upon that task 
if I hadn't had a deep 
feeling for F ortuny as a 
painter, nor would I re- 
vert to his art. now if I 
did not still preserve a 
vivid sense of his extra- 
ordinary ability. He was 
one of those painters'who 
are born, not made, even 
though it must be ad- 
mitted that as a lad he 
did not show the precoci- 
ty usual in a master. He 
was born at Reus, in the 
northeaster'n part of 
Spain, the child of ob- 
scure parents, who died 
when he was still very 
young. The grandfathér 
who brought him up used 
to travel about as the owner of a little pup- 
pet show. He would take Fortuny with 
him when he gave a performance in the 
market-place at Tarragona, and at home 
they used to work together over the wax 
figures employed in the tiny theatre. 
They made votive figurines for the 
churches, too, and Fortunv must have 
shown some talent in them; for presently 


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The Butterfly. { 
}'rom th, w....,-coIo< b, F
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At twenty he won the Grand PrI\., which 
sent him to Rome for two Years, with an 
allowance of about five hUI;dred dollars a 
year. It was not very much, yet it must 
be said that Barcelona was, on the whole. 
kind to him. The municipal authorities 
recalled him from Rome for the highly 
honorable purpose of sending him to make 
a big military picture in 
lorocco, where 


-- 



108 


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THF FIELD OF ART 


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the Spaniards were at war. He saw 
the decisive battle of Tetouan, or 
\Vad-Ras, and made from it ulti- 
mately a remarkable canvas. In- 
cidentally, his contact with the 
.Th100rish scene brought his art to a 
s wif t efflorescence. I shall not 
wickedly resume, in this place, the 
details accumulating in the course of 
those researches to which I have re- 
ferred. It is enough to state that 
thenceforth Fortuny's prosperity 
advanced with phenomenal rapid- 
ity. He worked variously in 110- 
rocco and at Rome, in 11adrid, Gre- 
nada, and Paris. I say" worked" 
advisedly, for he did very little else. 
Possessed of a delightful personal- 
ity, he had the world at his feet, 
especially when he married the 
daughter of Federigo 11adrazo, 
when the Goupils took him up, and 
1Ir. Stewart became not only his 
patron but his friend. He was inti- 
mate with some of the leading 
French artists of his time. Gérôme, 
upon one occasion, lent him his stu- 
dio. But he had few social tastes, 
finding his chief relaxation in the 
collecting of beautiful objects of art 
and craftsmanship, and his life was 
one long labor until he died of Ro- 
man fever in 1874. 

 
 
 
W HAT is the story of his labor, 
what were its origins, and 
what are the special characteristics 
of its fruits? I once went all the way 
to Barcelona to see what his early 
work was like, and found that it was 
nothing if not academic. The bac- 
chantes which figure in the rather 
conventional designs of'his pupilage 
might have been drawn by any of 
the carefully trained young types of 
the Paris Salon. Form, as he de- 
picts it, is form as it is understood in 
disciplinary studios. But the 110- 
roccan experience, as I have indi- 
cated, changed all that. It con- 
firmed in him an instinct for going 
straight to Nature for the truth, 
and in 11orocco, too, the effects of 
dazzling sunlight brought a vivify- 
ing element into his work. \Vhat I 



THE FIELD OF ART 


109 


feel was the specially invigorating and il- perspective for purpose.s of eulogy. On 
luminating force in F ortuny's art was what the other hand, I think that those who 
I can only describe as the genius of sheer would disparage Fortuny on account of 
painting, the innate disposition of a man his glitter overlook the firm foundation 
to express himself through consummate on which the glitter rests. They confuse 


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Sewing, 
From tbe painting by Boldini. 


draftsmanship and a fairly magical ma- spiritual with technical values. He him- 
nipulation of pigment. Both in oils and self had misgivings as to the precise depth 
in water-colors, once he had got into his of his art. In a letter to DaviIlier, 
stride, he became like a conjurer taking written at the zenith of his career, he says: 
a rabbit out of a hat. Connoisseurship "I continue to work, but truly I begin to 
to-day is a little impatient of such tri- tire (morally) of the kind of art and of the 
umphs as his, counting rabbits as but pictures which success has imposed upon 
small game, and I haven't the least in- me, and which (between ourselves) are 
tention of placing this artist in a false not the true expression of my taste." Very 



110 


THE FIELD OF ART 


well, let us agree as regards the matter of 
taste. I am not at all sure that I could 
live happily sitting opposite" The Choice 
of the :l\Iodel, " day after day, and year 
after year. But if it were hanging in the 
:f\letropolitan :l\Iuseum I know that I 


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A Moorish Scene, 
From the painting by Villegas, 


would pause before it just once in so often, 
not only with admiration and respect, but 
with a particular zest for the kind of tech- 
nical virtuosity that Fortuny exhibits in 
the picture. 
And the kind of virtuosity that is there 
is, I repeat, the kipd that has its roots 
deep in true painter's painting. He was 
no mere meretricious juggler with the 
brush, but a serious technician, who 
looked to the gra ver side of his art. 
There is nothing about him more signifi- 
cant than a certain passage in one of his 


. 


early letters, written when as a student of 
twenty he was settled in Rome. From 
this it appears that Raphael's decorations 
in the Vatican bowled him over, and when 
it came to the tablea'u bien peint, he pre- 
ferred, above all others, the great portrait 
of Innocent X, by 
Velasquez. He had 
always a passion for 
the old masters. At 
the Prado, in :f\la- 
drid, he made copies 
of Titian, Tintoret- 
to, EI Greco, Velas- 
quez, and Goya. 
\Vhat V elasq uez 
meant to him you 
may see from the 
"Spanish Lady," in 
the lVletropolitan 
Museum, which he 
painted at Rome in 
1865. There is no 
glitter in that. 'on 
the contrary, it is a 
t. broadly painted, 
1 really noble thing, 
an altogether 
worthy pendant to 
the tradition of 
Velasquez, of Goya. 
However, do not let 
us strain the point. 
It was not by work 
of this sort that For- 
tuny livedc His 
métier was for a 
lighter, more spar- 
kling type of paint- 
ing. \Vha tit is 
important to re- 
member is that the 
knowledge and au- 
thority affirmed in 
the "Spanish Lady" are carried over into 
the field in which it was his destiny to 
shine. They tell there primarily in his 
strong, swift, flashing draftsmanship, and 
then in his diabolically sure handling of 
pigment. There is no one like him for 
a kind of blazing fluency, for the plastic 
evocation of a figure or a bit of still life, for 
the perfect denotement of a lacy or shim- 
mering stuff. And over all his material, 
whether he be dealing with the sunlit pic- 
turesqueness of Morocco or Spain, or with 
romantic costumes in a stylized French 


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111 


have foregathered with flocks of them, 
and it always made me laugh a little 
inwardly to see how indisposed they 
were to admit any debt at all to the 
dead master. It was one thing to join 
in praise of his qualities; it was an- 
other to grant that without their influ- 
ence the speakers would ha \'e taken a 
different line. I could understand the 
attitude of those Spaniards and Ital- 
ians; .they hadn't studied under For- 
tuny but under other men, and doubt- 
less they had gone their own gaits. 
Nevertheless he had put something in 
the air which they had not been able 
to resist. It was the glamour of ro- 
mantic picturesqueness and with it the 
lure of sleight-of-hand, of miraculous 
dexterity. Villegas was one of the 
pillars of the schooL He travelled far 
enough from F ortuny when he pain ted 
the more celebrated canvases of his 
maturity, "The Death of the Bull- 
Fighter" and "The )'Iarriage of the 


. A Spanish Lady. 
From the painting by Fortuny in the Metropolitan 
Museum. 


interior, he causes the light to play in 
a staccato manner that is merely rav- 
ishing. The commentator who can- 
not get away from J\Ianet, says" bric- 
à-brac!" For my part, when I am 
confronted by Fortuny I can momen- 
tarily forget my J\Ianet and my Velas- 
quez and my Rembrandt, and say 
simply "\Vhat painting 1" 

 
 
 
W HEN they tell me it has gone 
down the wind I permit myself 
a chuckle. As a matter of fact, I do 
not believe the world will ever will- 
ingly let the work of Fortuny die. Its 
intrinsic brilliance is too much for 
that. It is too superbly eloquent of a 
man who exhaustively knew his craft. 
It has too much verve,. it is too finished 
and gaillard in style. There is a mea- 
sure of confirmation for its validity, 
too, in the circumstance that it left a 
deep mark upon its time. Fortuny 
founded wmething like a school, 
though I can remember little recogni- 
tion of this among his followers. I 


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The l\Ius:cians. 
From the painting by Garcia y Ramos. 



112 


THE FIELD OF ART 


Dogaressa." But if you want to get the 
pure flavor of Villegas you will get it in 
some such bits of piquant genre as he 
painted when he, in his turn, sojourned in 
lVlorocco. It was so again with Pradilla. 
He made his fame through big composi- 
tions like "The Surrender of Boabdil at 
Grenada," which were far more elaborate 
than anything in Fortuny's 11wnde, but 
there are many smaller things of his in 
which you come obviously upon the trail of 
Fortuny. There are any number of them, 
Gallegos, Viniegra, Domingo, Barbudo, 
Casanova, Garcia y Ramos, Pelayo, and 
more others than it is perhaps worth cit- 
ing, for if some of them are good, some of 
them are verv brittle and bad. 
The man 
ho more than all the rest 
rivalled F ortuny on his own ground was 
the Italian Boldini in his earlier period. 
He also had an incredible facility, incredi- 
ble sleight-of-hand. I can see him paint- 
ing my own portrait in two or three sit- 
tings. He did it like a man dashing off a 
note. But Boldini, like Fortuny, is both 
draftsman and brushman, an authentic 
master of paint, and in older days, before 
he had got committed to the portraiture 
that we know, he was wont to tackle the 
same sort of theme that had attracted his 
Spanish contemporary. He would paint 


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the women at a l\foorish bath, or the 
buildings around the Place Clichy, or a 
long road gleaming beneath a hard, blue 
sky, or a coquette lying on a sofa in the 
studio, all grace and frou-frou. They 
date from the seventies, these dazzling 
tours de force, a long time ago, and Bol- 
dini, I have gathered, has no great opin- 
ion of them himself. Just the same they 
are among the very best things he has ever 
done. Though they date from the seven- 
ties, they are still, praise be, very much 
alive. The whole Fortuny tradition, I 
maintain, still possesses this unmistakable 
vitality. Every now and then I find that 
I have to break a lance for it. I can re- 
call one that I bore in the fray against 
Elihu Vedder. At a dinner-table in Rome 
he nearly suffocated at the idea of my 
asserting that Fortuny knew how to 
paint. It was all a trick, he said. There 
was no glamour about Fortuny for him, 
though he had known the artist in the 
days of his triumph. But the glamour is 
there for me, and precisely for the reason 
that, in spite of Vedder. he knew in- 
effably how to paint. That is why I 
remain incorrigible and wish that, by 
hook or by crook, the Metropolitan had 
been able to salvage "The Choice of the 
l\lodel." 



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From the painting by Pradilla. 


A calendar of current art exhibitions will be found on page 13. 



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HE .oPENED HIS EYES TO THE DELECTABLE SIGHT OF THE GIRL SITTING 
BESIDE HIM. 


-See "The Madness oC_Gamaliel Sevenoaks," page 180, 


114 




 
 - 
SCRIBNER'S ( MAGAZINE 


POL. LXXP]]] 


AUGUST, 1925 


NO. 2 


Dottie 


BY McCREADY HUSTON 
Author of "His," "Wrath," "Jonah's Whale," "Not Poppy-," etc. 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY ETHEL PLUMMER 


Ä

D"Ç\
 ROM a writing-desk on 

x the gallery where she 

 W rij overlooked the lobby 
':HI 
. of the hotel, Mrs. 
. 
I 
 Cleaves saw her son 

 
 mount the stairs from 

7Ç1 the street and stand 
.searching the throng. 
She leaned back then, waiting to see him 
anger on not finding her at once in the 
corner he had specified. When she had 
told him at the last minute that she was 
not equal to the bright pretenses of a front 
box at the football game, but that she 
would meet him for dinner and the drive 
home, he had seemed relieved; but he 
had made a point of the dinner. He had 
rubbed it in on her memory, as the Cleaves 
men always did with women. 
\Vatching him now, she reflected again 
on how deeply he was a Cleaves. Her 
mind went back to his father, standing in 
the lobby of the Monongahela House, on 
a night he had come ashore from the river 
packet James G. Blaine. The frown on 
the son's face to-night was his father's 
and that of Grandfather Cleaves, men of 
sudden, unaccountable, unreasoning, and 
unreasonable furies. The look Lucius 
wore made her feel chilly and old. He 
threw open his long raccoon coat and 
looked darkly at his watch. 
Mrs. Cleaves rose stiffly and went down 
the marble staircase to join him. It was 
easier. If she had sent a page down for 
him he would have come tramping, hot 
with indignation. 
"Ah, mother! I thought you had mis- 


understood." It was the tone he used 
when, rarely, he tried to disguise his ir- 
ritation. 
"No
 Lucius. I remembered. But I 
went up-stairs to write a note. Did you 
have a good game?" 
"No. Beat us. Seven to nothing. I 
lost three hundred dollars." 
That, the defeat, not the three hun- 
dred dollars, accounted for part of his 
surliness. Lucius was a feverishly loyal 
alumnus of his college. }'1rs. Cleaves 
knew that further inquiries, in language 
not technical, would only annoy him, so 
she asked, looking about: 
"Shall we have dinner?" 
The noisy crowd of the November day 
depressed her, and she wanted to ask 
Lucius to get the car and some sand- 
wiches and start home at once. 
But he led her to where divans were 
grouped. "Let us sit here a minute," he 
said, throwing off his coat and tossing it 
across a chair. At thirty Lucius was 
growing distinguished looking, his mother 
mused, noting the early splashes of gray. 
That also was a Cleaves mark. The men 
were all tall, dark, a little, but very little, 
less than dour, graying soon. And im- 
perious-Lucius started with resentment 
when the wet sleeve of an overcoat 
brushed his cheek. 
His chair faced the hotel entrance and 
his mother saw, out of calm, experienced 
eyes, that he was watching the revolving 
doors for somebody; so when he sprang 
up to greet a rushing girl in a blue and 
silver cloak she was not surprised. 


Copyrighted in I925 in United States, Canada, 
nd Great Britain by Charles Scribner's Sons. Printed in 
New York. All rights reserved. 


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. . . he sprang up to greet a rushing girl in a blue and silver cloak. . . .-Page IrS. 


"Mother," he said, standing beside the 
small, light, smiling person and looking 
down at Mrs. Cleaves, "this is Dorothy 
Dravo-Dottie." 
Then he added, as J\;Irs. Cleaves put 
out a fastidious glove: 
"Dottie is going to have dinner with 
us. If you will sit down, Dottie, I'll go 
and see the captain." 
"I'm late, of course," the girl said, 
watching Lucius furrow the press. "He 
said half-past." 
Mrs. Cleaves gave the brim of her hat 
a twist. 
'II was late too," she responded, "but 
Lucius scolded me." 
She wondered if lVliss Dravo had caught 
the meaning intended by her tone. 
The girl said quietly: 'I I make it a point 
to be late with men. If you are on the 
tick they think you have nothing else to 
do; and, if you're ahead of time-well, 
you're sunk." 
Mrs. Cleaves had heard Lucius speak 
of being sunk. She thought of George 
Cleaves and old Captain Lucius, and the 
corners of her mouth jerked. She had 
been late at a meeting with George only 
u6 


once, and from that searing experience 
forward she had been desperately on the 
tick for more than thirty years, to his not 
unwelcome death. Miss Dravo was de- 
luded; if she should marry Lucius she 
would see. 
"Lucius must have intended to throw 
us together like this," the other remarked, 
smiling and looking at Mrs. Cleaves 
with oddly arched and oddly hued, yet 
fine, eyes. "He hopes I will make a good 
impression on you; not that he said so, of 
course." 
This was, Mrs. Cleaves saw, the new 
way of doing things; informal meetings in 
public places; looking people over. She 
was, then, to look Dorothy over and de- 
cide what she thought of her. Her op- 
position would not stop Lucius if this was 
the girl he desired to bring to the red brick 
house on Front Street; but he would go 
through the formality which was a part of 
the new technique of courting. 
"Ordinarily, I..ucius wouldn't need all 
this time to see about the dinner," the 
girl added. 1\1rs. Cleaves decided quickly 
that she must meet candor with candor. 
"It isn't so much what I think, Miss 



Dravoc I'm an old woman. It is you 
who would have to live with Lucius; and 
that is rather difficult at times. One must 
know how." 
"Call me Dottie, won't you?" the girl 


DOTTIE 


117 


authentic manner c She wanted to know 
more about her. 
"As to the rest of it," Dorothy said as 
though the other had inquired, "I an-: an 
orphan, living with a kind of aunt of my 


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His mother knew that if he wanted intimate talk the centre of a restaurant, with filled tables at his elbows, 
would not impress him as unsuitable.-Page 118. 


asked, ignoring Mrs. Cleaves's direct sug- 
gestion. "I don't want to seem impu- 
dent; Lucius told me vou disliked nick- 
names. But I want tõ start square; and 
that's what I am-just Dottie Dravo." 
"I should have to think about it; get 
used to it. My aversion goes rather deep; 
you'd have to know me to understand." 
lVIrs. Cleaves contemplated Dorothy 
Dravo, admitting her fair beauty and her 


mother, on the North Side-J\Irs. Clement 
King. . . ." 
lVIrs. Cleaves had wondered about that. 
This was the Dorothy Dravo. If the 
younger crowd of the city could have a 
personage, this was she. 
"I'll admit I'm crazy about Lucius, if 
it comes to that," she went on, facing 
lVlrs. Cleaves with clear, gray eyes. "Of 
course, he's nine years older than I am; 



118 


but I've felt for some time that I have a 
mission in his direction." 
"A mission?" 
"Yes; you see, I know all about 
Lucius. Everybody does." 
The mother sat back in the corner of 
the divan, folding her scrupulous hands 
and. gazing across the heads of the weav- 
ing hotel throng. She was unaccountably 
nettled by what the girl beside her had 
said. But after a moment she smiled 
faintly, then a little grimly, and tapped 
her slipper. It was true; it must be. true. 
Everybody must know about Lucius-odd 
that she had not thought of it unprompted. 
She turned to her companion. 
"Even knowing about him in advance, 
the woman who undertakes the mission 
will find it real enough. There will be 
nothing indefinite about it. I found it 
real with his father, and Grandmother 
Cleaves with old Captain Lucius. And 
not one of the wives, from the time of the 
first Lucius on this side of the mountains 
-he was a soldier in Aeneas J.\tIackay's 
regiment in the Revolution-not one 
came off too well. What they put up 
with.. ." 
She stopped abruptly, waiting to see 
whether the girl understood; but her face 
conveyed nothing; its animation meant 
politeness, nothing else; and Mrs. Cleaves 
was relieved to feel Lucius towering be- 
side them. They followed him among 
the pillars to the principal restaurant. 
The hotel had quieter places for dining, 
but Lucius had a preference for promi- 
nently situated tables. The three were 
the centre of a bright scene, and their 
table showed that if Lucius had left them 
together by design he had also been in- 
structing the captain. 
His mother knew that if he wanted inti- 
mate talk the centre of a restaurant, with 
filled tables at his elbows, would not im- 
press him as unsuitable. When she and 
her husband had travelled on the packet 
with Captain Lucius the two Cleaves 
would discuss their family matters at the 
common table in the long, red-carpeted 
saloon from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, 
until the myriad glass pendants of the 
chandeliers jingled as if the boat were 
making a bad landing. And Lucius was 
like them; he could change back into the 
eighties or seventies, from pumps to 


DOTTIE 


leather boots, from dinner coat to reefer, 
without shading a tone of his voice. 
So she was not astonished when he said, 
as he watched the waiter: 
"Dottie and I are going to be married, 
mother. " 
Since his dark eyes were on the waiter's 
movements, Mrs. Cleaves looked at the 
girl; and, for the first time, now that Doro- 
thy's cloak had been taken away, did a 
woman's justice to her loveliness. 
Dorothy met Mrs. Cleaves's eyes levelly 
for a moment, then turned with a slow 
smile to Lucius. 
"You do blurt things out. I suppose in 
a moment you will tell us that we are to 
be married to-night." 
He looked at her for a space gravely, 
then at the plate the waiter had put be- 
fore him. He gestured, giving an order, 
and turned back to his guests. 
" You said it, Dottie; to-night." 
He did not smile or look up. Instead, 
he passed a steel knife through a thick 
mutton chop. Mrs. Cleaves laughed 
lightly for Miss Dravo's assurance, but 
she knew Lucius was not joking; and she 
knew, too, by a certain hue of skin not 
perceptible by others that he was on the 
verge of one of his stately, quietly furious 
and infuriating, unreasonable Cleaves 
moods. He would be difficult, if not 
worse. 
"When we finish here we will drive out 
to Negley A venue. That preacher you 
mentioned once, Dottie-I called him up." 
He looked across at his mother. 
"The license has been attended to. 
We'll be married to-night, so go on with 
your dinner." 
"H I may say a word, even though I 
am not consulted," Dorothy began, "I'll 
do it; but understand that you are not 
bullying me into it. I think it is the best 
thing for you and me to do. But, I'm 
not being driven; it is as if I had thought 
of it myself." 
She stopped and placed a cool, firm 
hand on one of lYfrs. Cleaves's. 
In her tone the older woman found an 
unexpected note, to which she responded 
in spite of rising anger. 
"One would think, Lucius, that you 
had been drinking," she said and found 
her voice was shaking. 
"Perhaps I have been," he answered. 



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"But that is not the point. We will have 
the wedding at nine o'clock. You can 
call up your aunt, Dottie." 
"That will not be necessary. Aunt 
Kitty is used to me." 


DOTTIE 


119 


sions of the ornate ninetiesc The long 
ritual in the packed church on that hot 
June day, the breakfast of innumerable 
squab and cupids of ice cream, and the 
departure on the unbearable red plush of 


--- 


. . . but Mrs. Cleaves was thinking of something else. It was not whether Lucius should marry Dorothy 
Dravo, but whether he should marry anybody.-Page 120. 


Something about the slight droop of 
Dorothy's white shoulders and the sug- 
gestion of a sigh that escaped her as they 
followed Lucius out among the tables 
caused Mrs. Cleaves to revert to her usual 
attitude toward the girl-any girl-who 
should marry Lucius and take up the 
burden of the Cleaves women. 
Her own had been a plotted and pre- 
pared betrothal and her wedding one of 
those fretted, elaborate morning occa- 


gritty coaches for the first part of the 
railroad journey to the 'Vorld's Fair, 
those things placed her worlds apart from 
this bare ceremony that was to be Doro- 
thy's; but the two were identical in es- 
sence. She had married George; Dorothy 
was to marry Lucius; and both were 
Cleaves. If Lucius, following true in this, 
as he had in everything else, should reveal 
now a nature as brutal, as primitive, as 
his father's was thirty-three years ago, this 



120 


pretty playfellow of a girl would be devas- 
tated. That she had no mother made 
the case worse. She-Mrs. Cleaves- 
should be her protector. She had tried to 
warn her, but the hint probably was for- 
gotten now. Dorothy-well, she was a 
girl child; and Mrs. Cleaves, faltering for 
the first time, felt, as she seated herself in 
the closed car, that she was not doing 
enough to save herfrom what could hardly 
fail to be a bad and dangerous marriage. 
As they moved up the black, wet curves 
of the boulevard toward the East End, 
Dorothy, who was unaccountably calm, 
threw out: 
"I'm sick of never finishing anything. 
I've been starting and quitting for years. 
I didn't finish high school. My aunt sent 
me away then, but I didn't complete the 
work and flunked the college board ex- 
aminations. That meant I couldn't get 
into Smith, where mother went and where 
she wanted me to go. I've had a hundred 
flares of getting jobs, of having a career, 
and I've made a dozen false starts. I've 
intended to marry a dozen men, but I've 
always gotten on neutral with them and 
backed out. The last year I've been 
getting ready to reform. I've got to fin- 
ish something. I told Lucius that if I 
ever said I'd marry him I'd go through 
with it. . . ." 
That, of course, might be an explana- 
tion of the strange night errand satis- 
factory to Dorothy, but Mrs. Cleaves was 
thinking of something else. It was not 
whether Lucius should marry Dorothy 
Dravo, but whether he should marry any- 
body. From her position on the right of 
the rear seat of the sedan she watched her 
son's profile against the stale light of the 
dim boulevard lamps. She leaned back, 
turning sligh tly toward the girl at her side. 
" You said you knew all about Lucius," 
she said in a voice almost inaudible. 
"You know all about his father and his 
grandfather and that Lucius probably 
will go as they did?" 
" Yes; but that was in the old days. 
Things are different now." 
"You mean they can't get it? You 
ought to see what Lucius has at home!" 
"I don't mean that. Of course they 
can get it. But women to-day-well, 
they look at it differently and they have a 
different method." 


DOTTIE 


Mrs. Cleaves gave her a penetrating 
glance. Was this cocksureness, this 
placid minimizing of the Cleaves mania, 
or was it something else, something new, 
which she, belonging to another genera- 
tion, could not comprehend? 
Lucius, intent upon his driving, had 
paid no attention to the talk in the back 
seat, acting the usual traditional part of 
the "queer Cleaves." Mrs. Cleaves, an 
eye resting on the rise and turn of his 
knuckles on the steering-wheel, hoped 
that he wouldn't drink any more before 
starting on the seventy-mile drive home. 
They parked softly in Negley Avenue and 
hurried through the rain to the minister's 
front porch. 
The Reverend 1\1r. l\lclvor himself 
came to the door of the manse. Evident- 
ly, he had been expecting them earlier, for 
his wife came down-stairs quickly and 
took up a position by the study door with 
her hands folded, waiting for her husband 
to begin the ceremony, almost before 
Lucius was out of his fur coat. Mr. 
Me! vor fumbled the license under the 
lamp for a moment and then, with a ges- 
ture to Dorothy and Lucius, began read- 
ing the marriage service. 
Mrs. Cleaves, realizing now that this 
tall, dark son of hers had hardly spoken 
to her since his brief announcement in the 
hotel, saw that this thing she was wit- 
nessing was a thoroughly modern mar- 
riage and that actually the appearance of 
Lucius and Dorothy before the clergy- 
man was merely a good-humored con- 
cession to custom. One must be married 
by some one-she could almost hear 
Lucius say it. After all, she thought, 
what did it matter? The double ring 
ceremony, four bridesmaids, two priests, 
and a full choir couldn't help this girl 
cope with Lucius. They had not helped 
her with George nor l\10ther Cleaves with 
the old captain. 
It was over so quickly. The minister 
shook hands gravely with the married 
pair, and Lucius. with what in anybody 
else would have been florid taste, drew a 
crumple of gold bills from his trousers 
pocket and, pulling one from the wad, 
laid it on the table. He could do things 
like that. 
His mother crossed to where Dorothy 
was turning away from the good wishes 



of thc ministcr's wife and took her hands. 
"Well, you are one of us now," she began 
and was astonished at the warmth of a 
kiss that somehow reminded her of how 
rarely in her life she had felt such contact. 


DorrIE 


121 


of rain for the shelter of the car. Once 
in, Lucius, turning from his place behind 

he wheel, surprised :1\1rs. Cleaves by say- 
mg: 
"\Ve'll go back to the hotel now and 



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. . . as a door opened suddenly and two of his guests looted out, she saw the arrangements were far 
advanced.-Page 122. 


She thought Dorothy said: "Don't be 
afraid, mother," but she wasn't sure of 
that. She replied: "We'll start home 
now," and watched her daughter-in-law 
take the certificate from the clergyman 
and hand it over to Lucius with a: "Here, 
keep this." 
Lucius unfolded it curiously and made 
a wry mouth. 
"Doves I Hell I" he remarked, put- 
ting the paper in his pocket. 
Outside they had to run through floods 


stay there to-night. Three or four of the 
bunch will drop in. \\Te'll have a little 
celebra tion." 
His mother saw that what she had 
feared was coming to pass. What he had 
drunk earlier in the evening was showing 
itself in a mode of speech. 
"No, Lucius," she interposed. "If you 
don't feel like chancing it in the car we'll 
take the last train. \Ve must go home 
to-night." 
"The last train has gone, mother. But 



122 


even if it hadn't it wouldn't make any 
difference. This is something I've ar- 
ranged. Please don't object now. We'll 
have a little supper in my rooms; have a 
party." 
The car was running in the boulevard 
again now, slipping rapidly down-town, 
opposite to their homeward direction. 
"Lucius"-it was Dorothy who spoke 
-"you will consult me now. I am your 
wife. There will be no party, so don't be 
absurd. Turn at the next cross street 
and step on it." 
" Charlie and Howard Graham are 
waiting at the hotel; and Midgie and 
Norma are coming in." He shot this 
back as though it closed the question. 
"What do we care for Charlie or 
Howard ? We're going home." 
The girl did not raise her voice, but 
spoke serenely as if stating admitted facts. 
Mrsc Cleaves, recalling out of her own 
deep experience with Lucius's father his 
curious convictions about occasions to be 
observed and celebrated, sat helpless, un- 
able to speak, fearing to provoke that red 
wrath that she knew would sweep Lucius 
in a moment. This was precisely what 
she had feared for this girl, or for any wife 
who should undertake Lucius. 
He had, of course, no intention of obey- 
ing Dorothy's mandate to turn. Ignoring 
all intersections, he drove steadily down 
on the lights of the city thrown out across 
the triangle where the rivers met. Mrs. 
Cleaves could see the electric letters 
showing mistily from the roof of the hotel. 
She turned inquiringly to Dorothy. 
"What will you do? I know him so 
well. You can't stop him now." 
The girl, muffled in her evening cloak, 
was not disturbed. She smiled: 
"It will be all right." 
There was nothing to do but permit 
themselves to be helped out by the 
starter under the canopy in William Penn 
Way and pass inside to wait until Lucius 
should drive the car away. 
The strange jangle of sounds from the 
orchestra in the café, where there was 
dancing, swept Mrs. Cleaves with an odd 
pain. It brought back to her a night on 
a Mississippi levée the year of the St. 
Louis Exposition. Making a trip with 
her husband on the Theodore Roosevelt, 
the last boat he had owned, she had been 


DOTTIE 


taken by him to a black-and-white re- 
sort, following his whim to hear a prod- 
igy of a negro pianist play what George 
reported as a masterpiece of composition, 
the "Maple-Leaf Rag." The negro, 
George had said to her, was revolution- 
izing American music. 
In the dim basement of something less 
than a hotel she had sat, pale and 
alarmed, while George drank a series of 
raw glasses and applauded gravely in a 
haze of tobacco smoke. 
She had gotten him finally to their 
cabin on the Roosevelt only through the 
help of the resort-keeper, an amiable cab- 
driver, and two stevedores. She remem- 
bered chiefly the look on the face of the 
boy Lucius as he had peered, frightened, 
from his bunk. 
To maintain the veneer of an impec- 
cable household in the red brick house on 
Front Street in the up-river town that 
had been the seat of the Cleaves family 
since 1765, would have taxed the re- 
sources of any woman; but to preserve it 
while masking the periodic descents of 
her husband meant an existence frayed by 
anxious watchfulness, fear, and an al- 
most low cunning-the last to anticipate 
and prevent troublec When George's ca- 
reer was snapped off-and, curiously, he 
had died in bed, quietly and decently- 
she knew already Lucius was foreboding 
a similar task of wearying management 
and contrivance for her, or for some other 
woman. And Lucius was left rich and 
idle, the accumulations of four generations 
of boat masters furnishing him with a 
lavish income. His father and grand- 
father and the rest at least had been busy 
building and running steamboats on the 
Monongahela and Ohio. Lucius promised 
to be worthless. 
She saw now by the way he pushed a 
passage for them into an elevator and 
hurried them along the dim corridor to 
some rooms he had engaged that the ful- 
fillment of his desire for a wedding cele- 
bration was impossible to defeat without 
violence; and, as a door opened suddenly 
and two of his guests looked out, she saw 
the arrangements were far advanced. 
From inside came laughter of men and 
women and the click of glass and silver. 
The next room evidently was reserved 
for Lucius, for he hailed_the others, telling 



them to wait} and passed along to fumble 
with a key. As if suddenly recalling the 
rest of his preparations, he stepped across 
the corridor and unlocked another room. 
He said: 
"This is yours, mother. 1\fake your- 


DOTTIE 


123 


She forced her mind back to Dorothy. 

he saw her as one more girl to be drawn 
mto the web of the kind of wifehood that 
had been the portion of the Cleaves 
women since the first men of the race had 
crossed the mountains from Baltimore 



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"So you beat me home, Lucius?" she said. "But I had tire trouble."-Page 125. 


self comfortable for a little while. I want 
my friends to meet you in a minute." 
Turning, he flung open the room left 
for himself and Dorothy and stood wait- 
ing for her to enter. Dorothy said to 
Mrs. Cleaves: 
"'Vait for me here. I want to speak to 
Lucius in our room alone." 
They were gone. The door closed and 
1\irs. Cleaves stood deserted, the key to 
her room dangling ridiculously from her 
fingers. From over the transom where 
the guests were waiting came a pathetic 
essay at song, followed by laughter that 
was too loud, too meaningful. 


with pack-saddles. They were hard and 
cruel. Well, she had tried, certainly, to 
divert Dorothy. She had not had much 
time to forestall; and, of course, there had 
been the danger of too much opposition, 
making the girl think she was jealous of 
Lucius. She did not expect Dorothy to 
reappear, yet she stood there waiting. 
This was not a place for an old woman; 
she wondered if Lucius had been righ t 
about the trains; perhaps she could creep 
away and leave them. 
But before she could act on the impulse 
to inquire about the trains the bedroom 
door opened and Dorothy stepped into 



124 


the hall, summoning 
Irs. Cleaves with a 
bright glance. 
"Come, mother," she said. " We'll go 
down and get the car and drive homec 
It may be a little wet and skiddy, but I 
know the road." 
"But Lucius . . ." 
"Oh, that's all right. . Lock your door 
and I'll turn the key m. I just told 
Lucius that he was a damned fool and 
that I simply couldn't be annoyed with a 
party like this on our wedding night. I 
told him I was going to drive you home 
and he could do as he pleased. He was 
pretty violent for a moment, but. . ." 
The opening of the elevator stopped 
her explanation, and in a moment they 
were in the midst of the street-floor swirl. 
"It's only ten-thirty," said Dorothy. 
"We ought to make it by half-past one 
or so." 
She stopped a passing bellman and told 
him to have the Cleaves car brought 
around from the garage. 
While her daughter-in-law, a long, 
blue cigarette-holder between her fingers, 
picked her way smoothly, without effort, 
through the down-town night traffic and 
found the avenue that led to the Greens- 
burg Pike, Mrs. Cleaves, bewildered, took 
off her hat in the back seat and tried to 
reconstruct her point of view. 
The going was bad. The windshield 
fogged constantly and snow spat against 
the plate windows. There were innumer- 
able curves and crossings and car lamps 
looming up perilously out of the black. 
There was lurching later where the road 
was rough and frequently a side-slip as 
the unchained wheels failed on wet pave- 
ment. But Dorothy did not notice. She 
drove on and on, incredibly certain of 
every objective of the eastward highway. 
She did not drive rapidly, but well; and 
with a kind of rhythm They were stop- 
ping in Greensburg, thirty-five miles, for 
gasoline at midnight. She was leisurely 
then, seeming in no hurry to get forward. 
The route from there on for forty miles 
was more difficult. It proved to be nar- 
row, and cars were continually pressing 
from behind for room in which to pass. 
It was all baffling to Mrs. Cleaves that 
this fragile girl could carry her off this 
way so coolly, seventy miles or more on 


DOTTIE 


a forbidding night, into the mountains, 
after such an emotional crisis as her wed- 
ding and its strange sequel. She showed 
no sign. Did the girl of the day think? 
More accurately, did she feel? Was 
Lucius able to hurt her as the Cleaves 
women had been accustomed to be hurt? 
Wasn't she almost as far from the women 
of the Cleaves line as that car, shooting 
past them in the night, was from old 
Captain Lucius's Sunday phaeton? 


Somewhere beyond Connellsville, high 
on a bench above a noisy, tossing creek, 
with sleet slanting sharply across the 
scope of their headlamps, the motion of 
the car told them something had hap- 
pened to a rear tire. With a short laugh 
Dorothy stopped carefully against the 
mountain side and shut off the engine. 
Leaning back comfortably, she smoked a 
cigarette and regarded her mother-in- 
law. 
"That will mean half an hour," she 
said. "But it isn't as bad as running out 
of gas." 
All this time she had not mentioned 
Lucius or betrayed any thought of him. 
When she began presently to produce 
tools and prepare to get out Mrs. Cleaves 
asserted herself with a protest. 
" We can run on it as it is to the next 
garage. " 
(, Foolish to do that on these hills and 
with some bad road ahead. Just be com- 
fortable. I know how Lucius is about a 
car, and he would be especially sullen if I 
ran on the rim; the car belongs to me 
now, you see; and I have a reputation 
about machines to maintain with him." 
She smiled at her mother-in-law and 
added: 
"It will take-only ten minutes or so." 
It was, of course, longer than that; and 
when she reached in and drove the car 
off the jack she was blown and washed by 
the storm, with ruined gown and slippers. 
She looked so much more slight and frail, 
standing there in the road, putting the 
tools away; but the evenness of her tone 
never changed. 
"I put a chain on while I was about 
it," she remarked as she climbed in and 
sank drenched behind the wheel. " I 
don't want Lucius to be able to say that 
Dottie doesn't take care of things." 



YOUNGSTERS VS. OLDSTERS 


She drove furiously from that moment 
and passed under the courthouse tower 
of the sleeping town as the clock pointed 
to two. "I said half-past one when we 
left Pittsburgh; of course, there was the 
tire," she remarked. 
When they left the car in the Cleaves 
garage and let themselves in at the 
kitchen entrance of the old house, Mrs. 
Cleaves was pleased at lights the maids 
had left and hoped vaguely for something 
ready to eat. She started with Dorothy 
toward the stairs, thinking of measures 
for counteracting the cold and the wet- 
ting; but half-way she was arrested by the 
sensation of a tall figure emerging from 
the library. 
"Lucius!" she gasped. 
He ignored her and strode to Dorothy. 
His mother saw that he was wet and 
wildly spattered. 
Dorothy stood looking up at him with 
a wry smile, suddenly small in her wet 
silk. 
"So you beat me home, Lucius?" she 
said. "But I had tire trouble." 


125 


"If you could see the car I borrowed " 
he responded. "One of the first Fords; 
but I got forty out of her on that stretch 
this side of Dunbar." 
Dorothy laughed and reached out a 
slim hand to Mrs. Cleaves. 
"You see, it's a question of method. 
Lucius and I probably will come out all 
right." 
The older woman stood studyin cr the 
other. She saw herself in the old Bu
nett 
House in Cincinnati years ago quailing 
before flushed George Cleaves. She had 
fallen on the floor of their room and he 
had left her lying there, stamping off to a 
gathering of rivermen aboard the packet 
I saae Woodward. She gasped at a vision 
of what she might have done, should have 
done, then and there. 
" Dottie--" began Lucius, his voice 
different from any his mother had ever 
heard from him or from any other Cleaves. 
She sank down weakly on the bottom 
step. 
"That's it," she said, "'Dottie.' I'm 
going to call you Dottie from now on." 


Youngsters vs. Oldsters 
BY M. B. STEWART 


.'- VER at the club, the 
, ,. other night, they were 

 0 
... having the usual week- 

 
 
 end dance. The usual 

 
 crowd was there, the 
_ youngsters dancing, 
WW the oldsters looking on 
while they engaged in 
the gentle middle-aged pastime of pan- 
ning the rising generation. 
They had catalogued the latter's faults 
and weaknesses and had totalled up a 
very respectable score. As usual, they 
ended by wondering what the world was 
coming to, and a couple of them appealed 
to me to know what I thought; for ex- 
ample, what I thought of the way 
lillie 
Jones was acting. Millie's mother was 
present and Millie was doing her acting 
in plain sight, so I couldn't see just how 
my opinion was pertinent. As a matter 


of fact, Millie was giving a rather finished 
demonstration of what they call cheeking, 
with a nice-looking youngster who didn't 
seem to mind it in the least. 
I replied that it looked to me as though 
they were enjoying it and that I didn't 
see how much harm could come of it, ex- 
cept, possibly, to Millie's make-up. 
Apparently, my answer didn't make 
much of a hit, for they wanted to know 
right off how I would like to see a daugh- 
ter of mine doing that sort of thing, and 
I made even less of a hit when I replied 
that if I had a daughter and if she felt 
like doing that sort of a thing, I'd rather 
she did it right there in public than some- 
where out of sight-the way we used to 
do it. 
That let me out of the conversation. 
In fact, they intimated that they had 
only included me in it out of politeness, 



126 


YOUNGSTERS VS. OLDSTERS 


not that they cared in the least for my 
opinion. Of course I had intended to 
qualify my statements, but I have never 
had a chance to do so, and it looks as 
though I would have to write what I 
really think about it if I am ever to get it 
out of my system. 
So, do I think the rising generation is 
heading for a fall? Of course I do. It 
can't help it. Everyone of them is going 
to make mistakes that they will be sorry 
for later on, going to bump his or her 
reckless little noodle time and again, go- 
ing to have all sorts of foolish ideas, going 
to do all sorts of absurd things, going to 
experience a lot of bitter disappointments 
and some few heartbreaks. 
But do I mean to imply that they are 
going to the devil, individually or collec- 
tively, that they are going to wreck them- 
selves or wreck what we are pleased to 
call society? 
Not by a long shot. 
If you don't agree with me, just try 
projecting yourself back into your own 
dim, distant youth. Inventory yourself 
as you were twenty-five or thirty years 
ago, and tell me how many of the crazy 
things the youngsters are doing and think- 
ing to-day are missing from your own 
personal and private record of doings and 
misdoings. And, have we wrecked our- 
selves or society? 
Be honest now. Don't say you can't 
remember. 
If you can't remember, I can. I can 
recall very distinctly the attitude of the 
oldsters toward us youngsters and the 
feeling it gave me at times, a sort of con- 
ventional nakedness, as though my whole 
moral fabric had been condemned, swept 
aside, flimsy, worthless, 
But, after all, isn't it merely a matter of 
conventions, and what are conventions 
but conventions, and aren't conventions 
in life and society very much the same as 
in bridge-hard to understand until you 
get used to them, then simple as a-b-c? 
:JYloreover, as in bridge, isn't one set of 
conventions about as good as another, 
provided the people who are playing to- 
gether understand them? 
At best, conventions are merely the 
products of the times, of circumstances, 
of morals, religion, politics, and a lot of 
other things that go to make up the point 


of view. As the point of view changes, 
conventions change, and since it is the 
most natural thing in the world for each 
generation to have its own point of view, 
it is correspondingly natural for each 
generation to establish its own conven- 
tions. 
And, to my way of thinking, it is a 
mighty lucky thing that they do. Other- 
wise, the world would now be back in the 
Dark Ages, progress nowhere, and civili- 
zation at a standstill. \Vhen I was a boy, 
they used to admonish us youngsters to 
strive to be as good men as our daddies 
had been before us. They seemed to re- 
gard that as the natural limit of any boy's 
ambition. But if it were I, I wouldn't 
tell a boy anything of the sort. On the 
other hand, I would tell him that if he 
didn't grow up to be a mighty sight better 
man than his dad had been, I would re- 
gard him as a failure, or at least as not 
having measured up to his opportunities. 
Otherwise, what is the purpose of life and 
where does progress enter into its formu- 
la? Each generation has the benefit of 
all that previous generations enjoyed and 
a lot more-why shouldn't it be expected 
to develop something superior in the way 
of manhood? And the same principle ap- 
plies to the girls. Their mothers were all 
that their generations permitted them to 
be, perhaps a little more, but just as the 
discarding of trailing skirts and corsets 
has enabled this generation to develop a 
fuller and freer physical life, so the dis- 
carding of a lot of conventional furbelows 
ought to enable them to develop into a 
fuller and freer mental and moral life. 
As I see it, that is the way it should be. 
lt's up to each generation to set its own 
pace. There is no reason why one gen- 
eration should give up automobiles, elec- 
tric lights, and hot and cold showers just 
because a former generation had to travel 
in buggies, read by kerosene, and heat 
the Saturday-night bath on the kitchen 
stove. 
If this world is ever going to justify it- 
self, it has got to keep on moving, and the 
youngsters have got to keep it moving. 
That being the case, they have a perfect 
right to do it in their own way. As a 
matter of fact, they are all pretty near to 
partnership in the world to-day. To- 
morrow, they will be active partners in 



YOUNGSTERS VS. OLDSTERS 


the concern, and it won't be long before 
they will be running the business all by 
themselves-why shouldn't they take a 
hand in framing the rules of the game? 
I'll admit that this may surprise some 
of them. They aren't used to hearing 
this kind of talk from us oldsters, and I'll 
admit also that it doesn't come as easily 
as it might in this instance. It's hard for 
us oldsters to concede things to the young- 
sters, hard for us to get together with 
them, so to speak; on the contrary, we 
seem to be standing each other off most 
of the time when it would be to the in- 
terest of us all to get together. However, 
perhaps it is just as well that we can't or 
don't. There are pros as well as cons to 
be considered. For a good many years, I 
have held that if the average youngster 
would only consent to take advantage of 
the experience of the average oldster, that 
youngster would become a superman or a 
superwoman in record time, but I am be- 
ginning to weaken on that score. Much 
as I dislike saying so, I am beginning to 
believe that it wouldn't work in more 
ways than one. 
There is no doubt that age makes us 
conservative. After we have been burned 
a few times by the hot stove of experience, 
we instinctively shy off from it. Our 
counsel takes on a decided flavor of con- 
servatism, and conservatism doesn't go 
with the spirit of progress-progress has 
got to take a chance now and then. So, 
it's probably providential that the young- 
ster walks up to life the way he does to a 
swimming-pool-shucking off his clothes 
as he goes and plunging in head first. The 
oldster is more apt to go slow, wonder if 
the water is cold, how deep it is, whether 
there are rocks or snags on the bottom, 
then decide that it looks muddy, and final- 
ly, if he makes up his mind to go in at all, 
does so by inches. 
So, I guess that the youngsters do 
wisely in taking their own counsel. For 
one thing, it occurs to me that it would 
go a long way toward slowing up the 
matrimonial market if the youngsters 
consulted their parents, for I have never 
yet known the father who didn't think 
his son ought to be a little better fixed 
bdore taking such a step, and I have 
never known a real mother or father who 
didn't feel that their daughter was mak- 


127 


ing a mistake in marrying the man she 
married. 
But there are a lot of people who don't 
feel the way I do. They are too far re- 
moved from the present ideas, and the gap 
between day before yesterday and to- 
morrow is more than they can bridge 
easily. Jazz has followed too closely upon 
the heels of the minuet for them to get 
used to the change. I can recall the time 
when the world considered us rowdy be- 
cause we two-stepped, and I suppose 
people thought the same thing about my 
dad when he cut loose from square dances 
and the Virginia reel in favor of the 
waltz. Twenty-five years ago there 
would have been a riot as well as a scandal 
if the girls had appeared on the streets 
dressed as they dress to-day. Legs were 
taboo in those days, and the girl who laid 
aside her corsets except to bathe or go to 
bed was immodest, to say the least. All 
of which goes to show that it is merely 
the point of view. 
I may be wrong, but to my way of 
thinking it is not the things we do in 
public that need conventionalizing in the 
interest of public safety and morals, but 
rather the things we do in private. 
No, I haven't any fault to find with the 
youngsters. On the contrary, I envy 
them a lot. I envy them their youth, 
their health, their energy, their oppor- 
tunities to do things, their unbounded ex- 
pectations, their enthusiasm, their eager- 
ness to get at life, tear it apart and put it 
together again in better shape. I envy 
them their independence, their cocky as- 
surance. Yes, I envy them and from the 
bottom of my heart I wish them well. 
As I watch them starting out bravely and 
gayly along the beaten path of life, my 
only other feeling is that of regret, poign- 
ant and haunting, regret that I cannot 
lend them a hand over some of the rough 
spots, steer them away from som.e of the 
stumbling-blocks hidden from therr young 
eyes, shield them from some of the st?rms 
they will encounter, spare them the dIsap- 
pointments life has taught me to foresee 
in store for them. 
But they don't understand that. They 
don't want any help. That's the saddest 
part of it for me-to have to stand aside, 
helpless, with nothing left but to watch 
and hope. 



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128 



A Woman of No Imagination 
BY v ALl\IA CLARK 
.\uthor of "Senice." etc. 


[LLCSTRATlON
 BY GEORGE \\ RIGHT 


W'FJQ...."1to.o.
w HE bottle had rolled 
X

x. out onto madame's 

 ITJ Q rlesk when Bess dug 
c'I, T 
. into her stuffed bag for 
. 
 g, francs to pay her tea 

 I 
 bill. l\ladame exerted 
Ä
1Ç1Ä her
elf 
o the extent of 
takmg It up. It was 
merely a pencil-thin phial filled with some 
colorless fluid, but the single, minutely 
printed word of its label, as it lay upward 
in marlame's doughy palm, was like an ex- 
plosion-venomous, damning. 
.. Give it to me !" blazed Bess. 
Rut madame's liquid eyes merely 
rlrowsed out at her beneath the heavy, 
buttery lids. It struck Bess: the word 
was E
glish, and the woman was so thick, 
so lacking in imagination. . . . 
"Do you speak English?" she asked. 
"Je-lle c011lPrends pas anf!.lais." 
"And I don't 
peak French." Bess 
got possession of the bottle, snapped it 
shut again in her bag. Then she broke, 
quietly as to voice: "Though you don't 
know English, I want to tell you that 
you're the world's most torpid woman. 
Duugh without-without any yeast. . . . 
A bun without anv currants. . .. In 
terms which you co
ld understand, if you 
could understand anything. Through 
three weeks of teas I've watcherl you, 
squatting up there like one of your own 
bland cream puffs, all down about you 
people with their tragedies and their com- 
edies, and you seeing nothing, dozing your 
life away as though life is a-a nap." 
,. JI ais-" 
" Suppose"- Bess still spoke in that 
e\ en voice, scorning emphasis as she 
scorned underlined words and undue 
punctuation, but the burned-out, vivid 
person of her caugh t fire afresh-" sup- 
pose you had cakes to bake--a hundred- 
no, a thousand cakes, and then some one 
tolcl you that you had just a part of a day 
VeL, LXXYIII.-IO 


. 


to do them all in. "'ould you-take that 
lying down? Peter off like-like a wet 
sky-rocket? Oh, YOll would. But if you 
were a live one, and young, and if you had 
an ounce of good old Yankee spunk in y ou 
, ' 
you d do what I'm going to-" 
Bess collapsed into ruinous coughing, 
turned to the door. 
But Madame Beaup who had heard 
her through without a flicker of compre- 
hension on her comely, round face, now 
stirred: "Un moment, mademoiselle-" 
She beckoned to a slack, grayish man at 
a near-by table, spoke to him in French. 
The man addresserl Bess diffidently: 
"She says I'm to interpret; glad to-to 
give it to her in French for you." 
He was the pleasant-faced, rather in- 
determinate-looking one whom Bess had 
had difficulty in classifying. "Tell her 
for me"-Bess went up in a bubble of 
laughter-" tell her her brioches are good 
-the best I've eaten." 
.Madame Beaup dimplerl her pleasure. 
.. Thank you," murmured Bess; "good 
after-" 
But madame put out a plump hand, 
spoke again to the man. 
"A fresh tray is just coming up from 
the kitchen. She asks if you will not 
have another one, on the house; she will 
be hurt if you will not sample a fresh one." 
"Thank you, please thank her." Hess 
smiled indefinitely at him, moved toward 
the door. 
"But-but she's doggoned persistent; 
it seems to be a life-and-death matter with 
her." 
,. You arc an 
\merican !" wheeled Bess. 
" Yes." 
"r thought-only the stick-" . 
" Camouflage. You arc an Amencan, 
too. I-would you finish out tea with 
me?" he hesitated. 
"I've had tea;" 
"Oh ! " 


12 9 



130 


A \\'01'1 L\.N OF NO I1'1AGI
A TION 


"But I might have some" more-if 
you'll tell me how I betray my nation- 
ality." 
" Good." 
J\Iadame nodded to the waitress, and in 
spite of their protests they were shown 
to an entirely fresh table-the one di- 
rectly below lVladame Beaup's cashier 
desk-and entirely fresh tea things were 
whisked to them. J\ladame herself set- 
tled back into her bosom. 
"Now, how did you know-?" 
"I knew by the way you stepped out, 
by the way you-carried your h
ad. I've 
been watching you-if you don't mind." 
He was of a young-looking middle age, a 
long, slack, shy man, gray-suited, gray- 
skinned, hair-that colorless, sandy hue 
of a gray beach. " I think I was homesick 
for an American to talk to me." 
"Homesick!" She wouldn't go into 
that again, but she would go into madame 
again: "V ou see her!" she scorned, nod- 
ding upward. "The measure of her com- 
prehension is-a cake!" 
"But-but she'll hear you." 
"No English. She-" 
"But . . . some intuition . . " 
"She hasn't any. You've watched 
them, all the people who come in here, 
seen how every mark on their faces comes 
out dear at just that twilight instant of 
tea-time: that governess with the white- 
faced girl; the little bearded Englishman 
with the auburn curl right in the middle 
of his forehead-he's there, now, in the 
corner behind us; that fragile, sweet-faced 
old woman with the hat of black lace and 
roses, who said: ' Yes, we're back here at 
Menton; we never make any changes'? 
Stories. . .. But they're nothing to 
that woman-so many pastries consumed. 
so many francs and centimes added." 
"But you know I-I don't see her like 
that. She is a fine-looking woman in her 
way: a fine skin, magnificent dark eyes- 
well, character beneath the-the :flesh." 
" Character! If you mean a nose and 
a chin," conceded Bess scornfully. 
"She's seemed to me like-like a sort 
of calm goddess si tting over her hectic 
little tea-room, seeing everything and giv- 
ing no sign. \Vild?" he laughed. 
" Crazy. You'll find I'm right." 
"The husband-" 
"There," nodded Bess, stabb
ng a 


crumb, "there he comes." A little thin 
creature with a waxed mustache, in a 
baker's apron and felt slippers, danced 
into the setting. He made a clattering of 
tin trays, and a temperamental clattering 
of words; he charged into the slumber of 
madame with language and gesticulations 
of anger. 
Madame merely heaved herself, with a 
motion as of turning over to the other side 
in her sleep. 
Monsieur danced off. He called upon 
the waitress and two customers to sym- 
pathize with him in his righteous indig- 
nation against that somnolent figure of a 
wife of his, but his emotional anger was 
not unmixed with admiration of the ob- 
ject of it-as a hysterical wife at once 
chafes against, and is proud of, her rock 
of a husband. He danced back to his 
kitchen. 
J\Iadame Beaup stirred and murmured 
a word to Albertine, the waitress. The 
girl served up to her mistress, with the 
tenrlerness of devotion, a plate containing 
the carefully peeled and separated seg- 
ments of a" tangerine. Madame plopped 
a piece of the fruit into her mouth. A 
customer stopped to speak with her, and 
she laughed out, a thick, rich laugh in her 
throat, like the bubbling of a rich pastry 
filling. She ate, and drowSE'd. 
"How the woman could snore!" Bess 
finished her. 
"\Vhy do you hate her so?" 
"I don't know. It's-steadying to 
hate; I've got to hate some one, I guess." 
"Because you . . . love everyone." 
He handed it to her with the shyness of a 
child giving a lady a flower. His eyes 
were gray, like the rest of him, and his 
voice drawled, Yankee-fashion. Almost 
Bess relaxed. 
"Vou are a writer," he decided. 
(. I've written a little-stories. You 
too? " 
" No. \Vhere-?" 
"Magazines- Oh, nothing-nothing; 
I could have written good ones." 
,. V ou will write good ones," he amended. 
She let it pass. 
"This morning I had an idea-" Her 
hat came off, and her black hair, which 
was cut short and worn carelessly and url- 
com promisingly straight, came out. J\Iore 
than one person in the tea-room looked at 



A \YO:\lA
 OF NO L\IAGI:\" -\TIO:-\ 


Bess-not because of any regular beauty 
of feature or any style to her drab clothes. 
She was thin to intensity-gone; what 
beauty she had left belonged to the bone 
structure of her face. But few persons 
got this far in their ohservations of Bess 
Pettingel1. She was like a bla,æ going, 
and you did not stop to a"k what wood 


.,..... ,... 


131 


It's a stolen Voyage of the Imagination in 
a family where imagination is a sin, but 
only at the end do vou realize that the 
ship is still beached rn the back yard and 
tha
 i
 has not moved from the back yard. 
It fimshes on the note of-the missing 
:,tarch." 
.. T can 
ee it," he nodded. 


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squatting up there like one (If your own hland crcJ.m putT:,. 
. is a-a nap." .Page 129. 


, dol:Ïng 
 our life away as thúugh life 


was burning, whether pine or birch. It 
was her fever of life that caught and held 
people. It caught and held the English- 
man - with - the-curl- in - the- middle-of -his- 
forehead at the corner table; his gaze 
strayed once to 
Iadame Beaup, but ma- 
dame's buttery lids dripped down over 
her glowing eyes. ,. This story is called 
. \Vent to Sea. '" 
,.. The owl and the pussy-cat went to 
sea-' " 
.. But it's a girl. She's sent to the store 
for-for starch. In
tead. she goes off 
adventuring on her grandfather's old ship. 
which is beached and rotting on the shore 
of their back yard. She visits strange 
foreign ports, meets storms and pirates. 


,. But I don't know enough about sail- 
ing." 
"You could learn." 
.. Oh-!" She picked up her felt hat, 
dented it with a fist. "Too many ideas, 
too many . . . people. crowding ., ". 
her breath seemed to leave her. 
,. :\Iy name is John Harwood," he 
stated. 
,. 
Iine is Be
:.' Pett, ingell "she shrugged. 
"[-it's been nice meeting you; thank
 
for-listening to me." 
,. \Vill you-would you have tea with 
me to-morrow?" 
.:\Iadame Beaup stirred. 
,. Xo. I-I can't." 
But he was hurt. di::;appointed uut of 



132 


A \YO;\L\
 OF 
O J:\l:\GI
:\TIO
 


all proportion; she couldn't leave him that 
way. Besides, one day. . . 
Bess clutched at it: "I can-I can man- 
age it-" 
,. Good! At four-thirty again?" 
" Yes." 
.Madame awoke to take their francs, 
subtracting the brioches.. she sank back 
into her neck. 
Coming from the little pink-and-white 
tea-room with its warm pastry smells into 
the chill blue of the Riviera dusk, Bess 
suddenly felt a drowning need to cling 
to this American. She pointed out the 
white-frosted wedding-cake in the win- 
dow, an elaborate, high affair with flutings 
and two tiny dressed dolls, a black bride- 
groom and a white bride, on the top. She 
stooped to pat a dog sitting there, with" a 
curve to his back," she giggled, "for 
sticking pins into." She finally invented 
an errand, and they wandered down the 
narrow, crooked streets of :l\1enton with 
its lighted shops. Cosey little shops. . . . 
For the first time in weeks Bess had to 
remind herself that she hated this dinky 
little play place. Hated it! 
"I'd like," she said, "to meet a purple- 
faced cop, and a chocolate nut sundae, and 
a good old healthy traffic jam with-" 
"\\Tith all the cars, American make, 
honking themselves hoarse with good old 
American honks." 
"Yes. No tinkly little carriage bells, no 
snippy little tin yaps. I'm lonely to have a 
boy scream 'Ex-tree!' in my ear, and I'm 
hungry to-to see the broadside of a barn 
done into' Carter's Little Liver Pills.'" 
"By gad, I think you're as anxious to 
get back as I am ! When-?" 
\Vhen . . .? Rut Bess rushed on, 
laughing: "You know, I keep remember- 
ing a conversation between two business 
men in a bookstore back home. One said, 
'He's a four-flusher'; and the other said, 
, You've spilled a shovelful'; and it ended. 
'I'm stung for the price of these books.' 
I'd give a good deal to hear some one say, 
with just that gusto, ' You've spilled a 
shovelful!' " 
"You've spilled-" he drawled. 
"No, he was brisk and he wore blue 
serge; you won't do at all." 


Night in Bess's small room at the top of 
the pension with the blinds of her window 


fi ung open to a waning moon above 
one high, humped shoulder of the Alps, 
and with palm fronds making shadow 
patterns on the palely lit wall above her. 
A mosquito sang in her hair, and 
Bess thought, petulantly, that trifling 
things, like mosquitoes, had no right to 
trouble her now. The sheet was crum- 
pled again . . . no body to these French 
sheets . . . if some one would only in- 
vent a means of stretching sheets tight 
over beds, like drum-skins. The little 
peck-peck hammering at coffins in that 
place on a back street from the pension 
was in her ears yet. . .. And the cem- 
etery, that quiet hill above the town and 
the 1\Iediterranean, with its cypress-trees 
and its marble slabs with names French, 
Greek, English, Dutch, German- A 
hateful place! The sun shone on it; but 
all the world came here to. . . die. 
:JYIustn't think . . . mustn't think. . . . 
Why, she couldn't believe- Ideas- 
crowding ideas. She would write! 
She rose, and faced a china pi tcher and 
wash-basin and a blank sheet of paper. 
But it was useless'. . . the little time, 
the little sheet of paper. . .. The cough 
sent her back to bed. 
Home! The old barn with its sheet 
ivy rippled by the breeze, and the ivy 
creeping over the screens of her windows 
in loving little pink tendrils . . . gener- 
ous lawns sloping, unfenced, to the street 
. . . pigeons, flowers in the back yard 
which had a struggle for life and didn't do 
so very well. Bess saw. against these 
memories tropical flowers bursting forth 
in a riot behind plaster walls topped with 
wicked bits of sharp glass against tres- 
passers: that was France for you. Home! 
The beauty of the slate roof in its warm, 
mousy colorings on a rainy day, and the 
peace of the shade on a sunny day. . . . 
Elm-trees, great old ones, whose trunks 
came blackly alive at you in a wet season, 
and whose green leaves wa vered and 
flowed over you in a sunshiny one- 
played light on you as you rested on your 
bed, turned your very bath water a shim- 
mering green if you failed to pull down 
the window curtain. So much shade at 
home that they had sometimes talked of 
thinning out the elm-trees. \Vhile here! 
Bess closed her eyes against the blinding 
white sun of her days here; she opened 



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From a drawing by George Wright, 
. anò the man came out of tremendous ,-\mtric.ln rubbers and winrlings of gray mutllcr. "It's my mother, '. 
he apulo
jzcd; ., she makes me promi
e in every letter."-I',lg"C I,J4. 


133 



134 


A \YOl\/IAN OF NO IlVI:\GI
ATIO
 


them to the hateful, scratching movement 
of the palm shadows on the wall. Home, 
with its little frying of rain to put you to 
sleep, or with its winter fretwork of crystal 
against a blue electric street lamp; she 
flung her head away from the view of Alps 
and moon-the dry, clear beau t y of persis- 
tent stars in a sky of persistent azure. Just 
the pink curl of shrimps under a smother of 
home mayonnaise on a bed of home let- 
tuce-instead of these horrid, unfamiliar 
fishy fish, and the curly lettuce in which 
bugs lurked, and the oily French dressings. 
To be back home, with her mother, or 
father, or even Celia! But she harln't 
any home. . . or mother, or father, or 
even Celia. That English doctor this 
afternoon had wanted to know if she had 
any relative to whom he could talk. She 
had no one, Bess had told him; she was 
alone. And so he had let her have it- 
oh, as gently as possible! 
But she didn't have to stand it, alone 
like this, away from home! With her 
pillow clutched tight against her loneli- 
ness and terror, Bess remembered the 
phial. She had her pride, her American 
independence. She would do it, not be- 
cause she was a coward, but because she 
was independent. She sat up; she could 
do it now, only what was there . . . ? 
Tea, that was it-tea with the Ameri- 
can man. Harwood-John Harwood. 
Gray eyes. American. 


They met again at the doorway, and 
went in together. The same table was 
waiting for them, and the same little Eng- 
lishman of the curl sat in his corner. 
l\ladame, whose brooding tranquillity 
seemed continuous with her brooding 
tranquillity of the day before . . . so 
that you could see them swabbing off 
marble-topped tables and floors, running 
home for their nights, and dashing back 
to their bakings and scurryings, with ma- 
dame still squatting there, undisturbed, 
like a left-over puff. . . madame smiled 
upon them benignly. 
Bess slid from a transparent purple 
raincoat, and the man came out of tre- 
mendous American rubbers and windings 
of gray muffler. "It's my mother," he 
apologized; "she makes me promise in 
every letter "-and they parked their 
umbrellas, and settled cosily. 


"You have a mother?" 
"Oh, decidedly," he grinned. "You 
too? " 
"No," said Bess lightly. "I have- 
Dorothy Hicks in Paris. She's written 
something of coming down here Easter 
time, but she may change her mind. I 
don't tell her-" Bess stopped; "I don't 
tell her I'm dy-aching to see an Amer- 
ican." 
"And you won't go to Paris?" 
"No, the weather-rains." 
He nodded, with the manner of com- 
prehending the subject of weathers per- 
fectly. Bess glanced at him quickly, but 
he was not even seeing her-he could not 
be suspecting her. 
"Not that Menton is much better, with 
its dry winds and its dust." 
Yes, he had gone into that, too. 
But she mustn't be serious. "Dor- 
othy Hicks," she giggled, "has set her 
trap for art. She's copying' Monna Lisa' 
at the Louvre, and she's that exact about 
it-my dear, she's baited her canvas for 
the smile as definitely as you'd bait a 
mouse-trap with strong cheese." 
"That bad?" 
"Awful. She's a practical dear, and 
she's discovered black tights for chilly 
Paris days, and she writes me-blàck 
tights-black tights-" The cough seized 
Bess:" Cold," she managed-" I've caught 
one somewhere-" 
But lV1r. Harwood, also, had a cold, 
and he groped for his own handkerchief, 
making Bess's cold plausible. "Riddle: 
What has every American on the Conti- 
nent for a Christmas present?" he 
drawled. 
"Cold!" gasped Bess. And they 
laughed together over colds and French 
remedies. 
"But if you are-are homesick" (Bess 
was suddenly resting herself in that Y an- 
kee drawl), "why don't you go home? A 
boat calls at lV10naco bound for New 
York the day after to-morrow." 
She found herself wanting the relief of 
telling him, quite frankly. "I\-e no 
home to go to," said Bess. 
"No. . . people?" 
" No, they're all-dead, the house is 
sold. I stay here because, with the rate 
of exchange, I can just manage to live on 
l1l.y income; I couldn't live on it at home, 



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From a drau'i1Zg by George If'rig"t, 
But now Monsieur Beaup danced onto the scene. . , and worled himself up to a fury of outr.lgcd 
emotlOn.-J>agc I3Ó. 


135 



136 


:\ \YOl\IAN" OF NO I:VL\GIN:\T[()
 


without working, I'm lazy, you see. I 
can't even draw on my small capital and 
take a-a last fling with it, because it's 
tied up." 
" You're-bound here?" 
" Yes, but plenty of others are in the 
same boat; France is full of poor little 
orphans and widows who couldn't exist 
on their incomes at home. Now, please 
tell me, what are you doing here?" 
"Loafing-mostly loafing. I-had a 
year's leave from the university-" 
"A professor!" she tripped him up, 
spreading on a we and reverence. 
He colored like a boy, apologized: 
"Only an assistant professor." 
"Of what?" 
" La tin. " 
" Classics!" goaded Bess. c, Oh, my 
Lord ! " 
"But it's run into two years-Italy, 
mostly-Rome and Florence, some re- 
search work. I-came up here for the 
sun. " 
"Everybody comes here for the sun." 
"And look!" he shivered at the rain 
which swept the window-pane beside 
them. "Shall we have more hot tea?" 
He seemed as anxious as Bess to skim 
the sober facts with laughter, only he was 
a shade less adept at mirth than was 
Bess. So Bess sparkled breathlessly for 
him, teased him with "Professor this" 
and" Professor that," furnished him with 
an intimate and technical explanation as 
to how the Englishman's auburn curl 
could have been achieved with one damp 
rag. He stirred his tea, forgot to drink it 
in watching her; and Bess liked particu- 
larly the way his smile came out, not in 
any single definite region quarantined and 
restricted for smiles, but all oyer his thin 
face. 
People came and went. The tea-room 
buzzed with talk, was dripped over with 
rain puddles. Aboye it drowsed l\Iadame 
Beaup, with one sleepy eye on the pastry- 
counter, the other on the money-drawer. 
But now madame gave her first exhibit 
of energy in Bess's three weeks' experience 
of her-inadvertent and mistaken energy 
at that. The entrance of three small, 
muddy urchins with one copper to spend 
coincided with the entrance, from the 
kitchen, of a fresh tray of beautifully 
glazed éclairs. l\ladame sucked in her 


cheeks as though in distaste of muddy 
children; she puffed out her cheeks as 
though in approval of éclairs. She 
troubled herself to the extent of lifting her 
royal right eyebrow at Albertine in signal 
that she would be pleased to examine the 
éclairs more closely. 
The tray was heaved up to her on 
Albertine's flat right palm. ]\ladame 
pinched a crumb of chocolate with a criti- 
cal thumb and forefinger. So far, so 
good. But :i\Iadame Beaup chose that 
moment to move herself-really to move 
herself-a regular upheaval of movement, 
as though a cramp in all quarters of her 
great body, from all her years of sitting, 
suddenly turned her completely over. 
"Hold!" squeezed Harwood. 
"She starts-she moves-" 
"Going, going, gone!" Sure enough, 
the tray teetered, toppled, and turned 
turtle-crashed, with its fragile contents, 
to the floor, before the surprised Albertine 
could save it. 
lVladame considered the mess of éclairs, 
which had come uncorseted of their fill- 
ings on her floor, with a face which came 
as near achieving disgust as it could 
achieve any expression through its pad- 
ding of fat. 
She made a sucking sound of her cheeks 
and a motion of her head toward the chil- 
dren. The little rats needed no second 
invitation, they fell upon the ruined 
éclairs. But now :\Ionsieur Beaup danced 
onto the scene, and saw the wreck of hi
 
work. He accused Albertine, he accused 
madame. He concentrated upon ma- 
dame. He flung his fist in her face; he 
cleared out the small scavengers, not be- 
fore they had cleared up the éclairs; he 
toe-danced and beat his heart, and 
worked himself up to a fury of outraged 
emotion. l\Iadame lifted a left eyebrow 
at .\lbertine, and was served up her plate 
of quartered tangerines, She took a 
pulpy bite of the fruit, and the juice 
spurted directly into monsieur her hus- 
band's eye. .Monsieur Beaup made one 
final gesture of abysmal hopelessness- 
and faded off to his kitchen, doubtless to 
begin on fresh éclairs. 
"But honestly," giggled Bess, "did you 
ever see such a clumsy, stupid-?" 
" Sh ! " 
"She doesn't understand English." 



A \V01\lAN OF 
O Il\I:\GIN:\TIO
 


137 


"Oh, 1 keep forgetting. But are you "Nor I. But-such a little time." 
sure she's-?" (Only afterward did the strangeness of 
"You mean she did it on purpose?" that remark of his strike home to Bess, 
"\Vell, with a fussy little penny-pinch- causing her to wonder whether he was 
ing husband like that, and with those gifted with some kind of second sight.) 
hungry-eyed kids-" "Yes," she clutched. "It gives you- 
"But that would require imagination. almost the right to snatch. Yes!" 
Look at her, 1\1r. Harwoorl! Can you "Four-thirty?" 
trulysayyou think she's capable of-?" "All right." . 
"Well she doesn't look-" Behind them l\ladame Beaup's eyes 
"No. 'You're mistaking your own strayed over her tea-room, met the eyes 
imagination for her imagination. Stolid, of the little Englishman with the frontal 
stupid," held Bess, stabbing into her curl. The man's mouth. twitched ner- 
gloves. vously, as though he might wish to smile 
They seemed to be through. Bess at madame. l\Iadame's gaze rested on 
managed two witticisms and a compari- him placidly for a moment, then moved 
son of l\Iadame Beaup to a pet guinea on. But the effort of optic motion even 
pig she
d once had, and still they sat. was too much for madame, and she re- 
Again that sense of laughing over repres- lapsed into a gentle doze. 
sions-as though he shared the repres- That she should be buoyed up one min- 
sions with her, Bess felt strangely. He ute and toppled down the next, was 
had decided not to ask her to tea again- merely one of the symptoms of the mal- 
that was it. But he liked her, just as she ady which gripped her-Bess knew that. 
liked him; Bess knew that he-more than But this was one of her up nights. She 
liked her. Why, then. . .? Again she walked from the bed to the wardrobe of 
rested herself in the gray eyes, again her room, back and forth, and just the 
sparkled for him to bring out that smile swing of her hips gave her pleasure. She 
of his whole face. But she mustn't! If leaned from her window into another 
he asked her to tea again, she would de- lovely night-for it had cleared-of pa- 
dine. tient, purple mountain, and everlasting 
They were through. Bess waited for stars in a blue sky, and transient little 
him, while he paid at the desk. She but- town gone to sleep. And suddenly the 
toned up her purple coat against the rain, beauty of this foreign place was no longer 
and the last button gave her the sharpest sharply separate from the remembered 
realization of the end-everything done beauty of home; they seemed to merge 
up and finished. She would go out into and blend into one larger beauty, and 
the wet, and home to her own room, alone Bess was holding both beauties in her 
with all the terrors of last night returned heart as a vase holds two kinds of flowers 
to her. in one bouquet. If this was the Ameri- 
l\Iadame moved in her sleep and shed can, the effect of meeting some one kind 
words. - from home, then Bess would go on meet- 
"She says," he translated for her, "that ing him, she resolved. She would have 
they will have mince pies to-morrow of tea with him every day! 
'the true American mince-meat.'" But that promise to herself, as though 
"l\lince-pies," said Bess, on the note in the last, lost moment of her loneliness 
of a drowning person grasping at a raft. she should reach out and pull herself back 
"Do you like mince pies?" to safety by an unexpected hand, eased 
"\Ve had them a year ago Christmas; her too abruptly. It whittled so sharp 
Celia made them." the beautv which was still hers for a little 
"\Vill you-?" the man's breath longer, that Bess had to shut her eyes 
failed him. "\\Tould you," he requested, against tears. The beauty grew in her 
as solemnly as though he were asking her and pressed upon her until she had to do 
to marry him, Bess thought humorously, something with it. 
"have mince pie with me to-morrow?" And so she sat down and made hot, 
"No. I... ought not," she amended quick little jottings for stories: 
faintlyc "About her revolve great things, great 



138 


A \VOrvIAN OF NO I
IAGINATI0N 


persons, but she interprets them in her 
own language, which is the language 
of-dough. She sees the world gastro- 
nomically. Butter yellow and cinnamon 
brown." "This stupid woman," Bess 
continued it aloud, "-a love story de- 
velops under her very nose, and she never 
even sees it. And such a love story! Oh, 
I can write! I can map my days-mark 
it down, five hours every day for . . . 
howmanvweeks? No matter-it wiII be 
exciting, .breathless like a race." 
Bess felt the breathless excitement of 
it. She wrote feverishly until far into the 
nigh 1. 


"Hello. So! l\1ail for you, :Mister 
Professor! " 
"From my mother. You too." 
"Dorothy Hicks. A nd emery-boards, 
and soap flakes, and a patent-leather belt 
with scarlet knobs on it-an extrava- 
gance, tha t; I've been shopping, Pro- 
fessor Harwood." 
The table was certainly reserved for 
them; the whole setting, down to the little 
Englishman in his corner, seemed to be 
arbitrarily reserved for them without 
change. But they accepted this now as 
their right, stowed packages and letters 
away on their own window-sill, and set- 
tled themselves in their own chairs with 
an air as of arriving home. ::\Iadame 
might have been a familiar china bank for 
pennies on the mantelpiece, and the Eng- 
lishman a famiIiar bit of carving for mere 
doubtful adornment in the corner of their 
own dining-room, for any attention which 
the two paid them. 
"Two teas, two mince pies, toast, pas- 
tries, and er-" 
" Stop!" commanded Bess. 
"Have you any jelly? \Vhat kinds? 
Currant?" he said on a question. 
"Currant," said Bess on a period; "we 
do agree on all important points. Only 
why is it like a party? And is it a good- 
by party, or a-hello party, or only a 
birthday party?" 
" Hush-" 
"Silence!" mocked Bess. "A party is 
a party, and one accepts it with an appe- 
tite, reverence, and gratitude." 
She rippled on; she played with the sun- 
light on her fork, and talked against time 
-the moment when she would look up 
and find his gray Ameriçan eyes with her 


own. She was jabbed by trivial beauties 
-the delicious way the butter melted 
into the hot toast, the pale, smoky-tasting 
China tea-exquisite! She cut into the 
bright jelly with a spoon, and suddenly, 
ridiculously, it brought tears to her eyes 
just to have been so near spoiling that 
perfect mound. "I don't think I want it, 
after all," said Bess; and the jelly clung 
to the spoon for an instant, and then 
dropped back into place. 
"Too-pretty," growled Harwood. 
He understood-that was more ex- 
quisite, even, than the jelly. 
"l\Iore tea?" she asked. The bright 
mound stood untouched between them. 
"Three lumps," he laughed at her; 
"that's not civilized." 
"I like three." 
It was like an intimate family argument 
-the kind that repeats itself three times a 
day for a lifetime. Intimate, too, was the 
slow, absent-minded way he stirred his 
tea, sitting opposite her, or forgot his tea 
entirely to watch her. It was pleasant to 
sparkle for him, to rest in him. . . . Such 
layers of quiet kindness in him, like deep, 
soft blankets piled warmly against a bit- 
ter nigh t. 
"It's not-quite. . . ?" she insinuated, 
with a wry mouth for the" true American 
mince-meat. " 
"Not so you'd notice it." His Yankee 

rawl was like coming home-to her own 
home, with her mother and her father- 
after all these quick tongues. His smile 
-not the eyes, she could not bring herself 
to the eyes-was like a fire going on the 
living-room hearth. Bess looked down at 
her finger-tips. Ivy on the barn, old elm- 
trees, lawns sloping down to streets. . . 
poinsettias and bougainvillea, naked sun- 
light, and plaster walls spiked with glass 
. . . all the old things she loved-all the 
new things she'd hated-run together, 
blurred like the colors in an agate. 
She looked up at the little fragile old 
lady, in the bonnet of black lace and pink 
roses, who had said: " Yes, we are back at 
.l\lenton; we never make any changes." 
She went from one face to another, at just 
that instant of thin, clear twilight when 
every line was visible for her io read. 
Yes, even lVladame Beaup-even her face 
was a book not without words. Stories in 
flashes. . .. Life-all the meaning of life 
laid op
n to her in one instant of revela- 



A \Y01\1AN OF NO 1:\1 -\GINA TIO
 


tion. She, Bess Pettingell, was herself 
still alive, and yet she held the key to it 
like this. 
"Did I tell you," he laughed, "about 
the Exclusive Lady of our hotel? The 
one we've dubbed Atllwsphere?" 
Bess rose to the gray eyes, with an an- 


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139 


"Atmosphere," she struggled aloud. 
"Tell me." 
In love wIth him-too late she was in 
love. Too late life offered her everything 
everything-the irony of that ! Sh
 
must not see him again. . .. She had no 
right . . . 


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She . . . opened her door to that absurd littI
 Monsieur Bcaup and took her letter and her packages 
. . from him.!.-Page 140. 


ticipatory smile, But their smiles died, 
and their eyes met, naked of mirth. 
"Why," she faltered, "it couldn't 
be-!" 
"Couldn't it?" he met her, with that 
clear, serious gaze. 
" No, no ! " Bess escaped him, she an- 
chored herself to madame's immovable 
face. 
It couldn't be! Kot true-it didn't 
hit you this way. \Vhy, he was a stranger; 
she didn't half know him. But the 
strangeness of him was the proof of it- 
the things they'd skipped to come at the 
things that mattered-this sure, sudden 
contact out of-unfamiliarity. "I must- 
n't !" gritted Bess. 


But to live with him all the rest of her 
life. .. To teach his shyness, his awk- 
ward hands-Bess held herself down to his 
lean hands that fumbled the tea things. . . . 
To laugh at him, and to curl up in him, 
resting deep in her tiredness. '''hy, it was 
home! She had come home, harder than 
ever before, in her . . . love of him. 
Home-she had a right to a home. . . . 
Bess reared up her head, met the gray 
eyes, square, on a breathless challenge. 
She would! She'd take what was offered 
to her! 
,. I am lea\'ing to-morrow morning," he 
flung out; "I am sailing from .Monaco at 
noon on the Pro'i'idence." 
.. Home? " 



140 


A \iVOl\IAN OF NO IMAGINATION 


. "Colorado- I am going to Colorado." 
:I\Iadame Beaup sent a flock of little 
paper bills fluttering over the floor for Al- 
bertine to retrieve at the moment. That 
helped. 
"Our last tea "-Bess managed a laugh 
that turned into a cough. 
"Sorry," he muttered, "I-didn't find 
you before." 
"In which case-more teas," she 
nodded brightly. 
She must make the move to go; but she 
was riveted there. She turned on her 
flood of brittle mirth, consumed three for- 
bidden cigarettes. He seemed as bound 
by inertia, and as anxious to laugh. as was 
she. 
Albertine, at madame's signal, hung a 
sign on the door and switched off certain 
lights. Gradually the tea-room cleared, 
until they were alone in the place with 
only l\Iadame Beaup and the Englishman 
in the corner. Monsieur danced in, and 
the sputtering was as of many fireworks 
going off at once. 
"What is the row?" whispered Bess. 
"He seems to be furious because she's 
shut up shop." 
"It is early; they're open till seven 
o'clock regularly." 
" Yes." 
"\Vhy-? " 
"Some whim, no doubt." 
"But a whim that goes counter to the 
interests of the money-drawer-in her," 
puzzled Bess. 
"It's-cosey this way." 
" Yes. " 
"Priva te room for a farewell party." 
"And it's farewell now, I'm afraid," she 
smiled. "They've played the God Save 
the King an hour ago, yet here we sit. 
Nice party, :Mr. Harwood, and -bon 
voyage." They shook hands, quite cas- 
ually, under 
Iadame Beaup's chins. 
,. Good-by." 
,. Good-night and good-by," laughed 
Bess. 
l'vladame Beaup was awake. Since her 
head was turned tmvard the plate-glass 
window, she probably saw the American 
young lady moving off alone through the 
dusk. She sat in a stillness that might 
have been spun of thought. Her husband 
shot up a volley of words, from below- 
decks, at her, but l\Iadame Beaup, if she 
heard, gave no sign. She might have 


been pondering deeply-or was she only 
dreaming deeply? The Englishman with 
the curl on his forehead wiped his lips, and 
rose. He gathered in the letters and pack- 
ages which the two Americans had left on 
their window-sill. and handed them up to 
madame, with a bow. 
:Madame grunted. She glanced at the 
two letters with their two addresses, de- 
liberately took them from their respective 
envelopes. and looked them over. Since 
the letters were written in English, she 
doubtless made nothing of them; but the 
addresses, with their .:\Ienton pensions and 
their Menton streets, were legible to the 
densest inhabitant of .l\-Ienton, including 
postal clerks and 1Yladame Beaup. ' 
Now madame lifted her voice rather 
than herself: "Honoré! 0 Honoré!" 
l\Iadame's husband came running. She 
ga ve him the letters and packages, and 
exceedingly definite instructions. He pro- 
tested both volubly and emotionally; but 
he got himself out of his apron and into 
his jacket, and he trotted off into the 
night in exact obedience to his wife's com- 
mands. 
l\fadame wished the Englishman a 
pleasant" Bon soir, monsieur," and called 
to Albertine for an orange. 
That was how Bess was hauled up out 
of the darkness some ten minutes after she 
had gone down into it. She switched on 
the light, opened her door to that absurd 
little l\Ionsieur Beaup, and took her letter 
and her packages from him. But the let- 
ter was not hers, from Dorothy Hicks; it 
was his letter, from his mother. 
Bess tried to'stop the little man. but he 
was already gone, down five spiral flights. 
The letter would give her an excuse to 
see him once more-to call him at his 
hotel! 
But, dear God, no-she couldn't go all 
through that again- It was done, and 
that was right-right for him. She would 
put the letter into another envelope and 
mail it to the return address; the return 
address would be on the inside-yes- 
"Dear John-" It was contrary to 
every principle she'd ever had, yet she read 
on, lacking the energy to stop herself: 
". . . So glad you've decided on Colo- 
rado. l\lrs. Titcomb's brother-in-law's 
first cousin went to Colorado, and she 
came back, after two years, as sound as a 
bell. Also l'vliss Lina Sears's aunt on her 



A \YOJ\Il\N OF XO II\IAGINATION 


mother's side, and was a complete cure. 
But first, John, I òo want you to see Doc- 
tor Traphagen. I have such confidence 
in the Doctor. He was with you dear 
when you were born, and he would kno
 


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141 


dered at the vision of that terrible tea. 
He needed to be taken care of. Milk and 
eggs, sun and air- Oh, she knew all the 
tricks to that trade! 
Yet Colorado was the place-could she 



 


 


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Res;; dragged herself to a top balcony of the house, and saw, far off in an enamel-blue sea, the white steamer 
pass trailing its plume of smoke.-I'age 142. 


at once whether your lungs are seriously 
affected. . . ." 
Colorado . . . lungs. . .. So he had 
the same malady she had! And he hadn't 
guessed about her, and that was the rea- 
son- But this reversed the situation 
entirely; she would call him-of course 
she would call him! \Vhy, the great, 
shambling, awkward boy, wandering 
around in the rain, and eating-she shud- 


do better for him than Coloraòo? After 
all, he must still have a chance, while 
she- 
Bess dropped back to her bed. She 
would not call him. 
She thought she had lived through a 
great deal, but she found, in the next 
hours, that she had lived through nothing. 
Some time in the night she got up from her 
bed and rolled herself in her steamer rug 



142 


A 'Y01\IAK OF KO I=\IAGINATION 


on the floor, because she could no longer 
endure the softness. And some time later 
she rose and poured a colorless liquid from 
a slim bottle out the window. To-mor- 
row she might write. To-night she hoped 
she might sleep. 
At noon of the following day, Bess 
dragged herself to a top balcony of the 
house, and saw, far off in an enamel-blue 
sea, the white steamer pass trailing its 
plume of smoke. He was gone. 
At four-thirty the habit was too strong 
for her. She went to Beaup's for tea. 
l\ladame Beaup actually welcomed her. 
The stage-setting was as usual: the same 
Englishman in his corner, the same table, 
with the same little vase of yellow mar- 
guerites-nothing lacking except him. 
"Tea and toast," said Bess to the 
shadow over her. 
The shadow sat down in his chair. 
" r on! " 
"1 couldn't-" 
"But your boat?" 
"It sailed without me. This letter" 
(her letter from Dorothy Hicks) "-it 
seemed to-change things. 1 read it," he 
confessed abruptly. 
" And 1 read yours from your mother. ., 
"She speaks about-your lungs, too." 
"Dorothy always writes about lungs- 
nasty word I-it's one of the things 1 can't 
forgive her." 
"Both of us." 
"Yes." 
"But how," he paused to ask, "did you 
get my letter? lVIonsieur Beaup?" 
" Yes. He mixed them, I suppose." 
" And how did l\Ionsieur Beaup-?" 
"lVIadame Beaup." They looked up 
at madame in the simultaneous suspicion. 
But she sat placid as though even her own 
name, in English accents, was Greek to 
her; she was certainly neither a quick nor 
a clever woman. 
"If it's a stupidity," said Bess, "it can 
be traced directly to her." 
"Kever mind her." And he tried to 
explain to Bess, very carefully, how, being 
only half a man, he'd felt he had no right 
to-take her time. 
"But since I'm only a quarter of a 
woman?" she laughed. 
"No, it can't be as bad as-!" 
"And you-you can't be really-?" 
"vVell, I have a good chance. But 
you?" he per::3isted. 


"Dorothy's a si11y thing-always 
making a tremendous stew about noth- 
ing." 
"I thought I had a right to-" 
"To stay on and have teas with me." 
"\Vell, yes, teas." He was shy, and 
they dawdled, approaching indirectly to 
the intimacy of worrying about each 
other. He stirred his tea, and smiled. 
Bess struck in with bright little darts, and 
laughed. They built up an absurd story 
plot. They sat silent. 
But now. for the first time, madame 
took over the floor of her own tea-room. 
The folds of her fat moved first, and 
seemed to descend from the platform be- 
fore madame herself actually got under 
way. l\Iadame became, for the first time, 
agitated. Her agitation pertained, of 
course, to a cake. She waddled in with 
it-a high wedding-cake with the white 
frosting and flutings and the little doll 
bride and bridegroom-and she quivered 
all over in her distress. "A wedding- 
cake goes to waste, monsieur." (This is 
Harwood's subsequent translatio'1 for 
Bess, though at the time Bess, wIthout 
any French at all, followed the argument 
perfectly. ) 
"It needn't," said Harwood, 
'go to 
waste. If there were a wedding-" 
" Ah yes, monsieur, if there were a wed- 
ding. . ." 
He turned to Bess. "It's what-I've 
been trying to arrive at. I-they do give 
me a good chance, the doctors." 
, "And they give me no chance at all," 
said Bess. 
"\Vhat! Tie it up!" he ordered ma- 
dame brusquely. 
l\Iadame Beaup was content. Even 
then Bess spared, from her other feelings, 
resentment for that woman. Human 
beings might love and die about her, but 
cakes went on forever; the tragedies of 
cakes were the true ones! Of course, the 
creature lacked any real- 
She squee,æd her own imagination into 
one clenched fist. "So vou see-no use. 
I can't-" - 
"How long do they say?" 
"Six months." 
"l\'" 0 !" He was shocked, he refused to 
believe, he railed against doctors. 
He became a man of action. "No time 
to lose! \Ve'll go now. . . minister . . . 
night train to Paris. . . fast boat to New 



A \YOl\IAN OF NO HvlAGINATION 


York. . . Colorado. I'll take you to Colo- 
rado, and we'll show them-" 
" N" o. " 
"Yes." He had Scotch blood, and his 
stubbornness was up. There was no 
downing him. 
l\Iadame bestowed upon them a large 
cardboard box. They departed, still ar- 
guing and protesting. 
l\Iadame Beaup clambered back up to 
her throne, and for an instant her fat 
hands were raised in a gesture which was 
like a benediction, until one saw that she 
was merely stabbing their bill onto her 
tall spindle, and that even now she was 
relaxing into dreams. 


The train for Paris jerked and rocked 
them through the south of France on a 
morn
ng which opened golden, like a 
promIse. 
"Home," drawled Harwood. 
"Though it doesn't matter," Bess whis- 
pered. 
"And those damned doctors-" 
"They don't matter, either. Every- 
thing has seemed-inadequate: the things 
you feel, and then the little pint measures 
you pour them into. But this- ! You 
are not inadequate. . .. rou are a-a 
quart measure, at least. And six whole 
months! " 
"But say you'll fight it!" 
"I'll fight it," wistfully. 
"Say you won't give up!" 
,. I won't give up," she promised, with 
the smile of one who would like to believe 
in fairy-tales. 
They haù the compartment to them- 
selves. He moved from the seat opposite 
her, where he could only see her, to the 
seat ne)"t to her. But he sat upon a card- 
board box. .. 'Vhat in-?" 
.. J\.Iadame Beaup." 
"'VeIl, it's done for." 
"\Vhy, it's not a cake at all," Bess dis- 
covered; '.it's only papier-mâclzé frosted 
over-a show cake!" 
., But she said it was a wedding-cake go- 
ing to waste, that the party had failed her." 
,. And then she switched them and gave 
us the wrong one, If that isn't like her 
stupidity! " 
,. Bess, you're sure it couldn't be French 
cleverness? So many stupid incidents, 
one after the other, all working toward an 
end so-divine." 


143 


"Dear! . .. But you mean she hacIn't 
a wedding-cake at all? She only in- 
vented that, and then sold us her window- 
trimmings to-to prod you along?" 
He denied it. "I didn't need prodding! 
Only- " 
"Bosh," said Bess. "But it's a corking 
plot. Listen, John: stupid woman, sit- 
ting in on a-a love-story-" 
He kissed her. 
"-And in the end, she's not stupid at 
all. " 
"Suppose she'd mixed those Ictters on 
purposc," he nodded. 
"Even farther back, suppose she'd in- 
troduced us to each other on purpose." 
"She would have had to understand 
English, yet pretend-" 
"Because it pleases her to remain im- 
personal-like a god or a fate in the lives 
of these people about her. . .. A good 
touch, John. But the English-" Bess 
shook her head. 
"Still, that's not stretching it too far," 
he persisted; "they speak shreds of three 
and four languages, some of those .Menton 
sh opkeepers. " 
,. A good story," murmured Bess, her 
imagination playing with it. . .. "The 
\Voman of No Imagination. . .. She 
makes their romance, and they go off 
thinking her stupid and never do 
know. . . ." 


On that same afternoon, back in the 
tea-room, the little Englishman with the 
curl paused before 
Iadame Beaup's desk. 
"Les deu.\ américains?" he ventured. 
.. Ah," said madame, in clear, exact 
English, "they marry, those two." A\nd 
she laughed complacently. 
".Madame," said the little man gal- 
lantly, "you are a wonderful woman. I 
congratulate you." 
"Ah, monsicur?" she dimpled. 
"Ah, yes, madame," he bowed. "I 
should like to ask you one question-" 
But the one question was lost. "Psst!" 
warned madame. .. The English govern- 
ess with her pupil! The pupil, that girl, 
is in a great trouble. . .. If monsieur 
will excuse me-" 
The little Englishman took up his or- 
chestra seat in the corner. 
Iadame 
nodded negligently from Albertine to the 
table beneath her desk, and subsided into 
her neck. 



Heredity and Sex 
BY E. 1\1. FAST 
Professor at Harvard Vnivcrsity; .\uthor of ":\Iankind at the Crossroads, " "Heredity-the :\Iaster 
Riddle of Science," etc. 




 .' FRICA
 travellers 
, , agree that no ostrich 

 : Ib';.. ever tried to out- 

 : A I 
 manæuvre a danger 

 
 by sticking his head in 
__ _ _ the desert sand. This 
WW recipe for solving 
problems was invent- 
ed by man in order to deal with matters 
connected with sex. In a world peopled 
by men and women the subject naturally 
holds an important position. Every social 
question arises from, or is linked with, the 
differences between the sexes; yet for nine- 
teen hundred years civilized nations have 
tried to manage their affairs posing the 
while as if the sexual factor were non- 
existent. 
This pretense is passing, and we are 
well rid of it. \Ve have begun to realize 
that the subjective dominance of the sex 
appeal, which shows so clearly in the love 
interests pervading our literature, drama, 
and art, is the emotion to be expected of 
normal people. The mask of apathy is 
the abnormal, and psychologists have 
shown that it often cloaks something 
more inglorious than mere sham. 
Sex is an interesting subject. One may 
say this to-day without forfeiting his claim 
to respectability. It is interesting because 
apart from its other bearings it holds a 
prominent place among the objective 
studies of the biologist. And properly 
so. Sexual reproduction is the keystone 
of the whole evolutionary structure. 
This world would have had a monoton- 
ous history without it, not because it 
leads man to become a "chaos of thought 
and passion all confused," but because 
there would have been no such noble ani- 
mal to disturb the music of the spheres. 
Our humble planet would have rolled on 
to its final doom of cold and death with 
the inglorious record of having produced 
nothing even as varied and exciting as a 
jelly-fish or a grasshopper. Variety was 
144 


the price of life for man, and no one of 
nature's numerous experiments in propa- 
gation permitted the production of such 
varied forms as did the creation of a new 
individual by the union of two cells. 
The reasons why such conclusions have 
been generally accepted are numerous. 
Perhaps the simplest argument is the 
following. \Ve know that asexual meth- 
ods of reproduction were not abandoned 
because they were too slow. In one week 
a vigorous fungus like the corn smut can 
produce a number of potential new plants 
in the form of spores, greater than the 
total human population during the Chris- 
tian Era. The fusion of two cells is a dis- 
tinct loss of time. \Ve know too that 
spores, buds, bulbs, offshoots, and other 
similar methods of multiplication are 
perfectly good means of keeping species 
flourishing, for numerous sorts which re- 
produce in this manner are with us to-day. 
But species which did not adopt sexual 
reproduction remained lowly and unspe- 
cialized, and species which abandoned it 
abandoned the road of progress at the 
same time. Why? Simply because evolu- 
tion moves by steps, by mutations, and 
these changes are inherited more or less 
independently of one another. \Vhen 
half-a-dozen mutations occur in a given 
stock of the asexual type, therefore, that 
stock has only six chances to escape an- 
nihilation at the ruthless hand of Natural 
Selection. There are six opportunities of 
fitting into the general scheme of things 
with the alternative of being removed 
from the scheme entirely. On the other 
hand, six variations in a sexually repro- 
ducing organism where there is an oppor- 
tunity for crossing, give two to the sixth 
power possibilities for survival, or sixty- 
four all told, through hereditary recom- 
bination. It makes a great difference. 
Formerly it was thought that species 
propagating only by asexual methods 
gradually died out through loss of some 



HEREDITY A
D SEX 


mysterious sort of vital energy. Why 
people drew such conclusions in face of 
the fact that some of the most ancient 
types show no traces of sex, is an enigma 
which must be left to the psychologist, 
but they did. They believed that sexual 
reproduction meant rejuvenation, a kind 
of fountain of youth. The idea appears 
to have arisen because Paramoecium, a 
one-celled organism shaped like a bed- 
room slipper, dies under ordinary labora- 
tory conditions after a hundred or so 
generations of reproduction by division. 
Given the opportunity, however, these 
tiny slipper-animals fuse together. The 
twain become one flesh in physical reality, 
and afterward return to asexual multipli- 
cation with great activity and vigor. 
\V oodruff of Yale and Jennings of Johns 
Hopkins have given us the true explana- 
tion of this strange behavior. The ani- 
malculae are poisoned by the by-products 
of their own life processes. If waste 
products are removed and new food given 
periodically, Paramoecium cultures can 
be kept in a perfect state of health for 
thousands of generations without conju- 
gation, but conjugation serves as a kind 
of antidote for bad living conditions. 
By studying the behavior of the descen- 
dants after conjugation, moreover, Jen- 
nings found that only certain ones show 
renewed vigor. It is believed, therefore, 
that conjugation is not of itself a rejuve- 
nator, but that only those individuals 
having desirable combinations of heredi- 
tary characters profit by the transaction. 
Essentially, sexual reproduction is a 
method of propagation dependent on the 
behavior of the chromosomes, those mi- 
nute freight cars within each living cell 
whose operations with the materials they 
contain build up the body characters of 
every organism. \Vhen a type is suffi- 
ciently simple and un specialized to go on 
its way living and reproducing its image 
by mere chromosome divisions, \ve say 
that its propagation is asexual; when a 
tribe propagates by a fusion of chromo- 
some sets from two cells, we believe that 
it has taken on the essential features of 
sexual reproduction. 
Nature is not niggardly in her experi- 
ments. She will try almost anything, not 
only once but many times. She believes 
in giving new ideas a chance. By all the 
VOL, LXXVIII,-u 


145 


evidence sex has arisen again and again in 
both the ani
al an
 vegetable kingdoms, 
and the vanous gUIses under which the 
scheme is carried on are almost innumer- 
able. These various expedients, however, 
are but cloaks for one process, a shifting 
o! chromosome materials in the prepara- 
tIon of the germ-cells and their further 
recombination at fertilization. 
Wha t looks like an origin of sex occurs 
to-day in the tiny green alga (Ulothrix) 
one finds as a scum in stagnant water. 
In this species large fat spores are formed 
when times are prosperous which need 
only proper housing conditions to germi- 
nate and produce their kindc Under the 
pressure of adversity, on the other hand, 
the plant produces starved-looking, lonely 
little spores which must cast their lot to- 
gether so intimately as to become one 
body, before they can start life anew. 
And among primitive animals a very 
similar round of affairs takes place. 
After the origin of sex the evolutionary 
trend in both kingdoms was in astonish- 
ing agreement. First the germ-cells were 
like ordinary cells, showing their differ- 
ence only in the attraction they had for 
one another; yet even so, there is no harm 
in calling one the male and the other the 
female. Afterward germ-cells distinct in 
form appeared. Still later, types arose in 
which specialized organs produced the 
germ-cells. The final step in each king- 
dom, the mammals and the seed plants, 
was the protection of the young. 
Let us now forget the sex problems of 
the plants and turn our attention to the 
higher animals. \Ve may excuse this par- 
tiality by two reasonsc In the first place, 
the sex problems of the vegetable world 
are so complicated that the situation is 
not quite so clear. In the second place, 
we are not interested so much in plant 
biology as in animal biology. :Man recog- 
nizes his mammalian relationships and he 
likes to write and talk and speculate about 
matters that are at least related to his own 
private affairs. 
In most of the higher animals there 
are males and females. There are herma- 
phroditic organisms, it is true, whe
e the 
two kinds of germ-cells arc borne 111 the 
same individual. There are even animals 
which are first females because they bear 
eggs and afterward males because they 



146 


HEREDITY AND SEX 


bear sperms. But this unusual type of 
sexuality is nearly always confined to 
forms that are parasitic or otherwise de- 
generate. The tapeworm is a good ex- 
ample. The old Hebrew observation, 
"male and female created he them," still 
holds as a fair approximation of the facts; 
and this brings up the question as to what 
determines the proceeding. We know 
why there are males and females. We 
wan t to know the how of the matter. 
The subject has been very popular. A 
century or more ago Drélincourt counted 
some five hundred dead theories of sex 
determination, and his theory along with 
a trail of successors long since has gone to 
swell the number. It would be unneces- 
sary to mention these speculations here, 
were it not that their ghosts are so hard to 
lay. One meets them time and again in 
modern publications whose authors ought 
to know better. There may have been 
germs of truth in many of them, but any 
spark of life they had was usually so 
choked wi th falsehood and ignorance 
that the theory was doomed. 
The advantage of most of these hypoth- 
eses, from the standpoint of the origina- 
tors, was the difficulty of putting them to 
a critical test. Thus they were useful 
longer than would otherwise have been 
the case. For this very reason the idea 
that the two sexes were controlled indi- 
vidually by the right and left members of 
the paired reproductive glands, was prac- 
tically useless. It was killed by the first 
facts obtained. Let a man with an inferi- 
ority complex get started with a com- 
pensatory notion of male superiority, on 
the other hand, and he was hard to refute. 
Queerly enough, though, in the majority 
of such theories, the most highly devel- 
oped sex, the mentally superior sex, or 
the physically vigorous sex, which was 
the male of course, was nearly always sup- 
posed to produce the opposite sex in pro- 
portion to its assumed superiority. No 
doubt, the originators were blessed with 
large families of girls. Conversely, Girou, 
who identified the sex of the offspring 
with that of the more vigorous parent, 
must have wished to congratulate him- 
self over a preponderant lot of boys. 
We now know that sex in the higher 
animals is a matter of heredity, and is 
usually determined irrevocably by the 


kinds of egg and sperm which meet at the 
time of fertilization. Unfortunately the 
word usually must be used to qualify the 
statement, as will be seen later. 
The first piece of real evidence on the 
subject came from a study of human 
twins. Two kinds exist. There are fra- 
ternal twins who look no more alike than 
other members of the same family. About 
half of the time they consist of two boys or 
two girls, the other half of the time there 
is a boy and a girl. Then there are identi- 
cal twins, whose features and manner- 
isms are remarkably alike, and these are 
always of the same sex. Fraternal twins 
result from the fertilization of two ova by 
two sperms, as is shown by the separate 
sets of membranes enclosing the embryos. 
Identical twins, since they are both en- 
closed in one set of membranes, must have 
their origin in the separate development 
of the two daughter cells produced by a 
single fertilized ovum. \Vhere develop- 
ment is not wholly separate such bizarre 
creatures as theSiameseTwins are formed. 
It is difficult to imagine how such results 
could have come about unless sex were 
determined at fertilization. If it were 
otherwise, identical twins should consist 
of a boy and a girl just as frequently as 
fraternal twins. 
In the early part of the present century, 
when the study of heredity by controlled 
matings became the popular mode of re- 
search in biology, another bit of support 
to this idea appeared. \Vhen an individ- 
ual, hybrid for a single pair of character 
determiners, is crossed back with the re- 
cessive parent, the resulting progeny are 
half of the dominant and half of the re- 
cessive type. Thus DR X RR gives DR 
X RR. By analogy one could not avoid 
suspecting that one of the sexes is simi- 
larly a hybrid producing two kinds of 
germ-cells and the other a pure type pro- 
ducing germ-cells all of one kind, since 
the sex ratio in so many animals is very 
close to equality. Several slightly differ- 
ent hypotheses were published interpret- 
ing sex in this way, but the first direct 
proof was put forward by Doctor C. E. 
McClung, of the University of Pennsyl- 
vania, in 1902. A few years earlier a 
German investigator had noticed an un- 
paired chromosome in half of the sperm 
cells of certain insects he was studying. 



HEREDITY AND SEX 


He reported the matter, but thought 
little of it. 1vlcClung now found the same 
feature in the reproductive cells of vari- 
ous animals, and suggested that this odd 
chromosome element was the sex de- 
terminer. 
Other American cytologists then began 
to investigate numerous species of ani- 
mals, and corroborated J\IcClung's ob- 
servations in wholesale fashion. In most 
insects, in many worms, and in all mam- 
mals studied, including man himself, the 
male was the sex determiner. Half of the 
sperm-cells contained this sex chromo- 
some, which became known as the X 
Chromosome, and half were without it. 
The egg-cells all contained it. \Vhen a 
sperm carrying an X chromosome ferti- 
lized an egg, a female was produced who 
had two X chromosomes in each of her 
body-cells. \Vhen a sperm having no X 
chromosome entered into fertilization an 
individual was formed with only a single 
X of maternal origin in the body-cells, 
and this individual was a male. 
In some instances the X chromosome 
was found to be an unpaired element 
which at the maturation of the germ-cells 
passed to one of the daughter cells undi- 
vided. Its behavior, therefore, could be 
studied easily. In other species the X 
had a mate, a Y chromosome; but even 
then the behavior of these particular ele- 
ments during the formation of the germ- 
cells was different from that of the other 
chromosomes. As if conscious of the im- 
portance of the rôle they played, they 
hung back during cell division, joining 
their sister chromosomes at a slightly 
later stage. The entrance and exit of star 
performers belonged to them, and they 
took them. 
Here then are several great groups of 
organisms where the male controls the sex 
by virtue of producing, two kinds of 
sperm. The female is a passive actor, for 
all eggs are alike. But nature showed no 
favoritism. She gave the female an op- 
portunity to show her efficiency at this 
performance in moths, butterflies, and 
birds. There the sperms are all alike and 
the eggs are of two kinds. The determin- 
ation of sex thus comes about in essen- 
tially the same old way. 
If sex control is a chromosome function 
similar in character to the chromosome 


147 


control of other inherited traits body 
qualities ought to be found that ar
 trans- 
mitted by the particular chromosome 
which determines maleness and female- 
ness. Such a situation has been discov- 
ered, not once, but fifty or sixty times. 
In man, for instance, there are two reces- 
sive characters, a blood abnormality 
called hemophilia and color blindness 
where the affliction is more common i
 
males than in females, and where the 
hereditary transmission is peculiar. They 
are not transmitted from father to son 
nor do they appear in the son's descen
 
dants; yet the daughters of an affected 
man, though normal themselves, transmit 
the abnormality to half their sons. 
This exceptional type of inheritance is 
understandable if the determiners of the 
traits are assumed to be located in the X 
chromosomes, since the distribution of 
the latter parallels their own distribution. 
When a color-blind man has children by a 
normal woman, the sons are normal be- 
cause their X chromosomes come from 
their mother. The daughters also are 
normal because the normal X chromo- 
some inherited from the mother dominates 
the defective X chromosome inherited 
from the father; but these daughters will 
have defective sons whenever those sons 
get their X heritage from a defective egg, 
because sons are dependen t en tirely on the 
mother for this part of their inheritance. 
A similar type of criss-cross, sex-linked 
heredity, naturally, ought to be found, and 
is found, in birds where the female is the 
controller of sex. The best known case is a 
dominant character, barred feathers, such 
as are found in the Plymouth Rock. 
\Vhen a Barred Rock cock is mated with 
a hen of a black breed, the offspring of 
both sexes are barred; but these in turn 
produce progeny in which half of the hens 
are black, though all the cocks are barred. 
The reverse cross, a black cock mated 
with a Barred Rock hen gives barred 
cocks and black hens; and these when 
mated together produce barred individu- 
als and black individuals of both sexes in 
equal numbers. Anyone ought to be 
able to work out the way the inheritance 
goes after the explanations given above. 
Criss-cross inheritance is an easier puzzle 
than one of criss-cross words. 
In an the higher animals which have 



148 


HEREDITY AND SEX 


thus far been investigated, sex appears to 
be determined at fertilization by the par- 
ticular chromosome inheritance received. 
Yet it is well to be cautious. There are 
still a great many unsolved problems con- 
nected with the subject. Sex, in fact, is a 
precarious proposition; just when one 
thinks it is mastered, he finds that he is 
mistaken, as Saint Anthony discovered 
long ago. 
In man the sex ratio varies from 104 to 
108 males for every 100 females. \Ve 
would like to know why, but as yet we 
have not the slightest inkling of the truth. 
Under the chromosome theory there 
ought to be an equal number of male- 
producing and of female-producing 
sperms, and if there is no differential via- 
bility or fertilizing power between them, 
the sex ratio ought to be equality. But 
one must face the facts, and the truth is 
that there is an excess of males born alive 
among the people of every race. And if 
premature births only are considered this 
excess is sometimes as high as fifty per 
cent. 
Possibly equal numbers of each sex are 
produced at fertilization, with a consider- 
able proportion of the females eliminated 
at early stages of gestation because they 
find this particular portion of the life cy- 
cle difficult to pass. Such an assumption 
would account for the disproportionate 
number of males at later ages, and also, 
from the early elimination of feeble fe- 
males, for the fact that the so-called 
weaker sex is really the stronger sex and 
has a lower death rate from birth to old 
age. The theory is submitted here be- 
cause it is worth investigating and it is 
thought that some of our readers may 
possess the necessary data to confirm or 
to refute it. 
Slight differences in the sex ratio which 
can be accounted for by selective elimina- 
tion of the weaker sex do not disturb the 
view of sex determination through the 
chromosomes very seriously, but what is 
one to say of the experiments of Richard 
Hertwig and of :Miss Helen King? Hert- 
wig obtained as high as 100 per cent male 
frogs when he delayed the fertilization of 
frog's eggs until they were over-ripe and 
had taken up large quantities of water. 
Conversely, Miss King obtained 80 per 
cent of females, with a mortality of only 


6 per cent, by lowering the water content 
of the eggs of toads. 
Miss King also obtained some very 
strange results in an experiment with a 
strain of white rats in which the sex ratio 
is normally 105 males to 100 females. 
By selection a male-producing strain was 
originated in which the sex ratio was 122 
males to 100 females. Selection in the re- 
verse direction, on the other hand, re- 
sulted in a strain of female-producers in 
which the sex ratio was only 82 males to 
100 females. 
Not less confusing are the experiments 
of Riddle with pigeons and of Gold- 
schmidt with the gypsy moth, where a 
more or less complete sex reversal can be 
forced by changing the environmental 
conditions after fertilization has taken 
place and development begun. Gold- 
schmidt has even found strong-male and 
weak-male and strong-female and weak- 
female races of the gypsy moth, in which 
the various possible matings give differ- 
ent results in both the primary and the 
secondary sexual characters of the prog- 
eny. 
Still more of an enigma is a remarkable 
case of sex reversal reported by Crew in 
Scotland. It is an authentic case of 
"functional" sex change occurring in 
poultry. The word functional should be 
emphasized, because nU
!lerous instances 
of superficial changes in the sex organs 
have been found among other animals, 
even among human beings; but in no case 
has an individual become both a father 
and a mother. The facts are as follows: 
A hen, which had laid eggs and hatched 
chicks from them, later took on the ap- 
pearance and behavior of a cock. Mated 
with a hen, the erstwhile mother became 
the father of two chicks, one a male, the 
other a female. A post-mortem examina- 
tion showed that the ovary had been de- 
stroyed by a tumor and male organs had 
developed. 
Our data are somewhat contradictory, 
therefore; one cannot deny it. But one 
must expect contradictions. Life is com- 
plex. What we have to hold fast is that 
the two sexual states, maleness and fe- 
maleness, are not absolutely mutually ex- 
clusive. They are quantitative charac- 
ters, like many others with which the 
geneticist has to deal. In numerous spe- 




 
HEREDITY A
D SEX 


149 


cies the- germ-cells of 
 particular sex }1
ve heredity work together in producing the 
beco
e male det
rmme:s and female äe. .cha,racters of all animals and plants which 
termmers re.spect.lvely m !
e sens
 th
t.. mature their germ-cells by the ordinary 
they have mhented quahtIes which m method of chromosome reduction. In 
ordinary 
ircumstances hold the balance other words, sexuality of itself furnishes 
of power In the control of sex. Generally the means by which the two sexes in- 
speaking, they cast the deciding vote; herit their differences and, paradoxically 
but there may be a recount. enough, it also furnishes the mechanism 
Perhaps an illustration will make our by which the other characters of all sex- 
meaning plainer. One may think of men possessing organism
 are transmitted. 
or of women as possessing attributes both Direct experimental proof has been made 
of maleness and of femaleness, The con- on hundreds of species. 1\;lost hereditary 
trolling power which makes one actually characters are complex, but they do yield 
a m
n ar:d the oth
r a
tually a woman IS to the same type of analysis; and in sum 
the mhented constitutIon. The possessor total these analyses give us a practical 
of one X chromosome is a man, the pos- genetic philosophy applicable to yourself 
sessor of two X chromosomes is a woman. and myself as well as to the humble be- 
And tbis chromosome distribution has so ings which serve our material needs. 
far shifted the balance of conditions that The application of these genetic laws to 
no environmental changes can reverse it. evolution on the farm is obvious. Per- 
In some of the lower animals, the balance haps it is a little more difficult to see their 
of the sex complex is not shifted thus far relation to the problems of society with- 
by the particular inheritance received. out a few hints by way of leaven. As a 
Under extraordinary circumstances, con- matter of fact, the rules in both games 
ditions may be such that the sex is really are the same, but in dealing with human 
changed. beings we play under severe handicaps. 
In these lower forms where the infiu- No one ought to regard himself or her- 
ence of external conditions is relatively self blameless if they knowingly transmit 
large, there is still a possibility that man horrible physical or mental abnormalities 
may be able to control sex at will. That to their innocent offspring. There is too 
man will ever be able to control the sex of much at stake to be apathetic in such 
his own offspring is in1probable. The matters. Yet I have seen a family of six, 
possibility remains, like that of making each member fearfully deformed, with 
gold, but the chances weigh heavily claws in place of hands, whose condition 
against it. And to tell the truth the first was the direct heritage of a dominant 
is about as undesirable as the second. trait from a mother who did not know- 
The one would result in a terrible eco- or did not care. Just how many people 
nomic muddle, the other would bring marked as transmitters of such frightful 
about a social chaos. legacies will stifle their longing for pos- 
'Vhen I was a boy we youngsters were terity when they know the facts, is still 
led to the family pew twice a Sunday to questionable. Presumably it will be J. 
listen to a dear old patriarch, who gained small percentage. But since there has 
our confidence by a few well-chosen stor- been no general campaign for education 
ies seemingly as empty of morals as a along these lines, there i? .hope. It i
 a 
magician's hat, and then, presto, drew good omen that 
he phys!cIans are 1;>egm- 
out a whole litter of ethical lessons which Ding to take an mterest I
 the 
ubJect.. 
kept us thinking for at least half an hour. There are at I

st fifty distressmg doml- 
This was not a bad average as boys go, nant abnormalitIes of the skeleton, the 
and I am inclined to borrow his method. skin, the eyes, and the nervous system. 
I do not wish to strike the pose of one There are at least as many recessive con- 
having a message. I merely wish to point ditions which are just a: b.ad. '\
at we 
out that just such experiments as have need firs
 
nd foremost IS mstructlOn for 
led to the detailed knowledge we now pos- the physICIan as to what are the expec- 
sess regarding the evolution and inheri- tancies in the several cases. 
e ought to 
tance of sex, have also led to a generalized be able t
 say to 
he man. wIth brachy
 
conception of the way environment and dactyly: Your children will have hands 
 



150 


HEREDITY AND SEX 


that are practically useless, no matter 
whom you marry." He ough t to be able 
to say to the woman whose family tree in- 
dicates that she is carrying feeble-mind ed- 
ness: "You are playing with fire if you 
marry a near relative or a man with a 
similar heritage." And he ought to be 
given the opportunity to say these things. 
He is the intermediary between the in- 
vestigator and the general public in mat- 
ters of natural science, and our boards of 
health are in duty bound to see that every 
family obtains his good offices. 
Perhaps we ought to go still further and 
add to our numerous associations of 
Daughters and Sons a "Society for the 
Promotion of Prospective Ancestors." 
The geneticist yields to no one in his re- 
gard for good breeding. Contemplation 
of the records of fine old family lines 
brings joy to his heart. He likes to trace 
the influence of heredity in chronicles of 
achievement, to note how innate capacity 
has passed from knot to knot in the net- 
work of descent, and how the endowments 
of different individuals have manifested 
themselves variously, leaving their im- 
prints now in the realm of business, now 
in that of science, and again in that of art. 
But no one knows better than he the falla- 
cies of ancestor worship. One out-cross 
can spoil a lengthy line of irreproachable 
ancestors; one proper mating is all that is 
necessary to produce the real aristocrat. 
Unquestionably it is better to be good an- 
cestors than it is to have good ancestors. 
The old conceit was an arrogant pride 
in blood, gentle blood which at the worst 
risked only a slight dilution of its glorious 
,Powers by an ignoble union. To-day we 
put our faith in the germ-cell determiners, 
the genes. It is rather difficult to become 
vainglorious and haughty over genes, but 
if we wish to assume such attitudes over 
our hereditary blessings, there is no other 
source from which to draw. And dilu- 
tion, whether of power or of quality, is no 
attribute of a gene. The genetic consti- 
tution of a distinguished family is likely 
to be compounded largely of good quali- 
ties, hence the high probability of worth 
among its members; but the degenerate 
product of a bad genetic combination is 
not saved by the personal record of his an- 
cestors. Nor, by the same token, is the 
genetically great damned because his en- 


dowments are the choicest gifts from a 
scanty store. 
The mention of feeblemindedness as a 
recessive trait brings up a second point 
of sociological interest. It has been de- 
bated for centuries whether or not the 
marriage of near relatives carries disas- 
trous consequences. The records were 
conflicting. Sometimes there was loss of 
vigor and comparative sterility. Fre- 
quently physical and mental aberrations 
appeared in considerable numbers. Yet 
occasionally a family line originated 
which was characterized by a heritage 
having an extraordinary social value. 
Now we know our way about in this 
maze of contradictions. These are the 
tricks played by recessive characters, 
characters which never relinquish their 
part in heredity just because they often 
have to stand behind the scenes while the 
dominants take the stage. 
Man, like other bisexual animals, is 
usually a complex hybrid. He carries a 
train of latent possibilities. Happily for 
the race, some of these traits are good. 
So far as we know to-day, none of them 
are lethal when received from both par- 
en ts as often is the case among the lower 
animals. But many of them prove unde- 
sirable possessions when they come to 
light, and some of them are calamitous. 
Now near relatives are likely to be hybrid 
for the same traits, and if such hybrid 
kin marry, some of their children will 
surely be marked with the taint. On the 
other hand, if no such stigmata are part of 
the heritage, if the family has a continu- 
ous extended. history as a high-grade 
stock, inbreeding is the surest way to 
make its distinction permanent. 
Another important social problem upon 
which we begin to get some light is that of 
racial crossing. The three primary races, 
though named by their skin colors, have 
taken form because of frequent variation 
amid isolation for thousands of years. 
Their genetic differences number hun- 
dreds, possibly thousands, each inherited 
as more or less independent traits. Each 
race has become efficient biologically in 
that it is a smoothly running whole, 
adapted to the environment in which it 
grew. When we recall then that every 
additional pair of hybrid genes more than 
doubles the difficulty of securing just the 



HARDY, HUDSON, HOUSMA
 


151 


desired combination when we know what and 
 
nare, o
 rat?er it is self-complacent 
we want and can select freely, does it stupIdIty, whIch IS worse. There is no 
seem wise to gamble on such a forlorn question of race prejudice here, no ques- 
hope for betterment of the human race? ho
 of presumptuous superiority. Ge- 
It does not. To speak frankly, the advo- nebcs has answered on quite another 
cation of racial hybridization is a delusion basis-Nature's lawsc 


Hardy, Hudson, Housman 
BY GEORGE McLEAN HARPER 
Author of ..."William Wordsworth," etc. 


"Thou shalt be in league with the stones 
of the field; and the beasts of the field shall 
be at peace with thee." 


Citllt. 
w ID Eliphaz the Te- 

x manite promise too 

 much? Can love for 
man, can love for 
Dg, . righteousness, can love 

 for a supreme law or 


Ä person ever light up 
the face of this brute 
nature out of which we have sprung and 
from which we have never been detached? 
The force of gravitation has not, so far as 
we know, been relaxed to save the life of 
sage or saint. Fire scorches and water 
drowns the good and the great, the much 
beloved and the sorely needed. Is it 
other than flattery to say to any "awful 
Power": "Thou dost preserve the stars 
from wrong"? Is it other than self- 
deception for a sentient being to say to 
himself: "They shall bear thee up in their 
hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a 
stone" ? 
From the beginning of human time the 
heart of man has been educated by reli- 
gion and poetry, equally and often indis- 
tinguishably. Twin mothers of "fonn 
and fear" are they; twin sisters of conso- 
lation, twin daughters of confidence, hope, 
and glory c A third figure now looms be- 
side these two most ancient guardians of 
mankind, her feet heavily built, her hands 
sinewy, and her head indistinctly veiled. 
She is Science, who has grown with man 
and been the companion of his childhood; 
and at last she claims authority equal to 


that of Poetry and Religion. "We are 
one indeed," she says. 
When Religion had only Poetry as her 
colleague it was easy for them to agree 
upon the lessons: "\V e must teach the 
Child through his imagination, using him 
as the measure of all things; God, we must 
tell him, is a perfect man." It is not so 
simple now that Science has taken the 
third chair. Though her head is veiled 
and her body is rudely framed, she lifts a 
voice already magisterial, declaring that 
there are many things to be accounted for 
besides man and his projections of himself 
against the screen of his own ignorance. 
What is meant by "supernaturalism" I 
do not know. Probably there are a num- 
ber of meanings, some of them gross and 
some subtle, some of them merely an- 
thropomorphic, merely projections of hu- 
man ideals, others less naïve. All men, no 
doubt, wish to think and try to think that 
an Immanent Will throbs through space 
and time and life, leaving no cranny of 
the world of matter unbrightened by Its 
presence, no impulse of the world of en- 
ergy uninfonned with Its purpose, 
" All melodies the echoes of that voice, 
All colors a suffusion from that light." 


But wishing is not knowledge; and though 
it may be that nothing can be understood 
except on the assumption of an Immanent 
\Vill, even this incapacity is a proof, not 
of the existence of such a power, but 
simply of our own weakness. And taking 
for granted the existence of an Immanent 
\Vill three questions turn us pale: Is the 
\Vill' supreme? Is it conscious? Is it 



152 


HARDY, HUDSON, HOUSl\1AN 


kind? Religion and Poetry eagerly an- 
swer Yes. Science, or knowledge based 
on physical observation and on experience 
that can be tested by repetition, keeps her 
head veiled, while her active fingers grope 
patiently among" demonstrable facts." 


A most hopeful sign of the times, in 
this century, when reasonable hope is so 
rare and precious, is that Thomas Hardy, 
our great poet and greatest living novelist, 
the philosopher who has embodied his 
philosophy in art which in some respects 
equals real life as a means of demonstrat- 
ing the validity of moral law, has through- 
out his work and increasingly in his more 
recent poems raised and faced these ques- 
tions. They had been raised before: by 
the author of that supreme poem, the 
Book of Job, by the Greek tragic poets, by 
Lucretius, by l\liIton. The reply to Job 
is characteristically Semitic and accords 
with the teaching of Islam: "I will an- 
swer thee," said Elihu, "that God is 
greater than man." l\<Iilton, the most 
confident and therefore the happiest of all 
great poets, satisfies himself that the Will 
is conscious, bu t fails to show that it is 
really supreme or really kind. Shake- 
speare is forced to cry: 


" As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, 
They kill us for their sport." 
Hardy's" Dynasts" and the totality of 
his other poems have two aspects or fields 
of interest: they raise these religious ques- 
tions, and they also, under the guiding 
hand of what we may call science, record 
the actual life of men and women in time 
and space, record them imaginatively, 
which is to say creatively. His novels 
also serve this double purpose. Many of 
the poems are condensed novels; the nov- 
els are expanded poems. Excepting" The 
Dynasts," but not excepting every part of 
it, Hardy's imagination, in all his works, 
acts upon material furnished by direct ob- 
servation. It deals with matters known 
to him personally, contemporaneous, defi- 
nitely localized. "The Dynasts," a huge 
epic-drama, unfolds, crisis by crisis, the 
delirium of the Napoleonic wars, from 
1805 to Waterloo. The material was nec- 
essarily taken from books and oral tradi- 
tion, though even here we find that the 
scrupulous author has visited and studied 


many of the places in which his scenes are 
laid, and that he frequently brings his 
readers back from the Tuileries or the 
Kremlin to listen to the comments of Wes- 
sex folk known to him in his boyhood. 
Notwithstanding its enormous range and. 
the magnitude and magnificence of its 
chief scenes, "The Dynasts" includes lit- 
tle things, and here indeed is the reason 
why it makes an impression of natural- 
ness. The battles of Ulm and Leipzig, 
the burning of Moscow, the coronation at 
Milan, the sea fight off Trafalgar, can 
hardly be called natural events; they were 
indeed most unnatural; it was a game of 
kings, politicians, and one supremely reck- 
less gambler; the dice were human bones. 
But, as in Vachel Lindsay's" Santa-Fé 
Trail," the hideous clangor of the brawl- 
ing horns is broken by the bird singing of 
love and life, eternal youth, dew and 
glory, love and truth, so the sweet inter- 
ludes in "The Dynasts" bring us to the 
coolness and health of reality. The great- 
ness of this epic-drama is manifold; its 
scope is vast; its order and proportion are 
admirable; as an historical pageant it is no 
less accurate than splendid; in the right- 
ness of its dealing with mean persons in 
their pride of place it satisfies the moral 
sense; in describing and transmuting mi- 
nute details it combines science and imag- 
ination as only Dante and \Vordsworth, 
of all Hardy's predecessors, combined 
them; and still there remain two elements 
of greatness yet unmentioned, one of 
them Dantesque, the other unique. The 
first of these is the power of hallucination, 
the power of seeing things with dreamlike 
vividness. An Austrian army creeping 
"dully along the mid-distance, in the 
form of detached masses and columns of 
a whitish cast," Hardy startlingly de- 
scribes in one line: 


"This movement as of molluscs on a leaf." 


In a "stage direction" connected with the 
retreat from Russia, he writes:" What has 
floated down from the sky upon the army 
is a flake of snow. Then come another 
and another, till natural features, hitherto 
varied with the tints of autumn, are con- 
founded, and all is phantasmal gray and 
white. The caterpillar shape still creeps 
laboriously nearer, but instead of increas- 
ing in size by the rules of perspective, it 



HARDY, HUDSON, HOUSl\IA
 


gets more attenuated, and there are left 
upon the ground behind it minute parts of 
itself, which are speedily flaked over and 
remain as white pimples by the wayside." 
This vision of an amlY wasting away, and 
getting horribly smaller as it comes nearer, 
is like a nightmare, distinct, terrifying, 
unavoidable. Insight so natural-seeming 
and yet so unusual as to be akin to halluci- 
nation is shown in the following lines from 
a chorus before the "\V aterloo" Act: 


"The mole's tunnelled chambers are crushed by 
wheels, 
The larks' eggs scattered, their owners fled; 
And the hedgehog's household tbe sapper un- 
seals. " 


The unique element in "The Dynasts" 
is its philosophy, which permeates all the 
incidents, yet without lessening their in- 
dependent values and the sense of reality 
which they impart. It is Hardy's at- 
tempt not so much to solye as merely to 
state the problem which for shallower 
thinkers is no sooner stated than solved 
when they talk confidently about "the 
hand of God in history." There used to 
be, and perhaps there still are, university 
chairs for teaching the Philosophy of His- 
tory. The world is full of confident inter- 
preters of prophecy, who can tell the num- 
ber of the beast; Gog and 11agog they un- 
derstand, and the thousand years, and the 
white horse; the date of Armageddon is 
not withheld from them, and the wheels 
of Ezekiel whirl beautifully in their heads. 
They, and all of us who will not see be- 
cause we do not feel, have a ready and 
easy explanation for sin and misery, for 
poverty and injustice, for cruelty, for the 
mad folly of war, and the inexcusable 
baseness of cruelty. 1Ian, we lightly as- 
sume, is being educated; life is a school; 
God is a well-intentioned headmaster. 
This explanation fails to account for the 
natural disappointment of the moles and 
larks and hedgehogs when their little 
homes are smashed. It leaves much else 
unaccounted for. Hardy knows too much 
to be satisfied with a slippery fonnula. 
The third instructress, who entered so 
humbly into the presence of Poetry and 
Religion, but has by this time become a 
very august personage indeed, though still 
concerned with little things as much as 
with great things, forbids him to forget 


133 


ruined hopes, wasted economies, "white 

imples by the .wayside." All explana- 
tIons based on Ignorance of the terrible 
facts of history being denied him, insensi- 
tiveness to the pain of man or beast being 
not one of his mental cushions, his natural 
and acquired habit being to reason from 
effect to cause rather than to assume a 
cause and then admit only such effects as 
please a comfort-loving soul, Hardy is in 
a desperate situation when he contem- 
plates theologically the Napoleonic wars, 
or for that matter any other tragedy 
which afflicts a single creature. And it is 
a desperate situation for every pitiful and 
intelligent person. In the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, when some of our 
strongest theological conceptions were 
formulated, sensitiveness to the pain of 
others was probably less widely diffused 
among educated people than it is now. 
Men and women of culture could sit for 
hours at an auto da fé, and sleep soundly 
while actually believing in eternal tor- 
ments as part of God's plan of the uni- 
verse. \Ve may be more sensitive and 
may have more troubled slumbers; but 
the pain is here still, and we ask, Why? 
Hardy's philosophy is, on the one hand, 
a metaphysic of earnest wonder. His 
pity makes him bold. I have seen a timid 
woman face a big man who was abusing 
a horse and ask him \Vhy with a courage 
born of love. With far greater bravery, 
though with profound reverence, because 
so much is hidden and the purpose of pain 
may be beneficent (and oh, how ardently 
this is to be hoped), Hardy asks for an ex- 
planation. He offers none himself with 
anything approaching assurance. Not 
for him is Tennyson's bland confidence in 


"one far-off didne event, 
To which the whole creation moves." 


At the most we have the hope expressed in 
the last choral song in "The Dynasts": 


"But-a stirring thrills the air 
Like to sounds of joyance there 
That the rages 
Of the ages 
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from 
the darts that were, 
Consciousness the Will informing till It fashion 
all things fair." 


This is faith reduced to a minimum, but 
after all it is faith and of the very same 



154 


HARDY, HUDSON, HOUSMAN 


substance as all other faith, even the most 
audacious and inclusive. One might ask 
Mr. Hardy why, having got over the diffi- 
culty of having any faith at all, he could 
not go farther and be a joyful optimist. 
To put the matter thus is to throw light 
upon the nature of faith, to indicate that 
faith is not mere hope, is not blind belief, 
but the quintessential result of rational 
conviction, after all. If Mr. Hardy has 
even the faintest ray of faith in the su- 
premacy, consciousness, and kindness of 
the Immanent \Vill, it must be because ex- 
perience and observation (which we have 
been calling Science, the third instruct- 
ress) have kindled that light in him; and 
if the ray is feeble, it is so because the logi- 
cal balance between arguments for and 

gainst faith seems to him only slightly 
favorable. Even the hoped-for blessed- 
ness of distant future ages would be 
scanty compensation for the ages that 
have suffered and are still to suffer. If 
anyone is displeased at Mr. Hardy's use 
of the neuter pronoun in the Chorus 
quoted above, let him reflect that to have 
used either the masculine or the feminine 
would have been begging the question, for 
the chief metaphysical inquiry in "The 
Dynasts" is whether the Immanent Will 
is conscious, or, to put it in more us
al 
form, whether God is a person. In his 
Preface the author says what is no doubt 
true of himself, though it may not be as 
true of all "thinkers" as he supposes: 
"The abandonment of the masculine pro- 
noun in allusions to the First or Funda- 
mental Energy seemed a necessary and 
logical consequence of the long abandon- 
ment by thinkers of the anthropomorphic 
conception of the same." 
Hardy's philosophy, I have ventured to 
say, is a metaphysic of earnest and, I may 
add, of distressed wonder. It. is also an 
ethic of pity. The author of "Tess of the 
D'Urbervilles" and" Jude the Obscure" 
cannot justly be termed ignorant of hu- 
man sorrow and its causes. Nor can it be 
that life's tragedies touch him lightly. 
His novels and his poems are alike in this, 
that they were born of the travail of his 
soul. In the Apology that introduced his 
volume of "Late Lyrics and Earlier," in 
1922, he has with high self-respect pro- 
claimed the ethical purpose of his writ- 
ings: "Happily there are some who feel 


. . . that comment on where the world 
stands is very much the reverse of need- 
less in these disordered years of our pre- 
maturely afflicted century: that amend- 
ment and not madness lies that way. And 
looking down the future these few hold 
fast to the same: that whether the human 
and kindred animal races survive till the 
exhaustion or destruction of the globe, or 
whether these races perish and are suc- 
ceeded by others before that conclusion 
comes, pain to all upon it, tongued or 
dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum 
by loving-kindness, operating through sci- 
entific knowledge." And he protests that 
what is alleged to be his "pessimism" is 
in truth only" the exploration of reality 
and the first step toward the soul's better- 
ment and the body's too." He tells us 
also, in the same Apology, that he dreams 
of an alliance, by means of the interfusing 
effect of poetry, "between religion, which 
must be retained unless the world is to 
perish, and complete rationality, which 
must come, unless also the world is to 
perish, " 
All the foregoing remarks abou t Thomas 
Hardy have had a restricted scope and a 
particular purpose. I have tried to show 
that knowledge, coming through observa- 
tion and experience, has in his case co- 
operated to an uncommon degree with 
poetry and religion as an inspirer of ar- 
tistic creation; that his knowledge has 
determined the character of his metaphys- 
ical belief, making it small and weak, but 
highly respectable because thoroughly ra- 
tional; and finally that in moral practice 
his strong desire has been to relieve suffer- 
ing through an unflinching revelation of 
its causes. I have as yet said nothing 
about the very thing that makes him a 
great artist, his immense relish for life. 
It is a piece of pleasant irony that a man 
whose metaphysics are so extremely skep- 
tical, and whose ethical impulses lead him 
to the contemplation of sin and pain, 
should nevertheless be a joyous lover of 
beauty. He is one of those fortunate 
lovers of beauty who are not dependent 
upon the gala days and splendid hours of 
their goddess, not likely to be starved by 
her petulant whims any more than pam- 
pered by her indulgence. They know her 
in her homeliest attire and are with her at 
all times. It is not the extraordinary 



HARDY, HUDSON, HOUS:VIAN 


alone, either in nature or in humanity, 
that interests Hardy. He is Wordsworth- 
ian in the breadth of his interest in what 
his master so quaintly called" the goings- 
on of the universe." All his readers know, 
or if they do not know they feel, that his 
descriptions of places are accurate be- 
cause he has observed in nature the de- 
tails from which he composes his pictures. 
Fewer, probably, perceive that these de- 
tails are nearly always in themselves 
beautiful and were chosen with affection- 
ate care. This is true also of the traits 
which Hardy assembles in creating his 
characters. Even his dangerous, weak, 
and perverse people are made up of lova- 
ble features; and as for his great tragic 
figures, it is love, not hate, that is their un- 
doing. In fact, the ever-recurring sub- 
ject in Hardy's poems, even more than in 
his novels, is the pain that mortals bring 
upon themselves and one another in con- 
sequence of love, and upon this theme he 
plays in all its varieties, permutations, and 
degrees. \Vere he a less enthusiastic ad- 
mirer of human nature, he would have 
given more blame to selfishness and less 
to the antics of mischance. Love, brief 
in its happiness, long in its disappoint- 
ment, the loneliness of craving hearts, re- 
verie and the glamour of what is gone, this 
tragic and yet glorious thing, and one 
other thing, the deathless beauty of the 
world, are, it seems to me, the elements of 
Hardy's art. 
Another great writer, whose philosophy 
was like Hardy's and whose understand- 
ing of nature and love of nature were per- 
haps even deeper than Hardy's, has re- 
cently died, leaving a fame which had just 
begun to grow with leaps and bounds, al- 
though at the time he was in his eightieth 
year. I refer to \V. H. Hudson, the au- 
thor of many books of travel and scien- 
tific observation, and of "Far Away and 
Long Ago," the story of his own boyhood. 
This is one of those rare and precious 
pieces of literature upon which the world 
depends, more than upon any other kind 
of book, for knowledge of the human heart, 
a genuine autobiography. It is the rec- 
ord of a wholesome and singularly happy 
childhood, passed in unusually interesting 
circumstances, a natural life, untainted 
with morbidness, and afflicted only with 


153 


those sorrows that come sooner or later to 
all. Apart from the information provid- 
ed in this book, very little is generally 
known about Hudson's life. But from 
his numerous other writings it is possible 
to gather enough supplementary impres- 
sions to form a picture of him. Some of 
the peculiarities which distinguish him 
from most men are the same as Hardy's. 
Spending the years of his boyhood on a 
lonely ranch in Argentina, with haphaz- 
ard instruction from erratic tu tors, he was 
thrown back upon nature for entertain- 
ment and early showed a passionate curi- 
osity about wild life. Human visitors 
were so infrequent that they too made a 
deep impression upon him, as if they were 
rare specimens of natural history. In 
him were combined the direct and practi- 
cal observation of an Indian with the sci- 
entific interest of a thoughtful, civilized 
young man; but the field-craft came first 
and formed the basis. He appears to 
have accumulated a vast store of informa- 
tion about birds and beasts and plants 
and weather before he began the system- 
atic study of ornithology or zoology or 
botany or meteorology. It was an ideal 
education, with no short-cuts, no imposed 
theories. The best education is self-edu- 
cation, with just enough guidance to save 
the pupil from a wasteful groping in blind 
alleys; and such was Hudson's training. 
It kept his curiosity alive, kept his appre- 
ciation of knowledge fresh and keen, gave 
him at every point a conqueror's joy. 
In a very remarkable chapter of "Far 
Away and Long Ago," entitled" A Boy's 
Animism," he tells of a deeper and more 
subtle experience, which few town-bred 
and school-educated children can have 
had. In his eighth or ninth year he be- 
gan to be conscious of something more 
than a childish delight in nature, a spirit 
in nature more impressive, more awe- 
compelling than any of the manifestations 
of nature themselves. "This faculty or 
instinct of the dawning mind is or has al- 
ways seemed to me," he says, "essent
alIy 
religious in character; undoubtedly It IS 
the root of all nature-worship, from fe- 
tichism to the highest pantheistic devel- 
opment. It was more to me in those 
early days than all the religious instruc- 
tion I received from my mother." Simi- 
lar experiences are recorded by several 



156 


HARDY, HUDSON, HOUSMAN 


poets, notably by Wordsworth. They 
have had a great share in some of the 
most valued peculiarities of modern po- 
etry. The feeling described by Hudson 
is strong in Hardy. Egdon Heath, in 
"The Return of the Native," is endowed 
with a half-conscious life, not figuratively 
or symbolically, but in deep seriousness 
and subtle apprehension of a truth. 
There is nothing merely "literary" about 
this feeling, either in Hudson's case or in 
Hardy's. Their relation to nature is the 
fundamental fact for both of them, the 
ground of their interest in life, their hap- 
piness, their terrors, their sympathies, 
their knowledge of things and of men, and 
finally of their philosophy or religion. 
Emerson, with his Puritan antecedents 
and background, could distinguish be- 
tween a "law for thing" and a "law for 
man. " Not so these children of nature. 
By Hardy, I suppose, as Hudson avows 
was the case with himself, the doctrine of 
evolution was welcomed because it fur- 
nished a scientific explanation of his per- 
sonal feeling that all fonns of life were 
related to one another and that one vital 
force penneated matter throughout the 
entire scale, from rock and tree to beast 
and man. With this assurance might 
each have said to himself indeed: "Thou 
shalt be in league with the stones of the 
field; and the beasts of the field shall be 
at peace with thee." In two of Hudson's 
books, particularly" A Traveller in Little 
Things" and "A Shepherd's Life," the 
barriers between the successive stages of 
consciousness from low to high fonns of 
existence have been quietly disregarded. 
As might have been expected, Hardy 
and Hudson, being so deeply interested in 
objects outside of themselves and so de- 
voted to reality, resemble each other 
in manner of expression. Each writes 
clearly, simply, and in an original, indi- 
vidual style. Both are so interested in 
detail, so determined to set forth detail 
with absolute exactness, that the reader is 
scarcely aware of the deliberate skill with 
which every stroke is made to contribute 
to a general effect. They are alike also 
in having no easily discoverable political 
or social theories, no class prejudices, and 
yet withal having attained an individual 
philosophy, in which questions are more 
prominent than answers, a philosophy 


broadly based upon observation of nature 
and man, but timid in its conclusions and 
modest in its claims. What they might 
have termed supernatural in their own 
view of the world would by most people 
be called mere naturalism. No doubt it 
has failed to supply them with the confi- 
dent hope of a future personal and con- 
scious existence; but it has given them joy 
in this life and the material for a sound 
morality. Surely such a religion is supe- 
rior to one which saddens this life and per- 
verts the morals of its followers, though 
giving them full assurance of unending 
consciousness after death. There are re- 
ligions of tIns kind, fanatical forms of 
Christianity and of Mohammedanism. 
How remote from a selfish desire for im- 
mortality were the joy in nature, the hu- 
man loving-kindness of Jesus, and his ab- 
sorption in the common life of his fellow- 
men, is not enough appreciated, and how 
inconsistent with some of the theological 
statements made in his name, and some of 
the aberrations of conduct that have en- 
sued. 


Though Hudson is most conspicuously 
a student of natural history and Hardy a 
novelist, their works are in essence poeti- 
cal. And they are both very voluminous 
writers. Mr. Alfred Edward Housman, a 
professor of Latin in Cambridge Univer- 
sity, a severe classical scholar and critic, 
sixty-four years old, a genial companion 
with his intimate friends, a shy and reti- 
cent man in larger company, is the author 
of two little books of short lyrics, "A 
Shropshire Lad," published in 1896, and 
"Last Poems," published in 1922. The 
small number of these compositions, their 
brevity, the long interval of time between 
the two volumes, have been often re- 
marked, and also the singularity of the 
fact that a refined and learned scholar 
should have written them at all, consider- 
ing that for the most part they represent 
the musings of an unlettered country boy 
whose friends and comrades are careless 
farmhands, common soldiers, and men in 
jail waiting to be hanged. It would have 
been scarcely more surprising to discover 
in 1787 that the author of the poems pub- 
lished the year before at Kilmarnock was 
not an Ayrshire rustic after all, but a pro- 
fessor in Edinburgh. And we may say 



HARDY, HUDSON, HOUSMAN 


with equal truth that no Shropshire Burns 
could have harmonized with the vigor and 
raciness of English song a calm and lucid 
strain of sadness that has floated down 
from ancient Greece. While English boys 
and girls make love and dream of everlast- 
ing bliss, a tenor voice from pagan chor- 
uses weaves high above their happy tones 
its pure, undeviating call: 


"The living are the living .
... 
And dead the dead will stay." 
Again and again in these two little vol- 
umes what seems at first to be a homely 
rustic lay is changed by a word or a ca- 
dence into a wistful echo of Sappho or 
Catullus. We think we see a village 
green beside a village church; when a 
breath of air fingers the leaves of the 
sturdy English elms, and 10 t they now are 
"poplars pale" surrounding a broken al- 
tar to a forgotten god upon some distant 
isle in far-off seas. "Eternal beauty," 
whispers the wind; "eternal beauty-and 
death that naught can shun." 
It is not my purpose to attempt to 
praise these poems, more than to express 
my conviction that for poetic beauty in 
the strictest sense of the term, beauty that 
in this case depends almost wholly on 
sound and on those suggestions, now 
vague and again vivid, which are pro- 
duced by sound, we must go back to 
Keats to find an equal quantity of verse 
by anyone poet which excels them. Even 
less would I venture to explain the 
grounds of this persuasion. The poems 
have entered my heart through the 
porches of my ears. Among this great 
artist's cunning devices we find unexpect- 
ed and strangely suggestive checks in 
tunes that are flowing smoothly; deep 
words, brought from afar, and set like 
blazing planets in a J\lilky \Vay of sim- 
ple English; hidden hannonies, through 
rhyme and alliteration and cadence, 
which please like the rippling of unnoticed 
rills. There is space to quote only one of 
the most effective examples of the con- 


157 


summate technic by which he suggests far 
more than he definitely expresses: 
"And then the clock collected in the tower 
Its strength, and struck." 


Mr. F. L. Lucas, in a fine little essay on 
these poems, quotes very happily Mele- 
ager's tribute to the odes of Sappho, say- 
ing they are "few, but roses." But, I re- 
peat, it is not my purpose to linger in these 
pleasan t fields gathering flowers of beau ty. 
\Vhat suggested to me the writing of 
this paper was that I perceived, or 
thought I perceived, a deep relationship 
of spirit between Hardy, Hudson, and 
Housman. They are alike in their keen 
perceptions, their intense enjoyment of 
the natural world, and their heroic deter- 
mination not to let the love of life per- 
suade them that life is other than it is or 
that death is not its ending. They are 
not pessimists; their appreciation of good 
is one of their strongest traits, and grati- 
tude is often on their lips. They are 
honest and brave. In relation to :Ur. 
Housman even more than to Mr. Hardy, 
all the common irrelevancies about" pes- 
simism" and "optimism" are more than 
usually inept. He has expressed, more- 
over, the very essence of 1\1r. Hardy's life- 
work, and of Hudson's too, I think, in the 
following rugged lines: 
"Therefore, since the world has still 
Much good, but much less good than ill, 
And while the sun and moon endure 
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure, 
I'd face it as a v.ise man would, 
And train for ill and not for good." 
The reader will by this time, I suppose, 
be able to conjecture what 1\1r. Housman 
means when he sings: 


"Her strong enchantments failing, 
Her towers of fear in wreck, 
Her limbecks dried of poisons 
And the knife at her neck, 


The Queen of air and darkness 
Begins to shrill and cry, 
'0 young man, 0 my slayer, 
To-morrow you shall die.''' 



An Uncharted Course 


BY HARRIET WELLES 
Author of "Anchors Aweigh," etc. 


hLUSTRATIO:KS BY CAPT. JOHN W. THOMASON, JR., U. S. M. C. 


-' ': 

: .'- ROBABL Y because 

 '. during the weeks after 
L L;AP : 
I he received ills orders 

 .
 from the Navy De- 
partment . . . tl you 
will report for duty in 
WW connection wi th the 
fitting out of the 
u. S. S. Vermont. . . and in command 
of that vessel when commissioned. . ." 
Captain John Olney had more contact 
than is usual with the junior officers at- 
tached to his ship, he came to know them 
better than would otherwise have been 
possible. 
The executive officer had not yet re- 
ported for duty; details which would have 
been handled by him came directly to 
"The Old Man," and it was through the 
incident of the engineer officer's request 
to speak on a personal matter with his 
commanding officer that Captain Olney 
became cognizant of the doings of a new 
generation with which, before, he had 
been entirely unfamiliar. 
He liked his engineer officer on sight. 
Young Carson was a quiet, intelligent, 
straight-glancing boy with a dignified 
bearing and very blue eyes. His manner 
was equally direct: "I wanted to ask if I 
might have a few days' leave. . . sir? 
. .. No, sir: there's no time coming to 
me. I've had all that was due. I 
wouldn't ask if it wasn't absolutely 
necessary. " 
Captain Olney, martinet, frowned. 
"I'll have to know what you class as 
'absolutely necessary,' Carson." 
Lieutenant-Commander Carson found 
it difficult to commence; he fidgeted and 
cleared his throat. " You see, sir, my 
wife's at Reno, getting a divorce, and 
things aren't running smoothly for her. 
She's quarrelled with her landlady over 
the poor food and uncomfortable quar- 
ters, and she's telegraphed me five times 
15 8 


in two days to come and straighten mat- 
ters out for her. I think it's my duty to 
go and calm her down." 
Captain Olney stared at his engineer 
officer. "I don't believe that I heard you 
correctly! " 
"Yes, sir, you did." Carson laughed 
nervously. "It sounds preposterous to 
anyone who doesn't know Gwladys: she's 
very excitable and high-strung-goescom- 
pletely to pieces over trifles. Just now 
she's terribly upset." 
"\Vhat's that to you-if you've drifted 
apart enough for a divorce? She's getting 
it, I believe you said? . . . In my home 
State it's no honor to be the guilty one in 
divorce proceedings!" Hastily he amend- 
ed: "I speak from hearsay, of course. 
I'm an inexperienced and thankful bache- 
lor! " 
"Reno divorces are different," Carson 
instructed him. "Neither Gwladys nor 
I have any criminal grounds-I only con- 
sented because she was so miserable with 
me. Gwladys is eleven years younger 
than I, and she thinks she's fallen in love 
with an ensign-aviator of her own age. 
At first I laughed at her, tried to reason 
with her and bring her to her senses; but 
it wasn't any use! After fou(months of 
tears at every meal and a persecuted atti- 
tude the rest of the time, I gave in. I 
can't stand watching a woman cry I" 
"Humph!" growled the captain. 
"Gwladys has money of her own, I 
judge!" 
" Not a cent! Her people are the kind 
that have lived always beyond their 
means, in an endless turmoil of financial 
bickerings and quarrelling. I first noticed 
Gwladys through being sorry for her- 
her mother is so cheap and silly. What is 
the matter with the mothers nowadáys, 
sir? It seemed so unfair for Gwladys 
never to have a chance," 
" Judging from results I'd say that you 



AN UNCHARTED COURSE 


took the chance! 
o's paying for this 
divorce? " 
"I am, sir." 
"Carson," demanded the captain sus- 
piciously, "are you, joking?" 
The engineer officer reddened. "I sup- 
pose that what I've said sounds to you 
like a cheap anæmic pose? Well it 
isn't! " Seriously Carson added: "I'
 a 
firm believer in giving people their chance. 
If they really think that certain condi- 
tions will bring them happiness, I'll do 
anything I can to help them achieve those .tJ I 
conditions. I don't mean just Gwladys. II 
Anybody! . . . Sir? . .. YeS'I'veread 
 
 
what Emerson says about changed cir- f 
 
cumstances not remedying defects of \( I 
 
character
bu t who am I to judge what. 
 
might be just around the corner for' ' 
 
them? " J tJ 
"Just how recently," inquired the cap- 
 
 
 
tain, "did you arrive at this remarkable 
 
viewpoint?" !, 
"Long ago. 1\ly mother was an invalid '" 
for several years before she died, and she 
forgot her suffering in reading all sorts of 
books on travel and history-but mostly 
those on philosophy. Ever read any of 
those old Oriental writers, sir? . . . Well, 
one of their assertions has stuck in my 
memory, due, probably, to hearing my 
mother wonder if anyone could speak 
with such conviction who hadn't some 
grounds for his assurance; he believed 
that if, knowingly, you slur over, neglect, 
evade or do badly any duty which defi- 
nitely falls to your lot here, you'll have to 
come back and do it over! Tha t worried 
". . , she thinks she's fallen in love with an ensign- 
my mother!" He shook his head rem in- aviator of her own age."-Page 158. 
iscently. "We lived on a big isolated 
Western ranch where you couldn't get 
help of any kind; the servant class didn't 
exist. After my mother had read and 
thought over that mystic's book I've 
known her to clean the same floor seven or 
eight times in succession, until not a 
streak or a blemish showed. 'I've always 
hated to scrub,' she said. 'If that philoso- 
pher is correct, scrubbing is the one thing 
that I want to have forever behind me.' 
And that's how I feel about Gwladys: if 
ever I should have to come back, I don't 
want to repeat this sordid, miserable busi- 
ness. I'd rather do my best this time." 
Captain Olney had a moment of reali- 
zation as to the reason why hitting below 


159 


0 e belt had been adjudged unsportsman- 
lIke. For the first time since command 
rank had bestowed upon him the power to 
make decisions and issue edicts he was 
bereft of comment. Defensively he 
growled: "Outrageous nonsense-!" 


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The engineer officer flushed. " You see, 
Gwladys hasn't any foundations to build 
on: she's a modern product. I thought 
that when she escaped from her home, 
she'd develop-but she hasn't." He 
paused, then added honestly: "Of course 
it wasn't entirely because I was sorry for 
Gwladys that I married her: like all mod- 
ern girls, she was carefully pretty." 
"Isn't she pretty now?" 
"When you're fond of a person you 
don't think of that, do you?" Lieu- 
tenant-Commander Carson hesitated. "I 
don't like the paint and shellac women 
use nowadays: it's a definite retrogres- 



160 


AN UNCHARTED COURSE 


sion to the primitive. I tell Gwladys that 
instead of sighing for a string of pearls 
she ought to get a necklace of sharks' 
teeth; 'any coward can steal from an 
oyster' ! " 
- "H'm !" commented the captain. 
"Then you're still 'fond' of her?" 
" Yes, I believe that Gwladys has fine 
qualities-only nothing in her life with 
me calls them out. She hasn't needed to 
practise self-denial or courage or consid- 
eration or sympathy; her chief emotion 
has been resentment over her lack of 
good times as a girl, and a determination 
to have them now. I couldn't leave her 
moping around while I was off on this 
cruise. She and that aviator would get 
themselves talked about, sure as fate!" 
Captain Olney spoke sternly: "You 
seem to have mapped out your plan of 
action to the last detail; not a chink left 
open for help or advice! Now let me tell 
you something, young man: I consider 
you to be personally responsible for this 
whole newfangled muddle. I disapprove 
of it in every particular. And I won't 
have scandal and gossip following an offi- 
cer on my ship-especially the kind of 
gossip and scandal that gets into the news- 
papers. Such things are bad for a ship's 
morale: men don't take orders respect- 
fully from an individual who's proved 
that he can't run his own affairs. 'Officer 
pays for wife's divorce so she can marry en- 
sign '-that sort of stuff! If you get the re- 
porters after you I'll ask for your detach- 
ment." He stood up to signify that the 
interview was over. "Your request for 
leave is refused. And let this end it." 
The engineer officer arose; he was very 
pale now. "1'4 dislike newspaper no- 
toriety even more than you would, sir. 
I'm sorry to have bothered you. Please 
don't ever think of the matter again." 


Unfortunately for Lieutenant-Com- 
mander Carson his affairs could not be 
disposed of so easily: he found it neces- 
sary to reopen the subject with Captain 
Olney: he wanted, he reluctantly stated, 
to make a monthly allotment from his 
pay to Gwladys. 
" You don't mean to tell me that, after 
all the rumpus of your Reno divorce, you 
two have made it up?" demanded the 
captain furiously. " Young manl If 


there's one thing that I detest it's fuzzy- 
mindedness-" 
The engineer officer hastily intervened: 
"We haven't any such idea!" 
Captain Olney stared at him. 
"Gwladys and that ensign won't be 
able to get along on his pay," explained 
Carson. "I find that, alone, he can't 
keep out of debt-so where would he be 
when he has to pay for a woman's hats 
and dresses, not to mention her board 
and lodging? They'll be in constant hot 
water! So I've decided that, until he 
gets a raise, I'll make her a monthly al- 
lowance. Sort of alimony." 
The captain still stared at him. 
"You see, sir, if I hadn't failed in my 
attempt to make her happy she wouldn't 
be marrying him. And if they began 
right away quarrelling over money, how 
much of the happiness she expects would 
Gwladys get-?" 
Captain Olney's power of speech had 
returned. "I suppose that you're too 
'modern' to suggest to your wife that if 
she wants to make bricks she'd better 
furnish the straw?" 
"The rules of the Pharaohs' time 
wouldn't work nowadays; you have to 
take things as you find them-" 
" YO'll certainly seem to take them just 
as you find them!" roared the captain. 
" You aren't fit to be an officer if you 
haven't any more initiative than you've 
shown! What would you do in an acci- 
dent aboard ship-sit down and mull over 
what some Oriental wrote three thousand 
years ago? Now let me tell you some- 
thing: if you are making an allotment to 
that trifling wife of yours because, at any 
price, you're glad to get rid of her, you,'re 
a coward! And if, as you imply, you're 
trying to help her build up happiness on 
such foundations, you're a fooll And 
whichever you are, it's no credit to you! 
This is the very last word I ever want to 
hear about such private affairs as yours. 
Never again speak to me on any but 
official matters!" 
But even as he waved an imperious 
hand in dismissal, compunction seized 
him. The lad looked so young and puz- 
zled; his shoulders drooped under the 
baffling task of doing his best. Captain 
Olney caught himself wondering if those 
poet fellows who chanted so yearningly of 



A
 U
CHARTED CO{
SE 


161 


youth really believed that intelligent peo- fully ç
;ried 'out the Vermont joined the 
pIe regretted 
o bitterly youth's p
sing? fleet and went out to take part in target 
He doubted It! The heat of the day pmctit:e. 

ighrt have its, drawbacks: at least )(DU.... . Capt
in Olney had almost forgotten 
kne\\ where you wanted to go-but }Üs engmeer officer's marital perplexities 
you

! Bah! . An uncharted c?urse! when fate òrew him again into Lieuten- 
\\ Ith a defimte effort he bamshed the ant-Commander Carson's complicated 


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. . . the r crfflont joined the fleet and went out to take part in target practice. 


Carsons from his thoughts. " Human 
nature's changing or else-as I sincerely 
hope-that young man and his wife are 
isolated examples!" was his decision. 
Then the strenuous final work of getting 
the ship into commission drove less im- 
portant matters from his mind. On the 
dav of the official ceremonies he went 
th;ough the prescribed formalities; ac- 
cepted for the ship a gift of colors pre- 
sented by a delegation of dub women, a 
silver service given by the governor and 
a committee representing the ship's name 
State; then sped the official guests and 
put to sea. Life aboard settled down to 
busy usualness. Drills, inspections, and 
conferences crowded the days. And after 
the trial runs and tests had been suocess- 
VOL. LXXVIII.-I2 


affairs. The ship's first target practice 
furnished the compelling reason. 


"Efficiency in target practice-or the 
lack of it-makes or mars a ship; it's the 
decisive thing for which a battleship is 
created," remarked the captain to the 
executive officer. 
The executive agreed; then self-pro- 
tectingly let down an anchor to wind- 
ward: "Of course, with this brand new 
vessel, and the first time the guns are 
fired. it's a little different." 
"H'm! Perhaps. . . But no ship of 
mine has ever fallen down ill target prac- 
tice, so I'm not planning for an innO\'a- 
tion." He stood up. "E\'erything 
ready: fire-control, range-finders, plot- 



162 


AN UNCHARTED COURSE 


ting-room? Then I'll be on my way 
to the conning-tower." 
From that lofty vantage point-in 
company with the navigator-Captain 
Olney watched the last preparations on 
the deck below: the harassed executive 
here, there, everywhere, appeared, disap- 
peared, reappeared. Above the babel 
sounded the bugler's clear call to general 
quarters; a rush of gun crews to the tur- 
rets; followed, five minutes later, by 
officers' call and the taking up of specified 
positions. The captain, peering down, 
spied the executive arriving at his post in 
the lee of a turret, just as the plotting- 
room telephoned: "Target bears twenty- 
seven and a half degrees forward of the 
beam, sir 1 " 
"I hope," commented the captain con- 
versationally to the navigator, " that that 
new vertical hoist works all! right, but I 
mistrust innovations. I don't like handling 
the powder in silk bags-instead of the 
trusty old tin cans. I was growling about 
it to one of the retired admirals at the club 
and I said: 'The navy's gone to the dogs l' 
He answered: 'Sure 1 It always has and 
it always will!' Polite way of breaking 
it to me that I was in the fossil class!" 
The navigator indignantly repudiated 
such blasphemy. 
A long silence settled down upon the 
conning-tower. 
Captain Olney peered uneasily toward 
the turret, whose door, opening from 
within, was tightly closed preparatory to 
firing. "It's past time for that first sal- 
vo-" grumbled the captain; then clutched 
at the table for support as a strange, terri- 
fying tremor shook the ship. 
There was a moment of appalled still- 
ness, a dull pause, no one moved or spoke; 
men stopped short, their errands for- 
gotten, their sentences unfinished; the 
busy deck was galvanized into quietness. 
. . . Then, as a thin sluggish green film 
of smoke commenced seeping out from 
the forward turret the captain sprang for 
the telephone, to have his tense query: 
"JVhat happened ?-" drowned out by the 
deafening clamor of gongs and bugles 
sounding general alarm and fire call. 
". . . Explosion. Twenty-two men 
caught in the forward turret-" came the 
announcement from the plotting-room. 
"What ammunition had they?" 


"A good deal, sir. . .. And a fifty- 
pound bag had just gone up on the spon- 
son-" 
The captain did not wait to hear more. 
Breathlessly he made for the ladder, de- 
scended, and ran down the deck toward 
the turret. It was tightly closed, rigidly 
jammed, portentously still; no voices 
from within begged release. The guns 
pointed skyward at extreme elevation. 
"Couldn't be worse!" gasped the ord- 
nance officer, working with his men in an 
ineffectual effort to find some one small 
enough to enter the turret through the 
sight-hoods around the guns. 
"Get a hose! Force it through! l\-Iay- 
be some one inside there is still conscious 
enough to pull it down and use it-" 
But no help came, and without inner 
assistance the hose could not be jammed 
through the restricted opening. Several 
minutes were lost in the futile attempt. 
Captain Olney could not endure an- 
other second of inaction nor the sigh t of 
the sluggish, slowly thickening smoke. 
Suddenly he remembered that there 
was a tiny entrance in the floor of that 
turret through a compartment, jammed 
with electrical equipment, on the deck 
below, Frantically he ran toward the 
ladder, went down, made his way forward 
-to be halted by the executive, running 
to meet him. "Better go back, sir: the 
turret's being opened. They'll be taking 
out the gun crew." 
"Who opened it?" 
"Eq.gineer officer. He went-immedi- 
ately after the eXplosion-and wormed 
his way through the little opening into the 
turret. The men say he had a hard time 
squirming through: the space left between 
the deck and the breeches, when the guns 
are at extreme elevation, is so narrow. 
And all the time his head was in the fire 
and fumes." 
"\Vhy the engineer officer? It's out- 
side his duty!" 
" Initiative / He told the men that he 
thought there were two more rounds of 
ammunition in there ready to explode, 
gave the order: 'Noone is to follow me'- 
and shut the opening. I didn't get there 
until too late!" 
They were breathless when they reached 
the turret. In their absence, obeying 
muffled orders from within, the hose had 



AN lTNCH.\RTED CO. TRSE 


been successfully forced through the 
sight-hood, the fire extinguished. The 
door swung slowly back. 
Through the opening there emerged an 
appalling figure with singed hair and eye- 
brows, a scorched and blackened face; he 
was clad in smoking fragments and 


" 


163 


The captain tried again: "Carson-" 
A hospital corps man intervened: "He 
don't hear you, sir! That turret was all 
afire when he stuck his head into it!" 
,. I know!" answered the captain, and 
turned back to the chaos of his ship. 
Desolately he debated: "And that's the 


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Through the opening there emerged an appalling figure . _ . blankly oblivious of his surroundings, intent 
only upon his duty. 


charred shoes. \\Tith his burned hands 
he tugged at two of the unconscious 
gun crew and, staggering came forward, 
blankly oblivious of his surroundings, in- 
tent only upon his duty. Carefully he 
laid down his two charges and started 
back; then, seeing that a score of men had 
taken up his task, he paused, groped 
blindly for support, and-e\Ten as Cap- 
tain Olney sprang to his aid-collapsed 
limply where he stood. 
Later, when the dead and injured were 
being moved to the tugs \vhich were to 
carry them to the Naval Hospital. the 
captain stopped beside the stretcher upon 
which-ghastly under the bright yellow, 
picric-acid soaked first-aid bandages-the 
engineer officer Jay, and attempted a 
husky remark. There was no response. 


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lad I called a coward and accused of 
lacking initiative!" 


Followed then a grim interval. Every 
day, among the injured at the Kaval 
Hospital, the death list lengthened; each 
morning the survivors might seem to be 
holding their own, but one or two would 
slowly develop the strange hoar
enes:; 
indicatÎ\Te of internal burns; soon their 
empty cots were carried out. The ward 
reserved for them grew roomier and room- 
ier. Captain Olney, viewing their vacant 
places, grew grayer and sadder; hi:; 
dreams were haunted by spectres with 
burned faces and bandaged hands. 
His last visit every day was to the room 
of the engineer officer-there to stand 
looking down at the lit:utcnant-cùmmand- 



164 


AN UNCHARTED COURSE 


er's swathed head and limp, helpless 
hands. Carson did not notice his com- 
manding officer but lay staring at noth- 
ing with blank, half-closed eyes. The 
captain was the only visitor allowed to 
see him-and the sight brought no solace; 
after several visits he asked audience with 
the chief doctor and demanded to know 
why nothing was being accomplished. 
"Carson doesn't want to be helped. . . . 
Do you know what the only words he's 
spoken since he's been here were? One of 
the doctors was trying to persuade him to 
eat, and all the result he got was Carson's 
whisper: 'Too tired.' No medicine 
reaches that." 
"It ought to!" asserted the captain 
stubbornly. 
"\Vhat do you know about it? . . . 
The shock your engineer officer had 
wasn't any ordinary one--that turret 
must have been an inferno! I hear that 
he's been awarded a medal for excep- 
tional bravery? Quite right, too! If 
anyone ever earned it, he did!", 
Captain Olney nodded. H The medal 
came to-day. Do you think that if we 
made a little ceremony of the presenta- 
tion to-morrow we might arouse him?" 
Then, as the doctor dubiously shook his 
head, the captain's unhappiness broke 
into irritation: "You medicos are a fine 
lot ! You can't even cure a man that 
isn't sick!" 
H He's not only really sick-he's getting 
ready to go," answered the doctor grim- 
ly. "Find something that interests him- 
the rest will be easy; it doesn't matter 
what the interest is, oply so he gets it. 
As for that medal: present it if you like. 
I doubt whether Carson'll ever know-or 
care--that he has it." 
Captain Olney returned to the engineer 
officer's room, made a valiant effort to de- 
cide upon the material for arousing in- 
terest, chose his own most absorbing 
preoccupation, keyed his voice to en- 
thusiasm, and launched forth: " You'll be 
glad to know that the ship's getting back 
into shape again, Carson. Of course 
there are inspections and inquiries being 
held all over the place--that's inevita- 
ble ! " He paused to glance at the lieu- 
tenant-commander's unnoting expression. 
HThe sick lads are coming along well," 
remarked the captain; then hastily 


amended: "I mean that some of them 
are! They ask after you-those who are 
able! " 
Carson showed not the faintest interest. 
The captain embarked upon a detailed 
account of ship affairs, expounding and 
enlarging upon the daily happenings. 
Treacherously he repeated several pieces 
of news told him by another captain 
recently returned from a visit to the 
Navy Department. I t became amaz- 
ingly evident to him that Carson was not 
even slightly interested in the ship or in 
the service! 
Captain Olney paused, cleared his 
throat, hesitated, came to a baffled halt. 
Somehow. . . the brooding still- 
ness of that room was commencing to get on 
his nerves. It seemed always waiting to creep 
back, to close over . . . as deep water, dis- 
turbed by a stone, tranquilly resumes its 
calm. . . . IV hat was it that was waiting? . . . 
And was he an impertinent intruder, a fool 
rushing in? . . . He arose and laid a gentle 
hand upon Carson's shoulder. "I'll be 
back to-morrow with a surprise for you," 
he whispered-and fled. 
The doctor was right about the presen- 
tation of the medal. Captain Olney 
knew the bitterness of futility when, after 
the brief formalities of reading the accom- 
panying citation and a letter from the 
secretary of the navy, he pinned the 
medal to the engineer officer's pajama 
coat. Carson's half-closed eyes were 
dull; he was so evidently beyond the 
reach of honors or approval that his com- 
manding officer stifled a groan. Outside 
in the hallway, he spoke fiercely to the 
doctor: "Don't you dare let him go! 
There are some things I must say to him! 
If you know of anything that will help 
him, get it I" 
The doctor answered: "In cases like 
this we're helpless." 
Captain Olney, descending the stairs, 
repeated the word: '" Helpless'! That 
lad who, all of his life, had made it a fixed 
rule to help every person who had a real 
or an imaginary claim upon him-" His 
unhappiness made him oblivious of a 
young woman standing by the outer 
door; not until she touched his sleeve did 
he notice that she was young, blond. 
smartly dressed, and that a small hat 
sat awry upon her bobbt:d nair. She 



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"You're George Carson's commanding officer, aren't you? /low is he?" 


seemed little more than the child for 
which, at first glance, the captain had 
mistaken her. 
In a choked voice she asked: " You're 
George Carson's commanding officer, 
aren't you? H uw is he?" 
". . . Dying. , . ." 
She swallowed hard. "I've been here 


every day, but they won't let me see 
him. " 
"The doctors are trying to conserve 
his strength." 
"But I'm his wife-at least I'i.t'Gs, until 
I made the hideous mistake of thinking 
that I loved some one else. . .. \Vhy 
can't I see him? . .. If he knew that I 
16 5 



166 


A
 UNCHARTED COURSE 


was here he'd make them let me go to 
him ! " 
The captain stared down at her small, 
tear-stained face, crooked hat, and tum- 
bled hair. "Then you're Gwladys?-" 
"Yes. And I want to tell him that [ 
know what a fool I've been." The tears 
welled into her eyes and ran down her 
cheeks. "I hadn't realized. . . what 
life without him would be . . . until I 
rearl his name . . . in the list of the in- 
lured." She sobbed aloud. "I hadn't 
ever -imagi-ned . . . what it would be 
like . . . not to have him to turn to. . . . 
II c always Ize! ps! . .. I must see him 
. . . and tell him. . . ." 
"Ten him what?" 
"That I know how selfish and cruel 
I've been. But that . . . I'm so . . . 
sorrv. . . ." 
Ámazingly Captain Olney found him- 
self agreeing with Carson's description of 
her: she was forlorn and appealing, com- 
bining, with her evident need for consid- 
eration anù protection, an exasperating 
!'tubbornness; in the face of refusals and 
rebuffs from the hospital authorities she 
had haunted the place, awaiting her 
chance. At the thought of her tenacity 
the captain hardened his heart. 
"I won't contradict your judgment of 
yourself! "Then I remember what you've 
put your husband through, I don't think 
that anyone owes you much sympathy. 
However, the shock of that turret fire 
following his worry over you has knocked 
the will to live, clean out of Carson. None 
of us can rouse him. :Maybe you can. If 
the doctor is willing, it's worth a trial. 
In a world jammed full of selfish, greedy, 
unintelligent people we can't afford to 
lose a single one of his rare kind." 
But back in the engineer officer's room 
the captain's experiment seemed a for- 
lorn hope. Carson was oblivious of his 
wife's presence, heedless of her frightened 
whispered appeals. To Captain Olney, 
looking down at the lieutenant-command- 
er's quiet face, at the unnoted medal for 
conspicuous bravery hanging awry, came 
the realization that the loneliest of all 
created things is the soul which is getting 
ready to go. Desperately he turned to 
Gwladys: "Say something, can't you?" 
She shook her head. For the first time 
in her life she had encountered something 


too big for her, something beyond tears. 
The room was very still with that en- 
croaching stillness which was Captain 
Olney's particular dread; he wanted to 
fight it off with some decisive action- 
but what effort would serve him now? 
Irrelevantly there came to him the re- 
membrance of that day when Carson- 
speaking of the old rri'ystics and of his 
mother's belief in their admonition con- 
cerning the retribution rlealt out to those 
who wilfully neglected their tasks here- 
had admitted that he shared the fear. . . . 
Should he attempt to reach him now 
through that? And how? 
Outside in the harbor his beloved ship 
awaited his return; aboard her a Court of 
Inquiry was conducting an investigation 
of his administration; by all rights he 
should be there. But Captain Olney 
was convinced that unless the one right 
word could be spoken now to his engineer 
officer, the time for such speaking would 
be forever gone. He made a supreme 
effort; his voice held authority: "Carson! 
Y our wife is here! Come back!" 
There was a faint movement of the 
lieutenant-commander's heavy eyelids. 
Seeing it, the captain repeated his chal- 
lenge: "Carson! Come back! Your wife 
needs you!" 
But -the engineer officer was not listen- 
ing. Captain Olney despondently shook 
his head. 
And then, when he haù given up, the 
miracle happened. l\Irs. Carson spoke. 
She had forgotten herself and all the petty 
things with which she had filled her life. 
If her husband was to go, she must help 
him to go happily-taking with him the 
memory of her first valiant, unselfish 
effort. A gentle new spirit rang, wistful 
and entreating, through her quiet words: 
" You mustn't worry over me any more, 
George. . .. I'll get along somehow! 
But I want you to know-even if 
you can't hear anything else-] want )'O'lf, 
to know that ] love 'VOlt!" 
\Yhen, a few min
tes later, the captain 
paused for a second in the doorway he 
saw what was to be his one exultant 
memory of a time of sorrow, strain, 
and suffering: for Lieutenant-Commander 
Carson was trying comfortingly to touch 
his wife's bowed head with one feeble 
bandaged hand, 



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If one hails a gondola here, one finds oneself gliding between a succession of noble old palaces, great and small 
The pale-green watër laps the bases of their walls and the tall mooring-posts are often painted \\ith the family color.;. 


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THE KOISELESS CITY 


Eight Drawings by F. H. I\larvin 


167 



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l'ndcr the numerous bridge:; pass all sorts of boats-gondolas and the lighter (and swifter) sandolos, or larger 
boats ("burche") laden with vegctables from the mainland. 


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the basin of San )tarco. 


}60 



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After numerous turns, perhaps as the canal widens, we shall see before us the broad expanse of the 
lagoon, and, if we wish, we can go on out over its calm surface, on past Murano, 
with its glass factories, and still on for mile after mile to far away. 


172 



The Lost Story 
BY CLARKE KNOvVLTON 
Author of "The Apollo d'Oro" 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY GRACE DRAYTON 


(( All things that seem 
Are but 
One dreamer's dream." 
-CHlYO. 


SET down the facts as 
he gave them to me- 
the facts that seem in- 
finitely more impor- 
tant than any explana- 
tion. If you are a 
materialist, you will 
say that it was all im- 
agination, only imagination-the con- 
fused dreaming 'of a little boy; but after 
all are you sure? And of what are you 
sure? In our sordid preoccupation with 
the dull type of earthly experience what do 
we know of a reality not included between 
that capital letter termed birth and the 
strange hieroglyphic which lurks, forever 
enigmatic, the last of printed symbols? 
It may have been purely accidental 
that he told me about it on the eve of his 
departure; it may have been something 
more subtle by far. Certainly, if he had 
been asking for bread, I had given him a 
stone. But how was I to know? So 
many young business men from distant 
cities descend upon one in New York 
armed with letters of introduction and a 
desire to see the sigh ts. How was I to 
sense that this one differed from the 
others, unless it were that he seemed 
more presentable and had a rather nicer 
sense of humor? 
After he was gone, I cursed my own 
lack of discernment. There were people 
I might have had him meet, other things 
than dancing, theatres, and an occasional 
studio party. Also, I was to remember 
again how lVlargaret Owen had summed 
him up that first night at the Lido- 
Venice. "I like him," she had said. 
"Bronze wings." But I had put that 
down to the fact that Margaret was a 
woman and hence rather inclined to be 


influenced by such things as brown eyes, 
stalwart shoulders, and a certainly very 
well tailored back. 

e came around that last evening, so he 
saId, to thank me for having been decent 
to him during his somewhat protracted 
stay in the city. He found me ostensibly 
at work on a story, but in reality-since 
it wasn't going-hoping that the young 
sculptor chap with whom I was sharing a 
studio would return to give me an ex- 
cuse for stopping work under pretense of 
arguing about the exact proportions of the 
open fire and whether it might really be 
large enough to keep me from actually 
freezing without irreparable damage to 
the army of mummified clay figures with 
which the place was thronged. 
I explained about the story and said . 
that I welcomed the interruption. I even 
mixed a drink to prove it. 
"I'll tell you a story," my guest volun- 
teered when the drink was ready. 
"Though it really is only the imprint of 
a story." 
"The imprint of a story?" I asked as I 
pushed forward a ponderous armchair. 
" Si t down." 
He slumped into the chair, taking care 
not to spill his drink. "Yes. Like yours, 
it wouldn't come clear," he said. 
"How well I know that feeling!" I 
seated myself on our second-best chair. 
"
fakes suicide seem advisable." 
Hë smiled at me, and I noted again 
that this man smiled with his eyelids; 
they crinkled up in the most engaging 
way, and when he opened them suddenly 
the brown eyes sparkled with little flick- 
ering golden lights that seemed to be fall- 
ing sparks from a previous and private 
conflagration. 
"I can only tell you of it," he said, (0 by 
telling you of the impression it made on a 
little boy." 
"\V ould it be indiscreet to ask if you 
I ï3 



174 


THE LOST STORY 


were the little boy?" I questioned stu- 
pidly. 
"That little boy is gone," he said. "He 
certainly is not I; nor are his memories 
mine." For a moment he was lost in 


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"Begin at the beginning," I urgerl. 
"There is no beginning." 
"The little boy had a beginning!" 
"The little boy had a beginning that 
came too SOOI1." 


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The liule boy used to sit for hours, staring into sp,lCe-Page 177. 


revery. "And yet," he suddenly burst 
out, "if you made fun of him I'd want to 
fight you." 
"I won't make fun of him." 
"It seems odd," he said slowly, "that 
people didn't make fun of him. They 
might have so easily. l\lighty decent 
they were-those good people-consid- 
ering- " 


"How do you mean?" 
" He arrived in this vale of tears a couple 
of months before he was expected." 
" So ? " 
"But he insisted on staying." 
"He seems to have had determination 
from the very first." 
"Yes. Even his enemies would have 
granted him that," he said meditatively. 



THE LOST STORY 


" Enemies? " 
,. Did you ever see Jackie Coogan?" he 
asked, irrelevantly it seemed to me. I re- 
plied that I was a perfectly loyal Ameri- 
can. 
"\Vell, there is a picture of this little 
boy-it must have been taken when he 
was about three-might remind you of 
Jackie Coogan." 
,. Yes?" 
" Same big, dark, solemn eyes , . . 
wistful little mouth. . .. He had on a 
black velvet suit." For a moment my 
companion remained silent; then he con- 
tined: "It all must have happened before 
he was five-they moved away from there 
when he was five-and he must have been 
well over three when they first heard of 
the story that was to cause them all so 
much trouble. Shall I tell you about it 
as I have pieced it together?" 
I said that there was nothing would 
please me more. 
"The descriptions of the little boy will 
be those of other people, for of course 
many of these incidents have been told 
me." 
"I understand," I said. 
He took. a long drink from his glass, set 
it carefully on a nearby table, leaned back, 
closed his eyes for a moment, and then, 
opening them, began abruptly. And this 
is the story that he told me: 


"One day he came running to his 
mother, very much excited. '.l\tlama,' he 
cried, 'there's a white horse out front.' 
His mother was very busy-she was al- 
ways very busy. ' Well?' she said casu- 
ally. He tugged at her skirt. 'Hurry, 
mama. If we follow him maybe he'll 
show us the other one,' he begged. 
'What other one?' she asked. 'Why, 
mama, the one I used to ride.' How ag- 
gravatingly casual grown people can be! 
'The one you used to ride? \Vhen ?' she 
inquired, looking at him for the first time. 
She saw his eyes cloud. 'Mama, didn't I 
ever ride a white horse?' he asked. 
'" Not that I ever heard of,' she said. 
What she meant was that if he had ever 
ridden any kind of a horse it had been 
without her knowledge; also that the 
matter would bear investigation-men 
being what they are. 
'''But, mama,' he said earnestly, 'if I 


175 


didn't ride a white horse what about the 
chickens with the pretty tails?' 
" 'The chickens with the pretty tails? 
What chickens?' They might be a clue. 
'" .J.\;lama, they was chickens wasn't 
they?' he said. ' 
'''I don't know, precious-were they? ' 
she asked with the subtlety of the ser- 
pent. 
"He raised his hands and spread the 
fingers wide. 'Mama, they:; tails went 
like this,' he explained. 
"'They did?' 
" , Yes, mama, and they was pretty-so 
pretty. And the lady was pretty too.' 
'''What lady?' 
'''The pretty lady.' 
'''What pretty lady?' 
" 'Why, mama, don't you know about 
the pretty lady?' he asked in surprise. 
"His mother admitted that she didn't. 
'''1\1ama, the one that used to play 
with the prince.' 
'''Oh,' cried the good woman, enlight- 
ened and reassured. 'One of those stories 
your grandmother has been reading to 
you.' 
" · No, mama.' 
"'Yes, dear. It's in a book.' 
"He raised his eyes earnestly to her 
face. 'Are you sure, mama? Is it in a 
book? ' 
" , Yes, dear. Run and ask grandma to 
read it to you!' 
'" But, mama, the white horse will get 
away.' 
'" It doesn't matter, dear. The horse 
out front doesn't know anything about 
the other one. You'll find out about him 
in the book. Go ask grandma!' 
"But his grandmother didn't know. 
She wanted to read him about Cinderella 
and the Prince, though he told her it 
wasn't that. He listened with dignified 
condescension-a little boy has to humor 
grown-ups. \Vhen she had finished he 
shook his head. ' No, grandma, I knowed 
it wasn't that!' he said, but when she 
questioned him about the story, he could- 
n't make her understand. 'Grandma,' he 
said solemnly, 'I guess we'll just have to 
read 'em all until we come to the right one.' 
,. Very kind she was-that old lady. 
Day after day she read to the little boy; 
story after story she read; she read every 
book that she had ever read to him in the 



176 


THE LOST STORY 


past. Sometimes after one or two pages 
he would shake his head. ' No, it's not 
that,' he would say, and they would try 
another. . But how,' asked the old lady 
one day, 'do you know it's not that?' 


.. 


'>- 
" 
::.. 
'. {..)-;., 


1- -- 

 .. 


-;- 


his forehead. 'I-I'm forgettin'; all the 
time I'm forgettin'. Grandma, if we 
don't finò it soon, I'm afraid it will all be 
gone.' But when they finished the last 
book, they hadn't found the story. 


" 


':1 
,/ 


............ 



 i--
 



 


\ 


\) 


The little boy shut his eyes and entered the parlor.-Page 177. 


" 'Because, grandma, I would know.' 
". But, dear, you can't tell me the 
story.' 
" 'Grandma,' he pleaded, 'I knowed it 
-all of it; and if you was to commence it 
I'd know it again. . .. I-I would, 
grandma! ' 
"'But how did it go?' 
"The little boy passed his hand across 


It seems perfectly natural that the grand- 
mother should have wearied of the sub- 
ject. 'You see,' she remarked brusquely, 
as she laid down the book, 'it's not in the 
books.' . . . The little boy sat very quiet 
for quite a long time; at last he said un- 
steadily: 'But, grandma-if it's not in the 
books-won't I ever know?' The old 
lady said afterward that the eyes he raised 



THE LOST STORY 


to hers were terrible to behold-the eyes 
of a child lost in the dark corridors of hell, 
remembering the light. She said they 
nearly broke her heart. 'Good gracious, 
child!' she cried, 'if it means as much as 
that to you, we'll find it if we have to read 
every book that was ever written.' But 
they never found it, and soon afterward 
the grandmother went away." 


At this point in his narrative, my guest 
picked up his glass, held it up absently 
toward the firelight, then set it down un- 
tasted. I wheeled the statue of a lady 
from within whose gray wrappings faint 
but alarming noises had been issuing to a 
position somewhat more removed from 
the fireside. "He wasn't the first who 
has failed to find it in the books," I re- 
marked as I returned to my seat. But 
my companion did not seem to hear me: 
it was some minutes before he roused him- 
self and continued with the tale: 


"The little boy used to sit for hours, 
staring into space, trying to remember. 
AU by himself-out on the porch-some- 
times on the attic stairs. His head used 
to ache. . .. Oh, those efforts to re- 
member, and always so futile, so very 
futile; it never came that way. 
"The next time he questioned his mother 
she referred him to his father. 'Papa,' he 
asked one night at dinner, 'will you find 
out for me about the story?' 
"'What story?' asked his father. 
" , You know, dear,' said the boy's 
mother; 'the one about the pretty chick- 
ens and the prince.' 
'" No. I don't know,' returned the 
father, surprised. 
"The mother winked at the father with 
an expressive nod toward the little boy. 
'Of course you remember!' But she was 
not quite quick enough; the little boy 
saw her, and always he remembered that 
wink. 
" 'Oh, yes,' said his father quickly-too 
quickly. 'I'll find out about it to-mor- 
row-sure thing.' They hoped the little 
boy would forget, you see. But he did- 
n't forget; it was far too important for 
that. 
"Night after night he'd be waiting for 
his father. 'Did you find out to-day, 
papa? ' How his father must have re- 
VOL, LXXVIII,-I3 


177 


gretted that promise! Uncle Ned said 
that they ought to have beaten it out of 
the boy then and there; but they didn't, 
not then. . .. The father even took to 
going to the Public tibrary and looking 
up all sorts of queer stories, but he never 
found The Story. At last, the little boy 
began to lose confidence in a parent who 
would evade, repeat, change stories every 
time he told them. The little boy de- 
cided that he would have to find out for 
himself . 
"The books were kept in the parlor- 
two bookcases of them. But the parlor 
wasn't a safe place. In fact, it was a ter- 
rible place. The parlor was guarded by 
an ogre--a terrible old man: he stood in a 
gold frame on what must have been a sort 
of easel in the corner-the corner across 
from the books. They said it was the 
portrait of the little boy's grandfather. 
The eyes followed, followed, followed one 
about; they forbade one, terrified one. 
The old man seemed about to reach out 
an a ","iul hand and seize one by the hair 
if he so much as turned his back. Clearly 
it was impossible to get at the pictures in 
the books with those eyes watching one. 
Hence . . . the obvious thing to do . . . 
put out those eyes. But how? 
"The little boy thought of it a long 
time--he'd never dared go into that room 
alone. Finally he got his mother's scis- 
sors, the big ones, and stole down stairs. 
The house was very quiet. Yes, the old 
man was right there as usual. The little 
boy shut his eyes and entered the parlor. 
He bumped into a chair and fled wildly to 
the kitchen. But he went back-the per- 
sistence of the little devil I-he went back, 
and, without looking at the old man, he 
pushed a chair across to the picture- 
frame. Shaking all over, he climbed upon 
the chair. He almost died of fright when 
he opened his eyes and saw those other 
eyes so close, so very close. He slashed 
out wildly with the scissors. He cut and 
cut and cut, crying all the time. The 
first black hole where the eye had been 
appeared even more horrible than the 
eye. \Vhen he got down, the upper part 
of the picture was in shreds. 
"They found the floor strewn with 
copies of magazines, the wrecked picture, 
and no trace of the little boy. \Vhen they 
discovered hinl behind the stove in the 



178 


THE LOST STORY 


kitchen, he sobbed out an unintelligible 
story about papa-the story-the books 
-that old man-and a white horse. 
" 'The kid lies so!' said Uncle Ned. 
'If he were mine, I'd teach him a lesson.' 
"But they didn't punish him then. It 
always seemed odd that they didn't pun- 
ish him then: he'd expected to be pun- 
ished, expected his father to be angry- 
his father had an incomprehensible liking 
for that old man. It seemed that they 
always punished him when he didn't ex- 
pect it. Perhaps, they didn't punish him 
because they were taking him that night 
-as a surprise- to the circus-that mar- 
vellous circus. For a while he forgot all 
about the story. 
"They were standing in front of a lion's 
cage when suddenly he tugged at his 
father's hand and pointed excitedly 
toward a cage of monkeys. 'Papa,' he 
cried, 'papa, look! They was in the 
story, papa. They was, they was! And, 
papa, the walls of the house was all like 
the insides of mama's coat.' (The bril- 
liant foreign material with which his 
mother's new coat was lined had fasci- 
nated the little boy.) 'And, papa,' he 
went on when they saw the golden chariot, 
'it was like that too. It was, papa!' 
"For a long time afterward, in playing 
circus, he seemed to have forgotten the 
story. Then, one night, Uncle Ned came 
into the house swearing. 'That kid of 
yours is the damnedest little liar!' he said. 
'If you don't teach him to tell the truth 
soon, he'll never learn.' The father and 
mother exchanged glances. 
" 'What's he done now?' questioned 
the father. 
" 'He met me down at the gate and 
asked me where my horse was, and when 
I said I didn't have a horse, he said I did, 
because he'd seen it.' 
"They sent for the little boy. 
"'What's all this about Uncle Ned's 
horse?' asked the father. 
'''Papa, Uncle Ned had a horse.' 
'''Uncle Ned never had a horse.' 
"'Papa, Uncle Ned had a horse,' reiter- 
ated the little boy very earnestly. 
"'You see?' said Uncle Ned. 
" 'Son, you mustn't tell lies. Uncle 
Ned never had a horse.' 
'''Papa, I remember when Uncle Ned 
had a horse-not a white horse: my horse 


was white, but Uncle Ned's horse was- 
was-his wasn't white l' 
" 'Nonsense, Uncle Ned never had a 
horse. ' 
" 'Papa, my horse run over Uncle 
Ned's horse, and the pretty lady laughed.' 
"'You see?' cried Uncle Ned angrily. 
'" Dear, you just dreamed that,' inter- 
posed the mother. 
"'No, mama. Uncle Ned had a horse.' 
"The father took the little boy by 
the shoulder. 'Son,' he said, 'that isn't 
so l' 
"'But, papa, it is so. Uncle Ned had a 
horse. ' 
" , Wha 1'd I tell you? ' angrily pro- 
claimed Uncle Ned again. 
'''I'm sorry, son; but if you insist on 
lying I'll have to punish you.' 
"'But, papa, I tell you Uncle Ned 
hoo.-' 
"'Don't you say that again.' 
'''Papa, Uncle Ned-' 
"'You come with me!' said his father 
sternly. 
'" Son, tell papa that Uncle Ned didn't 
have a horse!' entreated his mother as 
the little boy was dragged from the room. 
"'But, mama, he had a horse. . . . 
Mine was white and his-' The door 
closed behind them. 
"They say that when the little chap 
stood defiantly in front of the big man 
with the whip, alone in that upper room, 
the mother came and beat on the 
door . . . it was locked. She heard the 
small voice say: 'Papa, why do I have to 
be a little boy?' She heard the man's 
voice say: 'Do you still insist that Uncle 
Ned had a horse?' and the familiar: 'But, 
papa, he had a horse!' Then the fall of 
the whip, swish, swish, swish, very loud in 
the painful silence. Then angrily a voice 
choked with humiliation, desperation, and 
tears: 'Don't you dare hit me again l' 
Swish. The sound of a scuffie, hard 
breathing, swish, swish, swish. And 
then, one single, long, loud wail-at last. 
"When the door was opened the little 
figure lay huddled on the floor. . . . 
They couldn't get him to open his eyes: 
he was so rigid, so unresponsive that they 
would have thought that he was uncon- 
scious if it hadn't been for the great 
racking sobs that now and then con- 
vulsed the little body, forcing their way 



THE LOST STORY 


relentlessly through the tight-clinched 
teeth. . .. They put him to bed, 
"Before morning fever set in. By the 
time the doctor got there he was delirious 
-no doubt about it this time; he was 
delirious for many days. They never 
referred to the whipping-not even Uncle 
Ned. Perhaps it had to come! There 
were mornings when he woke quite nor- 
mally. One morning his mother, de- 
lighted at the apparent improvement, 
cried: 'Good morning, Roger dear!' 
'" My name's not Roger,' he protested. 
"She did not contradict. 
''':My name never was Roger.' 
" , \Vhat is your name, dear? ' She 
sought to humor him. 
'''It's
it's-' The clouded look she 
had learned to fear settled across the little 
face. '1-1 don't know. . .. J\lama, I 
don't know. . .. It's all going away. 
J\lama, I can't see the pretty lady's face 
no more.' He beat his hands on the bed- 
clothes. 'Mama, mama, her face is gone.' 
"She took him in her arms. ' There, 
there,' she soothed. 
" , Mama!' he implored, 'does I. belong 
to theys or to yous?' 
'" To me, dear!' she cried bravely, 
gayly-as only a good woman can be 
brave with terror clutching at her heart. 
"The crisis arrived on Christmas Eve- 
it happens more often than one would ex- 
pect in life. There was some kind of sing- 
ing down the street-carol-singers, per- 
haps. The little lad sat up in bed. With 
an ecstatic expression on his face, he cried: 
'lVlama, they's comin' for me; I can hear 
them. . .. Mama, mama, I'll see the 
chickens, the pretty chickens.' It was 
the last time that he ever spoke of them." 
:.M: y companion ceased speaking; the 
firelight played strange tricks across his 
face. A log in the fireplace settled noisily 
in the quiet of the room. I waited. 
"The pretty chickens with the spreading 
tails!" he said softly as though to him- 
self. 


179 


'" Tall peacocks pass 
Across the grass, 
And trail their 
Tyrian draperies.'" 


I quoted under my breath from :Murray 
Sheehan. 
He shot me a golden glance. "Per- 
haps, turkeys," he said. 
"I insist it was peacocks." 
" Perhaps." 
"But," I questioned, "do you remem- 
ber nothing of the story, yourself?" 
"Only this," he said leaning forward, 
"that everything was very, very beauti- 
ful, very bright. There were no shadows 
there. And the people seemed made of 
light." He rose and reached for his over- 
coat. "There is something reminiscent 
of it in Botticelli's painting. I remember 
Botticelli because "-he smiled at me- 
"once, when the little boy grew up, he did 
a very foolish thing. 
" Yes? " 
"He took a year off and went 'round 
the world." 
"He did?" 
"In search of something-anywhere- 
that would compare with the lining to a 
coat." 
"And of course he never found it." 
"He never found it. . .. Sometimes 
almost. . . there were moments-" 
" Yes? " 
" In India, in China, in Egypt, in 
Rome. " 
I helped him on with his coat. "\Vhat 
happened then?" I asked as we shook 
hands. 
In the doorway he turned and the eye- 
lids crinkled up a moment, then opened 
blindingly to the golden light. "He 
came back and joined the Rotarians and 
the Boosters Clubs." 
"I don't believe it," I called after him 
as he disappeared. There floated back 
to me a line-a line in which there was 
laughter and something else that might 
have been despair: 
"Nobody ever has." 



The Madness of Gamaliel Sevenoaks 


BY ABBIE CARTER GOODLOE 
Author of "The Trafficker," "Darius and Alexander," etc. 


ILLUSTRATIONS (FRONTISPIECE) BY HARRY TOWNSEND 


: 

 .- LD SETH SNOW 
. -', stuck his quill pen be- 

 IO :JI hind his ear, twisted 
. 
 himself about on his 

 I '-.J 
 high stool, and took a 
L--. squint at the slim back 
WW of the young gentle- 
man rapidly making 
his way out of the glass-partitioned count- 
ing-room. 
"He's a chip off the old block, Jabe," 
he said. 
J abez Ruggles, who sat on the stool 
next to Seth's, looked up an instant from 
the invoice he was copying, gazed re- 
flectively after the personable young man 
disappearing in the direction of the N ep- 
tune wharf, where his father, Mr. Eph- 
raim Seven oaks, was waiting for him, and 
grunted a dissent. 
"Can't say ez I see it, Seth," he ob- 
jected. "He ain't seasoned. Old Ephraim 
warn't never green, like G'maliel. Too 
much Salem, I'm thinkin'. The old 
man's goin' to send him out to China- 
and a good idea, too. F our years in this 
countin-house's enough. He ought to see 
th' world a bit. He's young and innocent 
and thar's a power 0' things to lam in 
this wicked world," said J abez with a sigh, 
and bent to his task again over a sheet of 
the company's paper with its wide, red- 
inked margin and new letter-head that 
stood out in clear characters at the top. 


EPHRAIM SEVENOAKS & SON 


MERCHANTS 
CHINA AND MEDITERRANEAN TRADE 
In the right-hand upper corner was the 
imprint of a scudding hermaphrodite 
brig and beneath it the facsimile of the 
house flag-two five-pointed white stars 
on a red field. Up to a month before, 
the finn had been Pinton &- Seven oaks, 
but at that time Mr. Ephraim Seven- 
180 


oaks had bought out old Joshua Pinton, 
and had made young Gamaliel a full 
partner in the big overseas trading busi- 
ness. 
Mr. Sevenoaks had felt what he feared 
was an almost ungodly pride and elation 
on the day he had entered Gamaliel as 
junior partner. However, not only his 
affection but his business sense had ap- 
proved his action, for during the twenty- 
one years of Gamaliel's life he had never 
disappointed his father's ambitions or 
thwarted his plans, and daily did Ephraim 
offer up thanks to the stem God he wor- 
shipped that the one indiscretion of his 
youth had had no evil results for his son. 
The one indiscretion of Ephraim's 
youth had been his hasty marriage with 
Miss Evelina Gwathmey, of Louisville, a 
sister of Mr. Darius Gwathmey. Ephraim 
had met the gay Southern channer on 
one of his trips to Kentucky for the pur- 
chase of tobacco and, for the first time 
in his life, lost his head as well as his 
heart. Evelina had flouted his New Eng- 
land prejudices and broken his traditions. 
Then she had died. That was when little 
Gamaliel was two years old. 
Ephraim had named his boy for Mr. 
Gamaliel Instone, his neighbor and closest 
friend. They had the same religion, the 
same inhibitions, and the same business 
interests. When Mr. Instone determined 
to follow the trend of big shipping ven- 
tures and leave little old Salem for New 
York, he convinced Ephraim Sevenoaks 
that his business, too, would prosper by 
so doing, and induced him to wind up his 
affairs at the New England port and re- 
move himself and three of his most 
trusted clerks to New York. Little 
Gamaliel was left behind to be brought 
up, safely and sanely, by his maiden aunt, 
a notable exponent of the most austere 
traditions of Salem society. 
Both Ephraim and M rc Instone pros- 



'J 


THE MADNESS OF GAI\1ALIEL SEVENOAKS 


181 


pered mightily in New York, and when' solved. Ephraim suddenly felt-old and 
young Stephen Instone and Gamaliel tired. Decidedry it was time to plan 
were about seventeen or so, Mr. Seve1\.. ....-seriously for his 'son's future and the 
oaks sent for his son, and the two rich" perpetuation of his line. 
merchants built homes side by side in _ 
St, John's Park and settled down to a During supper there was much talk of 
sober enjoyment of their children and ships and cargoes, stormy weather and 
their comfortable fortunes. The two slow and fast voyages, but it was not 
houses were just alike externally and of until the conclusion of the meal, when the 
the chaste Salem style of architecture-- serving-maid brought in the silver tray 
Mr. Sevenoaks didn't approve of ostenta- set out with a pot of fragrant Young Hy- 
tion. And he wanted his life and Gama- son, a plate of nimble cake, and a squat, 
liel's to be as plain, as austere, as different bamboo-covered jar of fiery Canton gin- 
from other rich men's lives, as his house. ger, and left the gentlemen to themselves, 
He jealously maintained the simple cus- that Ephraim broached the matter upper- 
toms he had brought with him from New most in his mind. 
England: early to bed and early to rise; "I've been thinking, Gam," he began, 
prayers at night and church on Sundays, puffing meditatively at his cheroot, "that 
fair weather or foul; supper-no new- it's about time you saw the other end of 
fangled dinners in the evening; little com- our business. Now that you are a part- 
pany and no dissipations. In those days, ner, you ought to go out to Canton and 
when hard drinking was an almost uni- look over our affairs there. Eighteen 
versal custom, Gamaliel had never so months aboard ship and in the Orient. 
much as tasted a glass of wine. What d'ye say, boy?" 
Ephraim had secretly expected some Gamaliel reflected an instant before 
revolt from this quiet life on Gamaliel's replying. It was a way he had. 
part, but none came, and he realized with "I'll go, of course, if you say so, sir. 
heartfelt gratitude that Evelina's son But, frankly, I'm very well contented 
had inherited none of her flightinesses here and I don't care about going out- 
and inconsequential gaiety and irresponsi- unless, in your opinion, it is absolutely 
bility. Gamaliel was as sober, as unemo- necessary." 
tionally businesslike, as religiously in- Mr. Sevenoaks looked at his son from 
elined, as even Ephraim could have de- under his bushy white eyebrows. Some- 
sired. He was also handsome and unde- how he was vaguely disappointed. It 
niably shy. He shunned the girls-even was tremendously satisfactory, of course, 
Faith Sawyer, whom he had known from that Gamaliel was a cautious, quiet, 
childhood. She was down from Salem on home-loving youth-none of your roister- 
a visit to Miss Dorcas Instone, and showed ing young dandies like Tony \Villetts or 
a repressed but unmistakable interest in Skiddy Van Broeck-but, by Jupiter, 
him. This interest had been secretly Gamaliel talked like an old man! 
noted and approved by Ephraim. Faith " Well, in my opinion, it is necessary!" 
was a most suitable partner for Gamaliel, Mr. Sevenoaks brought his fist down on 
in his opinion. She was capable and the table. " A young fellow like yourself 
quiet, with a chilly, 1'ladonna-like beauty ought to jump at the chance of seeing the 
that struck. him as just the thing for world from the deck of a fast-going mer- 
Gamaliel and the very type he had chantman!" 
meant to marry himself-before he met Gamaliel sighed a little and looked 
Evelina. Every day he had intended to slowly about the handsome, firelit dining- 
speak to Gamaliel on the subject. It was room. 
time he was thinking of getting married. "I'll go if you say so, sir," he said re- 
As Ephraim watched the young man luctantly, after a long pause, "but I'll miss 
coming toward him from the counting- all this confoundedly"-he looked again 
house, the thought again crossed his around the familiar, charming room- 
mind that he would certainly broach the "and-and church of Sunday morning, 
idea to him and see how he took it. He and I know I'll hate the hot countries- 
would do it that very evening, he re- I like cold and snow, as you do, sir." 



182 THE l\lADNESS OF GAMALIEL SEVENOAKS 


Ephraim's heart went out in sympathy, 
but this was no time to humor Gamaliel's 
likes or dislikes. 
"Can't be helped, Gam. You've got 
to go-best get it over and settle down." 
Gamaliel looked at his father. "Just 
what do you mean by 'settle down,' sir?" 
he inquired gravely. 
l\fr. Sevenoaks moved uncomfortably 
in his big chair. He found it rather diffi- 
cult to explain the matter he had in mind 
to this clear-eyed, unimpassioned young 
gentleman. He took the bull by the 
horns. 
"\Vhat do I mean? Why, gettin' mar- 
ried, of coursc. \Vhat should I mean? 
I'm gettin' old and I want to see my 
grandchildren. " 
Gamaliel colored to the roots of his fair 
hair. 
"But I don't like-petticoats-sir." 
He made a faint grimace of repugnance. 
"Like 'em or not, Gam, we can't get 
along without 'em." Ephraim smiled 
sardonically. "Fact is, it's time you were 
marrying, and there's just the girl for you, 
ready and waitin'." 
Gamaliel blushed again, looking not a 
little bewildered and disgusted. 
"I don't know who you mean-" 
"You don't ? You haven't noticed that 
Faith Sawyer-?" 
"Faith Sawyer! You must be mis- 
taken, sir." Gamaliel spoke coldly. 
"l\.1istaken! Fiddlesticks ! You've 
only got to ask her and she'll fall like a 
ripe plum-" 
Gamaliel recoiled, shocked to the bot- 
tom of his proper soul. 
"If it's the same to you, father, I'd 
rather not discuss-" 
"It isn't the same to me," interrupted 
Ephraim grimly. "You'll sail on thc 
21st as supercargo of the Belisarius, with 
Captain Dover. You two'll get along 
famously, Gam, or I'm much mistaken. 
And I'll send old Jabez Ruggles along. 
He knows the ropes and he'll look after 
you until you cut your eye-teeth. 
"Captain Dover'll fetch a course out 
by way of Cape Horn and you'll come 
back t'other route-the Coromandel 
Coast and Sumatra for pepper and ben- 
zoin. You'll take out sixty thousand 
Spanish dollars, Gam, and you'll bring 
back gamboge and cinnamon mats and 


barn boo ware besides the Canton cargo of 
Padre Susong and Young Hyson. It'll all 
keep you busy as the devil. You'll be 
gone eighteen months, or more, and I 
won't have you gallivantin' around the 
globe without an anchor to windward. 
Get things settled before you go, boy- 
get the girl to say she'll marry you when 
you come back. There's no use discussin' 
the matter further-my mind's made up." 
Gamaliel rose quietly. 
"Very well, father. I'll ask Faith now, 
since you wish it." 
It was l\Ir. Sevenoaks's turn to feel 
slightly bewildered. He had meant to 
plant the idea in Gamaliel's young head, 
hoping that, by the time the BelisarÙts 
was ready to sail, affairs might have 
somewhat shaped themselves. This in- 
stant and prosaic submission to his wishes 
surprised, and faintly alarmed, Ephraim. 
But, he reflected, perhaps it was better 
this way. From a purely business point 
of view a lack of sentiment was an ad- 
mirable thing. Gamaliel would attend to 
his duties as supercargo with an abso- 
lutely single mind. 
He got up slowly and, going over to one 
of the arched cupboards which flanked 
the fireplace, swung back the diamond- 
paned glass door and took from the lowest 
shelf a decanter of Spanish wine and two 
tall-stemmed, crystal glasses. 
"We'll drink. to your-your future, 
Gam," he said. 
"No, father, I'd rather not, thank you. 
I'd like to keep my brain quite cool." 
Gamaliel spoke sedately. 
Again Ephraim looked at his son curi- 
ously. " As you will," he said at last and 
replaced the decanter on its shelf. 
Gamaliel went into the hall, got his silk 
beaver and greatcoat and put them on, 
He looked very handsome in them. 
"I won't be long, father. I'll tell you 
what she says, if you'll wait up for me." 
Gamaliel spoke astonishingly from the 
threshold. 
Ephraim nodded. "All right, Gam- 
I'll wait up," he said and as the young 
gentleman disappeared he told himself 
comfortably that a girl would have to be 
a fool not to take so good-looking a young 
man and the only child of Ephraim 
Sevenoaks. Besides, he felt sure that 
Faith was in love with Gamaliel. He 



THE MADNESS OF GAI\1ALIEL SEVENOAKS 


sat contentedly before the bright fire 
making plans for his son's future, smok- 
ing his long cheroot, and now and then 
taking a sip from the cup of hot, fra- 
grant tea. 
"They'd better live here for a while, 
then I'll set 'em up in a home of their 
own," he mused. "I like the girl, too. 
She's got good sense. She'll appreciate 
Gam. " 
He crossed his knees, leaned his head 
against the high back of the chair, and 
slipped off into a pleasant doze. In just 
a half-hour Gamaliel put his head in the 
dining-room door. 
"It's all right, father," he said. "She 
won't have me." 
Mr. Sevenoaks awoke with a start. 
" Won't have you? What the devil 
d'ye mean-'won't have you'?" 
Gamaliel came, dusting the powdery 
snow from his beaver and greatcoat. 
"Just what I said-she won't have me. 
It's snowing-first snow of the winter, 
and it's going to be a fine one I" 
Mr. Sevenoaks grew very red in the face. 
He waved away Gamaliel's remarks about 
the weather with a choleric hand. 
"Why won't she have you?" he de- 
manded. "She must be crazy I I'd have 
sworn the' girl was in love with you-a 
flirt like the rest of 'em!" He smiled 
bitterly. 
"No," said Gamaliel after an instant's 
pause, "she isn't a flirt. She says-she 
says she is in love with me." 
"Then why the-- ! " Ephraim checked 
himself in time. "\Vhat's the matter with 
her? What in thunder does she want? 
A clean young fellow like yourself, who's 
never hung around the petticoats! Got 
a notion you're like the others ?-en- 
tangled with some woman-?" 
"Oh, no," interrupted Gamaliel. He 
looked reflectively into the fire for an in- 
stant, then turned his clear young eyes on 
his father. "It's the other way 'round- 
it's because I haven't-that's what's the 
matter-don't you see?" 
J\-Ir. Seven oaks put his hands on the 
arms of his chair and half raised himself 
up. His face was purple. 
"See? No, I don't see! And don't 
talk foolishness to me, Gamaliel I \Vhat 
ye drivin' at? Tell me plain out-what's 
the mattcr?" 


183 


"That's what's the maUer-I haven't 
been in love. I've not been entangled 
with a woman. She says that I don't 
love her-that I don't know what love 
is. And she's right, father. The whole 
thing is rather distasteful to me. I only 
went to please you, you know." 
Ephraim looked at his son, speechless 
with amazement and indignation at the 
turn things had. taken. It dawned on 
him that he would never understand 
women. Evelina had. always been an 
irritating mystery to him, and now this 
girl-! This girl, with her cold, Madonna 
face, her chaste eyes, was-was actu- 
ally-I Good God! What was the mat- 
ter with the women? 
Gamaliel got up and, going over to one 
of the windows, drew aside the curtain 
and looked out at the thickly falling snow. 
"It's going to be a fine, dry snow," he 
said delightedly. "I have an idea that 
Canton won't have anything to show me 
as beautiful as a snow-storm I" He 
sighed and went back to the fireside and 
sat down again. "And now that my 
marrying has been disposed of," he said 
cheerfully, "we might talk business. I'd 
like to know exactly what you wish me to 
do and see in China. You'll give me let- 
ters to old Swithin and the others, of 
course. I'm confoundedly glad to be 
going out with Doverc Old J abez is all 
right, too. He'll be a big help-I want 
to make a success of my first try as super- 
cargo! " 
Ephraim looked at his son again, 
shook his head a little, and settled down 
to business. They talked for two hours, 
but Faith Sawyer's name was not men- 
tioned a
ain. 


II 


CAPTAIN DOVER emerged from the 
chart-room of the Belisari'lts and looked 
about him uneasily. He had fetched a 
course from Sandy Hook to Paramaribo, 
thence to Rio, and then, by way of the 
Falklands and Le 1faire Straits, past 
Cape Horn. For weeks they had had 
dirty weather-ice and snow and hail 
without end. The Belisarius had been 
lashed by furious gales, buried under 
mountainous seas, her spars and rigging 
shrouded with ice, and her crew half- 
frozen and worn out by frantic e.."1::ertions. 



184 THE MAD
ESS OF GAl\1ALIEL SEVENOAKS 


For once Gamaliel had had his fill of zero 
weather. He had begun to dream of the 
comfortable mansion in S1. John's Park, 
of the warm, bright rooms, the ease of 
the old life. He, with the rest of the 
wearied, frost-bitten crew, had heaved a 
long sigh of relief when at last they had 
entered the warm, steady trades and 
fo-and themselves running northward, 
bound for Christmas Island and a cargo 
of copra. They had left the Marquesas 
a day and a half behind them, and the 
Belisarius was being languidly propelled 
forward through the deadening heat by a 
light, variable wind. But even that had 
failed in the last hour. There was some- 
thing sinister, menacing, in the tense 
quietness of the air, suffused by a misty 
sunlight like powdered gold-as though 
all the winds of heaven had withdrawn 
somewhere below the darkening horizon, 
to marshal their forces and leap with fury 
upon the unprotected ship. 
Gamaliel, lounging at ease with Jabez 
on the quarter-deck, was suddenly aware 
of danger. He looked at the captain 
anxiously interrogating the sea and sky. 
"Anything wrong, Captain Dover?" 
he called out. 
Dover hesitated before answering, 
flinging another uneasy glance skyward 
and then across the strangely heaving, 
oily sea. 
"Everything's wrong!" he said at last. 
"Falling barometer, no wind, and an ugly 
cross-swell. It's unnatural-and, in these 
parts, whatever's unnatural is danger- 
ous. " 
Gamaliel, followed by Jabez, went for- 
ward and joined the captain. 
"I've got the best ship afloat, and men 
don't live who can handle a vessel better 
than the crew of the Belisarius," said 
Dover proudly, "but it's my belief we'll 
be in luck to get through this alive," 
and he looked anxiously again at the 
darkening horizon. "I wish with all my 
heart, for your sake, Gamaliel, that we 
were safe anchored off W'hampoa, in 
sight of the stinking paddy-fields!" 
As he spoke, a puff of sultry air sprang 
up from nowhere and slapped the listless 
sails with a sort of playful fury. A jagged 
streak of Jightning slit the mass of lower- 
ing clouds on the horizon, ripping them 
from top to bottom, and from out the 


livid wound thunder belched and roared. 
In an instant the anxiety and indecision 
of Captain Dover's attitude had changed 
to furious energy. Gamaliel, fascinated, 
watched him strip his ship. He stood on 
the weather side of the quarter-deck, 
holding to the mizzen-rigging and giving 
his commands in quick succession to the 
man at the wheel, to the first mate, and to 
the seamen, many of whom had been ly- 
ing, half-clothed, about the decks. 
The sky was now an inky black. An 
angry darkness was rapidly enveloping 
the unfortunate Belisarius. The wind, 
whose approach had been heralded by 
short bursts, was now roaring from every 
quarter of the compass, seemingly con- 
centrating in gusty rage on the driven, 
rocking ship. Now and then Captain 
Dover was swept clean off his feet, keep- 
ing his hold on the rigging only with the 
greatest difficulty. Above the tumult of 
the wind could be heard the booming of 
canvas and the piercing whine of strain- 
ing cordage, and suddenly the foretopsail 
and jib went overboard with a crash that 
seemed to rend the vessel from stem to 
stern. Almost at the same instant a 
mountainous sea struck the ship and 
broke into boiling foam upon the decks, 
and in this churning welter of storm- 
tossed water and wreckage Gamaliel and 
Jabez, holding to the mizzen-rigging with 
the captain, clung and struggled together. 
Through the darkness and howling gale 
the Belisarius plunged forward like some 
driven monster, now sticking her nose 
into a black abyss of swirling waters, now 
staggering backward, trembling and heel- 
ing over as she pitched against the solid 
mass of some formidable, uprearing wave. 
As the fury of the wind increased, the seas 
rose higher and higher, breaking clean 
over the three men still clinging together 
in a life-and-death struggle. A vast, in- 
distinguishable noise of crashing spars, 
shouting sailors, and creaking timbers 
added to the horror of the wind and rush- 
ing waters. 
A thousand thoughts crowded inconti- 
nently into Gamaliel's mind-pictures of 
the safe, warm house in S1. John's Park 
were projected, as though by magic, on 
the inky blackness of the surrounding at- 
mosphere; memories of his boyhood in 
Salem, of Sunday church-going, of the 



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"Why won't she have YOQ? ... I'd have sworn the girl was in luvc with you-a flirt like the rest 
of 'em !"-Page 183. 


18 5 



186 THE MADNESS OF GAMALIEL SEVENOAKS 


crowded Neptune wharf, of all that inti- 
mate, dear lost life pressed bitterly upon 
him. . . . 
Suddenly he was conscious of a lull in 
the stOnTI. It was as if all the turbulent 
air about him had been drawn away by 
some gigantic suction-pump, and then, in 
one terrible instant, there came from afar 
the percussion and repercussion of sound 
and all the treacherous wind came rush- 
ing back bearing with it incredible masses 
of water that boiled away over the ship's 
rails into the inky blackness of the heav- 
ing ocean. 
To Gamaliel it seemed as though the 
whole sea had flung itself upon him. 
Knocked down, breathless, gasping for 
air, he told himself that now, indeed, the 
end must come. With a mighty effort he 
struggled to his feet and wiped the water 
from his salt-stung eyes. A sudden 
crooked flash of lightning rent the dark- 
ness, and he gazed about him. As he did 
so, another sea, still more mountainous, 
reared itself in unconquerable fury above 
his head. Gamaliel felt a crushing blow, 
his bleeding hands were torn from their 
hold, he staggered, fell forward, engulfed 
in the onrushing waters, and knew no 
more. 


III 


WHEN Gamaliel recovered conscious- 
ness, he opened languid eyes upon a tran- 
quil, moon-drenched world. He was lying 
on the smooth, crescent beach of a little 
island and at his feet rippled the quiet 
waters of a lagoon, encircled by a coral 
reef that, in the moonlight, cut the water 
like a silver scimiter. On its outer edge 
the white surf of the ocean beat melodi- 
ously. At the far, curving tip of the reef 
there was a narrow opening, and Gamaliel 
surmised that he must have been borne 
through it, into this haven, on the crest 
of some towering wave. The thought 
came mistily into his tired mind that he 
had died in the fury of the storm and 
come to life in some island paradise. He 
tried to move his bruised and spent limbs, 
gave up the attempt, and turning over 
with a groan, slept again from annihilat- 
ing fatigue. 
When he next awoke it was with the 
sensation that some one was gazing at 
him. A warm sun was beating down 


upon him, tempered by a breeze fresh 
with the freshness of the early day and 
the salty tang of the ocean. Slowly he 
lifted heavy eyelids. Beside him, bending 
over him, watching him intently, sat a 
girl. Her silky black hair was drawn 
away from a low, broad brow, and hung 
down upon her bare shoulders in a thick 
plaited tress interwoven with scarlet flow- 
ers. Dark, thick-lashed eyes gazed at 
Gamaliel, while deep-cut lips parted over 
dazzlingly white teeth in a smile as he 
returned her look. 
At her glance Gamaliel's exhausted 
nerves leaped to life. The blood rushed 
to his pale cheeks. He had never had a 
woman look at him like that. He tried to 
rise, but the effort only made him sink 
back with a groanc To his horror, the 
girl quickly slipped one slender arm about 
his shoulders and, pillowing his aching 
head against her firm, young breast, drew 
him gently up the beach into the shade 
of a grove of cocoanut-palms. 
For a scandalized instant Gamaliel re- 
sisted, and then, suddenly, a most de- 
licious, soothing sensation invaded his 
tired body and mind. He abandoned 
himself to the girl's embrace with a sigh 
of contentment. A tingling delight swept 
over him. He closed his eyes in an ecstasy, 
to open them again, a moment later, on 
the delectable sight of the girl sitting once 
more beside him and smiling-smiling at 
him her slow, enticing smile. She broke 
off a large leaf from a palm-tree and 
waved it to and fro above him while she 
mUnTIured seductively, the strange, liquid 
vowels slipping effortlessly over her scar- 
let lips. Gamaliel's enchanted eyes 
turned lazily to the booming ocean, where 
the dark-blue water curled over the coral 
reef in dazzling white bursts of foam, 
then back to the dusky, cool grove of 
trees. 
Suddenly, at the far end of the grove, 
another girl appeared. At sight of 
Gamaliel she stopped, evidently stricken 
with surprise and fear. She looked like a 
startled faun, Gamaliel thought, and then 
wondered how he had come by such a 
comparison. He couldn't remember ever 
having thought of a startled faun before. 
The girl beside him fluted something to 
the intruder, who disappeared, and almost 
instantly returned with a wooden bowl of 



THE 1\IADNESS OF GA1\1ALIEL SEVENOAKS 


cocoanut oil. \Vith it they rubbed his 
stiffened limbs, and Gamaliel, who on his 
seventh birthday had kicked his old 
nurse, :l\Iehitabel Blake, in the shins for 
trying to wash him, now welcomed lux- 
uriously the touch of feminine fingers on 
his aching body. 
He must have dozed, for when he next 
opened his eyes he was languidly aston- 
ished to see a dozen or more girls ringed 
about at some distance, regarding him 
with flattering curiosity and amazement. 
They were lithe, brown creatures, flower- 
decked, bare of shoulder and bosom, 
the fibre of some tropical tree clinging in 
a fringe about their slender limbs. 
With a sudden movement the girl be- 
side him sprang up and addressed the on- 
lookers. Her manner was imperious, her 
soft voice took on a commanding tone. 
She stamped her foot, now and then, as 
though to enforce her words. 
"She must be a princess-the princess 
of this island," Gamaliel told himself and 
thrilled with a gorgeous satisfaction at 
the thought. 
'Vhen she had finished speaking, the 
girls moved slowly forward, dropping, one 
after the other, to the ground before 
Gamaliel, kissing first his hands, then his 
feet. Embarrassment oyerwhelmed him 
for an instant, but it passed quickly and 
an intoxicating sensation of delight swept 
over him. At a signal from the girl be- 
side him, the brown nymphs-again 
Gamaliel wondered how he had come to 
think of such fanciful beings as nymphs- 
disappeared into the forest and he was 
left alone with his princess. His sun-filled 
eyes scanned the ocean, where not a sail 
was to be seen, not a sign of life was visi- 
ble. A thrilling delight invaded his whole 
being. For the first time in his life he 
was free! 'What had he to do now with 
ships and cargoes and all the slavery of 
trade? The Belisarius, the hellish fury 
of the stonn just passed, the icy blasts of 
the Southern cape, the drab counting- 
house on Neptune wharf, the austere 
house in St. John's Park, the pale, in- 
effectual beauty of Faith Sawyer-all his 
former life seemed to be receding from 
his consciousness. It was as though a 
brilliant, opaque curtain was slowly un- 
rolling between his present and his past, 
shutting out not only all sight of, but all 


187 


interest in, that obscured, forgotten time. 
Gamaliel was filled with a strange, exotic 
feeling-an apotheosis of the senses 
hitherto unknown, undreamed of. . . . ' 
The exquisite hours of the morning 
were succeeded by a languorous noon. The 
girl who had brought the cocoanut oil,and 
whom the princess addressed as Bala re- 
turned with a flat, round basket poised 
gracefully on her head, containing deli- 
cious fruits for which Gamaliel knew no 
name. There were also those with which 
he was familiar-oranges, dates, pines, 
cocoanuts-but more delicate, fresher, of 
a richer flavor, a more heady aroma than 
he had ever encountered before, and after 
the feast, in the golden wannth of the 
afternoon, he slept again, the princess be- 
side him, waving the glistening palm-leaf. 
He awoke to find her gone. Sitting up, 
startled, he saw her afar, disporting her- 
self in the blue waters of the lagoon, 
swimming, diving, darting about like a 
mermaid, thought Gamaliel. Suddenly 
she caught sight of him, and as she swept 
up and forward on the crest of a white 
wave she laughed and called to him, the 
water falling from her beckoning anns in 
an iridescent shower. Gamaliel gasped, 
and the ,vords " Venus Anodyomene" 
flashed into his dazzled brain-he didn't 
know from where. \Vas he going mad, he 
wondered? If so, it was the most delect- 
able thing that had ever happened to him. 
He sprang up and, running to the blue 
water, plunged in. 
Together they swam across the lagoon 
to the coral reef and sat on its edge, their 
feet dipping into the curling waves. And 
suddenly, moved by some sweet, irre- 
sistible impulse, never felt before, Gama- 
liel put an arm about the girl's slim 
shoulders. She turned her face up to his 
and their lips met in the first kiss he had 
ever given a woman. 
So this was life! He felt like some 
great discoverer,for,mo
e than an):' is!and, 
any continent, he had discovered hfe Itself 
and love, which is the life of life. Sitting 
there on the ocean's edge, gazing athwart 
the sparkling, pellucid air-an air that 
had never swept the Neptune wharf-he 
envisaged a new existence. So all the 
rest of his life would pass, in such en- 
chanted days, he told himself delightedly. 
Good God! to think that he would have 



188 


THE MADNESS OF GAMALIEL SEVENOAKS 


missed all this in that cold, dreary Salem 
or unspeakable New York! He smiled in 
utter content and closed his dazzled 
eyes. . . . 
In the late afternoon they swam backc 
On the crescent beach they found Bala 
waiting with a message-apparently a 
disagreeable one-for the princess. Her 
eyes flashed as she listened to the girl, 
and again she stamped her foot in anger. 
Then she threw her arms about Gamaliel's 
neck, and with a sullen, imperious ges- 
ture motioned Bala away. Gamaliel, sunk 
in languorous delight, wondered idly 
what it might all be about and continued 
to gaze out at the blue, swelling ocean. 
Suddenly, through the dense forest at 
their back, came a strange, pagan, dis- 
quieting music, the sound of beating 
drums and shrill, reed-like wails. As it 
drew nearer and nearer, Gamaliel's pulses 
began to beat fast and unevenly with the 
fast, uneven rhythm of the music. I The 
girl sprang to her feet and stood in front 
of him with a protecting gesture as from 
all sides scores of savages rushed forward. 
Like the girls whom Gamaliel had seen, 
the island men were handsome, beauti- 
fully fonned creatures, but far more wild 
and barbaric looking. For a moment he 
stood motionless, appalled by the savage 
'
 warriors who gazed at him out of menac- 
ing eyes beneath lowered brows. Then 
an immense, a hitherto unsuspected cour- 
age surged magnificently through him. 
He felt that he could annihilate them all. 
"If I had a derringer, 1'd shoot the 
brutes!" thought Gamaliel-he who had 
never shot a cat or a canary in his life. 
He remembered longingly the rack of 
firearms in the chart-room of the Beli- 
sarius. In the torn gannents that re- 
mained to him from the shipwreck there 
was not so much as a penknife. 
While Gamaliel was thinking, the prin- 
cess was vehemently haranguing her 
warrior subjects, bending them slowly 
and sullenly to her will. In a few minutes, 
obedient to her orders, they began bring- 
ing forward stumps of trees, logs from the 
edge of the forest, and fashioned of them a 
rude sort of dais. The princess motioned 
Gamaliel to ascend the improvised throne. 
She followed him, throwing herself down 
at his feet with a magnificent gesture of 
abandonment as she laid a protecting arm 


across his knees, and at her command the 
islanders circled around, doing obeisance 
to Gamaliel Sevenoaks. Again a great 
elation, a consuming sensation of power 
swept over him. He knew now how kings 
and potentates feel at the homage of their 
subjects. . .. At the princess's com- 
mand they brought him food and a deep, 
pearly shell full of a sweetish liquid. The 
girl held it to his lips, and Gamaliel, who 
had never drunk a glass of Malvoisin or 
Amontillado in his life, drained the bowl 
of powerful native liquor to the last drop. 
The short tropic twilight was suddenly 
eclipsed and the thick, odorous gloom of 
the night illuminated by bonfires here and 
there. One, at the far end of the island) 
beyond the coral reef, streamed ocean- 
ward, a beacon of flame. The drums, 
which had been quiet for a time, began 
once more their insistent, uneven rhythm. 
Squatting figures sprang up and circled 
madly about in the flaring firelight, bend- 
ing, strutting, swaying. Gamaliel gazed, 
torn by strange emotions such as would 
once have sickened his puritanical soul. 
Here and there, on the edges of the 
throng, fonns arose and whirled away 
into the darkness. From the depths of 
the forest, once so still, now throbbing 
hideously with unseen life, came strangled 
cries. The drums beat more and more 
demoniacally-as though to marching 
thousands-and as the night hours wore 
away, the fires along the beach flared and 
sank, their ragged pennons of smoke 
floating up to an outraged heavenc . . . 
From beyond the coral reef came the long 
roll and crash of the sea. . . . 
Gamaliel's dazzled senses reeled. He 
felt himself a king, ruler of these af- 
frighting barbarians. Leaning forward 
on his throne, he shouted imperious com- 
mands, hoarse imprecations. Gamaliel 
was magnificently, uproariously drunk. 
Suddenly he rose to his full height. The 
girl at his feet sprang up, too. He 
pointed to the far end of the atoll lying 
silver-bright in the moonlight and to- 
gether they made their way through the 
groups of dancers, whirling more and 
more slowly, past sleeping men and 
women, fallen upon the ground exhausted 
with fatigue, overcome by the strong 
liquor, away from the insistent, monoto- 
nous noise of the diminishing drums, 



THE MADNESS OF GAMALIEL SEVENOAKS 


into the fragrant silence of the tropic 
night. . . . 


The new, unsullied day was beating up 
the eastern sky as the Belisarius, stonn- 
wracked but unconquered, rounded the 
far end of the island. A moment later 
her anchors hit the water and she rode at 
ease beyond the blue lagoon and curving 
coral reef. 
In the long-boat that put off immedi- 
ately sat Captain Dover, J abez Ruggles, 
and a round dozen of able seamen armed 
with businesslike muskets. Captain 
Dover surveyed the island they were ap- 
proaching through a mariner's glass. 
"There isn't a sign of life, Mr. Ruggles. 
There's no use looking for him, I sup- 
pose," he said despondently. 
Jabez shook his white head. 
"I ain't agoin' to leave these parts 
without makin' a thorough search fer 
G'maliel. Dead or alive we've got to 
find the boy and take him back to his 
father. Someway I've got a feelin' he's on 
one of these here islands." 
"But if there are savages, Mr. Rug- 
gles-" 
"They ain't all man-eaters by a long 
shot. I knòw these islands." Old J abez 
gazed slowly about him with a curious, 
reminiscent look in his faded blue eyes. 
"I been hereabouts afore." 
"Wait !-Good God! I see savages- 
up there-in the shade of those big trees- 
dead or asleep!" Captain Dover handed 
the glasses to J abez and turned to the 
rowers. "Hurry up, men!" he urged, 
The long-boat swept around the end of 
the encircling reef and,riding triumphant- 
ly the crest of a big wave, drove through 
the narrow opening into the quiet waters 
of the lagoon. Captain Dover jumped 
out and ran up the shelving beach, fol- 
lowed by J abez and eight of the armed 
sailors. As he ran he looked about him in 
astonishment. Far to the eastward he 
could make out the ashes of expiring fires 
and the huddled, inert forms of savages. 
Nearer him, but farther up on the shore, 
in the shade of a giant cocoanut-palm, 
lay two figures quite alone, and as he 
drew closer he saw, with a shock of glad- 
ness and amazement, that one of them 
was Gamaliel-Gamaliel, safe, but un- 
conscious, fast asleep, his fair, boyish 


189 


head pillowed on the shoulder of a dusky 
savage. 
"Glory be to God-it's G'maliel!" 
quavered old J abez. 
Captain Dover turned to the men fol- 
lowing him. 
" Quiet!" he commanded, and laid a 
finger to his lips. They stole forward 
noiselessly. 
"We'd best try to wake him, I guess," 
he whispered to Jabez as they stood look- 
ing down at Gamaliel. But J abez laid a 
restraining hand on Dover's ann. 
"No," he said. "Tell one of the men 
to fetch that piece of sail-cloth in the 
bottom of the long-boat. We'll take him 
away without wakin' him ef we can-he 
mightn't want to come ef he-wuz- 
awake-" 
"lVlightn't want to come-?" Cap- 
tain Dover's astounded glance interro- 
gated J abez. 
"It's-it's a sort 0' madness-that's it 
-a sort 0' madness. I've seen sailors ez 
had it-when the ends of the earth call. 
You can't drag 'em away-it's stronger 
than they air. A madness-" His voice 
trailed off into silence and he looked 
slowly about him at the waving, bur- 
nished palms, the green depths of the 
still forest, the curling tongues of white 
foam licking the edges of the coral reef, 
at the blue bend of sky above, at all the 
sensuous, appealing beauty of the strange 
world around him. 
He heard a sound. The girl had 'opened 
her dark eyes and sat up. At sight of the 
men before her she uttered a smothered 
cry, and Gamaliel awoke too. He sprang 
to his feet, looking in amazement at the 
company about him. 
"God be praised, we've found you, 
Gamaliel!" said Captain Dover, and he 
stepped forward, hand outstretched. 
For an instant Gamaliel hesitated, 
looking dazedly from the captain and 
J abez to the girl who stood beside him 
regarding him desperately, terror in her 
eyes. She made a quick movement and 
threw her slim arms about Gamaliel's 
neck. 
J abez gave a groan. He went close to 
Gamaliel and laid a trembling hand on 
his arm. 
"Come away, Gamaliel! Come back 
to the ship with us!" 



190 


RED GERANIUl\IS 


The ship! A raging despair filled 
Gamaliel's breast. They wanted to take 
him away-to make him leave all this he 
had so lately gained-this paradise, this 
new world of eternal ease, of passion, of 
all delight! Never would he go back! 
"Will ye come with us, G'maliel?" 
For answer Gamaliel shook off the old 
man's appealing hand, tore the girl's arms 
from about his neck, and, lunging forward 
unsteadily, aimed a blow at J abez- 
J abez who was trying to take him back to 
the ship! But as he did so, his uplifted 
. hand was caught and held. Captain 
Dover had sprung forward, pushing J abez 
behind him, and had seized Gamaliel's 
hand in a firm grip. 
"Don't make a row and wake up the 
savages, Gamaliel! Will you come quiet- 
ly or shall I have to knock you sense- 
less? " 
"Will I come? Never, damn you!" 
screamed Gamaliel, and he lunged for- 
ward again, trying, in a passion of rage, 
to wrench his hand free from Dover's 
iron grasp. For an instant the captain 
struggled with him, then suddenly releas- 
ing Gamaliel's hand, he drew back and 
let him have it on the point of his chin. 
It was a shattering blow, and a sickening 
jolt went through the boy. A million 
stars swarmed before his closing eyes. 


He stumbled and fell forward, uncon- 
scious. 
At a signal from the captain, four of the 
sailors picked Gamaliel up and lifted him 
to the stretcher. Jabez and Dover took 
their places on either side, the remaining 
four seamen, with cocked muskets, closed 
up the rear, and the little procession 
started for the long-boat. 
As he walked quickly forward, Jabez 
gazed down thoughtfully at the young, 
unconscious head over which a vast ex- 
perience had swept with the suddenness 
and fury of a storm. And, some way, he 
felt it to be as sad as inevitable that 
already the boyish face was altered, a 
strange, new maturity stamped upon it. 
The innocence, the ignorance of life which 
J abez had once so deplored in Gamaliel, 
now seemed to him a rarely beautiful, 
a rarely desirable thing. A melancholy 
surprise invaded his whole beingc 
Suddenly he felt an irresistible impulse 
to look back. The girl was still standing 
on the beach, gazing after them, the tears 
running down her cheeks. For a moment 
J abez, touched by the sight, halted, his 
old heart contracting with a curious pain. 
"A madness!" he whispered to him- 
self, "a madness! " Then, with an effort, 
he turned his eyes away, faced about, and 
fell into step again. 


Red Geraniums 


BY ELIZABETH DILLINGHAM 


I WONDER why they always grow 
In window-boxes, green and prim. 
They have a need of winds, to blow 
Their scarlet skirts less neat and trim, 
How can they flaunt their gypsy grace 
In such a crowded, narrow space? 


It must be rather hard, for flowers 
That are a blend of blood and flame, 
To spend the warm, seductive hours 
Being respectable and tame. 
Born to dance wildly on a hill, 
How dull must seem a window-sill! 



Closed Roads 


BY J. HYATT DO\VKING 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDWARD HOPPER 




Ä HE land about me lay 

 drenched and sodden. 

 T The clouds, blurred by 
';j the late November 
. 
 evening, hung low to 



W the.ground,heavy
th 
XU"
]lI' 
x thelI threat of ram. 
Somewhere, in the 
darkening distance, a dog barked loudly, 
once, and then fell silent. I shook the 
reins and slapped the jaded livery horse 
smartly, impatient with the weather and 
the mission which kept me out in it. 
\Veather affects me, even though I am a 
machinery man, supposed to be as un- 
responsive to such things as the iron stuff 
he sells, And discounts for cash strike 
the pit of my emotional existence. 
:My work, that trip, had been entirely 
harmonious with the gray, depressing 
days which followed unendingly upon 
each other's heels. I was collecting long 
overdue bills from farmers in a country 
where they hadn't had a crop in three 
years. The company didn't want to carry 
the accounts over and was taking what it 
could get-generally a mortgage on a few 
head of thin milch cows and work stock. 
The rutted, ungraded road I was fol- 
lowing turned in, at last, through a sag- 
ging barbed-wire fence. The gate, one 
of those three-wire affairs attached to two 
sticks and held upright by wire loops, 
fastened to the posts, was down. Be- 
yond, the dull outlines of farm-buildings 
loomed through the thickening dusk. 
There were no lights. The structures 
seemed a natural part of the vast, sweep- 
ing distances of prairie. 
I had to drive carefully through the 
yard to avoid rusted heaps of old, worn- 
out machinery and bits of broken boards 
and tangled coils of wire, red with weath- 
ering. A pig, thin and underfed, was 
rooting at the white fluff of a dead chicken. 
To the sagging barn, half covered with 
straw, I was directed by the sound of 


blows being struck on metal. There I 
found my man, working on a wagon-tire. 
He paused in his pounding when he saw 
me, though he said nothing in answer to 
my greeting. I jumped out of my buggy 
with that hearty only-got-a-minute man- 
ner we salesmen always have, and intro- 
duced myself. He nodded, and after a 
moment went back to his work. A team, 
hitched to a wagon, stood with drooping 
heads near by. It was then that I first 
noticed the boy. He was standing quite 
still in the wagon-box, holding the reins in 
hands blue with the cold. He wore an 
old sheep-lined coat, too big for him. It 
was fastened tight at the throat with a 
large safety pin. He regarded me with a 
steady, unsmiling gaze. Nor did he an- 
swer my bluff "Hello there, son." There 
was something in the boy's face that held 
me, a gravity far beyond his ten or twelve 
years, a delicacy of line and feature, a 
sensitive mouth which, I thought, might 
be handsome when lighted by a smile. 
"Son," I said, "you're going to lose 
money on that coat if you don't sell it 
pretty soon." I was immediately sorry, 
for his eyes fell, and he fumbled ner- 
vously with the lines. 
"Go unhitch." The boy, in response 
to his father's command, pulled up the 
heads of the scrawny team, and drove 
them slowly to the barn. 
It was late when I finished my business 
with lVIr. Bartels. His condition was so 
much like that of all the others, I could 
have told what he had to say before he 
spokec Except that he seemed a little 
more despondent. He had little. His 
wheat had gone for next to nothing be- 
cause the banks forced him to sell at an 
unfavorable time. Cholera had killed 
half his hogs. Because of the protracted 
drought there was little alfalfa; as a con- 
sequence most of his milch cows were going 
dry. "I'm takin' another hundred and 
sixty of hay land," he said. "And wild 
19 1 



192 


CLOSED ROADS 


hay's pretty sure-if a prairie fire don't 
come along." And so I didn't ask for a 
mortgage on his few head of stock. 
True to the tradition of the country, he 
asked me to spend the night. (It was a 
long road back to town. Might be bad 
in the dark. Better stay.) I thought I 
even detected a faint eagerness in his 
voice. Poor devils, it's lonely out on that 
God-forsaken prairie, month after month. 
I agreed; but it wasn't the roads or the 
drive so much. I really wanted to see 
that boy again. I've always liked kids. 
Mrs. Bartels, slender, faded, smiled 
when her husband mentioned my name 
and told her I was to stay all night. 
There was, I thought, a light for a mo- 
ment in the fine, dark eyes, and the ghost 
of beauty about the settled patience of her 
mouth. She busied herself with prepara- 
tions for supper while Bartels and I went 
into the sitting-room. Other than the 
air-tight stove and two or three creaky 
rockers, there was only one article of 
furniture in the room-an old organ with 
yellowed keys, from many of which the 
facing had been chipped, leaving only the 
wood beneath. But there was about that 
organ an air of use, as though it came 
daily into contact with loving hands. An 
old carpet, its warp showing through at 
the seams, covered the floor; and the 
room, like the kitchen, was immaculately, 
almost terribly, clean. Presently the boy 
entered the kitchen, and I heard him talk- 
ing in whispers to his mother. 
\Ve ate supper in the kitchen. Mr. 
Bartels asked the blessing, giving thanks 
for the favors of God. Favors ! You 
can't laugh off that kind of religion. It 
was one of those wordless meals, so com- 
mon to farm homes, whose only sound 
was the scraping of knife and fork on the 
thick tableware. Mrs. Bartels stood 
back in the shadow by the stove, or hov- 
ered near our chairs, passing the bread 
and potatoes. I tried a word or two, but 
they fell dead in that numb silence. 
The meal finished, Mr. Bartels and I 
went into the sitting-room while his wife 
and Danny (I heard her call him that) 
washed and wiped the dishes. I gave my 
host a cigar, and he smoked it in careful 
enjoyment, holding it between thumb and 
forefinger as though he feared it would 
break. 


'Vhen Mrs. Bartels and the boy came 
in we sat for a while without speaking. 
Danny perched, tense, on the edge of his 
chair, his thin, sensitive hands clasped 
between his knees. His large, luminous 
eyes never left my face. I was a being 
from the outside, another world, where 
the stream of life flowed instead of 
trickled. Presently his mother spoke 
with timid pride:" Can't you play for the 
gentleman, Danny?" 
I caught a quick look between the par- 
ents, a faint smile from Mrs. Bartels, 
half apologetic, and from her husband a 
heavy frown. The boy hesitated, glanc- 
ing questioningly at his father. I leaned 
forward. "I'd certainly like to hear you 
play, Danny." Expectantly, I moved 
my chair from in front of the organ. 
But the boy went into the bedroom. 
He came back with a violin-case under his 
arm. He was taut with excitement, and 
his fingers trembled as he unfastened the 
clasps of the old black box. The violin 
itself was new and shinyc "My mother 
bought this," he said, holding it tenderly 
in his hands. It was a simple statement 
of fact, and the first time he had spoken, 
yet I had a swift vision of the pennies, 
dimes, quarters, hoarded, one at a time, 
from the milk. and egg money. It was 
obviously cheap, but no Stradivarius 
could have meant morec Then Danny 
began to play. 
I know more about tractors than I do 
about music; but it seems to me that any 
dub can feel certain kinds of music. 
Danny's was of that kind. The notes 
were full and round and, I thought, he 
played without hesitation or uncertainty. 
But he seemed ill at ease and kept glanc- 
ing at his father. 
"Play that piece you heard on the 
graphophone at the drug-store, Danny," 
said his mother softly. And then from 
the boy's violin came the hauntingly sad 
melody of what I afterward found out 
was Massenet's "Elegy." And with the 
first strain all Danny's nervousness left 
him, his eyes looked toward some unseen 
distance, his small body relaxed, and the 
bare room was rich, filled with the most 
wonderful music I ever heard. It ended 
on a lingeringly wistful high note, and 
with it his arm fell, and he stood for a 
moment with drooping head. I was out 



CLOSED ROADS 


of my chair and patting his shoukler, and 
I think my eyes were moist. 
" Boy, that's great! \V onderful! You 
ought to go to one of these music schools," 
I found myself saying excitedly, It was 


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193 


was lost in bitter brooding. I said I 
guessed I'd go to the hay, and :\lrs. Bar- 
tels showed me to a room where Danny 
was already asleep on a narrow cot. 
The next morning when I got ready to 


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"Son, you're going lu lo..;e money on that coal if you don't ,;e1\ it prctl) soon," P,lgC 191. 


so unexpected that, for a moment, it 
lifted me out of machinery. 
"He'll never go to no music school and 
be a long-haired damn fooL" I turned. 
Bartels was talking with a sort of sup- 
pressed fury. "There never was a fiddler 
that was worth his salt. They're all 
alike. Don't I know?" 
"There, John, there," said the soothing 
voice of J\1rs. Bartels. "Danny, I expect 
it's your bedtime." 
We sat for a time. Just sat. Bartels 
VOL. LXX\'III.-I4 


leave I called Dannv around a corner of 
the house and put á ten-dollar bill in hi
 
hand. "Buy some music, kid," I said. 
"And say, I was just joshing about that 
coat, you know." I kept hold of his thin 
little hand for a long time, and drove 
away at last, feeling more depressed than 
ever before in my life. And as I took the 
long, cold drive back to town I remem- 
bered the sweet, rich notes of Danny's 
violin and the wistful, perplexed face of 
a little boy. 



194 


II 


CLOSED ROADS 


I ALWAYS like to remember faces. In 
my business it is almost as necessary as 
that peculiar thing which most people call 
salesmanship, and which is mostly hard 
work. You know everyone feels that 
in some way he is rather more important, 
that there must be some outstanding qual- 
ity of individuality about him. 
I was attending a convention of agri- 
culturists. It was one of those hot, sticky 
afternoons in the latter part of July, and a 
sort of settled apathy hung over the meet- 
ing. There seemed to be a hopelessness 
in the speakers' voices, a recognition of 
the inevitable futility of anything they 
migh t do. Crops were bringing less on 
the market than they cost to raise, and 
going lower. It was pretty depressing. 
I listened for a while, and was just about 
to get up and go out when a young fellow 
in the audience began talking. They 
asked him to take the platform, and I got 
a good look at him. He was rather 
young, twenty three or four, I guessed, 
and hard times were stamped on every 
garment he wore. But there was some- 
thing in his voice that commanded atten- 
tion. A quality of contempt, of scornful 
amusement, that instantly quieted that 
group of muttering farmers. 
"This meeting was called to outline a 
definite programme of resistance," he 
said. " So far there hasn't been anything 
done to cause the public to think we even 
want more for our produce. It has been 
just a moan meeting. And it seems to 
me that's typical of farmers everywhere. 
We talk about organization!" Here the 
youth laughed scornfully. "Organiza- 
tion! Without exception every co-opera- 
tive society we have established has been 
a failure. Why? Because we hire incom- 
petent men to run our stores and eleva- 
tors, men that reputable business con- 
cerns have probably kicked uut long ago. 
I'm a farmer, and I haven't any sym- 
pathy for myself nor for you. There 
never was a group of farmers that could 
hang together long enough to achieve any 
important result. We plant all the sun 
will give us time to get in, hire a lot of ex- 
pensive help to get it harvested before hail 
strikes, raise a bumper crop, and sell it to 
a glutted market in America in competi- 


tion with the world. But we continue to 
weep and plant corn and wheat." 
Then, abruptly, as though too angry to 
continue, the young speaker turned and 
left the platform. The farmers looked at 
him curiously as he passed, but, I thought, 
without resentment. He sat down near 
me, and I went over and held out mv 
hand. "Hello, Danny," I said. "Did 
you buy that music?" 
He looked at me questioningly for a 
moment, and then a quick smile of recog- 
nition broke over his face. I was right, 
back there on the farm so many years ago. 
There was a certain beauty about the 
boy's face when he smiled. But it was 
an unhappy face. There was a bitter 
droop to the corners of the mouth in re- 
pose, and his large, dark eyes were sombre. 
"Let's get out of here," I said, "It's 
hot." 
Presently, over a couple of cold drinks 
in a near-by drug-store, he answered my 
question. "No, I didn't buy music. 
Your ten dollars bought some fence-posts 
and a wire-stretcher. What is Schubert 
compared to the practical utility of a 
wire-stretcher? And, besides, my father 
hated music, you know." 
"I always wondered why." 
"l\lusic," Danny explained, "was 
linked, in his warped mind, with every- 
thing evil. His mother, so my mother 
has told me, was married to a bleak old 
Scotch Presbyterian, who believed all 
beauty on earth a lure of the devil. She 
left him. Ran off with a young German 
musician, and they never heard of her 
again, and never lived down the disgracec 
I think she did the right thing. If my 
mother had left my father right after I 
was born, or, better still, before, everyone 
would have been happier." 
I was embarrassed and ill at ease. 
"How is your father?" I asked, seeking 
to bridge the bitter silence that fell be- 
tween us. 
"Dead. He died about four years ago. 
It was the first happy day I ever knew in 
my life." 
"Oh, no!" I broke in, startled for a 
moment out of caution. 
"Why not? Why, it was like a dmk 
cloud had drifted out of the sky. It fett 
like sunligh t. " 
"I think your fatheJ missed his aim in 




 
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With the first strain all Danny's nervousness left him . . . and the bare room was riLh, filled \\ ith the most 
wonderful music I ever heard,-Pagc 192. 


life. Seemed to me he wasn't cut out for 
a farmer." 
"He wasn't. He'd ought to have been 
a preacher. He'd have been happy giv- 
ing 'em hell." 
" Do you ever play an r more, Danny?" 
I asked. 
"Sometimes. I play a lot for my 
mother. She enjoys it and understands 


it. It's about the only pleasure we have. 
\Ve're swamped with debts, you know. 
Debts that I don't seem to be able to get 
out from under. In one way, and only 
one, my father and I were alike. \Ve 
were both misfits." 
"You don't like farming, then, 
Danny?" 
.. I've hated it from the first day I can 
195 



196 


CLOSED ROADS 


remember. \Vhen I was a kid the only 
spot I liked on the farm was a place where 
the willows grew, down around the wind- 
mill. I used to go there, when my father 
wasn't about, and lie on my back and 
listen to the wind in the willows, and 
watch the white clouds sailing by in the 
sky. I expect you think I must have 
been kind of nutty." He glanced at me 
with a shade of defiance in his eyes. 
"Not a bit, Danny," I answered 
warmly. "Why, as a matter of fact, I 
like to do that sort of thing myself, even 
at my age. And in a kid- Say, how's 
your mother?" 
"N ot very well, I'm afraid. She's 
worked so hard, like most farm women. 
Only she got nothing for it, not even ap- 
preciation from my father. Farms kill 
women like my mother. I wish to God 
I could do something for her," he burst 
out passionately. "I wish I weren't a 
farmer! " 
Silence again. "Well," he said at last, 
" what have you been doing all these 
years? I've never forgotten that ten- 
dollar bill." 
"Oh, I've been shunted about the coun- 
try like most travelling men. Here, 
there, and everywhere. Not much fun 
in it. Say, how'd you like to go to a 
show? They have summer vaudeville in 
St. Paul, and there's a fellow that plays 
the violin up at the New Palace. I hear 
he's good." 
"Fine. Only, you see, I haven't-" 
His face flushed with embarrassment. 
"These clothes are pretty bad." 
"Oh, forget it, kid. They look as 
good as mine. Come along, Danny. I 
don't get a chance to go round with young 
fellows much. We old codgers mostly 
have to herd alone." I wanted him to 
feel that he was doing me a favor. "We'll 
go get something to eat first." 
The show, when we got there, was 
neither good nor bad, except for one 
number-the violinist. I guess I'm sus- 
ceptible to fiddles. That kind of music 
gets under my skin and makes funny 
krinkly feelings run up and down my 
spine. Danny sat in a sort of daze until 
the fellow finished playing, and then I 
saw his eyes were moist. When we got 
back into the street he walked along with 
his head down until we reached the hotel. 


Then I heard him say, more to himself 
than to me: "Happiness!" 
"\Vhat's that you said, Danny?" I 
asked. 
"I was thinking about that fellow 
who played to-night. He's happy. He 
couldn't be anything else. Doing the 
thing he loves, and the thing God in- 
tended him to do. I guess there could- 
n't be any greater reward in life than 
tha t. " 
"Well, kid, things may start breaking 
right for you, first thing you know. You 
never can tell about what's around the 
corner. " 
The boy didn't answer, and we sat 
thinking our various thoughts. I have 
been sorrier for few people. There is only 
one kind of person that belongs on a farm, 
and that's the person who is bred to it, or 
just naturally loves it. Loves the smell 
of the ground when the plough turns it 
over; loves to watch hogs grow and do the 
things necessary to make them grow; 
likes to get up with the dawn and hit the 
ball until dark. Some people are as un- 
fitted for a farm as a race-horse is for a 
dump-wagon. Danny was one of them. 
"The trouble is," he resumed at last, 
"I'm just tra velling a narrowing road 
that's going to peter out some place into 
nothing. It's a closed road for me. I 
work hard," he burst out in a kind of de- 
fensive passion. "Look at my hands!" 
He held them out before him, hard, 
cracked, and soil-grained. "But I can't 
make things come out. I've tried to use 
both my head and hands. By God, I've 
tried. But it's no use. 1\;ly father had 
a quaint little expression." The ghost of 
a smile lifted the corners of his mouth. 
" , You can't make a silk purse out of a 
sow's ear.' Neither, I suppose, can you 
make a good farmer out of a half-baked 
musician. I won't talk about it any 
more. But, oh! I wish I weren't a 
farmer." 


III 


WHEN my company made me field 
manager I ceased visiting farmers. I 
missed it in some ways. I've a great 
many friends among farmers, and some- 
times I yearn for one of those dinners I 
used to get-biscuit dumplings floating in 
a sea of rich chicken gravy, great slices of 



CLOSED ROADS 


honest-to-goodness bread, moulds of quiv- 
ering jelly, potatoes boiled in their skins. 
And don't think all farm homes are like 
Danny's. 
Iost of them are happy 
homes; plenty of love and sunshine and 
kids. By golly! they're the hope of the 
nation, these big farm families. 
I did see Danny once more. 1\1 y work 
carried me pretty much all over the civi- 
Jized globe, and some of it that wasn't so 
civilized. \\,7 e're a sizable outfit, and my 
firm had decided to open up a branch dis- 
tributing point in China. I was ordered 
to go to Hong Kong, organize, and get 
things going. It's a way my people have. 
Some day I expect to hear the Old :l\Ian 
say: "Ever hear of Timbuktu? Nice 
little place. Go there and teach 'em to 
raise wheat and not so much hell." 
So I packed a grip with my "other" 
suit, stuck a tooth-brush in my vest 
pocket, bought a ticket a mile long, and 
got on a train for San Francisco. 
It was my first sea trip, and that boat, 
the old r oslzihara, certainly looked big. 
I went aboard, primed with Ladysill's 
Cure for Seasickness. That was the 
only thing that made me sick. If I 
hadn't taken it I'd have been all right. 
But, as it was, I spent the first two days 
in my cabin, just able to get my head up 
to a porthole once in a while. But after 
that I was fine. Couldn't have wanted 
to feel anv better. 
I reme
ber the first day I came up 
on deck. Everyone was sitting around 
in these canvas-covered chairs, their 
steamer-rugs pulled up over their knees. 
The boat moved as smooth as silk, and 
everything was a dead silence except for 
the steady pounding of the big screw. A 
few gulls still followed around, swooping 
from blue sky into bluer water. I strolled 
along the deck a couple of times until I 
found my chair. I hadn't smoked since 
I came aboard, and now I thought a cigar 
would taste pretty good. But next to my 
chair was a young lady, the kind whose 
pictures you see in the metropolitan news- 
papers. She had one of those short, 
straight noses, an upper lip that curled a 
little bit, and a dimple in the middle of 
her oval chin. Her forehead was straight, 
broad, and low. She had corn-colored 
hair, and if she had been foolish: enough 
to have bobbed it, it would have filled a 


197 


bushel basket. 
ext to her sat a solid- 
looking man with a close-cropperl gray 
mustache. She talked to him now and 
then, and from her tone I guessed two 
things: that he was her father, and she 
could wind him around her little finger. 
"l\Iadam," I said, "would you mind if 
I smoked this cigar?" She looked at me 
anrl smiled. After that I wouldn't have 
cared if she'd have said no. But she 
didn't. "Please smoke," she said. "J 
know how cross daddy is if he can't have 
his cigar when he wants it." 
So I thanked her and lighted up, look- 
ing at the sea, which slowly rose and fell 
as the ship ploughed through it. 
I was fortunate enough to be placed at 
her table for meals. The old gentleman, 
her father, didn't say much. Just sat 
drumming on the table with his fingers. 
Every once in a while he'd glance at his 
daughter, shrug his shoulders, and sigh 
rather helplessly. I smiled. It seems to 
me there is no greater tyranny than that 
exacted by a spoiled and much-loved 
daughter over a worried and indulgent 
dad. She had only to lay her pretty hand 
over his, smile into his eyes, and the old 
chap would melt. Once I heard her say: 
"Be good, Daddy. I won't ask you to do 
it again." 
Just then the orchestra came in, and I 
saw her eyes following the figure of a tall 
young fellow with a violin-case under his 
arm. As he adjusted his chair and 
turned, I recognized Danny Bartels. He 
looked older than when I had last seen 
him back there in St. Paul. much older. 
Yet, when his eyes hunted for and found 
the Jittle girl at my table and he smiled, 
I thought it was the same rather wistful 
smile of the little boy I remembered. 
Danny Bartels! And so, I thought, a 
part of his little dream came true, any- 
way. At least he was doing the thing he 
had always wanted to do. But, some- 
how, I had always imagined hi.m playing 
in concerts. I rather had belIeved that 
in some manner the boy would have a big 
piece of his cake. \Vell, a ship's orchestra 
was something. Better, anyway, for 
Dannv than ploughing corn. 
I cö'uldn't help watching the face of the 
girl as the orchestra began playing. 
Never once did she take her eves from 
them. Her father fidgeted in his chair, 



198 


CLOSED RO-\DS 


a heayy frown on his handsome old brow. 
So, my thought ran, papa is against this 
thing, whatever it is. Just then the 
music ceased, and a little hush fell upon 
the diners. Danny had risen and, ad- 
vancing a step or two, began to play. 
1\ ot to the people listening so raptly at 
the tables, but to the girl who sat near 
me, looking at him, it seemed to me, with 
almost hungry eyes. Ah, the boy could 
play. There was something in his music 
that was hard to define. Loneliness, I 
guess. It brought back with a rush the 
little parlor with the battered organ, the 
faded carpet, the warp showing through 
at the seams, and the ceaseless Dakota 
wind outside, tugging at the windows. 
\rhen he had finished he was rewarded 
with a gust of hand-clapping. Danny 
bowed, stiffly, and took his place again 
among the orchestrac I glanced at the 
girl. Her eyes were alight and shining. 
Suddenly, I felt old and tired and done. 
There had never been anything like tha t 
for me. 
I didn't see the boy that night. Some- 
how, I didn't want to. Presently, I knew, 
he would come up on deck, and that little 
girl with the pert nose and wide, cool 
brow would be waiting for him. \Vhat 
right had I to horn in on their hàppiness? 
It was a night made for lovers if ever 1 
saw one-anò twinges of rheumatism in 
old duffers my age. So I went to my 
fitateroom anò listened to the ceaseless 
pounding of the screw. 
The following day was clear and sUllny, 
a crinkling ocean with the light dancing 
on the water in flashing little disks. Some 
of the men, stalking up and down the deck 
like myself, began to speculate on the 
speed of the boat. I guessed, from what 
they said, that the old tub had her foot 
in her hand and was making good time 
of it. And just then Danny and I saw 
each other at the same moment. He 
came up with his old smile and hand out- 
stretched. " Well! " 
" Well?" Two men can get over a lot 
of ground with those simple words. 
"How you running, Danny?" I asked. 
"Oh, all right." He stopped smiling 
and glanced for a moment out over the 
water. Then, as though he wan ted to 
get on to some other subject, he asked me 
quickly about myself, and what I was 


doing on the ocean. I answered him, and 
then brought the conversation straight 
back. I knew he wasn't as interested in 
me as I was in him. "It's a long way 
from Dakota, Danny, and this isn't farm- 
ing." 
He was quiet for a little spell as we 
tramped, side by side. Then: " My 
mother died and there wasn't anything 
to stay for." 
All -1 could think of to say was: "I'm 
sorry. I didn't know." Suddenly it oc- 
curred to me what this must have meant 
to the boy. He had loved his mother. 
He used to play for her alone in that bleak 
little house in Dakota. The two had 
been closer, 1 expect, than even most 
mothers and sons are. I glanced at 
Danny. The old brooding look was in 
his eyes, "So I got out," he went on. 
"Just any way. There wasn't anything 
left really. The farm was covered with 
mortgages. Even the personal property. 
The day after mother was buried I drove 
to town and saw the banker. I told 
him I had tied the horse to the hitch- 
ing-post at the side of the bank, and then 
walked out. I had money enough to get 
to St. Paul. I guess you think that was 
pretty cowardly." 
"A good deal depends upon the person, 
Danny," I told him. "With some, I 
would say yes, it was pretty cowardly. 
\Vith you, perhaps not. It's a matter of 
being fitted for the job. I guess you 
would never have been a farmer." 
" What a blind fool I was," he broke out 
passionately. "Why didn't I do it be- 
fore? I could have taken my mother to 
St. Paul, and even if it was too late for 
anything else, I could have made her 
comfortable at the end. She wouldn't 
have broken her heart with work that 
never seemed to help. Do you remember 
that café we ate in that time in St. Paul? 
I got a job playing in their orchestra. It 
was then that I found out I'd never be 
much, if any, better. Just a fiddlerin one 
kind of eating joint or another." 
"\Vhy?" I asked. 
"Too old. Oh, I had a few dreams 
when I went there. They lasted until I 
met a Hungarian who played with the 
l\Iinneapolis Symphony. I can hear him 
say it yet: 'The soul? Yes. The fingers? 
:No.' Too stiff, you see, and I was past 



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. swiftly the throb of music beat soothingly upon the ears of that fear-md.ddencd crowd.- Page 201. 


the time when I could eyer make them 
supple. Oh, well!" 
I hated that tone. "It seems to me 
you haven't such a lot to beef about, 
Danny," I said, sort of short. "Lots of 
young fellows would be tickled to death 
to have your job, going about, seeing the 
world, doing the thing you like, and, if I'm 
any judge, a girl that-" 
He stopped me with a look. And then 


I got sore. "There's a trick in this, kid." 
I blurted out at him. "It isn.t quite 
straight. Here you are, making good 
money. You're young. and e\'en if you're 
not going to play for all the Victrolas in 
the world, you've still got a lot of inter- 
esting life ahead of you. '''hy, what 
you've got is the most precious thing 
gi\'en a man-youth! ,\nd last night. 
down there, I watched that little girl. I 
199 



200 


CI .OSE D RO:\ DS 


was at the same table with her, and I can 
still recognize the real article when I see 
it. Pretty a little thing as ever I saw. 
And here you're acting like the world was 
all flooey. Take a brace for yourself." 
I glanced at him out of the corner of 
my eye to see how he'd take the gaff. 
His face was bleak and hard. "Sorry," 
he said shortly. "I guess I couldn't make 
you understand. Excuse me a moment." 
He left me abruptly, and I saw him join 
the girl I had just been discussing. 
"'Vell," I thought to myself, "what are 
,you going to do with a damn young fool 
like that one?" I tramped up and down 
the deck, talking to myself, saying a great 
many things that all men of my age say at 
such times. 
I flung myself into my deck-chair at 
last, fuming, and watched those two in- 
fants stroll up and down, up and down. 
She seemed to be doing most of the talk- 
ing. She'd glance up into his face, 
anxiously, I thought, and speaking rap- 
idly.- Every once in a while Danny 
vwuld shake his head. And then, .when 
she wasn't looking, his eyes were on her 
hungrily. It was too deep for me. I 
quit looking at them. 
The next day I got into conversation 
with her. She'd seen me talking with 
Danny, I guess, and an old chap like me 
with a red face and heavy watch-chain 
looks kind of harmless. I told her that 
I'd known Danny nearly all his life, and 
right off, somehow, I felt that my ac- 
quaintance with her covered about the 
same period. She was that kind of a girl. 
She told me her name was Jean Hatha- 
way, and that she was making the trip 
with her father, who was going to Hong 
Kong on business. She hesitated a little 
at this last bit of information, and her 
cheeks were suòòenly stained with color. 
After that I saw her nearly every day 
for a few moments. We got to be friends. 
Once I made a remark about Danny's not 
being a great violinist. All she said was: 
"How utterly ridiculous! " The next 
day she said, just as though we hadn't 
stopped talking: "It doesn't matter 
whether he's a great musician or not; he's 
a very exceptional man." I agreed to the 
last part, but suggested that it might 
make a lot of difference to Danny. 
"Yes," she said, "That's the bother of 


it !" Ah, I thought, how many, many 
things that explains. He'd swim the 
ocean for her if he thought he was great; 
but as he knew he couldn't be, he wouldn't 
have her. I fell to wondering how it 
would come out. It coulòn't last long- 
not with a girl as proud as she was. Yet, 
if Danny happened to be talking with me 
and saw her come on deck with her father, 
he'd stop right in the middle of a sentence, 
and never take his eyes off her un til they 
had disappeared down the deck. Then 
he'd go on talking, not realizing, I sup- 
pose, that he'd stopped. At one of these 
times I said softly: "Don't you like her, 
Danny? " 
He jerked around at me. ""fiat?" 
"Don't you like her?" 
He answered, almost in a whisper: 
" No, I don't like her. I love her." 
"Then, for God's sake, why don't you 
tell her so?" I almost shouted. 
He sighed a little, and began eXplaining 
in a patient, tired kind of voice: "Can't 
you see? Her father knows. He's got 
sense. \Vhat right have I to love her? 
I'm a dub musician. I'll never be any- 
thing else. She's always had all that life 
could give her, exéept the bitterness. 
What sort of life would she have with 
me? She'd have heartache and failure. 
She's young and had everything she 
wants. She thinks she wants me, too. 
This is the second trip she's made with 
her father on this boat-the second round 
trip, I mean-and it's got to end soon. 
It's too much to ask of a man-too 
much." Then he turned anò walked 
away, head down. 
The third night out from Hong Kong 
I thought I'd suffocate. The air was 
heavy and hot and thick. The barometer 
was falling, and I heard the captain say 
we were in for a blow, I walked the deck 
late, watching the stars gleam on the 
purple field of the sky. I couldn't get 
Danny out of my mind. Everything had 
sort of misfired for him all along the line. 
And yet, I felt sure it would come out all 
right. Youth is likely to be tragic about 
such things. .l\laybe that's what makes 
it so wonderful. \\,Then, at last, I went to 
my stateroom it was close and hot, and 
smelled like fresh white-lead paint. 
I don't know when I got to sleep, but 
I know when I awoke. I was sitting 



CLOSED ROADS 


straight up in my bunk. It seemed to 
me that I had been thrown upright. I 
was still conscious of a sort of shock all 
through my body. And there was ring- 
ing in my ears the awfulest sound I ever 
heard. And in three seconds it came 
again, a sort of gigantic, tearing cry. It 
was exactly as though the ship had 
screamed. The second time I was thrown 
from my bunk as I was getting out. 
Blindly I reached for trousers and coat, 
got into them somehow, and made my 
way to the deck. Hell was loose there. 
I heard a sailor say quickly to another as 
he ran by: "The guts are out of her!" 
Then the deck gave a sudden jerk, and I 
sprawled flat on my face. I was near a 
passageway, and people began to run and 
stumble over me before I had a chance to 
get up. I crawled out of the way as best 
I could on all fours, listening for the sound 
of the turning screw, but I couldn't hear 
it. I commenced to lose my head a little, 
but the sight of a man sitting gravely be- 
side me on the deck trying to put a wom- 
an's number-four shoe on a number-ten 
foot brought me back to my senses. I 
took a great deal of satisfaction in jam- 
ming my foot into his rear as I sat. That 
saved me, and I was all right the rest 
of the way. The officers were sloshing 
about, yelling: "It's all right, gentlemen, 
it's all right. Perfectly safe." 
But it wasn't all right. The boat was 
listed badly, and going farther over ev- 
ery second. Men were whimpering and 
women screaming. Then there was a 
deafening noise below, and my head 
banged against a brass railing. The next 
thing I knew the distress signals were 
going like mad, rockets, whistles, God 
knows what. The boat crew were call- 
ing: "Steady, steady at the boats." I be- 
came conscious of another sound, high 
and clear and piercingly sweet. And then 
others, and swiftly the throb of music 
beat soothingly upon the ears of that fear- 



 


. 


VOL. LXXVIII.-IS 


201 


maddened crowd. Its effect was notice- 
able immediately. Jean Hathaway's 
father was standing beside me, and notic- 
ing me, he said; "That, sir, is magnifi- 
cent." People took time to get into the 
boats instead of falling in. Men hung 
back to help the women and children. 
Instead of a senseless mob, we were, sud- 
denly, human beings. 
The waves were running high, and they 
were having trouble to keep the boats 
from being smashed like egg-shells against 
the side of the vessel as the davits swung 
them out. Mr. Hathaway had disap- 
peared when I turned to speak to him, 
and in his place was the captain, pointing 
to a vacancy in the last boat. "But 
here," I yelled above the noise of the 
smashing waves: "Those fellows playing 
there. \Ve can't leave them, you know." 
He only pointed to the boat, and I could 
see just one spot big enough for another 
person to crowd into. I still hung back. 
(My head was full of Danny and that 
violin of his, going all the time.) The 
captain gritted at me from between white 
lips: "Get in, damn you, or I'll knock you 
in." Somehow, I was in, the davits 
turned out, and the boat swung clear of 
the ship's side. It touched the water, 
climbed a big wave, and we were free. 
Somebody was sobbing wildly in the back 
of the boat, and a heavy masculine voice 
kept saying, over and over: "There, 
honey, there." It was Jean, her brown 
hair tumbled about her shoulders, her 
face buried in her father's arms. 
The sailors fell on the oars, and the dis- 
tance between us and the great, looming 
bulk of the ship swiftly widened. Still, 
oyer that seething stretch of tumbling 
water, came the clear, high note of a 
violin. The darkness fell like a curtain 
between us and the ship. Suddenly the 
music ceased, and there was only the rush- 
ing wind and the vast, heaving bosom of 
the sea. 


}e( 



 


. 
. 



The State and Religious Teaching 
BY HENRY NOBLE SHERWOOD 
State Euperintendent of Public Instruction, Indiana 



', '

 .'- E have been left a great 
, I . heritage in Greece, in 
i:jl 'b:'h. Rome, and in Jeru- 
eJiW 
 salem. It is our task 

 I 
 to make this herit

e 
our own. Modern CIVI- 
WW lization rests on three 
foundations, laid by 
the men and women of antiquity. With- 
out them our life and institutions have 
little meaning. Our traditions go back to 
them. 
The foundation in Greece is a triple 
one. No one thinks of this ancient coun- 
try without calling to mind the beautiful 
buildings on the Acropolis at Athens. 
Greece, above all other nations, laid the 
foundations of Art. 
Another Greek contribution to modern 
civilization is philosophy. Every school- 
boy knows the story of Socrates-his pov- 
erty, his skill at asking questions, his trial, 
his cup of hemlock. The mantle of this 
great teacher and thinker fell on Plato, 
who has left us the best of his master's 
though t in his own writings. A third 
Athenian, Aristotle, when joined with 
Socrates and Plato, forms a triumvirate of 
Greek philosophers, whose influence has 
touched every generation that has suc- 
ceeded them. These men made philoso- 
phy a science. 
A third root of modern times is embed- 
ded in Grecian soil. It is literature. The 
father of narrative prose is Herodotus, 
who told the story of the Greco-Persian 
wars, The first scientific historian is 
Thucydides, the author of the Peloponne- 
sian War. lVloreover, the Greeks invent- 
ed the drama. \Vhat was once a goat 
song and dance became the tragedy of 
Æschylus. Greece laid the foundations 
of literature as well as of art and philoso- 
phy. 
We recognize the value of this legacy. 
Every pupil in our schools, on the com- 
pletion of his sixth year, knows about the 
Greek heritage. It is a part of our ele- 
202 


mentary-school curriculum. It is also 
stressed both in high school and college. 
No educator would ignore it in building a 
curriculum. It is needed both to explain 
our present and to enrich it. 


Greece and Rome offer a marked con- 
trast. The one is a small peninsula, jut- 
ting down into the Mediterranean Sea; 
the other a vast territory, completely en- 
closing this sea. The one is fairly uni- 
form in temperature; the other has all the 
varieties of the torrid and temperate 
zones. The one has a homogeneous peo- 
ple; the other, many tribes and races. 
Rome, by reason of her extensive terri- 
tory, her pronounced seasonal changes, 
her variety of soil and climate, and her 
heterogeneous people, had a most difficult 
problem in the field of government. In 
the solution of this problem, however, she 
surpassed all nations of antiquity. Her 
Cæsars and senators, her generals and 
tribunes, are known to-day wherever 
books are read. Her unconquerable legions 
kept the invaders at bay and preserved 
order at home. Traders came from far 
and near over roads the marvel of to-day. 
The lanes of the sea were kept open by her 
indomitable galleys. Everywhere there 
was order; always there were courts. In 
the practical art of government, Rome 
was without a rival. 
Closely akin to this achievement is an- 
other no less important. This second 
contribution was law. The little city on 
the Tiber had done more than acquire ter- 
ritory and take on the ways of an empire. 
She had developed principles and formu- 
lated rules that govern man in his social 
relations. That she was conscious of the 
importance of this work is evident because 
from time to time it was recorded in per- 
manent form. The record that was most 
complete was authorized by Justinian in 
the sixth century. The Justinian code 
put the stamp of this mighty people on all 
subsequent time. 



THE STATE AND RELIGIOUS TEACHI'\fG 


It is interesting to note that one of the 
aphorisms embedded in American politi- 
cal writing is found in the great Roman 
documents. This is "All men are cre- 
ated equaL" Again, the jury principle 
which we appraise in unmeasured terms 
can be traced from the Theodosian code 
of the Romans to Normandy, thence to 
England and finally to America. 
\Ve believe this contribution to modern 
civilization is very significant. Every 
boy and girl who completes the sixth 
grade in our schools is taught to enjoy 
this heritage. Those who study beyond 
this grade have their attention called 
many times to this legacy. To under- 
stand the contribution of Rome helps us 
understand our own life and traditions; 
to enjoy it makes our vision broader and 
our sympathy richer. 


We now pass from Greece and Rome to 
Jerusalem, the home of the third factor in 
modern civilization. 
In ancient times there was a great na- 
tion in the valley of the Nile. At the 
same time, another lived in the valleys 
of the Tigris and Euphrates. Between 
these two ancient seats of civilization was 
Jerusalem, the holy city of Palestine. 
The interna tional highway between Egypt 
and Babylonia led through Palestine. 
Therefore, the Jew always met the trav- 
ellers between these ancient countries. 
\Vhether they were pleasure-seekers, busi- 
ness men, or warriors, they passed through 
his land. In this way the Jew became 
the most cosmopolitan man of antiquity. 
He garnered the thoughts of the ages. 
The Jew was a dreamer. He was also 
thrifty. Being so, he could put his ener- 
gies to the solution of the problems of the 
eternaL By and by he came to the con- 
clusion that God was not peculiar to any 
place, nor to any tribe or nation. He was 
Jehovah, the God of all. 
Hand in hand with the revelation of 
this great truth was the question-how 
to approach him? From the days of 
Abraham, this question was one on which 
the Jew deliberated. As he learned from 
time to time how to relate himself to 
Jehovah, the springs of religion began to 
rise 'within him. In the course of the cen- 
turies great religious experiences were reg- 
istered in his heart. To him was revealed 


203 


the great principles that govern the ad- 
justment of human conduct to the Su- 
preme \Vill. 
The Jew has recorded his religious ex- 
perience and achieve
ent on parchments, 
a great number of whIch have been bound 
in a single volume, known by everybody 
as the Bible. This book, written by Jews 
and for Jews, is the richest treasure in the 
field of religion in the world. It has 
brought spiritual peace and comfort to 
untold millions. The road over which 
the Jew travelled to find God has become 
a great world highway whose milestones 
are prayer and vicarious service. 
Jerusalem has left us the legacy of mon- 
otheism and religion. The story of how 
the Jew made this fortune, the value of 
which i:; inestimable, is not open to our 
boys and girls on the same easy terms as 
the Greek and Roman. Not only is the 
evolution of this contribution to our civ- 
ilization largely denied our youth, but the 
real product itself is poorly handed down. 
This fact naturally follows. The com- 
plete comprehension of any fact hangs on 
an understanding of how it came to be. 
Our present has been a becoming. To 
know the source of things and the story 
of their development adds to our thorough 
mastery of them. 
But why is the Jewish contribution to 
modern civilization so hazily present in 
our life and so poorly understood by our 
time? 
One reason is the existence of such a 
large number of religious bodies, each of 
which is more or less suspicious of the 
motives of the others. ,l\1any of our 
churches trace their history back to the 
sixteenth century; others are of later ori- 
gin. The break which came in the Cath- 
olic Church under the leadership of l\lar- 
tin Luther is a significant landmark in 
church history. It introduces the Protes- 
tant era, in which we see a multiplicity of 
religious groups and a period of suspicion 
and mistrust among them. Emphasis in 
this period has been too denominational, 
too much on externals, too much on the 
letter. In the effort to preserve an or- 
ganization and a name, the larger inter- 
ests of individual and social adjustment 
to God have been neglected. The history 
of "my" church has received more atten- 
tion than the weightier matters of the law. 



204 


THE STATE AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING 


Another reason for our failure ade- 
quately to receive our religious legacy is 
the fact that the modern state has taken 
over education as one of its functions. In 
America, as well as in Europe, schools 
were the children of the church. From 
the fall of the Roman Empire to the be- 
ginning of the Protestant era, education 
was regarded primarily as a religious re- 
sponsibility and functionc Among the 
first in modern times to point out the civic 
value of schools was Luther. This em- 
phasis received momentum from two 
sources: first, the conception of individ- 
ual responsibility to God; second, the be- 
lief that the people should vote and par- 
ticipate in government; that is, democ- 
racy. 
It took about three hundred years for 
these two principles to transform educa- 
tional practice. Of course, if the individ- 
ual was responsible to God, then he ought 
to be equipped to meet this duty. The 
least indispensable equipment was the 
ability to read and understand the Bible. 
He could know his religious obligations 
and how best to meet them in no more 
commendable way. Again, the idea of 
democracy in government rested on an 
intelligent electorate. The voter must 
understand the constitution of the state, 
the working of the lawmaking body and 
the courts, campaign issues and party his- 
tory. He must, therefore, be a reading 
voter. 
Democracy greatly accelerated the 
movement to make education a civic func- 
tion. Our schools in colonial times were 
established, maintained, and administered 
largely by - the church. In 1850 there 
were over six hundred academies in Amer- 
ica, with two hundred and sixty-four 
thousand pupils. Almost all of these in- 
stitutions were erected by the church. 
What is true of academies is also true of 
the early colleges. Of the first nine col- 
leges established on our shores, eight were 
built by the church. In 1860 there were 
two hundred and forty-six colleges in the 
United States. Only seventeen were state 
institutions. Both the academies and the 
colleges sought to prepare men for the 
ministry and for spiritual leadership. The 
secularization of schools began when the 
political emphasis became paramount in 
society. This was in the eighteenth cen- 


tury. In our country this emphasis was 
clearly evident at the time of the Ameri- 
can Revolution and has become more and 
more dominant since the establishment of 
our Constitution. Of the five commonly 
recognized strands which make up the 
cord of society-home, school, church, 
business, and state-it is now apparent 
that the last-named one has more gener- 
ally touched our citizenship than any 
other. - It has taken over the schools and 
made them civic institutions. 
Momentum has been added to the secu- 
larization of our schools by the peculiar 
character of our modern industrial sys- 
tem. This is a third reason for the indif- 
ference to our religious heritage. Since 
the coming of the industrial revolution of 
the eighteenth century, great stress has 
been given to matter. Machinery has 
supplanted the human hand. It is an age 
of steel. We have harnessed the light- 
ning, tunnelled the hills and mountains, 
bridged the streams and rivers. We don't 
walk; we ride. We standardize every- 
thing. We talk about atoms and elec- 
trons. We note the victory of dimes in 
business and chronicle the erection of the 
tallest skyscrapers. We rejoice when our 
country makes up the longest train of cars. 
We are glad when our railroad mileage ex- 
ceeds that of any other nation. Me- 
chanical power conquers. Steel gives the 
victory. Matter receives the emphasis. 
For almost two hundred years the ma- 
chine has displaced the hand; the material 
has crowded out the immaterial; matter 
has choked the spirit. Into the stream of 
life we have failed to pour the waters of 
fraternity and love, peace and good-will. 
In fact, we have not built a technic so 
comprehensive and complex for human 
relationships as we have for the adjust- 
ment of matter to matter. Is it small 
wonder then that Jerusalem has been neg- 
lected and that our religious legacy is a 
thing of indifference? 
And because of this situation we try to 
produce character by training that is 
largely rational. We have excluded from 
our public-school curriculum the study 
and in most cases the use of the Bible and 
religious literature. What was consid- 
ered a few generations ago as fundamen- 
tally essential in education has been sup- 
planted by an attempt to develop ration- 



THE STATE AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING 


ality in the pupil. Education of this type 
has produced a society against which 
grave indictments can be made. What is 
true in Indiana is in all probability typi- 
cal of the nation. In this state our penal 
institutions are fined with inmates half of 
whom have not reached their majorityc 
Sixty-two per cent of our entire popula- 
tion are not identified with any church. 
Boys and girls begin to drop out of Sun- 
day-school at the ,age of twelve. At four- 
teen, twenty-five per cent are gone; at 
twenty-one, ninety-two per cent are gone. 
In the presence of this indictment, we 
cry out like the conscience-stricken group 
to whom Peter preached: " Men and 
brethren, what shall we do?" Certain 
principles must guide us in making an 
answer: first, the separation of state and 
ch urch; second, the freedom of conscience 
in matters of religion; third, the responsi- 
bility of the home and the church for reli- 
gious education. 
Everybody knows that modern indus- 
try has greatly changed home')ife. It has 
taken the wage-earner to the factory and 
shop. It has put a severe tesfon domes- 
tic intimacies and companionships. Home 
has not broken down; it has been seriously 
crippled., A recent study shows that the 
most telling cause of immorality among 
young working girls is the disintegration 
of the home. That great unused power, 
prayer, is too seldom drawn upon at 
home. There are too few priestly fathers. 
Wives cannot be bread-winners, mothers, 
and religious teachers all at the same 
time. It is not enough that children 
come into a home; they must receive here 
in this elemental institution the legacy 
bequeathed to them by Father Time, the 
riches of our religious heritage. 
Closely bound to the home in this mat- 
ter is the church. Since the seculariza- 
tion of the schools, the church has too 
often said: "Education is no longer our 
obligation." On the other hand, the 
state has said: "On religious matters we 
have nothing to say." As a result of 
these positions millions in America reach 
maturity without any real religious train- 
ing. The church must rededicate itself 
to its most important and fundamental 
task-handing down from generation to 
generation the spiritual torch of the agesc 
Under our present order, the church holds 


205 


sovereignty over faith, one of the greatest 
resources of the world. To give instruc- 
tion in religious education, our churches 
generally are poorly equipped both in 
buildings and teachers. Their supreme 
challenge to-day is to provide the means 
and measures for putting America in 
touch with our religious heritage. 
There is nothing in the principles guid- 
ing this discussion to preven t the state from 
co-operating with the church and home in 
religious education. Among the ways this 
may be done is to give the schoolroom a 
reverential tone and atmosphere. Every 
schoolroom, therefore, should be well con- 
structed, immaculately kept, and artisti- 
cally decorated. A child will respect a 
room of this kind. When he does so, the 
state has begun to co-operate with the 
church and home in religious education. 
Another factor which the state can con- 
tribute is the teacher. Her appearance 
and bearing should command respect. 
She should be identified with one or more 
organizations whose purpose is to build 
character. The most important organ- 
ization of this kind is the church. There 
are other agencies that champion brother- 
hood and vicarious living. Affiliation 
with these is commendable. l\1ere mem- 
bership in any of these organizations is 
not enough. A teacher should be suffi- 
ciently active in the community in moral 
and religious work that her aims and 
ideals along these lines are obvious to any 
observing citizen. This makes possible 
the most effective teaching in the world- 
teaching by example. Religion is caught 
as well as taught. The state can most 
effectively co-operate with the church and 
home in handing down the religious heri- 
tage by the selection as teachers of men 
and women who typify the highest and 
best in manhood and womanhood. 
As the schools became more and more 
civic institutions, the use of the Bible as 
a part of the curriculum became less and 
less prominent. The complete secular
za- 
tion of the schools has almost wholly elIm- 
inated the Bible in connection with them. 
Many have felt that this was the logical 
consequence of the adoption of the princi- 
ple of separatio
 of church .and 
ta
e. !t 
is not necessarIly so. ThIs prmClple m 
essence is that no religious organization or 
group shall use the state in order to fur- 



206 


THE STATE AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING 


ther its own ends. It is a buffer against 
the selfish aggrandizement of the machin- 
ery of the government for denominational 
purposes. It is not a principle directed 
against the use of the Bible in the schools. 
In fact, there are features about this book 
that recommend it for a place in the cur- 
riculum. 
To begin with, it is a library of excellent 
literature. For beauty of expression, 
sublimity of thought, and emotional 
charm, few poems excel the Psalms. In 
fact, Biblical poetry well meets Milton's 
requirement-it is simple, sensuous, pas- 
sionate. The Proverbs are bits of wis- 
dom, terse and pungent, the like of which 
has not been produced by any other peo- 
ple. There is no drama with a more no- 
ble theme than the Book of Job. It is 
fertile in invention, full of emotional cli- 
maxes, and adorned with beauty of ex- 
pression. The Biblical short story, of 
which the Book of Ruth is an example, is 
still one of the finest in all literature. 
Notwithstanding the literary excellence 
of the Bible, makers of readers and other 
text-books too rarely draw from it for 
their selections. If the writers of school- 
books would incorporate more of the 
Bible in their texts, our boys and girls 
would, as they moved from grade to grade 
in our school system, become fairly well 
acquainted with it as literature. This 
would be a distinct contribution of the 
schools in an effort to hand down our re- 
ligious heritage. 
In its influence upon literature and its 
effect upon our speech, this wonderful 
book has been and continues to be "the 
well of English undefiled." Professor 
Cook, of Yale, declares that the King 
James Bible is the chief bond which holds 
united in a common loyalty and a com- 
mon endeavor the various branches of the 
English race, and more than anything 
else it tends to make perpetual that loy- 
alty and that high endeavor. Another 
Yale professor, Doctor William Lyon 
Phelps, expresses his estimate of the Bible 
in this striking paragraph: 
"I thoroughly believe in a university 
education for both men and women; but 
I believe a knowledge of the Bible without 
a college course is more valuable than a 
college course wiiliout the Bible. For in 
the Bible we have profound thought beau- 


tifully expressed; we have the nature of 
boys and girls, of men and women, more 
accurately charted than in the works of 
any modern novelist or playwright. You 
can learn more about human nature by 
reading the Bible than by living in New 
York." 
To recognize the Bible as a great liter- 
ary production and to make selections 
from it a part of the school curriculum is 
a third way the state can co-operate with 
the church and home in passing on the 
Hebrew literature to the youth of to-day. 
A movement that is making great head- 
way at iliis time is to release pupils from 
the public schools on the request of par- 
ents or guardians for as much as two hours 
per week in order that agencies already 
organized for the purpose may give them 
instruction in religious education. A rec- 
ord of their attendance is kept and credit 
for their work is given by the schools. An 
arrangement of this kind makes it possi- 
ble, not only to teach historical and liter- 
ary phases of the Bible, but to give in- 
struction in its moral and spiritual values 
as well. It is a significant fact, in view of 
the large number of our religious organiza- 
tions, that seven-eighths of the teaching 
giyen to released pupils is exactly the 
same. It is too early to appraise the re- 
sults derived from this plan for religious 
instruction. No serious objection has 
been raised against it. In some schools 
where the platoon system is in operation, 
play periods are frequently used for this 
purpose. The principle, however, is the 
same. The movement in general is an- 
other way in which the state can co-oper- 
ate with the church and home in bringing 
to our boys and girls the valuable but 
long-neglected principles of the Jewish re- 
ligion. 
A very similar practice has started 
in our State colleges and universities. 
Schools of religion have been built by 
private citizens or by churchmen, or both, 
in close proximity to the State institu- 
tions, to furnish the students in the tax- 
supported school an opportunity for addi- 
tional religious instruction. This instruc- 
tion has been put on a collegiate basis and 
has received credit by the State school. 
The J\Hssouri Bible College, founded in 
1896 by the Christian Church, has offered 
courses in religious education which have 



THE STATE AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING 


been accorded credit by the State Univer- 
sity, Similar religious foundations have 
been established in Illinois and Kansas, 
and their courses are approved for univer- 
sity credit. This seems a commendable 
practice, and it might well spread all 
over the Union. It makes possible the 
co-operation of the state with the church 
and home in religious education, and of- 
fers under proper regulation a right of 
way to Jerusalem free from danger. 
The tax-supported educational institu- 
tion, with its complementary private or 
denominational school of religion, can 
offer to students the opportunities for re- 
ligious education on a par with the tradi- 
tional church college. It makes possible 
a return to conditions which existed be- 
fore the secularization of the schools, but 
under different agencies. In many cases 
the church college of to-day has sheared 
its curriculum of courses distinctly re- 
ligious in character and depended on ra- 
tionalistic instruction for the development 
of spiritualleadings. This secularization 
process has not infrequently been applied 
to the faculty. As a result, instead of a 
group of choice personalities who know 
and enjoy the world's legacy in Greece, 
Rome, and Jerusalem, and delight in de- 
positing it in the innermost vault of the 
soul of youth, we too often find a body 
brought together for their erudition and 
scholarship alone. Notwithstanding this 
situation, the fires of religious emotion 


207 


have been kindled in many hearts in our 
church schools, and leaders trained within 
their walls have exerted a tremendous in- 
fluence in making our society wholesome 
and pure. The maintenance of these in- 
stitutions is a marked compliment to the 
spirit of high devotion and sacrifice of god- 
ly men and women. 
The demand made by the state for an 
intelligent citizenship does not go far 
enough. :Mere knowledge does not insure 
a citizenship that respects law and order, 
that knits together the threads of malad- 
justment in domestic and social relations, 
or that heals the misshapen and leech- r 
bitten units in our body politic, Learn- 
ing alone will not build a technic adequate 
for the problems of any generation. \Ve 
must have an intelligence established on 
faith, built in prayer, and nourished by 
good-will. We must have an intelligence 
so intimately bound to God that every 
citizen has written on his heart: 
"If I forget thee, let my right hand for- 
get its cunning and my tongue cleave to 
the roof of my mouth." 
We must have an intelligent citizenship 
that is righteous. 
American children will receive their in- 
heritance. The outlook for this joyful 
consummation is reassuring. \Ve are 
training spiritual minutemen for the cause 
of religious education. The signal-fires 
for a mighty effort are burning; a spiritual 
renaissance is imminent. 




 
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208 


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ú 


Fireflies 


BY LOUISE DRISCOLL 


n""hat are you, Fireflies, 
That come as dayUght dies? 
A re you the old, old dead 
Creeping through the long grass 
To see the green leaves move 
A nd feel the Ught wind pass? 
The larkspur in my garden 
Is a sea of rose and blue, 
The whi te moth is a ghost ship 
Drifting through. 
The shadows fall like lilacs 
Raining from a garden sky, 
Pollen laden bees go home, 
Bird songs die. 
The honeysuckle breaks a flask, 
And a breeze, on pleasure bent, 
Catches in her little hands 
The sharp scent. 
In the darkness and the dew 
Come the little flying flames, 
Are they the forgotten dead 
Without names? 


Did they love the leaves and wind, 
Grass and gardens, long ago 
With a love that draws them home 
Where things grow? 
For an hour with green leaves 
Love immortal leaped to flame, 
From the earth into the night 
Old hearts came! 


JVlzat are you, Fireflies, 
That come as daylight dies? 



Y ESTERDAY I read a new volume 
of American poems which I con- 
fidently recommend, being certain 
that nine out of ten will share my admira- 
tion. It is called "The Home Road" and 
was written by the late Martha Haskell 
Clark. She was the wife of the secretary 
of Dartmouth College, and Professor 
Curtis Hidden Page, in his introduction, 
speaks of " her charming, vital, and 
typically American personality." I envy 
those who had the privilege of her friend- 
ship; she must have been an extraordinary 
woman. I especially commend the poem 
called "The Villages," because such a 
poem seems to be acutely needed at this 
moment, to remind us of something 
eternally and profoundly true in human 
nature. \Vith reference to the metrical 
skill displayed in these verses, I cannot 
do better than quote Professor Page: 
They are always strongly lyrical. If any ad- 
verse criticism may be made on them, it is that 
they almost too easily and naturally, for present- 
day taste in metrics, "sing themselves." But 
just possibly that may be a criticism not on the 
poems but on present-day taste, which is cer- 
tainly for a day, not for all time. Such poems 
as these have a permanent appeal, to readers 
that love lilting song for its own sake, to hearts 
that love at once the open sky and the Ioofed- 
in fireside. 


I advise those who prefer free verse to 
rhyme, or squalor to beauty, not to buy 
this book. They won't like it. 
It is worth remembering that the ten 
leading living British poets are metrically 
conservative; they are-well, name them 
yourself. 

fr. Stark Young, the accomplished 
dramatic critic of the New York Times, 
is the author of a book on the theatre 
called "Glamour." Even if one does not 
agree with all of his pronouncements, this 
work is worth reading for the sheer beauty 
of its style. There is displayed a com- 
mand of the resources of the English lan- 
guage which is especially welcome at a 


time when so much "criticism" in Amer- 
ica is written in slang. Mr. Young's long 
chapter on Duse is a particularly fine 
appreciation. I wish I could have seen 
one-tenth as much in her interpreta- 
tions as he saw; perhaps I could, if my 
knowledge of Italy, of the Italian lan- 
guage, and of Italian dramatic literature 
were one-tenth as much as his. 


The N ew York Theatre Guild opened 
their own building in April, with one of 
the best of modern plays-Shaw's" Cæsar 
and Cleopatra." The rise of this Theatre 
Guild is the most astonishing and the 
most encouraging thing in American dra- 
matic history. And yet I believe its in- 
itial success is owing to luck, to one in- 
dividual's chance shot. There was a 
little group (semi-professional, semi-ama- 
teur) of actors called The Washington 
Square Players, who had the usual ex- 
perience of bankruptcy, though in this 
instance it is possible that their downfall 
was one of the innumerable war casual- 
ties. In the New York Sun for March 
28, 1925, Alexander Woollcott, in a highly 
interesting article on their rise from ob- 
scurity to fame, says: 
When the first Guild meeting was held in 1919, 
they had $500 in the bank and access to the 
Garrick Theatre, which had not had a success in 
it for so many seasons that it usually stood idle 
and the superstitious Broadway managers would 
have none of it. 
From that nervous beginning the Guild has so 
grown that its subscribers-those who at the be- 
ginning of each season buy seats for each of 
he 
six plays the Guild is pledged each year to gIVC 
-now number more than 14,000. Its fame has 
50 spread that it is known in Buda Pest and 
Vienna and Dublin and Paris as no American 
theatre was ever known before. Its scale of 
operations has so expanded that besides its new 
theatre it has four other New York playhouses 
under at least temporary control. And it has so 
grown in resourcefu
ness and ski
 t
at the b
t 
of American playwrIghts are begInnIng to brmg 
their manuscripts to its door. 
At first these were offish and suspicious and 
the Guild was fairly driven to depend on the 
playwrights of other lands. Indeed the wags 
209 



210 


AS I LIKE IT 


insisted that the new theatre should be named 
either the Hungarrick or the Buda Pesthouse. 
But all this is changing and I think the day may 
not be far distant when the very fact that the 
Guild stands there equipped for (and committed 
to) disinterested production will inspire the writ- 
ing of some great plays just as the existence and 
perfection of the Moscow Art Theatre moved 
a shabby country doctor named Tchekhov to 
write the finest plays of his age. 


There have been innumerable theatre 
companies started, whose members have 
had ability and ambition; most of them 
have been regarded by the multitude with 
indifference. It is just the other way 
with the N ew York Theatre Guild in 
1925. If this organization selects a play, 
its choice is in itself a magnificent adver- 
tisement. "Theatre Guild Production" 
means just about the best thing in New 
York. How did this come about? 
The first play put on in 1919 by the 
Theatre Guild was Benavente's "Bonds 
of Interest." It ran three weeks, steadily 
lost money, and apparently the company 
was going the way of all flesh. But one 
day Lawrence Langner was window- 
shopping on Fifth Avenue. Some years 
before that he had belonged to a debat- 
ing team in England of which St, John 
Ervine was a member. Looking into a 
window at Brentano's, lVIr. Langner saw 
the book" John Ferguson," and being at- 
tracted by the name of the author on ac- 
count of his personal acquaintance, he 
bought the book and recommended it to 
the Guild. Any manager in New York 
might have produced it, but no one be- 
lieved in it. The new Theatre Guild put 
it on as their second production; it had 
an enormous success; it gave the Guild 
prestige, and best of all, it filled the 
treasury to the brim. It made the com- 
pany independent; since the first night of 
"John Ferguson" they have never known 
either mental or financial depression. 
They followed it up with John J\iase- 
field's "The Faithful," the performance 
being one of the worst bores I have ever 
had the bad luck to witness. But after 
the success of Ervine's play, they could 
have mounted even worse things than 
"The Faithful," and still been solvent. 
Therefore, I take off my hat to the man 
who picked "John Ferguson." He per- 
formed a great service to modern drama 
-for if it had not been for that one 


choice--well, here is one of those rare in- 
stances where we can all be thankful for 
what was, rather than for what might 
have been. 
And what a magnificent performance! 
Not to my dying day shall I forget Dud- 
ley Digges, as he revealed all the degrada- 
tion of talkative cowardice. 
Since that time, the Guild has made 
few errors in choosing plays; and it has 
worked several miracles, two notable in- 
stances being "Heartbreak House" and 
"Back to J\fethuselah." I hope some day 
it will conduct a genuine Repertory Theatre. 
It has given encouragement to dra- 
matic art everywhere; and if the citizens 
of other American cities have no oppor- 
tunity to see good plays, it is their own 
fault. But better times are coming; to 
take only one instance out of many, the 
recent opening of Miss Jessie Bonstelle's 
Playhouse in Detroit is significant. 
Visitors to N ew York who wish to know 
what plays to see and what ones to avoid 
cannot do better than read the "Tips on 
Amusements" contributed to The Wall 
Street Journal by the veteran critic Met- 
calfe. His list of plays is rewritten every 
M O1u1ay noon, and his prefatory remarks 
are as sensible and penetrating as his con- 
densed comment on each play. 
The English literature of the Restora- 
tion (1660-1700) has always seemed un- 
English in its pornography; historians 
have explained it as a reaction against 
Puritan suppression. The dramatic critic, 
Charles Belmont Davis, in The Herald 
Tribune, calls attention to the disquiet- 
ing fact that the present season, 1924- 
25, has rivalled the filth of Restoration 
drama, and also hints that we may be in 
for a restoration of Restoration plays. 
If this is true, I hope we may be honest 
enough, as Mr. Dayjs is, to state the 
reason for this sudden interest in his- 
torical revivals. It is absolute cant to talk 
about their wit and charm; there is more 
wit and cerebration in one play of Shaw's 
than in the entire Restoration drama. 
Furthermore, it is always assumed, and 
probably correctly, that any play which 
is denounced as immoral and comes near 
to being suppressed without quite achiev- 
ing it, will instantly become popular. 
Who are the men and women who prove 
the truth of this assumption? Why 



AS I LIKE IT 


should people, who care nothing about a 
play until it is branded as immoral, then 
flock to see it? They are really Peeping 
Toms, who are delighted to find that they 
can peep legally at five dollars and fifty 
cents a peep. 
Mr. Metcalfe, in The JVall Street J Ollr- 
nal, foreseeing the tide of indecency which 
is about to engulf New York, makes a 
point that ought not to be forgotten. 
"In the general rejoicing let there be a 
little sympathy for those managers who 
have been deterred by their self-respect 
and sense of decency from putting on 
plays of a certain kind which have always 
been at their command. They have lost 
money they might have had. The other 
managers who have refrained only from 
fear of the authorities may now go as far 
as they like." 
The most healiliful of all antiseptics- 
laughter-has recently disposed of two 
rotten plays. Certain misguided persons, 
supposing that filth was all that was 
necessary, mounted two impossible pro- 
ductions, at which, according to the New 
York critics, the audiences howled and 
guffawed in derisive damnation. 
That acute interpreter of American 
life, Ring W. Lardner, has risen from the 
ranks of the fun-makers to the deserved 
dignity of a Collected Edition of his 
Works. And although some of the earlier 
pieces are surprisingly unequal in merit, 
there is an abundance of good things in 
every volume. 
Edith \Vharton's new novel, "The 
Mother's Recompense" has for the basis 
of its plot the same tragic material used 
by Guy de Maupassant in "Fort Comme 
La Mort," and by Maurice Donnay in 
"L'Autre Danger." A man wishes to 
marry the daughter of his former mistress. 
l\frs. \Vharton's book, while not so good 
as her masterpiece, "The Age of Inno- 
cence," is valuable for its pictures of New 
York and especially for its analysis of the 
mother's state of mind. In" A Son at 
the Front" a father was the protagonist; 
here it is a mother. Some may find this 
prolonged analysis too minute for their 
taste; to me, everything Mrs. Wharton 
writes is sufficiently rewarding. 
Thomas Boyd's collection of war 
stories, "Points of Honor," confirms my 


211 


first opinion of him, formed when I read 
"Through the Wheat. " No books take 
me closer to the ranks of our fighting men. 
No one writes more honestly, or with 
more impartiality. He has chosen to 
omit the humor which is characteristic 
even of war, perhaps because he found 
war a serious business. But although 
there is no humor, there is an undertone 
of irony, which is perhaps best displayed 
in the tale, "A Long Shot." 
Scott Fitzgerald shows more potentiali- 
ties in "The Great Gatsby" than in any 
of his preceding books. It is not a com- 
pletely satisfactory story, but there is un- 
canny insight. He might éasily have be- 
come a caterer; he is an artist. 
Sheila Kaye-Smith proceeds on her 
triumphant way with "The George and 
the Crown," I know of no living novelist, 
except Thomas Hardy, who mingles na- 
ture and human nature into so perfect an 
amalgam. The remarkable thing is that 
she is as successful in the Channel Islands 
as she is in her beloved Sussex. The isl- 
and idyl is a beautiful interlude. She dis- 
plays extraordinary skill in fashioning her 
hero. He is a non-heroic hero who carries 
our sympathy from beginning to end. 
Such men are the salt of the earth. 
"The Clutch of the Corsican," by Al- 
fred H. Bill, is a first novel, and shows de- 
cided promise. It is a romance of the last 
days of Napoleon but quite different from 
the manufactured conventional type. 
"The Cruise of the Cachalot," by F. T. 
Bullen, recently reprinted, is on the whole 
the best account of a whaling voyage I 
ever read. It is prefaced by a superlative 
compliment from Rudyard Kipling; but 
his enthusiasm for the book will be shared 
by all who love stories of the sea. Its 
fidelity to fact increases its value without 
decreasing its charm; and it has none of 
the tiresome metaphysics of Herman l\lel- 
ville. 
To those who love to travel in remote 
and dangerous places vicariously, let me 
recommend Rockwell Kent's astonishing 
narrative, "Voyaging Southward from 
the Strait of l\Iagellan." I have sailed 
around the Horn many times in books, 
and in like fashion have I often pro- 
ceeded through the Straits. I have al- 
ways vaguely imagined what ilie land was 
like between the Straits and the tip of the 



212 


AS I LIKE IT 


Horn, and wondered why brave fellows 
who love perilous adventures had never 
gone there. l\1anifestly the same idea 
had occurred to Rockwell Kent, only he 
turned the dream into reality. This is a 
thrilling story, and ilie numerous illustra- 
tions from the auilior's hand add to its 
piquancy. 
"The Life of John L. Sullivan," by R. 
F. Dibble, handles this hero as Lytton 
Strachey manhandled Manning. It is a 
highly amusing biography of the most 
popular pugilist of all time. John L. was 
a fighter who loved to fight. To-day it 
takes more diplomacy to get two heavy- 
weights into the ring than to organize a 
League of Nations. 
Mr. Dibble's book entertained me pro- 
digiously; perhaps it is lucky for him that 
Sullivan is dead. I wish in enumerating 
the various battles of the Strong Boy of 
Boston, the author had given him a little 
more credit for the greatest victory he 
ever achieved, the conquest of his thirst. 
. . . Let me recommend all who are in- 
terested to read Vachel Lindsay's poem, 
"John L. Sullivan." 
Another very diverting book is 
"Twenty Years on Broadway," by 
George M. Cohan, written in Broadway 
dialect. Speed I Speed I and then More 
Speed I has been the chief characteristic 
of Mr. Cohan's work as a dramatist. 
Well, that is also the ground quality of 
this autobiography. It is a headlong, 
breathless dash from obscurity to fame; 
written by one from whom no secret of 
success is hid. Years ago I saw Mr. 
Cohan in an American-flag-song-and- 
dance-show called "The Yankee Prince." 
I found it a colossal bore. However, the 
house was jammed to the last inch, and 
apparently the audience or vidience loved 
it. I rejoiced when lVIr. Cohan raised his 
game from his heels to his head-I have 
never enjoyed any American play more 
than "The Tavern." I cannot yet see 
why the critics attacked that piece so 
savagely. It seems to me one of the most 
original, one of the most brilliant, one of 
the most humorous of our native dramas. 
In addition to its outrageous mirth, it has 
an atmosphere of poetry and romance 
and wonder and mystery. I would go a 
long way to see it again. 
Scribnerians who share my opinion 


that Louis Tracy's "The Wings of the 
l\10rning" is the most exciting novel ever 
written, will be glad to know that a 
sumptuous quarto edition has just been 
published, embellished with colored illus- 
trations. 


Several questions of good usage are 
brought to the front by my correspon- 
dents. S. K. Ratcliffe, the accomplished 
English critic, wonders if "like I do" is 
a recent vulgarism, and uncommon in 
America. No, to both queries; but I hate 
it. Mr. Ratcliffe continues: "Certainly 
in England 'like' is getting everywhere; 
the so-called educated do it. Harold 
Laski sounds it in his lectures with ag- 
gressive force! . .. Well, anyhow, vile 
as it is, it isn't so villainous as 'different 
than,' which is now universal in America. 
\Vhen, I wonder, did it begin ? You and 
a few others, if you will enlist the col- 
yumnists . . . ought to be able to abolish 
it. But perhaps not. Think of F. P. A.'s 
lifelong war upon whom is he? And, by 
the bye, why don't you stop your coun- 
trymen from writing, always, 'his ilk'? 
. . . what has it to do with him and his 
class or kind?" 
A professor of English writes: "If you 
abominate 'angle,' in the sense-un- 
known till these later years, and I be- 
lieve not yet known to the dictionaries- 
of point de vue, or Standpunkt, I wonder 
if you couldn't make a good paragraph of 
it for one of your SCRIBNER articles." 
Alas, I may have, among my numerous 
errors, been guilty of this one. But it is 
an error, and henceforth- 


1925 marks the four hundredth anni- 
versary of the first printing of the Eng- 
lish Bible by Tyndale, and the two hun- 
dred and fiftieth of the first Oxford Bible. 
The best way for every American to cele- 
brate the occasion is forthwith to buy an 
Authorized Version IN BIG TYPE. One 
reason adults leave off reading the Bible 
is because they do not know that it is 
possible to buy an English Bible in a 
volume no bigger than many a novel, and 
yet with enormous black type, as big as 
that in pulpit tomes. The ordinary flexi- 
bly bound Bible, with tissue-paper, and 
small, thin, pale type, is a discourage- 
ment and even a danger to eyes that 



AS I LIKE IT 


have looked on the world more than 
thirty years. 


With reference to the word vidience, 
which, at the suggestion of Mr. John M. 
Shedd, I advocated in a recent number 
of this magazine, I am surprised to learn 
from the Chicago News of April 29 that 
"the word optience for a movie assem- 
blage is already in general use, in the 
Middle \Vest at least." I have never 
heard or seen this word until now, but I 
give it a hearty welcome into the English 
language. 
R. H. Pitt, editor of The Religious Her- 
ald, Richmond, Va., claims priority over 
:Mr. John 1\1. Shedd for the coinage of the 
word vidience. 


About five years ago I called attention in The 
Religious Herald to the fact that we did not have 
a word corresponding to audience which would 
describe a company of people who were gathered 
to see, as audience describes a company who were 
gathered to hear. This provoked quite an enter- 
taining correspondence and Dr. E. W. Winfrey, a 
Baptist minister of Culpeper, nominated vidience 
to fill the vacancy. 


Score one more triumph for the Baptists! 
I am pleased to get this genial note 
from the Virginia paper, because in my 
youth there was a Congregationalist 
journal of the same name, in Hartford. 
I used to set type (ou tside of school 
hours) in the office. The paper became 
famous for its howling typographical 
errors and misplacement of paragraphs. 
One day, in the column "1\1inisters and 
Churches" there appeared in the proof 
sent to the editor, "Lillian Russell will 
wear tights this winter." How it got in 
there no one knew. As this was the 
climax of a long series of misfortunes, the 
editor was so disgusted that he crossed 
out the line, and wrote on the margin, 
"Such is life." "When the paper appeared, 
it contained among the news of the clergy, 
the item about 1\Iiss Russell, followed by 
the editorial comment, "Such is life." 
Such indeed, it was-and is, 


1\1r. and 1\Irs. Oscar Hugh de Boyedon 
not only enter the Fano Club in a veri- 
table blaze of glory, but they give to 
members, future members, and Scrib- 
nerians the following valuable and inter- 
esting information. Let me urge club 


213 


members 
nd prospective voyagers to 
Italy to wnte at 

ce, as I am doing, to 
Professor l\fabelhm. Mrs. de Boyedon 
writes from Perugia: 


. I w
u:t you to know about our most interest- 
In
 .vISIt of se
e
al hours to the magnificent 
BIbltoteca FedenCla at Fano: it is smaller in size 
but equa
 in i
terest. to the Mazarin Library in 
The InstItute In Pans. The collection of price- 
less books, rare mapuscripts, gorgeous bindings, 
and old documents IS wonderful beyond anything 
I can express and we owe the greatest debt of 
gratitude to the director and curator Professor 
Cavaliere Adolio Mabellini. He w
nt to the 
greatest pains to show us everything of interest 
and to explain the countless treasures of the 
great library (for there are more than a hundred 
thousand volumes). Among the great treasures 
are all the household files of the Malatesta family 
t
e autographs of nearly every Pope since th
 
Slxt
 century, thousands of Ictters from the great 
car
lDals of the chl!rch, and many gorgeously il- 
lumInated manuscnpts. Professor Mabellini had 
never heard of the Fano Club, nor SCRIBNER'S 
and he was intcnsely interested when we told hi
 
about both and especially about your interest in 
Yano. He begged me to ask you and other Amer- 
Ican professors to get in touch with him and said 
anyone in
erested in the great library in Fano 
would receIVe a wann welcome there and be given 
every facility to examine or study the books and 
manuscripts. This charming and intellectual 
Italian gentleman has devoted twenty-eight 
years of his life to cataloguing and looking after 
the library and nearly lost his life when the old 
part gave way and he was caught in the falling 
walls. He is so full of information, so gentle and 
kind and courteous and seemed so touched that 
we stayed so long and evinced such interest. I do 
hope other Americans will go to see him and the 
magnificent collections he so gladly shows to in- 
terested visitors. Would you (if possible) send 
him a list of mem.bers of the Fano Club and some 
of your own writings and have some of our big 
libraries get in touch with him? I should think 
the Biblioteca Federicia would be priceless to 
students of all history pertaining to the early and 
Middle Ages in history: and may I ask all mem- 
bers of the Fano Club to send Professor Mabellini 
a word of greeting and encouragement for his is a 
lonely life devoted only to his precious books, and 
the greetings of my young country to this lonely 
man would cheer him greatly? 


1\1r. \Villiam A. \Vatts, regretting that 
the idea did not occur to him in time for 
the Bok prize competition, suggests as the 
best means of preventing war, a union of 
all the owners of Ford cars. "N"othing 
else is so truly and universally American. 
They are everywhere and where one Ford 
lays down its bones two Fords grow. It 
is rumored in California that the astrono- 
mers on 1vIount \Vilson have discovered 
a Ford in the spectrum of Betelgeuse. 



214 


AS J LIKE IT 


No combination of munition- 
makers, Wall Street bankers, or other 
worshippers of Mars could successfully 
combat the sentiment and dictum of the 
Embattled Ford Owners of America." 
Fords, unite I 
The Ohio State J O'ltrnal nominates for 
the Ignoble Prize the Slouchy Sock. 


In the long list of ugly features that come into 
view when men grow careless in their attire, 
slouchy socks seem to have a commanding lead 
over all others. No other bit of untidiness seems 
to upset so completely all harmony or to be more 
wholly inexcusable. . .. It seems to have a 
perfect right to first place. Just why men grow 
careless in that way is not easy to understand. 
Skillful artisans have fashioned many conve- 
niences for preventing that display and they are 
for sale on all hands at modest prices. 
Just now some unthinking promoter of style 
is seeking to induce young men to adopt slouchy 
socks, deliberately cast aside the ready-to-wear 
garters, or the safety-pin, that comfort bachelors 
know and appreciate, and let their socks hang 
loose, wrinkled above their shoes, the perfect 
picture of slouchiness. And, more's the pity, 
there are young men willing to adopt the change 
and call it style. It's the newest thing, so it 
must be adopted, by those who prefer change to 
harmony and slouchiness to order and arrange- 
ment. The young men still insist on faultless 
linen, trousers creased to perfection, hats folded 
and wrinkled to meet the extreme test, neckwear 
that is art or near art, then spoil the picture and 
ruin the appearance with slouchy socks. And 
this development comes at an unfortunate time, 
as all custodial institutions the state has are 
crowded to the limit. 


Let me add that I am in hearty accord 
with the Ohio editor on this question. I 
am not a hidebound conservative, but we 
want no new wrinkles of this kind. 
Remember when you are in England, 
never ask for garters; ask for sock sus- 
penders. 
Miss Reba White, of Villa Park, Illinois, 
nominates for the Ignoble Prize 


Expensive, hand-decorated greeting-cards. 
They cost a lot of money and you hate to throw 
them away. .. here's no more room in the 
table drawer-you have a cleaning-out fit on, 
anyhow . . . they are not suitable for framing 
. . . they are too conspicuous for grocery-lists 
. . , you can't palm them off on poor relations 
for the sender's name is usually engraved or hand- 
lettered prominently. . . they are too stiff for 
the children to cut out on a rainy day. . . . The 
plumber is calling" A piece of cardboard for gas- 
kets?" "Sure, take these!" 


Henry T. Praed, of Yankton College, 
South Dakota, nominates for the Ignoble 


Prize "the fellow who works the cross- 
word puzzles in the news sheets while the 
rest are waiting for the paper." This 
should be a capital offense. 
Doctor John A. Holland, of Tuckahoe, 
nominates for the Ignoble Prize not only 
the boxes, but the whole Metropolitan 
Opera House, because of the stage's low 
visibility. "I have seen some cussing 
wrecks after a performance. So why not 
include the whole Opera House in your 
nomination? And pray that some day 
there will be built in New York a home 
for 'opra' that will give everyone a dig- 
nified return for their money." 
One is to be built. Yet I must say that 
I never had bad luck at the Metropolitan; 
I have sat in every part of the house (not 
at once), and have also stood, seen, and 
heard. 
\Vhen M. Antoine consented to become 
director of the Odéon in Paris, the first 
thing he did was to sit down in every 
doubtful chair and delete those from 
which a good view of the stage could not 
be obtained. 
Miss Beulah Strong, of Florence, has 
the hardihood-she is a long distance 
away-to nominate for the Ignoble Prize 
Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Well, well! 
One of the greatest individual benefits 
derived from the establishment of the Ig- 
noble Prize is the enormous relief when 
some one releases a thought that has been 
for years gnawing at the vitals-if a lady 
may be said to possess something so ma- 
terial. She continues: "And when you 
suggest pictures of still life as candidates, 
would you not be willing to restrict these 
to 'those no gentleman's dining-room 
should be without'? and the equally of- 
fensive groups of flowers in high detail 
for the same gentleman's drawing-room? 
I think you must wish to exclude Chardin 
from this category; and some of our mod- 
ern paintcrs- V ollon, Chase, Emil Carl- 
sen; to name but a few-have done their 
best work in decorative composition and 
in expression of tactile values in the form 
of still life." 
lVIy Scribnerian colleague, Royal Cor- 
tissoz, should answer this question; as for 
me, I never saw a picture of still life that 
I cared for. 
Edmund Roberts, of Johns Hopkins, 
nominates for the Ignoble Prize "all 



AS I LIKE IT 


librarians who talk out loud in libraries, 
including even the somewhat more 
thoughtful ones who confine their chat- 
tering to the anterooms." I never met 
a librarian who had a loud voice, but per- 
haps it was because he didn't get a chance. 


My remarks on the English blackbird 
have drawn responses from many sections 
of our country. The Ohio State Journal 
declares the English blackbird to be a 
thrush. I don't care a thrush what you 
call him; by any other name his song 
would be as sweet. Mrs. C. W. Twining, 
of Oswego, Oregon, insists that our red- 
wing blackbird deserves more credit than 
I assigned. " His tones are like those given 
out by the oboe stop of a pipe-organ." 
J. S. Prout, of Fishkill, sends me an inter- 
esting and valuable article that he con- 
tributed to Forest and Stream on December 
24, 1884, called" Acclimation of Foreign 
Birds," in which he insists, reasonably 
enough, it seems to me, that in importing 
birds like the nightingale and the skylark, 
we should turn them loose in our Southern 
States, instead of exposing them to the 
fatal rigors of a Northern climate. On 
September 9, 1910, Mr. Prout returned to 
this theme in a letter to the N ew York 
Times,. it is now a pleasure to give him 
and his excellent suggestion the oppor- 
tunity of speaking to the most select and 
cultivated audience in the world. With 
all my heart I hope that some one or some 
organization will adopt Mr. Prout's plan, 
and then perhaps we can in America enjoy 
the greatest natural singers in Europe, just 
as we have long had at the Metropolitan 
Opera House the pick of the cultivated 
ones. 
I wish also to add a word of commenda- 
tion to Mr. Prout himself. He is ninety- 
one years old, and is still eager to see this 
experiment tried. "So far as I know, I 
have as yet made no convert," he writes 
me. Well, here is one. 


October 3, 4, 1926, will be the seventh 
centenary of the death of Saint Francis; 
and the blessed town of Assisi, where I 
spent a memorable day in April, 1912, will 
be fIlled with pilgrims. Foster Stearns, of 
Boston, writes me a letter on this subject 
that is of such general interest that I wish 
to present it to Scribnerians. 


215 


Mr. Johannes Joergensen, the Danish man of 
letters, who is now a resident of Assisi has started 
betimes (in 1923) with the organi
tion of a 
"Comitato Religioso per Ie onoranze a S. Fran- 
cesco d' Assisi nel VII centenario della sua 
Morte." The latest number of the Committee's 
very 

ar
cterful little periodical, "Frate Fran- 
cesco, brmgs the happy announcement that at 
a join.t meeting 
e
d on March 14, it was voted 
to umte the Rehglous committee and the Civil 
com
ttee organized by the Sindaco, under the 
presidency of the head of the former Professor 
Pennacchio The Sindaco made ad excellent 
speecþ, ': 
c?rdando come i1 giungere al Cen- 
tenano diVlSI avrebbe segnato di per se l'insuc- 
cess
 e la vanità d'ogni. celebrazione, la quale, 
per It suo carattere emmentemente spirituale 
deve inspirarsi alle idealità del Santo di Assisi.'; 
Now one of the leading points in the program 
of the Committee is this: to prevent, if possible, 

ny sch
me for a new "memorial" of any sort 
In the City, and to expend any funds raised in 
the restoration of the existing monuments. and 
along with this, to inspire the citizens of Åssisi 
to give their cooperation by the restoration of 
their houses so far as possible to their mediæval 
aspect, so that the whole town may recall to the 
devout (or otherwise) pilgrim as much as may 
be of its appearance in S1. Francis's day. 
They are fighting a new hotel scheme, I be- 
lieve-fighting, that is, its inclusion within the 
old walls; and they are planning a hostel where 
cheap lodging may be provided for pilgrims-but 
this also" fuori Ie mura." They have suggested 
that the existing international (and intercon- 
fessional) Society for Franciscan Studies might 
well be augmented by a Society for the Preserva- 
tion of the Monuments of Assisi, and they invite 
subscriptions, however small, from artists and 
art-lovers of all nations for that purpose. 


Thomas Hardy celebrated his eighty- 
fifth birthday on June 2. Inasmuch as 
he prefers to be known as a poet rather 
than a novelist, it is interesting to re- 
member that whereas out of the eighty- 
five years of his life, only twenty-five have 
been devoted to prose, about thirty have 
been given to poetry. I wish that he had 
continued the practice, begun in 1898, of 
illustrating his verses with drawings by 
his own hand. 
Objections are still raised to the im- 
probability of the plot of "The l\Iayor 
of Casterbridge," where a man sold his 
wife. An accomplished scholar, Fred- 
erick A. Pottle, l.\LA., sends me the fol- 
lowing from The British ]1 agazine (1767), 
page 331. 


About three weeks ago a bricklayer's labourer 
at Marybone sold a woman, whom he had co- 
habited with for several years, to a fellow-work- 
man for a quarter guinea and a gallon of beer. 
The workman went off with the purchase, and 



216 


AS I LIKE IT 


she has since had the good fortune to have a 
legacy of .L200 and some plate, left her by a de- 
ceased uncle in Devonshire. The parties were 
marricd last Friday. 


In the preface to the novel, IvIr. Hardy 
said he followed a fact. 


The death of Amy Lowell on May 
12, 1925, was a sacrifice on the altar of 
scholarship. There is no doubt that the 
continuous work for a thousand mid- 
nights which she devoted to the biography 
of Keats was too great a drain on even 
her splendid vitality. She had the satis- 
faction that comes from the completion 
of a long task; and I had the satis- 
faction of receiving a letter from her in 
which she expressed her pleasure at what 
I had said of her book in the May SCRIB- 
NER'S. 


Patriotism is an all but universal emo- 
tion; but the things that stimulate it vary 
enormously with various individuals. 
Just as the same sermon will produce re- 
ligious conviction in one mind, scepticism 
in another, and disgust in yet another, so 
the patriotic appeal will not always reach 
everyone in the same fashion. When I 
hear a flamboyant oration on American- 
ism, I feel as the boys felt in "Stalky and 
Co." when the visitor addressed them on 
the English flag. But when I was in Paris 
at the time of Whistler's death, and read 
an authoritative article in La Revue Bleue, 
which called him the greatest painter of 
the nineteenth century, the temperature of 
my patriotism rose. 
The death of John Singer Sargent on 
April IS is likewise a decisive defeat of 
the most formidable of all foes-oblivion. 


He was the greatest portrait-painter of 
modem times; and if any prophecy about 
anything can safely be made, he will 
remain forever among the artists. He 
seems to belong with Van Dyck, Velas- 
quez, Reynolds; and he had in his lifetime 
no rival. It is pleasant to think that 
genius does not have to appear in archaic 
garments; but that a man of our time, 
dressed in a plain business suit, and living 
at an American hotel, may have the di- 
vine gift. It stirs my patriotism to think 
that both Whistler and Sargent were 
Americans. 
On May 3, 1924, I had an interesting 
conversation with Mr. Sargent in his 
room at the Copley Plaza, Boston. He 
was absolutely natural, simple, without 
the slightest affectation or mannerism. 
Raymond Crosby's sketch of him, repro- 
duced in many newspapers, is an admira- 
ble likeness. 


In the May number of that vivacious 
and audacious magazine, The American 
...M erc'llry, there is a merry picture of the 
comic horrors that would come to pass if 
the United States had a Ministry of the 
Fine Arts. One of my own amusements 
in solitude is creating impossible day- 
dreams, like unto those imagined in The 
M erC'ltry, a particular one is so persistent 
tha t I shall not get rid of it until I print 
it. So, in all geniality, here it is: I see 
the interior of a crowded Methodist Sun- 
day-school, on a hot morning in June; 
close to the superintendent on the plat- 
form stand lVlencken and Nathan, 
dressed in white frocks, with pink sashes; 
they are holding hands, and singing 
"America, the Beautiful!" 



 
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Honoré Daumier. 


From the portrdit painted by himself 


W HEN Henri Beraldi came to 
Daumier in the compilation of 
his invaluable catalogue of "Les 
Graveurs du XIX e Siècle", he was a lit- 
tle amused to find what commentators on 
the subject had already done in the way 
of comparison. 
They had dis- 
covered points of 
contact between 
Daumier and 
about thirty dif- 
ferent masters, 
to say nothing 
of the traditions 
of the Flemish, 
the Dutch, the 
Venetian, and 
the Florentine 
schools. Daubi- 
gny, visiting 
Rome and seeing 
the "Moses" 
cries wi th e
- 
th usiasm: C ' est 
un Daumier! 
Above all things, 
the draftsman of 
Charivari was the 
Alichel-Ange de la 
caricature. One 
may be, with 
Beraldi, a little 
am used-un til 
one sees tha t 
there is in all this but the reflection of a 
very simple truth. It is that Daumier is 
of the elect, a mighty artist "with the 
mark of the gods upon him," to borrow 
\Vhistler's phrase. He made his fame 
primarily as a satirist in black and white 
but he triumphed through the possession 
of a genius transcending his main voca- 
tion. Champfleury, who catalogued his 
works in r878, the year before he died, 
wrote his best epitaph: Dans le moindre 
croquis de Daumicr on sent la gr
ffc du lion. 
It is none the less fitting because the 
lion had some of the traits of the bour- 
geois. Born at lVlarseilles, in r808, he had 
VOL. LXXVIII.-16 


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for father an humble glazier who by some 
extraordinary paradox nourished the 
ambitions ?f a poet! It is tempt
ng, of 
course, to mfer from that latter CIrcum- 
stance the germ of a certain romanticism 
in Daumier, only the romanticism is not 
there. \"hen he 
was brought up 
to Paris as a child 
it was to enter 
upon a rather 
humdrum exist- 
ence. In his 
teens he was in- 
ducted into a 
clerkship in a 
book-shop. How- 
ever poetically 
inclined the elder 
Daumier may 
ha ve been, he was 
slow to givé way 
to his son's ar- 
tistic predilec- 
tions. These re- 
ceived some en- 
couragement, 
however. from 
the functionary, 
Alexandre Le- 
noir, and present- 
ly we find him 
commencing lith- 
ographer under 
one Zephyrin 
Belliard. In r829 he was launched as a 
caricaturist. He had one characteristic 
alone calculated to carry him far, he had 
courage. It was even -in this formatÏ\-e 
period that his "Gargantua," a terrific 
lampoon upon Louis Philippe, procured 
him six months in jail. But he emerged 
with a career in his hands. Falling under 
the notice of Charles Philopon, founder of 
the weekly Caricature and the daily Chari- 
vari, he was closely associated with those 
publications for years. Sometime in the 
late forties he began to function as a 
painter also, and this continued until his 
death, but he never lost touch with the 



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218 


THE FIELD OF ART 


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From the lithograph by Daumicr. 


satirical arena. In 1878 there 
was a memorable exhibition of 
his works at the Durand-Ruel 
Gallery which had a qualitied 

uccess. He died in retirement 
at Valmondois in the following 
year, old, sightless, and in poor 
circumstances. He had been of- 
fered the ribbon of the Légion 
d'Honneur but had quietly re- 
fused it, not caring, like his 
friend Courbet, to make a theat- 
rical fuss about his declination. 



 
 
 
W HERE do the bourgeois 
traits come in, in the life 
thus rapidly surveyed? In a 
certain almost prosaic steadi- 
ness of activity. As a satirist 
he did his job and that was 
enough. He had among his 
friends men whose names are 
like so many challenging ban- 
ners against a French sky that 
in his time was nothing if not 
turbulent. He knew Delacroix 
and Corot, Barye and Diaz. He 


Á:t. ..1 


lived at the very heart of revolution in 
French painting, peculiarly at the heart of 
the romantic movement. But he staved 
of unromantic temperament. It is c
ri- 
ous, when you look down the vista of his 
long life, to reckon with the events that 
made his background. As a child he was 
old enough to sense the reverberations of 
"Taterloo. He grew up to witness the 
brief reign of Charles X, the coming of 
Louis Philippe, the rise of the Second 
Empire, and the disasters of 1870. An 
instinctive republican, he was on the side 
of liberalism and fought for it through all 
these permutations with passion and even 
with Yenom, so long as t he governing 
powers let the freedom of the press alone. 
Yet, when that freedom was curtailed, he 
turned readily enough from the castiga- 
tion of politicians to the satirizing of 
manners, and in the long run you feel that 
the march of history had comparatively 
little to do with the development of his 
genius. The break-up of the old Na- 
poleonic régime and the organization of a 
new France may have involved him in 
some cerebral activity, but it did not so 
inflame his imagination as to give a dis- 


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The Public at the Salon. 
From the lithogr,lph by Daumier. 



THE FIELD OF ART 


219 


tinctive color to his work. The inference 
might be that he remained just a ready 
journalist. But it is more fitting to de- 
duce, I think, that he remained just a 
great artist. 


Daubigny's a fellow artist once said to 
Daumier that a lithograph of his, the 
famous " Ventre Legislatif," made him 
think of the Sistine Chapel. It sounds like 
a boutade, but one can understand that 
the design made him think at least of the 
grand style. That was Daumier's great 
resource, that is where you recognize the 
claw of the lion. He drew with a certain 
largeness and sweep, a certain noble 



 
 
 
C RITICISM has often diverted itself 
drawing parallels between Daumier 
and Gavarni, despite the plausible obser- 


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Rue Trallsnonain, April IS. 1834. 
From the lithograph by Daumier, 


vation of Philippe de Chennevières that force. I say" noble" advisedly, because, 
you might as well waste your time draw- while the aim of the artist was ridicule 
ing a parallel between Poussin and \Vat- and he would exaggerate the points of a 
teau. The two satirists had this at least physiognomy sometimes to an almost re- 
in common-they knew how to draw. In pulsive degree, there is something which 
spirit, no doubt, they were poles apart. you can only designate as grandeur about 
I have before me as I write a design of the linear simplicity and power through 
Daumier's illustrating the" Calop Final" which he gains his effect. You see this 
at a masquerade ball. The delicious magic of his working supremely in his 
lightness and gaiety that Cavarni would caricatures, and the mere bulk of them, 
have givr-n it are somehow missing. In the mere salience they possess in his life, 
none of the drawings that Daumier dedi- would be sufficient justification for those 
cated to the feminine levities in the Pa- who -prefer to see their Daumier in black 
risian spectacle is there anything of the and white. I can feel with them. There 
exquisite frou-frou in which Gavarni ex- are lithographs of his that rejoice m) 
celled. On the other hand, there is com- soul, partly through their great drafts- 
position, there is movement, and there is manship and parth- through their mag- 
superbly puissant line. At a dinner at nificenl affirmation of the very genius of 



220 


THE FIELD OF ART 


lithography. Daumier knew a]] the se- 
crets of the stone. But, thinking of him 
as I most like to think of him, thinking of 
t he sa tirist as artist, I care for him es- 
pe,ially as a painter. 


COJlcours. I will not assert that it is a 
portentous conception, but there is no 
denying the monumental force and unit v 
of the design. It invites not unrea<;Oli- 
ably, I believe, the assumption that if 


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The Republic. 
.From the JMinting by ])aumicr. 


H E was more than the :l\Iichael-Angelo fate had so ordained it Daumier might 
of caricature. He was something of have developed into a remarkable mural 
a l\lichael-Angelo in paint. He was that painter. But it is not obvious that fate 
inasmuch as he was a great master of ever dowered him with the grandiose 
form. In 1848 the proclamation of the imaginative faculties that would have 
Republic gave occasion for the opening filled out his grandiose mode of tackling 
at the Beaux-Arts of a competition for a composition and the figure. He had no 
symbolical deLoration. 
Iore than five traffic with Olympus. He kept his feet 
hundred artists entered. Daumier's upon the solid earth and found his in- 
sketch was marked the eleventh in the spiration in obscure humanity. BanviHe 
group of twenty chosen as indicating the has pictured him in his big, austere attic 
painters to take part in the definitive on the Ile St. Louis, watching for hours 



THE FIELD OF ART 


221 


<10( .... 


the scenes below him along the banks of with a .broad, syntheti 
troke,. and 
the Seine. He did for the workaday finally, 'Ylth that compo
er's felicity of his,U I r l 
figures of the city what l\lillet did for places hIS forI? consumIl1ft .Jy within the ' 
their brethren of the fields. Like l\lil1et, rcctangle. HIS rangc was (14)t very \virle 
he found a measure of pathos in the lh.cs yct it was sufficiently yaricd. eside
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rrom the painting uy V.LUmier, 


of the humble, and he would paint a poor life of the ri\'crsidc hc would paint the 
washerwoman trudging along with her habitués of the law-courts. the peoplc of 
burden and her child, mixing positive the circus, the doctor and his paticnt, thc 
tenderncss with his sympathy. For the travellers on the railroad, and, occasion- 
submerged this bitter satirist always had ally, the amateur turning O\.er his prints. 
sympathy. But, again like l\lillet, he Once or twice he dealt with scenes in the 
utterly escapcs mawkishness in his idyls theatre, and there is a considerable 
cries 
of the pave. It is his feeling for form that of his pictures given to the celebration of 
is essentially his safcguard against senti- Don Quixote and his ach'entures. These 
mentality. He sees the figure simply and last represent, of course, imaginative e:x- 
grandly, gets the elements of structure cursions, but, as I ha\'e indicated, it is 



222 


THE FIELD OF ART 


not imagination but observation and 
human interest that especially denote his 
genius. He had a strong grip upon char- 
acter. \Vith his lifelong study of phys- 


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Ratapoil. 
From the statuette by Daumier. 


iognomy in the political world it was 
inevitable that when he came to paint his 
pictures he should paint them with the 
"seeing eye." The interesting thing is 
that as a painter he kept that eye so free 
from jaundice. The ferocity of the cari- 
catures fans from him like a garment 
when he takes up the brush. A trace of 
the old bitterness will creep into the 
studies of the avocaf, but when he paints 
his Seine folk or the homespun types of 


the troisième classe on the railroad, he is 
only the friendly bourgeois depicting his 
own kind. Only that, plus the great 
artist enveloping his people in the glamour 
of line and mass, flinging over them the 
mysterious beauty that flows from light 
and shadow, and adding to them that 
which sums up all the rest-the accent of 
style. 



 
 
 
H IS style is in the key of all those 
traits of largeness and nobility 
which I have endeavored to point out 
in his draftsmanship and his composi- 
tion. It is, too, intensely personal. 
That disposition amongst his commen- 
tators, which I have noted, to ally him 
with one master or another, does not 
leave him, as a matter of fact, in anv 
sense an eclectic type. You may say 
that there is an Hogarthian amplitude 
about his humor. You may find a sav- 
agery in him akin to Goya. But these 
and other strains in Daumier are in no- 
wise derivative. He is his own man. His 
technique, his energy, and pre-eminently 
his style are new-minted and "of the 
centre." There is a Daumier cult, and its 
divagations are sometimes a little over- 
done. Beraldi, as I have remarked, founn 
the rapprochements merely droll. If one 
were to swallow whole the ideas of the 
eulogists, one would, as he says, have to 
retouch Delaroche's famous hemicvcle 
at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and, erasing 
the heads of all the masters portrayed, 
substitute for each one the head of Dau- 
mier. The funniest of these oddities in 
criticism is- that of the recent biographer 
who would see in Daumier a forefather 
of the Post-Impressionists, as naïve a 
piece of body-snatching as the erection of 
Ingres into a spiritual ancestor of Nla- 
tisse, The truth is that there is nothing 
recondite or mysterious about the status 
of this artist. He was a good craftsman. 
He knew how to draw and how to paint. 
He looked at the life about him and 
mirrored it truthfully in his art. He sur- 
charged it with no romantic fervors. 
This comrade of Delacroix had nothing 
of his friend's emotion and nothing of his 
flair for color, but was content with a 
quiet tonality in which he leaned far more 
toward the "brown sauce" of Rem- 



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From the p.1inting by D,mmier. 


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224 


THE FJELD OF ART 


brandt than toward the luminous hues 
which the Impressionists were bringing 
into view just as he was about to pass 
from the scene. Exactly as he was un- 
affected by the splendors of Delacroix, so 
he did nothing to emulate the silvery 
vibrations of his beloved Corot. I may 
remark in passing that he was as señ- 
sit 1 ve as Corot in the delineation of land- 
scape. His backgrounds of earth, trees, 
and sky are always just, true, and well 
designed, and sometimes they are very 
beautiful. Did he care for beauty in the 
sense of grace, of charm, of that subtle 
enrichment which makes a picture one of 
the poetic things of life? I hardly think 
so. It may be that his spirit was too 
much subdued to the sardonic stuff in 
which he worked for so many years. 
\Vhen he touches the antique, it leaves him 
cold. There are some repellent profiles 
among his "Physionomies Tragico-Clas- 
siques." The beauty in Daumier is of a 
grave, even stern, order. Beside the 
suavity of Ingres his ruggedness seems 



 
I 


that of granitec It is, in its way, as be- 
guiling. Baudelaire noted that a long 
time ago, when he associated Daumier as 
a draftsman with Ingres and Delacroix. 
Each was different from the others, but 
he doffed his hat to all of them. Each, to 
return to our leading motive, had style, 
the indefinable elevation which imbues 
workmanship with a personal, distin- 
guishing mark and lifts it to a higher 
power. It is the mark of the creative 
artist, the original, born artist. That is 
why nobody can write about Daumier 
without seeking to illuminate his anal- 
ysis here and there by alluding to one or 
the other of the masters. There is a kind 
of solidarity amongst them. They stand 
for one idiom, one tradition. Daumier is 
not the tremendous portent that some of 
the zealots would represent him to be. 
He had limitations, as I have sought to 
indicate. None the less he used the 
idiom of the masters, belonged to their 
tradition, and he is of their glorious 
company. 


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Don {Juixote. 
From the painting by Daumier. 


A calendar of current art exhibitions will be found on page II. 



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From a drawing by John W. ThomasOl
, Jr., Captain, U. S, ],f. C. 


FL.\RE-F
O
T LINE, CHA:\IPAGNE. 
That night, lying in its shallow, hastily dug holes, the remnant of the battalion descended through further hells 
of shclling.-Page 242. 


226 



t 
SCRIBNER:S_ MAGAZINE 


VOL. LXXVIII 


SEPTEJfBER, 1925 


NO. 3 


Marines at Blanc Mont 


At\" EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF THE SECOND .\ \!ERIC \X DI\lSIO, 


BY JOH
 \Y. THO;\I:\SON, JR. 
Captain, L. S. :\Iarine Corps; .\uthor of "Fix Bayonets !-the Charge at Soissons'. 


\\ ITH PIcrURES BY THE \UTHOR, SOME OF \\ HICH WERE DRAWN ON THE FIELD IN THE 
CHAMPAGNE .\CTION 


The taking of Blanc ::\Iont is the greatest single achievement of the 1918 campaign-the Battle 
of Liberation.-MARsHAL rÉTAIN. 


Ä

Ä HE battalion groped its 
d ITJ 
 way through the wet 
. ::!l '
. darkness to a wood of 
. '& T i.g, scrubby pines, and lay 

 : 
 down In the slow 
W

W autumn rain. North 
X.U"C'"'[TO"U.x and east the guns 
made a wall of sound; 
flashes from hidden batteries and flares 
sent up ,from nervous front-line trenches 
lighted the low clouds; occasional shells 
from the Boche heavies whined overhead, 
searching the transport lines to the rear. 
It lacked an hour yet until dawn, and the 
companies disposed themselves in the 
mud and slept. They had learned to get 
all the sleep they could before battle. 
A few days before, this battalion, the 
first of the 5th Regiment of :l\Iarines, a 
unit of the Second Division, had pulled 
out of a pleasant town below Toul, in the 
area where the division rested after the 
Saint-J\.Iihiel drive, and had come north 
a day and a night by train, to Chalons- 
sur-l\Iarne. Thence, by night marches, 
the division had gathered in certain bleak 
and war-worn areas behind the Cham- 
pagne front, and here general orders an- 
nounced that the Second was detached 
from the American forces and lent bv the 
Generalissimo as a special reserve to ø Gou _ 
raud's Fourth French Army. 


Forthwith arose gossip about General 
Gouraud, the one-armed and able de- 
fender of Rheims, who had broken the 
German offensive in July. "A big bird 
with a beak of a nose and one of these here 
square beards on 'im-holds hisself 
straighter than the run of Frog generals," 
confided a motorcytle driver from divi- 
sion headquarters. "Seen him in Chal- 
lawns. They say he fights." 
"Yeh, ole Foch has picked the right 
babies this time," observed the files com- 
placently. "Special reserve-that's us 
all over, l\Iable! Hope they keep us in 
reserve-but we know they won't! The 
Frogs have got something nasty they 
want us to get outa the way for them. 
An' we see Chasser d'Alpinos and Colo- 
nials around here. Some thin' distressin' 
is just bound to happen." 
"Roll your packs, you birds! The 
lootenant passed the word we're goin' up 
in camions to-night!" 
A camion is a motor-truck of incredible 
roughness into which thirty-odd men are 
somehow crammed. Thev are used when 
troops are needed most l'Irgently in the 
line. They always mean a fight. 
The battalion got aboard in its turn, 
just as dusk deepened into dark, rode un- 
til the camion train stopped, and marched 
through the rain to its appointed place. 


Copyrighted in :1925 in United States, Canada, and Great Britain by Charles Scribner's Sons. Printed iu 
New York. All rights reserved, 


227 



228 


I 


1\IARINES AT BLANC lYIONT 


THE dawn came very reluctantly 
through the clouds, bringing no sun with 
it, although the drizzle stopped. The 
battalion rose from its soggy blankets, 
kneading stiffened muscles to restore cir- 
culation, and gathered in disconsolate 
shivering groups around the galleys. 
These had come up in the night, and from 
them, standing under the dripping pines, 
came a promising smell of hot coffee. 
Something hot was the main considera- 
tion in life just now. But the fires were 
feeble, and something hot was long in com- 
ing. The cooks swore because dry wood 
couldn't be found, and wet wood coulrln't 
be risked, because it would draw shell-fire. 
The men swore at the weather and the 
slowness of the kitchen force, and the war 
in general, and they all growled together. 
"Quite right - entirely fitting and 
proper!" said the second-in-command of 
the 49th Company, coming up to where 
his captain gloomed beside the galley. 
"\Ve wouldn't know what to do with 
:l\1arines who didn't growl. But, El Cap- 
itan, if you'll go over to that ditch yonder, 
you'll find some Frog artillerymen with a 
lovely cooking-fire. They gave me hot 
coffee with much rum in it. A great peo- 
ple, the Frogs-" But the captain was 
already gone, and the second-in-com- 
mand, who was a lean first lieutenant in 
a mouse-colored raincoat, had to run to 
catch up with him. 


They returned in time to see their com- 
pany and the other companies of the bat- 
talion lining up for chow. This matter 
being disposed of, the men cast incurious 
eyes about them. 
The French artillerymen called the 
place " the Wood of the Seven Pigeons." 
There were no pigeons here now. Only 
hidden batteries of lOSS, with their blue- 
clad attendants huddled in shelters 
around them. The wood was a sparse 
growth of scrubby pines that persisted 
somehow on the long slope of one of the 
low hills of Suippes, in the sinister Cham- 
pagne country. lVIany of the pines were 
blackened and torn by shellfire, and the 
chalky soil was pockmarked with shell 
craters from Boche counter-battery work, 
searching for the French guns camou- 
flaged there. Trenches zigzagged through 
the pines, old and new, with belts of rusty 
wire. There were graves. 
North from the edge of the pines the 
battalion looked out on desolation where 
the once grassy, rolling slopes of the Cham- 
pagne stretched away like a great white 
sea that had been dead and accursed 
through all time. N ear at hand was 
Souain, a town of the dead, a shattered 
skeleton of a place, with shells breaking 
over it. Beyond' and northward was 
Somme-Py, nearly blotted out by four 
years of war. From there to the horizon, 
east and west and north and south, was 
all a stricken land. The rich top-soil 
that formerly made the Champagne one 


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"Lordy, ain't we ever goin' to get outa this dam' place an' get at 'cm-?"-Page. 233. 




 
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nll'l ) 


The hush still hung around them as they moved out of the flat and began to ascend 
the long gray slope ahead.-Page 237. 


of the fat provinces of France, was gone, 
blown away and buried under by four 
years of incessant shellfire. Areas that 
had been forested showed only blackened, 
branchless stumps, upthrust through the 
churned earth. What was left was 
naked, leprous chalk. It was a wilder- 
ness of craters, large and small, wherein 
no yard of earth lay untouched. Inter- 
minable mazes of trench work threaded 
this waste, discernible from a distance by 
the belts of rusty wire entanglements that 
stood before them. Of the great national 
highway that had once marched across 
the Champagne between rows of stately 
poplars, no vestige remained. 
"So this, Slover, is the Champagne," 
said the second-in-command to one of his 
non-corns who stood beside him. The 
sergeant spat. ,. It looks like hell, sir!" 
he said. 
The lieutenant strolled over to where a 
French staff captain stood with a knot of 
officers in the edge of the pines, pointing 
out features of this extended field, made 
memorable by bitter fighting. 
"Since 1914 we have fought hard here," 
he was saying. "Oh, the French know 
this Champagne well, and the Boche 
knows it too. Yonder "-he pointed to 


the southwest-" is the Butte de Souain, 
where our Foreign Legion met in the first 
year that Guard Division that the Prus- 
sians call the 'Cockchafers.' They took 
the Butte, but most of the Legion are lying 
there now. And yonder"-the French- 
man extended his arm with a gesture that 
had something of the salute in it-" stands 
the l\10untain of Rheims. If you look- 
the air is clearing a little-you can per- 
haps see the towers of Rheims itself." 
A long grayish hill lay against the gray 
sky at the horizon, and over it a good 
glass showed, very far and faint, the spires 
of the great cathedral, with a cloud of 
shell-fire hanging over them. 
"All this terrain, as far as Rheims, is 
dominated by Blanc .Mont Ridge yonder 
to the north. As long as the Boche holds 
Blanc .:\lont, he can throw his shells into 
Rheims; he can dominate the whole 
Champagne Sector, as far as the l\Iarne. 
Indeed. they say that the Kaiser watched 
from Blanc .:\Iont the battle that he 
launched here in July. And the Boche 
means to hang on there. So far, we have 
failed to dislodge him. I expect "-he 
broke off and smiled gravely on the circle 
of officers-" you will see some very hard 
fighting in the next few days, gentlemen!" 
229 



230 


l\IARIKES AT BJ .ANC l\lONT 


, 


It was the last day of September, and 
as the forenoon went by an intermittent 
drizzle sent the battalion to such miser- 
able shelters as the men could improvise. 
Company commanders and seconds-in- 
command went up toward ruined Somme- 
Py for reconnaissance, and returned to 
profane the prospect to their platoon 
leaders. 
"I do not like this place," declared the 
captain of the 49th Company to his 
juniors. "It looks like it was just built 
for calamities to happen in." 
"Yep, and all the division is around here 
for calamities to happen to. . c. A sight 
more of us will go in than will ever come 
out of it !" 
:l\1eantime it was wet and cold in the 
dripping shelters. \Vinter clothing had 
not been issued, and the battalion shiv- 
ered and was not cheerful. 
,. \:rish to God we could go up an' get 
this fight over with!" 
" Yes, an' then go back somewhere for 
the winter. Let some of these here noble 
National Army outfits we've been hearin' 
about do some of the fightin'! There's 
us, and there's the First Division, and the 
Thirty-second-Hell! we ain't hogs! Let 
some of them other fellows have the glo- 
ry-" 
" Ga wd help the Boche when we meets 
him this time! Somebody's got to pay 
for keepin' us out in this wet an' cold." 


I 
I ,1 , 
"... 
. ... 
 
'- 
... 
0- . 
l 


,. Hear your young men talk, EI Capi- 
tan? They're goin' to take it out on the 
Boche-they will, too. Don't you take 
any more of this than your rank entitles 
you to! I'm gettin' wet." 
The second-in-command and the cap- 
tain were huddled under a small sheet of 
corrugated iron, stolen by an enterprising 
orderly from the French gunners. The 
captain was very large, and the other very 
lean, and they were both about the same 
length. They fitted under the sheet by 
a sort of dovetailing process that made it 
complicated for either to move. A sec- 
ond-in-command is sort of an understudy 
to the company commander. In some 
of the outfits the captain does everything, 
and his understudy can only mope around 
and wait for his senior to become a casu- 
alty. In others, it is the junior who gets 
things done, and the captain is just a 
figurehead. In the 49th, however, the 
relation was at its happiest. The big 
captain and his lieutenant functioned to- 
gether as smoothly as parts of a sweet- 
running engine, and there was between 
them the undemonstrative affection of 
men who have faced much peril together. 
"As for me," rejoined the captain, 
drawing up one soaked knee and putting 
the other out in the wet, "I want to get 
wounded in this fight. A bon blighty, 
in the arm or the leg, I think. Something 
that will keep me in a nice dry hospital 


- '-- - _. " 


" 


,/ 

 


-- 



_ _
.;;, -..u.. 


,,\)" 

 


j 


Others lay on the ground over which the battalion passed.-Page 234. 



1\1ARI
ES AT BLANC ì\10
T 


until spring. I don't like cold weather. 
Now who is pushin'? It's nothin' to me, 
John, if your side leaks-keep off 0' 
mine! " 
So the last day of September, 19 1 8, 
passed, with the racket up forward un- 
abated. So much of war is just lying 
around waiting in more or less discom- 
fort. And herein lies the excellence of 
veterans. They swear and growl horri- 
bly under discomfort and exposure-far 


.. 


\ 



 


\ 


'\ 


, 


....", 


.,t' , 


" 
\ 


.. 
-""::c -:- 


231 


switch li.ne of that system. Beyond the 
Essen lme the Blanc l\Iont position 
loomed impregnable. Late on the 1st 
of October, a gray, bleak dav the bat- 
talion got its battle orders, and' took over 
a mangled front line from certain weary 
Frenchmen. 


II 
GOURAUD'S battle roared on to the left 
with swelling tumult. The Americans, 


'" 



,- 


-. 


\ 



\ 


./ 


"Oh, Lordy! They've got us bracketed! "-Page 235. 


more than green troops; but privations do 
not sap their spirit or undermine that in- 
tangible thing called morale. Rather do 
sufferings nourish in the men a cold 
mounting anger, that swells to sullen ardor 
when at last the infantry comes to grips 
with the enemy, and then it goes hard 
indeed with him who stands in the way. 
On the front, a few kilomètres from 
where the battalion lay and listened to the 
guns, Gouraud's attack was coming to a 
head around the heights north of Somme- 
Py and the strong trench systems that 
guarded the way to Blanc l\font Ridge. 
Three magnificent French divisions, one 
of Chasseurs, a colonial division, and a 
line division with a Verdun history, shat- 
tered themselves in fruitless attacks on 
the Essen Trench and the Essen Hook, a 


in their sector, passed the day in ominous 
quiet. They wondered what the delay 
was, speculated on the strategy of attack 
-which is a matter always sealed from 
the men who deliver the attack-and 
wore through to the evening of October 
2. At dark, food came up in marmite 
cans-beef and potatoes and a little cof- 
fee. "Put ours on that mess-tin there," 
directed the second-in-command, as his 
orderly slid in with his and the captain's 
rations. The captain sat up in his corner 
a little later. "\Vhat th' hell, John?"- 
sniff-sniff! "Has that dead Boche on 
the other side of you begun to announce 
hisself? Phew!" The second-in-com- 
mand rose from the letter he was writing 
by the stub of a candle and sniffed busily 
-sniff-snnnn-" Damnation! Captain, 



232 


MARI:\TES AT BLANC 1\10
T 


it's our supper!" With averted face he 
presented the grayish chunks of beef that 
reposed on the mess-tin. " U rggg-throw 
it out!" He disappeared up the crum- 
bled steps to the entrance of the hole. 
A few minutes later he slid down again, 
foUowed in a shower of dust and clods by 
a battalion runner. "All the beef was 
bad, EI Capitan,! '\\'hat the young men 
are saying about the battalion supply 
would make your hair curl !-And here's 
our attack orders." 
There was a brief pencilled order from 
the major, and maps. The two officers 
bent over them eagerly. "Runner!- Pla- 
toon commanders report right away-" 
"What do you make of it, John? 
Looks like General Lejeune was goin' to 
split his division and reunite it on the 
field. . .. Hmmm! Ain't that the stunt 
you claim only Robert E. Lee and Na- 
poleon could get away with? . .. All 
here? Get around-the map's about 
oriented-" 
"Here we are, in the Essen Trench- 
seems that the Marines move down to the 
left to here-and the Ninth and Twenty- 
third move to the right-to here. These 
pencil lines show the direction of attack 
-then we jump off, angling a little to the 
right, compass bearing-and the infantry 
outfits point about as much to the left. 
That brings us together up here about 
three kilomètres, and we go on straight, a 
little west of north from there, to Blanc 
Mont- 
" Essen Hook and Bois de Vipre are the 
first objectives-Blanc :Mont final objec- 
tive. . .. That means we pass to the 
flank of the Hook and join up behind the 
Viper Woods-we'll get some flanking 
fire, but we will cut both positions off 
from the rear, and we won't get near as 
many men shot up as we would in frontal 
attack. Might be worse-" 
"That's all we know about the division 
orders- For the battalion, the major 
says the 5th Regiment will follow the 6th 
in support at the jump-off, and the zero 
hour will be communicated later-some 
time in the morning, I reckon. That's 
all. " 


The morning of October 3 [19181 came 
gray and misty. From midnight until 
dawn the front had been quiet at that 


point-comparatively. Then all the 
French and American guns opened with 
one world-shaking crash. From the Es- 
sen Trench the ground fell away gently, 
then rose in a long slope, along which 
could be made out the zigzags of the Ger- 
man trenches. The Bois de Vipre was a 
bluish mangled wood, two kilomètres 
north. Peering from their shelters, the 
battalion sawall this ground swept by a 
hurricane of shellfire. Red and green 
flames broke in orderly rows where the 
75s showered down on the Boche lines; 
great black clouds leaped up where the 
larger shells fell roaring. The hillside 
and the wood were all veiled in low-hang- 
ing smoke, and the flashes came redly 
through the cloud. Far off, Blanc :Mont 
way, a lucky shell found and exploded a 
great ammunition dump-the battalion 
felt the long tremor from the shock of it 
come to them through the earth and 
watched, minu tes after the high crimson 
flare of the explosion, a broad column of 
smoke that shot straight up from it, hun- 
dreds of feet, and hung in air, spreading 
out at the top like some unearthly tree. 
The men crowed and chortled in the 
trench. "Boy, ain't Heinie gettin' it 
now!" "Hear that shell gurglin' as she 
goes?- That's gas." "Listen to them 
75s ! You know, I never see one of them 
little guns that I don't want to go up and 
kiss it. Remember that counter-attack 
they smeared in front of us at Soissons?" 
The heavens seemed roofed over vrith 
long, keening noises-sounds like the 
sharp ripping of silk, magnified, running 
in swift arcs from horizon to horizon. 
These were the quickfiring 75s, the clear- 
cut bark of the discharges merging into a 
crashing roar. Other sounds came with 
them, deeper in key, the whine growing 
to a rumble-these were the heavier shells 
-lOSS, 155s, 210S. Almost, one expected 
to look up and see them, like swift, deadly 
birds, some small, some enormous, all ter- 
rible. Gas shells could be distinguished 
from the high explosive by the throaty 
gurgle of the liquid in them. ":l\Iove 
down the trench to the left," came the 
order. 
The battalion moved, filing around the 
traverses with judicious intervals between 
men, so that the Boche sheUs might not 
include too many in their radius of death. 




IARI:\fES AT HLA '\'"C 1\10'\1' 


233 


For Heinie was beginning to shoot back. mask. "Something ought to be done 
He had the range of his vacated trench about that gunner, EI Capitan!" "-n- 
perfectly, and, holding the high ground, he other landed in the opposite lip of the 
could see what he was shooting at. Shells trench where the two officers crouched, 


,. 


""" 



 


"Here comes a battalion runner. . what's up, any- 
way?"-Page 236. 


began to crash down among the com- 
panies, whole squads were blotted out, 
and men choked and coughed as the reek 
of the high eÀplosive caught at their wind- 
pipes. 
"Lordy, ain't we ever goin' to get outa 
this dam' place an' get at 'em-?" A 
shell with a drÍ\'ing band loose came with 
a banshee scream, and men and pieces of 
men were blown into the air. "That was 
in the first platoon," said the second-in- 
command, shaking the dirt off his gas 


hall -burying them both. "
I Y God, cap 'n ! 
You killed?" "Hcll, no! Are vou?" 
"Far enough to the left," the major 
sent word. "\V e will wait here. The 
6th leads-we're the last battalion in sup- 
port to-day." 
Coming from the maze of trenches in 
the rear, the assault regimcnt began to 
pass through the 5th, battalion following 
battalion at soo-yard distances. A num- 
ber of French "baby" tanks started with 
the assaulting waves, but it was an evil 



234 


I\lAR INES AT BLANC l\10NT 


place for tanks. Tank traps, trenches so 
wide that the little fellows went nose- 
down into them and stuck, and direct fire 
from Boche artillery stopped the most of 
them. \Vave after wave, the 6th went 
forward. For a moment the sun shone 
through the murk, near the horizon-a 
smouldering red sun, banded like Saturn, 
and all the bayonets gleamed like blood. 
Then the cloud closed again. 
\\Yhen an attack is well launched it is 
the strategy of the defenders to concen- 
trate their artillery fire on the support 
waves that follow the assault troops, 
leaving the latter to be dealt with by ma- 
chine-gun and rifle fire. So the battalion, 
following on in its turn, was not happy. 
"\Vish to Gawd we wuz up forward," 
growled the files. "Nothin' up there but 
machine guns. This here shellin' gets a 
man's goat. Them bums in the 6th allus 
did have all the luck! . .." "Lootenant, 
ain't we ever gonna get a chance at them 
Boches? This bein' killed without a 
chance to kill back is hell-that's what 
it is!" 
The battalion was out of the trench 
now, and going forward, regulating its 
pace on the battalion ahead. All at once 
there was a snapping and crackling in the 
air-a corporal spun round and collapsed 
limply, while his blouse turned red under 
his gas mask-the man beside him stum- 
bled and went down, swearing through 
grayish lips at a shattered knee--the men 
flattened and all faces turned toward the 
flank. 
"Machine guns on the left! "-" Hell ! 
It's that Essen Hook we've got to pass- 
thank God, it's long range I-Come on, 
you birds." And the battalion went on, 
enduring grimly. Finally, when well past 
its front, which ran diagonally to the line 
of advance, the 17th Company, that had 
the left, turned savagely on the Essen 
Hook and got a foothold in its rear. A 
one-pounder from the regimental head- 
quarters company was rushed up to as- 
sist them, and the men yelled with delight 
as the vicious little cannon got in direct 
hits on the Boche emplacements. Hope- 
lessly cut off, the large body of Germans 
in this formidable work surrendered after 
a few sharp and bloody minutes, and the 
17th, sending back its prisoners, rejoined 
the battalion. 


Prisoners began to stream back from 
the front of the attack, telling of the suc- 
cess of the 6th. Wounded came with 
them, some walking, some carried on im- 
provised stretchers by the Boche "kama- 
rads." Most of them were grinning. 
"Goin' fine up there, boys, goin' fine!" 
"Lookit, fellers! Got a bon blighty- 
\Ve'll give 'em your regards in Paris!" 
Others of the 6th lay on the ground 
over which the battalion passed. Some 
lay quietly, like men who rested after 
labor. Others were mangled and twisted 
into attitudes grotesque and horrible as 
the fury of the exploding shells had flung 
them. There were dead Germans, too. 
Up forward rifle-fire and machine-guns 
gave tongue, and all the Boche guns raged 
together. "Reckon the 6th is gettin' to 
Blanc Mont now." The second-in-çom- 
mand looked at his watch. Inconceiv- 
ably, it was noon. 
For a while now the battalion halted, 
keeping its distance from the unit ahead. 
The men lay on their rifles and expressed 
unreasonable yearnings for food. "Eat? 
Eat? Hell! Shock troops ain't sup- 
posed to eat!" Officers cast anxious 
glances toward the utterly exposed left. 
The French attack had failed to keep 
abreast of the American. 
The left company, the 17th, was in a 
cover of scrubby trees. The other com- 
panies were likewise concealed. Only the 
49th lay perforce in the open, on a bleak, 
shell-pocked slope. A high-flying Boche 
plane spotted its platoon columns, asprawl 
eighty or a hundred yards apart on the 
chalky ground. "No good," said the 
second-in-command, cocking his head 
gander-wise in his flat helmet, "is goin' 
to come of that dam' thing-guess all our 
noble aviators have gone home to lunch." 
The plane, high and small and shining in 
the sky, circled slowly above them. Far 
back of the Boche lines there was a rail- 
road gun that took a wireless from the 
wheeling vulture. "Listen," said the 
captain, "listen to th-" 
There were lots of shells passing over- 
the long, tearing whine of the 75s, the 
coarser voices of the Boche 77s replying, 
and heavy stuff, but most of it was break- 
ing behind or in front of the battalion. 
Into this roof of sound came a deeper note 
-a far-off rumble that mounted to an 



l\l.ARI!\"ES AT BL:\
C 1\10:\'"1' 


235 


enormous shattering roar, like a freight opened with thunder fairly he tween two 
train on a down-grade. The company platoon columns, and the earth vomited. 
flattened against the ground like par- ... It was wonderful shooting. All the 
tridges, and the world shook and reeled shells that followed dropped hetween the 
under them as a nine-inch shell crashed columns of prone men-but not a man 
into the earth fifty yards ahead, exploding was hit! The heavy projectiles sank far 
with a cataclysmic detonation that rocked into the chalky soil, and the ðplosions 
their senses. An appalling geyser of sent the deadly fragments outward and 
black smoke and torn earth leaped sky- over the company. .l\Iore than a dozen 


, 


, 


'-- 


'....... 


Flanking fire. "Hey! She's opening up again! "-Page 236. 


ward, jagged splinters of steel whined 
away, and stones and clods showered 
down. Before the smoke had lifted from 
the monstrous crater the devastating 
Tumble came again, and the second shell 
roared down fifty yards to the rear. 
"Oh, Lordy! They've got us brack- 
eted !" 
"I saw that one! I saw it-look right 
where the next one's gonna hit, an'-" 
"Look where it's gonna hit! Lawd, if I 
jest knew it wasn't gonna hit me-- 
ahh- ! " 
The third shell came, and men who 
risked an eye could see it-a dark, tre- 
mendous streak, shooting straight down 
to the quivering earth. A yawning hole 


shells were fired in all, the high sinister 
plane wheeling overhead the while. Then 
the company went forward with the bat- 
talion, very glad to move. 
"Anyone of those nine-inch babies 
would have blotted out twenty of us," 
marvelled a lieutenant, leading his pla- 
toon around a thirty-foot crater that still 
smoked. "Or ripped the heart out of 
any concrete-and-steel fortification ever 
built-the good Lawcl was certainly with 
us!" 
To the company commanders, gathered 
at dark in a much disfigured Roche shel- 
ter in the \V uod of Somme- Py, the major 
gave information. "The 6th took Blanc 
,Mont, and they are holding it against 



236 


l\IARI
ES AT BL}\NC 1\10NT 


heavy counter-attacks. Prisoners say 
they were ordered to hold here at any 
costs-they're fighting damned well, too! 
The infantry regiments piped down the 
Bois de Vipre, just as we did the Essen 
Hook. The division is grouping around 
the Ridge, but we're pretty well isolated 
from the French. To-night we are going 
on up and take the front line, and attack 
toward St.-Etienne-à-Arnes-town north 
of the Ridge and a little west. Get on up 
to Blanc :Mont with your companies- 
P. C. will be there, along the road that 
runs across the Ridge." 


III 
NOT greatly troubled by the Boche 
shelling, that died to spasmodic bursts as 
the night went on, the battalion mounted 
through the dark to its appointed place, 
Here, beside a blasted road that ran along 
Blanc l\Iont, just behind the thin line of 
the 6th, the weary men lay down, and, 
no orders being immediately forthcoming, 
slept like the dead that were lying thickly 
there. Let the officers worry over the 
fact that the French had fallen behind on 
each flank, that the division was, to all 
purposes, isolated far out in Boche terri- 
tory-let any fool worry over the chances 
of stopping one to-morrow-to-morrow 
would come soon enough. "The 100- 
tenant says to get all the rest you can- 
don-t-no-body need to-tell-me- 
tha-" 
In the deep dugouts behind the road 
the battalion commanders prodded at 
field maps and swore wearily over the 
ominous gaps behind the flanks-three 
kilomètres on one flank, five on the other, 
where the French divisions had not kept 
pace. Into these holes the Boche had all 
day been savagely striving to thrust him- 
self, and his success would mean disaster. 
Already the 6th had a force thrown back 
to cover the left rear, disposed at right 
angles to the line of advance. . .. And 
orders were to carry the attack forward at 
dawn. On top of that, after midnight a 
Boche deserter crawled into the line with 
the cheering news that the Germans were 
planning an attack in force on the Ameri- 
can flanks at dawn; a division of fresh 
troops-Prussians-had just been brought 
up for that purposec It looked bad-it 


looked worse than that. " Well," said 
l\lajor George Hamilton of the first bat- 
talion of the 5th, "orders are to attack, 
and, by God, we'll attack"-a yawn 
spoiled the dramatic effect of his pro- 
nouncement-" and now I'm going to get 
some sleep. Coxy, wake me at 5 :30- 
that will be an hour." 


And at dawn, while the Ridge shook 
and thundered under the barrage that 
went before the Boche flank attack, and 
the 6th held with their rifles the branch 
behind the left, the Fifth Marines went 
forward to carry the battle to St.-Etienne. 
They went in column of battalions, four 
companies abreast. For the first bat- 
talion, still in support, the fourth day of 
October began as a weary repetition of the 
day before. Shells whooped down into 
the platoon columns as they waited for 
the second and third battalions to get 
clear; machine-guns on the left took toll 
as they rose up to follow. Noon found 
them well forward of the Ridge, lying in 
an open flat, while the leading battalions 
disappeared in pine woods on a long slope 
ahead. It had fallen strangely quiet 
where they lay. 
" Now what's comin', I wonder?" 
"Anything at all, 'cept chow." "Boy, 
ain't it quiet here? What do you reck- 
on-" "Don't like this," said one old 
non-com to another. "l\'linds me of once 
when I was on a battle-wagon in the 
China Sea, Got still like this, and then 
all at once all the wind God ever let loose 
come down on us!" "Shouldn't won- 
der- Hey! She's opening up again! 
That there second battalion has sure 
stuck its foot in somethin' !" 
Up forward all hell broke loose. Artil- 
lery, machine-guns, rifles, even the cough- 
ing detonations of grenades, mounted to 
an inconceivable fury of sound. "Here 
comes a battalion runner-there's the 
skipper, over there-what's up, any- 
way? " 
The second-in-command came through 
his company with a light in his eyes, and 
he sent his voice before him. "Deploy 
the first platoon, J\.Ir. Langford. Three- 
pace interval, be sure. \Vhere's 1\lr. 
Connor? Oh, Chuck, you'll form the 
second wave behind Tom. About fifty 
yards, Other two platoons in columÍl 



l\1ARI:\!"ES AT BLAXC i\lü,T 


behind the company flanks. On yo' feet, 
chillun! 'Ve're goin' up against 'em!" 
And so, all four companies in line, the 
first battalion, a thousand men, went up 
against the Boche. " Capitan," said the 
second-in-command, as they started, 
"we're swingin' half-left. This tack will 
take us right to St.-Etienne, won't it? 
\Ve were pointin' a 1ittle one side of it be- 


237 


with underbrush, that ran back toward 
Blanc .Mont. Forward and to the right 
was the heavy pine timber into which the 
other battalions had gone, and from which 
still came tumult and clangor Tumult 
and clangor, also, back toward Blanc 
.l.\i10nt, and further back, where the French 
attacks were pushing forward and 
drumming thunder on the right,' where 


,""' 


1 ' 


" 


III . 


.' 

 


..... 


.-.. 


\.. 


" 


,. 


All along the extended line the saffron shrapnel flowered, flinging death and mutilation down.-Page 238. 


fore-major give you any dope?" ,. The 
Boche have come out of St.-Ftienne-two 
full infantry regiments, anyhow, and a 
bunch of :Maxim guns-and hit the sec- 
ond and third in the flanL 1\1 ust be pretty 
bad. \Ye're goin' up to hit them in the 
flank ourselves. 'Bout a kilomètre, I'd 
say. 'Vait until their artillery spots this 
little promenade. None of ours in sup- 
port, you know." 


The hush still hung around them as 
they moved ou t of the flat and began to 
ascend the long gray slope ahead, the 
crest of which was covered with a growth 
of pines. There was no cover on the 
slope-a few shell-holes, a few stunted 
bushes and sparse tufts of grass. .Across 
a valley to the left, 800 to 1,000 yards 
away, rose another ridge, thickly clothed 


the Saxons were breaking against the 
9th and 23d infantry-but here, quiet. 
Voices of non-corns, rasping out admoni- 
tions to the files, sounded little and thin 
along the line. Every man knew, with- 
out words, that the case was desperate, 
but to this end was all their strength and 
skill in war, all their cunning gained in 
other battles, and their hearts lifted up 
to meet what might come. "l\lore inter- 
val-more interval there on the left! 
Don't bunch up, you-" 
"That ridge over yonder, capitan-" 
said the second-in-command softly. "It's 
lousy with the old Boche ! And forward 
-and behind the flank, too! This is 
goin' to be- Ahhh-shrapnel!" 
The first shell came screaming down 
the line from the right, and broke with 
the hollow cough and poisonous yellow 



238 


l\IARI
ES AT BL:\NC l\IO
T 


puff of smoke which marks the particular 
abomination of the foot-soldier. It broke 
fairly over the centre of the 49th, and 
every head ducked in unison. Three men 
there were who seemed to throw them- 
selves prone; they did not get up again. 
And then the fight closed upon the bat- 
talion with the complete and horrid un- 
reality of nightmare. All along the ex- 
tended line the saffron shrapnel flowered, 
flinging death and mutilation down. 
Singing balls and jagged bits of steel spat- 
tered on the hard ground like sheets of 
hail; the line writhed and staggered, 
steadied and went on, closing toward the 
centre as the shells bit into it. High ex- 
plosive shells came with the shrapnel, and 
where they fell geysers of torn earth and 
black smoke roared up to mingle with the 
devilish yellow in the air. A foul murky 
cloud of dust and smoke formed and went 
with the thinning companies, a cloud lit 
with red flashes and full of howling death. 
The silent ridge to the left awoke with 
machine-guns and rifles, and sibilant 
rushing flights of nickel-coated missiles 
from :l\1axim and :Mauser struck down 
where the shells spared. An increasing 
trail of crumpled brown figures lay behind 
the battalion as it went. The raw smell 
of Llood was in men's nostrils. 
Going forward with his men, a little 
dazed, perhaps, with shock and sound 
such as never were on earth before, the 
second-in-command was conscious of a 
strangely mounting sense of the unreality 
of the whole thing. Automatically func- 
tioning as a company officer must, in the 
things he is trained to do, there was still 
a corner of his brain that watched de- 
tached and aloof as the scene unrolled. 
There was an officer rapped across the toe 
of his boot by a spent bullet-the leather 
wasn't even scratched-who sat down and 
asserted that his foot was shot off. There 
was Lieutenant Connor, who took a 
shrapnel dud in his loins, and was opened 
horribly. . . . 
There was a sergeant, a hard old non- 
com of many battles, who went forward 
beside him. His face was very red, and 
his eyes were very bright, and his lean 
jaw bulged with a great chew of tobacco. 
His big shoulders were hunched forward, 
and his bayonet glinted at a thirsty angle, 
and his sturdy putteed legs swung in an 


irresistible stride. Then there was, oddly 
audible through the din, the unmistakable 
sound that a bullet makes when it strikes 
human flesh-and a long, crumpled, form- 
less thing on the ground turned to the sky 
blind eyes in a crawling mask of red. 
There were five men with a machine-gun, 
barrel and mount and ammunition boxes, 
and a girlish pink-cheeked lieutenant 
went before them swinging a pair of field- 
glasses in his hand. Over and a little 
short of them a red sun flashed in a whorl 
of yellow smoke, and they were flattened 
into a mess of bloody rags, from which an 
arm thrust upward, dangling a pair of 
new, clean glasses by a thong, and re- 
mained so. . .. The woods on the crest 
were as far a wa y as ever through the 
murk-their strides got them nowhere- 
their legs were clogged as in an evil dream 
-they were falling so fast, these men he 
had worked with and helped to train in 
war. There was a monstrous anger in his 
heart. . . a five-inch shell swooped over 
his head, so near that the rush of air 
made his ear-drums pop, and burst. He 
was picked up and whirled away like a 
leaf, breath and senses struck from him 
by the world-shattering concussion. 
The second-in-command was pulled to 
his feet by Gunner Nice, who had taken 
the second platoon. His head 101led stu- 
pidly a moment, then he heard words- 
"an' that shell got all the captain's group, 
sir-all of 'em! An' my platoon's all 
casualties-" He pulled himself to- 
gether as he went forward. His raincoat 
was split up the back, under his belt. 
His map-case was gone-the strap that 
had secured it hung loosely from his shoul- 
der. There was blood on his hands, and 
the salt taste of it in his mouth, but it 
didn't seem to be his. And the front of 
the battalion was very narrow, now. The 
support platoons were all in the line. 
Strangest of all, the gray slope was behind 
them-the trees on the crest were only a 
few yards away. 
Behind and to the left the machine- 
guns still raved, but the artillery' fell 
away. A greenish rocket flared from the 
pines ahead, and right in the faces of the 
panting :l\Iarines machine-guns and rifles 
blazed. In the sharlow of the pines were 
men in cumbersome green-gray uniforms, 
with faces that looked hardly human un- 



MARINES A T BL:\
C MO:\'T 


239 


cler deep round helmets, With eyes nar- furious faces behind the steel. A few 
rowed, bodies slanting forward like men Brandenburger zealots elected to die on 
in heavy rain, the remnant of the bat- thei.r spitting lvlaxim guns, working them 
talion went to them. until bayonets or clubbed ritles made an 


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.\ few iron-souled Prussians-the Roche had such men--stood up to meet b.lyonet with bayonet, 
and died that way. 


It was the flank of the Boche column end. A few iron-souled Prussians-the 
which had come out of St.-Etienne and Boche had such men-stood up to meet 
struck the leading battalions of the 5th. bayonet with bayonet, and died that way. 
It had watched first with keen delight, The second-in-command saw such a one, 
then with incredulity, the tortured ad- a big feldwebel, spring against one of his 
vance of the battalion. It had waited sergeants with the long Prussian lunge 
too long to open its own fire. And now, that throws the bayonet like a spear to 
already shaken by the sight of these men the full reach of the arm. It is a spec- 
who would not die, it shrank from the tacular thrust, and will spit like a rabbit 
long .American bayonets and the pitiless, what stands in its way. But the ser- 



2-!O 


1\L\RINES AT BL
-\
C l\10NT 


geant, Bob Slover, a little fiery man with 
a penchant for killing Germans, ran un- 
der it and thrust from the ground for the 
Boche's throat. And as his point touched, 
he pulled the trigger. The felrlwebel's 
helmet flew straight into the air, and the 
top of his head went with it. 
A great many more flung away their 
arms and bleated c. Kamaraden" to men 
who in that red minute knew no mercy. 


let ue; go down an' take them 77s? "- 
"Shut up an' work yo' bolt, you dam' 
fool !-Whatinell you think you are-a 
army core? "-" Besides, 1\lr. Connor's 
dead. . .." On the hill beyond St.-Eti- 
enne new trenches scarred the slope; there 
were many Germans milling there, some 
fifteen hundred yards away. "Save your 
ammunition and lay low," the word was 
passed. "We're on our own out here." 


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A grcat many morc flung away thcir arms and blcatcd "Kamaradcn." 


Some hid in holes, or feigned death, to be 
hunted out as the press thinned. And 
the rest scuttled through the fringe of 
trees and back down toward St.-Etienne, 
while the lVlarines, lying prone or taking 
rest for their Springfields, killed them as 
they ran. This same rifle-fire, directed 
against the flank and rear of the column 
which had pushed to the right against 
the other battalions of the 5th, broke that 
force and dispersed it. There was a bat- 
teryof field-guns down the slope, five hun- 
dred yards or so. The gunners-those 
who were lucky-took to cover after the 
first burst of fire. "Thank Ga wd fer a 
shot at them dam' artillerymen! Bat- 
tlesight, an' aim low, you birds-don't let 
any of them bastards get away!" . . , 
" Sergeant, reckon the lootenant would 


And the battalion, a very small battalion 
now, little more than a hundred men, lay 
along the crest they had stormed, with 
their dead and wounded and the Boche 
dead and wounded around them. 
Almost immediately the Boche began 
to react. He opened on them a storm of 
fire, high explosive and shrapnel, and his 
machine-guns dinned fiercely. A counter- 
attack began to form toward St.-Etienne. 
Sweating gunners struggled into position 
with the two machine-guns that were left 
in the battalion, and these, with their 
crews, were knocked out by shellfire be- 
fore either had been in action long enough 
to fire a clip. But the rifles gave tongue 
and continued to speak-the last few men 
are always the most difficult to kill-and 
the BoclÍe had little taste for rifle-fire that 



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German infantry, Champagne, 1918. 


begins to kill at seven hundred yards. 
That counter-attack shortly returned 
whence it came, and the one that followed 
it went back also. 
The rifles fell silent, for the Boche in- 
fantry was in cover, or too far away to 
waste scant ammunition on. "0 Lord, 
for one battery of 75s or a machine-gun 
outfit! All the Boches in the world, an' 
nothin' to reach 'em with!" lamented the 
captain of the 49th. "We're clean away 
from our guns, and those devils seem to 
know it-look at 'em, yonder! Heard a 
shell from ours to-day, John? I haven't" 
- "Plenty from the other side, though- 
damn few of us left, capitan. Eastin's got 
it, Tom Langford's got it-Chuck Con- 
nor, and Matthews. Don't know where 
Geer is. Guess I'm the only officer you 
have left-here's Captain Whitehead." 
Whitehead, of the 67th Company, 
plumped down beside them. Small, very 
quick and wiry, with his helmet cocked 
on the side of his head, he gave the im- 
pression of a fierce and warlike little hawk. 
VOL. LXXVIII.-18 


"Hunt's comin' over, Francis," he said. 
"Bad place; worst I ever saw. Got 
about thirty men left. Hell that our 
machine-guns got knocked out so quick, 
wasn't it-must be two regiments of 
Fritzies on our front yonder!" 
Captain Hunt, senior in the field, a big, 
imperturbable Californian, came, and 
Lieutenant Kelly, promoted by casualties 
in the last hour to command of the 66th 
Company. "How does it look to you, 
gentlemen?" said Hunt. "Damn bad" 
was the consensus of opinion, with pro- 
fane embellishments. Followed some 
technical discussion. "\V ell," concluded 
the senior captain, "we've accomplished 
our mission-broke up their attack-bet- 
ter hook up with the rest of the regiment. 
\Ve'll find them through the woods to the 
right. Move off your companies-Kelly, 
you go first." 
Nobody remembers very clearly that 
swing to the right, through a hail of ma- 
chine-gun fire and an inferno of shelling. 
They found the companies of the second 
24 1 



242 


MARINES AT BLANC l\10NT 


battalion digging in astride a blasted road, 
and went into position beside them. 
"I've organized the company sector 
with twenty men-all we've got left-you 
and I make twenty-two," reported the 
second-in-command, dropping wearily into 
the shell hole where the captain had es- 
tablished himself. "Lord, I'm tired. . . 
and what I can't see," he added in some 
wonder, fingering the rents in his raincoat, 
"is why we weren't killed too. . . ." 


That night, lying in its shallow, hastily 
dug holes, the remnant of the battalion 
descended through further hells of shell- 
ing. The next night tins of beef and 
bread came up. There was some grim 
laughter when it came. "Captain," re- 
ported the one remaining sergeant, after 
distributing rations in the dark, "they 
sent us chow according to the last strength 
report-three days ago-two hundred 
and thirty-odd rations. The men are 
building breastworks out of the corned 
willy cans, sir I-twenty of 'em-" 
More days and nights, slipping, charac- 
terless, into each other. Being less than 
a company in strength, the first battalion 
of the 5th was not called on to attack 
again. They lay in their holes and en- 
dured. "Until the division has accom- 
plished its mission," said the second-in- 
command, rubbing his dirt-encrusted and 
unshaven chin. "That means, until the 
rest of the outfit is killed down as close as 
we are. Then we'll be relieved, an' get a 
week's rest and a gang of bloodthirsty re- 
placements, an' then we can do it all over 
again." " Yes," replied the captain, 
turning uneasily in the cramped coffin- 
shaped hole in which they lay. He 
scratched himself. "I have cooties, I 
think. In plural quantities." "Well, 
you would have that orderly strip the 


. 
. 



 


. 
. 


overcoats off a covey of dead Boches to 
furnish this château of ours. The Boche 
is such an uncleanly beast. . .. I have 
cooties, too, my capitan. Hell... ain't 
war wonderful!" 


And after certain days the division was 
relieved. The battalion marched out at 
night. The drumming thunder of the 
guns fell behind them and no man turned 
his face to look again on the baleful lights 
of the front. On the road they passed a 
regiment of the relieving division-full, 
strong companies of National Guardsmen. 
They went up one side of the road and in 
ragged column of twos, unsightly even in 
the dim and fitful light, the Marines 
plodded down the other side. They were 
utterly weary, with shuffling feet and 
hanging heads. The division had just 
done something that those old masters in 
the art of war, the French, and the world 
after them, including Ludendorff, were 
to acknowledge remarkable. They had 
hurled the Boche from Blanc Mont and 
freed the sacred city of Rheims. They 
had paid a price hideous even for this war. 
And they were spent. If there was any 
idea in those hanging heads it was food 
and rest. 
The Guard companies gibed at the 
shrunken battalion as they passed. Sing- 
ing and joking they went. High words of 
courage were on their lips and nervous 
laughter. Save for a weary random curse 
here and there, the battalion did not an- 
swer. . .. "Hell, them birds don't know 
no better. . .." "Yeh, we went up sing- 
in' too, once-good Lord, how long ago! 
. .. They won't sing when they come 
out. . c or any time after. . . in this war." 
. . . "Damn you, can't you march on your 
own side the road? How much room 
you need?" 


. 

 



 


>>! 


. 
. 
. 



Mrs. Riddle 


A FRAGMENT OF BIOGRAPHY 


BY GERALD CHITTENDEN 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRY TOWNSEND 


HILE I was taking tea 
with Mrs. Riddle, old 
Henry Page brought 
his liver to call. She 
sent me out to help 
him off with his cere- 
ments, a service which 
I performed with what 
sympathy I could muster in response to 
his repeated demands for it. About the 
time of the sloughing of the last overshoe, 

Irs, Riddle, unable to endure the agony 
any longer, called out: 
"Come in, 1\lr. Page! Don't die in the 
hall!" 
There was no acidity in her remark. It 
was simply the impatience of a good 
player with a bad one. Noone, I think, 
had a better right to make it than 1'lrs. 
Riddle, for at that time her own right 
side was withered and useless-had been 
so for a year. Such incapacity must have 
been hell to her keen mind and warm 
heart, but we who loved her had to imag- 
ine her suffering without aid from her. 
She never spoke of it without humor, 
not even to her nurse, and watched the 
coming on of complete helplessness with 
the old cool fire in her eyes, snapping 
her fingers in the face of fate and disease, 
and ultimately of death. 
I think Henry Page liked her style of 
attack, in spite of himself. At any rate, 
he came into the room with his insides 
inside of him, and for half an hour was 
as agreeable as he can be and seldom is. 
\Vhen he had gone, 1\Irs. Riddle rang for 
the maid to remove the tray, and com- 
mented with that flicker in her bright 
eye which made one wonder just where 
in history she belonged-whether in the 
mid-Victorian age, or in the late twenty- 
first century. 
"Henry Page's liver," she said, "is 
his only child. Adopted, I think-at 


least, he never speaks about it except 
when it misbehaves. It always misbe- 
haves. " 
Mrs. Riddle's aim was accurate and 
her penetration high, but her bullseye 
was gold. The town of Gristmill, Vt., 
owned its share of gold, and perhaps that 
was why it claimed her with an all-exclud- 
ing jealousy. A newcomer there, I had 
been conducted to her tea-table as soon 
as Mrs. Corcoran, the librarian, had 
made up her mind that I was worthy. 
Ever since I had been trying to fit Mrs. 
Riddle into her background, without suc- 
cess. Native sons and daughters gave 
me no help; they only grew angry when 
a stranger like myself dared to suggest 
that she had not always lived in Grist- 
mill, and angrier still when I called atten- 
tion to their own unguarded admission 
that she had lived in many other placesc 
Pondering the problem, it seemed to me 
that 1\Irs. Riddle resembled one of those 
good stock companies which used to 
travel about before the movies came, 
carrying with them their own scenery, 
and presenting the same high and low 
comedies, the same tragedies and melo- 
dramas, here in the Odd Fellows' Hall, 
there in a fire-trap of a theatre amid the 
fragments of make-up left over from the 
last high-school performance of" Charley's 
Aunt." In a pinch, you may remember, 
they sometimes acted in a barn or under 
canvas, but their scenery and costumes 
were always the same. 
"The idea of comparing :Mrs. Riddle 
to an actor!" Mrs. Corcoran protested. 
"Much less to a whole troupe of them! 
She belongs here." 
" Was she born here?" I pursued. 
"N-no." Evidently, the admission 
hurt. " New York, I think. But what 
difference does that make? Nobody 
lives in New York." 


243 



244 


MRS. RIDDLE 


"She's been here only eight years, they 
tell me." 
"A lot they know about it!" 
\Vhich remark was a masterly and 
shameless dodge, for " they" were, or 
was, chiefly Mrs. Corcoran. 
"If you want to know about the other 
side of Mrs. Riddle," she said later, 
annoyed by my persistency, "you might 
ask the Reverend Pugh." 
"I have no intention of asking the 
Reverend Pugh about anything," I re- 
plied. "But I'd just as lief ask you about 
the Reverend Pugh. How did Mrs. Rid- 
dle happen to cross his hawse?" 
"He crossed hers. They had words 
about earthquakes." 
"What do you mean by that?" 
"Ask the Reverend Pugh." 
In spite of my dislike for the man, I did 
ask him, cornering him on lVlain Street be- 
tween the fire-engine house and the police 
station. 
" Are earthquakes a visitation of 
God?" I demanded. 
"You've been talking to Mrs. Riddle," 
he said, and went away from there. 
There was nothing left but to ask Mrs. 
Riddle herself. 
"Polly Corcoran talks too much," she 
said. 
"But just what did you say to Pugh?" 
"I've said so many things to him that 
I can't remember them all. You mean 
about the San Francisco earthquake? 
The papers said that babies were being 
born in the streets there, and I got excited 
about it. Naturally-who wouldn't? I 
wanted to collect clothing and condensed 
milk for them. Everyone in town was 
a Christian except Pugh." 
"And he?" 
"A heathen. He said God had de- 
stroyed San Francisco because it was im- 
moral. I told him "-she smiled mischie- 
vously, her one useful hand moving among 
the cups-" I told him that he probably 
knew more about that than I did-I'd 
never been in that part of San Francisco." 
" Was that all you told him?" 
"How inquisitive you are! I think I 
said that my God wouldn't have lost 
his temper like that. Such peevishness 
seemed to me undignified in a divinity- 
altogether too much like an angry clergy- 
man." 


"Did he see the point?" 
" Well-he opened his parish house to 
receive what people contributed. I think 
that for a long time he expected the light- 
ning to strike me. Probably my stroke of 
paralysis restored his faith." 
No wonder Gristmill claimed her. She 
blew the cobwebs out of their attics-a 
process congenial to the New England 
mind. And no wonder that, when she 
passed over, even a comparative stranger 
could have heard all the trumpets sound- 
ing for her on the other side. She left 
behind her a wound over which the town 
closed slowly and reluctantly. People 
had never, even in her crippled years, 
gone to her tea-table as a matter of duty, 
or to cheer her up, or because of anyone 
of the other undertaker emotions. They 
knew well that they took away far more 
than they brough t, and therefore, when 
her old-fashioned silver service had been 
locked away in the local bank until a new 
generation should need it, their lives were 
thinner than they had been. To me also, 
the idea that she had lived anywhere else 
became incredible. 


It remained an untrue fact until a com- 
bination of business and pleasure took me 
to the Caribbean coast in the year follow- 
ing her death. There, in a country which 
I shall call Espinosa, on a banana farm 
forty miles in the bush and five from a 
white neighbor, I once more crossed Mrs. 
Riddle's trail. The farm-manager, a man 
called Driscoll, with the marks of twenty 
years in the tropics etched into his face, 
pointed it out to me. 
"You may call this lonely, if you like," 
he said. "I dare say it is. But I wonder 
what you'd have thought of Anita Grande 
Farm-Big Annie Farm-ten years ago?" 
"What part of the country?" I asked. 
He jerked his thumb in a general 
northerly direction, toward the delta of 
the Rio Amara. 
"Twenty-one miles up the track," he 
said. "Swamp. Foundation posts rot- 
ting or sprouting three days after you'd 
sunk 'em. No screens, no ice, no meat 
except what you could shoot. And you 
had to eat that within twenty-four hours. 
Plenty of nothing except fever and whis- 
key and quinine, and too much of those." 
"Laying it on pretty thick, aren't you?" 




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.-Page 243. 


245 



246 


MRS. RIDDLE 


"No. Things have changed since then. 
It was one woman who changed them at 
Big Annie Farm." 
" Was Big Annie the woman?" 
"God, no! Big Annie was a myth even 
when I first came here, and wasn't the 
one, I guess, to make things more sanitary. 
This was a woman from the States, 
mother of one of the new men. Her name 
was Riddle. She came and stayed three 
years-until her son died-and made our 
lives worth livingc Then she went away." 
"I know her," I said. "Knew her, 
rather." 
"She's dead, then?" Driscoll asked. 
"Last year." 
He was silent for some time. 
"I suppose she had to die, like everyone 
else," he said. "I wonder what she's do- 
ing now?" 
That speculation, coming from Driscoll, 
made me jump, so that my chair creaked. 
"Does that surprise you?" he asked. 
"My wondering what she's doing now? 
It shouldn't, if the Mrsc Riddle you knew 
is the same one I knew. I can't imagine 
her staying in her grave, or in heaven for 
that matter, if there was anything for her 
to do in hell." He lit a cigarette. "Es- 
pinosa was near enough hell in those days. 
She kept house at Anita Grande for three 
years. " 
"When you knew her," he went on 
after another pause, "did she ever show 
you a gold owl? Maya work? She might 
have worn it sometimes on a ribbon or a 
chain. " 
"She generally wore it." I remem- 
bered the ornament well-a queer and 
handsome bit of old work. 
"I'm glad she liked it that much. I 
gave it to her. A small matter, but I 
wanted her to remember me-what she 
did for me, anyhow." 
"Did she nurse you through something, 
or what?" 
"Yellow fever. But that wasn't all I 
wanted her to remember. I was on the 
beach in those days-practically. She 
cured me of that, too." 
She had indeed, as I learned in that 
long evening, with the banana fronds 
pattering like rain beyond the screens, 
and hot odors drifting in from the jungle 
and the garden. Mrs. Riddle had planted 
that garden, for she had lived at Què Tal 


Farm as well as at Anita Grande-had 
pervaded the place, as she seemed to per- 
vade it now. Certainly, as Driscoll talked 
on in that indistinct voice of his, it seemed 
as though she must have joined us quietly 
and was sitting in the third chair on the 
veranda. The aura of her high and sport- 
ing spirit was as palpable there as it had 
ever been at Gristmill, so that Què Tal 
seemed her world and not my own. Why 
not? It too had felt her indomitability, 
so that even the bush which she had 
driven back from her garden did not en- 
croach on it as it did on other clearings- 
was kept out by this man who was talk- 
ing to me-kept out because she still 
walked by night among her flowers. Even 
the hothouse perfume of frangipani, as 
different as possible from the freshness of 
cold violets which had always suggested 
her to me, seemed by some magic to be 
her fragrance. 
"So you see," Driscoll said as he threw 
away his last cigarette and rose, "why I 
wondered what she was doing now. Some 
of us may die altogether, and a good job 
too, but not Mrs. Riddle." 
The next day he took me to visit a dis- 
tant farm. We spent the day riding over 
it; when we reached the railroad-track 
once more, it was already dusk. 
"Jake Stein will feed us at Grenadilla," 
said Driscoll, and added to his motor-boy, 
"Shove along, mon." 
The negro pushed us a few steps, run- 
ning behind, and jumping aboard the 
track motor when the explosions beganc 
Conversation became impossible. We 
banged along the track for half an hour 
or so, running without train orders) of 
course, as all men did habitually in Espi- 
nosa until accidents compelled a change 
of custom. The probability of meeting an 
engine three rail-heads away made the 
curves interesting. Darkness came down 
on us before we had gone a mile. 
We stuttered into the yards of Grena- 
dilla Junction, going more slowly on 
account of adverse switch points, and 
stopped in front of the cantina and gen- 
eral store. A tall sort of a barracks 
loomed behind it, with yellow light pour- 
ing in wedges out of open doors, illuminat- 
ing three tiers of galleries. In reality, it 
was quiet except for domestic disputes in 
three different and equally unintelligible 



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"-Page 248, 
. I bet-und they vent. 
h 'n a low VOIce, 
spoke once to t em I 
/' She ordered them off- 


247 



248 


MRS. RIDDLE 


languages, but, somehow, it gave the im- 
pression of crawling life, of disorganized 
and continuous noise. Stein's cantina, 
however, was clean enough, and deserted 
at this hour; Stein himself was sitting 
behind his bar. He heaved himself to his 
feet and offered us drink; a moment later 
he shouted into the general obscurity: 
" Juana! Supper for two!" 
A disembodied voice answered him, and 
pots clattered somewhere. Stein turned 
on the single unshaded bulb over one of 
the tables; we took our drinks over to it 
and sat down. 
" Your first visit to Espinosa?" Stein 
asked me. "Yes? Und you find it inder- 
esting? " 
"Very," I said. 
" Any gountry is inderesting, if you do 
not haf to Iif in it. Here, dere is notting 
to talk aboud but bananas." 
"They're interesting, if you've never 
seen them except in a grocery," I replied. 
"Ja. In a grocery, it is nice to see ba- 
nanas. Here-" He shrugged and bur- 
ied his mustache in a glass of Espinosan 
beer. 
"Williams, here," said Driscoll, "knew 
Mrs. Riddle." 
"Knew her? She is, then, dead?" 
"Last winter, he tells me." 
" So ? " Stein, his head dropping a 
little forward, sat motionless for a time. 
A burst of rain assaulted the iron roof of 
the cantina; he reached up and closed the 
wooden shutter above our heads. Then 
he stepped behind the bar and pulled a 
coat over his damp-looking shirt. He sat 
down again and finished his beer. " So, 
she is dead," he said, and there was a 
quality of regret in his voice, a certain 
softening of his gutturals, even. "Vell, 
veIl. Burcell vill be sorry to hear that." 
"What's become of Purcell?" Driscoll 
asked. "I haven't seen him lately." 
"Burcell is as usual," Stein answered. 
"Sometimes I wonder if it was right for 
Mrs. Riddle to pull him through that time. 
But she always did vat she could for any 
sort of a yellow dog, or for the fleas on 
his hide, even. So-she is dead. VeIl." 
He meditated-a hunched frog of a 
man in a sweaty and collarless shirt, yet, 
just then, with a certain unexpected de- 
cency about him. A yellow girl with 
flopping slippers on her bare feet brought 


us our supper, and we began on it in 
silence. Stein filled his glass again. 
"Mrs. Riddle," he said, "vas afraid of 
notting. " 
"Not even of life," Driscoll added. 
"Not even of life. Not even of Bur- 
cell's niggers that time he was sick und 
they got nasty. You remember?" 
"Tell Williams." 
"Burcell vas sick, und he had no 
money, und no food in der house, und his 
vife had to dig up roots in the basture und 
gollect dry branches for der fire. Mrs. 
Riddle heard about it und vent to his 
place on a hand-car-her yard-man und 
her house-man bumping it." 
"Without train orders?" I asked. 
"Oh, ja. Certainly, vithout orders. 
She found der niggers-Haitians and 
Barbadians--on Burcell's platform, very 
nasty, as I have said. She ordered them 
off-spoke once to them in a low voice, I 
bet-und they vent." Stein laughed. 
"Then she came back here, und before I 
know vat I do, I load her car for her-a 
hundred pounds of flour, tea, canned 
milk-oh, many other things. It was a 
brivilege so to do." 
Before my mind's eye at that moment 
rose a picture of her perfect tea-table in 
Gristmill--of the firelight in the autumn 
dusk, of Henry Page and his liver, of the 
score of pleasant people who had revolved 
about her there and had claimed her 
as their peculiar property and product. 
When I tried to pay for my supper, Stein 
closed my hand over the money I offered 
him, and said: 
"No friendt of Mrs. Riddle can bay 
here. She vas here but three years, but 
she belongs to us." 
Once more before I left the Caribbean 
her name came up, this time at Havana, 
where an acquaintance of mine took me to 
dinner at the American Legation. After 
dinner, we sat on the roof overlooking the 
Maleçon and the sea beyond, and the 
talk skipped about over the world-from 
Petrograd to Pekin and back again. The 
minister at that time was particular about 
his subordinates, excluding the finikin 
type of secretary; therefore, the evening 
was interesting and pleasant. The first 
secretary, it seemed, had once crossed 
from the mainland with Mrs. Riddle. 
They had dined at the legation, as I was 



PRESIDENT VERGILIUS ALDEN COOK 


doing, and had rejoined the ship at three 
in the morning, an hour before it sailed. 
They had hurried, and when one hurries 
in a Havana Ford, one risks body and 
soul. They had been wrecked once and 
arrested once. Diplomatic pressure failed 
with the policeman until Mrs. Riddle be- 
gan to talk with him; he ended by desert- 
ing his post at the foot of the Calle 
O'Reilly and riding on the step of the car 
to the gate of the dock, which he had 
opened for them. 
"A wonderful and charming old lady," 
said the first secretary. "And to think 
that she had lived most of her life in V er- 
mont-in a hick town." 
From Havana I returned to Gristmill 
and took up my work again. Mrs. Rid- 
dle's house was occupied by some one 


249 


else, and I did not enter it that winter. 
Her name occurred frequently in conver- 
sation. Once, when I was talking to Mrs. 
Corcoran, I mentioned the Caribbean. 
"I've heard, of course, that she had 
been in that part of the world," Mrs. 
Corcoran admitted. "She told me so her- 
self, in fact. In several other countries 
, h ' 
too. I ve eard all that, and it means 
nothing. She always-always-lived here, 
and couldn't have lived anywhere else." 
"Well," I assented, "perhaps she did. 
Driscoll-Stein-the first secretary-all 
felt the same way, but they must have 
been dreaming." 
"She always lived here," repeated Mrs. 
Corcoran. "Why, look how she is re- 
membered here 1 That's the proof of it." 
"Of course," I agreed. 


Presiden t V ergili US Alden Cook 
of Harmonia College 


A STUDY IN STILL LIFE 


I 


BY CAROL PARK 


c, wn.a 
'" 
 E'S a good mi.xer and a 

 X

 straight Republican." 
[!!J Thus, somewhat in- 
H I formally, was the 
. 
 Jig. coming of President 

 
 Vergilius Alden Cook 
Ä@
Ä heralded by one of the 
trustees of Harmonia, 
the women's college of lVletropole. 
More fonnally, at the public induction 
into office, he was presented to his stu- 
dents, his faculty, and to the town's citi- 
zens as "one of the State's leading edu- 
cators, in honoring whom l\letropole 
honors itself." A stirring speech on 
"Democracy and Education" by the 
State commissioner of the latter led 
gracefully to the encomium on Doctor 
Cook delivered by the president of Doc- 
tor Cook's own Alma Mater. Such terms 
as "the glory of America," "American 


womanhood," "a true scholar," "every 
inch a gentleman" peppered the oration 
and called forth good-natured applause. 
Then, with a modesty that should be 
suggestive of Lincoln, tempered by a dig- 
nity that comes from the knowledge of 
one's worth, Doctor Cook rose to ac- 
knowledge the tribute and to present 
his own platform for education. At a 
previously detennined signal the massed 
student body came spontaneously to its 
feet and broke into a well-rehearsed song 
about: 


"Doctor Cook, with pen and book 
Weare aU for you. 
To you and to Harmonia 
\Ve will e'er be true." 


This gracious testimony of loyalty moved 
the new president to wipe his eyes fur- 
tively and to gulp a few times before 
proceeding with his carefully memorized 
speech. 



250 


PRESIDENT VERGILIUS ALDEN COOK 


So flushed were the students, however, 
with the success of their part in the eve- 
ning's ceremony that they were not very 
attentive to the new president's address 
and never did learn what his educational 
programme was. But, as a matter of 
fact, no one else in the audience, however 
attentive, learned it either. 
Properly introduced, Doctor Cook now 
belonged. Harmonia was willing to co- 
operate; at any rate, to do nothing to pre- 
vent the man's showing what he was. 
There were, of course, on the part of the 
student body and of the more curious 
members of the faculty, attempts to pene- 
trate the arcana of his earlier history. 
As pieces of information were brought to 
light they were joined, analyzed, and 
verified until a suggestive, if sketchy, 
biography was obtained. 


II 


VERGILIUS ALDEN COOK was born and 
brought up in Watertown, a small coun- 
try settlement. There he had received 
a stern religious drilling from a funda- 
mentalist grandmother; a political train- 
ing, in which his father, the village lawyer, 
served as model; and a rigid intellectual 
discipline at the hands of a conscientious 
country schoolmaster. A certain college 
tradition ran in the Cook family; so at 
seventeen, with his father's "Trigonom- 
etry" and his "Horace," Vergilius left 
his home for one of the smaller New Eng- 
land colleges. 
The boy Vergilius was a good boy. 
His ancestry was American; his father a 
man of some position. He joined the 
college glee-club. He played on the col- 
lege nine. He did well enough, but not 
too well, in his studies. And so he made 
the proper fraternity. He had received 
the accolade of rightness-even of su- 
periority. 
Superiority. Yes, one knew that in his 
heart; but, openly, one could not afford to 
be too snobbish. A little cordiality, a 
show of interest, a hearty hand-clasp, 
these rather than icy superiority were 
effective in winning the success repre- 
sented by class office. 
The genial attitude, moreover, was in 
keeping with a new spirit that on the 
campus was becoming intellectually ac- 


ceptable, a spirit expressing itself through 
some of the faculty and a few of the 
students in catchwords like "capital and 
labor," "frenzied finance," "social con- 
sciousness," "individualism," "democ- 
racy," "Americanism," "opportunity." 
A mind, not keenly aware of a struggling, 
growing outside world, had difficulty in 
understanding the significance of such 
terms. Vergilius tried to reconcile these 
new ideas with the ideas of the correct 
static universe with which he was fa- 
miliar. Of course, and even his father 
would agree, there should be equality of 
opportunity; every American should have 
a fair chance to get what he rightfully de- 
sired. But no American wanted any- 
thing that Vergilius, himself, didn't want. 
An American- Well, an American 
wasn't one of those dirty, greasy foreign- 
ers who came to this country, made 
bombs, and tried to upset a perfectly 
functioning government. Still-it was 
here that his broad college training 
showed its value-a little shoulder-pat- 
ting and hand-shaking often won a W op 
or a Mick to the side of righteousness. 
Vergilius decided to hand-shake. 
With this well-defined social policy and 
with his B. A. and M. A. degrees, Ver- 
gilius returned to a slightly changed 
Watertown. A twist of fortune had set 
its industries humming. Its population 
had increased; and if the staid settlers 
shuddered at the thought of the foreigners 
who were coming to work in factory and 
mill, who were turning old family man- 
sions into slum tenements, they still did 
not refuse to accept the increased rents, 
the booming profits, or other benefits of a 
thriving town. There was a welcome air 
of prosperity and, as an outward and 
visible sign, a new high-school building 
with a newly incorporated State normal 
training course. 
Two degrees and a father's political 
influence made Vergilius a welcome addi- 
tion to the school faculty. With energy 
and the application of successful busi- 
ness methods, he soon became principal 
and saw the school flourish. His position 
naturally threw him into close contact 
with all sorts of people. The presence of 
Watertown's irritating foreign section 
could not be ignored. But had not col- 
lege prepared Vergilius Cook to handle 



PRESIDENT VERGILIUS ALDEN COOK 


the problem? "Let them get out their 
citizenship papers. Get them out to vote 
-straight Republican, of course, and 
they'll no longer be aliens. They'll be 
Americans, sir." He carried out his own 
precepts. And so, since it was he who got 
the foreigners out to vote and patted them 
on the shoulder, he naturally became a 
force in local politics. 
An efficiency system enabled him to 
combine his two activities. He was" Our 
Leading Citizen" at home and he began 
to make shy faltering steps abroad. He 
attended educational conferences and 
noted how big educators spoke and acted. 
He attended State Republican conven- 
tions and noted how big politicians con- 
ducted themselves. And he patterned 
his behavior on a combination of the two. 
In a few years he became mayor. 
Thereafter his public activity alternated 
between the mayoralty and the school 
principalship. (Something in some con- 
stitution somewhere prevented one person 
from holding the two offices at the same 
time.) Then he became a power. His 
college conferred upon him the honorary 
degree of doctor of laws. He attended a 
Republican convention, at which he made 
a fairly forceful speech seconding the 
nomination of Hiram Parsons of Water- 
town for state engineer. The speech at- 
tracted the attention of some of l\fetro- 
pole's politicians, among whom was the 
trustee of Harmonia. 
So, when Harmonia needed a new presi- 
dent, one who could inaugurate a cam- 
paign of expansion and obtain a large en- 
dowment fund, Doctor Cook was chosen. 
He came to JYletropole with his wife, one 
of his former students in the normal 
kindergarten department, and four chil- 
dren, good-looking but a little stupid. 


III 
THE college now had caught up the 
loose threads of Doctor Cook's previous 
existence and, without praise or censure, 
was willing enough to see what the new 
man could do. Evidently, Doctor Cook 
had decided against the aping of foppish 
city manners. He came to the college 
each morning in a loose, baggy suit, 
carefully chosen to suggest straw and 
God's own country. Nor did he surround 


251 


his position with aloof dignity. \Veren't 
we all one family? So the college girls 
were encouraged to drop in familiarly at 
his office to hear a good story or to "talk 
over what's on your mind." Mrs. Cook 
came down to the college to sit on club- 
room divans under bas-reliefs of the 
:Muses, to throw her arms about the 
girls' shoulders, and to have heart-to- 
heart talks with them. But it was 
noticed that no Catholics or Jews or Ne- 
groes and none of those" \Vell, of course, 
they are ambitious and bright; but why 
do they come to America?" foreigners 
were singled out for such president-wifely 
recognition. 
Chapel, naturally compulsory, was the 
climactic occasion of the college week. 
Doctor Cook would unfold his long legs, 
rise majestically-with the majesty not 
of the polished but of the natural man- 
and make his announcements. A delight- 
ful piquancy was given them by his 
Yankee intonation, by frequent inclusions 
of "I want cher" and "won't cher" and 
by a slight disregard of grammar and of 
rhetoric. When some chapel speaker 
failed to appear, Doctor Cook would 
throw himself into the breach and talk 
for the allotted thirty minutes on some 
subject nearest his heart. His speeches 
were not without humor. They would in- 
clude a story or two about a drummer, or 
beginning: "It seems there were two 
men"; they would end with a quotation 
that contained the gist of his remarks. 
A favorite one was: 


"But the man worth while 
Is the man who can smile 
When everything goes dead wrong." 


There were changes in the faculty. 
Some members were dropped. "They're 
really too good for Harmonia," was the 
president's explanation. Some members 
preferred to go. Then, too, the natural 
growth of the college demanded new pro- 
fessors. These places were filled by "big 
men," with proper fraternity conne.ctions. 
Some, mistakenly chosen, came wIth fire 
and ideals in their souls, stood out for 
their convictions, and at the end of a 
probationary year-left. Those who 
stayed were able to read a text-book on 
their subject, assemble the facts therein 
presented, and deliver them again in lec- 



252 


MY LITTLE TOvVN 


tures. Their voices were loud and carried 
conviction. Their views coincided with 
those of the president. The new women 
of the faculty were delightfully feminine 
creatures who, after a few years of pro- 
fessorial duties, left to be married. 
This habit of his women professors de- 
lighted Doctor Cook. He believed in 
.marriage. He believed in families. His 
favorite address to his alumnæ was a 
capitulation of vital statistics, an an- 
nouncement of the number of married 
alumnæ and of their children. The alum- 
næ stationery carried the slogan, sug- 
gested by him: "Every Alumna a Po- 
tential Mother." In fact, so firm was his 
belief in the sanctity of the family as an 
American institution that in a now fa- 
mous interview with one who was anxious 
to help establish some connection between 
the undergraduate and the world after 
graduation he said: "We don't want to 
train our girls to receive large salaries. 
If they get good salaries, they won't want 
to marry. And we want them to marry." 
It was possibly this evidence of conser- 
vatism, together with his being a regu- 
lar fellow-the college janitor reported 
having seen the Big Boss at the League 
baseball games-that endeared Doctor 
Cook to his board of trustees. He and 
they did pull together. A steadily, if 
slowly, increasing stream of money flowed 
to Harmonia. The college grew c An era 
of "Advertise Harmonia" was entered 
upon. The college grew larger. l\1embers 
of the faculty joined the Chamber of Com- 
merce. Members spoke before the local 
branches of the Y. M. C. A. Some of 
them even made political speeches during 
the gubernatorial campaign. 


At last the time was ripe for the endow- 
ment-fund drive. No orthodox drive may 
be conducted without professional money- 
gatherers and without rallies. Har- 
monia's drive was orthodox. Harmonia 
began a whirl of dinners at which alumnæ 
campaign workers were urged to sing 
" Smiles" and "Pack up Your Troubles," 
to sing until such a state of frenzy was 
reached that the campaign should go over 
big. But the alumnæ wanted to have 
facts and refused to sing. It was some- 
what disheartening and not quite up to 
form. The money was collected more 
slowly than had been expected. Doctor 
Cook sometimes wondered whether this 
would have happened if the alumnæ had 
sung those songs. But he concealed his 
disappointment and wrote a letter to each 
worker: "The army has its back to the 
wall. But we won't give up the ship." 
And the money was raised. 
So Doctor Cook is a Great College Pres- 
ident. Even now nobody knows what his 
educational programme is; but of his 
greatness as a college president there is 
no doubt. Harmonia's new buildings are 
now being constructed. Doctor Cook 
drives prospective benefactors out to see 
them. He points out their glories. "A 
new Acropolis, sir. The largest pieces of 
granite in the State. And the best venti- 
lation system in the country." 
Between visits to the site of the new 
college, great Doctor Cook-the students 
call him "Vergy" or "V. A. C."-sits in 
his office. There are several questions 
which he must decide. Should $500,000 
or $600,000 be required to name a build- 
ing for the donor? Would 1928 be a good 
year to run for mayor of Metropole? 


My Little Town 
BY MARY EDGAR COMSTOCK 


OVER my little town 
White clouds are sailing. 
Above my little town 
Five steeples cleave the air. 
About my little town 
Brown hills are calling. 
Within my little town 
Beasts have their lair. 


Over my little town 
Great birds go soaring. 
Above my little town 
The moon floats pale. 
About my little town 
White birches whisper. 
Within my little town 
Joy is frail, 



The Chinese Renaissance 


BY ELLSvVORTH HUr\TINGTO'\T 
Author of "The Suicide of Russia," "The Character of Races," etc. 


ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 


IT has been the habit to speak of China as unchanging. As a matter of fact 
China is changin!? rapidly. The fighting and the antiforeign outburst of the sum- 
mer of I925 are different from the more peaceful, but by no means quiet, conditions 
of I9 2 3. But such variations a
e mere.ly mi. nor ripples upon a great, though slow, 
stream of progress. The followmg artIcle dIscusses some of the essential elements 
in that stream. The desire for modern education conflicts with the desire to pre- 
serve the good things of the past; the desire to control their own affairs conflicts 
with the desire to learn from the West and utilize our material conveniences. These 
conflicts are now acute, and sometimes one desire and sometimes another is dominant. 
Nevertheless, the general trend of progress is along the lines pointed out in the fol- 
lowing account of some of the author's observations in the autumn of I923. An 
appreciation of these main trends is essential to a correct idea of what China is 
doing, and is likely to do in the future. 




 HINA is slow, but 
I Cl China moves. The 
movement is perhaps 

 C 
 
ost evide
t in educa- 

 
 bon. Dunng a recent 
journey in China I was 
WW repeatedly impressed 
by the rapidity with 
which the Chinese interest in Western 
education is accelerating and assuming 
new and more aggressive forms. As so 
often happens in Oriental countries, the 
contrast between the old and the new 
leaves the traveller bewildered as to which 
is the real China and which will ultimately 
prevail. 
If you would get some idea of how the 
new is being grafted upon the old, come 
with me to the port of Amoy in South 
China. Walk through the narrow, ill- 
smelling streets, see the pigs and the chil- 
dren, and visit the private school where 
Chinese employ Americans to bring them 
foreign education. Then pass the ceme- 
tery, one of many, where the gravestones 
lie so close together that they form an al- 
most complete pavement. \Ve are on our 
way to the university, perhaps a mile and 
a half east of the city near the shore. 
That university is a concrete illustration 
of the way in which contact with the 
West, and especially with missionaries 


from America, has aroused in China an 
eager and almost imperious demand for 
modern education. Some years ago a 
bright young man from one of the Amoy 
villages went to Singapore, or there- 
abouts. He began life as not much more 
than a coolie, but being uncommonly 
energetic and capable, he acquired sugar- 
mills, rubber-plantations, and other 
sources of wealth, and made a fortune. 
Like most Chinese, he was devoted to his 
home, and wanted to return there. Un- 
like the majority, he also wanted to do 
something for his old village. So he con- 
sulted his friends, and built a new Bud- 
dhist temple at a reported cost of 30,000 
Mexican dollars. Then the merchant sat 
back and waited. Nothing happened. 
People came to the temple at first out of 
curiosity, but when the novelty had worn 
off, they came no more. The priests con- 
ducted services just as before, but the 
bright new temple was no more useful 
than the shabby old one. 
"No more religion for me," said the 
disgusted merchant. "\Vhether it be 
Buddhist, Confucian, or Christian, I have 
had enough of it." He consulted his 
friends again. They advised education. 
So he built a lower primary school for 
boys. It covered only the studies taken 
by our American children between six and 
253 



254 


THE CHINESE RENAISSANCE 


nine years of age, but naturally the age of 
the Chinese boys was greater. The rich 
ex-coolie sat back once more and waited. 
This time something happened. Three 
hundred boys flocked into the school, with 
more pressing to come in. Soon some of 
the boys were ready for an advanced 
primary school, and the merchant built 
one. Then the girls wanted education. 
High schools for both boys and girls had 
next to be constructed. So the tale was 
told to me. But neighboring villages saw 
the good work and were eager to send their 
children. Boarding-schools were added. 
In all, some 600,000 1\Iexican dollars of the 
wealth of Singapore are said to have been 
put into the schools of that one district. 
Even that was not the end. Some of 
the boys, and even some of the girls, 
finished the high school and were ready 
for the university, but there was none in 
Amoy or the surrounding country. So 
the merchant built a university, and 1\Ir. 
Elliot, the American secretary of the 
Amoy Y. ]VI. C. A., took me to it. \Ve 
found an excellent set of buildings and 
some 300 studentsc A new medical 
school was in course of construction. 
The teachers were for the most part 
bright, wide-awake young Chinese, edu- 
cated in America, or, in some cases, in 
Europe. There were only two or three 
Americans, and they were not in positions 
of authority, although held in high re- 
spect. The teachers gave us an example 
of the speed with which the Chinese can 
do things in spite of their reputed slow- 
ness. It appeared that some of them had 
read my books and wanted me to lecture. 
('No," I said. "l\1y boat leaves at twelve- 
thirty, and I have to start back in an 
hour at the outside." 
"That's all right," was the enterprising 
answer. "We'll get the students together 
in ten minutes, and that will give you 
forty-five minutes to talk." They were 
as good as their word. Not many uni- 
versities have a staff who would decide 
more quickly, or act more promptly, espe- 
cially when it all had to be done before 
the president arrived. But he was of the 
same stripe, and approved what his sub- 
ordinates had done. 
Thus far the founder of Amoy Uni- 
versity is said to have spent 2,000,000 
Mexican dollars on buildings and equip- 


ment, and is paying all the running ex- 
penses. The report is that he is willing 
to put 10,000,000 more into the univer- 
sity. That shows the wonderful place 
that modern education is beginning to 
have in the life of China. The great criti- 
cism of Amoy University, so I under- 
stand, is that the founder insists on keep- 
ing everything in his own hands. In that 
he simply reflects a weakness that runs 
through the warp and woof of Chinese 
character. The Chinese do not trust 
other people's honesty or judgment as do 
Europeans and Americans. By this I 
mean something more than mere honesty 
in dollars and cents. I mean that the 
Chinese have not yet learned, and tem- 
peramentally find it difficult to learn, the 
spirit which makes a corporate body of 
trustees more careful, honest, and wise in 
the affairs of an endowed university than 
in their own. A Chinese may be generous 
and even public-spirited himself, but the 
idea of feathering one's own nest as fast 
as possible is so ingrained, that our form 
of public trusteeship, which we rightly 
esteem one of our greatest glories, is al- 
most impossible in China. 
The keenness of the Chinese in respect 
to modem education may be judged from 
the fact that one of the few kinds of phil- 
anthropic effort that arouses real enthu- 
siasm in Chinese students is volunteer 
teaching. From many institutions the 
young men go out regularly to conduct 
free schools in surrounding villages. 
One interesting phase of the matter was 
brought to my attention by my friend 
Mr. Tsao, president of Ching Hwa, the 
American Indemnity College near Peking. 
But before I discuss it, I hope Mr. Tsao 
will pardon me if I tell a little story of the 
beginnings of our friendship. It illus- 
trates how easy it is for Chinese and 
Americans to misunderstand one another, 
and how much is gained by complete 
frankness. Years ago, when Mr. Tsao 
was a student at Yale, he was in one of 
my classes in physical geography. We 
were studying the desert formation known 
as loess, a fine yellow deposit, it will be 
remembered, which is brought by the 
northwest winds from the deserts of Gobi, 
and has been deposited over a large area in 
the provinces of Shansi and Shensi. In 
discussing this I mentioned the fact that 



-THE CHINESE RENAISSANCE 


though loess can be cut with a spade, it is 
so tenacious that the cut surfaces will re- 
main almost unchanged for decades, even 
though vertical. That is why many roads 
take the form of deep, steep-sided trenches. 
The dust kicked up by the animals, which 
are fairly numerous in those regions, is 
blown away, but the walls of the road re- 
main as cliffs. For the same reason, wher- 
ever there are cliffs of loess, it is easy to 
excavate houses in them. In speaking of 
these houses I incidentally remarked that 
they must be very dusty and badly venti- 
lated, but the people of China do not 
mind such things. The next day I re- 
ceived a long letter, two pages of foolscap, 
closely written on both sides. The gist of 
the letter was that Mr. Tsao felt grieved 
that I had spoken slightingly of the civi- 
lization of China, that I had misunder- 
stood it, and hence unintentionally mis- 
represented it to the class. The letter 
ended with the words: "And as you 
spoke, the thing that pained me most 
was the scornful glances which my class- 
mates cast upon me." I had not meant 
to convey any such impression, for then 
as now I was a strong admirer of many 
features of Chinese civilization. I went 
to Mr. Tsao in his room, and explained 
the matter. With the broad-minded 
spirit characteristic of many Chinese, he 
accepted my explanation fully and com- 
pletely, and we have been good friends 
ever since. 
This story has a sequel. The next year, 
in a different class, I had another Chinese 
student. This time our subject was the 
geography of Asia. At the beginning of 
the year, before I had become acquainted 
with the individual students, I wanted to 
discuss the character of the Chinese. In 
order to avoid any misunderstanding, I 
began with some of the many things 
which I admire in Chinese character. As 
a climax I said that, among the admirable 
qualities, none ranks above universal in- 
dustry. Thereupon, to my chagrin, the 
class turned to their Chinese classmate 
and grinned. I discovered later tha t he 
was notoriously lazy. 
To come back to l\Ir. Tsao and the In- 
demnity College, as we drove thither, and 
as we were walking about looking at the 
fine buildings, he told me something of his 
problems and aims. The origin of the 


255 


college, it will be remembered, is this: 
After the Boxer troubles in 1900, China 
was obliged to pay an indemnity to each 
of the foreign nations whose citizens had 
suffered. The United States returned 
this indemnity to China for use in edu- 
cating Chinese students in the United 
States. The preliminary training of such 
students is carried on by the Indemnity 
College. But many thoughtful Chinese, 
such as Mr. Tsao, are coming to the con- 
clusion that the Chinese students in 
America are becoming too much Amer- 
icanized. They go to America while still 
young. Many study for a year or two in 
an academy or high school, then take a 
college course, and add to that several 
years of graduate work. When they re- 
turn to China they have become so Amer- 
icanized, or Europeanized if they have 
been in Europe, that they have lost touch 
with their own country. They are neither 
fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring-not 
Americans or Europeans, and yet not 
thoroughly Chinese. One remedy for this 
is that the Indemnity College should raise 
its standards, and carry the students 
practically through their whole college 
course. Then they would come to Amer- 
ica as men sufficiently mature to be thor- 
oughly grounded in Chinese culture, and 
yet young enough to profit by a graduate 
course in an American university. 
Another interesting example of the dif- 
ficulties experienced when foreigners and 
Chinese try to co-operate in education is 
seen in the Union Medical College at 
Peking. The superb buildings, modelled 
on the old imperial palace, but with 
green tiles instead of yellow, and with 
airy convenient laboratories, lecture- 
rooms, and offices, instead of cold spacious 
audience-chambers and richly draped 
living-rooms, are typical of the way in 
which the whole institution is equipped 
and managed. The staff, under the presi- 
dencyof Doctor H. S. Houghton, consists 
of men who would do credit to a great 
medical college anywhere. The majority 
of those in the more important posi- 
tions are Americans; but Chinese are 
given full scope. The ideal of the Rocke- 
feller Foundation is that this great insti- 
tution should ultimately be turned over 
to the Chinese and become a self-support- 
ing Oriental institution. But that day 



256 


THE CHINESE RENAISSANCE 


seems far away. The very perfection of 
the present equipment and organization 
seems to put the] institution beyond the 
present Chinese capacity. Even after 
several generations it is doubtful whether 
the Chinese can improve so much faster 
than other nations that they will actually 
catch up with the Occident. To do this 
would require that they become suffi- 
ciently skilful and careful to conduct a 
great medical school in accordance not 
only with the present high Occidental 
standards, but with the still higher stand- 
ards which by that time will have been 
evolved in other countries. Yet if the 
Union Medical College is to accomplish 
the greatest work for China, it ought to 
be a Chinese and not a foreign institution. 
The Chinese at present seem perfectly 
willing to let foreigners pay the bills, and 
control the medical school, but the signs 
of the times suggest that they may soon 
want to run the institution themselves, 
and will even supply the money if America 
will no longer do so. How strong this 
tendency is appears not only at Amoy 
University, as we have already seen, but 
in many other instances. At Tientsin, for 
example, a poor teacher, single-handed, 
and with no backing except a strong will 
and a great desire to serve his country, 
has built up a college which is said to be 
of very high grade. At Nanking I visited 
Southeastern University, where the gov- 
ernment has established an institution 
which in a very real way parallels our 
State universities. Under the able leader- 
ship of Doctor Kua it seems to be forging 
ahead on liberal and sensible lines. Its 
staff, like that at Amoy, is mainly Chi- 
nese who have been educated abroad, 
with a small sprinkling of Americans and 
Europeans. Of course all these institu- 
tions are still new, and it remains to be 
seen whether they will continue to main- 
tain high standards. 
At }'uchow, where I stayed a week, I 
saw another phase of the modern educa- 
tional movement. Now it so happens that 
the Church of the Redeemer, at New 
Haven, Conn., to which I belong, sup- 
ports some missionaries there- Mr. Peter 
Goertz and his wife-and had recently 
contributed $5,000 to build a school in 
the neighboring market town of Diong 
Lokh. When Mr. Goertz met me at the 


Pagoda Anchorage in a broadening of the 
winding, mountain-rimmed river, fifteen 
miles below the city and twenty miles 
from the sea, he surprised me by saying: 
"We must go at once to Diong Lokh. 
The school is to be dedicated." 
Then he explained that the date for 
the dedication, and for a convocation of 
teachers, had been set before my letter 
arrived, but had been postponed to per- 
mit a representative of the Church of the 
Redeemer to be there. A trip of an hour 
or two up a winding river in a launch be- 
longing to the American missionary hos- 
pital at the Anchorage, and a walk of a 
mile or so across rice-fields and through 
narrow stony streets, brought us to the 
mission compound. I was especially in- 
terested to find that the old school-build- 
ings consisted of an ancestral hall and a 
temple, rented for the purpose. A quar- 
ter of a century ago such "desecration" 
by Christian Chinese led to the Boxer 
troubles. Now no one thinks anything 
about it. But the hall and the temple 
were about as poor and cramped quarters 
as one can well imagine for a school 
where young boys sleep, eat, study, and 
play. Picturesque gray walls and over- 
hanging upturned eaves do not compen- 
sate for damp earthen floors and sleep- 
ing-rooms with no windows. 
The new school is utterly different, a 
big, airy three-story building with plenty 
of dormitory space for boys and teachers 
on the upper floor where they get won- 
derful views of mountains, groves, ter- 
races, and rice-fields. The lower story 
contains light, airy classrooms, and the 
basement a kitchen, wash-room, dining- 
room, and gymnasium. Think of it, only 
$5,000 for a building seventy by ninety 
feet in size, that will hold a hundred boys 
as boarders without crowding, and has 
classrooms for twice as many. 
The dedication was most interesting. 
The embarrassed Chinese "monitor," who 
is really assistant principal, picked up the 
school-bell and gave it a clang or two to 
bring us to order. The boys at once began 
setting off firecrackers, bu t were per- 
suaded by the American principal to post- 
pone them till the end. when there was 
quite an eruption. After songs by the 
school and remarks by two American mis- 
sionaries, a Chinese pastor, a local magis- 



THE CHI::\FSE RFNAISS:\:\CE 


trate, and the visitor from America, the 
"monitor" went around among the audi- 
ence, inviting everybody of any impor- 
tance to speak. He included women, not 
only the Americans, but the Chinese 


257 


small sword" which symbolize their right 
to defend themselves. It was a most 
stupid decree, for the swords are as harm- 
less as neckties. 
The same spirit of self-confidence per- 


- ;:or- 


-, 
- .. 

 


 

 


I" 


-J 


- 


. 
i 


.. . 



 . a 


,-' 
".-' 

y 


t
 \" 
., , \ 
... 


I 


." 


The modern invasion of China by the \\" est at Legation Street, Peking. 


teachers. He appeared a bit embarrassed, 
and so did the Chinese women when they 
refused to speak, but such embarrassmeñt 
is rare. 
During the exercises the boys wandered 
in and out to a degree that seemed quite 
unnecessary. Although the school is only 
of elementary grade, the boys range from 
twelve to eighteen years of age. :Many 
are married, probably about twenty per 
cent. Exact figures cannot be obtained, 
because it has ceased to be good form to 
be married so young. Relatively they 
behaved very well, for in schools run by 
Ch inese the boys often do abou t as they 
please. It may seem impossible, but the 
Chinese of all ages appear to surpass even 
the Americans in self-confidence. Thi:-; 
was evident in the wave of revolt which 
led to student strikes all over China a 
few years ago. Shortly before my visit 
to Fuchow the same spirit induced the 
Fuchow students-in the Chinese, not 
the missionary, schools-to decree that 
within two years the village women 
should remove from their hair the three 
YOLo LXXYIII.-I9 


haps accounts for street-signs like this om: 
in Peking: 
TG
C AX PHOTOGR.\PHER 
ATTR.\CTIYELY ENLARGED 


Here is a better one from Shanghai: 


1\10 YOU
 ZUXG 
SHIP PLU:\IBER BL\CK \ITH COPPER 

nRK EXGI
EER SCELE 
AXD STO'"E REP.\IRS ELECTRIC \\ EIR 
BELLS .\L"".\YS OX H \XD 
ELECTRIC THEETRE .\ SRECL\LY 
FLOODGTEETS 


I defv any one who knows English tù 
interpret the whole of this sign. 
It must not be supposed that Chinese 
self-confidence is primarily a bad quality. 
On the contrary. it may be most delight- 
ful. as we saw at Diong Lokh. On the 
evening before the dedication, about 
thirty Chinese teachers, haH men and half 
women, gathered at the house of 
Ir. and 

Irs. Hubbard to see a play given by 
schoolgirls ten to fifteen years of age. 



258 


THE CHI
ESE RE
AISSA
CE 


One of the American teachers, Miss 
Cutting, had told a story in English to a 
Chinese teacher. The teacher told it to 
the schoolgirls. It was the story of the 
childless old woman who made a ginger- 
bread boy so toothsome and delicious 


!
 



 
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t' .. '. 
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Old temple formerly used as school at Diong Lokh. 


that she wished it were a real child. 
Presto. the child is real. \Vhen set to 
work it runs away. The farm-hands try 
to catch it and eat it, the old woman go- 
ing to market does the same, and so do 
the pig, the dog, and the monkey. After 
hairbreadth escapes. it decides to return 
home, and help the old mother. After 
the story was told, parts were assigned, 
and the girls began to rehearse, each 
making up her own part. Some scenes 
were rehearsed only once, and in two days 
the play was produced. That it was 
funny to look at I can testify. That it 
was amusing to hear was testified by the 
hearty laughter of the spectators. The 
really surprising thing, however, was the 


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revelation of Chinese character in the 
young girls themselves and in the younO' 
teacher who introduced the play befor
 
the curtain was drawn. Those little girls 
presented their parts with a dignity and 
poise which were truly admirable. The 
young woman, a teacher, 
was not pretty, but charm- 
ing. She stood there in the 
graceful waist, short skirt, 
and white stockings which 
are here the dress of the edu- 
cated woman. Her black 
hair was drawn neatlv hack 
from her forehead ancÍ coiled 
in a knot at the back of her 
head. As she smiled, her 
dimples kept showing. She 
talked as simply and with 
as little show of embarrass- 
ment as if she were merely 
speaking to a friend, Half 
her audience consisted of 
men, and . foreigners were 
numerous enough to be dis- 
concerting. No young 
American woman could have 
done better. 
Right in the middle of the 
play the bumptious side of 
C.hinese self-confidence 
popped out again. Two 
girls managed the curtain by 
holding up a sheet. \Vhen 
I 
I a bell rang, one girl walked 
J.. across the stage carrying the 
sheet. \Vhen the act was 
ended, she walked across the 
stage again to get the sheet. 
A young man in the audience, a mere spec- 
tator, thought it would be better to drop 
the sheet, making it work vertically in- 
stead of horizontally. He motioned fran- 
tically and vainly to the girls, and kept it 
up for two or three acts. It was none of 
his business, but like most Chinese and 
Americans he thought that he, and he 
alone, knew best. One is reminded of the 
saying of Safed the Sage that "The Over- 
alls of the .:\lechanic were much spotted 
with Places where there was no Grease." 
In the same way, Chinese character is so 
much overlaid with self-confidence that 
the underlying fabric of modesty appears 
only in spots. This is another case where 
the Chinese are much more like Americans 


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American :\Iission School Building at Diong Lokh. 


than like Japanest'. As I sum up the im- 
pressions of my recent journey, I am sur- 
prised to find how often this fact is borne 
in upon me. 
One of the most interesting problems in 
Chinese education is the relation between 
foreign and native institutions. At pres- 
ent China is gripped by a strong desire to 
do things for itself. Foreign influences, 
and especially American schools such as 
Canton Christian College, Peking Uni- 
versity, St. John's College, at Shanghai, 
and Yale in China, at Changsha, ha"'e 
aroused the Chinese leaders to the point 
where they are both willing and able to 
do much more in some respects than the 
foreigners can do. Thus, Southeastern 
University, at Xanking, has a financial 
backing quite impossible for its Christian 
neighbor, Nanking University. The lat- 
ter, like many of the best in China, is an 
undenominational, co-operative effort 
supported by practically all the missions 
of the district. Such institutions are ur- 
gently needed. Not only are they quick 
to feel new movements in foreign coun- 
tries, but they insist upon character as 
the prime essential, whereas the Chinese 
institutions pay little attention to any- 


thing except the purely intellectual. Co- 
operation and friendly rivalry between 
Chinese and foreigners are of vital impor- 
tance. But how shall they be fostered? 
On the one hand, how can the Christian 
institutions maintain their ideals, and 
attract the best students? They have 
not the money to employ such eminent 
professors, or to equip such good labora- 
tories and dormitories as have the schools 
supported by the government or by the 
private benefactions of Chinese like the 
merchant at Amoy. On the other hand, 
how can the Chinese universities become 
suffused with the spirit of public service? 
How can they escape that deadliest of 
Chinese faults, the selfish individualism 
which grasps everything for self, and neg- 
lects the welfare of others? 
It seems to me that the Chinese insti- 
tutions have far more to gain from the 
missionary colleges than vice versa. 
Nevertheless, the old classical Chinese 
education was not so bad as many people 
think. Formerly I looked upon it as ut- 
terly useless. a mere test of memory, but 
it was much more than that. In spite of 
its rigidity, and its insistence upon mere 
memory, it accomplished two great pur- 
259 



260 


THE CHI
ESE RENAISSA
CE 


poses. It provided a very strenuous 
training, and it selected for official ad- 
vancement a type of man possessed of 
certain very strong qualities. To pass the 
gruelling Chinese examinations required 
not merely a good memory, but great de- 
termination, great power of organizing 
one's facts, and considerable synthetic 
ability in putting those facts together to 
meet the requirements of the examiners. 
The grinding, crushing drill of the old 
examinations rejected all who failed to 
possess a high inborn endowment of 
such traits. In spite of all its faults, the 
old Chinese system probably sifted out a 
group of men having an intellectual caliber 
higher than that of the average man who 
gets a degree from the new universities. 
One of the greatest needs of China to- 
day is to unite three great aims; namely, 
to preserve whatever is good in the old 
Chinese culture, to give the fullest scope 
to modern intellectual movements, and 
to infuse high ideals into the future 
leaders of China. This cannot be done 
by having three sets of higher institutions 
of learning, whose main devotion is re- 
spectively to the old Chinese ideals, to 
modern science in the broadest sense of 
the word, and to moral idealism. Yet 
that is what is in danger of happening. 



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Doctor E. H. Hume, president of Yali 
(Yale in China), suggests a most interest- 
ing means of a voiding this danger. His 
ideal, as yet only half formulated, is that 
the future university of China should 
consist of a group of colleges, as at Ox- 
ford and Cambridge in England. Each 
college should be dominated by its own 
religious, social, or scientific ideals, but 
all should form parts of a closely organ- 
ized whole, and should profit by the same 
staff of instructors, the same university 
equipment, and the same incentives 
toward high ideals and self-sacrificing 
public service. Under such an arrange- 
ment the daily life of the students and 
their social contacts would be largely 
controlled by their colleges, while they 
would share an intellectual life and a set 
of ideals set up by the university as a 
whole. How feasible this may be I do not 
know. But what could be more inspiring 
than the vision of a China dotted with 
great universities in which all sorts of col- 
leges, Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist, Cath- 
olic, Protestant, and eclectic, all work to- 
gether in friendly rivalry under a single 
intellectual guidance? Under such a sys- 
tem the great ideals of Confucius and 
China might blend with those of Jesus 
and Christendom. 


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Loons on Lake Umbagog, New Hampshire. 
. American Mus
um of Natural History. 
Designed and mounted by Jenness Richardson, Sr., background by Hobart Nichol,;. 


Masterpieces of American Bird 
Taxidermy 
BY \YILLIAl\1 T. HOR:\!'ADA Y 


ILLUSTRATIO
g FRO:\I PHOTOGRAPHS 


Ä

 T is a -pleasure to con- 
I I 
 template the beautiful 
! and instructive groups 
. 
 i I 'II: . of American birds that 

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 are to be found safely 
W

W housed in the museums 
x,k.).C7
' <:J.u.X that stand as monu- 
ments of wise en- 
ùeavors along the way between Brooklyn 
and San Francisco. 
The sculptors and the painters have 
nothing on the men who made them. Be- 
side the awful raw materials and the 
handicaps of the group taxidermist, the 
clay of the sculptor is a luxury, and the 
canyas of the painter is a bed of roses. 
. But we hasten to point out that in group- 


making the painter now is the strong ally 
of the taxidermist, and with him the 
honors must be divided. 
In the development of natural history 
museums a stage has been reached where- 
in the habitat group is imperath-e. The 
museum is behind the times that depends 
only upon shelves filled with banks and 
rows of specimens singly mounted upon 
pedestals or perches of polished wood. 
Such collections have good scientific 
value, and decidedly are not to be denied 
or ignored; but distinctly they are not all 
in all. They are for the student and the 
scientist, and the hurried casual yisitor 
cannot stop to spell them out. He must 
take his instruction on the run, and for 
;?()) 



262 l\L-\STERPIECES OF .-\:\IERICA
 BIRD TAXIDERl\IY 


him the habitat group is indispensable. 
In it he reads in one good look lessons of 
a dozen different kinds. By it the great 
outdoors and its wealth of living things is 
brought literally to his feet, and if it fails 
to awaken and interest him, so much the 
worse for him. He that hath not the 
love of nature in his breast, and is not 
moved by concord of habitat groups, is 
fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils. 
It is quite logical to look for master- 


1882 we worked side by side in the" large 
museum," and I now write of what I saw. 
Even at that early time there were in 
America a score of men who could mount 
fresh birds exceedingly well, but with old 
and mummified" dry skins" their limita- 
tions were many. The skill of 'Yard's 
foreign taxidermists in dry skins was 
strictly limited. 
But to Fred \Vebster,ancient bird mum- 
rnies had no terrors whatever. He re- 


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Summer birds of the San Joaquin Valley, California. 
Habit.tt group in the American Museum of Natural History. 
Mounted by H. Denslow, background by Charles J, Hittell. 


pieces of bird taxidermy among the large 
habitat groups of the zoological museums. 
Inevitably, the group represents a su- 
preme effort, in collecting, designing, and 
execution. Therein do we find the ut- 
most results of which the operation is 
capable, the utmost limits in attitude and 
poses, and verisimilitude of free wild life. 
According to the originality of the de- 
signer, the accessories do, or do not, count 
heavily; and who is there who will say 
that a thoroughly successful habitat 
group, either with or without a painted 
background, is not a work of real art? 
In 1878 Professor Henry A. Ward 
brought to his Rochester establishment a 
really wonderful bird taxidermist. !tIs in- 
adequate to describe 1\lr. Frederic S. Web- 
ster by any smaller term. From 1879 to 


ceived them with outrageous confidence, 
sometimes tinged with contempt, and 
sailed through them with a display of 
cheerfulness, precision, and speed that 
was fairly amazing. His knowledge and 
skill never missed fire. The small skins 
he soaked into disreputable masses of 
wet feathers and bones, mounted them, 
fluffed them up, and wound them, at the 
rate of from four to eight per day, just 
like shelling peas. \Vith larger skins that 
seemed to defy human skill, he was equal- 
ly successful; and if you don't believe me, 
ask Doctor Frederic A. Lucas. 
Now, all this happens to be important 
history, because of the rich fruit that it 
bore in our American museums. Thanks 
to the open-shop spirit created by the un- 
terrified S. A. T. (Society of American 




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Cape pigeons and whale-birds following a ship. 
Brooklyn Institute Museum. 
Designed and mounted by Robert H. Rockwell, background by H. B. Tschudy, 


Taxidermists) eliminating an desire for seums, great, medium, and small, pcr- 
secrecy in methods, l\tlr. Webster taught haps nine out of every tcn of them began 
his processes to a long line of younger to upbuild themselves on foundations of 
men, who practised and passed them "stuffed" birds. I could name at least a 
along during the remainder of their lives. score in evidence. Of an materials for the 
Finany, in 1892, :i\lr. \rebster's methods amateur museum-builder of the earlier 
were enshrined in an abounding book days, birds were most plentiful, cheap, 
caIled "Taxidermy and Zoological Col- and satisfactory. It was the bird taxi- 
lecting," and by Charles Scribner's Sons dermists who were first in the field, and 
were scnt down the corridor of time, for down to 1880 they mounted little else 
the benefit of the museums of the world. than the easy and accommodating skins 
Of all our American zoological mu- of freshly killed specimens. 


26 3 



26.,t l\IASTERPIECES OF I\:\IERICA
 BIRD TAXIDER;\IY 


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The vanished pa
senger-pigcon_ 
United States National :Museum. 
Mounted by Henry Marshall and Nelson R. Wood. 


The mounted group of birds in three 
dimensions, with plenty of accessories 
both real and artificial, and at last a well- 
painted landscape background, is the last 
word in bird taxidermy, It is the supreme 
effort of a skilled and yersatile artist to 
bring beautiful birds and their most pic- 
turesque haunts as close-ups of nature to 
the very finger- 
tips of the pen t- 
up city millions 
who long to go 
afield but cannot. 
Now, thanks to 
the co-operation 
of men and wo- 
men of intelli- 
gence as well as 
means, the best 
of the results 
that have been 
achieved in 
American muse- 
ums are natural, 
artistic, instruc- 
tive, and beauti- 
ful. 
\Vhen you give 
yourself up to the 
illusions that such 
works of art place 
before you, you 
smell the woods 
perfume of the 
Adirondackswith 
the ruffed grouse, 
the pungent resin 
of the Southern 
pine with the 
wild turkey, the aromatic sage-brush 
with the cock-of-the-plains, and you 
hear the surf-beats and the scream of the 
gulls on the bird-bearing cliffs by the sea. 
The first efforts of the Society of Amer- 
ican Taxidermists to promote bird groups 
met with such pronounced discourage- 
ment from the three judges of the Roches- 
ter exhibition that the complete success 
of the idea was postponed from 1880 to 
1887-seven long years. . 
In the spring of 1888 1\lr. l\lorris K. 
Jesup visited the United States National 
Museum, and the writer had the pleasure 
of showing him the groups of bison and 
coyotes that opened the road. His ad- 
miration was generous and undisguised, 
and then and there he declared his in ten- 


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tion "to have groups for the American 
1\luseum." The writer's chief assistant, 
Jenness Richardson, Sr., then fairly in his 
stride as a qualified taxidermist, soon was 
offered the position of chief taxidermist in 
the New York 1\Iuseum, and sorrowfully 
we bade him go and make good. 
In a very short time l\Ir. Richardson 
was at work on 
a series of small- 
bird groups, and 
also the great 
thirty- five-foot- 
long group of 
American bison. 
Jenness Rich- 
ardson, Sr., 
wrought dili- 
gently on that 
pioneer series 
of small-bird 
groups. He col- 
lected all the 
ma terial, he 
mounted all the 
birds, and at 
first he made 
the green-plant 
accessories. 
Eventually, the 
artificial lea ves, 
plants, and flow- 
ers, produced by 
a slow and tedi- 
ous casting proc- 
ess, were made 
by IV1r. and 1\1rs. 
E. S. :.Mogridge. 
The first 
twenty groups produced by 1\1r. Richard- 
son consisted of American song-birds. 
Being of the four-sided type, they were 
without landscape backgrounds. The 
proletariat was delighted with them and 
asked for more. Although those groups 
,vere exquisitely done, the taxidermic work 
involved was not of an exacting kind. It 
was not until 1\1r. Richardson designed 
and mounted his great loon group, show- 
ing the shore and waters of Lake Umba- 
gog, that he struck twelve, and set the pace 
that ever since has been maintained in the 
American 1\1 useum. 
The loon group is a masterpiece, and 
among American bird groups it played 
the same road-opening service that was 
performed for mammals in the National 


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Condors and turkey vultures and a dead elk. 
Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh. 
Designed and mounted by Frederic S. Webster. 


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The California condor. 
Field Museum of Natural History. 
Mounted by Julius Friesser, background by Chas. A. Corwin, 


:265 



266 l\IASTERPIECES OF A:\IERICA:\T BIRD T.-\XIDER
IY 


:Museum, in 1887, by the group of Amer- 
ican bison. 
To-day the American l\luseum displays 
an exceedingly fine collection of large, 
medium, and small bird groups, in agree- 
'able variety. The largest and the most 
notable are those containing" The Loon," 
"Summer Birds of the San Joaquin Val- 
ley," "The '''hite Pelicans," "The Birds 


companionship of the gulls and terns, or, 
better still, the albatrosses, petrels, and 
frigate-birds that elected to sail along 
with his ship? Can we ever forget the 
sea-birds of Puget Sound that acted as 
our escort toward Victoria? 
l\[r. Robert H. Rockwell, of the Brook- 
lyn Institute l\1useum, has commemo- 
rated this charming sea-bird habit in a 



 




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The whooping and sand-hill cranes. 
Field Museum of Natural History. 
Mounted by Chas. Brandler and Julius Friesser, background by Chas. A. Corwin. 


of the Canadian Rockies," "The Ameri- 
can Flamingo," and "The Sea-Birds of 
Bird Rocks," Gulf of St. Lawrence. 
To my mind the American l\luseum 
group entitled "Summer Birds of the 
San Joaquin Valley" is particularly fine 
in artistic qualities, perfectly balanced, 
and thoroughly pleasing. At one glance 
it tells the story of California's most 
lovely valley and the richness of its bird 
life at its most charming season. The 
outdoor effect is perfect and the birds are 
excellently done. Every picture like this 
is calculated to inspire in the beholder a 
love of birds and a desire to protect them 
from slaughter. 
Where is the ocean traveller who has 
not been entertained and charmed by the 


delightful group. The bulwarks and rig- 
ging of a ship, faithfully reproduced, and 
the rolling sea overside, give to his group 
of flying Cape pigeons and whale-birds a 
startling degree of verisimilitude, and we 
salute both the good idea in the design 
and its excellent execution. If this group 
does not make every landsman yearn for 
a sea-voyage, nothing will do so. 1\1r. 
Rockwell's analysis of the attitudes of 
sea-birds in flight is an admirable con- 
tribution. 


So far as we have observed or learned, 
the United States Nationall\Iuseum was 
the first museum of America to begin to 
make habitat groups of mammals and 
birds because species were threatened 



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Bird life at Heron Lake, Minnesota. Close-up showing detail. 
7oological Museum, University of Minnesota. 
Collected and mounted by Jenness Richårdson. Jr. 


with extinction. That was the enacting 
clause of the bison group. 
To-day, out of the habitat bird groups 
in the National 11 useum, I would be 
recreant to my trust if I should fail to 
offer here the group of passenger-pigeons. 
However, not even the total extinction of 
a specics would justify the selection for 
this exhibit of any poor, or even medi- 
ocre, taxidermic work. This group of a 
vanished species stands squarely on its 
own merits. Does it not carry you 
straight back to the magic and mar
elíous 
plates of Audubon's" Birds of America" ? 
Right well would this group have pleased 
that master, had it been made in his day. 
I commend to other American museums 
the desirabilities of this particular group. 
To-day many people are asking: "\\llat 
does a passenger-pigeon look like, any- 
how? " 
In the Carnegie :l\Iuseum at Pittsburgh 
there is a fine bird and mammal group 
that now should be of unusual interest 
to the millions of American sportsmen, 


tourists, and others who know the elk- 
herds of the Yellowstone Park. It is 
Frederic S. \Vebster's flock of condors 
and vultures contemplating a dead elk. 
It suggests with stunning force the steadi- 
ly accumulating tragedy of "the Jack- 
son Hole elk-herd" that every Kovember 
wades through the deep snow. from the 
Park down to the Jackson Hole country, 
only to find barren grazing-grounds. The 
fertile lands of Jackson Yalley are all 
fenced hay-ranches, and the foot-hills, 
once well covered with grass, have been 
grazed bare by herds of cattle. 
The Carnegie :J\Iuseum group is most 
timely, as well as a fine picce of work. 
Look at it, fellow Americans, and remem- 
ber that our wild elk are going, in spite of 
all that is done and attempted to succor 
and to save them. Those elk are a tough 
prohlem. 
The Field .:\Iuseum at Chicago is a 
great institution, and in need of no shower 
bouquets from me. X evcrtheless, it is a 
profound satisfaction to see that along 
2 6 7 



268 
IASTERPIECES OF .Al\IERICA::\T BIRD TAXIDERl\lY 


with its other achievements it is develop- 
ing a series of habitat bird and mammal 
groups on a scale of excellence quite 
worthy of one of the greatest cities of 
America. 
The Field l\fuseum has three large bird 
groups that are particularly superb, I 


exterminated whoopers still find sanc- 
tuary during their breeding-season. 
These three groups naturally suggest 
the question: 'Vhy is it that more of our 
museums do not make more groups of 
these important, spectacular, and vanish- 
ing species of birds? 


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Laysan Island bird group. Rookery of sooty-backed terns. 
Museum of the University of Iowa. 
Collected and mounted by Homer R. Dill and others, under the direction of Professor C. C. Nutting. 


have not seen any in their class that sur- 
pass them. They represent "The Cali- 
fornia Condor," "The 'Vild Turkey," and 
"The 'Vhooping and Sand-hill Cranes." 
Each is an unqualified masterpiece. 
The dramatic composition of the con- 
dor group is very impressive. It is very 
simple in composition, but the magnif- 
icent swoop of the alighting bird is 
thrilling. "The \Vild Turkey" group will 
send thrills throughout the nervous sys- 
tem of every lo\"er of the woods and of the 
wonderful birds still found in some of 
them. \\T e can smell the dead leaves and 
the rich humus. In a moment "The 
Crane" group takes us a way to the 
prairies of Alberta, where a very few un- 


The largest and by far the most spec- 
tacular of all the world's habitat groups 
of birds is to be seen in the museum of the 
University of Iowa, at Iowa City. The 
great Laysan Island bird cyclorama was 
developed because of the vision and enter- 
prise of Professor C. C. Nutting, director, 
and Homer R. Dill, then chief taxider- 
mist, who saw a golden opportunity and 
felt that it was too good to be lost. They 
felt that other bird groups might come, 
even from the ends of the earth, but the 
people of Iowa and the l\Iiddle \Vest 
should be given one grand opportunitt to 
see a star-spangled island in the far-off 
mid-Pacific Ocean, and a sea-bird's para- 
dise, inhabited only by birds. 



l\IASTERPIECES OF A:\IERICA
 BIRD TAXIDERl\IY 269 


Laysan Island floats on the broad practical impossibility to reproduce here 
bosom of the tropical Pacific, 700 miles the entire ensemble. Out of ten sectional 
northwest by north of Honolulu, and to photographs we present three that fairly 
reach it you must go under your own indicate the scope of the work. The 
steam. To it the university sent l\Ir. group occupies about 800 square feet of 
Dill at the head of a competent corps of floor space. The painted background is 
collectors. The undisturbed birds were 138 feet long and 12 feet high. The out- 


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Laysan Island bird group. 
Main rookery of the Laysan albatross. 


studied, and enough specimens for the 
group were collected. The island was 
mapped and photographed, and quanti- 
ties of vegetation were taken and pre- 
served. 
The Laysan cyclorama depicts the 
shores and the hinterland of the island, 
and if any Laysan bird species got away 
unrepresented, we have not yet heard of 
it. The largest, most numerous, and most 
important bird is the albatross. The 
total show of ocean bird life is most im- 
pressive. There is a great array of Lay- 
san albatrosses, gannets, terns, petrels, 
shearwaters, man-o' -war birds, tropic- 
birds, and long-legged shore-birds. The 
varied features of shore and surf and sand- 
dunes all are there; but of course it is a 


side circumference is 138 feet, and the 
visitor's view is from a glass house in the 
centre. The total number of mounted 
birds is about two hundred, representing 25 
species. 
It must be stated here that the Univer- 
sity of Iowa lVluseum contains a remark- 
ably successful "Louisiana Swamp" 
group full of snowy egrets, and groups 
of large mammals such as American bison, 
white-tailed deer, puma, and Atlantic 
walrus. 
For the benefit of many American boys 
who are thinking about taxidermy as a 
career, I am now going to say something 
of particular interest to them. It is this: 
"The longest pole knocks the persim- 
mons, " 



270 .\IASTERPIECES OF L\.
IERICA
 BIRD TAXIDERl\IY 


And Professor Homer R. Dill is the 
only man I ever knew who studied hard 
and worked diligently for two entire 
years, without even a trace of "salary," 
to fit himself to fill a responsible position 
as a taxidermist of the first rank. .A 
friend of his laid out a course for him, and 


fields more good men than I have space 
to name. 
The State of l\1:innesota is famous as 
the home of a great defender of wild life, 
the late Senator Knute Nelson, and for its 
possession of many great marshes and 
lakes that serve as breeding-places for 



 
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Laysan Island bird group. 
South end of main albatross rookery, 


he followed it out in every particular. 
And now mark the sequel: 
1\0 sooner had young Dill completed 
that course, and fitted himself to fill a 
worth-while position, than the University 
of Iowa announced its intention to ap- 
point a chief taxidermist for its museum. 
There were twenty-four applicants, and 
some of them were mighty good men. In 
an open and fair competition, Dill won 
the prize, and made good. Now he is by 
righ t of election "Professor Dill," and 
director of the museum. 
Incidentally, the only educational in- 
stitution in America (so far as known) 
that gives a regular course in taxidermy 
and museology is that same Gniversity 
of Iowa, which has graduated into those 


water-loving birds. Because of this breed- 
ing-ground asset a great museum group to 
display it is very much in order. Natu- 
rally, the best place in which to seek such a 
group is the museum of the University of 
IVIinnesota. 
Now, even under the best conditions, 
a large and truthful marsh group is a 
mighty difficult subject to handle; and so 
is every large swamp group. The danger 
lies in too much vegetation and not 
enough visible bird life. On that rock 
many a good bird group has struck, and 
split wide open. Any group that is 99 
per cent accessories and I per cent birds 
or mammals is not a success. 
For the University of .:.\Iinnesota, Jen- 
ness Richardson, J r., has collected and 



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Summer marsh-birds of Louisiana. 
Colorado Museum of Natural History at Denver. 
Collected and mounted by John D. Figgins. 


made, under the direction of Doctor photograph of a real marsh, made from 
Thomas S. Roberts, the Her
m Lake bird a blind when the birds were at home. 
group; and it is a fine success. The The special purpose of this work is to 
painted background fits perfectly, and the show how marsh-loving birds live in 
picture of it all looks just like a good peace, and in safety from hawks, owls, 


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Sea-birds on the Farallone Islands. 
Museum of the California Academy of Sciences. San Francisco. 
Prepared under the general direction of Doctor Barton Warren Evennann, director. 
Mounted by John Rowley and Paul J. Fair, background by Maurice G. Logan. 


27 1 



272 '1 L\STERPIECES OF Al\1ERICAN BIRD TAXIDER
'lY 


and other vermin, among the friendly cat- 
tails and reeds. 
\Vise birds are these, and lucky, too. 
And we pity the unhappy birds of Oregon 
and other States nearer home whose 
swampy shelter-havens are being madly 
drained and destroved. 
One drawback to the preservation in 
books of fine bird groups of great length 


bird world in the geographical centre of 
the great \Vest. 


The presentation of our exhibits by 
natural geographical progression from 
East to \Vest is logical and fairly neces- 
sary, but it is not wholly satisfactory. It 
lea yes to the last a truly great collection 
of mammal and bird groups, of first-rank 






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California sea-lions. 
Museum of the California Academy of Sciences. 
Mounted by John Rowley, assisted by Paul J. Fair and Joseph P. Herring, background by Worth Ryder. 


is the impossibility of reproducing them. 
For example, consider the truly great and 
beautiful group of "Summer :\larsh- 
Birds of Louisiana" in the Colorado .:\1 u- 
seum of Natural History at Denver. It 
is reeking with roseate spoonbills and 
woodibises, both of them species that 
thrill every bird-lover \\"ho has the good 
fortune to see them in the great outdoors. 
This group is twenty-eight feet long, and 
what it needs is a magazine page with 
a type bed sixteen inches wide-a size 
rather hard to come bv. 
But half a reproduction is better than 
no picture, and as a matter of fact the 
composition of this group is so good that 
it would come near to holding its own on 
a postage-stamp. \Ve are glad to see 
Louisiana thus placed on the map ef the 


importance, to be found in the ::\luseum of 
the California Academy of Sciences, San 
Francisco. Therein will be found a grand 
array of habitat groups representing the 
splendid Pacific fauna from Alaska to San 
Diego, and every American who knows 
his California well knows the mountain, 
valley, and coast-rock faunas that de- 
mand representation. 
I regret that by reason of a mischance 
none of the mammal groups of the Cali- 
fornia Academy were included in my 
previous article in SCRIBNER'S .illAGAZI
E 
for July, 1922. ,As a desirable supplc- 
ment we here present the group of "Cali- 
fornia Sea-Lions" that is in e\rery wav 
worthy to represent the Academy and th
 
Golden State. 
Out of a fairly bewildering array of bird 



LIVE WHILE YOU LIVE 


groups we select without even a moment 
of hesitation the grand and imposing com- 
position of sea-birds, rocks, cliffs, and thun- 
dering surf depicting the famous Farallone 
Islands, just beyond the Golden Gate, 1t 
is the last word in groups of sea-birds, and 
it shows how the bird fauna of mighty 
California ends, on the picturesque Far- 
allones, literally in a blaze of glory. 
OVv'"Íng to various circumstances be- 
yond his control, the taxidermist rarely 
receives from the public that he serves 
the rewards that are due him. The 
painter and the sculptor can sign their 
works, good or bad, and send their names 
rumbling down the ages. Of the admi- 
rable picture or statue the intelligent be- 
holder promptly asks "Who did that?" 
But with taxidermic work it is different. 
It is only one visitor out of every 10,000 
who asks the name of the man whose 
brain and hand evolved it from the raw. 


273 


In the best museums the curators take 
pains to credit the taxidermist on the 
labels; and in America this practice was 
inaugurated in 1883 in the National Mu- 
seum by Doctor G. Brown Goode. 
In all save a very few conspicuous cases 
the salaries of taxidermists in museums 
are much too low. If the pay in appre- 
ciation is small, that in the monthly en- 
velope is still less. For the "versatile 
cuss" whose many-sided genius produces 
a beautiful group that will endure for at 
least two hundred years, there is nothing 
but a pittance of pay, that only just de- 
cently feeds, clothes, and amuses him 
during the weeks or months that the thing 
is actually wrought upon. For the rainy 
day there is next to nothing; and one of 
the saddest sights you can see in respect- 
able toil is a man past sixty who by 
poverty is compelled to go to daily toil in 
a hard and exacting business. 


Live While You Live 


BY LEE RUSSELL 
Anthor of "Thc Crisis in Education," etc. 


T is a noteworthy fact 
that two acute and ob- 
serving foreigners, 
visiting this country at 
periods of time a gen- 
eration apart, should 
have been impressed 
by the same deficiency 
in American lives, and should have sug- 
gested, in the sole address which each de- 
livered, the same remedy. 
Herbert Spencer came here in 1882, 
travelled extensively, met many men of 
note, and observed, with his usual keen- 
ness, the lives and habits of our people. 
Just before his departure he was given a 
complimentary dinner in New York. In 
his address on that occasion he gave his 
impressions of the people of this country, 
and in characteristic fashion admonished 
them to mend their ways. He found, he 
said, an intensity of application and a 
complete absorption in the mere making 
of a living and the piling up of weal th 
such as no organism could stand. \Ve 
VOL. LXXVIII.-20 


had made our lives so one-sided in this 
way that we had neither time nor taste 
for other things, for those matters of cul- 
ture, refinement, contemplation, and rec- 
reation which add so much to the joy 
and beauty and healthfulness of life. So 
he urged us to practise the gospel of re- 
laxation, not only for what it might give 
us in addition to what we had, but also to 
bring about greater efficiency in the busi- 
ness of life. We had had, he thought, 
somewhat more of the gospel of work than 
was good for us. 
A generation later, in 1919, Viscount 
Grey of Fallodon made a similar visit of 
observation to this country. His appar- 
ent object was, in part, to gain such first- 
hand knowledge as would enable him to 
understand us and to interpret us to his 
countrymen. He brought to the task a 
mind no less acute for the purpose than 
that of his distinguished predecessor. 
Though trained in a different school, his 
ability to see into the heart of men and 
things was of a high order, and there can 



274 


LIVE \VRILE YOU LIVE 


be no doubt of his sympathetic attitude. 
Like Spencer, he was here to observe, but 
was persuaded to give one address, that 
before the Harvard Union. 
Of all the subjects on which he might 
have spoken, he chose "Recreation." 
One is led to believe, from the earnestness 
and detail with which it is treated, that 
this selection was made because he 
thought it to be that, of all others, which 
his audience most needed to have pre- 
sented to them. His treatment is wholly 
different from Spencer's, but the basic 
thought is the same. In order to lead an 
efficient life, in order to be able to do our 
best for ourselves and for our country, we 
must be happy in that broad sense of the 
term which is implied in these four 
things which he considers necessary for 
happiness: 
"The first is some moral standard by 
which to guide our actions. The second 
is some satisfactory home life in the form 
of good relations with family or friends. 
The third is some form of work which 
justifies our existence to our country and 
makes us good citizens. The fourth is 
some degree of leisure and the use of it 
in some way that makes us happy." 
I gather that Lord Grey used "happi- 
ness" and " happy" in the wide and 
serious sense one would expect of a man 
who had led a life of service and duty. 
He went on to enlarge on the last point, 
and to show that leisure and the ability 
to use it wisely are essential to a happy 
life. He considered in some detail vari- 
ous forms of recreation; he showed how 
vital is the right use of leisure to both 
happiness and service. He cites Roose- 
velt as a man who, through recreation, 
was able to give his best service to his 
country and to live a happy life. 
Now it is not for nothing that these 
two men, so different in training and tem- 
perament, coming to this country at 
times so far apart, should, in their kindly 
criticism, hit upon the same national de- 
fect. It must be true, :Many of us must 
be so ordering our lives as to fail to make 
the most of our powers. It will, there- 
fore, be worth while to examine some as- 
pects of the case to see where we are in 
error. 
If there is anyone dogma which pre- 
vails in this country to-day it is that 
unrelaxed and unsleeping effort is neces- 


sary to success. It is held that to be a 
really successful lawyer or engineer, mer- 
chant or manufacturer, one must eat and 
sleep, lie down and get up with his busi- 
ness. No function in life may interfere 
with it. The" business luncheon" seems 
to have been devised by the man who 
"feeds his face" the while he concen- 
trates his mind on "doing" his neighbor. 
Even the" quick lunch" takes time, so a 
widely advertised patent food is put up 
in tablet form, to be eaten at the business 
desk itself. Men have telephones at their 
bedsides and may be called up at any 
hour of the night. A surgical operation 
is submitted to only in extremis, because 
of the time which must be lost from work. 
It is true that there have arisen re- 
cently those who are addicted to some 
form of so-called "recreation "-golf, 
fanning-by-proxy, motor trips, or the like. 
These group themselves in two classes. 
If young, the affair is taken up with a 
solemn seriousness, and not infrequently 
for the sake of getting in touch with those 
who may be useful in business. If older, 
it is taken in prescribed doses, like the 
"Deadly Dozen" of physical exercises, 
and is supposed to counteract years of 
bodily misuse in some magical way. 
Both of these groups are regarded by the 
unregenerate majority with some dis- 
trust, as having given up the highest suc- 
cess by allowing something to interfere 
with business. In the main, business is 
held to demand one's complete devotion 
during all the hours of the day and all 
the weeks of the year. The idea under- 
lying this belief, its philosophy, if such 
it can be called, seems to be that work 
and play are incompatible, that a man 
must be so thoroughly absorbed in his 
work as to exclude everything else from 
his existence, While he is young he has 
the idea that a time will come when, 
having accumulated a competency, he 
may retire and spend the rest of his days 
in play. As he gets older he comes gradu- 
ally to realize that his capacity for en- 
joyment has atrophied from lack of use, 
and, in addition, his measure of what con- 
stitutes enough on which to retire has 
changed. When we were boys, my friend 
and I gravely calculated that ten thou- 
sand dollars, invested to give an income 
of five hundred, would be ample to en- 
able us to enjoy life on a small farm we 



LIVE 'VHILE YOU LIVE 


had in mind. My friend at length bought 
a fann for ten thousand dollars, spent 
another ten thousand in stocking it, and 
reckoned that with fifty thousand in- 
vested, he could live on it. When he had 
the fifty thousand he sadly realized that 
he had lost the ability to enjoy the sort 
of life he had hoped to lead on that fann. 
His complete absorption in his business 
had brought about the atrophy of his 
finer faculties. 
This, as I look at it, is the distinctly 
American philosophy of life which Her- 
bert Spencer and Lord Grey saw and de- 
plored. No one can deny that it suc- 
ceeds in doing the thing it sets out to do. 
A man of fair ability who will follow the 
regimen is reasonably sure of a compe- 
tency by the time he is sixty years old. 
He must be willing to pay the price, and 
to accept as the measure of his success 
the prevailing standard of dollars and 
cents. He must play the game with due 
regard to its rules, but he must be ruth- 
less, both to himself and to others. As 
to whether this standard is a true one, 
as to whether the game is worth what it 
costs, either to the individual or to the 
race, there is evidently room for a differ- 
ence of opinion. Our own experience is 
too short for us to judge from it alone, 
and we are too near to be able to see it all 
in true perspective. We must go back to 
our predecessors on this planet to see 
what they have made out of life. 
Able men have led strenuous lives 
throughout all the ages. Wise men have 
pondered on the significance of life with 
no less acuteness than we of to-day. 
\Vhile it is the fashion now to feel that we 
are in aNew Age wherein new measures 
alone are valid, it is only in a superficial 
sense that this is true. Our material prog- 
ress has obscured the fact that the essen- 
tials of life for the individual man are the 
same as they have been for some thou- 
sands of years. If one looks at the vividly 
realistic portrait busts of Roman men and 
women which have come down to us, one 
sees with conviction the same stigmata of 
life which we ourselves bear. Intelli- 
gence, resolution, energy, reflection, sym- 
pathy, tenderness, all are there, Dignity 
and serenity, no less than grief and suffer- 
ing, left their marks on man then as now. 
Those age-old instincts and emotions 
which are strong in us because they were 


275 


strong in our remotest ancestors, still 
rule. We are alive to-day because they 
preserved the race in the past; they will 
be no less essential to its survival in the 
future. It is possible that we may have 
wandered somewhat from the path 
marked out by the development of man- 
kind. There is a current saying which in- 
timates that it is possible to "beat" any 
game devised by man. This may be true 
of man's devices, but the whole history of 
life on the earth is strewn with the wreck- 
age of races which tried to "beat" the 
game of life. 
If there is one thing upon which all 
philosophers agree, even from the re- 
motest times, it is that man's happiness 
and true success depend more on what he 
is than on what he has. The whole noble 
Stoic philosophy of Greece and Rome 
is a varied harping on this one string. 
Socrates said: "How many things there 
are in the world that I do not want!" 
Epictetus divides all things of this world 
into two classes. In the one are things 
over which we have control, what we, 
ourselves, are. In the other are what we 
cannot control, what we possess. All 
his teaching is to the end that his disåple 
may make the most of the fonner, and 
learn to ignore the latter, for he shows 
that the one has true worth, and the 
other only a spurious and counterfeit 
value. That remarkable diary, the" Re- 
flections of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus," 
is one long record of a man's communion 
with himself in the effort to attain a 
greater mastery over what he is, and to 
hold a true notion of the comparative 
worthlessness of what he has. The much- 
misunderstood philosopher, Arthur Scho- 
penhauer, devotes one of his most inter- 
esting essays to the same theme. In the 
delightful volume which Mr. Bailey Saun- 
ders has translated as "The \Visdom of 
Life," Schopenhauer, conceding that most 
of us are here on earth to live our lives out, 
examines into what should be the course 
and attitude of the wise man who would 
make the best of a bad bargain. The 
titles of his chapters are significant: Per- 
sonality, or what a man is; Property, or 
what a man has; Reputation, or a man's 
place in the estimation of others. He 
shows, with his usual wealth of illustra- 
tion, that all enjoyment and use of the 
last two categories depends on the first; 



276 


LIVE \VHILE YOU LIVE 


that what a man is in himself governs the 
use and pleasure he may derive from 
property and position. To take as vio- 
lent an antithesis as possible, even so 
incorrigible an optimist as Sir John Lub- 
bock has to make the same admission, for 
he says in his "Pleasures of Life" : "Hap- 
piness depends more on what is within 
than without us." 
It would be easy to go on and set forth 
many more examples from those superior 
intellects who have in the past reflected 
on the meaning and method of life, but 
these, so diverse in time and place and 
outlook, win serve to give the point of 
view. They seem to show that perhaps 
we, in this country, in our struggle for the 
means may have lost sight of the end. 
We seem to have wandered from the 
straight path pointed out by the wisdom 
and experience of the ages. Perhaps we 
are following a track which earlier explor- 
ers have found leading to disaster. At 
any rate, 1\1r. Spencer and Lord Grey 
think that we should leave it and get back 
to a more rational way. There are many 
thoughtful men among us who are of the 
same opinion, and there is evidence that, 
in a dumb, inarticulate way, most of us 
agree with them. 
We have the vacation habit, but for 
fifty weeks in the year it is held in check. 
We attend exhibitions of sports and games 
in which we take a vicarious part, our 
interest being kept alive by a thinly dis- 
guised commercial propaganda. Our 
automobile trips are passive, a mere whirl 
through regions we know would be beau- 
tiful if we could stop to explore them. 
The automobile and the moving-picture 
theatre seem to have come expressly to 
the call of the tired business man. In 
both he may sit still. In the one he is 
rushed by the scenery, in the other the 
scene is rushed by him. In both cases the 
speed is such as to preclude reflection or 
even thought. But these are not real 
recreations of the spirit. That is what we 
seek, that, and the enrichment of our 
internal life, our power of reflection and 
enjoyment. It is hard to prevent their 
being submerged, either by business or 
by these substitutes for recreation which 
so crowd in on us. 
In order to make the way somewhat 
easier, it will be well at the outset to get 
rid of the fallacy that life can be divided 


into two parts, one all work, the other all 
play. Life is whole and indivisible. It is 
lived for itself by each several one of us, 
and from birth to death, our feelings and 
activities condition all we do. l\Iany a 
feather-headed flapper has thought that, 
somehow, after marriage, she would be a 
different woman. Young men still sow 
wild oats, in the belief that, somehow, 
they can avoid reaping them. It can't be 
done. Even in the cradle, habits and re- 
actions are formed that are never got rid 
of. Many maladjustments in later life 
have been traced back to ideas or obses- 
sions acquired before the age of five yearsc 
There are no emotion-tight compartments 
in the mind. Free intercommunication 
amongst all the phases in which we live- 
rest, work, play, meditation, feeling, ac- 
tion-makes for balance and sanity. We 
may and must select groups of major and 
minor interests, which, when set off 
against one another, with a just emphasis 
on each, produce equilibrium. 
This leads us then to the conscious 
cultivation of our abilities. In theory 
and in practice, in work and in play, we 
must nourish and fertilize those habits 
and reactions which will tend to bring 
forth and develop the latent powers which 
are within us. Reserving a due propor- 
tion of time and energy for the culture 
of enjoyment and appreciation, we may 
so diversify our interests as not to twist 
or warp them in anyone direction. 
Stevenson has said that 


"This World is so full of a number of things, 
I am sure we should all be as happy as kings." 


\Vhile we may have some doubt as to the 
happiness of kings in these days, we 
should all agree that there is so great a 
diversity of delightful things in the world 
that he who cannot interest himself in 
something must have a very dull mind. 
If we begin to expose ourselves to a vari- 
ety of influences, we shall pretty surely 
find some of them affecting us favorably. 
Happily, children are endowed with an 
endless exploratory curiosity which leads 
them to enjoy all sorts of experiments and 
experiences. If they are given half a 
chance they will find, even in the dullest 
city, stimulating possibilities, and in the 
country a multitude of activities open to 
them, all, city and country alike, urging 
on to new and unheard-of searches in tills 



LIVE \VHILE YOU LIVE 


mysterious world, and, especially, to 
trials of their own powers. The whole 
world of books is also open to them. The 
habit of reading is formed on what one 
wants to read. Selection and taste will 
come later, according to capacity and in- 
telligence. 
While in the young the instincts sup- 
ply a sufficient incentive to new reactions 
and diversions, as we grow older these 
become more or less repressed by the con- 
ventions and inhibitions of the class and 
station in life in which we find ourselves. 
Lord Grey laid some stress on the neces- 
sity of planning ahead for the use of our 
leisure. Still more desirable is it, then, 
that we should so plan as to have this 
time for which to prepare. He gives a 
remarkable instance. While President 
Roosevelt was still in office, he was ar- 
ranging for his hunting-trip to Africa, to 
be followed by the tour in Europe. 
Though this was still two years in the fu- 
ture, he had so timed it as to reach Eng- 
land in the spring in order to hear the 
English birds in full song, and wished to 
have some one who could go with him to 
their haunts and tell him their names. 
This Lord Grey was himself able to do, 
and when the time came, fixed on two 
years before, the ex-President of the 
United States, and the secretary of 
state for foreign affairs of the British Em- 
pire, left, the one, the receptions, din- 
ners, and acclaim of that triumphal 
progress, and the other, the onerous 
duties of his office, to spend two days 
alone listening to the bird-songs in which 
both delighted. 
In this day of "efficiency" and "plan- 
ning," one might think that we would 
leave a preconsidered time each day and 
week and year for recreation. But obser- 
vation of one's acquaintance will show 
that few do so plan, and that fewer still 
carry out such plans as are made. I 
commend the example of a busy physi- 
cian, converted to this gospel by the signs 
of overwork, who has steadfastly kept 
one afternoon a week for the needed rec- 
reation. No call, except in case of life 
or death, is allowed to interfere, and the 
result, in his improved condition for work, 
enables him to give to the community he 
serves far more than he takes away. 
The scheme, then, is the :first step, and 
its carrying out the second; when we have 


277 


so arranged our affairs as to have leisure 
it is well to know how to use that time s
 
as to get the most out of it. But in our 
desire for "most," we have to guard 
against the contagious megalomania of 
the time. 11y neighbor counts that holi- 
day lost whose low-descending sun views 
his car less than two hundred miles from 
its starting-point. Parties now" do" the 
whole \Vhite Mountain region in one 
summer day. I find a ten-mile walk 
meets my every need. It is obvious that 
in this each must decide for himself, 
though there are some general principles 
which may guide our choice, and large 
and varied groups of activities among 
which we may select what best pleases us. 
Our most absorbing interests lie in 
those fields which are dominated by the 
primitive instincts. While these are often 
overlain and hidden by the trappings of 
civilization, they still govern the subcon- 
scious mind and reinforce our conscious 
desires and actions. The preservation of 
the individual is one of the strongest of 
our instincts, and around it cluster in- 
numerable functions, often seemingly re- 
mote from the impulse itself. Our inter- 
est in sports and games is one of these. 
Warfare is the ultimate in this direction, 
but all tribes and nations have devised 
substitutes for it in various forms of com- 
petition where man is pitted against man, 
or against the forces of nature, or even 
against himself. The solitary golf-player, 
striving to beat his own best score, is en- 
joying a form of warfare against himself, 
peaceful though he may look to the unen- 
lightened eye; when he is playing with 
another, while the game is the same, the 
interest is keener because of the competi- 
tion. The nearer we come to personal, 
hand-to-hand conflict the greater the ex- 
citement, until, in football and boxing, the 
struggle is almost too fierce to be recrea- 
tion, and may be indulged in only by 
trained men. 
In considering the forms of competitive 
games some will be found to suit the needs 
of each individual, adjusted in their de- 
mands to his physical frame, his age, his 
tastes, and his purse. While strength and 
vigor are desirable, there are many games 
which may be played by those who are 
not strong, and where men of nearly equal 
ability are matched, each may receive 
benefit without overexertion. The avaiI- 



278 


LIVE \VHILE YOU LIVE 


ability for frequent and constant use 
should also be considered. \Vhatever re- 
stricts in this sense is a drawback. Such 
games as can be played only in an elab- 
orate setting, or with a large team of 
players, are, therefore, less desirable than 
those needing simpler means for their 
exercise. 
The instinct of acquisition, the love of 
collecting merely for the sake of accumu- 
lation, is another deep-seated motive, the 
satisfaction of which serves many for 
recreation. If the things collected have a 
wide appeal and universal significance, 
one may have in their study engrossing 
pleasure, as well as the society of others 
similarly interested. A lawyer satisfies 
his acquisitive instinct by collecting fine 
pictures; this opens up the whole domain 
of art, leads him into new fields of litera- 
ture and life, and insures him a relief from 
the strain of his work wherever he may be. 
Hunting and fishing lead us back to our 
primitive ancestors who had to hunt and 
fish in order to live, These sports, and 
their near relative, camping out, are, 
therefore, deeply embedded in our nature, 
and the fascination they have for many 
people makes them among the best forms 
of recreation. They may be followed 
from youth to age, in company or alone, 
and they bring us into close contact with 
nature. One of the most hopeful signs of 
the sanity of our people is the recent in- 
crease of the vogue of camping and tramp- 
ing in the open air. The summer camps 
for boys and girls and the" Scout" move- 
ment, as well, are giving the coming gener- 
ation a taste for out-of-doors which will 
be of great value to them as they grow up. 
The disadvantage of these sports is that 
they can be indulged in only at long in- 
tervals and often only at much expense. 
I know a clergyman, however, who took 
his tent out to a secluded field or wood 
and enjoyed twenty-four hours of camp- 
ing each week during the summer. 
\Vhatever sport one follows, it must 
not be overlooked that one will get much 
joy from the planning of trips and the in- 
vention and making of devices during the 
closed season. The care of guns and fish- 
ing-tackle is a great delight in winter. My 
father and I once spent much time in in- 
venting a portable camp-stove. Like 
Thoreau's wood-pile at Walden, it warmed 
us twice: first while we were devising its 


many perfections and adjustments, and 
again when we built a fire in it in camp. 
Lord Grey tells us that so great is his en- 
joyment of the sport that he spends much 
time during the closed season in fishing 
favorite pools in his imagination. 
The occupations of our leisure must be 
interesting or capable of becoming so on 
cultivation. They should suit our tastes 
and genius, and should be such that physi- 
cal disabilities will not be likely to inter- 
fere too much with their enjoyment. De- 
fective sight would be a bar to some forms 
of sport, deafness to others, but many 
may be found which can be followed in 
spite of these, or worse, defects. Henry 
Fawcett, the celebrated English econo- 
mist and statesman, though accidentally 
blinded at twenty-five, continued to row, 
skate, tramp, and even to fish, during the 
rest of his life. 
It is of some advantage if we can select 
for our play such pursuits as are comple- 
mentary to our work. If we are employed 
indoors, we should get out; if rigid atten- 
tion is necessary in our work, our play 
may be of a go-as-you-please sort. If our 
business deals much with other people, 
we can enjoy solitude and reflection; if 
we work alone, then we may like better to 
play in company. 
Some of our recreation may well have 
cultural possibilities which can be ex- 
plored and enlarged. A busy housewife 
enjoys her flower-garden, which she culti- 
vates with her own hands. She discovers 
that there are several elaborate arts in- 
volved in getting a suitable combination 
of colors and fonns, in filling the space at 
her disposal so as to give æsthetic pleasure 
and make it hannonize with its sur- 
roundings, and in securing a succession of 
pleasing pictures throughout the growing 
season. A merchant takes up amateur 
photography. Not all photographs are 
pictures; he wants to know what makes 
the difference. This leads him to the 
study of art and artists. He learns that 
he must understand nature in all her 
moods if he would represent her with 
truth and feeling. He must know the 
processes he works in, and this means the 
study of physics and chemistry. Much of 
the charm of a landscape is due to the 
play of light and shade, the effects of 
cloud and mist, and this brings him to 
weather and atmospheric phenomena. 



LIVE WHILE YOU LIVE 


His whole horizon and outlook are broad- 
ened, events all about him which he had 
hardly even sensed before take on a new 
meaning, and he sees endless vistas of 
future interests and cultivation. 
Two forms of recreation are of almost 
universal appeal. One is the observation 
and appreciation of nature and the other 
the reading of books. They are availa- 
ble to youth or to age, to the poor as well 
as to the rich, at any season of the year, 
and for periods as long or as short as de- 
sired. Both present so great a variety 
that all tastes and fancies may be met. 
In these days of public libraries one may 
pursue any subject which has ever occu- 
pied men's thoughts and be supplied, 
free of all cost, with the material for his 
occupation or amusement. The resident 
in the remote country may have books 
sent to him by mail, and, grave or gay, 
the library is eager to satisfy his wants. 
Even if it is the study of life through those 
counterfeit presentments we call novels, 
the library is ready to give him the im- 
aginative literature of all ages and all 
tongues. 
When we think of the manifold forms 
in which nature appeals to us on every 
hand, it is remarkable that we pay so 
little heed to her call. From the sky 
above to the waters beneath she is teem- 
ing with beauties and mysteries. All 
times and seasons have their charm and 
their variety. Yet, for the most part, 
we pass through them untouched and un- 
moved. 


"The \Vorld is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our 
powers, 
Little we see in Nature that is ours," 


is as true now as it was in \V ordsworth's 
day. Knowledge of nature is wider and 
deeper than ever before, but love does not 
come of mere knowledge. There must be 
an inner and more emotional harmony for 
true love, that deeper appreciation which 
transcends knowledge. To some this 
comes by natural indination, but if not, 
it is still a taste capable of cultivation. 
All of us have traces of such feelings, 
handed down by heredity. These rarely 
fail to develop, under encouragement, 
into vigorous interests, ready to become 
absorbing motives of study or diversion. 

Iany valuable discoveries have origi- 


279 


nated in this way, through the play of 
some inquiring mind. Darwin, turning 
to the observation of earthworms as a re- 
lief from hard study, showed their un- 
suspected value to mankind, while his 
account of their habits proved to be the 
most popular of his many books. The 
memoirs of Darwin's cousin, Francis 
Galton, are filled with accounts of just 
such recreative studies. He spent much 
of his life in devising instruments, meth- 
ods, and investigations, many of which 
have proved to be of great value and wide- 
spread use. The study of stars by ama- 
teurs has added much to our knowledge 
of the universe. The clouds have given 
me an always-ready field of observation 
and interest for many years. They never 
cease to present problems from day to 
day and from year to year, assuring me 
that so long as I can see I shall be able 
to uplift both bodily and mental vision 
above the earth and its cares. In photo- 
graphing the clouds, delicate physical 
problems had to be solved. By making a 
collection of prints and lantern-slides of 
their varied forms, I have been able to 
give pleasure to many who might other- 
wise have failed to see their exquisite 
beauty. 
There is, in addition to the joy of ac- 
tual contact with nature, the pleasure of 
reading what has been written on the sub- 
ject. Many lovers of nature have been 
able to express what they saw and felt in 
a form which has placed their writings in 
our permanent literature. Poetry and 
prose alike have owed their inspiration to 
her. Great minds of all races and times 
have celebrated their joy in the stars and 
the sea, the clouds, the earth, the birds 
that fly, the winds that blow, and the 
plants that bloom. Whatever our mood, 
whether we need consolation or cheer, the 
literature of nature will meet our every 
want. 
When all is said, however, reading is, 
after all, but a passive joy. Second- 
hand knowledge is but a pale shadow of 
first-hand participation in the event. 
There is more delight in the discovery of 
what is new to us, even though it may be 
old to the world. The beauty of nature is 
always with us, it is varied and diversified 
beyond anything else we know, it re- 
sponds to all that is within us. City or 
country, peak. or valley, wood or prairie, 



280 


\VENT\VORTH'S MASTERPIECE 


none can fail to charm the eye and divert 
the contemplative mind. 
This, then, is my plea. Let us cultivate 
our leisure. We have been, and still are, 
a nation of furious workers. Leisure has 
been so rare and even unwelcome among 
us that we have hardly thought of pro- 
viding for it. The experience of other 


peoples has shown the necessity of relaxa- 
tion and diversion. The bow that is al- 
ways bent loses its elasticity. In the 
strenuous future that is before us we wish 
to do our part in the work of the world. 
We know how to work. Let us learn how 
to play. Then shall we Live While JVe 
Live. 


Wentworth's Masterpiece 
BY LOUIS DODGE 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. SCaTI' WILLIAMS 


(A poor young man writes a great play. A millionaire offers to buy it in order to produce it in 
his own name.-one of the Ten Syllogisms in "Plots and Personalities," by Slosson and Downey.) 


I 


" 


C!' UT I haven't any other 
interests," snapped 
the invalid, glaring at 
the man who sat op- 
posite him regarding 
him with calm ap- 
C!' praisal. " \Vhat could 
I be interested in now, 
after giving my whole life to steel and 
oil and transportation? I have never 
thought of anything else. I don't know 
anything else. They've been enough- 
until that damned stroke came. I tell 
you-" 
"There, there," interposed the other 
man soothingly. " I know what you 
would tell me. Unfortunately, the time 
has come when I must tell you certain 
things-if you'll permit me, and if we're 
to get you on your feet again. It won't be 
difficult. \Ve've simply got to get your 
thoughts into a new channel, away from 
the stress and excitement that have come 
near to wrecking you." 
"Very well; what do you suggest?" 
The question was put not with the pee- 
vishness of an invalid, but with the barbed 
contempt of a sceptic. 
Doctor Endicott moved to the window 
and looked down into the deep cavern 
where the city moved to and fro, pigmy 
figures whose comings and goings seemed 
meaningless. The whole world was a lit- 
tle ill, he thought, and he got no inspira- 


'!li 



 
 B II 
 

: -
 


C!' 


tion from looking down on the aimless 
crowds. He turned and glanced at the 
almost noiseless enamelled clock on his 
mantel. The hour of three had come, and 
he remembered that he had an appoint- 
ment at that hour. And yet he could not 
dismiss the great financier before him un- 
til he had induced in him a more hopeful 
frame of mind. The man wasn't really 
destroyed-yet. He might beat back to 
health and strength if he could be brought 
to rational ways of thinking and living. 
"I've been trying to think of the best 
thing to suggest," he said placidly. 
"There are a number of things-" 
He was interrupted by a discreet knock 
at his door; not the door opening to his 
waiting-room, where a miscellaneous lot 
of men and women were always stationed, 
drearily waiting to speak to him, but the 
door to an anteroom. He arose and 
opened the door a few inches. 
His assistant's face was visible. "That 
young Wentworth has come," announced 
the assistant. " You'll remember that 
you consented-" 
The doctor, unperturbed, replied quiet- 
ly: "Tell him I'll see him in a minute- 
and admit him this way." And then sud- 
denly his eyes were lit with a peculiar fire 
which imparted a mysterious transforma- 
tion to his immobile countenance. 
He turned again to Hawking, the in- 
valid financier. "How," he inquired with 
a faint smile, "would you like to write a 
play?" 



WENTWORTH'S MASTERPIECE 


281 


His famous patient bristled with scorn 
ommon du
t. He has lost his fight; he 
and impatience. "Why not suggest that IS slowly dyIng. I have interested myself 
I become a prima donna?" he retorted in in him at the request of one of his in- 
his harsh, unsparing voice. structors, a former classmate of mine. 


/' 


:r (
/Tú77/h
 
 


\ 


I 
, 
I;':
 J 
I 
I',. 

I ' 
,11.', 


\' 
\ 
, 


,,!, 


-- .-. 
.;.
 


"He too has been burning the candle at both ends." 


"Let me explain," said the doctor. 
"There is a youth outside waiting to see 
me. He will come into this room when 
you are gone. He will sit in that chair you 
now occupy. He will look at me appeal- 
ingly for that which I cannot give him. 
He wishes to live. He is doomed to die. 
His fight will be over in a year-two years 
at the most. He is a pauper, and he is a 
genius. " 
"A pauper, and comes to see you?" 
There was a taunt in the magnate's voice. 
,. Yes. He has been a student in the 
university, where he has been working his 
way through by odd jobs-odd in more 
senses than one. He too has been burn- 
ing the candle at both ends. His mind is 
.like a divine flame, but his body is poor 


The instructor showed me a play the boy 
had written, and in my moments of re- 
laxation I have read the play. I used to 
take an active interest in such things, and 
I can affirm-with his instructor-that 
the play is a masterpiece, a piece destined 
to win immortality. Unfortunately, the 
author will not live to enjoy his fame; he'll 
probably never see his play produced." 
"Very well," said Hawking, "but 
what's that got to do with me?" 
The doctor fixed his gaze upon space 
and his eyes were kindled again with the 
strange, almost malign, light which had 
come into them a moment earlier. " You 
might buy this play," he said. 
"Buy it?" 
"And affix your name to it, and have it 



282 


WENT\VORTH'S MASTERPIECE 


produced. It would be an interesting 
experiment for you. It would bring you 
into contact with a group of persons who 
know nothing of oil and transportation- 
but who know other things. It would di- 
vert you. It might prove to be the very 
thing you need." 
"Yes, and have the instructor-you 
mentioned an instructor-come forward 
at the psychological moment, as he would 
call it, and proclaim the real author's 
name and denounce me as an impostor." 
"The instructor, I regret to say, was 
the victim of an automobile accident only 
a week ago. You may have read of it in 
the newspapers-a tragic case. He was 
killed instantly." 
"But there must be others who know 
of this-this immortal masterpiece." 
"No. The youth has made a profound 
secret of his great work, producing it, 
quite appropriately, in a garret, burning 
what is known as midnight oil. It is not 
identical with the oil of commerce." 
Hawking's face became a study. Hehad 
been trained in a school wherein men take 
what they want, without caring too much 
about means and methods, so long as the 
corporation lawyer set up no difficulties. 
He did not know himself as an unscrupu- 
lous man, but only as a.. successful man. 
" And you think it could be arranged?" 
he asked. In his heart he had long de- 
plored the fact that he was known only as 
a man of money and of the money world, 
never as a figure of moment in the great 
and vague other world which hummed 
about him. 
"By discreet management-yes. Let 
us see." 
The doctor went to that anteroom door 
and opened it. An instant later he 
stepped back to make way for a youth 
who timorously entered the room. 
So for the first time they confronted 
each other-the man who thought in 
terms of metal and dividends, the youth 
who thought in terms of lofty images. 
Of the two, the youth was by far the 
more sadly in need of a physician's care. 
He was a mere wraith of a human being, 
a pallid-faced creature with stooped, nar- 
row shoulders, and dishevelled hair which 
swept away from eyes that were as the 
vent for an agitated flame. 
"Sit down," said the doctor softly, in- 
dica ting a chair. 


The youth found the chair with his 
hand, as if he could not trust his vision- 
seeing eyes, and slipped into it with a 
sigh. 
"What ails the young man?" asked the 
financier, his lips a little pursed, his voice 
rasping, his eyes passing from a swift and 
careless scrutiny of the youth to the 
doctor. 
The doctor smiled with an effect of 
condescending patience. He began lei- 
surely, philosophically: "We do not al- 
ways know precisely what ails men and 
women. It was a stupid device-the 
naming of diseases. The human body 
. . . it is like a cup, holding a certain 
amount of life. It is full, it is half-full, 
it is empty. An empty cup can be refilled 
occasionally, but there's no definite rule 
for refilling it. We physicians try this 
drug and that-and we talk a little." His 
smile deepened. "This youth here," he 
continued, "has used up all he had of a 
certain kind of life. His only hope now is 
to discover that he has some other kind of 
life. Can he discover it? Can I help him 
to discover it? That is now our question." 
"But you said-" began Hawking 
sharply; and Endicott checked him with 
a cautioning hand. 
"We have made no secret," said the 
doctor to Wentworth, " that you are 
steadily failing and that nothing but a 
miracle can save you. Fortunately, this 
gentleman here may be the means of 
bringing this miracle about." 
The youth turned challenging eyes 
upon the magnate. Something in the 
famous man's very presence chilled and 
antagonized him. He flung his head back 
with a gesture of intolerant pride. Hawk- 
ing, compressing his lips with instinctive 
antipathy, turned from him to the doctor. 
"I have informed you," said the doctor, 
addressing the student, "that you must 
get away from your studies-knowing 
very well that you could scarcely do so. 
You obey your nature when you become 
the slave of your attic, your books, your 
classrooms-and we have never com- 
bated nature very successfully. But a 
new way out occurs to me. If you could 
travel the world over, entering the real 
atmosphere which is only reflected in your 
books, you might find your health again. 
I mean this: you need the open air and 
exercisec You need to stand, to walk up- 



WENTWORTH'S MASTERPIECE 


right-to fill your cup again. I can imag- 
ine you taking up the trail of Odysseus, of 
Philip of Macedon, of Alexander the 
Great, of Herodotus-yes, and of Gau- 
tama and Confucius and Mohammed and 
Moses and Jesus. I can see you listening 
to the hum of a bee where Sidon stood. I 
can picture you strolling beside Eastern 
seas where the ancient galleys moved. 
Alexandria would lie in your path: I won- 
der if the old museum-the temple dedi- 
cated to the muses-still stands. And I 
can see you coming home at last a well 
man. I have pointed out to you your 
only chance." 
Wentworth thrust out a lip of scorn. He 
waited, his whole presence vibrating an- 
tagonism, for the end of this fantastic jest. 
"This gentleman here," continued the 
doctor, "has ample means; and"-he 
lowered his voice discreetly and did not 
quite cease to smile-" I think perhaps he 
would be willing to buy a play. He, too, 
desires to refill his cup." 
Wentworth caught his breath; and 
glancing alertly from one of the men in the 
room to the other, he grasped the situation 
in full. He had the gift of visioning 
things, and, besides, there was a tell-tale 
boldness in the eyes he encountered. 
"Perhaps," repeated the doctor, "he 
would be willing to buy a certain play that 
you and I know of. Outright, I mean. I 
am sure he would wish to pay a generous 
price. Such an arrangement would mean, 
I am aware, a sacrifice on your part; but 
when life itself is in the balance-" 
Wentworth was making an heroic ef- 
fort to control himself. He was wringing 
his hands slowly and looking at the floor. 
At length he lifted his eyes and looked 
only at the doctor. "Who is this gentle- 
man?" he demanded in a weak voice. 
"Ah-" began the doctor; but the 
magnate broke in sharply. 
"Hawking," he said; "Hawking of 
\Vall Street, of the oil world, of the rail- 
roads-of a million press despatches." 
The student now stared at him incred- 
ulously. This little man, this poor wreck 
of a man, this the man of millions known 
to all the world? 
"I'm hiding behind nothing," con- 
tinued the magnate. "I'm trying to get 
back my health, just as you are. I need a 
change, the same as you. Doctor Endi- 
cott has spoken to me of a certain play. 


283 


I'm willing to buy that play. But I want 
no silly misunderstanding. It's no new 
thing-and no disgrace-for men to buy 
and sell labor , to buy and sell the product 
of human brains. I've done that all my 
life. It's not my idea to win fame; I've 
no childish delusions. I'm not looking- 
just now-for dividends. But if I can get 
into the life of Broadway and into the 
circles of men I've never met before . . . 
well, Doctor Endicott here says that's 
what I need. And so I need a play. I'm 
willing to buy if I can find a man who 
wants to sell. Your play will answer if 
you care to accept a price for it." 
\Ventworth stared at the two men in- 
credulously. It was a monstrous thing 
they were proposing-he did not lose 
sight of that fact, despite the doctor's 
ambiguous smile and the magnate's suc- 
cinct and plausible speech. 
"What price?" he asked at length, his 
voice breaking over the words. 
"Fifty thousand dollars!" said Hawk- 
ing-and brought his lips together in a 
straight line. 
"Fifty thousand-" echoed Went- 
worth, and broke off. His face was like 
the face of a man who staggers, perishing, 
out of a desert, and falls in the shadow of 
a fountain. 
"Half of that is for your play," con- 
tinued Hawking sharply, "and the other 
half will pay you to keep my secret." 
\Ventworth gazed at him curiously; and 
presently he said, through dry lips: "The 
whole is the price of the play. I keep your 
secret without being bribed." 


II 


THE great Delando, most resourceful of 
the Broadway producers, put down the 
last act of "The Republic" and lifted his 
keen glance to the play-broker who sat 
opposite him. 
"It will do very well," he said. "I 
want it." 
"I was confident you'd see it," replied 
the smiling play-broker. 
Delando fell into one of his swift, brief 
muses from which he always emerged 
with a more powerful grip upon his prob- 
lems. "Of course," he said presently, 
"Hawking didn't write it." 
"That had occurred to me, too," re- 
plied Holland, the play-broker, "yet I 



284 


\VENT\VORTH'S MASTERPIECE 


don't know. I suppose the making of 
vast fortunes is the most dramatic phe- 
nomenon in our American life-and in 
that sense Hawking certainly has been 
identified with great dramatic moments. 
I don't know what his early career was- 
and when you lack that information it's 
never safe to say what a man is." 
"Of course it doesn't matter to me 
whether he wrote it or simply bought it," 
said Delando. He turned the manuscript 
over in his hands with a curious air. 
"This copy," he said, "hasn't been done 
by a writer. It has all the eannarks of a 
commercial typist: expensive paper, and 
the rigid uniformity of an expert who 
writes without emotional ups and downs; 
a crude mistake in spelling here and there, 
and no patient and labored alterations. 
Hawking has perhaps had the original 
copied in his office-as a method of keep- 
ing the author's name safely hid. But 
all that's none of our affair. No matter 
how he acquired it, it's no doubt his own 
property now." 
"That, certainly, states the case in 
full," said Holland. 
Delando sat a moment later in a man- 
ner of pregnant repose; then suddenly he 
assumed a brisk, practical air. CI Of 
course," he said, "it will have to be taken 
all apart and put together again." 
Holland knew much about the manner 
in which plays are produced-how, often, 
they are actually evolved in the hands of 
a stage-manager and during the processes 
of rehearsal. He waited undisturbed for 
the uncanny mind of Delando to reveal 
itself further. 
CI It will want a different title, certainly 
-something to attract attention. 'The 
Republic' would be a fatal handicap. A 
phrase describing the character of this 
woman Olympias, a tiger-cat if there ever 
was one. Ah-there we have the real 
title: 'The Tiger-Cat.' " 
Holland nodded, musing, beginning to 
smile. 
Delando abruptly demanded: "Where 
do you suppose a man like Hawking- 
supposing that he wrote this thing-got 
all these names-the people in the story 
-with that sort of Biblical flavor?" 
"A classical flavor," amended the play- 
broker. 
CI It's all the same. We must change 
the names. And you can see the author 


had no idea of the proper business to get 
his situations over. He's provided little 
more than just a skeletonc But holy 
smoke I-what a skeleton! It can be 
given a modern setting-the whole thing 
translated into terms of modern life. It 
ought to knock 'em cold!" He fell upon 
the manuscript again, turning the sheets 
eagerly. 
"His idea-Hawking's-I forgot to 
mention it before, is to have the thing 
produced anonymously, in a manner, and 
have the press-agents circulate the secret 
everywhere that it is his. He asked me 
if that could be managed, and I said it 
could-that I thought it might be a very 
good idea. His part would be neither to 
deny nor affirm that he had written the 
play, but to smile mysteriously when the 
question was raised." 
"That would be good business," said 
Delando decisively. "And he'd agree- 
Hawking-to our whipping the thing 
into shape? Do you suppose he'd do 
that? " 
"I think so. He seems curiously cold 
about the affair; he admits frankly that 
he wants to go into it as a diversion. 
He's had a breakdown of some sort, and 
his physician has prescribed the usual 
thing: diversion, getting away from his 
job-that sort of thing. I don't believe 
he'd bother you when it came to details. 
No, my idea is that you could handle him 
easily enoughc" 


III 


"THE TIGER-CAT" was produced on 
Broadway in November. A stupendous 
production had been made; it was widely 
heralded that a fortune had been ex- 
pended alone upon the scenic investiturec 
The most famous builders and painters 
known to modern stage-craft had been 
employed and had achieved new heights 
of magnificence. 
A woman hitherto unknown to the 
stage, but of commanding beauty and 
social eminence, the central figure in the 
latest divorce suit of international inter- 
est, had been persuaded to create the 
title-rôle. It was whispered-by means 
of every newspaper in town-that one of 
the gowns she would wear represented the 
last word in audacity and cunning. 
A ballet of girls averaging sixteen years 
of age-a score in number-had been 



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A spot-light was th 
rown on the b 
ox.-Page 286. 


2 8 5 



286 


WENTWORTH'S MASTERPIECE 


advertised as supplying one of the high 
pictorial moments of the drama. 
The promise was made that the mirror 
would be held up to life in the metropolis 
as it had never been before in the history 
of the American theatre. 
The best press-agents to be obtained 
had been engaged, and they had done 
their work to perfection. When the cur- 
tain arose for the first time on the first 
act of "The Tiger-Cat," it was safe to 
assert that the greatest success-or the 
greatest failure--ever known to Broadway 
had been launched. 
. . . At the end of the third act a faint, 
uncertain cry-rapidly taking purpose- 
ful, organized form-went up throughout 
the packed theatre: 
" Author! Author!" 
There was no response. 
Again the call: "Author! Author !"" 
And then the setting aside of restraint, 
and "Hawking! Hawking!" was the cry. 
Still no direct response; but as if by 
prearrangement a number of persons in 
one of the lower boxes melted into the 
background; a spot-light was thrown on 
the box; and there in the fierce light sat, 
or crouched, a harsh-visaged old man 
whose brows twitched with an apelike 
puzzlement, whose eyes harbored a 
strange shyness, whose lips drew together 
in a thin, defiant line. And then the 
searching light faded. 
IV 
Two years later Hawking, the magnate, 
was back in his old place, his firm, re- 
juvenated hand on the helm of the ship of 
oil and steel and transportation. He was 
a well man. Doctor Endicott sprang to 
new heights of fame because he had re- 
stored his famous patient from a condi- 
tion of complete collapse to perfect health. 
But intimate associates of Hawking per- 
ceived that he was a new Hawking. He 
had been a homespun, simple man in near- 
ly all his relationships in other days; now 
he regarded mankind not merely as pliable 
working material but as creatures to be 
despised. Added to the old egotism there 
was now the quality of bitter cynicism. 
The play had been an unprecedented 
success. It had only just completed a 
run of two years on Broadway. A minor 
actress had been given the leading rôle 
and the production had gone on the road. 


Out of his royalties Hawking had made a 
great deal more than he had paid for the 
play; he was certain to make as much more. 
But he had been brought into contact 
with what he conceived to be the intel- 
lectual, the artistic, phases of life, and he 
had not found them to his liking. He had 
always vaguely believed that there was 
something higher than the life he had 
known. He had had a sort of faith to 
sustain him, an anchor to hold to, a hope 
that in the future he might rise to a higher 
plane in the scale of human life. But this, 
as he now perceived, had been a delusion, 
He had gone into strange places, into 
the life of Bohemianism, into the circles of 
art and culture-or at least he believed 
this to be true-and he had come away 
from these places and circles with a re- 
lentless contempt for them. He had been 
confronted and followed by crowds of 
persons who began by bewildering and 
annoying him, and who ended by driving 
him half frantic by their poses, their af- 
fectations, their lofty pretenses, their 
shameless idleness-in brief, by their es- 
sential unreality. He, who had been ac- 
customed to a world where shams were 
weeded out swiftly, had gone down into a 
sphere where there was nothing but shams. 
He had gone back to his own world, to as- 
sociatewithmen who spoke crisply, who re- 
quired watching, no doubt; who were often 
rutWess, but who were at least genuine, 
who knew what they were trying to do, 
who did not clothe life in silly mysteries. 
V 
WENTWORTH, the student, did not die. 
He disembarked at San Francisco, re- 
turning to his native land after a lei- 
surely journey around the world, on the 
very night the New York run of "The 
Tiger-Cat" ended. 
For him, indeed, a miracle had been 
wrought. He had regained his health- 
had filled his cup again-and he had de- 
veloped from a student with a single am- 
bition, an obsession, into a man with a 
sane sense of balance and proportion. 
He had discovered that there are other 
things in the world than books; that 
books, far from being the most important 
thing in relation to men, were in fact one 
of the least important, a mere reflection 
of the things that count. He had no 
longer the desire to spend his energy upon 



\VENT\VORTH'S MASTERPIECE 


written and printed words, but to read 
and know the hearts of living men. 
At Benares he had associated for weeks 
with a quiet American traveller of obvi- 
ous means. \Vhen they had parted, the 
traveller had asked \Ventworth if he 
would care to accept a post at the head of 
the English department of a Western col- 
lege in America, and Wentworth, en- 
raptured by the thought, had declared 
that it would delight him to do so. 
Months later, at Kobe, he had received 
his official appointment to the post, with 
a request that he return to America and 
begin his duties. 
It should be said in passing that he had 
not disposed of even one of the fifty bonds 
Hawking had paid over to him. The in- 
terest on them alone had provided him 
with all he needed, with an actual em- 
barrassment of riches. He had lived 
simply, which is to say that he had lived 
wisely, a full life. 
At the end of his first year abroad he 
had written a brief letter to Doctor Endi- 
cott to say that his health had been re- 
stored. He had received a reply from the 
doctor, who congratulated him upon his 
recovery, and added: " You will be glad 
to know that the play, which has been 
produced under the title of 'The Tiger- 
Cat,' has been a very great success." 
And he had added: "I regret to say that 
a number of essential alterations were 
thought to be advisable." 
Arriving in San Francisco, he had only 
one immediate aim before reporting to 
his new employers, the governors of the 
college. This was to return to New York, 
to greet those of his old friends who might 
yet be there, including Doctor Endicott. 
He also wished to call on Hawking, the 
magnate, to thank him for restoring his 
life-though this visit, he reflected, would 
have to be made in secret. 
In Chicago he rested for a day and night; 
and there, with a chance acquaintance, he 
left his lodging-place for a walle It was 
November; the darkness had fallen early, 
and there was an area of floating mist 
about the street-lamps. The temperature 
was falling slowly, and crowds of men and 
women hurried to and fro, regardless of 
one another, along the wet streets. 
\\Tentworth and his companion came 
abruptly into a region of ornate illumi- 
nations; and stepping outside the march- 


287 


ing throng, Wentworth looked up to 
where the legend "The Tiger-Cat" was 
blazoned against the night sky. 
"Let's go in," he said, with an almost 
compelling force in his tone, and he led 
the way. 
His play! The work of his own brain 
and emotions, here at hand! He felt sud- 
denly weak, unstrung; he shivered as 
from cold. His hands were trembling as 
he stopped at the window and paid for 
tickets; and then he proceeded, like a man 
in a dream, through the theatre lobby. 
As he passed from the bright light of 
the lobby into the hushed obscurity of the 
interior, a hundred bitter-sweet attic 
nights came back to him vividly, and he 
perceived as from a remote height the 
student he had formerly been, writing his 
life away, catching a glorious phantom 
and making it real. He saw the little 
table and the chair and the narrow bed- 
yes, and the sputtering gas-jet against the 
wall, and the blistered wall-paper. He re- 
membered how the dawns came-too soon, 
too soon I-and the chimney-pots among 
their nameless débris emerged from the 
gray obscurity outside his attic window. 
And now his play, the fruit of his deep 
travail, the precious gift he had wrested 
from the valley of the shadow, was to be 
set before his eyes. 
Standing-room in the gallery was all he 
had been able to obtain; but a moment 
later he felt that he was standing very 
close to paradise, there in that high place 
where he was warm and sheltered, where 
he caught the spell of the hooded lights 
and of the mysterious mass of men and 
women whose inaudible voices merged in 
a peaceful murmur. 
And then the incredibly beautiful music 
of the orchestra. 


VI 
THREE hours later, reeling with despair, 
with fury, he was down on the sidewalk 
again, plodding through the cold mist. 
" Not ill, are you?" asked his companion. 
"No-yes-that is, I-the air in there 
was horrible, wasn't it?" 
"Yes, but not so bad as the play." 
"No, not so bad as the play, certainly." 
Buffeted by the wind, he plodded on a 
few steps; and abruptly he stopped and 
clutched his companion's sleeve. " You 
see, it was a travesty, an unspeakable 



288 


WENTWORTH'S MASTERPIECE 


travesty," he shouted; "a thing of gross 
vulgarity and cheap devices. But reflect 
a minute. Suppose it had had its setting 
back in the centuries before the Christian 
era-in Rome, let us say. Try to picture 
it if it had been done this way: the 
woman's name is Olympias-not Olivia. 
She is the queenly matron of another age 
-an age darker than the Dark Ages. 
Her son is Alexander the Great-and not 
that Wall Street vulgarian with those im- 
possible, absurd diamonds in his shirt. 
Her husband is Philip of Macedon in- 
stead of that up-State herder with his 
nasal Yankee dialect of a purely theatrical 
conception and tradition. And Olympias 
possesses a genuine mystical strain, drawn 
from Egyptian influences, which appears 
in her worship of serpents. You must 
think of that instead of that indecent 
modern type-that Olivia-keeping ser- 
pents about her as a mere modern fad. 
And instead of the elegance of a River- 
side Drive residence, you must think of 
the barbaric splendor of Roman arenas 
and of the chaste glory of temples. You 
can see what they've done all the way 
through; they've hired clerical hacks to 
write snappy lines. You can hear the 
producer saying: A few snappy lines herel 
Great heavens!" He released his com- 
p:mion's sleeve and brought his hands to- 
gether sharply. 
He heard an abashed voice say: "Let 
us walk on." He realized that he had 
been attracting attention. But he cried 
out: "Just a minute "-and he seized his 
companion's sleeve again. "And most 
important of all," he continued, "you 
must imagine a different meaning showing 
through the whole and coming out in the 
end; the great truth that material splen- 
dor and even intellectual power must 
come to the dust if they are not upborne 
by a spiritual foundation. That's the 
message! Yet that horrible, perverted 
thing back there took quite a different 
turn. Don't you see that I'm right? Oh, 
I don't mean to ask if you believe in the 
power of the spirit, but I only mean to 
ask if you don't think such an ideg has 
true dramatic value?" 
His companion suddenly laughed, and 
the sound of his laughter rose above the 
hum of the street. It was not two men 
quarrelling, after all-so the passers-by 
concluded. One of them was laughing. 


Laughter is the shining shaft with 
which man overturns the angels. W ent- 
worth, suddenly aroused from his dream, 
wholly subdued, murmured, "Excuse 
me !" and said no more. 
They walked on a little farther and 
then they parted. Wentworth went on 
alone to his lodging-place. 
His fierce arraignment against the pro- 
ducers found vent at last in a mood like 
that of a drunken man. Walking alone, he 
smiled. "Snappy lines," he muttered 
half aloud. "Snappy lines!" 
Suddenly, his breast heaving, his head 
held high, his hands clinched, he stopped 
short. He had made a momentous dis- 
covery . 
They had never produced his play at all ! 
VII 
HE was in New York again at last. 
The morning after his arrivaJ he entered 
the frowning door of a Wall Street office. 
"If I might speak to Mr. Hawking," he 
said in a low voice. 
"Did you have an appointment?" 
asked the youth who confronted him. 
"No-I've just come back to town 
after a long absence." 
"I'm sure it wouldn't be possible-" 
Wentworth resolved upon a bold stroke. 
"Say to 11r. Hawking," he said, "that Mr. 
Wentworth, known to him as a student, 
wishes to speak to him in regard to a play." 
A little later he was alone with Hawk- 
ing in his private office. 
He had had time to subdue his wrath, 
his despair, since that period of unspeak- 
able discovery in Chicago. He said in an 
even voice: "I have come, Mr. Hawking, 
to return a loan which you were good 
enough to make me two years ago." 
The magnate shot a penetrating glance 
at him. " A loan?" he said. "I know of 
no loan." 
"Let me refresh your memory," said 
Wentworth; and he drew from his pocket 
a bulging envelope containing fifty bonds, 
"If you'll kindly glance at these, I think 
you'll recognize them." 
Hawking recognized him then. Per- 
mitting the envelope to drop to his desk 
he said briskly: "Out with it-what did 
you want?" 
"They are yours, not mine," said Went- 
worth. HI have come to return them." 
"Why? " 



"VENT\YüRTH'S :\lASTERPJECE 


"You never used my play. The play 
that was producerl was no more like mine 
than-than you are like me, Mr. Hawk- 
ing. They are dissimilar at every point. 
I owe you my Jife because of the loan you 
maòe me. 1 am grateful to you for that. 
But I don't neerl your aid any longer. I 
have come to give you that which is yours." 
The magnate smiled oddly. "That's 
precisely what Doctor Endicott said too 
-about the play being wholly different. 
Rather strange, I should say. Where did 
they get the play they put on?" 
"It isn't-pardon me-it isn't a play," 
said Wentworth. 
The magnate smiled coldly now. "At 
any rate," he said, "you needn't have any 
scruples about keeping those honds. The 
play is paying me hack double what I gave 
for it-it was a very good investment." 
\Ventworth nodded. "But-it's your 
play; at least, it never was mine. I bid 
you good day." He turned away with- 
out looking again at the parcel of bonds 
on Hawking's desk. 
But Hawking detained him with a 
gruff, inarticulate sound. 
"If we're to indulge in scruples at all," 
he said, when Wentworth turned, "we'll 
both play at the game. If you had some- 
thing belonging to me, I have something 
of yours." 
He turned and stooped and adjusted 
the combination of a safe near his desk. 
\Vhen the door swung open he removed 
a. drawer, which he placed on his desk. 
He glanced among the documents it con- 
tained, examining this and that, and at 
length he took up the manuscript of 
Wentworth's play. After a second in- 
spection-to make sure he was not in 
error-he held the manuscript forth to 
the astounded \Ventvmrth. 
"It's yours," he said. " Good-by." 


VIII 
TIlE next winter ., The Republic" was 
reproduced-without a line of the orig- 
inal having been altered. 
\Ventworth had found a man, one of 
the intellectuals of the Great White \Yay, 
who was profoundly impressed by his 
play and who accepted it with eagerness. 
The production was made with the mi- 
nutest tidelity to detail. A company com- 
posed oÍ serious artists, men and women 
YOL. LXX\'III.-21 


289 


of the highest skill and repute, was or- 
ganized. There was a long period of re- 
hearsal-a period given over to patient 
study, to experimental interpretation, to 
loving assimilation of the drama's fine 
meaning. 
A "first night" of rare significance was 
widely advertised and discussed, and at 
last "The Republic" was produced. 
Wentworth was ahle to make a hurried 
journey from a point beyond the l\1issis- 
sippi to witness the launching. 
But the performance went on to its last 
curtain without arousing the unsym- 
pathetic audience from a waiting apathy 
which deepened toward the end to leth- 
argy. 
N ever in the entire history of the New 
York theatre had a play been a more com- 
plete failure. 
The newspapers the next morning were 
almost unanimous in declaring that the 
new work was an empty and lifeless thing. 
A few argued that a better company 
might have infused life into it; others set 
forth the belief that it was a pity to find 
really competent players laboring with 
such unpropitious material. There was 
one who suggested that the production, 
on its scenic side, had overshadowed the 
text; while another believed that a more 
impressive production might have given 
a convincing quality to the story. The 
brilliant and amusing critic of The 
1vlorning A rgus wrote over a column of 
hilarious abuse. 
Only one writer-Harrington, of The 
Beacon---saw "The Republic" in a dif- 
ferent light. He made the amazing state- 
ment that this fine drama marked a new 
era in the writing of plays in America. 
It was afterward reporterl that the busi- 
ness manager of Harrington's paper, upon 
Harrington's recommendation, took his 
wife to see "The Republic "-and that 
Harrington soon afterward left TlzcBeacoll 
to edit a sced catalogue for a firm in 
Yonkers. 
But Harrington's was the only di
sent- 
ing voice. Eyerybody else-save a few 
mute men and women who, pcrhaps, rec- 
ognized the best when they saw it- 
agreed that "The Repuhlic" was a pre- 
tentious, lamentable failure. 
At the end of the first week it was with- 
ùrawn. 



From a Little French Window 


BY l\10NROE DOCGLAS ROBI
SON 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. R. \VEED 



ili HEN one is ill, but con- 

 valescing, windows 

 W 
 come to mean so much. 
I They are frames that 
CJ 
 hold little pictures of a 

- great city, and though 

 W
 the background may, 
necessarily, be the 
same from day to day, the shadows change, 
and the pageant of folk who pass lends a 
variety that only the invalid realizes. 
1\1 y window here in Paris faces two 
streets, each with an individuality of its 
own. The Etoile bowers on the fashion- 
.lble district, but the Avenue Wagram 
and the rue B- are in, yet not of, the 
élite quarter. 
The Avenue Wagram, or my avenue, as 
I choose to call it, having studied it daily 
for so many weary months, is like a house 
divided against itself; for on one side there 
are many cafés, many motion-picture 
theatres, many passing people, many 
dogs, and many beautiful and unbeauti- 
ful noises. This is my side. The other 
contains a few respectable shops, such as 
, a drug-store with a proprietor who always 
stands in the door and never seems, poor 
fellow, to have any customers to call him 
within; a modiste who, to the druggist, 
must seem irritatingly popular; many 
staid, old-fashioned apartment-houses, 
whose occupants have taken on, as gen- 
erally people have a way of doing, the 
characteristics of their domicile; and a" 
large garage owned by one of the big taxi 
companies. The rue B-, forming the 
other side of the angle, is known as one of 
the roughest and toughest streets in all 
Paris. It peeps out, like a horrid old hag 
who has risen late after a night of dissi- 
pation, and sneers at the rest of the world. 
Yet I like the glimpses I am able to get of 
her. She interests me strangely, as wicked 
people always do. lVly hotel, the Bon 
Séjour, is No. I; and so I am able to peer 
in three directions. 
,Many people would look askance at 
such a location for one's dwelling-place; 
29 0 


but there's a reason. The reason is René. 
René is the owner of the Café Lutetia, 
above which I live. He is a hard, keen, 
progressive business man; yet there is 
ever a twinkle in his eye, and one knows 
intuitively that, like most Frenchmen, he 
is at heart a sentimentalist. At any rate, 
he has a strong feeling of friendship for his 
fellow mortals. 
We met on a very cold day last year- 
one of those days of penetrating rain 
which one experiences in France. I hap- 
pened into his café in search of something 
warm to drink. His suggestion of "un 
grog Americain chaud," uttered with such 
a welcoming smile, was accepted with 
alacrity; and at that moment we became 
fast friends. Now, the Café Lutetia is in 
no way different from other French cafés; 
but it takes on a distinction because it is 
presided over by René and his wonder- 
fully able and charming wife. They are 
the salt that seasons the room. 
. The clientèle is far from chic. It is a 
most interesting pot-pourri of the bour- 
geois type, boulevardiers, cinema stars 
(mostly ou t of work, of course), Arabs, who 
do odd jobs about the garage, Egyptians, 
and many Russian emigrés who seem to 
have nothing to do all day but sit about 
and play cards. A motley congregation, 
indeed, but one may pass many an inter- 
esting hour looking at the sea of faces, 
idly speculating upon the lives these folk 
lead when they are not blithely here. 
The Parisian has more time than we of 
America, and he seems to spend it more 
agreeably. His café represents his club, 
his place of relaxation as well as his place 
of business; and many a deal is consum- 
mated over a café noir, or an apéritif. 
The average café is open from four A. M. 
to two o'clock the next morning: twenty- 
two hours out of the twenty-four! .And 
during that time what a variety of human 
beings pass through its doors! 
From four-thirty in the morning until 
seven one could easily believe oneself to 
be in Algeria, as the sea of fezes surges 



FROl\1 A LTTTLt FRFNCH \VINDO\\' 


around the bar, asking for café and crois- 
sants. The babel of voices is continuous 
as the Sidis are taking their morning 
meal. At seven-thirty an entirely new 
crowd takes possession of the place-a 
crowd composed of the gens du quartier) 


291 


-thoroughly alive; for this is the hour of 
the apéritif. Every one knows that in 
France this is almost in the nature of a 
religious custom. 
After dinner) when the lights are lit) 
and the music is playing, and all the seats 


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, there arc occasional visitors who come in merely to read the paper. . 


taking their petit déjeuncr on their way to 
work. Each reads his morning journal 
as he sips his coffee at the bar) and here 
and there one may hear a political discus- 
sion, with voices raised in Latin excite- 
ment. During the rest of the morning a 
strange calm prevails, though of course 
there are occasional visitors who come in 
mere]y to read the paper or write a letter. 
It is then that the" mopping up" process 
is in force, and the damage of the night 
before is miraculously repaired. But at 
twelve o'clock the café is alive once more 


are taken) one sees the café at its best. 
It is like a flower that has suddenly 
bloomed into glorious life. René stands 
here) or rushes there) with a keen, ob- 
servant eye. He misses nothing. He even 
anticipates one)s wants; and always there 
is a cheery greeting) a word of warm wel- 
come, whilst madame, seated behind the 
caisse, like a proud cockatoo, deftly rakes 
in the waiters' chips, makes rapid change, 
and yet somehow manages to chatter ani- 
matedly with some friend of the house. 
René's café) as I have come to call it) 



292 


FROl\1 A LITTLE FRENCH \YI
DO\Y 


was so obviously French, and for the 
French-so different from the places 
manufactured to suit the American palate 
-that it interested me at once; and, after 
having met l\Ionsieur Raoul, my excellent 
hotel proprietor, I moved to the Bon Sé- 
jour, and luckily found therein a certain 



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verre de 'OÍn . . .-Page 294. 


homelike atmosphere. In the distance, 
the Arc de Triomphe towers through the 
haze and clouds, and stands out like some 
huge battlement destined to preserve 
something great and intangible from en- 
croachment and defilement. Day by day, 
its moods change. In the clear sunlight, 
when the beauty of its lines is most appar- 
ent, and with all the broad avenues radi- 
ating from the centre, it seems truly to 
represent the very spirit and soul of 
France. In the clean moonlight the mar- 
ble strength of it is magnified; and stolidly 
it stands there, a symbol of the indomi- 
table courage and the will to sacrifice of 
the French people. The meaning of the 
Arc, as conceived by Napoleon, has grown 
and expanded. It is more than a monu- 
ment to himself and his vast armies; to- 
day it represents the feeling and ideas of 
the people as a whole. It seems to say, in 
a voice of thunder, since the terrible 
\Vorld War, "Ils ne passeront pas." For 
the Unknown Soldier, resting peacefully, 


yet simply and imposingly under the Arc, 
has given a new religion to the French 
people. Even the taxi chauffeurs, who 
pass and repass many times a day, never 
fail to salute that mysterious lad who lies 
there in the dignity of death. The flam- 
beau, kept eternally alight, seems like a 
beacon showing the world a better way 
to live. 
Paris is ever a city of contrasts. This 
morning, as I looked from my window, 
there came to my ears a violent babel of 
voices, and curses filled the air. I saw a 
large cart filled with heavy iron bars, 
pulled by two horses in tandem forma- 
tion, which completely blocked the whole 
avenue. For the horses had managed to 
straddle the tracks sideways, and as it 
had just rained, they could go neither up 
nor down hill. A crowd gathered, and 
words and arguments were fast and furi- 
ous. There was a perpetual waving of 
arms, and for a moment it seemed as if 
the street were filled with jumping-jacks. 
The driver and two gendarmes were in 
the centre of the mob, the former big and 
swarthy, looking as if he could easily hold 
his own. Suddenly, however, after a few 
ineffectual attempts to move the cart, an 
enormous individual made his way 
through the crowd. He was imposing 
and important in lavish gold lace. Gran- 
diloquently he waved his hand for the 
crowd to disperse, and he swooped down 
upon the driver and the gendarmes, like 
an eagle, and bore them off in his talons 
to the nearest Poste de Police for an ex- 
planation. The horses and cart were left 
in full and triumphant possession of the 
avenue, their monopoly being disputed 
by honking motor-horns and clanging 
street-car bells. 
Two silent but interested spectators of 
all that went on were a little boy, aged 
about four, and a yellow cat of monstrous 
size and no known breed. The boy, I 
happened to know, was the son of the elec- 
trical store, and the cat was the scion of 
the pharmacy en face. They were both 
well known to the quartier, and both, al- 
though great friends, had strong indi- 
vidual feelings of possession to their side 
of the avenue. The boy was a sunny- 
haired. sturdy little rascal, and his play- 
ground was the streets, and his friends 
and playmates were the passers-by-and 



FROì\I A LITTLE FREKC H \\l
f)O'\' 


the cat. At all hours of the day he ran up 
and down, always smiling; and even when 
he fen down because of the speed with 
which he tried to get nowhere, he invari- 
ably picked himself up, or was picked up 
by some kind person, smiled. cheerfully 
nodded, cried "M erci!" and ran away 
again. All the world was his friend. 
The cat, on the other hand, approached 
his daily battles and the Avenue \Yagram 
from a different point of view. ,\Yhen the 
sun was out, his radius of action was 
greatly minimized, and consisted in sit- 
ting before the drug-store. dozing, never 
interrupting the stream of traffic-which 
does not exist. However, if the sun was 
not out, activity ensued. .. First, there 
was an ancient and dead Iv enemy to be 
taken care of in the form 
 of a big black 
cat, that made its habitat in the café 
half a block below. After many care- 
ful and serious moves the black offend- 
er was always chased away, and his 
post of vantage on a chair taken trium- 
phantly by Sir Yellow. 
At the other end of the promenade 
there was a little grocery-store, where 
once in a while a fish could be stolen. 
Sir YeHow knew this. I saw him, only 
a moment since, in the very act of his 
thievery, and I felt that if the rough 
and tumble of the boy and the silent, 
sinuous, yet effective method of the cat 
could be galvanized into one organic 
whole, the block caused by the aban- 
doned horses could be moved and 
the cart set in motion, and once 
more the affairs of the Avenue 
be permitted to resume and 
function. 
I t is a kaleidoscope of 
characters that pass and 
repass, every hour of the 
teeming day. I see Cos- 
sacks in their flowing 
uniforms of the time 
of the Czar; native 
French soldiers in 
their typical blue 
khaki; now and 
then a desert- 
riding Arab in 
his loose bur- 
noose and wide- 
sweeping trou- 
sers; and oc- 


''if 
/:-- 


293 


casionally a religious man of the East 
quietly passing, in sandals and with long 
hair, oblivious of his surroundings. 
"Polisson" goes by every day, and he 
is known to all. If he should fail to Dut 
in an appearance, we should be sure that 
something was wrong, and wonder' would 
be expressed. His clothes are of his own 
peculiar sartorial conception, consisting 
of a well-worn pair of heavy tweed trou- 
sers, patched in innumerable places with 
bits of sacking, and a very loose, very 
greasy, very shiny frock-coat of ancient 
vintage, which serves not oply as coat, 
but as overcoat and blanket. But, his 
chief glory is his hat, which sets off his sly 
face and twinkling eyes. This hat serves 
as a distinct means of livelihood for our 
old gamin of the quartier, because, as it 



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" Po\isson" goc,; by every day, and he b kno\\ n to all. 



294 


FROl\1 A LITTLE FRENCH \YINDO\V 


consists of nothing but a piece of loose 
felt which may be turned into any shape 
desired, coupled with a black eye patch, 
it affords" Polisson" any number of dis- 
guises. His shoes may be a sadly worn 
pair that he has filched from some ash- 
barrel; but more often he stumbles along, 
his feet encased only in newspapers. 
His day begins by his going the rounds 
of all the cafés and deftly picking up 
cigarette-butts with a sharp-pointed stick, 
amI stuffing them away in an old bag. He 
starts not later than five A. M., and with 
his ancient felt hat set at a rakish angle- 
perhaps he imagines himself a fop of the 
Boulevards I-he imitates the very char- 
acter of a typical young man just returned 
from JYlontmartre, dropping in for a cup 
of coffee before turning in. " Polisson " 
is always ready to sing you a song, give 
you his latest bit of political information 
-ah ! it is very special, monsieur I-make 
a speech, or even go so far as to do a pas 
seul, in return for which you offer him a 
café bien arrosé, with cognac. In no sense 
is this to be construed as begging; it is 
merely a fair exchange. " Polisson" 
would be outraged if he thought you con- 
sidered him a mendicant. As the hour of 
seven approaches, most of his audience 
must go to work; so, with a cheerful "Bon 
jour," and his bag of cigarette-ends under 
his arm, the old fellow shuffles out. 
At eight o'clock, if you are awake and 
perhaps opening the shutters, a most de- 
crepit-looking figure hobbling up the 
street will catch your eye. The gray hat 
has turned into an imitation top hat, the 
black patch covers the left eye, the gait is 
very slow and a walking-stick is heavily 
leaned upon, and masses of papers pro- 
trude from under the arm. " Polisson " 
is now enacting the part of a "11Zutilé" of 
so-ixante-dix. And now he is frankly a 
beggar, in a new group of cafés. With 
the help of a few pencils for sale, and his 
well-worn story, the Innocent are caught 
unaware, and coffee touched with cognac 
often finds its way down his ever-wiHing 
throat. The rest of the day is passed 
peering into ash-barrels for articles useful 
to him, perpetually filling his bag with the 
butts of cigarettes and cigars. At night, 
if a loud, raucous voice is heard singing in 
the streets, or an oration is being deliv- 
ered which forces the attention of the 


passers-by, op,e may be sure that "Polis- 
son" is in his element, and that he is wish- 
ing "Bon soir" to the quartier. 
The avenue is ever a seething caldron of 
motion. Jacques, the garçon of the café 
called" Le Bon Goût," which lies adjacent 
to the big garage, is certainly the most 
active exponent of the strenuous life. Le 
Bon Goût is a typical little estaminet, 
much in favor with the chauffeurs who, 
before going out, or just after finishing a 
day's work, drop in for a verre de 'l'in or a 
cup of coffee. The official duties of Jac- 
ques are those of garçon, and they are 
myriad; but his unofficial duties are far 
more numerous, and much more to his 
liking, as he is unofficial aide-de-camp to 
all the chauffeur clientèle. 
Jacques' uniform, of which he is inor- 
dinately proud, consists of a blue apron 
and the inevitable serviette; the latter 
never upon his arm-oh, no I-but always 
around his neck. It is difficult to tell 
whether the serviette around the neck is 
reminiscent of the ancient badge of ser- 
vitude, as symbolized by the iron collar 
worn by the serfs of old England, or is a 
mark of Jacques' distinguished unofficial 
position, and therefore a certain form of 
decoration. The clientèle arrive, and 
park their taxis wherever there is space 
along the curb, and it is Jacques' unoffi- 
cial duty, little by little, to bring these 
taxis down and place them in front of the 
café, so that the owners may step from the 
door of the café to the driver's seat with 
the least possible effort. The joy with 
which Jacques approaches his motor 
charges, and drives them down the tor- 
tuous curbing of the A venue, is apparent 
in every gesture and move. If sheer per- 
sonal contact with numbers of machines 
could count for anything, Jacques should 
be president of the company. 
Some time during the year every quar- 
tier of Paris elects a queen; but few quar- 
tiers may boast an uncrowned, unelected 
queen, who rules through force of person- 
ality alone, almost by divine right. 
Hers is a curious case. Beauty is not 
one of lVladeleine's strong points, for she 
is more or less round in body, and cer- 
tainly very round in the face, and her hair 
is closely akin to the tousled mane of the 
lion. But these physical blemishes are 
not regarded as disadvantages-neither 



FROl\1 A LITTLE FRENCH 'YI
DO'Y 


by l\Iadeleine nor by her loyal subjects in 
the quartier. Her always cheery greet- 
ing of "ça 'va," calls forth a hearty re- 
sponse from anyone to whom she has 
deigned to toss it. Hats are 
her dissipation; they might 
even be called her vice; and 
the wonderful creations in 
which she invariably appears, 
bring the hearty admiration 
-or at least the open- 
mouthed wonder-of the gap- 
ing multitudes. But thereby 
hangs a tale. 
A friend of mine, Captain 
B., before sailing for America 
wished to make l\Iadeleine a 
present, and, knowing her 
weakness for hats, decided 
that a new one would be the 
most acceptable gift he could 
offer her majesty. He was 
more or less shy, yet he hact 
no wish to wound l\fade- 
leine's feelings by refusing to 
escort her in broad daylight 
to the hat-shop in our quar- 
tier; therefore, very cleverly, 
I thought, he made an ap- 
pointment to meet her at a 
modiste's, where the hats 
were large and the prices 
small. The rendezvous was 
kept, and :Madeleine was as 
eager and nervous as a dé- 
butante before her first ball. 
Captain B., knowing her 
atrocious taste in hats, had 
told her that she must accept 
his judgment before she made 
a final selection. A large 
white creation, with sewn or ... the ne\\s is brought in ever-increasing tones of e."'{citement . . . 
painted flowers, was chosen 
as the t01lT de force. Never 
having seen :Madeleine with her hat off, 
my friend imagined that she was a per- 
oxide blonde; but, to his amazement, 
when her hat was removed, he saw that 
while part of her hair was indeed a vivid 
yellow, much of it was jet black! His 
consternation kne,v no bounds; but he 
manfully kept a stiff upper lip while the 
hat was selected-he was too weak to pro- 
test-and :l\1adeleine was overjoyed, and 
walked out of the shop proud in the pos- 
sesc,ion of her newest atrocity. Afterward, 


I' 
1. 


295 


in telling me of the episode, Captain B. re- 
marked: "I always said she looked like a 
lion. I was wrong. I meant a zebra." 
There comes a certain great day. 



 
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"Fête, c'est Ie Quartorze Juillet," rings in 
one's ears long before that holiday. 
Although confined to my room, the 
news is brought in ever-increasing tones 
of excitement as the time approaches. 
l\Iarguerite, de amir-du-pois, is panting 
heavily as she brings the café au/ail. She 
is full of the though t of how she is going 
to tread heavily upon the toes of h molt 
ami Paul," and she considers the amount 
of soupe à I'Oig1l011 they will swallow chez 
Ie Père Tranquille, .:\larie-Louise, the 



296 


FRO:\l A LITTLE FRE:\TCH "T
 DO\Y 


cook, is slim and slight, amI her eyes glis- 
ten at the thought of doing the foxtrot 
with Seraphin, the valet de chambre. . He, 
for his part, seems to be possessed of un- 
told energy, for trunks fly up and down 
the stairs as though they too were cele- 
brating. Fête it certainly is, and, unless 
one has seen it, it is impossible to realize 
with what whole-hearted joy and freedum 
the nation at large celebrates this day. 
All Paris is there, and each person on 
the streets in his or her own quartier. 
Since we are near the Arc de Triomphe, 
it seems as though the Avenue felt it her 
duty to outdo herself. The rows of bunt- 
ing, the Japanese or electric lanterns, the 
intertwined flags and the numerous or- 
chestra-stands give one the feeling of an 
ancient and honorable dowager bedecking 
herself in her finest raiment for the one 
great social event of the year. It is worth 
it; for at night, when everything is ablaze, 
it is as if the very stars had fallen into 
each quartier; and there is a blare of 
trumpets and a rattle of drums before 
each café--full proof that les Parisiens 
are enjoying themselves to the uttermost. 
America plays no small part in this day 
of days, and here and there on the many 
bandstands an ebony-hued citizen of our 
country may be seen, and the music 
blurted and blown out is principally 
American jazz. The physical endurance 
of the musicians is nothing short of mar- 
vellous, and is only to be compared with 
that of the dancers, as they tirelessly trip 
it for three days and nights, literally with- 
out pause. The cafés are crowded to suf- 
focation, of course, and there are so many 
Jacques trying to give their little :Uaries 
so many thirst-quenching drinks that the 
garçons de café simply run off their legs. 
René and :Madame have a wonderful 
array of flags, bunting, and electric lights, 
and they even have roped off a space in 
front of the café where tired revellers may 
come and rest. .\ splendid orchestrã, 
led by "Freddy," a big Ethiopian, who 


can make a drum almost sing, crashes 
forth airs in fearless competition with all 
comers. The results are so successful 
that the sidewalks, and even the middle 
of the street, are crowded with listeners 
and dancers, and behind the bar pande- 
monium reigns. 
As I look down from my little window 
it seems as though the Avenue itself were 
bobbing up and down, nodding its ap- 
proval. Marie-Louise and Seraphin are 
dancing with such élan that cafés au fait 
and trunks are things of another world, 
forgott
n, forgotten; and _Monsieur Raoul, 
completely oblivious of such a sordid fact 
that hotels exist, is waltzing in a most 
perfect and correct manner'with :l\fadame 
René. It would seem as if the energy 
given to the enjoyment and celebration 
of the historical evëñt by the Parisians of 
to-day is as great as that expended by 
their forefathers in the taking of the Bas- 
tile. . 
\Vhen autumn comes, once more the old 
Avenue is crowded, and again the sounds 
of music are in the air. But now they are 
military bands, and there is the light 
shuffle of regiments marching on their 
way to the Arc de Triomphe. For to-day 
is Armistice Day, and all Paris is wending 
slowlv to the TombeauduSoldat Inconnu. 
Littl
 bands of veterans of the war of 1870 
pass, and here and there groups of school- 
children bearing flags; but the most im- 
pressive sigh t of all are the masses of wo- 
men in deep black, carrying flowers, 
Eleven o'clock strikes; tþe guns boom 
forth, and for two' solemn minutes the 
French nation stands at attention, heads 
uncovered and bowed. It is as though 
France herself heayes a great sigh of re- 
]jef that the awfulness of war is over and 
done; but one senses a feeling of pride and 
glory in the deeds of her sons, And as 
long as the Arc de Triomphe stands, and 
the flame in the tomb burns in French 
hearts, as it does to-day, ils ne passeront 
pas, 



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Her eager eyes met mine, seemed to challenge me to exchange mysteries 


S"'fc.z-P 
--- 


Second Marriage 
BY \VALTER GILKYSO
 
Author of "Oil," etc. 


ILLUSTRATIOXS BY ETHEL PLUMMER 


ERI\YETHER had al- 
way s interested me. 
In the civilized, com- 
plicated, rather static 
world in which he 
moved, a world where 
the social life lay like 
thick cream above the 
churning of finance, he was an extraordi- 
nary figure. Yery alien and apart, one 
felt-a man who preserved the amenities 
of life with a sardonic impersonal care. 
\Ve were rather close, and yet I, in com- 
mon ,vith his other friends, knew little of 
his youth. He had come down from Bos- 
ton, and at thirty-six, four years ago, had 
been taken into the banking firm of Gar- 
rett, Randall and Company. That was a 
great deaL And then, as if by way of 
consummation, he had married Jessica 
Killian. 
\Ye were sitting together at one of the 
l\lontgomerys' evenings, Jessica between 
her husband and me. Reichantz was to 
play, and I suppose the l\fontgomerys 
VOL. LXXVIII.-22 


had invited at least a hundred people. 
Everyone who was invited came. It 
was not often we could hear such good 
music in such delightful surroundings and 
among such pleasant people. In the 
suave white-and-gray room, amidst the 
attentive, composed, and slightly masked 
faces, the art of music became domestic, 
a little somnolent and catlike, as if it re- 
vealed its strength with a luxurious satis- 
faction. 
As Reichantz seated himself Jessica 
turned to me. "I heard him in New 
York," she whispered. "You'll enjoy 
him. He extracts the full measure of 
poetry and meaning from all that he 
touches, Verr brilliant and subtle-an 
essential performer, and yet thoroughly 
intellectualized. And his nuance is as it 
should be, an emanation, not mere feel- 
ing blown from the soul. You know 
what I mean?" Her eager eyes Ipet 
mine, seemed to challenge me to e
- 
change mysteries. 
"Yes," I said, "I do, Jessica." Some- 
297 



changed, swept into a little waltz, an un- 
real, haunting, and wistful air, bright with 
sorrow that gleamed through arabesques 
like the passing of a lovely face, It was 
over in a minute, and I looked at him again. 
His eyes were remote, and the worn bril- 
liance of his face seemed nebulous and re- 
laxed, as if, for the moment, he had be- 
come quite young. 
The applause died away and a buzz of 
talk spread over the room. Meriwether 
was silent, listening to Jessica and Rufus 
Condon, the critic, who had come over to 
talk to her. I didn't like Condon-he 
was a voluble man, of rich talk and thin 
writing-one of those youngish middle- 
aged men who carry about them an odor 
of fingered bloom. 
"I think Firbank's like Ornstein," he 
was saying. "The same shrill inverted 
note, the ecstasy of metal against metal, 
and that last agony of sensation, the point 
where it sinks into dissolution." 
"I don't see Firbank that way," she re- 
plied, her hot exposed eyes very angry and 
hen-like. "To me 
his work is gold 
thread woven in ob- 
scene design on a 
scarlet background. 
The shrill muteness 
of it is decoration. 
That's why"-she 
crossed her slim 
pointed hands-" I 
enjoy it so much." 
I glanced at 
Meriwether. "'"'hat 
do you think? " I 
asked. 
" lYIe ?" He un- 
crossed his legs slow- 
ly
 then shook his 
head. "I don't 
think." 
" And you! " J es- 
sica looked at me. 
"What do you?" 
"Well-I'm a law- 
yer," I laughed. 
"And a lawyer, you 
know, passeth un- 
derstanding. Be- 
sides, I'm a spinal 
columnist, and that 
lets me out of art." 


298 


SECOND MARRIAGE 


how, when she talked that way I felt un- 
comfortable, a little as if she'd pulled at 
my collar and tie. She was evidently 
waiting for more, when Meriwether put 
his hand on her arm. "He's going to play 
now, Jessica," he said. 
The little man stared at an invisible 
point on the wall, and then began. It 
was Schumann's" Carnaval," and in a 
moment Jessica and her vaporings had 
floated away. Quite unconsciously I 
found myself wandering through sights 
and sounds too fleeting and evanescent to 
be put into words-sudden flashes of color 
and form that seemed to grow in the body 
and not the brain. Then something inter- 
fered; some outside influence kept draw- 
ing my attention off. I wondered vaguely 
what it was, until I realized it came from 
1vieriwether, that his presence was drift- 
ing into my mind. It was as if some 
radiation from the man had become audi- 
ble, and was weaving a pattern of inartic- 
ulate speech. I turned and glanced past 
Jessica at him, and as I did so the music 


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, , , looking rather like a benevolent ram . . , -Page 299. 



SECOND l\1ARRIAGE 


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Reichantz seated himself at the piano, 
and we stopped talking. The next thing 
was Chopin-the "Third Ballade" and 
the "Valse Ut Dieze Mineur." I glanced 
at Condon sprawling 
limply in a chair beside 
me, looking rather like a 
benevolent ram with his 
great satisfied nose and 
his wispy head. I won- 
dered what he would say 
about Chopin and Cesar 
Franck, who followed. 
And what Jessica would 
say. The thought was 
too much, and I rose as 
unobtrusively as I could 
and tiptoed. across the 
room. 
\Vhen the evening was 
over I saw l\leriwether 
in the cloak-room below. 
"Walk home with me 
and have a drink," he 
suggested, slipping into 
his coat and adjusting 
his tall hat very careful- 
ly. "Jessica's going 
somewhere and I'm go- 
ing home." He glanced 
up. 
"All righ t," I said. 
"I'd like to, for a little 
while. " 
The air outside was 
cold and the snow lay in 
dirty piles at the curb. 
\Ve walked down the 
street ; Jessica had taken the car and the 
house was only a few blocks away. When 
we entered, he preceded me up-stairs to 
the library, a room I'd never seen before. 
"Sit down," he said cheerfully. Then he 
sent the man off for whiskey and stretched 
himself out in a big brocade chair by the 
table. 
For a moment he was silent, with an 
easy comfortable silence as if he were by 
himself. I took a cigarette from the box 
and glanced about the pleasant, vaguely 
luminous room. The books stretched in 
wine-colored shadows below the pale gold 
of the ceiling and walls, and the blue-and- 
gold rug shone in the light like a circle of 
silvery moss. I caught the flat gleam of 
Chines
 red in a picture near the door, 


299 


repeated quite unexpectedly in the ver- 
milion moulding around the wall. 
"That's interesting," I said. 
" What? " 



 
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We walked down the street, , , the house was only a few blocks away. 


"That picture." 
" Yes." 
I rose and walked over, then stood back 
so I could see it clearly. It was small, in 
a wide gold frame, of a girl, wrapped in 
red, her arms at her side. She was very 
YOLlng, and the bands of cloth about her 
straight body gave it a graceful angularity 
that set off the upright pose of her head. 
She had a serious face, with a wide fore- 
head beneath dark hair, and gray eyes 
that seemed to appraise the world with 
untroubled expectancy. 
" Very nice," I remarked. 
"Yes." l\leriwether leaned forward 
and knocked his ash in the tray. "Do 
you know," he exclaimed, "I enjoyed 
that music to-night! But I get awful- 



300 


SECOND MARRIAGE 


ly fed up, don't you, with all that art 
stuff?" 
"I most certainly do," I agreed. "I 
don't know much about it. But the few 
men and women I've known who were 
any good didn't blow off steam the way 
Condon does. They couldn't because"- 
I hesitated for the thought-" I suppose 
iheir minds and emotions weren't sepa- 
rate the way his are. You see, Meri- 
wether, the two things have to go to- 
gether, and if you separate them"-I 
warmed up-"they both die, like Siamese 
twins. " 
"Yes, I think so. At least when it 
comes to such things as music and poetry. 
Music's queer," he added slowly. "I 
know a little about that. The musicians 
dry up-at least the women-when 
they've no emotional life." 
"How about the bankers and law- 
yers ?" I looked at him stretched out so 
comfortably in his chair. 
"Oh, they're artists too, only they do 
the work of the world. And, besides, the 
love of power is as great an emotion as 
any other, don't you think?" 
"The greatest," I said emphatically. 
"And we, at least you, indulge ourselves 
there. We've the satisfaction, emotion 
really, of sustaining the social structure, 
of creating wealth where none was be- 
fore. " 
"Yes. That's important." He nodded 
his head. "For a man it's the most im- 
portant. And he has to make every sacri- 
fice for it. Without form and order we go 
back-" He shrugged his shoulders. 
"I don't know what we go back to. 
That man Lawrence-he tries to show us. 
He may like what he shows, but as I read 
him he's damned well afraid of it. At 
least he's afraid of something. Oh, hell!" 
He sat up in his chair. "If you could 
only blend the two! And you can, if you 
have any luck." 
"How?" 
" Well," he stared down, then smiled at 
me with a little gleam in his eye. "Either 
one for all, or a lot in a row. And for some 
of us it has to be one for all. We sons of 
order," he laughed sardonically, "that 
carry the weight of the world! We're 
mystics, you see, romantic idealists that 
want to create new worlds and new 
wealth, as you say, where none was be- 


fore. So being romantics, we're like 
Dante with unconscious leanings toward 
Casanova. Only Dante prevails. A dull 
devil!" He sighed. "And just as ob- 
sessed as any American business man. 
Have another drink." He pushed the 
decanter across the table. 
"No more." I rose. "I'm in court to- 
morrow morning, sustaining the weight 
of the world." I yawned and stretched 
out my arms. "And what are we going 
to do about it, Meriwether?" 
"Nothing," he said, getting up from his 
chair. "It's all been done for us before 
we were born. It takes rarer and less 
useful spirits than we to escape. Spirits 
like Condon-men whose souls issue from 
their mouths as they do in the old pic- 
tures of the saints. Or else Lawrence 
heroes who gird their loins, or some one 
else's loins, in the dark. It sounds amus- 
ing, but I don't think it is. No." He 
patted me on the shoulder as we de- 
scended the stair. "No hope for us. By 
the way"- he paused as if the idea had 
just struck him-"I may send some one 
in to see you, professionally, one of these 
days, Good night," he said, holding open 
the door. "Glad you came around." 


II 


WHEN I next heard of Meriwether he 
had gone to Rumania on an oil deal. It 
seemed quite appropriate, I thought, 
when Satterthwaite told me. Meriwether 
would be at home in an oil deal-there 
was an elusiveness about him, an irides- 
cence, that sprang from some deep-seated 
source. He was earthy and romantic, an 
unusual combination, in my experience. 
On the street he was considered far-seeing 
and courageous, but I'd wondered, since 
our talk, whether he wasn't a good deal 
more than that. I didn't speak of it to 
Satterthwaite; he'd have thought I was 
crazy, or addled from reading too much 
fiction. And, besides, it wasn't important, 
and I was probably wrong, and when 
Satterthwaite left he took all thought of 
Meriwether out of the office with him. 
A few minutes later Miss Leisenring 
came to the door. "A Mrs. Fearon to see 
you," she said. 
" Who ? " I never can understand Miss 
Leisenring when she interrupts me. 



SECOND MARRIAGE 


"A Mrs. Fearon." 
"Never heard of her. \\7J1at's she look 
like?" 
Miss Leisenring nervously fingered the 
door-knob. She wasn't used to appraising 
women's looks. "I don't know," she 
muttered. "I think you'd better see for 
yourself. Shall I send her in?" 
" All right, send her in, and I'll tell you 
afterward what she looks like, Miss Lei- 
senring." I couldn't help smiling, and 
she mumbled something and turned with 
a little switch of her skirt and left the 
room. 
The door opened and a small figure in 
a brown coat stood in the doorway, hesi- 
tating. I bowed. "l\1rs. Fearon? Won't 
you sit down?" 
She seated herself without looking at 
me, her small gloved hands lying very 
quietly in her lap. "The manager of the 
Plaza sent me to you," she said. 
"Oh, yes. I represent the Plaza." I 
looked at her with what I hoped was an 
unapparent gaze. Her dark face was 
small, with a carven quality about the 
cheek-bones, and her eyes were hidden 
beneath heavy lids. It was a composed 
face, a little hard, as if the hardness had 
been achieved and laid on like enamel, 
leaving untouched the unconscious scar- 
let mouth. As I looked she glanced up at 
me with a sudden gleam of gray and 
white, Then she spoke again, very de- 
liberately, in her rich, groomed voice. 
"I came to see you about a divorce. 
Do you take them?" 
"Yes." I paused. "\Ve take every- 
thing that's respectable, or looks respect- 
able from the outside. And divorce is 
both," I added quickly. 
"Almost too much so," she said, with 
a smile. "I feel quite old-fashioned. And 
I can get one, in this State, I'm told, for 
desertion? " 
"That's the usual ground." I reached 
for the pad on my desk. "Have you 
lived here a year?" 
"l\Iore than that." 
"And where is Mr. Fearon, and how 
long is it since he left you?" 
" \Vell, we lived together five years ago 
in Boston, and he left me on the night of 
February 16, 1919." 
"And when and where did you last 
see or bear from him?" 


301 


"Not since then." She laughed sud- 
denly. "He vanished overnight." 
"With some one?" 
"I suppose so." Again I caught the 
swift gleam of gray and white. "They 
usually do, but I didn't know anything 
about her." 
"I see." I ignored the smile. For a 
moment Mrs, Fearon annoyed me. There 
was a touch of unreality in her voice, a 
note of amusement I didn't understand. 
Clients usually took their own divorces 
seriously, and I was inclined to agree 
with them. 
"Any children?" I asked. 
"One, Aileen." 
"And your full name?" 
"Ann Brewster Fearon." 
I leaned back abruptly, prepared to ask 
some more questions, when she winced 
and a little spasm of pain shot aciOSS her 
face. 
"\Vhat's the matter?" 
She shrugged her shoulders. " You're 
observan t." 
"I have to be-it's my business." 
"\Vell," she leaned forward, her eyes 
quite amused, "if you're observant, why 
don't you get your chair fixed? It 
screeches like a slate-pencil on a slate." 
I looked down as if I could see the 
screech, and she laughed. "\V ell, I 
never noticed that before!" I exclaimed. 
Then I straightened up. "\Ve lawyers 
can ask questions that are purely profes- 
sional, l\1rs. Fearon. You are, I take it, 
or have been, a musician?" 
She nodded. 
"A professional?" I glanced guard- 
edly at the sable coat. 
"Yes." 
"In America?" 
"Here and abroad. I studied in Paris." 
"And Mr. Fearon?" 
She stared at first as if she hadn't heard 
what I said, then she answered quickly: 
"Oh, he didn't interfere!" 
I asked her a few more questions, and 
then pushed the pad aside. "That's all 
I'll need now," I said. "I'll prepare the 
libel, and after it's filed I'll advertise for 
your husband." 
"Advertise for him t" She half rose 
from her chair. "\Vhat's that mean?" 
"Well, you don't know where he is and 
I can't serve him with papers, so I'll have 



302 


SECOND MARRIAGE 


to advertise-put a notice in the news- 
papers." 
" Oh !" The word sounded reflective, 
seemed to open a long, narrow vista be- 
hind it. "I see," she nodded, as if reas- 
suring herselfc "In the newspapers in 
Boston? " 
" Yes," I said, wondering. Quite 
clearly there was something in this that I 
hadn't yet put my hands on, and, besides, 
I realized now that she looked like some 
one I'd known, but when or where I 
couldn't tell. 
"Are you going to marry again?" I 
asked suddenlyc It was the only question 
I could think of that might stand on pro- 
fessional ground. 
For a moment she stared at me in sur- 
prise, then her face became serious, with- 
drawn. " Yes," she said, and the uncon- 
cerned curve of her mouth grew sharp. 
"Was that question necessary?" she de- 
manded. 
"Quite. We have to know." 
" Everything? " 
" No." I shook my head. " Not every- 
thing. " 
"But you'd like to, wouldn't you?" 
She rose. "Lawyers are curious things. I 
should think you'd soon know too much." 
" A little like standing on a bridge and 
watching the bodies float down-stream," 
I said cheerfully, and she shuddered and 
stared at me, a bright anger in her eyes. 
" A disgusting simile!" she exclaimed. 
(, But quite true." 
"But there's no use in saying it, is 
there? " 
"There's no use in saying anything, 
but, if we didn't, life would be very dull." 
"Oh !" She shook her head impatient- 
lyc "I don't like that sort of thing!" 
"\Vhat? " 
"Discourse by cynics about the dul- 
ness of life." 
"But it is." 
"Yes." Her eyes fairly blazed at me 
now. "But why say it so many times?" 
"I won't again. As a matter of fact, 
you're quite right." 
"Of course I am !" She stared at me, 
her face dark and defiant, as if her spirit 
stirred sullenly under a heavy hand. 
Then her eyelids dropped, and all sign of 
emotion vanished. "To-morrow at ten?" 
she said in her deliberate voice. 


I bowed and held open the door. 
The next day I was very busy and only 
saw her for a minute when she came in to 
sign the libel, and during the three months 
that followed she appeared in the office 
from time to time quite unexpectedly, 
bringing stray bits of information that 
were unimportant, and asking questions 
in the desultory way of women who have 
nothing much to do. At the master's 
meeting she handled herself very well, 
and the divorce was granted as a matter 
of course, and to-day at five o'clock she 
was coming in to get her copy of the final 
decree. 
We'd become very good friends, I re- 
flected, as I leaned for a moment against 
the window, smelling the spring air. The 
soft freshness outside crept like a tide 
beneath the acrid odors of the street, as 
if it were slowly washing them away, and 
the sun on the range of tall gray buildings 
was smoky and golden, the windows glit- 
tering with an uncanny light. Yes, we'd 
become very good friends, and I'd be very 
glad to see her, I thoughtc Then I 
marched back to my desk. 
She came in without being announced, 
opening the door with her little air of 
hesitation. I stumbled out of my chair. 
The thing had a way of catching me when 
I got up. "Don't fall," she said, holding 
out her hand. "Lawyers ought to be 
awfully good on their feet." Her eyes 
danced at me for an instant. Then she 
sat down demurely and folded her hands 
in her lap. "Have you got it?" she 
asked. 
"Yes, ma'am." I picked up the folded 
paper from the desk. "There's your free- 
dom, lady, sealed with a big red seal." 
"Like a valentine! " she exclaimed 
softly. Then she unfolded the paper. 
"It's very formal, isn't it?" she said, 
holding it up, "Quite majestic. That's 
all there is to it, I suppose? And it 
means"-she glanced down at the paper 
-"that I'm divorced from Benjamin 
Morris Fearon?" 
" Yes. It means you're free now to do 
exactly what you like." 
"How nice!" She stared at me, then 
walked over to the window, "It's lovely 
up here to-day. I suppose you lawyers 
need beautiful views from your windows, 
don't you?" 



SECOND MARRIAGE 


303 


"Well, we should have them," I agreed. And"-she leaned forward as if to catch 
"Although-there are times when we don't a glimpse of the river-"I wasn't big 
need them." I followed her to the window. enough for it to take me by the throat." 
"Are you going to stay here-in town?" "I shouldn't have said so," I ventured. 


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"I'll never be a musician again in New York, or anywhere else." 


She shook her head. 
"JHusic-in New York?" 
"No." She continued looking out of 
the window. "I'll never be a musician 
again in New York, or anywhere else." 
"Why not?" 
Her shoulders moved slightly. "Dried 
up," she said, "Just dried up. I'm 
thirty-four, and at thirty-four it's either 
dried up or it has you by the throat. 


"No, you wouldn't." Her eyes, turned 
upon me for an instant, were keen and 
reflective. "You haven't a feminine 
mind. " 
"lVIaybe not," I answered, feeling a 
little uncomfortable. "I wouldn't know 
what to do with one if I had." 
" Your wife would," she said quickly. 
"But don't get one." She shook her head. 
"Don't. It's a mistake." 



304 


SECOND MARRIAGE 


U But you're going to marry!" 
"Oh, yes," she turned on me suddenly. 
"I'm going to marry William Bundy, of 
Kansas City. He arrived yesterday for 
that purpose." 
"Indeed! That sounds"-I hesitated, 
then floundered along- 
"that sounds-very inter- 
esting." 
"It is. And he's very 
interesting." She turned 
to the window again. " I 
think I shall rather like 
being married," she said, 
as if to herself. 
For a moment we were 
silen t, then I ventured 
again. "I suppose you'll 
take up your music, after 
you're married." Then I 
remem bered suddenly 
what Meriwether had said 
that night in his library. 
"It's lack of emotional life 
that dries up an artist- 
especially a woman," I 
quoted triumphantly. 
She turned on me as if 
I'd struck her in the face. 
" Who told you that! " 
she exclaimed, her voice 
flat and harshc " Some 
one must have told you 
that! You'd never have 
guessed it yourself." Her 
eyes, as she stared at me, 
were dark, with queer lit- 
tle wincing lights. "It 
sounds-" Then she 
turned away. "I wish you 
hadn't said it," she mur- 
mured, with a quick move- 
ment of her shoulders. 
"I'm sorry," I answered. I was rather 
annoyed at the way she'd put me down. 
"Of course I couldn't evolve such a 
thought myself. I probably read it in a 
book. But I thought that marriage-to 
l\lr. William Bundy-" 
"Of Kansas City," she continued, 
mimicking my voice. Then she laughed 
suddenly. "It is a funny name, isn't it? 
l\;lrs. William Bundy and Miss Aileen 
Bundy, of Kansas City. But he's aw- 
fully nice." She turned away and picked 
up her silk coat from the chair. " Come 


out and see us some time, will you? 
You've been very kind, and I owe you a 
lot. " 
"In spite of my masculine mind?" I 
was still just a little hurt. 
"Because of it, maybe. Mr. Bundy 
has a masculine mind, too. 
Well "-she held out her 
hand-"good-by, and 
thanks ever so much." 
" Not a bi tc And I'll 
come out and see you the 
next time I'm in Kansas 
City, which, by the way, 
is a very delightful place." 
"I don't doubt it. I've 
never been there." She 
turned to the door. " You 
won't have to advertise 
any more for Mr. Fearon, 
now, wil] you?" 
" No," I laughed. 
"That's good. Be- 
cause I inadvertently told 
l\fr. Bundy about him 
once, and"-she looked 
up at me with the old 
gleam of gray and white- 
"I hope you don't find 
him. Good-by." She 
lifted her hand with a ges- 
ture of farewell, and then 
slipped through the door. 


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ABOUT six weeks later 
Garrett, Randall and 
Company asked me to go 
to Kansas City to take 
charge of a foreclosure in 
which they'd become in- 
volved. Seibert, of the 
firm, discussed the matter with me, as 
lVleriwether had only just sailed and 
wasn't expected back for another week. 
I was glad to go; there was always a cer- 
tain pleasure in getting away from the 
office, even if the journey's end was only 
Kansas City. And, besides, I'd have a 
chance to see l\1Irs. Fearon, and find out 
how she and William Bundy were getting 
along. 
On the second day I called her up, and 
she invited me to dinner. In the mean- 
time I'd learned something of William 


There was a suggestion of fragile 
violence about her, as if she 
were strung on wires.-Page 
3 0 6. 



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"But. . . we're going to see that Aileen's education along that line is continued. Aren't we, 
dear?"-Page 306. 


Bundy from my colleagues. He was a 
manufacturer who had made a lot of 
money in real estate; he was evidently 
well known and well liked, because my 
friends spoke of him with that offhand 
respect which the \Vest gives to its dis- 
tinguished citizens. They didn't seem to 
know much about l\1rs. Bundy, except 
that she'd married Bundy, and the couple 
had just returned from their wedding- 
trip. So I motored out to the house that 
night with a good deal of anticipation. 
It was a large colonial house, very new 
and set on a hill, with the scanty raw 
freshness of a made lawn and gardens 
around it. As I entered, the man took 
my hat and coat and ushered me into the 
drawing-room, a white, formal room with 
an atmosphere of having been well turned 
out and then left undisturbed. Every- 
thing seemed so evenly distributed, I 
though t, as I looked over the room, know- 
ing very little of periods, or tables, or 


chairs. 1fr. Bundy, no doubt, was a man 
of just proportions. I felt sure my own 
client wasn't so evenly distributed. 
While I was reflecting, a rustle came 
from the doorway, and I glanced up. l\Irs. 
Bundy was standing there, watching me 
with that odd look of amusement in her 
eyes. "\Vell," she said, "this is nice!" 
Then she held out her hand. For an in- 
stant I was astonished; I'd never seen her 
at night before, and she looked so lovely 
in her slim green dress. It seemed to 
change her in some way-to mould and 
heighten the duskiness of her face. " Yes, 
it is," I said, taking her hand. "I didn't 
know I'd see you so soon, and I didn't 
know, either, how charming you'd look!" 
She laughed. "That's only lawyer's 
blarney-you've developed that since 
women came on juries. I'm so glad you 
could come out. Are you going to stay 
long in Kansas City?" She caught me 
glancing involuntarily over her shoulder 
3 0 5 



306 


SECOND l\1ARRIAGE 


and looked around. "Oh, Aileen!" She 
put her arm about the girl and led her for- 
ward. "This is my daughter," she said. 
Aileen courtesied,gave me a quick stare, 
and then walked away. I watched her 
with the benevolent smile of an elder sur- 
veying a child of twelve, She was a 
moody little person, I thought, as I kept 
my eyes on her. There was a suggestion of 
fragile violence about her, as if she were 
strung on wires. "She's interesting," I 
remarked in a low voice. "And has she 
your talent for music?" 
"Yes," Mrs. Bundy answered indiffer- 
ently. Then she turned to the door. 
"Let's go out on the porch. William 
ought to be down in a minute." 
'Ve met him in the hall, a big, glossy, 
friendly man, with a red face and child- 
like eyes. "I'm glad to see you-very 
glad to see you, Mr. Blaisdell," he said, 
in his hearty voice. "Mrs. Bundy has 
told me about you, and how kind you 
were to her"-he nodded solemnly-" in 
her difficulties. Ever been in Kansas 
City before?" He brought over a chair 
and seated himself expansively, his square 
furry hands on his knees. "A wonderful 
city! vVe like it, don't we, Ann?" he said, 
beaming at his wife. "And Aileen does 
too!" He put his arm about her, and she 
smiled shyly and leaned against him. 
"Of course you have advantages in the 
East. And we recognize them." He 
nodded solemnly. " vVe recognize them, 
Mr. Blaisdell." 
"Not so many," I said. Looking at 
him, I rather felt the truth of my state- 
men t. 
"But we're interested, genuinely in- 
terested, in your advantages, Mr. Blais- 
dell," he continued, with his solemn nod. 
" And we're getting them ourselves. Now 
Mrs. Bundy"-he smiled at his wife- 
"she's lost her interest in such things. 
She won't keep up with her music. And 
I love it." He sighed. "I just love 
music. Never could get enough of it in 
my life, which has been pretty busy"- 
he smiled shrewdly-"pretty busy, l\Ir. 
Blaisdell. But"-he lifted his hand, 
touched the dark bobbed hair just above 
his shoulder-"we're going to see that 
Aileen's education along that line is con- 
tinued. Aren't we, dear?" 
" Yes," she whispered. She glanced at 


her mother, and then snuggled closer to 
him. 
A moment later the man announced 
dinner, and we followed Mrs. Bundy into 
the house. In the hallway a short, dark- 
browed woman joined us. " lVladame 
Roller, Aileen's music-teacher," an- 
nounced Mr. Bundy, in his hearty voice. 
" 'Ve got her from Chicago, where Aileen 
is going this fall to study. Walk in." He 
took me by the arm and ushered me into 
the dining-room behind Madame Roller. 
When dinner was over we had our coffee 
on the porch. In a little while l\ladame 
Roller and Aileen disappeared, and I sup- 
posed Aileen was being put to bed, al- 
though I wasn't familiar with children's 
bedtimes, they varied so in the houses of 
my friends. Then Mr. Bundy rose, say- 
ing he'd be back, and Mrs. Bundy and I 
were left alone together. 
For a moment or two we sat in silence 
and I gazed through the darkness, watch- 
ing the distant lights of the motors mov- 
ing behind the black silhouette of the 
trees. Then I turned to l\Irs. Bundy. 
"He's a big, restful chap, your husband," 
I said. "All this"-I waved my hand- 
"is healthy and comfortable." 
"Yes," she answered. Her face just 
beyond the circle of candle-light was 
carven and dusky, and the still gleam of 
her eyes moved slowly back to the dark- 
ness. 
"And health and comfort are every- 
thing, aren't they?" 
" Very nearly." She sighed and I heard 
the creak of her chair as she moved. 
"That, and a feeling of safety," she con- 
tinued, in a voice that grew strangely 
reminiscent and sharp, 
"Safety!" I echoed. I sat up. 
" Yes, You don't know what that 
means, you men." She gazed at me with 
sombre reflection. "Once a woman's out- 
side the world, she's cold, Unles.s she has 
some inward fire. And when that dies, 
she's very cold." 
"I suppose so," I answered vaguely. I 
looked at the lawn, its meagre outlines 
shrouded in tranquil mystery. Cold! 
The dim, fragrant night, with its warm, 
sleepy sounds and the smell of the roses 
about one's face, was anything but cold! 
"But," I said, turning to her, "does an 
inward fire ever die?" 



SECOND MARRIAGE 


307 


"Sometimes." She lifted her fingers to ruptly and we sat in silence, the darkness 
her forehead. "When it's not too great." shivering about us as if it were closing 
A crash of chords carne suddenly from over the splinters of soundc l\Irs. 
the drawing-room behind us, and Mrs. Bundy's face, just beyond the circle of 


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" Aileen! If you must play, won't you play something else! I loathe those sickly sentimental 
Germans! '-Page 308. 


Bundy started up. "\Vho's playing?" 
I asked. " M:adame Roller," she said 
wearily. Then she leaned back. "It's 
disturbing. I wish she'd stop." 
The music continued, and its waves 
seemed to pulse and glow through the 
darkness, to break into weird forms that 
vanished and reappeared in . bright 
streams that leaped into silver patterns 
against the nightc Then it ceased ab- 


light, was still, and her closed eyelids 
seemed as heavy as carven stone. 
In a moment the music began again, 
this time with a light clear touch, very 
fresh and immature. Some one else was 
playing, and I'd heard the thing before, 
not so long ago. I was puzzled- I 
couldn't remember when or where. As 
I wondered, the melody changed, dnfted 
into a waltz, elusive and haunting, filled 



308 


SECOND MARRIAGE 


with a sound of soft cries and a beat of 
little drums. In a flash I knew-remem- 
bered it all completely. It was Reichantz, 
that night at the 1'Iontgomerys. 
A noise broke into my thought, and I 
saw Mrs. Bundy standing before me. "I 
hate that soft sentimental thing 1" she ex- 
claimed. She walked to the door. " Ai- 
leen 1 " Her voice was flat and harsh. 
"Aileen 1 If you must play, won't you 
play something else! I loathe those sickly 
sentimental Germans 1" She clinched 
her hands, and her elbows shook. 
"My dear!" William Bundy's large 
form filled the doorway. "Remember 
Madame Roller!" He put his finger to 
his lips. 
"Oh, she's Swiss, William 1" she cried. 
Then she turned to me with a laugh. 
"It's absurd to make all this fuss about 
such a little thing, isn't it, 1'Ir. Blaisdell?" 
She lifted her hand to her hair as if the 
excitement had shaken it down. "Aileen, 
darling," she said, and her voice had re- 
covered its note of veiled deliberation, 
"don't you think it's time for you to go 
to bed?" 
Our talk was rather constrained for the 
rest of the evening, and I left early. The 
next morning a telegram from Garrett, 
Randall and Company called me home, 
and in the midst of the complications that 
inhabit a receivership I had little chance 
to think of Mrs. Bundy. It wasn't until 
I saw Meriwether in his office for the first 
time after my return that the suspicion 
which had been vaguely floating in my 
mind became fixed. And when we fin- 
ished our business I eyed him, wondering 
where to begin, 
As usual he didn't give me a chance. 
"How did you like Bundy?" he asked. 
"All right. You'd like him yourself if 
you knew him. Do you?" 
" No." 
"But why, Meriwether"-I crossed my 
legs and leaned back in the chair-"did 
the lady say the Plaza sent her?" 



 


"That wasn't my doing I" He looked 
at me quickly. "That was her own idea." 
"I see." I paused, wondering what to 
say next, ""VeIl, at least she was very 
charming," I said. "And if 1'd been 
married to her, I wouldn't have left her 
the way Fearon did. What was he like, 
by the way?" 
" Fearon? \Vha t did he seem like to 
you?" Meriwether looked at me with a 
curious little smile. 
"Very insubstantial. I never could see 
him, somehow, from her talk." 
"No. I guess you couldn't." He 
laughed quietly. "We had to invent 
Fearon." 
"Invent him 1" I sat up. 
"Yes. You see"-Meriwether tapped 
the end of his pen on the desk, then 
looked out of the window-"she told 
Bundy she'd been married and her hus- 
band had left her." 
"The hell she did 1 You mean to say 
there never was any Fearon 1" 
" No." He shook his head. "I'm 
sorry, but there never was," 
" \Vell 1 " I had visions of the d e- 
frauded majesty of the law, and a divorce 
record filled with perjury from top to 
bottom. A divorce without any mar- 
riage 1 It was crazy 1 Like Alice in 
Wonderland 1 I rose and stared at Meri- 
wether. He'd fooled me, and I wasn't 
going to spare him. 
"If there was no Fearon, why didn't 
you marry her yourself, my dear friend?" 
I asked slowly. 
"She wouldn't." The answer was very 
prompt. "She had a career in those days, 
and wouldn't leave it. And I thought I 
had one tooc So there you are. And 
when she found she hadn't, it was too 
late." He rose and walked to the window, 
and stood for a moment looking out: 
Then he turned, the sharp brilliance of 
his face very worn and clear. 
"I hope Bundy's good to Aileen," he 
said. 



 


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What Price Organization? 
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BY JESSE RAINSFORD SPRAGUE 


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 I f.LY lars was the sum to- 
, ward which the cam- 
W
 paign was directed. 
An almost religious 
fervor was in the air as one organization 
after the other pledged itself to the great 
work. Th
 young pastor of the First Bap- 
tist Church, himself a member of the 
Chamber of Commerce and the Advertis- 
ing Club, preached a Sunday evening ser- 
mon on the duty of the citizen toward his 
community, painting a brilliant picture of 
Old town's future when, with increased 
population and higher real-estate values, 
the cause of righteousness would be so 
much advanced. The Rotary and Kiwa- 
nis Clubs enlisted in the campaign one 
hundred per cent strong under the slogan 
of Service. The Associated Women's 
Clubs pledged co-operation, taking as 
their motto, "A greater Old town means 
greater opportunity for the kiddies." The 
Y. M. C. A., the Boy Scouts, and the 
Christian Endeavor Society of the Pres- 
byterian church pledged moral support to 
the cause by formal vote. 
:Monday morning was the date set for 
the beginning of the drive, and two hun- 
dred earnest men and women gathered 
at the Chamber of Commerce headquar- 
ters to receive their assignments. The 
president of each participating organiza- 
tion was designated as colonel and re- 
ceived an ann band on which was printed 
the title in gold. The captains were simi- 
larly decorated, while the rank and file 
wore ribbons on which was inscribed 
"\V orker." Cards had been prepared in 
advance by the Chamber of Commerce 
staff, and in a little while committees of 
three began hurrying along the streets to 
call on prospective subscribers. It was no 
time for slackers in Old town; whenever a 
citizen hesitated to set his name down 
for the amount indicated on a card his 


reasons were carefully noted and his name 
later turned over to the ft.ying squadron, 
a special committee of super strength and 
influence. At noon all workers gathered 
at the 1vIidland Hotel for luncheon, where 
inspirational speeches were made and 
reports of the committees received with 
cheers and hand-clapping. By Monday 
evening nearly half the desired amount 
had been pledged and duly indicated on 
the great wooden thermometer set up in 
the centre of Court House Square. 
On Tuesday morning fewer volunteers 
reported at the Chamber of Commerce 
headquarters, but these were of proven 
quality and the work went forward with 
unabated vigor. Pressure was brought 
to bear in proper quarters and at the 
noon luncheon it was announced that the 
members of the police and fire depart- 
ments had begged permission to donate 
a percentage of their month's salaries 
toward the cause. The superintendent of 
the city schools stated that a similar 
movement was also on foot among the 
teachers which he believed would be acted 
upon favorably, as the school board was 
sending out a form letter strongly urging 
it upon the teachers. 
It was evening of the third day that 
Old town actually went over the top. The 
managers of chain stores and Chicago 
meat corporations had generally been 
recalcitrant, taking advantage of the fact 
that as employees of corporations they 
had no right to pledge their firms to do- 
nations of any kind; this resistance was 
overcome by stern telegrams sent to the 
various head offices of the corporations 
setting forth the fact that the citizenry 
of Oldtown spent its money only with 
those who showed a willingness to co- 
operate in movements for the betterment 
of the community. Favorable responses 
to these messages coupled with other 
tardy donations brought the indicator on 
the thermometer almost to the desired 
figure. It was after nightfall that the 
final dramatic gesture was made. 
309 



310 


\VHAT PRICE ORGANIZATION? 


A little group of captains and colonels 
gathered about the platform on which 
the thermometer was erected, looking 
expectantly down the long vista of Com- 
merce Street. As the clock in the court- 
house turret struck the hour of nine a 
light was seen in the distance and a few 
minutes later fifty hooded and sheeted 
figures debouched into the square, pre- 
ceded by a flaming cross carried by two 
men. No word was spoken. The leader 
of the hooded band leaped upon the plat- 
form, tacked an envelope to the wooden 
thermometer, and descended. The flam- 
ing cross was raised and lowered three 
times, the hooded band departed as si- 
lently as it camec The Chamber of Com- 
merce secretary detached the envelope 
and read aloud the inscription: " one- 
hundred per cent for America and for all 
good works." Inside the envelope was a 
check for three hundred dollars. Old- 
town's campaign was finished. Hence- 
forth Old town would be on the map and 
its name emblazoned on the front pages 
of a thousand journals, for the ten thou- 
sand dollars was to be used in paying the 
expenses of a National League baseball 
team engaged to do its spring training at 
the local grounds. 
Old town is but a type of hundreds of 
other communities, large and small, 
throughout the United States where or- 
ganization is taken with tremendous seri- 
ousness. Organizations dictate personal 
habits, seek to influence nationallegisla- 
tion. Their number has increased incredi- 
bly during the past dozen years. Every 
trade and profession has its national, 
State, and local associations-an aggre- 
gate of more than two thousand accord- 
ing to the government statistics. There 
are the lodges, the women's clubs, the 
semi-religious reform organizations. Com- 
paratively recently a dozen nation-wide 
luncheon club bodies have come into 
being, now maintaining more than three 
thousand local chapters and aggregate 
membership in excess of a quarter of a 
million. Fifteen thousand conventions 
are held in the United States each year to 
transact the business of our multiplicity 
of organizations. 
Against legitimate organization there 
is nothing to be said, for the United States 
is a large country and requires co-ordi- 


nated effort to transact its proper busi- 
ness. But is there not a tendency to 
leave to organizations the things that are 
properly matters for individual thought? 
1\Iass judgment and morality are never 
quite so good as individual judgment and 
morality. The trade association in ses- 
sion at its annual convention passes 
resolutions that reflect the ideas of its 
most confirmed go-getters. Local boost- 
ers' clubs make a fetich of activities that 
to sober judgment are fatuous. Business 
is emotionalized, sentimentalized. Up- 
lifting slogans become a substitute for 
serious effort, and conservatism is 
swamped by mob spirit. 
It was in another Old town that I at- 
tended the weekly meeting of a prominent 
luncheon club that features boys' work 
along with its regular commercial and 
civic activities. On this particular day 
the business of the meeting was to finance 
a series of athletic contests to be held 
among the boys of the community, the 
principal expense of which was the gold 
and silver medals to be presented to the 
winning teams and individuals. It was 
a crowded meeting, for each of the two 
hundred club members had a boy guest; 
this fact helped the cause tremendously 
as subsequent events showed. 
The chairman of the day, a sporting- 
goods dealer, opened the meeting with a 
few stirring remarks on the duty of society 
to the physical well-being of the country's 
youth and made the statement that no 
boy turned to crime who had ever been 
a member of a basket-ball team. This 
statement brought a round of applause 
from both members and their youthful 
guests; and the applause was redoubled 
when the chairman introduced the princi- 
pal speaker of the occasion, an elderly 
gentleman with long white hair and a 
professionally earnest manner. 
The audience was not disappointed in 
its expectation of a prolonged emotional 
thrill, for the gentleman had been on his 
feet but a few moments when the tears 
came to his eyes and voice in contempla- 
tion of his subject. Perhaps it would be 
more correct to say subjects; for the be- 
ginning of his address concerned itself 
with the glory of motherhood and the 
statement that a nation of mothers is a 
moral nation, safe from the aggression of 



\VHAT PRICE ORGANIZATION? 


cynical foreign powers. The Stars and 
Stripes came in for hearty commendation, 
as well as the fact that America had never 
drawn the sword in other than a right- 
eous cause, \Vhen he came to the part 
of his speech concerning the youth of the 
country his emotion was so great as to be 
almost painful; for the boys, he stated, 
are the men of to-morrow. In his perora- 
tion he drew attention to the fact that 
such a gathering as he saw before him was 
but an augury of America's future great- 
ness; in no other land would there be 
found two hundred strong, two-fisted men 
willing to take the time from their busy 
lives to sit at table with bright-eyed, 
eager youths and to enter into their boy- 
ish pleasures. 
It is pleasant to be told that one is both 
two-fisted and noble, and the two hundred 
club members rose to their feet as one man 
in token of their appreciation of the 
speaker's statements. \Vhen the chair- 
man asked for donations to the fund for 
purchasing gold and silver medals the 
response was astonishing. One man 
leaped upon his chair and shouted one 
hundred dollars amid thundering ap- 
plause. Half a dozen others gave fifty. 
The twenties and tens came fast as rain- 
drops in a summer shower. Truly the 
club members paid generously for their 
emotional spree. The meeting adjourned. 
But the satisfaction was not quite 
unanimous if the remarks of one club 
member could be taken seriously. 
"Philanthropy by blackmail," he whis- 
pered darkly as we filed out of the ban- 
quet-room. "Oh, yes, I gave-I didn't 
dare not to-for fear of hurting my busi- 
ness. But I wonder what effect it will 
have on these youngsters to see their eld- 
ers get drunk on sentiment. And after 
this won't the youngsters be inclined to 
believe every time they want anything it 
will drop out of the sky into their hands 
if they are just emotional enough over 
it?" 
Curiously, the United States is the only 
country where organization has become 
so deeply rooted. It is also a fact that 
with us it came about largely through 
our participation in the \Vorld V\'
ar. 
During the war we were forced to work 
in masses, as did the citizens of other 
countries; but the crisis past, there came 


311 


a difference. The Europeans, trained in 
long-settled tradition, went back to their 
accustomed ways; while we, less com- 
mitted to tradition, continued in our 
newly discovered methods. There was 
also the difference that we were vastly 
richer because of the war and could 
afford to experiment, while the Europeans 
could not. In Europe the organizations 
formed to handle war-time problems dis- 
banded after the Armistice and the 
salaried secretaries went back to private 
life. America, being richer and more easy- 
going, allowed the secretaries to form 
other organizations and thus to continue 
with their salaries. 
Looking at it in a purely mercenary 
light, the question arises as to whether we 
shall be able indefinitely to support this 
multiplicity of organization. Is there 
greater efficiency in mass effort than in 
individual effort? Does organization 
make life easier for the average citizen? 
Do the Associated Candle Snuffer :Manu- 
facturers of America produce better and 
cheaper candle-snuffers because of their 
imposing headquarters in New York, their 
high-powered executive secretary, and 
their annual convention in Atlantic City? 
Does the retail shopkeeper in Old town 
sell candle-snuffers at a smaner profit be- 
cause he belongs to the national, State, 
and local candle-snuffers' associations, is a 
director of the Old town Boosters' League, 
and maintains his one-hundred-per-cent 
attendance at the weekly meetings of his 
luncheon club? 
Perhaps some day one of our great 
universities, through its department of 
higher business training, will compile 
statistics on the annual cost of the organi- 
zations of the United States, setting down 
in detail the aggregate salaries of the 
secretaries, the wages of office assistants, 
the railroad fares and hotel bills of fifteen 
thousand conventions, and the cash value 
of the time spent by millions of business 
men at their luncheon meeting and get- 
together conferences. 
The manifest object of organization is 
efficiency; which is to say, economy. If 
our multiplicity of organizations has made 
living cheaper, then the cost, whatever 
it may be, is justified. But during these 
past years of organizing fever the cost 
of living in the United States has not 



312 


'YHAT PRICE ORGANIZATION? 


lessened. It should have lessened because 
the more general use of automatic ma- 
chinery in place of hand labor has materi- 
ally reduced the initial cost of manufac- 
turing. There can be only one explana- 
tion. The public is paying the salaried 
secretaries, the cost of the Washington 
bureaus, the convention expenses, the 
Old town shopkeeper's overhead during 
the time he is in attendance on his lunch- 
eon club or serving on the drive for the 
fund to pay the training expenses of the 
National League baseball team! 
The United States cannot continue in- 
definitely to do things found by other 
nations to be extravagant. \Ve speak of 
the American standard of living as though 
it were something to which we have an 
inalienable right. The plain facts are 
that we have so far been able to maintain 
a higher standard of living because we 
have inherited a vastly rich country with 
tremendous natural resources. \Ve have 
been living on our capital. In the long 
run we will have to match personal ability 
with the harder-living people of other 
countries; and in such competition there 
will be no quick and easy way to su- 
premacy any more than there was fact 
behind the belief during the War that our 
inventors would produce some contri- 
vance to annihilate the enemy overnight. 
At present the United States lives on a 
scale of lavishness so great as to be in- 
comprehensible to the people of other 
countries. A few months ago I was privi- 
leged to visit a French family of the 
middle class in a town in Brittany. The 
lady of the house was particularly inter- 
ested in American life. 
"Is it really true," she asked, "that in 
the United States even the workmen have 
automobiles? " 
I said many workmen had them. The 
lady's husband is a building contractor, 
which probably suggested her next ques- 
tion. 
"And when a new building is being 
erected," she persisted, "do the masons 
and carpenters drive to their work in 
these automobiles? And while they are 
at their work do the automobiles stand 
about like so many horses?" 
I do not know why this mental picture 
seemed so droll to the lady, but during the 
balance of my visit she intermittently 


interrupted the conversation by mirthful 
interjections: "Des charpentiers! Des 
maçons! They leave their autos to stand 
about like the horses!" 
In passing it might be stated that Alen- 
çon, the lady's home city, has a population 
of about eighteen thousand souls; which 
in the average American city would mean 
three thousand automobiles. Citizens of 
Alençon, however, own fewer than sixty 
automobiles. But by actual count Alen- 
çon supports eleven fully stocked and 
solvent bookstores! 
If it is desirable that we continue to 
live so much more lavishly than other 
races the strictest efficiency will be neces- 
sary, for even our vast natural resources 
have a limit and the time is fast ap- 
proaching when we must compete on 
even terms with the rest of the world. 
Professional optimists tell us that mass 
production, which America has so amaz- 
ingly developed, will solve all our prob- 
lems and allow our workmen to continue 
ownership of automobiles, our stenog- 
raphers to wear fur coats, our small busi- 
ness men to belong to golf clubs, our 
farmers to spend their winters in Cali- 
fornia. But mass production has some 
serious weaknesses. It is easy to imitate. 
Germany, for example, is rapidly copying 
our methods, and with cheaper human 
labor to operate its machines can produce 
cheaper than we. J.\-Ioreover, mass pro- 
duction needs world markets; our own 
population cannot buy fast enough to 
keep up with the output of our machines. 
The professional optimist solves the prob- 
lem by advising that we should sell to 
foreign countries, but that we should buy 
nothing from foreign countries. Un- 
fortunately this solution is not workable, 
for if we sell abroad we must buy abroad. 
If we buy abroad, then our work-people 
and farmers must match their efforts 
against the poorer-living work-people and 
farmers of other countries. If we put up 
our tariffs and stubbornly resolve to main- 
tain our scale of living by neither buying 
nor selling abroad, then mass production 
soon saturates our home markets and the 
factories must stop until the goods al- 
ready produced are used up. 
In preparation for this article I have 
talked witìI scores of manufacturing and 
wholesale executives, practically all of 



"'HAT PRICE ORGANIZATION? 


whom declared that "sales resistance 
seems to be on the increase," which trans- 
lated into plain language means that for 
the present the public has bought all it 
can pay for, and that less manufacturing 
must be done in some lines until such 
time as the public is in position to begin 
normal buying once more. That is, the 
wiser business men see it that way and 
adjust their operations to conform with 
condi tions. 
But the others? There comes the dif- 
ference! It was for just such a crisis that 
the Associated Candle-Snuffer Manufac- 
turers Association was organized, ami for 
which it maintains its imposing head- 
quarters and its high-powered executive 
staff. The public is buying fewer candle- 
snuffers? Here, indeed, is a challenge to 
efficiency. From headquarters comes the 
announcement that the association is 
about to launch a campaign to place more 
and better candle-snuffers in every Amer- 
ican home. Speed is all-important, be- 
cause there is only so much money in the 
country to be spent and those first in the 
field get the biggest share. The quick- 
est way to get results? Candle-Snuffer 
Week, of course! An argument must be 
found to place the campaign on a high 
ethical basis and confound the manufac- 
turers of other commodities. The argu- 
ment is found. Candle-snuffers are men- 
tioned in the Bible! Telegrams and form 
letters go out to secretaries of religious 
organizations and luncheon clubs calling 
attention to this fact and demanrling that 
Candle-Snuffer Week be observed as a 
sacred institution. Other timely public- 
ity is necessary to make Candle-Snuffer 
\Veek a success. Shall it be through mag- 
azines and newspapers that have won in- 
fluence through years of constructive 
effort? Banish the thought! The fast- 
est-growing publications are those that 
feature sex and sensation. Full pages, 
then, in Corrupt Confessions monthly mil- 
lion copies. Candle-Snuffer Week must 
go over with a bang! 
Forced business is never good business, 
whether applied to the hectic selling of 
candle-snuffers, the coercion of the school- 
teachers of Old town into subscriptions to 
the baseball fund, or the activities de- 
scribed by the luncheon-club member as 
philanthropy by blackmail. Tyranny is 
VOL, LXXVIII.-23 


313 


tyranny, whether practised by an indi- 
vidual or by an organization, and in 
either case corrupting. No one is im- 
mune from the elation of conscious power, 
and membership in an organization sup- 
plies precisely that. At the weekly meet- 
ing of the luncheon club, at the trade 
convention, during the Chamber of Com- 
merce drive, voices are raised to an au- 
thoritative pitch as carrying the weight of 
numbers. Important questions are de- 
cided by an imperious aye or nay. In- 
evitably the joiner is a more assertive per- 
son than the non-joiner. 
During recent years a great deal has 
been written and said about our failure 
to establish foreign markets for our manu- 
factured articles-a matter vastly im- 
portant to the continuance of our Ameri- 
can scale of livingc Naturally we cannot 
easily gain world trade when to the higher 
wages of our workmen are added the cost 
of a multiplicity of non-productive organi- 
zations. But also commerce, particularly 
international commerce, is not alone a 
matter of price but of racial likes and dis- 
likes. It is probably mor
 than a coinci- 
dence that since the war, which is to say 
since the United States became so strong- 
ly addicted to the organization habit, 
there has been an increasing number of 
complaints from American exporters who 
claim their sales are being lessened by the 
eccentric conduct of their fellow country- 
men travelling abroad. 
It is only a short time ago that the resi- 
dent American colony in London was 
shocked by the actions of a confirmed 
joiner, a tourist gentleman from the :Mid- 
dIe West. The occasion was a banquet 
tendered by resident Americans to a 
prominent British diplomat who, in the 
course of his remarks, made some pleasing 
allusion to America. This was the signal 
for the joiner's extraordinary actions. 
Springing to his feet he delightedly hurled 
his napkin in the air and shouted: "Atta 
Boy!" Then, quite in the manner preva- 
lent at his home-townluncheon-club meet- 
ing he demanded to know what was the 
matter with the diplomat and answered 
his own question enthusiastically: "He's 
all righ t !" 
Another gentleman, also a joiner, after 
attending a convention in London, went 
to Paris with a party of Americans, the 



314 


WHAT PRICE ORGANIZATION? 


party being entertained at a formal lunch- 
eon by a group of French business men. 
The joiner had not been asked to speak, 
but did so anyhow. 
"There's going to be a big international 
convention in my home city next sum- 
mer," he told the Parisians expansively, 
"and I hope you'll all come. Probably 
while you're there you'll see something 
we can sell you!" 
During the past three or four years an 
entirely new method of elevating the ego 
has been discovered for the benefit of the 
joiner able to make a trip abroad. He 
belongs to the State Retail Merchants' 
Association, let us say, and offers to rep- 
resent that body on his contemplated 
journey. As this service is to be rendered 
gratis, the suggestion is gratefully accept- 
ed. The joiner then has cards printed 
bearing his name and the words, "Special 
Representative of the Blank State Retail 
:11erchants' Association," which cards he 
distributes liberally while on tour, thus at 
trifling cost placing himself in a vastly 
more important situation than his fellow 
tourists, and with the added pleasure of 
making a report of his investigations at 
the next convention of the association. 
Each summer some hundreds of these self- 
appointed representatives plod through- 
out Europe distributing their cards and 
leaving in the minds of the natives a 
puzzled impression as to the qualifications 
considered desirable in American official 
represen ta tives. 
International business depends largely 
on good-will. The English, long experi- 
enced in world affairs, understand this 
thoroughly; it is not for nothing that their 
prince is sent on long journeys to show 
himself to the people of other countries. 
The prince is a personable character and 
the model of every young Englishman. 
The inference is this: "Here is our prince, 
a typical Britisher. Look at the cut of 
his London-made clothes, his pipe, his 
hat. Pretty good, yes? And his man- 
ners-quite perfect ! Very well, then, buy 
our British-made goods, you'll like them. 
The prince is a pleasant chap. You'll find 
the rest of us are pleasant, too, especially 
in trade. And we make awfully fine 
goods!" 
Doubtless the prince creates more busi- 
ness for British manufacturers in a single 


trip than the many shiploads of American 
young ladies sent abroad each year as a re- 
sult of Chamber of Commerce popularity- 
vote contests. :1fore business even than 
the three char-à-bancs full of boy and girl 
students from an American co-educa- 
tional seat of learning observed one eve- 
ning in Paris during the last tourist sea- 
son, who sang blithely as they coursed 
through the streets: " Hail, hail, the 
gang's all here, \Vhat the hell do we 
care ! " 
The foreigners can only judge by ap- 
pearances; each stranger stands to them 
as a representative of race. They cannot 
know that the individual who goes about 
distributing cards or acting strangely at 
public gatherings is,athome, no more than 
chairman of the transportation committee 
of the Old town Boosters' Club. In the 
interest of our overseas commerce it may 
some time be advisable by enactment of 
law to subject each passport applicant to 
a rigid examination of his organization 
memberships and his offices therein, if any. 
Every extravagance we commit brings 
the time inevitably nearer when we shall 
have to exist on a scale comparable to that 
of harder-living peoples; when as in Eu- 
ropean countries our bank clerks will work 
for fifty dollars a month; our carpenters 
receive two dollars a day; our farm labor- 
ers seven dollars a week; our congress- 
men one thousand eight hundred dollars a 
year. Our present passion for overorgan- 
ization is an extravagance. How to rid 
ourselves of useless organizations ? Very 
simple if each patriotic individual will ap- 
point himself a committee of one to ex- 
amine dispassionately his various mem- 
berships and at once hand in his resigna- 
tion to those palpably conducted to fur- 
nish employment to the salaried officials; 
those that maintain attendance by the 
lure of emotional sprees; those whose 
annual conventions are gay parties in- 
stead of serious business conferences; 
those that force selling by hectic propa- 
ganda. 
It is doubtless more than a coincidence 
that the French, possibly the most skil- 
ful business people in the world, are least 
given to formal organization. Yet with a 
congested population and a country long 
since depleted of natural wealth, the 
French manage to hold their own. On a J 



THE ANTIQUE-SHOP LAMENT 


recent visit in France I chanced to be in 
conversation with a gentleman who op- 
erates one of the great printing-houses of 
Paris. It appears that in France as in 
America there is a disquieting tendency 
on the part of the rising generation of 
boys to flit from one employment to 
another rather than to perfect themselves 
in some regular trade. The people of 
France, the gentleman said, are uneasy 
over the situation because it is reaJized 
that more than anything else the country 
needs skilled workmen to hold its place 
in world commerce. 
I asked him if there were no societies 
working toward this end, for the cir- 
cumstances called to mind the need of a 
vast national organization with executive 
headquarters at the capital and chapters 
in a thousand cities, a drive for funds, a 
million earnest workers laboring under 


315 


the slogan, Back to the \Vork-bench, pa- 
rades and get-together luncheons with 
bright-faced young apprentices. 
The Parisian replied that there were no 
such societies; that most French munici- 
palities maintain trade-schools, but there 
concerted effort ends. We agreed to meet 
again; he stated that any time would be 
convenient for him except Sunday morn- 
ing. One surmised that this was his time 
for gay entertainment on the boulevards, 
but the surmise proved incorrect. 
"Each Sunday morning I am occu- 
pied," said the wealthy, middle-aged 
Parisian apologetically, "for I teach 
printing to a class of boys at the trade- 
school of the arrondissement. They are 
boys who are employed in the small print- 
ing-shops and Sunday morning is the only 
time they have. It is a duty I owe to my 
craft. " 


The Antique-Shop Lament 
BY CAROLINE CAMP 
Author of "The Antique Habit" 


U 'WFJ'Q.L:1o. .o'.n
( OES your head ache 
XkJJF

 and your back ache? 

 (Q] rJ Do you feel that you 

 '-" D 
. have no courage, no 
g. hope, no ambition 

 left? Absolutely no 
Ä
1Ç1Ä vita
ity? Is your hair 
commgout? Are you 
tired of the whole world? 
"Something is wrong! I can tell you 
what it is!" 
A customer came into my shop at that 
juncture, so I read no farther. It wasn't 
necessary anyway. I knew that the an- 
swer could be but one thing-"You run 
an antique shop." 
I started my shop five years ago. At 
that time my hair was long, golden, and 
curly. It is now sparse, drab, and tena- 
ciously stringy. At the start my eager- 
ness was almost volcanic. I could hardly 
wait to get to the shop in the morning to 
feast my eyes on my early American sur- 
roundings. The sight of a Sheraton desk 


or a banjo clock gave me quite the same 
flutter as did my first early morning view 
of the Grand Canyon. I! positively 
gloated over the whole thing, and exuded 
enthusiasm to every person who entered 
my door. Regardless of whether she 
came to rave or to buy, she was piloted 
ecstatically about. Wooden pegs and 
original legs were joyously displayed. 
But five years has made a difference! 
A Sheraton desk or a banjo clock gets no 
twitter from me now. No! Nor would 
a museum piece of the highest order! 
Do you know who is responsible for 
this diabolical condition of mine? I 
know, and I feel that you should know. 
1\-1 y customers, and my customers only, 
are accountable. They sift into my shop 
day after day, always effervescent, always 
loquacious, almost always trite and dull. 
I shall have to except one who came in 
yesterday. She effervesced up to the 
usual mark, but she was not loquacious, 
nor could one call her trite. A foreign 



316 


THE ANTIQUE-SHOP LArvlENT 


car with dachshund lines, guided and 
guarded by a chauffeur and a footman, 
rushed her to my gate. She dismounted 
from her chariot, looking very florid and 
wearing the strangest hat, I think, in the 
world. It was made of some sort of grass 
woven to look like a bird's nest, and there, 
perched on the edge of the nest, was the 
bird. The only thing missing was the re- 
liable worm which must have turned at 
the last moment, just not being able to 
keep up with the terrific pace. She wore 
a green gown striped with red, and mil- 
lions of beads were abou t her neck. She 
burst into my shop with "Have you any 
Quinze stuff ?-you know-Louis?" I 
came back with: "No, I have only Wash- 
ington stuff-you know-George." She 
thundered, "Oh, I see," and was gone. 
Time: one minute and ten seconds. 
A type of person who is partly answer- 
able for my decay is the one who gen- 
erally comes in with a friend or two. 
They saunter leisurely about-all the 
time in the world, and everything they 
see brings up sweet memories of some 
dear ancestor's home. 
It is: "Oh, J\1011y, don't you remember 
the chair that sat in Aunt Sarah's bed- 
room? It was precisely like this one. 
Her cat was forever curled up in it- 
morning, noon, and night. I always 
wanted that chair, but, of course, Emily 
got it; and look at this quaint hooked rug 
with the horse on it. Aunt Sarah had 
some of those rugs too. I don't know 
what did become of them. Have you 
ever seen a more beautiful bedquilt than 
this one, J\1011y? Just look at those 
stitches! Fancy their having time to do 
all that work-although I suppose there 
wasn't much else to do in those days. If 
we had only known years ago how valua- 
ble these things were going to be ! " Then 
she turns her attention to me: "You must 
find it so interesting-this business- 
fascinating." And on they trail to a 
table that is the perfect counterpart of 
one that J\tlolly's grandmother had in her 
up-stairs hall, 
They keep this up for, it seems, hours. 
At last it is their tea-time and they 
drift out, leaving nothing more encourag- 
ing than "Thank you so much; you have 
such lovely things ! We shall be in again 
very soon." 


Another tormenting soul is the woman 
who doesn't really know what she wants, 
but all of her friends are buying antiques, 
and she has decided to weed out her mod- 
ern furniture piece by piece, and stock 
up with early American. She knows 
nothing. A spool-bed seems quite as good 
to her as a field-bed, and she bickers some 
time over which one to buy. After much 
racking of her brain, and inexhaustible 
meditation, she takes neither. However, 
she does become greatly enamoured with 
a chair, although she is not sure that her 
husband will like it. He is not enthusi- 
astic over the antique idea; she doesn't 
think that most men are. Would I mind 
putting the chair aside until half past 
five the next day, when her husband will 
stop on bis way from the golf club? Cer- 
tainly, I am very glad to. All the time 
thinking: " You poor, benighted creature, 
if I wanted a certain chair or a certain 
anything, you can jolly well believe that I 
would have it, husband or no husband!" 
During the next day I have three 
chances to sell that chair. At half after 
five husband and wife meet at my shop. 
Husband sits in the chair, turns it over, 
knocks it around a bit, wiggles the arms, 
prods the seat, and in the end remarks: 
"If you can see forty-five dollars in that 
chair, I can't! Give me my good old 
siuffed chair with the foot-rest." 'Vife 
extends me a sickly smile and thanks me 
for holding the chair, but she thinks she 
won't take it just now. Exit one man 
and puppet. 
One of my best customers who knows 
antiques through and through, particu- 
larly glass, not long ago selected a dozen 
very good wine-glasses to be sent as a 
wedding-gift to a friend of her husband's 
in St. PauL The price was fifty dollars. 
They were extraordinarily choice and I 
had been a year collecting the dozen. I 
packed them myself, very carefully, and 
sent them on their way-really hating to 
see them go. Two weeks afterward I re- 
ceived this slightly caustic letter from 
St. Paul: 


I am returning, by express collect, a 
dozen glasses that were sent from your 
shop on the eleventh. J\lr. and Mrs. 
Stoddard's cards were enclosed, but I am 
sure there has been some mistake. !\-1 r. 



THE ANTIQUE-SHOP LAl'viENT 


Stoddard is a very good friend of mine, 
and I know that he and Mrs. Stoddard 
would never have selected such glasses 
as a wedding-gift for me. They are very 
poorly made, full of bubbles, and even 
rough on the bottoms. I cannot under- 
stand any reputable shop putting out 
such an article. 
I have tried to get in touch with 11r. 
and Mrs. Stoddard but they are in Ber- 
muda for a month. 
'Vill you kindly look the matter up 
and rectify the mistake at once? 
Very truly yours, 


And when the glasses arrived, five of them 
were b atoms! 
Perhaps you do not feel that these few 
every-day incidents are sufficient grounds 
for my deplorable symptoms and suicidal 
thoughts. You are doubtless visualizing 
me: "Hatchet-faced, orthopedic shoes, 
lace colJar, antique pine chip on shoul- 
der." Not so at all. I am simply a faded 
beauty, irreproachably gowned, and striv- 
ing to look pleased with my existence. 
Should you run my shop for a while, 
you, too, would fade and lose your genial 
look. 
Your first customer might be the kind 
who is looking for advice. You won't 
recognize the species when she comes in, 
and very likely you won't come to your 
senses until she goes out. 
She wiiI bring with her an infinitesimal 
piece of wall-paper and will say that she 
wants a lamp-shade in a corresponding 
color. Now do you think this, or do you 
think that? \Vhat kind of rugs would 
you advise? She has a needlework pic- 
ture done in mauve silk-no, she guesses 
it is taupe after all-and she is thinking of 
hanging it in the same room that the lamp- 
shade is for. "What color shade would 
you buy in that case if you were a lady?" 
says she. And do you think that the cur- 
tains on the mauve or the taupe, which- 
ever it is (she still can't remember), would 
be good, or would you prefer plain white 
ruffled curtains? 
You will hear all about her new house 
in the country too. "Such a darling 
place; six fireplaces, an old Dutch oven 
in the kitchen, all the beams hand-hewn 
and put together with wooden pegs, the 


317 


original old meat-hooks in the ceiling, 
floor-boards no less than twenty-eight 
inches wide, and a spring on the place that 
has never been dryas long as the oldest 
man for miles around can remember. 
A nd, the strange part of the whole thing 
is, that in looking over old deeds I found 
that back in 1770 my husband's great- 
great-grandfather's half-brother owned 
the place for six months. He afterward 
fought in the Revolutionary War and was 
at Fort Ticonderoga with Ethan Allen. 
Isn't it strange the way things work out? 
Little did he think during those six 
months that George and I would be living 
in the same house a hundred and fifty 
years afterward." 
This sort of customer never fails to 
ask you if you don't love mahogany. 
Assuming that you care more for maple 
or pine, as I do, you will no doubt receive 
the reply that I did on a similar occasion. 
" Well, of course if you had been brought 
up with good mahogany the way I was, 
you would like it." 
I might as well tell you that she will 
tease you along for some time. And does 
she buy the lamp-shade? She does not! 
I must sound the alarm for the people 
who register absolute fight over the price 
of everything in the shop. No matter 
what it is, they can buy it for one-half as 
much somewhere else. Even in New 
York, where the shopkeepers have such 
atrocious rents to pay, antiques are a 
bargain compared to my prices. They 
have motored from Quebec to Connecti- 
cut, stopping at every shop along the 
way, and my shop is the last word for 
robbery. 
'Vhen you spot these people, don't 
fail to knock every price in half, and be- 
fore they go, try to give them something. 
You don't have to worry; they won't take 
it. They never buy anything but suites 
of furniture at reduction sales, and they 
are merely stopping in order to tell some 
of their friends who like antiques that 
they visited three hundred and fifteen 
antique-shops on their trip and didn't see 
a thing that they would take as a gift. 
If you can stand the pcople I havc men- 
tioncd ami 
People with no imagination and no dis- 
crimination, 



318 


THE ANTIQUE-SHOP LAMENT 


People who call your best pieces reproduc- 
tions when you know that they are not, 
People who buy a flawless piece of china, 
take it home, and crack it in transit, 
then return it and want their money 
back, 
People who try to beat you down to a 
price that is less than cost, 
People who bring their dogs inside to 
frisk around pottery and a pink lustre 
tea-set, 
People who flick their cigarette ashes in 
a sixty-dollar flip glass, 
People who always want a glass of water 
for their children and want nothing 
else, 
People who insist that you should pay 
for crating and shipping, 
People who leave road-oil footprints on 
hooked rugs and think that it is funny, 
People who point at a portrait with an 
umbrella and punch a hole through the 
canvas, 
People who charge things and pay for 
them three years afterward, 
People who charge things and never pay 
for them, 
People who never charge anything, 
-thel1.., you. can run an al1tique-shop and 
keep your demeanor. 
But doesn't your head ache just a 
little? 1\1.ine is still throbbing, and I 
would appreciate your joining in the 
chorus with me. r am positive that 
Shelley was not thinking of me when he 
wrote: "No change, no pause, no hope, 
yet I endure." 
I have given my state of boredom seri- 
ous and deliberate though t and I think 
that I have found a way back to life. 
To-night I shall start a sampler signed 
"Caroline Camp. Her Thoughts and 
Her "Vork." On it shaH be embroidered 
in a precise early American cross-stitch: 


If any of your ancestors had a piece of fur- 
niture like any in litis shop, keep it a se- 
cret. 
If you are looking for advice, I can send Y01l, 
to an excellent decorator. 
If your husband does not like antiques, do 
not enter this shop 'Until you are positive 
that he is quite dead. 


The chairs in this shop are not to be used 
for punching-bags. 
Old glass is full of bubbles. The rough 
place on the bottom is supposed to be 
there and is called a pontil mark. 
If you are in this shop longer than fifteen 
minutes without buying something, the 
floor will open 'Up no matter where you 
are standing and )'our family will always 
be wondering why you do not come home. 
If you do not like my prices, tell your 
friends,. do not tell me, I do not care. 
Unless you can prove that you have brains, 
manners, a conscience, and a real bank- 
account, do not enter here. 


In one corner I shall emblazon a flint- 
lock gun and in another a tomahawk. 
The whole shall be framed and hung in 
my shop where it will attract the eye of 
every prowler for the antique. 
With my sentinlents so frankly posted, 
I can change my entire attitude toward 
my customers. Instead of acquiescing 
that a shop like mine is a joy forever, I 
shall snap: "It is not; I loathe it!" 
I shall also say: "I do not care, Mrs. 
White, what kind of curtains you have, 
nor how they hang. I simply cannot lis- 
ten to another word about your house. 
I despise old houses with broad board 
floors and fireplaces. Give me a nice 
quartered-oak floor and a gas-log." 
Unless I immediately take a fancy to a 
customer the minute she comes in the 
door, I shall whisper: "Do not disturb me; 
I have diphtheria, and I am reading any- 
way. " 
By this simple scheme my ennui may 
give way to rejoicing, and who knows but 
what my dingy locks may regain their 
erstwhile refulgency? 
I beg of you, antique maniac, not to 
fight shy of my shop on account of this 
handwriting on the wall. If you do not 
come, how can I play the game? Don't 
forget that I am here, on guard, waiting 
for you with my eyes open and my hand 
on the lever that dumps the floor into 
the cellar. Tread lightly and observe 
all rules or you will find yourself adver- 
tised among the "Lost" items and 
never will you find yourself among the 
"Found." 



The Public Libraries of America 


BY JOHN MALCOLM MITCHELL 
Secretary of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust; Author of "The Public Libraries of Great Britain 
and Ireland"; Member of the Departmental Committee on Public Libraries (England and Wales) 


'. 
it:.:. ONCE knew a pro- 

 fessional scribe who, 
, I . on the strength of a 
L!JI I
 three weeks' stay in 

 India-mostly at 
I Simla - ventured to 
WW write a critical review 
of Lord Curzon's In- 
dian policy. The result is a standing re- 
minder of the unwisdom of committing 
oneself to paper on the basis of superficial 
investigation. 
None the less, after a five weeks' tour in 
the United States, I succumb to the temp- 
tation of paying a tribute to the remark- 
able progress which is being made in many 
places in the sphere of public-library pro- 
vision. During my short tour I have had 
the pleasure of meeting many leading li- 
brary experts and of visiting a number of 
the more important library systems. To 
one who is a keen student of library policy 
in the United Kingdom, the experience 
has been most stimulating, and I think it 
may be of interest to put on record certain 
special features in which the American 
system seems to be in advance of its Brit- 
ish counterpart. 
The great weakness of the British ser- 
vice is its lack of systematic co-ordination. 
This defect exists to some extent in the 
United States. Small local institutions 
still struggle on by themselves in water- 
tight compartments on insufficient funds. 
But the British system, at present, is 
without the invaluable" Inter-Loan" sys- 
tem under which serious works not con- 
tained in one library maybe borrowed 
from another. At the fountainhead of 
this national loan service is the Library 
of Congress-America's magnificent na- 
tional collection. Serious students re- 
quiring expensive works which their small 
local libraries cannot afford to provide, 
may have their applications forwarded by 
the local librarian to the Library of Con- 
gress, which will either itself supply the 
books on loan, or refer the applicant to 
some other of the larger collections from 


which they may be obtained. This sys- 
tem is naturally limited to important and 
costly works of high authority, but it is 
just these works which a library with a 
small clientele cannot reasonably be ex- 
pected to buy for itself. 
The obvious wisdom of the Mutual 
Loan Service has led to two important de- 
velopments of an administrative nature. 
The first is the system of "Union Cata- 
logues," by which a group of libraries, of 
similar status, or in a certain locality, 
combine their lists of rare and important 
works (ordinary fiction and children's 
books being, of course, excluded). These 
joint catalogues enable anyone of the 
various librarians, before having recourse 
to the Library of Congress, to ascertain 
whether a given work, which he does not 
himself possess, is on the shelves of an 
associated coHection. This co-operative 
system, in which even the universities to 
some extent take part, is manifestly both 
economical and of immense value to seri- 
ous students, who soon tire of approach- 
ing their local librarians in vain. It is the 
only method of helping studious readers 
who live far away from the great centres 
of population in which comprehensive li- 
braries are economically possible. 
The second important administrative 
development is the creation by the Li- 
brary of Congress of a national system of 
card-cataloguing, under which any library 
-public, university, commercial, profes- 
sional-and any individual may contract 
to receive printed copies of the cards pre- 
pared for the Catalogue of the National 
Library. These cards are, of course, pre- 
pared by the best experts, and they have 
the invaluable feature of containing skilled. 
annotations-an enormous advantage to 
the less highly trained librarian in smaller 
centres, who is also in many cases far too 
busy to be an omnivorous critical reader. 
The economy of the system is obvious. 
The creation of this co-operative ma- 
chinery manifestly marks an epoch in the 
sphere of national library service. It 
3 1 9 



320 


THE PUBLIC LIBRARIES OF AMERICA 


should lead not only to similar develop- 
ments in other countries, but also, within 
the inevitable limits, to some form of in- 
ternational co-ordination. The world's 
treasures of culture and knowledge are 
not to be hoarded on the racial or the 
geographical basis. The problem may 
well be discussed in a preliminary way, if 
the American Library Association is able 
to arrange for international sessions at its 
conference in 1926. 
Before leaving the topic of national co- 
operation it is interesting to observe that 
neither the United States nor the United 
Kingdom has so far set up a National Li- 
brary Bureau, either separately or as part 
of an existing government department. 
There are, of course, in both countries, 
distinct objections to centralized control 
or even inspection, but it is worthy of no- 
tice that in the Province of Ontario a cen- 
tral inspectorate appears to perform a use- 
ful and stimulating function-especially 
beneficial to the less wealthy libraries in 
which salaries are low and book selection 
presents a serious annual problem. The 
individual freedom of local libraries must, 
obviously, be preserved; the pride of own- 
ership is a great asset in library policy. 
But the nation as a whole has a vital in- 
terest in the spread of culture, and effi- 
ciency may perhaps be capable of increase 
under tactful, but systematic, supervision 
from a national correlating centre. 
To pass from the nation to the State, 
the chief interest to a British student of 
libraries is the evolution of the county 
system, which, allowing for the obvious 
differences of scale, has made such striking 
progress in the United Kingdom during 
the past ten years. The system is ten 
years older in the United States, and 
though it has not as yet covered anything 
like so large a proportion of the country, 
it has, in at least one State, advanced to a 
high degree of efficiency. This State is, 
of course, California, where the system de- 
vised by the far-sighted :Mr. Gillis is de- 
veloping under the devoted and skilful 
management of :hir. Milton J. Ferguson. 
The basis of the county scheme is too fa- 
miliar to require description; it is enough 
to remind readers that its purpose is to 
distribute collections of books from a cen- 
tral depot to small places in which it is 
economically impossible to maintain an 
adequate local service. 


In California, however, there are two or 
three features which specially call for ad- 
miration. In the first place one is filled 
with amazement at the remoteness and 
inaccessibility of many of the local cen- 
tres. Books are taken on pack-animals 
to lonely schools on the roadless Pacific 
slopes, to mining villages high up in the 
Sierra canyons, to small clubs far away 
from railroads and ordinary lines of motor 
transport. A few counties in the British 
Isles-e. g., Donegal, Argyll, Sutherland 
-have similar problems, but in California 
the system is literally marvellous. It is 
an educational service of the highest qual- 
ity, achieved under almost unique topo- 
graphical difficulties. 
The great weakness of the county sys- 
tem, namely that it can only provide in 
the ordinary way books of general interest 
(largely fiction), is overcome in California 
by the loan system, under which the State 
Library, in Sacramento, acts locally for 
the State as the Library of Congress acts 
for the nation. If the county librarian of 
Monterey or Los Angeles is unable to meet 
a reader's requirements in any subject of 
serious study, application may be made 
to Sacramento, and if even the State Li- 
brary cannot provide the necessary book, 
the request can be transmitted to a higher 
source-ultimately to the Library of Con- 
gress. :Moreover, the system of "Union 
Catalogues" is in local operation both in- 
ternally in the counties and collectively 
in the State, so that no outside application 
is made until local resources have been 
thoroughly tested. 
A third feature of the Californian sys- 
tem is the wise policy adopted by small- 
town library boards of entering into in- 
tegral relations with the county scheme. 
A town with a small tax valuation is 
grievously handicapped in the attempt to 
provide a balanced collection of books in- 
dependently. It is far more economical, 
and likewis
 more efficient, to have access 
to a large loan collection of literature in 
addition to maintaining an adequate nu- 
cleus of standard works. Both the town 
and the county benefit by broadening the 
basis of supply, and co-ordination is an 
economy to both. 
These are only a few of the more im- 
portant features of modern American li- 
brary administration which strike the in- 



THE PUBLIC LIBRARIES OF AI\1ERICA 


terested observer. It is not to be as- 
sumed that British libraries are not also 
moving with the times. Indeed, interest 
is so keenly alive over there that the presi- 
dent of the Board of Education has ap- 
pointed a departmental committee to in- 
quire into, and report upon, the whole 
problem. The county system has spread 
so rapidly that after ten years only a 
dozen counties or so are without library 
systems. The Central Library for Stu- 
dents is rapidly building up a loan collec- 
tion of serious literature which will be a 
national reserve for all the public libraries 
of the country. Many of the highly spe- 
cialized technical libraries are co-ordi- 
nated with it. The whole problem of 
these latter libraries is under investiga- 
tion by an expert committee. The re- 
moval, in 1919, of the statutory limita- 
tion upon library finance, has opened the 
way to the development of urban li- 
braries, though the pressing demands of 
economy have so far constituted a serious 
obstacle. 
Nevertheless candor compels the con- 
clusion that the American system is, in 
practice, more elastic. The American 
public pays-apparently without demur 
-a good deal more per caput than the 
British library normally receives. The li- 
brarian appears to have greater freedom 
and a larger measure of administrative re- 
sponsibility. 1'Iore extensive provÌsion 
is made for professional training, and the 
status of librarianship is more on a par 
with that of the learned professions gen- 
erally. The American citizen is, on the 
whole, perhaps, more keenly alive to the 
importance of the public library as a fac- 
tor in communal life. 
There are only two respects in which, 
as an outsider, one may be permitted to 
ask a respectful question. The first is 
this: Have the various authorities concerned 
sufficiently considered the relation which 
should exist between the public library and 
the boards of education as regards tlre sup- 
ply of reading for children of school age? 
This is a vital problem, since it is axiomat- 
ic that the habit of reading should be in- 
culcated at an early age. In practically 
every town provision is made-ample and 
generous provision-for children in the 
library,. children's rooms are almost uni- 
versal, and even separate buildings are 
provided; children's librarians are spe- 


321 


cially trained. But the supply of actual 
school libraries is apparently unsystem- 
atic; there is no consensus of opinion as to 
their proper place in the scheme, and un- 
der whose ægis they should be selected 
and administered. 
The problem derives peculiar impor- 
tance from the fact that modern educa- 
tional theory, rightly or wrongly, tends 
to lay less and less emphasis on the pre- 
scribed text-book, and to give the child, 
even at a very early age, a large freedom 
of choice. The teacher clearly cannot be 
relieved of all responsibility in this matter, 
but librarians, rightly or wrongly, are 
loath to accept the teacher, or even the ed- 
ucation authority, as coequal experts in 
the selection and administration of gen- 
erallibraries. There is, in fact, evidence 
of a clash of opinion which calls for ad- 
justment. A modus vivendi should not be 
difficult to devÌse, and a solution is desir- 
able, not so much because it matters 
greatly upon whom the responsibility 
should be placed, as because, in the ab- 
sence of a definite ruling, it is largely a 
matter of chance whether school libraries 
of any kind are provided. 
The second question is closely allied. 
JVlzat is the function of the public library 
in relation to adult education? This 
problem is engaging the careful attention 
of the American Library Association, and 
a preliminary report has been published. 
The librarian, obviously, cannot, and does 
not presumably wish to, take the place of 
the university extramural tutor, or to 
turn any part of his premises into ordinary 
classrooms. Yet it is clearly necessary 
that the public library should keep in 
touch with and assist isolated students, 
and even organized classes, by providing 
expert guidance and appropriate reading- 
matter. Special borrowing facilities can 
often be allowed, even to the extent of re- 
laxing the rigid rules against lending books 
from the reference department for home 
and class study. Deliberate adult study 
is a thing to be encouraged, and it is 
greatly to be hoped that the inquiry 
conducted by the association will lead to 
a clear-cut definition of responsibility. 
Education is one of the most costly of all 
public services; uneducated democracy 
means chaos; the public library, within 
its limits, is the most economical of all 
educational institutions. 



The Admiral Sails- 


(OCTOBER 1, 1922) 


BY MARY RAYMOND SHIPMAN ANDRE"VS 


[The epic note was struck in the stirring career of Rear-Admiral Charles E. Clark by the voyage 
of the Oregon. People past forty will recall that the Spanish War found this large ship at San 
Francisco. Her presence on the eastern coast was essential. Captain Clark sailed on March 9, 
1898, and made Florida on May 24. It was a voyage unprecedented for a ship of its class, a race 
of ten thousand miles to a battle-field, with an always present danger-and hope--of meeting the 
Spanish fleet. The great ship made the great voyage with the smoothness and precision of a ferry- 
boat crossing the North River, and went at once into action at Santiago. 
Admiral Clark died on October I, 1922. These verses are meant to "tune in" on any first of 
October.] 


Clark of the Oregon's dead. 
One can fancy him landing in heaven 
Straight from the voyage, he who made long voyages, 
\Vith his vigorous, grizzled head 
And the blue glance, humorous, straight as a blow; 
One can almost hear how he said,- 
If Saint Peter, by chance might have asked him his name- 
"Clark." Only that; not a hint of his fame 
In the brief, simple name to which all the acclaim 
Of a nation swept up, like a draft to a flame. 
Only "Clark." But Saint Peter would know 
In a flash. He would show 
In his look, old Saint Peter-so used to the same 
Long routine; million following million of good folk. and dull. 
He would maybe salute, old Saint Peter, just touching his head's big dome; 
"You're Clark, of the Oregon, sir; welcome home." 


And all over heaven the sailormen 
Would be hailing each other: "Have you heard it then?- 
The news to-day?" So might Farragut say, 
And Drake, and Lord Nelson, and Dewey-all they 
\Vhose names are like thunder of big guns at sea- 
Great sailors of history, hailing each other 
Across heaven's field; " You've heard the news, brother? 
No? \Vhy, Clark of the Oregon made port to-day." 


Clark of the Oregon dead? 
Maybe the splendid gray head, 
The thick-set, strong body is dead; 
Maybe even the blue of his eye, 
Used to wide spaces, rolling waves, rushing sky, 
Keeping always that glint of outdoors, that sea-water clearness, 
That easy commanding, with all of its dearness 
Of friendly, quick answer. Those wonderful things may be dead, 
But Clark-the American, Clark-Captain Clark of the Oregon-he'll never die! 


Only-the Admiral's sailed. 


22 



D OCTOR J. LESLIE HOTSON, of 
Harvard, has made a sensational 
contribution to Elizabethan liter- 
ary history by his discovery of the facts 
concerning the death of Marlowe. In a 
slender and exquisitely printed volume 
called "The Death of Christopher Mar- 
lowe," he gives an accurate and thrilling 
description of the poet's last day on earth, 
the circumstances of his taking-off, and 
the name of the man who stabbed him. 
Not only has he discovered the truth of 
what for more than three hundred years 
has been a romantic legend, he has ar- 
ranged his material in a manner to delight 
both lawyers and dramatists. I salute 
young Doctor Hotson, for he is envied by 
every English scholar in the world. 
This is the highest possible form that 
a doctor's thesis can take: a discovery of 
prime and universal importance, set forth 
with consummate literary art. The ordi- 
nary thesis-its futility and tragic recoil 
-gave a young American scholar, sati- 
rist, and poet, Leonard Bacon, his oppor- 
tunity; and he seized it in a book, recently 
published, called" Ph.D.s. " Many men 
and more women injure their health along 
the doctor of philosophy route; and when 
the girls, in addition to overwork, have 
been obliged to borrow money in order 
to continue their researches, the effect is 
often disastrous. Constance spoke truly 
, when she said: 
TVe women hate a debt as men a gift. 
The personality of Kit Marlowe is as ro- 
mantic as his plays; he has frequently been 
made the protagonist of tragedy. Perhaps 
the best of all such biographical dramas is 
"The Death of Marlowe" (1837), written 
by Richard Hengist Horne. Take it out 
of the library, and see for yourself. 
The N ew York dramatic season that 
closed in June was memorable for the re- 
vivals of Ibsen and of Gilbert and Sullivan. 
Only a few new plays of importance ap- 
peared; but Ibsen's masterpiece, "The 


Wild Duck" (1884), magnificently pro- 
duced and acted, ran for over one hundred 
consecutive performances, breaking all 
records. Thus New York, which used to 
look upon Ibsen as stimulating reading 
for the hypercultivated, while depressing 
and even impossible for theatrical mana- 
gers, has the honor of giving him his 
longest run. Ibsen was first, last, and all 
the time a playwright, a man of the 
theatre. He was greater as a dramatist 
than as a philosopher. 
As for Gilbert and Sullivan, the demand 
for a revival of the cycle of their incom- 
parable operas is now so sharp that it can 
hardly be resisted much longer. 
A play that is bound to excite comment 
during the coming season, which will have 
its first performance in London in Sep- 
tember, and in New York in October, is 
Channing Pollock's "The Enemy." This 
had its world première in New Haven on 
the night of the 1st of June, and
 although 
that entire week broke all records for 
infernal heat, eight performances were 
given in New Haven, and to large audi- 
ences. I was present on the opening 
night, and, like everyone else, was deeply 
impressed. It is a good play and a good 
sermon-it is quite possible to be at once 
both. The driving idea is more needed in 
the world than any other, and it is fortu- 
nate that the excellence of its presentation 
seems to guarantee performances in every 
European capital. 
Meanwhile the Little Theatres of our 
country pursue their admirable course, 
converting the blossoms of promise into 
the fruits of performance. To take a 
single instance: the Hedgerow Theatre, 
near Philadelphia, produced in the month 
of June Ibsen's "Pillars of Society," 
Shaw's "Androcles and the Lion," 
O'Neill's "DifI'rent," and :Milne's "The 
Romantic Age." 
An article in The Living Age, comment- 
ing on the "almost unanimous delight" 
3 2 3 



324 


AS I LIKE IT 


with which the novels of Sinclair Lewis 
are hailed by the London critics, and also 
by the British public, says: "Now this 
is a very amazing event." It seems to 
me precisely the contrary; it would be 
amazing if Sinclair Lewis were not popu- 
lar in England. The people of any coun- 
try rejoice to see the people of another 
country ridiculed by one of the latter- 
who therefore knows what he is talking 
about. l\lr. Lewis confirms the unfavora- 
ble foreign opinion of America. 


To those who had rather read good long 
books than bad short ones, let me recom- 
mend three, both interesting and valua- 
ble, in the order of their length. "The 
Life of Edward Everett," by Frothing- 
ham, is more entertaining than its hero. 
To a large extent it gives the social, polit- 
ical, and academic history of America 
from 1800 to 1865; and not the least di- 
verting pages are concerned with the 
years in England when Everett was our 
representative. In commenting on the 
old-fashioned but genuine oratory of this 
statesman, Mr. Frank Bergen writes me: 
"I think Everett's contrasting of Blen- 
heim Castle and J\Iarlborough with 
l\lount Vernon and \Vashington, in his 
oration on Washington, is the most splen- 
did piece of prose in the English language 
-at least I have never found anything 
else so completely admirable." 
To go from the sublime to the ridicu- 
lous, here is a question that will liter- 
ally set many by the ears. Everett 
says that one night while dining in Eng- 
land, the British minister of agriculture 
declared that he could not remember 
whether a cow's ears were in front of or 
behind her horns. The first six persons 
-one of them was a milkmaid-whom I 
asked had no better memory than the 
agricultural chief. Few people notice 
anything. 
The second big book is "The Public 
Life," in two stately volumes, written by 
one of the most accomplished and high- 
n:inded journalists in the world- J. A. 
Spender. This is a work for mature 
readers; but everyone who votes should 
read it. The author describes the true 
inwardness of parliamentary government 
in England, pointing out its profound 
difference from representative govern- 


ment in the United States. His sketches 
of recent and present British statesmen 
are done with extraordinary skill; his 
comments on Conservatism, Liberalism, 
Socialism, War, International Morality, 
and many other burning questions show 
cool wisdom. The last chapter rises to an 
elevation of thought and language that re- 
minds me of the solemn splendor of the 
closing words in Raleigh's" History of the 
\Vorld." 
No one, no matter how well informed, 
can read this work without having his 
mental horizon extended. 
The third and longest is the biography 
of Sir William Osler, by Doctor Harvey 
Cushing. When Cushing was an under- 
graduate, he was known for his excellence 
in playing baseball. To-day he is perhaps 
the first brain surgeon in the world, and 
how he found time to write this monu- 
mental work, so completely and minutely 
documented, will forever remain mysteri- 
ous. It is a medical history of the nine- 
teenth century, and, coming from such an 
authority as Doctor Cushing, it is of com- 
manding importance. The reader follows 
Osler from birth to death, and discovers 
that, although the Regius professor at Ox- 
ford was at the top of his profession, he 
was even more remarkable as a human 
being. He lived abundantly. The power 
and wealth of his personality impressed 
even casual acquaintances; on patients 
and on colleagues he left an ineffaceable 
memory. I had the pleasure of meeting 
him on a visit he made to New Haven in 
1913; his conversation at dinner was 
worthy of the best days of the eighteenth 
century, when table-talk was a fine art. 
Then he came to the Elizabethan Club, 
and read us an affectionate essay on Bur- 
ton's" Anatomy of Melancholy." Dur- 
ing this performance, we were clock- 
unconscious. Finally he modestly in- 
quired how long he might talk, and I told 
him we could sit as long as he could stand. 
U all journalists were like Spender, and 
all physicians like Osler, there would soon 
be need of neither. No one would require 
editorial persuasion and all the sick would 
be made whole. 


A good book on religion and one that 
can be read through in half an hour is 
" Everlasting Life. A Creed and a Specu- 



AS I LIKE IT 


lation," by William W. Keen, 1f.D. Doc- 
tor Keen is nearly ninety years old, is an 
active physician and surgeon, and his 
mind is described by his name. 
Lincoln :Mac V eagh, the accomplished 
publisher, has just compiled and pub- 
lished an attractive volume, called" Poet- 
ry from the Bible." With the exception 
of three passages from the Gospel of Luke, 
all the selections are made from the Old 
Testament. Don't try to read any mod- 
ern poetry until the next day. 


In a previous issue, writing about the 
national game, I was careless enough to 
speak of a "bush league team" in Du- 
buque, Iowa. I shall never do so again, 
but I am glad I sinned, for it drew from 
the City of 11exico the following letter 
from our able American ambassador, 
James R. Sheffield: 


I quite agree with what you say of John 1\I. 
Ward and Radbourn. But when you speak of a 
"bush league team" in Dubuque, Iowa, you are 
using your brilliant talents to injure the good 
name and fame of the greatest town in our Mid- 
dle West-the one that has been big enough to 
outlive the fact that I was born there. 
You may praise Browning, hit Upton Sinclair, 
put the Mayor of Augusta in rôle of high priest 
of l\Iorality, admire Amy Lowell for taking 1200 
pages to tell about Keats with 50 additional 
pages for index, put in Dutch Carter to make us 
swallow all that Keats, add a well deserved trib- 
ute to Tinker and to Clarence Day, and speak of 
a lawyer as a "profcssionallawycr" (p. 547), very 
bad expression, and no one who knows you but 
would forgive it all. But when you speak slight- 
ingly of Dubuque, Iowa, you display qualities I 
fain would have you lose. 
I, too, will call you Doctor rather than Pro- 
fessor, not for the reasons your friend Mrs. l\Iorse 
of Boston gave, but because you might excuse 
such ibnorance of Dubuque in a man whose map 
is the human frame, but not in a Professor who 
is supposed to both read and traveL 


Two young American poets who will 
bear watching are Hervey Allen, whose 
recent "Earth lYloods" contains a high 
percentage of genuine poetry, and Archi- 
bald 11acLeish, whose volume "The Pot 
of Earth" is tenuous in physique but 
weighty in cerebration. It is necessary 
to read the book through twice, but it is 
worth it. 
\Vhen I was an editor of The Yale Liter- 
ary AI agazine, thirty-nine years ago, I 
wrote a review of a new volume of lyrics, 
called" Cap and Bells," by Samuell\-Iin- 


325 


turn Peck. Last week was published a 
fresh volume of verse by the same author, 
who is enjoying life in Tuskaloosa, Ala. 
The melody, optimism, and faith that at- 
tracted me in the earlier work are char- 
l.cteristic of this. I wonder if J. 11- 
Barrie is right in thinking that people 
never change? 


l\lr. Ernes"t Boyd remarks in Harper's 
AI agazine, "The spectacle of a person of 
mature taste encountering Dickens for 
the first time would have about it an air 
of incongruity as unbecoming as the sight 
of a man of forty stuffing himself with 
cream-puffs." It certainly would, be- 
cause no person of mature taste encoun- 
ters Dickens for the first time. Persons 
of taste have had their taste matured by 
reading him. l\len of forty of mature 
taste have in their childhood read Dickens 
with delight, in their middle age with 
enthusiasm, and in their later years will 
read him with wonder at the miracle of 
such stupendous genius. 


Van Wyck Brooks has written an il- 
luminating and penetrating work in liter- 
ary criticism, called "The Pilgrimage of 
Henry James." To read this book, in 
combination with the prefaces that the 
novelist contributed to the New York 
edition of his works, is to get as near to 
the heart of the mystery as is perhaps 
possible. 
To those who share my pleasure in 
reading tales of mystery and horror, let 
me recommend "Stolen Idols," written 
by that master specialist, E. Phillips Op- 
penheim. In this story he has surpassed 
himself, and what more do you want? 


lYlr. Roland Holt has produced a useful 
little book called "A List of 11usic for 
Plays and Pageants. \Vith Practical 
Suggestions." Those who are interested 
in the presentation of open-air pageants 
by children will find this a valuable 
guide. 
An admirable work of criticism on 
short stories and their authors is bv Alfred 
C. \Vard, called" Aspects of the Í\Iodern 
Short Story, English and American." The 
brief essays are lively and pungent, and 
the work is embellished with twenty-two 



326 


AS I LIKE IT 


portraits. I think here is the only pic- 
ture of Ambrose Bierce that I have seen. 
Mr. Ward's qualifications as a critic are 
proved by his first sentence. "The great- 
est creator of short stories in world-litera- 
ture was the greatest figure in world- 
history-Jesus of Nazareth." 


I am pleased to see that there has re- 
cently been published an "Anthology of 
American J\Iystical Verse," by Irene Hun- 
ter, with a preface by Zona Gale, who 
writes: "Miss Hunter died on her birthday 
anniversary, July 1, 1924, on the day on 
which the letter was dated accepting for 
publication her collection." For most of 
the two years preceding her death Miss 
Hunter was confined to her bed by illness; 
her windows were open toward the moun- 
tains of California. Looking toward the 
glory of this world and the mystery of the 
next, she selected these poems from au- 
thors in both places. Every person who 
thinks he has a soul should own a copy of 
this book. 


I am sorry I questioned the religious 
faith of Dean lnge. l\lrs. Gertrude W. 
Page, of Los Angeles, has sent me a copy 
of the dean's little book" Personal Re- 
ligion and the Life of Devotion." I take 
back what I said in the April issue against 
Doctor Inge. I had not then seen this 
book, but I have now. 
lYliss Betsy Ireland Shoup, of Louis- 
ville, nominates for the Ignoble Prize the 
Sistine J\tIadonna and "Silas l\1arner." 
She confesses she has never seen the 
original painting, which I think explains 
her dislike of it. As for "Silas," I won- 
der if it was part of her enforced school- 
reading? It is not even a paradox that 
what we are taught we often hate. She 
is a woman of good taste, for she loves cats. 
lYlrs. Elizabath Case, of Hartford, 
nominates "all numbered and lettered 
streets," thinking that every street and 
avenue should have the dignity of a name. 
The post-o.ffice at New York must have 
difficulty in deciphering addresses. I 
observed a statement in the newspapers 
yesterday that ought to please lYlrs. Case. 
As everyone knows, railway employees 
do not call trains by their names, "The 
Twentieth Century Limited," but by 


their number. Now the Pennsylvania 
Railroad has recently decided to name 
even their freight trains, believing that 
in this manner the crews will take more 
interest. This is another instance of the 
righ t kind of Soloism. 


Doctor J. D. Logan, Associate Domin- 
ion Archivist, writes me from Halifax 
that he is the first to use the word "vidi- 
ence" in motion-picture criticism in 
Canada. In an article in The Evening 
Mail he shows that although vidience is 
formed on a bad analogy (audience), and 
strictly should be spelled vidence, it is 
better to use the form vidience. There 
are indeed plenty of bad English spellings 
that come from false analogies. Our word 
tongue ought to be philologically spelled 
tung, but it followed falsely after langue. 
I heartily welcome so good a scholar as 
Doctor Logan into the circle of those who 
ha ve adopted the word vidience. 
Mrs. Elizabeth Zeilitz Shapleigh, of 
Williamsville, N. Y., writes: 
You will be interested in another aspect of the 
word si. In Swedish we have two words-ja, 
which corresponds to oui, and jo, which corre- 
sponds to si. Well, in Stockholm the populace 
have taken to using the jo form, only doubled 
fo jo-which is indescribably odd to a Swede not 
of the younger Stockholm genelation. We have 
another form that English needs, a common gen- 
der reflexive-"Each child must learn his lesson" 
-but half of them are girls! In Swedish we use 
sig, sin, sill, sina, which are absolutely without 
gender implications and very convenient. . . . 
A feminist friend also points out that English has 
no word for human being, of purely English ori- 
gin. She referred to the German Mensch for com- 
parison. 
Commenting upon my remark that 
Clyde Fitch was unable to control his 
characters, the Reverend R. F. Dixon, of 
Wolfville, Nova Scotia, sends me the fol- 
lowing pat quotation from Thackeray's 
"De Finibus": 


I wonder do other novel writers experience this 
fatalism? They must go a certain way, in spite 
of themselves. I have been surprised at the ob- 
servations made by some of my characters. It 
seemed as if an Occult Power was moving the 
pen. The personage does or says something, and 
I ask, how the dickens did he come to think of 
that? Every man has remarked in dreams, the 
vast dramatic power that is sometimes evinced. 


Thomas Sergeant Perry writes that if 
I will say nothing about it, he is eligible 



AS I LIKE IT 


to membership in the Faerie Queene Club. 
Mettons que je n'aie r.ien dit. 
Mrs. Martha Summerhayes, the author 
of " Vanished Arizona," is now living in 
Nantucket, and I fervently hope that her 
book may soon be reprinted, as at present 
it resembles the territory it describes. 


The Reverend Alfred J. Barnard, of 
Elgin, Ill., has been talking with some 
English ladies, and 
They could not quite agree with your selection 
of the four best songsters of English life and 
literature. They felt that the thrush came before 
the cuckoo, His song is sweeter; and the cuckoo's 
reputation militates against his musical ability. 
He is the laziest bird of all English birds; he will 
not build his own nest; he eats other birds' eggs; 
and he clears his throat and keeps it in condition 
by the juices of such a diet. They held too that 
the literature of the land gave a far more impor- 
tant place to the thrush than to the cuckoo. 
But surely the character of the cuckoo 
has nothing to do with the excellence of 
his singing. Not every operatic tenor is 
a pattern of the domestic virtues. 
Sometimes, though, a great prima 
donna is as fine in character as in voice. 
Emma Eames is not the only one who 
reads the Bible. Talking with Louise 
Homer recently, I was pleased to discover 
that she is an ardent student of Holy 
\Vrit. The Bible is a good foundation for 
success in any art. 
That President Angell of Yale is fa- 
miliar with the Bible is indicated by the 
fact that when I was golfing with him 
and two others, and we all drove into the 
water, and I remarked, "The waters of the 
pool are troubled," he immediately replied, 
"and an angel has just troubled them." 
Charles S. Parker, of Arlington, Mass., 
who became editor and proprietor of a 
newspaper sixty-five years ago, and who 
has been in the same profession ever since 
(except during his service in the American 
Civil War), was pleased to find in SCRIB- 
: NER'S my quotation from Chapman: 
"Young men think old men are fools, but 
old men know young men are fools." It 
seems that at the age of sixteen, in a 
" lyceum" meeting, he scored off an old 
fellow of seventy, whereupon the veteran 
tUlned on him with the above remark. 
"From that time until a few days ago I 


327 


have thought of myself as squelched wirh 
an original punch, which goes to show 
how much remains to be picked up even 
by the most omnivorous reader." 


As so many modern biographical critics 
prefer the spice of fiction to the sincere 
milk of the word, here is a contribution to 
English literature made by a college stu- 
dent in New Hampshire: "The sadness 
in Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' was 
caused by the fact that he was living 
with his wife and three children next door 
to a girl of seventeen with whom he was 
desperately in lovec" 


My nomination of Episcopal hymn- 
books for the Ignoble Prize has stirred 
up so many Episcopalians that I rejoice 
to see their pride in the church. J:\1iss 
Ruth Dimmick, of Newark, 1\1rs. Hugh 
\V. Ogden, of Brookline, :Mrs. J. P. Smyth 
of Bellport, 1\Jiss Eleanor Hunneman, of 
Brookline, and many others inform me 
that the vast majority of Episcopal 
churches use a hymnal with tunes. I am 
glad I was in error; but why do I always 
visit the wrong church? 
Mr. and Mrs. George A. tfahan, and 
their son Dulany, are going to erect a 
monument to :Mark Twain in Hannibal, 
Mo. On a suitable pedestal will stand in 
bronze the two boys, Tom Sawyer and 
Huck Finn. The monument is designed 
by Frederick C. Hibbard, and the Hanni- 
bal Courier-Post of l\.fay 27 gives a large 
picture of it, which reveals a work of art 
of such beauty that some day I hope to 
see the original. The paper says that 
this monument is "believed to be the first 
of its kind to be erected to a literary 
character in the history of the United 
States." 


Prohibition is still the favorite subject 
of conversation, I cannot get excited 
over the fact that I am unable to get a 
drink or that I am apparently the only 
one so estopped. 
How the world would improve if legis- 
lative bodies would emphasize the second 
half of the word governmental! 
When D. H. Lawrence reads a French 
book, the sight of the feminine form of the 
adjective inflames him. 



^ rvIONG the anecdotes relating to 
rt Ingres which have come down to 
us there is one illustrating the 
attitude that he held toward his demigod 
Raphael. He sat at dinner with his friend 
Thiers, and the latter undertook to dem- 
onstrate that the fame of the Italian mas- 
ter rested chiefly upon his Madonnas. 
Ingres was furious. "I would give them 
all," he exclaimed; "yes, monsieur, all of 
them for a fragment of the 'Disputa' or 
of the 'School of Athens' or of the 'Par- 
nassus.'" The episode is symbolical of a 
conflict which has long persisted in the 
modern world of tastec If the "Sistine 
Madonna" is the most famous painting 
in the world, it is because it embodies the 
most universally appealing of all pictorial 
ideas of the mother of Christ. It seems 
conclusively to exalt Raphael as an inter- 
preter of sentiment both human and di- 
vine. But that very painting points to 
the equally potent element in his genius 
which accounts for the enthusiasm of 
Ingres; the "Sistine Madonna" is noth- 
ing if not a masterpiece of design. It re- 
veals the same transcendent power of 
composition which makes immortal the 
decorations in the Vatican. Nevertheless 
the conflict aforementioned will still go 
on. Laymen will think first of the" J\1a- 
donnas." Artists return to the mural 
paintings. In the meantime, of course, 
Raphael's art remains all of a piece, and 
true appreciation of it depends upon our 
realization of the unity binding together 
its different aspects. He was one of the 
most versatile men who have ever lived. 
The important thing is to follow him 
sympathetically into every field, and then 
to seize upon the central force which ani- 
mated him in them all. 

 
 
 
T HE American student has had the 
opportunity to study here one of 
Raphael's important religious subjects 
ever since Pierpont Morgan placed the 
Colonna "Virgin and Child Enthroned 
with Saints" in the Metropolitan Mu- 
3 28 


seum. Now there seems to be every 
likelihood that we shall have in this coun- 
try a monument to a very different phase 
of the master's activity. Only a few 
months ago there was a tremendous to-do 
in the press over the purchase by the 
Duveens of a great portrait by Raphael. 
It belonged to a collector in Berlin, 1:1r. 
Oscar Huldschinsky. His sale of it 
grievously excited the Germans, who 
looked upon it as one of the national trea- 
sures, and its exportation, if that had 
been heard of in time, might possibly 
have been prevented. However, it got to 
London and about this time it may be 
expected to arrive here. Once in this 
country it is almost certain to be acquired 
by an American collector, and though it 
would then pass to a private gallery, prec- 
edent justifies the supposition that sooner 
or later one of our museums will possess 
it. It would be a little more than wel- 
come, for it would serve to enlighten the 
student where most he needs enlighten- 
ment as regards Raphael, that is, on his 
purely human side, on that side which 
brings him down from the clouds and 
makes the Prince of Painters one of the 
raciest figures of the Renaissance. The 
Raphael of legend is a portent, a worker 
of miracles, who in a brief life of thirty- 
seven years achieved a mass of work- 
most of it flawless-large enough to have 
occupied several giants of art through a 
period three times as long. But he was 
a man like other men, save for his genius, 
and his work is to be apprehended in 
very human terms. That is where his 
portraiture helps. 
This example of it is a portrait of 
Giuliano de Medici to which Vasari refers 
as one hanging in his time in the palace of 
OUa viano de rvledici at Florence. From 
that home it disappeared for centuries, 
nothing being known of it save a copy by 
Alessandro Allori in the UffizÏ. Then, 
some time in 1866 or 1867, the German 
critic Liphart went one day with the 
Grand Duchess Marie of Russia to the 
house of a Signor Brini in Florence, tc 



THE FIELD OF ART 


look at some paintings that he had to 
sell. They were struck by this portrait 
of Giuliano, and after the dust upon it 
had been sponged off, were only the more 
impressed. Brini apparently did not re- 
gard it as of exceptional importance. He 
could not have paid very 
much for it when he had got 
it from the firm of Baldo- 
vinetti, for he sold it to the 
Duchess at \vha t Liphart 
characterizes as a very mod- 
est price. She took it to her 
villa at Quarto, and she 
brought in the restorer TrÏc- 
ca, who transferred the can- 
vas, and in the process of 
cleaning it discovered the 
initials of th
 painter and the 
fragments of a date. In 1901 
the Duchess sent the por- 
trait to Paris, where Eugene 

Iuntz, one of the biogra- 
phers of Raphael, pronounced 
it the lost portrait of Giuliano 
de J\ledici, Duke of Xemours. 
Later Doctor Bode confirmed 
this opinion. \Ve next hear 
of it as belonging to the Se- 
delmeyers in Paris, and then 
in the gallery of ::\lr. Hulds- 
chinsky. 


329 


forces against France. Illness alone prevented . 
him .from leading the troops in person, and a fatal 
dechne soon deprived him of his life. But before 
leaving Rome, Giuliano had apparently had the 
wish to leave a portrait behind him which should 
adorn his wife's drawing-room. Raphael, as the 
Duke's" familiar," was selected to paint it. . . . 


- 



 
 
 
G HJLIANO, the younger 
brother of Leo X, was 
lucky in his artists. :Michael- 
Angelo made his stupendous 
monument in the Sacristy at 
San Lorenzo, and Raphael 
painted this portrait. I must 
quote most of what Crowe and Ca valcas- 
eUe have to say about it, for it revives 
, something of the atmosphere in which it 
was produced, besides throwing some light 
upon the subject of the painting: 


f 


Raphael. 
From the portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo in the Czartoryski Collection 
at Cracow. 


. Giuliano de Medici was the highest personage 
m 
he Papal State for whom Raphael could paint 
a hkeness. All the arts of Leo X had been ex- 
erted to raise this prince to a station worthy of 
, his birth and pretensions. He was Duke of 

emours in the peerage of France; the Pope had 
!pven him a principality, Louis XII a wife of royal 
hneage. The marriage took place early in Feb- 
ruary, 1515, and Giuliano returned to Rome to 
form a court over which his wife presided. Within 
less than five months after these events occurred, 
the French Duke was commanding the papal 
VOL. LXXVIII.-2.... 


Giuliano's repute is good amongst the princes 
of the l\Iedicean house. He is said to have been 
weak. But he had a quality which other mem- 
bers of his family wanted. He was grateful to 
those who had favored him in adversity. His 
features, handed down to us in several examples, 
are of the genuine l\Iedicean type, including a 
long hooked nose, almond-shaped eyes, and a 
beard and mustache kept short to suit a small 
chin and upper lip. Great breadth and flatness 
marked the plane of the cheeks, which, in every 
extant specimen, are seen at three-quarters to the 
left, with an oval black eye-ball looking to the 
right. According to the fashion of the period, a 
coif of golden net drawn obliquely over the head 
to the level of the left ear, and a wide toque set 
aslant over the right ear, leave the whole of the 
forehead bare. A ticket of lozenge-shape and 
three gold buckles are affixed to the toque. The 



330 


THE FIELD OF ART 


. low dress displays a long neck fringed with the 
border of a white shirt covered by a red vest, all 
but hidden by a black doublet over which a fawn- 
colored watered silk pelisse is thrown, adorned 
with a collar and facings of brown fur. A black 
patch conceals the forefinger of the left hand, 
which lies on a table partly hidden by the right, 


courtier like Castiglione. His net em- 
braced all manner of men. He had but 
one prejudice as regards a sitter. As 
l\Iuntz remarks, ,. the artist was unwilling 
to transmit to posterity the features of 
any but those \vho were worthy of sym- 
pathy or admiration." I 
am strongly tempted to 
pause upon this matter of 
Raphael's discrimination, 
and especially to pursue 
him as a denizen of the 
highest circles in Roman 
society. But it is well to 
diverge here upon the 
foundations of his work in 
portraiture. It is well to 
go back to his pupilage, to 
those early years in which 
he felt the influences of 
Timoteo Viti and Peru- 
gino. He has left por- 
traits of both painters, a 
superb drawing of Viti in 
the British l\Iuseum, and 
a similarly moving head 
and shoulders of Perugino 
in the Borghese gallery at 
Rome. The first is par- 
ticularlv to be admired 
just fo
 its broad, sweep- 
ing draftsmanship, but the 
thing that still further 
touches the imagination in 
both portraits is their in- 
tense realism. Raphael's 
portraits, indeed, from the 
very beginning, complete- 
ly eÀpose the fallacy of re- 
garding him as even tinc- 
tured by that unreality which we associate 
with so-called "academic" art. I recall 
an odd conversation about these portraits 
with a very capable artist. They were, no 
doubt, very fine, he said, but it was a great 
pity that Raphael "didn't know how to 
paint." Seeing me rather stunned by this 
cryptic remark, he hastened to add that, 
of course, what he meant was that Raphael 
was neither a Rembrandt nor a l\-lanet, 
that the Italian didn't know anything 
about brush-work. I have to smile a little 
when I remember that and think. of the 
sheer technicalmaestria in the portraits I 
have just mentioned, the linear breadth in 
the" Viti" and the nervous flowing brush- 


\ 


J. 


Giuliano de 
Icdici. Duke of X emours. 
From the portrait by Raphael belonging to the Duveens. 


holdin
 a letter. . .. A green hanging half con- 
ceals an opening through which the sky appears 
cut out by the broken outline of the Castle of St. 
Angelo, to which the secret approach is shown by 
a covered way. 


There is a significant phrase employed 
in the foregoing passage, the one designat- 
ing Raphael as the duke's "familiar." It 
recalls us to the splendor of the painter's 
life, his intimacy with popes and all 
their gorgeous satellites. His biogra- 
phers glance at the notabilities who were 
his sitters, not only the princes of the 
church but statesmen, diplomatists, and 
poets. He would portray not only such 
men as Julius and Leo, but a lettered 



Timoteo \'iti. 
From the drawing by Rapbael in the Britisb Museum. 


work in the" Perugino." The truth is that 
Raphael is only superficially an artist of an 
academic cast. Essentially he was as keen 
a realist as any in the history of art. 



 
 
 

OK only to that question of school 
currents, of formative influences, of 
which the exhaustive historian is bound 
I to make so much, and you get to thinking 


of Raphael as dabbling in more or less ab- 
stract principles all his life long. Trace 
him from his labors in Umbria under 
Perugino and Pintoricchio, watch him as 
he is stirred by the magic of Leonardo, 
observe him shrewdly taking a leaf from 
the book of Fra Bartolomeo, and study 
above all the impetus he draws from con- 
tact with the manner of l\Iichael-Angelo. 
You forthwith call him an eclectic, which 
33 1 



332 


THE FIELD OF ART 


is a freezing enough label to affix to any 
man, and you wonder how through all 
those mutations he had anything to do 
with life. He had everything to do with 
it, as the portraits in part
culaÏ-, clearly 


Bembo, writes these words, in the course 
of his comments on the decorations in the 
Vatican: "And at this time, when he had 
gained a very great name, he also made 
a portrait of Pope] ulius in a Ijicture in 


{ 
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}ir , 
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I'erugìno. 
I:rom the portrait by Raphael in the Borghe:;e Gallery at Rome. 


show. They testify to nothing so much oils, so true and so lifelike that the por- 
as to the master's grasp upon the deep trait caused all who saw it to tremble, as 
sources of vitality, the thrilling actuality- if it had been the living man himself." 
with which he could endue his every In this matter of embodying å formidable 
stroke. There is an apposite passage i
 personality in a portrait I know of noth- 
a letter of Bembo's to BibbieÍ1a. "Raph- ing more impressive, not even the great 
ael," he says, "has painted a port
ait Innocent X of Velasquez. There must 
of our Tebaldeo, which is so natural that have been something in portraiture which 
it seems more like him than he is him- poignantly appealed to Raphael, for even 
selL" His contemporaries put his real- when he was dealing with personages long 
ism among the first of his merits. Va- dead and gone he had a way of lending t? 
sari, paying a tribute akin to that of his images of them an extraordinary ven- 



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333 



334 


THE FIELD OF ART 


similitude. \Vhen he painted the Vatican 
decorations he had to deal with numerous 
historical figures, with Sappho and Plato, 
with Virgil and Pindar, with Ptolemy. 
The task never gave him a moment's 
hesitation. He painted them with a viv- 


comparable, as witness the portrait of 
Bramante introduced into the foreground 
of "The School of Athens." A:3 you may 
see from the sheet of drawings in the 
Louvre, when he came to study the linea- 
ments of his architectural friend he got 
such a grip upon them 
that they seem fairly to 
vibrate with character. 
. Over and over again Vasa- 
ri returns to this motive. 
He loves to speak of the 
power that Raphael had 
"to give such resem- 
blance to portraits that 
they seem to be alive, and 
that it is known whom 
they represent." I con- 
fess that I find it hard not 
to emulate Vasari, linger- 
ing repeatedly on the 
simple truth, the almost 
artless animation in 
Raphael's portraits. One 
point that is pertinent I 
cannot neglect. It is the 
triumph of this truth over 
the purely decorative mo- 
tive pursued as an end in 
its e If . It is especially 
noticeable in his por- 
traits of women, such 
as the "1\Iaddalena 
Doni," the "Donna 
V elata," and the "J oan- 
na of Aragon." They 
have a freedom and a 
solidity making them 
strangely predominant 
over the typical Flor- 
entine p"rofile, consummately exquisite 
though that may be. 

 
 
 


, 


.. 


Baldassare Castiglione. 
From the portrait by Raphael in the Louvre. 


idness that makes them seem almost his 
contemporaries. Speaking of the "Par- 
nassus," Vasari says: "There are por- 
traits from nature of all the most famous 
poets, ancient and modern, and some 
only just dead or still living in his day; 
which were taken from statues or medals, 
and many from old pictures, and some 
who were still alive, portrayed from the 
life by himself." It is like Vasari to 
speak of them .all as "portraits from na- 
ture," for no matter what he used, 
whether a document or the living model, 
Raphael made a living and breathing pre- 
sentment of his subject. \Vhen he had 
the model before him he was merely in- 


H IS genius was too great to wear the 
shackles of a convention, to be con- 
fined within the linear bounds of a pat- 
tern. But I indicated at the outset of 
these remarks that Raphael's genius was 
all of a piece, that one pervasive inspira- 
tion went to the painting of the ".1\la- 
donnas," the decorations, and the por- 
traits. To return to that issue is to 
enforce the unity of Raphael's art by ex- 
posing its corner-stone where the portraits 
are concerned. He couldn't have sus- 



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Studies for the portrait of Bramante. 
From the drawing by Raph.lel in the LuuHe. 


tained in them that yirtue of lifelikeness his early four-square portrait of Peru- 
on which I ha,-e dwelt if he had not known gino. Rapidly he de,'eloped it and 
how to build for it a perfect scaffolding of richly exploited it, achieving, as he placed 
design. That is 'where the painter of a figure within the rectangle, the same 
t
ree great types of pictorial art affirmed freshness and felicity which you obserye 

lmself a master of one great secret. It in such a decorath'e gem of his as the 
IS the secret of composition. Raphael "Jurisprudence." Look at the" Angelo 
had it in its simplest form when he made Doni," look at the "Cardinal Bibbiena," 
335 



336 


THE FIELD OF _\RT 


look at the "Baldassare Castiglione," a 1d 
look finallv at the" Giuliano de l\Iedici." 
If they th;ob with human life, their beauty 
springs also from the supreme composi- 


ure
 appear to be not painted but in full relief. 
there is the pile of the velvet, with the damask 
of the Pope's vestments shining and rustling the 
fur of the linings soft and natural, and the 'gold 
and silk S3 counterfeited that they do not seem 
to be in color, but real gold 
and silk. There is an iIlumi- 
na ted book of parchment 
which appears more real than 
the reality; and a little ben 
of wrought silver which is 
more beautiful than words 
can tell. Among other 
things, also, is a ball of bur- 
nished gold on the Pope's 
chair, wherein are reflected, 
as if it were a mirror (such 
is its brightness) the light 
from the windows. the 
shoulders of the Pope, and 
the walls round the room. 
And all these things are ex- 
ecuted with such diligence 
that one may believe with- 
out any manner of doubt 
that =no master is able, or is 
ever likely to be able, to do 
better. 


\ 


.... 


\Vas any other master 
ever able to do better? 
l\iuntz seems to have 
been a little in doubt. 
" Nor can we place be- 
fore him," he says, "any 
but the greatest masters 
of portraiture, such as 
Jan van Eyck, Holbein, 
Titian, Velasquez, Van 
Dyck, and Rem- 
brandt." For my own 
part, I cannot see why 
any of these save Rem- 
brandt should be placed 
"before" Raphael in portraiture. The 
Dutchman, to be sure, is hors concours. 
Noone in the whole range of portrai- 
ture can touch him for pathos, for the 
dramatic, even tragic presentation of 
character. But for the rest, Raphael's 
portraits seem to me to stand among 
the greatest. They do so by virtue of 
force in characterization, distinction in 
design, and, above all, a certain serene 
beauty. 


Pope Julius II. 
From the portrait by Raphael in the Pitti. 


tion that is in them. Raphael could 
meet, through his grasp upon that art, 
the last test of the portrait-painter. He 
could make of a portrait a really great 
picture. The point is appreciated by 
Va sari when he comes to describe the fa- 
mous "Leo X with Two Cardinals," 
now in the Pitti: 


In Rome he made a picture of good size, in 
which he portrayed Pope Leo Cardinal Giulio de 
Medici and Cardinal de Rossi. In this the fig- 


'" 


'" " 




 


':/ 
, . II 
" I 
I 
t 
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... ., 


.,.... 


! 

 


Copyright by 1Jïlti..m G. St. Clair. 


LIEUTEXANT ROBERT E. LEE, U. S. A. 
From a painting made at the time of his marriage to 
li55 Mary Custis in 1831. 


33 8 



SCRIBNER'S 


VOL LXX17I1 


MAGAZINE 


OCTOBER, 1
25 


LY O. -l 


Lee and the Ladies 


C
PCBLISHED LETTERS OF ROBERT E. LEE 


BY DOCGLAS FREE:\L-\X 
Editor of the Richmond (Va.) Xt'zt' -Leader 


ILLUSTRATIOX
 FRO
I PHOTOGRAPHS AXD PAI:-lTIXGS 



n-<>I
Q
W HE picture of General 



X Robert E. Lee given by 
1 T r more than twenty bi- 
. 
ï 
 
. ographers is that - of a 
man physically mag- 
,'>A(
 
 nificent and intellectu- 

U'"D
:7Ç1X ally pre-eminent, a 
man humble but re- 
I served, courtly but always self-contained, 
considerate but unsmiling. serious all his 
life, alive to duty but (lead to humor, lov- 
ing no jest and lightening his labor with 
no laughter, walking on a l1igher, calmer 
level than that of others' dusty plodding. 
It is the picture to be expected from bi- 
ographers who did not know him until he 
was bearing the weight of a falling cause. 
They saw him as he rode among the dead 
and as he rallied the wearv on the march. 
Thev could on Iv describe -him as the,- be- 
held- him. ThO'se who came later to 
vrite 
of him looked at him through the glamour 
of a great military reputation and through 
the halo the South had thrown about him 
when it acclaimed him as the embodiment 
, of what it wished to be considered. 
It is a natural picture, and it does not 
belie reality. The Lee 'who stands dis- 
closed wh
n his youthful letters are 
opened again and his unguarded confi- 
dences are revealed is as clean and as 
Jofty as the Lee whom Gamaliel Brad- 
ford portrays. Xot once in all of his 
writings is there a suggestion of impro- 
priety. No scandal sets afluttering the 
pages that Virginia families have at last 


taken from their treasuries in unvoicEd 
agreement that the whole man shall be 
presented to the world. But the accepted 
picture is not complete, nor is it as at- 
tractively human as it might be. There 
ought to be a smile on his face, and his 
eye should show a mirthfulligh t, in every 
sketch of him as he appeared before the 
war. Few Americans had more of honest 
humor than he. Few delighted more in 
the company of women. From his earli- 
est letters to those of 1870, his correspon- 
dents numbered more of the other sex 
than of his own. and almost always they 
were young, brilliant, and attractive. His 
fondness for the feminine is unmistak- 
able. \Vomen had endless attraction for 
him. In his earlier years this carried him 
into a few mild flirtations. In later life 
it led to a beautiful relationship, half- 
fatherly. half-courtk, with not a few 
100-ely girls. - 
He came honestk by his love for 
women-too honestl)", perhaps, for the 
safetv of a man less sureh- schooled than 
he in- moral discipline. F 
r. if such things 
are transmissible, he inherited a menac- 
ing weakness for the sex. His father, 
General "Lighthorse Harry" Lee, has 
been treated ,-erv merciful1\- bv histori- 
ans for his son's -sake, but lie must have 
been something of a Lovelace. One 
astute Yirginian on sending his boy out 
into the world is traditionally said to haye 
gi,"en him three warnings - to sa,-e him 
from financial ruin-one was that he 


Copyrighted in 1925 in United States, Canada, and Great Britain by Charles Scribner's Sons. Printed in 
New York. All rights reserved. 


339 



3
O 


LEE A
D THE L.-\DIES 


should not stand a stallion, the next that 
he should not operate a sawmill, and the 
third that he should have no dealings 
with Harry Lee. 
Another story, long current in the Old 
Dominion, is that Harry Lee came to the 
house of a friend on the lower peninsula 
of Virginia and explained that he had lost 
his horse. In accordance with the com- 
mands of good hospitality, his host 
loaned Lee a mount and sent a servant 
with him to bring back the animals. 
Days passed, and weeks, without the re- 
turn of the horses or the negro. At last 
the black limped back and, when scolded 
by his master, explained that General Lee 
had sold the borrowed steeds. "Why 
didn't YO'll come home, then?" he was 
demanded. "'Cause Gen'l Lee sold me 
too," the negro is alleged to have an- 
swered. 
More authentic than this is the story 
told in one of the letters of the Carter 
family, kept at Shirley, their old home on 
the James. A kinswoman of Anne Lee, 
"Lighthorse Harry's" wife, who had been 
Anne Carter, described delicately some 
new amour in which Harry Lee was en- 
gaged and added laconically but sig- 
nificantly: "Poor Anne." The son of 
such a man might easily have been a 
Lothario, and in the circumstances of his 
life and vocation-the husband of an in- 
valid and long absent from home-might 
not have lacked apologists. 
When Robert E. Lee graduated NO.2 
and left \Vest Point with the class of 1829, 
he was no more sober-sided than the aver- 
age cadet of good morals and intellect, 
except in the inconsequential respect that 
he did not use tobacco. He was poor, but 
he was very handsome, and he had the 
best of social connections. He enjoyed 
parties and dances. In his own dress he 
was always careful and probably was 
something of a dandy. While at Fort 
J\.fonroe he debated in much earnestness 
whether he should indulge himself in a 
dress uniform. \Vhen at last he pur- 
chased it, he was elated. "We shall be a 
grand set of fellows with our gold and 
silver," he wrote in an unpublished letter 
of June 6, 1834, "and if I could only catch 
some of the grandiloquence of my neigh- 
bor Fabius [""Thiting] I might hope to rise 
in the world." A little later he was delv- 
ing in the family genealogy and the mys- 


teries of his coat-of-arms, with which he 
håd no familiarity until that time. In 
his work, from the very outset, he was 
diligent and serious. He soon became an 
excellent engineer and he continued in his 
devotion to that science throughout his 
army career. The system, the thorough- 
ness, and the originality of his reports 
show plainly enough that if he had not 
remained in the service of his govern- 
ment, he probably would have been one 
of the most brilliant private engineers of 
his generation. He had periods of rest- 
lessness and seasons of disappointment 
over the slow promotion of the army. 
Twice, at least, he considered resigning. 
But he was held by the traditions and 
associations of military life and was saved 
from ennui by the sense of humor that 
glints waggishly through his correspon- 
dence. He delighted in an occasional 
prank, and he could play with muCh satis- 
faction a mock-serious rôle, but, after the 
company of women, he enjoyed most of 
all in his earlier years the genial humor of 
an intimate letter. And when he found 
a good jest he did not laugh it into ob- 
livion. He cherished his jokes and he 
looked to them for comfort through the 
years. 
He probably had known J\Iary Custis 
all her life, for she must have come often 
to Alexandria from nearby Arlington, 
home of her father, George \Vashington 
Parke Custis, son of Washington's 
adopted son and grandson of J\lrs. \Vash- 
ington. Lee doubtless visited Arlington, 
and when he came home, a cadet in uni- 
form, he must have made the old, old ap- 
peal of the soldier. But of all this there is 
nothing in his correspondence. Not even 
anecdotes of the courtship remain. His 
first assignment to duty carried him to 
Cockspur Island, near Savannah, Georgia; 
thence, early in 1831, he was transferred to 
Fort lVlonroe. Old Point Comfort, the 
site of this station, was then closer to 
Arlington than if it had been located 
twenty miles away over Virginia roads, 
for government steamers came down reg- 
ularly from \Vashington to Hampton 
Roads, and could be utilized, of course, to 
carry a young lieutenant up the broad- 
banked Potomac on a lover's leave. 
There was no resisting his siege tactics. 
On the evening of June 30, 1831, the 
wedding ceremony was performed in the 




 


'_1 



 



 


Copyright Þ'y 11 ül.am 6. St. amr. 


Miss :Mary Custis. 
From a painting made at the time of her marriage to Lieutenant Robert E, Lee, l'". S. A. 


right-hand drawing-room at Arlington copal bishop of Virginia. 1\11'. 1\leade had 
as one enters the house from the front. arrived in due time for the nuptials, but 
It was formal and elaborate, as befitted on his way he had been drenched in a 
the union of two of the most famous of thunder-shower. Expecting no such 
Virginia families. Lee's groomsmen were calamity, he had brought no change of 
his brother, who was in the navy and a clothes with him, and, as he could not 
number of fellow lieutenants. The cere- officiate in dripping garments, he was 
mony was saved from too much pomp by a forced to borrow dry apparel from the 
happy accident to the minister, the Rever- bride's father. 1\11'. Custis was short and 
end \Villiam :Meadec subsequently Epis- stout. as became a mellowing aristocrat, 
34 1 



3-1-2 


LEE A
D THE LADIES 


::\1r. ::\1eacle as gaunt as ever hungry 
clergy was. The hang of the re'"erend 
gentleman's coat and the detached dis- 
tress of the trousers ga,-e unanticipated 
humor to the reading of the marriage 
ser\"Ïce. 
Lee ne'"er forgot (what sentimental 
man eyer forgets?) the incidents of the 
wedding. At the end of June, 1864, when 
the pressure of the Federals already was 
bowing his shoulders, he wrote from 
Petersburg of the anniversary, wrote very 
simply, with the warmth of a love that 
had sun-iyed war and separation: 
"Do you recollect what a happy day 
thirty-three years ago this was? How 
many hopes and pleasures it gave birth 
to! God has been very merciful and kind 
to us, and how thankless and sinful I have 
been. I pray that he may continue His 
mercies and blessings to us, and gi,"e us a 
little peace and rest together in this 
world, and finally gather us and all He 
has given us around His throne in the 
world to come. The President has just 
arrh-ed and I must bring my letter to a 
close. " 
There exists in Lee's own autograph an 
account of the "happy days," written 
soon after in a letter to his friend and 
superior officer, Captain Andrew Talcott, 
of the engineers. This has remained in 
manuscript nearly a hundred years and 
is now printed for the first time. It is the 
most colorful of all the letters of Lee's 
youth: 


" So Captain, you would not come up to 
Arlington on that memorable Thursday. 
But I gaye you the se'"erest scolding you 
ha ve had this many a day, from which I 
hope you will derive great benefit. How- 
eyer you would have seen nothing strange, 
for there was neither fainting nor fight- 
ing, nor anything uncommon which could 
be twisted into an adventure. The Par- 
son had few words to say, though he 
dwelt upon them as if he had been reading 
my Death warrant, and there was a 
tremulousness in the hand I held, that 
made me anxious for him to end. I am 
told I looked 'pale & interesting' which 
might have been the fact. But I felt as 
'bold as a sheep' & was surprised at 
my want of Romance in so great a degree 
as not to feel more excitement than at the 
Black Board at 'Vest Point. The Party 


all kept together till the following Tues- 
day, when most of them departed, par- 
ticularly the Gentlemen. Some of the 
Ladies remained the rest of the week. 
And we were then left alone. I would tell 
you how the time passed, but fear I am 
too much prejudiced to say anything 
more, but that it went very rapidly & still 
continues to do so. \Ve are this far on our 
way to the epper Country where we shall 
spend the remainder of mv leave of ab- 
sence. And I there hope "the 1\lother & 
Daughter will reco'"er from the effects of 
an attack of the Fever & Ague, they have 
lately undergone. Their health has been 
reestablished though not their looks. 
\Ve shall return to the District about the 
first of August & you may expect me 
duwn in the first Boat in that l\1onth. I 
purchased in Alexandria some few Arti- 
cles which I directed to be sent by the 
Potomac to your care, & are to go down 
next Friday. 1\lay I trouble you to have 
the Bedstead placed in the larger room, (of 
the two in the '''ing) since the .11 ad am pre- 
fers that, and such other articles as you 
may think fit, the rest can be placed in the 
small room. All Feather beds have been 
forbid the apartment under pain &c. and 
as I could not procure a Palliasse, The 
::\1attress must answer for the present. 
The Box of Articles I will not trouble you 
to open or arrange, as I can do that in 
fi,"e minutes after my arrival. And this 
closes the list of commissions. There is 
nothing new here except a second edition 
of the Ingham affair which has been put 
to press since the arrival of the President 
& all of 'which you will get by the Papers. 
I was over in \Vashington last 1\1onday, 
saw the Geni. and 1\lrs. G. the first of 
[them] was not very well. They talk of 
going 
[orthJ before to Old Point. Col 
Thayer had arrived that day & was with 
the Geni. Poor .:\1ansfield had been or- 
dered on to consult Genl Bernard & 
arrived the very day he resigned, so that 
he has to go back to 
. Port. I was very 
an..xious to see ÀI. but could not find him. 
Remember me kindly to ::\1rs. Hale & tell 
her I am constantly reminded of her by 
the Good People I am with & that the 
l\ladam looks forward with great pleasure 
to forming her acquaintance. I long to 
hear little À1iss Rebecca's 'Lee,' 'Lee' 
& to see whether .Miss Kate is stilI as 
'Bwack as \Vee'. I write in great haste, 



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with the servant waiting to take this to 
the Office which will give him a long ride 
because I actually could not find tim(' be- 
fore I left the District for anything but- 
Remember me to even'one & excuse Dear 
Capt. all the trouble ï have given you & 
Believe me 
Yours truly & Sincerely 
R. E. LEE 
" p" S. They are all talking around me 
at such a rate that I hardly know what 
I have written & despair of reading it. 
But Please send the boat out for me the 
first trip the P. makes in August." 


steamer to Lee's station at Fort :J\fonroe. 
All the phases of the honeymoon had 
passed. l\lary Custis Lee, formerly the 
young mistress of Arlington and the only 
child of her parents, settled down in the 
engineers' quarters, determined to live 
within the means of a lieutenant who had 
no private income with which to supple- 
ment his none too generous salary. 
It was a marriage in which happiness 
ou tweighed the sorrows. 
"I wouldn't be unmarried for all you 
could offer me," he wrote a friend in a let- 
ter of February 27, r834. 
Iary Lee was 
not brilliant nor was she counted a beauty, 
From Ravensworth, where this letter but she had the look and 
was written, the Lees paid other visits, the bearing of an aris- .\" 
 
 
and about the firs , t of August returned to tocrat. and she had intel- :'\ 
 
 . ' ! 
Washington. Thence they journeyed by Icct of no low order. Her ,,::! 
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Reduced facsimile of the first and last parts of Robert E. Lee's letter to Captain .\ndrew Talcott written 
shortly after his marriage in 1831. 


343 



344 


LEE A
D THE LADIES 


letters prove that. She bore her hus- 
band seven children, and lost none of 
them during their infancy. One died 
during the war between the States; the 
others outliyed both parents. .:\lrs. Lee 
retained a profound love for Arlington, 
and returned there whenever she could. 
After her father's death, in October, r857, 
when the estate came into her hands as 
life tenant, she lived there continuously 
until the outbreak of the war. She never 
resided with Lee on his distant posts, 
though she made a journey to St. Louis 
and back while he was stationed there in 
the late thirties. She had little weak- 
nesses about which her husband twitted 
her, and to which he had to adjust him- 
self. She was somewhat unmethodical in 
her housekeeping, was often late for her 
appointments, and had the failing of al- 
ways leaving behind her something she 
did not remember until the very instant 
she should be starting for the church, for 
the boat, or for the train. At 'Vest Point, 
where it was necessary that he appear at 
chapel punctually while he was superin- 
tendent, Colonel Lee' would wait for her 
as long as he could and then wo
ld leave 
her to follow with some of the children. 
He made as light other shortcomings as 
he could. In an unpublished letter of 
r834 he wrote unabashedly: "Tell the 
ladies that they are aware that :1\1rs. L. 
is somewhat addicted to laziness and for- 
getfulness in her housekeeping. But they 
mav be certain she does her best. Or in 
her- J\lother's words, 'The spirit is willing 
but the flesh is weak.' " 
The burden of her life-the chief sor- 
row that came to them before the tragedy 
of the war-was ill-health. She was not 
strong when they were married. That 
fall she was sick. From that time onward 
her condition was progressively down- 
ward until she was chained to her chair 
with rheumatism. During the war she 
spent most of her days as well as her 
nights in her bed or by its side knitting 
socks for the soldiers. After the war, at 
Lexington, she was the busy occupant of a 
wheel-chair, painting, coloring photo- 
graphs for charity, always quick to share 
the interests and the small talk of her 
guests and of the students who visited the 
home of the president of \Vashington 
College. Her condition, long before the 
coming of war, brought heavy grief to 


Lee and for a time seems almost to have 
turned him to pessimism. In one of his 
letters to his son, Custis, written in :l\Iay, 
r859, he affirmed with much earnestness 
that no enjoyment in life was left him ex- 
cept in his children. 
Lee made many friends at Fort Mon- 
roe, both before his marriage and after- 
ward. In January, r833, he had admired 
the art of brilliant Fanny Kemble. "She 
surpasses any performer I ever saw," he 
says in an unpublished letter to an army 
friend, whose descendants are too modest 
to permit hi
 name to be used. Lee must 
have seen the actress in private life or on 
the street, for he adds regretfully that he 
could not ,. recognize her off the stage 
for the beautiful creature" he admired on 
it. The following year, writing to the 
same friend from Fort l\lonroe, he con- 
fided that Fannv Kemble was more en- 
chanting than lãst winter. 
The bathing season at the fort brought 
him much pleasure 
"As for the daughters of Eve in this 
country," he wrote the same friend in a 
letter of June 26, r834, now just brought 
to print, "they are formed in the very 
poetry of nature, and would make your 
lips water and fingers tingle. They are 
beginning to asseplble to put their beauti- 
ful limbs in this salt water." 
Of all his women friends at the fort, 
none had more of his admiration than 
l\Irs. Andrew Talcott, the lovely young 
wife of his brother engineer, Captain Tal- 
cott. She was of high blood-Harriet 
Hackley, her mother a Randolph-and 
she must have fairly dazzled with her 
beauty. Her portrait by Thomas Sully, 
reproduced herewith, shows her with 
great brown eyes, a finely turned face, 
and a bosom of "superb abundance where 
a man might base his head." 
'Vhenever he or the Ta1cotts were 
away from the ,. Point," as the fort was 
often called, he regularly wrote one or the 
other of them gossip of the post and all 
chit-chat of the army, as breezily some- 
times as if he had been old Holly 'Valpole 
himself. Here, for instance, is a breathful: 
"The troops sailed for Savannah this 
morning in two sh
ps. The Comp[an)i[e)s 
were Fabius 'Vhitings, Gardners, Latts, 
Fraziers, Griswolds, Porters, Washing- 
tons and l\Iacka ys commanded by Ring- 
gold. 



LEE A
O THE LAD] ES 


Fanny Kcmble 
From the painting by Thomas Sully, 1833- 


"Lyon, Rose, Dimmock, & Archer 
Huger & Capt. Green remain behind. 
"Co!. Eustis has a leave of absence for 
three months & leaves here for S. Cara 
tomorrow with all his family, accompanied 
by 1\lrs Huger, l\irs Hunt, 1\lrs Taylor, 
::\lrs Allen and l\Irs Heiskill will return to 
their frieucls and 
the other ladies 
rem a i n. . . . 
i\Irs Tavlor and 
l\Irs Visher T. 
were at the Point 
last Tuesday, 
and left all well 
in Norfolk." 
Lee's favorite, 
if somewhat in- 
timate, theme 
wi th th e Tal- 
cotts was the ar- 
ri val of thei r 
new babies. The 
stork fairly nes- 
tled in the Tal- 
cott quarters. 
Almos t every 
year there was 
another heir to 
the name. Lee 
awaited their ad- 
vent expectant- 
Iv and hailed 
their arrival 
gleefully. All 
this is set forth 
most humorous- 
ly in the letters 
now to be quoted for the first time from 
the unedited originals. 
Of the first little Talcott to make her 
appearance after Lee became friendly with 
the family, he wrote the young father: 
"I have been expecting this pleasant 
intelligence since an ominous dream of 
.l\1rs Lee's some few nights ago. I have 
only to wish that these dreams may be 
confined to others than ourselves and to 
predict that the Engineer Quarters will in 
time be pretty well filled." 
This was on February 21, 1833. Less 
than thirteen months later he again con- 
gratulated the parents: 
"I was sincerely delighted yesterclay 
to learn by your note of the magnificent 
presènt offered you by IvIrs T. and had 
some thought of taking the Barge this 


3
3 


morning and presenting my congratula- 
tions to l\Irs T. in person. Do uffer them 
in my stead in the kindest manner. IVe 
have been waiting for this event to decide 
upon the sex uf our next and now deter- 
mine it shall be a girl in order to retain 
the connection in the family." 
"The sex of 
our next" was 
considered im- 
portant because 
Lee had struck a 
humorous ba r- 
gain wi th his 
friends that his 
children were to 
be mated with 
theirs as th ey 
appeared. He 
went on, apro- 
pos the tiny 
l\Iiss Talcott: 
"Inform the 
little lad v of the 
most fó'rtunate 
fate that awaits 
her. The all ac- 
complished and 
elegant l\laster 
Custis Lee begs 
to place in her 
_ hands, his hap- 
piness and life, 
being assured 
that as for her 
he was born, so 
for her will he 
live! His only 
misery can be her frown, his only deligh t 
her smile. He hopes that her assent will 
not be withheld from his most ardent 
wishes, and in their blissful union Fortune 
may be indemnified for the miscarriage of 
the Affaire du Cæur of the Father and 
,i\Iother." 
Apparently there was no baby in 1834. 
Lee's reference, however, is somewhat ob- 
scure. He says under date of October I: 
"I hope long before this the whole party 
are on their feet again, that 
Irs T. has 
already felt the good effects resulting from 
her firmness and that her dear little epi- 
tome is as blythe as a lark." 
In the fall of 1835 the normal schedule 
was resumed. Lee shaped his congrat u- 
lations in a clever and well-sustained 
metaphor, based on the .lllltuals of verse 



346 


LEE A
D THE LADIES 


and sentiment which the Victorians pub- 
lished and Thackeray joyed to deride: 
"I hasten to present my congratula- 
tions to yourself and l\Irs T upon the 
happy event mentioned therein. We 
cannot be too thankful to our beautiful 
Talcott for the pleasure she thus yearly 
affords us, in the multiplication of these 
little miniatures of herself; a new edition 
of which I as regularly and anxiously look 
for as I do for the Souvenirs & Annuals of 
the Seasons." 
The next spring Lee hoped for a visit 
from l\Irs. Talcott to the family at Arling- 
ton, and on the agreed date he went to the 
Washington pier to meet her-only to be 
disappointed. He wrote her in lively, 
scolding strain a letter that shows quite 
accurately the friendly, informal, but 
thoroughly" safe" character of their rela- 
tions: . 
"I had much to say to you, which I 
must now keep for the next time, and in 
the language of a young Nimrod from the 
\Vest, declining an appt. of this year to 
the 1'1. Academy I hope my country will 
not be endangered by my so doing! But 
Talcott, AI y Beauty, how could you have 
served your Uncle so! I know the sight 
of his red nùse, looming above the anxious 
heads on the W;wharf, would have been a 
grateful sight to you, and then your re- 
ception at A. would have been so warm 
. . . the country looks very sweet now, 
and the hill at A covered with verdure, 
and perfumed by the blossoms of the 
trees. . . . · But the brightest "flowe'r 
there blooming is my daughter, oh, she 
is a rare one, and if only sweet sixteen, I 
would wish myself a Cannibal, that I 
might eat her up." 
Surely, there is one line in this letter 
that will humanize Lee iri the opinion of 
those who haye read only the serious 
biographies. It is scarcely possible to re- 
peat without a smile the future general's 
plaintive: "But Talcott, 1J.I y Beauty, how 
could you have served your Uncle so ! " 
In January, 1837, Lee must have had 
word that the Talcotts were expecting to 
make another entry in the family Bible. 
The news made him throw over the bar- 
gain for the intermarriage of the Lees and 
Talcotts of the new generation: 
"Be sure to remember me to 1\lrs H. 
Mrs T. Sis Jane, 1\lisses l\I. and Pat and 


the five little Talcotts. You are aware 
that you must look out for c01l1texions 
for three of them in some other families. 
For I had given up in despair some years 
ago the hope of supplying them, and I 
now doubt whether there is anyone fam- 
ily. in Virginia that can keep pace with 
their number. Having retired from the 
lists myself I have engaged my sister 
Nanie to enter the ring. She, however is 
not sanguine, seeing that upon a trial of 
her speed, two for the same year was only 
her mark." 
At that, he did not consider his own 
record poor, for when he was at work on 
the 1'lissouri River he wrote a friend in 
a letter much cherished by its owners, but 
never printed previously: 
"Do you know how many little Lees 
there are now? It is astonishing with 
what facility the precious creatures are 
dressed up for their Papa! I am sure to be 
introduced to a new one every Christmas." 
And in 1 841 he wri tes to the same friend 
of the advent of another baby, "whose 
approach, however long foreseen, I could 
have dispensed with for a year or two 
more. However, as she was in such haste 
to greet her pa I am now very glad to 
see her." - 
The month after:. resigning the commis- 
sion to supply a Lee for every Talcott, he 
reverted to his metaphor of the Annuals: 
"Tell my beautiful Talcott that we have 
been anxiously expecting the appearance 
of the next copy of her Annual, which she 
has been editing so long for our gratifica- 
tion. Her rival in the other Hemisphere 
the Countess of Blessington, can produce 
nothing equal to her. . .. I hope we 
may be able to get on there for a short 
time, when besides the pleasure of seeing 
the Authors, we can peruse at leisure each 
several production, and enjoy the light 
of that l\Iaster-piece with the blue eyes." 
By this time orders had carried him to 
other stations. From St. Louis, in Octo- 
ber, 1837, he wrote to Captain Talcott of 
his hopes of seeing the family again: 
(, I still look forward with as much 
anxiety as anticipation of pleasure to the 
visit I am to pay her some of these days. 
You know that is to happen when I can 
get together my large family and have 
leisure for a family trip of pleasure and 
enjoyment. Can you tell me when it will 



,---- 


Harriet Randolph Hackley Talcott, \Irs, Andrew T .J.lcott. 
A woman much admired by Robert E. Lee when he was serving- under her husband as a lieutenant of engineers at Fort 
Monroe, \ a. 
This photograph (by Cook, of Richmond) is from an oil-painting made for Mrs. Tdlcolt's mother, in 1832-33, b) 
Thomas Sully. 


take place? If you do make ready to be 
of the party and if we don't make the 
natÌ\ es stare with the Patriarchal appear- 
ance of oursehTes, and the loves of our 
little responsibilities whose fault will it 
be?" 


The 'Yest, incidentally, did not plcase 
him. "J make an exception," he contlded 
to a friend in a letter of September 27, 
1837, from the same city, "and that is in 
fa'"or of the pretty girls, if there are any 
here, and I know there are, for I have 
34ï 



3.,18 


LEE A
D THE LADIES 


met them in no place, in no garb, in no 
situation that I did not feel my heart 
open to them like a flower to the sun." 
FOUT years later, when he was at Fort 
Hamilton, Xew York, and the seventh 


she could not have been forgotten. Dur- 
ing the war General Lee had one of her 
sons, a colonel of engineers, attached to 
his headquarters, and serving for a time 
as a member of his staff As he received 


I 


Robert E. Lee, U. S. A., 1850. 


little Talcott had arrived, he still talked 
of seeing them. "l\Iy beautiful Talcott" 
has now become" our dear Talcott, " and 
little wonder, after the seventh baby: 
"Shall be most happy if you will bring 
'our dear Talcott' and her seven to see us. 
\Vhat a pretty dozen [with his own chil- 
dren] they will make!" 
Mter 1841 the letters to the Talcotts 
must have been less frequent. The 
lovely Harriet passed out of his life, but 


young Talcott's reports in 1864 and 1865 
of bridges built and new lines drawn, did 
Lee ever think of the colonel's mother and 
of the easy old days at Fort lVlonroe? 
In his friendship for other women in the 
army, as well as for" the beautiful Tal- 
cott," young Lee displayed the easy com- 
radeship that still prevails among those 
who wear their country's uniform. His 
chatty letters of the early years abound in 
details of comings and goings and, as 



LEE AXD THE LADIES 


3-t9 


always, in waggish reports of new babies. And he enjoyed it too, for he appears 
In August, 1833, he wrote an unpublished in this correspondence (pace idolaters) 
letter in a vein of delightful informality: frank, normal, wholesome, and without a 
"If I had time I could make you laugh shadow of unco guid. 
about this Green and Shaw affair. . .. As the years passed, women did not 
Genl. :!\Iacomb, Lady & Aids, have been cease to interest him. When he met old 
here about a fortnight. . . the Tavern friends he was delighted. \\'hen he was 
is quite full. l\lrs Taylor is at present introduced to strangers he was quick to 
with 
Irs Burke, who since J\Irs J\lay- study them. The unusual types amused 
nadier has presented her spouse with an- and the unbending sort did not disturb 
other pledge of affection, is shaking in her him. In 1846, when he was thirty-nine 
shoes. Sally is as blythe as a larke and and stationed at Fort Hamilton, he was 
admitted me (an innocent man) into her much diverted by the sleigh-riding Ïrrto 
bedchamber a few days after the frolick." New York City. 
The next year he announced to a friend "It cost sixpence," he wrote a friend- 
in the far South: the letter is new-"and you might be 
"The population of the Point has been accommodated with a lady in your lap in 
increased by one little Huger boy, and I the bargain. Think of a man of my for- 
take it upon myself to predict the ar- bidden countenance having such an of- 
rival of a small French." fer. But I peaked under her veil before 
Doubtless some of the admirers of the accepting, and though I really could not 
great Confederate will be a trifle dis- find fault with either her appearance or 
tressed in spirit to know that even when he age, after a little demurring preferred 
was twenty-six he dared to venture alone giving her my seat. I thought it would 
into a lady's boudoir. They will be the not sound well if repeated in the latitude 
more concerned to learn that he once pro- of \Vashington that I had been riding 
tested that the wife of a friend would have down B[roadJ \V[ay] with a strange 
to abandon her prudery. But here are his woman in my lap." 
own words: Fourteen years after this and twenty- 
"Robert amused me ycry much with an five years after the little incident with the 
account of Lucies' prudishness. She will ,. sweet innocent young things" in Alex- 
have to lay that aside in these degenerate andria he wrote home from Texas in 
days." amusement of the wife of a 
Iajor Brooks, 
And what will be said about the letter on whom, it seems, he made no impres- 
in which Lee admits an evening of flirta- sion. She" adhered to her husband," he 
tion under the colors of a single man? It wrote, and, "though they are encamped 
happened in 1835, when he was twenty- about three or four miles from town, she 
eight. His brother Sidney Smith, of the declines the protection of a house and re- 
nayy, was married on February 5, follow- mains in camp. She rode up Saturday 
ing which the wedding party kept up the and I brought her into the office to warm 
festivities for several days, as they had herself while the 
fajor was adjusting his 
after Lee's own nuptials. On the night papers. . . she would not dine with me, 
of the 9th some of them went to another nor accept a room at 
Irs Phillips, but 
wedding in Alexandria. returned with the 
Iajor to camp." 
"J\'fy spirits were so buoyant. .. Then, playing on the name Brooks, he 
when relieved from the eyes of my dame," added: "I did not hear or see anything of 
Lee confessed in a letter the next day, any little streams or rivulets and hesi- 
"that my sister Nanie was trying to pass tated to ask." 
me off as her spouse [the bridegroom] but This was penned near the end of 1860, 
I was not going to have my sport spoiled at a time when, as Lee wrote in the same 
in that way and undeceived the young letter, the lone star was ,. floating all over 
ladies and told them I was her younger the state." _\. few months later came the 
brother. Sweet innocent young things, great decision, the separation from the old 
they concluded I was single, and I have army, the abandonment of Arlington to 
not had such soft looks and tender pres- the enemy, and, soon, the acceptance of the 
sures of the hand for many years." leadership that brought him world fame. 
"' (More of General Lee's letters will appear in the November Kumber.) 



Salon 


BY \YOOD\YARD BOYD 
Author of .. The Love Le
end" and .. Lazy Laughter" 


" 


ILLùSTRATIO
 BY H. YAK Bl"REX KLI"IE 


EA UTIFUL poetry 
will never compensate 
for disgraceful actions 
in the poet, will it," 
remarked :Mrs. Hemp- 
stead, with no ques- 
tion at all in her "oice. 
She bent forward in 
her chair with a slim, almost youthful tor- 
so, as she expertly passed the cup of tea 
she had just poured to \Vallie Sands, the 
young Englishman she was addressing. 
He laughed. "Shelley was rather a 
rotter at times," he said. 
l\Irs. Hempstead rippled her brows, 
suppressing a frown. This young man 
(he couldn't be more than twenty) acted 
as if he were humoring her. There was 
something in his expression as he leaned 
carelessly against the mantel abo,"e the 
fireplace that she did not like. "He was 
indeed/' she went on. "His biography 
was a great disappointment to me." She 
folded her lips in a firm way she had. 
"Think of what he might have done if he 
had led a worth-while, self-sacrificing life! 
And Byron was the same way, only 
worse! " 
The young Englishman looked into the 
mirror out of the comer of his eve at the 
four other young people, in the r
om, who 
were conversing in low tones. " Byron 
wrote a lot of tripe," he observed agree- 
ably. But J\lrs. Hempstead missed the 
note of complete understanding that she 
had hoped for. It was almost as if he 
were laughing at her. E,"idently he was 
like so many of the young idiots in Amer- 
ica whom Rosemary was always picking 
up. No respect at all for an older woman 
of intelligence. In Paris, really, she had 
hoped for better things from Rosemary's 
friends. This young man was perfectly 
positive that he knew all there was to 
know on every subject in the world. And 
yet when he had seen more of the world 
35 0 


he would know that only one thing made 
real art: character! 
She sighed and glanced across the room 
,vhere her daughter Rosemary was sitting 
with the young painter, Evans Pierce. 
Rosemary had been talking to him quite 
long enough, was the faint, uncomforta- 
ble feeling that lay under the thought that 
prompted the glance. For she was re- 
membering the poem that Rosemary 
wrote when she was finishing school. 
Sweet Rosemary, she did have the right 
principles: 


".\nd if we ne"er stoop to things beneath us, 
.\nd if we all forever upward strain. 
The victor's laurel crown may never wreathe us, 
But all our world would reach a higher plane. " 


That was the last verse. .:\lrs. Hemp- 
stead had once read these lines to a set- 
tlement worker in America, a woman of 
vast experience and great intelligence. 
She had said simply (
lrs. Hempstead al- 
ways put in the descriptive adjective with 
the suggestion of a quiver in her ,'oice): 
"That's not verse, 
lrs. Hempstead, 
that's poetry." And Rosemary had 
written it when she was only eighteen. 
Her lm'elv character had made that bit 
of art. 
 
Howe,-er, this incident would not do 
to relate to the young Englishman yet. 
The soil was not ripe. It was neces- 
sary to have patience in dealing with 
the younger generation. After she had 
gained him for a friend she could teach 
him a lot. Just now he was a little on 
edge toward her. "I wonder if we could 
poke up the fire a little," she said. 
"These rooms seemali ttle chill." 
"It's wonderfully warm in here for 
Paris at this time of year," said \Yallie 
Sands. " You ought to be in the rooms 
Pierce and I have. Thev're like a re- 
frigerating plant." . 
1\lr5. Hempstead gave the fire a little 



ì 


\. 


t - 


it. 
t 


1 
 
 
,:" 
 

'" .... \ ......... 
" 
I - .. 
*& 
- .: 
" 
 
., ..... 
1 ... ..... J .." 
, 


1IfI1II<'.
 


I> 


L- 
From a dra'iJ:ing by n. Van Buren Kline. 
"Good-by," she said. Then, as if rallying for a final siege, she asked: "Do you have to go?" 


35 I 



352 


poke that was almost yicious. "I sup- 
pose .l\Ir. Pierce has been selling a lot of 
pictures?" She knew he had not been 
selling any, but it seemed inevitable that 
she begin to talk of this crazy artist that 
Rosemary seemed so interested in. 
"No; last week in London, when we 
were hard up, we tried to sell three of 
them for ten shillings, but it was no good," 
said \Vallie Sands. He glanced around 
the comfortable sitting-room with its long 
red-\'elvet hangings, shutting out the coM, 
dark Parisian afternoon, and 1\1rs. Hemp- 
stead thought he looked a little wistful. 
Probably this warm apartment was Para- 
dise to these two poor boys. The table 
beside her was nearly bare of cakes and 
sandwiches, though Rosemary had in- 
sisted on having much too much food for 
a proper afternoon tea, 1\lrs. Hempstead 
considered. It mav do for dinner for 
Evans, she had told her mother anhiouslv. 
J\Irs. Hempstead wondered if the bO)Ts 
were ever really cold and hungry and un- 
able to get food and warmth. She shiv- 
ered. After all, it ought not to be hard to 
make friends. She smiled her agreeable 
smile. 
"You paint, of course," she said to 
Wallie Sands. 
"No, I'm afraid I don't." He glanced 
uneasily across the room and caught the 
eye of Irene Sack, who was absorbed 
in conversation with another American, 
named Browne. His face became ani- 
mated suddenly as it had not been ani- 
mated for one moment during his talk 
with J\Irs. Hempstead. Youth calls to 
youth, thought the older woman, a little 
sadly and a little complacently at the apt- 
ness of her phrase. Irene Sack was call- 
ing, in her harsh 1\liddle- \Vestern accent, 
across the room. Really, over here her 
voice sounded almost unbearable. 
"Wallie, I'm going to make my fortune. 
I've just thought of the most wonderful 
invention in the world," called Irene. 
Mrs. Hempstead decided that \Vallie 
Sands would be revolted immediately, but 
he seemed more interested than ever. 
'Vith a wonderfully forbearing smile 1\lrs. 
Hempstead waited until the frivolity 
should release \Vallie again. How long 
was Rosemary going to continue to talk 
to that impossible artist, leaving young 
J\1r, Browne from the consulate to be 


L\LO :\T 


bored by Irene Sack. She would have to 
move things about some way. 
"It's a toothbrush," shouted Irene tri- 
umphantly. "1\lr. Browne's craz\' about 
it. You put the toothpaste in the stem, 
press a little button, and the toothpaste 
shoots out." lV1rs. Hempstead shud- 
dered. \Vhat a pity it was that girls like 
I rene came over and represented the 
American girl in Europe! However, thev 
could all see that Rosemary was different. 
" I thought Rosemary told me you 
painted," went on 1\lrs. Hempstead pa- 
tiently. " You young artists are so mod- 
est. You all say you're trying to paint." 
"No, really, I assure you," said \Vallie 
Sands. He raised his voice and spoke 
across the room to Irene Sack. "That's 
like my comb that I invented, \vith hair- 
oil in it." 
Hair-oil! And l\Irs. Hempstead had 
always thought the English so conserva- 
tive. 'VeIl, no doubt this young man 
carne from questionable people. Rose- 
mary seemed to be getting a genius for 
picking them up here in Paris. She sat 
very still, pleasantly smiling in a faint, 
well-poised way. Her gray hair rose in 
even undulations to a summit, like a so- 
phisticated hill that has been worn from 
its pristine ruggedness by a thousand cos- 
mopolitan feet. And as she glanced at 
her young, delicately wrought daughter, 
she seemed even more the mistress of the 
room and of any situation that might 
imaginatively arise. Rosemary was hers, 
a part of the room, and very different 
from the rest of the people sipping tea and 
wine there. It was as if Rosemarv were 
chained to her with an invisible b
t yery 
strong goklen chain. She sighed slightly. 
It was exhausting waiting for the young 
people to stop. Youth must be served, 
she thought. Phrases like that were so 
helpful in really thinking things out. 
"Then she was young she would never 
have broken into a conversation with an 
olc1.er woman like that. The older woman 
would not have suffered it. However, 
she was more open-minded than those old 
women she used to know. Yes, and 
times had changed. To-day you had to 
wait on young people, if you wanted them 
to like you; if you wanteù to be an influ- 
ence. 
" I've invented an eyebrow pencil, 



too," said Irene. "The advertising slo- 
gan will be: ' Washes and Dyes in one 
operation.' " 
Mrs. Hempstead leaned forward smil- 
ing. "And while you're about it," she 
said in her soft, distinct tones, "you might 
tell them to dispense with the dye alto- 
gether. Isn't it queer that people don't 
seem to know that rouge ruins the skin?" 
No one had any answer to make to this, 
it seemed, for every one in the room was 
silent and then, Wallie Sands, mumbling 
something, seized the opportunity to re- 
tire into a corner with Irene Sack. This 
left young Mr. Browne sitting alone on a 
straight chair, awkwardly pretending to 
be interested in some carved candlesticks 
that Rosemary had bought at Caen, which 
stood on a buffet of heavy oak behind 
him. The electric light glared down on 
him pitilessly, exhibiting every line of his 
faultless afternoon costume and the un- 
happily vacant look upon his face. 
"I'm deserted, you see," said Mrs. 
Hempstead, smiling. She felt somehow 
that she would be able to put this young 
man at his ease and to bring him out, 
two of her favorite exercises with men, 
which she was seldom able to practise on 
the young men. Rosemary knew. " Won't 
you come and sit beside me?" She indi- 
cated the large, low, mustard-colored arm- 
chair beside her, and IV!r. Browne rose 
stiffly and came toward her. As he ad- 
vanced, his collar seemed to be pressing 
into his neck so that he turned his head 
with great difficulty. He exhibited the 
back of his cutaway to Rosemary and 
Evans Pierce somewhat uneasily before 
lowering himself with a slow precision into 
the mustard-colored chair beside Mrs. 
Hempstead. 
"You're in the consular service," be- 
I gan Mrs. Hempstead brightly. She bent 
forward with great interest while she 
listened to his response, though she was 
much more conscious of the low hum of 
the voices of Evans Pierce and Rosemary 
on one side of the room, of \Vallie Sands 
and Irene on the other, of the sucking 
noise which the logs made in the fireplace, 
and even of the footsteps which were pass- 
ing in the hallway of the building be- 
yond the door. "Oh, that's very inter- 
esting," was her next remark, and, as she 
had foreseen, it started Mr. Browne off 
VOL, LX,'XVIII,-26 


SALON 


353 


excellently on the conversational road to 
which he was accustomed. 
In drawing this young man out it 
would be as well to find out something 
about him, Mrs. Hempstead was think- 
ing. Perhaps she had been permitting 
herself to grow rather careless in regard to 
the young people Rosemary was meeting. 
Not really careless, either, she thought. 
Things were somehow getting out of her 
hands more and more. Like serving wine 
at tea. She was reminded of this by the 
consciousness that Evans Pierce had risen 
and advanced to the table beside her to 
refill his wine-glass. She looked up and 
smiled her competent, somewhat dexter- 
ous smile at him, a smile which in no way 
robbed lVlr. Browne of her perfect atten- 
tion, yet included Pierce in a little kindly 
greeting. She was remembering what 
Rosemary had said before the arrival of 
her guests: "We simply must serve wine, 
or Evans Pierce will think we are simply 
provincial! " That was the kind of a 
young man he was. And then Rosemary 
had repeated a silly little anecdote with 
that far-away, almost affectionate expres- 
sion that IVlrs. Hempstead was beginning 
to dread whenever the name of Evans 
Pierce was mentioned. Some one had 
said to Pierce once in Rosemary's hearing 
that he was a regular tea-hound, he was 
seen at so many teas. " Yes, but I never 
drink tea at any of them," Evans had re- 
plied, and Rosemary had thought this 
amusing! :NIrs. Hempstead's thoughts 
were becoming more and more unpleas- 
ant. Evans Pierce and Rosemary! Im- 
possible! But Rosemary was being really 
rude, the way she was neglecting the rest 
of her guests. 
"That is pleasant," she said to Mr. 
Browne with enthusiasm. He had been 
an easy one to start talking. Her cues fed 
in at just the right time gave her the old 
sensation she had always loved: that of 
making men talk well. She had always 
prided herself on her ability to make them 
converse with her on really serious sub- 
jects. Her conversation had never been 
mere frivol, the way it was with young 
girls to-day. Even in her youth she had 
known the value of being serious and had 
had grave, important men discuss grave, 
important subjects with her. 
Like the scent of spring being wafted in 



354 


through the windows on a lilac-laden 
wind, a dozen delicious triumphs of her 
girlhood passed through her thoughts for 
an instant, leaving their wann, satisfying 
feeling of comfort. There was the ear- 
nest young lawyer who had walked with 
her those summer twilights, the year that 
she was twenty, talking law to her, ut- 
terly absorbed and quite unaware that 
she was not understanding a tenth of 
what he said. It had never mattered. 
She had kept him talking, and he had 
complimented her once publicly on her 
brilliant mind. And Senator Bridgeman I 
One of our nation's real men. He had 
liked to tell rather old jokes, and she had 
always laughed. He came about once a 
week for dinner and told the same stories 
over and over, Once in a national crisis 
he had asked her advice about a bill, the 
bill was about waterways or currency or 
something frightfully important, and she 
had been thrilled to the very marrow to 
think she was really helping with things 
that really counted. 
Oh, well, she was older now, and to-day 
the younger people in the world did not 
care what she thought. Nonsense, she 
was getting morbid. And Rosemary was 
a very good daughter compared to a great 
many girls. There was no real harm in 
serving a moderate amount of wine, and 
to a girl of Rosemary's active intelligence 
it was probably quite natural to find a de- 
sire for people in the arts. If only they 
weren't such queer people. Evans Pierce, 
for instance. What could she see in him? 
No doubt a nice sweet boy, a thoroughly 
fine, good boy, and to be commended 
highly for working himself up from the 
lower classes. Yes, a self-made boy, she 
admired that in him, and probably that 
was what Rosemary admired, too. But it 
seemed a little strange that Rosemary 
should want to spend so much time with 
him. She must get frightfully bored with 
him. 
Mrs. Hempstead experienced a definite 
feeling of dread as she realized that this 
last thought had been meant to deceive 
herself. Rosemary was not bored with 
him, and she didn't even seem to mind his 
grammar. And this was the third time 
this week that she had seen him. The 
third time ? Yes, last night at dinner, 
and Monday at tea, and this morning 


SALON 


when he came to return the book. "How 
amusing I" she said aloud to the by this 
time voluble Mr. Browne. 
But her fear deepened as she thought of 
this morning and the incident of the book. 
He had come in just as Rosemary was 
about to have her hair washed. "If you 
like to wait about ten minutes, I'll come 
in and dry it in here," Rosemary had 
said. How could Rosemary have done a 
thing like that? But she was so innocent. 
She didn't realize what it did to young 
men to see her long golden hair hanging 
loose like that. She had come in with her 
head done up in a towel as soon as the 
hair-dresser had finished with her, and 
actually sat with her wet hair and talked 
to Pierce for about half an hour until he 
left. 
The young man was probably very 
much encouraged by the incident. She 
did wish that Rosemary would stop talk- 
ing to him. What could they be finding 
to talk about for so long ? Young Mr. 
Browne had come to a stop and needed a 
cue. 
" Your experiences are so interesting, 
and you really do a lot of good, too. How 
did you happen to choose the consular 
serviæ ? " 
" Well, you see my dad makes motor- 
cars, and he wanted me to go into the 
business with him, but I couldn't see 
it. . . ." Motor-cars! Her mind jumped 
into action away from the troublesome 
thoughts that had been cluttering them, 
Browne motor-cars I Could it be? Why, 
this was one of the largest fortunes in 
America. No, it couldn't be. How could 
she find out without appearing to be pry- 
ing. This young man was thoroughly 
nice, anyway, thoroughly presentable. 
She liked his even, regular features, a sign 
of delicate perceptions. His ear-lobes 
were the right shape, too; he had no crim- 
inal instincts. She always judged men by 
their ear-Iobesc Evans Pierce had none. 
A Princeton man he was, too. Then he 
had had the right training. He had all 
the ideals of the real American, a glow ran 
through her as she thought: "Real Amer- 
ican." Somehow, far off on a foreign 
shore those words always gave her a 
thrill. It didn't matter, really, whether 
this young man was connected with 
Browne motor-cars or not. Just so he had 



enough money to keep Rosemary comfort- 
able. And it was evident that he had 
enough or he wouldn't be in the consular 
service. He was just the kind of a young 
man that Rosemary would care for. So 
handsome and attractive and well-bred. 
l\Ir. Browne's talk rippled on with al- 
most no interruption. In the fireplace 
the logs emitted a derisive roar now and 
then, and in a corner the Englishman, 
Wallie Sands, and Irene Sack conversed 
in low tones. Across the room Rosemary 
still sat absorbed in Evans Pierce, a flush 
on her face, and her slim figure slumped 
down in her chair. 
""Vhat time'd you get up this morn- 
ing, Rosemary?" called Irene. "I was 
simply dead to the world." 
"I can't remember what happened af- 
ter we left the Lapin Agile," said Wallie 
Sands. "Oh, yes, I do, too. You were 
funny, Evans." l\Irs. Hempstead was 
wrenched away from her delightful con- 
templation of l\1r. Browne's conversation 
with a horrid jolt. Rosemary hadn't told 
her that the party last night had been gay. 
How dreadful for her little girl! To her 
horror Wallie Sands was going on: " You 
came in and said you had come on up- 
stairs with Rosemary instead of leaving 
her at the door. You must have been 
gone!" 
Evans Pierce was having the grace to 
look embarrassed. "I'm afraid the party 
was a little too rough for you, Rose- 
mary," he was saying. At least, Mrs. 
Hempstead was thinking with relief, he 
realizes that Rosemary is different. 
"Not at all," Rosemary answered with 
her soft little laugh. "I was only sorry I 
wasn't able to join in more." 
Mrs. Hempstead was nearly angry at 
that. Didn't Rosemary understand when 
she ought to take a decided stand? " I'm 
sure nobody would blame you for that," 
said l\Irs. Hempstead. She looked around 
smiling. "But really, I'm monopolizing 
Mr. Browne. It's not fair for an elderly 
person of very small attraction to take up 
all of one gentleman's time. Rosemary, 
you come sit here and talk to l\iIr. 
Browne. " 
Rosemary arose and came over to the 
chair by the fire that her mother had va- 
cated with a reluctance almost obvious. 
She began without the oil of experience 


SALON 


355 


her mother possessed for making conversa- 
tional wheels go round more smoothly. 
She blundered over asking him about the 
consular service. Everything stopped. 
They both fidgeted. They tried the 
weather, they tried Paris. Every one in 
the room watched them with embarrass- 
ment, for 
Irs. Hempstead, who would 
have helped, perhaps, had gone out of the 
room. It was Wallie Sands who came 
over and began to talk to Rosemary. 
"Horrible ass, isn't he?" he whispered. 
"Why do you go on talking to him?" 
"What can I do?" said the agonized 
Rosemary, a little comforted. 
" Shu t up like an oyster! I would!" 
said Wallie. "He's poisonous. Worse 
when he gets going than he is stopped up. 
I listened to him going it to your mother." 
"Mother's wonderful," said Rosemary 
wistfully. 
"Does she go on like that all the time? 
I mean, ask you what you are, whether 
you paint or write, or what and then fol- 
low up with just the proper questions for 
each one? What if I told her I was a 
tight-rope walker? What would she say 
then?" . 
":Mother's always made people talk," 
said Rosemary disinterestedly. " She's so 
interested in every one that she draws 
people out." 
Irene, deprived of her Englishman, had 
gone back to 
lr. Browne and drawn him 
into her circle of nonsense. Evans Pierce, 
with his eyes on nothing in particular, his 
legs stretched before him, sat staring. 
"Evans is wondering where his next 
meal is coming from as usual," said 
Wallie. 
Rosemary lost her look of languid dis- 
comfort. "Oh, dear," she said. " Wallie, 
if I could only get him some kind of a job. 
And yet he has so much talent, it's awful 
to think of him wasting his energy when 
he ought to be painting. \Vallie, I think 
he's got real genius; I mean . . ." She 
broke off and began again. "Do you know, 
I don't think of anything else all day long 
but of how to get some kind of a job for 
Evans, where he won't have to work so 
hard and can have time to paint." 
The intensity in her voice caused Wallie 
to glance around somewhat apprehen- 
sively. J.\1Irs. Hempstead had come back 
into the room. He saw that she had 



356 


heard even before she spoke. "Of course 
l\lr. Pierce is going to get a nice job," she 
said soothingly to every body. " Now I 
think, not that anyone wants to know 
what I think-" she paused and looked 
around the room. 
"Oh, I'm sure we all want to hear what 
you think, mother," said Rosemary. 
l\ilrs. Hempstead took a chair in the 
centre of the room, that contrived to 
dominate the group. If these young peo- 
ple were really willing to listen to her she 
could tell them a lot of things that would 
make life much simpler and easier for 
them. In that instant of expansion she 
saw Irene, minus her rouge and with her 
hair grown long and neatly tucked in, 
wedded to a strong virile man and nurs- 
ing a baby enveloped in lace. She saw 
Rosemary married to Mr. Browne, and 
l\1r. Browne's father in the background 
giving them their first check for a million 
dollars, and she saw Evans Pierce, his 
grammar entirely made over, stout, pros- 
perous, and respectable. Yet none of 
these pictures were definitely formed in 
her mind except the last, for it was of 
Evans Pierce that she' was going to 
speak. 
"Mr. Pierce will get a job in some nice 
architect's office," she began in the tone 
of a fond mother painting the joys of go- 
ing to bed to a sceptical son. "And there 
he will find plenty to occupy the artistic 
side of his nature, as well as the other 
methodical work he will have to do. And 
besides that he can have the joy of know- 
ing that he is doing good for others. He 
does not need to begin designing pleasure 
palaces and big luxurious mansions. Let 
him begin humbly, and bring real beauty 
into the lives of the poor." 
" Yes, I don't see why some one doesn't 
do that," said Mr. Browne helpfully. 
But Rosemary, with her voice full of 
young tender yearning, said hopelessly: 
"But, mother, he's an artist and he wants 
to paint, and he ought to paint, and you 
can't paint in an architect's office." 
Evans looked at his shoes and grew 
redder than ever. 
"That's all very well," said Mrs. 
Hempstead, "to want to paint. Nobody 
appreciates these artistic impulses more 
than I. At the same time we all must live, 
and though man cannot live by bread 


SALON 


alone, he needs the bread. \Vhat he 
really wants is to create beauty, isn't it, 
Mr. Pierce?" 
Evans Pierce looked up and into Mrs. 
Hempstead's eyes with a look that 
startled her. What was that, there be- 
hind his eyes? He was like a caged ani- 
mal perhaps. He didn't understand. He 
thought she was goading him. "1-1- 
guess so," he choked. Her heart softened. 
He should understand that she under- 
stood this craving for beauty that he had. 
Her voice softened. 
"I know. We've all had it perhaps at 
some time in our lives, the desire to cre- 
ate something beautiful. To paint a 
beautiful picture, to write a beautiful 
song that will lodge in somebody's heart 
forever. To reach the heart, that's what 
we all want to do, isn't it? I go to all the 
exhibitions and I look around at the pic- 
tures, and what do I see? I see beautiful 
things, things that I can appreciate and 
admire, but do I ever see anything that I 
want to take home and have on my walls? 
Could I stand it to look at any of these 
modern things day after day? " She 
smiled and they comprehended that she 
could not. 
" No. Why is it ? You all wonder why 
it is that you cannot do beautiful things 
such as the old masters did. Because you 
are not doing it with love in your hearts. 
I don't mean that you personally haven't 
love in your hearts, but-" 
"lVlother," said Rosemary painfully, 
"do you know of any architect's office in 
Paris where Evans could get a job?" 
l\ilrs. Hempstead with a faint ripple of 
annoyance turned toward her daughter, 
but she did not follow up her daughter's 
rudeness with another rudeness. " Why, 
I dare say there are any number of offices 
where }\IIr. Pierce could get a job." 
"Would you like it, do you think, just 
for a while?" said the girl eagerly to 
Evans Pierce. 
Mrs. Hempstead was seriously alarmed. 
All this about a job was very terrifying. 
Had things gone that far? Had he spoken 
to Rosemary, and had Rosemary? . . . 
Looking at the flush on Rosemary's face 
she could hardly doubt what Rosemary 
had answered. And the exclamation that 
she had overheard as she came into the 
room: "I think of nothing else night and 



day but how to get him a job I " If Rose- 
mary were seriously in love with this 
horrible boy, what should she do? He 
was without doubt a fortune-hunter and 
hoped to marry Rosemary and live on her 
income for the rest of his life, while he 
lazily painted pictures and listened to 
Rosemary call him a genius. 
But perhaps she was being too hard. 
If it was a real love-match she could not 
oppose it. After all, Rosemary had had 
the right training and she would not 
choose a man likely to be unworthy of her. 
Perhaps-and here Mrs. Hempstead, in 
her effort to be just, administered a morti- 
fying dose to herself-she had been a little 
snobbish and had actually allowed herself 
to be influenced against the man on ac- 
count of his grammar. A slow flush came 
up into her finely poised head, and she was 
thoroughly ashamed of herself as she 
remembered her thoughts about l\i1r. 
Browne. She had been unconsciously for- 
tune-hunting herself. She had wanted 
Rosemary to marry :tV1r. Browne, a young 
man about whom she knew absolutely 
nothing and to whom Rosemary was 
not even attracted, just because she had 
thought him very rich. And perhaps he 
wasn't rich after all. There were dozens 
of Bro'WIles in America probably in the 
motor-car business. However, it didn't 
matter. This man was a son of the rich, 
and was doing no actual creative work 
himself. While Evans Pierce, as you 
could see by his manners (or lack of them, 
rather), had come up by the hardest kind 
of labor, A self-made man, After all, 
that had a genuinely American sound. A 
self-made man 1 
" \Ve might give Mr. Pierce a letter to 
Gerald Boone," she said. She knew that 
this was the thing at which Rosemary 
had been hinting. 
"Oh, thanks, it's awfully kind of you," 
said Evans Pierce, "but I don't think I 
care to go into an architect's office." 
"Just until things get better," pleaded 
Rosemary. Eyes, tones, almost the 
drooping lines of her figure pleaded, :tV1rs. 
Hempstead thought, though that would 


SALON 


357 


not be quite nice. cc Or would it be too 
awful? " 
"I wouldn't be any use," said Evans 
Pierce. He rose lazily to his feet, and 
cheerfully picked up his hat and stick. 
l\i1rs. Hempstead revolted slightly from 
her benevolent attitude. Why would he 
carry a stick when he was so shabby? No 
sense of the fitness of things at all. He 
came forward smiling and took Mrs. 
Hempstead's hand before she offered it. 
"Don't you worry about me, neither," he 
said. "I'm going to be all right, but I'm 
mighty obliged to you, just the same." 
He crossed to Rosemary and took her 
hand. "Good-by, Rosemary. I've en- 
joyed the afternoon, and I'll see you again 
sometime, I hope." There was a final- 
ity in his tone that rebuked the young 
passion in Rosemary's face. 
Rosemary, very pale, suddenly took 
his hand. "Good-by," she said. Then, 
as if rallying for a final siege, she asked: 
"Do you have to go?" 
"It's late, and I got a lot of things I 
need to do. Coming, Wallie?" 
" We're all coming," said Irene. "It's 
nearly dinner timec Shall I drive you up 
and drop you somewhere, Mr. Bro'WIle?" 
Things were frightfully mixed up, lV1rs. 
Hempstead was thinking. The patterns 
of the afternoon were dissolving, and Irene 
apparently was going to walk off with the 
prize, Mr. Browne. Not that it mattered, 
only she would like to see Rosemary set- 
tled. It had been a false alarm about Mr. 
Pierce, after all. There was evidently no 
understanding between them. After all, 
he was not quite of Rosemary's class, even 
though he was a self-made man. Rosemary 
demanded more: higher ideals, a broader 
outlook, a higher sense of the beautiful. 
"I'm so glad. Yes, do come again." 
She turned as the last guest walked 
do'WIl the hall. "It is nearly time for din- 
ner, dear, I think- Why, what is it, 
precious baby?" 
She gathered the sobbing figure of 
heartbreak that had thrown itself on 
the couch into her uncomprehending but 
comforting armsc 



You 


BY EDWARD 'V. BOK 


I 


Author of "The Americanization of Edward Bok," "Twice Thirty," etc. 


CRAVE the power to 
put down here just the 
word that will let a 
shaft of true light into 
the hearts and minds 
of timid folk who do 
not seem to realize the 
potentiality that is im- 
planted in each one of us-singly. These 
folk write in numbers. They have aspira- 
tions and, apparently, the urge to do. 
But, invariably, they fall back upon the 
self-analysis: "What am I?" or "I am 
just one man" or "one woman. What 
can I do?" Their plaint is always depre- 
catory, ever disparaging of self: belittling, 
minimizing, with no conception, apparent- 
ly, of the seed of divine energy implanted 
in each and the given capacity to bring 
that seed to its fullest development. 


Ä

)( 
II] 
ÄG*
 


II 


HERE is one of many: 
"I am just one woman." . 
How many women does she want to 
be? What more can she ever J].ope to be 
than what she is: one woman? What 
was Florence Nightingale but one wo- 
man? Yet her work led straight to the 
Red Cross! How far would be the hu- 
mane processes of healing the wounded 
and sorrowful all over the world to-day 
had this English nurse sat down and be- 
moaned the fact that she was" just one 
woman"? Nor did Florence Nightin- 
gale wait for others. When all the medi- 
cal officers had retired for the night, dog- 
tired, and silence and darkness had settled 
upon those miles of prostrate sick, the 
light of a single little lamp could be seen 
moving from cot to cot in a solitary round. 
It was the lamp of Florence Nightingale. 
" Just one woman" ! 
Where would the marvellous work done 
358 


by radium be to-day if, when bereaved, 
Madame Curie had folded her hands when 
her husband passed away and minimized 
herself by saying: "I am just one wo- 
man" ? 
Yes, but singularly gifted, you say, were 
these women. Not according to their own 
testimonies. Quite to the contrary. "I 
had faith: that was all," said Florence 
Nightingale. "I had confidence, little 
else," said Madame Curie, and to their 
work each applied her fullest aspiration 
and trust. Each recognized the potency 
and the inner power which God gives to 
the individual, and enjoins him or her to 
unfold and develop and bring that power 
to the highest fruition. 
"But they were exceptional women," 
will be the rejoinderc 
They were not, as a matter of fact. 
Was this woman also "exceptional"? 
A young actress came from N ew York 
one Sunday evening to Philadelphia to 
appear in the chorus of a 
usical comedy 
during the following week. She was a 
stranger to the city, and when she arrived 
at the station she was at a loss to know 
where to find a hotel. She walked along 
the streets until she met a woman whom 
she felt she could safely approachc 
"Would you mind directing me to a ho- 
tel where I could safely stop?" she asked. 
As the two walked along to a stopping- 
place, the young chorus girl said: "Don't 
you think there should be some one place 
in a great city like this that we girls 
could go to?" 
It was just a casual remark, but it took 
root in the mind of the elder womanc 
To-day, as a result of that remark and 
the initiative of the elder woman, the 
Charlotte Cushman Club in Philadel- 
phia has a club-house for young actresses 
which, in a single year, accommodates 
over twelve hundred girls employed in the 
different theatrical companies which visit 
the city. 



Were either of these women "excep- 
tional " ? 
Was that mother" exceptional" whose 
six-year-old boy came home from school 
one day with a note from his teacher 
suggesting lhat he be taken from school 
as he was "too stupid to learn"? 
"My boy is not stupid," said the 
mother to herself. "I will teach him 
myself. " 
She did, and Thomas A. Edison was the 
result. 
"Exceptional"? In faith, yes! 


III 


ANOTHER example: 
"I am just a home body, with a hus- 
band and two boys, busy with the daily 
task." 
So was Dwight L. lV:Ioody's wife" just a 
home body." But she taught her husband 
how to write, put the love of God and of 
his fellow-men into his heart, and sent 
him forth as the greatest evangelical force 
that the nineteenth century gave to 
America, leaving thousands behind him 
all over this and other lands blessing the 
name of this wife-inspired man. So was 
Abraham Lincoln's stepmother "just a 
home body." But she taught and inspired 
the son of her husband-not even of her 
own blood-and held a torch before him 
which he carried to emancipate a people. 
"The greatest book I ever read, you ask 
me?" asked Lincoln in a letter. "l\ily 
mother." 
Just "a husband and two sons," says 
my correspondent. \Vhat more and bet- 
ter material does a woman want to stamp 
her influence upon a generation? Look 
at the men and women who are great 
to-day in the work of the world and the 
councils of the great. \Vhence derived 
they their guidance and the light which 
led them to their works? From a woman 
who bemoaned the fact that she was 
"just a home body"? From a woman 
who seemed to think that God, in putting 
their lives into her hands to shape and to 
mould, did it just by chance and for no 
great purpose? An infinitely wise Being 
docs not work like that! "To you I en- 
trust," said He. "To you I commit." 
To do what? To sit and bemoan the 
fact that He made you" just a woman"- 


YOU 


359 


the most powerful single influence in the 
world to-day? 
Listen to this instance of a " home 
body. " 
A husband was discouraged. 
"Up against a stone wall," he told his 
wife. 
" Nonsense," rejoined the wife. " It 
isn't the wall. It's you. Come and let's 
get over it. You've got it in you. But 
you must do." 
He did. And, with her courage behind 
him, he has risen to be one of the ten 
greatest men in the United States to-day. 
His influence enters directly into the lives 
of over forty thousand men and women. 
"Just one woman." That is all that 
this wife was! 
That was all another wife was when her 
husband had to leave home for an indefi- 
nite period, leaving his son in his wife's 
care. 
"I will take his father's place," she said. 
And she read to him of the achievements 
of the great men of his time and stirred 
his ambition. She implanted in him the 
highest ideals of Christianity. 
For years she did this; "just a home 
body." But she produced Robert E. 
Lee. 


IV 
WE do not seem to be able to get it into 
our heads that the great works of the 
world always begin with one person. No 
man understood better the psychology of 
the human than did Emerson, and he put 
a sermon into a dozen words: "A great 
institution is but the lengthened shadow 
of a single man." It is not the organiza- 
tion that creates. Man creates: organi- 
zation builds. A man, disgusted with 
working on ineffective committees, put a 
large truth into his statement when he 
said: "The ideal committee consists of 
three, with two of the members ill." 
Every institution that has contributed to 
American progress, said Theodore Roose- 
velt, has been built upon the initiative 
and enthusiasm of an individual. 
The present is the time of all times for 
the individual man: the individual will: 
the individual mind: the individual en- 
ergy. It is pre-eminently the day of the 
individual character of the independent 
citizen. It always comes back to the in- 



360 


dividual: to the single man: the single 
woman. We have become obsessed in 
this country with the idea that we cannot 
work alone: only in organizationc Or- 
ganization for co-operation, yes. But 
always the individual for the initiative. 
Look at these organizations, and invari- 
ably the creative part, the driving power, 
is traced to the individual: ofttimes, one: 
other times, two: rarely more. " Yes," 
it is agreed. "But these are greater than 
I am." "There are no great and small," 
says Emerson. We fancy others greater 
than ourselves because they light the 
divine spark given them, and we do not. 
We are all children of one Father. It is 
because we minimize ourselves that we do 
not accomplish. We do not realize the 
amazing power of the positions in which 
we are placed. 


v 


TAKE this example: 
"I am just a teacher!" 
Fancy! "Just a teacher!" In a be- 
littling tone this is said of the greatest post 
of potential influence in life to-day next 
to a mother. So said once a teacher I 
know. Then one night the vision came 
to her. To her lips came "I am nothing." 
But her soul said: "I am everything." 
She shook herself loose from her bondage, 
as the dew is shaken by the lion from his 
mane. From that day her work in her 
class changed: her eye took on a new 
radiance to her children: her voice that 
of the supreme confidence which God 
gives to us all to bring into being. She 
had lighted the divine spark within her. 
Within fifteen months she was the head 
teacher of her floor, and another eighteen 
months found her principal of the entire 
school. To-day into hundreds of hitherto 
perplexed eyes of the little foreigners in 
her school she has put a steady light: a 
true Americanization has entered into 
their hearts and minds, and every June 
she is sending out into this wonderful 
America of ours a line of true little Amer- 
icans who, within a few years, will register 
the teachings of this one woman at the 
ballot-boxes and in the homes of our 
land! 
"Just a teacher." That is all she is, 
But what an "all" ! The" all" lay in the 
fact that she came to herself, fully grasped 


YOU 


the titanic opportunity placed within her 
grasp by an all-wise God, and, with her 
head high, her eyes seeing straight and 
clear, and her heart singing at the mar- 
vellous chance at her command, which she 
had almost missed, she went to her work. 
She didn't bend to it: she went to it I 
"Just a teacher." Great Heavens: the 
opportunity of the ages! A privilege: a 
chance for power that comes to few-God- 
given: born as straight of Providence as 
a light from heaven! 


VI 


"0 YE of little faith." 
That is where the trouble lies: either 
we have no faith at all, or we are "of 
little faith." 
What a sentence that is which Jesus 
spake: 
"If ye have faith as a grain of mustard 
seed, nothing shall be impossible unto 
you. " 
Not faith of mountain size, but" as a 
grain of mustard seed." 
"Yes," continues the sceptic, "but 
those who have done these great things 
had something within them." 
They did. Exactly what you have: a 
spark of divine energyc But, with what 
Jesus called faith and we call conceit and 
egotism, these doers lighted the spark, 
fanned it into flame, until the eye 
sparkled, the soul was ignited, the mind 
was inflamed-and "Well done," says 
Jesus, looking on. For" unto everyone 
that hath shall be given." Hath what? 
Faith-pure and simple. To those He 
gives. Not to him who moans. " From 
him that hath not [faith] shall be taken 
away I" No account is here taken, mark 
you, of great or small except" The last 
shall be first." 
I wish thousands would put aside their 
preconceived notions of the Bible, take a 
copy and read the t\-venty-eight short 
chapters of Saint 1\1atthew just as they 
would read a new book, and feel the ring- 
ing note of individual faith and the works 
wrought by faith as told in that small 
compass, \Ve turn to books of modern 
success as to reservoirs of hope. But the 
greatest book of success ever written, or 
that ever will be written, is contained in 
those chapters of Saint Matthew, 



VII 


SCORES say this: 
"I am just a young man," 
In other words, what thousands of men 
to-day would like to be! A potentiality 
with his face to the east! A lifetime 
stretching ahead! The Book of Life with 
clean pages to be written on as he may 
elect! "J ust a young man" in a time like 
this: in a land like this: in a world like 
this! Then he deprecates himself! In a 
land of Opportunity where every chance 
beckons and every road invites! A road 
straight and clear, and the high peaks of 
achievement beyond-with oh! so few 
on them! To carve out of Life what one 
wills! How ,many men there are who 
would gladly give all they possess to have 
that chance once more! Did Christ say 
to the world "I am just a young man"? 
"Ah, well," you say, "but He was excep- 
tional." How? By being the son of a 
carpenter? Did Lincoln say that to 
America? He was only a rail-splitter. 
He had reason to think that he might not 
count. 


VIII 


I STAND puzzled-yes, aghast-at young 
men who busy themselves with self- 
analysis, with introspective thoughts, full 
of argument of whether they can do this 
or do that. Wasting their time. Instead 
of saying just one thing to themselves: 
"God put me here for some purpose. I 
am going to realize it." It makes no dif- 
ference what the purpose is. Why puz- 
zle over it, when we can come to no con- 
clusion, arrive at no answer? Enough is 
I it for us to know that we did not happen 
just by chance. A wise God does not 
work that way. Once we are convinced 
of that single fact: that we are put here 
for a purpose: that the seed of divine en- 
ergy has been given us and that it is for 
us to cultivate it to its fullest bloom, the 
way will be shown us. We are not adrift: 
we are not without a compass. There are 
forces outside and around us that we do 
not understand, and it is a waste of time 
to try to analyze them. The farthest 
we can get is to give them a name, and a 
name is only a word. It is our part to 
make the effort and to put the fullest 
force and integrity into that effort. 


YOU 


361 


It is the young man of little faith who 
says "I am nothing." It is the young 
man of true conception who says" I am 
everything," and then goes to prove it. 
That does not spell conceit or egotism, 
and if people think it does, let them think 
so. Enough for us to know that it means 
faith, trust, confidence: the human ex- 
pression of the God within uSc He says: 
"Do my work." Go and do it. No 
matter what it is. Do it, but do it with 
a zest: a keenness: a gusto that sur- 
mounts obstacles and brushes aside dis- 
couragement. 
I love those two lines of Doddridge: 
"Awake, my soul! stretch every nerve 
And press with vigor on!" 


IX 


THERE is another kind of doubter. He 
is at the other end of the line. His fa- 
vorite plaint is: 
"Ah, but I am fifty. Rather late." 
For what? For using a background of 
fifty years of experience for truer judg- 
ment? For erecting the house of which 
he has been laying the foundations? 
Have the great men of all time said that 
at seventy-five, eighty, and even ninety? 
At fifty a man's real life begins. He has 
acquired upon which to achieve: received 
from which to give: learned from which to 
teach: cleared upon which to build. 
"Rather late"? Rather early to cry 
" Wolf." Exactly the time to "cash in" 
upon the capacity that God has bestowed. 
Not for one's self, but for others. For 
fifty years it has been all for one. Now, 
one for all. That is divine arithmetic, 
and makes for an Infinite total. 
"My race is run," said a man at sev- 
enty. " No," said a Voice; "to you I will 
give." The man heard. That was four- 
teen years ago. To-day he is counted as 
one of the most active and useful Ameri- 
cans of his day: more active than at sev- 
enty. For others. To him did He give. 
He always does to such a man. 


x 


IT is a wonderful pronoun: You. But 
remember it is singular. It is personal. 
It means You. It is not plural. It takes 
no account of others. It deals with a 



362 


single unit, You. Never mind about 
" we" and "us." Those are something 
different. The nearest approach to You 
is that other personal pronoun I, or its 
objective, lVle. 
\Vhen God made You, He created You. 
He made a being potential: a being power- 
ful: a being of possibility. And with the 
seed of potentiality, He gave You cer- 
tain capacities with which to develop the 
powerful possibilities that lie in You. 
Potentiality and capacity: never the one 
without the other. There lies the seed. 
It is latent. Take a flower seed in your 
hand. It has potentiality within it. The 
capacity to produce wondrous beauty. 
Not in your hand, however. There it will 
lie latent, dormant, and shrivel. But put 
it into the soil, let it work, develop its hid- 
den energy and the most wondrous beauty 
will come forth. From the seed springs 
the blossom: from the blossom the apple. 
It matters not to one seed that another 
brings forth no blossom and no fruit. It 
seeks only to do its work: to harness its 
capacity to its potentiality. You can 
hold it in your hand and feel it not. But 
the tree it produces a score of men cannot 
lift. The acorn is small, yet a majestic 
oak that a hundred men cannot budge 
lies within it. Just one acorn. But it is 
enough to produce majesty of unknown 
strength. Just so has God placed His 
Infinite potentiality in one seed planted 
in the world. One man. You. It may 
be the seed of the apple: the Queen of the 
Orchard. It may be the acorn of the oak: 
the King of the Forest. But in You lies 
that seed. 


XI 


WHAT are You doing with that seed? 
It is not for others to decide. Their de- 
cision is theirs: your decision is yours. 
It is for You. Alone for You. The seed 
is there. Also the capacity. We cannot 
all be oaks. The forest has need for other 
trees. The orchard for its fruits. But 
an apple-tree is not less useful to the or- 
chard than the oak is to the forest. The 
seed implanted in the human may be of 
the orchard or the forest. The one to 
serve and give food: the other to serve and 
give shelter. The queen of beauty: the 
king of service. Woman and man. The 
serving and the served. The seemingly 
greater: the seemingly smaller. Each 


YOU 


indispensable to the other. We could not 
live without the fruits: we could have no 
shelter without timber. The oak is not 
sufficient. A world of oaks would be 
useless. 


XII 


NAPOLEON struck at the very founda- 
tion of all this when he said" Circum- 
stances? I make circumstances." That 
was not the word of an egotist. It was a 
fact. We all make circumstances. Each 
one of us. Let me, as a concrete exam- 
ple, take the supreme power of the indi- 
vidual as applied to the greatest question 
in the world to-day: the saving of human 
life by the greatest destroyer of human 
life: war. Suppose each one of us, sepa- 
rately, washed our minds clear of the 
thought of war and substituted the idea 
of peace. Here is what seems a titanic 
question reduced to the individual, where 
it must rest. How could there be war if 
each one of us made up our mind that 
there should be no war ? No group of 
men, no government, can stand up against 
the individual with his mind made up to 
a certain definite conclusion. Weare apt 
to say: "What can one man or one woman 
do to prevent war?" We are apt either 
to deride or quietly indulge the man who 
says he can stop war. Who else can stop 
war but you ? You decide what the 
world is and shall be. Noone else. Never 
mind about what the other fellow thinks 
or does or does not do. It is what You 
think, it is what You do. There would be 
no other fellow if You thought straight. 
But there is the rub. There is where we 
fail. It is always the other fellow. So 
rarely You. But that is all that counts: 
You. Just You. 


XIII 
LET us get this great and yet this simple 
truth straight in our minds. The power 
of the individual: the tremendous influ- 
ence of the single unit. Take a snow- 
flake. What is it of itself? \Ve flick it 
off our sleeve. But what becomes of that 
snowflake, multiplied by the millions? 
The most powerful piece of machinery is 
helpless before the combined unit. 'Vhat 
is a grain of sand? Nothing, you say. 
But before millions of those grains, Man 
and all his ingenuity stand powerless. So 
with the human, You are the snowflake. 



THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE 1VIADE ON 363 


You are the grain of sand. You start 
something, say, here in this country of 
ours. There are one hundred and ten 
millions of Y ous. You cannot move those 
millions, you say. Why not? It is 
a small snowflake that singly begins the 
storm: it is one grain of sand that starts 
the cyclone. 
It is You who are potent. 
You who are mighty. 
" Ye shall go forth!" 
"I will return unto you." 
"I will make you fishers of men." 
XIV 
To whom is the Sermon on the Mount 
addressed? To many? To others? 


"Verily, I say unto You," said Christ. 
." Let your light shine before men," He 
saId. 
Not their light. But your light! 
Yes, you say. But how? 
Lis ten: 
"Ask, and it shall be given you." 
"Seek, and you shall find." 
"Knock, and it shall be opened unto 
you." 
Always You. 
Just You. 
Believe that, and the world is- 
Yours. 
Because He said: 
"Ye are the light of the world." 
YOU! 


The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On 


BY. H. C. SPROUL 



 
it 
 HERE is a cry that our 
;- American colleges ren- 

 T 
 der their students un- 

 
 fit for life. Hundreds 
. I 
 of young people, it is 
, I II said, leave their class- 
, .. 

 :
., rooms every year pre- 
. sumably educated to 
function as integral parts of society, but 
actually unfitted for the task. They have 
been shown no relationship between their 
studies and the business of society. They 
have lived on the inside of a pleasant wall; 
the processes of making a living, of run- 
ning a government, of getting along, ma- 
terially and spiritually, in the welter of the 
world-all that has been outside the wall, 
of no interest to the student. Critics sug- 
gest varying causes for this condition, and 
remedies for its cure. The curriculum is 
at fault, say some. Let us introduce stu- 
dents to civilizations, past and present, as 
complete wholes, not offer them isolated 
piles of information on "subjects." The 
teacher is at fault, say others. Let him 
refrain from sneering at businesses and 
governments, and relate the material of 
his teaching, cultural or otherwise, to 
every-day life. At any rate let us not 
merely excite the student with Plato and 


Shelley and a knowledge of Utopias. The 
result is a distaste for the workaday 
world. The student, in despising it, will 
enter on a dubious career as a misfit in 
society. 
This that I have been speaking of was 
the burden of several magazine articles I 
read as I sat in the half-light of the Fac- 
ulty Club. As I laid aside the magazines 
and watched from the window the darken- 
ing gray of the winter afternoon, the quiet 
of a deserted building wooed me to mus- 
ing. I mentally applauded the efforts 
being made to break down the wall be- 
tween education and life. But there 
lingered in the back of my mind the teas- 
ing suggestion that there was more to the 
problem than had appeared. 
And then I became conscious of the 
presence of an old thought-a thought 
wrapped up in the colors of many emo- 
tions and experiences. And I said to my- 
self: "There are misfits; I myself am one 
of them. But we cannot put the blame 
here or there; the explanation is too sim- 
ple to be proposed by brilliant people. 
And the conditions, in the last analysis, 
are irremediable. The danger lies in 
nothing particularly modern; the cry is 
an old one. Look beyond curricula and 



364 THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE ON 


teachers at the nature of truth and 
beauty, and you have found the danger. 
You need no definition of these abstrac- 
tions-Plato himself could not define 
them. You need merely to consider hu- 
man experience, and it will tell a tale of 
devastation resulting from glimpses of 
heaven." And so I considered my own 
life, and I found that I had not spoken 
too lightly. 
I am thinking, now, as an individual 
concerning individuals. You can arrange 
society neatly, and decide the functions 
of its members, but the members will still 
be themselves, sometimes even refusing 
to be pigeonholed. It is to the individual 
therefore, that the danger I speak of ap- 
plies-that bright danger that became the 
legend of Helen in ancient times-and the 
legend of Deirdre-and many there were 
who cherished this danger to their de- 
struction. We need not fear, however, 
that the majority of students will ever be 
blinded by this beauty. For them the 
curriculum may be adjusted, and the 
teaching, and they will, fortunately, be- 
come unprotesting parts of the social 
order. They will have no qualms, no 
sinking of the heart, no ecstasy. 
Do not think us conceited, we who find 
no place in human schemes. Weare not 
all fools; it is often a matter for despair. 
It is not that we despise the world and 
the machinery of careers. We simply 
have no interest in them. Often we find 
ourselves working as doctors, lawyers, 
engineers, teachers. And we may do our 
jobs passably well, but they are quite 
meaningless to us-empty rooms in the 
chambers of our minds. F or they are not 
the reality. We live in a dream-a dream 
which is for us reality, and clients, 
friends, bridges, students, these are but 
shadows in the dream, "the somnambu- 
lism of uneasy sleepers." 
"What," you ask, "has college to do 
with this dream?" It is at college that 
the susceptible student finds gathered up 
the wisdom and beauty of all ages, and 
gradually he builds out of his discoveries 
a monastery for his mind. There is no 
premeditation in this; the boy is directed 
by inexorable loveliness. He cannot help 
himself. He is exiled into his dream, into 
his private world built up of bits of 
earthly color, as if he were to become the 


central figure of a cathedral window he 
had just fashioned. 
I say "earthly color," for I do not 
mean to suggest that the dream is not of 
this world. I, for example, am no ascetic. 
The flesh is very dear to me. F onns, col- 
ors, emotions, ideas-they are the stuff of 
my life. Human, earthy stuff it is. One 
does not wonder that Whitman with his 
lust for life was incoherent. I love trees 
and the variations of the weather, the 
smell of leather bindings and good food, 
beautiful people, clouds-God, yes, I love 
the earth and shudder when I think that 
I shall ever be quite dead to its glory. 
The moist freshness of newly turned 
earth, the touch of hands and bodies, the 
wild harmony of autumn, wind from far 
spaces that sweeps across the mountains 
-all these and more I love. But they do 
not reconcile one to the business of so- 
ciety. They are unconsciously selected 
and pieced together into my dream; they 
form a world of loveliness and ecstasy. 
And it is ecstasy that is largely re- 
sponsible for the lack of meaning that the 
processes of society have for people like 
myself. Often, at college, as I walked 
out through the great pillars of the libra- 
ry in the evening and descended the 
long flights of steps down into the dim- 
ness of the streets, I was only half aware 
of the city bustling about me, and the 
fresh night air. In there I had opened a 
book, casually chosen from one of the 
shelves. And now I was experiencing 
that thrill that comes to "some watcher 
of the skies when a new planet swims into 
his ken." The heavens were opened. 
I knew ecstasy- Or perhaps I sat listen- 
ing to a lecture on a seventeenth-cen- 
tury poet, while beyond the city and the 
hills shone the still, white radiance that 
so often follows the sunset. And the 
genial, human widsom of that bearded 
lecturer would flow on, while against that 
dying whiteness, infinitely deep, the per- 
fect curve of a tree branch faded into 
blackness. And some indefinable blend- 
ing of all these elements and all their 
connotations would leave me touched as 
by a god. After such drunkenness of spirit, 
the human scene became merely a specta- 
cle, rather a poor one for the most part, 
far removed from my real life. It held 
out to me no invitation to participate. 



THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE ON 365 


I play the cello well enough to enjoy 
what is, to me, the highest form of music 
-string quartets. Sometimes, when my 
friends and I have been playing for half 
the night, when we four and our instru- 
ments seem to have attained a kind of 
spiritual unity, I gradually become con- 
scious of a power-an infinite power- 
born of the harmony. In the centre of 
the square we make, a flame springs up, 
and I am drawn into that flame. There 
is exaltation, the hint of a rhythm and 
harmony beyond the grasp of human 
mind. 
Whenever I think of Nantucket there 
comes the emotional taste of an old ex- 
perience. One summer vacation of col- 
lege days, I got a job in a Nantucket 
hotel as a waiter. In the evenings after 
work I used to leave the quaint old fishing 
village with its wide streets and ancient 
elms, and wander out onto the moors. 
There would be nothing but the undu- 
lating blackness of the ground and the 
sea which merged, far off, into the sky of 
stars. And the faint perfume of hidden 
flowers would mingle with the salt breeze 
from the sea. There was a compelling 
unity about the arrangement that often 
caught me up. 
One night I lay on my back in the 
thick grass of a bluff above the water. 
The pounding surf seemed to draw out 
the restlessness of my mind into itself, 
and I looked up at the tremendous star 
systems in a mood of quiet wonder. And 
my vÍsion seemed gradually to acquire 
new attributes of power; for I could see 
through the heavens, past the stars- 
could almost grasp the significance of the 
whole, could feel the earth, all black be- 
neath me, moving in its great course 
through immeasurable space. I felt the 
impact of terrific forces and was up- 
lifted in exultation. It was close to mad- 
ness, I suppose. The human brain can- 
not bear to look on eternity, and Pan 
must be clothed with dainty legends. I 
stumbled home in the early morning, 
dazed, the warm colors of the sunrise 
seeming strangely unreal. I cannot for- 
get that rending ecstasy. 
There is nothing mystic about such 
experiences. My vision never pierces 
through to any Absolute. The Mystic 
Rose is not revealed, and the Word is 


silent. Or should I say, I am a mystic to 
whom the vision is denied? Sometimes 
when I am able to take science with the 
necessary humor and realize that it can 
only make the world a bit more habitable 
and safe, I am conscious of vast realms of 
knowledge closed to us because we are 
human, We speak of the knowledge 
gained through the senses. That is neces- 
sary. But what a stuttering, fragmen- 
tary knowledge it is for one who would 
really know! Some of us are too insub- 
ordinate to leave it to God. We aspire to 
be Godc And yet we have no means of 
knowing or understanding beyond our 
feeble senses and the apparatus we in'.rent. 
It is as if we, like Plato's souls, had once 
glimpsed perfection but had lost the vi- 
sion with the acquirement of a body, and 
only remembered a vague glory; or per- 
haps we are the decadent offspring of that 
ancient race of giants which appeared 
when the daughters of earth mated with 
the sons of God. Again, we are like the 
child of Metanira, snatched from the 
deathless arms of Demeter before he had 
been purged of the dust of earth. We 
only half know, surmise, guess at approxi- 
mations. 
Perhaps that explains my love for the 
music of César Franck. It is of the earth 
earthy, but, like my own experience, full 
of hints of unimagined splendor. It is in- 
stinct with a haunting desire, which now 
and again mounts up in subtle and 
passionate yearning, but dies without 
having attained its end. There is illusion 
and disillusion, and the deep beauty of an 
ecstasy that falls before the revelation. 
The stuff of that music is the stuff of life 
for me. All my days and nights, when I 
am not bowing to the thousand and one 
necessities, are spent in a search for such 
experience. 
There are many who will laugh at all 
this, who understand the words but not 
the meaning. Living is a simple task for 
them. Their roll-top-desk sort of world 
with all its neat pigeonholes, their nice 
systems of philosophy, their schemes for 
the salvation of the world-oh, I some- 
times envy them humbly! They have not 
known ecstasy, perhaps, but then they 
have not known that damnable sense of 
futility that pervades common activity, 
robbing the will of initiative and choice, 



366 THE STUFF THAT DREA11S ARE rvlADE ON 


well U even in a pa1ace." And we con- 
tinue our teaching, and our accounting, 
and our buying and selling, for we say 
with Falstaff: "Young men must livec" 
After all, perhaps we would not be dif- 
ferently constituted if it were possible. 
For the pestering trifles, and the sense of 
futility and loneliness, only intensify for 
us the escape into our world of ecstasy. 
It is not Gilbert Murray's" calm world- 
the world of the grammaticus "-though 
the ancient madness of Greece is there. 
Saint Augustine prayed: "\Ve have no 
rest until we rest in Thee." There will 
be a time for flickering out and stillness. 
Now there is always the thrust of desire, 
joy, and pain that are flames in the night- 
time. It is sman of us that we stop our 
ears with wax against the searing song of 
beauty so that we might return to bicker 
with Penelope. It is meanness of spirit 
that we who are teachers should betray 
our vision and hide behind a faint-hearted 
scholarship. 
But, for a moment, I should like to for- 
get the need for courage. In the quiet of 
my mind there runs the burden of an old 
song. There is consolation in its despair: 


and making the every-day world an un- 
ending succession of unimportant trifles. 
And trifles make the tragedy for us. 
The "dust and shadows" of the cosmic 
drama are moving and inspiring, bringing 
wonder and terror, and a purging of the 
spirit. But to be continually pestered 
with meaningless trifles-" stung with 
pismires" so much of the time before we 
are covered with a little earth-that is 
tragedy that deadens and destroys and 
soaks up the brightness. It" brings our 
high things low" and makes an "aver- 
age" that could never be "divine." 
I rested one night on the library steps 
of the college where I am teaching. As I 
sat there, recovering, in the stillness, my 
own world after a day of red tape and 
rules and dull students and gossipy fac- 
ulty, there came out of the lighted door- 
way a dumpy little woman clutching a 
brief-case. She descended the steps slow- 
ly, perhaps blinded by the sudden night, 
perhaps mentally chewing the cud of her 
reading. On the last step she paused, un- 
certain, and peered down. To me, she 
seemed to hesitate to trust herself to the 
level of the paved walk-she feared that 
flat monotony. "How right she is!" I 
thought, half-laughing at the picture she "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, 
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. 
made. She finally stepped down, with We hanged our harps upon the willows in the 
something of ajar, and made off across midst thereof- 
the campus. And I thought then of the . 
mental state induced by that level ex- How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange 
panse, and of how men amuse themselves land?" 
littlely. 
What is to be done about it? In God's 
name-nothing. In this the colleges are 
not at fault. Weare what we are; on the 
authority of the Koran, "Every man's 
fate is hung about his neck." Resigna- 
tion comes as it came to the Stoic em- 
peror, who found that one could live 


We are forever condemned to be mis- 
fits in a strange land, and have no knowl- 
edge of any other land but only ecstasy 
and desire. And we are not few. There 
are many who brood in secret over this 
aspect of "the tears of things," and many 
who are poets, wondering why they sing. 


^ 
I.' 



,. 


A Battleship in Action 
BY PO\VERS SYMINGTON 


ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 


fThis article was written to be published anonymously from the point of view 
of a civilian, and is based on the comments of some spectators at a recent target 
practice 
The author is Captain of the Philadelphia Navy Yard and was captain of a 
battleship during the war.] 


Wr:fo
'" o..

"" HAT goes on in a bat- 
X

x. tleship when the men 

 rnJ Q and officers are prac- 

 .". I W 
 
. tising for the possible 
day of battle with an 
I enemy fleet? 

1Ç1Ä The ships go to sea 
every now and then, 
and we hear guns firing, also we see in the 
papers that such and such a ship has done 
well at target practice, but information is 
hard to get. 
I happen to be one of the few individ- 
uals who have been privileged to see one 
of these great vessels in action. I was in- 
vited to witness a fleet battle-practice 
from a ship . of our Pacific fleet. There 
were three civilians in our party, and we 
went down to San Pedro one morning 
earlv. There were about a dozen battle- 
ships at anchor behind the breakwater, 
and my first impression was surprise at 
the great size of these ships when you see 
them close to shore and have something 
familiar to compare them with. At sea 
they appear small compared with the im- 
mensities of the sea and sky, but compared 
with houses and railroad trains they are 
colossal. 
We went aboard and at once there was 
a sense of change. I have been aboard 
many of our ships, but always heretofore 
when the ship was rigged for port. On 
this day the rail was gone, the hatches 
were closed, no boats were in sight, even 
the familiar flagstaff was gone. There 
was an emptiness, a bareness, apparent. 
The ship was cleared for battle. 
We went down into the cabin and there 
also there was a marked change from what 
I had seen before. Pictures were down, 
doors were off, lamps were missing; the 


whole place looked as if it had been 
wrecked. The only thing that was fa- 
miliar or appeared unchanged was the 
captain. I had a vague sense that some- 
thing was going to happen. 
From time to time various people came 
into the cabin and made reports; the only 
one that sticks in my memory being that 
of the grave, intellectual-looking com- 
mander who, I was told, was the gunnery 
officer. He reported the cylinders filled 
and everything ready. I remember him 
because I asked what cylinders were 
filled, and the captain explained to me 
that when a gun is fired the kick is tremen- 
dous, and in order to control the gun it is 
necessary to have very powerful hydraulic 
machinery to keep the gun from jumping 
overboard, and the cylinders referred to 
were part of this hydraulic machinery. 
Then an orderly came in and said: 
"The officer of the deck reports every- 
thing ready for getting under way." The 
captain said: "Let's go up on the bridge." 
All the familiar ways had been barred, 
and the captain led us through the ship 
over a new route, up and down ladders, 
along passageways that seemed intermi- 
nablec I thought I was familiar with the 
interior of our ships, but it was all dif- 
ferent, somehow. I felt a little bit pan- 
icky in spite of the calmness of the people 
about me, like a stranger underground at 
Times Square for the first time. 
Once on the bridge, things seemed 
more normal. There were fifteen or 
twenty people about, some half-dozen 
officers and the rest sailormen. Suddenly 
the great ship's bell rang out under our 
feet, and immediately there was intense 
activity. The flagship had a signal up 
and soon we were under way. The ship is 
3 6 7 



368 


A BATTLESHIP IN ACTION 


as long as the Grand Central Station, and 
there were a dozen of them all turning and 
twisting like a bunch of automobiles go- 
ing away from the Polo Grounds. Soon 
we passed the end of the breakwater and 
were headed out to sea in single file, the 
flagship leading. San Pedro is on Santa 
Barbara Channel, and twenty miles away 
is the island of Catalina, and this is the 
manæuvre area and target ground for our 
Pacific fleet. The water is everywhere 
very deep, and as the traffic is inconsider- 
able there is not much interference with 
manæuvres. Ships can steam east or 
west or south, and, in a comparatively 
few miles, have a splendid space for shoot- 
ing without danger to people on shore or 
to passing ships. 
After a short time the captain pointed 
out what appeared to be a tow of barges 
away over toward the horizon, and told 
us that they were the targets, and that 
they had left the harbor about daylight in 
order to be out there in time. He ex- 
plained that the targets are canvas screens 
hoisted on a framework which is carried 
on a specially constructed raft which floats 
just at the surface of the water. We could 
see four of them in single file all being 
towed by a tug. He said that the admiral 
was manæuvring the squadron so as to 
get the targets on a certain bearing and at 
a particular distance. 
Suddenly a single flag appeared on the 
flagship, and instantly there was renewed 
activity on our ship. A bugle blew, the 
distant hammering of a gong was heard, 
and men and officers were seen hurrying 
in different directions. Orders were given 
through speaking-tubes and over tele- 
phones. In a moment everyone had dis- 
appeared. We three civilians were alone 
on the bridge. Before leaving, the captain 
said: "This is only a rehearsal run; watch 
it and you will see what we do. I will give 
you some instructions before we open fire. 
I will be in the conning-towerc" 
I had seen a battle-drill before and knew 
roughly what was going on. I tried to 
imagine myself in command of the ship. 
Through a peep-hole in the conning- 
tower I could hear the reports going to 
the captain and the orders he gave, 
The ships were hurtling through the 
water at twenty knots' speed, still in single 
file. The targets, four of them, were ten 
or twelve miles away, steaming along at 


an unknown speed in an unknown direc- 
tion. It was like a man in Luna Park 
shooting at the Pennsylvania Station or 
the Plaza Hotel. There would be no dif- 
ficulty if they would only stay in one place, 
but with Luna Park moving at twenty 
knots and the Plaza Hotel moving at an 
unknown speed in an unknown direction, 
how do they ever manage to make a hit? 
I heard a quiet order from the captain: 
"Open fire." And I braced myself for an 
explosion. Nothing happened for a time, 
and in a few seconds I heard a pop such as 
a firecracker makes and thereafter once 
every thirty seconds I heard a similar pop. 
Suddenly the whole line of battleships 
seemed to be broken up: the three ahead 
swung out to the left, the next three 
swung out to the right, and the three be- 
hind us swung one way or the other, but 
the steady popping of the firecrackers 
went on once every half-minute. I didn't 
quite understand what was going on, but 
I could see the great guns of all turrets 
pointed toward the targets. 
Then a quiet order, "Cease firing," a 
dang of bens, a bugle-call, and voices ap- 
parently all over the ship repeating the 
order: "Cease firing." 
The captain appeared on the bridge, 
where he was soon joined by the gunnery 
officer. The captain asked: "How did it 
go?" "All right, sir; there was a failure 
in a certain piece of electric machinery." 
"How soon can you fix it ?" "In ten min- 
utes." "Can I report ready?" " Yes, 
sir c" "Quite sure?" " Yes, sir." The 
captain turns to another officer: "Report 
to the admiral that the ship is all ready 
for practice; all precautions taken." 
Knowing something of the navy, this 
quiet order was illuminating. The cap- 
tain staked his name, his reputation, his 
career-in fact, his whole future--on that 
order. He assumed full responsibility for 
everything that might happen of an un- 
expected nature. If an accident occurred 
and some one was hurt, if government 
property was destroyed, if any man 
failed in his duty or was incompetent, so 
that the target was missed, the blame 
would fall on the captain. 
"Are you quite sure?" he asks the 
gunnery officer, and upon an affirmative 
answer he picks up his burden of re- 
sponsibility, a burden which I venture to 
say is unknown in any other walk in life, 



A BA TTLESHT P T
 ACTTO
 


I looked at him and wondered what 
manner of men were they that command 
our battleships. I had known this par- 
ticular officer for a long time, and he 
seemed a bit casual in ordinary life. He 
was a pleasant chap, well liked and inter- 
ested in what was going on, but somehow 
a naval officer has always seemed to me a 


369 


admiration, without envy, is something 
very rare in our modern worM. 
The captain said it would be about half 
an hour before the admiral would get back 
into position for opening fire. He gave us 
some cotton to put into our ears, and 
strongly recommended that we use it. 
He tolrl us to button our coats anrl jam 


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but I could see the great guns of all turrets pointed toward the targets.-Page 368. 


rather pathetic individual. \Vhy should 
a man work hard, with little pay and no 
chance to have a home? If he is any good 
at all, he ought to be able to make more 
money outside of the navy and have a 
freer life. I have, I am afraid, always had 
a feeling that the mere fact of staying in 
the navy indicated that a man had a de- 
fect in him somewhere. I was now to see 
the business these men are engaged in 
when away from civilian observation, and 
I got a new line on my friend. There was 
a dignity of power and responsibility that 
emanated from him that I had never had 
the wit to see before. The loyal respect 
of his subordinates was of a quality I had 
never encountered before. Respect and 
VOL. LXX\-III.-27 


our hats on tight, and said he would de- 
tail a quartermaster to see that we did 
not fall overboard and to tell us what to 
look at. I thought this last remark fa- 
cetious, and we chatted until some one 
reported ,. ten minutes" to the captain, 
whereupon he left us and again went into 
the conning-tower. 
\Ve three and a sailor remained on the 
bridge. The sailor made us plug our ears 
and suggested that we hold on to the rail. 
He also recommended that we try to 
stand on tiptoe. 
Everything went along as before. \Ye 
saw the signal on the flagship and heard 
the same quiet order gi\'en-" Open fire," 
and waited for what would happen. 



370 


A B -\TTLESHIP I
 ACTIO
 


Even now I can't describe what did 
happen. The earth, the sea, the sky were 
torn apart, my body disintegrated, my 
mind was hurled from its pedestal, my 
shivering soul was left naked and ex- 
posed. I was stunned and stupefied, and 
staggered blindly about the bridge. 
"Then I started to come to, the first thing 
I remember was the sailor holding me, 
calming me, quieting me. He gave me 
my hat and talked to me, and I began to 
collect my wits and to remember where I 
was and what I was doing. That terrible 
cataclysm seemed a long time ago; I was 
beginning to wonder what had happened, 
and then the sailor said: "
ow, sir, if you 
will put your glasses on the target. you will 
see where our shots fall; they will be out 
there in a few seconds now." It was only 
thirty seconds since it had happened. I 
had a new conception of time and eternity. 
Immediately after the splashes were 
seen in the neighborhood of the targets I 
heard a steady voice giving orders in an 
ordinary tone: "Down six hundred, right 
two." I wondered what next. 
Without warning, again the tearing 
apart of aU things. I was again dashed 
from my men tal position; I knew nothing; 
I was again alone in chaos. After an in- 
finite time I was aware of another person. 
It was the sailor; he had his hand on my 
shoulder and was talking. He said: "You 
are getting used to it; a few more rounds 
and you won't mind it." I looked around 
and saw other ships and an island; the 
sun was shining. The sailor pointed out 
the targets and said: "In about fifteen 
seconds now." I could hear machinery 
working and a dull booming sound that 
my sailor friend told me was shells being 
rammed home in the guns. 
After a long time my sailor said, 
"Stand by," and then the great white 
splashes of water appeared all about the 
target. At almost the same time the 
world was again ripped open. This time 
I had some personal sensations that I 
could remember. I could feel the rail 
that I was holding on to snatched from 
my hands, I could feel myself stagger 
about and bump into various things, and 
that sailorman holding me. I was getting 
used to it. 
Again a lucid interval and I looked at 
the targets; the splashes were spurting 
into the air almost continuously, and I 


asked my sailor: "\\That are the other 
splashes I see?" He replied that they 
were shots from the other ships, and for 
the first time I realized that there were 
enormous and terrifying explosions going 
on in front of and behind our ship. Explo- 
sions that were rocking the buildings and 
rattling windows in Los Angeles, thirty 
miles away, were going on in my immedi- 
ate neighborhood and I did not even hear 
them. Such is the effect of the great guns 
of a modern dreadnought on those in 
their immediate vicinity! 
Then the single file of battleships was 
broken up and I saw some going to the 
right and others going to the left; and in 
the midst of the manæuvres the next salvo 
was fired and again I was helpless, speech- 
less, and profoundly distressed. But I 
seemed to remember it had happenecl be- 
fore and that I would live through it. 
After a very long time-in reality only 
three or four minutes-when these terrible 
things seemed to be the natural order of 
events, and what we must expect in life 
forevermore, I heard the same quiet, 
steady voice say, "Cease firing," and 
gradually I realized that it was all over. 
!vIy wits were slow in returning to normal. 
The captain came on the bridge and 
gave us a quizzical glance, but immedi- 
ately turned to the gunnery officer, and I 
heard a very technical discussion that I 
could not understand carried on with less 
emphasis than is usually shown in speak- 
ing of a ball game. 
I have used the word "quiet" quite 
often because one of my strongest im- 
pressions is of the great contrast between 
the person of my imagination and the real 
naval officer. I had always supposed 
that a naval officer in action would be 
rather noisy and very imperative, but in 
reality" self-control" and "quiet ef- 
ficiency" are the dominant characteris- 
tics. 1'\0 excitement, no obvious energy; 
expecting and getting instant obedience 
from a vast organization, he is the es- 
sence of calmness. 
\Ve headed for home, still following the 
flagship. l\Ien and officers swarmed over 
the ship, and she was being quickly 
brought back to the condition I had be- 
come familiar with before. 
The captain asked us to come down to 
his cabin for luncheon. Pictures were up, 
ports open, everything restored. 



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Conversation dragged, and when the 
captain left the cabin to go on the bridge 
we three civilians were asleep before he 
had reached the quarter-deck. The phys- 
ical reaction to what we had been through 
was complete nervous exhaustion. 
After a nap I talked to the ship's doc- 
tor. He was less reticent about the per- 
sonnel element than the captain. He told 
me that he thanked God after every such 
practice if there was no accident; that he 
had been on one ship when many were 
killed, that it was always a possibility, 
and that always before such a practice 
he made his preparations to handle one 
hundred dead and dying men. He said 
they all lived in that shadow, but that 
the load carried by the captain was the 
heaviest of all, and that each such prac- 
tice aged a captain perceptibly; the strain 
is unbelievable and almost unbearable. 
\Ye came into port at San Pedro and 
we three went ashore. One of our party 
said he could understand now why the 
men who came back from the war could 
not be made to talk about what they had 
been through. He said: "I could never 
give anyone an idea of what I have been 
through to-day; so why talk about it?" 


I felt much the same way, but I had gone 
out to see and learn, intending to write 
about it, and so I am trying to give an 
idea of my experiences. 
I have seen the life on the sea in almost 
all of its various phases. I have seen and 
known most of the more strenuous ac- 
tivities of modern men of action, but no- 
where, and in no other walk of life, have 
I ever before seen trained intelligence 
working with unbelievable forces in an 
orderly manner where the least mistake 
may mean the death of 1,200 of our fin- 
est people and the complete destruction 
of 540,000,000 worth of property. 
But this was only drill, merely an exer- 
cise, and I allowed my imagination to 
drift into the possibilities of a real battle, 
where the target is shooting back, sub- 
marines and destroyers are shooting tor- 
pedoes, and airplanes are dropping bombs 
or launching torpedoes or laying smoke 
screens of poisonous gases, and the sea 
is sown with mines. I begin to realize 
the terror of a modern naval battle and 
the stoutness of soul and character that is 
required of the captain of a battleship in 
order to carry his ship through the inferno 
that he is liable to encounter. 


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With forced deliberation he measured his distance, addlessed his balL-Page 373. 


The Elixir of Lies 


BY PHILIP CURTISS 


ILLl.:"STRATIOXS BY J. H. FYFE 


: itit.', .'- HE annual tournament 
" - - - I' of the Heath Hills Golf 

 I 
A Club reached its high 
WI !
 point about eleven 

 
 o'clock in the morning. 
. _____ At that hour, on quali- 
W
 fying day, the first tee, 
roped off like a prize- 
ring, was surrounded, three and four deep, 
by waiting contestants. The secretary, 
important as a train-starter, sat at a table 
under a huge white score-sheet, while the 
terrace above was filled with a banked 
mass of gayly dressed spectators. 
It was exactly the kind of crowd which 
a dour philosopher might have described 
as typical of "pleasure-mad America," 
37 2 


bu t there was one member who was cer- 
tainly not pleasure-mad. Standing well 
back among the contestants, his sleeves 
rolled up and his clubs at his feet, Walter 
Sanders was awaiting events with about 
the same emotions that he might have 
felt in the anteroom of an old-fashioned 
dentist. \Vithout hope, without heart, he 
asked but one thing-that he and his 
partner, Bob Reising, might be allowed to 
start their match with the least possible 
amount of attention, be duly qualified 
for the fourth, or lowest, division, and 
then be permitterl to sink into harmless 
oblivion for the rest of the week. 
Yes, tournament play was a tragic 
thing to poor Walter Sanders. He was 



THE ELIXIR OF LIES 


one of golf's most cringing, terrorized 
slayes; but to his partner, fat Bob Reising, 
it was all a huge joke. A noisy, boister- 
ous man, Reising regarded himself as the 
club's favorite buffoon. He actually en- 
joyed his reputation of being the club's 
worst player The moment his match 
with "ralter was called he pushed through 
the ropes and crossed the tee with jocose 
importance. He took a huge handful of 
sand and, with dainty, mock-feminine 
gestures, patted it into a tee as big as a 
pie-plate; then stood up, feet wide apart, 
and waved his club with the strokes of a 
wood-chopper. A direction flag far down 
the course took his eye awl he turned 
around to the secretary's table. 
,. Say, Nick," he demanded, "how far 
is that flag?" 
,. A hundred and forty yards, for a 
guess," replied the secretary. "Want us 
to move it?" 
The fat man, who had never driven a 
hundred yards in his life, studied tl:e flag 
in affected concern. "\YeIl, perhaps I can 
get around it." 
" Give you five dollars if you land within 
twenty feet of it," laughed the secretary. 
"y ou're on," snapped Reising. 
\\Tithout even taking a regular stance, 
and holding his club like a flail, he made 
a wild swipe at the ball. To the utter 
amazement of everyone, including him- 
self, there came a sharp crack, the ball 
went far in the air, and came to rest three 
or four feet beyond the Hag. A spon- 
taneous cheer arose from the crowd, and 
Reising bowed right and left. 
"Lay-dees and gentle-mun," he an- 
nounced, "I am happy to say that I am 
playing in top form to-day and the chal- 
lenge cup will remain in Heath Hills." 
In the laughter that followed Bob Reis- 
ing's unexpected coup, \Valter Sanders 
had lost, for a moment, his own trepida- 
tion, but as he stepped out on the tee, 
there came a little stir in the crowd, and 
the secretary stepped quickly inside the 
ropes. 
"Walter," he asked, "do you mind 
standing aside and letting another player 
go through? .Mr. l\Iallock, the State 
amateur champion, has just arrived. He 
came too late to be paired with anyone, 
so we are going to let him qualify alone, 
with a scorer." 


373 


_\.s \Valter fell willingly back to the edge 
of the tee, he saw, approaching, a wiry, 
keen-looking player of about his own age, 
with quick, decisive movements and the 
tannen, deeply lined face of the man who 
makes a life-work of sport. The spectators 
above craned eagerly to watch, while the 
secretary fawned over him effusively. 
'Vith no ceremony whatsoever the 
champion teed up his ball and gave a 
swift, whip-like motion with his driver. 
'Vith a whiz and a leap totally different 
from anything seen all the morning, the 
ball shot straight out on a long, even line, 
and found its ultimate home far down the 
centre of the fairway. 
The champion stepped briskly off the 
tee. "Thanks a lot," he tossed casually, 
then suddenly he caught sight of \Valter's 
long, brooding face and he stopped in sur- 
prise, but 'Valter was not even looking, 
and, apparently concluding that he had 
made some mistake in recognition, the 
champion nodded again and passed on his 
way. 
Ãnd that was the player whom poor 
\Yalter had to fol1o\v! Nobody but the 
State champion! His hands like ice and 
his lips like sandpaper, 'Valter slowly teed 
up his ball. \Vith forced deliberation he 
measured his distance, addressed his ball 
-and let g-o with a terrible wallop. But 
as he had made his back swing a queer 
gray shadow had seemed to sweep over 
his mind. As if he were coming out of a 
shock, he felt his arms pulled hard in their 
sockets, and under his eyes, still neatly 
teed up, remained his brand-new white 
ball. He had missed it clean-by a good 
six inches. 
A girl in the crowd above him tittered 
involuntarilv and \\Talter himself smiled 
in a forced, inirthless way. He again took 
his stance and went through his deliber- 
ate, studied motions. This time his club 
took an ugly slice from the tee, but it did 
at least hit the ball, and the latter went 
bouncing dully away for fifty or sixty 
yards. Like a whipped dog Sanders 
picked up his clubs, and as he stepped off 
the tee he could hear an amused hum of 
conversation start up behind him. 
Late that afternoon, 'Yalter's wife, re- 
turning from a picnic at the lake, found 
the house uncannily quiet, with a sus- 
picious and eerie silence. In vague ap- 



374 


THE ELIXIR OF LIES 


prehension she went at once to the study, 
and at the door gave a little cry of alarm, 
for, in the gathering shadows, she found 
her husband crouched low in his chair like 
a man in a chill. His hair was mussed, his 
shoulders were bowed, and his lips were 
moving in a strange, nervous way. His 
wife leaped forward and put her hand on 
his shoulder. 
""Valter! "'
alter, darling!" she cried. 
""Vhat in the world has happened? Are 
you ill?" 
Her husband straightened painfully in 
his chair and forced his lips into a hard, 
dry smile. 
"Don't worry," he answered. "Noth- 
ing is the matter. I'm just feeling a little 
blue. that's all." 
Betty Sanderg was a small, pretty, 
capable girl, nearly ten years younger than 
her husband, but the difference in their 
ages had the paradoxical effect of making 
her unusually motherly. In wide-eyed 
concern she took a seat on the arm of 
'Valter's chair and put her hand over his 
listless, extended fingers. She found them 
as cold as ice, and instinctively began to 
warm them by holding them hetween 
both her palms. To her caresses 'VaIter 
responded only in a sluggish and dutiful 
way. 
"But, dearie," she argued, "I know 
there's something." As he made no re- 
sponse, her own instinct and her own ex- 
perience told her the truth. "Walter, is 
it that wretched golf?" 
Sanders answered reluctantly. "Not 
really that. Or only partly that. That's 
merely typical of the whole blooming 
business. I've simply decided that I'm 
a pretty poor specimen. I'm a hopeless 
excuse for a man." 
"Oh, you fool!" blurted out Betty, bu l 
the way in which she said it was in Itself 
a caress. She leaned over and pressed her 
lips to his tousled hair. Walter straight- 
ened slightly as he put his arm around her 
wais t. 
"No, honestly, Betty," he argued. 
His voice was breaking and he was almost 
in tears. ., It isn't just golf itself. It's 
the whole idea of the thing. I feel like 
such a silly ass." 
His wife gently tightened her grip on 
his fingers. "Sweetheart," she asked, 
., aren't you making a mountain out of a 


molehill? Does it ever occur to you that 
if a stranger had gone up to the club this 
morning and looked over everyone pres- 
ent, the name of Walter Hale Sanders 
would probably have been the only one 
that he would have ever heard of?" 
"As an essayist and a critic-yes," 
muttered "Valter in deep self-contempt, 
"as a namby-pamby, little velvet-coat 
poet, only read by women and adored at 
tea-parties. A sissy, a mollycoddle, that's 
what they think. Can't you see what it 
means to me-not to be any good at 
physical things? It's an awful phrase 
but it's just what I'm not-a man among 
men. " 
Betty remained a moment in silence, 
then she asked quietly: "Tell me about 
it. 'Vhat happened? Didn't you even 
qualify? " 
\Valter groaned. "Oh, yes, I qualified 
-because I couldn't help it. There were 
only sixty-two players entered for all four 
divisions, and all of them had to qualify 
unless they dropped dead. But I made 
the worst score I've ever made in my life 
-the worst score that anyone ever made. 
One hundred and twenty-four. And I 
was beaten by fat Bob Reising. He beat 
the pants off me." 
Even Betty could realize the horror of 
being beatenrby Bob Reising. For a mo- 
ment she was again reduced to silence, but 

he gave no other sign of attaching any 
importance. 
"\Valter," she said at last, slowly, "I 
was talking to Harry Short the other day 
about your golf, and he says that there is 
no reason on earth why you should not 
become one of the best players in the 
club." 
":Ko reason," grunted her husband, 
"except that it isn't in me." 
"It is in you," retorterl Betty sharply. 
" You know you play an awfully good 
game when you're alone or just playing 
friendly matches. \Vhen you don't get 
excited you're a long, hard driver. Even 
Harry himself has never driven the eighth 
green-and you have." 
"Yes," replied \Valter cynically, "and 
then took five putts to hole out. I knew 
I'd do it." 
"That's just the trouble!" retorted 
Betty quietly. "That's just what Harry 
says ! You always think you're going to 



THE ELIXIR OF LIES 


miss and so vou do miss. He has watched 
you and he "'knows the signs. When you 
draw your club back for a stroke you are 
thinking to yourself: 'Now suppose I 
should hit the turf.' And of course you 
do hit the turf. I believe Harry's right, 
because you know you're like that in 


375 


"It was mv own car. I knew it wouldn't 
explode-ånrl it didn't." 
,. And do you think," continued his 
wife, ,. that a quitter would have taken 
over my father's debts, given his own 
notes in exchange, and paid them off inch 
by inch? Twelve thousanrl dollars, 



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"The doctor has ordered you to take this prescription now-and again when you go to bed."-Page 376. 


most things. The trouble with you is that 
you have too much imagination." 
\Valter shook his head. " No, Betty," 
he answered glumly. "That may be true 
to a certain extent but it isn't the real 
truth. I know the real truth. The real 
truth is that I'm a quitter. I'm yeHow." 
His wife leaped to her feet with flash- 
ing eyes. "If you say that again," she 
commanded, "I'll leave you to-morrow. 
You yellow ? You a quitter? Do you 
suppose that a man who was yellow would 
leap into a blazing car and drÍve it out into 
the road when even the regular garage 
men were running away in every direc- 
tion ? " , 
"That's different," grumbled "Talter. 


\Yhen you yourself had to go three years 
without a new winter overcoat? 
o, 
thank you! That's not my idea of a 
quitter." 
Again her voice assumed a sudden ten- 
derness, Again she put her hand on his 
forehead and began to stroke it down over 
his wearied eyes. 
"\VaIter, old sweetheart, I know you 
better than you know yourself. Your 
only trouble is that you're overtired and 
you're oyerstrained and you're sensitive 
as a baby. You've fretted over this golf 
for so long that you've lost all perspec- 
tive. Now just sit back in your chair and 
doze and smoke, and in the meantime I'm 
going to get you something." 



376 


THF ELIXIR OF LIES 


Fifteen minutes later \\Talter was still 
sitting, gloomy and motionless, in his 
chair when he heard a faint knock at his 
door and muttered: "Come in." 
A second later he started in surprise. 
c, \Vhat the-?" 
And wen he might, for the most perfect 
imitation of a hospital nurse was standing 
in the doorway, looking at him demurely. 
First Betty had changed into a starched 
blue print dress and over her shoulders 
she had draped a white table-spread for 
a kerchief. On her head was a napkin 
skilfully folded into an imitation of a 
nurse's cap with even a red cross cut out 
of paper and pinned to the front. In her 
hand she carried a silver card-tray with 
a tumbler, a bot tle, and a spoon. 
In spite of himself \Valter laughed and 
Betty came into the room. She bobbed 
a courtesy. 
"Nurse Hallam reports for duty," she 
announced. " The doctor has ordered you 
to take this prescription now-and again 
when you go to bed." 
Without further ado, she put the tray 
on the table and began to measure out 
some sort of potion. A druggy, aromatic 
odor came from the glass as she handed 
it to her husband. 
"Take this," she commanded. " Hon- 
estly, I mean it." 
Walter smiled in the same forced, hu- 
morless wave "\Vhat in the world is this 
nonsense? ,; 
Betty still held the glass before her, un- 
flinching. "It isn't nonsense at all. It is 
just what you need. It is merely some of 
that nerve-quieting medicine that Anne 
used to take when she broke down on her 
concert tour." 
"\Vhat is it? An opiate?" asked \Val- 
ter sharply. He had sudden suspicions 
of his sister-in-law, a statuesque soprano 
and a very worldly individual. 
"Opiate nothing!" retorted his wife. 
"Do you suppose that Anne would take 
opiates? Or that old Doctor Rosenthal 
would let her? No. Anne was just like 
you-an artist and a mass of tempera- 
ment. She'd simply go all to pieces to- 
ward the end of a tour, and Doctor Rosen- 
thal gave her this prescription. He's 
doctor to half the singers in the l\Ietro- 
politan Opera and knows howJ to handle 
them. I suppose it's reaDy bromides or 


something, but Anne said it was wonder- 
ful. This was a bot tIe she left when she 
was up here two years ago." 
\Valter picked up the bottle suspi- 
ciously and, now that he looked at it, it 
was perfectly familiar. It had stood for 
months in the medicine-cabinet in his own 
bathroom and had been allowed to re- 
main there largely because the label had 
struck him rather humorously. It always 
reminded him of the florid, fussy Anne. 
It bore the name of a druggist in a well- 
known theatre building in New York City 
and of Doctor Rosenthal, together with 
these directions: 


Two teaspoonfuls in half a glass of water thirty 
minutes before a performance. Not for use át 
any other time. 


"But this stuff is two years old," per- 
sisted \Valter. "We don't know what is 
in it. By this time it may be rank poi- 
son." 
"In that case we die together," retorted 
Betty promptly. "I've just taken a dose 
myself to see what would happen." 
Her husband looked at her in alarm. 
"Dearie, you shouldn't have done that. 
But all right. If you go, I goc Here. 
Le
 me have it." 
He took from her hand the half-tumbler 
of greenish pearl-colored liquid, while 
Betty cautioned him. "Better take it all 
at a gulp, for it tastes like fury. Anne 
always used to have a crust of bread 
readÿ. Bùt it makes you feel fine, once 
you've got it down." 
\Vith a single gesture Walter swallowed 
the dose and immediately made a gri- 
mace, for the stuff was as bitter as worm- 
wood. Just the same, it did give a warm, 
comforting feeling, away down inside. He 
and Betty grinned at each other like fel- 
low conspirators, or like two little boys 
just learning to smoke. 
"I hope that it isn't dope," repeated 
Walter guardedly; "but I have to con- 
fess that it does warm the tummy." 
"I told you it would," replied Betty. 
"I feel like a princess." She whisked up 
the bottle and spoon and went out of the 
door with a final caution. "Now just sit 
back and relax and give it a real chance 
to work. In half an hour you'll be ready 
to go out and sing 'Tosca.'" . 
And, sitting back in the twilight, Wal- 



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 \. 
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Þ I '(J..J 


he was dreaming away, an old beloved volume of Gibbon before him, 


ter Sanders did have to admit that the 
tonic was potent. The warm glow in- 
creased inside him, and all at once his 
nerves seemed to relax. Presently the 
humorous side of it struck him, and he 
began to chuckle. Then he began to 
think of his match that morning, and that 
also appeared to him indescribably funny. 
He lit a pipe, leaned back in his chair, and 
when Betty came to call him for dinner 
he was dreaming away, an old beloved 
volume of Gibbon before him, and on his 
lips an expression of sardonic enjoyment. 
N'evertheless, on the following morning 


when \Valter picked up his clubs to go up 
to the links, certain ominous signs began 
to return, but Betty said nothing until he 
was actually starting, when, at the very 
doorway, she appeared again with the 
bottle and spoon. 
"Come on, now," she ordered firmly. 
"Open your mouth. Take it down like a 
man, and then go up there and play like a 
whirlwind. " 
In only the faintest manner her hus- 
band protested. "Oh, look here, Betty. 
You don't want to make a dope fiend out 
of me." 


3ï7 



3ï8 


THE ELIXIR OF LIES 


"I guess if it didn't hurt Anne, it won't 
you-a man with your constitution." 
Estimatingly Betty held the bottle up to 
the light. "I've stopped taking it my- 
self," she remarked, "so I guess there's 
just enough here to see you through the 
tournament. I'll give you three teaspoon- 
fuls the day you get into the finals." 
"The finals!" laughed \Valter, but at 
the same time an odd and exultant idea 
crept into his brain. The finals of the 
fourth division! After all, the fourth di- 
vision was composed mostly of young 
boys and old men. The finals. Why 
not? 
Almost eagerly he gulped down the 
glass of bitter liquid, and as he walked up 
to the club-house he began to feel the 
same mellow warmth of well-being creep 
through his veins. 
As a matter of fact the club-house ter- 
race, as he faced it this morning, was not 
nearly as formidable as it had been on 
the previous day. The bystanders were 
mostly other players, already engrossed 
in their own matches and completely un- 
concerned with \Valter Sanders. Glanc- 
ing at the score-card, which had been ar- 
ranged on the basis of yesterday's quali- 
fications, Walter found that he was paired 
with a stranger named Dorgan, a pleasant 
young man with red hair and compact 
athletic figure. A stranger is always for- 
midable to a doubtful player, especially 
a red-haired stranger, and at first Walter 
regarded him with some trepidation, but 
the warm dose from Betty's bottle was 
still coursing good-humoredly through 
him, and as Dorgan came up with his 
clubs Walter suddenly caught the true 
gist of the matter. 
"After all," he thought to himself, 
"any man who would be in the fourth 
division can't be very much better than I 
am. Possibly he's worse." 
His confidence was still further restored 
when Dorgan stepped up to drive and, to 
his amazement, \Yalter saw that he was 
using an iron. The principles of golf, if 
not the practice, were thoroughly familiar 
to Walter Sanders, and he knew that only 
one motive could ever induce a player to 
drive from this clear, open tee with an 
iron. Either he had never learned to use 
his wooden clubs or else he was afraid to 
do so. With a feeling of almost contemp- 


tuous superiority \Valter fondled his own 
driver, for he himself used his wooden 
clubs better than his irons. He was per- 
fectly composed as he teed up his ball, and 
this time he did not make his usual at- 
tempt to drive round the world. With 
Dorgan's ball lying only a scant hundred 
yards down the course, there was no need 
to do so. Taking an easy, good-humored 
swing, Walter laid his ball straight out for 
a hundred and seventy yards, and as they 
walked down the fairway Dorgan looked 
at him in some amazement. 
"Say, l\1r. Sanders," he demanded, 
"who in the world ever put YOlt in the 
fourth division?" 
He wondered still more and more as 
Walter took hole after hole with compara- 
tive ease, and on the twelfth green he held 
out his hand in humorous resignation, 
Slinging their bags over their shoulders, 
they cut back across the course to the 
club-house, and for the first time in his life 
Wal ter had the thrill of which he had so 
often dreamed, the thrill of seeing the 
secretary write on the score-board: "San- 
ders 7 up, 6 to go." 
Almost immediately Betty, who had 
been waiting all the morning in anxious 
trepidation, heard a ring at the phone, 
and \Valter's voice, trembling with excite- 
ment, came over the wire. 
" Well, Betty, I cleaned him up. I 
won!" 
Betty gave a shriek which brought the 
cook from the kitchen. " You won?" 
she exclaimed. "Y ou won the tourna- 
ment ? " 
In his booth at the club-house Walter 
laughed. "No. Hardly. But I won my 
first match." 
"Then, \Valter Sanders, come right 
home and kiss me." 
"I'd like to, Betty. You certainly de- ! 
serve it, but I'm scheduled to play Doc- 
tor Winters in the second round at two 
o'clock. I think I'd better just snatch a I 
bite here at the club. Do you mind very 
much?" 
"N-no," replied Betty, slowly, "if you 
think I can trust you that long out of my 
sight. But, sweetheart, promise me faith- 
fully just one thing. I'm going up past 
the club myself at quarter of two, and I 
want you to wait for me. I've got some- 
thing here I want to show you." 



THE ELIXIR OF LIES 


A shade of anxiety crept into her 'hus- 
band's voice. "\Vhat is it? Bad news?" 
"Oh, quite the contrary," laughed 
Betty. "You wait and you'll see." 
_\t five minutes to two, as Walter and 
his new partner were walking out for their 
match, the former heard the familiar rat- 
tle of his own car on the driveway, and 
Betty came running up the steps of the 
terrace. In her hand were a bottle, a 
tumbler, and a spoon. 
"Here is your medicine," she an- 
nounced. quite regardless of the startled 
onlookers, "I've got the water and 
everything right here in the glass." 
"Oh, come, Betty," argued Walter, 
blushing; but already his hand was 
reached out for the tumbler, and he 
gulped down the familiar dose. 
Doctor \Vinters, who was a clergyman 
and not a physician, protested in amuse- 
ment. "Look here, 1\lrs. Sanders. 
That's not fair. You're doping your 
man." 
"\Yell, what of it?" laughed \Valter. 
He waved his driver belligerently. "After 
all, everything's fair in love and golf." 
The wise old clergyman glanced in 
fatherly fashion from one to the other. 
"Particularly in love, I should say, by 
the looks of it.'; 
Doctor \Vinters was immeasurably a 
better player than Dorgan, but on the 
seventeenth tee he also turned to \Valter 
with an odd look in his eyes. 
"\Yalter" he remarked "I don't know 
what was i
 that bottle, but it's done the 
trick. This gives you the match. Con- 
gratulations." 
So for the second time in one day \Val- 
ter watched his name go up on the score- 
, board:" Second round, \Vinters-Sanclers. 
Sanders 2 up." He was now in the semi- 
finals, but during the club dinner after 
the first day's play Doctor \Vinters laugh- 
ingly spread the story of Betty's potion, 
and by the next morning it had become 
(Ine of the current yarns of the tourna- 
ment. Bob Reising, whose phenomenal 
I spurt had not survived the first round of 
match play, got up an elaborate story to 
the effect that Betty's uncle had been an 
old sea-captain who had brought from 
the South Sea Islands a strange herb so 
powerful that when the most timid native 
took even a nibble he would run amuck 


3i9 


and sm
sh up three or four host_ile vil- 
lages. Bob explained that only by taking 
a triple dose of the potion had Betty her- 
self ever got up the nerve to marry a man 
like \Valter. \Vhen Walter himself ap- 
peared on the links in the semifinals, he 
was greeted as "the drugged marvel" 
or "the bottle-fed wonder," and a dozen 
players begged longingly for a swig at his 
private stock. 
For while his sister-in-Iaw's nerve tonic 
was undoubtedly working wonders with 
\Valter's play it was, at the same time, 
having a subtle, undermining effect on 
that of his opponents. No matter how 
much of a joke it may be in the beginning, 
no one can play his best game against a 
man who regards himself as invincible. 
The story certainly got on the nerves of 
young Aldrich, a sixteen-year-old boy 
who was \Valter's opponent in the semi- 
finals. On the first hole he drove three 
times out of bounds, and on the fifteenth 
he missed a putt of eight inches. Walter 
himself drew a long breath, hummed a 
little song, and sank his ball from the edge 
of the green. He was now in the finals. 
The next twenty-four hours, however, 
were to put a hard test on Betty's tonic 
and on \Valter's confidence, for on Thurs- 
day night both of them showed signs of 
running low. According to the schedule 
the finals in the second, third, and fourth 
divisions and all the consolation finals 
were to have been played on Friday, 
leaving the whole links open on Saturday 
for the finals of the first division, in which 

Iallock, the State champion, had easily 
climbed to the top on one side of the card 
and a brilliant player from Lakemont had 
done the same thing on the other. But on 
Friday morning it was raining hard. It 
rained hard all day. On Saturday morn- 
ing the greens were still slow and soggy, 
and as a result four final matches and 
four consolation finals were all crowded 
into Saturday afternoon. 
Thus had accumulated for \Valter San- 
ders all the conditions which were most 
disastrous to his natural temperament. 
All day Friday he was obliged to sit around 
the house, mooning and fretting. He was 
unable to read, he was unable to work. 
He did not even dare to smoke very much 
for fear of upsetting hi
 nerves still fur- 
therc In the late afternoon he went up to 



380 


TIlE ELIXIR OF LIES 


Betty's room and gave a furtive glance at 
the bottle of medicine, 
"\Vhat do you think-?" he suggested 
tentatively. "Don't you believe that per- 
haps-? " 
Betty seized the bottle with vigorous 
grasp and put it up on the top shelf of her 
closet. "Not on your life!" she retorted 
firmly. "Not a drop do you get until to- 
morrow morning. In the first place, this 
isn't going to be your life's work, you 
know-taking this stuff. In the second 
place, there are only three teaspoonfuls 
left in the bottle." 
On Saturday afternoon \Valter walked 
up to the club-house to face conditions 
which, normally, would have been even 
more appalling. A huge striped marquee 
had been erected on the lawn, gay ban- 
ners were flying on staffs all over the 
club-house, a noisy jazz orchestra was tun- 
ing up for dancing on the piazzas, and a 
much larger crowd was assembled than 
that which had watched his ignominious 
downfall on the first day of the tourna- 
ment. The presence of l\1allock, the 
State champion, had been the original at- 
traction, but before he had been five min- 
utes on the terrace \Valter began to grasp 
the fact that his own was really the popu- 
lar match of the day. His spectacular 
rise after years of hopeless defeat had 
struck keenly home to the sportsmanship 
of the crowd. It gave new hope to all the 
dubs in the place. In the eyes of the gal- 
lery he had become a sort of golf Walter 
Johnson. 
In addition to the popular good-will 
which desired a victory for Walter, there 
was also a large group in the club which 
hoped with eager malicious eyes for the 
sound defeat of his opponent, old Colonel 
Badget. For Colonel Badget, a retired 
private banker, was one of the most de- 
tested men in Heath Hills. He was one 
of those disagreeable, carping little mar- 
tinets who ha ve played slow golf for 
twenty years, making it more and more 
of a religion to themselves and more and 
more of a nuisance to everyone with 
whom they come in contact. He was the 
kind of man who shouts "Fore!" the in- 
stant that anyone ahead of him shows 
the slightest signs of having lost a ball, 
and he always insisted on the rights of a 
slow twosome to keep ahead of a fast 


foursome. If his opponent accidentally 
touched his ball in addressing it, he in- 
sisted on counting it as a stroke. He kept 
his opponent's score-aloud-as well as 
his own, and even in the most informal, 
friendly matches, if his opponent lost a 
ball, he would claim the hole. 
The colonel's tactics were well known 
to \Valter; but three whole teaspoonfuls of 
the tonic were now nestled warmly under 
his belt and three good wins lay behind 
him, \Vith the utmost composure he 
placed his first ball for a straight, sure 
two hundred yards, and the gallery ap- 
plauded. The colonel followed with a 
scant hundred and fifty, and from the 
midst of the crowd Bob Reising suddenly 
leaped to his feet. 
"Look here!" he exclaimed. "This is 
the match that I'm going to follow!" 
"And, by George, so am I !" responded 
another player who had been defeated by 
Colonel Badget on a series of technicali- 
ties. At the same time the modest Dor- 
gan rose to his feet, Doctor \Vinters fol- 
lowed suit with a humorous twinkle, and 
when Walter stopped for his second shot 
he found himself followed by an eager 
gallery, almost as large as that which was 
left for the champion. He calmly studied 
the distance and the turf and took out his 
brassie. Waiting a moment until he was 
coolly certain of just what he wished to 
do and just how he wished to do it, he 
allowed his muscles consciously to relax 
and gave a long sweeping swing. There 
was a clean, thrilling whish and the ball 
soared up in a beautiful, high, travelling 
arc. It landed plunk on the green, took 
a splendid back kick, and lay within three 
feet of the pin. And the par of that hole 
was five! Disregarding all caution, the 
crowd broke into applause, and Colonel 
Badget, who was getting ready for hi
 
third shot, looked up snappishly. I 
"Unless we can have quiet for OUI 
shots," he announced, "I shall request 
that the course be cleared for the re- 
mainder of our match." 
" You can't do it," shouted Bob Reisin
 
hotly, but others in the crowd warned hirr 
to be silent, and at the second tee all but 
a few of the followers vanished in con, 
tempt. The afternoon was too fine t( 
waste on a man like Colonel Badget. 
At the disappearance of his follower
 



THE ELIXIR OF LIES 


\Valter tried to settle down into easy effi- 
cient golf, but the ultimate goal now lay 
so closely before him that he began to get 
nervous again. After his glorious fluke on 
the first hole he was forced to realize that 
he had no easy match. Colonel Badget 
played exactly the kind of game that 
would have been expected from his na- 
ture and his age. He seldom lifted the 
ball more than three feet from the ground 
and seldom sent it more than a hundred 
yards. On the other hand, he putted like 
a machine c and he never went an inch out 
of the fairway. He played, in short, a 
kind of glorified croquet, but in a long, 
dragging match this glorified croquet can 
be ominously effective. After all, \Val- 
ter's last name was not yet Hagen. He 
had not become Sarazen overnight. In 
the normal course of events he ought to 
ha ve won all the long holes and Colonel 
Badget most of the short ones, but when, 
as twice happened, \Valter tried to repeat 
his spectacular shot on the first and drove 
into the woods, the colonel dribbled up 
, grimly and gathered both holes. Never- 
theless, the confidence of the last three 
matches had not entirely disappeared, 
and, although "Talter was not playing the 
game that he should, he managed by his 
long shots to keep a shifting lead of from 
one to four holes. 
As they passed the club-house between 
the ninth green and the tenth tee \Valter 
looked up and saw Betty standing on the 
piazza with anxious eyes. He knew per- 
fectly well that only by Spartan control 
had she stifled her longing to follow the 
match, and \Valter himself had known 
that her presence would have made him 
I self-conscious; but at this last moment the 
I appeal of her questioning eyes was too 
much to be resisted, He beckoned to her 
to come down and continue beside him. 
"\Yell, how are you coming?" she 
: asked. She was not any too cheery, her- 
self. 
"Pretty well," answered \Valter gruffly; 
but this was too much for Bob Reising, 
who had followed the match an the way, 
largely out of defiance of Colonel Badget. 
"Pretty wen nothing I" he broke in 
angrily. "OIrl \Yalter's got the match in 
his pocket. He's got him three down." 
But Betty knew her husband too well 
to accept this reassurance, She studied 


381 


\Valter's tight lips and a strange, faint 
pallor that was begihning to display itself 
even under his tan. Unconsciously she re- 
alized a fact that \Valter himself had begun 
to realize very acutely indeed. For some 
men of imaginative type it is actually 
harder to keep their nerve while winning 
than it is while losing. Almost any man 
with good blood in his veins can fight a 
hard up-hill battle. All the traditions of 
his race have taught him to do that re- 
gardless. The realization that there is 
everything to gain and nothing to lose 
will stimulate his brilliancv and enable 
him to draw out the contest. It is when 
actual victory is hanging by a hair just 
before one's eyes, but when, at the same 
time, one knows how easy it will be to 
lose, that comes the real test of a cham- 
pIOn, 
Hardly indeed had the tenth hole 
started when fate itself seemed to em- 
phasize this unhappy realization. A per- 
fectly good straight shot of \Valter's took 
a bad bound, rolled into the rough and 
cost him a stroke, while an attempt to 
play it out brought his mashie against a 
hidden root and cost him another. On 
the other hand. Colonel Badget played al- 
most identically the same shot and landed 
in identically the same place, but his baU 
continued true and roUed far on down the 
centre of the fairway. The next hole was 
tied, but in spite of every effort to keep his 
control \Valter began to feel himself slip- 
ping. On the thirteenth hole he was only 
one up and, at this crucial point, an his 
morbid forebodings swept back. He be- 
gan to wonder whether he really could be 
one of those men destined to climb just so 
far up every ladder and then, within sight 
of the top, fall hopelessly back again. 
Once more to his restless mind there be- 
gan to return all the deadly black imps of 
his own imagination. 
"X-ow," he began to think to himself, 
"if I lose this hole, we will be all even, and 
if Colonel Badget wins the next Ire wlll be 
one up and the balance will have shifted. 
That would mean that I should have to 
get three holes out of the remaining four. 
Could I possibly do it?" 
The unfortunate part was that the cli- 
max of these thoughts came to \\Talter 
just as he was lifting his mashie. The re- 
sult was that the mashie came down to 



382 


TH
 ELIXIR OF LIES 


earth like a feeble hoe. It cut a large sec- 
tion of turf, the ball rolled a sickly few 
inches, and the hole was Colonel Badget's. 
As they walked up the hill to the four- 
teenth tee, "'alter's face was like that of a 
man going to be sentenced, and poor little 
Betty, trudging behind him, was almost 
crying. At the same time both of them 
realized that if "'alter were going to win 
the match at all, now was the exact time 
to do it. The fourteenth tee faced a wide, 
deep ravine with water at the bottom, 
and Colonel Badget, with his fussy little 
strokes, could never possibly drive over. 
The only question was: In his present 
state of mind, could TValter do it? 
To make matters worse, at this four- 
teenth tee they ran into a long delay, 
which prolonged the agony. Two players 
in a consolation match were still on the 
tee waiting for two others who were just 
ahead of them. The deadly ravine always 
checked the whole field, and while Walter 
was sitting under a tree with Betty be- 
side him, the champion, !VIallock, came 
up from the last green fonowed by his 
usual crowd of spectators. 
An easy, invincible winner like 1\lallock 
was the last thing that 'Valter wanted to 
see at that moment. It made him think 
too much of what he was himself. He re- 
mained staring moodily at the ground 
until suddenly he felt a nudge from Betty 
and, looking up, he realized that Mallock 
himself was coming straight toward him. 
The great man held out his hand and Wal- 
ter rose slowly. 
"I beg your pardon," asked :Mallock, 
smiling, "but aren't you 11r. Sanders?" 
Bewildered, Walter nodded, and the 
champion continued. "Didn't you go to 
Beaufort College years ago and weren't 
vou on the track team?" 

 ":Many years ago." admitted Walter, 
" and I was a very humble member of the 
track team." 
lVlallock nodded. "I was sure I remem- 
bered you when I saw you the other 
morning. I was a Colton University man 
myself and J once ran against you in a 
quarter-mile run on our own field. I shall 
never forget it. You and I were fighting 
it out for third place with the others 'way 
out ahead of us, I can see the back of 
your neck now. I don't think I ever 
hated any man as I hated you at that 


moment. You stuck two feet ahead of me 
all around the track, and any minute I 
expected to catch 'you. Then suddenly, 
when we turned mto the stretch, vou 
looked around and realized I was there. 
You reached ou t your stride and gave a 
spurt and left me as if I had been hitched 
to a pole. You gave me the worst trim- 
ming I ever had in my life. 1\1y legs felt 
just like two tallow candles." 
\Valter laughed, and as Betty rose froIl. 
her seat on the ground to be introduced 
she noticed that her husband's eyes again 
sparkled. The drooping, hangdog look 
was gone from his lip
, and his shoulders 
were no longer twitching nervously. The 
incident of which 1\lalIock had spoken 
had been only a tiny athletic meet half a 
generation before, between two tiny New 
England colleges-annual rivals. In ath- 
letic circles it would have ranked about 
on the same level as 'Valter's golf, and 
'Valter himself only barely remembered 
it; but to Manock, apparently, it still had 
the outlines of heroism, and Walter began 
to feel an odd little straightening of his 
spine. He was conscious that the spec- 
tators around the tee were watching them 
curiously, eager to catch any golden 
words of the champion, and when IVlallock 
had spoken the phrase " You gave me the 
worst trimming I ever had in my life," a 
little thrill of amazed curiosity had run 
around the group. Of course it couldn't 
have been at golf. Even the spectators 
must have known that. But he had 
beaten the champion at something. It 
didn't matter what, so long as he had 
beaten him. He must have the winning 
gift just as much as anybody else-if he 
would only cease being so silly about it. 
It was an idea that appealed to his man- 
hood and his sense of humor in about 
equal proportions. After all, use common 
sense. There was no magic in this ability 
to win something. For Walter Sanders at 
that moment it was absolutely the ideal 
tonic, even better than the one in Betty's 
bottle. Watching her husband like an 
eager trainer, Betty herself was fully con- 
scious of the change. Hoping to continue 
the stimulus as long as possible, she turned 
to the champion. 
"You must have a wonderful memory, 
l\1r. !vIallock." 
The champion laughed. "Better than 



THE ELIXIR OF LIES 


your husband's, :Mrs. Sanders. But then, 
isn't that always the way? The man 
whom you beat you seldom remember. 
It's the man who beats YOlt that always 
sticks in your crop." 
A command for silence rose from the 
tee, and, looking up, they found that 
Colonel Badget was preparing to drive. 


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383 


gave his driver to his caddy, and came up 
to Walter with outstretched hand. Wal- 
ter looked at him in amazement. 
"Why, Colonel, aren't you going to 
play it?" 
The older man grunted testily, while 
behind him Bob Reising's eyes were 
nearly popping out of his head. 


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 ... 


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a free, easy, confident swing, and, like a bird, the ball sailcd cleanly o\-cr to the other side of 
the ravine. 


\\'atching his fussy, precise little motions, 
the champion looked at \Valter and 
winked. His wink was prophetic, for, 
badly hit and weakly followed, the ball 
rolled hopelessly, pitifully down into the 
water at the foot of the ravine. Another 
I ball followed the first, and a third clung 
merely on the nearer bank. \\ïth a nod 
to the champion and a wave of his hand 
to Betty, \Valter himself walked calmly 
out on the tee, quietly placed his own 
ball, gave a free, easy, confident swing, 
and, like a bird, the ban sailed cleanly 
over to the other side of the ravine. 
.. Good work!" exclaimed l\Iallock in 
shrewd professional respect. "I see 
you've still got your spurt in the pinches." 
At the same moment Colonel Badget 


,. X'o, \Valter," replied the colonel, 
"you're too young for me and too good. 
It would be a waste of time. The next 
three holes are all long and all over water 
and I couldn't touch you. I knew you 
had me beaten before we had played five 
minutes, but I wasn't sure whether you 
knew it yourself. You've no business in 
the fourth division. I was going to quit 
back there when you had me three down, 
but I said to myself that I would just 
cling along and see whether you cracked 
when you came to the big ravine. If you 
had, I might have got you. But-con- 
gratulations, boy. I know when I'm 
whipped. " 
"It seems a shame--" began \Valter 
heartily, but already Bob Reising and 



38
 


THE ELIXIR OF LIES 


Betty were merely waiting for a chance 
to spring on his neck. 
And, by some strange quirk in the hu- 
man mind, Colonel Badget's sudden col- 
lapse on the fourteenth hole was the most 
popular thing he had ever done in Heath 
Hills. A genuine burst of good feeling 
greeted him that evening at the tourna- 
ment dance when he was called out for 
the runner-up prize in the fourth division, 
but nothing like the ovation that over- 
whelmed \Yalter when he went up with 
the winners. 
For her own part, little Betty never did 
witness the actual conclusion of that cere- 
mony. Her own tears forced her to seek 
the darkness of the piazza before it was 
over. She was still in the shadows, by 
an open window, when l\Iallock, who had 
broken the record for the course that 
afternoon, but who still found himself 
rather alone in his greatness, came out 
and hailed her as one of the few individu- 
als who were not too awed to talk, 
"1\1rs. Sanders," he began, as he sat 
down beside her, "I am beginning to won- 
der whether I have not done a dreadful 
thing. I believe that I made your ac- 
quaintance under false pretenses. Has 
your husband a younger relative who 
looks a lot like him?" 
Betty regarded him in sudden uneasi- 
ness. "Why, yes," she admitted; "Hal 
Sanders. He is a cousin. They do look 
alike." - 
" And did the cousin also go to Beaufort 
College and also run on the track team?" 
"All the Sanders family went to Beau- 
fort," replied Betty, "and Hal was proba- 
bly on some of the teams. He was always 
much more of an athlete than "'Talter, al- 
though Walter did run a little in college, 
too." 
"Then that explains it," exclaimed 
1\lallock. "I got to talking with another 
man here this evening, and he didn't see 
how your husband and I could possibly 
have been in college at the same time. 
Later, when I got to thinking it over, it 
did seem to me that the man I ran against 
was called 'Harry Sanders,' or something 
like that." 
"That was probably it," replied Betty 
weakly. She looked up suddenly. ":Mr. 
:r>.lallock, do you want to do me a favor? 


Please don't ask \Valter anything about 
it-at least not to-night." 
l\lailock looked at her, puzzled for a 
moment, then, being himself a champion, 
he slowly realized what she meant. 
" You're right, 1\lrs. Sanders. Don't 
worry. I understand. He mustn't think 
of anything but wins this evening. But, 
look here; while we are on the subject, 
I have something on my own mind that 
I want to ask you. \Vhat is this wild 
story about some sort of wonderful nerve 
medicine that your husband takes before 
his matches? I have been hearing about 
it all the week. Some one told me that it 
was some dope that singers and actors 
take before big first nights. You know 
golf is very largely a matter of nerves and 
confidence. I've got to play myself in 
the National Open Championship neJo..t 
month. It's my first try at the big show 
and I know I'll be as frightened as a 
schoolbov. Is this stuff really worth an\'- 
thing? 
-\nd is it harmless?- I don't see 
any reason why I shouldn't use it myself." 
. "I'll send you a bottle very gladly," re- 
plied Betty, laughing. "If it does you as 
much good as it did \Valter, you'll be the 
champion of the world." 
"But what, in the name of Time, is in 
the blamed stuff?" insisted :\Iallock. "I 
don't want to fill myself up with some 
drug that will send me to sleep in the 
middle of the course." 
Betty laughed again. "I don't think 
there's any danger, I can't tell you what 
was original1y in the bottle because it was 
all dried up, so I washed it out and threw 
it away. \Vhat \"alter got was a com- 
bination of rose-water, table salt, essence 
of ginger, bay rum, and imagination. Oh, 
yes! And I also put in six drops of horse 
liniment to make it stronger. I knew 
that if it wasn't hot and bitter, it would 
never work." 
In his chair beside her, the champion 
lay back and roared. Betty waited until 
he had stopped and then she warned 
sharply: 
"Now, mind you, that was merely the 
dose I gave \Valter. But let me tell you, 
1\lr. :r>.Iallock, that if \\Talter ever learns 
the truth about that race in college, the 
bottle I send \'ou will be filled with white 
lead and arseiÜc !" 



Quackery and I ts Psychology 
BY EDGAR JAMES SWIFT 
Author of "Psychology and the Day's Work" 


ULLIBILITY evident- 
ly has the distinction 
of an tiqui ty, since 
Populus vult decipi is 
the more polite expres- 
sion of the ancient Ro- 
mans for what P. T. 
Barnum put less cour- 
teously when he said: "There's a fool born 
every minute." And Barnum must have 
known, since he took his Ph,D, in hum- 
bugology and then, having neatly lined his 
pockets with the product of his maxim 
that "people like to be humbugged," he 
tried to save them from less genial fakers 
by writing his warning, "Humbugs of the 
\Vorld." 
Perhaps one must be bitten a few times 
by a bug before learning to distinguish the 
dangerous ones from the harmless. At 
any rate, even Barnum, the expert in that 
particular species of insects scientifically 
known as humbugs, has admitted that he 
purchased the patent of more than one 
perpetual-motion machine. 
It is possible that we have here a real 
distinction between man and the lower 
animals. \Ve might say, for example, 
that man is a quackable animal, since, as 
good old Doctor Brown, many years ago, 
observed in his "Spare Hours," "quack- 
ery and the love of being quacked are, in 
human nature, as weeds in our fields." 
Time, evidently, has not obliterated the 
love of being quacked, since, after the 
death of the Earl of Carnarvon, fear of 
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "evil elemen- 
tal" almost overwhelmed the British 
:Museum with an avalanche of mummies, 
shrivelled hands, feet, and other relics 
from Egyptian tombs, sent by those who 
feared to keep them. 
The purpose of the present writer is to 
reveal the weak spots of the human mind 
which make it such an easy prey for the 
infection of humbuggery. To be a little 
more specific, how may we explain the 
fact that people otherwise intelligent are 
VOL. LX.'XVIII.-28 


ÄGt! 


 G 
 



 

7QÄ 


constantly led astray and intellectually 
ravished by fresh onslaughts of occult- 
ism? 
The fascination of the mysterious 
comes first. People do not want scien- 
tific explanations. They prefer some- 
thing that tickles the palate of savage 
man-something that appeals to his 
craving for the occult. Man will always 
accept the interpretation of "authori- 
ties," provided the explanation is obscure 
en01egh. The love of the obscure is al- 
ways prepared to take the offensive the 
moment a contest between reason and 
superstition begins. Since, however, 
modern man likes to think that he has 
outgrown superstitious longing for the 
mysterious let us begin with an example 
from to-day. 
A hospital connected with one of our 
leading Eastern medical schools has a 
large tuning-fork which has marvellous 
curative properties. Now the patients to 
whom it is applied do not know that it is 
an ordinary tuning-fork. If they knew 
this, it would be useless. But modem 
civilized man has a curious superstition 
about the effect of magnets. So patients 
are told that this big tuning-fork is a 
"magnet," and many afflicted with hys- 
terical paralysis of leg or arm are cured 
by the application of this mysterious ob- 
ject to the limb which the patient believes 
is paralyzed. And at other times the 
mystic power of the unknown, symbolized 
by the "magnet," subdues the uninten- 
tional refusal of patients to be cured. 
To learn that some sick people refuse 
to be cured may seem strange, but this 
is one of the curious ways in which the 
human mind acts. In such cases there 
are really two streams of thought-the 
one anxious to be. cured and the other 
engaged in keeping up the symptoms of 
disease because of the attention that the 
patient receives, or for some other reason 
of which the victim of his suppressed 
thoughts is not fully aware. 


3 8 5 



386 


QUACKERY AND ITS PSYCHOLOGY 


Then, too, people want to be cured in 
their own way, and if their physician does 
not use a method of treatment in which 
they believe, their mind and body refuse 
to play the healing game. This is the 
reason why quacks get so many patients. 
There are enough of them to enable the 
afflicted to select the one who practises 
the sort of healing jugglery in which each 
believes. Confidence in the medicine that 
one is taking has great therapeutical value. 
Some years ago, when belief in magical 
charms was much cruder, though prob- 
ably not more common than to-day, a 
woman who was suffering from an affec- 
tion of the eyes applied to a young medi- 
cal student for a magical writing to charm 
away her trouble. The student, knowing 
little of medicine, but much of human na- 
ture, wrote a sentence on a piece of paper, 
which he folded and sealed. This charm, 
he said, would cure her eyes if she wore 
it constantly and under no conditions 
opened it. The result was so good that 
she loaned the charm to a friend, who 
was also cured of a similar affection. But 
after they were cured and the danger of 
violating the instroctions had passed, curi- 
osity could not be resisted. So they broke 
the seal to read the marvellous magical 
formula. And this was what they saw: 
"May the devil pluck out your eyes and 
replace them with mud." 
Progress of the sciences has not notice- 
ably weakened the attraction of the oc- 
cult. "Quackery and the love of being 
quacked" are still as strong forces in 
human nature as they were when Doctor 
Brown wrote of them in his "Spare 
Hours." Knowledge and scientific at- 
tainments are frequently useless. Their 
acquisition has been so recent in the long 
history of man's evolution that he has 
not yet learned to use them in other lines 
of thought than those in which he has 
been taught to employ them. 
An illustration is given in the" Road to 
Endor," by E. H. Jones. The scene is a 
Turkish prison-camp during the recent 
war, and the author of this book was en- 
tertaining his fellow prisoners by spirit 
communications through an ouija-board, 
The prisoners were all educated men, and 
when the war was over Jones confessed to 
one of his dupes that all the communica- 
tions were fraudulent-that he had gotten 


much information from his fellow prison- 
ers, and later had given it back to them 
as coming from the spirits. At other 
times he had made several guesses and 
read in their faces the correct hit. But 
the convert to spiritism smiled pityingly 
at him. 
" , You call it guessing. Do you know 
what I think it was?' 
" 'No,' said I. 
" 'Unconscious telepathy.' 
"Is there any way of converting be- 
lievers ? " 
The imagination plays many a game 
with reason, and it usually wins. Let us 
then follow it rapidly through the wide 
range of mental activities over which it 
rules so subtly as not to betray its pres- 
ence. We will find that it makes well 
people sick and sick people well; at least, 
if there is nothing much the matter with 
them. And it does many other remark- 
able things. Some illustrations will show 
its power and the way in which cures may 
be effected. 
"Animal magnetism," and the craze 
that followed the coining of this catchy 
phrase, offer one of the most striking mod- 
ern illustrations of the spread of an epi- 
demic of real disease when the imagina- 
tion is encouraged to run riot. Under the 
powerful influence of the mystical belief 
in animal magnetism hysterical seizures 
became as fashionable as the latest gowns. 
So large were the crowds that assembled 
for treatment that Mesmer arranged a 
trough around which the throng might 
sit to receive the benefits of the widely 
heralded magnetic fluid. And one of 
Mesmer's pupils magnetized an elm-tree 
on the village green that the crowd of 
patients might receive the treatment 
while he attended to more important mat- 
ters. 
So powerful was the belief in this new 
healing magnetic fluid of animal mag- 
netism that anything which the healer 
touched, whether stones or dogs, cured 
believers of all diseases to which man is 
heir. But even in those days thoughtful 
men could not but recall the words of 
that wise old Greek who, when shown the 
votive offerings to Neptune of those 
whom the god had saved from the sea, 
exclaimed: "But where are the offerings 
of those who never returned?" 



QUACKERY AND ITS PSYCHOLOGY 


Mesmer was not the first to use the 
"magnetic fluid," but he made it dan- 
gerously popular. He was wise enough 
to see the value of the stage-setting for 
the cult which later, when animal mag- 
netism had been laid to rest with other 
follies, received the name of mesmerism 
and more recently, after removal of its 
superstitious decorations, has been called 
hypnotism. 
The circular trough which Mesmer used 
in his cures had an additional advantage 
beyond the numbers who could sit around 
it. Powdered glass and iron filings were 
in the bottom, and among these mys- 
terious substances lay bottles symmetri- 
cally arranged and connected, one with 
another, by wires. Other wires, fitted 
into the bottles, emerged from the trough 
and ended in handles, one of which each 
patient grasped. The afflicted were ar- 
ranged in concentric rows, and, that the 
circle for the passage of the" fluid" might 
be complete, each patient held the hand 
of his neighbor, and cords passed round 
their bodies throughout the circle that 
none of the precious fluid might escape. 
Thus the circle was completed. But not 
so with the mystery and solemnity. 
Not a word was spoken. And stained- 
glass windows cast a soft religious light 
over the room, while many mirrors added 
to the chann. Sweet music from unseen 
harps was wafted through the rooms, and 
then, anon, the gentle song of a girl 
floated softly down from an upper cham- 
ber. Thus was mysterious solemnity 
prepared for the appearance of the healer. 
Mesmer entered noiselessly on the soft 
Turkish rugs, dressed in lilac silk and 
waving majestically a magic wand. Not 
a sound was heard except the sighing of 
the soft music that was wafted to them 
from distant chambers. After slowly and 
solemnly walking around the room, Mes- 
mer set aside his wand and, laying his 
hands upon each patient in turn, he 
stroked them until they were saturated 
with the healing fluid of his animal mag- 
netism. Could the stage be better set? 
Is it to be wondered at that many fell into 
hysterical convulsions and were cured? 
Benjamin Franklin was a member of a 
committee that was appointed to inves- 
tig
te Mesmer's claim that animal mag- 
netIsm has great curative value. And 


387 


this committee reported that those who 
were told that they were being magnet- 
ized felt much improved even when imi- 
tation magnetizers were used. And those, 
again, who had no reason to think that 
they were being magnetized received no 
benefit when all of the paraphernalia were 
used. In other words, imagination wi th- 
out magnetism, animal or other kind, pro- 
duced marvellous cures, while "magnet- 
ism" without imagination was useless. 
Mesmer's animal magnetism shows the 
imagination at its best, or shall we say 
its worst? At any rate, nothing like it 
had happened since the crusades. "It is 
impossible," one writer says, "to conceive 
the sensation which Mesmer's experi- 
ments created in Paris." But let us pass 
on to more recent events. 
Some of the readers of this magazine 
will recall the blue-glass craze which 
swept through the country some years 
ago, Various experiments were said to 
have been made, all of which proved be- 
yond question that blue glass would work 
miracles. Underdeveloped pigs, after 
they had sunned themselves beneath its 
beneficent rays, began to improve and to 
look longingly toward the market. And 
a calf hardly alive at birth, after a brief 
sojourn under blue glass, frisked about as 
only vigorous newly born calves can frolic. 
One of the practical advantages of the 
blue-glass treatment was that one did not 
need to know one's ailment. A mule, for 
example, was cured of what his physician 
had diagnosed as chronic rheumatism, 
and mules certainly are not intelligent 
enough to know what is the matter with 
themc 
Whatever the affection might be, rays 
of light after passing through blue glass 
were believed to search out the disease 
and cure it. Bald-headed men were es- 
pecially happy since, after a very brief 
exposure to the rays of blue, heads as 
smooth and shiny as billiard-baBs were 
speedily covered with a growth of beau- 
tiful hair. At least, this was commonly 
reported, though, like many other miracu- 
lous occurrences, sceptics could not run 
fast enough to catch up with the cure. 
It is a rather interesting psychological 
fact that, aside from such realistic things 
as rheumatic mules and bald heads, the 
imagination first produces the disease 



388 


QUACKERY AND ITS PSYCHOLOGY 


and then cures it. The description of 
symptoms in the advertisements of char- 
latans is so vivid and interesting that the 
reader feels that he must have that par- 
ticular disease. Then he takes the rem- 
edy and is cured. 
The effect of the imagination is also 
observed in the early stages of hypnosis. 
If the operator were to go at it in a cold- 
blooded matter-of-fact manner he would 
fail. But, instead of telling his subjects 
that he is going to hypnotize them, he 
talks in a quiet, monotonous tone, telling 
them how easily one falls asleep when one 
thinks of nothing and lets the mind drift 
into a state of peaceful rest. 
The present writer had an experience 
that illustrates the effect of stage-setting 
upon the mind. He was demonstrating 
the early stages of hypnotism to a small 
group. One was asked to stand and look 
intently at an electric-light switch. The 
writer stood behind the subject and, pass- 
ing his hands slowly down his body, re- 
peated in a monotone: "Y ou are falling, 
falling, falling backward." And, in a mo- 
ment, the subject was obliged to step 
back to keep from falling. This was re- 
peated with several so successfully that 
the members of the group were fairly 
holding their breath, so tense was the at- 
mosphere. Then one sceptic exclaimed: 
"That's a joke! Let me try it !" Hardly 
had she stood up and fixed her eyes on 
the electric switch when she collapsed, 
and would have fallen to the floor had she 
not been caught by those near by. 
The imagination plays us many tricks. 
A performer throws a ball into the air a 
few times, then merely makes the gesture, 
and the spectators see the ball ascend and 
disappear in the air. This product of the 
imagination has received many imaginary 
embellishments. One of the reported 
feats of Hindu jugglers, for instance, 
after having aroused spectators to a 
properly expectant state, is to toss a rope 
into the air, let a small boy climb up, and 
then to watch the poor fellow fall in pieces 
from the clouds-legs, arms, head, and 
trunk. And after having been thus psy- 
chologically decimated, the lad literally 
gathers himself together, jumps up and 
runs away. The only trouble with this 
decorative addition to the original feat of 
throwing balls and other juggling para- 


phernalia into the air is that no one has 
ever been found who has seen the reported 
Hindu trick performed. 
The imagination is always discrediting 
the evidence of our senses, but it makes 
their evidence especially unreliable if the 
emotions are aroused. As recently as 
1907, for example, the authorities of a 
town in the Vosges, fearing a riot, pro- 
hibited a religious procession. A few days 
later, during a violent storm, hailstones 
of unusual size fell, and devout men main- 
tained under oath that they recognized a 
sacred image on these hailstones. 
Every one remembers the wide-spread 
rumor early in the recent war that Rus- 
sian troops were passing through England 
on their way to the battle-front in France. 
The report was so circumstantial that it 
seemed it must be true. The reader will 
recall that the soldiers were described in 
detail. They were unusually tall and 
were said to be Cossacks. The imagina- 
tion evidently did an exceptionally good 
job. 
Two important psychological facts be- 
sides the work of the imagination were 
observed in connection with this rumor. 
First, people believe what they wish may 
happen, and, second, one likes to be per- 
sonally connected with great events. And 
the coming of Russian troops, had they 
come, would have been a tremendously 
importan t event. 
Probably it is because of the effect upon 
the imagination that the curative value 
of a medicine has always depended in 
part upon the obscurity of its name. A 
" Book of Counsels to Young Practi- 
tioners," published a long time ago, ad- 
vised young physicians to use long and 
unintelligible words when speaking to 
their patients. Large-sounding words 
make the advice and medicine more im- 
pressive, And as a bit of evidence that 
years have not removed this curious mys- 
ticism from the human mind, a practising 
physician has recently said, as the result 
of his experience, that a patient sick with 
the mumps was put into a state of mind 
more suitable for cure when told that he 
was suffering from Cynanche parotidæa 
than when the more plebeian name was 
used. And, of course, so important a dis- 
ease as the unintelligible words indicate 
requires a medicine with a name that 



QUACKERY AND ITS PSYCHOLOGY 


makes a correspondingly imaginative ap- 
peal. 
Large, incomprehensible words, a re- 
cent writer has said, are effective because 
they put the patient into a better frame 
of mind. He feels that he has a real dis- 
ease. And physicians have quite properly 
made use of this therapeutic factor. A 
number of years ago rectifiers of the vitals, 
vivifying drops, cephalic tinctures, and an- 
gelic specifics were quite common. Memo- 
ry cures were also in demand by business 
men in those bygone days as memory 
systems are to-day. So we read in an ad- 
vertisemen t in an early number of Ad- 
dison's Spectator that "Loss of memory 
will certainly be cured by a grateful elec- 
tuary, peculiarly adapted for that end." 
The psychological value of meaningless 
words in creating belief has not been over- 
looked by spiritists of to-day. "Lumi- 
nous radiance," " psychic arch," " odic 
effluvia," "radiant aura," "brain waves," 
"odylic force," "switching the brain on 
to the universe," "ectoplasm," and Sir 
Arthur Conan Doyle's "evil elemental" 
and "soul stuff," certainly meet man's 
demand for obscurity. 
Words have always had magical po- 
tency. Fighting cocks in ancient Wales 
were protected by Biblical verses wrapped 
about their legs. Charms were often 
magic writings which were sealed and 
under no conditions to be opened and 
read. The wisdom of this admonition is 
apparent when we find that one which 
had relieved many a sufferer of toothache 
when opened was found to say: c, Good 
devil, cure her, and take her for your 
pains. " 
Among ancient people, the full benefit 
of a medicine-man's prescription was not 
obtained unless the writing of the pre- 
scription was swallowed. Even as late 
as the nineteenth century, Doctor John 
Brown of Edinburgh reports the case of 
a man who consulted him for a severe 
colic. A prescription was written and 
the patient was told to return the follow- 
ing day. At the appointed hour the 
man returned and joyously said that he 
was cured. When the doctor asked to 
see the prescription the patient said that 
he had" taken" it as directed by swallow- 
ing the paper. 
All of these people, of course, had con- 


389 


fidence in their physician and hence in 
his prescription. The imagination will 
not work without confidence. A recent 
writer quotes a physician as saying that 
his medicine never had any effect upon 
his mother-in-law, because she did not be- 
lieve in his ability. 
Why are intelligent people so frequent- 
ly led astray and intellectually ravished 
by fresh onslaughts of occultism? This 
was the question that we asked above, 
and thus far we have found three answers 
-the fascination of the mysterious or the 
lure of the obscure, the influence of the 
imagination, and the effect of large-sound- 
ing, unintelligible words. Superstition, 
of course, is only another name for the 
lure of the obscure. Men fall for the oc- 
cult because they are still superstitious, 
though they like to think that they have 
outgrown that stigma of primitive, sav- 
age man. 
The writer, for example, knows one 
Congressman who invariably carries a 
rabbit's foot in his pocket, and he says 
that it has been the unseen force which 
has elected him through many consecu- 
tive terms. Another acquaintance--a 
business man-assures his friends that he 
wards off rheumatism by means of a 
horse-chestnut that he has carried since 
his first attack, which, incidentally, was 
cured by medical treatment. But that is 
a minor matter which he does not think 
of in connection with his recovery. 
Why did he not ascribe his recovery to 
the medical treatment? The answer ad- 
mits us to one of the secrets of psychol- 
ogy: namely, a believer forgets what 
conflicts with his belief. And this man 
has full confidence in the horse-chestnut. 
Darwin noticed this in himself. "During 
many years I have followed a golden 
rule," he says in his "Autobiography," 
"namely, that whenever a published fact, 
a new observation or thought comes to 
me which is opposed to my general re- 
sults, I make a memorandum of it with- 
out fail and at once; for I have found by 
experience that such facts and thoughts 
are far more apt to escape from memory 
than favorable ones." 
We believe what we want to believe 
and we forget opposing arguments if any 
are so inconsiderate as to come our way. 
But facts which conflict with our cher- 



390 


QUACKERY AND ITS PSYCHOLOGY 


ished beliefs rarely get -so far that they 
must be forgotten because we do not see 
them. Man is mentally blind to the 
things that oppose views which he holds 
dear. Every one has a few of these men- 
tal blind spots. This fundamental fact 
that men believe what they want to be- 
lieve is a tremendously important factor 
in the acceptance of the occult, and this 
brings us to the subject of spiritism, by 
the side of which, according to Sir Ar- 
thur Conan Doyle, the reconstruction of 
Europe is of no importance. 
If spiritism were merely an inexplica- 
ble trick the problem would be quite 
different, because conjurers are nightly 
exhibiting the most marvellous perform- 
ances. Some years ago a celebrated 
magician entered this country from Eng- 
land by allowing passengers on the steam- 
er to nail him up in a box on the deck of 
the boat, weight the box, and throw it 
into the bay. And the next night he ap- 
peared upon the platform to begin his well 
advertised performances. Had this ma- 
gician ascribed his rescue to spirits, thou- 
sands of people would have believed him. 
"I must believe the evidence of my 
eyes," is a common reply to sceptics, but 
magicians are constantly proving that 
we cannot believe what we seec The 
writer recently witnessed such a perform- 
ancec The conjurer passed a card-the 
ace of spades-to a confederate, who 
handed it to the writer that he might be 
assured there was but one cardc A:, soon 
as it was returned to the confederate he 
held it up and instead of being the ace 
of spades it was the king of diamonds. 
Let spirits do something more marvellous 
than conjurers accomplish before the me- 
diums ask us to believe in them. 
A large part of the evidence for spirit- 
ism is based upon the reports of eye- 
witnesses-"all men of honor." David 
Home some years ago was "seen" to sail 
out of a window in one room and float 
back through a window of an adjoining 
room. But the witnesses were believers 
and their minds had been prepared to see 
this feat by earlier performances of a less 
startling sort, and by predictions that 
something much more marvellous would 
happen. Further, the room was dark and 
consequently much of the "seeing" was 
hearing. The sitters heard the window 


raised in the adjoining room, into which 
Home had gone, and a few moments later 
he was seen on the ledge of the window 
through which he was assumed to have 
been wafted back. The two rooms, how- 
ever, were connected by an open door, 
and curtains were hanging conveniently 
between this door and the window 
through which Home was expected to 
enter. An agile man by noisily opening 
the window in the second room could 
easily have coddled the expectation which 
his assurance had already aroused, quietly 
have slipped behind the curtains and 
stepped onto the ledge of the window 
through which his expectant guests were 
awaiting his spiritual appearance. This 
is the way in which a joker would have 
carried off the trick of levitation, but such 
a method is too simple for believers in the 
occult. To them the law of gravitation is 
a negligible factor. 
It should be noticed that only believers 
ever witness these wonderful exhibitions. 
A sceptic may be knocked on the head by 
a tambourine as it flies around the dark- 
ened room--spirits always take an unfair 
advan tage of sceptics-or he may be 
patted on the cheek by a prospective 
spirit bride, but the moment he prepares 
to check up on the mysterious actions the 
spirits refuse to play. 
Now it is a curious fact that when you 
believe that you are going to see some- 
thing you are likely to see it, however im- 
possible the event may be. Some years 
ago a practical joker stood on Trafalgar 
Square in London, and pointed up to the 
model of a lion on the top of a house. 
"See 1" exclaimed the man. "It wags its 
tail [ There! Look! Now it wags it 
again [ " And the expectant crowd ac- 
tually saw the tail of that brazen animal 
move back and forth. It wagged because 
the tense, expectant crowd, with eyes 
fatigued beyond the point of clearest vi- 
sion, were made to see it move by verbal 
motion pictures. 
People readily believe what they hope 
may happen. Expectancy prepares the 
mind to see and hear that for which one 
is looking. We all know how expectancy 
works when we are awaiting a friend who 
is to arrive on a certain train. As we 
stand at the railway gate intently watch- 
ing the crowd that streams through we 



QUACKERY AND ITS PSYCHOLOGY 


start every few moments, thinking that 
we see our friend. But the next glance 
reveals our error. 
Lay the foundation of belief in the oc- 
cult, one writer has said, and the rest is 
easy, since a believer will then accept any 
manifestation or communication as pro- 
duced by spirits. But the same state- 
ment may be made about other matters. 
Lay the foundation for belief in anything 
and the converted see only what agrees 
with their opinions. The blind spot then 
begins to obscure the vision, and experi- 
ments as well as experience are without 
value. 
One writer who through several months 
manufactured spirit communications to 
order for a group of intelligent, educated 
men that he might prove to them how 
easily it may be done, says that the art of 
mediumship is to get information indi- 
rectly, and then to give it back to the 
sitter as the message of a spirit. But this 
is only a part of the story. To be sure, 
men do literally" give themselves away" 
in the questions that they ask, and the 
interesting psychological fact is that they 
do not know that they have betrayed 
themselves. The man whom one fools 
the easiest is oneself. Howard Thurston, 
the magician, once remarked that those 
who attend his performances are continu- 
ally insisting that they saw him do things 
which he actually did not do. 
li the imagination makes well men sick, 
if, under the spell of large-sounding 
phrases, it cures many who believe that 
they are sick, if it causes men to see things 
which do not happen, what may it not do 
in the presence of mysterious perform- 
ances that are ascribed to occult forces? 
Imagination, the lure of the mysterious, 
and the subtle influence of obscure ex- 
planations, all come to the aid of spirits 
who seek to broadcast their communica- 
tions to believers. 
The imagination of expectant ct sitters" 
also enables mediums to economize space 
in the equipment which they carry. One 
illuminated head serves for the face of 
one spirit as well as another. Not so 
many years ago, Buguet, a famous spirit 
photographer, was arrested and made a 
full confession. In the beginning of his 
career, his assistants, he said, played the 
part of departed spirits. But later, fear- 


391 


ing lest their faces would be recognized, 
he made a headless doll. Various heads 
were then manufactured to suit the needs 
and expectations of the sitters. A large 
stock of heads was found by the police in 
Buguet's spirit studio. These heads had 
been recognized by numberless sitters as 
the spirits of relatives who had passed be- 
yond, and by a few, who were more inter- 
ested in the celestial activities of famous 
men, as the materialization of Charles 
Dickens and other distinguished persons. 
Another medium, whose conscience 
would not permit him to allow successors 
to reap the profits which he had made, 
has said that not even a head or mask is 
necessary. This medium wrapped a 
handkerchief loosely around a bottle 
filled with water and illuminated with the 
phosphorus of matches. And when he 
slowly moved this" head" in front of his 
cabinet, spectators recognized their de- 
parted fathers and husbands. One man, 
a physician who was more interested in 
anatomy than in those who had passed 
beyond, saw the convolutions of the brain. 
Celestial communications are still in 
good form, though in other matters spirits 
have become more circumspect in recent 
years. In the good old days they staged 
some highly interesting stunts. They 
tipped tables, wrote on sealed slates, read 
sealed writing, touched sitters with cold 
hands, played on musical instruments 
that were flying through the air, gave in- 
formation "known only to the sitter," 
struck sceptics on the head, and young 
feminine spirits embraced old men who 
were known by those on this earthly plane 
to be rich. 
It is a rather interesting coincidence 
that the change in the programme of me- 
diums followed many exposures of trick- 
ery. The climax came when amateur 
conjurers succeeded in duplicating the 
performances which had for many years 
startled the world. 
S. J. Davey, an amateur performer, 
who was connected with the London So- 
ciety for Psychical Research, produced 
"spirit writing" on the inside of double 
slates which had been carefully cleaned 
by the sitter and then screwed together. 
Every attempt to discover his method 
failed. He wrote on locked slates, the 
key of which was in the pocket of the 



392 


QUACKERY AND ITS PSYCHOLOGY 


sitter; on slates tied, sealed and stamped 
with a monogram, and he wrote in colored 
pencils or ink selected by the sitter; he 
quoted passages from a given page and 
line of a book which the sitter thought he 
had selected at random from shelves con- 
taining upward of a thousand volumes; 
he made glass jars march across the table 
and he induced crayons to draw the fig- 
ures requested by the investigator. All 
of these things were done in full gas-light. 
In the darkness of the usual seances, 
raps were heard, cold hands felt, and 
musical instruments floated round the 
room, playing their tunes; a woman and 
a man appeared in the dim light, bowing 
to the spectators. In only one of these 
cases was his trick discovered and this 
discovery was an accident before the per- 
formance began. He was never caught 
while performing his tricks. Yet Mr. 
Davey was an amateur at the business. 
His purpose was to see what could be done 
by trickery and to ascertain how much 
the credulity of men would accept. And 
his success was the more astonishing be- 
cause he was dealing with unbelievers. 
His sitters were investigators who were 
told to watch and detect him if they 
could. And they failed because of the 
way in which the human mind works- 
or doesn't work. 
Of course Mr. Davey used the "tricks 
of the trade," which are based upon hu- 
man psychology. A continuous stream 
of "patter," or chatter, diverted the at- 
tention of the sitter when the "medium" 
wished to substitute one slate for another, 
and the book from which the quotation 
was written was forced upon the sitter 
though neither he nor the performer laid 
hands upon it. The book, in fact, was not 
removed from the shelf. Real mediums 
use a simpler method. They have books 
especially prepared in which each page is 
alike with the exception of the number. 
So it doesn't matter between which leaves 
the knife blade is thrust, the passage will 
be found written on the slate which has 
been previously prepared. Of course 
slates are washed in the presence of the 
8itter before being fastened together, but 
that does not erase the writing, which is 
under a lining that looks exactly like the 
slate. The lining is what is washed and 
afterward, during an outpouring of patter 


which distracts the attention of the sitter, 
this lining is deftly removed, so that when 
the slates are opened the passage which 
had been selected " at random" and 
which" neither the medium nor the sitter 
had seen" is found written within. 
Spiritists have recently secured a 
strategical advantage. Immediately after 
the war they took the offensive, and thus 
far they have kept it. Instead of trying 
to verify and prove their celestial com- 
munications, as in the past, they now 
present the evidence and calmly say, 
"Disprove it." It is as though an African 
explorer were to answer doubts regarding 
his discovery of a race of African monkeys 
that speak the English language by say- 
ing, "I have heard them talk, disprove it 
if you can." 
Few, probably, doubt the sincerity of 
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but his com- 
petence as a witness must be seriously 
questioned. He wanted to believe in 
communion with spirits when he began 
his investigations, and that attitude of 
mind disqualifies one's testimony. The 
will to believe makes one see the things 
one wishes to see. 
Spirit photographs prove nothing, be- 
cause they can be made to order. In- 
deed, one photographer has offered to 
make any kind of a spirit picture that Sir 
Arthur may request. And if all of the 
phenomena which are ascribed to spirits 
can be produced by natural means the 
supernormal must at any rate be held 
under suspicion. 
We hear much to-day about the" acid 
test" to be applied to spiritism, but there 
is no acid test. .l\-Iediums have been 
investigated and exposed until both the 
acid and patience with man's credulity 
are well-nigh exhausted. But believers 
are continually bringing forth a new 
medium and saying, "Try your acid test 
on this one." Eusapia Palladino was 
brought from Italy and exhibited as one 
who through years of spirit intercourse 
had never been caught in trickery. And 
her exposure was so complete that it was 
almost pathetic. Yet man's quest of the 
supernatural is so keen that spirit broad- 
casting has continued with unabated vigor. 
The human mind is much the same as 
when witchcraft- and possession by the 
devil were believed inc The chief differ- 



QUACKERY AND ITS PSYCHOLOGY 


ence is that the devil, ably supported by 
imagination and superstition, plays a dif- 
ferent rôle in the changing ages. And 
there are many characters and plots in this 
continuous moving-picture show of hu- 
man credulity. The contradictory ac- 
counts of the same seance show not only 
that an investigator cannot be sure that 
he has seen what has occurred but, in ad- 
dition, he cannot be certain of what he 
himself has done, 
The investigator's intention, for ex- 
ample, to use the slates which he has 
brought to a writing seance and not to al- 
low them to leave his hands is foiled, in 
the excitement of the moment, by the 
skilful diversion of his attention in vari- 
ous ways. Even when no attempt is made 
to divert the attention reports are inac- 
curate. A striking instance has been re- 
ported by one of the investigators. 
A man regarded as unusually observing 
once made the statement that a table was 
lifted from the floor when no one was 
within a yard of it. But later, when he 
conferred with others who were present, 
he found to his amazement that several 
insisted that the hands of all participants 
were upon the table. 
Then, again, the intention to do a 
definite thing becomes so fixed in the 
mind that one is confident that the thing 
was donec An illustration will make this 
clear. A juggler was entertaining a crowd 
by making various small objects dance 
around upon the ground. One of the 
spectators took a quarter from his pocket 
with the intention of placing it apart from 
the others. But as he started to lay it 
down the juggler deftly received it in his 
hand and placed it with his own. During 
the later discussion of the trick the spec- 
tator insisted that he himself had placed 
his coin upon the ground at a distance 
from the others, but one who had watched 
the game assured him that he saw the 
conjurer receive the quarter and place it 
where the trick would work. Thus does 
our memory play us false. J t is one of the 
jokers of the human mind. When once 
we have firmly decided to do a thing our 
memory later tells us that we have done 
it. And mediums, as well as conjurers, 
take advantage of the tricks that memory 
plays upon us. 
But aside from trickery there are some 


393 


who fool others because they fool them- 
selves. An illustration will show the way 
in which one thus deceives oneself. 
A young woman, as the story is related 
by Mr. Frank Podmore, fell in love with 
a young man. When she discovered no 
evidence of his affection her effort to pre- 
serve her self-respect caused her to be- 
lieve that he would love her but for the 
malice of her enemies. Soon after this she 
began to show signs of hysteriac She be- 
came possessed by the spirit of the object 
of her affections, imitating his words and 
personality. She conversed, as she be- 
lieved, with his ghost, though he was still 
alive, and she had visions in which she 
thought she saw what he was doing. 
Sometimes he talked with her through an 
"inner voice," or spoke to her aloud 
through her own mouth. At other times 
he wrote messages to her with her own 
hand, and the writing is said to have re- 
sembled that of the young man. This 
was her diseased way of getting compen- 
sation for affection unrequited. 
We have found some reasons for man's 
"love of being quacked." In matters oc- 
cult these reasons are deeply rooted in 
human nature. Men consult mediums 
to-day for much the same reasons that led 
the ancient Greeks and Romans to con- 
sult their soothsayers and their oracles. 
They want to be comforted. But they 
want to be comforted by assurance that 
their beliefs are true and that their wishes 
will be realized, and these assurances the 
spirits are always glad to give. If the 
medium is trying to deceive, his reward 
depends on satisfying those who seek con- 
solation. And if, as in the case just given, 
the spirit communication is the result of 
emotional exaltation or terrible mental 
strain, it expresses the innennost longings 
and hopes of the afflicted. 
"Seeing things" which do not exist, 
hearing sounds for which no cause can be 
found, and being touched in the dark- 
ness by soft feminine hands give men real 
joy. Limitation to natural laws is too 
commonplace. Eu t connection with mys- 
terious forces gives one distinction. So 
the lure of the obscure and imagination 
come to the aid of those who want to be- 
lieve in the occult. And the range of the 
imagination is unrestricted by such trivial 
matters as laws of nature. 



394 CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL 


Man's mind is a wonderfully adaptable in earlier days was a sign of witches or 
organ. It fits whatever he finds and he possession by the devil, those who seek 
finds what he is looking for. So, led on spirits will find them. And the mental 
by love of the mysterious, aided by tricks blind spot conveniently hides from view 
of the imagination and by the fascination whatever is opposed to that which one 
of meaningless words, and supported by wishes to believe. "Quackery and the 
occasional raps and utterances of those love of being quacked are, in human na- 
afflicted with some mental disorder which ture, as weeds in our fields." 


Character and Situation in the Novel 


BY EDITH WHARTON 
Author of "The Writing of Fiction," etc. 


I 


EFINITIONS, how- 
ever difficult and in- 
adequate, are the nec- 
essary "tools of 
criticism." To begin, 
therefore, one may dis- 
tinguish the novel of 
situation from that of 
character and manners by saying that, in 
the first, the persons imagined by the 
author almost always spring out of a vi- 
sion of the situation, and are inevitably 
conditioned by it, whatever the genius of 
their creator; whereas in the larger freer 
form, that of character and manners (or 
either of the two), the author's characters 
are first born, and then mysteriously pro- 
ceed to work out their own destinies. Let 
it, at any rate, be understood that this 
rough distinction shall serve in the follow- 
ing pages to mark the difference between 
the two ways of presenting the subject 
since most subjects lend themselves to 
being treated from either point of view. 
It is not easy to find, among great novels 
written in English, examples of novels of 
pure situation, that is, in which the situa- 
tion is what the book is remembered byc 
Perhaps "The Scarlet Letter" might be 
cited as one of the few obvious examples. 
In "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," which one 
is tempted to name also, the study of 
character is so interwoven with the drama 
as to raise the story-for all its obvious 
shortcomings-to the level of those su- 


preme novels which escape classification. 
For if one remembers Tess's tragedy, still 
more vividly does one remember Tess her- 
self. 
In continental literature several famous 
books at once present themselves in the 
situation group. One of the earliest, as it 
is the most famous, is Goethe's "Elective 
Affinities," where a great and terrible 
drama involves characters of which the 
creator has not managed quite to sever the 
marionette wires. Who indeed remembers 
those vague initialled creatures, whom the 
author himself forgot to pull out of their 
limbo in his eagerness to mature and pol- 
ish their ingenious misfortunes? 
Tolstoy's" The Kreutzer Sonata" is an- 
other book which lives only by force of 
situation, sustained, of course, by the pro- 
found analysis of a universal passion. No 
one remembers who the people in "The 
Kreutzer Sonata" were, or what they 
looked like, or what sort of a house they 
lived in-but the very roots of human 
jealousy are laid bare in the picture of the 
vague undifferentiated husband, a puppet 
who comes to life only in function of his 
one ferocious passion. Balzac alone, per- 
haps, managed to make of his novels of 
situation-such as "César Birotteau" or 
"Le Curé de Tours"-such relentless and 
penetrating character studies that their 
protagonists and the difficulties which be- 
set them leap together to the memory 
whenever the tales are named. But this 
fusion of categories is the prerogative of 
the few, of those who know how to write 



CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL 395 


all kinds of novels, and who choose, each 
time, the Vl3.y best suited to the subject in 
hand. 
Novels preeminently of character, in 
which situation, dramatically viewed, is 
reduced to the minimum, are far easier 
to find. Jane Austen has given the norm, 
the ideal, of this type. Of her tales it 
might almost be said that the reader some- 
times forgets what happens to her charac- 
ters in his haunting remembrance of their 
foibles and oddities, their little daily 
round of preoccupations and pleasures. 
They are "speaking" portraits, following 
one with their eyes in that uncannily life- 
like way that good portraits have, rather 
than passionate disordered people drag- 
ging one impetuously into the tangle of 
their tragedy, as one is dragged by the 
characters of Stendhal, Thackeray and 
Balzac. Not that Jane Austen's char- 
acters do not follow their predestined or- 
bit. They evolve as real people do, but so 
softly, noiselessly, that to follow the de- 
velopment of their history is as quiet a 
business as watching the passage of the 
seasons. A sense of her limitations as cer- 
tain as a sense of her power must have 
kept her-unconsciously or not-from 
trying to thrust these little people into 
great actions, and made her choose the 
quiet setting which enabled her to round 
out her portraits as imperceptibly as the 
sun models a fruit. "Emma" is perhaps 
the most perfect example in English fic- 
tion of a novel in which character shapes 
events quietly but irresistibly, as a stream 
nibbles away its banks. 
Next to "Emma" one might place, in 
this category, the masterpiece of a very 
different hand: "The Egoist" of Meredith. 
In this book, though by means so alien to 
:Miss Austen's delicate procedure that one 
balks at the comparison, the fantastic 
novelist, whose antics too often make one 
forget his insight, discarding most of his 
fatiguing follies, gives a rich and delib- 
erate study of a real human being. But 
he does not quite achieve Jane Austen's 
success. His Willoughby Patterne is typ- 
ical before he is individual, while every 
character in "Emma" is both and in de- 
grees always perfectly proportioned. Still, 
the two books are preeminent achieve- 

ents in the field of pure character-draw- 
mg, and one must turn to the greatest con- 


tinental novelists-to Balzac again (as 
always), to Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoiev- 
sky, Turgenev, Marcel Proust, or perhaps 
to the very occasional best of Trollope- 
to match such searching and elaborate 
studies. 
But among the continental novelists- 
with few exceptions-the delineation of 
character is inextricably combined with 
the study of manners, as for instance in 
the novels of Tolstoy, of Balzac and of 
Flaubert. Turgenev, in "Dmitri Rud- 
in," gave the somewhat rare example of a 
novel made almost entirely out of the por- 
trayal of a single character; as, at the 
opposite extreme, Samuel Butler's "Way 
of all Flesh," for all its brilliant character- 
drawing, is essentially the portrait of a 
family and a social group-one of the most 
distinctive novels of "manners" it is pos- 
sible to find. 
Such preliminary suggestions, cursory 
as they are, may help, better than me,1 e 
definitions, to keep in mind the differinè-' 
types of novel in which either character 
or situation weighs down the scales. 


II 
THE novel, in the hands of English- 
speaking writers, has always tended, as it 
rose in value, to turn to pictures of char- 
acter and manners, however much blent 
with dramatic episodes, or entangled in 
what used to be vaguely known as a plot. 
The plot, in the traditional sense of the 
term, consisted in some clash of events, or, 
less often, of character. But it was an 
arbitrarily imposed and rather spaciously 
built framework, inside of which the 
people concerned had room to develop 
their idiosyncrasies and be themselves, ex- 
cept in the crucial moments when they 
became the puppets of the plot. 
The real novel of situation, a compacter 
and above aU a more inevitable affair, did 
not, at least on English soil, take shape 
till "plot," in the old-fashioned sense of a 
coil of outward happenings, was giving 
way to the discovery that real drama is 
soul-drama. The novel of situation, in- 
deed, has never really acclimatized itself 
in English-speaking countries; whereas in 
France it seems to have grown naturally 
from the psychological novel of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein 



396 CHARACTER AND SITUATIO
 IN THE NOVEL 


the conflict of characters tended from the 
first to simplify the drawing of character 
and to turn the protagonists into embodi- 
ments of a particular passion rather than 
of a particular person. 
From this danger the English novelist 
has usually been guarded by an inexhaus- 
tible interest in personality, and a fancy 
for loitering by the way. The plots of 
Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot 
and their successors are almost detachable 
at will, so arbitrarily are they imposed on 
the novel of character which was slowly 
but steadily developing within their lax 
support, and which became, as the nine- 
teenth century advanced, the typical form 
of English fiction. 
The novel of situation is a different 
matter. The situation, instead of being 
imposed from the outside, is the kernel of 
the tale and its only reason for being. It 
seizes the characters in its steely grip, and 
jiu-jitsus them into the required attitude 
with a relentlessness against which only 
genius can prevail. In every form of 
novel it is noticeable that the central 
characters tend to be the least real. This 
seems to be partly explained by the fact 
that these characters, survivors of the old 
"hero" and "heroine," whose business it 
it was not to be real but to be sublime, are 
still, though often without the author's 
being aware of it, the standard-bearers of 
his convictions or the expression of his 
secret inclinations. They are his in the 
sense of tending to do and say what he 
would do, or imagines he would do, in 
given circumstances, and being mere pro- 
jections of his own personality they lack 
the substance and relief of the minor 
characters, whom he views coolly and ob- 
jectively, in all their human weakness and 
inconsequence. But there remains an- 
other reason, less often recognized, for the 
unreality of novel "heroes" and "hero- 
ines," a reason especially applicable to the 
leading figures in the novel of situation. 
It is that the story is about them, and forces 
them into the shape which its events im- 
pose, while the subordinate characters, 
moving at ease in the interstices of the 
tale, and free to go about their business in 
the illogical human fashion, remain real 
to writer and readers. 
This fact, exemplified in all novels, be- 
comes most vivid in the novel of situation, 


where the characters tend to turn into 
Laocoöns, and die in the merciless coils of 
their adventure. This is the extreme 
point of the difference between the novel 
of situation and of character, and the 
cause of the common habit of regarding 
them as alternative methods of fiction. 


III 
THE thoughtful critic who would be rid 
of the cheap formulas of fiction-reviewing, 
and reach some clearer and deeper expres- 
sion of the sense and limitations of the art, 
is sure to resent the glib definition of the 
novel of situation and the novel of char- 
acter (or manners) as necessarily anti- 
thetical and mutually exclusive. The 
thoughtful critic will be right; and the 
thoughtful novelist will share his view. 
What sense is there in such arbitrary di- 
visions, such opposings of one manner to 
another, when almost all the greatest 
novels are there, in their versa tili ty and 
their abundance, to show the glorious pos- 
sibility of welding both types of fiction in- 
to a single masterpiece? 
In what category, for instance, should 
" Anna Karenina" be placed? U ndoubt- 
edly in that of novels of character and 
manners. Yet if one sums up the tale in 
its rapidity and its vehemence, what situ- 
ation did Dumas Fils ever devise for his 
theatre" of situation" half so poignant or 
so dramatic as that which Tolstoy man- 
ages to keep conspicuously afloat on the 
wide tossing expanse of the Russian social 
scene? In "Vanity Fair," again, so pre- 
eminently a novel of manners, a novel of 
character, with what dramatic intensity 
the situation between Becky, Rawdon and 
Lord Steyne stands out from the rich pop- 
ulous pages, and gathers up into itself all 
their diffused significance! 
The answer is evident: above a certain 
height of creative capacity the different 
methods, the seemingly conflicting points 
of view, are merged in the artist's compre- 
hensive vision, and the situations inherent 
in his subject detach themselves in strong 
relief from the fullest background without 
disturbing the general composition. 
But though this is true, it is true only of 
the greatest novelists-those who, as 
Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare, do 
not abide our question but are free, In 



CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL 397 


them, vast vision is united to equivalent 
powers of coordination; but more often 
the novelist who has the creative vision 
lacks the capacity for coordinating and 
rendering his subject, or at least is unable, 
in the same creation, to give an equal part 
to the development of character and to the 
clash of situation. Owing to the lack of 
that supreme equipment which always 
rises above classification, most of the nov- 
elists have tended to let their work fall 
into one of the two categories of situation 
or character, thus fortifying the theory of 
the superficial critics that life in fiction 
must be presented either as conflict or as 
character. 
The so-called novel of character, even 
in less than the most powerful hands, does 
not, of course, preclude situation in the 
sense of a dramatic clash. But the nov- 
elist develops his tale through a succession 
of episodes, all in some way illustrative of 
the manners or the characters out of which 
the situation is eventually to spring; he 
lingers on the way, is not afraid of by- 
paths, and enriches his scene with subor- 
dinate pictures, as the mediæval mini- 
aturist encloses his chief subjects in a 
border of beautiful ornament and delicate 
vignettes; whereas the novel of situation 
is, by definition, one in which the problem 
to be worked out in a particular human 
conscience, or the clash between conflict- 
ing wills, is the novelist's chief if not his 
only theme, and everything not directly 
illuminative of it must be left out as irrele- 
vant. This does not mean that in the 
latter type of tale-as, for instance, in 
"Tess of the d'Urbervilles"-the episode, 
the touch of colour or character, is for- 
bidden. The modern novelist of situation 
does not seem likely to return to the mon- 
ochrome starkness of "Adolphe" or "La 
Princesse de Clèves." He uses every scrap 
of colour, every picturesque by-product of 
his subject which that subject yields; but 
he avoids adding to it a single touch, how- 
ever decoratively tempting, which is not 
part of the design. 
If the two methods are thus contrasted, 
the novel of character and manners may 
seem superior in richness, variety and play 
of light and shade. This does not prove 
that it is necessarily capable of a greater 
total effect than the other; yet so far the 
greatest novels have undoubtedly dealt 


with character and manners rather than 
with mere situation. The inference is in- 
deed almost irresistible that the farther 
the novel is removed in treatment from 
theatrical modes of expression, the more 
nearly it attains its purpose as a freer art, 
appealing to those more subtle imagina- 
tive requirements which the stage can 
never completely satisfy. 
When the novelist has been possessed 
by a situation, and sees his characters 
hurrying to its culmination, he must have 
unusual keenness of vision and sureness 
of hand to fix their lineaments and detain 
them on their way long enough for the 
reader to recognize them as real human 
beings. In the novel of pure situation it 
is doubtful if this has ever been done with 
moreart than in "The Wrong Box," where 
Stevenson launched on his roaring torrent 
of farce a group of real people, alive and 
individual, who keep their reality and in- 
dividuality till the end. The tears of 
laughter that the book provokes generally 
blind the reader to its subtle character- 
drawing; but, save for the people in "Gil 
Bias," and the memorable figures of 
Chicot and Gorenflot in the Dumas cycle 
headed by "La Dame de Montsoreau," it 
would be hard, in any tale of action, to 
find characters as vivid and individual as 
those which rollick through this glorious 
farce. 
The tendency of the situation to take 
hold of the novelist's imagination, and to 
impose its own tempo on his tale, can be 
resisted only by richness and solidity of 
temperament. The writer must have a 
range wide enough to include, within the 
march of unalterable law, all the incon- 
sequences of human desire, ambition, 
cruelty, weakness and sublimity. He 
must, above all, bear in mind at each step 
that his business is not to ask what the 
situation would be likely to make of his 
characters, but what his characters, being 
what they are, would make of the situa- 
tion. This question, which is the tuning- 
fork of truth, never needs to be more insis- 
tentlyapplied than in writing the dialogue 
which usually marks the culminating 
scenes in fiction. The moment the nov- 
elist finds that his characters are talking 
not as they naturally would, but as the 
situation requires, are visibly lending him 
a helping hand in the more rapid elucida- 



398 CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL 


tion of his drama, the moment he hears 
them saying anything which the stress of 
their predicament would not naturally 
bring to their lips, his effect has been pro- 
duced at the expense of reality, and he 
will find them turning to sawdust on his 
hands. 
Some novelists, conscious of the danger, 
and not sufficiently skilled to meet it, 
have tried to turn it by interlarding these 
crucial dialogues with irrelevant small- 
talk, in the hope of thus producing a 
greater air of reality. But this is to fall 
again into the trap of what Balzac called 
"a reality in nature which is not one in 
art." The object of dialogue is to gather 
up the loose strands of passion and emo- 
tion running through the tale; and the at- 
tempt to entangle these threads in desul- 
tory chatter about the weather or the 
village pump proves only that the narra- 
tor has not known how to do the necessary 
work of selection. All the novelist's art is 
brought into play by such tests. His 
characters must talk as they would in 
reality, and yet everything not relevant 
to his tale must be eliminated. The se- 
cret of success lies in his instinct of selec
 
tion. 
These difficulties are not a reason for 
condemning the novel of situation as an 
inferior, or at least as a not-worth-while, 
form of the art. Inferior to the larger 
form, the novel of character and manners, 
it probably is, if only in the matter of 
scale; but certainly also worth-while, since 
it is the natural vehicle of certain creative 
minds. As long as there are novelists 
whose inventive faculty presents them 
first with the form, and only afterward 
with the substance, of the tales they want 
to tell, the novel of situation will fill a pur- 
pose. But it is precisely this type of mind 
which needs to be warned against the dan- 
gers of the form. When the problem 
comes to the novelist before he sees the 
characters engaged in it, he must be all the 
more deliberate in dealing with it, must let 
it lie in his mind till it brings forth of it- 
self the kind of people who would natur- 
ally be involved in that particular plight. 
The novelist's permanent problem is that 
of making his people at once typical and 
individual, universal and particular; and 
in adopting the form of the novel of situa- 
tion he perpetually runs the risk of upset- 


ting that nice balance of attributes unless 
he persists in thinking of his human beings 
first, and of their predicament only as the 
outcome of what they are. 


IV 


THE predicament-the situation-must 
still be borne in mind if the novelist ap- 
proaches his task in another way, and sees 
his tale as situation illustrating character 
instead of the reverse. 
Even the novel of character and man- 
ners can never be without situation, that 
is, without some sort of climax caused by 
the contending forces engaged. The con- 
flict, the shock of forces, is latent in every 
attempt to detach a fragment of human 
experience and transpose it in terms of 
art, that is, of completion. 
The seeming alternative is to fall back 
on the" stream of consciousness "-which 
is simply the" slice-of -lif e" of the' eigh ties 
renamed-but that method, as has al- 
ready been pointed out, contains its own 
condemnation, since every attempt to em- 
ploy it of necessity involves selection, and 
selection in the long run must eventually 
lead to the transposition, the "styliza- 
tion," of the subject. 
Let it be assumed, then, that a predica- 
ment there must be, whether worked out 
in one soul, or created by the shock of op- 
posing purposes. The larger the canvas 
of the novel-supposing the novelist's 
powers to be in scale with his theme-the 
larger will be the scale of the predicament. 
In the great novel of manners in which 
Balzac, Thackeray and Tolstoy were pre- 
eminent, the conflict engages not only 
individuals but social groups, and the indi- 
vidual plight is usually the product-one 
of the many products-of the social con- 
flict. There is a sense in which situation 
is the core of every tale, and as truly 
present in the quiet pages of "Eugénie 
Grandet" or "Le Lys dans la Vallée" as 
in the tense tragedy of "The Return of the 
Native," the epic clash of "War and 
Peace" or the dense social turmoil of 
"Vanity Fair." 
But the main advantage of the novelist 
to whom his subject first presents itself in 
terms of character, either individual or 
social, is that he can quietly watch his 
people or his group going about their busi- 



THE HAPPY DEAD 


ness, and let the form of his tale grow out 
of what they are, out of their idiosyn- 
crasies, their humours and their preju- 
dices, instead of fitting a situation onto 
them before he really knows them, either 
personally or collectively. 
It is manifest that every method of fic- 
tion has its dangers, and that the study of 
character pursued to excess may tend to 
submerge the action necessary to illus- 
trate that character. In the inevitable 
reaction against the arbitrary "plot" 
many novelists have gone too far in the 
other direction, either swamping them- 
selves in the tedious " stream of con- 
sciousness," or else-another frequent 
error-giving an exaggerated importance 
to trivial inciden ts when the tale is con- 
cerned with trivial lives. There is a sense 
in which nothing which receives the touch 
of art is trivial; but to rise to this height 
the incident, insignificant in itself, must 
illustrate some general law, and turn on 
some deep movement of the soul. If the 
novelist wants to hang his drama on a 
button, let it at least be one of Lear's. 


399 


All things hold together in the practice 
of any art, and character and manners, 
and the climaxes springing out of them, 
cannot, in the art of fiction, be dealt with 
separately without diminution to the sub- 
ject. It is a matter for the novelist's 
genius to combine all these ingredients in 
their due proportion; and then we shall 
have "Emma" or "The Egoist" if char- 
acter is to be given the first place, "Le 
Père Goriot" or "Madame Bovary" if 
drama is to be blent with it, and "War 
and Peace," "Vanity Fair," "L'Educa- 
tion Sentimentale" if all the points of 
view and all the methods are to be har- 
monized in the achievement of a great 
picture wherein the individual, the group 
and their social background have each a 
perfectly apportioned share in the com- 
posi tion. 
"Four great walls in the New Jerusalem 
Meted on each side by the angel's reed-" 
Yes; but to cover such spaces adequate- 
ly happens even to the greatest artists 
only once or twice in their career. 


The Happy Dead 
BY KARLE WILSON BAKER 


WF..EN I'm alone, the happy dead 
Brush me with soft and silver wings- 
Drop smilingly on hands or head 
A touch that brings 


Suddenest joy, as when, half-heard, 
An early leaf comes slipping down, 
Hinting a brief, secretive word 
Of autumn brown; 


Or when the wild geese taunt my 
soul 
Awake with clamor in the night, 
Desiring urgently a goal 
Folded from sight. 
So come the happy dead, to bless 
Still hours I hedge about for them, 


Bringing me peace, or holy stress, 
Joy like a gem- 
Joy like the rosy red that dyes 
Old door-step flowers with just the glow 
That lit my childish ecstasies 
Ages ago. 
I wish the dear and happy dead 
Might reach me through the heavy noons 
When, spent with cares for cloak and 
bread, 
The spirit swoons; 


But they would smother in that haze- 
They wait beyond that cloudy din. 
Their feet gleam down the quiet ways 
I yet shall winc 



British Labor Steps Ahead 


ITS INFLUENCE ON LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES 


BY EDWIN W. HULLINGER 
Author of "Radicalism in the United States" 


no
1Io.
Ä F all social develop- 


 ments in the Anglo- 
[QJ 
 Saxon world during 
O I
 ' 
 the last half-century, 
along with the growth 
. of our modern in- 
Ä

Ä dustrial system, the 
rise to power of or- 
ganized labor in both England and the 
United States stands out with command- 
ing importance. It is a factor that has 
intrinsically changed the social and eco- 
nomic picture in the United States, and 
in England labor is already becoming a 
political feature of steadily growing mo- 
ment-despite the defeat of the Labor 
party at the polls last autumn. I say 
Anglo-Saxon world, because, although 
labor is moving into prominence in all 
civilized countries, it is in the Anglo- 
Saxon lands that it has reached its highest 
development. In France the growth of 
trade-unionism has been held in check to 
an extent by the overpowering individual- 
ism of the French worker, who has repeat- 
edly refused in time of crisis to sacrifice 
for the common cause what he believed 
to be his own immediate personal advan- 
tage. German labor, while bctter organ- 
ized, has also suffered from lack of moral 
courage. And Italian labor is momen- 
tarily eclipsed by Fascism. 
From a starting-point of virtual impo- 
tence in the last century labor has risen, 
in America and England, to a point where 
it is now able to make or unmake social 
destiny. Labor has a human and eco- 
nomic strength almost equal to capital, 
and must hereafter be taken seriously 
into account in any calculation of the 
future. The balance of social forces has 
been fundamentally changed from what 
it was seventy years ago. He who would 
look into to-morrow must not neglect to 
study labor of to-day-its structure, 
4 00 


methods, and, most important, the kind of 
men it is bringing to the fore. 
Without entering into too great detail, 
it may also be said, in my opinion, that 
labor itself is now on the threshold of a 
new phase in its development. Its first 
cycle-its struggle for recognition and 
the fight exclusively for higher wages-is 
nearing its end, both aims being on a fair 
way toward attainment. (And in the 
final analysis, the raising of wages is a 
process which, by its nature, cannot go on 
indefinitely.) A new objective is begin- 
ning to take form, and this objective will 
be, as I see the signs, the great issue of the 
next century-labor's demand for a share 
in the actual control of industry. This 
demand is already prominent in England. 
It is less emphatic, but nevertheless audi- 
ble, in America. It is a development in 
the evolution of the movement which is 
not hard to understand. 
It is partly because British labor has 
already entered this second cycle of its 
development, while American labor is still 
hardly emerged from the first period, that 
the British labor movement offers a pe- 
culiarly attractive field of study to the 
student of American social economics. 
Partly, also, because on account of the lan- 
guage tie, British labor is coming to have 
an increasing influence on American labor 
at the moment, although in so many ways 
the two national movements are so differ- 
ent. And, passing over all these facts, 
there is still another fcature of the British 
trade-union movement that compels at- 
tention-the fact that it has been able to 
develop from its own ranks a type of 
leader distinctly above the usual run of 
leaders in the American labor movement 
-a real labor statesman, whose capaci- 
ties compare not unfavorably with the 
fine minds in "capitalist" groups in Amer- 
ica. 



II 


BRITISH LABOR STEPS AHEAD 


401 


IN attempting any study of the British 
labor movement, it is necessary first of 
all to visualize clearly the organic differ- 
ence in the structure of the country as 
compared with our own. It is a differ- 
ence which, in my opinion, has played an 
extremely important part in accounting 
both for the form which the movement 
has taken and for the superior type of 
leader at the head of the English move- 
ment. 
The British labor movement came into 
existence in a social organism that was 
intrinsically different from that of the 
United States, a country in its formative 
stage, with its outlines constantly chang- 
ing and its population and classes in con- 
stant shift-a land which until very re- 
cently has been conspicuous owing to the 
relative absence of fixed lines between 
the social groups. British trade-unionism 
was created in a country that had long 
since reached a definite social mould. 
The island's population has been firmly 
fixed for centuries in a "caste" system 
which has furnished the background for 
all of England's internal history since feu- 
dalism, a system to which the whole men- 
tal attitude of the nation had adapted it- 
selL British trade-unionism had to extend 
itself inside class walls too solidlyestab- 
lished in tradition to be broken down, 
which reached through both economic 
and social aspects of national life. 
England was a land where cobblers' 
sons were cobblers, traders' sons mer- 
chants, and where nobody expected any- 
thing else. Generally speaking, each 
class filled a definite sphere in economic 
and social life, kept distinctly to itself, 
and had its distinct class characteristics 
(which extended even to physical con- 
formity of the face and manner of speech). 
Even to-day, despite the corrosive in- 
fluences of twentieth-century democratic 
political currents, these differences con- 
stitute a real human factor in national life 
from which no individual can escape 
fundamentally. A member of one class 
stands out conspicuously in the midst of a 
group belonging to another class; and since 
the control of industrial affairs still rests 
largely with the upper classes, "lower- 
class" origin is something that is a de- 
VOL. LXXVIII.- 2 9 


cided handicap to a member of that group 
moving in circles where his superiors pre- 
dominate. The war made a breach in the 
system, it is true. Fighting side by side, 
men came to see human virtues in men in 
other social groups which they may have 
hardly suspected before, and the economic 
upheaval since the armistice has broken 
dovm some barriers which had seemed so 
high. But even the war did not sweep 
the system away. And it also must be 
said that most of the barriers that are 
crumbling now are those which separated 
the groups in the upper half of society 
from each other; the human gulf between 
the upper half and the bottom half is still 
very wide I 
Perhaps one reason class consciousness 
is so persistent is because it has so many 
physical "landmarks" that make it hard 
to overlook. The difference in speech is 
certainly a big factor. It is a very im- 
portant reason for the fact that England 
still has separate school systems for the 
different classes. A member of the upper 
classes cannot afford to send his children 
to the free state schools to mingle with 
children of the Cockneys and acquire an 
accent that would be a serious social, and 
even economic, handicap to them all their 
lives. This is a practical, rock-bottom 
fact which no American parent, however 
democratic in tastes, could afford to dis- 
regard if he were in England with his 
family. 
When modern industrialism developed 
in England, the caste system automati- 
cally adjusted itself around it, each class 
taking over and manning a distinct part 
of the productive organism. True, there 
were a few modern Dick \Vhittingtons- 
even Tsaristic Russia had her share-but, 
broadly speaking, the classes continued in 
their distinctive spheres, and the personal 
trials of those who tried to break over the 
lines were painful to anyone with the sus- 
ceptibilities that usually go with a more 
developed character. Nor was it possi- 
ble, in the "tight little" isle, to escape 
from the shadow of one's past, as one 
could in America. 
I have gone into this situation in such 
detail because if one does clearly get hold 
of its human value, there is so much in 
present-day English life that will be so 
dear. 



402 


BRITISH LABOR STEPS AHEAD 


It makes clear, first of all, why the 
British "proletariat" was able to retain 
inside its own ranks for services in leading 
the labor movement the best brains it 
produced. History has shown, particu- 
larly that of our own country, that execu- 
tive caliber is not exclusively a class affair. 
But in the United States, when the prole- 
tariat did bring forth such a person, he 
ahnost inevitably soon rose out of his 
class into another higher social group, 
where he found better opportunities for 
self-development and ceased to be a 
proletarian! 
And still more significant, the English 
caste system has furnished the mould 
upon which the modern labor movement 
is based, both in its economic and politi- 
cal phases, and explains, in my opinion, 
to a great extent some of the funda- 
mental differences between the British 
movement and trade-unionism in the 
United States. 
British labor is, and always has been, 
dynamically a class phenomenon. It re- 
ceives its impetus from the class urge, 
and owes its success to its clever exploita- 
tion of class consciousness, a class feeling 
that was already a deep reality and had 
only to be diverted to its use. It began 
with a definite recognition of the fact of 
class, and shaped its whole line of thought 
accordingly. In fact, its leaders were in- 
capable of thinking in other tenns-a fact 
which also will throw some light on their 
susceptibility to socialism, a system which 
bases itself upon the pillars of class con- 
sciousness, and which also puts forward 
one method by means of which the lower 
class could participate in the control of 
things. (Nor must one also overlook 
the fact of geographic propinquity: Karl 
Marx's body still lies in a cemetery in 
Highgate, a region of north London.) 
The rank and file of labor in England 
has a conception of the "eternal" in class 
which American laborers could not have, 
hoping, as nearly all of them did until 
very recently, to become capitalists them- 
selves some day! As individuals the Brit- 
ish workmen had virtually no hope, al- 
most no thought, one might say, of com- 
ing to share in the management. From 
the birth of modem trade-unionism the 
leaders have been convinced of the fu- 
tility of trying to participate in the con- 


trol of industry except through group 
force and group action. The struggle for 
wages came first, of course, because one 
had to live, but the other objective was 
always in the back of their heads. 
Under these circumstances the early 
leap into politics was quite understand- 
able, especially since labor had at its head 
men of a type that would be attracted 
by the broader career. And labor's suc- 
cess during the last decade has exceeded 
expectationsc Labor politicians were 
obliged, it is true, even in their own class, 
to overcome a certain remnant of feudal 
psychology which may be best expressed 
in the words of a Midland village laborer, 
who shouted out at a recent labor rally: 
"What? Do you want us to turn agin 
the gentry what keeps us?" 
This idea explains why certain portions 
of the population that are naturally pro- 
letarian are still outside the party. But in 
the long run, class instincts have usually 
proved stronger than feudalism, and 
labor is advancing steadily in political 
strength. Only a few years ago, it could 
scarcely muster several hundred thousand 
votes. Last fall, despite its loss of forty 
parliamentary seats, the party polled 
5,000,000 ballots-a million more popular 
votes than it ever had received before. 
To-day the political and industrial as- 
pects of labor are inseparably intertwined. 
They are controlled virtually by the same 
men, and are simply two phases of the 
same thing. Most of the members of 
MacDonald's cabinet returned from their 
ministerial offices in Westminster to their 
old duties in trade-union offices, from 
which point they direct both political and 
industrial policies. 
Labor's entry into politics has also 
furnished the British proletariat with a 
fresh urge to develop itself, in that it has 
opened the glamour of a parliamentary 
career to many with latent ability who 
otherwise would probably have remained 
silent. It has also been partly responsi- 
ble for attracting to the folds of labor a 
number from the intelligentsia, who have 
deliberately left their own class and of- 
fered their services to labor, either for 
reasons of personal ambition-the Labor 
party offers much the quickest way to 
parliamentary prominence--or real altru- 
istic devotion to the cause of the "under 



BRITISH LABOR STEPS AHEAD 


dog." Some of the finest minds in the 
labor movement belong to this element, 
which is very active and has had a dis- 
tinct influence on the group. For, in addi- 
tion to the services of their wits, they 
brought with them new methods and ideas 
that have left 
an impression that is defi- 
nite, even if difficult to measure finitely. 
One of the most important of these was 
the idea of scientific research as a prelimi- 
nary to either industrial or political ac- 
tion; anothf'r was the idea of education 
inside the group-two features which 
make British labor stand out in the world 
labor movement of to-day.* 


III 


PROBABLY no phase of life seems more 
remote from romance than statistical re- 
search ! Yet, as I have picked up again 
during these last months the story of the 
development of this phase of the labor 
movement, I have found a story that had 
a very human appeal-the story of how 
the idea was born, twenty years ago, in a 
little clique of intellectuals who, in some- 
thing of the crusade spirit, broke away 
from their class and joined labor; how 
their proffer was at first scorned as a 
"highbrow" and " upper-class" thing; 
how gradually they prevailed, until to-day 
the little bureau they opened has the sup- 
port of nearly every local union in Eng- 
land, and serves as a kind of intellectual 
attorney to trade-unionism in general, 
while another bureau, similarly patterned, 
is an integral part of the official machinery 
of the Labor party and the Trade-Union 
Congress (the British A. F. of L.) 
The research idea actually originated in 
a club of college and literary men, called 
the Fabian Society, which used to meet in 
London to discuss social problems. The 
group included men who have become 
foremost writers of the day: George Ber- 
· In this connection, it must be noted that several branches 
of American labor very recently have begun to show signs 
of awakening to the need for regular research as well as 
schools for the development of union leaders. The New 
York Federation of Labor has made several praiseworthy 
experiments witt> schools of this kind. And in the field of 

esearch the National Union of Ladies Gannent Workers, 
In 1923., commissioned Doctor Louis Levine, formerly of 
the Uruversity of Montana, to spend eight
n months in 
research for the purpose of compiling a history of the union 

 a social group since its beginning. Doctor Levine's trea- 
tise. p!lblished in book fonn recently, is a constructive work, 
and WIll be. it is to be hoped, only the pioneer of other similar 
efIo
s. But as a group, American organized labor has not 
realized the value of statistical inquiry, nor has scientific 
research become a feature of the movement as a whole. 


403 


nard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and the two men 
who, strictly speaking, became the fathers 
of the research movement in labor, Syd- 
ney Webb and Gc H. D. Cole. In I908 
these last two actually opened a small 
office, labor's pioneer bureau, which 
continues to-day as the "unofficial" 
bureau of the trade-union movement. 
Both Cole and Webb were Oxford men. 
Both have since become prominent as 
writers on economic subjects. Cole, the 
younger of the two, has lately branched 
into fiction. Two of his novels were re- 
cently published in the United States. 
The early years of the venture were 
very difficult. Since neither Cole nor 
Webb was wealthy, both having to earn 
their living at the same time, they had to 
depend chiefly upon the support of the 
society. Many of the Fabians lent a 
hand when necessary, among whom Shaw 
was one of the most active (he still occa- 
sionally takes on a research assignment in 
a pinch!). 
The first problem was to gain recogni- 
tion from labor, a task by no means easy. 
They had to overcome a considerable 
amount of class antagonism and sus- 
picion, traces of which I found even to- 
day in certain branches of labor when the 
"highbrows" came under discussion! 
They had to prove their usefulness, show 
labor that it paid to know definitely the 
ground it stood upon! 
Perseverance won, however, and thanks 
partly to the fact that labor had at its 
head men of above the average vision, 
British trade-unionism adopted the high- 
brows into its midst. To-day this pio- 
neer bureau is self-supporting, receiving 
regular subscriptions from nearly every 
local union in England. It is an integral 
part of the labor machinery. Very few 
unions think of taking any important 
step without first appealing to it for in- 
formation. It has a regular staff of 
twelve persons and relies on volunteer 
reservists for emergencies. Cole himself 
recently resigned from actual charge of 
the bureau, to devote his time to teaching 
in the working men's classes. But !\1rs. 
Cole is still second in command, and both 
:Mr. and Mrs. 'V ebb keep in close touch. 
In the present headquarters, near the 
Victoria Station, lVlrs. Cole told of their 
struggles and experiences. The room was 



404 


BRITISH LABOR STEPS AHEAD 


small, but stuffed with documents and 
books, part of the "morgue" and refer- 
ence library they have built up. The ser- 
vice occupies one floor. 
" We went from one extreme to an- 
other," she recounted. "At first the 
unions would pay no attention to us. 
Once they got the idea in their heads that 
we were of use, they swamped us! A 
crisis would arise. We would receive a 
frantic call for all the facts about so-and- 
so in twenty-four hours. They never 
seemed to realize that research takes time. 
Of course we couldn't get them all they 
wanted overnight, but we were able to 
reach into our files and bring out quanti- 
ties of material already on hand on this 
situation, and we immediately would send 
out a call to our reservists. The lot of us 
would then plunge into a day-and-night 
orgy of research for a few days!" 

Irs. Cole revealed that the bureau is 
operated on a per-capita cost of only 
thirty-five cents per year to the labor move- 
ment! She added: "If we can do this, and 
in a poor country, think how much more 
American labor could accomplish!" 
After the armistice the Labor party and 
the trade-union congress decided to open 
an "official" research bureau of its own, 
which would be more immediately at the 
disposal of the executive staff at Eccleston 
Square, leaving the Cole- Webb bureau to 
continue to look after the individual 
unions. Under Arthur Greenwood, M.P. 
(a member of MacDonald's ministry), this 
bureau has done some very commendable 
work. Several times it has taken the ini- 
tiative in a political crisis, and has been 
able to influence to an extent opinion 
outside its own group. During the Irish 
crisis Greenwood and two colleagues went 
into the fighting area, interviewed hun- 
dreds of partisans at "court martials," 
held almost under fire, and conferred se- 
cretly with leaders of both factions while 
sentries watched at the windows to pre- 
vent surprise. The report which they 
brought back laid down in a general way 
the plan which finally was adopted by 
Lloyd George. Like the Cole bureau, it 
is continually following up new lines of 
inquiry between assignments. 
During Labor's term in office the party 
instituted an elaborate form of committee 
research, the Labor members of Parlia- 


ment being distributed among more than 
a score of committees, each charged with 
the duty of keeping the party posted on 
its particular field. This system has 
fallen into disrepair since the party left 
power, but still functions, the committees 
now meeting once or twice a month in- 
stead of twice a week. 
In trying to measure the concrete re- 
sults of this phase of labor one must be 
careful to bear in mind that the rôle of 
these bureaus is only advisory, of course. 
The findings are not binding, nor have the 
recommendations always been followed. 
British labor has made some exceedingly 
stupid blunders since the war, even if it 
did have the means of knowing better. 
But all things considered, the existence 
of this system has unquestionably had a 
marked effect on the stability of the 
movement, particularly on its leadership, 
and it has had a very salutary, sobering 
influence on habits of thought. One of 
the most eloquent testimonials of the 
Cole-Webb bureau's effectiveness was an 
incident during the great mine strike 
after the war. When the mine-owners 
and the union leaders came to meet, the 
former found, as one of them expressed it 
at the time, "men who knew quite as 
much about the mining business as we did 
ourselves! " 
The presence of this factor of research 
behind it, has also undoubtedly contrib- 
uted to an extent to labor's political 
prestige. It has enabled labor to step 
upon the scene with an air of authority 
that it otherwise could not have had, and 
capitalize the Englishman's inborn respect 
for figures and" facts." It certainly is one 
of the big reasons for the respect which 
labor's political adversaries have for it. 
And it must be remembered that the re- 
search bureaus have also served as pub- 
licity directors for the movement during 
the last decade and have aided greatly 
in helping labor to interpret itself more 
intelligently to the public at large. . . . 
There is another intellectual phase of 
the labor movement which space prevents 
treating a t length here, bu t which will cer- 
tainly exert a growing influence in the 
future-the educational programme (an- 
other Fabian idea)c Already night-schools 
have been opened in all the large indus- 
trial centres of England. The total en- 



BRITISH LABOR STEPS AHEAD 


rolment is well over 40,000. The classes 
deal with a wide range of subjects, from 
industrial history, the history of trade- 
unionism, to literature. The schools are 
supported partly by trade-union contri- 
butions, partly by government subsidy. 
One class which I visited, in company 
with Mr. Cole, dealt with the develop- 
ment of trade-unionism. It met in the 
evening, in a conference-room in the Uni- 
versity of London. The ages of the pupils 
ranged from twenty-one to fifty years, and 
all came from the "lower middle class," 
a group of recent proletarian origin, 
which had had the initiative to push 
themselves into positions requiring an 
amount of executive ability. One was a 
postal clerk, another a bookkeeper, an- 
other a trade-union secretary, etc. All, 
Cole explained, were under training to 
become leaders or teachers. 
Thus far the main object of the night- 
schools has been to develop leaders, al- 
though the system is slowly extending it- 
self downward. 
This group had been together three 
years, and showed surprising grasp and 
acumen. The material Cole gave them 
was solid, heavy subject-matter, such as 
might have figured in an average uni- 
versity course in economics or statistics. 
The approach was objective. 
In fact, the labor-union movement gen- 
erally is becoming greatly intrigued by 
the idea of educationc Another group, 
the" Plebs," who represent the very small 
left or radical wing in labor, have estab- 
lished a rival system of schools, in which 
Marxianism is openly taught. It is 
charged in labor circles that this group 
originally received money from Moscow. 
But most people believe that they are 
virtually self-continent at the moment, 
l\loscow having terminated its subsidy, 
the story runs, when it saw that their in- 
fluence was so small [ J. F. Horrabin, a 
successful cartoonist, and one of the ruling 
spirits among the Plebs, insisted with all 
seeming sincerity that the schools were 
now supported only by sums from their 
own pocketsc He added, however, that 
they did not wish to have help from the 
British Government, because they pre- 
ferred to be free to teach a definite Marx- 
ian interpretation of things social and 
economic. 


405 


While these " left" wing schools are 
not so numerous or large as the official 
labor colleges, they constitute a factor 
in the British industrial situation which 
is not quite so reassuring as one might 
wish. 
The general aim of the British radicals, 
bluntly speaking, is virtual sabotage. 
They have no confidence in the possibility 
of evolving the present system into any- 
thing of merit, and think that the" quick- 
est way out of the mess" is to bring 
matters to such a bad state that the 
masses will rise in despair. For this rea- 
son they are fundamentally against par- 
liamentary methods and in favor of di- 
rect industrial action. 


IV 


IT remains, now, to project the general 
profile of British labor upon the canvas of 
American industrial conditions, a process 
which brings a number of interesting 
points into view. 
We have seen the differences in the 
form and spirit of the British labor move- 
ment, why it is it has been able to pro- 
duce a superior type of leader, and how 
British labor came to extend itself into 
the political field. \Ve have reviewed the 
research phase of the movement, a feature 
only slightly developed in American labor, 
and have noted the beginnings of an im- 
portant educational programme within 
unionism. 
In a word, British labor possesses an 
all-round group compactness which Amer- 
ican labor does not now possess, and in- 
ternal conditions have been such that it 
has acted as a group in spheres which 
American labor has not tried to capture 
as a group. British labor, for this reason, 
has a wider orbit of social influence. 
But when we come to examine closely 
the great bulk of labor and the physical 
conditions of life of the individual trade- 
unionists, one finds that in a material 
way large sections of British labor are 
decidedly worse off than is American 
labor. A recent investigation by the In- 
ternational Labor Bureau at Geneva 
brought out that the real wage in America 
is more than twice that in Great Britain. 
In other words, British labor has not been 
able to raise its standard of life to the 



406 


BRITISH LABOR STEPS AHEAD 


level American labor has attained. I say 
attained, because, despite the more recent 
growth of a more human attitude toward 
things in American industry, it must be 
admitted, in my opinion, that it was the 
influence of the American Federation of 
Labor, expressed in strikes and repeated 
threats of industrial pressure, that really 
brought wages up and thereby raised the 
standard of life of the American working 
man to a point unequalled in any other 
part of the world. 
British labor's backwardness in this re- 
spect is due first to the much greater pov- 
erty of the country-a factor which few 
Americans stop to consider-which has 
made fewer profits to distribute in the form 
of wages. A second factor is the fact that 
the British worker himself is a much less 
energetic workman than the American. 
He works more slowly, is inclined to take 
things as they come, and certainly has 
very little of the personal interest in the 
success of production which American 
capital and labor are trying hard now to 
encourage. Part of this is traceable to 
his lethargic nature, and part, I believe, 
to the relative hopelessness of his outlook 
on life. 
In handling the human mass of labor, 
the British labor leaders have had diffi- 
culties to overcome which have not arisen 
in the brighter, more enterprising Ameri- 
can rank and file. 
In a few ways, also-due to a great 
extent to the doggedness of the rank. and 
file-British labor has advanced less rap- 
idly in its industrial conceptions than 
American labor. Its opposition to the 
introduction of machinery and labor-sav- 
ing devices has been more protracted. In 
the mining industry, for instance, this 
stubbornness has held the industry back 
noticeably. Again, a very practical rea- 
son may be found, however: in America, 


with our steadily broadening resources, it 
was not so serious for a few men to be 
displaced by a machine. There were new 
fields to enter, where the labor-saving de- 
vice would increase production. In Eng- 
land the field was limited. The country 
was already greatly overpopulated, and 
the resources well exploited. There 
might not be a new job for the men re- 
placed by machinery! This terrible fear 
has also figured in the rank and file's in- 
sistence on very strict, and often very 
selfish, apprenticeship regulations, which 
have hobbled British production to the 
extent of drawing indignant protest from 
the employing and middle classes. 
In conclusion, then, in a number of 
ways British labor is distinctly in ad- 
vance of American labor, due to the cir- 
cumstances enumerated before. I t has 
adopted certain methods which American 
labor would do well to copy. British 
labor has definitely begun to attack the 
solution of social problems which Ameri- 
can labor has not taken up in earnest. 
England is destined, I believe, to be a 
laboratory in which some very interest- 
ing social experiments will be made dur- 
ing the next few decades. 
But I also believe that America will, 
possibly a little later, possibly as soon, 
undertake the working out of details in 
the readjustment of our social order which 
will be quite as constructive and impor- 
tant. American labor will surely play 
its part in this. It quite conceivably will 
follow a different course from British 
labor. Conditions in the two lands are 
different. But in the end it is America 
that offers the greatest possibilities for 
effective social workmanship. Ours is 
the new organism. American labor has 
better human material to work with, and 
is not handicapped by the overshadowing 
poverty of the Old W orId countries. 


. 

. 



 


. 
. 
. 



Crime and Sentimentality 
BY JAMES L. FORD 
Author of "Forty Odd Years in the Literary Shop," "My Memories of the Early Eighties," etc. 


'. . 

 .'- DRING the past dec- 
ade crime and such 
D allied to p ics as crimi- 

i 
 
Yl;:Q I
 nals , their treatment 

! '
 and reform, and prison 
management have 
W : been more conspicu- 
ous in print than at 
any time within the memory of persons 
now living. We have only to read the 
discussions carried on in the press and 
periodical literature, and even in certain 
works of fiction, and to listen to the lec- 
tures of so-called eminent criminologists 
and to the well-meaning persons whose 
utterances reveal their own lack of knowl- 
edge and experience, to understand why 
so little of benefit to humanity has re- 
sulted from it all. Crime stilI flourishes 
as seldom before, prison discipline has re- 
laxed, and hardened offenders are not in- 
frequently let loose on the community by 
the parole board or suspended sentence 
imposed by a magistrate, when they 
should have been locked up. The truth is 
that the subject in everyone of its many 
forms has been viewed sentimentally in- 
stead of through the spectacles of pure 
reason, and far more interest is shown in 
the criminals than in their victims. 
Sentimentality may be described as a 
flabby, unwholesome attitude of mind 
that sees only the lesser aspects of affairs 
and is blind to the greater issues. Justice 
has no place in its philosophy, but instead 
a maudlin sympathy for the undeserving 
which takes heed of the welfare of con- 
victs and gives no thought to those who 
have suffered by them. Sentimentality is 
rarely found under the same thatch as the 
power and willingness to reason. It must 
not be confounded with worthy sentiment 
from which it sometimes springs-or falls 
-and which it resembles as synthetic gin 
resembles honest liquor. 
The very essence of sentimentality may 
be found in the act by which the historic 


name of Blackwell was removed from the 
East River island which has long shel- 
tered so many of the city's evil-doers, 
paupers, and other unfortunates, and the 
ridiculous word "Welfare" put in its 
place. There is the very quintessence of 
sentimentalism in the recent slogan of 
"sunshine in every cell," signifying that 
evil-doers deserve the heaven-sent bless- 
ings which comparatively few New York 
flat-dwellers enjoy. 
There is no more serious matter among 
the many difficult ones that now confront 
us, none more worthy of sane and sober 
consideration at the hands of those who 
understand it, than that of crime. To 
treat it sentimentally is as absurd as to 
treat the Steel Trust or the freight traffic 
from such a maudlin point of view. But 
when a subject is allowed to take its place 
among the various "problems" that now 
harass us, it is certain to let loose a flood 
of foolish counsel and undigested informa- 
tion from the lips of those who are the 
least qualified to speak. 
I have read with an interest not always 
unmixed with amusement many of the 
essays written about crime and its punish- 
ment, and one of these impressed itself 
strongly on my mind. Like all senti- 
mental efforts, it concerned itself sympa- 
thetically with the criminal and paid 
absolutely no heed to the victim. The 
author of this contribution suggested as 
a substitute for the death penalty the 
choice of three methods by which a man 
convicted of murder might expiate his 
crime. He should be allowed to choose 
between death by hanging, electrocution, 
or the lethal chamber; life imprisonment 
at hard labor, without hope of pardon, 
or the delivery of his body to medical 
authorities for experimental research, by 
which is meant inoculation by every vari- 
ety of noxious germ. In fact, the whole 
tendency of the scheme is to enable the 
murderer to escape the worst conse- 
4 0 7 



408 


CRIME AND SENTIMENTALITY 


quences of his sin and to weaken the 
effect on others of his kind which a legal 
execution invariably produces. 
In marked contrast are the sage ob- 
servations which illumine the pages of a 
book called "Points of Friction," written 
by lVIiss Agnes Repplier, one of the few 
women holding a pen who look at life and 
literature through spectacles of cold rea- 
son. It is refreshing to read what Miss 
Repplier has said about the sentimental 
attitude that declares a criminal free from 
responsibility and fails to punish him. 
With like clearness of vision she discusses 
hunger strikes, the Pacifists, the I. W. W., 
and, to quote her own words, the efforts 
of "well-meaning ladies and gentlemen 
who flood society with appeals to 'open 
the prison door' and let our good-will 
shine as a star on political prisoners, and 
seem curiously indifferent as to what the 
liberated ones will do with their liberty." 
In her customarytfine satiric vein Miss 
Repplier says: "Stealing liberty bonds 
is a field full of promise for youth. Ap- 
parently nothing can shake the con- 
fidence of brokers in the messengers who 
disappear with one lot of bonds, only to 
be released on a suspended sentence, and 
speedily intrusted with a second batch." 
We owe a great deal of the present flood 
of sentimentality to Mr. Thomas Mott 
Osborne, who made a profound impres- 
sion by his lectures. 
The late James Connaughton, gener- 
ally known as P. K., for many years 
principal keeper at Sing Sing, was a strict 
disciplinarian, but was, nevertheless, re- 
garded with respect by all those under his 
rule and with affection by a considerable 
number. An explanation of this may be 
found in the simple words which he once 
addressed to me: "These men appreciate 
justice." At Christmas-time he received 
innumerable picture post-cards and mes- 
sages of greeting from all parts of the 
world, sent to him by former convicts, 
who had not forgotten what they called 
"square deals" enjoyed by them at the 
hands of a man whose power was so great 
that he might have made their lives 
wretched. I believe that during a period 
of more than thirty years "P. K." never 
went outside the boundaries of the village 
of Ossining, and spent most of his time 
within the gray walls of the prison. Con- 


naughton and his associate, State Detec- 
tive Jackson, knew more about crime and 
criminals than any men it has been my 
fortune to meet. Neither one was ever 
invited to lecture, so far as my knowledge 
goes, and I doubt if their appearance on 
the platfonn would have drawn a cor- 
poral's guard of attendance. 
The entire criminal procedure in this 
country, and especially in the city of New 
York, has become so thoroughly soaked 
with sentimentalism as to jeopardize life 
and property. The Sullivan law, which 
is directly responsible for many of the 
murders committed by robbers pursuing 
their nefarious work, was passed by an 
Irish-American politician who made a 
moving appeal to the sentimental classes 
based on the imaginary case of a young 
working man who shot his opponent in 
the course of a quarrel. Sullivan argued 
that if the use and even the possession of 
fireanns were prohibited by law under 
heavy penalties, there would be no more 
shooting affrays, and the argument 
seemed so convincing to those who were 
incapable of seeing any save the lesser 
aspects of a case, that the bill received 
their outspoken commendation. Conse- 
quently the law was passed, and its result 
was to restrict the use of pistols to the 
criminal classes, several of whom were 
numbered among the constituents of its 
sponsor. 
As a concrete example of the working 
of this law, we may take the case of a 
N ew York shopkeeper, who courageously 
came to the aid of a neighbor who was 
being robbed by a hold-up man, and 
promptly shot and killed the robber. Ar- 
rested on a charge of manslaughter, the 
valiant defender of the right was ar- 
raigned before a judge who, although he 
complimented him upon his gallant deed, 
felt obliged, under the law, to fine him 
one hundred dollars for having firearms 
in his possession, and this sum the man 
was compelled to pay. 
When a victim of the special privileges 
enjoyed only by the criminal classes suc- 
ceeds in bringing his assailant to what he 
hopes will be justice, sentimentality in- 
vades the court-room, enters the jury-box, 
and not infrequently occupies a seat of 
honor on the bench. It cries aloud for 
mercy to the ruffian in the dock, but 



CRIME AND SENTIMENTALITY 


wastes no sympathy on the maimed vic- 
tim. It busies itself outside the walls of 
the chamber of justice among evil-doers 
-a class that is always ready to listen to 
such appeals, and to arrange promptly a 
ball or benefit in aid of its pal, and sell 
tickets by every means of persuasion short 
of the black -jack. 
The sum thus raised is used to secure 
legal talent for the prisoner's defense and 
to suborn a few witnesses. It is not dif- 
ficult in New York to hire individuals who 
in the face of all evidence to the contrary 
will cheerfully swear to any alibi sug- 
gested by the lawyer. The voice of the 
sob-sister is not heard now as frequently 
as in the days when that preposterous 
school of journalism termed "yellow" 
was making its earliest appeals to the 
light-minded. But in the case of an un- 
usually brutal crime a member of that 
tearful Sorosis is apt to invade the court- 
room and send waves of sentimental sym- 
pathy out over the land. But the burden 
of the defense rests on the shoulders of 
lawyers chosen for their ability to bally- 
rag witnesses and move jurymen to tears. 
Had the prisoner at the bar followed his 
nefarious calling a third of a century ago 
he would have taken from the proceeds of 
the benefit, what is known in thieves' 
slang as his" roll of fall money," the not 
inconsiderable sum needed to secure the 
services of those eminent legal advisers, 
Messrs. Howe and Hummel, whose office 
was in the immediate neighborhood of the 
Tombs. The malefactor was deemed 
lucky who could induce the senior mem- 
ber of the firm to assume personal direc- 
tion of his case. 
"Bill" Howe was a burly Englishman 
of undoubted forensic powers whose ca- 
reer in his native land had been such as to 
breed sympathy with the wrong-doers of 
America. He wore flashy clothes, and I 
dimly remember seeing him attired in a 
velvet coat and glaring red necktie. His 
partner, "Abe" Hummel, was a diminu- 
tive man of far higher calibre than the 
other and a much wider acquaintance 
beyond the limits of the criminal frater- 
nity. He dressed soberly, was a constant 
attendant at theatrical first nights, and 
had many clients among the respectable, 
law-abiding classes, for his legal acumen 
was unusual. Even the most respectable 


409 


persons are liable to require rescue from 
some malodorous predicament by dubi- 
ous legal talent. It has been said that 
the partners divided their profits every 
night. 
In accepting a retainer, ]\;lr. Howe often 
showed himself willing to allow a just 
valuation for the watches, jewelry, and 
laces offered in part payment, having, as 
may readily be imagined, clients quite in 
a position to dispose of them. In select- 
ing a jury he was careful to challenge 
every man who had not a weak chin. He 
brought to every case he tried a complete 
bag of tricks, all of tremendous appeal to 
the sentimental heart. With extraordi- 
nary skill he contrived to divert the at- 
tention of the jury from the crime to such 
irrelevant facts as the love entertained for 
his mother by the gentleman to whom he 
referred as his" unfortunate client," the 
piety of that estimable parent, and the 
poverty which had deprived her son of 
his chance of entering one of the learned 
professions, and perhaps gaining the uni- 
versal esteem in which "you, gentlemen 
of the jury, are held in this community." 
But not until" Bill" Howe summed up 
the case for the defense, by which time 
his lachrymal glands were in working or- 
der, did he shine with his full effulgence. 
'Vith hand resting on the shoulder of an 
elderly woman, said by him to be his 
client's mother, and appropriately garbed 
for the rôle, he would remind his weak- 
chinned auditors of the blessing of ma- 
ternallove, and beg them in the name of 
that love and of their own filial affections 
to set his unfortunate client free that he 
might be able to follow the paths of hon- 
esty and sobriety on which his heart was 
now set. He would deliver this homily in 
a voice choked with sobbing, and when 
he began to weep, the prisoner, his aged 
parent, and many of the jurors would 
mingle their tears with his. No orator of 
recent years has run the gamut of senti- 
mental appeal as did "Bill" Howe. 
It sometimes happens that justice tri- 
umphs over sentimentalism and a crim- 
inal is found guilty by a sane jury, sen- 
tenced to imprisonment by a wise and 
honest judge, and, despite the efforts of 
a lawyer almost as much of a criminal as 
himself, conveyed to Sing Sing, There he 
finds that conditions have improved 



410 


CRIME AND SENTIMENTALITY 


vastly since his last visit, and that zealous 
philanthropists have introduced many 
schemes calculated to "preserve his self- 
respect," as the phrase goes. The striped 
suit, which once served as a means of 
identification in the event of his escape, 
has been replaced by clothes of coarse 
gray, which might be worn by any honest 
laborer, while instead of the close-cropped 
head he may have locks that might pos- 
sibly adorn the brow of a stage poet or 
artist. \Vholesome entertainment awaits 
him in the shape of baseball and motion- 
pictures, and he is permitted to enjoy the 
privilege, long denied to upright citizens, 
of attending theatrical representations on 
Sunday night. Even the solace afforded 
by liquor and the more pernicious" dope" 
may be his, for friendly keepers are al- 
ways ready to supply those agreeable 
stimulants. The minimum of labor is re- 
quired of him, and he receives visitors and 
letters to an extent unknown in English 
prisons. The governor of one of these 
last-named institutions once visited Sing 
Sing in the course of a tour of investiga- 
tion, and was asked by the warden what 
British offenders would think of incar- 
ceration in the American penitentiary. 
"They would regard it as a holiday," was 
his answer. 
The Sing Sing convict's occasional peri- 
ods of depression are cheered by thoughts 
of what a complacent parole board may 
accomplish for his relief. And we have 
only to read the printed records of certain 
hold-up men to realize that a bright future 
possibly awaits themc Time and again 
the pedigrees taken from police head- 
quarters reveal the fact that a convict has 
been paroled many times, and has re- 
newed his nefarious activities as soon as 
set free. 
I have been told that the claim has been 
made by members of this board that a 
large proportion of paroled prisoners have 
been reclaimed from their evil ways by this 
judicious system. This brings us to the 
subject of reformation, concerning which 
no end of preposterous arguments have 
been given to the world. In discussing 
the matter one must be careful to draw 
the line sharply between the habitual of- 
fender, who is in many cases a criminal by 
birth and upbringing, and the young bank 
clerk who has embezzled to make good 


losses on the Stock Exchange or race- 
track. In the majority of cases such a 
one leaves prison filled with an earnest 
determination to live honestly, and it not 
infrequently happens that he manages to 
live down his record and gain the con- 
fidence of his fellow citizens. He cannot, 
in justice, be called a criminal, for he 
knows that he has done wrong and is 
anxious and willing to reform. This he 
can do without the aid of any society of 
reformers, and, in fact, the work must be 
done by himself if it is done at all. 
But in the habitual offender who serves 
many terms we have a very different per- 
son with whom to deal. There is such a 
thing as a distinct criminal caste in which 
crime is hereditary and runs in the blood. 
There have been criminal families, not all 
of whom are of the lower orders, and some 
of them have amassed millions in high 
finance and sent the criminal strain of 
blood down through the veins of their 
offspring. 
It is an odd circumstance that one of 
the most famous of England's nineteenth- 
century criminals bore the name of Peace, 
while that of the most illustrious Ameri- 
can bank burglar was Hope. The late 
"Jimmy" Hope was a burglar of remark- 
able skill and daring, and his two sons, 
Johnny and Harry, were brought up to 
follow the paternal calling. It was the 
elder Hope who engineered that gigantic 
enterprise, the Manhattan Bank robbery, 
in which his son Johnny acted in a minor 
capacity, and, if my memory serves me 
aright, both promising lads were con- 
cerned in the Northampton Bank rob- 
bery. Reformation for such men as these 
is not to be thought of. 
The radical difference between a crook 
and an honest man lies in their respective 
mental attitudes. The last named be- 
lieves in the rights of property, while the 
first looks upon other men's goods as a 
sportsman regards the fish in the stream 
and the birds in the forest, as legitimate 
prey for his rod or gun. It would be just 
as easy to convince a sportsman that it 
was morally wrong to fish or to shoot as 
to make a thief believe sincerely and act 
on the belief that it was wrong for him to 
lay hands on that which did not legally 
belong to him. In considering the matter 
I cannot help recalling the phrase which 



CRIME AND SENTIMENTALITY 


has come to me more than once from lips 
of high authority: "Once a crook, always 
a crook." 
I do not deny that in many instances 
even habitual offenders against the law 
have given up stealing and "lived 
straight," as they might express it, to the 
end of their days. But no reform society 
can effect such a change, for it is always the 
result of volition on the part of the crim- 
inal. He may give up his evil courses be- 
cause of his growing family, and paternal 
love is not unknown among his kind. He 
may feel that he has had enough of prison 
life and of constant hounding by the po- 
lice, and in more than one instance that I 
can remember his savings have been 
sufficient to justify his retirement from 
active business. 
But even though he should continue to 
live honestly until the grave closed over 
him, he cannot be said to have "re- 
formed" in the true sense of the word. 
It may be pleasanter and more convenient 
for him to live out his days in the odor of 
honesty, and even to die, as did the late 
" Jimmy" Hope, with a clergyman at his 
bedside. 
Extreme cunning is one of the charac- 
teristics of the criminal mind, and it is not 
infrequently accompanied by an ability 
to create a favorable impression on others. 
I once saw a man who, to my certain 
knowledge, had served at least three 
prison terms, standing in a cage in the 
office of a prominent 'Vall Street firm, 
surrounded by packages of bills, and per- 
forming with skill and assiduity his daily 
task of receiving and paying money. 


411 


That which is usually termed "reform 
work" is, like embroidery on textile fab- 
rics, better suited to women than to men. 
In short, such is the emotiona 1 nature of 
the gentler sex that the prospect of re- 
deeming a human soul from sin, or a num- 
ber of human souls, has an alluring charm 
in eyes that can make or mar a life. 
Women can be organized by an experi- 
enced professional almoner into associa- 
tions or leagues for the reformation of 
evil-doers, and it frequently happens that 
a woman will marry a man so worthless 
and undeserving of her sympathies as to 
regard her simply in the light of what he 
calls his "meal ticket." But there are no 
leagues or associations that give aid to 
those who have suffered through criminal 
operations, and no woman would think of 
marrying a man simply because he has 
been shot through the lung and robbed of 
his savings. Far more gracious in senti- 
mental eyes is the estate of him who did 
the deed. 
There is but one solution for what the 
owlish school of though t calls the "crime 
problem," and that solution is so simple 
and effective as to render the use of the 
word "problem" superfluous. So long as 
we slobber over thieves, murderers, and 
swindlers instead of punishing them, the 
periodic" crime waves" will continue to 
roll on, robbing us of our savings and dis- 
turbing our peace of mind. And of one 
thing we may be sure, the present deplor- 
able conditions will continue so long as 
sentimentality is permitted to usurp the 
offices that rightly belong to justice and 
reason. 



The Minimum Standards of Australia 


BY ELLSWORTH HUNTINGTON 
Author of "The Suicide of Russia," "The Character of Races," etc. 


ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 


W1")"Q
J.,,-n
 USTRALIA is an im- 

 X

 
 X portant factor in .h
- 
A man progress, for It IS 
doing something new. 

 I It is helped in doing 
, this by its attractive- 
Ä
7Çl ness as a land of great 
possibilities, by its re- 
moteness, and by the sparsity of its popu- 
lation. The attractiveness of the con- 
tinent has drawn people thither from Eu- 
rope, but the remoteness has generally 
tended to keep at home the timid, weak, 
and conservative, whereas it acts as an 
incentive to persons with strong phy- 
siques and with a bold, adventurous, 
progressive, and optimistic temperament. 
Hence Australia is occupied by a highly 
selected and competent population. The 
fact that this population is still relatively 
sparse permits practically every one to get 
a comfortable living. Such sparsity is a 
great boon, which the Australians will 
sadly miss when they get the denser and 
poorer population for which there is such 
a hue and cry. 
During a journey to Australia in 1923, 
as a delegate to the Third Pan-Pacific 
Science Congress, I was greatly impressed 
by the high character of the Australians 
as a whole, and also by the contrast be- 
tween the frontiersmen and the city peo- 
ple. The matter is admirably set forth by 
Doctor C. H. Northcott in a lucid and 
impartial study of " Australian Social De- 
velopment" which hides its light under 
the paper covers of a "Columbia Univer- 
sity Study." He makes it clear that the 
great bulk of the Australian population 
has come from two main groups, "alike in 
race, speech, and political tradition, dif- 
fering merely in economic circumstances 
and in their manner of entrance into Aus- 
tralia. One was possessed of at least suf- 
ficient capital to pay the cost of the 
lengthy voyage to Australia, the other 
412 


had every qualification for worthy citizen- 
ship in a new and unexplored land except 
sufficient passage-money. In the latter 
fact there is no suggestion of pauperism. 
Never, except by a philanthropic blunder 
which aroused so much indignation that 
its repetition was impossible, were Eng- 
lish paupers shipped to Australia. The 
assisted emigrants were as free from 
pauperism as the average English la- 
bourer of the years following the reform 
of the Poor Laws." 
The other group consisted of unassisted 
immigrants, among whom the gold- 
diggers hold a pre-eminent position by 
reason of their numbers. " The gold- 
diggers," so Northcott says, "were cer- 
tainly above the average of their class." 
A study of signatures and marks affixed 
to marriage registers seems to indicate 
that the early settlers in Victoria from the 
United Kingdom, even though both as- 
sisted and unassisted immigrants are in- 
cluded, were better educated on an aver- 
age than were their compatriots who re- 
mained at home. Northcott also quotes 
an interesting estimate of the Victorians in 
general, made in 1868 by an Englishman 
apparently well acquainted with the social 
and political conditions of Australia: 
"The mass of the people are certainly 
more intellectual, more ardent, better 
educated, and more independent, than the 
parallel classes of any European popula- 
tion. . .. The very fact of a large por- 
tion of them having voluntarily emigrated 
from the old country and accepted all the 
hazards of a new career in an unknown 
land, argues in them a certain moral and 
intellectual superiority." 
Despite their general likeness, "the 
free settler and the assisted immigrant 
have contributed two distinct strains to 
the Australian population." The free 
settlers took advantage of the opportu- 
nities for settlement on the land. The as- 



THE l\'IINI
IU:\I STANDARDS OF AUSTRALIA 413 


sisted immigrants fO\lnd employment in 
the cities. In each ca<;e the type of oc- 
cupation depended to a considerable de- 
gree on the temperam cnt of the immi- 
grant. The free settlen; penetrated the 
dense forests of the coastal rivers and 
planted their farms. They opened up 
mountain pastures, followed the explorer 
out into the interior along the banks of 
the inland rivers. "Theirs was, in every 
case, a life of adventure and daring. For 
if Nature deprived the early Australian 
settler of the American colonists' struggle 
with a savage foe and equally savage wild 
beasts, she faced him with a hostile en- 
vironment more forbidding than any 
other country presents. The fight with 
the naked elements was the pioneers' 
battle. Only men of inherent courage and 
initiative, men in strength and breadth of 
outlook above the average, would have 
faced the long voyage and the uncer- 
taintyof life in a new land. Nature was 
fickle in this new country. Flood and 
fire and drought migh t come to rob the 
settlers of the rewards of their efforts. 
Hence they tended not only to become in- 
dividualists, fighting each his own battle, 
but to assume some of the gambler's op- 
timism, some of the hopefulness and con- 
fidence of those who take great risks, who 
are often thrown down, but arise again 
with smiling faces. 
" In this psychological reaction the 
large number of assisted immigrants who 
did not become tillers of the soil were not 
sharers. Their position and outlook were 
different. ... Their entry into the country 
was facilitated by the use of government 
funds. They came to accept employ- 
ment, though some of the farm labourers 
thus brought in were able to get selections 
[homesteads] of their own after 1861. But 
the majority were unfortunate in the mo- 
ment of their entry and in the inade- 
quacy of the opportunities for settlement 
on the land. Until 186r men and women, 
introduced in this way and under such cir- 
cumstances, were likely to rely upon state 
aid. Cheap lodgings had to be found for 
them on arrival, they had to be assisted 
with work and with transportation facil- 
ities to that part of the country where 
work was to be found. Further, the aggre- 
gation into cities became fixed in the so- 
cial process of Australian life by the ar- 


rival of the nominated [assisted] immi- 
grant." 
One result of this division into two 
types of settlers is the sharp distinction 
between city and country and the exces- 
sive growth of the cities. Because the 
rural parts of Australia contain so much 
undeveloped wealth and because that 
wealth is being developed by people of 
such high types, Australia is able to sup- 
port cities of excessive size. :Moreover, 
as Northcott well says, "city and coun- 
try are not only distinct in Australia, as 
in other lands, but there is less inter- 
change between them than elsewhere. 
The city is not recruited mainly from an 
overflowing countryside. [Its industries] 
. . . are carried on by people who have 
never been stimulated by the hardship, 
the restricted opportunities, the individ- 
ualism of country life and work. His- 
torically the city has been built up, and 
many of its industries are still carried on, 
by the immigration of the town dwellers 
of the United Kingdom." 
These, then, are the conditions under 
which the social organization of Australia 
has grown up. Remember that although 
the assisted city immigrant may not equal 
the unassisted rural type, he nevertheless 
possesses more than the average ability of 
his class in Great Britain. In his case, as 
in that of the unassisted immigrant, there 
has been a selection on the basis of 
health, temperament, and, to some ex- 
tent, thrift. Thus, in its relatively huge 
cities, Australia possesses a group of work- 
ing people who, in comparison with those 
of almost any other country, are unusu- 
ally competent, so competent that they 
have established a fundamentally new 
system and have maintained a labor gov- 
ernment at some time in practically 
every state as well as the commonwealth. 
The laboring people have not done all 
this alone. In spite of the Labor party's 
claim that it is the cause of the country's 
prosperity, much of the so-called progres- 
sive legislation was well under way long 
before the Laborites came into power. 
This is true of the state railways, tele- 
graphs, and telephones; of minimum 
wages, and wage boards. It is likewise 
true of the regulation of the labor of 
women and children, the appointment 
and treatment of apprentices, and many 



414 THE MINIMUl\l STANDARDS OF AUSTRALIA 


other things such as old-age pensions, 
maternity bonuses, assisted immigration, 
the closer settlement policy, loans to 
farmers, and the policy of alienating pub- 
lic lands on leases rather than as freehold. 
Although the so-called Liberal party is 
the conservative party of Australia, its 
name is not a misnomer. In comparison 
with the conservative party in other coun- 
tries it is distinctly liberal, and it has had 
the wisdom to adopt many of the ideas of 
the Labor party, but at the same time to 
modify them in the interests of stability. 
To-day, when the Labor party happens to 
have been more or less in power for some 
years, the government is especially active 
in carrying forward the same general pol- 
icies by means of price regulation, loans 
for working men's homes, public bakeries, 
state canning factories in irrigated fruit 
districts, and co-operative selling agencies 
for farm products. 
The point of the whole thing is that, re- 
gardless of changes in parties, Australia 
has been constantly progressing toward a 
condition in which the state not only 
insists on, but almost guarantees, high 
standards of living for people of all 
classes, Thus Australia has evolved a so- 
cial and economic system which stands 
out as one of the important recent con- 
tributions to human progress. The reas- 
onableness, stability, and effectiveness of 
this system stand in marked contrast to 
the seeming unreasonableness, instabil- 
ity, and ineffectiveness of the system 
whereby the Bolsheviki have ostensibly 
sought the same results. In the one case 
we have an example of what happens 
when two divergent and somewhat op- 
posed groups composed of persons of 
more than average ability join hands in 
an attempt to frame a system which shall 
inure to the ultimate advantage of all 
concerned. In the other we have a case 
where the most competent members of 
all classes, from peasant to royalty, are 
largely exterminated or driven away, 
while a small minority impose their will 
on a huge majority who represent the al- 
most helpless residue after the most able 
leaders have been culled out. 
Let us look more closely at what has 
happened in Australia when a laboring 
group of uncommon ability has made de- 
mands upon a capitalistic group of em- 


ployers, landowners, capitalists, and pro- 
fessional men possessed of similarly un- 
common ability. The fundamental ideal 
which has thus become established in 
Australia is that wages should not be 
based upon the old ideas of competition 
and of supply and demand. They should 
be based primarily upon the standard of 
living. Only after a minimum wage has 
been assured to everyone should any 
available surplus be used for higher pay 
for the more competent workers and for 
profits to owners of capital. The mini- 
mum wage, as now generally defined in 
Australia, must in the first place be large 
enough so that every worker will have 
enough to support himself in reasonable 
comfort. But marriage is the normal and 
desirable condition of all healthy adults, 
and married women cannot take proper 
care of their children if they spend their 
days at work away from home. There- 
fore the minimum wages of men must be 
such that every man can support a wife 
and three children in accordance with the 
prevailing standards of living. It is as- 
sumed that a woman's personal expenses 
are the same as those of a man, but that 
her responsibilities for dependents aver- 
age only half as great as those of the 
men. Wages are fixed accordingly. Sup- 
pose a man's personal expenses are 
reckoned as thirty shillings a week, The 
additional cost of supporting a wife 
might be twenty shillings, and of each 
child ten shillings, making eighty shill- 
ings, or four pounds per week, as the 
minimum wage. A woman's personal ex- 
penses would be thirty shillings, like those 
of a man, but as she is supposed to have 
only half as many dependents, on an 
average, her additional wages would be 
only twenty-five shillings instead of 
fifty, making her minimum wages fifty- 
five. It would seem only logical to pay 
unmarried men at the same rate as 
women, where equal work is done, but 
Australia has not yet reached that point. 
This does not end the matter. The 
Australian ideal does not assume that peo- 
ple need merely food, clothing, shelter, 
and the opportunities of family life. It 
also assumes that they need recreation 
and leisure, and that provision for these 
must be made in determining wages and 
hours. Furthermore, the ideal has now 



THE MINIMU
1 STANDARDS OF AUSTRALIA 415 


reached the point where, as Northcott 
puts it, "it is a fundamental part of the 
national aspiration that Australians shall 
themselves be healthy citizens rearing 
healthy families. The building up of a 
nation with stamina and a reserve of 
physical strength adequate to the task of 
settling an almost unpeopled continent, 
with no mean supply of climatic difficul- 
ties, has been definitely accepted as a con- 
scious ideal. On the basis of a healthy 
childhood in home and school, the Aus- 
tralian people desire to create a social or- 
der that will prevent disease from impair- 
ing their social efficiency and will give 
them power and strength to realize their 
destiny. 'All Australia in its waste 
places is waiting for live men, with the 
fire of life in them, and a power of hand 
and brain, to translate what is barren and 
unlovely into something that shall be of 
use to man and beautiful as his desire.' * 
To people the northern territory with 
white settlers, to wrest from the virgin 
fastnesses of tropical Australia its enor- 
mous wealth, to rule its heritage of tropical 
isles in the Pacific Ocean, to make the fer- 
tile but arid regions of Central Australia 
yield up their wealth, and in shop and fac- 
tory to drive the humming wheels of in- 
dustry, will require a strong and healthy 
people with no racial poisons in their 
blood. Such a people the Australians 
aspire to be." 
This ideal of universal health causes 
motherhood to become a social function. 
1Ioreover, there is a growing conviction 
that "the baby is the best immigrant." 
For these reasons the commonwealth al- 
lows a maternity bonus to the mother of 
every living child, and 9S per cent of the 
mothers apply for the bonus. 
Naturally the care for health includes 
not only crusades against disease, but 
I care for children and women in industry, 
, good provisions for housing, and the care- 
ful inspection of food. During the war 
this even led to the establishment of 
bakeries and other industries connected 
with the preparation of food. If the state 

s thus to take care of its citizens so fully, 
I It cannot logically leave them to suffer, in 
old age. Hence old-age pensions are now 
paid on a considerable scale. 


*Buley, E. C., .. Australian Life in Town and Country," 
þ.67. 


Farther than this we have not space to 
go in explaining the social system of Aus- 
tralia. But let us look for a moment at 
the device by which the Australian Labor 
party has safeguarded itself against un- 
restricted competition. In order to keep 
the standards of living high, the Aus- 
tralians have given the government the 
power to decide what is a fair mini- 
mum wage and to see that no one gets 
less. The ideal is that the wages remain 
constant in buying power, or else rise in 
conformity with improvements in the 
standard of living. Hence wages are not 
measured in terms of money, but of what 
they will buy; and the number of pounds, 
shillings, and pence in a week's pay must 
vary in response to changes in the cost of 
living. 
In order to realize this ideal the regula- 
tion of wages has been placed in the hands 
of wage boards with large powers and with 
immediate authority to order changes. 
Either employers or employed can appeal 
directly to the boards, but note an inter- 
esting limitation. No individual can ap- 
peal to the boards in his private capacity. 
The boards recognize only responsible 
corporate groups in the form of associa- 
tions of employers or unions of em- 
ployees. 
The normal composition of a wage 
board is one representative of labor, one 
of the employers, and one of the state or 
the public. Whenever any question, not 
only of wages, but of hours and conditions 
of work, is brought before the board it 
makes a ruling which stands until 
amended. Such amendments are fre- 
quent, for the boards themselves have 
power to make them, or at least can sug- 
gest that matters needing amendment be 
brought to their attention. The awards 
are carefully adjusted not only to the gen- 
eral cost of living, bu t to the needs of 
special places and industries. They are 
higher in the city than in the country, 
higher in the inaccessible regions than in 
those easily accessible, and higher in the 
warm, sparsely populated north than in 
the cooler, pleasanter south. l\10reover, 
they fluctuate from industry to industry, 
the wages being raised in industries that 
are unpopular and need workers, and 
lowered in the popular, easy industries 
to which the workers tend to flock. 



416 THE l\1INIlVIUM STANDARDS OF AUSTRALIA 


\Vage boards are now accepted as a 
matter of course in practically all occupa- 
tions throughout Australia. Indeed, they 
are so well established that one hears rel- 
atively little criticism of the general prin- 
ciple, although there are many bitter 
criticisms of details, especially among the 
employers. The general tenor of the 
criticism is: "The wage awards are too 
high. The working people get everything 
they want. They know they'll get their 
wages whether they work or not, and they 
loaf as much as they like." 
A real criticism is found in the fact that 
the members who represent the govern- 
ment often have no first-hand knowledge 
of the business which they are called upon 
to regulate. There is also doubtless some 
truth in the further accusation that being 
political appointees these members are in 
danger of basing their decisions on polit- 
ical expediency and on sympathy for the 
under-dog. Australia is rich, active, and 
prosperous, and has a high tariff, so runs 
the argument addressed to such men. 
Hence it not only can stand high wages, 
but must have them to maintain its uni- 
versal high standard of living. The re- 
sult of such arguments, according to the 
critics, is that the political members of 
the boards, in whom rests the final de- 
cision, put wages as high as the most 
prosperous employers can stand and too 
high for those who are less fortunate. It 
is only fair to add that on the whole the 
Australian officials are high-minded men 
who according to their light are really 
seeking the best course for all concerned. 
A more serious difficulty is that, so far 
as the law is concerned, the good man gets 
no more than the incompetent. The labor 
people maintain that the minimum wages 
are the lowest that can be paid without 
lowering the standard of living. Since the 
unions hold out for high wages for the 
common laborer, and since the employers 
maintain that higher wages will spell 
ruin, the skilled laborer suffers. In many 
trades the minimum wages of the un- 
skilled are so nearly the same as those of 
the skilled that there is little incentive to 
acquire skill. The number of appren- 
tices is likewise sharply limited in many 
trades, which again deters men from be- 
coming skilled. Moreover, the law makes 
no provision whereby the industrious man 


gets more than the man who merely does 
enough work to hold his job. Thus in a 
business which is having hard sledding the 
employer may pay his best men scarcely 
more than his worst, because he feels that 
what he pays to the poorest is enough for 
even the best. 
Another real criticism of the labor situ- 
ation arises out of the fact that the state 
regulation of wages is subject to revision 
by federal arbitration courts. The courts 
can be appealed to by either party, but in 
practice it is generally the unions and 
rarely the employers who resort to them. 
The federal authorities can either raise or 
lower wages, but they generally raise 
them, or at least that was the case from 
19 1 0 to 1923. The value of the federal 
courts and their exceptionally high char- 
acter are usually admitted. The criticism 
of them lies in the fact that they introduce 
a dual control and create uncertainty. 
Also they may create unfair conditions 
because their awards apply only to those 
factories which have actually been cited 
by the unions. Thus two factories side by 
side may differ in wage scales, hours, and 
other conditions, one depending on state 
laws and the other on federal arbitration 
awards, perhaps more onerous. A factory 
which has no quarrel of any kind with its 
employees, so the critics say, may be 
haled into court, and compelled to make 
expensive changes in its rates of pay,hours 
of work, or other conditions, even when 
both the management and the workers 
have no desire for a change. Again, the 
unions can prevent a factory from being 
represented by legal counsel, thus forcing 
the managers to appear in person. Many 
manufacturers complain that months of 
time, which ought to be given to running 
their factories, are taken up in appearing 
in court, even when they are not parties 
to any real dispute. 
Among the working people there is lit- 
tle criticism of the wage boards. The gen- 
eral feeling seems to be: "The wages are 
all right. A man here does a good day's 
work and gets a good day's wages. He 
has time to enjoy life, and a little extra 
money to spend on his home or a good 
time. A workingman's a man out here in 
Australia, not a slave." A chauffeur said 
to me: "I like it out here. You get good 
wagesc You don't have to work too hard. 



THI.. i\n
] :\1(11\1 STA
DARDS OF :'\1 JSTRALI:'\ 417 


But the best thing is they treat you right. 
Mv people don't mind my talking to 
them, and if I want to smoke they don't 
say anything. If they are on the road of 
an afternoon and want a cup of tea, they 
ðpect me to have one too." 
In most of the factories that I visited I 
was impressed by the clean. intelligent, 
competent, contented appearance and 


They admit that wages were formerly too 
low. .:\Iorem'er, practically all pay some 
of their people more than the official 
awards of the boanls, and something like 
half pay such wages to a considerable 
percentage. :Most of them recognize that 
their employees are of high quality, and 
that the general pro:;perity of the country 
permits high wages and a hi
h clegree of 


ç,;. 
. 


,.--:.- ',- 


I . 
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1 1
:t- - :' 
.:_ ;;'," 
"- '..."- - .. -- 


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'" 



!) 


" 

'-, 


, 


-. 


The l..ind of comfort experienced in the ., .Ne\"cr-
e\"cr:' or far frontier. 


-4 ..,. . - 


friendly attitude of the employees. To be 
sure. I visitecl only the best factories, but 
that is just what I do in 
\merica. Com- 
paring factories of the same type in the 
two countries I am obliged to give the 
palm to Australia. This does not mean 
that I saw no signs of discontent, for I saw 
many. The Australian workingmen are 
altogether too ready to take advantage of 
every minor grievance to get more pay, or 
better conditions of work, and labor agi- 
tators seem to have much influence, es- 
pecially in Queensland. Nevertheless, the 
Australian working people impress me as 
on tl1(' whole the most prosperous and con- 
tented whom I have seen in any country 
uf Europe, Asia, or America. 
The most significant fact about the 
wage boards seems to be the attitude of 
the manufacturers themselves. In spite of 
the criticisms mentioned above, relatively 
few complain of the actual rates of wages, 
VOL. LXXVIII.-3:> 


comfort. The things that really make 
trouble are details such as the present di- 
vision of control between the federal and 
state governments. The saner employers 
recognize that these are the inevitable 
troubles incident to healthy growth. Such 
men support the .\ustralian ideal of a 
high standard of living. They almost 
universally approve of the boards' system 
of variations in wages to fit the conditions 
of the respective industries, to make up 
for the differences in the cost of living 
from place to place, and to compensate for 
fluctuations in prices from year to year. 
I was surprised to find how almost uni- 
versally the Australians who really know 
anything about it approve of the general 
principle of official wage boards whose 
function is to determine the minimum 
wages which will support the high Aus- 
tralian standard of living. I was likewise 
surprised to find how soon a little careful 



418 THE l\IINIì\IUl\l STA
DARDS OF A,CSTRALIA 


analysis showed that the great torrent of 
criticism is directed toward details of ad- 
ministration, or toward other principles, 
and not toward the principle of minimum 
wages. That principle seems now to be as 
firmly established in Australia as is the 
principle of representative government. I 
believe that the two principles are of 
equal importance. We hear incessant 
criticism of the way our representative 
government is administered, but only a 
few extremists advocate its abolition and 
the adoption of a bolshevistic, socialistic, 
monarchic, or feudal system. In the same 
way many Australians may say that dif- 
ferent types of men ought to serve on the 
wage boards, and that individual deci- 
sions are unfair, bu t very few would seri- 
ously advocate a return to the old system. 
When the great principle of universal 
minimum wages prevails in America and 
elsewhere, as I trust it will, the distribu- 
tion of wealth will almost certainly be 
more equable than now, as is the case in 
Australia. If that happens, we shall owe 
much to Australia for leading the way. 
The main trouble with Australian so- 
cial organization to-day seems to be that 
having accepted the great principle of 
minimum wages, it has not adopted the 
obvious and inevitable corollary of that 
principle. Here is the corollary: If the 
standard of living is high, the standard of 


production must also be high. Much 
must be produced if much is to be en- 
joyed. Hence, if it is right and wise to 
say that a man's wages must never have 
less than a certain purchasing power, it is 
equally right to say that a minimum 
amount of work shall be required of each 
worker. But this the Australians do not 
vet realize. It is not at all uncommon to 
hear working people praise Australia be- 
cause they do not have to work very hard. 
In many places I was astonished at the 
leisurely way in which the factory people 
were at work. They do, indeed, accom- 
plish a good deal, for they are competent, 
but much of the time they give the im- 
pression of not doing their best. One rea- 
son for this is that they are relatively sure 
of their jobs, for almost no one really 
needs to be unemployed in Australia. In 
the rural districts, except during severe 
droughts, there is almost always a great 
demand for" station hands," while every- 
where housemaids are sought eagerly. 

\nother reason for relatively poor work 
is that in many industries, as we have 
seen, the wages of skilled and unskilled 
men are nearly alike. Since even the un- 
skilled can live in comparative comfort, 
why bother to become skilled? Such an 
attitude is especially marked in factories 
which adhere closely to the wages fixed by 
the boards. The worst condition is among 


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High-grade rams in Xew South Wales, illustrating the greatest "inglc sourCt' of 
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the unskilled men. Thcv know that it is 
not easy to fill their places. They cannot 
be discharged without notice; and in 
many cases the unions can force a factory 
to work part time with all its men rather 
than full time with only the better ones. 
For all these reasons the tendency is to 
work no harder than is barely necessary. 
Neither the unions, the men themselves, 
nor the Australians as a whole have 
learned that high standards of wages and 
of living cannot exist permanently unless 
high standards of work are also enforced. 
This leads to another important con- 
sideration. Suppose that we accept the 
principle of minimum wages below which 
no worker shall fall, and accept also its 
corollary of minimum standards of work 
below which no one shall fall. \Vhat 
about the people who are not competent 
to maintain eyen the minimum standard 
of work? Shall the state give them doles 
of charity? All history proves that that 
is demoralizing. By far the most satis- 
factory way is to get riel of such pcople. 
But how can that be done? Eclucation 
will get rid of some, for it will make them 
more competent. 'Health campaigns will 
get rid of others, and the careful fitting of 
the worker to his task is also effective. 
But when all this has been done, there 



ti11 remains a certain percentage of people 
who are inherently incapable of meeting 
the minimum requirements of work, and 
of maintaining the minimum standard of 
living, even when paid the corresponding 
wage. If all the rest is the function of the 
state, is it not likewise its function to get 
rid of such people? 
In following out this line of reasoning I 
am merely trying to see the logical con- 
nection between the various elements 
which enter into the Australian labor 
problem. As I see it, the basic assump- 
tion, right or wrong, is this: The state is 
bound to insure that its people do not fall 
below a certain standard of living. 
Thcrefore it must set minimum standards 
of wages below which no one shall be al- 
lowed to drop. But minimum wages will 
ultimately prove a farce unless they are 
balanced by minimum requirements of 
work to which everyone must rise. Al- 
ready Australia would probably have suf- 
fered severely in this respect if it were not 
for the newness and natural wealth of the 
country, and the great rcturns realized 
from labor on the land and on the stock- 
stations. \Vhen these returns diminish- 
as they inevitably must in a few decades- 
the standard of wages, and hence of liv- 
ing, must fall, unless a minimum standard 
4 1 9 



420 THE \II:,{L\llT\1 ST:\NDARDS OF .-\USTRALI-\ 


of work is also required. This in turn 
means minimum requirements in the way 
of education and health. But these last 
cannot be met unless there is also a mini- 
mum standard of inherited abilitv. 
Standards of living, of wages, of work, of 
education, of health, and of inborn capa- 
city, that is the sequence. Or perhaps we 
had better put these in the reverse order: 
high capacity due to a good inheritance, 
good health due to a strong inheritance 
and favorable sanitary and medical sys- 
tems; good education due not only to a 
fine school system, but to good health and 
good inheritance; good work because of 
good education as well as good health and 
good inheritance; high wages because òf 
good work and all its antecedents; and a 
high standard of living as the result of an 
the others. \Vhether these conditions are 
placed in one order or the other, their 
logical and indissoluble connection is the 
same. It is natural to approach the prob- 
lem from the standpoint of the standard of 
living because that is the thing of immedi
 
ate interest to every one. Yet logically 
the true order is inborn capacity, health, 
education, work, wages, and standards of 
living. No matter how high the other 
conditions might be, a country would re- 
'"ert to utter savagery if the innate capac- 
ity of all its people should suddenly be 
reduced to that of morons, or of the stu- 
pidest, most half-witted people whom you 
know. There would never be anything 
bu t savagery so long as no people were 
born with more than the moron's intel- 
lectual capacity. Suppose, on the other 
hand, that the people of a country lost all 
their material advantages, their stores of 
knowledge from the past, their education, 
and even their wealth, but were all en- 
dowed with a remarkable inheritance of 
physical strength and moral and mental 
ability like those of the world's greatest 
leaders. They would at once begin a 
steady advance along the toilsome path 
toward a new ci,"ilization, higher perhaps 
than any which the world has yet seen. 
Let us return now to the point whence 
we started, namely, the way in which 
physical environment has influenced the 
selection of immigrants and their selec- 
tion has in turn borne fruit in a few social 
systems. As I see it, one of the most far- 
reaching facts in respect to Australia is 
that because the laboring classes have 


been subjected to a relatively high selec- 
tion, they have raised their own standards 
of living, and have made themselves re- 
spected and powerful as in almost no 
other countrv. Yet their case is not 
unique, for the same thing is found in 
New Zealand and, to a certain extent, in 
California. 
The position of women has been in 
many respects analogous to that of the 
laboring classes. That is, women have 
been deprived of what we now regard as 
their rights, and have been exploited by 
man as truly as have the laboring classes. 
In "The Character of Races" I have dis- 
cussed many examples in which rigid se- 
lection through migration, hardship, and 
disease has weeded out all the women ex- 
cept those most strongly imbued with the 
pioneer qualities which exist abundantly 
in Australia and especially among the wo- 
men of Queensland. Where a community 
has started life again after such a migra- 
tion,and where its women,even more than 
its men, have been remarkable for their 
physical vigor, their thrift and common 
sense, and their spirit of initiative and 
optimism, the position of woman has al- 
most invariably shown a marked im- 
provement. The Hakkas of China, the 
only Chinese among whom the custom of 
foot-binding never prevailed, are an ex- 
ample. The same is probably true of an- 
cient Athens, although there the facts are 
not so well known. It is certainly true 
among the Parsees, who migrated from 
Persia to India under the stress of re- 
ligious enthusiasm. The Norse who set- 
tled Iceland are another example, for 
their famous sagas show that after the 
hard migration from Norway the Ice- 
landic women occupied a position of re- 
spect and authority probably nowhere 
paralleled at that time. In the same way 
when the early settlers, especially the 
Puritans, came to America it was the 
women among whom there was the great- 
est natural selection. I t was likewise the 
women who experienced the greatest 
change in social status, the greatest in- 
crease in freedom. In few respects is the 
contrast between England and colonial 
America more pronounced than in the 
position of women as to the choice of hus- 
bands, the education of children, and gen- 
eral participation in the affairs of the 
community. In Australia, likewise, the 



THE 
II
I:\lUl'v1 ST4-\
DARDS OF AlTSTRALI:\ 421 


same contrast prevails, for the women of 
Australia have a freedom much greater 
than that of their sisters in England. 
The experience of women in respect to 
migration, selection, and social rights and 
privileges appears to be typical of that of 
any group of people which is somehow set 
off by itself. If the members of that 
group are selected because of strong traits, 


Anglo-Saxon Americans. The thing that 
struck me, however, was the great num- 
ber of high-grade, thoughtful, earnest 
men and women whom I met wherever I 
went, from TownsviHe to l\Ielbourne. Of 
course there are plenty of the same sort of 
people in the United States and England. 
Yet it seems to me that, on the whole, the 
educated Australians rlisplay an earnest- 


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:\.delaide, a sample of Australia"s magnificent cities, 


the group is almost sure to better its 
position in comparison with similar but 
unselected groups. Thus Australia's so- 
cial experiments and the improvement in 
the condition of her laboring classes are 
the normal result of the physical condi- 
tions which demanded that the laborers 
who went to Australia have better bodies, 
more energy, and a higher spirit of initia- 
tive than did those who stayed at home, 
or even those who went to America. The 
basic fact, I believe, is not so much the 
new social system which raises the level 
of the people, but the high innate level of 
the people which frames a new social 
system, and thereby raises the people still 
higher. 
I cannot. end this article without men- 
tioning the cünstant feeling of delight 
which I experienced in the Australians 
whom I met. Of course, when I started 
for the Pan-Pacific Science Congress I 
knew th8.tAustralians were essentially like 


ness, an openness of mind, and a readiness 
to accept the logic of facts and act accord- 
ingly such as one finds almost nowhere 
else. Perhaps what I mean was typified 
one day when we took lunch by the road- 
side on our way to Broken Hill. Our 
party, of about twenty, included Aus- 
tralians, British, Japanese, Dutch, and 
Americans. As I looked around after all 
had been served, I noticed that part were 
standing and part sitting on the ground. 
Then I observed a curious fact. Those 
who were standing were all Australians 
or Americans. Those who were sitting 
all belonged to the other countries. That 
seems to be typical. The Australians are 
standing at attention, eagerly looking for 
the next step whatever it may be. They 
do this partly, perhaps, because they live 
in a new country, but chiefly because the 
type of person who stands up and looks 
for something to do is the type which nor- 
mally gravitates to Australia. 



The Garment of Praise 


BY l\lARY ELLE
 CHASE 


ILLL'"STRATIONS BY L. F. \YILFORD 


.&iÌi HE
 Ethan and Sarah 
, Craig drove back to 

 
 North Dorset after 
rl W JI 
caving their only son 
I I In the cemetery at 
Dorset Village, they 
'WW did not talk. There 
was perhaps less oc- 
casion for conversation than on many 
another silent journey homeward, from 
church, or the Saturday trip to the village, 
or the monthly meeting of the Grange. 
Sarah could not have spoken if she would. 
She was inwardly trembling too acutely, 
with relief that things were over, that she 
must no longer endure Alvida Cum- 
mings's nervous flittings in and out of 
the front room, her officiousness as their 
nearest neighbor; that, if she could but 
get through the evening in her chair on 
one side of the table and the night in their 
room with its sloping ceiling. she might 
get up at four and wash. She was grate- 
ful for the size of the wash-the extra 
sheets and quilts. As for Ethan, he had 
nothing to say, and much to think about. 
There were the questions of how much 
Luke Crosby would charge to help two 
days at haying. and whether funeral ex- 
penses, too, had gone up. But these were 
not fit subjects for conversation. In fact, 
there is not much to talk about after two 
people have lived on the outskirts of 
North Dorset, l\Iaine, together, for thirty 
years. 
At \\-Titham's Corner they took the back 
road, Ethan turning to give a curt nod of 
appreciative farewell to their few main- 
road neighbors who had driven behind 
them in the procession. It was hot on the 
back road. All the heat of a mid-July af- 
ternoon seemed concentrated there-on 
the few rock-cut, uneven acres that bor- 
dered it, on the dusty, up-hill progress of 
the road itself. The air shimmered with 
heat, as though some mighty furnace were 
4 22 


sending blasts of it into the atmosphere. 
The dry, keen scent of newly cut hay 
weighted it with smell; red elderberries, 
drooping over a stone wall, intensified it 
with color; locusts in shrill monotony lent 
sound to it. 
Into the brilliant southwest sky yellow- 
tinged clouds began to intrude them- 
selves and to foretell thunder in their 
tumultuous outlines. There was a mo- 
mentary gleam in Sarah Craig's eyes as 
she sighted them. Then her anxious, in- 
tense gaze never left them, except for 
an occasional fleeting and surreptitious 
glance from behind the thick folds of Al- 
vida Cummings's veil at Ethan's gray, 
set face. Once, years ago, she remem- 
bered, when she was a child and alone in 
the house, she had prayed that an im- 
pending storm might be averted, and 
then, with more of wondering incredulity 
than of faith triumphant, had watched the 
threatening clouds pass over and move to- 
ward other places where there were, per- 
chance, other praying children. She did 
not pray now-she had, indeed, small rea- 
son to expect any interposition of provi- 
dence in her behalf-but she continued to 
gaze west ward with the strange sense that 
her suffering in some inexplicable way 
must, by its 0\V11 pent-up strength, effect 
what she wished. 
For to-night she wanted a stonn. 
Those northward tumbling clouds, could 
she but control their course, might mak
 
tolerable her evening and her night. They 
promised subjects for conversation, mo- 
mentary rents in that stifling three days' 
silence, during which Ethan had sat, 
clean-shaven, in his best clothes, by the 
kitchen window, during which she had 
surrendered to her neighbors the work she 
longed for. One could talk about a storm. 
One could say: 
" 1'd better close the up-stairs windows, 
It's coming from the north." 



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nto the brilliant 
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age 422. 


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--l2-! 


THE GAR:\IENT OF PRAISE 


Or, when a flash and a crash came to- 
gether: 
"Don't you think you'd better see if 
the barn's all right?" 
And, finally, as the rumbling became 
more distant though the lightning still 
played in the air: 
"They're getting it over in Petersport 
now, I guess." 
T 0 say those things and others like 
them would be as the momentary loosen- 
ing of chains about those who are bound. 
Yet a storm promised more. It would 
spend itself in reckless abandon, racing 
low through the orchard grass, hurtling 
the dripping lilac-bushes against the back 
windows, beating to the ground the weeds 
in the yard. It would gather grim, gray 
forces upon the spruce ridge above the 
house, and sweep with a crash of arms 
through the valley. \Vithin, the lightning 
would cut the darkness of the small rooms 
and the thunder would ruthlessly tear 
away the silence. ToSarahCraig,shackled 
by the restraint of years on the out- 
skirts of North Dorset, and during these 
last days fast bound by a repression com- 
pared to which grief was easily endurable, 
such freedom, amounting in its wildest 
moods to profligacy, offered a kind of 
vicarious relief. 
The storm came swiftlv on. She 
watched the sun disappear behind a tow- 
ering thunderhead, incredulous as she had 
been as a child. But a jagged streak of 
lightning, slitting the purple sky above 
the spruce ridge, assured her as they left 
the road for their own lane, driving past 
Alvida Cummings's horse hitched to the 
fence, past her extra chairs piled on the 
front porch, past the orchard, the bee- 
hives, the wood pile, the pump, to the side 
door. Here, as she stepped from the car- 
riage, trying not to see Alvida's proffered 
hand, she felt the first blessed loosening 
of the chains that bound her. 
"There's a storm coming, Ethan. 
You'd better get the horse put up quick's 
you can, and the milkin' done." 
"The milkin's done. I had Luke Crosby 
stay an' do it." J\Iiss Cummings spoke as 
master of ceremonies. Ethan mumbled 
his thanks as he drove to the barn. 
Sarah Craig followed her neighbor up 
the walk, and across the sagging, vine- 
hung porch to the house. A white kitten, 


contentedly lapping milk from a pink 
saucer in the corner, came forward with 
its tail erect, its round eyes expectant. 
J an'is Craig had liked to pet it as he 
waited on the porch steps for supper after 
work. It would have brushed against 
Sarah now and followed her inside had not 
Alvida's ready foot unceremoniously 
turned it back toward the milk. 
A girl in a pink dress stood bv the 
kitchen tahle hulling wild strawbérries. 
Her fingers were stained. and there were 
some red spots on her cheeks where she 
had pushed back some refractory locks of 
hair. She did not look up as the two en- 
tered, and Sarah Craig was puzzled at the 
sudden sense of comfort she felt in her be- 
ing there. She was l\Iartha Sutter, .Miss 
Cummings's girl. She did not belong in 
North Dorset. Jarvis Craig had felt 
sorry for her. One night upon his return 
from carrying _\lvida Cummings's two 
quarts of milk O\"er the ridge, he had said 
in an outburst of feeling that surprised his 
mother that no girl ought to have to live 
over there. 
Alvida came from the bedroom where 
she had taken Sarah's things, folding her 
black veil in brown paper as she came. ;\ 
sudden rumble shook the back windows. 
Sarah stood in the kitchen doorway, 
watching lVlartha Sutter's quick hands. 
They were delicate hands with tiny blue 
veins in them. She was wondering ab- 
sently how soon they would become hard 
like her own. 
"I think we'll have to go now, so's to 
get home before the storm." Alvida's 
voice was crisp and decisive. "The ta- 
ble's set for your supper and the kettle's 
on. You'd better drink some tea. It'll 
steady you. I'll take two 0' the chairs, 
and Ethan can bring the rest as he gets to 
it. Come, .:\Iartha." 
The girl at the table did not look up, 
and Sarah Craig, watching her, saw that 
her hands were trembling. 
"I'm not going," she said. "I'm stay- 
ing with l\Irs. Craig till the storm's over." 
And then, as if to fortify herself against 
Alvida Cummings's amazement: "I have 
Sunday afternoons off after five. It's six 
now." 
Sarah Craig moved forward, Fate was 
kinder to her than she had been led to 
expect. 



THE GARMENT OF PRAISE 


(( Let her stay," she said. " 1'd like her 
to." 
Alvida, with her hand on the door- 
knob, turned to the girl. She could not 
thus easily relinquish dictatorship. 
"You're let off Sundays for prayer- 
meetin' ," she said. " You've always gone 
with me till Luke Crosby broke in. I 
thought he was drivin' you to the village 
to-night same's he's been doin' for months 
back. 'VeIl," as the girl did not answer, 
"well, ain't he?" 
"He can't. He's going away." 
lVIiss Cummings's perennial hunger for 
news drew her toward the table. 
"Goin' away? \Vhere's he goin'?" 
" 'Way off. Canada maybe, now their 
haying's done. I don't know where." 
" When' d he tell you?" 
"'Vhen he brought in the milk, only I'd 
known it before." 
Sarah Craig was hulling strawberries 
now. In some inexplicable way she knew 
that Martha Sutter needed her help. A 
louder clap of thunder crashed through 
the still, sultry air. Alvida Cummings 
opened the side door. 
"So you'd known it before? But you 
don't know where he's goin'?" 
Her expectant detennination was draw- 
ing an unwilling answer. Sarah Craig saw 
how unrelaxed was the body of the girl 
pressed against the table. She knew how 
it felt to be bound like that. 
"I told you I didn't!" Defiance had 
rushed into the tone. 
The silence grew tense. Alvida Cum- 
mings broke it. 
" Well, there's one thing more I want to 
say. Y o'lt-ouglzt-to--know! " 
Her small brown eyes tried in vain to 
raise 1-Iartha Sutter's. Failing, she went 
out. 
Left mercifully alone, the two by the 
I table finished the strawberries. Sarah 
Craig, as the significance of her neigh- 
bor's words slowly came to her, kept 
glancing at the girl, at the convulsive 
twitching of her shoulders inside the pink 
dress. \Vhen the last berry was in the 
yellow bowl, she examined them critically, 
moving the bowl in a revolving fashion 
upon the table. She must do something. 
1\-Iartha picked awav some bits of the hulls 
which had fastenéd themselves to her 
stained fingers. The stonn burst in a 
VOL. LXXVIII.-31 


425 


flash of blue lightning and a sudden blast 
of rain. 
"It was nice of you to pick these for 
us," said Sarah Craig. "Where'd you 
find them, late like this?" 
"On the ridge just above the house 
here. There's a glen where late ones 
grow." 
She drew her breath in sharply. When 
she let it go, she came with it, falling on 
her knees beside the table, her arms out- 
stretched upon it, her whole body shaken 
with a paroxysm of sobbing. Sarah 
Craig watched her, half-rising from her 
chair. Alanned though she was at such 
display of feeling in her kitchen, which 
had never known such abandon, she would 
have given anything to have let herself go 
like that. But a long succession of years 
held her back. Still, as with the storm, 
now fully upon them, she was experienc- 
ing through Martha Sutter's sobbing a 
momentary relaxation and rest. 
Ethan's step as he came from the barn 
through the carriage-house to the shed 
aroused l\-Iartha Sutter. Before he had 
reached the kitchen, pausing as he had 
done for years to gather up a few sticks of 
wood, she had washed and dried her face 
at the sink. Sarah Craig watched her 
gratefully as she took his hat and helped 
him off with his coat. Twenty years be- 
fore she might have done it as easily. 
They got supper together as the storm 
crashed overhead-cut the bread and 
cake, portioned the strawberries, got 
doughnuts from the cellarway, made the 
tea. Ethan watched the barn from the 
back window. Sarah's occasional com- 
ments upon the force of the wind or an un- 
usually vivid flash broke a silence less 
cruel than she had feared. Martha Sutter 
did her part. She asked Ethan if he 
thought the hay would be spoiled, and 
contributed the infonnation that Jason 
Webber had lost a calf that morning. 
Sarah did not tell Ethan that Luke Crosby 
had gone-perhaps to Canada. 
The stonn continued throughout their 
supper. The dining-room was at the back 
of the house, its two windows facing the 
western spruce ridge. Lightning so con- 
tinuous as to seem a shimmering yet un- 
broken glare threw the dark spruces and 
pines into blue relief. 
1artha Sutter, 
from her chair opposite the windows, saw 



426 


THE GARl\IENT OF PRAISE 


them bend toward the earth in one gust 
of wind and then in another toss impre- 
cating arms toward heaven. Once she 
started from her chair, stifling aery, as a 
red ball of fire seemed to cleave a great 
gray boulder below the trees. 
"That struck somewhere on the ridge," 
said Ethan as the simultaneous thunder 
shook the house. "A tree, most likely." 
With a quick glance at Sarah he passed 
his cup for more tea. She had loosened a 
yarn in the tea-cozy and was ravelling it 
absently. 
Suddenly l\Iartha Sutter seized her 
plate, knife, and spoon and moved to the 
other side of the table with her back to 
the window. It was Jarvis Craig's place 
that she had taken, but the grief of his 
father and mother in its dull, aching 
monotony was not pierced by any sudden 
or more poignant anguish. 
In the evening, after the dishes were 
washed, they sat in the sitting-room, 
Ethan at his side of the table, Sarah at 
hers, Martha Sutter in a chair by the 
stove. Ethan glanced once at the weekly 
paper, still folded, in the middle of the 
table. He did not touch it. That would 
have suggested his longing to think of 
other things. Martha Sutter held the 
white kitten which had whimpered to be 
let in. It was forlorn and wet. Once it 
cried out piteously. Sarah Craig started 
in her chair, and 1-Iartha Sutter flushed. 
She had not known she had been holding 
it so closely. 
The rumbling of the thunder became 
more distant, though the lightning still 
played in the air. 
"They're getting it over in Petersport 
now, I guess," said Sarah Craig. 


The days that followed seemed to Sarah 
Craig in their dreary level the advent of 
nothingness. She was like one on a high, 
limitless desert, hot and windswept, the 
unchanging sky over her. She was choked 
with sand and thirst, weary from lifting 
her heavy feet. An impassable distance 
shut the past from her. There was noth- 
ing ahead but sand, and hot, unyielding 
sky. 
She remembered that one of her neigh- 
bors, on that day a fortnight since when 
they had brought Jarvis home from be- 
neath the load of hay, had prophesied a 


swift coming of pain to her-pain which 
should cut sharply through this steady, 
dull torment, superseding this heavy, 
monotonous ache with knifelike thrusts of 
anguish. But the prophecy had not been 
fulfilled, though as July gave way to 
August with its noonday droning of in- 
sects, she found herself still looking and 
longing for it. It would not only concen- 
trate the protracted agony which she had 
endured so long, but it would, perhaps, by 
its very sharpness tear from her the gar- 
ments in which she seemed so swathed 
and bound and set her spirit free. 
Even before Jarvis's death she had 
wanted that. Evenings when the three of 
them had watched the moon make vine- 
shadows on the porch; nights when she 
and Ethan had listened to the whip-poor- 
wills at their very window; mist-hung 
mornings when she had put up the bars 
for Jarvis and watched him following the 
cows down the lane. What was this 
thing, she asked herself for the hundredth 
time, that so early began to lace itself 
about them all, that held so closely all the 
people whom she knew? It hovered over 
the North Dorset farmers and their wives 
like a mocking fiend as they drove to the 
village on Saturdays, enjoining silence 
upon them or forcing them to an oc.. 
casional, strained remark; it reigned tri- 
umphant over their supper-tables and 
their evenings; it added torture to tor- 
ment when grief came to them. 
Was it engendered and nourished by 
the rocky acres of North Dorset, the long, 
silent winters, the six months' fight each 
year against the land? Was youth its 
enemy, that it sought to shackle it? It 
had early seized and bound her and 
Ethan, slowly, to be sure, but irrevocably, 
turning their speech into silence, trans- 
forming their early confidence in each 
other into a taciturn and necessary de- 
pendence, substituting for happiness a 
kind of inevitable content. In pathetic 
helplessness she had watched Jarvis fall 
an early prey to it, had seen him draw 
within himself while still a little boy, had 
recognized his restless suffering as he grew 
older, and yet had been unable to help 
him. 
Pain, such as she longed for, must, at 
least for the moment, loosen or break 
those cruel bonds, must give to her as it 



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From a dra . 
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She would ba . 
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109 to have let h If 
erse go like that - p 
. age 425. 


4 2 7 



428 


THE GARMENT OF PRAISE 


had given to Martha Sutter on that Sun- 
day evening freedom to fall by the table 
and sob, freedom to do for Ethan un- 
necessary, tender things when he had 
come for supper after another day's fight, 
single-handed, against the land. Waiting 
for that merciful hour, she could but sub- 
stitute the material for the spiritual, make 
the pies he liked best, carry a jug of cold 
molasses drink to the garden or hay field, 
place a pillow in his chair on the porch. 
Not infrequently, as the August fogs 
lessened and the evenings grew clear and 
cool, Martha Sutter came from :J\-Iiss AI- 
vida Cummings's to sit on the porch with 
them. Once Sarah, washing the dish- 
towels at the sink by the back window, 
was startled to see her poised in her pink 
dress on a boulder half-way up the spruce 
ridge, looking like some gigantic flower 
sprung into sudden bloom. She would 
have mentioned it as lVlartha came on the 
porch a few minutes later, but something 
in the girl's face made her hesitate. 
To Sarah Craig there was something 
approaching peace in those evenings, 
silent as they were. Ethan smoked in his 
corner, gazing defiantly now and then at 
the dim outlines of his cornstalks or at his 
sparse rows of potatoes. Sarah in her 
chair by the door commented now and 
again upon some neighborhood happen- 
ing, contributed by Martha, who sat on 
the doorstep, the white kitten in her annsc 
At nine, while the insects droned in the 
air and the spikes of larkspur by the porch 
were like still, thin threads of blue smoke 
in the gathering darkness, :J\-Iartha Sutter 
put down the white kitten and went back, 
through the pasture lane and over the 
spruce ridge, to Alvida Cummings's. 
It was on a Tuesday in late September 
following one of these evenings that Sarah 
Craig, coming down-stairs at five to begin 
the ironing, found :J\-Iartha Sutter already 
at work in her kitchen. She was ironing 
a shirt of Ethan's, and she did not look up 
as Sarah passed her to put her lamp on its 
shelf above the sink. In the corner by the 
stove were a battered straw suit-case and 
some bundles. As Sarah turned slowly 
from the sink, the girl, still busy with the 
shirt, began to speak in a hard, dry voice. 
"AI vida Cummings won't let me stay 
with her any longer. She sent me away 
last night. I stayed on your porch. She 


,:ouldn't have kept me this long only I 
hed to her and she couldn't get anyone 
else. I can go to the canning-factory at 
Petersport. They need girls and they 
don't care who they get." She laughed 
nervously. "But I'd rather stay here. 
I'll work for my board, and I've got fifty 
dollars saved, so I won't be any cost to 
you when-when I'm sick. And you're 
tired out. You need some help." 
Sarah Craig took her apron from a hook 
on the cellar door and put it on. Then 
she sat down and began fingering it. She 
was surprised at the ease with which she 
made up her mind. 
" You can stay here," she said. "I'm 
alone lots. I'll be glad of company. 
\Vhen-?" She hesitated. It was hard 
to frame the question. 
:J\-Iartha Sutter hung the shirt upon the 
rack and reached for another. A flush 
colored her neck and face. 
"I don't know exactly. In January, I 
guess. What'll :J\-Ir, Craig say? Folks '11 
talk, and I can't have you and him 
suffer. " 
" Suffer!" said Sarah Craig. She kept 
absently repeating the word under her 
breath as she went toward the back stairs. 
Once in the darkness there she sat down 
in the middle of the stairway. There had 
suddenly come to her consciousness some- 
thing of the magnitude of what she had 
promised Martha Sutter. 
She would be harboring a girl who, in 
North Dorset parlance, had " gone 
wrong." Such a situation was frowned 
upon by the countryside, and her harbor- 
age might well be interpreted as her coun- 
tenance of such behavior. But the girl 
could not be bad, Sarah Craig argued with 
herself. She had picked strawberries for 
them on the afternoon of Jarvis's funeral, 
had staid with them that evening, had 
sat with them in summer twilights, and 
more than all else had brought with her 
from some strange source an assurance of 
hidden powers which, one day freed, 
would bring security and peace. These 
were not the accompaniments of sin. 
They would be less lonely with her 
there. It would be easier to talk at meals 
and in the evenings. If they talked of 
Jarvis, who, Sarah remembered, had been 
sorry for her-if she could induce the girl 
to prick her with questions about him- 



THE GAR1\IENT OF PRAISE 


that pain might come which was some day 
to set her free. 
Lastly-Sarah Craig clutched her knees 
in the darkness-lastly, there was to be a 
child, an unwelcome child in place of the 
one she had dreamed of for years past. 
If its father did not come back to do the 
right thing by Martha Sutter, its mother 
must work. It might be then that the 
child would stay with them during those 
early years before chains were forged for 
it, might save others though it could not 
save itself. It might be-the floor in the 
hall above creaked under Ethan's heavy 
tread, and she went up the stairs to meet 
him on the landing. Necessity lent her 
courage-necessity, the darkness of the 
narrow hall, and the knowledge that 
Ethan, like Jarvis, had always hated AI- 
vida Cummings. 


The fall was long and quiet with days 
that began in gold and ended in blue haze. 
Even North Dorset, its uncompromising 
fields and rocky, angular pastures, be- 
came under the autumn sun a land that 
would have tempted the spies of Israel. 
For the first time in twenty years Sarah 
Craig felt herself distantly related to 
the full-bosomed contentment of October. 
Although no swift pain had as yet come 
to set her free, she was gratefully aware of 
a new sense of peace as she sat with Mar- 
tha Sutter sewing on the porch on still, 
amber afternoons. It more than com- 
pensated for the curiosity and disap- 
proval which she intuitively felt when she 
met her North Dorset neighbors. 
Strangely enough, Martha Sutter, too, 
seemed at peace. Not since that Sunday 
evening in July had Sarah Craig seen her 
give way. If she sobbed by herself in her 
room at night or during the hours in 
which she climbed to the spruce ridge, she 
I gave no sign. Nor was her peace nega- 
tive, To Sarah Craig, incomprehensible 
as it seemed, she was like one who, hav- 
ing discovered something of inestimable 
value, has locked it away forever. 
Then the short, mellow, sunlit days 

eased as abruptly as one extinguishes the 
lIght of a candle in a dusky room. North 
Dorset again became a bleak land, a prey 
to November winds and low, gray clouds. 
Late autumn was always its hour of tri- 
umph, Sarah Craig thought. Then, se- 


429 


cure in its colorless fields, its stark, bare 
pastures, and the surety of a long winter 
close at hand, it could mock those who, 
allured by its October mood, had been 
tempted to dream of plenty and content. 
:J\-Iartha Sutter, gazing from the win- 
dow one November morning, as they pre- 
pared the vegetables for dinner, at the 
first snowflakes powdering the spruces on 
the ridge, spoke suddenly to Sarah Craig. 
" North Dorset's a cruel place, isn't it?" 
Sarah Craig dropped the potato from 
which she had been removing the scabs 
with a knife. At that moment she heard 
herself speaking, herself thirty years ago 
standing at that kitchen table and look- 
ing out upon those bare hills. Those 
words were her own which she had never 
uttered. 
Martha Sutter did not wait for an ans- 
wer. "They're all cruel-places like this. 
West Stetson was where I came from, and 
Morgan's Bay and the Falls. I know 
about all of them. They hold you in 
close so's you can't get away." 
Had Sarah Craig known of Greek 
drama, she might have heard in :11:artha 
Sutter's words a chorus, accompanying 
and interpreting her own tragedy. The 
idea of her girlhood ghost persisted. She 
did not speak. 
"They hold you in close," repeated the 
girl. There was no anger in her voice. 
It was dry and even as though she were 
but giving tangible form to thoughts she 
had long held. "They tie you all up like 
as if there were ropes about you, and then 
they make you want things just like other 
people. When you can't stand it any 
more and break the things they tie you 
with "-her words came slowly-" when 
you do that, they call it wrong." 
Sarah Craig felt a sense of wonder that 
the clock upon the mantel above the sink 
kept on ticking. 
"I've thought it all out these last 
months, and I don't think it's wrong- 
leastways not in North Dorset." She let 
her hands play in the pan of brown, dirt- 
filled water. "You can't stay tied up 
that way forever. You've got to have 
some way out. If you don't, after a time 
you just die, inside." 
"Yes," said Sarah Craig, A sudden 
bitterness had discovered her voice for 
her. "Yes, I died twenty years ago!" 



430 


THE GARIVIENT OF PRAISE 


"People do," continued the girl. She 
was rubbing the paring-knife across her 
fingers to free them from dirt and water. 
"Or else they find some way out. Take 
Carrie Knowles. She went to work in a 
store over in Stetson. There's things 
happening there. There's young people, 
and parties, and a picture-show every 
night. She wouldn't live here any more 
for all of North Dorset. She said so last 
time she was home. 
"Take those Stover boys. They went 
up around Boston somewhere in a ma- 
chine-shop. You don't see them coming 
back to North Dorset. 
"Take-well, take Alvida Cummings. 
She ain't tied up like most folks. She 
goes to prayer-meeting at the village, and 
makes long prayers, and tries to convert 
people. That's her way out." 
Sarah Craig's kitchen had never wit- 
nessed such heresy, though she herself 
seemed now no stranger to it. 
"Take"-l\1:artha Sutter hesitated, but 
only for a moment-" take me," she said. 
Again she hesitated, but, the gates once 
opened, the flood was too strong for her. 
Sarah Craig, too, was helplessly borne 
along by it. 
"I'm twenty. I've lived with Alvida 
Cummings six years, and I've wanted 
things all along. What have I had? 
Work all day in her kitchen, and nowhere 
to go except to meeting with her Sundays 
or winters to the Grange. Last spring for 
three months I got something I wanted 
for the first time in all my life. I found 
out that some one-that some one loved 
me." 
It was strange that in the close, hot air 
of her kitchen, now so tense and preg- 
nant, the fragrance of lilacs came to Sarah 
Craig, that her yellow, painted floor gave 
place to the grass of a blossoming or- 
chard, that the sound of her tea-kettle 
became the even hum of bees. 
"I found out other things, too," said 
Martha Sutter. She had put her hand 
again into the water and was circling it 
about the pan. "That's what I couldn't 
understand at first-that discovering 
lovely things could have any place with 
doing wrong. I found out that even 
North Dorset was beautiful. I found out 
that it wasn't work to pick berries when 
there were clouds and a wind. I found 


out "-she gave a deprecatory little laugh 
-"you'll think I'm crazy, but I found 
out one day that there was something else 
to the bread I'd baked for Alvida Cum- 
mings besides its just smelling nice." 
Sarah Craig was putting a blue flower 
on a breakfast-table set for two. 
"He found out things, too. He told 
me once that even taking the cows to pas- 
ture was-was-different. He said-" 
Something inside Sarah Craig was giv- 
ing way. With the instinct of years she 
strove to hold it back. For an instant she 
was angry with Martha Sutter for making 
her like this. 
"If he said those things, why hasn't he 
-done right by you?" She spoke tense- 
ly, her voice rising with each word. 
:J\-Iartha Sutter did not answer until she 
had carried the pan to the sink, emptied 
it, and filled it with clear water by quick 
jerks of the pump. She brought it to the 
table and began to rinse the vegetables. 
"He wanted to. We were going to be 
married after haying. Then he had to- 
to go away." 
"Ain't he comin' back?" She had 
caught herself again. 
"He can't-just now." 
Sarah Craig looked out of the window. 
The snow had given place to a fine rain. 
A wraith of white mist like an uneasy 
spirit hovered over the spruce ridge. A 
sudden wave of pity swept over her for 
Martha Sutter-that she and her child 
must pay so dearly for her way out. North 
Dorset knew so well how to take revenge. 
"Do you still-" Try as she would, 
she could not frame the word. "Do you 
still-set store by him, :J\-Iartha, after all?" 
The girl's eyes followed the mist as it 
wavered among the dark treetops and 
was tom into shreds that floated away 
down the valley. 
"Yes," she said. "That's why since I 
came here, I haven't minded. Over 
there I got all tied up again so that I did 
mind. I thought of all kinds of things. 
One night coming down here I thought 
I'd throw myself off that big boulder on 
the ridge. But I knew all the time I 
wouldn't. Here it's different. Here 
I'm "--she studied Sarah Craig's bent 
face for a moment-" I'm glad!" 
Once freed, her words followed each 
other swiftly, almost fiercely, 




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. . , She was gratefully aware of a new sense of' peace as she sat with 
Iartha Sutter sewing on the porch on 
still, amber afternoons.-Page 429. 


"I'm not saying it wasn't wrong, but 
I'm glad North Dorset can't ever hold me 
in like that again! I'm glad I've learned 
there are lovely things--even in this 
place! I'm glad-" 
She paused suddenly as Ethan's step 
sounded on the porch. As he came in, 
bringing with him the chill November 


air, she smiled and asked if more snow 
were commg. Sarah Craig bent over 
the oven, putting in the potatoes. Ethan 
went through the kitchen to the sitting- 
room. When he was out of sight of 
the women, he called back to 11artha 
Sutter: 
"I met Alvida Cummings on the lower 
43 1 



432 


THE GARMENT OF PRAISE 


road, Martha. She said to tell you that 
Luke Crosby got back last night." 
"Did he?" asked Martha Sutter. 
She went into the shed suddenly. 
Sarah Craig, rising from the oven, saw her 
through a crack in the door, her face 
buried in an old coat of Jarvis's that hung 
there by the wood pile. 
:Martha Sutter's child, a boy, was born 
on a bitter night in early February. She 
lived long enough to say that he looked 
like his father and that he must go away 
from North Dorset when he grew up. 
Then she died. She had had her way out, 
and North Dorset, for once baffled, must 
wait a few years before wreaking its cer- 
tain and cruel revenge. 
But that morning as she lay in Jarvis 
Craig's room, waiting for the doctor from 
Dorset Village to break through the drifts, 
she had talked with his father and mother 
in the intervals between her suffering. 
They had sat on either side of her bed and 
listened, until Ethan stumblingly had 
moved his chair beside Sarah's. That was 
when she had raised her hands suddenly 
above her head. When she dropped 
them, he took one in his own and held it 
awkwardly. 
Now Martha Sutter lay dead in the room 
which should have been her own. Fate 
had been kinder to her than she, perhaps, 
deserved. On her face in the dim light of 
the lamp on the table was the still, hopeful 
peace of October afternoons. Outside in 
the white moonlight rose the spruce ridge, 
its glen, where late strawberries grew, 
snow-filled and silent, its dark trees aus- 
tere among their own long shadows. 
Sarah Craig sat in her kitchen by her 
stove, a white bundle on her lap. For 
hours she had been as one in a dream who 
tries unavailingly to knit up into a co- 
herent whole a myriad of illusions, reali- 
ties, contradictions. Since morning, when 
she had learned that the child who was 
coming was her son's, she had felt herself 
lifted from one wave of emotion only to be 
instantly submerged by a conflicting one. 
Jarvis, to whom alone they had looked for 
safety from themselves, whose death had 
been to them as the closing of a great 
door, had, after all, not left them comfort- 
less; yet this child had, in the eyes of 


North Dorset, been conceived in sin. 
:J\-Iartha Sutter's words, heard in that pain- 
fraught room, had struck shackles from 
their hands and their feet; yet her son 
must some day pay for their regained 
freedom. Their meaningless days on the 
North Dorset uplands would be hence- 
forth fraught with meaning; yet those 
bare uplands must leave their mark upon 
the son of Jarvis Craig and Martha Sut- 
ter. Could the salvation of one be 
rightly born in the sin of another? Were 
the fruits of the spirit ever made manifest 
in the works of the flesh? 
But with the passing of :J\-Iartha Sutter's 
soul out of the window, beyond the spruce 
ridge, far beyond the confines of North 
Dorset, a peace had descended upon 
Sarah Craig. It enveloped her like a 
loose and shimmering gannent in which 
her mind and body were at rest. It dis- 
solved her futile questions and answers, 
age-old queries that had baffled all men 
at all times, and silenced the voices that 
might have driven joy from her. To- 
morrow, next month, next year, she and 
Ethan might weigh those questions and 
listen to those voices. To-night they 
moved together in wide, light spaces, far 
from North Dorset. 
The child on her lap stirred. She felt 
the wannth of its tiny body against her 
own. From somewhere, far back in al- 
most forgotten years, words came to her: 
He hath sent me to bind 'Up the broken- 
hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, 
and the opening of the prison to them that 
are bound. . . . 
To give 'Unto them beauty for ashes, the 
oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise 
for the spirit of heaviness. 
The words rang in her ears like the far- 
off pealing of great bells. She closed her 
eyes, and held the child close, repeating 
them: 
To give 'Unto them beauty for ashes, the oil 
of joy for mourning, the garment of praise 
for the spirit of heaviness. 
The child cried out sharply. She 
opened her eyes, to see Ethan bending 
over them. They did not speak. Mter 
all, there should be no need of talking 
when two people have lived on the out- 
skirts of North Dorset, Maine, together, 
for thirty years. 



O N the title-page of his last novel, 
"The Brothers Karamazov," Dos- 
toevski placed a text from the 
Gospel of S1. John: "Except a corn of 
wheat fall into the ground and die, it 
abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth 
forth much fruit." 
The law of sacrifice is as efficient in lit- 
erature as in religion and morality; if it is 
true that human character cannot develop 
except by frustration and pain, and that 
the sacrifice of the few makes for the wel- 
fare of the many, it is equally true that 
poetry and music, which give elevation to 
millions, have often come from the grief 
and anguish of creative artists. But we 
can go even further. If it is expedient 
that one man should die for the people, it 
is true that some young men of great 
promise have accomplished more by dy- 
ing than they could have done by a long 
and fruitful career. The death of young 
Nathan Hale has been and will be more 
productive of character than had he lived 
long and successfully; two brilliant young 
Cambridge undergraduates, Edward King 
and Arthur Hallam, accomplished more 
for literature by dying than they could 
have done by years of service. 
Arthur Henry Hallam and Alfred 
Tennyson were undergraduates at Cam- 
bridge, and belonged to the same secret 
society. They were, in every sense of the 
word, intellectual kinsmen, and their bond 
, of friendship was stronger than the aver- 
age family tie. Hallam had a powerful 
and original mind, and if there had been 
votes then as there are to-day in American 
colleges, he would have been elected by 
his classmates as "the man most likely to 
succeed." During the summer vacation 
of I833 he died. 
Tennyson lived to be eighty-three; the 
death of Hallam was the most severe loss 
he ever sustained. I used to think that 
the way Tennyson spoke of his friend in 
the poem was the naturally exaggerated 
language of grief; that he overestimated 


Hallam's ability and character, Hallam 
having died too young to leave any im- 
portant "remains." I used to think so 
until, somewhere in the nineties of the 
last century, I read an article contributed 
to The Y o-uth's Companion by Gladstone, 
in which he wrote that Hallam was the 
most remarkable man he had ever known. 
No superlative of Tennyson can surpass 
such a tribute. 
\Vhen we remember that Gladstone was 
over eighty, that he had met practically 
everybody in Europe and nearly every- 
body in America who had achieved prom- 
inence, and that, looking back over his 
amazing career and passing in review 
statesmen, military heroes, poets, novel- 
ists, scientists, and philosophers, he put 
young Hallam first, we can form some idea 
of the impression this college youth made 
on his contemporaries. 
There is a curious and interesting lit- 
erary and chronological parallel between 
" In lVlemoriam" and :J\-Iilton's "Lyci- 
das." Almost exactly two hundred years 
before Hallam's death, Edward King, 
]yElton's undergraduate friend at Cam- 
bridge, was drowned during the summer 
vacation. In American colleges to-day, 
if a student dies during vacation, his class- 
mates meet at the opening of the term, 
appoint a committee, and resolutions ex- 
pressing regret are published in the col- 
lege paper and forwarded to the family. 
But in the seventeenth century there 
were no college dailies; if a student died, 
those of his friends who imagined them- 
selves capable of writing poetry wrote 
poems in his honor, the ,. efforts" were 
collected in a pamphlet, and a few copies 
printed. So when Edward King was lost, 
some Cambridge men, among them John 
Milton, issued a little booklet, containing 
their memorial verses. This is an ex- 
tremely rare volume to-day, and as I was 
looking over the original in the Yale Li- 
brary, I was impressed anew by the fact 
that, no matter what the occasion, Milton 
433 



434 


AS I LIKE IT 


always did his best. It gives one a 
strange sensation to read through that 
collection of poetical tributes, where effort 
is so much more perceptible than talent, 
and come to the immortal strains of "Lyci- 
das." lvlilton did not know that he was 
writing one of the great poems of all time; 
it was his duty to contribute something 
to the memory of his dead friend, and he 
did his best. 
However important existence may be 
to an individual, the world gains more by 
one great work of art than by the active 
life of even the exceptional man. 
Some years ago there was an amusing 
and yet instructive article in an English 
magazine, which took the form of a dia- 
logue in the Elysian Fields between King 
and Hallam. One congratulated the 
other upon the fact that, although neither 
had lived long enough to accomplish any- 
thing, they were both saved from oblivion 
by having for an intimate friend an im- 
mortal poet; and incidentally, remarked 
the speaker, I think. I am even more for- 
tunate than you. This was stoutly de- 
nied; and a long debate took place. 
Yet it is vain to compare these master- 
pieces. "L ycidas" is vertical, "In Me- 
moriam" horizontal. "Lycidas" attains 
a height of poetry unreachable by Tenny- 
son; but "In Memoriam" is far more ex- 
tensive in its appeal. Nearly every house 
in the world containing cultivated Eng- 
lish-speaking people contains also a copy 
of "In 
1emoriam"; it has comforted 
and stimulated millions. "Lycidas" rises 
above the earth, and dwells in thinner air. 
"In Memoriam" is in the atmosphere of 
humanity. "Lycidas" makes an irre- 
sistible appeal to the poet and the critic; 
" In Memoriam" makes an irresistible 
appeal to the average man. \Vhat is the 
cause of its instant and lasting popular- 
ity? 
Tennyson's father was a clergyman of 
the Church of England, and his mother 
pious. At an early age Alfred was affiict- 
ed with scepticism, like so many college 
undergraduates everywhere, and while 
still at Cambridge he wrote a poem with 
the defensive title, "Supposed Confes- 
sions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind," 
which deals with the torture of doubt. 
Later he became ashamed of the diction 
of this piece, and suppressed it; after 


nearly fifty years, it was found by a reli- 
gious periodical, which announced that in 
its next issue would appear an early and 
forgotten poem on religion by the great 
Laureate. Tennyson wrote to the paper, 
threatening legal prosecution if the poem 
appeared; so they did not print it-or did, 
I've forgotten which. 
This rather crude poem shows how 
early in his career Tennyson was absorbed 
by the current problems of religion and 
theology. A few years later he wrote 
"The Two Voices," in which, unlike the 
earlier poem, faith triumphs over scepti- 
cism. Then in I850 appeared "In Me- 
moriam," 
It is curious that the death of one who 
is nearest and dearest should increase 
rather than diminish the survivor's faith 
in God; but it is so. An enormous number 
of people enter the Christian Church by 
the way of thorns, The death of Hallam 
was a shattering blow to Tennyson; but 
after he emerged from the lethargy of 
grief, he began an examination of the 
grounds for Christian faith. His general 
attitude is stated in the Prologue, which 
was written after the main part of the 
poem had been finished. This prologue 
is not only interesting because of its 
ideas, but because Tennyson so happily 
combined the classical Invocation to the 
Muse with the Christian habit of prefac- 
ing every great undertaking with prayer. 
Artistic creation has always been assumed 
to be on a higher level than industrious 
construction. Poets and musicians seem 
inspired, while mechanical laborers must 
depend upon themselves. When a classi- 
cal poet set out to write an epic, he began 
by invoking the Muse, feeling that he 
must look for divine inspiration. 
Now when Milton wrote " Paradise 
Lost," he wished to write a Christian 
poem on a pagan model; he combined the 
classical form of invocation with the 
Christian habit of prayer-he accom- 
plished this by appealing first to the heav- 
enly Muse, and then to the Holy Spirit. 
"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world, and all our woe, . . . 
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top 
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire. . . . 
And chiefly thou, 0 Spirit, that dost prefer 
Before all temples the upright heart and pure, 
Instruct me, for thou knowest." 



AS I LIKE IT 


It would have been ridiculous for Ten- 
nyson to have begun "In Memoriam" 
with an invocation to the Muse; it would 
have given to his poem an intolerable air 
of artificiality. So, taking the framework 
merely of the classical invocation, we see 
him at the beginning of his great under- 
taking kneeling in prayer to the Son of 
God. 
Adverse critics have said that there is 
not enough of personal grief in the poem; 
that it is epical rather than lyrical. These 
critics misunderstand its purpose and 
scope. Tennyson is not weeping at the 
grave of his friend; he is erecting a mau- 
soìeum over his remains. There is a differ- 
ence between attending a funeral and vis- 
iting the tomb of Napoleon. When we 
enter the tomb of Napoleon, we do not 
burst into tears because Bonaparte is 
dead, 'Ve are rather in a state of awe and 
wonder at the sublimity of the funereal 
architecture, we wander hither and 
thither, admiring details. So in opening 
"In Memoriam," it is not so much the 
bitterness of loss that affects us as the 
beauty of the poetical architecture. We 
read through a century of cantos, where 
everyone will find something appealing. 
One of the chief functions of a great 
poet is to reflect as in a mirror the thought 
of his timec Certainly in "In :Memoriam" 
we find more accuracy in reflection than 
originality of thought. As in a mirror, we 
see the ideas of 1850; as by an echo, we 
hear the voices of that epoch. 
It was a confused, stormy, and revolu- 
tionary time, a war of Titans. Darwin, 
Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer represented 
the advance of science; John Stuart Mill 
the principle of utilitarianism as distin- 
guished from religious altruism; Carlyle 
was a reincarnation of Elijah plus a sense 
of humor; Dickens and Thackeray re- 
vealed with satire nearly every phase of 
English social life ; Kingsley and Newman 
debated Protestantism and Catholicism. 
Many hoped, and many feared, that 
Christianity would not survive the cen- 
tury. 
Out of the noise of argument came a 
clear singing voice-the voice of Tenny- 
son, who harmonized these discords into 
a masterpiece. 
From the death of Edward King sprang 
a poem that rises like an austere peak on 


435 


the sky-line of literature; from the ashes 
of Arthur Hallam came an epic that made 
universal grief articulate. 


Among the new books, I have read with 
sustained interest "William Graham 
Sumner," by Harris E. Starr. Of course 
I have, because I was a pupil and later a 
colleague of Sumner. It is not easy to 
predict just what effect this biography 
will have on those who never knew the 
man; but Allan Nevins, in the New York 
TVorld, wrote a column review that was 
impressive to me, not merely because of 
its excellence, but because it seemed to 
prove that l\lr. Starr had succeeded in his 
undertaking. The personality of Sumner 
stood out in rugged beauty, and Mr. 
Nevins saw him as he really was. 
Force, force to the uttermost-such 
was the effect produced by this famous 
teacher on his pupils, and on all who 
heard him, and on all who read his books. 
The time was out of joint, and he revelled 
in the fact that he was born to set it right. 
Curiously enough, with his fierce dogma- 
tism, hatred of sentimentality, and ag- 
gressive attitude, he never to his students 
seemed conceited. No one is quicker to 
smell conceit than an undergraduate; per- 
haps because to no one is conceit more of- 
fensive, No, it was almost the opposite 
of conceit; it was the complete absorption 
of the man in his subject, his innate con- 
viction of the importance of wbat he was 
teaching, and his ruthless delight in bat- 
tle. For although he loved to discover, 
reveal, and explain the truth, there was 
one thing he loved much more-to fight 
error. "Billy was in great form this 
morning! " 
He was the arch-foe of romanticism 
and sentimentalism; and I, who am in- 
curable, found his teaching an excellent 
antiseptic. 
Immediately after finishing the Life 
of Sumner, I began reading "Newman 
as a :Man of Letters," by Doctor Joseph 
J. Reilly. Both Sumner and Newman 
studied theology at Oxford. From that 
point their careers were like the two arms 
of a hyperbola, travelling off into space. 
The farther they travelled, the farther 
apart they became, The possibilities of 
divergence of view could hardly be better 
illustrated. Both had a high-grade in- 



436 


AS I LIKE IT 


tellect, both loved the truth, both tried 
honestly to follow it, both were skilled in 
dialectic and debate, both finally lived in 
mental states so far apart that if they had 
dwelt in different planets they could not 
have had less in commonc What is 
truth? 
Perhaps they know now. One is re- 
minded of Rossetti's sonnet on Shelley, 
who finds the truth only beyond this life. 
""Vas the Truth thy Truth, Shelley?- 
Hush! All-Hail, Past doubt, thou gav'st 
it," 
Doctor Reilly's book on Newman has 
been much needed. It is not controver- 
sial, it is not propaganda; it is an attempt 
to interpret Newman as a literary artist, 
and frankly to induce this present gener- 
ation to read his best prose with enjoy- 
ment. The author's enthusiasm for his 
hero and his sympathy with his attitude 
make him well qualified. The best criti- 
cism is born of sympathy and enthusiasm. 
It is interesting to reflect that although 
Newman spent his energies in persuasive 
prose, in the endeavor to make others see 
the truth as he saw it, and that both from 
the literary and from the theological 
points of view he had more success than 
he could have expected-one short poem 
that he wrote in his youth will outlast the 
rest of his work. I think if a secret and 
universal ballot were taken, "Lead, 
kindly Light!" would be voted the best 
of all hymns. 
It resembles the Lord's Prayer in its 
universal quality, for without any refer- 
ence to creed or dogma, it voices human 
aspiration. 


As just before a total eclipse, observers 
can sometimes see the black shadow ap- 
proaching along the earth, so any reader 
of M. Paléologue's "An Ambassador's 

Æemoirs " can plainly feel the coming 
shadow of the Russian Revolution. He 
was French ambassador to Russia during 
the war; and the second volume of his 
memoirs (now available in English) is like 
a prologue to the swelling act. This vol- 
ume covers the period from June 3, 1915, 
to August 18, 1916-the comments in his 
diary show that shrewd insight and sense 
of fact so frequently characteristic of 
Frenchmen. I have read many books on 
this period; but I seem in this diary to 


breathe the air of Petrograd, to feel the 
crisis coming. If- 


Other recent books: "The Earth Speaks 
to Bryan," by Henry Fairfield Osborn, is 
a short and clear outline of some phases 
of evolution by a scientist who believes in 
religion, "Seducers in Ecuador," by V. 
Sackville-West, is not so bad as its title, 
for there was only one of them, anyway, 
and he didn't exist. "The Rational 
Hind," by Ben Ames Williams, is an ad- 
mirable story of Maine farmers; I hope 
the author will send a complimentary 
copy to Eden Ph illpotts, who is sure to 
like the book. Two mystery-thrillers 
that I will guarantee to clutch the read- 
er's mind are "The Locked Book," by 
F. L. Packard, and" Thus Far," by J. C. 
Snaith; while to those who still like 
gramercy romances let me recommend 
"Knight at Arms," by H. C. Bailey. 
This is the story of a hero so brave and 
able that in comparison with him D' Ar- 
tagnan seems sluggish and crude. Why, 
in one place he- But let me not spoil the 
thing by giving it away. 
Just as I was feeling at peace with all 
the world, and free from national preju- 
dices, I háppened to read in The Living 
Age an article taken from (of all periodi- 
cals) the Manchester Guardian Weekly 
(now if it had been The Morning Post or 
The Saturday Review) called "Dignity and 
Impudence," by A. R. This Englishman 
compares Englishmen quite favorably 
with Americans and with Frenchmen; the 
English are democratic, yes, but not im- 
pudent and pushfullike Americans; they 
have not the appalling bad manners of 
Americans; they would rather die than be 
like Americans. On the other hand, 
while the English have a certain innate 
and noble dignity, they are not slaves to 
the caste system like the French people. 
The English aristocrats do not have to 
think of their dignity, as the French must 
do. The English have that combination 
of aristocracy and democracy which 
neither the French nor the Americans can 
understand, but which makes every Eng- 
lishman an example to the human race. 
(St. Luke 13: II.) 
Well, after all, it is only an individual 
relieving his mind; and it comforts me to 



AS I LIKE IT 


think how much more angry John Gals- 
worthy must have been when he read that 
article than any American can possibly be. 
Furthermore, if American pride is 
rumed by A. R., let us remember that 
Dean Inge published in an English news- 
paper his opinion that Americans were in 
most respects far in advance of the Eng- 
lish. So the matter remains as it was, is, 
and ever will be; there are many excellent 
people born in England, France, America, 
and other countries. I have always be- 
lieved, for example, that every one who 
loves music has something good in him; 
which is also true of everyone who does 
not. 


Clement F. Robinson, of Portland, 
J\Iaine, is admitted to the Faerie Queene 
Club, having read the poem when an 
undergraduate at Bowdoin over twenty 
years ago. He found it profitable reading, 
as he won the prize in a contest for which 
this task seemed a prerequisite. It is in- 
teresting that Bowdoin College in the first 
twenty-five years of its existence made 
more important contributions to Ameri- 
can literature than Yale accomplished in 
two hundred and twenty-five. 
Miss Marie Bowen, of Cambridge, 
Mass., enters the club, having received 
her first impulse to read the poem from an 
appendix in Ruskin's" Stones of Venice." 
And Miss .LVi. E. Blatchford, a citizen of 
the same city, is admitted not only to this 
but to the Samuel Richardson Club. 
Frank. A. Manny, of Boxford, Mass" 
read the poem through when an under- 
graduate at the University of Michigan, 
because he wanted to, only a portion 
being required. Another valuable new 
member is William l\lorton Halpin, of 
London, Ontario. 


Here is an advertisement that must be 
true. "The Sons of the Sheik" is called 
"The Book that is Sweeping the Coun- 
try." I have not seen it, but I am sure 
that if I looked inside I should find the 
sweepings. 


With reference to the speed of sailing- 
ships, Mr. Charles E. Cartwright, of New 
York, author of "The Tale of Our 1\1er- 
chant Ships," a book recently reviewed in 
these pages, writes: 


437 


I don't know whether you have happened to 
run across "The Maritime History of Massachu- 
setts" by Samuel Eliot Morison, published in 
1921. Professor þ"'Iorison, formerly of Harvard, 
now or recently Rhodes Professor of American 
History at Oxford, has this to say of the compara- 
tive speeds of the old clippers and the modern 
racing yachts: 
" Eight knots an hour is considered good speed 
for an America's Cup race of thirty miles. The Red 
Jacket logged an average of 14.7 for six consecu- 
tive days in the Western Ocean; the Lightning did 
15.5 for ten days, covering 3722 miles, and aver- 
aged I I for an entire passage from Australia to 
England. A speed of 12.5 knots on a broad reach 
in smooth waters, by the Resolute or Shamrock, 
excites the yachting reporters. The Lightning 
logged 18.2 for twenty-four hours in 1857, etc." 
It is likely, I think, that the speeds credited to 
the yachts are greater, rather than less, than 
would be the case with the chip-log readings of the 
old ships. 
Mr. Albert de Roode, of New York, 
sends me the following interesting infor- 
mation on toothpicks: 
In your section in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE I have 
noted your comments on toothpicks. In the Kew 
York Law Journal for June 22, 1925, there is a 
legal pronouncement on this subject. 
In New York State before a certificate of in- 
corporation of a membership corporation is ac- 
cepted it must have the approval of a judge of 
our State Supreme Court. This approval has 
been held to be in the nature of a finding that the 
objects and purposes of the proposed corporation 
are in accord with public policy. 
It appears that in Brooklyn recently applica- 
tion was made for the incorporation of a mem- 
bership organization to be known as Toothpick 
Boys, Inc. The application was submitted for 
approval to Mr. Justice Russell Benedict. Judge 
Benedict apparently disapproved of the purposes 
of this organization and in a memorandum print- 
ed in The Law J ollrnal of the date above specified 
as follows: 
"In re Toothpick Boys, Inc. The name sought 
to be assumed by this association is a misnomer, 
because it is not in accord with the particular ob- 
jects sought to be attained by incorporating, 
which are stated to be 'to improve the minds and 
bodies of the members by the open discussion of 
topics of the day, by athletic exercises,' etc. If 
the athletic exercises referred tc. are mainly in the 
application of toothpicks, it is manifest that the 
continued practice of the toothpick habit would 
not improve either the minds or bodies of the 
members and would seriously interfere with an 
open discussion of the topics of the day. Appli- 
cation refused." 
I thought you would feel fortified in your cam- 
paign by this expression of judicial opinion. 
Curiously enough, two letters written 
on the same day, the first by Frank A. 
Manny, of Boxford, l\Iass., the second by 
S. Barclay, of New York, contribute to 
the discussion of "Xmas." 



438 


AS I LIKE IT 


I. A reference to Xmas for Christmas recalls 
the distress of one of my Dutch students in Mich- 
igan over this custom. His protest was new to 
me. "They have no business to use X to repre- 
sent Christ! X stands for an unknown quantity 
and there is nothing of the unknown quantity 
about Christ!" 
II. At least thirty years ago Ambrose Bierce 
. . . asked in his daily column in the San 
Francisco Examiner: "Is it because Christ is 
an unknown quantity that Christians write 
Xmas? " 


Mr. \V. Sc Davenport, formerly in- 
structor in chemistry at Boston "Tech," 
writes: "The best cat story I have read 
is by Charles Warner, which you probably 
have read. [I had read "Calvin" and 
admired it.] . .. The best American 
novel I have found is 'Ruggles of Red 
Gap.' [It is excellent; but why has "The 
Boss of Little Arcady," by the same dis- 
tinguished author, enjoyed so little popu- 
larity?] . .. How about horn-rim spec- 
tacles . . . and ice-cream cones for the 
Ignoble Prize?" 
Ah, but what would the circus and ball- 
games be without the ice-cream cone? I 
went to the circus last June to see if I 
could recapture my lost youth, and I dis- 
covered that I had never lost it. 
The first pair of horn-rim spectacles I 
saw on a young nose appeared on that of 
Alfred Hamill, of Chicago, an undergrad- 
uate in my classes in 1905. He was a 
good student, and did not need them to 
impress the teacher; but his example was 
speedily and almost universally followed, 
first by boys and then by girlsc Fashions 
are queer, and their significance changes. 
Such spectacles in the nineteenth century 
were the sign of an old "greasy grind," 
and in the twentieth the sign of the oppo- 
site; even as long hair, which used to con- 
note bookwormishness (el. the expression 
"long-haired grind"), became for a few 
years toward the close of the nineteenth 
century the hall-mark of a football-player. 
At about the same period high-water 
trousers, formerly the infallible sign of the 
rustic, were worn by macaronies. 


A gentleman writing from the Cosmos 
Club, Washington, and signing himself 
"A Princeton Phi Beta Kappa Man," 
nominates these essays for the Ignoble 
Prize, saying he does not like" a self-ad- 
vertising punster." Neither do I; but in 
order to be eligible for the Ignoble Prize 


the thing must be a generally acknowl- 
edged classic, which is not yet true of my 
works. Let me assure my brother in Phi 
Beta Kappa that he is in good company. 
I used to subscribe many years ago to a 
press-clipping bureau, until I found in 
Life the following dialogue: "Papa, what 
is a press-clipping bureau?" " My son, 
you pay five dollars, and receive one hun- 
dred insults." It occurred to me that I 
could obtain them cheaper. 
Speaking of Princeton, I meant to have 
called attention last year to what seems 
to me a splendid example of intercolle- 
giate chivalry and courtesy. The New 
York Princeton Club founded a scholar- 
ship at Yale, which is given annually to 
a Yale undergraduate. For many years 
Princeton has had the respect, admira- 
tion, and affection of Yale students, and 
this generous gift should make such senti- 
ments permanent. 


I am sorry to see Roman numerals at- 
tacked, as they make dignified chapter 
headings. One of the many crusades to 
which I have devoted my life is the elision 
of the period. I have nearly outlived it, 
though it used to be all but universal, ex- 
cept on clock faces. They used to write 
"King Henry VIII. died in 1547," break- 
ing the sentence with a superfluous punc- 
tuation point. Now they don't. By the 
way, books print IV and clocks IIII. 
An excellent quip was made by H. J, 
Phillips, the merry columnist of the New 
York Sun,. commenting on Michael Ar- 
len's complaint that in America he could 
not get his boots blacked, H. I. P. COf- 
rectly surmised that he had no difficulty 
in getting them licked. 


I wish the heroines of novels would stop 
wailing, even though it is always in the 
past tense. From Edith Wharton to 
the limit, it is "Why did you go? she 
wailed. " 


The conception of beauty not only 
changes from age to age, witness eigh- 
teenth-century and Victorian architecture, 
but from individual to individual. To 
me there are few uglier blots on a land- 
scape than oil wells; but if I owned one, 
it might look beautiful. During the war 



AS I LIKE IT 


there was an immense munition factory 
that ran all night. On a neighboring 
street, those who owned no stock in it 
were kept awake, and suffered in health; 
whereas the others were never disturbed. 


Why should statements of no impor- 
tance, and emanating from persons of no 
authority, be advertised in newspapers? 
Anyone may obtain free space merely by 
predicting the date of the end of the world. 
And the shorter the interval, the longer 
the space, 
I wonder if it is really harder nowadays 
to acquire a permanent literary reputation 
than it used to be. Daniel Webster re- 
marked there was always plenty of room 
at the top; to which some one replied that 
there were so many blockheads at the 
bottom, the road was choked. Does the 
fact that everyone now writes books 
make immortality easier or more difficult ? 
Take, for example, the case of the seven- 
teenth-century poet, Sir John Suckling. 
Only two or three of his lyrics survive, yet 
he is unquestionably an immortal poet. 
I wonder why. It would seem that in 
beauty, wit, grace, and finesse, there were 
some of our living poets who write as well 
as Suckling at his best. Yet they are 
doomed to oblivion. It is harder for a 
minor poet to gain immortality than for 
a rich man to enter into the kingdom of 
heaven. Why should all these clever 
fellows be forgotten, and Suckling (for ex- 
ample) remain? 


439 


Or is it indeed that in saying "The 
devil take her!" Suckling put a common 
attitude in an unimprovable phrase? I 
hope that three hundred years from now 
students of English literature will be fa- 
miliar with Joyce Kilmer's poem on 
Trees; will they? This poem will cer- 
tainly outlast many now flourishing ma- 
ples; how about the sequoias? 


If I had to name to-day the most civi- 
lized country in the world, I should name 
Sweden. Not only because of the way 
Sweden manages national and municipal 
affairs, and education, and hygiene; not 
only because she has not had a war for 
one hundred years, but because she am- 
putated Norway without blood. Is there 
any other country that could have shown 
such statesmanship, such wisdom, such 
understanding, such conciliation? Good 
sense was displayed both by Sweden and 
Norway. That magnificent old lion, 
Björnstjerne Björnson, who had fought 
for Norwegian independence for so many 
years, sent to his government during the 
final negotiations this telegram: "Tell me 
what I can do to help." He received the 
answer: "Hold your tongue." The cause 
of civilization is sometimes served not by 
violence, but by serenity. 
Sweden set the world an example of the 
peaceful adjustment of something that 
even most conciliatory statesmen think is 
beyond the possibility of arbitration- 
national honor. She gained honor by 
concession. 



^ PPRECIA TION of an artist's work 
1\. obviously does not require that one 
should meet him face to face. N ev- 
ertheless, it is sometimes a help toward 
understanding. In my own experience I 
have felt this to be the case with regard to 
the art of George Bellows. I knew him 
over a period of years, well enough to 
learn something of his nature, and the 
more I saw of him the more I perceived 
the inevitability of his work as the fruit of 
a way of thinking and feeling. What he 
did sprang instinctively from first-hand 
dealings with life. I have never known a 
man more direct in his contacts, more 
spontaneously or artlessly a realist, more 
whole-heartedly sincere. It was his wont 
to take the shortest route to a given point. 
In talk about the old masters, whose 
works in the European galleries he had 
never seen and with whose history, I gath- 
ered, he had not much concerned him- 
self, he evinced no great perspective, but 
at the same time he knew his way about 
and there was something refreshing about 
the wholesome unconventionality of his 
judgments. He had seen much over here, 
and with a delightfully candid vision he 
had philosophized what he had seen. He 
used to puzzle me by his absorption in the 
mysteries of Jay Hambidge's "dynamic 
symmetry" until I saw that they were 
not mysteries to him but practical aids to 
the painting of a picture. I had thought 
it odd that an artist of his stripe should 
get enmeshed in recondite theory, but he 
took the thing in his stride like any of the 
instruction he had received in the time of 
his pupilage. For him it was one more 
path to the truth, and he searched after 
that, I think, more ardently than after 
anything else. 
The Americanism which-is one of his 
outstanding traits has sometimes been 
identified with his choice of subjects and 
with the circumstances of his training. As 
a matter of fact it had deeper roots. It 
was something implicit in the whole man. 
Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1882, his 
blood came down to him through an an- 
44 0 


cestry reaching back to 1632, when Colo- 
nel Benjamin Bellows came to this country 
and founded the town of Bellows Falls in 
Vermont. His father was an architect, 
who sent him in due course to Ohio State 
University. He is said to have shown 
some precocity in draftsmanship, but I 
have never heard of his giving at that time 
any other signs of artistic predestination. 
" You know," he once confided to me, "I 
used to play baseball," meaning that he 
had been regularly allied with the sport, 
and despite his father's professional rôle 
and its influence, I always think of him as 
of having lived his youth pretty close to 
the natural, utterly unsophisticated in- 
terests of the ordinary human being. 
When I knew him he was a tall, strongly 
built, strapping fellow, good-natured, a 
perfect sportsman, altogether manly and 
endearing. He must have been like that al- 
ways, a genuine type if ever there was one. 
In 1903, when he was twenty-one, he 
came to New York, to study under Ken- 
neth Hayes Miller, Robert Henri, H. G. 
Maratta, and Jay Hambidge. It was Hen- 
ri, I imagine, who did more than any of 
the others to bring out his talent. An 
"Early Nude" of his, dating from 1906, 
one of the first of the canvases to proclaim 
the advent of a capable painter in him, is 
clearly the product of Henri's admonition. 
His progress was very rapid. Within 
three or four years of his arrival in New 
York he was an artist with whom it was 
necessary to reckon. His success with the 
public was reasonably prompt. Before he 
was thirty, paintings by him had found 
their way into more than one museum, 
and when he died, early in January, 1925, 
he was represented in art institutions all 
over the country. The memorial exhibi- 
tion at the Metropolitan this fall comes 
with unprecedented celerity, which brings 
me back to his Americanism. 



 
 
 
C ONSIDER certain of his predecessors 
in that series of commemorative af- 
fairs at our greatest museum which have 



THE FIELD OF ART 


4..11 


taken on a kind of canonical significance. would have been an intensely American 
A \Yhistler or a Chase makes you think of picture because it would have had all the 
all manner of æsthetic refinements, of sub- American traits of breadth, simplicity, 
tic experiment, of painting saturated in sincerity, and blunt truth which Bellows 
more or less Europeanized culture. But drew from the soil. If one of his prize- 
there are others in the list who tell a very ring pictures were to stray into the Salon, 
different story, men like Thomas A. Ea- a Frenchman might sense in it dimly the 
kins, "Ïnslow Homer. and Alden \Veir. influence of 1Ianet, but he wouldn't have 


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The Palisades. 
From the painting by George Bellows, 1<)09 (?). 


These recall you to what is most American 
in our natiye art-its fresh, unspoiled 
character, its im-incible raciness. \Vith 
the differences that individuality imposes 
Bellows is of their line. To glance again 
at that matter of his subjects, I do not be- 
lieve that he painted Xew York wharf 
rats any more than \\Ïnslow Homer paint- 
ed :àlaine fishermen because he thought 
there was anything talismanic about them. 
He did not say to himself: "Go to, I shall 
paint this because it is American." He 
had no arrièrc peJlsée about it at all, but 
painted what he saw because it was there 
and because it roused the gusto in him. 
It would haye been just the same if by 
some accident of fate he had gone abroad 
and had painted there. A study by him 
of an Arab chief or an Italian peasant 
Y01.. LXXYIII.-3 2 


the least doubt about the nationality of 
the painter. That would be manifest in 
the very grain and texture of the picture, 
in its complete freedom from that fac- 
titious yeneer which we sometimes take 
over from a foreign source. 
It is this central gift in Bellows, this 
harmony which he established between 
his art and the world in which he lived, 
that seals the fitness of the exhibition at 
the .Metropolitan, organized within only 
a few months of his death. It comes in 
response to a wide-spread public senti- 
ment. People feel that Bellows wa3 one 
of themselves. He not only painted the 
things they know but into the fibre of his 
work put something with which they sym- 
pathize, something which they can under- 
stand, something keyed to the rhythm of 



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Forty-two Kids. 
From the painting hy Georl!;e Bellow
. 1907. 


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A Day in June. 
From the painting by George Bellows, 1913. 


442 



THE FIELD OF ART 


.,l-B 


American life. And he did this with a 
brilliantly powerful technique. That is, 
of course, the other indispensable ratifi- 
cation of the show. If subject, as subject, 
were alone to be considered, then the 
, wharf rats and pugilists and polo-players 
. of George Bellows migh t be no nearer 
canonization than the bootblacks and 
newsboys of the late J. G. Brown. 


off at the zenith of his powers. I hold a 
higher opinion of him than that. The real 
tragedy resided in the cessation of a prog- 
ress that might have carried him immea- 
surably further. Bellows was only forty- 
two when he died. His ripest years were 
before him and his latest works show that 
his path was about ready to take an even 
more exciting turn. It is doing him an in- 


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Spring-Gramcrcy Park. 
From tbe painting Ly George Bellows, 1920, 


W HA T constitutes the achievement of justice to assume that he had shown all 
Bellows is his fusion of subject and the stuff that was in him. Especially as it 
, treatment, his matching of truth with was his marked characteristic to be alwavs 
technique in a remarkable balance. He moving and striving, always set upon a
- 
did this, too, in greater variety than is, I other adventure. The most exhilarating 
think, generally realized. Besides the thing about him, to me, was that he did 
polo-players, pugilists, and wharf rats I not stand still but was forever attacking 
have just cited he painted nudes, land- new problems with joyous zest. From the 
scapes, and portraits, made a notable beginning I saw everything that he pub- 
historical picture, deviated once into liclv exhibited in Xew York. He didn't 
religious art, and in his later vears was by åny means invariably strike twelve. I 
dipping more and more into i
aginative remember things of his that appeared to 
composition. Indiscriminate admirers la- me to be flat failures. But I never saw a 
mented his untimely death as cutting him dull, standardized picture from his hand, 




 


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Edith Cavell. 
From the painting by George Bellows, IQI8. 


I never saw anything of his that hadn't 
some forceful truth in it. 
That is what lifts the "Early Nude" 
out of the ruck of academic student's 
work, that, and a certain fluent directness 
in the technique. \Vhere, in our modern 
categories, does his technique belong? 
There is always danger in speculation as 
to an artist's spiritual ancestry, and in the 
case of an un travelled man like Bellows it 
is particularly difficult to link him with 
any school or influence. I remember little 
of his likes and dislikes, though they 
sometimes cropped out in our conversa- 
tion. One memory that does survive is of 
his indifference to the picture involving a 
lot of machinery in its fabrication and his 
more than indifference to academic rule- 
of-thumb, Immersed as he was in Ham- 
bidge's mathematics, he none the less re- 
mained a man loyal to the raw phenomena 
of the visible world, keeping his ere ruth- 
lessly on the object. If he had any artistic 
forefather it was 
Ianet, a 
\Ianet seen for 
himself here and there and in a measure 
filtered down to him through Robert 
444 


Henri's example. I mention this because, 
indeed, no artist exists in a vacuum, im- 
mune from all external pressure. There is 
a continuity in art from which no man en- 
tirely escaI;es and there is a tie, of a sort, 
between Bellows and the :\Ianet tradition. 
But it does not touch the integrity of that 
.\mericanism to which I am always refer- 
ring. If he has the tradition it is only as 
a method which he somehow fills out and 
energizes by his own personality. His 
art is pure Bellows when he comes to 
paint, as early as 1907, the fascinating 
"Forty-Two Kids," with its tangle of 
nude boyish forms moving in and about 
the water. He did some of the best, most 
unforgettable things of his career in the 
period of that picture, including the" Up 
the Hudson," which passed into the :ì\Iet- 
ropolitan in 1908. 

 
 
 
I T IS an interesting point that for the 
painter of the "Early Xude," for the 
student of Henri seemingly dedicated to 
the handling of form, he so soon developed 



THE FIELD OF ART 


4 1"" 
-r:J 


a formidable grasp upon landscape. I was a personal quality in his forthright 
say "formidable" advisedly, for in those transcripts of the truth that submerged 
open-air scenes of his, clone in his later its merely commonplace elements. In 
twenties, there is a force akin to that of a time it gave a deeper, more complex tone 
physical blow. His impressions along the to his lanclscapes. There must have been 
river-front are solid, four-square things. some tender emotional places in his cos- 
I do not know how he actually made them, mos. 'Ve didn't by any means always see 
whether he sat down to them out-of-doors eye to eye and I think he was amiably be- 
or worked them over in the studio, but wildered by my incurable predilection for 
they have the air of subjects grasped and "charm," as though it were one of those 


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Emma and Her Children, 
From the painting by George Bellows. 1923. 


painted at a stroke. They have extraor- things which critics talk about while art- 
dinary truth, extraordinary character. ists leave them to take care of themselves. 
He painted much on the Hudson and Perhaps he was the more diverted because 
on the East River, sometimes embracing he knew that I didn't very often find it in 
bridges, docks, and the types frequenting his own work. But if I ever found it there 
the latter in his vision, and occasionally it was in his landscapes. In the several 
he tuuched life in the humbler streets studies that he made of a ship's ribs set 
between, as in the memorable "Cliff- up upon the shore, he had a positively im- 
Dwellers" of 1913, with its frowsy tene- pressive way of massing hill and sky be- 
rnents and the teeming hordes at their hind 'the embryo craft. Then there come 
base. He made himself in some sort a back to my mind two or three scenes, "A 
laureate of the city. Since he did not 'Yet Xight," "Spring-Gramercy Park," 
poetize his themes I am tempted to say and" A Day in June," in which the "nat- 
that he gave us painted prose, but that ural magic," the sense of trees and of 

nti
hesis is only fair when you qualify mysterious ligh t, evoked a feeling that 
It wIth the statement that his was an art some one almost romantic had passed 
raising facts to a higher power. There that way. Yes, he could have had charm 



4
6 


THE FIELD OF ART 


if he had cared persistently to cultivate it. and horses of the polo pictures he made 
It gets into a painting, to be sure, involun- around 1910, the gorgeous but still very 
tarily, under the unconscious play of an twentieth century picturesqueness of "The 
artist's temperament. But in Bellows. I Circus," done in 1912, or the ugly violence 


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.\mour. 
:From the lithograph by George Bellows, 1923. 


think, it was just a casual last-minute 
gift of the fairies and he rarely gave it its 
chance. Perhaps he could not have done 
anything of the kind without dislocating 
his whole scheme of things. 
Dalliance wi th charm migh t ha ve cooled 
his passion for actuality, for the vivid, in- 
spiring bursts of human energy. He 
loved best to paint the figures of a sen- 
tient, moving world, the plunging men 


of his three or four prize-ring subjects. 
Life as he was inclined to depict it was 
crude, tangible, and essentially episodical. 
He took it on the whole as he found it. He 
was a picture-maker rather than an illus- 
trator, as he showed when he made some 
compositions for Donn Byrne's "The 
\Vind Bloweth," and for \VeIls's book, 
w:\Ien like Gods," two or three years be- 
fore he died. But he had the ideal illus- 



I 


THE FIELD OF ART 


447 


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Lady Jean. 
From the painting by George Bellows, 1924. 


trator's faculty of observation and a 
good deal of the illustrator's instinct 
for the telling action. 
Of design in the high inventive 
sense he gave no sign for a long time. 
It did not concern him when he was 
moving up and down his American 
world, on the lookout for the arrest- 
ing "slice of life." But it drew his 
imagination after a while, and it 
holds in a firm unity the drama of 
his "Edith Cavell." By that time, 
19 18 , Hambidge or no Hambidge, he 
had gained in structural composi- 


tion, and it is with that really noble 
and beautiful picture in mind that I 
most poignantly regret his early tak- 
ing-off. It is enkindling to think 
of what the painter of the" Edith 
Cavell" might have done with high- 
erected themes if the gods had only 
been kind. He wouldn't have passed 
lightly from triumph to triumph. 
"The Crucifixion," painted in 1923, 
is a lamentably stagey affair, me- 
chanically built up, and as melo- 
dramatic in sentiment as it is arti- 
ficial in attitudes and gestures. The 
" Two \Yomen," belonging to the 


" 


An Early Nude. t- 
From the painting by George 
lows. IQ06. 



448 


THE FIELD OF ART 


following year and on exhibition at the 
time of his death, was hardly more per- 
suasive. The juxtaposition of a draped 
with an undraped figure, so familiar 
among the paint- 
ers of the Re- 
naissance, was 
accomplished in 
it merely as an 
arrangemen t of 
facts; it was not 
transmogrified 
by art, and it 
lacked, if I may 
wickedly repeat 
the word, charm. 
Bellows was 
never a colorist, 
and, without 
sensuous glam- 
our, the picture 
failed to come 
off. There was a 
want, too, of the 
dashing maestria 
which he so oft- 
en employed. 
:Main strength 
seemed to ha ve 
taken the place 
of slashing tech-
 . 
nique. But de- "" 
sign, nevertheless, was steadily growing 
in him. It counted with increasing effect 
in his portraits, notably in the "Emma 
and Her Children," of 1923, and in the 
captivating "Lady Jean." In these 
things, in the 'V ells illustrations I men- 
tioned just now, and especially in his re- 
markable lithographs, there are striking 
intimations of what must have proved a 
great expansion. He was coming more 
and more to grips with ideas, and I firmly 


I, 


\ 


Back of 
 ude. 


believe that with maturing powers he 
would have dealt with them in the grand 
style. The years would have brought him 
other things, too, in all probability-a 
more sensitive 
quality in paint- 
ed surface, a 
richer and at the 
same time a 
lighter gamut of 
color with sub- 
tler tones, and a 
finer, more gra- 
cious sense of 
beauty. Some 
of the la te and 
masterly Ii tho- 
graphs point to a 
refining tenden- 
cy in his treat- 
ment of form. 
But in what 
5 u repossessIOn 
of what splen- 
did attributes 
he stood when 
the bru sh fell 
from his hand! 
As the draw- 
ings, the pic- 
tures, and the 
lithographs 
show, he could draw superbly. His 
touch as a painter was swift and certain, 
carrying a decisively individualized ac- 
cent. His technical equipment made the 
firmest foundation for that which he had 
chiefly to give to the world, the elo- 
quence of truth. His work has enduring 
reality, and it is American to the core. 
No man of his time has a stronger claim 
upon remembrance in the annals of Amer- 
ican art. 



... ( 
... 


01: 


'I 
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From the dra\\ing by George Bcllows, 1924, 


A cdlcndar of current art exhibitions \,ill be found in the }ïfth Avenue Section 



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I" 


BEETHO\'E
 . 
From the sculpture by Bourddl:. 


-See" The Field of Art," pag
 553. 


45 0 



SCRIBNER'S 


\ 
MAGAZINE 


VOL LXXf7I1 


NOVEl'vIBER, 1925 


NO. 5 


Science and the Faith of the Modern 


BY ED'YIN" GRA
T CO
KLI
 
Professor of Biology, Princeton University; Author of "The Direction of Human 
Evolution," etc. 


Ä

Ä BOOK was published JVIany advocates of the old philosophy 
r;1 
 
 in this country two and theology of supernaturalism and tra- 
':?t 
. years ago bearing the dition attribute the present disturbed 
l A -! striking title" Science state of the world to science, which they 
.
 -g, RemakingtheWorld." say has been undermining the old found a- 

 - - ..' 
 Fourteen well-known tions of the social order, and they call up- 
Ä

)( scholars contributed on all men everywhere to repent and to 
chapters on subjects return to the old faith. On the other hand, 
ranging all the way from electrons to evo- many advocates of science and the new 
lution, from industries to food, medicine, ' knowledge maintain that for persons of 
and public health, all showing how man mature minds, the old, naïve faith of child- 
is gaining control over his environment. hood and of the childhood age of the race 
But science is remaking the world in ÌnÙch is gone, and gone forever, and that the 
more fundamental ways than in thëse only hope for the progress of mankind lies 
practical and material respects. It is re
 jn more knowledge, newer and better 
making not only the outer world in which faith; and not in a return to old beliefs. 
we live, but also the inner world òf our Let us briefly compare some aspects of 
thoughts and ideals. It has brought ahout the old faith and the new knowledge and 
the greatest intellectual revolÙtion in hu- then inquire what is the duty of forward- 
man history, a revolution that concerns the looking men in this age of intellectual, 
origin, nature, and destiny of man himself sociål, and religious unrest. 
-and thoughtful men everywhere are in- I. The old cosmogony, philosophy, and 
quiring what the results are. likely .to be: theology sought cornfort, satisfaction, and 
1Iany distinguished authors, scientists, inspiration rather than unwelcome truth. 
philosophers, and theologians have at- It magnified man by making him the cli- 
tempted recently to analyze present ten- max and goal of all creation. It placed the 
I den.cies and to forecast the future, with earth, man's home, at the centre of the 
results that range all the way from ecstat- universe. The sun, moon, and stars were 
ic visions of optimists to the dismallucu- created to give light to the earth. All 
: brations of pessimists. Apostles of sweet- things were made to minister to man's 
ness and light and eternal progress have welfare. ,1Ian himself was created in the 
been more than matched by the" Gloomy image of God, perfect and immortal. By 
Dean"; Haldane and Thomson have been his first disobedience he fell from his high 
I answered by Russell and Schiller. Ancient estate and 
mythologies have been revived in the 
. I f "Brought death into the world and all our woe." 
I tIt es 0 modern Sibylline Books that set 
forth the future of mankind as symbolized But the promise was given that ultimately 
1 by Dædalus, Icarus, Tantalus, and Pro- evil should perish and good should tri- 
metheus. uniph. The great Drama of Humanity 


Copyrighted in 1925 in United States, Canada, and Great Britain by Charles Scribner's Sons. Printed in 
New York. All rights reserved. 


45 1 



452 SCIENCE A:\"D TH
 FAITH OF THE lYI0DER
 


ran from Paradise Lost to Paradise Re- 
gained, from initial perfection to final per- 
fection. 
In this old philosophy and theology 
supernaturalism was universal; there was 
no proper conception of nature and of 
natural law. The earth was peopled not 
only with godlike men but also with man- 
like gods, angels, spirits, witches, demons. 
Some supernatural being was responsible 
for every phenomenon. The movements 
of sun and stars, the return of the seasons, 
wind and rain, ligh tning and rainbow, vol- 
canoes and earthquakes, plagues and pes- 
tilences, were willed by some supernatural 
being. All nature was the expression of 
wills, big or little, good or bad. 
The old ethics was based primarily on 
the will of God, supernaturally revealed in 
code or book, and to this certain rules 
were added from time to time by Church 
or State under divine guidance. Right 
was what God approved, wrong was what 
He forbade, and if ever doubts arose with 
regard to these there were not lacking 
those who would interpret the will of God. 
::\Ian himself was a free moral agent. No 
bonds of heredity or necessity rested on 
his mind or soul. He was the architect of 
his own character, the arbiter of his own 
destiny. All good was the result of good 
will, all evil of evil will, and good would be 
rewarded and evil punished either in this 
life or in an eternal life of bliss or torment. 
There was enormous satisfaction in this 
view of the universe and of man. It not 
only glorified man, explained evil, and 
promised redemption, but it was a great 
stimulus to efforts for betterment and a 
source of high ideals and aspirations, anrl 
undoubtedly its commands and sanctions 
worked powerfully to preserve the ethical 
code. Furthermore, there was admirable 
directness and positiveness in the old 
ethics regarding right and wrong, truth 
and error, freedom and responsibility, re- 
wards and punishments. There was no 
hazy middle ground between these, no rel- 
ativity of truth or right or duty to con- 
fuse the mind. Things were absolutely 
true or false, completely right or wrong. 
This old faith with its specific command- 
ments was especially well suited to imma- 
ture minds. In the childhood of the indi- 
vidual and of the race there is need of au- 
thority and obedience before it is possible 


to appeal to reason. Childhood is pre- 
dominantly the age of obedience, adoles- 
cence of imitation anrl example, maturity 
of reason and judgment. The results of 
permitting children to grow up as their 
nature and judgments dictate are perilous 
for the children and annoying to the 
neighbors. One such harassed neighbor 
asked the mother of some children of na- 
ture how she expected them to become 
civilized, and she said, "Oh, we are rely- 
ing on the germ-plasm"; upon which 
the unscientific neighbor eagerly asked: 
"\Vhere do you get it?" 
Heredity, or the germ-plasm, determines 
only the capacities and potentialities of 
any organism. In every individual there 
are many capacities that remain undevel- 
oped because of the lack of stimuli suit- 
able to call them forth. These inherited 
potentialities are both good and bad, so- 
cial and antisocial, and it is the purpose of 
education to develop the former and to 
suppress the latter. In the heredity of 
every human being there are many alter- 
native personalities. Education is chiefly 
habit formation, and good education con- 
sists in the formation of good habits of 
body, mind, and morals. It is the duty 
of parents and teachers to guide children 
in this respect, to replace unreason by 
reason, selfishness by unselfishness, and 
antisocial habits by social ones. To trust 
to germ-plasm is to forget that heredity 
furnishes capacities for evil as well as for 
good, and to disregard the universal ex- 
perience of mankind. 
Society is compelled to repress many of 
the primordial reactions and instincts of 
the natural man. Our whole culture rests 
upon the suppression of antisocial im- 
pulses and the cultivation of social and 
moral reactions. If such reactions are to 
be built into character and become "sec- 
ond nature," they must be cultivated r 
early, preferably in the home, and ethical 
teaching must be clear-cut and authori- 
tative. The old ethics, when wisely incul- 
cated, was admirably suited to this pur- 
pose. It did develop men and women of 
high moral character, and to a large extent 
it forms the foundation of our present so. 
cial systems. . 
II. Contrast with this older phllos' 
ophy, theology, and ethics the newer reye' 
lations of science, The man of scientIfi< 



SCIENCE A:\'D THE FAITH OF THE 
IODERN 453 


mind seeks truth rather than comfort or 
satisfaction. He would follow evidence 
wherever it leads, confident that even un- 
welcome truth is better than cherished 
error, that the permanent welfare of the 
human race depends upon "the increase 
and diffusion of knowledge among men," 
and that truth alone can make us free. 
Science is not an esoteric cult anù scien- 
tific methods are not mysterious or magi- 
cal processes. Huxley once defined 
science as trained and organized common 
sense, and scientific methods of inquiry 
are only the careful and accurate methods 
that are used by intelligent people every- 
where in the affairs of every-day life. 
These methods consist in observation, 
comparison, analysis, and generalization. 
Every sensible person uses these methorls 
in his business or profession, and in his 
judgments of men, policies, and institu- 
tions. It is only in its greater accuracy 
that the scientific method differs from 
those in universal use. It is true that no 
scientific observation, comparison, anal- 
ysis, or generalization is ever complete or 
perfect; it is true that in science, as well as 
in all affairs of life, we deal with proba- 
bilities of a higher or lower order rather 
than with certainties; it is true that all 
generalizations are theories rather than 
facts and that all scientific knowledge is 
relative and not absolute. But in spite of 
these limitations, no other method of in- 
quiry has been found as reliable as the 
scientitîc method. 
It would seem incredible, were it not an 
actual fact, that anyone should object to 
the use of such methods of inquiry regard- 
ing the origin and nature of man, society, 
government, ethics, religion, the Bible, or 
anything else; but, alas! there are thou- 
sands, if not millions, of people in this 
country, some of them educated and in- 
telligpnt with respect to things with 
which they have had experience, who re- 
fuse to apply common-sense methods of 
inquiry to such subjects, who character- 
ize those who do this as atheists, blas- 
phemers, dishonest scoundrels, and who 
denounce science and scientists for laying 
impious hands on sacred things which 
must never be studied by the methods of 
common sense. 
To thos
 who refuse to apply scientific 
methods of inquiry to the study of man 


and society, cosmogony and theology, 
ethics and religion, but who base their 
whole conception of these upon ancient 
traditions or unreasoning emotions, science 
has no message; they neither understand 
the language nor appreciate the methods 
of science. But to the increasing number 
of those who recognize that man, society, 
and human institutions are proper sub- 
jects of scientific investigation, and who 
also realize that neither authority, tra- 
dition
 nor prejudice is a safe guide in 
the search for truth, the question may 
well arise as to what effect the scientific 
study of these subjects will have on 
human ideals, aspirations, and conduct. 
Accordingly, these remarks are addressed 
to those only who accept the methods and 
results of science in their application to 
man but who are concerned that mankind 
shall grow not only wiser but also better 
as the ages pass. 
The methods and results of science 
have shaken to their foundations the old 
cosmogony and philosophy. It is now 
universally recognized that the earth is 
not the centre of the universe, but a mere 
dot in a mediocre solar system whirling 
through immeasurable space. l\Ian is 
only one of some millions of species of 
living things on the earth, and although 
in mind and soul he is the paragon of 
animals, it is becoming increasingly cer- 
tain that the traditional views regarding 
his supernatural creation and divine per- 
fection are no longer tenable. On the 
contrary, the sciences of geology, biology, 
psychology, sociology, and anthropology 
are furnishing an ever-increasing amount 
of evidence that the body, mind, and 
society of man are products of evolution. 
The old philosophy of universal super- 
naturalism is giving place to a philosophy 
of universal naturalism; everything that 
has been scientifically analyzed is found 
to be natural-that is, orderly, lawful, 
causal-and many men of science claim 
that" nature is everything that is." Be- 
lief in an anthropomorphic God, a big 
man in the skies who made us little men 
in His own image, established society, 
ethics, and religion by His commands, and 
governs the world as a human autocrat, 
is rapidly yielding place to more ideal- 
istic conceptions. 
It appears probable that the universe 



454 SCIENCE A:\"D THE FAITH OF THE 
10DERN 


and man are subject to immutable 
natural laws; that causality is universal 
in the living as well as in the lifeless 
world; that the entire man, body, mind, 
and soul, develops from a germ and is the 
product of heredity and environment; 
that will itself is no exception to universal 
causality, since it is merely a link in the 
chain of cause and effect, being itself the 
effect of preceding causes and the cause 
of succeeding effects; that freedom is the 
result of intelligence acting as cause; that 
intelligence is the capacity of conscious- 
ly profiting by experience; that instincts 
and emotions are causally relatcd to body 
functions; that society, ethics, and even 
religion are based primarily on instincts, 
emotions, reaction patterns, and ductless 
glands. 
Some of these conclusions are tentative 
and may be modified by further research, 
but there can be no doubt as to the 
general trend of the scientific study of 
man and his activities. These conclu- 
sions, or others of a similar nature, are now 
accepted by most of the recent investi- 
gators in human biology, psychology, and 
sociology. The application of science and 
the scientific method of observation and 
experiment to human behavior has re- 
vealed much concerning the physiology 
of mind as well as the hidden springs of 
action, the unconscious complexes that 
determine our constitutional hopes and 
fears, our prevailing loves and hates, our 
delusions and failures, and "the sin which 
doth so easily beset us." Recent studies 
indicate that there is also a physiology of 
ethics, and that our conceptions of right 
and wrong, of good and bad, are associ- 
ated with particular body functions, re- 
action patterns, and instincts. In short, 
man himself, in all of his manifold com- 
plexities and activities, is a part of Nature. 
These studies and conclusions have 
raised serious apprehensions on the part 
of many friends of science and violent 
opposition on the part of some adherents 
of the old order, who hold that the guesses 
of "science falsely so called" are destroy- 
ing the foundations of religion, ethics, 
and all that is most valuable in human 
life. On the other hand, many Christian 
scientists who have been convinced by 
the evidence of the essential truth of these 
new discoveries, are equally certain that 


truth and goodness and beauty, faith and 
hope and love, reverence and aspirations 
and ideals are just as real and as desirable 
as they ever were, and that religion and 
ethics remain secure whether the old tra- 
ditions stand or not. 
There can be no doubt that science has 
given us grander conceptions of the uni- 
verse than were ever dreamed of in former 
times. Contrast the old cosmogony with 
the revelations of modern astronomy, 
physics, and geology; the old conception 
of the creation of the universe in six 
literal days with our present conceptions 
of the immensity and eternity of natural 
processes; the old views of the special 
creation by a supernatural \Vorkman of 
everyone of a million different species of 
animals and plants, beasts of prey and 
their victims, parasites and pests, with 
the scientific view that animals and plants 
and the universe itself are the results of an 
immensely long process of evolution! 
Even in its revelations concerning man, 
science is giving us not only truer but also 
grander views than the old ones. There 
is sublimity in the conception of man as 
the climax of vast ages of evolution, as the 
highest and best product of this eternal 
process, as the promise of something 
better still to be. The evolution of man 
from lower forms of life is not degrading 
but inspiring. Nature and human history 
love to proclaim the fact that a humble 
origin does not preclude a glorious des- 
tiny. "The real dignity of man consists 
not in his origin, but in. what he is and in 
what he may become." 
So far as the substitution of natural law 
for chance or caprice is concerned it ha
 
been a great gain not only in our concep- 
tions of the world but also with regard tf 
our inmost selves, for it means order in- 
stead of chaos, understanding in place oi 
confusion. If all our activities are the re' 
suIts of natural causation, it means thaI 
the will is not absolutely free, but prac- 
tical people have always known tha" 
freedom is relative and not absolute; tha' 
we are partly free and partly bound. WI 
know that we are able to inhibit man
 
reactions, instincts, and forms of behavio 
and to choose between alternatives tha 
are offered. But this does not mean tha 
such freedom is uncaused activity; on th 
contrary, science shows that it is the re 



SCIENCE AND THE FAITH OF THE ì\10DERN 455 


sult of internal causes, such as physiologi- 
cal states, conflicting stimuli, the remem- 
bered results of past experience or edu- 
cation, all of which are themselves the 
results of preceding causes. Conscious 
will is not" a little deity encapsuled in the 
brain" but intelligence acting as cause, 
while intelligence in turn is the capacity 
of consciously profiting by experience. 
But however we may explain that 
which we call freedom, it is plain that for 
practical purposes it exists, though in 
varying degrees in different persons or in 
the same person at different times, and 
that it entails a corresponding degree of 
responsibility. The universality of natu- 
ral law does not destroy ethics nor the 
basis of ethics; on the contrary, it places 
morality upon a natural, causal, under- 
standable basis. Furthermore, it leads to 
a more rational view of human behavior 
and to a more sympathetic attitude to- 
ward the criminal or the offender. As 
long as men regarded non-ethical conduct 
as the result of absolutely free will, or of 
an evil spirit within man, it was logical 
enough to exorcise the demon by torture 
and in general to "make the punishment 
fit the crime" rather than make it fit the 
criminal. But an understanding of the 
fact that non-ethical conduct is causal 
rather than capricious and is the result 
of natural rather than supernatural cau- 
sation leads society to look for and to 
correct these causes rather than to seek 
vengeance or retribution. Indeed, the 
only justification for punishment of any 
kind is the correction of the offender or 
the protection of society; there is no 
longer any place in civilized society or in 
a rational theology for retributive or ex- 
piatory punishment. 
A study of human history and pre- 
history shows that there has been a 
I wonderful development of ethics and of 
religion. There is no satisfactory evi- 
dence that these were handed down from 
heaven in perfect form, but there is 
abundant evidence that they, in common 
with all other things, have been evolving 
and that this process has not yet come to 
an end. .M uch of the ethics and religion 
of the Old Testament was condemned bv 
Christ and would not be tolerated i
 
civilized society to-day. Some of the 
ethical codes and religious practices cur- 


rent to-day will probably be considered 
barbarous in times to come. 
Variations and mutations are the ma- 
terials of the evolutionary process and 
they occur in all possible directions; some 
of them are progressive, many are retro- 
gressive, but only those that are fit sur- 
vive. The present is apparently a period 
of great social, ethical, and religious muta- 
tion, and many of these are certainly retro- 
gressive; but let us hope that the decent 
instincts and the common sense of man- 
kind will see to it that these retrogressive 
mutations do not survive. 
\Vhatever the ultimate basis of ethics 
may be, whether divine commands, intui- 
tions and instincts, utility or pleasure, the 
content remains essentially the same: 
however much codes and practices may 
change, our ideals and instincts remain 
much the same from age to age. \Vhether 
written on tables of stone or on the tables 
of our hearts, the "cardinal virtues" are 
still virtues and the "deadly sins" are 
still sins. The deepest instincts of human 
nature cry out for justice, truth, beauty, 
sympathy. Ethics that is based on 
pleasures of the highest and most endur- 
ing sort, on pleasures of the rational mind, 
the better instincts, refined senses, is not 
different from the ethics of the divine com- 
mand to "lay up for yourselves treasures 
in heaven." These are "the enduring 
satisfactions of life." The new ethics of 
science does not essentially differ in con- 
tent from the old ethics of revelation, and 
the commandments of a God wi thin are 
no less binding than those of a God with- 
out. 
Kevertheless, the decline of faith in the 
supernatural origin of man and of ethics, 
the decreasing fear of hell or hope of 
heaven, and the increased freedom of 
thought and action brought about by 
science and education have led, in some 
instances, to a general weakening of the 
ethical code. \Vhen increasing freedom 
carries wi th it an increasing sense of re- 
sponsibility and duty it never endangers 
progress, but when liberty degenerates 
into license it marks the beginning of 
social and moral decay. Freedom is one 
of the principal goals of human endeavor, 
but the best use man can make of his 
freedom is to place limitations upon it. 
"r e can be safely freed from external re- 



.136 SCIE
CE AND THE FAITH OF THE ]yl0DER
 


straints only in so far as we replace these 
bv internal inhibitions. 
- Partly as a result of this increased free- 
dom from the old restraints, but largely 
as one of the terrible aftermaths of the 
\Vorld \Var, lawlessness, immorality, and 
selfishness seem to be more than usually 
evident throughout the world to-day. The 
war gave social sanction to murder, arson, 
and theft; it unchained the wild beasts in 
men that long had been restrained; it glor- 
ified acts which in times of peace would 
have been abhorred; and it is no wonder 
that we are now reaping the whirlwind. 
Grafters in high office and bandits in high- 
powered cars are preying on society. Law- 
lessness and selfishness are wide-spread. 
Social solidarity has diminished; races 
and nations are suspicious or antagonistic; 
many political parties, churches, labor- 
unions, social classes are split up into war- 
ring factions_ Jealousy, suspicion, intoler- 
ance, hate, and war are preached from 
some pulpits and from many platforms 
and presses. The war that we fondly 
hoped was to end wars, has apparently 
only ended peace. 
The new freedom which recently has 
come to women, and which is in the main 
a progressive change, has led to some 
bizarre views in these later days. Some 
of its radical advocates are demanding 
that it shall mean freedom from all sex 
distinctions and restraints, except such 
as are purely personal and voluntary- 
freedom from marriage and reproduction 
and the care of children; abolition of the 
family with its cares and responsibilities; 
state subsidies for such women as are will- 
ing to be mothers and state infantoria 
for the rearing of all children. Less 
extreme and therefore more dangerous 
tendencies are seen in the acceptance of 
pleasure as the sole basis of ethics and the 
interpretation of the ethics of pleasure as 
the satisfaction of animal appetites for 
food, drink, and sex. The reaction from 
undue sex repression has led to the oppo- 
site extreme of sex eXploitation. Obscene 
literature and plays are not only tolerated 
but justified and patronized by many 
leaders of public opinion. In several 
universities student publications have 
been suppressed recently by the author- 
ities because of indecency or blasphemy. 
Free love, trial marriage, easy divorce 


are widely preached and practised. \Ve 
vigorously condemn and forbid polygamy 
in Utah but easily conrlone worse prac- 
tices nearer home. The question of the 
old catechism, "\Vhat is the chief end of 
man?" is now answered by multitudes of 
people: "To glorify pleasure and enjoy 
it while it lasts." They say frankly: "-r 
have but one life to live and I propose to 
get the most pleasure possible out of it. 
Why should I think of social progress or 
of posterity? \Vhat has posterity done 
for me? Let us eat, drink, and be merry- 
for to-morrow we die." Yes, persons who 
live as mere animals die as the beast dieth; 
they deserve no immortality on earth or 
anywhere else. \Vhether we believe in 
religion or not, our better instincts revolt 
against such ethics. \Ve are more than 
brutes and cannot be satisfied with the 
pleasures of brutes. \Ve may not accept 
the old ethics of supernaturalism and 
tradition, but we cannot adopt the ethics 
of pigs and hyenas. 
III. What is the remedy for this 
condition? Fundamentalists think. that 
science in general, biology in particular, 
and the theory of human evolution most 
of all are responsible. They would, 
therefore, prescribe by law that the 
latter may not be taught in tax-supported 
institutions. But if state legislatures are 
to decide that evolution shall not be 
taught, they should also eliminate the 
teaching of all subjects which furnish 
evidences of the truth of evolution; they 
should forbid the teaching of morphology, 
physiology, ecology, paleontology, genet- 
ics, comparative medicine, comparative 
psychology, and sociology. Indeed, there 
are few subjects that are now studied 
and taught by comparative and genetic 
methods that should not be banned. If 
the farmers of Tennessee and Kentucky 
can decide what may be taught in biology, 
they can also decide what may be taught 
in mathematics, as indeed one sufferer 
from interminable decimals proposed 
when he introduced a bill to fix by law the 
ratio of the circumference to the diameter 
of a circle at exactly 3. 
I have been assured by persons who are 
very orthodox in faith but very heterodox 
in spelling and grammar, that "Evolu- 
tion is all rot"; that it is "leprocy" (sic); 
that "the heads of evolutionists are full 



SCIEXCE A
D THE FAITH OF THE 1IODERN 
57 


of mud" (their own, of course, being full 
of "monkey"); and that "God hath 
chosen the fools of this world to confound 
the wise," leaving it in doubt as to who 
is which. l\Ir. Bryan's characterization 
of scientists as "dishonest scoundrels" 
shows the same unrestrained emotion- 
alism as the antivivisectionists show when 
they call animal experimenters" inhuman 
fiends." Antievolution, antivivisection, 
antivaccination, and anti science are all 
the outgrowths of extreme emotionalism, 
recklessness in handling facts, and an ut- 
ter ignorance of the value of scientific evi- 
dence. 
Fundamentalism, if logical, would de- 
mand the abolition of the teaching of all 
science and scientific methods, for science 
in general and not merely the theory of 
evolution is responsible for the loss of faith 
in the old traditions. It is folly to at- 
tempt to promote education and science 
and "at the same time to forbid the teach- 
ing of the principal methods and results 
of science. The only sensible course would 
be to abolish altogether the teaching of 
science and scientific methods and to re- 
turn to ecclesiasticism. The Church once 
told scientists what they could think and 
teach, and now state legislatures propose 
to do it. Such methods of resisting 
change have always failed in the past and 
are foredoomed to failure now. 
The real problem that confronts us, and 
it is a great problem, is how to adjust 
religion to science, faith to knowledge, 
ideality to reality, for adjustment in the 
reverse direction will never happen. 
Facts cannot be eliminated by ideals and 
it is too late in the history of the world to 
attempt to refute the findings of science by 
sentimental objections or supposed theo- 
logical difficulties. If science makes mis- 
takes, science must furnish the cure; it can 
never be done by church councils, state 
legislatures, nor even by popular vote. 
The only possible remedy for the 
present deplorable condition is not less 
but more and better science and edu- 
cation; science that recognizes that the 
search for truth is not the whole of life, 
that both scientific reality and religious 
ideality are necessary to normal, happy, 
usefulliying. \Ye must keep our feet on 
the ground of fact and science, but lift 
our heads into the atmùsphere of ideals, 


"To the solid ground of Nature trusts 
the mind that builds for aye." Educa- 
tion from the earliest years must teach 
love rather than hate, human brother- 
hood rather than war, service rather than 
selfishness; it must develop good habits of 
body and miml; it must instil reverence, 
not only for truth but also for beauty and 
righ teousness. 
"Where there is no vision, the people 
perish." :Man cannot live by bread alone; 
he musthave ideals and aspirations, faith 
and hope and love. In short, he must 
have a religion. The world never needed 
a religion of high ideals and aspirations 
more than it needs it now. But the old 
religion of Ii teralism and of slavish regard 
to the authority of church or book, while 
well suited to some minds, cannot serve 
the needs of those who have breathed the 
air of science. 
I ust all such be deprived 
of the benefits of a religion which they 
need and be forced into a false position of 
antagonism to religion as a whole because 
they cannot accept all the literalism, 
infantilism, and incidentalism of so-called 
fundamentalism? The fundamentalists, 
rather than the scientists, are helping to 
make this an irreligious age. 
IV. Science has destroyed many old 
traditions but it has not destroyed the 
foundations of ethics or religion. In 
some respects it has contributed greatly 
to these foundations: 
I. The universality of natural law has 
not destroyed faith in God, though it has 
modified many primitive conceptions of 
deity. This is a universe of ends as well 
as of means, of teleology as well as of 
mechanism. :ðlechanism is universal but 
so also is finalism. It is incredible that 
the system and order of nature, the 
evolution of matter and worlds and life, 
of man and consciousness and spiritual 
ideals are all the results of chance. The 
greatest exponents of evolution, such as 
Darwin, Huxley, Asa Gray, and \Veis- 
mann, have maintained that there is 
evidence of some governance and plan 
in Nature. This is the fundamental ar- 
ticle of all religious faith. If there is no 
purpose in the universe, or in evolution, 
or in man, then indeed there is no God 
and no good. But if there is purpose in 
nature and in human life, it is only the 
imperfection of our mental vision that 



438 SCIENCE A
D THE FAITH OF THE l\10DERN 


leads us sometimes to cry in despair: 
,. Vanitas yanitatum, all is vanity." No 
one can furnish scientific proof of the 
existence or nature of God, but atheism 
leads to pessimism and despair, while 
theism leads to faith and hope. "By 
their fruits ye shall know them." 
2. Science leaves us faith in the worth 
and dignity of man. In spite of weak- 
ness and imperfection, man is the highest 
product of a billion years of evolution. 
\Ve are still children in the morning of 
time, but we are attaining reason, free- 
dom, spirituality. The ethics of mankind 
is not the ethics of the jungle or the barn- 
yard. In the new dispensation men will 
no longer be restrained from evil by fear 
of hell or hope of heaven, but by their 
decent instincts and their high ideals. 
\\-fien love of truth, beauty. goodness, 
of wife, children, humanity, dies in us 
our doom will be sealed. But it will not 
die in all men; the long-past course of 
progressive evolution proves that it will 
live on, somewhere and somehow. 
3. Science leaves us hope for the fu- 
ture. Present conditions often seem des- 
perate; pessimists ten us that society is 
disintegrating, that there will never b
 
a League of Nations, that wars will never 
cease, that the human race is degenerat- 
ing, and that our civilization is going the 
way of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece, 
and Rome. But though nations have 
risen and fallen, and cultures have waxed 
and waned, the major movements of 
human history have been forward. After 
civilization had once been attained, it 
never completely disappeared from the 
earth. The torch of culture was handed 
on from Egypt to Greece and from Greece 
to Rome, and from all of these to us. One 
often hears of lost arts and civilizations 
of the past, but the best elements of any 
culture are immortal. 
The test of biological variations and 
mutations is whether they lead to increas- 
ing fitness, and the test of an social and 
moral mutations and revolutions, such as 
those of to-day, is whether they lead to 
increasing perfection and progress. The 
great principle of the survival of the fit has 
guided evolution from amæba to man, 


from tropisms and reflexes to intelligence 
and consciousness, from solitary indivi- 
duals to social organizations
 from in- 
stincts to ethics, and this great principle 
will not be abrogated to-day or to-morrow. 
It is the" power, not ourselves, that makes 
for righteousness." Man can consciously 
hasten or hinder this process, but he can- 
not permanently destroy it. He can re- 
fuse to take part in it and can choose to be 
eliminated, but the past course of evolu- 
tion for millions of years indicates that 
somewhere and somehow this process will 
go on. 
The evolutionist is an incorrigible opti- 
mist; he reviews a billion years of evolu- 
tion in the past and looks forward to per- 
haps another billion years of evolution in 
the future. He knows that evolution has 
not always been progressive; that there 
have been many eddies and back currents, 
and that the main current has sometimes 
meandered in many directions; and yet he 
knows that, on the whole, it has moved 
forward. Through all the ages evolution 
has been leading toward the wider intel- 
lectual horizons, the broader social out- 
looks, the more invigorating moral atmos- 
phere of the great sea of truth. 
What progress in body, mind, and soci;- 
ety; what inventions, institutions, even 
r"lations with other worlds. the future 
may hold in store, it hath not entered into 
the heart of man to conceive. What does 
it matter if some men r
fuse to join this 
great march onward, what does it matter 
if even our species should become extinct 
if only it give place to a better species! 
Our deepest instincts are for growth; the 
joy of life is progress. Only this would 
make immortality endurable. Human 
progress depends upon the increase and 
diffusion among men of both knowledge 
and ethics, reality and ideality, science 
and religion. Now for the first time in the 
history of life on this planet, a species can 
consciously and rationally take part in 
its own evolution. To us the inestimable 
privilege is given to co-operate in this 
greatest work of time, to have part in the 
triumphs of future ages. \Vhat other aim 
is so worthy of high endeavor and great 
endowment? 



, . 
....... 



 
" 


\ 


..,# 


- 


General Robert E. Lee. 


Lee and the Ladies 


UNP"CBLISHED LETTERS OF ROBERT E. LEE 


BY DOCGLAS FREEj\IA
 
Editor of the Richmond (Va.) Sews Leader 


ILLUSTRATlO:irS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 


II 


ally religious temperament of the man. 
He was as little changed, perhaps, in his 
attitude toward the ladies as in any other 
respect. He loved their company still, 
and he sought it when his duties per- 
mitted. There is no prettier picture in 
the ,,,hole colorful album of the war than 
459 


T HE outbreak of hostilities cost Lee 
the buoyancy of spirit that pre- 
viously had always been his, ex- 
cept for occasional days in the depths. 
\Yar brought to the front the fundament- 



460 


LEE AKD THE LADIES 


that painted by the brilliant Constance white and his strong chin, which had been 
Carv later the wife of President Davis's clean shaven until 1861, was covered with 
secrèÌ:ary, Burton N. Harrison, and moth- a gray beard. 
er of the former governor of the Philip- He frankly delighted in the prerogative 


. 


.. 


'" 


.- 
 


Miss Caroline C. Stuart, subsequently the wife of Governor F. \\T. 1\1. Holliday. 
This is reproduced from a painting, and shows her at about the period of the war, when she was 
eighteen. 


pines and of Fairfax Harrison, now head of of kissing the girls, which prerogative he 
the Southern Railway. Constance Cary assumed with age. One day in 1863 a 
'was a young girl then, a refugee in Rich- a love-sick youngster, Beverly Dan- 
mond with her mother. One night when bridge Tucker, now bishop of Southern 
General Lee had finished a call on them Virginia, was sitting on the steps of a 
and had put on his military cape, mother Richmond house vainly wooing .1\Iary 
and daughter went out on the porch to say Triplett, then about sixteen and already 
good night to him. As he stood there a displaying much of the charm that made 
moment he turned and, putting an arm her, after the war, one of the most beaut i- 
around Constance, kissed her smilingly. ful women of her generation. General 
He had become paternal in appearance Lee rode up, alighted, mounted the 
then, as in feeling, for his hair was almost steps, and leaned over to kiss .1\Iary. As 



LEE AND THE LADIES 


he lifted his tall figure again he turned 
to young Tucker and, with the glint 
of a twinkle in his eye, said solemnly: 
"\Y ouldn't you like to do that. sir?" 


461 


\Vhile he was in winter quarters during 
the war between the States and even elur- 
ing the open campaigning, when he found 
time for a social letter, he was pleading in 


t 


:Miss Margaret Stuart, who became 
Irs. Robert \\. Hunter, probably was General Lee's 
best-loved young cousin. 
Tills picture, which does her much less than justice, was painted about 1860, when she was twenty-three. 


General Lee played the part of fatherly 
matchmaker to many a pretty girl of his 
circle. In fact, he had always liked that 
rôle. 
"Tell :\Iiss -," he had written from 
:l\Iexico, during the occupation, "she had 
better dismiss that young divine and 
marry a soldier. There is some chance of 
the latter being shot, but it requires a par- 
ticular dispensation of Providence to rid 
her of the former." 


mock seriousness the cause of some sol- 
dier to the lady of his devotion, or else he 
was exhorting one of the young men of his 
circle to put faint heart aside for fair lady. 
Probably the most charming of all his 
war letters-certainly the equal of any- 
are those to 
Iargaretand Caroline Stuart, 
his cousins, daughters of Doctor and :\lrs. 
Richard Stuart, of "Cedar Grove," in 
King George County, Va. The girls were 
tall and dark, young and pretty, .:\largaret 



462 


LEE 
\
D THE LADIES 


twenty-fiye in 1862 and Carrie eighteen, 
and they were proud of their kinship to 
him. They had domesticity and strong 
religious fè'eling, as well as 
haracter and 
breeding, and on these accounts doubled 
their appeal to him. In the winter of 
1862-1863 1\Iargaret, whose home was 
then within the Federal lines, contrived 
to p l lt into the hands of one of Lee's 
spies her card and a pair of gauntlets ad- 
dressed to "Cousin Robert "-one can 
imagine the thrills she had in planning 
and doing it. He, of course, did not let 
this attention pass without his thanks. 
In fact, he contrived throughout the war 
to answer in his own hand every letter 
sending him a present and most personal 
letters addressed to him on any subject. 
\Yhen a kinsman or, better still, a kins- 
woman wrote him, he seemed to recog- 
nize a special obligation and he would 
reply promptly, often at length, and in- 
variably with details of family news. He 
applied most rigidly the strong Virginia 
la w of the clan. He knew his cousins to 
the third and fourth generation, and when 
the train stopped or the march of his 
army brought him near any of the Lees or 
of the host of the Carters, his mother's 
people, he always called for a social visit. 
And if there were girls in the family, at- 
tractive of person and of age, he seldom 
failed to kiss them. At that, it would 
seem, he did not quite rival his cousin and 
subordinate, the gallant Colonel Thomas 
H. Carter, of the artillery. For the tra- 
dition is that after the war, when Colonel 
Carter was at the Springs, he went out one 
day when the bus arrived from another 
resort, and as each young woman stepped 
out he kissed her with much show of af- 
fection, and then inquired of her in his 
gentle voice: c, "'hat might your name be, 
my dear? I think you are a kinswoman 
of mine." 
The correspondence between General 
Lee and the Stuart girls, as far as it has 
been preserved, begins in April, 1863, 
after .Margaret had sent him the gloves 
and when the general was recovering from 
an illness of some severity. The first let- 
ter, which has never been printed, con- 
tains so much new biographical data and 
so perfectly illustrates Lee's epistolary 
manner with his cousins that it may be 
quoted in full, lengthy as it is: . 



EAR FREDG. 5 ApI. '63. 
GenI. Stuart brought me this morning 
your letter of yesterday dear 1\fargt. I 
am much better I think, in fact when the 
weather becomes so that I can ride out, I 
shall get well again. I am threatened with 
a bad cold as I told you, & was threatened 
the Drs, thought with some malady which 
must be dreadful if it resembles its name, 
but which I have forgotten. So they 
bundled me up on 1\fonday last & brought 
me over to l\r1r. Yerby's where I have a 
comfortable room with Perry to attend 
me. I have not been so very sick, though 
have suffered a good deal of pain in my 
chest back & arms. It came on in 
paroxysms, was quite sharp & seemed to 
me to be a mixture of yours and Agnes' 
diseases
 from which I infer they are 
catching & that I fell a victim while in R. 
But they have passed off I hope, some 
fever remains, & I am enjoying the sen- 
sation of a complete saturation of my 
system with quinine. The Drs. are very 
attentive and kind & have examined my 
lungs, my heart, circulation, &c & I be- 
lieve they pronounced me tolerable sound. 
They have been tapping me all over like 
an old steam boiler before condemning it. 
I am about a mile from my camp & my 
handsome aids ride over with the papers 
after breakfast which I labour through by 
3 p.mc \Yhen 1\1rs. Neal sends me some 
good soup or something else which is more 
to my taste than the Drs. pills. I am in 
need of nothing. I have tea & sugar & 
all that I want. 1\1 y brother officers too 
have been very kind. Some have sent me 
apples, some butter from the Valley, oth- 
ers turkey, tongue, hams, sweet potatoes 
&c. so it seems to me I had better remain 
sick. But I should enjoy your company 
very much and should much prefer my 
little Agnes to Perry. I am not however, 
altogether destitute, 1\lr. Yerby is very 
kind & is a perfect Sir Charles Grandison 
in manner. He has a married son living 
with him, and the young wife of course has 
a babv. Then there is :rvlrs. Neal & a 
Capt. - & j\Irs. :McIntyre & their two 
daughters, relatives, refugees from Fredg. 
The whole family came in one day to see 
me. The baby & black George besides. 
They expressed great sympathy for my 
condition & 
Irs. X. thought she could 
make me a cotton shirt tha t would ex- 



'" 
\ 

, 
I \ 
I 
 " 
I 
 
II
 
I '" .,. 


\ 


----- 


Miss Norvell Caskie, later l\Irs. A. Seddon Jones, a Richmond favorite of General Lee, whose wit, fighting 
spirit, and brave acceptance of adversity won his admiration. 
This picture was taken i8 1863. when she was eighteen. Her Scotch father, fearful of losing his only child to some 
Confederate soldier, refused to permit her to wear evening dress. 


tract all the pain out of me. But the Drs. the sick room with :l\Iiss 
annie & 
or- 
lacked confidence & I was wanting in vell running in to inquire my wants. 
faith so the scheme fell through. Thank But then I thought they might not run in 
:'Mr. & l\Irs. Caskie for their kind invita- as often as they did when it was previ- 
tion. 1\Iy thoughts have reverted very ously occupied & that would be dread- 
often to their pleasant house, & I have fully mortifying. I shall therefore have to 
imagined how comfortable I should be in remain where I am as long as I can attend 
4 6 3 



464 


LEE A:\'"D THE LADIES 


to mv duty. \Yhen I cannot I must then 
give "it up-to others. But I think I shall 
be well soon & in the meantime must suf- 
fer, & I do not see how you can relieve me. 
Soldiers vou know are born to suffer & 
they canï;.ot escape it. I am still confined 
to my room. I am very glad to hear you 
are better & trust you will go on to im- 
prove. \Ye had a terrible storm last 
night which continued this morng. It 
caught Fit7hugh's brigade in the march I 
fear, & I apprehend both men & horses 
suffered last night, as they were probably 
without tents &c. I thought the last fine 
weather might bring 
lr. Hooker over, as 
he has been so anxious, but he stands fast 
yet awhile. I am glad :\lary is well, but 
grieve for our poor people who have been 
so plundered. There is a just God in 
Heaven who wiI] make all things right in 
time. To Him we must trust & for that 
,ve must wait. 
Remember me very kindly to all with 
you. Give much love to Agnes-believe 
me 
Always yours, 
R. E. LEE. 
In July, after Gettysburg, he wrote in 
acknowledgment of further letters from 
l\Iargaret, and quite candidly described 
the defeat of his hopes at Gettysburg. 
One would hardly look for such a confes- 
sion in a letter from a commanding gen- 
eral to a vouthful cousin, yet here it is: 
"I knéw that crossing- the Potomac 
would draw them [the enemy] off & if we 
could only have been strong enough, we 
should have detained them. But God 
willed otherwise & I fear we shall soon 
have them all back. The army did all it 
could. I fear I required of it impossibil- 
ities. But it responded to the call nobly 
and cheerfully & though it did not win a 
victory it conquered a success. \Ve must 
now prepare for harder blows and harder 
work. But my trust is in Him who 
favours the weak & relieves the oppressed 
& my hourly prayer is that He will fight 
for us once again." 
From these he passed to lighter 
though ts : 
"Tell ,-\,da [a twenty-one-year-old sister 
of :Margaret] if she will join the army I 
will give my consent, but Carrie need not 
think of that other one. I shall let no 
one have you :\Iaggie till the war is over. 


I have one in reserve for you." l\ieaning 
one of his sons-Custis, doubtless. He 
concluded simply: "I must now bid you 
goodbye. :\Ia y God guide and protect 
you all is the earnest prayer of your af- 
fectionate cousin." 
The following September l\largaret and 
Caroline paid him a visit near his head- 
quarters. He was much pleased. 


"!\ly dear daughters," he wrote on 
September 8, in an unpublished letter, 
"I could not leave camp last evg. in time 
to see you before you went to the sur- 
prize. I knew it would be too much of a 
surprize to you to meet me there, so I had 
to forego the pleasure of seeing you alto- 
gether. How are you this morng? I 
hope well & bright. Tell me what you 
wish to do. If you want to go anywhere I 
will send up the wagon. I have two 
horses & bridles but no saddles as yet. 
\Vill not blankets do? If you are not 
comfortable I can get you a room at ::\lrs. 
Fry's I am told, which is a nice house, or 
at some other place I am sure. But I have 
always a tent for you, you would make an 
ungainly camp very bright & cheerful & 
we would hail your presence as the ad- 
vent of angels. I send you a letter from 
Charlotte, which I have answered this 
morng. \Vrite to her when you have 
time & cheer up the poor child. 
" YOUR FOND FATHER." 


"I have not seen you all day," he wrote 
them on the loth, "I hope this has not 
made you as sad as it has me. I would 
have gone to you this afternoon, but heard 
you went to ride with some of the young 
men." He would be busy the next morn- 
ing, he went on, but later in the day he 
would review Hill's corps. If they wished 
to be present, he would send a wagon for 
them. "Let me know your wishes, I 
have kept a basket of grapes for you all 
day. I send a letter for Carrie which 
came tonight. It looks as if it came from 
the signal officer. Rob did not like it's 
appearance and is taking refuge in sleep, 
in hope to smother his sorrow. Good 
night, :l\1ay good angels guard you and 
bright visions cheer you." This was ad- 
dressed to ".:\ly beautiful daughters," and 
was signed "very truly and affection- 
ately your father." 



LEE AND THE LADIES 


The "Rob" of the letter obviously was 
Robert E. Lee, Jr., the general's youngest 
son, whom it pleased Lee to represent as 
the rival of the unnamed signal officer. 
The Misses Stuart accepted the inyita- 
tion--:what girls could decline to be of the 
reviewing party of the commanding of- 
ficer? But unfortunately their note came 
so late that General Lee was doubtful 
whether the team would reach them in 
time. 
" Your numerous beaux, the' Stonewall 
band,' I fear kept you up too late last 
night," he banteringly told them. "Ask 
Mr. Hiden to close his doors at ten 
o'clock. That is the proper time for you 
to retire your bright eyes from the sol- 
diers' gaze. I hope you will have a pleas- 
ant visit this morning, and an agreeable 
ride this evening with the Major and the 
Major Gen'!. Poor Custis and Rob." 
For the older son was now declared a 
suitor for ,l',iargaret's hand as Robert 
was for Carrie's, and all without the con- 
sent of any parties to the quadruple con- 
tract. No casualties to Cupid resulted 
from the review or the ride. The next 
day came word that they were leaving on 
the morrow, Had not Robert informed 
him? He answered regretfully in this new 
letter: 
CAMP 1 dh Sept. '63. 
No you precious children Rob did not 
tell me you were to go tomûrrow. What 
is the necessity now that Ada is married ? 
I think you had better stay with me alto- 
gether. Poor little Ada. I fear some one 
will serve both of you so some of these 
days if you leave me. Could not be al- 
lowed even to wait for her sisters. I can- 
not eat the wedding cake in any pleas- 
ure. 
If you must go tomorrow I shall be 
very sorry, but you must let me know & I 
will make all the arrangements & send 
some one with you. I hope you are not 
tired of your old papa already. He is 
never tired of thinking of you & is always 
hoping to see YOUc I fear you have had a 
sad time with him. 
I have directed the wagon to report to 
you. Keep it as long as you wish & al- 
ways tell the driver the hour you wish it. 
Truly & Affy, 
R, E. LEI:. 


Sweet J\-Ieta & Carrie. 
VOL. L}(.'XVIII.-34 


465 


When he bade them farewell, it was not 
with thought of them alone. He sat down 
and wrote their mother this letter: 


CAMP, ORANGE C. H. 
My DEAR COUSIN JULIA- 12 Sept. '63. . 
I cannot express the pleasure I have 
experienced in the society of your sweet 
daughters. They have furnished the only 
sunshine, save the occasional glimpse I 
have had of my own family, that has 
shone on my path during the war. 
But my dear Cousin I commiserate you 
deeply. I see that you will lose them all. 
Ada has already gone & the rest will soon 
follow. They will not last till the end of 
the war. What will you & their poor 
father do? I suppose the Randolphs will 
take them all. I do not wish to alarm but 
merely prepare you for the fate that in- 
evitably awaits you. They have been so 
surrounded here with GenIs, Cols. and 
Majors that I bave scarcely seen them. 
But then I have had the hope of going so 
constantly before me & that has been a 
great comfort to me. 
Wishing you all great happiness, with 
much love to Mrs. Ada 
I am truly and afIy. yours 
M R H St t R. E. LEE. 
1 rs, . . uar c 
Could the girls' visit have been more 
gallantly ended? He reverted to it two 
months later in a frankly intimate letter 
to Caroline: 


CAMP RAPIDAN 
21 Nov. '63. 
I am very much obliged to you dear 
Carrie for the manufacture of the drawers. 
Your handiwork will impart to them I am 
sure additional warmth. I examined 
them anxiously to see if I could discover 
any impression of your sweet self, but 
could not. I fear you did not look at them 
during your work. They fit very well. 
You know anythirig you can get in suits 
for camp. I wish you had come up with 
Custis. I want to see you very much and 
so does Genl. E. Johnson. I hope all were 
well at Cedar Grove when you heard. 
Remember me to them all when you 
write. Also to Miss Rosalie & Ada. 
\Vith much affection 
I am very truly yours 
R. E. LEE. 


l\'1iss Carrie Stuart
 



466 


LEE AND THE LADIES 


Christmas Day, fresh from a visit to 
Richmond, Lee described to Margaret the 
doings of Carrie and of Ada, who had 
married Colonel \Villiam \V. Randolph. 
Lee wrote that Caroline was "so sur- 
rounded by her little beaux that little 
could be got from her. But there was one 
tall one with her, a signal man of that 
voracious family of Randolphs, whom I 
threatened with' Castle Thunder' [Rich- 
mond prison for army misdemeanors]. I 
did not see her look at Rob once. But 
you know he is to take her home on cer- 
tain conditions. I hope your mother has 
given her consent and that the cakes are 
baking. I also saw happy l\Irs. Ada, 
Her face was luminous with content and 
she looked as if she thought there was but 
one person in the world. . " Custis 
says he cannot be married now till six 
months after the ratification of peace- 
the day on which all the public dues are 
payable. So you will have to visit, 
Maggie. " 
Robert apparently accompanied Carrie 
home, She took with her a coat of Gen- 
eral Lee's that needed repairs, and when 
she sent it to him, restored to use as a 
backslider to the fold, she got a letter that 
combined thanks for her kindness with a 
friendly scolding for her treatment of 
Robert. "He is now. . . nearly hope- 
less. He says although your kind mother 
made him 500 cakes, it produced not the 
least effect upon you. What more he can 
offer you he is at a loss to conceive," 

Iargaret by this time had taken Caro- 
line's place in Richmond, had the name- 
less signal officer in succession to her 
younger sister, and was attracting men 
with three stars and a wreath on their uni- 
form collars-among them a renowned 
general of division. Lee duly reported all 
this to Carrie: 
"I was very glad to see your sweet sis- 
ter Margaret in Richmond. She was of 
course attended by the signal corps. As 
soon as Genl. Edward Johnson drives 
back Meade's army I am going to let him 
go to Cleydall-not before." 
The next day he wrote Margaret, 
apropos a letter she had mailed and he 
had never received. "Are you sure you 
wrote it?" he quizzed. "Perhaps it was 
to some other old general in this army. 
o 0 0 I can tell you for your satisfaction 


that General Johnson is well [and] that 
General Early has just returned from a 
visit home, and is handsomer than ever. 
He looks high in his new garments, and 
the black plume in his beaver gives him 
the air of a gay cavalier." 
The point of this was that General 
Early, slyly put forward by his chief as 
a gay cavaJier seeking the aristocratic 
hand of the prayerful Margaret, was one 
of the homeliest, hardest-swearing to- 
bacco-chewers of the whole Army of 
Northern Virginia. 
l\largaret's letter duly arrived. "The 
superscription of this missent epistle," 
wrote General Lee in immediate acknowl- 
edgment, "reminds me strongly of the 
chirography of General Edward Johnson. 
The suspicions of the postmasters at 
least have been excited from its being 
turned out of its way to me, Its arrival 
with your note is somewhat of a sugges- 
tive coincidence. I think I ought to send 
it to your mother." 
All this was written a little more than a 
month before General Grant opened the 
offensive of May, 1864, that was to con- 
tinue, an unbroken battle, until the end 
of April, 1865. Although Lee wrote with 
as much gentle humor as he ever dis- 
played, he foresaw what was coming and 
seemed to realize that he was about to be 
cut off from her. "I shall have no hope 
of seeing you," he said, "after you cross 
the Rappahannock," from Richmond. 
"\Vhcn you reach home," he wrote 

1argaret wistfully on April 28, "I shall 
be unable to communicate with you, for I 
dislike to send letters within reach of the 
enemy, as they might serve if captured to 
bring distress on others. But I shall 
think of you always & you must some- 
times cast your thoughts upon the army 
of N. Va., and never forget it in your 
pious prayers. It is preparing for a great 
struggle but I pray & trust that the Great 
God, Mighty to deliver, will spread over 
it His almighty arm and drive its enemies 
before it ! 
"You must give much love to your 
father mother & sweet Carrie. ßlay you 
& they be blessed in your home, your 
labours, & your prayers." 
The correspondence ends in the drum- 
fire of the Wilderness campaign. 
Ada's young husband was killed. 



LEE AND THE LADIES 


Carrie married a good soldier, who sub- 
sequently became governor of Virginia, 
F. W.1f. Holliday. The gentle Margaret, 
when the war was over, became the bride 
of Major R. W. Hunter, a staff officer of 
distinction. She died young; the major 
lived to old age, a raconteur much loved 
and everywhere welcomed in Virginia. 
As the charming Stuart sisters were left 
beyond the battle-lines, General Lee drew 
nearer to Richmond and to other friends, 
among them Norvell Caskie, who had be- 
come one of the closest friends his daugh- 
ters had made after they had removed to 
Richmond. She was the only one of the 
four children of James Kerr Caskie to 
survive childhood. Her father, a wealthy 
tobacconist, had married Ellen Gwath- 
mey, a granddaughter of Howell Lewis, 
General Washington's nephew. 
Irs. 
Caskie was connected with Mrs. Lee 
through Lorenzo Lewis, Mrs. Caskie's 
cousin, who was a son of Nellie Custis, 
!\.1:rs. Lee's 'great-aunt. The families had 
been acquainted before the war and were 
brought intimately together when Gen- 
eral Lee sent his wife to the Hot Springs 
in the late summer of 1861. Knowing 
that 1\Ir. Caskie was at the Springs, 
General Lee wrote him asking that he 
would give J\Irs. Lee his "protection"- 
a request that humorously illustrated how 
feeble was the "protection" Southern 
women then had, apart from that on the 
battle-line, for !Ir. Caskie himself was a 
crippled invalid. But he welcomed Mrs. 
Lee, of course, showed her such courtesies 
as he could, and, when she left the Springs 
and went on a brief visit to Shirley, he and 
:Mrs. Caskie invited Mrs. Lee and her 
daughters to make their home with them 
in the hmple Caskie residence at Eleventh 
and Clay streets in Richmond. The Lees 
accepted and stayed there for some months 
-for Richmond was dismally crowded- 
until Custis Lee's messmates gallantly sur- 
rendered to them quarters in the house 
No. 707 East Franklin. General Lee's 
daughters, :l\fildred in particular, during 
this visit grew to be Norvell Caskie's warm 
friends. Norvell had been sixteen when 
hostilities began, and though she had con- 
sidered herself old enough to become en- 
gaged to a young soldier in 1861, after the 
infectious fashion of the day, her father 
kept her as much of a child as he could. 


467 


He would not permit her to wear evening 
dress until the last year of the war, and 
he insisted that she appear in such high 
neck and long sleeves as are shown in the 
war-time photograph of her reproduced 
on page 463. Her mother was an invalid 
and she consequently had to do the hon- 
ors of the Caskie home. They were not 
simple honors, either, despite the fact 
that Mr. Caskie's Scotch blood and cul- 
ture made him despise ostentation. The 
most interesting people in Richmond fre- 
quented the parlors. \Vhile the Lee girls 
were there, soldiers were added by the 
company. One Sunday more than twenty 
cavaliers came to call. The next Sunday 
all except two of the twenty were dead or 
wounded. Most of the Seven Days' Bat- 
tles had been fought meantime. To en- 
tertain so large a circle, Norvell was busy, 
but her father's wish was that she remain 
as much in the background as she could 
and that General Lee's daughters be con- 
sidered the hostesses. In this setting 
General Lee met her whenever his duties 
permitted him to be in Richmond. He 
became interested in her, and naturally 
enough, because she was a beautiful and 
most unusual girl. She was saved from 
the typical state of mind of an only child 
by the sickness that hung over the Caskie 
family. She was a nurse from childhood, 
familiar with suffering. The times and 
her stout-hearted ancestry gave her a 
fighting spirit which General Lee did not 
fail to see and admire, With it was a 
cheer that adversity could not destroy 
and a wit that circumstance never dulled. 
These qualities, too, appealed to General 
Lee. In his letters to her father, who gen- 
erously transacted all his business for 
him, he always had a message for Norvell, 
and sometimes from camp he would write 
her direct. The family still cherishes, 
among other treasures, an envelope ad- 
dressed in General Lee's handwriting and 
franked by him: 



Iiss :LVI. Norvell Caskie 
Honble J as. K Caskie, 
Clay & nth Sts. 
Richmond, 
Virginia 


This letter itself has gone, but the tem- 
per of the times in which it was written 



468 


LEE AND THE LADIES 


may be judged readily enough. The en- 
velope General Lee used was one he had 
"turned," for in the shortage of station- 
ery in the South most envelopes had to 
serve twice. On that face of the envelope 
that had been used before he had ad- 
dressed it to Norvell, the paper bears the 
superscription: 


Very important 
Gen R. Ec Lee 
Comd G 


at a gallop 
From some field of frenzy, perhaps, he 
had turned aside and with his amazing 
composure had been able to write a 
kindly letter to his youthful friend. 
The days grew too dark for him to 
write to Margaret, to Norvell, or to any 
one other than his wife or "]\/lr. Presi- 
dent" or ":Mr. Secretary of War." The 
commander of a thinning army, weaker 
every day, had neither the time nor the 
heart for bantering correspondence. Af- 
ter Appomattox, as he rode wearily 
homeward, he planned to stop overnight 
at the home of his brother, Charles Carter 
Lee, in Powhatan. The house already 
was so crowded with guests that Mrs. 
Gilliam, a neighbor across the way, was 
asked if she could receive General Lee. 
She made ready the best room, happy in 
the prospect of having him under her 
roof, but when he arrived she was told in 
his manner of courteous finality that he 
could not think. of troubling her and that 
he would camp out, but that he would be 
grateful if she would entertain an officer 
who happened to be travelling with his 
wife. Then he added, as he saw the lady's 
disappointment, that if it were agreeable 
to her he would be happy to take break- 
fast with her the next morning. He bivou- 
acked that night with the officers who 
still kept his company-it was probably 
the last time he ever did so-and he ap- 
peared at the appointed hour at his host- 
ess's. The anguish of defeat had almost 
numbed him, and the burden of the 
maimed, the dead, and the widowed lay 
on his heart, but even then, while the 
corpse of his country still twitched, he did 
not forget his love of youth. After the 
meal he took the little girl of the family 
on his knees-she was about ten-and 
when he had caressed her, asked her if she 


did not want to go with him to Richmond, 
where, he told her, he would find a "lot of 
little sweethearts for her." She still lives, 
with more than seventy years behind her, 
and she cherishes that moment in the lap 
of General Lee as the most precious in her 
life. 
He rode on to Richmond, where the rev- 
erent welcome of the people must have 
eased the anguish of his soul, and then, 
after a few weeks, he went back to a 
quiet farm up the James. Two of the few 
letters he wrote while there were to Mr. 
Caskie, whom he asked to transfer to his 
nephew, Louis Marshall, a former soldier 
in the Federal army, certain stock he 
held as trustee for his sister, Marshall's 
mother. In this earlier of the two letters 
is a message to Norvell, the first, it seems, 
in which there is any suggestion of a re- 
covery of the old playful spirit he had 
displayed in teasing his young friends 
about their sweethearts. The message is 
brief and the gentleness of its touch 
somehow discloses a heartache, but it was 
written nevertheless with a brave spirit 
and a firm grip on himself. It has never 
been printed before: 
"Mrs. Lee has, no doubt, in her letters 
informed you of all family affairs, I 
wrote to you some days since, thanking 
you for your letter to me, requesting you 
to present my kindest regards to Mrs. 
Caskie and Miss Norvell. Tell the latter 
that Miss Anna Logan was driven over 
here yesterday in a buggy by Capt. 
Owens of Louis'- I fear these Louisian- 
ians think our Virginia girls belong to 
them. I met a Capt. Bridges at Bel- 
mead the other day, where he has been 
refreshing himself since the war. None of 
them shall bear her off, I assure you. I 
think Agnes is slightly better but her dis- 
ease is not yet conquered." 
He held to this deliberate effort to be 
cheerful. "Tell Miss Norvell," he wrote 
Mr. Caskie in a further unpublished let- 
ter, dated August 30, regarding the same 
bank stock: 
"Tell Miss Norvell I rode over yester- 
day"-he was still near Cartersvillc--" to 
see Miss Anna Logan-she looked kill- 
ing, and acted as bad. I took with me 
four beaux. They pretended to be over- 
come by the heat of the ride, but I knew 
from what they were suffering. 'Her 



LEE AND THE LADIES 


469 


eves were dusk as India's sun, & just as 

arm.' Miss Bettie Brander has fled, so 
they were spared the darts with which she 
would have covered them." 
This, perhaps, can only be appreciated 
by those who knew the two young ladies 
General Lee whimsically represents as 
potentially the destroyers of the four 
beaux's happiness. 
General Lee by this time had accepted 
the presidency of Washington College, 
Lexington, Va., and soon he went there to 
prepare a home for his wife and daughters 
to take the place of Arlington, which had 
been seized and sequestered by the Fed- 
eral authorities. In September he went 
to the Rockbridge Baths, where two 
cousins, 1vIiss Belle Harrison, of "Bran- 
don," and Mrs. Chapman Leigh, greatly 
cheered him. J\1iss Belle Harrison, it 
would seem, was always one of his favor- 
ites. A month iater and in his chatty 
letters to the family he was talking of 
marriages in the neighborhood. "I did 
not attend the weddings," he wrote, "but 
have seen the pairs of doves. Both of the 
brides are remarkable in this county of 
equestrianism for their good riding and 
beauty." When word came that one of 
his daughters wished to go to Richmond 
to attend the wedding of Miss Sally \\Tar_ 
wick, another of his young friends, he 
gave his consent in a characteristic letter: 
". . . if it will promote your pleasure 
and Sally's happiness, I will say go. You 
may inform Sally from me, however, that 
no preparations [for a wedding] are neces- 
sary, and if they were no one could help 
her. She has just got to wade through it 
as if it was an attack of measles or any- 
thing else-naturally. As she would not 
marry Custis [his oldest son], she may 
marry whom she chooses. I shall wish her 
every happiness, just the same, for she 
knows nobody loves her as much as I do 
, . . she need not tell me whom she is 
going to marry. I suppose it is some cross 
old widower, with a dozen children. She 
will not be satisfied with her sacrifice with 
less, and I should think that would be 
cross sufficient." 
All this might have been written ten 
years before, 
In the new house the college provided 
him, Lee welcomed much company and 
sought to return some of the hospitality 


his family had received during five years 
when they had been homeless. Among 
his guests were not a few of the girls he 
admired-his " sweethearts" as he be- 
gan now to call them. He autographed 
innumerable small photographs for them 
and uncomplainingly supplied his daugh- 
ters with prints for distribution to those 
friends who importuned them. To his 
"worrying little Agnes," as he styled her, 
he wrote in December, 1865, while she 
was in Richmond: 
"I have autographed the photographs 
and send a gross of the latter and a lock 
of hair. Present my love to the recipients 
and thank them for their favours." 
He continued to report marriages, and 
occasionally, as in other days, he at- 
tempted to make them. 
A marked improvement in his general 
spirits occurred during 1867, following the 
release of President Davis from prison 
and the second marriage of his son, 
1Iajor-General \V, H. F. Lee, whose first 
wife had died during the war, while 
"Rooney" was a prisoner in the hands of 
the Federals. On the young man's in- 
sistence, the old general agreed to attend 
the wedding, which was to be held in 
Petersburg. He made the journey by 
way of Richmond and completed the last 
stage of it in a special car with the wed- 
ding party, which included a number of 
Richmond girls. The trip lay southward 
over bloody ground from the Confeder- 
ate capital, past Drewry's Bluff, the 
Howlett line, and close to the fortifica- 
tions he had held for nine desperate 
months against Grant's assaults. Cruel 
memories crowded on him, of anguish and 
of death during the siege, and of the wom- 
en and children who had suffered want and 
woe in the little city to which he was go- 
ing with the happy guests. The thoughts 
weigh ted him down. He sat silent in the 
car, obviously depressed, anxious to finish 
the travel, yet dreading the arrival and re- 
ception. He was met as a hero-with a 
carriage and four white horses-and he 
was welcomed as a friend by a throng of 
citizens and former soldiers, who wanted 
to unhitch the team and pull the carriage 
to Generall\íahone's residence, his stop- 
ping place. This incident and others in 
kind had a profound effect on him. After 
he returned to Lexington he confessed to 



470 


LEE AND THE LADIES 


his son what his feeling had been as he 
"passed well remembered spots and re- 
called the ravages of the hostile shells." 
"But" he went on "when I saw the 
cheerfuÌness with whi
h the people were 
working to restore their condition, and 
witnessed the comforts with which they 
were surrounded, a load of sorrow which 
had been pressing upon me for years was 
lifted from my heart." 
In this spirit he came on toward the 
end. The courage of the people was his 
comfort. He never recovered, of course, 
from the strain of the war, but from 1867 
to his death he found more of happiness 
than of sorrow in his life, and he was 
cheerful. In scores of letters that have 
already appeared in print, chiefly in Cap- 
tain Lee's "Recollections and Letters of 
General Lee," he writes to old friends and 
to new, with humor and unfailing kindli- 
ness, of visits and courtships, of be- 
trothals and weddings, of home-building 
and of births. But when tragedy did be- 
fall any of those he loved, he seemed the 
better able to sympathize because he him- 
self had covered, amid mud and misery, 
the road from the Wilderness to Appomat- 
tox, Norvell Caskie was one of those to 
whom his heart was opened. Her ailing 
parents had survived the war. Her 
father's business had escaped destruction. 
Her future seemed bright. In the sum- 
mer of 1868 she went to the Springs as 
usual, and there she met A. Seddon Jones, 
of Orange County. He was the son of a 
planter of prominence, over whose splen- 
did farm on the Rapidan both amlies had 
tramped. He had been a soldier in Lee's 
army and, like Norvell, had the spirit 
that met adversity with courage. Soci- 
ally irresistible and quick of perception, 
he could honorably aspire to the hand of 
so splendid a girl. But, like most Vir- 
ginians of his day, he had only a name and 
a memory, a farm and a roof-no money. 
He could not have gone to the spa that 
summer and probably would not have 
met Norvell had he not had a very drag- 
ging case of typhoid, which had left him 
in such plight that the family had made 
sacrifices to give him the treatment the 
doctor had prescribed. Norvell's inter- 
est in the sick, her instinctive impulse to 
help them, drew her to the young con- 
valescent. His character and personality 


did the rest. They fell in love, The 
heart that had sustained the long cam- 
paigns of the war capitulated to his sud- 
den assault. They became engaged. 
When she returned home it was to find 
her father manifestly in deep distress and 
looking very bad. "I hope," he told 
her, "that you have gotten into no en- 
tanglements at the Springs. ., She laughed 
off the query, anxious to defer the news of 
her engagement until he was better: 
"Don't you think it's time I were en- 
tangled, I'm twenty-three." The next 
day his condition was worse, and soon he 
was dead. Then it was discovered that 
he had sustained ruinous losses just be- 
fore he was taken sick and that what had 
been a very sizable fortune for the time 
had been swept away. \Vith this tragedy 
in the background, the approach of the 
girl's marriage was not without gloom. 
General Lee knew all the facts and 
grieved over the losses of herself and her 
invalid mother. He rejoiced that love 
had come to her, but he must have won- 
dered how she would fare on a lonely 
farm, she who had always lived in a city 
and always had had about her the most 
brilliant of the Confederates in a home of 
rich culture. The letter he wrote her 
just before her wedding has never been 
printed previously, but, as faultlessly as 
anything that ever came from his pen, it 
shows the inborn tact of Lee, his breeding, 
and his attitude toward the girls for whom 
he had affection. Here it is: 


My DEAR MISS NORVELL: 
As the day of your nuptials approaches 
my thoughts revert to you more often 
and intensely and I recall the manifold 
kindnesses of your dear father and mother 
a,nd the affectionate consideration of your- 
self with increased gratitude and pleas- 
ure. 
Your future happiness, is therefore I 
assure you a matter of deep concern to 
me, and this most important event in 
your life one of great interest. l\lay it 
prove as happy as I sincerely wish it; may 
the blessing of kind heaven accompany 
you throughout your course on earth, and 
may a merciful Providence shield you 
from all evil, and lead you in the end to 
everlasting joy and peace, 
Hoping that you will not forget us, but 



LEE A
D THE LADIES 


will sometimes give us the pleasure of 
)our company, 
I am with true affection, 
Your constant friend 
R.E.LEE 


Miss Norvell Caskie. 


As he was in this, so he was to the last. 
Not long before he died he attended a 
convention of his church, held in Freder- 
icksburg, the old city on the Rappahan- 
nock that had been the scene of his most 
splendid triumphs as a soldier. While he 
was in the city, the people insisted on 
tendering him a reception, at which, as 
usual, he was soon surrounded by young 
girls. 
"Where do you live?" he asked one of 
the most charming. 
" At old Chatham," she answered, 
knowing he did not need to be told she 
meant the quaint Fitzhugh mansion that 
overlooks :Fredericksburg from a lofty 
hill on the north side of the river. 
"Is the oak-tree still standing in the 
corner of the yard?" he inquired in- 
stantly. 
" Yes," she replied. " I have played 
under it from childhood." 
"Well," he said softly, "it was under 
that oak that I courted my wife; and 
standing yonder on Marye's Height, at 
the fiercest moment of the battle of 
Fredericksburg, I yearned to get a sight 
of that tree. When the smoke cleared a 
bit, I caught a glimpse of its upper 
branches." He had to pause and turn 
away, for his voice was choking as he 
finished. "And it strengthened me for 
the day's work," 


. 
. 


.. 


. 
. 


471 


That was Lee. Not an immodest word 
did he have, and doubtless not a prideful 
thought, of a concentration so complete 
and of a position chosen with so much 
care that the Federal formed and failed 
and charged and broke again and still 
again, and all so futilely that he had 
turned to Longstreet that December day 
and had said: "It's a blessing war is so 
terrible, else we'd come to love it too 
much." Not a touch of a smile of recollec- 
tion of the winter of 1862-63, when the 
victories he had planned and directed 
seemed to have brought the South so near 
to independence that every soldier's hope 
was high and sober generals had laughed 
and had cheered as "Jeb" Stuart rode 
over with Sweeney, the banjo-player, and 
serenaded them merrily. Not a satisfied 
reference to that noon in l\íay, 1863, when 
he had risen from the vicinity of Freder- 
icksburg into the inferno of the \Vilder- 
ness, with its stunted forest and stifling 
fumes, and had been acclaimed by mea 
who poured out from among the burning 
trees, black as charcoal-burners and mad 
with rejoicing that Hooker was routed. 
Not a mention of that other May of 1864 
when, near-by, he had stood off Grant 
with half the numbers his great adversary 
commanded, and then had successfully 
anticipated him when Grant had thought 
to slip away secretly to the left. Freder- 
icksburg might have meant glory and 
huzzas and captured flags and presented 
arms with bloody bayonets. To him 
Fredericksburg suggested Chatham, and 
Chatham brought youth and an oak-tree, 
and 1Iary Custis under it, and a love that 
had strengthened him. 


. 
. 
. 



 


1<< 


. 
. 
. 



" I Went to College" 
BY JESSE LYNCH 'VILLIAMS 
Author of "Why :Marry?" etc, 


. it:
., J F a young man really 
. - wants an education, he 

 1 iJ 
 can get one anywhere, 
L1J 
 even at college. 

 To be sure, few of 
them nowadays seem 
'W
 very keen to be edu- 
cated at all. Perhaps 
that is why so many of them are crowding 
into our universities. The motive is not 
educational but social. At college the lit- 
tle sons of new wealth will meet the light 
sort. For in this land of the free and 
home of the brave it is undemocratic to 
acknowledge that we have class distinc- 
tions, but a university degree makes a 
very convenient badge of social status 
without jeopardizing our theoretical de- 
mocracy. It stamps the wearer as a college 
man. He belongs to the American gentry, 
and is listed in the Social Register. 
Whatever may be the motive, they are 
now storming our academic strongholds 
in such unprecedented hordes, like the 
Goths and Vandals of long ago, that some 
of our older universities have raised their 
standards, like walls, for their self-protec- 
tion. It is not only much harder to get 
in, but far harder to stay in, than it was in 
the good old days. Our American col- 
leges used to welcome almost anybody. 
Now they have begun to pick and choose. 
They are actually changing these com- 
fortable country clubs into institutions of 
learning, thus spoiling the chief charm of 
college life and destroying the only real 
leisure class we ever had. 
This is creating considerable dissatis- 
faction among certain of the loyal alumni 
who always give three cheers for dear old 
Alma Mater but seldom anything else. 
For not only is this new and fatal policy 
keeping out valuable athletes, but even 
sons of prominent graduates. One of the 
questions asked last fall in the "psycho- 
logical test," which is really an innocent- 
looking camouflage for rejecting undesir- 
ables, was: "Why do you want to go to col- 
472 


lege?" The answer supplied by one 
young hopeful whose father had been a 
"big man" in college was: " To become 
eligible for the University Club." He was 
not admitted. 
At this same ancient seat of learning, 
which has no ambitions to be big, there 
were two thousand applications for the 
freshman class last year, but only six 
hundred passed through the eye of the 
needle. Those who do get in find to their 
dismay, and sometimes to the indignation 
of their parents, that they are obliged to 
work almost as hard as if they had to earn 
their own livings. The worst of it is that 
the alumni can't do anything about it. 
The university has got them where it 
wants them now. If a boy cannot keep 
up, he can keep out. 
Now, in the old days everything was 
different. Fewer men went to college, and 
most of those who did had an amiable in- 
tention of acquiring an education. Per- 
haps that is putting it too strongly, but at 
least they were not averse to the idea, 
They came with the expectation of being 
made to work whether they liked it or not. 
But the joke of it was that in those days 
it was not necessary to study in order to 
be a student, and as there were so many 
more interesting things to do, only a few 
of them worked hard and every one had a 
good time. 
Thus we see two jokes on two genera- 
tions. The older generation went to col- 
lege for an education, but remained to 
have the time of their lives. The mem- 
bers of the new generation go to college 
for a good time but get an education-if 
they remain. It may not be the best kind 
of an education. It is acquisitive rather 
than creative, a consumer's culture, not a 
producer's. Our universities are still in 
the thrall of" the educational ideals of the 
idling class and their dependent priests 
and clerks." But even culture-climbing 
is better than social climbing, and hard 
work is better than either. 



"I WENT TO COLLEGE" 


It may be bad taste in me to criticise 
college education, because I was not edu- 
cated at college, I merely went there. I 
loved it. With remarkable acumen for 
one so young, I perceived that the best 
education was life, and decided that the 
best life was college life. 
A student goes to his professors to be 
taught, but he learns from his fellow 
students, as has been well said by Emer- 
son-better said, in fact, but I never 
learned to quote correctly in college or out. 
For example, I was taught to drink and 
I learned to smoke a pipe; I had already 
taken a course in cigarettes at an excel- 
lent prep school, and had occasionally, 
even at that early age, elected cigars. 
You see I was a precocious child and 
learned quickly. 
I am broad-minded enough to admit 
that such accomplishments can be and 
often are self-taught elsewhere, at less 
eÀpense to one's parents, but at home 
there is not nearly so much encourage- 
ment for these forms of self-expression. 
There is an indefinable something about 
the Gothic architecture of academic halls 
which seems more stimulating than the 
atmosphere behind the barn. 
At college I also acquired some lasting 
knowledge of tennis and other athletics, 
and became an expert shooter of clay 
pigeons, having made the gun team in my 
freshman year. Think of the aid this has 
been to me all through my life in killing 
ducks and quail. Invaluable. I also be- 
came an amateur editor in my junior 
year, and began writing as a professional 
when a senior. Best of all, it was at col- 
lege that I learned the rare art of loafing, 
though I have since ceased to practise it 
consistently. 
I learned how to work, too, for I be- 
came involved in all kinds of "extracur- 
riculum activities"; and so, as I had very 
little time left for my classes, which were 
always rudely interrupting my important 
interests, I learned to work like the devil 
at examination time in order to remain in 
college and enjoy what I was informed 
were the happiest years of a man's life. 
They are not, but I believed it then. 
Indeed, I liked those four years so well 
that after getting my bachelor degree I 
returned for a couple of years of graduate 
."work," and received an 1\1.A. for it; 


473 


thus proving that I was a master of arts, 
though just what arts they were and how 
I mastered them I have never discovered. 
:1\1 y professed purpose in coming back 
was to get something out of books. I 
knew this could be done, for others had 
managed to do so at college. I would 
thus make up for wasted opportunities 
which come but once and float by on the 
sea of life. But instead of reading a thou- 
sand books, I wrote one. It was a collec- 
tion of stories about college life which has 
seduced many younger men to come to the 
same college and enjoy the same life. It 
is an old book now, but if by chance it is 
responsible for the presence of any of our 
modern hard-toiling, worried-faced un- 
dergraduates, they doubtless curse me for 
misrepresenting the facts. 
There were only two professors who in- 
terested me enough to make me work on 
their courses. One was Woodrow Wil- 
son and the other, as it happened, was 
Dean West, the very man with whom, 
some years later, \Vilson had a famous 
fight. West won out and got his graduate 
school. Wilson got out and won the 
presidency of the United States. So each 
got what he wanted and everything was 
lovely. 
Under Professor Wilson I studied 
jurisprudence and under Professor \Vest 
pedagogics. They were both interesting 
men, inspiring teachers. That must have 
been why such otherwise unaccountable 
subjects were elected by a boy who had 
decided to become a writer, and who al- 
ready felt that he and Thackeray were the 
only authors who had ever really under- 
stood human nature. 
Both these teachers told me that all 
students, embryonic writers especially, 
should secure a firm foundation of 
"broad general culture" by taking the 
old-fashioned classical course, with plenty 
of Greek and Latin. But the reason I se- 
cured no firm foundation of broad general 
culture is that I not only took the old- 
fashioned classical course, bu t also, even 
after I had a chance to escape, about mid- 
way through college, I elected still more 
Greek to the bitter end. 
It bored me to death and made me hate 
the Greeks and Romans and all their lit- 
erary works. Perhaps I got excellent dis- 
cipline from the drudgery of grammar and 



474 


"I \VENT TO COLLEGE" 


construing sentences, but the discipline 
wasn't worth the sacrifice of what might 
have proved an inspiring, peradventure 
useful, acquaintance with what I am re- 
liably informed is immortal literature- 
" the best that has been said and thought." 
It might come in handy, when writing a 
play or something, to know the Greek 
drama. I hear they're good. 
I had sense enough to see through the 
English courses and to snub them as much 
as the law allowed, but unfortunately I 
did not snub the classics. Well, I was 
weak, I was ignorant, and I was led astray 
in my youth by the evil influences of my 
professors and parents. So I fell for the 
classics. Perhaps it was because my 
father had taken a classical course in col- 
lege; so had five of my uncles, and on my 
mother's side there were eight genera- 
tions of Scotch Covenanter ministers. 
They all devoutly believed in the study 
of the classics. Therefore I did too. It 
ran in the family. But it didn't seem to 
work out right in my case. If I only 
hadn't "studied" Greek literature, I 
might have learned something about it. 
If I only hadn't gone to college, I might 
have become educated. 
The other day I glanced over a book 
lying open on a friend's library-table 
while waiting for her to come in and pour 
me a cup of tea. It was great stuff. It 
gave me a thrill I hadn't had in years. 
I turned back to the title-page, eager to 
see who in the world the author could be. 
It was Euripides, translated by Gilbert 
Murray. At that point my hostess en- 
tered and I closed the book. Of course I 
could have continued when I reached 
home. I have Murray's translations in 
my own library, for I do not intend to let 
my sons miss the pleasure and benefit of 
great literature by being taught how to 
disembowel it. But it has remained a 
closed book to me. 
Perhaps mine is an extreme case-a 
college complex, as it were. All my class- 
mates, well-known bankers, lawyers, and 
big business men, probably read Greek 
and Latin every morning in the original 
on their way down to VIall Street. 
But I should hate to convey the idea 
that I acquired nothing of value out of 
my college experience. That would not 
be fair to my college or to myself. I ac- 


qui red the rudiments of a most excellent 
business training-while taking my clas- 
sical course in broad general culture. It 
came about as a result of athletic training. 
I was" trying" for the track team. I had 
a beautiful stride. I ran in almost per- 
fect form and had only one slight defect 
as a runner. I did not go fast enough. 
So after taking a place in the national 
cross-country championships-I think it 
was the eighty-fifth place-I felt that I 
was entitled to retire from active partici- 
pation in athletics. I deemed it my duty 
to give the younger fellows a chance, and 
believed that I could be of greater ser- 
vice by managing athletics. 
If I am not mistaken, the title of my 
high calling was "University Athletic 
Treasurer." At any rate, it had to do 
with the finances of all branches of major 
sport, and required so much time, such 
expert attention, that subsequently this 
job became a salaried position. 
The thing I liked about it was that I 
travelled around the country with the 
teams, and on the campus I carried a 
japanned tin box and wore what was 
called the varsity monogram. Only the 
athletic oligarchy were allowed such or- 
naments. 
I was quite important now, one of the 
really "big men." To be an editor of the 
Lit. was not exactly a disgrace in the 
college world, any more than being an 
author is in the outside world-merely a 
queer sort of thing to be. But running 
athletics was something that was really 
respected and honored, quite as is con- 
trolling financial credit of the real world. 
But the educational feature of my ex- 
alted position lay in the fact that I had 
to keep books, audit accounts, write and 
render financial reports, and get all kinds 
of things done on time by all kinds of 
people. I had to "handle men," I had to 
meet unexpected emergencies. And, as I 
believed that whatsoever your hand finds 
to do you should do it with all your might, 
I was complimented by a big business 
man who was on our graduate advisory 
committee. He told me that I would 
make a good business man some day. 
It was the greatest compliment he 
could give anyone. No doubt I appreci- 
ated it. Only it seems too bad that the 
only rigorous training received in a whole 



college course should have been utterly 
wasted upon me. I had no taste, even if 
I had the talent, to follow up my golden 
opportunities for getting in with big 
business men. I wanted to write. 
Since that day I have written no more 
financial reports, and the only books I 
keep now are those loaned me by loving 
friends who believe that because I write 
by day I must want to read by night. 
Something like inviting the postman to 
take a walk. 
There is no doubt about it, a college 
course is valuable to a business career. 
l\Ianyof the modern rulers of great busi- 
ness say, invaluable. But for a career in 
any of the arts, I have my doubts. Those 
are precious and impressionable years. 
Perhaps they should be devoted to more 
penetrating and important experiences, 
in some environment where a real rever- 
ence for fine things is not killed by stupid 
standardization, and where a natural love 
of beauty is not so likely to be perverted. 
Among writers it is difficult to trace the 
benefits or injuries of formal education. 
In fact, I can detect very little difference 
between those who have had a univer- 
sity training and those who have not, ex- 


\YORDS 


475 


cept that the latter are likely to be better 
informed, better read, and less afraid of 
new ideas than college graduates. 
I doubt if l\Ir. Howells would have had 
such keen literary passions if at the age 
when he was setting type ou t in Ohio he 
had been made to detest" required read- 
ing" by dodos who can render even love- 
liness loathsome. If :J\Iark Twain had 
gone to college he would have missed the 
l\Iississippi. The youthful Kipling would 
have been killed by the "awful orderli- 
ness" of Oxford. Wells might have gone 
in for true scholarship, which means find- 
ing out all there is to know about some- 
thing no one else cares about and telling 
it in such a way that no one else can un- 
derstand it. Shaw would have been fired 
in his freshman year. Still, it might have 
been hard to ruin those fellows even by 
college. 
After all is said and done, there is only 
one sure way to discover whether or not a 
man, even though you may have known 
him for years, is college bred. It is a per- 
fectly simple test. All you have to do is 
to ask him. If he says yes, then you know 
that he is educated. If he says no, then 
you know that he is not. 


Words 


BY NATHALIE SEDG\VICK COLBY 


DRAW over eyes dry-socketed 
Phrase of crape, instead of tears. 
Fling the strumpet cloaks of red 
Verse to hide her spoiling wares! 


Without one beam of truth, lift high 
Towered forensic palaces, 
Where mummers hail the passers-by 
\Vith calls that lure like painted faces. 


There was a time when words were things 
Coined from the mint of the first man's heart, 
\Vhen a sound shaped by his sufferings 
Jagged his savage lips apart. 
He was the word that lay ice-curled 
In primal silence; waiting cry- 
Wombed in bleak caverns of the world 
To be unnumbed relentlessly. 



Enter Eve 


BY V ALMA CLARK 
Author of "A \Voman of No Imagination," etc. 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEORGE \VRIGHT 


'" Ä

Ä N Epicure's Ja'unt 
I I 
 Through France,'" I 
A soared. " We tour the 
country, and we eat 
t chicken sauté at 

 
 Dieppe, and bouilla- 
Ä
1Ç1Ä baisse-a kin? of fish- 
stew-at NIce. We 
collaborate, Henry-" 
"But how," objected Henry, "am I to 
paint a fish stew?" 
Right there a light streamed out of our 
own room to welcome us, and a little, 
dark, bitter-looking girl rose up and 
greeted us: "I thought you were never 
coming. " 
" Pardon? " 
She was a total stranger to us, yet her 
manner was that of a cross elder sister 
waiting up for two prowling young 
Toms. " You are Gus Silvernail, aren't 
you?" 
" No. I'm only Henry-Henry Gallup. 
This is Sliver." 
"Oh? Well, I'm Eve Carter." 
"Eve . . ." I mumbled, pulling up the 
name out of some half-forgotten limbo. 
"Then you're Aunt Zoe's daughter." 
F "Hm. I had a room over on the Rue 
Dutot, and I was going to take biol- 
ogy-" 
"Biology?" A scientist in the ranks 
of our improvident Bohemian family was 
something different. 
" Yes. I've taken my degree at Wis- 
consin, and I wanted to study at the 
Pasteur Institute. ]\10ther is on tour in 
'Down She Comes,' and she promised to 
send me money every month. I've waited 
six weeks, and I've cabled her twice, and 
I haven't had one word from her." 
" Your mother must be like my father," 
I observed politely. 
But she had gone back to Henry. "I've 
waited and w-waited, and I didn't dare 
register at the Institute; I spent my last 
47 6 


c-centime, and to-day the concierge- 
turned me out. She kept my suitcase 
and clothes. . .. She wouldn't even let 
me have a c-clean handkerchief or a 
f-fresh piqué collar," sobbed Eve. "I 
came here, and I told the woman-" 
"Madame Cochois?" 
"-That I was-part of your fam-fam- 
ily-" 
Henry was absolutely choked up with 
feeling. "Handkerchief, Sliver-a clean 
one. \Ve haven't any-piqué collars, but 
we'll get some. Blow in that." 
"If you could just lend me, until my 
money-order comes through-unless"- 
she glanced from Henry's old easel and 
my battered typewriter, past a cracked 
wash-basin, to a piece of Flemish tapestry 
and a really good old Persian bowl, bronze 
with black patina-" unless you're down, 
too." 
"Lord, no, we're up!" Henry reas- 
sured her. "Never higher." 
"Then you can lend me the money- 
to-night, now?" 
":J\Ioney?" gulped Henry. 
" You are broke!" 
"Merely temporarily out of-" 
"\Ve're all broke, and what am I going 
to do?" 
"Y ou'll stay here for the present; 
Sliver and I'll vacate-won't we, Sliver?" 
"Camp out on the street? There's 
the alcove-perhaps she'll let us hang 
ou t in the alcove," I suggested sarcastic- 
ally. 
" Well, the alcove. And to-morrow 
we'll get your duds, and we'll fix you 
up-" 
"But how can you get my suitcase, 
and how can you fIX me up," she scowled 
pessimistically, "without any money?" 
"Our prospects-you haven't heard our 
delirious prospects! 
". . . You see, it was one of those lit- 
tle, musty, dusty art shops, and we bam- 



ENTER EVE 


boozled the old gentleman-De Smet, his 
name was-into giving my painting the 
spotlight place in his window. The idea 
was Sliver's. 'Ve bet him twenty francs 
it would sell for a good price inside of two 
weeks. Either way-the twenty francs, 
or the commission-De Smet stood to 
win, and he couldn't resist it. It was cool 
of us, for we were flatter than flat, 
but-" 
"The picture sold?" 
"No. But a corpulent American, the 
manufacturer of buttons, on a holiday saw 
the painting, and, not
 knowing French, 
he thought that' lVIlle. Eventail Rose' was 
the name of a woman, and that my girl- 
she was just any girl with a fan-was a 
real person. He obtained my name and 
address, and he sent for me and asked if I 
was a portrait-painter. I admitted it; I 
am-or was to be. He offered me two 
hundred good round American dollars to 
paint a portrait-a pretty portrait-of his 
daughter." 
" You agreed." 
"Before I saw the daughter. It was a 
commission which could never have been 
executed; the daughter resembled her 
father. But, wait, that's only half of it! 
Sliver and I were glooming, when we were 
visited by a plump Jew, who introduced 
himself as J\1ax Beer, the Paris art editor 
of Dress. You know it?" 
Eve nodded. 
"'VeIl, he'd seen my painting, too, and 
he was struck by the detail work of the 
fan. Sauval had been supplying their 
covers, wild things in color, bu t he had 
graduated to the distinction of an exhibit 
at the Georges Petit Galleries, and had 
failed them for the moment. They 
needed something at once--not later than 
a week from Thursday." 
"So soon?" 
"Yes. 'Mlle. Pink Fan' wouldn't do, 
because fans were at present 'out,'" 
mimicked Henry. "But tulle scarfs were 
in, and he advised a 'J\llie. Tulle Scarf.' 
1\11 y fan was-precisc-and seldom had he 
seen chiffon painted as I painted it. He 
promised nothing. But if I retained that 
excellent manner, reproducing the crisp, 
light sheerness of the tulle--well, it might 
run me to fifteen hundred francs, and it 
might even run me to a series of covers, 
featuring white swan's-doYin, and-uh- 


477 


scalloped skirts, and I don't know what 
all. There's no limit to the future." 
"But two hundred dollars is more than 
fifteen hundred francs." 
"Eh? If I wrote home to Athens, 
New York, that I am earning money 
painting tulle scarfs-" 
"You've turned down the button 
man?" pressed Eve. 
"Haven't broken it to him yet. But 
did you ever hear of such drunken luck? 
First the button man mistaking it for a 
portrait; next the fashion expert being 
hooked by a fan!" 
Eve was unconvinced. "It's a week 
before you can collect if- You've 
started 'The Tulle Scarf?' " 
"To-day we had to celebrate," Henry 
explained, "but to-morrow- Look here," 
and he produced a bundle, and divested 
it tenderly of its tissue-paper wrappings. 
"What-?" Eve's black eyes opened 
on the little white porcelain figure of 
Kuan-yin, Goddess of l\Iercy, whose own 
eyes were closed in a suave Chinese smile 
and whose arms were folded, in enigmatic 
placidity, under the porcelain flow of her 
robe. 
"'Ve celebrated with her. We'd cov- 
eted her, and to-day we swaggered out and 
bought her. She's an antique-probably 
good-and we got the fellow down to 
three hundred and fifty francs." 
"You paid three hundred and fifty 
francs for that?" 
"Our last," I contributed. 
"But-" 
"But-Kuan-yin is our luck!" Henry 
would convince her; if she couldn't grasp 
luck as an abstract principle, she would 
grasp it as a concrete object. 
"If you hitch your luck to a symbol, 
you smash it sure!" I warned him, hor- 
rified. "1\1 y father pinned his faith to a 
Chinese penny, and he lost the Chinese 
penny, and-" 
"But we'll put Kuan-yin out of smash- 
ing reach," said Henry, and installed the 
porcelain goddess on our highest book- 
shelf. "There! She's our luck-your 
luck and-my luck," he smiled softly at 
Eve, "and don't you worry." 
But my disagreeable small cousin 
merely scowled at the figure. She trans- 
ferred her scowl to Henry; and suddenly I 
saw that poor, foolish Henry, in that boy- 



478 


ENTER EVE 


ish gesture of hanging his fortune onto so 
frail a thing, had stirred in her the fierce 
maternal. 
Eve had adopted Henry, and Henry 
had adopted Eve, and their mutual adop- 
tion excluded me. 
"I'm-starved," she smiled faintly; 
"you haven't anything-?" 
"My God, she's hungry, and here we 
stand- The herring-hook, Sliver! Can 
you bear herring?" 
Already Henry was leaning precari- 
ously over the window-ledge into the 
night. He came up triumphantly with a 
paper bag at the end of a long string. 
"\Vhat-?" demanded Eve. 
"It's the herring. We hang them on a 
hook under the ledge that dangles them 
down in the corner of the building, where 
nobody can see 'em. We used to dangle 
them directly under the window, but 
there's a man below-a well-to-do col- 
lector of old china-who doesn't buy 
what he can take, apparently. One day 
we missed the herring-" 
"But why-?" 
"The herring-hook," grinned Henry, 
busy with a skillet, "is our own invention 
for giving a herring the air." 
"But haven't you an ice-box?" 
"No, no ice-box." 
"But you ought to have an ice-box." 
"Yes'm." 
"How," demanded Eve, "do you keep 
milk sweet?" 
"Canned milk." 
"But I can't endure milk out of a can. 
You really ought to have a little re- 
frig- That hook," said Eve decisively, 
"won't do." 
"I cannot sleep with a herring," I re- 
marked coldly. 
"Shut up, Sliver, we'll eat the her- 
ring." 
"The hook," persisted Eve, "is ridicu- 
lous. Who ever heard-?" 
"The hook is taboo; from this day forth 
it doesn't exist." 
"We could make a little temporary 
refrigerator out of a wooden box and 
packing and old carpets," she suggested 
eagerly; "they really do work quite 
well. " 
"\Ve'll make the refrigerator," prom- 
ised Henry. 
"If you're going to cook it on both 


sides, you'll have to turn it," was Eve's 
final shot on the subject of the herring. 
Henry turned it. 


We set ourselves about Eve's business 
-fresh milk, ice-box, and baggage-and 
if you imagine she was grateful to us, you 
are wrong. We arrived with two heavy 
suitcases; pressed by Eve, we explained 
that Henry had simply asked for a room 
and had been shown Eve's room, and 
while I had then summoned the concierge 
to conversation below stairs, he had gath- 
ered up the baggage and walked out by 
the rear entrance. . . . An entirely sim- 
ple ruse. 
But Eve at that point, with one eye on 
Henry's suavely smiling little Chinese 
lady, developed an unexpected and mean 
little conscience, which must be appeased. 
She couldn't feel right about doing the 
concierge in that way. 
But the concierge should be paid from 
our first funds; besides, she deserved to be 
done, 
\\Touldn't it be wise, moreover, to ap- 
pease the concierge, and so to keep in 
touch with her mail? 
I suggested that she had only to notify 
the bureau de poste of her change of ad- 
dress to receive her mail. 
But Henry stepped on me; if Eve felt 
that way about it, then the concierge 
must be mollified at once. 
He invited M. Lepetit, the connoisseur 
of china on the floor below us, to come up 
and have a look at Kuan-yin. 
1\1. Lepetit held Kuan-yin to the light. 
He perused her soft ivory glaze, and mur- 
mured that the rose tinge was lacking. 
He pronounced her an imitation Tê-hua, 
but interesting; he might part with one 
hundred and fifty francs to possess her, 
But Eve's smile was too much for me, 
I told 1\1. Lepetit we would let him know 
la ter. 
He raised to two hundred francs. 
I assured him that he should have first 
chance at Kuan-yin, in the event that we 
were driven to part with her. 
Then I sat down to it. 
I outlined a plan to Henry, and we di- 
vided a cane and a monocle between us, 
and put on the manner of important art 
connoisseurs, and went down to the 
Luxembourg Galleries. There we sta- 



ENTER EVE 


tioned ourselves before a Laurent's lady- 
in-a-pink-dress, which invariably at- 
tracts attention, and kept our eyes open 
for a quarry of means. \Ve found him in 
the person of a lean, dyspeptic-looking 
American with his stout wife. The man 
wore a diamond on his middle finger, and 
his profile was greedy; the lady pointed 
a lorgnette, and was in heavy and un- 
skilled pursuit of culture. 
,\\'e merely compared Laurent's paint- 
ing unfavorably with the painting of 
Henry Gallup, a young artist. I had dis- 
covered-sh I-in a little second-rate 
store a really remarkable canvas, "l\l1le. 
Éventail Rose," by this young Gallup; I 
had learned that the painting might be 
had for a paltry five hundred francs, and 
if I was any judge of art at all) it would be 
worth ten thousand dollars in tcn years. 
As an investmcnt alone-not to mention 
the fame which attaches itself to a patron 
of the arts who first recognizes a master- 
piece . . . 
"Where?" begged Henry. 
" Sh-sh ! " I would give him the ad- 
dress, but it was my find, and he must 
give me his solemn oath not to pur- 
chase. . . . 
The lean American unscrewed a foun- 
tain pen. Five minutes later he and his 
wife summoned an auto-taxi. 
Henry and I called round at 1\1:. de 
Smet's. Sure enough, "NIlle. Pink Fan" 
was gone, and De Smet,all respect, poured 
into Henry's palm four hundred and fiíty 
francs, having subtracted his own com- 
mission, and begged Henry for more can- 
vases. 
Eve broiled us small, tender steaks- 
she could cook, that girl I-and went her- 
self to pay the concierge in full. Even she 
could not object to an honest-to-goodness 
sale. I began to believe that Kuan-yin, 
safe on her shelf, had, indeed, brought us 
luck. 
I pass lightly over the sad event which 
followed. My cousin had anchored her- 
self to us, and there seemed to be no im- 
mediate prospect of her removal. On her 
second day she cut the superfluous taiìs 
from all Henry's shirts and neatly turned 
them into new cuffs, wholly ignoring my 
frayed state. On the third day she 
moved Henry's easel into the right light 
and my typewriter into the wrong light. 


479 


On the fourth day she eliminated me al- 
together, 
Yes, Henry and Eve were married, I 
came in late in the afternoon, and found 
the two tranced before a view of chimneys 
against the hazed, dusky orange sky 
which makes a Paris sunset in early N 0- 
vember. Their faces, in the glow, when 
they finally did become aware of me and 
turn, left me in no doubt of the issue. 
They were married, without much ado, 
on the following morning, and I moved 
across the hall into a room conveniently 
vacant. :Madame Cochois, to whom we 
were several weeks in debt, proved unex- 
pectedly accommodating; there was a 
glint in Eve's eye which madame, shrewd 
woman that she was, recognized for com- 
petence. 
I moped alone, while Henry and Eve 
went out and did the things over Paris 
which Henry and I had done together. 
An afternoon at the races, with a bet won 
and a rainbow holding the Eiffel Tower in 
a hoop; an evening on the Boulevard S t. 
Michel, with roasted chestnuts out of a 
newspaper bag and bocks at assorted 
cafés; adventure and the merry joke 
everywhere-in the tipsy Frenchman 
who addressed a moral lecture to the 
tomes on a book-stall, in the sober Eng- 
lishman who mistook the café's silver 
globe, container of slop cloths, for a magic 
ball which would reveal to him his fu- 
ture. :My idea for a story: "A wealthy 
old wreck of a woman who has nothing 
left in her life but to dress for the approval 
of a superior and snobbish young 
waiter." Henry's idea for a painting: 
"Its prim, never abandoned ballet danc- 
ing is, Sliver-even that dance of the 
Seduction in Hell. If you could convey 
that-pretty, conventional dancers in- 
Hell; crisp, stiff skirts-prim, you 
know. . . ." 
I t had been Henry and I knocking 
about together, rowing, pursuing the 
gleam, striving to capture the light, 
bright zest of it. Now it was Henry and 
Eve-confound her I-with me let out. 
As for "J\;Ille. Tulle Scarf," Henry got 
no further than a feather-light sketch of 
the painting, with Eve as his model and 
with a sky-blue tulle scarf, which had 
practically emptied his pockets, as the 
chief property. 



480 


ENTER EVE 


"You're not working!" Eve would ac- 
cuse him. 
"I-can't work." 
"If you want me to come and sit in that 
tulle thing some more-" 
But no, truth hampered him, Henryex- 
plained; he preferred to keep his figures 
vague and fanciful; the tulle scarf draped 
about the chair-back was all the model he 
needed from this stage. "But the tulle 
scarf will keep," he wound up; "let's go 
for a walk." 
"No," said Eve. 
"Hang it all, I won't keep school on 
my-honeymoon! " 
"But this is Sunday; you've got only 
till Thursday to finish it." 
"I'll finish it." 
"You're not so good at last-minute 
spurts," I reminded him gloomily. 
"But I'll be good at this last-minute 
spurt!" boasted Henry brazenly. "It'll 
be all right, you'll see-with Kuan-yin 
overlooking the job." 
"Kuan-yin!" scoffed Eve. "If you'd 
hang your faith to yourself, Henry Gal- 
lup, instead of to a silly, smug little china 
doll, we'd both be better off." 
"I forgot to tell you," said I, "that 
Lepetit stopped me on the landing to-day 
and offered me five hundred francs for 
her." 
"Five hundred francs! I could buy 
chintz for window-curtains." 
"I'll buy you chintz after Thursday," 
promised Henry
 "but we won't part with 
Kuan-yin, dear." 
"No. I've a hunch myself we'd better 
hold onto her," I admitted. 
"Come on out, Eve!" 
"No." 
But she flipped her dust-cloth over 
Henry's head, and Henry caught her 
down into his arms, and I left them. 
Later I heard them going down the stairs 
beyond my door. 
Still in her hat and coat, with Henry 
departed on a l\Iétro jaunt to the hotel of 
the American button-maker to turn down, 
finally, that gentleman's impossible com- 
mission, Eve came restlessly into my 
room and demanded of me what I was 
doing. 
"Story about a sculptress whose mini- 
ature figures are all done as playthings 
for her dead child," I elucidated. 


"Oh." 
"It won't sell," I added morosely. 
"Why?" 
"Because the child is dead." 
"Make her alive, then." 
"But that ruins it. \Vhat have you 
been doing?" 
" I ? " She un tied the package which 
she had been dangling by its string, and 
showed me. "A jam jar; I haven't any 
jam yet, and it is an awkward shape, but 
it was a bargain-only one franc, Sliver!" 
" So." 
"Imagine it filled with strawberry 
jam." 
"Henry is partial to fig jam." 
"Is he? W ell, I don't know about fig 
jam. Sliver," concentrated Eve, "I 
wanted to ask you-is Henry good at 
portraits? " 
"Good enough to take the Proctor 
prize on his' Portrait of a Child '-Pro- 
fessor Conliff's daughter." 
"And he might make a success of por- 
trait-painting? " 
"He might." 
"It seems more-solid." 
"Yes." 
"\V ouldn't one commission lead to an- 
other commission?" 
"The button-manufacturer might tell 
his-shoe- manufacturing friend-" 
"And before you know it, you'd have 
a real business going, with a regular in- 
come to count on." 
"Business?" I chuckled. 
"Painting business. Wouldn't you?" 
" Perhaps." 
"Well, then, I don't think Henry has 
any right to turn down-" 
"Henry doesn't want to do portraits; 
he wants to play with his imagination." 
"Huh. If chasing lucky flukes is keep- 
ing him from luckier work-" 
"It's an idea; let me jot it down: man 
of ability sidetracked by the glitter of a 
little luck. . .. But take your jam jar, 
for instance. Wouldn't you prefer a jar 
of standard shape; wouldn't such a jar, 
even at a-standard price, be more sensi- 
ble and more economical in the long 
run? " 
"But this was a bargain-and who ever 
heard of a jam jar of 'standard shape'?" 
she giggled. 
" You see! A bargain! It's the ap- 



ENTER EVE 


peal of the gratuitous, the something for 
nothing. It's the same thing with 
Henry. . . ." 
But Eve didn't see it-and at that mo- 
ment Henry appeared. "Hello! Let's go 
down to the Two Crowns for supper, Eve." 


481 


"If Thursday doesn't hatch c
Iiss Tulle 
Scarf' and a check for fifteen hundred 
francs-well, there's still the button- 
man's daughter!" 
"Yes. . .. All right. You'll join 
u
 ?" Eve asked me. 


, 
 ;, 
......... 
cf ')., . -....', 
f -.. . \ \,: 
\. 
 ), " 
p." .

-\ 
 

 . 

.. f\ -([ - t,
 
 
'\
 

 
 l 
-a . \ . \ 
J \ " . 
 \ 
\ \ , 
-.
 Jf 
:" 
_.....
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(, 
.( \'-' 
,
 
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, . .; . 
 
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..... 1 1 I . k-l 
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If ' j 
\: 
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"Ko. I'm only Henry-Henry Gallup. This i" Sliver:'-Pa
e 476. 


"Did you see your man?" 
"I didn't; he'd gone over to London, 
with the daughter, and he left word that 
I might call round again in two weeks, 
with a fresh canvas tucked under my el- 
bow. But let's go!" 
"Have ,'ou monev?" 
"Enough." . 
"For to-morrow?" 
"\\Te'll squeeze through to-morrow." 
"And if Thursday doesn't bring anv- 
thing-?" " 
YOLo LXX,TIII.-35 


From that hour Eve cbanged her tac- 
tics. 
"It'::; pretty damned hard," said Henry, 
C'to see Eve wanting things -" 
"'Vhat does she want?" 
"'VeU, it was a batik-blouse affair in 
black and rose, the stunningest colors." 
"Sounds more like the kind of frippery 
that would catch \'our eve." 
"I noticed it, å'nd Eve agreed that it 
was lovely, and there was I with barely a 
fare homé for us in my pocket. It was' on 



482 


ENTER EYE 


one of those e'Xpensive side streets, the 
Rue Daunou, and T simply hadn't the 
crust, Sliver- Eve, of course, wasn't 
onto the prices." 
"She-developed an affection for the 
garment? " 
"She . . . lingered. . . ." 
"There's nobody," I muttered, "who 
knows prices better than Eve." 
"'Yhat," blazed Henry, "do you 
mean? Do vou mean that Eve would 
make me feél like-like a tigh twad on 
purpose? " 
It was just what I did mean, but I fal- 
tcred and denied it. 
Now l\Iadame Cochois pu t in a firm 
plea for her money. Thursday? But she 
could not wait till Thursday. To-mor- 
row? 'VeIl, to-morrow, then. I had 
previously seen Eve herself in private 
conference with madame, and I had my 
suspicions. 
But Henry, having risen from his la- 
ment over the batik blouse, was un- 
squelched and confident. And now his 
luck struck a series of notes, played a 
little scale, running up in a crescendo to 
the climax. In the morning came a note 
from 1\1. de Smet. Henry, at the dealer's 
urgent insistence, had dug out a couple 
of old things for De Smet's window, and 
one of them, a girl in a sun-hat, had ac- 
tually sold, of itself, for a small sum. 
" Luck! " laughed Henry, tossing up the 
breakfast loaf and catching it. "Luck, 
unmanæuvred-1tow can you deny it, 
Eve? " 
"Luck's nothing, you can't count on it. 
You're staying for toast, Sliver?" 
"Regular American toast?" 
"As near as I can make it from this 
crust. The butter," she stated, "is ran- 
cid; if we had any ice-" 
"We'll have ice. By golly, honey, I do 
believe that Kuån-yin is a lucky-" 
"Oh, Kuan-yin and-luck! There, 
you-you've made me burn my finger." 
Eve, in her practical little blue rubber- 
ized apron, was too efficient a housewife to 
make burned fingers plausible; but with 
the burned finger, she had Henry; Kuan- 
yin was forgotten. 
But at supper that evening, a special 
celebration, the suavely smiling little 
Chinese lady was placed by Henry in the 
centre of the table and was toasted in our 


favorite sauterne. It was a merry partv 
which was interrupted by a knock upon 
the door. "There," said Eve, "that's 
probably l\Iadame Cochois for her 
money." 
"\Ve can give her something." 
"But she'll not be satisfied with less 
than the whole sum-you'll see," she pre- 
dicted smugly. 
It was IVladame Cochois, but her errand 
was more cheerful. She came, in fact, 
with Eve's long-due money-order from 
her mother. 
".:\Iore luck?" grinned Henry con- 
fidently. 
Eve scowled, and would have concealed 
the evidence from us, but there was not a 
chance for her. Madame Cochois was 
poured out a glass of our good wine, and 
she accepted, avoiding Eve's eye, a small 
palmful of loose change on account. 
"You can have your batik blouse 
now!" Henry rejoiced. 
"I-don't want my batik blouse." 
"It's good, Sliver?" 
"Too good to last," I prophesied 
darkly. 
"Bosh! But I'm getting downright 
superstitious about that little lady; if 
anything happened to her, Sliver-" 
"I told you not to give your luck a 
mortal heel." 
"\Vhat could happen to her?" 
"You'd better keep her locked up-I 
caught old Lepetit hanging about our 
landing to-day. But, anyhow, your luck 
breaks to-morrow; it's Thursday, and you 
can't produce that cover overnight." 
"l\fy luck does not break, Sliver, and I 
can finish the thing-I'll show you. How 
about a cinema?" 
Henry's room, when I rapped on the 
following morning, was a j umble of tulle 
scarf and paint-tubes. Henry was trying 
to work, and Eve was moving him here 
and there to sweep. 
"But, dearest-" 
"He can't do it anyhow," Eve told 
me. 
"Take her out, Sliver-take her out 
for the day." 
"I don't want to-" 
"Don't you waut Henry to pull it?" 
"But I'm not bothering-" 
"Darling, I can't. look at you without 
being bothered," grinned Henry. 



EI'\TER EVE 


Henry fairly put her out, and I dragged 
her out. I had her on my hands, and she 
was not in a pleasant mood. I. 'VeIl, he 
can't possibly do it," she consoled herself. 
"It's doubtful enough, but with-in- 
spiration and luck." 
"I don't believe in-" 
"Luck? It's the very tlavor of this 


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483 


Henry himself was a study in blue and 
white I-and somehow it caught the fra- 
gility of tulle scarfs and Paris. 
I. Do I pass, Sliver?" 
" You-you may pass." 
"J[ ay? Good Lord, I've done it! 
Can vou look at that and not admit I \'e 
done- it? It's popular." 


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Madame Cochois was poured out a gIas-- of our good wine.-Page 482. 


place. :Much luck at home in-Athens. 
New York, shall we say?-would be far- 
fetched, but here in Paris, I could believe 
in any luck! That luck theme," I pon- 
dered; " an essay . . ." 
By three o'clock I could no longer de- 
tain Eve. Henry was putting the finish- 
ing t ouches to his canvas, and he begged 
us to wait, not to breathe. . . . 
The air \vas a blend of cigarette-smoke 
and strong coffee, and Henry looked like a 
fever. He made a javelin thrust with his 
brush at a clear space on the wall. I. \VeIl, 
do I pass?" 
It was a study in blue and white- 


" Yes." 
"It's deft." 
" \Vell . . ." 
"And, moreover, it's rather good." 
"Her skin's blue," I argued critically. 
"That's the cream of it. I've got that 
bluish reflection from the scarf absolutely 
right; she is ,Mlle. Tulle Scarf. Do you 
like it, Eve?" 
"So, I don't." 
"But if 
Iax Beer likes it-" 
I. He won't," said Eve. 
1'1 think he will." I stated deliberately. 
.. He'll take it, you'll see." 
Eve herself was almost convinced of 



48-t 


ENTER EYE 


Henry's incredible luck, but she fought it. 
"She's not a real woman." 
"Certainly she's not; she's the spirit 
of a tulle scarf. But, Lord, I'm tired! 
T\vo minutes till I wash up. \Ve'll go 
out for drinks, and then I'll get hold of 
Beer, and we'll see- Careful, Eve! 
For God's sake don't topple it onto that 
messy palette." 
"Lock the door," I reminded Henry. 
But Eve had forgotten something, and 
she took the key and went back; she was 
gone just a minute, and returned with her 
pointed white face flushed from hurry. 
That was how the door came to be wide 
open when we climbed back an hour 
later, with l\Iax Beer himself; Eve had 
carelessly failed to lock it. 
I looked quickly for Kuan-yin, found 
her reassuringly present. No harm done. 
But at that instant Henry uttered an 
exclamation, Beer remained, for a mo- 
ment longer, by the door, chatting with 
Eve on the absurd vogue for cheap 
rococo jewelry. 
But I stood with Henry, and saw him 
lift up the painting from the smeared 
palette, upon which. it had fallen face 
down, and view with him the wreck. The 
canvas was a fairly small one, and the 
palette was a huge one-Henry's sole af- 
fectation-so that l\Ille. Tulle Scarf was 
almost completely covered with the daubs 
of blue and white paint with which Henry 
had been so lavishly working. The blue 
complexion was done for; a particularly. 
large blob of white paint had obliterated 
the face. 
" \Vell . . ." said Henry. 
"How-? " 
"It must," breathed Eve, who had 
moved up, "have been the-draft from 
the door, It was there all right when 
1-" 
"A strong draft," I flung in; "a regular 
north wind." 
" Ah," said 1\lax Beer. " Ah ? " 
We simply gazed at our man, too done 
for to speak. 
" It looks," Beer groped, "like a snow- 
storm. It is," he concentrated" a verita- 
ble snow flurry. Ah . . .? But I had no 
idea, Mr. Gallup, that you were a l\Iod- 
ern. It is not what I had thought of, but 
still-it has merit-" 
I took one look at Eve's dropped face, 


and plunged to it. "Merit, Monsieur 
Beer? That impression of a snow flurrv 
has distinction. It reproduces the blu"e 
chill, the mad whirl, the very mood of the 
flying snow. It-it-" 
"I am not saying there is not . . . dis- 
tinction. . .. I seem to see an arm-a 
vague woman," he puzzled. 
Now Henry came into it. "It is a 
woman, the-uh-the spirit of the snow- 
storm." 
" Ah! I follow-I seem to catch. . . . 
It is-good. Port ?-the merest taste, 
Mr. Silvernail. Good port-old port, 
yes? It is, in fact, excellent-excellent," 
said our art editor, his enthusiasm mount- 
ing. "Seldom have I seen such a vivid 
expression of a mood-so striking, so-er 
-suggestive. It is in the manner of 
Sauval himself. It is not what I had in 
mind for a cover to Dress, and yet- In 
addition to styles, we strive to give our 
reader the newest in new art, you must 
understand, :Mr, Gallup. Thank you, the 
least drop, NIr.-Silvernail; good port. 
Yes, I am not saying that it might not 
be a plume in the cap of Dress to intro- 
duce to the public a new, young Modern 
-a new and undiscovered exponent of 
the unspeakable, the-er-incomprehensi- 
ble. 
" Yes," glowed Beer, tossing off his 
third glass of port, "I think we can make 
use of your painting, l\Ir. Gallup." 
"Touching-uh-monetary consider- 
ations? " 
"Ah? I think I may venture to prom- 
ise that it will run you to the fifteen hun- 
dred francs of which we originally spoke. 
We see. You come to my office to-mor- 
row with this masterpiece; I make practi- 
cally certain that I can promise you- 
'Ve see about a series, eh? I think," 
ended 1\1. Beer, "that I can assure you a 
series. " 
"I think," parroted Henry weakly as 
the door closed upon the gentleman, 
"that I can assure you a . . . series!" 
"Thank God for the port," said I; "it 
was the merest luck." 
But Henry was beyond boasting of his 
luck; he had reached the stage of rever- 

nce. 
"The picture fell, it was spoiled," Eve 
gasped. ' 
I translated for her. "It-may have 



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From 0 drou:ing by George Wright. 
Henry was putting the finishing touches to his canvas, and he begged us to wait, not to 
breathe.-Page 483. 


4 8 5 



486 


ENTER EYE 


fallen. but it was not spoiled. That was 
a lucky tumble for Henry. It runs him 
to francs, and it runs him, I prophesy, to a 
place with the wild ones in the spring 
Salon in the near future. Your husband, 
Eve, has joined the ranks of the 1\Iod- 
erns. " 
"If this is what it takes to be a l\Iod- 
ern," Eve said, "then you can't tell me 
there's anything safe about being one." 
","Te might finish the port," I moved. 
" You know there is something in that 
'Snow Flurry,' Henry; the longer I look 
at it . .. If you can produce more of 
them-" 
"Can I produce more?" he grinned. 
"Sav-! " 
, , You mean," stabbed Eye, " that 
you'd rather go on faking than to build a 
real success out of real work?" 
" ,"T ork-do you mean portraits? I 
wish, honey, you'd stop harping on por- 
traits. So long as I'm bringing home the 
bacon-" . 
"It won't last-it's bound to break." 
"It won't break . . . unless I lose 
Kuan-yin. By George, she is lucky; call 
it superstition, but there's something in 
the way she smiles down. . . ." 
Eve herself failed to scoff at Kuan-yin's 
powers; she looked up at the porcelain 
goddess with a glint of fear and with that 
measuring consideration with which one 
challenges an equal. 


The catastrophe follows quickly. The 
next day was a day of triumph, marked 
by the cashing of the check for fifteen 
hundred francs and a debouch into chintz 
curtains, batik blouses, and practical 
hardware. It was the tip-over of the 
wave, the last high fling of the spray from 
the crest. 
On Saturday afternoon Henry, much 
shaken, flung into my room and blurted: 
"She's gone!" 
"\Vho? Eve?" I asked hopefully. 
"No, Kuan-vin." 
"How-?;' 
Eve, questioned, knew absolutely noth- 
ing beyond the fact that she had left the 
door open for five minutes while she ran 
across to the corner pâtisscrie. I called 
upon 
I. Lepetit and felt him out; I even 
forced my way into his room in his ab- 
sence and searched, but with no result. 


I felt certain that 1\1. Lepetit was the 
thief, but I had no evidence on him. 
Henry protested that it was nothing, 
that he would shortly be in a position to 
buy a dozen Kuan-yins. But he was not 
steady in his faith; and when he acci- 
dentally smashed Eve's jam jar and twice 
cut himself with his safety-razor, he was 
sure that his luck had turned. 
There is no use to prolong it. I watched 
him smearing canvases, but he worked 
too hard over those smears, he had no 
conviction for them. 
"I told him it was 'A Cloud,' shrugged 
Henry after Beer's visit, "and he said it 
looked, veritably, like 'A Disease' to him. 
It's no go, Sliver." 
"But why didn't you name it 'Disease'? 
\\Thy didn't you give him the suggestion, 
and why didn't you give him port? 
You're breaking, old kid; you've got to 
keep your nerve." 
But Henry broke. In the end, he 
painted the button-maker's solid daugh- 
ter; he put in solid hours on the portrait, 
and received a solid sum for it. 


Some years later I had a small piece of 
luck, and I moved back into the old room 
which Henry and I had shared before 
Eve came between us, on the very day 
on which Henry arrived in Paris from 
his New York studio. Henry has pro- 
gressed. He is one of the greater portrait- 
painters who dare to paint the truth. 
His imagination helps him to catch the 
spirit of that truth. He did the little 
Grosvenor boy on his mother's lap just 
at the age when he had almost outgrown 
a mother's lap, and the awkwardness was 
wistful and lovely. He has been exhibited 
and has taken prizes everywhere, and he 
covers a page in "Who's Who," and it is 
not an exaggeration to say that America is 
proud of him. He was at present on his 
way to Amsterdam, with a commission to 
paint the Queen of the Netherlands. 
I had been out collecting a supper, and 
I met Henry at my own doorstep, just as 
he dropped from the auto-taxi. We went 
up together, and I told Henry about my 
idea for a Sunday column in the New York 
-, and it seemed that we had never 
been apart. 
"But luck," he sighed, looking out over 
the chimneys at the new moon in a night- 



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From a drawing by George JV righl. 
"It is, in fact, excellent-excellent."-Page 4 8 4. 


4 8 7 



blue Paris sky, c'is youth-a state of 
mind." 
"Yes. \Vith age, you haye to choose 
between being a free failure or a tied 
success. " 
" You're free, Sliver, damn you!" 
"And a failure!" 
"I'm tied." 
" And a success." 
c, But aren't vou glad?" asked old 
Henry wistfully. - 
"Yes, I wouldn't change; it's-pros- 
pecting, in a way." 
"Luck!" grinned Henry. "Do YOU 
remember the painting that fen? Did 
any one else in the 
wórld ever have such 
a stroke of rank, lush 
luck?" And we 
laughed together over 
tha t old episode. 
"Eve? Oh, Eve's 
well. Eve has-made 
me, Sliver." 
" Yes, I'm inclined 
to think she has." 
"Everything I am, 
I owe to Eve. But if 
Kuan-yin hadn't gone 
back on me . . ." 
he smiled whims i- 
caJly. 
("Or if Eve 
hadn't-taken 
you in hand:" I 
muttered, all 
myoId suspi- 
cions of her ris- 
ing again. 


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488 


"That smell ?'. sniffed Henry. 
" The supper herring," I apologized. 
"\Vait-the herring-hook!" And, laugh- 
ing with Henry, I leaned out into the 
nigh 1. 
" Hello!" I hauled up something hard 
wrapped in an old weather-stained cloth. 
\Ve untied it, and were confronted by- 
Kuan-yin ! 
"But how-how in Hades-?" 
\Ve gaped at the bland porcelain smile. 
" How, Sliver?" 
I blushed. "I'll be damned if I know," 
I said uncon vincingly. 
Henry was concentrating upon me; he 
arrived at last. "Eve. 
You mean Eve 
. . . ?" 
'c There weren't 
many hiding-places, 
and you'd been for- 
bidden th e--h erring- 
h 00 k. She believed 
just enough in Kuan- 
yin's power to be 
afraid to-get rid of 
her en tirely. And 
then, when you left 
so hurriedly-" 
"And in all these 
years no one has dis- 
covered the her- 
ring-hook." 

 "Not likelv." 
c, \\-Thy," s"'aid 
'\ Henry slowly, 
"you mean that 

 Eve did-make 
me." 


ENTER EYE 


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Wt; gapcù at the bland porcelain smile. 



Monke)T-Meat 
BY JOH
 ,Yo THO:\IASO
, JR. 
Captain, L. S. 
Iarine Corps, L. S. S. Rochester; _\uthor of "Fix Bayonets!" and 
" :\Iarincs at Blanc 
Iont" 


ILLCSTRATIONS BY THE \CTHOR 


[At various times and places in 1918 the Second American Division was subsisted 
on the French ration, a component part of which was preserved Argentine beef with 
carrots in it. This was called monkey-meat by the marines of the Fourth Brigade. 
l\Ien ate it when they were very hungry.] 



it. . 
 a mangled place 
-- called the 'Vood 
r iJJ ' , , ' I AI 
:
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: 

 
 ants of the manne 
I brigade squatted by a 
W
 hole the size of a coffin 
and regarded with at- 
tention certain cooking operations. The 
older, and perhaps the dirtier of the two, 
was intent upon a fire-blackened mess-kit, 
which was balanced on two stones and two 
German bayonets over a can of solidified 
alcohol. In the mess-kit was simmering 
a grayish and unattractive matter with 
doubtful yellowish lumps, into which the 
lieutenant fed, discriminatingly, bits of 
hard bread and frayed tomatoes from a 
can. 
"Do what you will with it," he ob- 
served, "monkey-meat is monkey-meat. 
It's a great pity that damn Tompkins had 
to get himself bumped off last night when 
we came out. He had a wav with mon- 
key-meat, the kid did-hell! 
I never have 
any luck with orderlies!" He prodded 
the mess of Argentine beef-the French 
army's canned meat ration-and stared 
sombrely. His eyes, a little blood-shot in 
his sunburned, unshaven face, were sleepy. 
The other waited on two canteen cups 
stilted precariously oyer a pale lavender 
1lame. The water in them Degan to boil, 
and he supplied coffee-the coarse-ground 
pale coffee of the Frogs-with a spoon 
that shook a little. He considered: 
"S'pose I'd better boil the sugar in with 
it," he decided. "There isn't so much of 
it, you know. 'Ye'll taste it more." And 
he added the contents of a little muslin 
sack-heavy beet sugar that looked like 


sand. His face was pale and somewhat 
troubled, and his week's beard was strag- 
gling and unwholesome. He was not an 
out-of-doors man-and he was battalion 
scout officer. A gentleman over-sensitive 
for the rude business of war, he would con- 
tinue to function until he broke-and one 
sensed that he would suffer while about 
it. . . . 
,. I don't like monkey-meat. Before 
this smell "-he wa ved 
his spoon petu- 
lantly-" got into my nose I never could 
eat it. But now you can't smell but one 
thing, and, after all, you've got to eat." 
The smell he referred to lay through the 
wood like a tangible fog that one could 
feel against the cheek and see. It was the 
nub-end of June, and many battalions of 
fighting men had lain in the \Vood North- 
west of Lucy, going up to the front a little 
way forward or coming out to stand by in 
support. It was a lovely place for sup- 
ports; you could gather here and debouch 
toward any part of the sector, from Hill 
142, on the left, through the Bois de Bel- 
leau and Bouresches, to Vaux, where the 
infantry brigade took on. l\Iany men had 
lain in the wood, and many men lay in it 
still. Some of these were buried very 
casually. Others, in hidden tangles of it, 
along its approaches, and in the trampled 
areas beyond it where attack and counter- 
attack had broken for nearlv a month of 
days and nights, hadn't béen buried at 
all. .\.nd always there were more, and 
the June sun grew hotter as it made to- 
ward July. 
Troops lay in the wood now; a bat- 
talion of the Sixth and two companies of a 
Fifth Regiment outfit, half of which was 
still in line on the flank of the Bois de 
4 8 9 



490 


l\10
KEY -l\IEA T 


Belleau, These companies had come out 
at dawn, attended by shell-fire; they had 
plunged into the wood and slept where 
they halted, unawakened-except the 
wounded-by the methodical shelling to 
which the Boche treated the place every 
day. Kow, in the evening, they were 
awake and hungry. They squatted, each 
man in his hole, and did what they could 
about it. A savage-looking lot. in bat- 
tered helmets and dirty uniforms. But 
you saw them cleaning their rifles. . . . 
The scout officer, with his hand out to 
lift away the coffee, which was, in his 
judgment, boiled, heard: "ßIr. Braxton? 
Y eh, he's up thataway, with the looten- 
ant." "Hey, yuh dog-robbin' battalion- 
runner, you-what's up? Hey?" "Scout 
officer? Over yonder, him wit' the green 
blouse-" and a soiled battalion-runner, 
identified bv his red brassard and his air 
of one laden with vital information, 
clumped up and saluted sketchily. 
c'Sir, the major wants to see the bat- 
talion scout officer at battalion head- 
quarters. The major said: Right away, 
sir. " 
The scout officer swore, inexpertly, for 
he was not a profane fellow, but with in- 
finite feeling. c. Good God, I hope it 
ain't- If you can keep my coffee hot, 
Tommie- Be right back as soon as I 
can. Save my slum. Don't let anything 
happen to my slum-" The words 
trailed in the air as he went swiftly off, 
buckling his pistol-belt. The battalion 
commander was that kind of an officer. 
The lieutenant growled in sympathy: 
"Somebody's always takin' the joy out of 
life. Jim, he's hungry as I am, an' that's 
as hungry as a bitch wolf. That's the 
trouble with this war stuff; man misses 
too many meals." He took the cooking 
from the fire and replaced the lids on the 
little alcohol cans with care. Canned 
heat was quite hard to come by; the 
Boche was much better provided with it; 
he was indebted for this to a deceased Ger- 
man gentleman. and it was the last he had. 
"No tellin' what the old man wants. 
Glad I ain't a scout officer. This war's 
hard on Jim-he takes it too serious. I'll 
wait, though." Absently he drank the 
tomato juice left in the can. He tried his 
coffee, and burned his mouth. "\Vish I 
had the man here that invented this 
aluminum canteen cup! Time the damn 


cup's cool enough so you won't burn the 
hide off yo' lip, the coffee's stone cold." 
Then, later: c. Not boiled enough. Jim, 
he's used to bein' waited on-never make 
a rustler, he won't. . . . 
c. Well, he's long in comin'. Old man 
sent him forward to make a map or some- 
thing, most prob'ly." He tasted the 
slum. "That Tompkins! \Vhy the hell 
he had to stop one-only man I ever 
knew that could make this monkey-meat 
taste like anything! And he goes and 
gets bumped off. Hell. That's the way 
with these kids. This needs an onion." 
He ate half the mess, with scrupulous 
exactness, and drank his coffee. He put 
the lid on the mess-kit, and covered Jim's 
coffee, now get ting cold. He smoked a 
cigarette and talked shop with his platoon 
sergeant. He gave some very hard words 
and his last candle-end to a pale private 
who admitted blistered heels, and then 
stood over the man while he tallowed his 
noisome socks. He interviewed his chaut- 
chaut gunners, and sent them off to beg 
new clips from the battalion quartermas- 
ter sergeant. It grew into the long French 
twilight; Boche planes were about, and 
all the anti-aircraft stuff in the neighbor- 
hood was furiously in action. Strolling 
back to his hole, the lieutenant observed 
that the pale private had resumed his 
shoes and was rolling his puttees with a 
relieved look. At this moment the nose- 
cap of a 75 came whimpering and hirp- 
ling down out of the heavens and gutted 
the fellow. . .. 'Vhen that was cleaned 
up, the lieutenant lay in his hole, weighing 
the half-empty mess-kit in his hands, and 
trusted that nothing unseemly had hap- 
pened to Jim. He thought of going up to 
battalion to see what was doing-but the 
major liked for you to stay with your 
men, unless he sent for you. . . . "\V ell ! 
l\1ight as well get some sleep. . . ." 
Toward dark the Boche began to slam 
77s and 150S into the "Vood Northwest 
of Lucy. It became a place of horror, 
with stark cries in the night, between the 
rending crashes of the shells. About an 
hour before midnight the word was passed 
and the two companies got out and went 
up across the pestilential wheat-fields and 
into the Bois de Belleau. 


That same afternoon an unassigned 
colonel had come up to brigade head- 



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"Hey, yuh dog-robbin' battalion runner, you-\\hat's up? "- Page 490. 


quarters. \\Yanted to go to Paris, he did, 
and the brigade commander said that the 
only way to get there was to bring in a 
prisoner. One prisoner; seven days' 
leave. Be glad to get a prisoner. In- 
telligence had word of a new division or so 

oYed in over there last night; identifica- 
tion not yet positive. 
This colonel took steps. He was a man 
of parts and very desirous of the flesh- 


pots of the Place de l'Opéra. There was 
an elegant French captain attached to 
brigade for no very evident reason-just 
attached-spoke English and knew vint- 
ages. Said to be an expert on raids. The 
colonel put it up to him in such and such 
a way: would he go ? Yes, but certainly. 
Just a small raid, my colonel? Oh, a 
very small raid. 
 ow. as to artillery 
support-a map was broken out. 


49 1 



492 


l\1 O
KEY -l\IEA T 


Brigade artillery officer-chap the 
colonel knew out on the Asiatic station- 
happened in. How about it-just about 
half as much stuff as you fellows wasted 
on the Tartar 'Vall that time-eh? 
Sure: it could be arranged. Ten min- 
utes' intensive; say, one battery; where 
you want it? Brigade intelligence took 
thought: They've got some kind of a 
strong point out from the ruined air- 
drome in front of Torcy. Their line is 
through Torcy; battalion in there. Left 
of the Bois-see here? Our photos show 
two big craters
some of the. heavy stuff 
they shot at the railroad the 29th of 
:May, or the 30th, most likely-eh, 
m'sieur Ie capitaine? :Might look at 
that, colonel. Best jump-off is from 
Terry's battalion-about here-he has 
two companies here. Six hundred yards 
to go; keep the Bois well away-well 
starboard, as you leather-necks say; come 
back the same route. '\Theat. Little 
gully here. Craters just beyond. l\lain 
line at least a hundred metres back. 
Good? Let's call up Terry and see if he'll 
give you the men. c . . Terry would give 
him twenty-five men and two chaut- 
chauts and not a marine more. Who 
wanted a raid, anyway? Sending two 
support companies up to the Bois as soon 
as it's dark. Looks interestin' on the 
right. . .. Good! All set. Start your 
covering fire at 23 hours IS. You jump 
off at 23 hours 19. Take you six minutes 
to get over, huh? "All right, colonel, 
bonne chance!" 
Just before dark the colonel and Cap- 
tain de Stegur were at battalion head- 
quarters. "Whitehead will give you your 
men, and I'm sending my scout officer 
along. Needs that sort of thing. Be sure 
you come back where you went out. 
Crabbe's to the right of there. You know 
Crabbe. Shoots quick." 
"But, my colonel," represented Cap- 
tain de Stegur, "one should arrange, one 
should explain, one should instruct-in 
effect, one should rehearse-" 
"Rehearse hell, sir! I'm due in Paris 
to-morrow night. \\There those marines, 
major? I'll tell 'em what I want-" 


So it was that a wedge of men de- 
bouched into the wheat at 23 hours 19 
minutes;* it being sufficiently dark. 
*11: 19 P.M. 


The battaJion scout officer and a dis- 
illusioned sergeant, with hash-marks on 
his sleeve, were the point. The men were 
echeloned back, right, and left with an 
automatic rifle on each flank. In the 
centre marched the colonel, smoking, to 
the horror of all, a cigar. Smoking was 
not done up there, after dark. With him 
was the elegant French captain, who ap- 
peared to be very gallantly resigned to it. 
The story would, he reflected, amaze and 
delight his mess-if he ever got back with 
it! These droll Americans! He must re- 
member just what this colonel said: a 
type, Nom de DieIt! If only he had not 
worn his new uniform-the cloth chosen 
by his wife, you conceive- 
The 75s flew with angry whines that 
arched across the sky and smote with red 
and green flames along a line. . . . There 
was a spatter of rifle-fire toward the right; 
flares went up over the dark loom of the 
Bois; a certain violence of machine-gun 
fire grew up and waxed to great volume, 
but always to the right. Forward, where 
the shells were breaking, there was noth- 
ing. . . . 
The scout officer, leading, had out his 
canteen and wet his dry mouth. He was 
acutely conscious of his empty stomach. 
His mind dwelt yearningly on the mess- 
kit, freighted nobly with monkey-meat 
and tomatoes, awaiting him in the de- 
pendable Tommy's musette. "Hope to 
God nothing happens to old Tommy!" 
The wheat caught at his ankles and he 
hated war. Lord, how these night opera- 
tions make a man sweat! He went down 
a little gully and out of it, the sergeant at 
his shoulder, breathing on his neck. That 
crater-he visualized his map-it should 
be right yonder-two of them. A hun- 
dred metres forward the last shells burst, 
and he saw new dirt. Ahead, a spot 
darker than the dark; he went up to it. 
A wa y on the righ t a flare soared, and 
something gleamed dull in the black hole 
at his feet-a round deep helmet with the 
pale blur of a face under it; a click, and 
the shadow of a movement there, and a 
little flicker; a matter of split seconds; the 
scout officer had a bayonet in his stomach, 
almost- Feldritter Kurt Iden, Com- 
pany 6 of the :Margrave of Brandenburg 
Regiment (this established later by bri- 
gade intelligence, on examination of the 
pay-book of the deceased), being on front- 



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The scout officer and the sergeant got him back some way. both filled with admiration at his language. 
-Page 49t. 


post with his squad, heard a noise hard on 
the cessation of the shelling, and put out 
his neck. Dear God, shoot! Shoot 
quickly! 
The- scout officer was conscious of a 
monstrous surge of temper. He gathered 
his feet under him, and his hands crooked 
like claws, and he hurled himself. In the 
same breath there was a long bright 
flash right under his arm, and the mad 


crack of a Springfield. The disillusioned 
sergeant had estimated the situation, 
loosed off from the hip at perhaps seven 
feet, and shot the German through the 
throat. Too late to stop himself, the 
scout officer went head first into the 
crater, his hands locking on something 
wet and hairy, just the size to fill them; 
and presently he was at the bottom of the 
crater, dirt in his mouth and a buzzing in 
49.3 



4<)-t 


1\ lOX KEY - \ I EAT 


his head, strangling something that 
Hopped and gurgled and made remarkable 
noises under his hands. There were ex- 
plosions and people stepped hard on his 
hack and legs. He became sane again and 
realized that \vhatever it was it was dead. 
He groped in his puttees for his knife, and 
cut off its shoulder-straps and a button or 
two, and looted its bosom of such papers 
as there were-these being details the 
complete scout officer must attend to. 
J\Iore explosions, and voices bleating 
"Kamaraden ! "-terribly anxious voices 
-in his ear. 
The disillusioned sergeant, a practical 
man, had ducked into the crater right 
behind the scout officer. The raiding- 
party in his rear had immediately fired 
their weapons in all directions. A great 
many rifles on forward stabbed the dark 
with sharp flame, and some of these were 
,.ery near. The sergeant tossed a grenade 
at the nearest; he had toted that Frog 
citron grenade around for quite a while, 
somewhat against his judgment; he now 
reflected that it was good business- 
"grenades-I hope to spit in yo' mess-kit 
they are-ask the man that used one-" 
It was good business, for it fell fair in 
the other crater, thirty feet away, where 
the rest of that front-post squad were be- 
ginning to react like the brave German 
men they were, Two of these survived, 
much shaken, and scuttled into the clever 
little tunnel that connected them with the 
Felclritter's crater, emerging with pacific 
cries at the sergeant's very feet. Being a 
man not given to excitement, he accepted 
them alive, the while he dragged the scout 
officer standing. "\Ye got our prisoners, 
sir. Le's beat it," he suggested. "Their 
lines is wakin' up, sir. It's gonna be bad 
here- " 
The colonel, as gallant a man as ever 
li,.ed, but not fast, barged into them. 
"Prisoners? Hey? How many? Two? 
Excellent, by God! Give 'em here, young 
man!" and he seized the unhappy Boches 
by their colJars and shook them violently. 
"Thought you'd start something, hey? 
Thought you'd start something, hey?" 
The scou t officer now blew his whistle, 
the sergeant shouted in a voice of brass, 
and the colonel made the kind of remarks 
a colonel makes. The French captain, 
close alongside, delightedly registered fur- 


ther events for narrative. The raiding- 
party gathered itself-chaut-chaut gun- 
ners slamming out a final clip-and they 
all went back across the wheat. It is re- 
lated by truthful marines there present 
that every German in Yon Boehn's army 
fired on them as they went, but no two 
agree as to the manner of their return. 
It is, however, established that the col- 
onel, bringing up the rear, halted about 
half-way over, drew his hitherto virgin 
pistol, and wheeled around for a parting 
shot-something in the nature of UJl. beau 
geste. Seeing this, the tall French captain, 
to his rear and left, drew his pistol and 
wheeled also, imagining pursuit. The co- 
lonel-and to this attest the scout officer 
and the sergeant-then shot the French- 
man through the-as sea-going marines 
say-stern sheets. 
The scout officer and the sergeant got 
him back some way, both filled with ad- 
miration at his language. 
"If I had my time to do over, I'd learn 
this here Frog habla," remarked the ser- 
geant afterward. "I don't know what 
the bird said, but it sure sounded noble. 
Ample, I called it. Powerful ample." 
By the time they stumbled through
the 
nervous outposts to their own place, the 
French captain had lapsed into English. 
" As a wound, you perceive, it is good for 
a permission. But it is not a wound. 
It is an indignity! And, besides, my new 
breeches! Ah, Dieu. de Dieu! Ce sale 
colollel-ci! "'That will my wife say! That 
one, she chose the cloth herself! TOlUzcrre 
de canon,!"-and he sank into stricken 
silence. 
The raiding-party shook down in their 
several holes, praising God, and went to 
sleep. The colonel, with his prisoners, 
received the compliments of battalion 
headquarters and departed for brigade. 
The scout officer observed, to his amaze- 
ment, that they had been out of their 
lines less than twenty minutes. ""There's 
the 49th?" he wanted to know first. 
"Hell, Jim, they went up to the Bois 
right after the major sent for you. An' 
the 17th. \Ye're moving battalion head- 
quarters up there now. Get your people 
and come along. Attack or something." 
After a very full night, the scout of- 
ficer crawled and scuttled along the last 



]\10
KEY -l\IEAT 


tip of the Bois de Belleau, looking for a 
hole that a battalion-runner told him 
about. "Seen the lootenant diggin' in 
just past that last :l\Iaxim gun, sir. Right 
at the nose of the woods where the big 
rocks is. There's about a dozen dead 
Heinies layin' by a big tree, all together. 
Can't miss it, sir," The scout officer had 
no desire to be moving in the cool of the 
morning, when all well-regulated people 
are asleep if possible, and if you moved 
here the old Boche had a way of sniping 
at you with 88s-that wicked, flat- 
trajectory Austrian gun-but he followed 
an urge that only Tommie could supply. 
"The damn slum will be cold, but two 
sardines and a piece of chocolate ain't 
filling I" He ducked low behind a rock 
as an 88 ripped by and burst on the 
shredded stump of a great tree; he tum- 
bled into a shell-crater, atop an infantry- 
man and three bloated Germans long 
dead; he sctambled out and fell over two 
lank cadavers in a shallow hole, who raised 
their heads and cursed him drowsily; and 
he came at last to a miserable shelter 
scooped in the lee of a rock. Here two 
long legs protruded from under a brown 
German blanket, and here he prodded and 
shook until the deplorable countenance of 
his brother officer emerged yawning. 


495 


"Say," demanded the scout officer, 
"you save my slum? Gimme my slum." 
"\Vhy, hello, Jim I \Vhy didn't you 
come back, like you said you was? 
Where you been? You said you was com- 
in' right back." 
"Didn't you save me my monkey- 
meat? \Ye went on a raid, damn it. 
1-" 
"Raid? Raid? \Vhat raid?" 
"Oh, we went over to Torcy. Gimme 
my monkey-meat." 
"\Vell, you see, Jim-the fact is-well, 
we got moved up here right after you 
left, and they attacked from in here, an' 
we came on in after them. Just got to 
sleep-" 
"I haven't had any sleep or any chow 
or anything-two sardines, by the brigh t 
face of God !-" The scout officer 
pounced upon a frowsy musette bag 
which the other had used for a pillow and 
jerked out a fire-blackened mess-kit. He 
wrenched the lid off and snarled horribly. 
"Empty, by God I" 
His hands fell lax across his knees. He 
looked sadly over the blasted fields to 
Torcy, and he said, with the cold bitter- 
ness of a man who has tried it all and 
come to a final conclusion: "\Var-sure- 
is-hell." 


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49 6 


From the Castello 


BY CORI

E ROOSEVELT ROBe
'SO
 


ILLUSTRATIOX FROM A PHOTOGRAPH 


1\1 y window is a frame for one dark tree; 
A sentinel cypress focussing the eye 
To fall beyond it, 'gainst a morning sky, 
On one small town that nestles quietly 
Against the gray-green hillside lovingly; 
I hear the church bells; like a gentle sigh 
The breeze moves slowly. lingeringly by, 
Bringing their fuller meaning back to mc. 


. 


o little town of dreams, and deep sweet bells, 
That clings against a line of lilac light! 
What mystery, within, of beauty swells, 
Enriching all my being as I gaze, 
Knowing, no matter what may come of night- 
I shall possess thee now for all my days! 



Memories of Actresses 


BY BRANDER MATIHE\VS 


I 
n'oÆ:lt.D

 CTORS have always 
[KJ 

Jd\. 
 held it as their peculiar 
ét:,j' I , A misfortune that their 
",.. , work perishes with 
I g c them and that they 
I 
 can leave behind them 


Ä only the reputation 
they achieved in the 
practice of their profession-a reputation 
unsupported by tangible evidence. For 
them there is no possibility of an appeal to 
posterity in the frail hope of reversing an 
adverse verdict. Moreover, even when 
the judgment of their own generation has 
been favorable, it is likely soon to fade 
away, having nothing to validate it ex- 
cept the unsubstantial echo of departed 
popularity. Joseph Jefferson used to say 
sadly that the comedian-and no doubt 
the tragedian also-could survive solely in 
the written report of the impression he 
made upon his contemporaries. That is 
to say, he can continue to exist only by 
virtue of their record of his achievement 
-rus work having ceased to be at the very 
moment it came into being. If this com- 
memoration shall fail him, then the abun- 
dant and superabundant applause he may 
have fed upon while he was on the stage 
will avail nothing to preserve him from 
swift oblivion. The fiery ardor of Ed- 
mund Kean still burns brightly in the 
luminous pages of Hazlitt and of Lewes; 
and the incomparable versatility of Co- 
quelin is still made manifest for us in the 
essays of Francisque Sarcey and of Henry 
James. 
Although I yield myself willingly to the 
contagious enthusiasm of Hazlitt and 
Lewð, Sarcey and James, I lack their 
power of recapturing their emotions and 
I have not their art of delicate discrimina- 
tion. None the less do I feel that I should 
be ungrateful for past delights if I shrank 
from setting down a few of the most out- 
standing of my countless histrionic remi- 
niscences. For sixty years now I have 
VOL, LXXVIII.-36 


been an incessant and indefatigable play- 
goer. In my earlier attempt at an auto- 
biography, "These l\:lany Years," and in 
one or another of my volumes of essays on 
the theatre, I have tried to assemble and 
to classify my recollections of the more 
important of the actors I have known, 
on the stage and off, Booth and Irving, 
Coquelin and Salvini, John T. Raymond 
and N at Goodwin; and now I am moved 
to recall and set in order my reminiscences 
of certain actresses, who smile back at me 
as I hold up before them the mirror of 
memory. 
When I had the youthful privilege of 
beholding Charlotte Cushman, Adelaide 
Ristori, and Adelaide Neilson I was too 
immature in judgment and too ignorant 
of the art of acting to fonn opinions 
worthy of record; but none the less do I 
cherish the immediate impression, even if 
I can do no more now than testify to the 
austere power of Miss Cushman as Queen 
Katherine, to the dignity and pathos of 
Signora Ristori as l\tlarie Antoinette, and 
to the fragile chann of :Miss Neilson as 
Juliet. I thrill again as I recall dimly the 
startling appearance of Charlotte Cush- 
man as M:eg Ivlerrilies and the sinister sug- 
gestion which Ristori as Lucrezia Borgia 
insinuated into her "Don Alphonso 
d'Este, my third husband!" Unfortun- 
ately, my recollections of these actresses, 
seen only twièe or thrice in my boyhood, 
are too few and too faint for me to revive 
them now after half a century; and I must 
perforce draw upon later recollections, 
abiding with me more solidly because I 
was older and better prepared to appre- 
ciate and because I had more frequent 
occasion to accumulate impressions. 


II 


RISTORI was an Italian who actcd in 
French in Paris and in English in New 
York, and who conquered her audiences 
in France and in America in spite of her 
alien accents. Fechter was a Frenchman 
497 



498 


MEMORIES OF ACTRESSES 


who had spoken English from his youth 
up but who was never able to acquire the 
rhythm of our sharply accented tongue. 
Modjeska was a Pole who learned English 
only when she was a mature woman; and 
her speech always revealed itself as for- 
eign, although some of her ardent ad- 
mirers accepted this exotic flavor as add- 
ing piquancy to her delivery. That an 
Italian, a Frenchman, and a Pole estab- 
lished themselves on the American stage 
despite their incomplete mastery of Eng- 
lish, may testify to our cosmopolitan 
hospitality; but it is evidence also of the 
artistic accomplishment of these polyglot 
immigrants. 
I saw Modjeska during her first engage- 
ment in New York, when she was appear- 
ing in well worn plays of an approved 
popularity, the "Lady of the Camellias" 
and" Adrienne Lecouvreur." She had no 
difficulty in transmitting the customary 
emotion of the death scenes of these old- 
fashioned heroines. She had the gift of 
compelling tears; she had power and re- 
serve; she could be brilliant without being 
metallic. What I recall in her perfonn- 
ance of that lachrimatory consumptive 
Camille was her standing by the fireplace 
in the first act, toasting a dainty slipper, 
and telling her lover: "You see, I am very 
expensive "-a finn and delicate stroke. 
And I saw her later when she took posses- 
sion of a series of Shakespeare's heroines, 
always dangerous for one not native to 
our speech. Of all her Shakespearian im- 
personations I found Rosalind the most 
satisfactory in its archness, its womanli- 
ness, its coquetry. 
She was a consummate artist, with ab- 
solute command of all her resources; yet 
she did not achieve the essential Englishry 
of Rosalind. She remained continental 
and not insular. As my friend H. C. 
Bunner put it aptly, "Mod jeska's Rosa- 
lind would be perfect-if only we could 
admit that Rosalind was a pretty French 
widow." It was exquisite; it had high 
breeding and playful wit; it had every 
excellence-but it was exotic; and per- 
haps it was a little too complicated, a 
little too lacking in the simplicity which 
is an undeniable quality of Shakespeare's 
English girl. At times Modjeska's art 
was perilously close to artificiality. I do 
not mean to imply that she was ever 


stagy or theatrical; she was too com- 
pletely a mistress of her craft for any 
overstress of this sort; but she could not 
quite attain to that concealment of her 
art which is the ultimate perfection of 
craftsmanship, It was shrewdly said of 
Duse that "she sometimes overacts her 
underacting"; and it can be said of Mod- 
jeska that she never felt any temptation 
to underact. She gave good measure, 
pressed down yet not running over. 
It was this slight suggestion of artifice 
which sharpens an anecdote (perhaps 
apocryphal). Maurice Barrymore was 
her leading man for several seasons and 
he was the author of a boldly effective 
piece, "Nadjesda," which she had in- 
cluded in her repertory but which she did 
not put in the bill as often as he desired 
and expected. VVhen he urged her to 
appear in his piece more frequently, she 
eXplained that she found the part of 
N adjesda very fatiguing, in fact, almost 
exhausting. Whereupon Barry blurted 
out: " You would have more strength to 
act at night, Madame, if you didn't act 
so much in the daytime!" 
Shocked by this unexpected attack, she 
accused him of ingratitude. 
"And why should I be grateful to 
you?" asked Barry. 
"I have done so much for you," Mod- 
jeska explained. "I have taken you with 
me all over the United States. I have 
made you known." 
"Made me known?" he returned in- 
dignantly, for he also had his full portion 
of the artistic temperament. "Let me 
tell you, Madame, that Maurice Barry- 
more was known from Portland, Me., 
to Portland, Ore., when nobody knew 
whether Modjeska was a toothwash or 
what! " 
Even if she carried into private life 
more or less of the artifice which had 
become second nature, she had a sense of 
humor, exemplified in another story, 
which I can vouch for and which I cannot 
omit here, although I seem to recall that 
I have already told it in print. One Sun- 
day evening at a reception she was asked 
to recite something in Polish. She ex- 
cused herself on the ground that she did 
not remember anything in her native 
tongue. But after repeated urgings she 
smiled and stood up and began to recite. 



MEMORIES OF ACTRESSES 


At first she was apparently telling a sim- 
ple story, possibly a folk-tale with the 
repetitions of primitive song; then her 
tones became sad and charged with feel- 
ing; the tears were about to roll down her 
cheeks; but at last, with the persistent re- 
currence of the same syllables, her voice 
became stronger and finner until it rang 
out in triumphant accents. Just then the 
host happened to look out into the hall 
and he saw Modjeska's husband, Count 
Bozenta, laughing to himself because the 
Polish recitation which had so profoundly 
moved the company was not bing more 
and nothing less than the multiplication 
table. 


III 


I DOUBT if I ever saw two actresses more 
divergent in their personalities and in 
their methods than l\fodjeska and Clara 
Morris-one was the fine flower of Euro- 
pean culture and the other a wilding 
bloom of our own virgin soil, vigorous and 
uncultivated. Modjeska spoke English 
with an alien intonation; and Clara 
:Morris had an accent of her own, which 
Londoners would have considered " Amer- 
ican" and which New Yorkers called 
"Western." Modjeska had studied her 
art in a comm.unity with rich æsthetic tra- 
ditions, under competent guidance, where- 
by she developed taste and discretion; 
and Clara :Morris had spent the years of 
her youth in the stock company of an 
inland city where the bill was changed 
weekly and sometimes nightly. She be- 
gan as an extra in the ballet; she was later 
entrusted with" utility parts"; and as she 
gained experience she rose to characters 
as important as Emilia in "Othello." 
Her schooling was arduous, varied, and 
invaluable; but it was deficient in im- 
parting the delicate refinements of the art 
of acting. If only she could have had the 
severe training of a conservatory she 
would have been one of the foremost ac- 
tresses of America. Even as it was she 
r.nade an outstanding place for herself on 
the stage of her time. 
It was to the Othello of E. L. Daven- 
port, one of the most vigorous and versa- 
tile actors of half a century ago, that she 
played Emilia; and when Davenport 
joined the stock company with which 
Augustin Daly opened the Fifth Avenue 


499 


Theatre, he recommended her. Dalyen- 
gaged her, to play any part he might 
assign; and her chance came when Agnes 
Ethel, the favorite pupil of Matilda 
Heron, found herself too fatigued (after 
the long run of "Froufrou ") to undertake 
the heroine of Daly's dramatization of 
Wilkie Collins's "1Ian and Wife." In 
her autobiography, which is not defic- 
ient in self-appreciation, :;he does not 
overstate the extent of her unexpected 
success as Anne Sylvester. With that part 
she established herself in the favor of 
New York playgoers, who recognized th
 
power and the sincerity of the perform- 
ance, even if they were also acutely con- 
scious of her occasional crudity. Despite 
this exhibition of her skill, Daly (who was 
the most autocratic of managers) cast her 
the next season as one of the half dozen 
girls who existed merely to be recipients 
of the intermittent attentions of the im- 
perfectly monogamous hero of Bronson 
Howard's "Saratoga." 
Her chance came again when Daly 
adapted a turgid and tawdry melodrama, 
"Article 47," by Adolphe Bélot and cast 
Clara Morris as Cora. I recall the ab- 
sorbed stillness during the final act at the 
first perfonnance of this play, when Cora 
was seated on one side, taking no part in 
the dialogue, and when we suddenly be- 
came aware, I know not by what means, 
that the silent woman rocking her body 
to and fro was going mad before our eyes. 
That was Clara 1Iorris's hour of triumph; 
and there was no doubt that she deserved 
it. Her acting might be unequal and un- 
certain; but now and again it was illu- 
mined by flashes of insight and inspiration; 
and in "Article 47" she displayed histri- 
onic imagination. So sbe did a little later 
in "Alixe," a lachrymose heroine, whom 
she impersonated with touching pathos. 
I recall this perfonnance in "Alixe" as the 
perfection of simplicity in accord with the 
poignancy of the situation. 
After she left Daly's, she went to the 
Union Square, where she had a part en- 
tirely within her compass, the weepful 
heroine of a weepful play, "Miss l\.Iul- 
ton," an adroit rehandling of the story 
of "East Lynne," by two skilful Parisian 
playwrights, Nus and Bélot. Clara 
Morris. had not only the power of com- 
pelling tears from the spectators, she 



500 


MEl\10RIES OF ACTRESSES 


could herself shed them at will. That 
admirable comedian, James Lewis, who 
was with her in the company at Daly's 
as he had been with her in her 'prentice 
days at Cleveland, used to say to her, 
"Cry for us, Clara, won't you?" and the 
obedient tears would course down her 
cheek. The gift of tears is not uncom- 
mon, but it is rarely possessed by the 
most accomplished actresses; and, there- 
fore, it is sometimes despised by those 
who hold that the art of acting must be 
independent of the emotion of the mo- 
ment. Coquelin, the best equipped of co- 
medians, once said to me that a certain 
actress of great popularity "actually 
weeps on the stage-therefore, she is a 
mediocre artist." Highly as I rated Co- 
quelin's opinions about the art in which 
he excelled, I confess that this seemed to 
me a harsh judgment, N 0 doubt
 Co- 
quelin agreed with the remark that Emile 
Augier is reported to have uttered to a 
temperamental actor rehearsing a leading 
part: "A little less genius, if you please, 
and a little more talent!" 
The last time I saw Clara Morris was 
when she headed the English-speaking 
company engaged to support Sal vini, and 
when she played the wife of Conrad in 
"Morte Civile." I can pay her perform- 
ance of this pathetic part no higher com- 
pliment than to express my opinion that 
she was not unworthy to stand by the 
side of the Italian tragedian. She had 
dignity and reserve; she curbed her old- 
time exuberance; and she displayed all 
her old-time power. She controlled her 
genius and exhibited her talent. In her 
account of her career she took pleasure in 
telling us that she was able to suggest to 
Salvini a modification of a customary 
piece of "business," a suggestion which 
he considered an improvement. She had 
a gift of invention; and she earlier re- 
corded a novel effect devised by her when 
she was acting Enùlia to the Othello of 
E. L. Davenport. 
There was a delicate discrimination in 
the complimentary lines which Edmund 
Clarence Stedman sent to Clara Morris, 
when once she reappeared on the New 
York stage after a prolonged absence: 
Touched by the fervor of her art, 
No flaws to-night discover! 
Her judge shall be the people's heart, 


This Western World her lover. 
The secret given to her alone 
No frigid schoolman taught her:- 
Once more returning, dearer grown, 
We greet thee, Passion's daughter. 


IV 


AT one time or another Augustin Daly 
managed four theatres in New York. 
Clara l\lorris appeared in "l\1an and 
Wife" at the original Fifth Avenue 
Theatre in 24th Street. When this was 
destroyed by fire Daly opened a house in 
Broadway opposite Waverley Place, which 
had been a church and which was later 
the Old London Street; and it was there 
that Clara Morris played in "Alixe." 
Then the second Fifth A venue Theatre 
(still standing on the comer of tlroauway 
and 28th Street) was built for Daly; and 
there Clara Morris acted in "Article 47." 
After several unprofitable seasons Daly 
was forced to relinquish management, 
bu t after an interval he was able to secure 
control of Wood's Museum, on the corner 
of Broadway and 30th Street, remodelling 
it and calling it Daly's Theatre. This 
house was under his direction until his 
death; and it was there that Ada Rehan 
slowly won her way into the affections of 
our playgoers. 
I recall distinctly the impression she 
made upon me on the opening night. 
She played an inconspicuous part in 
"Newport," Olive Logan's clumsy adap- 
tation of " Niniche." She was then a lank 
and gawky girl-and in one scene she 
had to wear an unbecoming bathing-suit. 
The play did not please; and the new- 
comer did not attract any attention. No 
one could then foresee that, under the ju- 
dicious guidance of Daly, she would de- 
velop into a perfonner capable of carrying 
off the leading parts in Shakespearf;'s 
comedies. Only by degrees did she ad- 
vance in her art and capture the admira- 
tion of the public. With John Drew as 
her partner, with James Lewis and Mrs. 
G. H. Gilbert to complete the quartet, 
she frolicked and rollicked through a swift 
succession of Daly's arbitrary localiza- 
tions of pieces by the Gennan play- 
wrights. In these she disclosed an Ameri- 
can sense of fun and a Celtic exuberance 
of humor; and her singing of" lVliss Jennie 
O'Jones" was an exhilarating exhibition 



1\1El\fORIES OF ACTRESSES 


of comic farce; of sheer vis comica, of spon- 
taneous and effervescen t gaiety, 
In time, these contemporary farces al- 
ternated with older and old-fashioned 
comedies which forced her to broaden her 
methods and to refine her style. Perhaps 
she was most abundantly successful as 
Peggy Thrift in Garrick's "Country 
Girl" (a most skilful deodorization of 
Wycherley's unspeakable "Country 
Wife "). But only second to this were her 
successive impersonations of the heroines 
of" She Would and She Would Not." the 
"Recruiting Officer," and the "Incon- 
stant." As she gained in experience, her 
figure filled and her beauty made itself 
manifest. She had a wholesome feminin- 
ity; and her winning personality never 
appeared to better advantage than when 
the heroines she impersonated had to dis- 
guise themselves in manly attire-a use- 
ful preparation for her later appearances 
as Rosalind. Violac and Portia. 
Year by )
ear sh
 improved by practice 
in parts of varying character; her art 
ripened; her individuality asserted itself; 
and she acquired authority, the precious 
quality which adds command to charm. 
It was in the "Taming of the Shrew" 
that she first asserted this authority with 
compelling amplitude and assurance. 
"'hen she rushed on the stage in her 
wrath, with her flaming gown and her hair 
flaming above it, she was a superb embodi- 
ment of youthful energy, a magnificent 
animal in a magnificent rage. And it 
was as Kate the cursed that she took 
London by storm and was rewarded by a 
fervor of appreciation more exalted than 
any she had received in New York. Here 
we had seen her climbing the ladder; and 
there they beheld her at the summit of 
her artistry . We had the full value of her 
later mastery shadowed by our recollec- 
tion of her earlier novitiate. The British 
might be less than half-hearted in its lik- 
ing for Daly's idiosyncratic rearrangement 
of Shakspeare's text, but it was whole- 
hearted in its acknowledgment of Ada 
Rehan's genius-a large word which I 
prefer to use with caution but which the 
enthusiastic Healey applied to Ada Rehan 
without hesitation. The British were 
captivated, both by her personality and 
by her power of impersonating. 
I do not mean to suggest that Kather- 


501 


ine was the best of her Shakspearian per- 
fonnances, but it was the first in which 
she triumphed. Her Rosalind was de- 
lightful in its playfulness and its tender- 
ness; it was blithe and buoyant and, 
above all, womanly, without taint of self- 
consciousness and with unfailing enjoy- 
ment of the situation. Her Rosalind was 
fitly companioned by John Drew's Or- 
lando, which was one of the most satis- 
factory it has ever been my privilege to 
admire. Indeed, the full effect of Ada 
Rehan's Rosalind was due, in a measure, 
to the fact that John Drew's Orlando 
frankly accepted Ganymede as a lad and 
never allowed us to suppose that he sus- 
pected all the time that this lad was his 
very Rosalind. I have elsewhere recorded 
that Ada Rehan's Portia gave us a new 
and truer and more effective rendering of 
the Quality of Mercy speech than it had 
ever had before; she did not make it an 
elocutionary stunt, as is the wont of most 
actresses; she spoke it as a direct appeal 
to Shylock, pausing between sentences in 
the vain hope that her words might soften 
his hard heart. And I may add now that 
her voice was vibrant and melodious; and 
that she had mastered the difficulties of 
blank verse, never chopping it into halt- 
ing prose and never weakly falling into 
singsong. 
In the fall of r887 Daly asked me to aid 
him in editing" A Portfolio of Players," a 
privately printed volume containing a 
score of photogravure portraits of the 
leading members of his company with 
brief commentaries by H. C. Bunner, E. 
A. Dithmar, Laurence Hutton, William 
Winter, and myself. My own tribute to 
the irrepressible and irresistible fun of 
1liss Rehan in her repetition of an empty 
song called" Jenny O'Jones" was a little 
too brief to fill out the space allotted to it; 
and when Daly wrote asking me to 
lengthen it a little, he called my attention 
to "the marvellous versatility and range 
of 1fiss Rehan-a range not reached by 
any living actress "-and he pointed out 
also "her womanliness in all." And thi5 
was before she had revealed the deeper 
and broader gifts in impersonations of 
Rosalind and Viola, Portia and Lady 
Teazle. She grew in stature with the 
years and she ripened as the seasons rolled 
around, until at the end there was no 



502 


l\IEl\10RIES OF ACTRESSES 


rival who had essayed so many and so di- 
verse parts and who had done them all so 
well. 
Charles Lamb thought it a consolation 
for growing old that he had seen th
 
"School for Scandal" in all the glory of 
its original cast; and we who were wit- 
nesses of the splendid days of Daly's 
Theatre may have a similar solace. To 
the "Portfolio of Players," Bunner C:)ll- 
tributed an epilogue addressed "To a 
Reader of the XXIst Century": 
" A Daly private print "-a chaste 
Example of our fathers' taste. 
They made books then-who can, in our 
Degenerate days of magnet-power? 
See--Ada Rehan, Fisher, Drew, 
Dame Gilbert, Lewis-through and through 
The sharp cut plates are clear as new. 
Then comes the old, the tardy praise-- 
"Those were the drama's palmy days." 


But We?-Vou'll see the shadow-now 
To us these living creatures bow, 
For us they smile--for us they feign 
Or love or hatred, scorn or pain; 
For us this white breast heaves-this voice 
Makes hearts too young too much rejoice; 
For us those splendid eyes are lit; 
For us awakes embodied wit; 
For us the music and the light- 
The listening faces, flushed and bright- 
The glow, the passion and the dream- 
To you-how far it all must seem 1 


v 


THE company which Daly managed in 
each of his theatres was a stock company, 
remaining substantially the same year 
after year. It stood ready to play comedy 
or tragedy, melodrama or farce, social 
drama or comic opera. Sometimes it 
lent its support to stars, Mrs. Scott- 
Siddons, Charles J c Mathews, Edwin 
Booth; but for the most part it was able 
to do without these expensive interlopers. 
It was so numerous in its early seasons 
that it could give the" School for Scan- 
dal" in New York while its unemployed 
members went to Newark to present 
" London Assurance." This was sheer ex- 
travagance, as Daly found to his cost; and 
when he opened Daly's Theatre at Broad- 
way and 30th Street, he was more cau- 
tious, and he relied mainly on the famous 
"Daly quartet"-Ada Rehan and John 
Drew, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert and James 
Lewis, who played into each other's hands 
with unfailing loyalty and who profited 


by Daly's extraordinary skill in stage 
managemen t. 
He loved the theatre; he lived in it; he 
was never so happy as when he was di- 
recting a rehearsal; he was intensely in- 
terested in his work and untiring in his 
devotion to it. He delighted in his con- 
trol of what was really a training school 
for actors; and he was a strict discipli- 
narian, exacting complete compliance 
with his will. He had a marvellous under- 
standing of the stage; and he knew how to 
perceive the special gifts of his actors and 
how to develop these gifts. It is note- 
worthy that those who submitted to his 
guidance improved while they were sub- 
ject to his control and that they often 
ceased to advance in their art when they 
left him. His judgment was sometimes 
at fault and his taste was not always im- 
peccable. But he abides as one of the sig- 
nificant figures in the history of the Amer- 
ican theatre. 
No member of his company had been 
with him longer than Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, 
who had appeared in the opening per- 
fonnance of Daly's first season, in 1869, 
and who remained with him till his death 
in 1899. She was ready to play any kind 
of part in any kind of play, from IvIrs. 
Candour, in the" School for Scandal," to 
the Infant Phenomenon, in a little sketch 
taken from an episode in "Nicholas 
Nickleby." She did not like to be out 
of the bill; and, therefore, she was willing 
to accept the most insignificant charac- 
ters-for example, Curtis, one of the 
servants in the "Taming of the Shrew," a 
character which appeared only in one 
scene and which had little to say in that 
solitary appearance. She knew that 
Daly was always doing his best for her 
and he knew that she would always do 
her best for him. 
Although she was most favorably 
known by her impersonation of comic 
characters, she had a dramatic power un- 
known to those who saw her only in the 
later years of the company. It is half a 
century now since the first night of "l'tlan 
and Wife," and yet I can visualize again 
the thrill which ran through me when I 
beheld the sinister figure of Hester Deth- 
ridge silently gliding down the stage for 
some evil purpose that I can no longer 
remember. I recall that in "Froufrou" 




IEMORIES OF ACTRESSES 


only a few months earlier she had been 
miscast as a woman of the world; but al- 
though this character was out of her line, 
she was at least adequate. 
I have mentioned her 
:lrs. Candour, 
and I regret to have to say that it was 
not one of her most satisfactory efforts; it 
was a little too dry, perhaps even a little 
too intellectual; it lacked the unction and 
the broad humor which ought to char- 
acterize the gossip-monger and mischief- 
maker of Sheridan's comedy. Yet she 
looked the part to perfection; and she 
danced in the minuet with the perfect 
grace which was always hers. She had 
been a professional dancer in her youth; 
and this early experience stood her in 
good stead when she appeared as Mme. 
Pierrot in that ever delightful pantomine, 
"L'Enfant Prodigue." Thanks to her 
youthful training in the ballet, pantomine 
was an art of which she was a past mis- 
tress. Here she had the advantage over 
Ada Rehan, who played Pierrot and who 
always seemed to be wanting to talk and 
to employ gesture only because she could 
not speak, whereas, 
Irs. Gilbert used 
gesture as speech. 

frs. Gilbert was held in affectionate 
regard by all the members of the Daly 
company. She was always gracious and 
encouraging to the newcomers. From 
her varied experience she was able to be 
helpful to the young folks who were try- 
ing their wings; and she often guarded 
them from the pitfalls into which they 
might tumble from ignorance of the tradi- 
tions of the art. She was as cheerful as 
she was helpful. She appeared to best 
advantage when she was playing over 
against James Lewis, whose humor was 
akin to hers, dry, restrained, and clear- 
cut. She survived this partner of her 
toils, as she survived Daly. Thereafter, 
her occupation was gone; and although 
Clyde Fitch adapted " Granny" espe- 
cially for her and not unsuccessfully, she 
did not linger long on the stage. As I 
"squeeze the sponge of the memory" (to 
borrow a phrase from Henry James) and 
as I try to call the list of the countless 
parts in which she appeared, I am inclined 
to the opinion that she was the most va- 
ried and the most accomplished imperson- 
ator of "old women" that it has been my 
good fortune to observe. She had her 


503 


limitations, -no douht; but in her own 
field she was unexcelled. 


VI 


IT has always been a puzzle to me that 
there are so few notable performers of 
"old women." I can name half a dozen 
brilliant actresses as Lady Teazle, while I 
should be hard put to it to cite more than 
one or two fairly satisfactory renditions 
of Mrs. Malaprop and 
lrs. Candour. 
Every season there appear young ac- 
tresses of real promise; and some of these 
persevere and fulfill expectation. But 
very few of them, even after the lapse of 
two score years on the stage, are able to 
confinn their earlier reputation by devel- 
oping from leading ladies into old women. 
I suppose that they prefer to retire rather 
than to linger superfluous on the stage or 
to play mothers instead of daughters. 
l\fostly they shrink from facing the fact 
of old age. 
It is true that Ellen Terry, once tri- 
umphantly acclaimed as Juliet, has since 
been willing to express the rich and oily 
humor of Juliet's Nurse. More often 
than not the actress who has continued to 
appear as the youthful heroine, year 
after year and even decade after decade, 
refuses to acknowledge the march of time 
and insists on believing herself to be as 
young as she feels. 
It is to Legouvé-at least, I think it 
was in the pages of this channing chronic- 
ler of the French stage in the middle of 
the nineteenth century that I found the 
story-it is to Legouvé that I owe a char- 
acteristic tale of Mlle. Mars, whose ad- 
vancing years did not prevent her from 
conveying the impression of youth by 
sheer force of art and far more convinc- 
ingly than could be done by actresses 
thirty years younger than she. After she 
was fifty she refused to relinquish the 
girls of twenty to the girls who were 
twenty. She was held in such high es- 
teem by her comrades of the Comédie 
Française that no one of them was 
willing to hint to her that she ought 
thereafter to content herself with more 
mature characters. \Vhen that most in- 
genious of playwrights, Eugene Scribe, 
was appealed to, he volunteered to help 
them out. He wrote a little piece about 



504 


l\1EMORIES OF ACTRESSES 


a young grandmother who was so charm- 
ing that she was the successful rival of 
her own granddaughter. But when he 
read the comedy to Mlle. 1\1ars, she said 
that she would be glad to act in it-" but 
who is there to play the grandmother?" 
Forty years ago there were two ac- 
tresses, one in Great Britain and the other 
in the United States, who brought to the 
perfonnance of old women the mastery of 
effect which they had acquired in the im- 
personation of leading ladies. Mrs. Ster- 
ling had been the original Peg W offington 
in "Masks and Faces"; and Mrs. John 
Drew had been accepted as one of the 
best of Lady Teazles. At almost the 
same time they appeared, one in London 
and one in New York, as Mrs. Malaprop. 
Both of them won the plaudits of the 
public, but by totally different methods. 
Both had authority; both were popu- 
lar favorites, assured of a welcome in 
whatever they undertook; both knew all 
the traditions of old comedy; and there 
the resemblance ended. 
Mrs. Sterling was a mistress of all the 
bolder devices for arousing laughter; she 
sought broad effects; she splashed on her 
color with an unsparing hand, as though 
she could not trust the intelligence of the 
spectators. I do not dare to be rude 
enough to hint that she clowned the part; 
yet I cannot find any other tenn fit to 
describe her method. In her hands Mrs. 
Malaprop was not a lady and not a finely 
drawn character; rather was she a carica- 
ture. She was intensely self-conscious of 
her verbal blunders. As the time came 
for one of them to be delivered, she visibly 
braced herself for effort, as though saying 
to the audience: "I'm Mrs. Malaprop 
and here is another malapropism. It's a 
good one, I assure you. You really can't 
help laughing at it. Are you ready for 
it?" Then she hurled it at the spectators, 
waiting for the outburst of laughter and 
smiling in comic complicity with them, 
as if assuring them that it was a good one, 
wasn't it? 
When Mrs. Drew played l\1rs. Mala- 
prop she lifted her from low comedy to 
high comedy. Sheridan's figure of fun 
ceased to be a caricature and became a 
deftly etched character, more human and 
more humorous. Mrs. Drew's Mrs. 
Malaprop was a woman educated beyond 


her intelligence and puffed with pride in 
her little learning. She was serenely un- 
conscious that there were any such things 
as malapropisms, and she delivered each 
of them with evident delight in her "nice 
derangement of epitaphs," letting us 
share in her joy that she had hit upon 
exactly the right word, the only word, the 
word that she alone could provide. Every 
malapropism was a fresh invention of 
hers; she made us feel that it had just 
occurred to her; and thus she produced 
the illusion of spontaneity. She exhibited 
the perfected art which seemed like na- 
ture, because it was able to conceal its 
processes. As a result of this subtler 
reading of the lines and of this more 
accurate conception of the part, Mrs. 
Drew's Mrs. Malaprop was really more 
effective than 1\1rs. Sterling's. If I may 
trust my memory after two score years, 
the laughter it evoked was both heartier 
and more abundant. 
In his autobiography, worthy to stand 
by the side of Colley Cibber's incompara- 
ble "Apology," Joseph Jefferson makes us 
share the pleasure he had in acting with 
Mrs. Drew in the "Rivals," and he re- 
cords that she was the inventor of a novel 
piece of business. Mrs. Malaprop is 
deeply disgusted with the persistence of 
her niece, Lydia Languish, in loving" En- 
sign Beverley." She says: "Oh, it gives 
me the hydrostatics to such a degree! I 
thought she had persisted from corre- 
sponding with him; but, behold, this very 
day, I have interceded another letter 
from the fellow; I believe I have it in my 
pocket." Then Mrs. Drew used to search 
in her voluminous pocket for the missive 
and by mistake to take out the letter of 
Sir Lucius O'Trigger. Then, discovering 
her error and in great confusion, she 
pulled forth the epistle which Captain 
Absolute recognizes, to his immediate em- 
barrassment. The ingenuity of this is as 
evident as its propriety is indisputablec 
It is a happy suggestion, which Sheridan, 
we may be sure, would have adopted with 
a gratitude equal to that of the youngt:f 
Dumas when he accepted a similar im- 
provement due to Eleonora Duse's fine 
dramatic instinct. 
"Those were the drama's palmy days"; 
and no doubt our grandchildren will say 
the same of ours. 



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Heartbreak Dance 


BY l\IARY ALICE BARRO'YS 
Chief Supervisor of Public Dance Halls of San Francisco 


DECORATIONS BY rviARGARET FREEMAN 


'. 
m O-NIGHT he came 
and talked to me. I 
i T JiI met him here last 

 h:'l.. night. I stop in o
ten 
"rr,:Q 
 to watch the dancmg, 
and he had been point- 


 ed out to me at several 
previous dances here 
at Heartbreak Hall. They said he is a re- 
markable dancing- master, one who teaches 
the teachers. He has a class here. 
Heartbreak Dance runs every Wednes- 
day, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday 
night from 8 to 12 o'clock; admission: 
ladies 25 cents, gents 50 cents. There 
can be no afternoon dance, because all the 
patrons are then at work over the city 
-at work for other people. From get- 
ting home at 6 P. M. to up for work at 
6 A. M. they call their time their own; 
they do their own living then. 
Heartbreak Hall, right in the business 
section, rises on a spot where the milk. of 
human kindness seems curdled by greed. 
All day it watches passers-by, itself re- 
tired and quiescent. Deep within it this 
hall knows what passers-by do not see in 
each other in their trot. 
When night comes down the street, 
things change. A fancy ticket-seller ar- 
rives, goes up into her coop, and begins. 
A special police officer comes and takes 


his stand to keep an outward semblance 
of peace. Out from the open night into 
the human-heated hall move the ticket- 
buyers. Past the blazing electric sign 
outside into the confidentially lighted in- 
side, from the gazers on the street outside 
to the fellow hunters inside, they come. 
A bank of people stand milling about 
beyond the hat-check room. They are 
waiting for the music, observing, select- 
ing, discarding, noting, sensing, enjoying. 
In the list of unfortunates, begin any- 
where and go anywhere, up or down, 
they are here. There will be a little time 
left for some sleep after the close before 
one must plod through again. A little 
sleep! 
As he came smiling up to-night, his fig- 
ure was tall and looked distinguished. 
His face was made by eyes set in like a 
Turk's, back under a good forehead and 
above cheeks that sagged and ended in a 
lip. Always he smiled, yet his smile was 
one of self-control. It carried one up to 
a contemplation of the good and high 
forehead. His dancing was calm. His 
face showed a fineness of culture, but his 
features were gross. He was both un- 
pleasant and attractive. Last night he 
fell immediately to discussing dancing as 
a racial need and music as a response to 
creative existence. Here, in Heartbreak 
5 0 5 



506 


HEARTBREAK DANCE 


Dance, made up of these tense-feeling and 
non-understanding roamers from the 
whole city, where each one has given and 
taken from life without personal repres- 
sion, and each is always by circumstances 
oppressed, where eight hundred persons 
have eight hundred histories of eight hun- 
dred kinds of unchecked joys and troubles 
-here the observations of my new ac- 
quaintance amazed me. He had a vel- 
vety voice, coming from somewhere else. 
He stated himself in few words, and now 
in a lisping accent he began: "Are you 
studying the crowd?" 
"Not very much," I answered, as he 
sat down beside me. "This crowd does 
not require study; it spells itself all 
alike. " 
"Yes, they are all alike out there," he 
said, emphasizing it with a gesture, "all 
alike. No people-all apes-no people 
among them-none," he chanted. 
" Apes! " I laughed. " I had not 
thought that. They could none of them 
cavort on a leafy limb, I am sure. I 
thought these human creatures more 
tame, if less sensible, than apes." 
"Less sensible, yes. An ape will reach 
out when he wants something and will 
pick it, eat it, and be satisfied. No mon- 
key will pick more than he thinks he 
needs to eat. But people! They are 
not going to be satisfied with that; they 
want more." He went on: "I know the 
monkey tribe. I used to go out to the 
Zoo every day with peanuts and I learned 
those monkeys. I named each one for 
some friend, and then I used to watch 
how they behaved. I would treat each 
as I did the friend. I used to talk to 
them and we learned to understand each 
other. One day, about my hundredth 
visit there, I had three of my friends 
along and they went with me to the cage. 
\\Then I called a name and a monkey came 
ambling over to me, one friend spoke up: 
'But hold on! Vv
here did you get that 
name i ' I t was his own. I told him I 
had named this monkey for him because 
of its characteristics." 
"But the friend, how did he take it?" 
I asked, 
"He laughed it through, but deep 
down he was tapped." 
I pondered. "That was rather re- 
markable," I concluded, 
. " Yes," he wagged, "but you see I 


reached something in him that day. It 
took five years for it to come through. I 
met him five years later and he said: 
'Tuck, I want to tell you. That monkey 
talk of yours taught me a lesson. I 
couldn't for a long while figure out just 
what, either. But gradually it came to 
me, and now I am always hunting God 
and I am trying to learn all I can.' " 
"What nationality are you?" I asked 
abruptly. 
" French," he answered. "French and 
Spanish." 
"Not farther East," I questioned, "not 
originally? " 
" Yes, on my father's side, 
foorish, 
really." 
"There! I was sure of it; but I think 
you came from the depths of the Orient 
farther back still. Are you not some- 
thing of a mystic?" 
"There is no such thing as a mystic," 
he said readily. "There is only under- 
standing. I do )me from the Orient. 
Oh, I know that for sure! And I have 
the understanding; whether from any- 
thing of my own or from this present ex- 
perience I do not know." 
" Now you are talking reincarnation," 
I commented. 
"Surely. One must. We are either a 
self or an experience reincarnated, are we 
not? It must be one or the other." 
"Experience reincarnated ? You mean 
heredity?" I asked. 
"Of course. Are we not each a re- 
incarnated set of experiences that our 
parents had?" 
He fell to musing as his eyes rested on 
the dancers moving over the floor. " We 
all are reincarnations," he repeated. "I 
talk. to my classes at my lessons, and 
when I am teaching these people about 
their dancing, I sometimes look over the 
floor and think: 'What right have you to 
interfere? What right?'" He leaned 
close as he said this. I had a sense of a 
power of hypnotism in his gaze. I avoid- 
ed his eyes, though his rhythmic voice 
delighted me and his whole discourse 
laughed. 
"This right," I answered; "the strong 
must warn the weaker of any known dan- 
ger. The real question lies in a definition 
of danger." 
"Yes. And-yes-I think we must 
warn them. We are then the instruments 



HEARTBREAK D
NCE 


of power, I suppose. They can treat it 
just as they please-take it or leave it." 
He considered-" But I am a sensitive in- 
strument, and--oh-so easily put out of 
order [ I cannot be w rked by blows, like 
a drum. I am not meant to be struck." 
A thoughtful silence, then the music 
started. It was a waltz. "I must excuse 
myself," he said with deference. "I 
promised to give the soda-fountain girl a 
good waltz the next one that came, and 
here it is"-and he bowed his leave. In 
a moment I saw him steering a trimmed- 
up, heavy-set girl through the maze. 


Not so large, this hall. It is dimmed 
by a lighting in rose-and-green gloqes 
during this waltz, a "moonlight waltz." 
Here at Heartbreak Hall it is Transition, 
the moonlight waltz. The troubled man 
becomes during this waltz the man at 
peace. His trouble is not forgotten, it is 
dissolved. Into the place where it was 
comes the sensation of twilight in May. 
The music stops. That stops the mo- 
tion. Standing still ends the dance. The 
lights come on. Again it is a material 
room with objects. The boys crowd in 
heaps into their chosen corner-the girls 
seek seats. 


"C'n I sit there?" asked a .disappointed- 
looking young man. The secretive-look- 
ing girl moved down the bench. 
"Nice crowd, ain't it?" said he. 
"Not so nice," said she. 
"But you're goin' to stay?" said he. 
"Think I'll be going soon," said she. 
"Ye-ah?" from him. Then he sat 
sidewise and looked at her. "Maybe 
you've got your troubles too, like me," 
he confided, "but you look happy," he 
ventured, with scrutiny in his gaze. 
"What d'you mean-like you?" was 
the response. She settled herself, so did he. 
" What I mean? I mean, I've got 
troubles all day and all night. I've lost 
my home. I haven't got anybody or 
nothin' left. I don' care much any more. 
Sometime
 I drink some and I've forgot- 
ten it all. \\That's the use?" He thrust 
his feet forward. 
She grew mildly interested. "Oh, I 
know all what you mean. Where's the 
wife?" she ended. 
"That's it. She's home. She's got 
the whole thing. It went all her way. 


507 


She got the house an' the kid an' all the 
furniture. I haven't got anything. You 
see, she went in and worked them aU, 
judge an' lawyers an' everybody, y'know; 
worked the whole bunch against me. 
The whole bunch. Even the kid." 
"\Vas it a baby?" 
"No--she'll be nine in August." 
"H'm. Hard on you. What'd you 
done?" 
"Nothing [ That's it-nothing [ An' 
here I am without anything; turned clean 
out of the works. Just turned out." 
"What did she say you did?" asked the 
wily member of the dialogue, who was 
perhaps thirty-two. She had a face that 
seemed to say it knew howc It under- 
stood the trick of getting something and 
being nothing. The powder was well put 
on so her complexion was tempting and 
very pure with sweet lips. The face was 
framed by hair of light brown, tightly 
marcelled; and the ensemble was trimmed 
with sparkling stones suspended on tiny 
chains from the ears. She moved her 
head often. Her dress was the usual 
black with heavy black lace set in for 
sleevelets and trimmings. Below, French 
flesh silk hose and fancy strapped patent- 
leather slippers completed the decora- 
tions. 
"Oh," he muttered savagely, "what 
she said? Everything [ you know-every- 
thing [ Claimed my drinkin' has caused 
me to change all 'round. I'm an elec- 
trician an' I made good money. I bought 
our home. She got everything I had-" 
And he slumped. 
The lace lady thought. "She played 
you a dirty trick," she decided. ":Maybe 
you did drink a little, but you all do. 
I'll bet she does when she can. The low- 
down faker. I know just how you feel. 
I know-believe me-I know. Ain't I 
been there!" plaintively. Then suddenly 
and eagerly: "I'll bet it didn't do a bit of 
good, either, for you to say a thing. She 
could not understanÇ. any explanation. 
Oh--don't I know, sweet mama [" 
He was watching her, amazed. "You 
sure do seem to understand. Are you- 
have you been married?" 
"Rather [" 
"Had troubles too?" 
" Some. We're divorced." 
" You [ " 
"Sure, me. And he did all the things 



508 


HEARTBREAK DANCE 


to me same as she did to you. They 
ain't fair when they are jealous. My 
husband was so jealous he didn't want 
me even to sit near a window, I guess." 
"God, the dumb-bell!" he exploded. 
"You! and you understand a man so 
well. I can't see how your husband 
could've picked at you." 
She, sweetly: "Ain't it strange we, who 
understand each other so, should meet 
here? Looks like it was planned." 
He, distractedly: "There's the music, 
and I've got this dance out. I've got a 
blonde I brought here to-night, but this 
dance is with a different one. My 
blonde's been dancing. There she is, that 
tall one with the black drapes an' the big 
white beads; the fellow's in gray. See- 
that's her." 
The lace lady looked, then nodded, 
while her ear-drops sparkled. "Here 
comes my guy. I've got this out, too!" 
And she went to meet him. . 


A boy sitting out the dance went over 
to the Hall 
10ther. "Hello, mother, 
how are y' to-night?" He seated him- 
self with a jerk at his knees. 
"Very fine, thank you, John._ Are you 
not dancing this?" 
" No, mother, I'm all in. I'm in 
trouble "-mopping his brow after his 
speed through the last dance, 
"So?" kindly. "What sort?" 
"With my wife. We are getting an 
annulment. It isn't really Isabelle I'm 
divorcing, though; it's her mother. I've 
just got to have my liberty." John flat- 
tened back and put away his handkerchief. 
"How long have you and Isabelle been 
marrieù ? " 
"Three weeks." 
The supervisor jumped. "\\'hy, John! 
a divorce after three weeks?" 
"Got to. Look here, mother, I gave 
up my religion to marry Isabelle. Now, 
after we are married her mother says I've 
got to give up pork meat and then do a 
bunch of their other stuff. I won't. I 
will have my liberty. I'm healthy. I 
won't, that's all. I've applied for an an- 
nulment." 
"How old is Isabelle?" 
"She's nineteen," he answered, sitting 
forward to search a corner. There he lo- 
cated a slender girl in a straight black 
dress and long ivory ear-pendants, sitting 


out the dance, and with "Guess I'll have 
a dance with lVlaye," he left energetically. 
The general manager came up. "Good 
evening! \Vha t news?" 
"None here. What do you know?" 
"Well, I do know a bit. Our floor 
manager, Kirk, is going to leave us." 
"Is that possible? After his sixteen 
years here I thought he had grown into 
these painted walls," she laughed. 
"Nothing like that. You know, six- 
teen years ago Kirk left a lady he loved 
behind him in New Brunswick. Well, 
she married soon. He never went back. 
Now she's a widow, and it is on between 
her and Kirk again. He's going back 
next month and marry her. See his hair? 
You see, when he left there he had plenty 
of nice thick hair. It curled a little, 
Now he's awfully worried because he's so 
bald. He has a salve he is using nights 
and he puts on a little tight-fitting cap to 
hold the salve on all night, but," the man- 
ager asked concernedly, "do you think he 
can get it to grow in in a month?" 
"Maybe, but I'm afraid it's a ques- 
tion," said the supervisor, trying to keep 
sober. "I remember he got his new 
teeth just last winter; it's good that they 
are all adjusted now." 
He watched Kirk moving about on the 
floor, tall and thin, coming to a peak 
above the crowd. " Sixteen years is 
quite a while, you know," he puzzled. 


" Hello, Juliette! Did y' hear what 
happened to me?" breezed a twenty-year- 
old excited dancer, as he poised his part- 
ner amidships and shivered to the music 
while he stood still in front of Juliette. 
"Nope, what?" encouraged his audi- 
ence. 
"I've nearly died; been sick. Poison. 
Everybody said it was my wife poisoned 
me, but it wasn't; it was ptomaine. I 
was sure sick, too." He showed great 
sa tisfaction. 
" Wife?" pumped Juliette. "I never 
saw any here with you. I never knew 
you was married." 
"No, guess not. Most folks don't. 
You see, she dances at Starlight and I 
dance here. \Ve like different halls," he 
beamed. The music urged and he skated 
off happily. His cleaving little partner 
followed his many steps as truly as could 
his own aura. 



HEARTBREAK DA
CE 


"Hello, Jule! See that dark, short 
woman with the straight bob?" This 
came from a cool, self-possessed girl with 
dark-red hair, cut to stand out curly all 
over her head. "That is a grandmother, 
and she is chambermaid at the Lewis 
Hotel from 8 to 5 o'clock and makes up 
forty-seven rooms every day, and then 
dances here or at the Princess five nights 
each week; and she has had two husbands, 
and the second one was as mean as dirt 
to her, and so now he is dead and she 
says it is her turn and she is going to 
have a good time. She enjoys herself 
great." All this in one breath as grand- 
ma danced complacently past. The 
breath expired as Myrtle, the stout, 
dropped out of the music onto the bench 
and plunged hurriedly into her vanity 
box, chewing and patting rapidly with: 
"Say, listen, Bertha, if that guy I just 
danced with asks you to dance, don't tell 
him I'm married, see? Don't tell him. 
I live with my mother and sister-see?- 
and I'm not married "-interrupted here 
by: "Did ja know him before to-night?" 
-and continuing: "Sure--he was here 
the first night I came three weeks ago, 
and danced with me both the nights I 
came before to-night. I've been kiddin' 
him along-he believes I'm single-see? 
Tell him I'm livin' at home--I work at 
Dunn's-see ?--don't come out often- 
just with you sometimes-see?" 
Here the music brought an avalanche 
of partners, and a pleasant-looking boy 
hurried up, drawing a clipping from his 
inner coat-pocket. He was short, with 
sociable brown eyes which had seen J uli- 
ette about to rise. 
"Hear about me, Jule?" and he took 
the seat Bertha, the red bob, had just left 
to dance with a pale, gray man. 
"Hear what?" agreeably asked J ule, of 
shiny black hair, a straight bob. 
"Why, I committed suicide last night; 
didn't you know? Read this "-regally 
handing her the clipping. "You see I 
put one over on them! They say I'm in 
the hospital, see? and here I am at this 
dance," he crowed triumphantly. "I 
swore I wouldn't go anywhere, too, but 
here I am. I got down here somehow," 
perplexedly. 
"It says you took poison. D'you feel 
sick?" quizzed Jule. 
"Oh, I'm all punkins. I went to work 


509 


already to-day. You see, I took it at six 
last night and they took me to the hospi- 
tal at midnight, after the dance at Bean's, 
so I was all over it this morning, fine and 
dandy. And they don't know it!" 
"Love trouble, Bud?" 
"No-no girl in it. I just couldn't 
find any friends or any fun for myself, 
ain't got any folks left, and I was too 
lonesome for dust, so I just thought I'd 
end it, too." 
" Gosh! Be glad they pulled you 
back, Bud, and I'll show you where to 
find your friends. You look me up at 
the dance to-morrow night. This girl 
acts like she thinks you've got this dance 
out with her now." 
"Yes, I have. Sure. It's the whirl. 
I forgot. Hello, Myrtle. I'll be back; 
thanks. Goòd-by." He stepped off gaily 
and replaced the distinguishing clipping 
in his inner pocket. 


The whirl began. Only once each eve- 
ning is the whirling one-step allowed. 
Then the orchestra plays in circles and 
affects the room like a musical egg-beater, 
drawing into the suction of whipped tunes 
all dancers who venture on the floor to 
spin around at top speed, one foot to each 
revolution. The bulk of the crowd sit 
down to watch, and they watch breath- 
lessly. Some couple is sure to intrude 
into some other at tornado velocity with 
tornado results. The wreckage squeals 
and is diverting. All the while the music 
is stirring up everything and everybody, 
and keeps the air swirling in a cyclone of 
saxophones and drums. 
But Bertha was calmly revolving with 
great repose and perfect precision, guided 
by the pasty gray man equally self-pro- 
pelled. In spite of speed they reversed 
as regularly and as simply as any pendu- 
lum. Bud had J\Iyrtle, and the pair were 
hectic. Bud looked like a horse-race. 
Heartbreak Dance was doing homage 
to its hero. As the blur dissolved itself 
into features, I saw. Here was the lov- 
able young boss of the most just and pow- 
erful gang in the city. \Vinning, reliable, 
quiet-they were cheering him. Not for 
his brute record, but for combining it with 
qualities that endeared him. They loved 
him. 
Jule burst out to me: "It is Bunchy 
Bock. He and Sue. Everybody likes 



510 


HEARTBREAK DANCE 


Bunchy. He works hard-never misses 
a day. And he's good to his mother, too. 
They say his gang killed a man last 
month, but Bunchy's always on the right 
side if anyone's in trouble. He was sure 
good to me an' my brother when we was 
up against it-he sure was. He's fair, 
too-" She broke into fresh applause. 
The top excitement of the evening, the 
whirling dance! 


As I grew dizzy watching, I turned to 
find the Oriental smile near me, waiting. 
" 'Most closing time. One more dance 
over," was his salutation. "Just listen 
to those crazy instruments. They all 
scream like drunken witches." 
"Witches! It sounds more like de- 
mons. Its real name is jazz.." 
"Jazz! It is something your apes out 
there think they understand, but they do 
not. Jazz? I can explain that in a few 
words, but the world won't listen," he 
announced decidedly. 
"I will," I baited. 
" Jazz is located on the piano all below 
middle C, and in the human race all be- 
low the sixth dorsal," he taught. 
" You are right on the latter point, but 
wrong on the former. Jazz squeaks. 
Squeaks are high," I corrected. 
"Oh, well, I used the piano to make the 
picture," he wheedled. 
"To illustrate, the spine you really 
mean," I corrected again. 
He smiled like Mona Lisa. "Music is 
a vibration that is first heard not in the 
nerves," he challenged. 
"Then where?" 
"In the bones. The bones are porous 
like a reed. They vibrate. Above the 


seventh dorsal the drum is not felt; it does 
not register there. And below the sev- 
enth dorsal melody does not penetrate, 
so is not heard. It vibrates only above." 
"A stimulating idea," I said. "You 
think we hear music with the spine?" 
"With parts of the spine," he now be- 
nignly corrected me. "The bone takes 
the vibration according to its substance. 
The nerves get it only from the bone. 
So-a bonehead, you see, is a-?" he 
laughed facetiously. 
"I see readily. A bonehead is a being 
who lives all below the sixth dorsal," I 
defined. "All drum." \Vhile we were 
laughing, the "Home, Sweet Home" was 
played. 
"So!" he exclaimed. "Good night 
then. \Vhen we reincarnate, if we meet 
with those others one hundred years from 
now in the top of a tree, remember I'm 
not a bonehead-nor a drum," he added 
belligerently. 
We parted, but he turned again and 
laughed his way back to me, as he added 
in quaint accent: "Remember, we're not 
of those apes, but you never can tell 
where freaks will meet next." 


Out from the human-heated hall into 
the open night go the ticket-buyers. 
From the confidentially lighted inside, 
past the blazing electric sign outside, from 
the fellow hunters inside to the gazers on 
the street outside, they go. Go, to wher- 
ever the street takes them. 
And this is a true story of Heartbreak 
Dance. Heartbreak Hall is in any city, 
and in any house of the public dance. 
I And all these people will be there, for 
they really said these things, and danced. 


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The Danube as Peacemaker 


BY CHARLES H. SHERRILL 
Author of "Have \Ve a Far Eastern Policy?" "Great Personages in the 
ew Italy," etc. 


ILLGSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 


"wno,L1Io.
W UR best thought is 

 X [Q] 

X vitally necessa
y for 
every move III the 
O I 
 study of this problem, 
. 
 but every move must 

 - be above the table, as 
Ä

Ä in a game of chess, not 
partly above and part- 
ly beneath it, as some people play cards." 
It was President Masaryk speaking of the 
Central Europe situation at Lany, his 
delightful country home, just outside 
Prague. We sat out in the brilliant sun- 
shine after luncheon, facing the splendid 
copper beeches, the eight-hundred-year- 
old oaks, and looking down the long vistas 
bordered by stately elms. The president 
himself, despite his seventy-five years, 
seemed as sturdy an oak as the best of 
them-a simple country gentleman, in rid- 
ing breeches and coat, wearing the plain 
cap with a narrow red-and-white ribbon, 
treasured souvenir of the days when he 
commanded Czech troops in Russia dur- 
ing the war. No chief executive enjoys 
more wide-spread affection and respect 
than that which all the citizens of this 
new republic show their revered president. 
To an American, meeting him seems like 
meeting a modern George \Vashington. 
By their constitution he is president for 
life--could public confidence and heartfelt 
respect go further? 
Lany was formerly the property of 
Prince Fürstenberg, one of the intimate 
group of friends surrounding the Kaiser. 
Naturally the new republic confiscated 
the estates of the enemy nobility, but 
President 
lasaryk refused to occupy a 
confiscated château, so his government 
purchased it from the Fürstenbergs. 
Everything one hears of President lHasa- 
ryk commends him. 
And what is this Central Europe prob- 
lem of which he spoke? Can the Danube 
or any other accident of geography help 


its solution? Perhaps no question is so 
important to a lasting stabilization of 
Continental conditions than that of pro- 
viding a balance to Germany on her 
southerly border, coupled with a fair ad- 
justment of Germany's frontier toward 
Poland. It was to this problem that our 
talk at Lany was turning, and this it was 
that evoked the veteran statesman's pro- 
nouncement quoted abovec 
The pivotal country in all that part of 
the world is the new Czecho-Slovakia, an 
east and west dike, running between Ger- 
many's southern border and her" Splen- 
did Second," as Kaiser \Vilhelm dubbed 
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is 
this gallant fatherland of 14,000,000 self- 
reliant, progressive, and sturdy folk that 
bars the road to the German "Drang 
nach Osten," the Berlin-Bagdad railway, 
and other such war-provoking visions of 
the \Vilhelmstrasse in Berlin. Nor is any 
other people in Europe better qualified to 
perform that service for international 
peace. None other has a greater passion 
for education nor a more intelligent aspira- 
tion for physical betterment (witness the 
body-building Sokol societies everywhere 
active among them). In their treatment 
of racial minorities they are more politi- 
cally broad-minded than most of Europe's 
new nations. There are a dozen l\Iagyar 
delegates and more Pan-German ones in 
the Czech Parliament, German and Mag- 
yar schools for children speaking those 
languages, while radical extremists are al- 
lowed a liberty of expression elsewhere 
considered dangerous. Furthermore, it is 
estimated that eighty per cent of the 
manufactures of the pre-war Austro- 
Hungarian Empire are located within the 
boundaries of the present Czecho-Slo- 
vakia. One does not have to be reminded 
of the Czechs' splendid fighting record 
during the war-they can take care of 
themselves! 


SII 



512 


THE DANUBE AS PEACEMAKER 


But 14,000,000 people, no matter how 
well equipped mentally, physically, and 
commercially, cannot provide a strong 
enough dike alone to retain 65,000,000 
Germans, if the Junker war spirit flames 
up again. No one knew this better nor 
foresaw a clearer solution of the problem 
than President Masaryk and Edward 
Benes (pronounced Benesh), the present 
Czech minister for foreign affairs. Our 
own revered George Washington would, 
as first president, have been greatly 
strengthened had he had at hand a 
younger comrade, a tried politician whom 
he completely trusted, one who could face 
the political heat and battle of those early 
days of our republic. Such a man for 
President Masaryk is Minister Benes. 
Their cordial intimacy dates back to the 
days when both were victims of Imperial 
persecution because of their nationalistic 
aspirations for Czech home rule. The wife 
of the latter and the daughter of the for- 
mer were imprisoned while they them- 
selves were exiled. Last, but not least, 
:Masaryk is a Slovak and Benes a Czech- 
a combination as politically useful as an 
Eastern President with a Western Vice- 
President for us. 
From the very beginning Benes dis- 
played striking far-sightedness-he recog- 
nized the significance of the Danube, al- 
though for him it was only a southern 
frontier. Vienna, Buda Pesth, Belgrade, 
and much of Roumania cannot forget the 
Danube, for it is always in the foreground 
of their national existence. But Prague 
is on the Moldau, north of the Danube's 
watershed, flowing away to the Elbe and 
the North Sea. And yet Benes was and is 
capable of sufficient geographical detach- 
ment to realize what the Danube has done 
and can again do for Central Europe, even 
though his windows in the Hradchin Pal- 
ace look down upon an altogether differ- 
ent water system. 
Obviously, "Safety First" had to be the 
basis of Czech policy. I t was the fertile 
brain of this same Benes that conceived 
the idea of the Little Entente, a defensive 
and offensive alliance between Czecho- 
Slovakia, Y ugo-Slavia (the enlarged Ser- 
bia born at Versailles), and Roumania. 
It was in August, 1920, that Benes set out 
on the visits to Belgrade and Bucharest 
that resulted in mutual treaties worded 


with such foresight as to insure their sub- 
sequent renewal and development. In 
this alliance the intercommunication af- 
forded by the Danube was recognized to 
the fullest degree. Thus was the east and 
west dike across Central Europe con- 
structed and strengthened. " Safety 
First" had to be the watchword of those 
shattered remnants of the old Empire- 
peoples that never dare to forget the solid 
mass of Teutons on their north. Up to 
this point the interests and points of view 
of all three parties to these treaties were 
identical-protection not only against 
Gennany but also against the recent 
enemy units within the old Empire-Hun- 
gary and Vienna-Hungary that desired a 
return of the Hapsburgs, and Vienna whose 
Gennan speech linked it to Gennany. 
Once that "Safety First" had been 
satisfied by this treaty-grouped Trium- 
virate, it became obvious that a second 
step must be taken-the negotiation of 
commerce-favoring treaties between them 
all. This step, of course, introduced many 
new elements into the relations of these 
nations. Here again the Danube asserted 
its helpful significance. 
All of us outsiders used to believe that 
the Austro-Hungarian Empire was held 
together by the police and military power 
of the Hapsburgs seated at Vienna. The 
insiders thought so too, and none believed 
it more finnly than that very police and 
soldiery. The world is now beginning to 
see that the real cohesive basis for that 
strange grouping of contrasting races was 
the fact that, whether they realized it or 
not, they fonned a natural and inter- 
dependent economic confederation, with 
the Danube River as a delivery wagon. 
This Tower of Babel had, thanks to the 
Danube, cogent commercial reasons for 
co-operation! Therefore the inevitable 
second step for the Petite Entente was a 
renewal of those mutual commercial ad- 
vantages which the so-called Succession 
states of to-day formerly enjoyed when 
enclosed wi thin the iron ring of the Haps- 
burgs. Just as they used to be too tightly 
enclosed, so at Versailles they broke too 
widely apart. It will take time and pa- 
tience for them to get back to normal re- 
lations, the one with each of the others, 
and the Danube River will prove a potent 
aid thereto. 



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It was the doctrine of Self-Determina- 
tion that broke the old empire into mu- 
tually distrustful fragments. Let us seek 
an American translation of that new doc- 
trine. President \Vilson came of Southern 
people, from that section of our country 
which believed it had a right to secede 
from the Union, even welcoming a bloody 
civil war to establish that right. The 
1861 doctrine of Secession differs only in 
VOL. LX.'XVIII.-37 


time from the 1919 doctrine of Self-Deter- 
mination. It was natural that J\ilr. \Vil- 
son, corning of people who believed in 
Secession, should indorse and push Self- 
Determination at Versailles, even when it 
affected so natural an economic confeder- 
ation as that connected up by the Danube. 
All the foregoing brings us face to face 
with the great European question of to- 
day. Let us make a paraphrase upon a 
5 1 3 



51.t 


THE DANUBE AS PEACEl\IAkER 


popular song: "The Little Entente is on 
its way, but which way is it going?" ,\\'ill 
it forget the Danube or will it not? Eco- 
nomic considerations swing it in one direc- 
tion and political expediency in another. 
\Yhich will prevail? 
It is obvious that France, for security's 
sake, needs a strong bloc to the south of 
Germanv, and for that reason has aided 
and must aid the Little Entente in every 
way possible. France's best friends in 
that regard are the 2,000,000 Pan-Ger- 
mans included in Czecho-Slovakia, for 
their obstructive tactics in Parliament so 
constantly irritate the Czecho-Slovaks as 
to drive them into the arms of the French. 
One hears that France wishes to use the 
Little Entente not only because geograph- 
ically it provides a natural dike on the 
south of Germany, but also for the pos- 
sibly abnormal purpose of aiding Poland 
to continue its existence as a dike on Ger- 
many's east. But would participation in 
this la tter policy be a source of weakness 
or strength for the Little Entente? 
Unfortunately, Poland emerged from 
the Versailles Council-chamber with the 
top-heavy population of 38,000,000, which 
meant the inclusion of so many racial 
minorities and so much partly alien ter- 
ritory as to surround Poland with an 
Alsace- Lorraine soreness on every side. 
Russia is vexed on the east, Lithuania 
(because of Yilna) on the north, Czecho- 
Slovakia (because of Teschen) on the 
south, while the ghastly joke of the 
"Danzig Corridor" on the north west, 
cutting off Posen from the rest of Prussia, 
is a manifest war-breeder from either an 
economic or political point of view. 
If Poland had contented herself at Ver- 
sailles with a smaller area and a popula- 
tion of pure Poles, this irritation of all 
her neighbors could have been eliminated 
and her future stability immensely en- 
hanced. As it is, she must depend upon 
France's assistance in time of need, and 
that means that France in turn must be 
able to count on the active co-operation 
of the Little Entente. But can she? One 
should not forget that an important por- 
tion of that Entente's striking force has to 
come from those excellent fighting men, 
the Serbs (Yugo-Slavia). But these Serbs 
are south Slavs, and the Poles have antag- 
onized the Russian Slavs by annexation 


of territory and population. In the last 
analysis will these south Slavs fight for a 
Poland unfriendly to the north Slavs? 
It is at least extremelv doubtful. Also 
Poland is far from the-Danube! ' 
Only recently we have seen that during 
the negotiations leading up to a guarantee 
of France's own boundaries by her former 
allies, the English press was unanimous 
in drawing a clear line between England's 
guaranteeing the Rhine frontier on Ger- 
many's west and the Polish frontiers on 
the east. Says an editor of an important 
London daily (generally pro-French in it
 
policy) : 
"The security of the western frontiers 
of Europe is of real and vital concern to 
us. As to the frontiers in the dim and re- 
mote interior of the Continent, we are 
sympathetic; we remember our obliga- 
tions under the Treaty and the Covenant, 
but we are not willing to undertake any 
fresh commitments, . . . 
"It is quite clear that in regard to the 
eastern frontiers, in which France has dis- 
played a particular interest through alli- 
ances with Poland and Czecho-Slovakia, 
concluded since the general peace, Great 
Britain can undertake no engagements 
additional to those implied in the Treaty 
of Versailles and the Covenant of the 
League of Nations. '\\
hat the British 
Government is prepared to do is to join 
in a guarantee by France, Germany, and 
other Powers of the security of the west- 
ern frontiers." 
Thus we see how vitally important it is 
and will be for the French to gain the 
Little Entente's political and military 
support for Poland in her hour of danger. 
I t is "on the knees of the gods" whether 
she will succeed or not in this effort. Eng- 
land is interested in the Rhine, which flows 
into her North Sea: she is not interested 
in the Danube. 
\Ye must not forget that the Little En- 
tente confronts serious local danger of its 
own. Self -Determination burst the old 
empire wide open, each fragment looking 
out for itself. \Ve have seen how three of 
these units decided to form the Little En- 
tente, and thus took the first step back to 
normal relations. But they left Hungary 
and the new Austria outside, and both of 
them are Danube countries! Hungary 
was stripped of much territory, while Aus- 



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tria was not only refused entrance into the 
new Entente büt was also warned against 
attempted union with the German Reich, 
so greatly desired by most Germans. If 
a plebiscite on the subject were allowed 
to the 6,000,000 German-speaking Aus- 
trians who now constitute that country, 
they would surely yote to join Germany. 
Fortunately, however, there are certain 
far-seeing Germans who do not favor this 
union, and for two reasons: first, that the 


addition of these 6,000,000 Roman Catho- 
lics to Germany would offset the Protes- 
tant north now controlling the Reich; sec- 
ond, that the addition of this souther- 
ly strip to Germany would make her co- 
terminous with Italy and so reopen the 
old .Adriatic question, prejudicing Italy 
against neutrality the next time Germany 
should find Italian neutrality valuable. 
".hat has the eloquent Danube to say 
on this question? Is not the logical third 
5 1 5 



516 


AND YET SO FAR! 


step in the development of the Little En- 
tente an advance to a full and complete 
Danube Confederation? This would be 
delayed if the Germans were let cut the 
Danube at Vienna by acquiring the new 
Austria, and that delay would menace the 
peace of Europe. 
l\Iany Americans impatiently exclaim: 
""'hy are not Austria and Hungary taken 
into the Entente by the three other Suc- 
cession States so that the Danube eco- 
nomic confederation, so obviously needed 
by all of them, can become an accom- 
plished fact?" But those Americans have 
not spent much or perhaps any time in 
that quarter of the world, or they would 
know that the virus of Self-Determination 
has not had time to lose its poison-to 
work itself down to a harmless condi- 
tion. 
Patience is urgently needed by the 
statesmen of Central Europe-like the 
steady flow of the Danube, constantly 
teaching the value of interdependence to 
the peoples it connects and servès. For- 
tunately for a world desiring ultimate 
stability, men like l\Iasaryk and Benes of 
Czecho-Slovakia, Horthy and Bethlen of 
Hungary, and Pachich of South Slavia 
have both the understanding and the tem- 
perament to value patience. The im- 
patient American must not forget that 
such phrases as a "Danube customs 


union," "no custom-houses," "economic 
confederation," etc., are "fighting words" 
to races who remember that it was upon 
just these very shibboleths that the old 
Hapsburg tyranny was step by step built 
up. 
Just as steadily and as certainly as the 
Danube swings its useful way through and 
around all those peoples will they in God's 
good time come to realize their need of 
closer economic relations. Perhaps it will 
be a sort of Cnited States of the Danube. 
But equally certainly would any attempt 
to rush such a move delay a consumma- 
tion so ,. devoutly to be wished." 
\Yhether one looks down upon that 
ancient river from Bratislava's height, 
from Vienna's many bridges, from Buda's 
palace-crowned bluff, from Kalamegdan's 
park and fortress at Belgrade, or from the 
Iron Gates where Roumania stands guard, 
always and ever the low soft voice of the 
historic stream whispers" Patience." 
There must be patiently awaited that 
current of public opinion, sooner or later 
seeking betterment of human conditions 
as certainly as the river seeks the sea. To 
struggle against that current is as futile as 
to attempt reversing the Danube's flow. 
Patience will bring back the old interde- 
pendence as surely as the Danube is, al- 
ways has been, and always will be its in- 
valuable servant. 


And Yet So Far! 


BY CH.-\RLES F. LUl\I:\IIS 


OUR though ts run, hand in happy hand, together 
As children-and all the ecstasy of wings 
\"hen our Ideals meet, in starry weather, 
And soar accordant as the wedded strings; 


Yet invisible as the winds that walk between us, 
Impalpable as the moonlight on your brow, 
"Cnfathomable as eyes that have not seen us, 
Impassable as th
 Never to the N ow- 
\Yhat is it, Flower of my Dreams, that still divides us- 
\Yhat \Yall we cannot see, yet may not pass- 
\\'hat "Almost" that demands us yet derides us, 
As I were kissing you through a door of glass? 



The Golden Calf 


BY ED\YARD SHEI:\TON 
Author of "The Gray Bcginning" 


I 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR 


.' 
it. ,'! E:\IPFIELD is a town 
. , I of perhaps ten thou- 

 H II sand people, situa
ed 
I 
 so close to a great city 

, 
 that the necessity for 
I _ separate industrial ac- 
WWW tivity has never de- 
veloped. It was a 
lovely old town thirty years ago. Much 
of its charm remains to-day in spite of 
Cosey Tea-Rooms, filling-stations of de- 
praved Greek architecture, and Silver 
Creek Inns arising from the dust of the 
motor traffic and-pray God-to be re- 
turned some bright morning to the same 
indifferent dust. 
The streets where I walked as a boy 
have not altered greatly. The blue dusk 
drops through the same enormous elms 
and horse-c!1estnut trees. In spring the 
little yellow buds fall upon the mellow 
brick walks; in autumn small fires of 
leaves smoulder in the dry dirt of the 
gutters. Ancient beauties linger in houses 
wearing the brass name-plates of old fami- 
lies. Only here and there where a family 
has passed forever from the roster of the 
town have the generous dwellings been 
subdivided into modern apartments, and 
even these retain something of that past 
spaciousness, hospitality, ease. 
There is decay, I know, beneath the 
webs of hey, but it is not too apparent. 

Iy eyes note few outward changes. 
Even the young people passing with a 
murmur of speech in the odorous dark of 
midsummer are not total strangers; they 
bear familiar names; in their faces I can 
find faintly reflected the features of the 
friends of my generation; in their voices, 
their gestures, are reborn the people who 
have become old with the long wear of 
years. '\"e differ, these boys and girls and 
I, in many things, but completely in one 


thing. None of them know, J am sure, 
the story of Helen Ortend and Rodger 
Canby. . . . 
They are both dead; a decade now. 
On the hill to the east of the town is the 
art gallery built and. maintained with 
Rodger's fortune. Its perfect façade can 
be seen from almost any street and at sun- 
down the windows flare brighter than the 
first stars. 
The Ortend house, erected in l784, of 
stone and plaster, I bought several years 
ago. To-day the jonquils bloomed in the 
garden. I ate breakfast in the tiny room 
where Helen breakfasted so many solitary 
mornings, and gazed over the gray edge 
of my newspaper at their gold margin. 
I think about those two, Helen and 
Rodger, a great deal and have recon- 
structed something of the twenty years 
in which their absurd, tragic drama oc- 
curred, and of the time preceding, the 
history of their families and the irrelevant 
factors joining to produce the ultimate 
disaster. 
Both were only children. Their homes 
stood on opposite sides of the same brock. 
The Ortends were among the oldest fam- 
ilies in Hempfield, antedating the Canbys 
by nearly a quarter-century. They had 
been at one time quite wealthy, but most 
of the money was lost through patriotic 
injudicious loans during the Civil ,rare 
None of the men who foHowed had been 
able to prosper. The heritage their chil- 
dren received was beauty, dignity, repose. 
The women the Ortend men married were 
lovely, their children handsome. 
The Canbys rose in the financial scale 
as the Ortends dwindled. They were 
energetic, robust, violent-tempered, lika- 
ble, but there were queer outcroppings 
of character-Rodger's great-grandfather, 
for instance. Rodger's father was worth 
several hundreds of thousands. possibly 
half a million. The Canbys and Or tends 
5 1 7 



518 


THE GOLDEN CALF 


were the closest friends and often agreed 
that a sympathetic providence had given 
them respectively a boy and a girl to per- 
mit a union of the two houses. 
Rodger and Helen grew up with this 
tapestry of intention already woven as a 
background to their future. They ac- 
cepted this situation willingly, at least as 
soon as they were old enough to under- 
stand and be interested in the plans of 
their parents. Helen's father died when 
she was fourteen, but this seemed only to 
strengthen the idea. 
Helen was a shy, exquisite girl. Her 
Dutch blood had given her the wide, low 
brows, light eye
, pale-yellow hair, and 
rather square, grave face. Tall and 
slightly anæmic, she had gracious man- 
ners, little slow, characteristic gestures 
with her hands, a delicate elegance of 
speech and thought. I remember she 
never passed through the period of gauche- 
rie, like the other girls I knew. She had 
an instinctive desire for all in life that 
is serene, charming, dispassionate. Per- 
haps I should not say instinctive, for this 
tranquillity, this calm detachment, was a 
trait of all the women in her family, al- 
though with Helen it had no root in any- 
thing substantial; it was loosed from 
reality. 
Never strong, she remained always a 
little apart from us. We admired her, 
but our admiration was clouded with 
awe, uncertainty. Her frail health made 
her timid. She became more and more a 
recluse, until at twenty she spent most of 
her days with her books-which were, 
like her, restful, languid, misted with 
dreams-or in the walled garden with her 
beloved flowers. Rodger was the only 
boy who had ever approached her com- 
pletely at his ease. But no one discon- 
certed Rodger-and there was the fact of 
their contemplated marriage. 
Her withdrawal had blurred the actual 
outlines of her character in a romantic 
light resulting almost in a legend. She 
became an intriguing figure, fragrant with 
mystery, separated from our normal, 
hobbledehoy existence of school, parties, 
dances, tempestuous young love-affairs; 
the happiness and unhappiness of those 
years of our teens. Her beauty was in- 
tensified, as remote cities and dead queens 
gather about them the additional fascina- 


tion of distance. She was an ivory girl, 
provocative, alluring, unattainable. Half 
the young men of the town were secretly 
in love with her. . . . Yes, and I was in 
love with her. 


II 


THE phrase coming most often to my 
mind in connection with Rodger Canby is 
"fortune's darling." I know it is hack- 
neyed and not permitted even in the un- 
exclusive circles of the newspapers, but it 
has still a certain grace which makes it 
seem coined for this particular use. He 
was a tall, dark boy, not at all swarthy; a 
clear sort of darkness such as we associate 
with the finest Italian type. His hair was 
black, his eyes a deep brown with ex- 
traordinarily long lashes. He had a 
haughty nose, a sharp masculine jaw. 
Only his mou th did not harmonize with 
the aristocratic face. It was well shaped, 
but the lips were too heavy, the lower lip 
a trifle pendulous and very red; the blood 
appeared about to burst the thin tissue. 
Most girls admired his too red mouth. 
When he was quite young he had dis- 
played an aptitude for music; more than 
that, a distinct talent. This desire was 
cultivated by his mother and directed by 
the best teachers. He made remarkable 
progress. At nineteen he could play the 
violin, piano, and organ. His voice was 
full and pleasant, and he enjoyed singing. 
He had written a few compositions- 
waltzes, gavottes, haunting dance music 
with sensuous under-rhythms. They were 
dedicated to Helen Ortend, printed for 
private distribution, and created some 
excitement. The Canby and Ortend 
families decided his music was worthy of 
a postponement of the wedding. His par- 
ents proposed he should go to Germany 
for several years and finish his training. 
At that period no American could begin 
an artistic career without the credentials 
of a foreign education. Helen agreed, of 
course, to the scheme. AppareI1tly there 
was no change in their attitudes toward 
each other, but I am sure there was a 
fluctuation in the undercurrents of their 
lives. 
Helen loved Rodger with bewildering 
intensity. He never wearied her. Gradu- 
ally all her ideas were directed to him, 



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Rodger played and Helen, relaxed in the great shadowed chair, listcned.-Pagc 520. 


merged into his personality until she no 
longer recognized them. Her vague de- 
sires concentrated, as a lens focusses the 
sun, into her love of him, burned upon her 
heart. . . . How should I know? I was 
the only other young man who saw her. 
I was her brother, almost. Living with 
aunt and uncle, my parents dead, Helen's 
mother was my mother. I came and 
went as I chose. . . . 
Before Rodger sailed the engagement 


was announced. The dinner was Helen's 
last appearance at a social function; after 
that night the walls of her garden were 
the hori.wns of the universe. Had her 
father lived this might not have hap- 
pened, but 1\lrs. Ortend, herself a solitary 
woman, still mourning the man she had 
loved, always acceded to Helen's de- 
sires. At the dinner Helen sat quiet and 
remote, luminous beside the dark grace 
of her fiancé. A little smile turned the 
5 1 9 



520 


THE GOLDF
' CALF 


edges of her lips. F or some reason I 
thought of Sir Galahad and the Grail. It 
seemed indecent to expose such happiness 
to the chattering crowd about the table. 
The three months preceding Rodger's 
departure brought to Helen the flowering 
of her life. Like a strange blossom she 
unfolded the hidden color of her love, 
spreading it before the eyes of her lover in 
charming, faint surprises; disclosing all 
the secret glory of her shy dreams. Nev- 
ertheless;her mode of living did not alter, 
and, as far as she knew, only Rodger saw 
this exquisite transfiguration. They were 
together constantly, but in particular 
Sunday was the day dedicated to his 
adoration. He ate supper at her home on 
Sunday evening and afterward they went 
to the parlor, where Rodger played and 
Helen, relaxed in the great shadowed 
chair, her pale hair falling covertly 
across her cheeks, listened and felt her 
life draining from her into the possession 
of that slender young man with the over- 
red mouth. 
When he had sailed Helen returned to 
her placid existence. She wrote to him 
twice a week. I know; I mailed the letters 
with her round, impersonal chirography 
designating :ðlunich, Berlin, Vienna, or 
Paris; following the uneven circle of his 
journeys like bits of her own serene spirit. 
Rodger's answers were incoherent en- 
thusiasms for the student life, descrip- 
tions of the excursions so popular in those 
days, anecdotes of new friendships, or im- 
modest reports of what teachers said con- 
cerning his music. These general portions 
Helen read to her mother, who retold them 
until Rodger became to the townspeople 
a genius who would return some day 
and place Hempfield foremost in artistic 
realms. 
Days, weeks, and months passed with 
few changes beyond occasional marriages, 
babies, new business ventures or failures. 
Two years passed. The boys and girls 
whom we had regarded as children 
lengthened their trousers and dresses. 
The indifferent seasons repeated their 
continuous variety. I went to Yale; 
fretted through a semester and came 
back to town; decided to become a writer 
and spent all my time fishing in the river. 
:My appearances at the Ortend home be- 
gan to resemble formal callsc Helen's 


mother was not well. Helen received me 
as often as I cared to go, but our conver- 
sations were strained. She thought only 
of one man. . . . Another year linked 
with the unseen chain of the past. Sud- 
denly, as though nature resented this 
monotony, our feeling of security, Rod- 
ger's father was killed in a railway acci- 
dent, and my aunt and uncle, both of 
them quite old, died within a few weeks of 
one another, leaving me a fixed income of 
three thousand dollars. 
Everyone thought Rodger would come 
home, but his mother refused to permit 
him and, I think, he did not insist. He 
had been gone a little more than three 
years. Hempfield depressed me. It was 
inert, stagnant. I went to New York, 
later to Chicago, and then on to San 
Francisco. !\of y life was a mirage. Ac- 
tuality appeared remote, too small to be 
attractive. The foggy, steep city quieted 
me. I dozed through five years, pruning 
my mind of stray, unrelated fancies, hop- 
ing some day to gather the clippings into 
a book, but not too much concerned with 
the realization. Helen wrote to me once 
when her mother died. She did not men- 
tion Rodger, but I inferred he was still 
abroad. She told me the hyacinths were 
pluming their' white cones in the garden; 
the river had risen beyond the highest re- 
corded mark, sweeping away all the boat- 
houses and the old covered wooden 
bridge; 
lartha, their maid, was going 
deaf; lightning had destroyed the colonial 
steeple on the Presbyterian church. . . . 
I wondered what would happen now, 
I went back to Hempfield the year be- 
fore the San Francisco fire, and rented a 
small house on the street behind the Or- 
tend home. From the window of mv 
sitting-room I could look down through 
the narrow leaves of some peach-trees 
into Helen's garden. I called on her at 
once and she received me as though I were 
returning from an errand to the corner 
grocery. The casualness irritated me. 
We sat talking, fitting together the ab- 
sent years. She was astonishingly un- 
changed; a trifle thinner,. more abstract:d; 
if possible, more beautiful. Her VOIce 
bewitched me. I tried desperately to 
make her talk of herself, but she evaded 
my questions without seeming to under- 
stand my intention. She nodded her 



THE GOLDEN CALF 


521 


lovely, pale head, smiled; mentioned the 
dairy routine of her existence. We drank 
tea, brought in by :l\Iartha, who appar- 
ently had diminished an inch for each 
departed twelvemonth. I was embar- 
rassed in that tranquil, twilit room; said 
stupid things and felt clumsy. As I was 
leaving she said: 
"Rodger is having a little success in 
Europe. He has given a few recitals. 
Played several of his own compositions. 
He thinks another year will be enough." 
She did not ask me to come again. I 
departed enervated with the emotions I 
had thought stifled forever. 
Rodger did come home the next year. 
He arrived with trunks of clothes, an equal- 
ly elaborate store of foreign phrases; de- 
scended from the e:x-press to the fanfare of 
a flare head on the front page of The Star. 
He had changed. For the worse, I 
thought, but no one agreed with me. His 
face had lost its masculine angularity. 
It was smooth, pink, plump. He wore a 
mustache that curled in the fashionable 
manner. His waist had thickened, and 
his lips seemed brighter than ever. A 
monocle hung down on a black grosgrain 
ribbon. The townspeople gazed at it with 
respect. A dozen persons, mostly women, 
said to me: "Doesn't Rodger Canby look 
splendid! So stylish, you know. And 
foreign. With a monocle." . .. There 
would be a pause and then: "I suppose 
they will be married at once." . . . 
Shortly after his arrival Rodger gave a 
recital. I attended. I don't know what 
I expected; certainly not what happened. 
I suppose, secretly, I wanted him to fail. 
Instead he tore me apart with his music, 
tossed, buffeted, agonized me. His vir- 
tuosity was superb; he played with the 
most acute understanding, with feeling. 
As encores he gave several of his own 
compositions. They were gorgeous. Oh, 
he could play! I left while the applause 
was bursting about his bland, suave face. 
After that . . . nothing. The antici- 
pated marriage was not announced. He 
was ather house every day. Each eve- 
ning I saw them walking the garden 
among the autumnal golden-glow and 
asters. "Why don't they get married?" 
"What's the matter?" "Isn't it queer?" 
The questions were almost tangible upon 
the disturbed air. 
VOL. LXXVIU.-38 


I avoided meeting him for a long time. 
It was in late November, I think, when 
we came abruptly together. There had 
been a light fall of snow, a gentle powder- 
ing over the brown earth. The day was 
crusted with brilliant sunlight. A rest- 
less wind twirled the white flakes along 
the bricks. He wore a coat reaching to 
his ankles. It was fur-lined and the fur 
turned back at the neck in a wide collar. 
He looked as I vaguely imagined Russian 
noblemen must appear striding along the 
N evski. 
" Aah ! " he said through the fur. 
"J\;Iiserable weather, I can't stand cold. 
It makes me frantic. I'm going to Italy 
in a few days. I'll stay there until spring. 
This horrible place. . . ." 
He drew the collar closer and hurried 
on. Indeed he did go, but the death of 
his mother brought him home within six 
months. 


III 


THEY were alone now, Helen Ortend 
and Rodger Canby, entering upon the 
last act of their extravaganza. It was a 
long act, with little variety until the cur- 
tain was ready to fall. It was fantastic, 
with its motives deep in some obscurity, 
lost in those unfathomable caverns of 
human impulse that produce the incred- 
ible commonplaces of brother and sister 
living for years under the same roof with- 
out speaking, husbands and wives signing 
purity pacts. "Beauty and the Beast"; 
the old fairy-tale retold, but not for chil- 
dren. 
Rodger settled in the gray stone man- 
sion of the Canbys, brough t a new piano 
from N ew York, and never played in 
public. Strange as it may seem, he be- 
came organist in the :Methodist church- 
and that was all. There was no mention 
of a wedding. After the first shock the 
situation resolved into a town joke. If 
anyone had an unpleasant job to do he 
would say: "Sure. Just as soon as Rod- 
ger Canby marries Helen Ortend." It 
was a simile of futurity; of any event 
never to be completed. 
Rodger did not withdraw as Helen had 
done. He held himself aloof, but gave 
no impression of snobbishness. In a 
subtle manner he managed to establish 
the idea that his actions were the result of 



522 


THE GOLDEN CALF 


temperament. People will forgive much 
on these grounds. Besides, Helen Ortend 
was almost forgotten; not actually, of 
course, merely shelved as one of those 
"queer things" having nothing to do with 
the busy gossip of each day. A few re- 
tained the bright image of her beauty; 
myself, Doc Saylor, Ramsey Doane, who 
had married Betty Parker because he 
could not marry Helen. 
Rodger did not abandon his music. He 
practised every morning. Often I wan- 
dered by his house and listened to the 
notes, diluted by glass and stone barriers; 
distant, faint voices crying untranslatable 
magic upon the quiet street. I had been 
an irregular churchman, but I went every 
Sunday to hear him. No one in Hemp- 
field had ever heard such music. Bach, 
Handel, the religious necromancy of 
Palestrina; a thousand things new to us. 
When the service was over he chatted for 
a while, pleasantly enough, with anyone 
who wished to talk to him, and then went 
home-or so we thought. When he was 
asked about his career, he smiled and 
said: "There's plenty of time." The re- 
mark had a furtive mystery, like a prom- 
ise, slyly given, of some waiting revelation. 
But the years continued and the words re- 
tained their secret. He grew fatter, a 
little slovenly; the flesh descended and 
covered the rim of his tight collars. 
Helen? I don't know. I saw her only 
in the garden, still slender, gracious, re- 
strained. She wore a silver-gray Floren- 
tine scarf-given her by Rodger-over 
the pallid halo of her hair, shadowing her 
face, transforming her to a ghost of 
twilight. Rodger dined with her every 
Sunday evening. He would arrive about 
four. If the weather was kindly they sat 
outdoors; if stormy, somewhere in the 
faded house. I knew he was there. I 
could see 
Iartha bustling in the kitchen, 
talking to herself and spilling things. At 
ten minutes of eight he left for the 
church. I went about the same time. 
Often I'd see the door open, a rectangle 
of light tumble noiselessly upon the 
porch. The door closed. I could hear his 
heavy feet scuffing the bricks ahead of me. 
Each month he made a visit to New York; 
from l\10nday until Saturday. Endless, 
futile years. Let me see. Mrs. Canby 
would be dead twelve years this spring. 


Helen must be forty-one. I'll be forty- 
four and Rodger is a year younger. . . . 
I don't know exactly when the rumors 
started. They flew in flocks of buzzard 
words across the town. Rodger had been 
seen by a milkman coming from a certain 
house between three and four on a Mon- 
day morning. 
Two Greek girls and their mother lived 
in the house. There were not many for- 
eigners in Hempfield then, and most of 
them quiet, sober people; Swedes, some 
Italians, several Armenian Jews. The 
Anapolies were a bad lot. The father was 
a thief. He stole from habit, training, and 
desire. He was serving, even then, a 
five-year sentence for his last exploit. 
The girls were beautiful and shiftless; 
dark, lithe young animals with great, 
languid eyes. Their occupation was un- 
spoken knowledge. The mother I had 
seen once or twice. She was a cripple 
with a face where evil smiled openly. 
I left my lunch half-eaten and went to 
find the milkman. He admitted he might 
have been mistaken. Dawn was scarcely 
come. His team had been a block awaý. 
All that day Ramsey Doane and I fol- 
lowed the rumor, quietly obliterating its 
ugly trail. "I feel just like Saint Patrick 
chasing the snakes out of Ireland," said 
Ramsey with a wan smile. But we could 
not quite destroy it. 
The next Sunday I saw Rodger and 
Helen sitting in the garden. She read to 
him while he crossed his hands on his too 
apparent stomach. That night I did not 
go to hear him play. . . . 
It was a breathless spring. The days 
drifted through the green haze of the 
young trees. The air was giddy with life. 
The world hung in a tumult of light. The 
brilliance struck upon you with an actual 
impact. I could get nothing done, but I 
had been in that condition for a long time, 
and a season more or less did not seem of 
importance. 
I arose early one Monday morning for a 
walk. There were no people about, only 
Ramsey Doane hurrying along the street 
toward me. He waved and started to 
run. His shadow came before him in dis- 
torted bounds. I wondered what could 
have happened. 
"Here's a mess," he gasped. "Come 
along." 




 , " 


 
'\" 
'- 
.... \ 


t, 


't. 


. 
 


j; 


'. 
" ' 


to, ,; 


Ii 
.
 
< .."" . 


[1 


From a drawing by Edward Shenton. 
He looked as I vaguely imagined Russian noblemen must appear striding 
along the Nevski.-Page 52!. 


5 ,.,
 
-.) 



524 


THE GOLDEN CALF 


"\Vhat's wrong?" I said. 
"A hell of a jam. Rodger Canby's 
dead." 
The statement seemed ridiculous. The 
afternoon before he had been with Helen. 
"Dead, I say," Ramsey repeated. 
"In the Anapolies' house. Doc Saylor's 
there. He sent for you." 
"The Anapolies?" 
Ramsey looked at me with his tired 
smile. 
" One of the girls came after Sa y- 
lor. . . ." 
It was a mess. 'Ve reached the miser- 
able shack. Saylor took us into the dingy 
parlor. There was Rodger's body on a 
cheap plush sofa and covered with a red- 
and-white-checkered tablecloth. 
"No use," said Saylor. "He's been 
dead some time. Several hours. Heart 
failure. I'm having him taken home at 
once. " 
"How did it happen?" I asked. 
" The girls said he was sitting in a 
chair drinking some wine. He gave a 
funny gasp and dropped the glass. When 
they spoke to him he was dead." 
Saylor was the town coroner. He fum- 
bled 'with the collarless neck-band of his 
shirt. 
"Dick," he said, "we've got to keep 
this quiet." 
The two girls stood, shoulder to shoul- 
der, in the darkest corner of the room. 
"Did he come here often?" asked Ram- 
sey, pointing toward the couch. 
"Every Sunday," one of the girls an- 
swered. 
" Very long?" 
"Good many years." 
"Let's get some air," said Ramsey. 
"Keep it quiet," repeated Saylor. 
As well try to silence the wind. In an 
hour the news was in every house-a de- 
lectable appetizer, served with the morn- 
ing rasher of bacon. I rushed to see 
Helen. It was a terrible interview. I had 
not spoken to her for years. And when I 
saw her, her hair caught hastily in a soft 
coil at her neck, my voice deserted me. I 
stood and stared. She guessed, of course, 
that something concerning Rodger had 
brought me. She lifted one hand and 
tapped at the corners of her eyes. I was 
amazed her hands were so youthful. She 
seemed younger Ùlan she was; her disor- 


dered hair, the loose dressing-gown; she 
looked tired, as though she had danced 
late the night previous. . . . 
I was mercifully brutal, I hope. I told 
her at once; all lies, except that Rodger 
was dead. 
Luckily there was no possibility of it 
getting in print until the next morning. 
I went to see the editor of The Star. He 
was very pompous; I suppose he thought 
himself impressive. He spoke about 
newspapers "standing for the truth," 
"organs of honesty," "no privileges for 
any class," "the unmuzzled press." The 
words filled the mean office. He lolled in 
his chair and smacked his lips. Before 
his eyes were the figures of a record sale. 
The town trembled with righteous in- 
dignation. Suddenly Helen was remem- 
bered. Everything was remembered. 
No epithet was too strong for the dead 
man's epitaph. He was a scoundrel, a 
roué, a lecher. Reporters went to the 
Ortend house. They did not enter. I 
saw to that. About three in the afternoon 
Doc Saylor came to see me. 
"Dick," he said, "go tell that blasted 
rotter of an editor Rodger has left all his 
money to the town to build and maintain 
an art gallery. I'll bring a copy of the 
wiìl to him later." 
He wore a collar now but no tie. 
Twisting the gold-plated button, he mur- 
mured: "\Vhat a stroke I" 
The Tuesday morning Star gave the 
first page to Rodger Canby; his talent, 
his charming personality, his public spirit, 
his sudden, unfortunate demise, his gener- 
ous will. His death had been in keeping 
with his life. Quietly, peacefully he 
passed away in the famous Canby man- 
sion. . . . Yes, that's true. . .. In 
the great four-poster where so many hon- 
orable citizens of his family had rested 
and sunk, finally, to the last sleep. . . . 
I took a paper to Helen. She read here 
and there, in a scattered sort of way, and 
said: 
"That's just like him. Just like him. 
He was a great man. We didn't quite 
understand him." 
I left to escort the Anapolies to a train 
headed for remote places. 
Hempfield people are a clannish group. 
They are proud of their town. They love 
its traditions and plan many beauties for 



BROKEN MEATS 


its future. The Canby Memorial Art 
Gallery, designed by one of the best archi- 
tects in the country, and furnishing many 
small plums for various persons in the 
course of its building, is the keystone for 
contemplated civic developments on a 
large scale. Townspeople mention it with 
arrogance. Visitors come from many 
places to gaze at the pictures, most of 
which are of indifferent merit. Still they 
are ours and the fact gives them a value. 
Overnight the contempt for Rodger 


525 


Canby vanished. Now it is forgotten. 
A capable sculptor is modelling a figure 
of him, heroic in size, to be placed in 
the rotunda of the gallery. The broad 
street, lined with plane-trees, some day to 
lead from the railroad station to the 
building, will be called Canby Drive. 
Rodger is spoken of in voices muffled by 
respect. . . . 
And, as one town wag remarked: "Any- 
way, he died sitting in a chair, didn't 
he?" 


Broken Meats 


BY GORDON HALL GEROULD 



:IL
Ä R. THOMAS SPEED- 

 WELL, president of 
t1 U M r the Speedwell Com- 
. -,;. 
 ' pany, leaned forward 
slightly in his desk- 

 ,,_J 
 chair and emphasized 
1Ç1Ä his question with a 
downward sweep of 
the hand. 
"Why do you wish to publish the 
thing? Do you mind telling me?" 
To the beginner in the trade of letters 
-let us distinguish carefully between the 
art and the craft-Mr. Speedwell would 
have been an inspiring spectacle. His 
considerable bulk, his good gray clothes, 
his well-nurtured face with its prominent 
but not obtrusive mustache, would have 
represented the topmost pinnacle of suc- 
cess. To talk with him would have been 
a fearful pleasure. 
The young man who sat opposite was, 
however, inured to publishers and the 
spectacle of their grandeur, and he did not 
seem afraid of Mr. Speedwell. Instead, 
he was making himself as comfortable as 
possible, and twisting a stick negligently 
with his right hand. He had been accus- 
tomed to publishing-houses from his boy- 
hood, for he was Bradbury Grantham. 
George Grantham's only son could not 
have been expected to regard pubJishers 
with awed respect: ever since he could 
remember, he had heard about them as 
docile creatures who were always begging 


more books of his father and forever of- 
fering better terms. With the house of 
Speedwell, to which the elder Grantham 
had been extraordinarily faithful-as any 
one who keeps the run of imprints will 
remember-he was especially familiar. 
Even in boyhood he had sometimes vis- 
ited the offices, and he had formed the 
habit, later, of running in on his own 
account. Since he had taken over the 
responsibility of managing George Grant- 
ham's literary estate, he had come in 
still more frequently. 
He looked now at Mr. Speedwell in 
some perplexity, frowning a little as he 
repeated the question. "\Vhy do I wish 
to publish it? I don't see why there 
should be any doubt about that. It's 
the most important thing that father left, 
and it ought to come out as a matter of 
course. " 
"I'm-I'm inclined to think, for my 
part, that it had better not be published." 
A trace of hesitancy in speech ":as one of 
Thomas Speedwell's most baffling traits. 
It accorded ill with his appearance of 
force and with his habitual decisiveness 
of actionc 
"I can't see why you say that." 
Young Grantham's tone was rather pet- 
ulant. "The book is complete. Even if 
it isn't up to father's best-and I don't 
say it is-the public ought to have it." 
"I wish I could-could agree with you. 
You are right, of course, in saying that it 



526 


BROKEN MEATS 


is ready for the press. Your father was 
always careful about his manuscripts, 
and this one is characteristically prepared. 
Only-I hope you won't press for its 
publication. " 
"But why?" asked Grantham. "'V on't 
it sell?" 
"Ah, yes-" Speedwell paused. "It 
would, unquestionably, do very well, 
very well indeed. Anything of your 
father's would, of course, do excellently 
-perhaps even better than before his 
death. That isn't the point I'm making. 
I do wish you'd drop it, Mr. Grantham." 
" You stand to make more than my 
sister and I do out of it." The tone was 
even more impudent than the words. 
Speedwell did not wince. " You must 
remember," he said most gently, "that 
I have always taken a very great interest 
in your father's work. He was older 
than I, to be sure, but he did me the 
honor of consulting with me rather more 
closely than authors generally do with 
their publishers. I can't believe that he 
would like to have the book printed." 
"Apparently you think it isn't any 
good, then?" 
"No-no. I wouldn't say that. Any- 
thing he did could not help having dis- 
tinction of a sort. Besides, as I've al- 
ready admitted, it would find a sale. 
I'm not even sure that it wouldn't reach 
a public which was not always interested 
in your father's writings." 
Bradbury Grantham ceased playing 
with his stick and leaned forward eagerly. 
"I agree with you about that," he said, 
"and so do two or three other men to 
whom I've shown the book. It has a 
more modern note, hasn't it?" 
"Modern? 'Vell, yes; perhaps the term 
applies. Certainly nothing else your fa- 
ther did struck quite the same note." 
"Precisely. There you arec That's 
why I feel particularly anxious to have it 
come out. It may not be up to his best, 
as I've said, but it will show the public 
that he kept abreast of the times, to the 
very last." 
Speedwell swung gently in his chair for 
a little before he replied. "Do you hap- 
pen to know," he asked, "when the book 
was begun?" 
"No." The young man grew impa- 
tient. "Nothing has turned up by which 


it can be dated very accurately. Father 
never said much about what he was doing 
at any given time. I make out, however, 
that he must have done it not very long 
before he was taken ill." 
"He began it twenty years ago. I've 
been looking up some memoranda, so I 
can be very precise about that, fortu- 
nately." 
Grantham carried off his embarrass- 
ment with a laugh. "A bad guess of 
mine, then! I didn't know you had ever 
seen the thing before." 
"In its completed form I haven't. 
Indeed, until you brought it in I wasn't 
aware-that your father had gone on 
with it. He never told me. I saw a few 
chapters only. He sketched the plot to 
me orally, I remember." 
"Oh, I see." 
"Yes. I advised him not to continue. 
You wouldn't-wouldn't know, of course; 
but I think some of the difficulties he was 
facing at the time probably affected the 
novel. Probably the-I suppose I mean 
the unpleasant quality in it can be ac- 
counted for in that way." 
"I think you'll find," put in Grantham, 
"that people in general won't think any 
the worse of it for that. The vein isn't 
so high and mighty, perhaps, as the one 
he usually worked, but it can't fail to be 
appreciated. It's unsparing criticism of 
life that he gives in this, but it can't hurt 
his reputation to let the world know what 
he was capable of in that line." 
The publisher clasped his hands and 
looked sadly down the long vista of light 
oak that was visible through the open 
door. "I hate to say it," he murmured, 
almost as if to himself, "but, if anyone 
else had written the book, I should call 
the picture of life that it gives rather 
muddy, No-no. Really, it isn't up to 
the mark, 
1:r. Grantham, and it had 
better be suppressed." 
"Y ou come back to that every time, 
:Mr. Speedwell, but you must see that 
there's room for difference of opinion 
about its quality. Now, Henshaw, for 
example-I showed it to him. He has a 
keen eye, and he thinks it one of the finest 
things father ever did." 
"Does he, indeed?" Speedwell's tone 
was polite, but unenthusiastic. "I won- 
der whether he may not be-may not be 



BROKEN MEATS 


misled by the excitement of seeing some- 
thing new by your father. I took up the 
manuscript very eagerly, myself, when I 
thought it was really something new. By 
the way, it may interest you to know that 
the story isn't worked out in at all the 
way originally intended. I have the 
useless faculty of remembering plots, you 
see. It's rather a nuisance. The whole 
thing came back to me as I read." 
"That's very interesting," said Grant- 
ham. "I suppose he must have dropped 
the book after he showed you the earlier 
chapters, and have changed his plan when 
he took it up again." 
"No doubt-that was the way of it. 
I think, however, he would have done 
more wisely to keep his earlier plan. It 
gave some strikingly good opportuni- 
ties that I missed in reading this." He 
touched the typewritten sheets on his 
desk. "The latter part seems to me 
very weak. But that is beside the ques- 
tion." 
"There isn't any question in my mind, 
:Mr. SpeedwelL" Grantham began once 
more to play with his stick. "Of course 
if you don't wish to print the book, I can 
take it to somebody else. I brought it to 
you because it seemed more decent to 
have everything together; but I can find 
a dozen houses that would snap it up in 
a minute." 
"I am aware of that." Speedwell per- 
mitted himself a momentary lapse from 
his slow suavi ty. "Otherwise I shouldn't 
be wasting your time in discussion, you 
know. I see no reason why anyone should 
publish the book. I hope you'll burn it." 
Young Grantham grew white, clearly 
with anger. "I shouldn't have any right 
to do that," he burst out; "and, besides, 
I can't afford to." 
"Oh, I'm sorry." Speed\vell's voice be- 
came instantly sympathetic. Then he 
hesitated with embarrassment. "But- 
but surely, your father-" There was a 
questioning emphasis on the broken 
words. 
"Yes," said Grantham with a little 
shrug. "The royalties amount to some- 
thing, and the investments are sound. 
Only you know what it costs to live now- 
adays. I have to keep up the little place 
in the country, and-well-one must have 
some sort of hole in the wall in town. 


527 


There's my sister, besides, with her chil- 
dren-she has her share. What's left for 
my wife and me isn't so much." 
Speedwell wrinkled his forehead at this 
too candid statement. "I see. However, 
you can't complain that the volume of 
your father's letters hasn't done welL 
Personally I have been very much grati- 
fied by the sale it has found. You put it 
together extremely well, to be sure, and 
the returns have been most-yes, most 
satisfactory." 
"Oh, the letters!" Young Grantham 
bit his lip nervously. "They haven't 
done much more than keep my car run- 
ning, you know. I'm not complaining; I 
simply wish to show you that I can't af- 
ford to let a good thing go by. More than 
that, how do we know-any of us-that 
my father wouldn't have printed the 
thing when he got to it? He always kept 
things by him a long while, till he was 
satisfied with them-or disgusted." 
" Yes, he had a conscience. That's why 
-why I find it hard-to believe he would 
have put this into print. Don't you 
see? " 
"No, I don't see," answered the young 
man hotly. "Why should he have gone 
to the trouble of typewriting the manu- 
script so carefully, or getting it copied-I 
don't know whether he did it himself-if 
he didn't intend to turn it over to you?" 
Speedwell nodded, as if in assent. "I 
can't make that out," he confessed, "but 
I don't feel so sure as you do about his in- 
tentions. l\tloreover, I do think it likely" 
-he hesitated-"that he would have con- 
sulted me before he came to a decision. 
He wouldn't have forced the book upon 
us-" 
"If you think I'm trying to do that," 
Grantham interrupted, "you're greatly 
mistaken. I've given you a chance at it, 
that's all. If you don't want it, I'll take 
it away and make other arrangements. I 
have the right to dispose of it as I see fit, 
and I've made up my mind that the pub- 
Hc ought to have it. I'll take it now." 
He rose and stretched out his hand to- 
ward the pile of manuscript on the table. 
"No-no! " Speedwell rose also and 
placed one hand on the precious copy, as 
if to guard it, "Please don't think of 
carrying it off now. Let us take a little 
more time to consider the situation. Per- 



528 


BROKEN l\IEA TS 


haps we shall come to an understanding, 
after all. I-I wish to talk with Orring- 
ton again. He has read it, you know." 
"Very well. I'll leave it, if you prefer, 
l\1r. Speedwell. I don't care to have the 
mattcr hanging fire too long; but a few 
days' delay makes no difference, I sup- 
posec I'll drop in again soon." 
Holding his head high, young Grant- 
ham departed. Clearly he was well 
pleased with the line he had taken: never 
for a moment had he allowed the tyran- 
nical publisher to outface him. 
When he had gone, Speedwell sat for a 
few minutes at his desk, quite idle and 
whistling softly between his teeth. His 
facé grew more and more troubled. 
Finally he rose and went along the pas- 
sage till he came to the door of the little 
room where his chief literary adviser was 
sitting. Harvey Orrington was known to 
a limited circle as the author of two vol- 
umes of rather exquisite essays about lit- 
tle or nothing, and as a poet of delicate 
refinement. He was a very fat man with 
a dull eye. Just now he was deliberately 
drumming on the edge of his desk with 
the fingers of one hand while he turned 
over some proof-sheets. 
"Can you spare me a few minutes?" 
asked Speedwell, entering and shutting 
the door behind him. 
" Yes. Yes, indeed. I was only won- 
dering what to do about J\tIrs. Anstruth- 
er's punctuation. She'll never learn! 
This new thing is so full of dashes that 
you can barely see the words between 
them. And she resents alterations." 
"Oh, let Cabell attend to it. I'll talk 
with her when she comes in to make a 
row. I think she's afraid of me. But I'd 
like to discuss that book of Grantham's 
with you. Young Bradbury has just been 
in." 
"Riding a high horse? It would be an 
insult to George Grantham's memory to 
print that book." 
"So I-I argued. Unfortunately, he 
doesn't see things in that light. He in- 
sists that it be published." 
" Does he? I hope you told him he was 
a puppy. Gad!" 
"He says he needs the money." 
"I dare say he does. But that's no rea- 
son for defiling the tomb of his father." 
Orrington was getting angry. With a 


swift movement he disarranged the thin 
veil of hair that swept across his forehead. 
"He's spoiled-too good to work-that's 
what's the matter. It's a great pity that 
men of genius couldn't hire somebody to 
spank their progeny for them. Puppy! " 
"\-Vhat-what you say is perfectly true, 
Orrington." Speedwell was unruffled. 
"There's no use in sputtering, however. 
What we've got to find is some way of 
meeting the situation." 
"Tell him you'll be damned if you pub- 
lish it. Throw it in his face. Kick him 
out of the office." 
Speedwell shook his head. "I don't 
know what-what I should do without 
you, Orrington, but sometimes-I-I fear 
you're not wholly practical. You see, 
young Grantham threatens to peddle the 
book about if we don't take it. That 
might make matters worse. Do you sup- 
pose we could get it out in some form that 
would kill it-something very expensive, 
perhaps? " 
"That wouldn't do any good, I'm 
afraid," answered Orrington, sighing. 
"It would make all the more noise. In 
six months we'd have an irresistible call 
for a cheap edition, and we'd have to 
print one." 
"I suppose so," said Sp
edwell. 
"That's one trouble, Grantham is-is 
perfectly right in arguing that the public 
would buy the thing. When he says that, 
what's left for me to say? I'm supposed 
to be a publisher, not a curator of literary 
reputations." 
"Oh, if you put it that way, what's the 
use of having a conscience at all? It's a 
bother. Can't you bribe the fellow?" 
"Bribe him? Into suppressing the 
book? How? " 
"I don't know. I'm not supposed to be 
practical. But if he won't keep the fifth 
commandment by fair means, he might be 
induced to do it by fouL" 
Speedwell was silent for a moment, con- 
sidering. "I should feel no scruple about 
doing it, I think," he said after the pause. 
"Unfortunately I don't know what I 
could offer him. He wouldn't accept any 
sum I could afford to pay for the manu- 
script outright, if I were simply going to 
burn it." 
"I suppose he wouldn't, bad luck to 
him ! " Orrington agrecd. 



BROKEN MEATS 


"I might-I might tempt him with an 
easy berth here-for a term of years." 
"Not unless you wished the rest of us 
to leave. Oh, I'd be willing to do almost 
anything to kill that book; I'd give up 
my place to him in a minute if he could be 
trusted to do the work. He must have 
got some taste rubbed off on him from his 
father, and he has ability. But it would 
be no good, I'm afraid. He'd play with 
the job. Of course you might recommend 
him highly to somebody else-if you've 
got an enemy." Orrington chuckled. 
"I'm too forgiving for that," Speedwell 
replied. "Besides, the young man knows 
the value of what he holds; he knows 
that anything George Grantham wrote 
is sure of a capital sale. Moreover, he is 
not wholly ignorant about the business 
of publishing. He'd prefer, I'm sure, to 
take his profit without working at all." 
"No doubt he would, and he'd drive a 
hard bargain With you for the privilege 
of publishing something you'd rather die 
than print." 
"Do you know," Speedwell bashfully 
surveyed one well-shod foot as he sat 
cross-legged in his chair, "I'm inclined 
to think Grantham is telling the truth 
when he says that he doesn't see anything 
wrong with the book. We must do him 
justice. I doubt whether he realizes that 
it's so bad." 
"Humph! Perhaps he doesn't; and if 
so, I'd better not give up my position. 
But what then?" 
"It's harder to deal with him, that's 
all. " 
"Oh, it's hard to deal with him anyhow 
you take it. I can see that. Unless you 
I can get one of your millionaire friends to 
make him rich overnight, I don't know 
how he can be appeased. Give him a 
plutocratic scorn for literature, and he'd 
I like to keep the ma!luscript to himself. 
He'd begin to 'collect' at once. You 
really think he likes the book, do you? 
Doesn't see how bad it is?" 
"I feel sure he doesn't. No doubt he'd 
think the same of anything his father 
wrote. Very loyal of him, but-" 
"Let me have another look at the man- 
uscript. Will you?" 
"Certainly. I'll send it back at once. 
I'm-I'm a good deal troubled." 
"I'll run it through to-night," said Or- 


529 


rington. "Perhaps something may sug- 
gest itself to me if I read it again. Mean- 
while, if you think of any way of keeping 
the wolf from the Grantham motor-car 
without sacrilege, you'll be doing a mag- 
nificent service to letters. I rather like 
the notion of a publisher's committing 
bribery to prevent the public from getting 
what it would buy like hot cakes. It 
would be a proper theme for a moral tale, 
wouldn't it?" 
"Wholly lacking in plausibility, I'm 
afraid. It would shatter every tradition 
to have a publisher appear in fiction ex- 
cept as a low-lived villain." In spite of 
the difficulties and misapprehensions that 
he had to face, Speedwell smiled as he 
returned to his own office. 
Late the following morning, Orrington 
came to him. The poet's heavy-jowled 
face, usually so good-natured, looked very 
stern. "I crave audience," he said in a 
melodramatic undertone, holding up one 
fat finger. "l\-Iay I close the door?" 
"If you're going to stage a play, per- 
haps you'd better," returned Speedwell 
drylyc "The effect-on the younger 
members of the staff, you know-might 
be bad." 
Orrington did not smile, but closed the 
door carefully and sat down. "It's about 
Grantham," he began. 
" Yes? So I ga thered. Have you dis- 
covered that the book is a masterpiece, 
after aU?" 
"I've traced the footsteps of the mas- 
ter pretty carefully, but I think we were 
dead right about refusing it. It would 
have got us into no end of hot water be- 
fore we were through with it." 
"I fear so. But just what do you 
mean? Have you found any new rea- 
sons for not taking the thing?" 
"Reasons? As plentiful as black- 
berries. We've got to stop it on all ac- 
counts. There would be a terrible sçan- 
dal if it were published." 
"Of course, of course," Speedwell 
agreed. "People would be dreadfully cut 
up at finding that George Grantham had 
written anything in that vein. I wish 
you could persuade Bradbury Grantham 
of that. I can't." 
"I will!" Orrington, in his excite- 
ment, almost shouted the promise. "Ex- 
cuse me. I'm getting corrupted by the 



530 


BROKEN MEATS 


heroes of the novels you make me read; 
but I think I can show the young man 
some things he doesn't dream of. Get 
him here, and give me a free hand, that's 
all. " 
Speedwell frowned slightly. "What 
on earth is your plan?" he asked. 
"I'm not sure whether I'm ready to 
tell you yet. In any case, I'd like to 
know whether you've discovered any 
easy way of buying him off. Do you 
mind telling me that part of it before I 
decide whether I'd better give you my 
idea-for what it's worth ? Yours may 
be better." 
"I'm afraid I haven't discovered any- 
thing-anything very satisfactory, that 
is. I did-did have the opportunity of 
talking the matter over with my friend 
Van Pelt last night. You know Van Pelt, 
of course?" 
"Only slightly, but I recognize him as 
a fitting counsellor." 
"Very interesting, what he said, I 
thought. He has always been bookish, 
you know. Wanted to write, I believe, 
but was forced very young into banking 
-case of the rich boy compelled to sup- 
port the family," 
"I understand," said Orrington. 
"Well, his first comment was that any 
publisher who got out posthumous works 
by a decent author ought to be electro- 
cuted. That didn't help greatly, as I 
indicated to him. However, that was 
merely his way of getting up steam. He 
made me tell him the whole story-very 
much interested in George Grantham, it 
seems-has a complete set of first edi- 
tions and that kind of thing." Speed- 
well hesitated. He had never caught, for 
himself, the narrative style. 
"But did he give you hints about bri- 
bery and corruption? Isn't that the 
point?" Orrington asked. 
".He did, in a way," said Speedwell. 
" At least, I'm inclined to believe that he 
worked out the thing correctly. He has 
seen something of Bradbury Grantham, 
and he thinks he knows how to make him 
useful. Possibly he does. His-his judg- 
ments are usually very sound. He's ex- 
ceedingly interested, you see; his feeling 
about Grantham is positive adoration." 
Orrington smiled. "That's good. Did 
he offer to make the son vice-president of 


something on the score of the father's 
books?" 
"No-o-o. That is, of course I didn't 
do more than lay the case before him, 
Precisely what he had in mind I don't 
know. We can leave that to him." 
"Oh, surely," Orrington agreed. 
"\Ve'll have to. I only hope that Van 
Pelt hasn't the megalomania of wealth, 
that's all. Some rich men get the notion 
that they can create a new heaven and 
a new earth with their money. That 
does very well as a comforting thought, 
but it doesn't work out satisfactorily 
in practice. When they try to remake 
even a little thing like a man,r they mess 
the job; the Jovian fiat doesn't create 
anything but an echo." 
"Van Pelt isn't like that." Speedwell's 
tone implied reproof. "If you knew him 
better, you'd realize how modest he is." 
Orrington laughed good - naturedly. 
"So much the better. I've barely met 
Van Pelt, and I merely wished to discount 
his possible inadequacy. I don't see, to 
tell the truth, just what he can do." 
"Nor do I," Speedwell answered sadly, 
"but I have some faith in him. Now, 
won't you please tell me the plan you 
have in mind?" 
Orrington considered. "I think that 
perhaps I won't," he said after a little 
pause. "I will, of course, if you insist 
on it, but I'm inclined to believe that I'd 
better confide in no one. My plan, as 
you call it, isn't really a plan, you see. 
If it's anything, it's an opening merelyc" 
" You wish me to arrange the pieces for 
your move?" Speedwell asked. 
"Precisely that. You don't mind?" 
"Not at all. I can't judge, of course, 
about the wisdom of the move unless you 
tell me; but I'm not anxious to take a 
hand. If you and Van Pelt can save poor 
Grantham's reputation, between you, I 
shall call you blessed." 
Orrington rose. " Very well, then. 
I'll be ready to do my part whenever the 
young fellow comes in. May I keep the 
manuscript? " 
"Please do." Speedwell smiled. "I'd 
-I'd be very glad never to see it again." 
Although Bradbury Grantham had 
promised-or threatened-to return very 
soon, it was, as a matter of fact, quite a 
week before he came into the office. He 



BROKEN MEATS 


entered, head high, with the evident in- 
tention of concluding his business at once 
and on his own terms. The hint of sup- 
pressed excitement that appeared in his 
carriage and even in the way he shook 
hands with the president of the company 
showed his confident expectations. He 
looked like an alert business man just 
finishing a highly successful deal. No one 
need try to thwart him, because he would 
be prepared against every attack and 
because he had determined to have his 
way. Rather handsome and perfectly 
groomed, he was not essentially different 
in appearance from a thousand other men 
at that moment sitting down in a thou- 
sand other offices all over town. Speed- 
well eyed him gloomily. 
"I've come in about that book of my 
father's, of course," he announced. 
" Yes-yes." Speedwell spoke with 
even more than his usual deliberation. 
"I had-been expecting to see you." 
"I've been out of town, as a matter of 
fact," said Grantham, leaning back in his 
chair. "It hardlv seemed worth while to 
write. But nov/I want to get the book 
off my hands at once. I've given you 
plenty of time to consider it." 
" Yes-yes, indeed. You-you have 
been very lenient with our delay, Mr. 
Grantham. I'm-I'm exceedingly sorry 
that we haven't been able to change our 
minds. \Ye still think that it would be 
very unwise to put the book on the mar- 
ket, and we hope you won't ,,,,ish to do 
so." 
"I told you what I thought about that 
the other day, Mr. Speedwell." Grant- 
ham's voice had a note of dominance in 
it. He was prepared to triumph. "I feel 
under obligation to the public to get the 
thing out without further delay." 
"I'm afraid-I'm afraid that we sha'n't 
accomplish much by argument." Speed- 
well's comment was timid, almost apolo- 
getic. " We appear to hold our opinions 
strongly, don't we?" 
"\Ve do," said Grantham firmly. "Cer- 
tainly I do, and I've no desire to discuss 
the question further. If you're sure you 
don't care to take the book, you might as 
well let me have it now. I'll make other 
arrangements at once. I believe, indeed," 
-he looked at his watch-" that I'll at- 
tend to the matter this morning. Will 


531 


you please have the manuscript turned 
over to me immediately?" 
"It-it-Mr. Orrington still has it in 
his room, I believe. By the way, he said 
he wished to speak to you about it when 
you came. I'll send for him at once." 
"That can't do any good," Grantham 
remarked loftily. "If he wishes, of course 
I will listen to what he has to say, but I 
can't give up much time to it." 
"We won't-we won't detain you very 
long, I feel sure. In the meantime I wish 
to tell you that we have decided to put 
your volume of letters into the' Argonaut 
Edition.' " 
So, with grateful tidings, the difficult 
moments before Orrington came in were 
tided over. Grantham seemed pleased, 
but by no means overjoyed. Apparently 
he had expected no less, and felt satisfied 
merely that the book and the publisher 
had done their duty. 
Orrington entered hurriedly, bearing 
the manuscript. 
"I have just been talking with Mr. 
Grantham about the new form we're giv- 
ing his book about his father," said Speed- 
well, after greetings were over. 
"Yes, very well done," returned Or- 
rington quietly. "By the way, Mr. 
Grantham, why have you never written 
anything on your own account?" 
Grantham smiled, not without a touch 
of disdain. "Isn't one writer in a family 
quite enough?" he asked lightly. 
" W e--we should welcome another," 
remarked Speedwell, then fell silent as he 
noticed Orrington's impatient gesture. 
He had promised to give his counsellor a 
free hand. 
"I'm afraid the public wouldn't," went 
on Grantham. "I should be perpetually 
compared with my father, shouldn't I?" 
"You might achieve your father's 
style." Orrington spoke again, still qui- 
etly. "That would be an achievement, 
wouldn't it?" 
"I should say so !" Grantham's laugh 
was rather forced and unpleasantly bit- 
ter. "Nobody could hope to do that." 
"Really, Mr. Grantham," Orrington 
went on more expansively, "I don't know 
that I've ever had the chance to tell you 
so; but the connective tissue in that vol- 
ume of letters that you did is almost up to 
your father's standard." 



532 


BROKEN I\1EA TS 


Grantham relaxed a little from his at- 
titude of defiant alertness. "That's very 
good of you," he said. "I suppose I may 
have caught something of the manner 
from being with him, you know." 
" No doubt you did." Orrington al- 
lowed no pause. "But that doesn't take 
away from the merit of the performance. 
I'm speaking of the matter, of course, be- 
cause I'm anxious to have you suppress 
this book of your father's and write some- 
thing for yourself." He nodded at the 
manuscript which he had laid on Speed- 
well's desk. 
"That's out of the question." Young 
Grantham resumed his pose of inflexibil- 
ity. "As I've told :Mr. Speedwell, my 
mind is quite made up about that. 
There's no use in discussing it. It strikes 
me that you're being very foolish, that's 
all. You'll have to put it in the collected 
edition later, you know, and you'll have 
to pay for the privilegec I shall see to 
that." 
Speedwell was about to speak, when 
Orrington cut in. "Are you sure, Mr. 
Grantham? Things might happen that 
would make that inadvisable." He eyed 
the young man keenly. 
"I don't know what could happen. If 
you intend to threaten me with misman- 
agement of the copyrights you hold, you 
,von't get far with it. I don't know 
whether you are aware of it, but I'm a 
lawyer by profession." 
"Ah!" Orrington shifted his position 
slightly. "That makes it simpler. We 
shall find it easier to come to an under- 
standing, I hope. I wish to ask you again: 
won't you drop this book and write some- 
thing for yourself?" 
Grantham turned red with anger and 
started from his chair. "\Vhy do you 
come back to that?" he asked. "What 
on earth has my writing got to do with the 
publication of a posthumous work of my 
father's? " 
"Everything, I'm afraid. Mr. Speed- 
well says that you excuse yourself by say- 
ing you need the money." 
"Excuse myself? Why do I need to 
excuse myself? I don't care whether you 
like the book or not; other people will." 
"Possibly." Orrington's tone was full 
of mild regret. "But I couldn't forgive 
myself if I allowed the public to get hold 


of it. I think you will see that I must pre- 
vent its publication at all hazards. I 
shall do so." 
F or the first time during the conversa- 
tion Grantham showed signs of nervous- 
ness. He fumbled with his stick and drew 
out a handkerchief that he immediately 
crumpled in one hand. He turned to 
Speedwell. "Really, Mr. Speedwell, I see 
no point in our prolonging this. If you 
and Mr. Orrington have worked up some 
dirty trick between you, 1 think you'd 
better go on with it. I can't be frightened 
by vague threats, let me assure you." 
"1-1 think you'd better hear Mr. Or- 
ring ton out," said Speedwell. "Orring- 
ton, perhaps-perhaps you'd better be a 
little more explicit, What have you in 
mind? " 
Orrington smiled. "Apparently I've 
got to be explicit, but I'd prefer to say 
nothing more. Mr. Grantham under- 
stands what I mean, and what I'd do." 
"1 understand that you're threatening 
me." 
"I've only to say a word. I'm per- 
fectly sure of my ground." 
Suddenly there came into Grantham's 
eyes a look of fear. "What are you sure 
of?" he demanded. 
"That I have it in my power to prevent 
the appearance of the book, or to expose 
your rascality if it should come out. I 
prefer to stop it right here. I've had con- 
siderable experience, :Mr. Grantham, and 
I'm not without a good deal of admira- 
tion for you. I don't see how you man- 
aged what you've done. I'm sure you 
could be a successful writer if you'd try." 
"Thanks." Grantham's attempt at 
irony faltered. "When I wish to go in 
for literature, PIllet you know." 
Orrington seemed not to hear. "Mean- 
while," he went on, "I strongly advise 
you to destroy this manuscript." He 
took the copy from the desk and held it 
in both hands. "\Vill you promise me 
that? " 
"Not till I feel sure that you know 
what you're talking about," said Grant- 
ham sullenly. He did not raise his eyes 
to meet those of the other men, both of 
whom were watching him intently. 
"I can't give you the exact page, but I 
could come pretty close to it," Orrington 
replied. 



BROKEN MEATS 


"Oh, well!" Grantham laughed un- 
easily and rose, "I can't be so clever as 
you make out, then," he said. 
"Indeed you are!" Orrington ex- 
claimed. " You've gone through a re- 
markable exercise in technic. I hope 
you'll take my advice and do something 
in your own style-something else. I feel 
sure that Mr. Speedwell would see you 
through. Wouldn't you, Speedwell?" 
"Yes-yes, indeed," said Speedwell, 
who looked dazed but eagerly interested. 
"Fortunately I need not depend on 
you." Grantham straightened up with 
some slight return of his former jaunty 
air. "I have recently gone into business, 
which makes your decision about my 
father's book quite unimportant. I have 
accepted a connection with the Van Pelt 
interests. If it will relieve your minds, 
I'm willing to say that I shall make no 
attempt to publish the noveL" 
"I congratulate you-doubly, indeed." 
Orrington held out the manuscript. 
"You'd-you'd better let me have the 
package wrapped for you," Speedwell put 
in. "I'm greatly pleased that we have 
come to an understanding, :Mr. Grant- 
ham." 
For a moment Grantham stood irreso- 
lute, half-extending his hand toward Or- 
ring ton as if to take the manuscript. 
Then he drew back and addressed Speed- 
well. "Yes, we appear to understand 
each other. I think I'll leave the manu- 
script with 
1:r. Orringtonc He seems to 
prize it more than I do." 
With a curt "good morning" Grant- 
ham took his hat and went out. When 
he had gone, the two men looked at 
each other for half a minute in silence. 
Speedwell was the first to speak. 
"\Vhat on earth, Orrington? \Vhat 
have you been doing?" He brushed his 
forehead with his hand. "I saw that you 
and Grantham had come to a-to an 
understanding, but I must confess to be- 
ing bewildered." 
"So am I, a little," Orrington admitted. 
"Grantham, however, understands per- 
fectly. What I suspect is that he found 
his father's unfinished story and com- 
pleted it. Doesn't it look like that to 
you? " 
"Yes-yes, it does. But you seemed 
very sure just now, while he was herec I 


533 


thought you must have worked out a 
complete case against him." 
"Oh, I had no doubt of it for myself, 
but I couldn't absolutely prove it. I 
had to let him do that; I had to bluff a 
little. He did an extraordinarily good 
job with the book." 
"But why? He must have foreseen 
the danger." 
Orrington's huge face put on a melan- 
choly smile. "\Vhat won't a man go in 
for when he worships mammon and his 
motor-car? Grantham wasn't busy-he 
has never really settled down to the law 
or anything else, I fancy. He was idle, 
and he needed the money. Of course it's 
a pity, with a talent like his! The novel 
is no good, in one way, but it's a remark- 
able tour de force. It's a damnably clever 
imitation of his father, and it would sell. 
I can't tell you, even now, just where he 
took the thing up." 
"But-but you-" 
"I first suspected what was up when 
you said that he defended the tone of 
the book. That set me thinking. The 
trouble with it is chiefly in the tone, of 
course. I'd been puzzled, as you were, 
by the latter part of it. \Vhen I went 
through it again, I felt sure. George 
Grantham wouldn't have written it-he 
couldn't. The conclusion was obvious. 
Only I do wish that the young man would 
take seriously to writing. He'd go far." 
Speedwell "\vrinkled his forehead. " I 
see-I see. He crumpled as soon as he 
realized that you suspected. Yes; but 
I don't share your regret that he is go- 
ing into business instead of writing. He 
hasn't the stuff in him, no matter how 
clever he is. George Grantham had the 
right tone, and his son never could get 
that." 
"I'm not so sure. Forgery has been a 
temptation to men of letters since the 
beginning, and they've been reasonably 
successful at it. Haven't they? The 
better the plagiarist, the better the plagi- 
arism. I fancy that the Grantham fam- 
ily didn't say all it could in a single gen- 
eration." 
"But think of what he did, and what 
he tried to do ! " protested Speedwell. "I 
wonder whether I ought not to warn V an 
Pelt. " 
Orrington shrugged his heavy shoul- 



534 


MASSON OF KENTUCKY 


ders. U Don't. The young man will run 
straight; you can be sure of it. 1 tell 
you, you don't understand the tempta- 
tion. There he was, needing money for 
useless luxuries to which he'd always been 
accustomed. He was conscious that he 
could write almost like his father, and 
yet that he couldn't stand comparison 
if he tried something independently in 
the same style. 1 blamed him at first, 
but 1 don't now. At least, I'm willing 
to forgive him for trying to play the 
game on us; and I'm exceedingly glad he 
caved in so easily. What 1 should have 
done if he hadn't, 1 don't quite know." 
"1-1 feel guilty about Van Pelt. 1 
think we owe our escape partly to him, 
vou know. If Grantham hadn't been 

fraid of losing this new position of his, 
1 fear he'd have brazened it out and taken 
the riskc Very noble of Van Pelt, I call 
it. I'm sure he has arranged it simply 


because he's a devotee of George Grant- 
ham," 
Orrington rose lumberingly. "Then 
you needn't pity him, my friend. I've 
no doubt, in that case, he will be rather 
proud to have Grantham's son associated 
with him. That will be his reward. Be- 
sides, he may get the fellow to work. 
Everybody is satisfied, and we've upheld 
the integrity of the publishing business 
by-" 
"By-by the skin of our teeth," sug- 
gested Speedwell, "as you wouldn't be 
likely to say in one of your essays, Or- 
rington. You don't mix metaphors in 
them as you do in ordinary life, but- 
but you're less practical. In business you 
outdo me for hard-headedness-some- 
times.' , 
Orrington chuckled as he marched 
heavily down the corridor to his own 
office. 


Masson of Kentucky 


THE STORY OF AN "IRRECLAIMABLE VAGABOND" WHO BECi\ME A 
POWER IN INDIA 


BY FREDERICK PETERSON, l\1.D. 
Formerly Professor of Mental Diseases at Columbia University; Author of 
"Chinese Lyrics," etc. 



 

 
 EDlCAL men have a 
I specIal Illterest III ex- 

 M Ih:'h, plorers, 
rst because 

 they are III a way ex- 

 ' plorers themselves in 
new fields of the hu- 
man body and new 
regions of mind and 
faculty, and secondly because the famous 
explorers whose works one likes to read 
either have been physicians themselves or 
have found it almost imperative to prac- 
tise medicine among the primitive peoples 
with whom they come in contact. Oc- 
casionally they take a doctor along with 
them, as did Sir Alexander Burnes in his 
travels in Bokhara. \Vinwood Reade, the 
African explorer, author of "The 
1artyT- 
dom of Man," was a doctor. So was 
David Livingstone. On the other hand, 


,. . FRFR . 
" 
-
 .,' 


Doughty, whose two huge volumes on 
Arabia Deserta have of late become so 
popular, had no medical education what- 
ever, but practised medicine nevertheless 
among the native Arabs, with a few sim- 
ples and much caution, as one gathers in 
reading the formidable accounts of his ad- 
ventures. 
Here is the story so far as it is possible 
to uncover it of an American boy, born 
with that strange psychological make-up 
that leads to wandering and adventure, 
who, following his dream, achieved such 
grea t things as to place him among the 
foremost explorers of the world. But, 
by some curious fate, he has been lost 
sight of in the hurry and bluster of these 
modern days. 
1 make no apology, therefore, in velltur. 
ing to present such brief facts as 1 have 



MASSON OF, KENTUCKY 


been able to gather together in the history 
of Masson of Kentucky, that" irreclaim- 
able vagabond," as Sir Thomas Holditch 
caIls him in the two chapters he devotes 
to him in his fascinating book entitled 
"The Gates of India "-a history and 
description of the regions in and around 
the only passes between the vastnesses of 
Asia and the Indian peninsula. For, ex- 
cept in this northwest, there are no gates 
to the treasure-house through the cloud- 
covered mountain walIs of snow and ice. 
Through these northwest passages have 
poured all the invaders from immemorial 
times-Aryans, Greeks, Mongols, or what- 
ever hardened race among migrating and 
conquering peoples has sought the mild 
south and wealth and ease. 
I can imagine this boy born (perhaps in 
1798) in Kentucky-born with the spirit 
of adventure among a pioneer people who, 
amidst hardships, the hostility of nature, 
the peril of Indians, were cutting farms 
out of the primeval woods and slowly 
beginning to build up a civilized common- 
wealth. These pioneers were adven- 
turous too in going into the wilderness to 
make their new homes, to hew and plow 
and plant and build, bu(this was common- 
place adventure, making little appeal to 
the inteIlect or imagination. \Vhat was 
it that spiritualized in l\fasson in Ken- 
tucky those homely ambitions that made 
him reach out into the oldest parts of the 
Old World? There were no newspapers 
or magazines or news from anywhere 
except what came by word of mouth or 
letters months old. There could have 
been few books, and yet possibly some 
well-thumbed copy of l\Iarco Polo came 
into his hands; or among his teachers, for 
he must have had some inspiring ones, per- 
I haps was some intellectual exile and wan- 
derer who told him tales of Polo, Genghis 
I Khan, and Tamerlane, Baber, the Arabian 
Nights, Egypt, Golconda. However it 
may have been, there is no trace of any 
Masson family in the historical annals of 
, Kentucky, añd we must imagine this 
American boy, about twenty years of age, 

aking his way slowly, perhaps earning 
It, on horseback, by boat or lumbering 
stage from Kentuckv wilds to New York, 
then by slow sail "to England; and we 
know with certainty that he then had 
four years of wandering and study in 


535 


England, France, and Russia before he 
reached Tiflis. 
There is no book that tells us about 
him, no note of him in any of the biog- 
raphies or encyclopædias, except a tiny 
note in Allibone's Dictionarv of Authors 
that mentions just Charles 
1:asson, with- 
out date or place of birth or death, and 
the titles of his books: "Journeys in Balo- 
chis tan, Afghanistan, the Panjab and 
Kalat" in four volumes, Bentley, London, 
18 44. "Legends of the Afghans, "in verse, 
1848. This is all that is mentioned in Alli- 
bone. I have, besides the above edition, 
another edition of the Journeys published 
earlier by Bentley, in 1842, in three vol- 
umes. Aside from what he himself reveals 
to us of his character, attainments,and do- 
ings in these books and in one lette(writ- 
ten in September, 1830, by the Resident of 
the Persian Gulf to the Chief Secretary 
of the Government of India (preserved 
in the Documents of the Bombay Secre- 
tariat), which sets forth a few things in 
his life which l\fasson had told the 
Resident, we have no data with regard 
to him, and we have no account of what 
became of him subsequently to the publi- 
cation of the last edition of his works, in 
1844. I have not been able to find a copy 
of his "Legends of the Afghans," in 
verse, published in 1848. 
The letter of the Resident of the Per- 
sian Gulf referred to says that "an 
American gentleman of the name of 
Masson arrived at Bushire from Bas- 
sadore on the 13th of June last [1830] 
describing himself as from the State of 
Kentucky and saying that he had been 
absent from his country for ten years, 
which he must consequently have left 
when he was young, as he is now only 
about two-and-thirty years of age." 
From the same letter we learn that before 
1826 he had gone in from Tiflis through 
Persia and Afghanistan to Sind, and his 
book begins after this in the autumn of 
1826, when he journeys from India via 
Peshawer to Kabul and Kandahar, in 
Afghanistan, and back to India. \Ve have 
no record of the earlier journey through 
Afghanistan. 
During the next four years he seems 
to have been continually travelling in 
these regions, though we have no dates be- 
tween till his appearance before the Res- 



536 


l\IASSON OF KENTUCKY 


ident of the Persian Gulf at Bushire, in 
June,I830c He had reached Bushire from 
Karachi in India, by sea in Arab craft, 
and he returned along the seacoast in the 
same way to India and began farther 
journeys into Kalat and Afghanistan. 
We hear of him again spending a long 
period of time in Kabul in 1832 and 1833 
and 1835, and indeed he was in that 
country for years till 1838, and early in 
1840, his fourth volume tells us, he 
had just dispatched various manuscripts 
to England for publication and started 
on another journey from Karachi to 
Kalat, which lasted into 1841. This is 
almost the last date we have of any 
personal news of him, except that the 
preface of the fourth volume of the 
second edition of his book is dated Lon- 
don, February I, 1843. 
\Ve establish however that for fifteen 
years he was a wanderer in those strange 
lands, an c, irreclaimable vagabond" truly, 
yet a nomad with more than the usual 
lure of food and self-protection and gain. 
Whatever may have been the oppor- 
tunities ill those full years of his, since 
early life he was essentially a student, 
full of a zeal for knowledge and experi- 
ence, an educated man, wisely critical of 
the disturbed political conditions in that 
quarter of the world, humanly sympa- 
thetic with his fellowmen of whatever 
race, adaptable to all conditions of life, 
and with marvellous courage to under- 
take such arduous journeys among count- 
less perilsc He had no private means. 
He travelled in Mongol or Hindoo 
costume or in rags or practically naked, 
when robbed of his all by mountain or 
desert bandits. If he needed a little 
money he would practise medicine. 
Sometimes a chieftain or official would 
make him a present of a small amount of 
money, a few rupees, but he often refused 
it. He preferred to go like the natives 
with perhaps a few coppers sewed up 
in his clothes. :1\lost of those countless 
miles which made a network as shown on 
his own map all over Balochistan, Af- 
ghanistan, and Sind he made on foot. 
He shared the meals and resting-places 
of the natives, the peasants, the pilgrims, 
the travelling merchants whom he met by 
the way. 
From such documents as we have, 


especially his own books, we find that 
he wrote in an unusually good English 
style, that he spoke French fluently, 
that he spoke Persian and Hindi, that 
he made particular studies of the lan- 
guages and dialects of the Balochs and 
Afghans, that he studied thoroughly the 
histories of these countries and peoples 
and the works of preceding travellers as 
far back as the Arab travellers and the 
routes of Alexander and Nearchus as 
described by Arrian. He made extensive 
studies of . the political conditions, the 
military forces, the revenues, trades, 
agriculture and horticulture, religion, the 
manners and customs, ethnology, the 
natural history, including quadrupeds, 
birds, insects, amphibia, botany, geology 
and mineralogy, the data of which are 
brought together in his booksc He made 
elaborate researches into the archæology 
and geography of these regions. 
He was a careful collector and investi- 
gator of coins and sent some 30,000 coins 
to the East India Museum in London 
which he had found himself or come upon 
in his travels. Perhaps his chief interests 
might be considered to be archæology and 
numismatics. He could draw very well, 
and the first three volumes of his jóurneys 
are illustrated by some twenty drawings 
of cities, landscapes, ancient monuments, 
and the like. It is amazing what this 
young Kentuckian accomplished with the 
obstacles he must have had to overcome, 
and his books are far more interesting and 
romantic to read than those of Doughty. 
Perhaps the chief fascination in Doughty 
is his extraordinary style, Biblical in its 
character with much use of archaic words, 
parentheses, and involved sentences. It 
reads more like an epic poem than a rec- 
ord of observation and travel, even 
though its geographical and I ethnic data 
afforded great help to the English in their 
Arabian campaigns. 
Sometime in 1835 Masson accepted a 
proposal from the Indian Government to 
act as British agent and to keep them in- 
formed as to affairs in Kabul, but becom- 
ing dissatisfied with British governmental 
methods he resigned three years later a 
position which he called "disagreeable 
and dishonorable." He had nine years' 
intimate acquaintance with the Afghans 
and saw with consternation the way the 



MASSON OF KENTUCKY 


ignoran t and foolish officials of the Indian 
Goverrunent were beginning to muddle 
up affairs between the two nations. Hol- 
ditch says apropos of this that the Indian 
Government officials at that time were 
but amateurs in their knowledge of Af- 
ghan politics compared with Masson, and 
that much of the horrors of subsequent 
events might have been avoided could 
Masson have been admitted freely and 
fully to their counsels. Thus came the 
first Afghan war, with its complete de- 
struction"of the British army (1838-1841). 
The Oxford History of India tells the story 
and says of Lord Auckland, the Governor 
of India, that nobody would have "sup- 
posed it possible that he would drag the 
honor of England in the dirt and expose 
India to the most shameful humiliation 
she had ever suffered." 
In the preface to "The Gates of India" 
Holditch says: "My excuse for giving so 
large a place to the American explorer 
Masson, for instance, is that he was first 
in the field at a critical period of Indian 
history, Apart from his extraordinary 
gifts and power of absorbing and collating 
information, history has proved that on 
the whole his judgment both as regards 
Afghan character and Indian political 
ineptitude was essentially sound." 
In the two chapters devoted to Masson 
he gives him much praise. He says: 
"There was at least one active European 
agent in the field who was in direct touch 


537 


with the chief political actors in that 
strange land of everlasting unrest, and 
who has left behind him a record which is 
unsurpassed on the Indian frontier for the 
width of its scope of inquiry into matters 
political, social, economic, and scientific, 
and the general accuracy of his conclu- 
sions. This was the American, Masson." 
Elsewhere he says there is a peculiar value 
in the records of this traveller, that they 
are as valuable now as they were eighty 
years ago, and that no narrative of adven- 
ture that has ever appeared before or since 
in connection with Afghan exploration 
can rival his for interest. " Nothing 
seems to have come amiss to his inquiring 
mind. Archæology, numismatics, botany, 
geology, history-it was all new to him, 
and an inexhaustible opportunity lay be- 
fore him. He certainly made good use of 
it." "He was a wide observer and must 
have been the possessor of a most remark- 
able memory. He was indeed a whole in- 
telligence department in himself." " As 
an explorer in Afghanistan he stands alone. 
His work has never been equalled." 
It was a long way in those days from 
Kentucky to Afghanistan, and one won- 
ders what burning fires of imagination led 
this mysterious and unknown youth from 
the crude and rough borders along the 
Ohio River to the magic banks of the In- 
dus and Oxus to achieve there fame and a 
great name, even if for a moment, in the 
century he has been forgotten. 


VOL. LXXVIII.-39 



Boys and Poetry 
BY MATTHEW \VILSON BLACK 


.i. 
 : .i. OME weeks ago there 
- .. : - came to my theme- 

 
s 
 litter
d desk a letter 
''rl 
. bearIng the super- 
I scription of a "cozy" 

, I 
 little "art bookshop" 
Ä located down on 
quaint Camac Street, 
a romantic byway which does for our city 
what "The Village" might, but does not, 
do for New York. I knew the charming 
proprietress, and I knew what the letter 
contained: an invitation to "give a little 
talk" to the "patrons of my little shop" 
("your message about such and such a 
book or so-and-so, the new novelist, would 
fit in so nicely"). My reflections, as I slit 
the envelope and read its contents, were 
mildly cynical. Public lectures-giving 
them and going to them-are a literary 
weakness of present-day America. They 
have been the intellectual ruin of wiser 
men than I; and besides, I was too busy 
to sally forth to fill in the hour before tea, 
unless I found an opportunity to be really 
helpful on some subject that was near to 
my heart. 
"If," was my answer, "you are inter- 
ested in either of the things I care about 
most in all the world-boys or poetry-I 
shall be glad to talk." 
Her reply was prompt and also stimu- 
lating. "Why not talk about both to- 
gether? I shall invite a hundred poetry- 
lovers, teachers, older brothers and sisters, 
parents who are continually asking, 'Can't 
you give me something that will get my 
William or my Ethel interested in poet- 
ry ?' I do hope you can tell us something 
encouraging and make some helpful, 
practical suggestions." 
Well, after six happy though hectic 
years spent teaching literature at a large 
university, I could and did. The hundred 
devotees, or a percentage of them large 
enough to assure me that the subject was 
to them a live one, assembled. I talked 
earnestly, but cheerfully, for I have a 
deep and abiding faith in poetry and what 
538 


it can do. It is my way of saving souls, 
But, as so often happens, I received from 
the subsequent discussion more than I 
gave. I came away with impressions 
which have kept me thinking about this 
significant and fruitful puzzle ever since, 
Incidentally I have been wondering 
whether my audience, in interest and in 
point of view, were not typical of a hun- 
dred similar groups in other cities. 
Above all else, they seemed to me to 
exaggerate the hopelessness of the situ- 
ation. "The weak point in your armor, 
if I may say so," challenged one man, a 
dramatic critic on one of the papers, "is 
that you talk as though boys read poetry. 
As a matter of fact, scarcely anyone 
reads poetry, or even buys it. The poetry 
alcove in a bookstore is about the one 
spot in our whole civilization of stone 
and wheels and collective mediocrity, 
where a man can be sure of being quiet 
and alone." "I don't know what Amer- 
ica's coming to," said a woman. "We 
have ceased to dream dreams. When I 
think of what 'Pippa Passes' meant to 
us! And my son and daughter will not 
even read it." And there was general 
agreement. Some one quoted solemnly, 
" Wi thou t vision the people perish," 
And, "Frankly, none of my friends, either 
boys or girls, ever read a word of poetry," 
cried a girl, to cap the climax. 
Of course, it is undeniably true that 
poetry is less widely read to-day than it 
was, say, a hundred years ago. Times 
have changed when one is asked to ap- 
pear before a group of reading people, 
cultivated people, and talk to them op- 
timistically about literature in its rarest, 
its quintessential form. Suppose for a 
moment the little bookshop had been in 
one of the byways off Fleet Street in 
London just a century since. Suppose 
my audience had been ladies in poke 
bonnets, in elbow gloves, and little heel- 
less slippers tied on with narrow ribbons; 
and gentlemen in pantaloons, swallow- 
tails and double-breasted waistcoats, bea- 



BOYS A
D POETRY 


ver hats, side-whiskers, with long hair 
curling over their stocks. Suppose that 
they had driven in from the \Ves t End of 
London, deserting the Ring and Rane- 
lagh for an hour, to listen to an obscure 
don of one of the universities on the 
subject, "Poetry for the Young." 
How different my task would have 
been! I should have warned them that 
t he young of London were poring over 
books of verse at the expense of their 
. health, if not also of their morals. I 
should have picked my way amid a per- 
fect host of popular, famous names, warn- 
ing, deprecating, recommending. H there 
were a moment for gossip, I should doubt- 
less have remarked the sale of Mr. 
Crabbe's copyright for 1:3000 (a sum no 
doubt equal to $50,000 in present money 
value. Can anyone mention a poet save 
Kipling whose copyright is worth that 
to-day?). I might have mentioned the 
rapid sale of the edition de luxe of Sir 
Walter Scott's metrical romances, of 
Lord Byron's most immoral "Don Juan" 
or any of a multitude of other" best- 
sellers." But ever and anon, the burden 
of my discourse would have been that 
the young people of London must learn 
to pick and choose among the host of poets 
they read, and that cricket must not be 
allowed to suffer. 
Certainly, it is not so with us. The 
impecuniousness of poets has become a 
stock joke, with humiliating examples on 
every hand. 
But it is easy for facile teacup pes- 
simism to paint us-far more benighted 
than we are. The comparison between 
London in 1825 and America in 1925 is 
utterly unfair. The just parallel, which 
is that between America in 1825 and 
America in 1925, is vastly more encourag- 
ing. Besides, fashions change. The host 
of writers, the host of readers, the high 
financial rewards that used to follow 
poetry, have been diverted to the novel 
and the short story for a time. Yet one 
does hear of dozens of young people in 
every large city who not only read poetry 
but write it. And there must be a pro- 
portionately greater number whom one 
does not hear of. Generally speaking, 
my guess is that there are perhaps as 
many people reading poetry as there ever 
have been, but no more. And with the 


539 


spread of education, we have a right to 
expect that there should be many more. 
Certainly at no time have there been so 
many otherwise civilized young people 
who are not interested in poetry. 
What shall we do about them? Let 
them go their unenlightened way? De- 
cide that they aren't worth saving? Not 
while there live any with the hearts of 
missionaries, the zeal of crusaders, who 
believe, as I do, that the awakening to 
poetry is an event in a boy's or a girl's 
emotional life, a landmark in the forma- 
tion of character, second in importance 
only to religious conversion, very similar 
to it in kind and in the depth of its effects, 
and very similar to it in suddenness and 
unexpectedness. It is a phenomenon 
which I have been privileged to witness 
intimately, only perhaps half a dozen 
times. But no young minister burning 
to save souls could feel one whit more 
tender or more proud toward the young 
enthusiasts in his confirmation class than 
I have felt and feel toward these young 
converts to poetry. It is an experience 
beautiful to watch. The surprised de- 
light in the eyes of a boy who has "got 
it" is reward for no matter how many 
years of apparently fruitless striving. 
Their expression of what they feel is 
crude enough; thank the Lord, they 
don't become critics overnight; one 
doesn't mind their inarticulateness, still 
less the refreshing naïveté of their ex- 
planation of how it happened; for these 
only show how genuine the experience has 
been. I remember a certain fresh-faced 
lad who came into my rooms one evening 
to borrow a book. I asked him what 
kind of book-he usually wanted some- 
thing funny, like O. Henry or Leacock. 
It appeared that he wanted a book of 
poetry. I looked at him in surprise; I had 
had a try at him already and had pro- 
duced what seemed to me to be less than 
no effect; he had said somewhat proudly 
that he never read poetry. And now he 
wished to borrow a volume of it. I said: 
"Why, Stevenson, man, what's happened 
to you? Are you in love?" 
He brushed this suggestion aside. " No, 
nothing like that, sir. I'm off women. 
But the other day in Doctor Felton's 
course, he was readin' along from a man 
named Blake, or something like that, 



540 


BOYS AND POETRY 


something about a little child, and a 
fellow playin' the pipes, and a lamb, and 
something about a tiger too, I think. 
\VeIl, anyway, I wasn't paying much 
attention, and then all of a sudden Doctor 
Felton's voice got husky, and I looked 
up an' saw there were tears in his eyes. 
But the funny part of it was, he looked 
so darn happy all the time. 
"So after class I got to thinking about 
it, and I said to myself, 'Say, if that stuff 
can make an old hard-boiled egg like 
Doctor Felton cryin'-happy, it must be 
strong stuff.' So I got the book out of 
the library and got to readin' some of 
it myself and I'll say it's great; gee, it 
sure is great." 
Another returned my copies of "
Iod- 
ern Love" and Noyes with the following 
outburst: "I say, sir, here are those 
books of poems you lent me. Thanks 
ever so much." A pause; then: "I say, 
sir, I never could see much in the stuff. 
And I can't get much out of this man 
Meredith, yet; but say, Noyes, he's 
great. That one about the fellow that 
gallops up to the old hotel at night-gee, 
it's great. Have you got any more by 
him? " 
The word "great" is all his critical 
vocabulary. But it is enough. From 
that on he was an easy victim. 
"What happened to these young men 
afterward?" some one might ask. "Did 
their interest last through the football 
season? After all, it's not much of a 
triumph to get anyone to respond to a 
few childlike lyrics of William Blake, 
stilI less a narrative romance like Noves's 
'Highwayman.' " . 
l\1y point is that the start is every- 
thing. Once break down that fright 
which many right-minded boys feel when 
confronted with verse, once let them feel 
the thrill of words, and you have given 
them a spiritual treasure which they will 
never altogether lose. 
As for these two young men, they were 
students in our School of Commerce and 
Finance, embryo business men. Nothing 
happened to them, as far as anyone 
could see. They didn't give up their 
business course to change over into the 
arts department and devote themselves 
to literature. But in the two years that 
have passed, they have gone on reading 


poetry. They have taken all the courses 
they could get in which the reading of 
poetry is a feature. They still come 
around to see me and talk about some- 
thing they like-much of it still bad, but 
improving in taste. But what is more 
than this, I know, I can see, that they 
are happier and finer for the experience. 
I think they will be better citizens for 
the ideals they are absorbing
 better busi- 
ness men because they will have more 
imagination; they will be nicer to their 
wives and a thousand times more inter- 
esting to their children. I can't say more 
than that; but I wonder if that is not all 
there could be to say. 
Exceptional boys? Not at all. Yet 
to reassure the reader that we have in 
mind the same " Young People" let me 
describe a typical American youth of 
the sort one hopes to reach, as I meet him 
by the hundred every year. He is, let 
us say, about twenty, and in one of his 
first three years at a college or university. 
He plays on one of the teams, and if you 
could see him when he is alone in his 
room, you would observe that he is proud 
of his mighty arm and chest muscles and 
studies them from different angles in the 
mirror. He has only recently begun to 
plaster down the rebellious hair that used 
to make him so cunning when he was a 
boy. For the first time he is secretly 
wishing that he had practised when, as 
a mere kid, he was having his music and 
dancing lessons-though that is an ad- 
mission that you will not easily get out 
of him. His mother is encouraged, 
though, about his clothes. He is begin- 
ning really to take notice of what he 
wears. In fact, he is becoming a bit of 
a dandy. The shape and angle of his hat 
are matters of tremendous moment, judg- 
ing by the amount of time he spends 
adjusting them. They are things with 
whicþ no mere woman can tamper any 
longer. His suit is of tweed, with belted 
jacket and trousers moderately bell-shaped 
at the bottom. His shoes are enormous, 
tan, with thick soles and intricate (hence 
"trick") perforated decorations on the 
toes. He wears a muffler which calls to 
mind Mr. Hergesheimer's book, "The 
Bright Shawl." 
Mentally, he has retained from the 
first five years of his schooling the three 



BOYS AND POETRY 


R's; less from the second five years; 
little from the third five years. He is, 
however, an authority on one or more 
of the following subjects: the viscera of 
an automobile; radio; the sporting page 
of the newspaper; the personnel of the 
comic strips; moving pictures; dancing. 
He reads more than you think: maga- 
zines: a few novels, but no poetry. 
Psychologically: his most striking trait 
is apparently a profound and lasting cyn- 
icism. For you must know that this man 
has ti'lled and suffered, and learned. He 
has spent a whole week's allowance on a 
girl, and then two nights later she danced 
four times with that snake, Joe West. It 
follows that all women are false. A prof. 
has posed before his class as an authority 
on drama and then one day when they 
asked him something abou t Al J olson, it 
turned out that he thought AI Jolson was 
a prize-fighter! And anyhow half the 
things that profs. say are matters of opin- 
ion, just purely matters of opinion. (He 
likes phrases like "matters of opinion.") 
It follows that all education is bunk, which 
one submits to perforce, but is not de- 
ceived by. All profs. "sell hokum." 
Toward poetry his attitude is simple 
and logical. He has tried it, and there's 
nothing in it. Stories are all right- 
there's something doing, action, excite- 
ment in them; essays too, for you can 
sometimes figure out, if you have to, 
what" the bird is trying to prove." But 
this poetry stuff-all about nightingales 
and flowers and stars, and guys playing 
mandolins with long necks-is a lot of 
fairy-tales and sweet nothings; a lot 0' 
nothing dressed up in a lot 0' words. 
If you press him, he will add that he 
can't have the other men taking him for 
a softy. Nobody but greasers go in for 
poetry and all that kind of hooey-litera- 
ture and stuff. Greasers and a lot of sen- 
timental women! Heh! (His sister is 
startlingly like him in this and many 
other ways, save that she may cherish in 
secret a love for the very things she affects 
to scorn. And who shall say that the boy 
does not do even this?) 
You recognize him, I hope. He sounds 
pretty impervious. But he really isn't. 
He is not as easily susceptible to poetry 
as he was at twelve, let us say. He has 
developed a number of other material- 


541 


is tic, alluring interests, of the kind I have 
mentioned-tangible things that he can 
play with. And he has developed a kind 
of protective shell against idealism. But 
he is by no means as hardened as he ap- 
pears. There is nothing yet which a 
detennined, tactful, and well-equipped 
missionary cannot penetrate. And under- 
neath he is still a living mass of undi- 
rected enthusiasm, just as fine, just as 
ductile as ever, just as receptive of real 
poetry if some one can bring it to him, 
But I have mentioned a crucial point. 
Whence has come this protective shell? 
What is it in his experience between five 
and twenty that tends to close up those 
avenues of his soul by which beauty ex- 
pressed in words can reach him? 
First of all, it seems to me, the period- 
ical-reading which he does for himself 
creates in him a false notion of what 
poetry is. One day, after finishing the 
adventures of the Gumps and exhausting 
the sporting-page, he has a few moments 
on his hands and he leafs through the 
rest of the paper. He sees a half-column 
of something which by its ragged, broken- 
up appearance he recognizes as verse. 
A feeling of virtue surges over him. His 
mother and his teacher are always telling 
him that he ought to read poetry. He 
will read it. And what does he read? 
Probably something like this: 
THE LITTLE GIRL WITH A BROKEN 
NOSE 
Poor little girl with the broken nose, 
Wondering why all the attention goes 
To the baby now, and why daddy's knee 
Isn't all yours as it used to be! 
Oh, it's all so strange and it's all so queer, 
You used to have all of the love, my dear, 
And now there's another to claim a share 
And somehow it doesn't seem just quite fair. 


There is very little here for a boy's 
spirit to lean upon. 
He may even chance upon one of the 
more literary magazines, which he picks 
up from the library table, and there he 
finds too often verse which is merely pale, 
anæmic, pretty-pretty. 
What wonder, after a few such ex- 
periences, that he comes to the conclusion 
that poetry is a trivial thing, propagated 
by and for---:-to use his own phrase-" a 
lot of sentimental women." \Vhat won- 
der that he concludes that it has no place 



542 


BOYS AND POETRY 


in his life present or future? Jack is by 
no means lacking in hard penetration: 
and he feels, as any hard-penetrating 
person would, that if this is poetry, he 
not only doesn't need poetry, but is better 
off without it. 
It seems to me, then, that one of the 
missionary's first duties is by a series of 
judicious and tactful allusions made over 
the newspaper or the magazine while he 
is around to hear-never direct, never so 
far as he can see, aimed at him-to stig- 
matize such filler as the trash that it is, 
and so break down the confusion between 
sentimentality and poetry. 
Another layer in this protective crust 
was added when he studied poetry in 
school-to say nothing of learning "The 
Chambered Nautilus" as a punishment. 
Poems, masterpieces, have been picked to 
the bones in his bored presence, to serve 
an entirely different end from that of 
inculcating a love of poetry. He has had 
to look up all the old words in that first 
true English nature lyric, the prologue to 
the "Canterbury Tales"; he has learned 
what a "loud bassoon" is. A story has 
been going the rounds of college English 
departments about a boy who when asked 
to identify Milton's "L'Allegro" finally 
produced the information that that was 
the poem in which you had to look up 
Calliope. Poetry had become synony- 
mous to him with the juiceless, uninspir- 
ing labor of looking up forgotten goddess- 
es and mediæval nouns. Our universities 
are full of these graceless, unwilling little 
pseudo-pedants. 
One of them who discouraged me re- 
cently was a girl, by the bye. I had asked 
her personal reaction to a wonderful old 
tale of chivalry and magic in which a 
huge knight, with a beard as long and 
green as a bush, rides into King Arthur's 
glamorous court, has his head severed by 
a sword-stroke, picks up his head, holds 
it facing his adversary and challenges 
him to a meeting one year hence, What, 
I asked her, in effect, do you think of 
that? Her personal reactions of wonder 
and delight were somewhat as follows: 
" 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' is 
a non-alliterative English metrical ro- 
mance, written by some anonymous con- 
temporary of the great Chaucer. There 
has been considerable discussion among 
scholars as to the date of this great work, 


which can only be determined by delicate 
turns of dialect and internal allusions, but 
in my opinion it was written about 137 0 , 
in the West Midland dialect, etc., etc." 
Well, poetry was made to be read, and 
enjoyed, and thrilled to, not studied. 
Equally unfortunate is the boy upon 
whom some misguided pedagogue has 
thrust a knowledge of those profound and 
terrible mysteries, the iambus, the dactyl, 
the trochee and the anapest. There is 
no help in handbooks, no meat in metre! 
And then there is the system of writing 
what are called reading-reports. Don't 
ask a boy to tell you what he has read, 
at least at first. Don't ask him to write 
anything about it. The report system 
is a most unfortunate but happily tempo- 
rary feature of high-school and university 
literature courses, in which there are so 
many people that it is impossible to learn 
of a student's capabilities in any other 
way. It will disappear as the institutions 
enlarge. Meanwhile, nothing could be 
more unfortunate than any attempt to 
carry it into the home, under any guise 
whatever. Not only does it outrage that 
sense of delicacy with which a boy of 
twenty regards the strange new impulses 
that poetry rouses in him; but the re- 
sults themselves are bound to be disas- 
trous. He can't do it. Literary criticism 
is an art in itself, and an art that by no 
means follows upon the instinctive, prim- 
itive appreciation we are trying to stir. 
I, who read over a thousand of these 
papers in a year, know whereof I speak. 
Still another thing that the object of 
your proselyting must be carefully guarded 
from, is definitions of poetry. Too many 
of them are on a plane to which he cannot 
mount, ethereal, moonlit, pools-at-even, 
evanescent, misty-the " Ah-h-h,poetry!" 
kind of thing. 
Even the definition given by Dr. Watts- 
Dunton in the "Britannica" would go 
far, in fact, toward confinning him in the 
notion that a poet and, to a slightly less 
extent, anyone who is interested in po- 
etry is, in his words, a kind of "nut." 
No study of poetry, then, no bewilder- 
ing definitions, no ultra-modern experi- 
ments: all that is necessary is to bring 
the young person and poetry together, 
without any third factor of whatever kind. 
I mean, put poetry of a certain kind where 
he can get it, in your library, in his room, 



BOYS AND POETRY 


and it will be its own answer, win its own 
victories. 
The only question is: What poetry shall 
we begin with? Remember, the start 
is everything. Please, kind reader, do 
not say to yourself: "\Vhy, what is the 
man thinking of? We have standard 
editions at home of every great poet from 
Shakespeare and Spenser down-Keats, 
Tennyson, Shelley, all of them, and I've 
just begged our Henry to read them." 
Please do not say that. I do not mean 
the Classics. You do not feed a starving 
man meat. And you do not send miles 
away for a basket of humming-birds' 
wings, 
There is need, then, of a new anthology 
of asort never collected before, a " Youth's 
Anthology," a selection for Jack and Jill. 
Anthologies, to be sure, we have a-plenty. 
But they are for the exceptional boy; 
the thing has never been done, I think, 
for the average boy. And so far as I 
have analyzed the type of poetry which 
belongs in this new, this useful book, I 
shall indicate it here. 
First of all, our anthology will include 
only poems with a strongly marked 
rhvthm. Alexandrines and hexameters 
m
st come later; free verse, too. I had 
a striking example of the power of rhythm 
in one of my classes not so long ago. It 
was drawing near the glad hour of twelve, 
for which the sufferers longed, not only 
as they long for the end of every class, 
but with the cumulative suppressed 
animalism of a long morning plus the 
gnawings of hunger. Worse still, it was 
hot. And I had miscalculated my time, 
and found myself with but three minutes 
in which to read an illustration and point 
a moral. With a bland unawareness of 
their anxious faces, a deaf ear to their 
shuffiing feet, I launched into the illus- 
tration. It was Alfred Noyes's" Forty 
Singing Seamen. ,. I feared the worst, 
for I read poetry at least as badly as most 
people. 


543 


from the faces before me. The thrill of 
their edified silence carried me on until 
I had read it all-a matter of at least 
ten minutes. Eight after twelve and 
they never moved a muscle, forty hungry 
freshmen on the hard oak seats! I must 
write to Mr, Noyes about it, I think. 
Swing, then, the pieces of our anthology 
must have. And now for the content: 
the requirements are, briefly, three. It 
should be poetry of our own time, or near 
it, not only because we must eliminate 
the intellectual distraction of notes and 
explanations, which the boy understand- 
ably detests, together with all the other 
apparatus for studying poetry before he 
loves it, but also because the Classics are 
too big for him as yet. Second, it should 
be poetry that deals with life, and not 
with dreams-Hardy, not de la Mare; 
and poetry which deals with life dramat- 
ically-kinetic, or potentially so, not con- 
templative, introspective. And even out 
of this I would select: poetry dealing with 
emotions which the boy has felt and feels. 
This last is the real key to the difficulty. 
Poetry is bound up with emotion, and 
the boy's emotional range is limited. 
How can he understand or like what he 
does not feel, never has felt? 
For the matter of that, let the maturer 
lover of verse call honestly to mind how 
much of the great poetry was really, 
instinctively, his the first time he read 
it; how much of it brought the exultation 
of seeing what he felt as strongly as the 
poet, put for him into beautiful words- 
how many of the lines he could shout 
aloud with conviction, with passion. What 
a lot of literary hypocrisy we should 
clear away if we all confessed the truth! 
Let me admit, for example, that when I 
read Wordsworth for the first time, only 
the Lucy poems, and two sonnets, es- 
pecially the one beginning 


"I am not one who much or oft delight, 
To season my fireside with personal talk-" 


and the other: 
"Across the seas of \V onderland to Mogadore 
we plodded, 
Forty singing seamen in an old black barque," 


The swaggering, sea-legged swing of it 
caught me, as it always does. And, to 
my delight it caught them too. The 
note-books stopped slapping, the uneasy 
movements ceased, the anxious look faded 


"The world is too much with us; late and 
soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our 
powers;" 


hit me at all. These, and these only, 
represented the part of Wordsworth that 
was strongly, inescapably mine at first. 



544 


BOYS AND POETRY 


Of Byron, I found myself written in a 
few passages of proud, bitter egotism in 
" Childe Harold." And so with the rest. 
I aspire to the "Ode on Intimations of 
Immortality" just as I aspire to "The 
Skylark" and "The Nightingale," and 
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." I can 
rise to them while I am reading them, 
but afterward I come back to earth with 
a thud. Some day I hope I shall possess 
them all. But when that time comes, I 
shall be a different person from the person 
I am now. 
Let each of us apply that test, if he 
dares, to his own reading of poetry, and 
then let us apply it to our selection of 
poems for boys and girls. I have often 
thought that the proverb, "Hitch your 
wagon to a star," makes no mention of 
the length of the rope. A proper humility 
about one's own 
ppreciation of poetry 
does much to prevent the error of the 
forcing-house in this delicate task. 
But no such vague analysis can lead 
one unerringly to the proper selection. 
Nor is it possible, I think, to render the 
analysis more exact. Let me set forth 
with due hesitancy a few of the poems 
which seem to me to belong in " Youth's 
Anthology" because I have seen them, 
in classroom and study, have their high 
way with boys and girls: 
Masefield's "Dauber," and "Biog- 
raphy." In the latter, the description 
of London nights spent in glowing talk 
with his friends and the passage which 
tells of the boat-race are precisely in 
the right key. It is a strange youth who 
is not moved by them. Of Noyes, "The 
Barrel-Organ" and the "Highwayman," 
"A Victory Dance," and for youngsters 
of a scientific bent, "The Watchers of 
the Skies" and "The Torch-Bearers." 
As many as the book will hold of Rupert 
Brooke, Joyce Kilmer, Alan Seeger-all 
the gallant young group of war poets, 
English and American. "Savage Por- 
traits" of Don Marquis. The title-piece 
of Mary Dixon Thayer's " Songs of 
Youth." Many of Kipling's, which are 
sure to catch lads who are fond-as 
hundreds of them are-of Robert Service. 
Service himself should by all means be 
liberally included. And so, carefully, on. 
Nothing more fatuous could well be im- 
agined than any attempt here at com- 
pleteness. A hundred others come to 


mind. I put these first, as songs against 
whose appeal few boys are proof. Nor 
need the older nor the gentler poets be al- 
together neglected. That simple little 
sonnet-drama of :Michael Drayton's, 


" Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part. 
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me. . . ." 


the serenity of "My mind to me a king- 
dom is," the manly sweetness of "Shall 
I compare thee to a summer's day?"- 
these are examples out of hundreds which 
are completely within youth's scope and 
are perennial in their appeal. 
One thing the reader will notice about 
my choices is that the poets are all men 
whom youth can respect. The school- 
room presentation of the lives of the 
bards leaves many boys with a notion 
that in their private life they were either 
sissies or rakes, or both. They listen in 
wide-eyed enlightenment to the tale of 
how Noyes threw the batman down- 
stairs; of Ben Jonson killing his man 
in single combat on the plains of Flanders; 
of Keats expelled from school for pug- 
nacity. The boy must be made to see 
that a poet may be very much like him- 
self before he can respect him. But 
choose white souls like Masefield, Kilmer, 
Brooke, for deep down in his heart the 
boy is pretty much of a Puritan. Above 
all, tell him the story of Rupert Brooke. 
I have told it many times, and have yet 
to find a boy unmoved by it. 
This, then, is my advice. Am I a 
Jesuit? Am I palming off the little gods 
and forgetting the big ones? Is the reader 
worried about the Classics and the young 
person? I can only say again, unstop 
his ears, and after that he will not wish 
to close them. He will listen for all that 
his soul can catch of the beauty of words. 
But let the apostle not forget that he 
himself must be the thing he wishes his 
proselyte to become. He must steep 
himself in the great things of all the ages, 
make them his own. For the young 
person is quick to detect any but the 
sincerest and richest enthusiasm in those 
who try to lead him. Poetry must be 
a necessity to you before you can make 
it desirable to him. To such a mission- 
ary nothing is impossible; and of a 
surety the fault is with us and not the 
rising generation, if we fail to pass on the 
torch. 



I s it possible that there is any connection 
between the United States "crime 
wave" and the flood of detective 
novels? There is certainly a tidal wave of 
crime. An admirable editorial in the New 
York World for August 4 is headed Had 
your little murder to-day? and ends what to 
do, and do it? 
As it seems probable that the third dec- 
ade of the twentieth century in America 
will forever be memorable for its daily 
list of murders, so I cannot remember 
a time when current fiction was more 
heavily spiced with crook novels. The 
proof that these are works of fiction is not 
in their strangeness, but that in every in- 
stance the criminal is caught and properly 
dealt with; whereas in actuality be is not 
often apprehended, less often convicted, 
and conviction may mean little or nothing. 
I dare sayan insurance company would be 
mathematically justified in taking on any 
one who was under sentence of death. 
Here is a list of novels published within 
the last few months, that I will guarantee 
as thrillers; there must be thrice as many 
I have not read. In addition to "The 
Three Hostages," "The House of the 
Arrow," "The Locked Book," "The Mon- 
ster," "A Voice from the Dark," "Thus 
Far," which I have previously mentioned, 
and which, although of British origin, are 
selling sweetly in America, there are" The 
1vI ystery of the Singing Walls," by W. A. 
Stowell, "A Midsummer 
Iystery," by 
Gordon Gerould, "Darkened \Vindows," 
by Cornelia Kane Rathbone, "The Red 
Lamp," by l\Iary Roberts Rinehart, "The 
Black 
Iagician," by R. T. M. Scott. In 
addition there is a stirring tale by a new 
author, Rufus King, called "North Star," 
wherein the detective is a dog-and those 
who love both excitement and dogs will 
have a feast. 
Of the list just given, "The Red Lamp," 
by the well-beloved Mrs. Rinehart, is 
perhaps the most ingenious, she being a 
specialist in ingenuity; it is if anything 


too complicated, for I stopped occasion- 
ally to look back and reassure myself on 
identities, as one constantly does in read- 
ing an Elizabethan play. In addition to 
crime, Mrs. Rinehart gives us spiritism 
and ghosts. I never saw a ghost, but 
many intelligent people have believed in 
them, William De :l\Iorgan, for example. 
But if "The Red Lamp" is the most 
ingenious, "The Black Magician" is the 
most thrilling. It is a delectable dish, 
with the ingredients kindly mixed. 
I enjoy reading sleuth-books, though I 
have not read so many as G. K. Chester- 
ton or Count Ilya Tolstoi, both of whom, 
I believe, always carry one in the pocket. 
To turn from the pursuit of crime to the 
pursuit of something yet more elusive, 
Truth, let me recommend a small volume 
called "Can a Man Be a Christian To- 
day?" by William Louis Poteat. The 
author is a botanist and President of Wake 
Forest College. I wish I might study both 
botany and religion under his direction, 
as he has the gift of lucid exposition. 
This is a talking book, consisting of three 
lectures which Doctor Poteat was in- 
vited to deliver at the University of 
North Carolina. The three lectures are 
called, respectively, "To-day," "Bag- 
gage," "Peace." 
The real advance in Christian thought 
to-day consists in going back-going back 
through the accumulated baggage of the- 
ology, dogmas, creeds, and rituals, to the 
Founder of Christianity. It has never 
been easy to be a Christian; Browning 
thanked God that it was very hard. Doc- 
tor Poteat does not ask if it is easy or 
hard; he asks if it is possible. And after a 
candid examination of both scientific and 
spiritual truth, he answers in the affirma- 
tive. There are hundreds of thousands 
of honest young people who are in per- 
plexity, and who would like to have an 
intellectually respectable religion. They 
will find illumination in this little book. 
It is commonly said that the youth of 
545 



546 


AS I LIKE IT 


to-day are indifferent to religion; but my 
observation seems to indicate that they 
are more indifferent to science. How 
many of them, unless they are forced to 
do so, read through a scientific book? In 
general conversation, is it science or is it 
religion which is the more frequent topic? 
Those who admired Doctor Frank 
Crane's popular confession of faith, "Why 
I Am a Christian," will enjoy Bruce Bar- 
ton's "The Man Nobody Knows," which 
is also written in colloquial language. It 
is an attempt, by an expert in this field of 
business, to advertise the manly virtues 
and the "psychology" of Our Lord in his 
dealings with men. It affords one more 
illustration of the range of appeal made 
by the most interesting personality in 
history. I imagine that Mr. Barton, who 
is an able, energetic, successful man of 
business, cannot patiently endure the 
common spectacle of seeing the most in- 
teresting of all persons the subject of so 
many dry sermons. Ministers have the 
most appealing thing in the world, and 
they often advertise it clumsily. He will 
show them not only how to do it, but will 
show them how He did it. 
It will not hurt any minister to read 
this book; and there are no persons who 
are more willing and eager to learn than 
ministers of the gospel. It is strange that 
their enemies represent them as opposed 
to knowledge, whereas the members of no 
other calling or profession make such 
sacrifices to give their children an un- 
hampered education. 
Still another presentation of the central 
truth in the Christian religion is to be 
found in A. S. M. Hutchinson's new novel, 
"One Increasing Purpose," which, by the 
time these lines are published, should be 
at once delighting the public and enraging 
the critics. It will enrage the critics be- 
cause of the idiosyncrasies of its literary 
style, and because of its evangelical fervor. 
Instead of making religious people dull 
and disgusting, he actually makes them 
attractive. He will never be forgiven for 
this. It will delight the public because it 
is, first of all, an interesting story: because 
its characters, especially the three broth- 
ers, are impressively real; because it comes 
from a personality so rich in humor, sym- 
pathy, loving-kindness, and ideality that 
one is often reminded of De Morgan and 


Dickens. The youngest of the three 
brothers in this novel is a kind of Grcat- 
heart, leading pilgrims toward the Celes- 
tial City; in his capacity to understand 
sinners and to unshackle them he recalls 
the author's Mark Sabre, and the young- 
est of the three Karamazov brothers. 
In J\lr. Hutchinson's preceding novel, 
"This Freedom," the story came to grief 
through a temporary eclipse of the au- 
thor's sense of humor, which here emerges 
brighter than ever. I feel sure that 
either Mr. \Vells or Mr. Bennett would 
have been glad to write the chapters 
about Stupendity. 
l\1r. Hutchinson takes religion seriously; 
he seems to think that Christianity should 
reveal itself in daily living. But he does 
not take himself too seriously, and he does 
not take his adverse critics seriously at all. 
He himself appears in his own story as the 
popular writer" B. C. D." Here is his own 
description of the Super-famous novelist 
(Part I, Chapter XX): 
The habitual look of this remarkable man 
-a youngish-looking man wearing rimless 
spectacles-was the look of a man in im- 
minent peril of at any moment being ar- 
rested; which, in the considered judgment 
of the great majority of those literary critics 
and inteUectuals who together form the 
eminent and redoubtable Bodyguard of the 
glorious heritage and traditions of English 
literature, he not only deserved to be but, as 
they said, if literature were properly appre- 
ciated and protected in this country, would 
have been long ago. . .. The primary 
offence which caused this trogloditish yet 
universally known individual to warrant ar- 
rest was of a double order. It reposed first 
in the injurious fact that the novel, "The 
Road Home," which had brought him fame 
had not brought him fame by order of the 
Bodyguard (who had indeed either ignored 
it or perfunctorily dismissed it until they 
discovered it to be running like a pestilence 
among the common people); and it reposed 
secondly in the insulting fact that his novel 
sold in more hundreds of thousands than any 
modern novel had hitherto sold or than any 
novel not written by a member of the Intel- 
lectual branch of the Bodyguard, or not 
issued under the direct patronage of the 
Critical branch of the Bodyguard, had any 
right, reason, excuse, precedent or permis- 
sion to sell. 
His adverse and pompous critics have 
not succeeded in removing his head, nor 



AS I LIKE IT 


547 


has his popularity with readers turned it. 
B. C. D. is speaking (Part IV, Chapter I): 


My intention is, as also I have said, when 
it comes for me to cut the painter and put 
out to sea, to leave this record behind me for 
the purpose that whoever comes to write 
that man's chronicle may have it, not to use 
in what is I am afraid and despite all my 
efforts my characteristic style, but to work 
upon and gather what he may. . .. For 
my own share I have this-that though in 
my passage here I have done no more than 
earn a little specious notoriety, to be shovel- 
led back to me with the earth and left there 
with me when they cover me in, etc. 
Every one knows how difficult it is to 
persuade a good man to become a candi- 
date for political office; naturally enough, 
he does not like to leave a congenial occu- 
pation and the happiness of the domestic 
circle, to become a target for abuse and 
slander and ridicule. Something has re- 
cently happened in England which is go- 
ing to make able and virtuous citizens 
even more reluctant. If there was one 
man in the nineteenth century whose pri- 
vate life seemed to be above suspicion, it 
was Gladstone. But now, after he has 
been in his grave nearly thirty years, a 
book appears (see Time) in which Glad- 
stone is accused of being a sensualist. If 
a man of Gladstone's character is not safe 
from posthumous attack, what is going 
to be the fate of ordinary citizens? 
J. A. Spender, in his admirable work, 
"The Public Life," said: "Nothing served 
Gladstone better with the mass of his 
supporters than the well-founded belief 
that he lived seriously in private as in 
public." Gladstone made so many ene- 
mies, especially after 1886, that if it had 
been possible to find a stain on his private 
character, his foes would have published 
it-how they hated hind In 1889 I was 
talking with Professor J. P. Mahaffy, of 
Dublin. I thought it strange in Great 
Britain that political animosity should de- 
stroy personal friendship. "\Vhy," he 
replied, "Gladstone and I used to be the 
best of friends, we had hours and hours of 
intimate conversation. But if I saw him 
on the street to-day, I would not greet 
him or notice him." And he gave as his 
onlv reason Gladstone's attitude on Home 
RuÍe, If he had known anything against 
the private character of the great states- 


man, he would have mentioned it, for he 
spoke with fury. Furthermore, in the same 
conversation, he said that Parnell's irreg- 
ularities with women were well known, 
and this was before the public scandal. 
In the anonymous book, " Uncensored 
RecoHections," whose author does not 
hesitate to publish much racy gossip, 
Gladstone is treated with respect; if there 
had been any irregularity, it would surely 
have been set down. Both l\Ir. and Mrs. 
Gladstone attempted to save many of 
those wretched women who are so senti- 
mentally called daughters of joy. Glad- 
stone never hesitated to risk his reputa- 
tion if he could do anyone of these crea- 
tures any good; and his wife not only knew 
of his efforts and approved of them, but 
shared them. In one of the few idealistic 
pages in his cynical autobiography, the 
author of "Uncensored Recollections" 
writes: 
But speaking of the Prince of Wales (later 
Edward VII) and his tender sympathy and 
care for all who were in sorrow and his ex- 
quisite tact in expressing that sympathy, 
leads one naturally to think of the incident 
of his stooping and reverently kissing the 
hand of l\Irs. Gladstone as she stood in her 
great sorrow by the grave of her illustrious 
husband at the funeral in Westminster 
Abbey. I think that there can be no doubt 
that 1-Irs. Gladstone--" Aunt Pussy," as she 
was lovingly called by her near relations- 
may safely be taken as the most perfect type 
of an English lady that the nineteenth cen- 
tury can show us. . .. She was beautiful 
when I knew her-beautiful in the late au- 
tumn of her life; but that was as nothing 
compared to her charm of manner, delight- 
fulness of disposition, and the noble qualities 
of her tender heart. I have heard, from 
persons well acquainted with the fact, of this 
sweet refined lady dressing herself shabbily 
and going out at night to talk to and help 
(never, of course, in a patronizing way) the 
poor girls walking Piccadilly; cheering them, 
sympathizing with them in their utter deso- 
lation, made all the more pitiful by the 
powder, paint, and smiles with which they 
strove to hide it. I could tell many tales of 
the almost countless acts of Christian love 
performed by steal th (and in many cases 
even unknown to the Grand Old Man) by 
this-in the highest and best sense of the 
term-grande damc,. but as they did not 
come within my personal knowledge, and as 
they are almost too sacred to find place in a 
book of gossip, I will say nothing. But I 



548 


AS I LIKE IT 


repeat that as a perfect type of sweet, pure, 
tender, refined, loving English womanhood, 

irs. Gladstone stands unrivalled; and it 
was knowing this, that the Prince so rever- 
ently kissed her hand in the Abbey. 
Attacks on Gladstone's private charac- 
ter could do no harm if it were not for the 
lamentable fact that so many human be- 
ings eagerly swallow slander. The two 
modern statesmen who should be in this 
regard as safe from insult as nuns-W. E. 
Gladstone and Woodrow Wilson-have 
now both suffered defamation. It is 
strange that those who are sceptical about 
so many things should in this respect show 
such credulity. But there are people who 
love to spit on statues. 
The words of Stephen Phillips on Glad- 
stone would also apply to \Vilson: 


" Yet not for all thy breathing charm remote, 
Nor breach tremendous in the forts of Hell, 
Not for these things we praise thee, though 
these things 
Are much; but more, because thou didst 
discern 
In temporal policy the eternal will; 
Thou gav'st to party strife the epic note, 
And tõ debate the thunder of the Lord; 
To meanest issues fire of the 1\lost High." 


To Americans generally and to the in- 
habitants of Brooklyn particularly, I rec- 
ommend an autobiography by John Ray- 
mond Howard, called "Remembrance of 
Things Past." Mr. Howard is eighty- 
eight years old, and, having spent most of 
his life in the publishing business, has an 
accurate sense of what contemporary 
slang calls "news values." It is curi9us 
to read of his conversations with Eliza- 
beth Barrett Browning, who died in 
Florence sixty-four years ago; with Abra- 
ham Lincoln, Secretary Stanton, and other 
famous folk. His two heroes are John C. 
Frémont and Henry Ward Beecher; the 
reader will become intimately acquainted 
with both. (I remember that I thought 
Frémont almost prehistoric, when 1 saw 
him in 1884. 1\111'. Blaine made a short 
speech in New Haven, and then intro- 
duced the first candidate of the Repub- 
lican party). 
Mr. Howard's fourscore-and-more years 
have not been labor and sorrow, but labor 
and happiness. I fear he is an incurable 
optimist. He is a fine representative 


American citizen; one who knows the 
world of business, one who has travelled 
abroad, one who loves art, music, and let- 
ters, one who loves his wife and family, 
one who goes to church, reads his Bible, 
prays every day, and says grace at meals. 
He is the kind of man of whom Robert 
Benchley spoke so approvingly and affec- 
tionately in his excellent dramatic criti- 
cisms in Life-the kind he sawall around 
him at a Gilbert and Sullivan revival. 
Such men are the salt of the earth. 
Students of human nature will find it 
instructive to turn from the record of a 
sturdy, alert, sound-hearted man like Mr. 
Howard to the BosweIlian records written 
down by J. J. Brousson, called "Anatole 
France Himself," where everything that 
Mr. Howard admires is laughed at by the 
French academician, and where every- 
thing Mr. Howard would find detestable 
is held up to admiration. Brousson has 
not only written down his records, he has 
written down his hero, who appears, with 
all his wit, as a rather slimy old lecher. It 
is entertaining to read, in the translator's 
preface, that the publication of this book 
in France has had a "beneficial effect" on 
the great man's reputation. 
What I should like to see would be the 
expression on the faces of the awarders of 
the Nobel Prize while they peruse this 
vivacious volume. 
I greet with cheers a scholarly work 
that has been awaited eagerly by every 
student of English literature-the Ox- 
ford Jonson. This complete critical edi- 
tion will appear in ten volumes, of which 
the first two reached me yesterday. The 
editors are C. H. Herford and Percy Simp- 
son, and these two volumes are perhaps 
the most interesting. They are called 
"The Man and His Work," and consist of 
a biography of old Ben, some hitherto 
unpublished letters, the Conversations 
with Drummond, many gossipy frag- 
ments, legal and official documents, a list 
of books in Jonson's library, and Intro- 
ductions to all the plays and separate 
works. Everyone interested in Eliza- 
bethan literature should become familiar 
with these Oxford editions. There have 
already appeared in complete form, 
"Thomas Kyd," edited by F. S. Boas; 
"John Lyly," edited by \Varwick Bond; 
"Robert Greene," edited by the late 



AS I LIKE IT 


Churton Collins; and Tucker Brooke is 
hard at work on the" Marlowe." 
It would be difficult to find in the annals 
of the drama a more interesting person- 
ality than Ben Jonson, and less interestmg 
plays. \Vith few exceptions, his dramatic 
works are appallingly tediousc 
The most inspiring lecturer on litera- 
ture I ever heard was R. G. Moulton, for 
many years professor at the University 
of Chicago. When he first came to this 
country from England, he selected three 
of the worst of Jonson's plays, and de- 
livered a lecture on them that held the 
audience breathless. I thought if he 
could create a soul under those ribs of 
death, what would he do with an enliven- 
ing theme? Well, he gave sufficient evi- 
dence in later years, when he lectured on 
the Bible, \Villiam Shakespeare, and 
Robert Browning. 
In the year 191 I, when a story called 
"The Prodigal Judge" appeared, the pub- 
lishers offered a prize for the best pub- 
lished review, and I was selected as one 
of the three judges. The other two voted 
for the N ew York Evening Post reviewer; I 
voted for a journalist named H. L. Menck- 
en, whose critique in the Baltimore Sun 
seemed to me the best. To-day I am glad 
to say that of all the reviews of Harvey 
Cushing's biography of Sir William Osler, 
the best I have seen is by the same H. L. 
l\lencken, in The American ]Jferc'ltry for 
August. It is an admirable, appreciative, 
rliscrimina ting essay. 
Those who imagine that only trashy 
books are best-sellers should observe that 
Dr. Cushing's biography, a huge, expen- 
sive work in two volumes, went to a second 
printing of five thousand copies within a 
few weeks of publication, while in Great 
Britain it is also selling swiftly. Upon 
my congratulating Dr. Cushing on his 
book, on its sale, and on l\lr. l\Iencken's 
review, he wrote me: 


I am not at all proud; I am mereiy sur- 
prised; and as 'V. O. would say "I am wear- 
ing the same sized hat "-even though I 
have just heard to-day from the Oxford 
Press that they are getting ready for a third 
five thousand. :My real business is to take 
brain tumours out of people's heads, and my 
next, which you will not care to review, will 
be published this fall, on a Classification of 
the Gliomata, . . . After all, what is a good 


549 


biography? I wish you or Strachey or some- 
one would discuss the matter. Certainly it 
was no time or place for me to attempt what 
is called an interpretive sketch of W.O., 
though that is the kind of thing people seem 
to expect in these days. But don't you 
think it astounding that a long chronological 
story such as I perpetrated, hoping that it 
might reach a few medical students, should 
without any previous advertising have gone 
into a second impression of five thousand 
inside of six weeks? With my possible 
readers in mind, I felt that it was better to let 
Osler's story gradually unfold, rather than 
merely to touch on some of the high points 
which would have left no special impression; 
in other words, that people who wanted real- 
ly to get at Osler would have to give a little 
time and do a little work themselves and 
not leave it all to the biographer. It is 
astonishing to me that so many people in 
these busy days would be willing to give the 
time necessary to read such a big and some- 
what old fashioned kind of biography. All 
of which shows that there are more people 
in the country who read than I had sup- 
posed. 
Stepping blithely into the precincts of 
the Faerie Queene Club comes the dra- 
matic critic \Valter Prichard Eaton, hold- 
ing his sister by the hand: 


I once read the "Faerie Queene" all 
through, and not as a stunt, either. I was 
about ten or eleven, and I liked it. . . . 
Speaking of stunts, though, my small sister 
once read the" Faerie Queene," "Paradise 
Regained," "The Excursion," and a trans- 
lation of " Jerusalem Delivered." She 
emerged none the worse for the ordeal. 


From the tiny republic of Andorra three 
college professors send me the following 
poem, accompanied on the reverse side of 
the card by the only picture of Andorra I 
ha ye seen: 


"Three budding professors out for a 
Long tramp through the realm of Andorra, 
From this marvellous hilly 
Landscape send to Billy 
Their best from the Hotel de Torra." 


Signed by A. R. Bellinger, R. S. Bart- 
lett, C. \V. Mendell, the last-named being 
dean-elect of Yale College. How I wish 
I might now found an Andorra Club! 
But unfortunately no club can be founded 
in this department unless I am president 
of it; and I cannot even belong unless I 



550 


AS I LIKE IT 


have visited the place clubably immor- 
talized. I will say, however, that this 
marvellous poem from three jolly trouba- 
dours will turn the eyes of one hundred 
thousand intelligent people toward the 
Pyrenees. 
Another member of a college faculty, 
Alexander Witherspoon, writes: 
I wonder if you have a Bemerton Club, 
after the similitude of the famous Fano 
Club? If so, I should like to make appli- 
cation for membership. I walked out to the 
little village from Salisbury one day last 
summer, and paid my respects to the mem- 
ory of George Herbert. George Herbert's 
little church at Bemerton is in need of an 
organ-that is the first fact in the case, and 
the second you will already have surmised; 
the members of the poor little congregation 
are unable to purchase one. They have 
within the last year or two spent all their 
pence in repairing the church, but have not 
the wherewithal to buy an organ. This was 
told me by a delightful elderly couple, Major 
and Mrs. Fisher, of the Hermitage, Bemer- 
ton, who took me to see the church, and 
afterwards to tea with the present vicar, in 
the garden of Herbert's rectory just across 
the way from the church. . .. A small 
organ would be all that is necessary or de- 
sirable, the church itself is so tiny. I offer 
the suggestion for whatever it is worth. If, 
in any of the numerous ways open to you, 
you see fit to mention the matter, Bemerton 
Church would, I am sure, be very grateful. 
And I can hardly think of anything which 
the Sons of Donne or other American readers 
of Herbert might do which would be at once 
so gracious and so inexpensive. 


I visited Bemerton Church in 1900, and 
did homage to the sainted memory of the 
poet George Herbert, who died in 1633, 
and whose biography by Izaak Walton is 
an impeccable classic. I will receive, ac- 
knowledge, and forward any sums sent to 
me for the purpose of placing a new organ 
in this church, where the life of the seven- 
teenth century rector was as harmonious 
as his verse. George Herbert loved music, 
and used frequently to walk to the cathe- 
dral at Salisbury to hear it; that his spirit 
will be pleased by the gift of a new organ 
to his own church is apparent from his 
poem, "Church Music J7: 
"Sweetest of sweets, I thank you: when 
displeasure 
Did through my body wound my mind, 


You took me thence; and in your house of 
pleasure 
A dainty lodging me assign'd." 
Miss Beulah Strong qualifies for mem- 
bership in the Asolo Club by sending me 
a postcard picture of Duse's tomb; from 
the granite slab there is a marvellous 
view. Every day some one places fresh 
flowers in tribute to the famous actress. 
(Not far away reposes "Pen" Browning.) 
Other new additions to the Asolo Club 
are Eric Foederer; also Mrs. Robert 
Carmen- Ryles, of Philadelphia. 
Miss Hortense Metzger, of New Haven, 
joins the Asolo Club with the following 
postcard ditty: 
" Asolo-that place of magic! 
Not to have 
een it would be tragic." 
She informs me that the Grand Hotel 
Eleonora Duse has not yet begun to ma- 
terialize. 
In a later postcard she enters into the 
more exclusive Fano Club, which is also 
enriched by Henry T. Rowell, a punditical 
member of the senior class at Yale, and 
by two of Father McCune's New York 
parishioners, Constance A. Jones and 
Helena Paul Jones, who commemorate 
the fact that they have followed their 
rector and Professor Tinker thither, iR 
these stirring lines: 
"To be in Italy and not see Fano? 
McCune and Tinker once cried' Ah, no !' 
So what could good Ignatians do 
But follow in their footsteps too? 
And following, as you will see, 
Our minds are filled with poesy. 
And if the merest mortal dare 
Her own poor efforts to compare, 
We think we sing a better tune 
Than either Tinker or McCune!" . 


From a remote part of the world, name- 
ly, Stevenson's grave on the mountain-top 
at Samoa, comes a picture postcard from 
Paul Fenimore Cooper, great-grandson of 
the novelist. It is a graceful return for the 
homage done Cooper by Stevenson in his 
prefatory poem to "Treasure Island." 
Mr. Cooper writes: "I think this club 
should rival your Fano Club. I had the 
good fortune to be at the grave during a 
most glorious sunsetc It is a beautiful 
spot. J7 I wish I were eligible, for in these 
days, when both Stevenson's character 



AS I LIKE IT 


and ability are attacked, I remain an ar- 
dent Stevensonian. The strange thing is 
that every person who attacks announces 
that he is displaying both courage and 
originality; whereas the stones are flying 
so thickly from all quarters that R. L. S. 
may become a saint, after all-St. Steven. 
1'leanwhile millions of readers, who care 
nothing for the envy and malice of less 
successful authors, continue to read the 
stories, essays, letters, and verses of the 
great magician. 
James R. Bettis, of Webster Groves, 
:Missouri (beautiful St. Louis suburb, he 
says), nominates for the 
gnoble Prize, the 
word coworkers: 
Probably it is my fault, but I cannot see 
it in print as anything but cow-orkers. It 
appears to my eye to divide naturally that 
way. Could any word be more abhorrent 
to ear and eye, or more entirely without 
meaning? I am not sure that it is worthy of 
a place in your limbo, for to my mind-I 
have just got to say it-" it's not worth hell- 
room! " 


Well, the famous seventeenth-century 
divine, Doctor South, used the expression 
"coworkers with God," which I am sure 
did not refer to the sincere milk of the 
word. Did you know that South accused 
the Dean of St. Paul's of tritheism? 
George M. Payne, the accomplished 
literary critic of the Cincinnati Ti11les- 
Star, nominates for "Bishop" Phelps's 
Ignoble Prize: 
Slogan of the defeated: "\Ve are just be- 
ginning to fight." 
The reviewer who says, "\Vhether you agree 
with him in all respects , . ." 
. All first novels which have to be "let down" 
carefully. 
Machine-made detective stories. 
Caricatures of authors. 
Books with uncut leaves. 
I The author who writes a "humorous" ac- 
count of his life, doings, and appearance. 


There are two oft-reported historical 
events the accuracy of which I have never 
been able to discover. I cannot find out 
whether Paul Jones announced he had or 
had not begun to fight, though I feel sure 
his adversary had no doubts on the mat- 
ter. The other refers to Sir Philip Sidney. 
Was it wine or water he passed along to 
the rookie, with the famous "necessity" 


551 


comment? On this highly important 
question, the history-books split about 
even. 
History has been bowdlerized more 
than literature. Professor W. G. Sum- 
ner, commenting on Ethan Allen's "In 
the name of the great Jehovah and the 
Continental Congress," told us under- 
graduates that what he really said was, 
"Come out of there, you G- d- old 
galoot! " 


From that delightful intellectual haven, 
the Faculty Club of Berkeley, California, 
where I spent many happy hours in 1908, 
Clay MacCauley writes me with reference 
to vidience: 
A talk I had some years ago with friends 
in J apan. We wished to help our Japanese 
friends in getting hold of really expressive 
English terms in their appropriation of our 
language, and among other things this 
"movie picture" problem was talked over. 
We did not think of vidience or optie-nee as a 
satisfying invention; but we did talk quite 
favorably of some derivative from the verb 
spectare, "to look at"; and proposed to offer 
spcctance or spectarcnce as the name for a 
group of spectators or auditors. There, then, 
are three good words with which to meet an 
evident need-vidicnce, optience, spectancc. 


Here is British comment. The Liver- 
pool Post and lrf ercury for August 4, after 
saying that a word like vidience or optience 
is needed, and that for many years the 
English have been resorting to "all sorts 
of odd dodges to get over the difficulty," 
adds: 


But Americans are different. Over there, 
when they see a hole in the language they 
fill it up. In the Eastern States they have 
begun to use vidicnce to describe a gathering 
which has collected to see something; and 
in the Middle \Vest the word opticnce for a 
movie assemblage is already in currency. 
'Professor W. Lyon Phelps, of Yale, . . . is, 
of course, at liberty to draft any word he 
likes into his own vocabulary, but he must 
not, as he does in SCRIBNER'S this month, 
give it "a hearty welcome into the English 
language." \Vho gave the English language 
into the custody of Professor Phelps? \Vho 
has ever sanctioned its being opened for new 
admissions with a Yale key? 


I took the English language into my 
custody, because I found in the new books 



552 


'\5 I LIKE IT 


so many arresting phrases. I give to that 
excellent journal, the Liverpool Post and 
Mercury, a hearty welcome into the list 
of supporters of vidience and a hearty wel- 
come into the English language its pun on 
Yale. 


I am writing in my summer home, at 
Huron City, 1\1:ichigan, situated on the 
thumb nail of the State, on the shore of 
Lake Huron. This was once a crowded, 
turbulent lumber town, of the kind so 
often described by Stewart Edward White. 
The forest fires of 1871 and 1881 trans- 
formed the countryside from a timber to 
an agricultural district. To-day Huron 
City consists of a half-dozen farmers' 
houses, one store, one disused skating 
rink, one schoolhouse, one community 
house, one church. We have no railway, 
no postoffice, no telegraph, no gas, no 
electricity, and in my house there is hap- 
pily no telephone. I could live in content- 
ment without once stepping outside of 
house, garden, and the links at my front 
door. I have heard that another Baptist, 
John D. Rockefeller, is the only other 
American who owns a links. Well, if you 
take his money and my money, and 
put them together, it makes a very large 
amount. 
In the Methodist church here adjoining 
my garden I preach every summer Sun- 


day afternoon to the finest of all audiences 
-the farmers and their families who drive 
hither from miles around, and the "re- 
sorters" who come from Pointe-aux- 
Barques (seven miles) and Harbor Beach 
(seventeen miles). Edgar Guest is at the 
Pointe, and Henry Ford at Harbor Beach, 
but I have not seen the latter among my 
flock, although the well-beloved poet is a 
faithful attendant. Our church realizes 
the dream of unity. Last week in the con- 
gregation were five Methodist ministers; 
while among the lay brothers and sisters 
were Fundamentalists, advanced Modern- 
ists, Latter Day Saints, Christian Sci- 
entists, Presbyterians, High Church Epis- 
copalians, a few Jewish friends, a famous 
Swedenborgian, a red-hot Unitarian; at 
the organ, playing evangelical Methodist 
hymns, was a stanch Roman Catholic. 
We are fighters, but we are not such fools 
as to fight each other. 


In recent issues of this otherwise excel- 
lent magazine, I have shocked some wor- 
thy souls by puns. The fatal tendency I 
inherited. When I was a child, there was 
a certain man of God who used to shout 
in the pulpit and emphasize the shouts 
with athletic gestures. One day he banged 
the Bible so fiercely as to tear off both 
covers. "The word of God is not bound," 
quoted my father. 




 


..
 


"'. 


..' 
&.
 



 
I 
I 
I 
I 


I 


.... 


Bourdelle in his studio. 


^ T about the time that these pages 
J-\. see the light an exhibition at the 
Grand Central Galleries will afford 
an interesting opportunity to the student 
of plastic art. It will expose practically at 
full length the work of the French sculp- 
tor, Emile-Antoine Bourdelle. This has 
not been left altogether unknown in the 
Cnited States. A few pieces have passed 
into private collections here, and at the 
Kraushaar Galleries, in New York, Bour- 
delle has more than once been brought 
into the foreground. But the impending 
exhibition to which I refer, one of fifty or 
sixty examples, will be the first of a really 
comprehensive nature to introduce to us 
the hero of the most portentous cult in 
modern sculpture since that of Rodin. 
:More than :J\.Iaillol, more than Epstein, 
more than I\Iéstrovic, Bourdelle has some- 
thing of the status of a chef d' écolc. There 
VOL. LK.XVIII.-40 


is at least one wing of French criticism 
that hails him as the renovator of an art. 
He is indeed a renovator, a man of great 
constructive gifts. But appreciation of 
"him is only the more likely to be sympa- 
thetic and just, if it avoids the ecstatic 
note and seeks the truth regardless of the 
importunate acolyte. 
I venture this word of warning because 
as a matter of fact Bourdelle's fine char- 
acter as an artist is easily misapprehended 
if we allow it to be cloudily obscured by the 
rhetoric of his enthusiasts. The gush that 
used to be written about Rodin is now 
written about him. That divine instru- 
ment, the French language, treacherously 
lends itself to the improvisation of dithy- 
rambs at once beguiling and misleading. 
As an illustration of the hifalutin into 
which some of Bourdelle's compatriots 
have been lured I may cite a characteristic 
553 



55
 


THE FIELD OF ART 


Head of Apollo. 


From the sculpture by BourdclIe. 


passage from 1\1. 
Iarcel Pays. Speaking 
of the sculptor's drawings, he says: 


Des dessins, en série, constituent de véritables 
épopées mythiques ou mystiques sans texte. Leur 
puissance d'évocation est telle qu'il semble 
qu'elles accompagnent de chants Homériques ou 
Virgiliens inconnus ou 
de proses liturgiqucs 
oubliées. 


It is pretty, isn't 
it? But when you 
come to look at the 
drawings you fee 1 
like saying Épopées, 
non-sens! It is curi- 
ous how fond the 
Frenchman has 
been, at all events 
since Napoleon's 
day, of an éPoPée. 
Give him the least 
occasion for critical 
fervor and he makes 
an éPoPée out of it. 
Bourdelle's d raw- 
ings are good dra w- 
ings. They are not, 
on the other hand, 
howling master- 
pieces. On their 
precise significance, 
however, it is not 
necessary to pause 
at this point. The 
danger latent in the 
talk of the unbridled 
eulogist having been 
indicated, the next 
step in an approach 
to Bourdelle is one 
toward understand- 
ing of the conditions 
arose. 


./' 



 
., 



 ' 


in which his art 



 
 
 


T HE origins of French sculpture are 
peculiarly racy. They date from the 
Middle Ages, when the stone-workers, 
collaborating with the cathedral-builders, 
enriched architecture with images and 
decorations having to this day a tremen- 
dous eloquence. The primitive emotions 
their carvings embody are expressed with 
a craftsmanship that seems simple until 
you realize how consummate it often is, 
with what subtlety and beauty it inter- 


prets religious ideas. In the process of 
time that simplicity was lost, and, with it, 
the largeness, the breadth, sometimes 
reaching to positive grandeur, which be- 
longed, paradoxically, to a naïve epoch. 
The Renaissance endued French plastic 
art with a sophisti- 
cation that has pre- 
vailed eve r since, 
and the eighteenth 
century gave it an 
academic seal which 
in modern times 
.seemed destined 
never to be broken. 
The tradition upon 
which the great 
name of Houdon 
shed so glorious a 
lustre has been ap- 
parently an invio- 
lable possession of 
the school. Yet ev- 
ery once in so often 
some individuality 
has pushed for- 
ward, too robust to 
be content with 
that correctness, 
that polish, that 
elegance, which 
came to be especial- 
ly characteristic of 
French sçulpture. 
Rude was too ebul- 
lient a type to obey 
all of the old laws. 
Carpeaux, himself 
all for grace and 
charm, had never- 
theless too much 
animation in his genius to subdue the 
movement in his works to the serene mea- 
sure of an earlier régime. But in the more 
specifically modern school, the school in 
which the practitioners of our own time 
touch hands with the Houdon tradition, 
the academy has set the pace, and the 
representative figure is that of Paul Du- 
bois. So pure was his ideal of beauty, so 
masterly was his workmanship, so dis- 
tinguished was his style, that it is tempt- 
ing to regard him as conclusively vali- 
dating a tradition. But, as I have just 
remarked, the academic hypothesis will 
always find its challengers and from the 




. - <!- 



THE FIELD OF ART 


555 


ensuing clash new forces are often gen- H E was born at .Montauban in 18óI, 
erated. Rodin was one of these. He the son of a cabinetmaker., under 
drove straight at the truth of life, and so whose roof it was natural for him soon to 
long as he was faithful to it he did things turn to the carving of wood. I do not 


\ 


.,.' 


\ 


" 


.--...,..- 


_____'___1 


Herakles. 
From the sculpture by Bourdelle. 


having a justly revolutionary character. 
Unfortunately, his facility as a modeller 
ran away with him, and a good deal of his 
work is of dubious value. In his intensely 
individual way he gave himself up to that 
same technical virtuosity which has be- 
trayed so many of his academic contem- 
poraries, and if he has helped modern 
sculpture he has also hurt it. Avoiding the 
technician's pitfall, Bourdelle is another 
such renovating force as was Rodin. Less 
disposed to decline upon mannerism, he 
brings to bear upon the sculpture of his day 
an influence more central, more organic. 


know the exact age at which he was for- 
mally dedicated to an artistic career, but 
it must have been when he was very 
young. He went to the École des Beaux- 
Arts at Toulouse, not very far away, on a 
purse supplied by the municipality. In 
the old southern city he disclosed such 
ability that in due course he was sent, on 
public funds won in competition, to pur- 
sue his studies in Paris. There he entered 
the atelier of Falguière, master of a veri- 
table host, the man who" formed" scores 
of the plastic talents of his time. Bour- 
delle had no intention of losing himself in 




 


.", 


......... 


\ 


> 


.;s 


"\" 


, 


\, 


} 



 


"..
 " 
- 



 


J- 
.... 


, 11 


....-. 
-
 


-'1 


--.,. 


-
. 


'-4 


-' 


55 6 


La Victoire. 
From the sculpture by Bourdelle. 



THE FIELD OF ART 


a crowd. He stayed with Falguière for 
hardly more than a month and then en- 
listed with Rodin. He appears to have 
made extraordinary progress with that 
master. 1\1. Pays says tha t he became 
Rodin's favorite pupil and then his ,. col- 
laborator." Afterward, on the occasion 
of an exhibition which his 
junior made at Prague, Ro- 
din wrote to the organizers: 


557 


governed Ingres. This is our modern 
master's unique gift. \Vhen a new artist 
comes into view it is natural to ask about 
his technique and his style. With Bour- 
delle you fasten at once upon the soul of 
his art, upon the imaginative, spiritual 
elements which vitalize it. It is his inner 


Bourdelle is a beacon of the 
future. I love his sculpture, so 
personal, so expressive of his sensi- 
tive nature, of his fiery and im- 
passioned temperament. And I 
find in it a certain delicacy which 
is proper to the strong. Impetu- 
ositv is the characteristic of the 
tale
t of Bourdelle. 



 
 
 
T HERE was a charming 
accord between the two, 
and it is the more admirable 
because it was based on 
mutual respect, without any 
tincture in Bourdelle of that 
emulous sympathy which 
ordinarily is aroused by a 
master in his pupil. It never 
crossed the young man's 
mind to imitate Rodin. 
Keither, by the way, was he 
susceptible to an influence 
that must have been all 
around him in his youth. 
Born in the town that gave 
Ingres to the world, he grew 
up to make a bust of him, 
but he remained absolutely 
indifferent to the Raphaelesque elements 
in the painter's genius. He was himself 
too vigorous, of too realistic a tendency. 
The bust is superb. I wish it could be sub- 
stituted for the bronze by Etex that forms 
part of the memorial at l\Iontauban. 
Bourdelle conceived Ingres as every atten- 
tIve reader of the biographies must believe 
that he was, a solid, weighty, powerful, 
thoroughly human creature, the very an- 
tithesis in his strong, dictatorial habit of 
the superfine delicacy which marks the 
pictures and drawings. Yet Bourdelle 
doesn't miss the more elusive fineness of 
his man, either. \Vith moving penetration 
he makes you feel behind the rude physi- 
ognomy the rare and elevated spirit that 


't 


" 
" 

} I 
',Þ 


\}. 
" 


Anatole France. 
From the sculpture by Bourdelle. 


quality, I think, which will most aggres- 
sively awaken interest in the forthcoming 
exhibition. 
/\. statue or a bust by him is a true and, 
indeed, a convincing embodiment of an 
idea or a personality. His" Head of Apol- 
lo," done in 1900, is not a reminiscence of 
the classical types in the museums but an 
authentic conception, clearly, and, as it 
happens, very persuasively, a creation of 
Bourdelle's mind. There is nothing con- 
ventional about it. It is not a scholar's 
pastiche. Perhaps it is not,eith
r, the prod- 
uct of a strictly poetic inspiration. But 
for my own part I feel that inspiration, of 
a sort, was there. He may have been 
merely lucky with his model, but, even so, 



558 


THE FIELD OF _\RT 


he invested the head with something that Force" is force. "La Victoire," a tall 
proceeded from himself and from himself slender, even meagre, figure, gives you a
 
alone. It is the same with the romantic idea of victory curiously new and beauti- 
"Beethoven," which belongs, I believe, to ful after the throngs of vapid stereotypes 
the same period. He is said to have made in bronze or marble with which the earth is 
countless studies for it, and it has the ear- cumbered. I am unmoved by the equestri- 
marks of a deeply pondered, emotionally an group making the central motive of 
and thoughtfully created thing, a thing this monument. The charger is handsome 


,- 
#I 'v .. . 


. 


.JÞr 



. 
I 
. 


:J(. 


",. 


I> 


I 


1 


.. 


, 


'f 


. 


.' ..'":.... 


,. 



 


(
 ' 


,\ - 
. 
 


..' ,
' 
-.
':: 
-' -:-- ........ 


..,. 


At Torre Galli. Florence. 
From the painting by Sargent. 


evolved from within, There can be no 
doubt of Bourdelle's escape from Rodin's 
sometimes enchanting but sometimes very 
specious impressionism. If he keeps his 
eye on the object, and he undoubtedly 
does that, he has an even livelier concern 
for his idea of it. \Ve shall see the point 
magnificently demonstrated if we see in 
this winter's exhibition the busts of Ingres 
and Anatole France and certain of his 
mythological and symbolical figures. The 
famous" Herakles" is an amazingly sug- 
gestive representation of the mythical 
hero. The four flanking statues for the 
General Alvear monument at Buenos 
Aires have the same power to touch the 
imagination, they have the same poign- 
ancy as of attributes made manifest. "La 


without suggesting for a moment what 1\.1. 
Pays asserts. that it rivals the" Colleone" 
of Verrocchio. But the subsidiary figures 
to which I have alluded are characteriza- 
tions of the first rank, the works of a 
sculptor who has something to sayc 

 
 
 
H O\V does he say it? He is a past 
master of craftsmanship and handles 
his material with an easy, firm touch. He 
is, I may add, very adroit in all the medi- 
ums, marble, bronze, terra-cotta, and 
wood, and he works with a loyal feeling for 
the genius of each. N e brusques pas la 
pierre, he is quoted as saying to his pupils, 
et ne tourmcntez pas Ie bron:e. C' est 1m 
crime de lèse-sérénité. Still he is, himself, 



THE FIELD OF ART 


559 


none too suave, but, on the contrary, a delle." You feel it in his composItions 
broad, bold modeller. It is one of his great given to the dance, or in his" Herakles," 
virtues and, in my opinion, an immense a kind of pulsing life communicated to his 
relief from the melting modulations of work by the whole force of the artist. You 
Rodin. Those not infrequently slide into feel it, for that matter, even in the figures, 
the void of prettiness. Bourdelle could like those of the Alvear monument, which 
not be pretty if he tried. Is he, then, are in repose. They, too, have felt the 
markedly beautiful ? Yes, in an austere, impact of the life-giving spark. 


" 


Þ: 
\ 


.. 



 . 
. 


.. 


,.,.. 
, . 


, 'I 


Claude l\Ionet Painting by the Edge of a \V ood. 
From the painting by Sargent. 


archaic way, with a trace of the large and 
noble simplicity of those masters who lie 
behind the ripest period of Greek art. He 
is strong on the architectural relations of 
sculpture and in some notable reliefs of 
his we see how he rather more powerfully 
than gracefully fuses line and mass into 
unity of design. The architect Peret gave 
him an opportunity to decorate the Thé- 
âtre des Champs-Elysées which turned 
out to be one of the great productive mo- 
ments of his career. His panels of dancers 
are veritable decorations and within their 
arbitrary confines he handles form with 
impressive flexibility, truth and dignity. 
He has unmistakable mobility, too. Ro- 
?in's phrase is very happy-"Impetuosity 
IS the characteristic of the talent of Bour- 


How naturally they lead me far from 
questions of style and technique! That is 
Bourdelle. He detaches you from consid- 
eration of the means that he uses and 
causes you to think only of his end. His 
technique, if I must pedantically charac- 
terize it, is that of a French craftsman 
with Parisian cleverness and arid "finish" 
left out of his system, simple, broad, hon- 
est, nearer to archaic methods than to 
those of the sophisticated eras. His style 
is not so much original as it is unconven- 
tional, with something of the antique 
hanging about it, and, occasionally, a 
faint hint of things Byzantine or of the 
mediæval imagiers. It has power in it, a 
sense of a spacious, virile world. It tanta- 
lizes and baffles me a little. I don't quite 



560 


THE FIELD OF ART 


feel that it is, as a style, one marking him 
as of the race of the great masters. He 
never seems to me one of those utterly 
affirmative, new, and full-rounded men of 
genius such as I know when I am in the 
presence of the "Gattamelata," or the 
J\Iedicean tombs, or that astounding 
"Well of J\loses" at Dijon. But of genius 
he has, beyond all peradventure, his share. 
Unquestionably, as I said at the outset, he 
is a renovator. Let the reader who doubts 
this look, without waiting for the exhibi- 
tion, at the handful of illustrations from 
the artist in these pages, and thên let him 
send his memory back to the accomplished 
but hard, hollow, and shiny sculpture 
characteristic of the Salon. He will be 
bound to admit, I maintain, that Bour- 
delle, if not himself a prodigious master, 
is, at any rate, the harbinger of better 
things. 


contained, the study that Sargent had 
made for that early full-length of his 
which was such a landmark in his career 
" ' 
the :Madame Gautreau," now in theJ\Iet- 
ropolitan l\luseum. The study was pur- 
chased for presentation to the Tate Gal- 
lery, in London. The artist's sisters also 
retained another work, "Claude J\Ionet 
Painting by the Edge of a Wood," to give 
to the National Gallery. 
\Vhen the Wertheimer portraits were 
lodged in the National Gallery several 
years 
go there were .peevish outcries in 
some British quarters against the honor 
thus paid to Sargent, and the sale of course 
lêd to a revival of thesè jealous stupidities, 
There were some owlish shakings of some 
sorrowful heads, and there even bulged in- 
to the subject .one sprig of Continental 
royalty who was quoted in the dispatches 
as gravely expressing the opinion that in 
t ten years the prices fixed at Christie's the 
other day would be appreciably lower
. 
I CANNOT forbear making some allusion These discord
nt:notès- in the general 
in this place to the greát artistic sensa- chorus would hardly require attention if it 
tion of the summer, the Sargent sale at .....were not that th
y are . symptomatic 'of 
Christie's. It disposed of mòre than two, certain elements in current criticism which 
hundred of the paintings, studies, and need 'explanàti
n: ' It is .not áltogether 
drawings left in his studios and aroused surpr
sing' that our American master 
phenomenal competition. At the first of should evoke disp
ragement both in Lçn- 
the two sessions, the one devoted entirely don and Paris. National pride is sensitiye, 
to his own works, something over $700,000 and it is doubtless hard for the French and 
was realized. Collectors and dealers from English to admit that they have had no 
all over the world were present, and from technician in Sargent's time to challenge 
the very start they showed that they were his pre-eminence. But the most persistent 
willing to go to any lengths to obtain sou- carping against him has developed in the 
venirs of the master. The bidding began modernist camp. The envy characteristic 
at the rate of $1,000 a minute, and it was of mediocrity has been reinforced by the 
kept up at the same extraordinary pace. hatred among men who do not know how 
"San Vigilio," a Venetian scene, fetched to paint for the man who did know how. 
.t7,350. "At Torre Galli, Florence," was The meanest and most spiteful animad- 
sold for .t6,930. At the second day's sale versions upon Sargent have come from 
even a copy, after Hals, brought almost as modernistic oracles. The reader will do 
much. In short, the sale smashed all prec- well to remember this when he encounters 
edents so far as they have concerned the the contention that Sargent was not a 
works of a modern master. It was a great painter; he should look carefully to 
sweeping posthumous triumph, a perfect the credentials of the malcontent. \Ve are 
demonstration of the thoroughness with likely to have, by the way, more than one 
which Sargent had established himself as book about Sargent. An official biogra- 
the greatest painter of his time. Incidents phy is fairly certain to appear, and in the 
were not wanting to show more than pri- meantime J\Ir. \V. H. Downes, the former 
vate recognition. Just before the sale Sir art critic of the Boston Transcript, has 
Joseph Duveen bought out of the collec- been working upon a volume which is 
tion one of the most interesting things it marked, I believe, for early publication, 



 
 
 


A c.1lend,lr of current .1rt exhibitions will be found in th" Fifth Av
nuc Section 




!ir. 


eJ&m'
"",1'<'X""'';' 
18.f'I.J<<'1'J"ì"
 



SCRIBNER'S 


VOL LXXVIII 


MAGAZINE 


DECEMBER, 1925 


NO. 6 


The Silver Spoon 
BY JOHN GALS WORTHY 
Author of 
The White Monkey," etc, 


I 


A STRANGER 


w

 
 HE young man who, at 
X. ,the end of September, 
ï T I 19 2 4, 
ismOl:,nted from 
':!II a taxICab III Sou th 
Square, Westminster, 
W' 
 was so unobtrusively 
x
1Ç)
 American that his 
driver had some hesi- 
tation in asking for double his fare. The 
young man had no hesitation in refus- 
ing it. 
" You certainly are unable to read! " he 
said softly: "Here are four shillings." 
With that he turned his back and 
looked at the house before which he had 
descended. This first private English 
house he had ever proposed to enter in- 
spired him with a certain uneasiness, as of 
a man who expects to part with a family 
ghost. Comparing a letter with the num- 
ber chased in pale brass on the door, he 
murmured: "It sure is," and rang the 
bell. 
\Vhile waiting for the door to be opened 
he was conscious of extreme quietude, 
broken by a clock chiming four as if with 
the voice of Time itself. When the last 
boom died, the door yawned inward, and 
I a man, almost hairless, said: 
" Yes, sir?" 
The young man removed a soft hat 
from a dark head. 
"I judge this is 11rs. :Michael !vlont's 
house. " 
"Correct, sir." 


PART I 


"Will you give her my card, and this 
letter? " 
" '1Ir. Francis Wilmot, Naseby, S. C.' 
\Vill you wait in here, sir?" 
Ushered through the doorway of a room 
on the right, Francis \Vilmot was con- 
scious of a commotion close to the ground 
and some teeth grazing the calf of his 
leg. 
"Dandie !" said the voice of the hair- 
less man, "you little devil! That dog is 
a proper little brute with strangers, sir. 
Stand still! I've known him bite clean 
through a lady's stockings." 
Francis \Vilmot saw with interest a 
silver-gray dog nine inches high and 
nearly as broad, looking up at him with 
lustrous eyes above teeth of extreme 
beauty. 
"It's the baby, sir," said the hairless 
man, pointing to a sort of nest on the floor 
before the fireless hearth; "he will go for 
people when he's with the baby. But 
once he gets to smelling your trousers, 
he's all right. Better not touch the baby, 
though. 1tlrs. Mont was here a minute 
ago; I'll take your card up to her." 
Francis Wilmot sat down on a settee in 
the middle of the room; and the dog licked 
the head of the baby. 
"You're a cute couple," said Francis 
\Vilmot under his breath. " Gee! This 
is a sure-enough 'salon.' " 
The sure-enough "salon" was painted 
in panels of a sub-golden hue, with a 
silver-colored ceiling. A clavichord, lit- 
tle golden ghost of a piano, stood at one 
end. Glass lustres, pictures of flowers 


Copyrighted in 1925 in Unite.i States, Canada, and Great Britain by Charles Scribner's Sons. Printed in 
New York. All rights reserved. 
VOL. LXXTIII.-41 5 61 



562 


THE SILVER SPOO
 


and of a silver-necked lady swinging a 
skirt and her golden slippers, adorned the 
walls. The çurtains were of gold and 
silver. The silver-colored carpet felt won- 
derfully soft beneath his feet, the furni- 
ture was of a golden wood. 
The young man felt suddenly quite 
homesick. He was back in the living- 
room of an old "colonial" house, in the 
bend of a lonely South Carolina river, red- 
dish in hue and not wholly divested of alli- 
gators. He was staring at the effigy of 
his high-collared, red-coated great-grand- 
father, Francis Wilmot, Royalist major in 
the War of Independencec They always 
said it was like the effigy he saw when 
shaving every morning; the smooth dark 
hair drooping across his right temple, the 
narrow nose and lips, the narrow dark 
hand on the sword-hilt or the razor, the 
slits of dark eyes gazing steadily out. He 
was hearing the darkies crooning in the 
cotton-fields under a sun that he did not 
seem to have seen since he came over here; 
he was walking with his setter along the 
swamp edge, where the Florida moss fes- 
tooned the tall dolorous trees; he was 
thinking of the Wilmot inheritance, 
ruined in the Civil War, still decayed yet 
precious, and whether to struggle on with 
it, or to sell it to the Yank who wanted a 
week-end run-to from his Charleston dock 
job, and would "sure" improve it out 
of recognition. It would be "darned 
lonely" there, now that Anne had married 
that young Britisher, Jon Forsyte, and 
gone away north, to Southern Pinesc And 
he thought of sister Anne, thus lost to 
him, dark, pale, vivid, "full of sand." 
Y eh! this "salon" made him homesick, 
with its perfection, such as he had never 
beheld, where the only object out of keep- 
ing was that" dawg," lying on its side 
now, and so thick through that all its 
"cunning" little legs were in the air. 
Softly he said: 
"It certainly is the prettiest room I 
ever was inc" 
"What a perfectly charming thing to 
overhear! " 
A young woman, with crinkly chestnut 
hair above a creamy face, with smiling 
lips, a short straight nose, and very white, 
dark-lashed eyelids active over dark hazel 
eyes, stood near the door. She came to- 
ward him and held out her hand. 


Francis \Vilmot bowed over it and said 
gravely: 
"Mrs. Michaell\lont, ma'am." 
"So Jon's married your sister. Is she 
pretty? " 
"I guess so." 
" Very? " 
"Yes, ma'am," 
"How do you like my baby?" 
"I think he's just too cunning." 
"He is, rather. I hear Dandie bit 
you? " 
"I judge he didn't break the cuti- 
cle. " 
"Haven't you looked? But he's quite 
healthy. Sit down, and tell me all about 
your sister and Jon. Is it a marriage of 
true minds?" 
Francis Wilmot sat down. 
"It is, ma'am. Young Jon is a pretty 
white man, and sister Anne-" 
He heard a sigh. 
"I'm very glad. He says in his letter 
that he's awfully happy. You must come 
and stay here. You can be as free as you 
like. Look on us as an hotel." 
The young man's dark eyes smiled. 
"That's just lovely of you! I've never 
been on this side before. They got through 
the war too soon." 
Fleur took the baby out of its nest. 
"This creature doesn't bite. Look- 
two teeth, but they don't antagonize- 
isn't that how you put it?" 
"What is its name, ma'am?" 
"Kit for Christopher. We agreed 
about it, luckily. Michael-my husband 
-will be in directly. He's in Parliament, 
you know. They're not sitting till Mon- 
day-Ireland, of course. We only came 
back for it from Italy yesterday. Italy's 
so wonderful-you must see it." 
"Pardon me, ma'am, but is that the 
, Congress' clock that chimes so loud?" 
"Big Ben-yes. He marks time for 
them. Michael says Parliament is the 
best drag on Progress ever invented. 
With our first Labor Government, it's 
been specially interesting this yearc 
Don't you think it's rather touching the 
way this dog watches my baby? He's got 
the most terrific jaw!" 
"What kind of dawg is he, anyway?" 
"A Dandie Dinmont. We did have a 
Peke. It was a terrible tragedy. He 
would go after cats; and one day he struck 



THE SILVER SPOON 


a fighting Tom, and got clawed over both 
eyes-quite blinded-and so--" 
The young man saw her eyes suddenly 
too bright. He made a soft noise, and 
said gently: "That was too bad." 
"I had to change this room completely. 
I t used to be Chinese. I t reminded me 
too much." 
"I guess this little fellow would chaw 
any cat?" 
"Yes; but luckily he was brought up 
with kittens. \Ve got him for his legs- 
they're so bowed in front that he can 
hardly run, so he just suits the pram. 
Dan, show your legs!" 
The Dandie looked up with a negative 
sound. 
"He's a terrible little 'character.' Do 
tell me, what's Jon like now? Is he still 
English? " 
The young man was queerly conscious 
that she had uttered at last something 
really in her mind. 
"He certainly is; but he's a lovely fel- 
low." 
"And his mother? She used to be 
beau tiful." 
"And is to this day, ma'am." 
"She would be. Gray, I suppose, by 
now? " 
" Yes. I judge you don't like her?" 
"Well, I hope she won't be jealous of 
your sister!" 
"I think, maybe, you're unjust." 
"I think, maybe, I am." 
She sat very still, her face hard above 
the baby's. And the young man, con- 
scious of things beyond his reach, got up. 
"When you write to Jon," she said sud- 
denly, "tell him that I'm awfully glad, 
and that I wish him luck. I shan't write 
to him myself. J\<lay I call you Francis?" 
Francis \Vilmot bowed. "I shall be 
proud, ma'am." 
"Yes; but you must call me Fleur. 
We're sort of related, you know." 
The young man smiled and touched the 
name with his lips. 
"Fleur! It sure is a beautiful name!" 
" Your room will be ready when you 
come back. You'll have a bathroom to 
yourself, of course." 
He put his lips to the hand held out. 
"Gee! It's wonderful," he said. "I 
was feeling kind of homesick; I guess I 
miss the sun over here." 


563 


In going out he looked back. Fleur had 
put her baby back in its nest and was 
staring straight before her. 


II 


CIL\NGE 
BUT more than the death of a dog had 
caused the regamishing of Fleur's Chinese 
room. On the evening of her twenty- 
second birthday l\fichael had come home 
saying: 
"Well, my dear, I've chucked publish- 
ing. With old Danby always in the right 
-it isn't a career." 
"Oh! l\1ichael, you'll be bored to 
death. " 
"I'll go into Parliament. It's quite 
usual, and about the same screw." 
He had spoken in jest. Six days later 
it became apparent that she had listened 
in earnest. 
"You were absolutely right, l\fichael. 
It's the very thing for you. You've got 
ideas. " 
"Other people's." 
"And the gift of the gab. \Ve're fright- 
fully handy for the House, here." 
"It costs money, my child." 
"Yes; I've spoken to father. It was 
rather funny-there's never been a For- 
syte, you know, anywhere near Parlia- 
ment. But he thinks it'll be good for me; 
and that it's all baronets are fit for." 
" One has to have a seat, unfortu- 
nately." 
"Well, I've sounded your father too. 
He'll speak to people. They want young 
men." 
" Ah! And what are my politics?" 
"My dear boy, you must know-at 
thirty. " 
"I'm not a Liberal. But am I Labor 
or Tory?" 
"You can think it out before the next 
election! " 
Next day, while he was shaving, and 
she was in her bath, he cut himself slightly 
and said: 
"I'm a Foggartist." 
" What? " 
"Old Sir James Foggart's book. You 
read it." 
" No." 
"Well, you said so." 
"So did others." 



564 


THE SILVER SPOON 


"Never mind-his eyes are fixed on 
nineteen-forty-four, and his policy's ac- 
cording. The Land, and Child Emigra- 
tion; adjustment of Supply and Demand 
within the Empire; cut our losses-Eu- 
rope; and endure a worse Present for the 
sake of a better Future. Everything, in 
fact, that's unpopular." 
"Well, you could keep all that to your- 
self till you get in. You'll have to stand 
as a Tory." 
"How lovely you look!" 
"If you get in, you can disagree with 
everybody. That'll give you a position 
from the start." 
"Some scheme!" murmured Michael. 
"You can initiate this Foggartism. He 
isn't mad, is he?" 
" No; only too sane. \Ve've got a 
higher wage-scale-he says-than any 
other country except America and the 
Dominions; and it isn't coming down 
again; so, in the long run, we've only the 
new countries to look to for markets; we 
shall never again produce cheap enough 
for the rest of the world. He's for grow- 
ing as much of our food as we can, and 
pumping British town children, before 
they're spoiled, into the colonies, till 
colonial demand equals our supply. It's 
no earthly, of course, without whole- 
hearted co-operation between the Gov- 
ernments within the Empire." 
"It sounds very sensible." 
"We published him, you know, but at 
his own expense. It's a 'faith and the 
mountain' stunt. He's got the faith all 
right, but the mountain doesn't move." 
Fleur stood up. "Well," she said, 
"that's settled. Your father says he can 
get you a nomination as a Tory, and you 
can keep your own views to yourself. 
You'll get in on the human touch, Mi- 
chael." 
"Thank you, ducky. Can I help dry 
you?" . . . 
Before redecorating her Chinese room, 
however, Fleur had waited till after lVIi- 
chael was comfortably seated for a divi- 
sion which professed to be interested in 
agriculture. She chose a blend between 
Adam and Louis Quinze. Michael called 
it the" bimetallic parlor"; and carried off 
"The White Monkey" to his study. The 
creature's pessimism was not, he felt, 
suited to political life. 


Fleur had initiated her" salon" with a 
gathering in February. The soul of so- 
ciety had passed a wa y since the Liberal 
débâcle and Lady Alison's politico-legal 
coterie no longer counted. Plainer people 
were in the ascendant. Her Wednesday 
evenings were youthful, with age repre- 
sented by her father-in-law, two minor 
ambassadors, and Pevensey Blythe, edi- 
tor of The Outpost. So unlike his literary 
style that he was usually mistaken for a 
colonial Prime Minister, Blythe was a tall 
man with a beard and gray bloodshot 
eyes, who expressed knowledge in para- 
graphs that few could really understand. 
"What Blythe thinks to-day the Conser- 
vative Party will not think to-morrow" 
was said of him. He spoke in a sm
ll 
voice and constantly used the impersonal 
pronoun. 
"One has a feeling," he would say of a 
situation, "that one is walking in one's 
sleep and will wake up without any 
clothes on." 
He was a warm supporter of Sir James 
Foggart's book, characterizing it as "the 
masterpiece of a blind archangel"; and 
had a passion for listening to the clavi- 
chord. He was invaluable in Fleur's 
" salon." 
Freed from poetry and modem music, 
from Sibley Swan, Walter Nazing and 
Hugo Sols tis, Fleur was finding time for 
her son-the eleventh baronet. He rep- 
resented for her the reality of things, 
Michael might have posthumous theo- 
ries, and Labor predatory hopes, but for 
her the year 1944 would see the eleventh 
baronet come of age. That Kit should 
inherit an England worth living in was of 
more intrinsic importance than anything 
they proposed in the Commons and were 
unable to perform. All those houses they 
were going to build, for instance-very 
proper, but a little unnecessary if Kit 
still had Lippinghall Manor and South 
Square, Westminster, to dwell in. Not 
that Fleur voiced such cynical convic- 
tions, or admitted them even to herself. 
She did orthodox lip-service to the God 
Progress. 
The Peace of the World, Hygiene, Na- 
tional Safety, and the End of Unemploy- 
ment, preoccupied all, irrespective of 
party, and Fleur was in the fashion; but 
instinct, rather than Michael and Sir 



THE SILVER SPOON 


James Foggart, told her that the time- 
honored motto: "Eat your cake and have 
it," which underlay the platforms of all 
parties, was not" too frightfully" sound. 
So long as Kit had cake it was no good 
bothering too deeply about the rest; 
though, of course, one must seem to. 
Fluttering about her "salon"-this to 
that person, and that to the other, and 
to all so pretty, she charmed by her grace, 
her common sense, her pliancy. Not in- 
frequently she attended at the House, 
and sat, not listening too much to the 
speeches, yet picking up, as it were, by a 
sort of seventh sense (if women in Society 
all had six, surely Fleur had seven) what 
was necessary to the conduct of that 
"salon"-the rise and fall of the Govern- 
mental barometer, the catchwords and 
clichés of policy; and, more valuable, im- 
pressions of personality, of the residuary 
man within the l\fember. She watched 
Michael's career with the fostering eye of 
a godmother who has given her godchild 
a blue morocco prayer-book in the hope 
that some day he may remember its exist- 
ence. Although a sedulous attendant at 
the House all through the spring and sum- 
mer, l\lichael had not yet opened his 
mouth, and so far she had approved of 
his silence while nurturing his desire to 
know his own mind by listening to his 
wanderings in Foggartism. If it were in- 
deed the only permanent cure for Unem- 
ployment, as he said, she too was a Fog- 
gartist; common sense assuring her that 
the only real danger to Kit's future lay in 
that national malady. Eliminate Unem- 
ployment, and nobody would have time 
to make a fuss. But her criticisms were 
often pertinent: 
"l\ly dear boy, does a country ever 
sacrifice the present for the sake of the 
future?" or: "Do you really think coun- 
try life is better than town life?" or: 
"Can you imagine sending Kit out of 
England at fourteen to some God-for- 
saken end of the world?" or: "Do you 
suppose the towns will have it?" And 
they roused l\1ichael to such persistence 
and fluency that she felt he would really 
catch on in time-like old Sir Giles Snore- 
ham, whom they would soon be making 
a peer, because he had always worn low- 
crowned hats and advocated a return to 
hansom cabs. Hats, buttonholes, an eye- 


565 


glass-she turned over in her mind all 
such little realities as help a political ca- 
reer. 
"Plain glass doesn't harm the sigh t ; 
and it really has a focussing value, l\li- 
chael. " 
"l\ly child, it's never done my dad a 
bit of good; I doubt if it's sold three copies 
of any of his books. No! If I get on, it'll 
be by talking." 
But still she encouraged him to keep 
his mouth shut. 
"It's no good starting wrong, l\Iichael. 
These Labor people aren't going to last 
out the year." 
"Why not?" 
"Their heads are swelling, and their 
tempers going. They're only on suffer- 
ance; people on sufferance have got to be 
pleasant or they won't be suffered. When 
they go out the Tories will get in again 
and probably last. You'll have several 
years to be eccentric in, and by the time 
they're out again you'll have your license. 
Just go on working the human touch in 
your constituency; I'm sure it's a mistake 
to forget you've got constituents." 
Michael spent most week-ends that 
summer working the human touch in mid- 
Bucks; and Fleur spent most week-ends 
with the eleventh baronet at her father's 
house near Mapledurham. 
Since wiping the dust of the City off his 
feet, after that affair of Elderson and the 
P.P.R.S., Soames had become almost too 
countrified for a Forsyte. He had bought 
the meadows on the far side of the river 
and several Jersey cows. Not that he was 
going in for farming or nonsense of that 
sort, but it gave him an interest to punt 
himself over and see them milked. He 
had put up a good deal of glass, too, and 
was laying down melons. The English 
melon was superior to any other, and 
every year's connection with a French wife 
made him more and more inclined to eat 
what he grew himself. After Michael was 
returned for Parliament, Fleur had sent 
him Sir James Foggart's book "The Par- 
lous State of England." When it came, 
he said to Annette: 
"I don't know what she thinks I want 
with this great thing!" 
"To read it, Soames, I suppose." 
Soames sniffed, turning the pages. 
"I can't tell what it's all about." 



566 


THE SILVER SPOON 


HI will sell it at my bazaar, Soames. It eleventh baronet was extremely agreeable 
will do for some good man who can read to him. Though at first he had felt a sort 
English." of disappointment that his grandchild 
From that moment Soames began al- was not a girl-an eleventh baronet be- 
most unconsciously to read the book. He longed too definitely to the Monts-as the 
found it a peculiar affair which gave most months wore on he began to find him "an 
people some good hard knocks. He began engaging little chap," and in any case, to 
to enjoy them, especially the chapter dep- have him down at Mapledurham kept him 
recating the workman's dislike of part- away from Lippinghall. It tried him at 
ing with his children at a reasonable age. times, of course, to see how the women 
Having never been outside Europe, he hung about the baby-there was some- 
had a somewhat sketchy idea of places thing very excessive about motherhood. 
like South Africa, Australia, Canada and He had noticed it with Annette; he no- 
New Zealand; but this old fellow Foggart, ticed it now with Fleur. French-per- 
it appeared, had been there, and knew haps! He had not remembered his own 
what he was talking about. What he said mother making such a fuss; indeed, he 
about their development seemed quite sen- could not remember anything that hap- 
sible. Children who went out there put pened when he was one. A week-end, 
on weight at once and became owners of when Madame Lamotte, Annette and 
property at an age when in England they Fleur were all hanging over his grandson 
were still delivering parcels, popping in -three generations of maternity concen- 
and out of jobs, hanging about street trated on that pudgy morsel, reduced him 
corners, and qualifying for unemployment to a punt, fishing for what he felt sure no- 
and Communism. Get them out of Eng- body would eat. 
land! There was a startling attraction in By the time he had finished Sir James 
the idea for one who was English to a de- Foggart's book the disagreeable summer 
gree. He was in favor, too, of what was of 1924 was over, and a more disagree- 
said about growing food and making Eng- able September had set in. The mellow 
land safe in the air. He complained, how- golden days that glow up out of a haze 
ever, to Fleur that the book dealt with which stars with dewdrops every cobweb 
nothing but birds in the bush; all the on a gate simply did not come. It rained, 
same, he shouldn't be surprised if there and the river was so unnaturally full that 
were something in it. \Vhat did "Old the newspapers were at first unnaturally 
Mont" say about it? empty-there was literally no news of 
"He won't read it;he says he knows old drought; they filled up again slowly with 
Foggart." reports of the wettest summer" for thirty 
This strengthened Soames' approval of years." Calm, greenish with weed and 
the book. That little-headed baronet fel- tree shadow, the river flowed unendingly 
low was old-fashioned. between Soames' damp lawn and his 
"Anyway," he said, "it shows that damp meadows. There were no mush- 
l\lichael's given up those Labor fellows." rooms. Blackberries tasted of rain. 
"Michael says that Foggartism will be Soames made a point of eating one every 
Labor's policy when they understand year, and, by the flavor, could tell what 
what it means." sort of year it had been. There was a 
HHow's that?" . good deal of "old-man's-beard." In spite 
"He thinks it's going to do them much of all this, however, he was more cheer- 
more good than anybody else. He says ful than he had been for ages. Labor 
one or two of their leaders are beginning had been" in," if not in real power, for 
to smell it out, and that the rest of the months, and the heavens had only low- 
leaders are bound to follow in time." ered. Forced by Labor in office to take 
"In that case," said Soames, "it'll some notice of politics, he would utter 
never go down with their rank and file." prophecies at the breakfast-table. They 
And for two minutes he sat in a sort of varied somewhat, according to the news; 
trance. Had he said something profound, and, since he always forgot those which 
or had he not? did not come true, he was constantly able 
Fleur's presence at week-ends with the to tell Annette that he had told her so. 



THE SILVER SPOON 


She took no interest, however, occupied, 
like a woman, with her bazaars and jam- 
making, running about in the car, shop- 
ping in London, attending garden-parties; 
and, in spite of her tendency to put on 
flesh, still remarkably handsome. Jack 
Cardigan, his niece Imogen's husband, 
had made him a birthday present of a set 
of golf-clubs. This was more puzzling to 
Soames than anything that had ever hap- 
pened to him. What on earth was he 
to do with them? Annette, with that 
French quickness which so often annoyed 
him, suggested that he should use them. 
She was uncomfortable! At his age-! 
And then, one week-end in May the fellow 
himself had come down with Imogen, and, 
teeing a ball up on half a molehill, had 
driven it across the river. 
"I'll bet you a box of cigars, Uncle 
Soames, that you don't do that before we 
leave on Monday!" 
"I never bet," said Soames, "and I 
don't smoke." 
"Time you began both. Look here, 
we'll spend to-morrow learning to knock 
the ball ! " 
" Absurd!" said Soames.' 
But in his room that night he had stood 
in his pajamas swinging his arms in imita- 
tion of Jack Cardigan. The next day he 
sent the women out in the car with their 
lunch; he was not going to have them 
grinning at him. He had seldom spent 
more annoying hours than those which 
followed. They culminated in a moment 
when at last he hit the ball, and it fell into 
the river three yards from the near bank. 
He was so stiff next morning in arms and 
ribs that Annette had to rub him till he 
said: 
"Look out! you're taking the skin off !" 
He had, however, become infected. 
After destroying some further portions of 
his lawn, he joined the nearest golf club 
and began to go round by himself during 
the luncheon-hour accompanied by a little 
boy. He kept at it with characteristic 
tenacity, till by July he had attained a 
certain proficiency; and he began to say 
to Annette that it would do her all the 
good in the world to take it up and keep 
her weight down. 
" M erci, Soames," she would reply; "I 
have no wish to be the figure of your Eng- 
lish misses, flat as a board before and be- 


567 


hind." She was reactionary, "like her na- 
tion "; and Soames, who at heart had a 
certain sympathy with curves, did not 
seriously press the point. He found that 
the exercise jogged both his liver and his 
temper. He began to have color in his 
cheeks. The day after his first round with 
Jack Cardigan, who had given him three 
points per hole and beaten him by nine 
holes, he received a package which, to his 
dismay, contained a box of cigars. What 
the fellow was about he could not imag- 
ine! He only discovered when, one eve- 
ning a few days later, sitting at the 
window of his picture-gallery, he found 
that he had one in his mouthc Curiously 
enough, it did not make him sick. It pro- 
duced rather something of the feeling he 
used to enjoy after doing Coué-now 
comparatively out of fashion, since an 
American, so his sister Winifred said, had 
found a shorter cut. A suspicion, how- 
ever, that the family had set Jack Cardi- 
gan on prevented him from indulging his 
new sensation anywhere but in his picture- 
gallery; so that cigars gathered the halo 
of a secret vice. He renewed his store 
stealthily. Only when he found that An- 
nette, Fleur and others had known for 
weeks did he relax his rule and say openly 
that the vice of the present day was ciga- 
rettes. 
"My dear boy," said Winifred, when 
she next saw him, "everybody's saying 
you're a different man!" 
Söames raised his eyebrows. He was 
not conscious of any change. 
"That chap Cardigan," he said, "is a 
funny fellow! I'm going to dine and sleep 
at Fleur's; they're just back from Italy. 
The House sits on Monday." 
" Yes," said \Vinifred; "very fussy of 
them-sitting in the Long Vacation." 
" Ireland!" said Soames deeply. " A 
pretty pair of shoes again! " Always had 
been; always would be! 


III 


IDCHAEL TAKES "A LUNAR" 


]\1lICHAEL had returned from Italy with 
the longing to "get on with it," which re- 
sults from southern holidays. Committed 
to Foggartism, he had taken up no other 
hobby in the House, and was eating the 
country's bread, if somewhat unbuttered, 



568 


THE SILVER SPOON 


and doing nothing for it. He desired, 
therefore, to know where he stood and 
how long he was going to stand there. 
Bent on "taking this lunar"-as "Old 
Forsyte" would call it-at his own posi- 
tion, he walked away from the House that 
same day, after dealing with an accumu- 
lated correspondence. He walked toward 
Pevensey Blythe, in the office of that self- 
sufficing weekly The Outpost. Sunburned 
from his Italian holiday, and thinned by 
Italian cookery, he moved briskly and 
thought of many things. Passing down 
on to the Embankment, where a number 
of birds on a number of trees were also 
wondering, it seemed, where they stood 
and how long they were going to stand 
there, he took a letter from his pocket to 
read a second time. 


"12 Sapper's Row, 
"Camden Town. 
"HONORABLE SIR,-Being young in 
'\Vho's \Vho, , you will not be hard, I 
think, to those in suffering. I am an Aus- 
trian woman who married a German 
eleven years ago. He was an actor on the 
English stage, for his father and mother, 
who are no more living, brought him to 
England quite young. Interned, he was, 
and his health broken up. He has the 
neurasthenie very bad, so he cannot be 
trusted for any work. Before the war he 
was always in a part, and we had some 
good money; but this went partly when I 
was left with my child alone, and the rest 
was taken by the P.T., and we got very 
little back, neither of us being English. 
\Vhat we did get has all been to the doc- 
tor, and for our debts, and for burying our 
little child, which died happily, for though 
I loved it much this life which we have is 
not fit for a child to live. We live on my 
needle, and that is not earning much-a 
pound a week, and sometimes nothing. 
The managers will not look at my hus- 
band all these years because he shakes 
suddenly, so they think he drinks; but, 
sir, he has not the money to buy it. We 
do not know where to turn, or what we 
do. So I thought, dear sir, whether you 
could do anything for us with the P.T.; 
they have been quite sympatical; but they 
say they administrate an order, and can- 
not do more. Or if you could get my hus- 
band some work where he will be in open 
air-the doctor say that is what he want. 


\Ve have nowhere to go in Germany or in 
Austria, our well-loved families being no 
more alive. I think we are like many, but 
I cannot help asking you, sir, because we 
want to keep living if we can, and now we 
are hardly having any food. Please to 
forgive me my writing, and to believe 
your very anxious and humble 
"ANNA BERGFELD." 


"God help them!" thought Michael, 
under a plane-tree close to Cleopatra's 
Needle, but without conviction. For in 
his view God was not so much interested 
in the fate of individual aliens as the gov- 
ernor of the Bank of England in the fate 
of a pound of sugar bought with the frac- 
tion of a Bradbury. He would not arbi- 
trarily interfere with a ripple of the tide 
set loose by His arrangement of the 
Spheres. God, to Michael, was a mon- 
arch strictly limited by his own Constitu- 
tion. He restored the letter to his pocket. 
Poor creatures! But really, with 1,200,- 
000 English unemployed, mostly due to 
that confounded Kaiser and his navy 
stunt-! If that fellow and his gang had 
not started their naval rivalry in 1899, 
England would have been out of the whole 
mess. 
He turned up from the Temple station 
toward the offices of The Outpost! He 
had "taken" that weekly for some years 
now. It knew everything, and managed 
to convey a slight impression that nobody 
else knew anything; so that it seemed 
more weighty than any other weekly. 
Having no particular party to patronize, 
it could patronize the lot. Without Im- 
perial bias, it professed a special knowl- 
edge of the Empire. Not literary, it made 
a point of reducing the heads of literary 
men-Michael, in his publishing days, 
had enjoyed every opportunity of notic- 
ing that. Professing respect for Church 
and the Law, it was an adept at giving 
them "what-for." It was strong on 
drama, striking an Irish attitude toward 
it, based on personal preferences. Above 
all, it excelled in neat detraction from 
political reputations, keeping them in their 
place, and that place a little lower than 
The Outpost. Moreover, from its editorials 
emanated that "holy ghost" of inspired 
knowledge in periods just a little beyond 
average comprehension, without which no 
such periodical had real importance. 



THE SILVER SPOON 


l\fichael went up the stairs two at a 
time, and entered a large square room, 
where 1fr. Blythe, back to the door, was 
pointing with a ruler to a circle drawn on 
a map. 
"This is a bee map," said Mr. Blythe 
to himself. "Quite the bee-est map I ever 
saw." 
:Michael could not contain a gurgle, 
and the eyes of Mr. Blythe came round, 
prominent, epileptic, richly encircled by 
pouches. 
"Hallo!" he said defiantly. "You? 
The Colonial Office prepared this map 
specially to show the best spots for Settle- 
ment schemes. And they've left out Bag- 
gersfontein-the very hub." 
1'Iichael seated himself on the table. 
"I've come in to ask what you think 
of the situation? My wife says Labor 
will be out in no time." 
"Our charming little lady!" said Mr. 
Blythe; "Labor will survive Ireland; they 
will survive Russia; they will linger on in 
their precarious way. One hesitates to 
predict their decease. Fear of their Bud- 
get may bring them down in February. 
After the smell of Russian fat has died 
away-say in November, Mont-one 
may make a start." 
"This first speech," said Michael, "is 
a nightmare to me. How, exactly, am I 
to start Foggartism?" 
"One will have achieved the impression 
of a body of opinion before then." 
"But will there be one?" 
"No," said l\lr. Blythe. 
"Oh !" said 11ichael. "And, by the 
way, what about Free Trade?" 
"One will profess Free Trade, and put 
on duties." 
"God and Mammon." 
"Necessary in England, before any 
new departure, Mont. 'Vitness Liberal- 
Unionism, Tory-Socialism, and-" 
"Other ramps," said :Michael gently. 
"One will glide, deprecate Protection 
till there is more Protection than Free 
Trade, then deprecate Free Trade. Fog- 
gartism is an end, not a means; Free 
Trade and Protection are means, not the 
ends politicians have made them." 
Roused by the word politician, Michael 
got off the table; he was coming to have 
a certain sympathy with those poor 
devils. They were supposed to have no 
feeling for the country, and to be wise 


569 


after the event. But, really, who could 
tell what was good for the country among 
the mists of talk? Not even old Foggart, 
Michael sometimes thought. 
" You know, Blythe," he said, "that we 
politicians don't think ahead, simply be- 
cause we know it's no earthly. Every 
elector thinks his own immediate good is 
the good of the country. Only their own 
shoes pinching will change electors' views. 
If Foggartism means adding to the price 
of living now, and taking wage-earning 
children away from workmen's families 
for the sake of benefit-ten or twenty 
years hence-who's going to stand for 
it? " 
"My dear young man," said Mr. 
Blythe, "conversion is our job. At pres- 
ent our trade-unionists despise the out
 
side world. They've never seen it. Their 
philosophy is bounded by their smoky 
little streets. But five million pounds 
spent on the organized travel of a hun- 
dred thousand working men would do the 
trick in five years. It would infect the 
working class with a feverish desire for a 
place in the sun. The world is their chil- 
dren's for the taking. But who can blame 
them, when they know nothing of it?" 
"Some thought!" said Michael. "Only 
-what Government will think. it? Can 
I take those maps? . .. By the way," 
he said at the door, "there are societies, 
you know, for sending out children." 
Mr. Blythe grunted. " Yes. Excellent 
little affairs! A few thousand children 
doing well-concrete example of what 
might be. Multiply it a hundredfold, and 
you've got a beginning. You can't fill 
pails with a teaspoon. Good-by!" 
Out on the Embankment Michael won- 
dered if one could love one's country with 
a passion for getting people to leave it. 
But all the blight and dirty ugliness; the 
overbloated town condition; the children 
without a chance from birth; the swarms 
of poor devils without work, who dragged 
about and hadn't an earthly, and never 
would, on present lines; the unbalanced, 
hand to mouth, dependent state of things 
-surely that wasn't the country one 
loved! He stared at the towers of \Vest- 
minster, with the setting sun behind 
them. And there started up before hinl 
the thousand familiars of his past-trees, 
fields and streams, towers, churches, 
bridges; the English breeds of beasts, the 



570 


THE SILVER SPOON 


singing birds, the 'owls, the jays and rooks 
at Lippinghall, the little differences from 
foreign sorts in shrub, flower, lichen, and 
winged life; the English scents, the Eng- 
lish haze, the English grass; the eggs and 
bacon; the slow good humor, the modera- 
tion and the pluck; the smell of rain; the 
apple-blossom, heather and the sea, His 
country, and his breed-unspoilable at 
heart! He passed the Clock Tower. The 
House looked lacy and imposing, more 
beautiful than fashion granted, Did they 
spin the web of England's future in that 
House? Or were they painting camou- 
flage-a screen, over old England? 
A familiar voice said: "This is an ugly 
great thing!" 
And Michael saw his father-in-law star- 
ing up at the Lincoln statue. "What 
did they want to put it here for?" said 
Soames. "It's not English." He walked 
along at l\Echael's side. "Fleur well?" 
"Splendid. Italy suited her like every- 
thing." 
Soames sniffed. "They're a theatrical 
lot," he said. "Did you see ]\filan cathe- 
dral ? " 
"Yes, sir. It's about the only thing we 
didn't take to." 
"H'm! Their cooking gave me the 
collywobbles in '82. I dare say it's better 
now. How's the boy?" 
"AI, sir." 
So
mes made a sound of gratification, 
and they turned the corner into South 
Square. 
"What's this?" said Soames. 
Outside the front door were two bat- 
tered-looking trunks; a young man, grasp- 
ing a bag and ringing the bell, and a taxi- 
cab turning away. 
"I can't tell you, sir," murmured :Mi- 
chael. "Unless it's the angel Gabriel." 
"He's got the wrong house," said 
Soames, moving forward. 
But just then the young man disap- 
peared within. 
Soames walked up to the trunks. 
" 'Francis Wilmot,' " he read out. '" SSe 
Amphibian.' There's some mistake!" 


IV 


MERE CONVERSATION 
WHEN they came in, Fleur was return- 
ing down-stairs from showing the young 
man to his room. Already fully dressed 


for the evening, she had but little on, and 
her hair was shingled. . . . 
" My dear girl," .lYIichael had said, when 
shingling came in, "to please me, don't! 
Your lluque will be too bristly for kisses." 
"My dear boy," she had answered, "as 
if one could help it! You're always the 
same with any new fashion!" 
She had been one of the first twelve to 
shingle, and was just feeling that without 
care she would miss being one of the first 
twelve to grow some hair again. Marjorie 
Ferrar, "the Pet of the Panjoys," as 11i- 
chael called her, already had more than 
an inch. Somehow, one hated being dis- 
tanced by Marjorie Ferrar. . . . 
Advancing to her father, she said: 
"I've asked a young American to stay, 
dear; Jon Forsyte has married his sister, 
out there. You're quite brown, darling. 
How's mother?" 
Soames only gazed at her. 
And Fleur passed through one of those 
shamed moments, when the dumb quality 
of his love for her seemed accusing the 
glib quality of her love for him. It was 
not fair-she felt-that he should look at 
her like that; as if she had not suffered in 
that old business more than he; if she 
could take it lightly now, surely he could! 
As for 1Ylichael-not a word I-not even a 
joke! She bit her lips, shook her shingled 
head, and passed into the "bimetallic par- 
lor. " 
Dinner began with soup and Soames 
deprecating his own cows; they were not 
Herefords. He supposed that in America 
they had no Herefords? 
Francis \Vilmot judged they had more 
Frisians now. 
"Frisians!" repeated Soames. "They're 
new since my young days. What's their 
color? " 
"Parti-colored," said Francis Wilmot. 
"The English grass is just lovely." 
"Too damp with us," said Soames. 
"\Ve're on the river." 
"The river Thames? \Vhat size will 
that be, where it hasn't a tide?" 
" Just there-not more than a hundred 
yards. " 
"Will it have fish?" 
" Plenty." 
"But not alligators, maybe?" 
Soames stared. "Alligators!" he said. 
"I thought the States were civilized by 
now." 



THE SILVER SPOON 


Francis \Vilmot smiled. 
Soames was a good deal puzzled. 
Americans were human, of course, but 
peculiar and all alike, with more face than 
feature, heads fastened upright on their 
backs, and shoulders too square to be real. 
Their voices burred and clanged in their 
mouths; they pronounced the words 
U very" and "America" in a way that 
he had tried to imitate without success; 
their dollar was too high, and they all had 
motor-cars; they despised Europe, came 
over in great quantities, and took back all 
they could; they talked all the time, and 
were not allowed to drink. This young 
man cut across all these preconceptions. 
He drank sherry and only spoke when he 
was spoken to. His shoulders looked nat- 
ural; he had a neck; more feature than 
face; and his voice was soft. Perhaps, at 
least, he despised Europe. 
"I suppose," he said, "you find Eng- 
land very small?" 
" No, sir. I find London very large; 
and you certainly have the loveliest kind 
of a countryside." 
Soames looked down one side of his 
nose. U Pretty enough!" he said. 
Then came turbot and a silence, bro- 
ken, low down, behind his chair. 
"That dog!" said Soames, impaling a 
morsel of :fish he had set aside as uneatable. 
"No, no, Dad! He just wants to know 
you've seen him ! " 
Soames stretched down a finger, and 
the Dandie fell on his side. 
uHe never eats," said Fleur; "but he 
has to be noticed." 
A small covey of partridges came in 
cooked. 
U Is there any particular thing you want 
to see over here, )\ilr. Wilmot?" said l\-li- 
chael. "There's nothing very un-Ameri- 
can left. You're just too late for Regent 
Street." 
"I want to see the Beefeaters, and 
Cnút's Dawg Show, and your blood 
horses, and the Derby." 
Soames looked round his nose. "Dar- 
by!" he corrected. "You can't stay for 
that; it's not till next June." 
" 11 y cousin Val will show you race- 
horses," said Fleur. "He married Jon's 
sister, you know." 
A "born be" appeared. "You have 
more of this in America, I believe," said 
Soames. 


571 


"\Ve don't have much ice-cream in the 
South, sir; but we have special cooking; 
it's very tasty." 
"I've heard of terrapin." 
"\Vell, I don't get frills like that. I 
live way back, and have to work pretty 
hard. 1fy place is kind of homey; but 
I've got some mighty nice darkies that 
can cook good--old folk that knew my 
grannies. The old-time darky is getting 
scarce, but he's a lovely fellow." 
A Southerner! 
Soames had been told that the South- 
erner was a gentleman. He remembered 
the Alabama, too; and his father, James, 
saying: "I told you so" when the Gov- 
ernment ate humble pie over that busi- 
ness. 
In the savory silence that accompanied 
soft roes on toast the patter of the Dan- 
die's feet on the parquet floor could be 
plainly heard. 
"This is the only thing he likes," said 
Fleur. "Dan! Go to your master. Give 
him a little bit, Michael." And she stole 
a look at Michael, but he did not answer 
it. 
On their Italian holiday, with Fleur in 
the throes of novelty, sun, and wine- 
warmed, disposed to junketing, amenable 
to his caresses, he had been having his real 
honeymoon, for the first time since his 
marriage enjoying a sense of being the. 
chosen companion of his adored. And now 
had come this stranger, bringing reminder 
that one played but second fiddle to that 
young cousin, her first lover; he couldn't 
help feeling the cup withdrawn again from 
thirsty lips. She had invited this young 
man because he came from that past of 
hers whose tune one could not play. And, 
without looking up, he fed the Dandie 
with tidbits of his favorite edible. 
Soames broke the silence. 
"Take some nutmeg, l\-Ir. \Vilmot. 
1vlelon without nutmeg-" . . . 
\Vhen Fleur rose Soames followed her 
to the drawing-room; 1fichael led the 
young American to his study. 
"You knew Jon, maybe?" said Francis 
\Vilmot. 
" No; I never met him." 
"He's a great little fellow, and some 
poet. He's growing lovely peaches." 
"Is he going on with that now he's 
married? " 
"Sure. " 



572 


THE SILVER SPOON 


"Not coming to England?" 
" Not this year. They have a nice 
home-horses and dawgs. They have 
some hunting there, too. Perhaps he'll 
bring my sister over for a trip next fall." 
"Oh !" said Michael. "And are you 
staying long yourself?" 
"Why, I'll go back for Christmas. I'd 
like to see Rome, and maybe Seville; and 
I want to visit the old home of my people 
down in \V orcestershire." 
"When did they go over?" 
"William and Mary. Catholics, they 
were. Is it a nice place- \V orcester- 
shire? " 
"Very; especially in the spring. It 
grows a lot of fruit." 
"Oh ! You still grow things in this 
country? " 
"Not many." 
"I thought maybe that was so, coming 
on the cars from Liverpool. I saw a lot 
of grass and one or two sheep, but I didn't 
see anybody working. The people all live 
in the towns, I guess?" 
"Except a few unconsidered trifles. 
You must come down to my father's; they 
still grow a turnip or two thereabouts." 
"It's kind of sad," said Francis Wilmot. 
"It is. We began to grow wheat again 
in the war; but they've let it all slip back 
-and worse." 
"Why was that?" 
l\1ichael shrugged his shoulders. " No 
accounting for statesmanship," he said. 
"\Vhat do you grow in South Carolina?" 
"Just catton, on my place. But it's 
. mighty hard to make catton pay nowa- 
days. Labor's high." 
"High with you too?" 
"Yes, sir. Do they let strangers in to 
your Congress?" 
"Rather. Would you like to hear the 
Irish debate? I can get you a seat in the 
Distinguished Strangers' gallery." 
"I thought the English were stiff; but 
it's just too lovely the way you make me 
feel at home. Is that your father-in-law 
-the old gentleman?" 
" Yes." 
"He seems kind of rarefied. Is he a 
banker?" 
"No. But now you mention it, he 
ought to be." 
J<'rancis Wilmot's eyes roved round the 
room and came to rest on "The White 
l\Ionkey." 


"\Vell, now," he said, softly, "that, 
sure, is a wonderful picture. Could I get 
a picture painted by that man for Jon and 
my sister?" 
"I'm afraid not," said Michael. "You 
see, he was a Chink-not quite of the best 
period; but he went west five hundred 
years ago at least." 
"Is that so? He had a lovely sense of 
animals. " 
" We think he had a lovely sense of hu- 
man beings." 
Francis Wilmot stared. 
There was something, Michael decided, 
in this young man unresponsive to satire. 
"You want to see Cruft's Dog Show?" 
he said. "You're keen on dogs, then?" 
"I guess I'll be taking a bloodhound 
back for Jon, and two for myself. I want 
to raise bloodhounds." 
l\1ichael leaned back and blew out 
smoke. To Francis \Vilmot, he felt, the 
world was young, and life running on good 
tires to some desirable destination. In 
England- ! 
"What is it you Americans want out of 
life?" he said abruptly. 
"To get on top of the next thing, and 
that darned quick." 
"JVe wanted that in 1824," said Mi- 
chael. 
"Is that so? And nowadays?" 
"To get back on to what we were on 
last, and that darned slow." 
"I guess," said Francis Wilmot, "we're 
sort of thinly populated, compared with 
you. " 
"That's it," said Michael. "Every 
seat here is booked in advance; and a 
good many sit on their own knees. Will 
you have another cigar, or shall we join 
the lady?" 


v 


SIDE-SLIPS 
IF Providence was completely satisfied 
with Sapper's Row, Camden Town, lVli- 
chael was not. \Vhat could justify those 
twin dismal rows of three-storied houses, 
so begrimed that they might have been 
collars washed in Italy? What possible 
attention to business could make these 
little ground-floor shops do anything but 
lose money? From the thronged and 
tram-lined thoroughfare, so pregnantly 
scented with fried fish, petrol and old 



THE SILVER SPOON 


clothes, who would turn into this small 
backwater for sweetness or for profit? 
Even the children, made with heroic con- 
stancy on its second and third floors, 
sought life outside its precincts; in Sap- 
per's Row they could neither be run over 
nor stare at the outside of cinemas. 
Hand-carts, bicycles, light vans which 
had lost their nerve and taxicabs which 
had lost their way provided all the traffic; 
potted geraniums and spotted cats sup- 
plied all the beauty. Sapper's Row 
drooped and withered. 
IVIichael entered it from its west end, 
and against his principlesc Here was 
overcrowded England at its most dismal, 
and here was he, who advocated a reduc- 
tion of its population, about to visit some 
broken-down aliens with the view of keep- 
ing them alive. He looked into three of 
the little shops. Not a soul! \Vhich was 
worse? Such little shops frequented or- 
deserted? He came to No. 12, and look- 
ing up, saw a face looking down. It was 
wax white, movingly listless, above a pair 
of hands sewing at a garment. "That," 
he thought, "is my 'obedient humble' 
and her needle." He entered the shop 
below, a hair-dresser's, containing a dirty 
basin below a dusty mirror, two dirty 
towels, some bottles, and two dingy 
chairs. In his shirt-sleeves, astride one 
of them, reading The Daily !vIa iI, sat a 
shadowy fellow with pale, hollow cheeks, 
waxed mustache, lank. hair, and the eyes, 
at once knowing and tragic, of a philoso- 
pher. 
"Hair cut, sir?" 
Michael shook his head. 
" Do lYlr, and Mrs. Bergfeld live here? " 
"Up-stairs, top floor." 
uHow do I get qp?" 
"Through there." 
Passing through a curtained aperture, 
:Michael found a stairway, and at its 
top stood hesitating. His conscience was 
echoing Fleur's words when he read her 
Anna Bergfeld's letter: "Yes, I dare say; 
but what's the good?" when the door was 
opened, and it seemed to him rather as if 
a corpse were standing there, with a face 
as if some one had come knocking on its 
grave, so eager and so white. 
"Mrs. Bergfeld? 1:'Iy name's Mont. 
You wrote to me." 
The woman trembled so that Michael 
thought she was going to faint. 


573 


"Will you excuse me, sir, that I sit 
down? " And she dropped on to the end 
of the bed. The room was spotless, but 
besides the bed held only a small deal 
wash-stand, a pot of geranium, a tin trunk 
with a pair of trousers folded on it, a wo- 
man's hat on a peg, and a chair in the 
window covered with her sewing. 
The woman stood up again. She 
seemed not more than thirty, thin but 
prettily formed; and her oval face, with- 
out color except in her dark eyes, sug- 
gested Rafael rather than Sapper's Row. 
"It is like seeing an angel," she said. 
"Excuse me, sir." 
"Queer angel, :I\-Irs. Bergfeld. Your 
husband not in?" 
"No, sir. Fritz has gone to walk." 
"Tell me, Mrs. Bergfeld. If I pay your 
passage to Germany, will you go?" 
"We cannot get a passport now; Fritz 
has been here twenty years, and never 
back; he has lost his German nationality, 
sir; they do not want people like us, you 
know." 
:I\-Iichael stivered up his hair. 
"\Vhere are you from yourself?" 
"From Salzburg." 
"What about going back there?" 
"I would like to, but what would we 
do? In Austria everyone is poor now, 
and I have no relative left. Here at least 
we have my sewing." 
"How much is that a week?" 
" Sometimes a pound; sometimes fifteen 
shillings. It is bread and the rent." 
"Don't you get the dole?" 
"No, sir. \Ve are not registered." 
lvlichael took out a five-pound note and 
laid it with his card on the wash-stand. 
"I've got to think. this over, 1Irs. Berg- 
feld. Perhaps your husband will come 
and see me." He went out quickly, for 
the ghostly woman had flushed pink. 
Repassing through the curtained aper- 
ture, he caught the hair-dresser wiping 
ou t a basin. 
"Find 'em in, sir?" 
"The lady." 
" Ah! Seen better days, I should say. 
The 'usband's a queer customer; 'aU off 
his nut. \Vanted to come in here with 
me, but I've got to give this job up." 
"Oh! How's that?" 
"I've got to have fresh air--only got 
one lung, and that's not very gaudy. I'll 
have to find something else." 



574 


THE SILVER SPOON 


"That's bad, in these days." 
The hair-dresser shrugged his bony 
shouldersc " Ah !" he said. "I've been 
a hair-dresser from a boy, except for the 
war. Funny place, this, to fetch up in 
after where I've been. The war knocked 
me out." He twisted his little thin mus- 
tache. 
" No pension?" said l\1ichael. 
"Not a bob. What I want to keep me 
alive is something in the open." 
J\:'Iichael took him in from head to foot. 
Shadowy, narrow-headed, with one lung 
-was he like England? 
"But do you know anything about 
country life?" 
"Not a blessed thing. Still, I've got 
to find something, or peg out." 
His tragic and knowing eyes searched 
l\Iichael's face. 
"I'm awfully sorry," said l\1ichael. 
" Good-by! " 
The hair-dresser made a queer jerky 
little movement. 
Emerging from Sapper's Row into the 
crowded, roaring thoroughfare, Michael 
thought of a speech in a play he had seen 
a year or two before. "The condition of 
the people leaves much to be desired. I 
shall make a point of taking up the cud- 
gels in the House. I shall move-!" 
The condition of the people! What a 
remote thing! The sportive nightmare 
of a few dreaming nights, the skeleton in 
a well-locked cupboard, the discomforting 
rare howl of a hungry dog! And probably 
no folk in England less disturbed by it 
than the gallant six-hundred-odd who sat 
with him in "that House." For to im- 
prove the condition of the people was 
their job, and that relieved them of a 
sense of nightmare. Since Oliver Crom- 
well some sixteen thousand, perhaps, had 
sat there before them, to the same end. 
And was the trick done-not belikely! 
Still they were working for it, and other 
people were only looking on and telling 
them how to do it. 
"Not got a job about you, sir?" 
Michael quickened his steps, then stood 
still. He saw that the man who had 
spoken, having cast his eyes down again, 
had missed this sign of weakness, and he 
went back to him. They were black 
eyes in a face round and pasty like a 
mince pie. Decent and shabby, quiet 


and forlorn, he wore an ex-Service man's 
badge. 
" You spoke to me?" said Michael. 
"I'm sure I don't know why, sir; it just 
hopped out of me." 
"No work?" 
" No; and pretty low." 
" l\1arried ? " 
" Widower, sir; two children." 
" Dole? " 
" Yes; and fair sick of it." 
"In the war I see?" 
" Yes, sir; Messpot." 
"What sort of job do you want?" 
"Any mortal thing, sir." 
"Give me your name and address." 
"Henry Boddick, 94 Waltham Build- 
ings, Gunnersbury." 
Michael took it down. 
"Can't promise anything," he said. 
"No, sir." 
"Good luck, anyway. Have a cigar?" 
"Thank you, and good luck to you, sir." 
Michael saluted, and resumed his prog- 
ress; once out of sight of Henry Boddick, 
he took a taxi. A little more of this, and 
he would lose the sweet reasonableness 
without which one could not sit in "that 
House" ! 
"For sale or to let," recorded recur- 
rently in Portland Place, somewhat re- 
stored his sense of balance. 
That same afternoon he took Francis 
Wilmot with him to the House, and leav- 
ing him at the foot of the Distinguished 
Strangers' stairway made his way on to 
the floor. 
He had never been in Ireland, so that 
the debate had for him little relation to 
reality. It seemed to illustrate, however, 
the obstacles in the way of agreement on 
any mortal subject. J\lmost every speech 
emphasized the paramount need for a 
settlement, but declared the impossibility 
of "going back" on this, that, or the other 
factor which precluded such settlement. 
Still, for a debate on Ireland, it seemed 
good-tempered; and presently they would 
all go out and record the votes they had 
determined on before it all began. He re- 
membered the thrill with which he had 
listened to the first debates after his elec- 
tion; the impression each speech had 
given him that somebody must certainly 
be converted to something; and the re- 
luctance with which he had discovered 



THE SILVER SPOON 


that nobody ever was. Some force was at 
work far stronger than any eloquence, 
however striking or sincere. The clothes 
were washed elsewhere; in here they were 
but aired before being put on. Still, until 
people put thoughts into words, they 
didn't know what they thought, and 
sometimes they didn't know afterward. 
And for the hundredth time Michael was 
seized by a weak feeling in his legs. In a 
few weeks he himself must rise on them. 
\V ould the House accord him its custom- 
ary indulgence; or would it say: "Young 
fellow-teaching your grandmother to 
suck eggs-shut up!" 
He looked around him. 
His fellow members were sitting in all 
shapes. Chosen of the people, they con- 
firmed the doctrine that human nature 
did not change, or so slowly that one 
could not see the process-he had seen 
their prototypes in Roman statues, in 
mediæval pictures.... "Plain but 
pleasant," he thought, unconsciously re- 
producing George Forsyte's description 
of himself in his palmy days. But did 
they take themselves seriously, as under 
Burke, under Gladstone even? 
The words "Customary indulgence" 
roused him from revery. They meant a 
maiden speech. Ha! yes! The member 
for Cornmarket. He composed himself 
to listen. Delivered with restraint and 
clarity, the speech seemed suggesting that 
the doctrine" Do unto others as ye would 
they should do unto you" need not be 
entirely neglected, even in Ireland; but 
it was long-too long-Michael watched 
the House grow restive. "Alas! poor 
brother!" he thought, as the speaker 
somewhat hastily sat down. A very 
handsome man rose in his place. He con- 
gratulated his honorable friend on his 
able and well-delivered effort; he only 
regretted that it had nothing to do with 
the business in hand. Michael slipped 
out. Recovering his "Distinguished 
Stranger," he walked away with him to 
South Square. 
Francis \Vilrnot was in a state of some 
enthusiasm. 
"That was fine," he said; "it certainly 
was. Who was the potentate under the 
bed-curtains? " 
"The Speaker?" 


575 


"No; I mean the one who didn't 
speak. " 
"Exactly; he's the dignity of the 
House. " 
"I judge they ought to feed him 
oxygen; it must be kind of sleepy under 
there. I liked the guy who spoke last. 
He would 'go' in America; he had big 
ideas. " 
"The idealism which keeps you out of 
the League of Nations, eh?" said l\:1ichael 
with a grin. 
Francis \Vilmot turned his head rather 
sharply. 
"Well," he said, "I guess we're like any 
other people when it comes down to hard 
tacks. " 
"Quite so," said l\1ichael; "idealism is 
just a by-product of geography-it's the 
haze that lies in the middle distance. The 
farther you are from hard tacks, the less 
quick you need be to see them. \Ve're 
twenty sea miles more idealistic about 
the European situation than the French. 
And you're three thousand sea miles more 
idealistic than we are. But when it's a 
matter of niggers, we're three thousand 
sea miles more idealistic than you, aren't 
we ? " 
Francis Wilmot narrowed his dark eyes. 
"That's so," he said: "I judge the 
farther north we go in the States, the 
more idealistic we get about the nigger. 
Anne and I've lived all our life with 
darkies, and never had trouble; we love 
'em, and they kind of love us; but I 
wouldn't trust myself not to lynch one 
that laid his hands on her. No, indeed! 
I've talked that over many times with 
Jon. He don't see it that way; he says a 
darky should be tried like a white man; 
but he doesn't know the real South. His 
mind, I judge, is still three thousand sea 
miles away." 
Michael was silent. Something within 
him always closed up at mention of a 
name which he still spelled mentally with 
an h. 
Francis Wilmot added ruminatively: 
"There's maybe a few saints in every 
country that's proof against your theory; 
but the rest of us aren't any ways above 
human nature." 
"Talking of human nature," said l\Ii- 
chael, "here's my father-in-law!" 
(To be continued.) 



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DECORATION BY \VILLIAM BERGER '; l' '
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The playing stopped. She fumbled at her waist- 
I saw her throw a bit of money down, 
I heard it roll and tinkle in the street. 
I heard a hundred noises suddenly: 
Clattering dishes-laughter, and an oath; 
The thin, persistent wailing of a child. 
576 



A Bit of New England Character 
and Countf)T 


AS GEORGE "'RIGHT SEES IT 


WITH NOTES BY THE ARTIST 


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IiIking-timc. 
Ed Beers has 
ot a cat. He don't haf' to remember 'bout millin' time, cat comes and 
ets him, He sez he raises sand 
ïr he don't act spry. 
Ed ain't here now. One time he owned the house "e 
ot now. He sold it for $Qoo. then a Pollack got it and we bou
ht 
it. It was built in ISIS. Place's been all dug up. Two brothers n,lmed Sturgis, BiIly and Henry, They called Rilly the 
"gentleman." They say they buried their money somewheres. Well. I think I found tbe pl.tce. it's in the cell.lr, \\ hen I 
need money I'll st,lrt diggin'. Gives me somethin' to look forward to, 


YOLo LXX\iII.-42 


577 





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Olù fox. 


They's a heap of foxes 'round here. They was two dens just back here a bit. I saw the old lady the other side of the 
wall. with her puppie. sand they was playin' just like regular puppies. She seen Ine, though: next day she was gone; they'll 
do that if you find 'em "ilh their young 'uns, take 'em all away. 
I saw an old fox just after an inch of snow fell 'm old frozen snow. He wa<< about a hundred yards away; I follered hi" 
tracks for mebbe an hour and then he'd doubled on 'em so often, I'd got all twisted, He was watchin' me all the time, I bet! 



 
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The mouth of the Saugatuck. 
This is a good place for ducks. Art Fuller comes here a lot. Art's crazy 'bout huntin'. A feller said he was a regular 
nemesis. He kin shoot, though, 'cause he gave me and my wife a pair of ducks. They was awful oily but I guess we didn't 
know about cook in' them. They's lots of ways. 
Art don't make nothing out'n his huntin', He's an artist by trade but he likes huntin' best. I think. Hen Buckingham 
and him had a shoot-off to see which was best. 1 forget who was. 
Hen's a house-painter. One day, he's in the hardware-store buyin' some Iinseed-oil and white lead and a feller comes 
in, says give me a box of shells, saw some birds coming down. Hen says, never mind them things, meanin' the paints he 
ordered, I'll get 'em later, I gut to see a man; and off he went for hi.; gun. Hen's that way Ef he hears a bob-white he 
just can't work. 
578 



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Atwood's coal-dock. 
"'e get our coal down to Atwood's. 'Tain't Atwood's any more, both of 'em are dead. Coal comes up in barges; used 
to be enough water at the dock for three-masted schooners, but they let everybody throw things in the river and they ain't 
much water in the channel now. 
Old William Atwood was pretty close. I guess he had a lot. too. mebbe not so much as people thought but they owned, 
him and his brother, nigh all of l\1ain Street. One day in the market when peas was comin' from the South, he had the boy 
wrap up some and he says. "How much?" Boy says, .. Forty cents a qu,lrt." "I don't \\ ant 'em then," \Villiam says. 1\\0 
d,lYS later he was dead. Might just as well had 'em! Other people got his money! 


579 



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Gossip. 
DO\\n to the town meetin' last Wednesday night they voted to bond the township for two hundred thousand dollars 
for cement roads, 'tain't comin' as f.u as this, 
\\ hat you think? 
\\. ell, I think that's a pile of money! What they goin' to do with this road? Hain't done nothin' to it since Bob Coley 
\\as selectman. Gosh. spendin' all that money on one or two roads. 
I hear they got them bootleggers sent up for a long time. Well, that sort of thing ain't right. People ought to obe
 
the law. 
How's your wine comin' this year? 
She's pretty good, got a good kick, 'bout ripe in April. So long! 


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People is funny- 
The Buxtons: 
Old man Buxton's too close to hire him a man and he gets him a boy out'n the home and has him bound That's some. 
thin' like they used to do in slave days. Him and her, that's 
trs, Buxton, beat him, so the neighbors say. 
Jim Calvin says the old man and old woman fight like cats and dugs. 
That's no way to live. 
But people is funny! 
5 80 


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Oxen with wood-sled. 
\\"ill Smith'" got the best pair O"\:en 'round here, I guess. He raised 'em from calves; they hain't as big as a pair I saw 
over to Danbury Fair but they're awful fellers to pull. Will says they'll outpull any pair in the county an' he'll bet on it. 
He knows cattle, Last winter he hauled my wood for me, It was cut green and heavy oak mostly, and hard goin' 
through deep snow. He's got a nine-year-old horse he raised from trottin' stock; this was a great place for trottin' horses 
once. The horse that was the father sold down in Kentucky for thousands of dollars. He sure is a good road-horse. 


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Old lady on the road with horscs. 

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s' Bradley's terrible heavy now! She went doy,n the road walkin'. She used to drive in the buggy but she's so deaf 
no:". Bill says it ain't safe fer her, one of them young kid" in a Ford run into her and upset her, sort of shook her up, her 
being heavy. 
Bill says'll do her good walkin'. She' used to be a slim pretty girl an' did hand-painting and wax flowers. They got a 
pianner she painted pansies on. She don't play any more, she can't hear. Her plJyin' got kinder ragged too. 


58! 



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Cattle wading a 
ew Zealand stream. 


The Newness of New Zealand 


BY HENRY VA
 DYKE 
.\uthor of "Songs Out of Doors," "The Cnknown Quantity," etc. 


ILLUSTRATIONS FRO"I PHOTOGRAPHS BY CLARK, ROTORUA, N. Z. 


.'- LD ULYSSES (so 
Dante reported an 
interview in Hades) 
was not content with 
peaceful retirement in 
his island Ithaca. He 
wanted to have one 
., 
more new adventure 
before he ended the voyage of life. Tenny- 
son makes him say: 


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"I cannot rest from travel: . . . my purpose 
holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars." 


It was just this feeling that came over 
me in the quiet book-room of Avalon in 
the early winter of I9z5. So I did what 
even Ulysses never dared: I took a 
daughter in each hand and sailerl away to 
Kew Zealand. 
\Vhy this choice? For three reasons. 
First, it is really a very far country, just 
about at the opposite side of the globe- 
5 82 


summer is there while winter is here. 
Second, it is politically the newest and 
most experimental civilized nation in the 
world. Third, it claims to have superla- 
tive trout fishing, and I confess to being 
an inveterate angler and therefore, ac- 
cording to President Coolidge, only a boy 
-thank God. 
You get your first real sense of the re- 
moteness of New Zealand when you take 
ship from San Francisco and roll through 
the Pacific for nearly three weeks. 
It is a big, beautiful, lonely ocean-blue 
as the stone called laPis lazuli, bare as the 
primal world. You meet no ships. The 
mysterious" radio" brings you jazz tunes 
and bedtime stories from Los Angeles. 
Flying fish-silver arrows-skitter from 
wa ve to wave. A whale sends up his 
spouting signal from the horizon. Dances 
on deck give a chance for youth to show 
its unfailing verve and to demonstrate the 
ungainly modern steps. The junior offi- 
cers of the ship JI aUllgallui prove that 



THE XE\YXESS OF XE\Y ZE:\L_-\
D 


they are good fellows as well as good sea- 
men. The humid heat of the doldrums 
makes you "speak disrespectfully of the 
equator" and bless the man who put an 
electric fan in your .cabin. 
Then, sudrlenly, you come to Tahiti, 
sticking up out of the illimitable blue- 
green mountains, mangoes, palm groves, 
bananas, all enveloped in a moist languor 
which makes effort seem like folly. Pa- 
peete, the capital of the islands, is a moth- 
eaten paradise. There are live people 
there, of course, like the intelligent and 
courteous French manager of the prin- 
cipal store and the young American who 
is energetically reviving a copra planta- 
tion. But most of the inhabitants, na- 
tive and relapsed, seem to wander in a 
state of moral and mental deliquescence- 
softening away. The South Sea islands 
have their charm, no doubt, but it is a 
kind of dope. The natives stand it better 
than the whites. 
Next you touch at Raratonga, in the 
Cook Islands-virid mountain crests, 
valley jungles, red-roofed houses and 
stores, no harbor but an open roadway 
swept by long billows on which the cargo 
lighters dance like corks. The native 
king comes off-a good-looking brown 
gentleman-and invites you to tea at his 
palace in the afternoon. But the rollers 
increase in height; the steamship com- 
pany does not wish to take risks with its 
passengers; so the ship's doctor, douce and 
clever old gentleman, conveniently dis- 
covers a case of possible measles in the 
steerage, the ship is put in quarantine, 
nobody can go ashore. ,Thus ends your 
chance of seeing Rara tonga and taking 
tea with native royalty. 
Eighteen hundred miles from here runs- 
the course, across the tropic of Capricorn, 
into the southern hemisphere-a new 
world, where all your notions of climate 
are reversed. 
Xew Zealand is in sight. You enter the 
harbor of \Vellington. The bare, bold, 
grassy hills of golden brown rise around 
you like the hills of San Francisco Bay, 
You feel that you have reached a real 
country-not a refuge of pipe dreams. 
But when you settle down into the 
plushy comfort of the Royal Oak Hotel 
you feel that you are still in the Old 
\Vorld. This is exactly like a mid-Vic- 


383 


torian inn at \Yinchester or Coventry- 
quiet almost to the point of suppression- 
the same old sentimental and sporting 
lithographs on the walls-the same primi- 
tive washing arrangements in the bed- 
rooms-the same respectable and mutu- 
ally mistrustful Britishers moving into 
and out of the dining-room and lingering 
vacuously in the lounge over the cups of 
alleged coffee. It is not exactly gay, but 
it's very homelike and "couthy." And 
every now and then a Scotchman or an 
Irishman blows into the smoke-room to 
liven things up. 
Now is a good time to review what we 
have read in the books about Xew Zeal- 
and, and to get an outline of the country 
and its short, eventful history, and to 
meet and talk with the people who can 
help us to understand its newness. 
First of all, we must realize that this 
country is not a part of Australia, not 
even an annex. \Vellington is separated 
by twelve hundred miles of deep and 
rough sea from Sydney, the capital of 
K ew Sou th \Vales. The difference be- 
tween the lands and the peoples is no less 
wide-and navigable. 
New Zealand is a little continent bv it- 
self, composed of two large islands añd a 
small one, divided by narrow straits, and 
stretching from southwest to northeast 
over a thousand miles from end to end. 
This streak of land is comparatively slim; 
on either side the sea is ne,.er more than 
SLxty miles away. The total area is about 
one hundred thousand square miles- 
more than Great Britain, less than the 
State of California, of which, by the way, 
it reminds one strongly in many respects. 
Both began civic life in the eigh teen- 
forties Both were boosted by the dis- 
covery of gold. Both are fresh-air, out- 
spoken countries and people. California 
has four million inhabitants; Xew Zea- 
land about one million three hundred 
thousand. Yet in that antipodal coun- 
try, so remote and so distinctly British, 
I never could get away from the home 
feeling of California-and I did not want 
to. 
The first white man to see these islands 
(1642) was a roving Dutch sea captain, 
Abel Tasman, from Hoorn, now one of the 
"dead cities" of the Zuvder Zee. His 
discovery was named aftér a flat Dutch 




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God must have had sheep in His mind when He created this country.-Page 590. 


province, Zeeland, to which it has not the 
remotest resemblance. New Zealand, 
within its long, narrow area, embraces the 
most extraordinary variety of soil and 
landscape: snowy Alps and glaciers, vol- 
canoes and geysers, fertile plains and up- 
land pastures, broad lakes and rushing 
rivers, semitropical forests and northern 
fiords. 
Tasman, apparently, did not dare to 
land in this wonderful country, because it 
was inhabited by the .Maoris, a particu- 
larly fierce and cannibalistic people. 
Over a hundred years later along _ came 
that bold British mariner, Captain Cook.' 
He got ashore with difficulty, got off again 
safely, and came back on two later voy- 
ages. He brought pigs, goats, chickens, 
and geese to a hungry land, in \\'hich the 
only original mammals (except humans) 
were rats and bats. It looks as if Cook 
liked the :l\Iaoris and wanted to cure their 
insatiable appetite for human flesh. He 
escaped from their bill-of-fare only to fall 
a victim to the primitÏ\'e impulses of "the 
noble savage" in Hawaii. 
Then followed a long era of riot and 
confusion in the history of New Zealand. 
The l\Iaori tribes continued to slaughter 
and devour one another, varying their 
diet with white meat when obtainable. 
5 8 4 


\Vhite traders, sealers and whalers, came 
in and taught the noble savage new tricks 
and diseases. Christian missionaries, led 
by Samuel 1\larsden (1814), bravely 
tackled their job of bringing to the 1\-1aoris 
the only real cure for human depravity. 
Settlers, some drawn by the richness of 
the new land, some driven by the neces- 
sity of getting away from their old coun- 
try, began to triCkre in, and then to flow 
in, until the white people far outnum- 
bered the brown. But the hostility be- 
tween the hvo"races was not allayed, and 
from time to time it blazed out in mas- 
sacre and atrodty. 
In 1840 Xew Zealand became a British 
crown colony, and the famous Treaty oj 
Traitangi \\'ås signed by Lieutenant- 
Governor Hobson, an English naval cap- 
tain, a'nd five hundred and twelve of the 
native chiefs. Bv this wondrous-wise 
document, which was backed by the grow- 
ing influence of the Christian missionaries 
of all creeds, and by the sober sense of the 
most intelligent of the native chiefs, three 
things were accomplished: 
I. The :l\Iaoris accepted the sovereignty 
and claimed the protection of Queen Vic- 
toria. 
2. The queen recognized their title to 
all their tribal lands, forests, fisheries, and 



THE XE'Y
ESS OF XE'V ZF.:\LAXD 


other possessions, reserving to the govern- 
ment only the right of pre-emption in case 
the native owners wished to sell at a price 
agreed upon. 
3. The natives of Kew Zealand were 
guaranteed all the rights and privileges of 
British subjects. 
This was an eminently fair state paper 
-almost an ideal transaction between 
brown aborigines and white settlers. But 
there were two little hidden springs of 
trouble in it. The first was the question 
of native land-titles. You see, the .:\Iaoris 
(a race with many noble qualities and 
one detestable appetite) were terrific mili- 
tarists; they believed in the right of con- 
quest. The man who won the fight owned 
the land and the goods; the tribal and 
family wars were intermittent but inces- 
sant; the question was: \\'ho had licked 
whom? Did reconquest confer a valid 
title? 'Vho owned the real estate--the 
man who sat on it or the legitimate heirs 
of the man whose bare bones were buried 
in it? 
The second source of difficultv was the 
question of price. Did the party of the 
first part have the authority to offer and 
the money to pay the said price? Did 
the party of the second part freely accept 
it after due consideration, or was he 
tricked or bulldozed into it? 'Vas it a 


383 


fair bargain, after all? Questions like 
these have been known to raise quarrels 
even between Professed Pacifists. There 
are three unfailing causes of strife and 
contention among men: land, women, and 
the formulas of religion. 
I believe that the great majority of the 
British and the :l\Iaoris were sincere in the 
Treaty of \\'aitangi, and have tried to live 
up to it, according to their lights. There 
were long and bloody years to wade 
through before the two races stood on the 
firm ground of mutual understanding and 
lasting peace. But the ,Maori Land Courts 
have done good work under tangled con- 
ditions. The rights of the natives, so far 
as they could be discerned, have been 
protected. 
To-day, for example. you buy a gov- 
ernment license to fish in all the waters of 
Xew Zealand. But when you follow a 
stream that flows through :l\Iaori land, 
you must pay a fee to the native owner. 
This is inconsistent but fair. 
The :Maoris have four representatives 
in the Dominion Parliament, among its 
best debaters and speakers. The :Minis- 
ter of Health in the present government is 
an accomplished man-Sir 1\Iaui Porn are 
-whose name tells his blood, of which he 
is proud. I have seen a good many coun- 
tries, including every State of our own 


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An old-time bas bringing out wool from the back lots, 



586 


THE NE\YNESS OF NE\Y ZEALAND 


Union. But nowhere, excep( possibly in 
the Hawaiian Islands, have I seen a na- 
tive or a dark-skinned race as fairly, hu- 
mahly, and wisely treated as the l\laoris 
are" in Kew Zealand. The question of 
racial intermi
ture is another storv. I 
have had no ex- 
 
perience which 
would qualify me 
to pass an opinion 
on it. The l\Ia- 
oris are certainly 
not dying out. 
Some say they 
ha ve increased in 
number during 
the last fifty 
years. 
There were 
three main 
streams of white 
immigration into 
New Zealand. 
Firs t, the New 
Zealand Com- 
pany, a commer- 
cial organization 
with highly ideal- 
is tic principles, 
1 i k e the Pilgrim 
Fathers of New 
England. This 
company settled 
Trellington, now 
the capital. Sec- 
ond, the Church 
of England Colo- 
ny, who settled 
the province of 
Canterbury, and 
C /Zristchuyc/Z- 
names which are 
significant. Third, the Scotch colonists 
who came to Otago, in the South Island, 
and named their capital Dunedin, after 
Edinburgh. A uckland, the largest city, 
and the first capital, was the natural 
child of trade. The colony, which had 
long had representative government, was 
raised to the status of a "Dominion" in 
19 0 7. 
A shrewd Y orkshireman whom I met in 
\Vellington gave me his view of the dif- 
ferent cities. "Dunedin," said he, "is 
worth twenty-six shillings in the pound. 
Christchurch and Wellington are worth 


. . 


twenty shillings. Auckland is worth 
twelve and sixpence." 
New Zealand was lucky in having 
among 
er early leaders s<?me really big 
men. SIr George Grey, scholar, soldier 
broad-minded democrat and generou
 
aristocrat; Sir 
Julius Vogel. bold 
borrower for the 
state; John Bal- 
lance, mild and 
ra.tional laborite; 
RIChard Seddon 
a miner's boy: 
"King Dick," 
idol of the people; 
Sir Robert Stout, 
adventurous con- 
servative, from 
the Shetland Isl- 
ands; William 
l\Iassey, a farm- 
er's boy, born in 
Ireland, who was 
chosen prime 
minister in 1912, 
and held the lead- 
ership until his 
universally la- 
men ted death 
this year. 
I t -is very hard 
for a stranger, a 
brief visitor, to 
form an opinion 
of the political 
status of such a 
new country as 
this. Is it radi- 
c ai, communis- 
tic? Certainly 
not. Is it capi- 
talistic? Certainly not, uruess you recog- 
nize the fact that the state can only bor- 
row money from the people who have 
saved it. Is it going to the bad because 
of its socialistic legislation? Certainly 
not, because it is guided by the hard- 
headed British common sense, and safe- 
guarded by the British passion for finding 
fault. 
The only dubious effects of 
ll the new 
laws, so far as I could see, were these: the 
government has to pay a little over 5 per 
cent for the money that it borrows in 
London and elsewhere: the individual 


Kea, sheep-killing New Zealand parrot. 


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Ki\\i, wingless New Zealand bird. 


man has a slight tendency to rely on the 
state for those things which he should, 
and in the end must, do for himself. 
The first man I talked with in New 
Zealand was a rosy representative of the 
Dominion newspaper. He came to inter- 
view me, but I interviewed him. "What's 
wrong?" I asked. "The trouble," said 
he, "is that we have three parties: the 
Reform Party (now in office), which does 
not believe in reformation; the Liberal 
Party, which detests liberality; and the 
I Labor Party, which abhors work." It 
sounded to me like home. 
Four of the most interesting men whom 
I met in Wellington were Sir Robert 
I Stout, chief justice, last survivor of the 
old days when the newness of N"ew Zea- 
land began; Sir John Findlay, ex-minister, 
able lawyer, and eloquent orator; Doctor 
Begg, long-time bishop of St. John's Pres- 
byterian Church; and Charles Wilson, 
parliamentary librarian and upholder of 
the beacon of belles-lettres. From these 
men, and others, like l\Ir. Gunsaulus, our 
American consul-general, and l\Ir. "Tebbe, 
secretary of the English-Speaking L nion, 


I tried to get light on the real state of af- 
fairs. I also talked with fellow-travellers 
all along the road, and drew as much in- 
formation out of them as possible-real 
facts, you know, not theories. 
For at least forty years New Zealand 
has been the foremost social-experiment 
station of the world. 
Woman suffrage, old-age pensions, la- 
bor laws, power to break up large land 
holdings, state control of industries, gov- 
ernment loans to settlers and home- 
builders, state conciliation and arbitration 
of labor disputes, legislation for the com- 
monwealth as superior to the individual 
-in all these things New Zealand has led 
the way. She had a good chance by rea- 
son of her remoteness, limited territory, 
and unity of British race. 
'Vhat I wanted to observe and consider 
was the practical working out of these ex- 
periments in state socialism. Frankly, I 
could not see that they had made any 
radical change in the fabric of human life. 
The industrious people were prosperous 
and happy. The idlers and incompetents 
suffered and growled. The rich were 
587 



588 


THE NE\VNESS OF KE\V ZEALAXD 


neither bloated nor ostentatious. The 
poor (" always with us," according to the 
Scripture) were dissatisfied, but did not 
seem depressed or oppressed. 
\Ve walked and motored all through 
and around Wellington. The streets of 
the lower town were full of pedestrians 
strolling under the wooden arcades (which 
seemed to speak of a showery climate). 
The shops looked well-stocked, especially 
the tea-rooms. The signs were familiarly 
English: "mercer and draper," "haber- 
. dasher," "chemist," "hairdresser and 
tobacconist," "fishmonger," and so on. 
There was a fine book-shop-\'Thitcomb 
& Tombs-which would do any Ameri- 
can city proud, both in the range of books 
carried and the intelligent civility of the 
management. The parks and public gar- 
dens were full of brilliant flowers and 
handsome trees from all parts of the world 
-pine and palm growing side by side. 
The Turnbull Library held a wonderful 
collection of rare first editions, gathered 
by a Wellington merchant, and left to the 
city. The Parliament Library, where 
Charles Wilson beamed, was full of real 
books as well as state records and local 
histories; and the bright attractiveness 
of the well-kept rooms seemed to hint that 
the lawmakers of the new country liked to 
do a quiet bit of reading now and then. 
There are three newspapers in the city 
-good ones-The Times, The Dominion, 
and The Evening Post, all unmistakably 
more English than American in type. 
They give a great deal of space to sporting 
news and events. This is an out-door 
country, and the New Zealanders are des- 
perate bettors on horse-races-almost as 
much given to this curious form of gam- 
bling as the Australians. :l\Iost of the 
bettors know little about horses; but, after 
all, horse-racing is a handsomer sport than 
cock-fighting or bull-baiting. 
The open, grassy amber-colored hills 
around Wellington (and around the other 
cities too) are sprinkled with red-roofed 
houses, mostly of the "bungalow" type, 
set in blooming flower gardens. We saw 
no palaces and hardly any hovels. In the 
towns there seemed to be no real "slums." 
It looked like a country in which the good 
things of life are fairly well distributed, 
and every man who is willing to work can 
earn a living and a home (" be it ever so 
humble "), and raise a family of his own. 


The real passion for these things will al- 
ways save a nation from the insanity of 
communism. 
"How does the government railway 
system work?" I asked a clever country 
doctor from a little town on the west 
coast. "Not too well," he answered. 
" You can't get time-tables. The trains 
are usually late. The whole business is 
clogged with red tape." (Then he gave 
me some extraordinary illustrations of 
stupid regulation and inefficiency.) Mv 
own impression is that under private owñ- 
ership a man knows that he has ajob, and 
must work to hold it; under government 
ownership he thinks he has an office which 
depends on politics. If a station master 
in New Zealand is promoted for efficient 
service, all the other railway employees 
have a right to protest before a certain 
tribunal and to be heard at full length. 
Imagine t 
"How does woman suffrage work?" I 
asked a charming lady, daughter of an 
Italian sea captain, married to a big New 
Zealand farmer. "\V ell," she answered, 
"we vote, of course, because if we don't 
we lose our suffrage. But I can't see that 
· votes for women' have had any partic- 
ular effect-except in the "matter of hygi- 
enic and sanitary laws, where we ought 
to know a little more than the men. 
Don't you think so? \Vomen are less 
sentimental and more practical than men. 
They have to be." 
"How does the plan of government 
conciliation and compulsory arbitration 
of labor disputes work?" I asked the 
Highest Legal Authority. "Cpon the 
whole," he said, "it has done considera- 
ble good. It has not produced either the 
ruin which its enemies predicted or the 
Utopia which its friends promised." (At 
that moment most of the New Zealand 
ports were tied up by strikes of the water- 
side workers.) "The trouble just now 
comes not from the employers, who have 
generally accepted the awards of the 
court as fair, but from the unregistered 
labor unions, who have no legal responsi- 
bilities, and who 'want what they want 
when they want it.'" 
The newness of New Zealand doesn't 
get us far away from the oldness of human 
nature, after all. lVlan is a fighting 
animal, with pacific desires and heaven- 
ward aspirations. His upward progress 



THE :KE\YXESS OF :\E\" ZEAL:\XD 


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depends on what Christ taught: fair play, 
love, and immortal hope. 
:Kow let us go out into the open air of 
New Zealand. 
Christchurch, the northern city of the 


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589 


The plain of Canterbury, where the 
Anglican colony made its first settlements 
is a broad, level, fertile region. Her
 
they found in great abundance the wild 
K ew Zealand flax, which was one of the 


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101 


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View from Hermitage, :\Iount Cook. 


South Island, is an inland cathedral town. 
Lyttleton, the port, five miles away, has 
one of the most picturesque harbors in the 
world. Look down from the hill above 
Covernor's Bay, and you will be en- 
tranced. The harbor of Auckland is less 
bold but broader. You get a wonderful 
view of it from the hill behind the city. 


first staples of export from the new 
colony. 
N ow the land has been transformed, 
transmogrified, "translated" (as Bottom 
said). It is a beautiful picture of what 
human industry can do with natural re- 
sources. Here are green pastures and 
still waters, wheat lands and turnip fields, 



590 


THE :\TE\V
ESS OF NE\V ZEALAND 


little farmhouses nestled among the trees 
and placid villages clustered by the rail- 
way or at the junction of the highroads. 
Flocks of sheep wander in the pastures; 
herds of cattle graze through the meadows 
and wade across the valley streams. It is 
as fair a scene of rural prosperity as ever I 
saw in my life. Flowers everywhere; no- 
body in a hurry; all the faces tanned and 
healthy. 
\Ye stopped five days at Temuka, a cele- 
brated angling station, with two fine little 
rivers flowing through it. But that is an- 
other story, reserved for another chapter. 
Then we went on to Timaru, a typical 
British seaside resort-smoky, dusty, 
dull-with well-tended flower gardens and 
a flat view of the sea; but nothing more 
except shops and factories. The prin- 
cipal hotel, the Grosyenor, is a monument 
of faded Victorian magnificence; food 
stolid, atmosphere torpid, except when 
disturbed by the parrot and the three 
Jap dogs of the testy landlady. 
From this "pleasure city" we em- 
barked in a stout motor bus for :Mount 
Cook, the highest point in New Zealand 
(12,170 feet). A hundred and thirty 
miles the drive runs, through the heart 
of the South Island. First we passed 
through Fairlie, in a farming, dairying 
district. \Ve saw plenty of fine cattle in 
the meadows and along the streams, 
placidly and with apparent cheerfulness 
fulfilling the function of a good cow as 
Stevenson describes it: 


"The friendly cow all red and white, 
I love with all my heart; 
She gives me cream with all her might, 
To eat with apple-tart." 


At Fairlie we enjoyed the tart and the 
cream, with lamb and fresh butter of an 
excellence only to be found in X ew 
Zealand. Then the road wound on, 
growing steadily rougher, over Burke's 
Pass, on to the l\lackenzie Plains, an open 
highland region, named after a bold 
Scotch "reaver" of the olden time. Here 
in this lofty, secret native pasture he used 
to feed his abstracted flocks and herds. 
God must have had sheep in His mind 
when He made this country. JUan 
brought them here, and they have mul- 
tiplied and flourished abundantly . We 
saw them everywhere on the golden brown 
hills. They almost blocked the roads, 


going to or coming from the sheep auction 
at Lake Tekapo, where hundreds of motor 
cars were parked and the people were 
picnicking. 
\Vhen you see these flocks of sheep and 
herds of cattle you understand that 
ew 
Zealand is still, like the old Land of 
J\1idian, a pastoral country. A touch of 
reality comes into the government statis- 
tics of exports for the last year: 


$55,000,000 worth of wool. 
$45,000,000 worth of frozen meats. 
$50,000,000 worth of butter. 
$30,000,000 worth of cheese. 


All this, mark you, is the product of the 
sheep runs and dairy farms of the newness 
of New Zealand. The noble savage had 
none of these things and did not know 
how to get them. As yet the natural re- 
sources of the country have not been more 
than 10 per cent developed. It can sup- 
port ten million people as well as a million 
and a half. 
One thing seems to me certain. As the 
human inhabitants of the world increase 
in number, they must do one of two things: 
either they must learn how to bring out 
and use the hidden riches which God has 
stored in the earth for their sustenance- 
and that means knowledge, order, peace- 
ful training; or else they must revert to 
the primitive method of killing (and per- 
haps eating) one another-and that means 
war, barbarism, and" going native." 
On the Mackenzie Plains we saw the 
Kea, one of the most interesting and 
primitive of the native birds. He is a 
parrot, but he looks like a degenerate 
hawk. In his hours of leisure he is said 
to be playful and amusing. But he has 
developed a habit of perching on the 
rumps of sheep, holding on by their wool, 
tearing a hole in their backs with his 
sharp bill, devouring their kidneys and 
other savory and essential organs, and 
then leaving his victims to die. Some peo- 
ple say this is a slander or an exaggera- 
tion. But at all events a price has been 
put on the Kea's head, and he is listed 
for suppression, except in the little "Her- 
mitage" reservation, where he is pro- 
tected as a curiosity. 
There is another New Zealand bird, 
less harmful but still more curious-the 
Kiwi. He has no wings, an excessively 



THE NE\YNESS OF NE\V ZEALAND 


591 


long bill, and feathers which are like an- :1Iount Cook, after seeing the newness of 
cient lace. The :I\Iaoris use these feathers New Zealand, formerly 1Iaoriland. 
for cloaks of fashion, the anglers for the 
dressing of trout flies. \Ye were sorry P. S.-For readers who have a curiositv 
that we could not catch sight of a Kiwi. about the newest civilized country i
 
His habits are nocturnal; ours, not. the world, and the outpost of progressive 
At Pukaki our motor bus crossed the legislation, this bibliographical note is 
foot of another mountain lake. The added to a brief and imperfect article. 
glacier-fed river foamed out of it white as New Zealand has more literature of her 
milk, and therefore hopeless for fly-fisher- own than the American colonies had at a 
men. After the sacred rite of" afternoon corresponding period of their history. 
tea" at the tavern we bumped along up The list of publications by 'Vhitcomb & 
beside the wild, picturesque, desolate, Tombs (Auckland, Christchurch, Dune- 
milk-white lake. din, and \Vellington) proves this state- 
At the upper end of it we saw the noble ment. Here are nature books, J\.laori 
panorama of the .New Zealand Alps-not legends, histories, poems, and political 
equal to Switzerland, perhaps, as the treatises. Here are two books of rem in is- 
Tourist Bureau claims, but visibly splen- cence by white men who" went native": 
did and snow-crowned. Great records "Old X ew Zealand by a Pakeha :I\Iaori" 
of Alpinist audacity have been made (F. E. 1Ianing), and "The Adventures 
among those glittering peaks. of Kimble Bent," edited by James Cowan. 
After a rough ride through river beds The latter is the story of an irrepressible 
we come to "The Hermitage," a big, 1Iaine boy, who deserted from the Ameri- 
friendly Alpine inn, where tourists, and a can army and the British navy to escape 
conference of doctors, have gathered to from all restraints, only to find that the 
have a good time. Ping-pong, bridge "taboos" of the barbarian were more op- 
games, and jazz dancing are going on in pressive than the rules of the civilized. 
the main assembly-room. In the smoke- The festive Kimble was made a slave, 
room and the ladies' drawing-room wel- forced to marry an ugly one-eyed wife, 
come wood fires are burning on the open and to assist (in the French sense) at 
hearths. Unless you are a spoiled Syba- ghastly cannibal feasts. "Going native" 
rite you can't help being comfortable here. as a way of getting free to do what you 
The ne)..t morning was cold and rainy. please is a delusion. 
But at noon it cleared up. \Ve set out A very interesting book on present so- 
on a climb to Kea Point, three miles away. cial and political conditions is "Human 
Here were the great peaks facing us. Australasia," by President Charles F. 
Snow fields spreading against the sky. Thwing of \Yestern Reserve Pniversity 
Glaciers draping the mountain shoulders. (the 1Iacmillan Company, 1923). It is 
Avalanches dropping their momentary well-studied, and carefully and liberally 
thunders from every side. written from personal observation. 
Against this the half-tropical bush is The best and most inclusive book on 
creeping up. Palms and ferns and euca- Xew Zealand is the last edition (beauti- 
lyptus against the snow and ice. \Vhich fully illustrated) of the volume by 'V. 
will conquer in the coming ages? After Pember Reeves, a native of the Dominion. 
all, on the answer to this question more and for many years a member of its 
than on any human legislation, depends Parliament. It is called "The Long 
the long future of man on earth. \Yhite Cloud" (" Ao-tea-roa," the 1Iaori 
\Ye humans, if the race is to survive, name of the land). It is written in ad- 
must not be terrified by Alpine solitudes, mirable English, and is a rich storehouse 
nor seduced by tropical islands. \Ve of knowledge. It is published by George 
have got to work together if we want to Allen and Unwin, in London. Everyone 
live. And if we want to get and keep the who wishes to understand X ew Zealand 
result of our working, we must do our and its picturesque history should read 
best to eliminate fighting as a racial habit. this book-and then go to see the country 
This was the reflection that came home to for himself. 
me, in face of the glacial splendors of H. v. D. 
Anbther article by Doctor van Dyke, "Angling in the Antipodc
." \\ill appear in an early number. 




- 


GARTH 
JONES 


.) 


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t(
 

 
eJ}y 


BY ELS
-\ B
-\RKER 


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. 

 


The Two Selves 


T\,"o sèh"es h,n"e I that work not for the weal 
Of one another, though they must abide 
In the same house of life. One is the tried 
Indomitable Spirit, made of steel 
Tempered by fire and cold from head to heel. 
The other is the "'oman, who is made 
Of softest rose-leaves, wistful and 
 fraid, 
\Yhose only armor is love's pure appeal. 
""ater and oil will blend before these two. 
\Yhat hidden purpose of the Infinite 
Has to these alien dwellers thus decreed 
One narrow house of life the long years through? 
The rose-leaves rust the steel and weaken it, 
The steel has torn the rose-leaves till they bleed 


59 2 



West of Romance 


BY J\IARGH:\RITE FISHER J\IcLEA
 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY L. F, \VILFORD 


nQ
",
wEFORE our engage- 


X ment, David tried to 
I B : r tell me about Haskell, 
I 
. l\Iontana, where the 
I I population is sixty, 

 I 
 with several gone since 
ÄG"
Ä the census. But I 
looked straight into 
his awfully nice, honest blue eyes and 
didn't take in a word. It's amazing how 
easily that sort of thing can be done. 
Then a minute later, after we were en- 
gaged, I said in my most practical man- 
ner: " David, if you had to live in the 
Sahara, I'd go there too. Of course, it 
wouldn't just blossom like a rose because 
of you, and I don't expect Haskell to, 
either." 
He looked impressed until I added: 
"But the \Vest has romance. I know I'll 
adore it." East of Chicago, l\linneapolis 
is considered positively Angora; but we 
of it speak of further west as "The 
'Vest." 
"Oh, Sally," said David, with almost 
a groan, "I thought you were sensible 
until you dragged in the romance." 
But romance whistled blithely when we 
romped through a honeymoon in Glacier 
Park. By day, we rode beastly little 
horses over all sorts of trails, until by 
night it was only with stiff-legged aban- 
don we danced to hotel orchestras. 
'Yhen David strolled out on a glacier, 
I discovered how awfully necessary he 
was to my life's happiness. He didn't go 
a bit near the edge, but a piece broke off 
-oh, I admit, miles from him-and went 
ker-plud into the heathenish, jade-green 
little lake that the glacier's parked on. I 
shut my eyes tight and must have grown 
white, because one of the men in the party 
said in the nicest clipped voice: 
"Oh, really now, you poor little thing!" 
\Vhen David returned he registered be- 
low zero, which I thought was perfectly 
natural considering where he'd been, until 
VOL, LXXVIII.-43 


. he explained that he had seen that man 
pat my shoulder. But when I told him 
how awful he had made me feel by being 
on that iceberg, he thawed right out. 
I forgot all about Haskell until one 
night, when I wore a special dress, David 
eyed me as one struck by a thought. 
"Sally," he said, H you've got some 
clothes that in Haskell you're going to be 
all dressed up in and no place to go." 
"They're my trousseau." I explained. 
And right then, for the first time, I 
doubted if a trousseau was an integral 
part of a wedding-like the minister. 
But at that moment the orchestra struck 
up a waltz that had spilled from a poet's 
heart into jazz and off we went, care-free 
as swallows. Then after two joyous 
weeks, David announced: 
"I'm sorry as the dickens, but we've 
got to go home." Home, of course, mean- 
ing Haskell. 
The next morning I got up early. I 
thought David was sound asleep; but 
while I stood on the porch gazing at those 
vain old mountains that eternally look at 
themselves in the still lake waters, he 
joined me. 
Personally, I think David's handsome, 
but I can't decide which is his most be- 
coming e.xpression. Just then he was 
solemn. \Ve were leaving that morning. 
But he tried to be jaunty, inquiring: 
"\\That's the big idea of waking the 
birds? " 
I sniffed a bit tearily: " Oh, David, I'm 
saying good-by to our honeymoon." 
And David said: """hat's the matter 
with taking it with us?" '''hereupon he 
looked scared stiff that he had said some- 
thing sentimental. 
Then one right after another came the 
bites of reality before which my romantic 
\Vest crumbled. This morning we left 
our train for the most unreliable-looking 
one I ever saw-just two ancient coaches, 
a baggage-car, and a fat, chuggy engine. 
593 



594 


'VEST OF RO:\L-\
CE 


The travelling men call it the Galloping 
Goose. \Yhich is apt. It takes it two 
hours to make thirty miles. But David 
says we're darn lucky to have it gallop 
once a day. That means daily mail, and 
we wouldn't have it more than twice a 
week but for the oil-fields at the end of the 
line. 
En route, the clearest of mountain 
streams serpentined beside us. 
"\Ve can eat fish, anyway," I observed 
optimistically. David had mentioned 
that there was no butcher shop in Haskell. 
The thought fascinated me. "Doesn't 
anybody eat meat in the country?" 
,. Oh, yes, a rancher now and then kills 
an animal and one buys a hunk of meat 
and cans it." -' 
David said that in the same tone I 
would say: "One drives to the store and 
buys a pair of gloves." 
The scenery that crawled past the win- 
dows didn't woo me. It just knocked me 
silent. On one side rose big rimrocks. 
Pine-trees marched up and down them. 
One had split a rock and looked as though 
it were sitting down and resting. I looked 
across the aisle and up a valley. Its 
dried-grass tan was broken with ploughed 
brown patches, and, here and there, a 
yellow carpet of uncut ripe wheat. In 
the distance the High Line l\lountains, 
stencilled in purple. stabbed the sky with 
their snow-dashed peaks. 
Suddenly, David sprang to his feet and 
almost yelled: "Sally, we're here!" and 
he looked all lit up and joyful. But I 
looked out the wrong windows-the town 
was only visible from the opposite ones- 
so, of course, I didn't seç anything until 
we got off the train. Then I saw that 
Haskell is a treeless handful of buildings. 
There was no colorful pageant. K ot 
one sheep-chapped, broad-brim-hatted 
male-just a few lounging, flannel- 
shirted ones with soft felts pulled over 
their eyes. A robin-eyed, barefooted 
child or two. A woman in a bungalow 
apron framed for an instant in the station 
doorway; that low, narrow building 
painted the eye-stunning orange railroad 
companies reserve for small towns. 
Then I found David looking at me, his 
eyes just pools of anxiety. He looked 
awfully miserable, too, as though he real- 
ized how Haskell in the flesh was looking 


to me. I couldn't say a word, so I just 
up and kissed him. And then we had to 
walk past the galvanized stag-line. David 
strode past, greeting members of it out of 
the corner of his mouth, and his ears just 
blazed. 
Past them, he slowed up and let me 
catch up with him. For a moment, he 
looked about to speak; his mouth opened 
and then shut tight. Finally he remarked 
that the sidewalk, which ran down one 
side of Main Street and with strict im- 
partiality crossed over at the bank to 
continue for a block or so on that side 
had been donated oy the Woman's Club
 
,. \Voman's Club!" I echoed. I 
counted ten buildings on Main Street. 
Four were vacant. On straggling lanes, 
adjacent to the street, box-like houses 
clustered in shaken-dice fashion. 
"Before it split up." David's grin 
spelled drama. 
Then David left me and our hand-bags 
in one room of Henry's Hotel-whoever 
Henry is-and he flew back to his grain 
elevator, one of those three gaunt, gray- 
tinned buildings that stand like mailed 
fists by the railroad tracks. He's per- 
fectly certain that his three weeks' ab- 
sence has upset the wheat market. 

ow I'm waiting for him and a pair of 
galoshes. Seeing the wheat's still being 
threshed and no one wants it to rain, it's 
rained, and Haskell mud is a cross be- 
tween thick pea soup and warm tar. 
Nothing but galoshes can withstand the 
suction-and I want to see our house! 
\Ve drew plans for it on the back of an 
envelope and sent it to one John Swenson 
who runs our elevator here. John, in turn, 
was to submit it to an outlying rancher 
who had one time been a carpenter and 
who would erect our house in between 
planting his crops, feeding his chickens, 
and milking his cows. I recall David said 
that first the cows had to be found, as they 
saunter off anywhere from one to three 
miles. 
l\leantime, I ponder the ways of coun- 
try hotels. Why do they have walls kal- 
somined the pink of cold baked salmon, 
and towels like small, slippery boards. 


David forgot my galoshes, so after din- 
ner here, we just went for a walk up the 
railroad-tracks. Now he's back at his 



'VEST OF ROl\1A
CE 


elevator again. He's worried about the 
shocked wheat getting wet. Which 
moves me to reflect that the wheat busi- 
ness, whether you raise it or "house" it 
and sell it, as David docs, is like the post- 
card epigram about life-one thing after 
another. Only I left out the damn. 
This evening, as we walked up the 
tracks, David, with pathetic eagerness, 
tried to convince me that we're in one of 
the prettiest as well as most fertile parts 
of lYIontana. 
"Picturesque is the word," I said 
feebly. 
I'm used to friendly hills that hold 
sunny lakes in their soft green arms in a 
way you can croon over. But there's 
such a gaunt bigness about this country. 
A crouched hardness in its brown old hill- 
sides. Yes, sir-it's like a big, hungry 
animal waiting to gobble you up. I guess 
it's gobbled up lots of people, too, their 
hopes and their fortunes. On the train 
we passed some deserted homestead 
shacks, dead bones of little homes that 
had been there. On one side of one of 
those lopsided doorways had hung a 
faded pink sunbonnet. 
I remembered that sunbonnet and I 
suddenly wondered if its owner's face was 
young or old-or just looked old when she 
hung it there. 
I didn't tell David why I squeezed his 
hand so hard. I saw him sneak a look up 
and down the track. He thought I 
wanted to kiss him; but I was just com- 
forting myself with the thought that any- 
way we'd be gobbled up together. 
Then close by gushed a song. Up, up 
soared a voice, each note clear as drops 
of water tossed from a fountain. On a 
half-charred fence post perched the wee 
coloratura, its head flung back, its swell- 
ing throat nearly shaking off its yellow- 
tinged feathers. 
Now there's hope for a State that has 
meadow-larks. :\Iaybe they take the 
place of the vanished romance of cow- 
boys. Before we got home, home mean- 
ing Henry's Hotel, there was a star flicker- 
ing in the sky and a thread of a moon, 
just a silver basting glinting through 
heaven's dark blue. 
"Isn't it sweet I" I sairl in the way I 
talk to our moons at home. 
\Vell, even if Haskell is going to be as 


593 


drab as the worn-out skirt of a circus- 
rider, it's spangled-meadow-Iarks, stars, 
and little moons, and, shiniest of all, 
Da vide 
At that moment, David was particu- 
larly shiny, because when I exclaimed, 
"That's the first star, let's wish on it," 
he said, "I have nothing to wish for." 
And even though he added real quickly: 
"\Vell, I might wish for a bathtub"-in 
Haskell the nocturnal tub is a wash-tub- 
he couldn't spoil his first perfectly lovely 
remark. 


Almost a week has gone by. I'll just 
sketch in the high lights, because think 
what this record will mean to David and 
me when we're old 1 
First high light, our house-we're liv- 
ing in it. But when we put the plans for 
it on that envelope, we didn't allow for 
plaster. The length and width of each 
of our three rooms is one unsuspected foot 
smaller. 
,. Gosh," said David, rumpling his hair 
in a trapped manner, as he looked around 
for the first time. "\Vhat a lot an archi- 
tect must know 1" 
That first evening David busied him- 
self setting up our wickless kerosene stove. 
Its distinguishing feature means that if 
anything boils over you won't have to 
scrape for hours to change wicks. Da- 
vid's as proud of his discovery of that 
stove's existence as :Marconi should be of 
the wireless. 
I spent my time eying the odds and 
ends of furniture we had picked up at the 
Haskell Emporium. Once we almost 
weakened and sent away for one of those 
big, luscious divans that you curl up on 
with a book you don't read because you're 
so comfortable. But we sternly reminded 
ourselves that we might just as probably 
live here one year as ten. 
A\S soon as our few elevators grow to a 
goodly flock of them, we'll have general 
offices in Ferristown, population eight 
thousand, and assume a bathtub, elec- 
tric lights, and a maid and mahogany fur- 
niture-all given in the order of their 
dwindling importance. 
I'll know that heav:en has no rewards 
for our privations on earth if Saint Peter 
doesn't greet me with: "Sally Leighton, 
yon gold glittering tub is your own, fill it 



596 


'YEST OF ROl\L\
CE 


full of warm crystal water till your ears 
float like lily-pads." 


David's had a surprise up his sleeve 
and wet wheat has ruined it. John Swen- 
son took in a load of it at the elevator 
and didn't tell David, because he was so 
tickled at the chance to get one of his 
competitor's crops. Being wet, the 
wheat, contrary to the laws of human re- 
actions, got hot and spoiled the good 
wheat in the same bin and out it all had 
to be dumped. 
Yesterday, David came home for lunch 
as though he were walking to Chopin's 
"1\Iarche Funèbre." He slumped into a 
chair and finished his wet-wheat story 
with, "and there went our Deleo lights 
and a divan." 
Of course, we can't afford to lose a cent, 
but that wasn't what made him feel 
worst. I've discovered that David's so 
anxious to make it up to me for living in 
Haskell that I'll have to act enthusiastic 
or we'll never save money. 
"Don't worry, David," I chirped, "I 
think kerosene lamps are-are quaint." 
Thank goodness I thought of that word, 
because that's all they are, if they're that. 
Mter dinner David forlornly wiped 
dishes. 1\1 y chatter didn't cheer him a 
bit. There's nothing in the world as 
pathetic as one's husband when he looks 
like a dejected small boy. Something had 
to be done, 
As soon as his limp coattails disap- 
peared down the street, I hurried to the 
store and bought three cans of wagon 
paint-that kind takes only one coat. 
Also, I wrote mother and a mail-order 
house. Kow I'm started, I'm not going 
to stop until the shack .looks like a tea- 
house in Greenwich Yillage. . I once re- 
ferred to our abode as the shack to mother 
and she wrote back that ., cottage" sound- 
ed much more civilized. I guess that's 
why I like to call it the shack. 


David fell for the paint. He says he 
shakes a wicked brush, and we just paint- 
ed everything. The orgy lasted for days. 
N ow the floors are chocolate-brown and 
the walls sunny yellow. The chairs are 
sand-colored with little blue feet. The 
gate-leg table has shed golden oak for re- 
splendency and the wicker rockers cry 
aloud for cretonnes. 


\Ve even painted the water-pails. 
There are two of them, because our water- 
supply being a pump just exactly half a 
block off, David insists upon carrying two 
at a time. He calls himself Big Chief 
Running \Vater. \Vhich is accurate, as, 
due to his unseemly haste, the contents 
of both pails on his arrival with them can 
always be pooled. 
Last night we had our official house- 
warming. The shack has risen to its 
zenith. There are cretonnes at the win- 
dows and on the floor Oriental rugs, ones 
I wrote asking mother to contribute from 
her attic. A bit threadbare, but on the 
brown floor they are grateful pools of 
rose, blue, and ivory. One bigger and 
more vivid than the others-an old Per- 
sian must have woven into it the hot 
loves of his you th-we flung over our 
substitute divan, an army cot, and it be- 
came haremesque. 
Then we turned on 1\1r. Gallagher and 
1\1r. Shean, and with me clasped to Da- 
vid's chest we nimbly fox-trotted around 
-most around-the parlor, dining-room, 
den, and library, which is the one middle 
room, until the stovepipe came down. 
The rest of the evening we spent wiring 
it up. 
"I suppose you'll paint the wire in blue 
stripes," said David scampishly, and for 
revenge I wiggled the ladder until he 
nearly fell off. 


I know I shall never like any season 
here as well as the fall. The air is fresh 
and cool, as though it had blown over 
water, and the sunshine is honey-colored. 
But you can't find out about summer. 
"'hen I asked a rancher what last one 
was like, he got a far-away look in his 
china-blue eyes and drawled: 
"Let's see-I played baseball that 
day. " 


This afternoon, I picked up two more 
spangles to sew on Haskell's drab skirt- 
Black Butte and a sunset. I had scram- 
bled up those grim old rimrocks and fol- 
lowed a trail that shuttled through pine 
woods. Then all of a sudden the trees 
just swept back and left me, and I was 
alone on the bare top of the bench lands. 
Bronze hummocks rolled fluidly into 
fields and on to the horizon. There, 
etched in blue steel against a flaming 



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"Don't worry, David," I chirped, "I think kerosene lamps are-are quaint."-Page 596. 


drop-curtain sky, was a dome-shaped, 
jagged, old Butte. The beauty of the scene 
thundered at you like a \\; agner opera. 
To-night, as we lingered over our coffee, 
I tried to tell David about it; but he in- 
sisted a Wagner opera sounded like hell. 


I had him there, because I pointed out 
that hell must be awfully impressive, too, 
when it's going full tilt. 
I can understand why the discovery of 
fire dynamited man out of the animal 
597 



598 


'YEST OF RO
IANCE 


kingdom. At last we have light. Yes- 
terday David, as proud as a peacock, 
brought home a gasolene lamp. It was 
advertised as rivalling the sun, and the 
storekeeper said he had only heard of one 
blowing up. 
I remember when dad presented mother 
with a diamond bar pin he'd picked out 
all by himself. He had looked just like 
David strutting up the walk-that chest- 
lifted, pleased expression. And mother 
hadn't pounced on her pin with any more 
joy than I on the lamp, with its hideous 
nickel base and dead-white fluted shade. 
That lamp already has reyolutionized 
our social routine. David and I can read 
now until ten-thirty instead of getting 
groggy-eyed at nine-an hour at which it 
didn't seem respectable for one's intelli- 
gence to stop functioning, but at which 
Haskell is as black as a well. 


Just weeks have gone by. The Wo- 
man's Club has reorganized and I've had 
loads of callers. Almost ten. I guess 
everybody was wild to know where all 
the paint was going. One little field- 
mouse of a woman looked around the 
place, and after a struggle between truth 
and tact said: 
"I've never seen anything like it." 
But my brand-new friend 
:Iary Haynes 
approves of it. At which thought I purr. 
She lives in a charming Rose of the 
Rancho kind of place just outside of Has- 
kell. Her husband is a retired cattleman. 
The moment she grasped my hand and 
smiled a flash of white teeth and warm 
brown eyes, I knew we'd be friends. 
l\fary Haynes agitated reorganization 
of the \Voman's Club, but before the 
meeting of the former members she and 
the banker's young wife and I pondered 
some common interest of women on which 
to rebuild it. 
It seems that the banker's wife, who 
looks like David Copperfield's Dora, isn't 
one. She worked in a beauty parlor in 
Great Falls, and there found fuel for the 
most delicious but quiet sense of humor. 
It was what she learned about women 
there that has relaunched the \Voman's 
Club. 
Formerly the club had met to play Five 
Hundred, serving coffee and cake after- 
ward, with the husbands summoned from 
the pool hall. But cards gave too much 


time for exchange of opinions. That was 
what had broken it up. I suggested some 
course of study; but 
lary Haynes ex- 
plained that there were several members 
who couldn't write their own names. 
More complicated than that, there is a 
l\lrs. Saboni who scarcely can speak Eng- 
lish. But she has been known to trudge 
miles through deep snow, and when she 
arrived at the meetings, she'd sit by her- 
self and smile as though she were being 
warmed by just being with people. 
"Illiterate or high-brow, no woman is 
satisfied with her weight." That remark 
was from the banker's wife, which was so 
true it wasn't funny. 
There was our common interest of 
women! 


Vanity has united the club. There was 
enough money in the treasury-four dol- 
lars-to pay the first instalment on a set 
of exercise-directing phonograph rec- 
ords, The banker's wife knew all about 
them. They were advertised to reduce 
fat people and fatten thin ones. \Ve, 
meaning the club, plan to give dances to 
raise the rest of the money, and, in the 
meantime, we meet every other week at 
the schoolhouse for an evening of vigor. 
David's privately christened the club 
"The Ziegfield Training School." 
But I can't say the dove of peace 
broods with folded wings. lVlrs. Bleeker, 
the wife of Henry, of Henry's Hotel, won't 
take her exercises standing next to the 
station agent's wife, who said" such mean 
things" about her in the county-division 
fight. And the station agent's wife 
wouldn't even attend a meeting until a 
delegation from the club called upon her 
to assure her that her presence was wel- 
come, and once she dropped out because 
she thought that I didn't return her call 
soon enough. 
And people write me and ask: " \Vhat 
do you find to interest yourself in in that 
dead little burg?" \Vhy, here are the 
materials of life right under one's nose! 


I understand one of the habitués of the 
pool hall is scandalized at my behavior, 
which consists of my wearing knickers and 
high boots and now and then patronizing 
the pool hall with David for a game of 
pool. But my censor seems kindly, be- 
cause his latest remark is that" no doubt, 



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\\TEST OF ROl\IA
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the East is more free in their ways. " And 
he invited David to their ranch next Sun- 
day for a chicken dinner, He added: 
"Ãnd bring the wife." 
David said he got the idea that what 
he meant was, "and even bring the 
wife." 
The idea of chickens makes my eyes 
roll. \Ve were supposed to have a young 
army of them growing up at the elevator, 
but the coyotes got them. All but one, 
and I think it was scared thin by the fate 
of its brothers and sisters. You can hear 
the coyotes some nights; long, thin, shiv- 
ering cries that are like the screams of 
little ghost children at play. 
Last night David and I had a conver- 
sation with one. \Ve climbed the rim- 
rocks. There wasn't a moon. The sky 
was splashed with stars. \Ye picked our 
way up the cattle path with a flash-light. 
I wanted to look at the stars through the 
branches of one of those great, whispering 
pines. David thought it sounded inter- 
esting, although, of course, he grumbled 
all the way up. 
The pines were black and mysterious. 
Somehow, it was like standing in a dark 
cathedral; Da vid and I whispered when 
we said anything. Then a little banshee 
wail splintered the stillness. It sounded 
very close and like such a self-pitying 
coyote. I imitated as best I could and a 
pleased yip, yip, friendly as the barks of a 
collie puppy, answered me. 
David promptly understudied a whole 
pack. He has powerful lungs. There 
was a stunned silence. Then from farther 
away, I've no doubt 
lr. Coyote even 
turned his back, came the old dismal wail. 
One could picture h;m, his little nose 
lifted to the stars and his lower jaw quiv- 
ering with the strain of the long-drawn 


high C. He appeared so bent on being 
miserable that we left him alone. 
K 0 picture-gallery could ever hold the 
wind-swept, thrilling beauty of stars seen 
through wide-flung pine branches. The 
effect is breath-taking. As you look up, 
the stars glitter like crystal, then they 
seem caught in the branches until it's a 
glorified Christmas-tree with the candles 
all lighted. 
"David," I whispered, "wasn't God nice 
not to give any certain part of the world a 
corner on beauty?" And hand in hand, in 
silence, we walked down to the shack. 
David has just laid aside his magazine 
to explode: "For the love of l\like, what 
do you find to write about?" 
But this is going to be a surprise for 
him-oh, years, years from now. I can 
just see myself as a little porcelain old 
lady-although, no doubt, with alkali 
water and a blasting sun, I'll be more 
raisin than porcelain. I'll read this aloud 
in a thin, wavery voice, and my favorite 
granddaughter, who will look just like 
David, will interrupt, round-eyed-I 
wonder if her hair will be bobbed: 
"Oh, grandma, you were a pioneer, 
weren't you?" 
"I'll turn a misty little smile to David, 
who with his dove-gray spats will be just 
the picture of elegant old age, and I'll say: 
"Yes, dear-and those were the happiest 
days of our lives." 
"How just awfully romantic I" will bub- 
ble that favorite granddaughter. 
I'll nod dreamily: "Yes, dear, it was." 
But, thank goodness, as I look at David, 
his good-looking nose buried in his maga- 
zine and the dear, boyish length of him 
slouched in that chair, I can say right 
now, "It is," instead of waiting to say: 
"Yes, dear, it was," 


_ .:..=-: 


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-----.- - -- - 
_. - 



An Interview with a Newcomer in 
New York 


BY STUART P. SHERl\IA
 
Author of "The Genius of America," etc. 


-'.' " m " :" T is well known .tJ;1at 

 - .. the crowded conditIOn 
I LU 
 1 I !!'hI of New York has made 
17T,:q 
 the advent of new- 

 
 comers a matter of 
concern to its inhabit- 

 WW ants. Apprehension, 
long entertained re- 
garding immigration from eastern Europe, 
has recently been extended toward migra- 
tion from the Midwest, which, it is be- 
lieved in some quarters, produces a type 
of personality even less congruous with 
that of the authentic New Yorker than, 
say, Russia, Ethiopia, Palestine, Czecho- 
Slovakia, Bulgaria or Tuscany. This fact 
was brought to my attention last fall, 
shortly after I had stolen into the city and 
had begun to make my residence there. 
I was earning my living, I should sup- 
pose, in a fashion as peaceful and as law- 
abiding as is customary among Mayor 
Hylan's proud, liberty-loving Six Million. 
But I had entered from the 5uspected dis- 
trict. And I had been only two or three 
months in residence before I had received 
an intimation-not, to be sure, from the 
police, but from an agency interested in 
public welfare-that I had better prepare 
a three or four thousand word explanation 
of why I had left the Midwest and come 
to New York. 
Since I have always been a person of 
obscure life and notorious modesty, of 
course I recognized at once that there 
could be nothing personal in the intention 
of this request. Obviously, my small pri- 
vate affairs and reasons were to be eleva- 
ted into the realm of "general ideas" by 
the sin1ple process lately employed with 
such success in Tennessee: I was to be 
made a "test case." .l\ly entire training 
and course of life have fixed in mind the 
nobility of these voluntary offerings of 
one's body for the advancement of science 
and for public instruction. l\ly only hesi- 
VOL. LXXVIII.-44 


tation about complying with the request 
rises from a suspicion that I may not be 
just the sort of "case" desired. 
To get the plain facts before us at once: 
I am not a perfect nor perhaps even 
an adequate representative of the l\Iid- 
western Peril. So far as my geographical 
instability has any illustrative value, it 
should properly be classified under Men- 
ace of the Floating Population. When 
metropolitans who have never migrated 
farther than from Tenth Street to Seven- 
tieth betray to me their curiosity about 
any New Thing, saying: "Yes, we know 
you are from Illinois, but where is your 
home?" I sometimes brusquely and bra- 
zenly reply, " New York." Thus I silence 
trivial though, to me, acutely painful in- 
quisition. But if the question comes from 
a tender and sympathetic soul, to whom 
"home" manifestly means something pro- 
found and intimate, as it does to me- 
something more than Robert Frost's 
place, "where when you have to go they 
have to take you in "-why then I sigh 
and murmur: "I have no home." 
"But you were born and brought up 
somewhere, weren't you--out there in the 
Midwest? " 
"No," I have to reply, "I was born in 
Iowa; but so far as I can remember my 
bringing-up, it was mainly in California, 
but partly also in Arizona, Vermont, and 
Massachusetts; then I was higher-educated 
for seven years in l\Iassachusetts; I have 
spent a summer or two in New Hampshire, 
one in Colorado, a dozen in Michigan; I 
have spent shteen academic years in Illi- 
nois. I have lived two years in New York 
City. Ancestrally, my connections are 
with Vermont, New York, and Connecti- 
cut. By education I am almost exclusively 
from California and :Massachusetts. As a 
university teacher I have been almost ex- 
clusively connected with Illinois, but inci- 
dentally also with California and New 
601 



602 AN INTERVIE\Y \YITH A NEWCO!\1ER IN NEW YORK 


York. I am a member, I believe, of the 
Iowa Press Club, but since I have not 
visited that State since my fifth year, I 
have to attribute my election to my asso- 
ciation with New York papers, which be- 
gan in 1907-s0 that, at need, I could 
make out some sort of case against being 
classified as a pure newcomer here." 
"But where do your roots go down into 
the soil? After all those years in the Mid- 
west, there must be some place for which 
you feel that sentimental attachment 
which we have in mind when we speak of 
'home.' " 
"In the first place, Madam, length of 
years has little to do with sentimental 
attachments, either to persons or to places. 
One develops no sentiment for an ice floe 
without food or water by mere duration 
of sojourn there, and a wife-beating hus- 
band is no dearer after the tenth beating 
than after the first. On the other hand, 
it is quite as easy to give your heart after 
twenty-four hours as after twenty-four 
years. Every place that I have loved I 
have loved at first sight and always with 
an intensity which bears no relation to 
length of residence." 


"Then you have, or have had, attach- 
ments ? " 
" I have had and ha Ye. So far as a 
member of the Floating Population can 
feel that intimate and profound, that 
blissful and sacred, sense of being 'at 
home,' which you have in mind, I feel it, 
with a kind of sweet poignancy in two 
adorable green valleys of Vermont; on the 
summit of Mt. Greylock, in Massachu- 
setts, whence one can look across remem- 
bered valleys to many a familiar and fond- 
ly visited peak; on nine miles of the Lake 
Michigan shore, where, on the white sand 
by a driftwood fire betwixt the water and 
the woods, I have, through many delight- 
ful summers, watched the evening star; in 
any patch of cactus and sagebrush in the 
Far West which recalls my 'first adven- 
ture'; also in New Orleans, for which I 
have a mystical sentiment; in San Diego 
and San Francisco, which are lovely in 
themselves and still preserve something of 
the charm for me which Los Angeles pos- 
sessed thirty-five years ago; on Lake Ta- 
hoe, in the Yosemite Valley, in the Grand 
Canyon; in the old-world quietude of \Vall 


Street, on Fifth A venue, Madison Avenue, 
43d Street, 42d Street, 40th Street, lower 
Broadway, and in all the little streets 
odorous of old books, printers' ink, and 
roasting coffee between Vesey Street and 
the Battery." 
"But that is not what you are leaving 
when you come to New York." 
"No, l\1adam, I shall never leave any 
of those places, and so I shall never be 
homesick for them. I have never known 
that pang. The home as a distinct, fixed, 
and unique spot of earth is being destroyed 
by the Floating Population, of which I am 
a representativec How can one love a 
Connecticut village with a 'single heart' 
who loves the woods of Kentucky so well ? 
How can one feel any exclusive passion 
for the \Vhite IVlountains who has been 
rocked in the long green undulations of 
the prairie and dreamed by the white foam 
of the beach at Coronado? If you like 
the idea of an expanding love and a widen- 
ing home, of course you may say that, in- 
stead of destroying the home, we floaters 
are extending its limits to include the en- 
tire area where Americanese is spoken, 
where standard breakfast foods are ob- 
tainable, and 'the American standard of 
living' prevails. Whatever that may be, 
there are now few places in America where 
a mobile American feels strange or need 
feel, if he possess a tenth part of St. Paul's 
adaptability to environment, intolerably 
uncomfortable. I trust, Madam, you re- 
call the grand declaration of the Apostle, 
that he had learned in whatsoever place 
he was therewith to be content." 
" You mean, then, that after half a life- 
time in the l\fidwest one can move to New 
York with no particular sense of emo- 
tional dislocation?" 
"Exactly so, l\1adam. Every moder- 
ately intelligent person who lives outside 
New Y ork-excepting only the inhabi- 
tants of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who 
in that, as in all other respects, are com- 
pletely self-sufficient, and carry their own 
atmosphere with them to Europe, to 
China, whithersoever they wander-every 
moderately inteHigent person outside this 
great and beautiful and inexhaustible city 
is at least subconsciously a suburbanite 
and spiritually a' commuter.' Whether he 
lives in Yonkers or Montclair and comes 
in daily, or in Richmond or Indianapolis 



AN INTERVIE\V \VITH A NE\VCOMER I
 NE\V YORK 603 


and comes in only once or twice a year, 
makes little difference. \Vhen you live in 
your mind, it makes little difference where 
your body is." 
"Oh, but that is stuff and nonsense, 
you know. If it really made no difference 
where you lived, physically, why did you 
leave--where was it ?-not Chicago?- 
well, one of those Midwestern universities 
out there, and come into New York? 
Wasn't it a Western professor-perhaps 
it was you yourself-who used to write 
about the beauty and worth of life' in the 
provinces,' about the advantages of stay- 
ing there, and the folly of rushing to the 
metropolis? " 
"Yes, Madam, it was 1. But that was 
a different matter! I did not rush to the 
metropolis as a tender and devourable 
youth. I not merely shunned the insular 
bewitchment and 'saw America first.' I 
withdrew to the city only after I had com- 
pleted one life in the provinces. If at my 
age I were moved by the 'corrupt desire 
to please,' I could give you an explanation 
of this act, plausible, modish, and readily 
understandable by all natives of the en- 
chanted islandc I might say that I, like 
all the remoter suburbanites, had always 
nourished, deep in the subconscious, a 
smoldering passion for a metropolitan 
existence; that psychoanalysts had got 
hold of me and dragged this subconscious 
TVunsch to the conscious level; and that 
consequently, seeking an 'adjustment,' I 
had cast off 'the provinces,' like an old 
wife, and' moved in.' But that would 
not be true. As for the truth, I am not 
sure that I could make that a matter of 
any public interest." 
" Suppose you disregard the public, and 
try to interest me." 
"\Vill that be easier?" 
"No, but better worth trying." 
"Very well. I came to New York in 
order to change not my place but my pro- 
fession. N ew York enabled me to change 
my profession from teaching to learning- 
with the privilege of earning my living by 
writing about what I learned. Does that 
interest you? " 
":Moderately. I suppose you were a 
failure as a teacher." 
"No, at least not a marked failure. 
The marked failures never leave the 
profession. " 


"That is interesting. Still, I suppose 
you didn't really take to teaching." 
"Oh yes, with rapacity. I was addicted 
to it. I tried to teach something when- 
ever I opened my lips. 'When I made a 
call, it became a quiz. \"hen I wrote a 
letter, it was an examination. 'Vhen I 
composed an essay, it was informing, it 
tended to edification. I was full of in- 
struction. I am still. That was my 
métier, and it becomes habituaL" 
"\Vhat a bore! But since you like it 
and yet left it, you must have been a non- 
conformist and have fallen out with the 
Administration-if that's what you call 
it. " 
"Not at all. On the contrary, I feared 
that if I stayed on in my profession for 
another twenty years I should be made a 
Dean: and as a matter of fact I was so 
generally considered pillar-material that 
Mr c Francis Hackett, the eminent Ameri- 
can observer, publicly recommended me 
several years ago to the attention of all 
iron-manufacturing university trustees in 
the East who were looking for the sort of 
man they were looking for." 
"Then this Mr. Hackett must be a great 
friend of yours. I suppose everyone wants 
to be made a Dean." 
"Deans do. A deanship is almost the 
summit of academic success. I don't 
know just why. A Dean does more dirty 
work than anyone but the President. But 
anyone can be made a Dean who has good 
health, respectable behaviour and ten- 
acity, and can add and subtract. I liked 
to teach." 
"Surely, in a university they like to have 
you teach!" 
"Oh yes, they like to have you do every- 
thing: teach a little, if you like; research a 
little, if you insist; contribute to the 
learned journals, if you can get around to 
it. But none of these things bulks very 
large in the average successful academic 
life. The celebrated 'busy professor' is a 
person who lives and manages help; or- 
ganizes schools and courses of instruction; 
devises educational, moral, and athletic 
legislation; disciplines drunkards; de- 
velops 'war morale'; co-operates in drives; 
advises the Y.l\I. C. A.; supervises under- 
graduate publications; edits catalogues; 
publishes bulletins; presides at mass- 
meetings; conducts clubs; addresses legis- 



604 AN INTERVIE\V \VITH A NE\VCOMER IN NE\V YORK 


lative committees; tours the State in the 
interest of publicity; visits alumni associ- 
ations and fraternal organizations j enter- 
tains visiting lecturers; plans libraries 
and laboratories; writes, examines, and 
introduces text-books; attends receptions 
and association meetings; revises entrance 
requirements; investigates educational 
standards; attends five to twenty-five 
hours a week committee meetings; reads 
examination books; keeps records of the 
scholarship of from one to five hundred 
students; takes the attendance of the 
same; reports absences; and keeps in touch 
with his colleagues." 
"You fail to interest me." 
"I feared it, Madam. Yet it is a rich 
life and a varied one." 
" Seriously? " 
"Yes, quite. I know of no other life 
,\'hich so completely exercises so wide a 
range of the human faculties, except per- 
}-.aps getting a living out of a New Eng- 
land farm. I have seen some Vermont 
farmers who impressed me as even more 
ycrsatile in their occupation than my col- 
leagues. But I fancy that, for one who 
likes working indoors, teaching is more 
agreeable than New England farming; 
and it yields just as good a living." 
"But what you call its variety seems so 
monotonous. " 
"Madam, life is monotonous. The im- 
mense superiority of academic monotony 
is that it is safe. I am inclined to believe 
that the academic life is the safest, and 
therefore the highest, form of monotony 
which our civilization has yet produced. 
To any young person casting about in 
search of a long life and a safe one, a com- 
fortable life and a creditable one, I shall 
always unhesitatingly recommend an 

 cademic career. In all these respects, 
journalism, or what yearning young poets 
call 'the writing game,' is immeasurably 
inferior. It is disreputable, uncomfort- 
able, short, and dangerous." 
"But to have to live always in an 
academic community! Think of it!" 
"I have thought of it for thirty years. 
And I ask you in all seriousness, Madam, 
do you know anything more closely ap- 
proximating a perfected American com- 
munity-this side of the Kingdom of 
Heaven? Such security! Such freedom 
from temptation (I speak, you under- 


stand, of 'Faculty Circles,' in all uni- 
versity communities which are really such 
that is, dominated by Faculty influences): 
Such' desirable' places to live in! Elms! 
The Academic Shade! Such a high general 
level of literacy, manners, and conduct! 
Such regular hours! Such \Vholesome 
recreations. Such Moderated desires. 
Such long vacations. Such facility for 
loafing and slackness whenever one is dis- 
posed or indisposed. Pensions. Security 
of tenure. Old age no disability. No real 
competition after one has fairly started. 
Nothing to do but sit tight and hang on." 


"But I suppose the 'out' is that the 
ordinary professor is so terribly under- 
paid." 
"Oh, no; ordinary professors are over- 
paid. After the first forty years of his life, 
the ordinary professor, like the New Eng- 
land farmer, gets discouraged and begins 
not doing more than a third or a fourth of 
the things which he is at liberty to do. He 
begins to see that his profession does not 
adequately test him for any definite 
achievement in his line. More and more, 
it tests him as a man-of-all-work. He per- 
ceives that if he avails himself of his per- 
fect 'academic freedom' to do three men's 
work, he is mortally certain, in the end, to 
be made a Dean, who is merely a professor 
deprived of the satisfactions of teaching 
and research. To avoid the malign con- 
sequences of efficiency, the ordinary pro- 
fessor 'lies down on his job.' I am ac- 
quainted with no more essentially slug- 
gish, improvident, resourceless, unambi- 
tious, and time-wasting creature than the 
ordinary professor of forty, nor anything 
more èmpty of adventure or hope than the 
fu ture years of his career, daily to be oc- 
cupied in matching his wits with the flat 
mediocrity of successive generations of 
adolescent C-students, and patiently wait- 
ing till the death of some better man, 
hardy and long-lived, allows him to slip 
into a larger pair of old shoes." 
"But the extraordinary professors who 
remain in the profession to the end? 
There are some extraordinary ones, I sup- 
pose- I mean, they seem so to one an- 
other, even though we don't hear much of 
them. But there is Professor Phelps, and 
there is Professor Burton, and-who else 
is there?" 



AN INTERVIEW 'VITH A NEWCOMER IN NEW YORK 605 


" Pardon a correction, Madam: No pro- 
fessor seems extraordinary to any other 
professor. But actually there are quite 
a number of notable professors scattered 
here and there among the forty-eight 
States and odd Territories-seldom 
enough in anyone place for company and 
for the precious abrasion which one first 
class mind receives from another. But 
there, Madam, are men of colossal forti- 
tude, superhuman energy, vast patience, 
sacrificial spirit, religiously dedicated to 
instr!.lction, or impersonally devoted to the 
service of scholarship and science. They 
leaven the luIPp. Yet in perhaps most 
instances you will find on investigation 
that these men are not strictly' of the pro- 
fession,' but are more or less solitary and 
independent rebels or tyrants, who have 
established a little autocra..tic imperium 
within the precincts of the university, 
where they do as they please under the 
indignant nose of authority and amid the 
snorting and envy of their colleagues." 
" Oh, but those are the' geniuses' whom 
everyone admires!" 
"They may be geniuses, 1\1adam, but 
they are not regarded as ' good professors.' 
No university administration really con- 
siders the chance that it has got a genius 
worth gambling on. The academic at- 
mosphere is hostile to them-or they to 
it. The steady tendency of educational 
machinery is either to crush or to eject 
them. They are a standing menace to 
academic decorum, academic dogma, 
academic discipline, and the smooth func- 
tioning of the stenographers in the Dean's 
Office. At Harvard, for example, there 
were William James and Barrett Wendell, 
who proved their extraordinary vitality 
by becoming more intellectually radical 
and independent as they grew older and 
yet managing to remain in the university 
to the end; and there were also Henry 
Adams and Mr. Santayana, to whom the 
professorial chair at length became insuf- 
ferably tedious and they themselves be- 
came dangerously unacademic." 
"How dangerous?" 
"Oh, they blurt out things. They let 
cats out of bags where they have slept for 
centuries. Every now and then, you 
know, after a lifetime of right thinking, 
even a professor yearns to say what he 
thinks instead of what he ought to think; 


and, with all the advantages of his envir- 
onment to withhold him from a course so 
unbecoming, sometimes he does it. Every 
now and then those in whom mental curi- 
osity is active make a discovery and an- 
nounce it, in spite of consequences; or 
they become interested in a conjecture 
and desire to follow it up. Every now 
and then they forget where they are, and 
liberate ideas for adults, instead of con- 
fining themselves to what is entirely safe 
and proper for young people who are being 
instructed to avoid all the rash experi- 
ments of their parents. Every now and 
then the experience and ratiocination of 
professors lead them to conclusions that 
are at variance with the well-known wis- 
dom of the ages, which, in the main, they 
are employed to transmit." 


"But I thought professors were supposed 
to be investigators and discoverers." 
"Not, l\ladam-if we may trust Mr. 
Santayana-in the field of 'moral philos- 
ophy.' Or rather, they are supposed to 
be discoverers of new reasons for believing 
all the old things. Possibly you may re- 
call .l\Ir. Santayana's delicately malicious 
essay on 'The Academic Environment' 
and his explanation of the popularity of 
the' great school' of philosophy in Cam- 
bridge. It came to just about this: \Vhen 
Puritan theology had evaporated out of 
the Unitarian drying-pans, James and 
Royce poured in a philosophy which ex- 
actly filled the old containers. That is 
just what every university wants." 
"But aren't the Midwestern univer- 
sities very-what do you call it ?-pro- 
gressive, liberal?" 
"Madam, in the long run no institution 
is liberal, nor can it be. An institution 
seeketh her own and loveth those that do 
her will. A university is like a church: 
when backed to the wall, it recognizes no 
higher law than self-preservation. In a 
university, as in a church, there is no nec- 
essary man. The university, like the 
church, survives all the famous men whose 
names are inscribed on her halls, and this 
fact, so incontestable, steadily prompts 
the university president to say to him- 
self, '\Vhat is man, that thou art mindful 
of him? ' and to put up another hall. The 
university, like the church, lives on 'tri- 
umphant' though all the' live' men with- 



606 AN INTERVIE\V \VITH A NEWCOl\1ER IN NEW YORK 


draw from it and its offices are performed 
by the maimed, the halt, the blind, and 
the dead, to whom the more vigorous per- 
sonalities perform an act of kindness by an 
early demise or departure." 
"Then you would agree with that radi- 
cal assailant of universities, Mr. Upton 
Sinclair? " 
"Not for the world, 
1adam! Mr. Sin- 
clair is an eternally young man who has 
never been able to reconcile himself to the 
fact that whatever has an upper side must 
have an under side. I am entirely recon- 
ciled to that fact. l'tIr. Sinclair, further- 
more, has quaint illusions regarding the 
influence of private capital upon the free- 
dom of academic institutions. As a mat- 
ter of fact, privately endowed institutions 
of learning, ultimately controlled by cor- 
poration lawyers and big business men, 
are often more liberal and intellectually 
progressive than those controlled by the 
people. A State university president is 
usually an able man and means well; but 
unless he is a practical fighting dreamer 
of steady vision and immitigable valor, 
he is not merely crushed into educational 
insignificance by L."e big powers to whom 
he must appeal for support but he is also 
terrified into intellectual cowardice and a 
daily fluttering anxiety by every meddle- 
some Sunday School Teacher, every small 
farmer, and every parish priest in the 
State, so that he will say' Sh! Sh!' to his 
Faculty and choke his Student Body blue 
in the face rather than incur the risk of 
hearing Public Opinion roaring through 
some fanatical village female against his 
appropriation bills." 
"Did anyone every say 'Sh! Sh!' to 
you? " 
"N ever. Yet the university in which I 
taught may at present be regarded as 
gravely conservative. The difference, 
however, between one and another is only 
a difference of nuance." 
"Really? " 
" Yes, they are all conservative. That 
is why they are such safe places to live in. 
Perhaps they all ough t to be. There are 
a lot of good things which are worth sav- 
ing, either for continued use or for mu- 
seum purposes. Why shouldn't the uni- 
versities be set apart to save them? At 
times one wishes the university were a 
little more like a temple and a little less 


like a shrine, and tha t there were more 
prophets and fewer vergers within its pre- 
cincts. But in so far as the university is 
a museum, a preserver of archives, a cus- 
todian of tradition, a maintainer of 
established standards, a transmitter of 
the 'cultural inheritance,' and a school 
for unformed young people, its primary 
business is perpetuation. It has to be 
conservative. " 
"But surely some universities are much 
less so than others. Here at Columbia, 
for example-" 
"Madam, I must insist that they are 
all alike. In the course of my academic 
experience, I received the customary in- 
vitations to move from one institution to 
another. I have at least 'looked into' all 
the principal varieties of American college 
and university from coast to coast. As 
soon as I became acquainted with the 
respectable ones, I perceived that all the 
respectable ones are alike--so profoundly 
alike that no professor seeking a change of 
life could essentially alter his situation by 
shifting his chair. That observant ex- 
professor and clever journalist, Mr. Edwin 
Slosson, once made a tour of them wi th a 
view to characterizing and differentiat- 
ing the principal varieties. He wrote an 
amusing book, but his attempt to estab- 
lish distinctions broke down pitiably." 
"Why pitiably?" 
"I haven't the book at hand. But at 
Harvard, let us say, seeking its distinc- 
tion, he was informed that they were 
proud of their 'democratic spirit'; and at 
Yale, that they were proud of their' tradi- 
tions.' He entered in his memoranda: 
'Harvard: democratic spirit. Yale: tradi- 
tions.' But long before he reached Berk- 
eley he discovered that every university 
is proud of its democratic spirit and its 
traditions, whether they are three hun- 
dred years old or three. By the time he 
had visited half a dozen of the 'leading 
institutions,' he was ready to gasp for joy 
and reach for his note-book when an Eng- 
lish professor, to whom he had confided 
his troubles, said: 'Let me take you out 
to the Farm. What we are proudest of 
here is our white bull.' " 
"But that was different, wasn't it?" 
"Yes, for the moment. But the instant 
Mr. Slosson's book appeared every uni- 
versity in the country made an appropri- 



AN INTERVIEW \VITH A NE\VCOl\lER IN NE\V YORK 607 


ation for the purchase of a white bull, and 
Harvard, which likes to be in the lead in 
all things, has been working tooth and 
nail, ever since, to find a bigger and whiter 
bull than is to be seen on any of the other 
university farms." 
H But, jesting aside--" 
H I am not jesting." 
"Well, anyway, I should suppose that 
even if they have a white bull in Cam- 
bridge and another white bull in-where- 
ever you come from, one of those :Mid- 
western universities must be, in its per- 
sonnel, very different from an Eastern 
university." 
"Madam, I wish you were not so ignor- 
ant. We could get on much more rapidly. 
I have already informed you that all re- 
spectable universities are alike. The Mid- 
west is full of big respectable universities, 

lust I now explain to you that all uni- 
versities, East and West, are 'nationalized' 
institutions? All academic communities 
are made up of a fluent circulating popu- 
lation which now extends over almost the 
entire surface of the United States. If I 
did not dodge them, I could lunch every 
day in New York with former Illinois 
students now in attendance, or teaching, 
at Columbia or elsewhere in the city, or I 
could return to Illinois and get myself 
invited to a sizable Columbia dinner. As 
for the Cambridge atmosphere at Illinois, 
believe me, it was preserved by the forty- 
five or fifty Harvard men among my col- 
leagues with whom I lunched monthly 
there. And in the teaching staff of my 
own department, I can recall, offhand, 
graduates from Princeton, Harvard, Yale, 
Columbia, Dartmouth, Williams, Brown, 
New York University, Radcliffe, Welles- 
ley, Holyoke, Vassar, Chicago, Indiana, 
Ohio, \Visconsin, l\1ichigan, Minnesota, 
Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, California, and 
Leland Stanford, Jr. You will find sub- 
stantially similar conditions wherever you 
go. No large university community is 
Eastern or Western or :rvIidwestern. It is 
national." 
" I thank you for enlightening my 
ignorance." 
H You are welcome, lYladam. It is 
common. And now shall we develop 
briefly the consequences of the facts?" 
"Please do-if you think I shall be able 
to follow you." 


H Madam, I am sure that you can follow 
anything to which you consent to aban- 
don your excellent mind. The first conse- 
quence of the thorough nationalization of 
academic life is that within five minutes 
after a professor arrives at any university 
between Cambridge and Berkeley he is 
'at home,' among friends, talking from 
the same long list of familiar topics, and 
from exactly the same point of view." 
"That must be very tedious." 
" No, Madam; academic talk is like a 
mild tobacco which one can smoke all day 
long without harm, though, to be sure, 
without much satisfaction. This second 
consequence of the homogeneousness of 
the academic world is that a professor, 
if he sticks to his profession, comes to be- 
lieve that he is a normal person, an 'aver- 
age man,' a standard individual, just like 
everyone else, just like the hundreds of 
his colleagues that he knows, and, in his 
fundamental needs and aspirations, not 
importantly unlike the thousands of stu- 
dents that he knows, students from every 
State, from every economic and social 
background, and from every level of intel- 
ligence. As it appears to him, his oppor- 
tunities for observation have been fairly 
extensive. He conceives perhaps that he 
is fairly well acquainted with young 
people as a class and, through them, with 
American civilization and its resources. 
As he approaches middle life without 
meeting any new and distinct species of 
human being, he may even fancy that the 
evidence is all in, and that the common 
lot closely enough resembles his own to 
warrant his making some critical obser- 
vations upon it." 
"Are you speaking of yourself, Profes- 
sor? How interesting 1 You don't really 
think so now, do you?" 
"Madam, I do not know. Shall I speak 
a little of the steps which led directly to 
doubt?" 
"Pray do." 
" Well, then, you must understand that 
in the voyage or pilgrimage of this life we 
cross two great shadow-lines. Conrad, 
you remember, wrote a haunting tale 
about the first crossing-that crucial pe- 
riod in a young man's life when he recog- 
nizes that his irresponsible youth lies be- 
hind him, and that the hour has come to 
accept 'command.' A marvellously fine 



608 AN INTERVIE\V \VITH A NE\VCOl\IER IN NE\V YORK 


tale, 
Iadam, which stirs you more deeply 
at each rereading." 
"I must read it." 
"Yes, Madam, you must." 
"And the second shadow-line?" 
"That, Madam, falls athwart our path 
when, in a melancholy fit, we think the 
best of life is over, when we have had 
, command' and have undergone the typi- 
cal human experiences, when not our 
youth only but our middle years, too, lie 
behind, we seem retreating at the double- 
quick, and we face, for the first time 
squarely, The End, and coolly estimate 
the length of Pater's' measured interval,' 
after which our place shall know us no 
more." 
"Is there any profit in dwelling on such 
gloomy thoughts?" 
"Not at first, Madam. Not unless one 
reacts positively. While I was crossing 
that second shadow-line-the transit re- 
quires some years, for there are weeks and 
months of doldrums in which one makes 
no headway-I had a gradual experience 
something like the gloom of Conrad's first 
officer, though naturally it presented it- 
self to me in very different imagery. I 
felt that I had been 'touring' through a 
level land for a long time. I had visited 
most of the famous scenes along the aca- 
demic highroad, and now I was merely 
going on from one filling-station to an- 
other. The novelty of the tour was over. 
There was nowhere else in particular to 
go, and nothing left to see. As I looked 
ahead, the prospect was 'more of the 
same' straight through the 'measured in- 
terval' to the end. If I could have heard 
a voice crying , End of the road: all 
change!' I should have jumped to my 
feet with a cheer. But I felt like a dusty 
transcontinental tourist in his own car, 
gripping the steering-wheel of ills Ford, on 
one of the interminable prairie thorough- 
fares, stretching between dusty osage and 
bare telegraph poles-straight, hard, and 
hot, as far as the eye could see. N atural- 
ly, I generalized. I said to myself: ' After 
one has crossed the second shadow-line, 
life is like that-all life is like that, to the 
end. '" 
"Oh! But it needn't be like that, you 
know, if one doesn't-doesn't entirely- 
well, 'ossify' is what I say to my hus- 
band. " 


"Madam, so I have been informed. 
Conrad's first officer, you recall, threw up 
his perfectly good 'Scotch ship.' And 
when one is driving one's own car, there is 
often the possibility of a detour, and 
sometimes the possibility of swapping the 
thing for a motor-boat or a horse-and 
travelling down the same road on that." 
"But it needn't be the same road!" 
"Madam, in the neighborhood of my 
fortieth year, something of that sort was 
suggested to me, and the suggestion lived 
on deep in The Subconscious. Then two 
or three years later I received a succession 
of small but distinct shocks which shook 
my grip upon the wheel. In crossing the 
Atlantic a well-known American clergy- 
man, with whom I had refused to drink a 
third glass of brandy, declined my to- 
bacco, because it was not stro-ng enough. I 
had long felt that the stuff was rather 
tasteless, but to have the fact brought 
home to me by a clergyman gave me a 
curious little start. Shortly after I had 
landed, the newly married wife of a col- 
league-a girl of, say, twenty-five-re- 
marked to me, apropos of I know not what 
trivial literary discussion: 'But you know 
nothing whatever about women.' 'In that 
case,' I replied, borrowing the words from 
Isabel Paterson, 'I must have been deaf 
these last twenty years.' But the remark 
rankled. In the mail, on the same day, as 
it happened, came a letter containing a 
savage reference to me by a distinguished 
ex-professor, declaring that I knew' abso- 
lutely nothing about life.' In the evening 
of the same momentous day a journalist, 
who on all previous occasions had treated 
me politely and even deferentially, re- 
marked in my presence: 'You can always 
tell a professor wherever you see one, and 
usually a professor's wife, unless he has 
married out of his class.' " 
"That was rather nasty, wasn't it?" 
"Yes, l\1adam. No one says that about 
a modern clergyman. No one assumes, 
because a man has been a shoe clerk or a 
grocer or a drygoods merchant or a farm- 
er, that he is not perfectly competent to 
speak about Life. No one questions, the 
competency of professors before they en- 
ter the profession. No one questions the 
competency of freshmen. I doubted the 
alleged utter invalidity of the professional 
point of view. I wanted to deny it. But 



THE SOCIAL UPSET IN FRANCE AFTER THE \VAR 609 


my hands were tied. It was impossible to 
judge the profession so long as one was a 
defendant at the bar. The little series of 
incidents which put these profoundly per- 
turbing thoughts into my mind was of 
course insignificant. Yet in their united 
insistence that professors were radically 
different, a 'peculiar people,' they had an 
extraordinary effect upon an equilibrium 
which I had devoted half a lifetime to per- 
fecting. And when, on the following morn- 
ing, I received an invitation to an editorial 
office in New York, I resigncd- I abruptly 


changed my profession in order to learn 
whether it is true, as Mr. H. L. l\Iencken 
and many others have long been contend- 
ing, that the American professor is out- 
side human nature." 
"Well. is he?" 
"I don't know, Madam. But you can't 
conceive the satisfaction I have in feeling 
that my decision, when I reach it, will, 
now that I am a journalist, be just as 
authoritative as if I knew nothing about 
the subject." 
"Yes, that must be gratifying." 


The Social Upset in France 
After the War 


BY RAYMOND RECOULY 
Author of "Foch: The Winner of the War," "Reconstruction in France," etc. 


... 
 : ... HERE is a saying of 

 ITJ " : 
 Napoleon: "I prefer 
W i T 

 the briefest possible 
sketch to a whole 
'
i .g. volume of explana- 

: 
 tions." 


Ä According to this, it 
seems to me that to 
make clear to a foreign public the viol- 
ent change, the real turnover of every- 
thing, that five years of war with their 
moral and material consequences have 
brought about in French social affairs, a 
few examples will be more enlightening 
and impressive than a long dissertation. 
I lunched recently at the house of a 
friend, in company with M. François Mar- 
sal, former president of council and minis- 
ter of finance; the director-general of the 
Suez Canal Company, the president of the 

1essageries Maritimes, and several other 
important financiers. 
\\nile speaking of the very critical situ- 
ation which is, at present, affecting our 
French middle classes, the high and low 
bourgeoisie, one of the guests gave the 
following example. "Take a man," he 
said, "who, before the war, had an income 
of a million and a half francs a year, which 
in France was considered a very large for- 


tune; if he still has that income to-day, he 
begins by having 68 per cent taken away 
from him by the treasury. Then with the 
depreciation of the franc, now one quarter 
of its pre-war value, he finds his income 
of fifteen hundred thousand reduced to 
one hundred and twenty thousand, less 
than one-tenth of his former revenue." 
In greater and less proportion, this ex- 
ample can serve to illustrate what has 
happened since the war to a large number 
of French people. All those, and they 
were very numerous, who lived on their 
income have lost the greater part of their 
fortune. For the young it is not so serious. 
By their efforts they can look for and find 
positions. But for those whose lives have 
run half the course, and especially for the 
old, the diminution, and sometimes the 
almost total loss, of their money has had 
disastrous consequences. 
Those who live in the country, on their 
lands, can succeed more or less in making 
ends meet; even then, their farmers and 
laborers are much better off than the pro- 
prietors themselves. For those who are 
obliged to live in the cities it is poverty, 
even misery. 
Aside from those who depend entirely 
on their incomes, there existed in France a 



610 THE SOCIAL UPSET IN FRANCE AFTER THE WAR 


much larger category, those whose modest 
bank account provided for a small part 
of their necessary expenses. 
This category assured the recruitment 
of that which is called "les professions 
libérales ": officials, magistrates, officers, 
diplomats, writers, artists, lawyers, doc- 
tors, etcc The greater number of these 
officials, particularly the most important, 
were pretty badly paid before the war. 
They are even worse off now, their salary 
having been barely doubled, while the 
cost of living has at least quadrupled. 
But formerly their small fortunes enabled 
them to live. An officer, a magistrate, a 
diplomat, in adding what he possessed 
himself to what he received from the gov- 
ernment, could, thanks to the cheapness 
of living in France, to the ingenuity of the 
French, especially the French women, in 
getting the most out of their money, lead 
a very decent existence, keep up a good 
appearance, have a nice apartment, a 
couple of servants, etc. 
But to-day what is the exact situation 
of this class of people, who form the armor, 
the framework, of the French bourgeoisie? 
The salary paid by the government has 
been actually cut in half owing to the de- 
preciation of the franc. The personal for- 
tune in most cases has diminished three- 
quarters. The same family who ten years 
ago lived in a very dignified way finds it- 
self now in a situation no better than that 
of the greater part of the common work- 
men, sometimes worse. It is obliged to re- 
duce all expenses, give up servantsc It 
suffers from the most painful, the most 
heartbreaking of all poverties, a poverty 
which must be hidden. 
Here are quantities of privations, of 
sufferings, which foreigners, especially 
those who pass a short time in Paris to 
amuse themselves, do not suspect-for 
that matter, neither do a certain number 
of the French themselves. 
The other day, one of myoid com- 
panions of the Latin Quarter, deputy and 
lawyer, was trying a case before the tri- 
bunal of Besançon. It concerned a work- 
man in a cheese factory (the workmen 
who in the Jura Mountains make the 
Gruyère cheese) who, according to him 
unjustly discharged by his employer, 
claimed an indemnity of a year's salary. 
"What is your salary?" asked the presi- 


dent of the tribunal. "Twenty thousand 
francs a year," answered the workman, 
upon which the president fell back in his 
chair with a gasp of astonishment. 
This factory workman was making 
twenty thousand francs a year, while he, 
the president of the tribunal-theoreti- 
cally at least a considerable person in the 
city, a high magistrate and obliged to put 
up a certain show-was making barely 
fifteen thousand. 
Contrasts of this nature, cases like this 
of real upset of social equilibrium, could be 
quoted by the hundreds of thousands. 
They are causing a complete transforma- 
tion in the hierarchy of classes in France. 
The guardian of seals, minister of jus- 
tice, with whom I had occasion recently 
to talk., said to me: "Y ou have no idea of 
the misery of the magistrates of Paris. 
The greater number of them have no 
longer hardly any personal fortune. Their 
state salary is not sufficient for them to 
live decently. They can no longer pay 
for a suitable apartment. Their wives are 
without servants. I know several who, 
to make a living, are obliged to take extra 
copy work in the evening, ordinary typist 
workc This is the situation," added the 
minister, "and be assured it is not painted 
too black. 
"The consequence of all this," he con- 
tinued, "is that none of the sons of magis- 
trates wants to enter the magistracy. They 
are all attracted by trade and industry. 
Formerly, as you are aware, it was not 
like that. I knew and you doubtless 
knew quantities of families where since the 
Revolution one was magistrate from fa- 
ther to son." 
The situation of officers in the army 
and navy is no more enviable. There also 
I could quote a flock of examples one more 
depressing than the other. l\1y former 
chief, at whose side as aide-de-camp, I 
served the greater part of the war, and for 
whom I felt the greatest respect, almost 
veneration, General Humbert, died sud- 
denly a short time ago in the prime of life 
(he was barely sixty years old) while mili- 
tary governor of Strasbourg. I had been 
to see him a few weeks before his death, 
and was received by him in the magnifi- 
cent governor's palace. His sudden death 
left his family almost destitute: his two 
sons, officers, having nothing to live on but 



THE SOCIAL UPSET IN FRANCE AFTER THE \VAR 611 


their salaries, his widow to whom is given 
a pension of six thousand francs, his two 
young daughters. The numerous friends 
and admirers of this general, who defended 
and held the road to Paris in the great of- 
fensive of :March, 1918, immediately inter- 
ested themselves in this sad case. We 
succeeded in finding a small situation for 
his widow. The two young daughters be- 
came one a stenographer and the other a 
designer. 
Exactly the same thing has just hap- 
pened in the case of General Mangin, 
who, also dying suddenly, left a widow 
without fortune and eight children, all 
very young. Their misery would have 
been so great that a public subscription 
was raised. A great number of Americans 
have very generously subscribed. 


The smallest tradesman in Paris, a 
dairyman, grocer, butcher, makes on an 
average eight or ten times more than 
the general of an anny, the rector of the 
Sorbonne or the president of the Court of 
Appeal. 
This is a fact of which the natural and 
moral consequences will certainly be very 
great. It is at present introducing a radi- 
cal change in French society. 
Paris, as a result of the greater or less 
wealth of the strangers who flock to it 
from all parts of the world, has become a 
colossal pleasure resort, the greatest of all, 
a veritable fair of nations. Certain cen- 
tral districts from the Place de I 'Opéra to 
the Place de la Concorde, passing by the 
Place Vendôme, fonn 
 sort of interna- 
tional settlement where French has long 
since ceased to be the popular language. 
English most of all is heard, Spanish, 
sometimes Gennan. One never counts in 
francs but in dollars, pounds, and pesetas. 
This part of their capital is practically 
prohibited to the French-to the natives; 
that is, to all who do not ply a trade, who 
do not produce or sell something. They 
have the right to walk in the streets, per- 
haps stand on the sidewalks, or look in the 
windows, but never to enter the stores or 
restaurants, which are much too expensive 
for them. It is a state of affairs they ac- 
cept for the most part with good humor 
and philosophy, telling themselves that, 
after all, the presence of all these strangers 
tends, in spite of certain drawbacks, to 


bring in money and wealth to the coun- 
try. 
Toward the end of the war and di- 
rectly after, there was much talk about 
what one called "les nouveaux riches." 
They were watched, studied, usually ra- 
ther satirically, in the theatres, papers, and 
novels. The" nouveau riche" was origi- 
nally one whom the war had suddenly, 
and often unjustly, enriched. Neither 
was he peculiar to France. He existed in 
England under the name of "profiteer," in 
Germany and all Central Europe under 
that of "schieber," in Italy "pescecane." 
Rather a curious study could be made on 
the development and evolution of this 
type in each country. 
In France it did not take long for a cer- 
tain number of them to lose their fortune. 
Intoxicated by their too easy success, they 
threw themselves into all sorts of enter- 
prises and speculation. After the boom 
caused by the war, there came in 1920 a 
rather violent depression which wrecked 
many of them. What was called the 
" nouveau riche" is now in process of 
transfonnation. He exists still, naturally, 
but considerably changed. He is not re- 
cruited in the same manner, his fortune is 
not made so rapidlyc It is no longer the 
result of a hazardous speculation, a throw 
of the dice. The rise toward luxury and 
ease for this category of people is following 
a more regular, more nonnal rhythm. The 
"new rich" in France at present are prin- 
cipally tradesmen, those who sell some- 
thing, above all in Paris, and one of the 
most remunerative trades is "alimenta- 
tion." It is estimated that a butcher, 
after four or five years' business, makes a 
fortune sufficiently large for him to retire 
and give up his place to another. 
This rapidity of fortune is for the great- 
er part of tradespeople in France some- 
thing absolutely new. Before the war the 
same butcher, instead of working four or 
five years, would have been obliged to 
work thirty or forty before retiring; that 
is, ten times as long. And the fortune ac- 
quired would certainly be less than what 
he makes now in so short a time. This is 
one of the direct and very curious conse- 
quences of the war. Tradespeople used to 
content themselves with fairly small prof- 
its. They now insist these profits shall be 
very large. Competition, contrary to a 



612 THE SOCIAL UPSET IN FRANCE AFTER THE \VAR 


principle commonly quoted by professors 
of political economy, does not check this 
in the least. With conditions the same, 
the tradesmen all sell at about the same 
price. And, at bottom, the true explan- 
ation is that the public who formerly in 
France was always keen to bargain, bar- 
gains no more. They pay the price asked 
without discussion; the shopkeepers see 
this and take advantage of it. 
Thus we see on one side a category of 
people-tradesmen, farmers, small land- 
owners-who exploit their own lands, 
growing rich rapidly. On the other side 
another category-the middle class bour- 
geoisie, small officials, professors, artists, 
journalists, etc. -getting poorer and poor- 
er, losing each day a little more money, 
and with it the social prestige necessarily 
attached. 
There is a double movement in contrary 
directions which is tending toward a com- 
plete social redistribution. The effect of 
the rise on one hand and decadence on the 
other is incalculable. One has to go back 
to the French Revolution for an analogy. 
The sale of national properties allowed 
certain elements of the bourgeoisie to 
pass quickly from poverty to ease, then 
wealth. This social change has been 
copiously studied by historians. No one 
has explained it in so luminous, so dram- 
atic a manner as Balzac, the Titan novel- 
ist. With the force of his genius, he has 
understood this profound cause of the 
modifications French society underwent 
after the fall of the old order (ancien 
régime) . 
In one of his masterpieces, "Eugénie 
Grandet," he shows, and with what pow- 
er, how the father, Grandet, the rough 
wine-grower of Saumur, climbs up to for- 
tune. Of course his terrible avarice, his 
commercial flair, his business judgment 
counted for much. But these qualities or 
defects would have been of little use with- 
out the favorable conditions, the cheap 
purchase, literally for a piece of bread, of 
the most beautiful vineyards belonging to 
an old abbey, and sold as national prop- 
erty. 
The purchaser of national property is 
one of the principal types in the" Comédie 
Humaine." If in ten or fifteen years there 
rises up a new Balzac, even of smaller stat- 
ure, anxious to study the changes in 
French society brought about by the war, 


the "nouveau riche" will be the type to 
study first of all. 


This impoverishment of a certain ele- 
ment of the bourgeoisie, the lessening of 
its power, of social influence, threatens, if 
the movement accelerates, the French in- 
tellectuals. It is, in fact, the intellectual 
élite-savants, professors, artists, writers 
-who are the most profoundly affected. 
Take the professors for example: in the 
last few years, a diminution, in quantity 
and quality, has been noticed in the candi- 
dates for the examination of "l' agréga- 
lion," which in France is required for a 
university professor. At the period when 
I passed these examinations, about twenty 
years ago, we had on an average, among 
the scholars of the Normal High School 
and among the students of the Sorbonne, 
ten or twelve times more candidates than 
were accepted. Among these candidates, a 
certain number were professors fairly well 
along in years. At present the number of 
aspirants has diminisp.ed almost half, five 
to one instead of ten to one. As a conse- 
quence of this diminution, many positions 
in the lycées and secondary establish- 
ments in the provinces which were for- 
merly held by "agrégés" are now occu- 
pied by professors of inferior education. 
This lower standard of teaching threatens 
to be seriously felt. 
The Revue de France, which I founded 
five years ago, and which I direct together 
with Marcel Prévost, the well known nov- 
elist, of the Académie Française, has pub- 
lished in its last numbers a series of arti- 
cles, very detailed, on this crisis in the 
"professions libérales" in France. The au- 
thor, a young professor of the University 
of Nancy , Jean Laporte, has taken the 
pains not only to study this important 
question theoretically but also to get in- 
formation from the people best qualified, 
the most competent, to express an opinion. 
His inquiry has reached the Catholic, 
Protestant, and Jewish clergy, where the 
recruiting, always for the same reason, has 
become more and more difficult; the army, 
navy, universities, writers, artists, musi- 
cians, magistrates, lawyers, doctors. In 
almost all these branches of activity, he 
has arrived at practically the same conclu- 
sions. 
Those who suffer the most are naturally 
those who receive their salary from the 



THE SOCIAL UPSET IN FRANCE AFTER THE \VAR 613 


government or from some large adminis- 
tration. Doctors and lawyers in direct 
contact with the public can get along 
fairly well. As the cost of living rises, 
they can increase in proportion the tariff 
of their consultations. 
During this inquiry, I was asked, to- 
gether with two or three other editors of 
important newspapers in Paris, to give my 
opinion on a question which I know 
thoroughly, that of the journalist. 1\1 y 
opinion was most decided. There is un- 
doubtedly a crisis in journalism, so far as 
the quality and talent of the writers are 
concerned. This crisis is caused by the 
miserable pay most journalists receive. 
l\Iany of them get barely the double of 
their salary before the war, while the 
prices of everything have quadrupled. The 
consequence is that many young men who 
could make excellent journalists seek other 
professions. This is the advice I myself 
give to those (they are fairly numerous) 
who seek my counsel. For example, three 
years ago, there came to me an extremely 
brilliant young secretary who wished to 
take up newspaper work. I kept him with 
me a year, thus giving him a chance to see 
for himself-always the best way. At the 
end of the year, he told me the experience 
was sufficient, that he renounced journal- 
ism. He is at present manager in a large 
olive-oil manufactory, in the south of 
France, and makes three or four times as 
much as he would have eyer made with 
the newspapers. 


Among these elements of the French 
bourgeoisie, impoverished by the war, 
obliged to reduce, without ceasing, their 
manner of living, to lead an existence al- 
most miserable, there are a great many 
who have become soured, discontented. 
Is it surprising? The contrary would be 
astonishing. From a political, an elec- 
toral, vie'\\'Point, this discontent is shown 
in the large number of votes given to the 
advanced parties, radical socialist, social- 
ist, and communist. It is a cause, among 
many others, of the defeat of the Bloc 
National at the last elections. 
If this movement of part of the bour- 
geoisie toward the more advanced parties 
continues to increase, it may have very 
disturbing results. The communist party 
in France has sufficient followers recruited 
from all over, principally from among the 


foreign labor, to which France, having so 
many sons killed in the war, is obliged 
more and more to resort. But, if there are 
followers, chiefs, in a great measure, are 
lacking. There is neither a frame nor a 
well organized staff. It is obliged to get 
its intellectual and political directing, all 
its organization, from :Moscow, a city half 
Asiatic, which does not fail to shock the 
good sense of the French. The day when 
certain intellectual elements of the bourge- 
oisie, driven to despair, throw themselves 
into communism, they will bring to it a 
framework, an intelligent staff, which it 
now lacks. Communism will find itself 
considerably reinforced. 
To fill these gaps in the bourgeoisie, one 
can count evidently to a certain extent on 
the rising movement of those who have 
been enriched by the war-the small farm- 
ers and small tradespeople. These will 
occupy the place of the others. But this 
replacement will take time: some decades 
of years will be necessary for the opera- 
tion. The strength and solidity of the 
social structure in France are due to the 
development, extremely large, of the mid- 
dle classes. From the little bourgeoisie, 
neighbor of the people from which it came, 
to the large and rich bourgeoisie there is 
an infinite number of intermediaries, 
which by an imperceptible gradation al- 
lows each one to improve little by little 
its situation, to raise itself in the social 
hierarchy. The well-being, the "joie de 
vivre," which one notices in France is 
greatly owing to this. 
When I see so many Americans come to 
Paris or to the provinces, to pass part of 
their lives, I never fail to ask them their 
reasons. The greater number reply they 
can lead in France a much more agreeable 
exis
ence, have prettier houses or apart- 
ments, better trained servants, better food, 
excellent wines, etc. . .. This pleasant 
way of living, good servants, good cook- 
ing, and all, was the product of the French 
bourgeoisie, which succeeded by force of 
ingenuity to get from their revenue, often 
very modest, a maximum of result. But 
it has taken centuries to succeed in estab- 
lishing this equilibrium, which is now be- 
ing so disturbed. That is why one can not 
hope to see it re-established in a short time. 
France before the war was the country 
whose people, from the highest to the low- 
est, were the most economical in the 



614 THE SOCIAL UPSET IN FRANCE AFTER THE 'VAR 


world. Hardly anyone, rich or poor, 
spent his entire revenue. A part was al- 
ways reserved, either for the needs of old 
age or, above all, to better the situation of 
the children, to enable them to have a 
more brilliant social position than the 
parents. This spirit of economy, so often 
observed and remarked upon by foreign- 
ers, is, for the greater part, now lessening 
if not disappearing. Only the peasants 
and country fanners still continue to fill, 
as one says in France, the" bas de laine" 
(the woollen stocking). The workmen in 
the cities spend almost all they earn. 
Whereas, for the middle classes, the offi- 
cials, all those who suffer the most, they 
no longer possess the means even if they 
had the will to save a cent, considering 
that their expenses equal if not exceed 
their receipts. 
The uncertainty of the present finan- 
cial situation, the progressive devaluation 
of the franc, does not encourage, one 
must admit, the people to save their 
money. Each one applies himself to 
spending all he has, sometimes more. It 
is a state of mind which continues to de- 
velop and which partly explains many 
things otherwise obscure, for instance the 
very marked diminution of the Treasury 
Bonds of National Defense, from which 
1\1. Caillaux, the minister of finance, is at 
present suffering, There exists certainly, 
as a cause of this, the lack of confidence 
provoked by the menaces of the Socialists 
against capital. But there is also, without 
doubt, a weakening of the spirit of 
economy. 


When formerly one of us, one of those 
who have always lived in Paris, entered a 
restaurant or a theatre he would always 
meet a number of acquaintances anð. ex- 
change greetings to right and left. Now 
if I go into a theatre or restaurant, nine 
times out of ten I know absolutely no 
one. It is the same with my friends. The 
places are filled either by foreigners or by 
French people among whom there are no 
familiar faces, belonging to a social class 
who before the war did not meet in thea- 
tres (or not in the same seats) nor in the 
restaurants. 
Nothing emphasizes more plainly than 
this simple fact the importance, the mag- 
nitude, of the social changes produced. 


While some get poorer, others grow richer. 
The first, having become poor, have no 
longer the means to go to theatres and 
restaurants: the second, on the contrary, 
throw themselves with a sort of frenzy in- 
to pleasures new to them. 
It has been asked, for example, why in 
the three or four years following the war, 
the Parisian theatres did not produce any 
new plays. They were satisfied to give to 
their public revivals of old plays, some- 
times ten or twenty years old, former big 
successes, which should therefore be well 
known and more or less old stories. These 
pieces have had long runs, sometimes 
several months, which is long in Paris. 
This apparently astonishing fact is really 
easily explained. It is simply that the 
theatregoers have entirely changed. For 
these newborn spectators these pieces have 
all the charm of novelty. 
As for the literary merit of the new 
plays produced, one can not lay claim to 
a very brilliant period for the French 
theatre since the war. With a few excep- 
tions (one could count them on one's 
fingers), the plays have been most medi- 
ocre. This mediocrity can be partly ex- 
plained by the quality of the audience 
which sees the plays and applauds them. 
Authors and managers arrange to give 
their public what suits it and is agreeable 
to it. When its taste is not difficult and 
it devours with appetite everything put 
before it, why should they worry? 
The music-hall, which has increased 
considerably in Paris (instead of the two 
or three big ones existing before the war, 
there are now at least ten), is also an effect 
of the same causes: affluence of foreigners, 
and appearance of the social new-born, 
rather uncultivated and not difficult as to 
the diversions presented to them. A bril- 
liant, sumptuous "mise-en-scène," expen- 
sive actresses, Mlle. :Mistinguett, for ex- 
ample, head-dresses of feathers, hats a 
yard high, clowns, funny men, a crowd of 
young pretty girls lightly clad, if clad at 
all, swarms of English and American 
dancers, and there you are--sure of hun- 
dreds of perfonnances. 
The cultivated, intelligent, and now 
very poor public which went formerly to 
the theatre, which demanded plays of a 
certain quality, a certain merit, stay 
chiefly at home. They devote to reading 



the time formerly given to the theatre. 
The result (one of the most curious and in- 
disputable) is that never in France have 
there been so many books sold as at pres- 
ent. This is a phenomenon that every 
one, beginning with authors and editors, 
agrees in affirming. At no other time have 
there been so many books published and 
\lever before have certain books sold so 
successfully. Twenty years ago, when a 
French novel reached one hundred thou- 
sand copies it was a sort of miracle. Only 
Zola and Daudet, once or twice, reached 
these figures. But since the war, quite a 
few authors, even young authors, Pierre 
Benoit, for example, Dorgeles, without 
mentioning the celebrated ones-Anatole 
France, Loti, l\larcel Prévost, Bourget- 
have sold these large editions. 1'Iany 
books sell thirty, forty or fifty thousand 
copies; this before the war would have 
been considered enormous. There has 
been in fact a considerable growth in read- 
ing; never has the book trade been so 
flourishing. It is because many people 
who hesitate, not without reason, to pay 
twenty or twenty-five francs for a theatre 
ticket, do not hesitate to pay seven francs 
for a book. They consider that, after all, 
the book is really worth more than the 
show. 


The great changes which I have been 
pointing out, in the social classes in France, 


GIFTS 


615 


are leading to a sort of loss of equilibrium, 
very apparent to an attentive observer. 
Every one sees the consequences, which 
are of every description, material and 
moral, intellectual and economic. We 
find ourselves in an intennediate stage, a 
sort of balancing between two stools. We 
have lost or are in the process of losing 
something, and there is nothing to take 
its place. We must not, however, look too 
much on the dark side of things, nor refuse 
to believe that this void will be filled. It 
is the same with nations as with indi- 
viduals. When the constitution is solid, 
when there is plenty of reserve force, na- 
ture works, silently, slowly, to cure the 
ills from which they suffer, to replace what 
is lacking, to restore the health and 
strength temporarily lost. 
France is in the clutches at the present 
moment of one of these social maladies. 
A too bloody and too prolonged war has 
shaken her, led to profound disturbances 
in her society. Little by little, all that 
'will arrange itself. But we shall never see, 
and no one will ever see, the France of 
before the war, with her organized life and 
her society. It has gone like the "ancien 
régime" after the Revolution and Em- 
pire. It will be something quite differ- 
ent born of these new classes who are tak- 
ing the place of the old. But a certain 
equilibrium, and order, is sure to be es- 
tablished in the end. 


Gifts 


BY CORNELIA OTIS SKINNER 


I LIFT my head when taking gifts from you:- 
This lace spun of a convent's quiet art, 
Persian enamels of disturbing blue, 
Strange little stones that goldsmiths set apart, 
Fruits you have chosen for their tropic hue,- 
And I accept them, dear, with all my heart. 


But could you never think to come to me 
Bearing the witless gifts I'd treasure so? . 
A bit of glass smooth-polished by the sea, 
Milkweed at night, with fire-flies a
low. 
Oh, bring me apples from some tWIsted tree, 
Or just a handful of new-falle1.1 snow! 



"'- 
":"='- .- 


"Every flatfoot in the city has been in here askin' for him."-Page 618. 


Twelve to Eight 
BY GEORGE S. BROOKS 
Author of "Smile and Lie" and "Pete Retires" 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY E. 11. ASHE 


O NL Y the city's scene shifters are 
working between midnight and 
breakfast - time. 
Behind the curtain of night, these back- 
stage men set t
e properties for a new 
day. As they toil, the orchestra plays an 
616 


overture. The staccato movement is the 
rattle of milk-bottles; the crescendo, an 
owl surface-car; that solemn minor theme, 
a swish of water as the pavement is 
flushed. 
Streets and buildings seem to change 



T\VELVE TO EIGHT 


their physical appearance as the night 
drags on. Dirty little alleys grow longer, 
more forbidding and mysterious. 
Upon a page of the complaint book in 
the Detective Bureau at Police Head- 
quarters the history of the night will be 
written: 
"12 M.-8 A. l.f., Detective-Sergeant 
Shannon in charge. Clear and cool." 
There is a note from the police com- 
missioner lying on Sergeant Shannon's 
desk: 
"Tony Libertore, a contractor, was shot 
yesterday morning. He is unconscious in 
the City Hospital and will die. No arrest 
has been made. This neglect has caused a 
considerable criticism of the department. 
"I understand there is reason to believe 
a taxi-driver called 'Fat George' fired the 
shots. If he is still in the city he 11tUst be 
apprehended immediately. Officers of the 
department will make every effort to accom- 
Plish this. 
"By direction of the mayor." 
Shannon closes his desk and turns to 
his squad of detectives. He stretches 
lazily at the prospect of the hours before 
him. He tucks a revolver into one of his 
hip-pockets, a billy and pair of hand- 
cuffs into the other. 
"I'll go out after Fat George," he an- 
nounces. "Michaels, come with me." 
He names five operatives who will stay in 
the office to doze and wait for an emer- 
gency call. The others pair off and dis- 
appear down the stairs. 
In appearance Shannon is no stage 
detective. He looks like a successful phy- 
sician or lawyer. He is fifty, with iron- 
gray hair and deliberate, confident move- 
ments. He has been an intimate friend 
of two Presidents of the United States, 
whom he guarded when they were on cam- 
paigning tours. For twenty-eight years 
he has associated with clever men; in 
business, in society, and in the under- 
world. He understands human nature 
as a college professor knows his text- 
books. 
As he stands in the doorway, it is star- 
tling to reflect that this man is responsible 
for the lives and property of a half-million 
sleeping persons. His pay is $237.50 a 
month. Somewhere in the miles of 
streets is a house where Fat George is 
hiding. Sergeant Shannon is considering 
VOL. LXXVIII.-45 


617 


a little problem in selective mathematics: 
1 : 500,000 : : Shannon : X. Time for 
solution, eight hours. 
Shannon and J\lichaels swing up the 
street. They cut through an alley. 
Ahead of them is a figure slouching close 
to a building. They see it is a youth and 
that his hands are in the pockets of his 
coat. Shannon nods to his assistant. 
Michaels loosens his revolver in the 
holster and hurries ahead to cut off the 
youth's retreat in case he should run. 
The sergeant grasps his billy in his left 
hand, walks quickly to the prowler and 
seizes him by the shoulder. 
"What's your name?" 
"None of your business." 
"I'm an officer." The sergeant flips 
back the lapel of his coat and displays his 
gold badge. "\Vhat's your name?" 
" None of your business. I ain't done 
nothin'." 
l\iichaels runs his hands over the pris- 
oner's clothing, searching for a pistol or 
a burglar's jimmy. He finds nothing. 
"What's your name?" 
"Mike Cox." 
" Your right name?" 
"Mike Chuchofski." 
"Where do you live?" 
Slowly, resentfully, l\like tells his life 
history. 
"All right." Sergeant Shannon releases 
him. "Go home. Find a job and go to 
work. If you hang around these ware- 
houses at night, you'll be shot for a bur- 
glar, most likely." 
The detectives saunter on. They are 
silent; Michaels because of a healthy def- 
erence for his superior, Shannon because 
he is thinking of Fat George. The ser- 
geant leads the way to a corner lunch- 
room. The counter-man, a slight, nervous 
individual, welcomes them. 
"Hello, gents. Glad you come in. 
Have a cup of coffee. Here's a hot tip for 
you on the second race to-morrow." 
Shannon winks at Michaels. "How 
did you come out to-day, Red?" 
"Oh, that goat quit on me and didn't 
even show. It cost me fourteen skins. 
But here's a real one for to-morrow. Lis- 
ten. I had it off Nigger Joe and he's a 
porter up to the hotel where the steward 
of the Jockey Club lives when he's in 
town. . . ." 



618 


TWELVE TO EIGHT 


No babe in the wood has a nature so 
trusting as a race-track follower's! 
"We're in a hurry, Red. Remember 
Fat George, the taxi-driver?" 
The counter-man waves his towel and 
reaches into the pocket of his soiled white 
coat for a cigarette. " Sure. Him that 
shot the grease-ball yesterday. Sure. I 
know him." 
Shannon starts. "How do you know 
he shot Libertore?" 
"Every flatfoot in the city has been in 
here askin' for him. Yes, sir. Every kind 
of a flatfoot, from the harness bulls (uni- 
formed policemen) to some of them duds 
in the brains department (Detective 
Bureau). The only one that ain't lookin' 
for Fat George is that mule-faced spit- 
cop (sanitary officer). I didn't think they 
wanted to hire his cab." 
"Who is Fat George's girl?" 
"I dunno that." The counter-man 
lowers his voice. "But afternoons he 
used to hang out in Big Mike's place. I 
seen his car there, a hundred times. 

Iaybe Big Mike would know the woman. 
\Vhen the other bulls was in here askin' 
about Fat George, they didn't say noth- 
in' about the girl and I didn't think to 
tell 'em. Try Big Mike. I'll bet he can 
give you a line if he wants to. . . ." 
That is the reason Shannon is a detec- 
tive-sergeant. He always remembers to 
inquire about the women. 
On their way to the tangled alleys of 
the Italian section, the detectives pass 
a hotel. They crowd into a telephone- 
booth and call the office. 
" Sergean t speaking. Anything new?" 
"They just called you from the City 
Hospital, sir. This Libertore is still un- 
conscious. There's a pressure on his 
brain, the medic says. They're goin' to 
operate and see if he'll regain conscious- 
ness. The papers called. They want to 
know if there's anything new on the 
shooting. " 
"Tell the papers about the operation 
and say we're looking for a suspect." 
"They know you're lookin' for Fat 
George. They're goin' to print his 
name." 
"Oh, hell!" Sergeant Shannon is dis- 
tinct1y annoyed. "They might just as 
well get out handbills telling him to screw 
out of town, There's co-operation for 


you." He bangs the telephone-receiver 
upon the hook. 
Outside the hotel, a repair crew is work- 
ing on the trolley tracks. A canvas is 
stretched around the spot to shield the 
eyes of chance pedestrians from the glare 
of the electric welding. The workmen 
wear colored goggles and hoods and might 
pose as deep-sea monsters. High up on 
the buildings, dark windows reflect the 
light. An ornate fresco is thrown into 
sharp relief. 
Sergeant Shannon sees no beauty in the 
barbaric splendor of the scene. He 
grasps Michaels's arm. 
"Between the noise and the light, 
yeggs could blow every safe in the neigh- 
borhood and no one would notice it." 
Michaels nods gravely. "Ain't it the 
truth? " 
Shannon resolves to cover the district 
with plain-clothes men another night. 
They walk on. 
Two o'clock strikes in the City Hall 
tower. Shannon leads the way to The 
Cave, fastest of the all-night key clubs 
and dance-halls. 
A doorman passes them in. A saxo- 
phone orchestra blares a welcomec The 
owner comes forward. Big l\fike Pul- 
rnicino, fat, expensively dressed, and Ital- 
ian, waves his hand to them. His dia- 
monds sparkle as he greets them. 
"Anything I can do for you, gentle- 
men? Have a bite to eat? Have a 
drink? " 
"Thanks, Mike. I'll take a glass of 
wine. " 
"\Vhat's yours, Mister Michaels?" 
"The same." 
Pulmicino signals to a waiter. "Three 
wines and some cigars, quick." 
The dance-floor is crowded. A high- 
priced interior decorator has made the 
room a work of art. Walls and ceiling are 
rough, tinted stone, with lights concealed 
in the crevices. Waiters in Bohemian 
costume hurry about with trays of drinks, 
as if the world had never heard of prohi- 
bition. Here" members" of the club can 
dance until morning, behind a steel door, 
safe from police interference. But, so con- 
tradictory are our governmental institu- 
tions, the police are welcomed, if they 
pay a social instead of a business call upon 
the owner! 



TWELVE TO EIGHT 


Sergeant Shannon names the patrons 
as they wriggle past the table. 
Thf're is Rose Story-christened Re- 
becca Solomowitz-who is technically a 
dancer. Her partner is Baldy Izzo, who 


'-. 


619 


woman in the Williams divorce suit. She 
was his stenographer. There was more 
to that than was ever published in the 
papers. She's with Danny Wilson, the 
fight-promoter. There's Tommy Rogers, 


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Sergeant Shannon names the patrons as they wriggle past the table. 


beat the case when he was tried for shoot- 
ing a customs inspector. The jury, by 
some quirk of collective humor, found 
him not guilty of the charge. Following 
them is a pretty little bobbed-haired 
girl who lives on The Drive. Her grand- 
father was a vice-president of the United 
States. The youth with her is Buddy 
Rand. His father is The Rand. You 
know. He invented the synthetic salad 
oil and transformed the lowly peanut and 
cottonseed into the American olive. 
That tall, dark woman is Daisy How- 
ard. Remember her? She was the other 


son of President Rogers of the State Uni- 
versity. His girl? She's Dorothy Hunt. 
Her father is the typewriter Hunt. They 
have the show-cattle and that big place 
up the river. . . . 
Over in the corner is Dago Pete, the 
dope-peddler. He keeps his stock of 
morphine in a safe-deposit box at the 
Traders' National Bank, and sells it from 
an office with as bold a front as if he were 
a rug merchant. He's no addict himself. 
Too smart for that. His girl is leading 
woman of that burlesque company that's 
playing at the Garden Theatre. 



620 


T'VELVE TO EIGHT 


These characters and many others rub 
elbows on the dance-floor, enjoying the 
democracy of lawbreaking. 
Shannon, IHichaels, and the café 
owner sip their California sherry. 
"Th' mayor send for me to go to City 
Hall," says Big Mike Pulmicino, blowing 
upon the diamond in his ring and then 
polishing it with a silk handkerchief. " So 
I go up. I see mayor. He tell me he got 
plenty trouble about this place." Big 
1\Iike waves his arm, pointing about the 
room admiringly, as if the complaints 
were an advertisement of his business 
sagacity. "He say I gotto be careful, or 
I get raid and they shut me up." 
"What did you say?" 
"I tell mayor he gotto be careful or he 
don't get elect' next time. He say re- 
formers is busy like hell. I say Demo- 
crats is busy like hell, too. He say he 
hear nothing except kicks about me. I 
say I hear nothing except kicks about 
him. He say women's clubs wants me 
out of here. I tell him the Italian-Amer- 
ican Republican Club won't support him 
no more. He say: ' Well, have cigar.' I 
say: 'Well, thanks.' That's all. I come 
away." 
Shannon smiles as he grasps the humor 
of the situation. "I guess you stand 
pretty high down in this part of town," 
he remarks easily. "You must know 
Fat George's girL" 
Big Mike is deceived by the casualness 
of the tone. " Sure. Betty Y onick. I 
know her fine." 
" Yes. Betty Y onick." Shannon re- 
peats the name to engrave it upon his 
memory. "I thought Betty would be in 
here." Upon this information depends 
the policeman's success or his failure. If 
he can make Big :Mike tell, he can capture 
Fat George. If not, another more sar- 
castic letter from the police commissioner 
will be lying on his desk to-morrow. 
Sergeant Shannon is a diplomat. His 
manner is careless. He might be asking 
politely about the health of a friend's 
relative. 
"Betty is a good gal," says Big Mike 
with a patronizing air. "But, what you 
call it, she always talks out-of-turn. Yes. 
Twice she talk out-of-turn in my place. 
She make the trouble with her mouth, so 
I throw her out on her neck. Now she 


hang out in Polock Minnie's dump. I 
know some of them people ain't none of 
the best "-the café owner makes a sweep- 
ing Latin gesture toward his customers- 
"but they gotto act swell when they're 
in here. Taxi-drivers an' college boys an' 
roughnecks like them has gotto go some- 
where else." 
Big Mike would have cut off his tongue 
before he would have been bullied into 
giving information. But so adroitly is 
he questioned that Sergeant Shannon se- 
cures a complete biography and excellent 
description of Miss Y onick. Then the 
detectives shake hands with the café 
owner, thank him for his hospitality, and 
leave the smoke-filled room to the regular 
patrons. The orchestra is murdering 
"Charlie, My Boy," as they pass the steel 
door. 
Through two alleys, down a dark street, 
and across a railroad-yard the men hurry. 
They pass a switchman's shanty, where 
they see a uniformed policeman sleeping. 
Both men smile at the thought of the 
many times they "crawled into a hole" 
for a smoke and nap, when they were 
working on a beat. In the middle of an- 
other alley, they pause. The sergeant 
taps on a window. 
A woman peers out, recognizes them, 
and opens a door. 
"Mister Shannon and Mister Michaels. 
Come in." 
Shannon shakes his head. "'Who you 
got inside?" 
Polock Minnie shrugs her shoulders. 
"I dunno. Three or four parties. Young 
fellers. " 
" Any women?" 
"Oh, Mister Shannon. You know I 
don't let no women in that settin'-room 
since you tol' me . . ." 
"I saw two come out of here last 
night." 
Minnie smiles. "They was only my 
sister-in-law and her . . ." 
"It was Box-Car Annie and Baby 
Girl. " 
Polock Minnie, whose house is under a 
dark cloud of suspicion and who is not 
invited to call upon the mayor, is silenced. 
"God Almighty, Mister Shannon ! You 
see everything, you do." 
"Any women in there now?" 
Minnie is doubtful. "Well, you know 



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"I ain't pairl my last fine yet. And I owe four hundred on my car." 


how it is. One or two might have snuck 
in while I was standing here." 
"I'm going to call the wagon, Minnie." 
"God Almighty, Ivlister Shannon! 
Don't do that. Honest to God Almighty! 
I ain't paid my last fine yet. And I owe 
four hundred on my car. So I do. You 


wouldn't drive me to the poorhouse, you 
wouldn't. You used to have a good heart, 
you did." 
Sergeant Shannon is silent for a min- 
ute. 
"Is Betty Y onick in there?" 
"She . . . she might be," 


621 



622 


T\VELVE TO EIGHT 


H I'm not promising anything. But if 
vou could find out from her where Fat 
George is staying . . ." 
Polock IvIinnie takes heart. She knows 
now that the detectives have come only 
for information. She grins with pleasure. 
"Sure, I can find that out for you. You 
mean Fat George, him that rolled the 
drunk travelling-man and boosted the 
taxi? " 
"Yes." 
"Come in and set down." 
"We'll wait here." 
Minnie, beaming and cordial, disap- 
pears. The men smoke in silence. Then 
the woman returns to whisper her mes- 
sage. "Fat George is up to his uncle's 
house, corner of Central Avenue and Pitt 
Street." 
It is after three o'clock. Newsboys are 
gathering in an all-night lunch-room, 
near a printing-office. A truck and 
trailer jolt through the street, hauling a 
steel girder to a new building. A group 
of taxi-drivers are huddled in the body of 
a cab, rolling dice. Almost everybody on 
the street knows everybody else. There 
is a certain occupational fraternity about 
night-workers. They might be residents 
of a small village, set down in the centre 
of a city. 
Shannon finds a telephone. He calls 
Headquarters. "Sergeant speaking. Any- 
thing new?" 
"Quiet, sir. Just a few burglaries. 
They want you to call the hospital." 
Shannon gives the hospital number to 
a sleepy operator. 
"Sergeant Shannon speaking. The 
superintendent wanted me to call." 
"Just a minute. We've been trying to 
locate you. . . ." Then comes the voice 
of Miss Howard, night superintendent. 
"This Libertore shooting case, sergeant. 
The bullet lodged in his brain. He did 
not regain consciousness. I was unwill- 
ing to order an operation, without the 
consent of the coroner. So the coroner 
has come and made an ante-mortem ex- 
amination. 'Ve'll operate at once. The 
coroner will wait to see the result." 
"How long will he be on the table?" 
"Half an hour, possibly. They're in 
the surgery now." 
Sergeant Shannon considers. There is 
a chance the man will regain conscious- 


ness long enough to identify the assassin. 
" Well, I'll be there by the time the opera- 
tion is over." 
Then the officer rings his office. He 
gives the desk man his location. "Send 
the touring-car and two men down here 
immediately. " 
Shivering, Shannon and :Michaels wait 
on the curb until the police machine rolls 
up. Two detectives are inside. " Drive 
to Central and Pitt Street. Stop away 
from the corner," Shannon tells the chauf- 
feur. "I've found Fat George." His as- 
sistants look at each other, genuinely 
pleased. They have triumphed over the 
day platoon. 
The machine stops. Shannon sends 
the office men to the rear, while he and 
Michaels try the front door. They pound 
on the panels. 
"Who's there?" comes a sleepy voice 
from inside. 
"Open the door." 
"'Vho's there?" 
"Police. Open the door." Each of 
the officers has his hand upon his revolver. 
One never knows when a panic-stricken 
fugitive will begin a gun battle. 
"What do you want?" 
"I want Fat George, the taxi-driver." 
"He ain't here." 
" Yes, he is. Open the door or I'll smash 
it in." Michaels kicks the panels. 
Sounds of a scuffle come from the rear 
of the house. " Serg ! We got him." 
"All right. Never mind opening that 
door." This is addressed to the relative 
inside. It is an ironical comment. 
Fat George, frightened but not re- 
pressed, is led to the au tomobile. 
Michaels handcuffs himself to him. 
"I ain't goin' to say nothin' until I see 
my lawyer," Fat George announces. 
"What do you think we pinched you 
for?" asks Sergean t Shannon mildly. 
"For drillin' that Wop, but I didn't do 
it. " 
"Why do you think we picked you up 
for that?" continues the sergeant. 
"Because him and me had trouble. 
But I didn't do it." 
Sergeant Shannon smiles grimly. 
"If you hadn't done it, son, you'd have 
asked us what we wanted you for, instead 
of telling us." 
In the hospital office stands the coro- 



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A frisky little student nurse from the maternity ward pins rosebuds in their buttonholcs.-Page 625. 


nero He is a gruff, kindly, profane man, 
famed for his knowledge of medical juris- 
prudence and his rough-and-ready sur- 
gery. He leans upon Miss Howard's desk 
to deliver his opinion of foreigners who 


are responsible for his being called out at 
night. 
"\Vhy don't they have their killings 
at a reasonable time? " he demands. 
"White people usually do their murders 
62 3 



624 


TWELVE TO EIGHT 


during office hours. But these \Vops! 
It takes 'em until midnight to make up 
their minds to it." 
Miss Howard is quick to apologize. 
"I'm sorry we called you, doctor. But I 


explains, " Libertore will recover con- 
sciousness in a few minutes. The bullet 
lodged in the front of the brain. They 
located it without difficulty. It was in 
that part of the brain that contains the 


"It woulJ serve you right if you did die."-Page 625. 


felt you ought to be here when they 
operated." She tucks a strand of gray 
hair under her cap. "Here's Sergeant 
Shannon, just too late." 
"Is Libertore dead?" asks the detec- 
tive. 
"Dead? Huh!" The coroner grunts 
his displeasure. "The only way to kill 
such people is to cut off their heads and 
hide 'em for a few days. Dead? I should 
say not. They'll do everything but die. 
Good night. I'm going home and get 
some sleep." 
Miss Howard laughs at the outburst. 
"The operation was very successful," she 


higher-thought processes," she explains 
naïvely. "I don't believe it would have 
inconvenienced him if we had allowed it 
to remain there." 
Sergeant Shannon's face shows a keen 
disappointment. "Ain't that the luck," 
he complains bitterly. "I thought this 
was good for a murder, first-degree charge. 
But if this cuss doesn't know enough to 
die, the best I can do with Fat George is 
to charge him with assault and intent to 
kill. " 
"Have you got the man?" 
"Yes. He's outside." 
"Bring him in," the superintendent 



TWELVE TO EIGHT 


suggests. "As soon as the patient re- 
covers from the ether, we may be able to 
get an identification. In the meantime, 
you can have supper with me." 
:Michaels leads in the prisoner. The 
detectives leave the police chauffeur to 
watch him and follow ::M.iss Howard to 
the diet kitchen, where they eat poached 
eggs, toast, and coffee. Their hostess 
makes it a social affair by calling down a 
head nurse and sending for a waffle-iron. 
The men light cigars, in brazen defiance 
of the hospital rules. A frisky little stu- 
dent nurse from the maternity ward pins 
rosebuds in their buttonholes. 
The telephone rings. 
" Libertore is conscious now," Miss 
Howard explains. "The intern says it 
will be safe for us to talk to him." 
"I want three witnesses to the confes- 
sion besides 1'lichaels and myself," says 
the sergeant. He mentions it as a per- 
sonal grievance. "That new judge threw 
out my testimony in the Briggs case." 
It is arranged that l\liss Howard, the 
head nurse, and the intern shall be present 
when Libertore is questioned. The office 
stenographer is called to take the state- 
ment. Leading Fat George, the little 
procession troops through the corridors, 
as the dull, gray sky lightens outside. 
They reach the surgical ward. 
One of Anthony Libertore's eyes peers 
from a mass of bandages. 
"Did Fat George shoot you?" demands 
the sergeant. 
"Yes, Mister." 
"Then this is the fellow who shot 
you?" Fat George is led around within 
Libertore's range of vision. " You two 
had trouble and he shot you? Is that 
right? " 
Fat George's face darkens. He glares 
at the wounded man. He shows his teeth 
in a mean grin, and, with a quick move- 
ment of his free hand, bites his forefinger 
at the first knuckle. It is the Sicilian 
death-sign. 
The effect upon Libertore is remarka- 
hIe. The eye blinks. "Oh, no, l'tIister. 
That ain't the feller who shot me. This 
feller and me is good friends. I don't 
know the feller who done the shooting." 


625 


"Sure we're good friends," growls Fat 
George, in a tone that would cow a moun- 
tain-lion. 
Libertore is quick to agree. " Yes. 
Him and me is good friends. He didn't 
shoot me." 
Sergeant Shannon shakes his fist at the 
man on the bed. "It would serve you 
right if you did die." 
The detectives lead Fat George to the 
outside door. There is nothing for them 
to do except turn him loose. 
Iichaels 
removes the handcuffs from the man 
they know is guilty, then relieves his feel- 
ings by kicking him down the front steps 
of the hospital building. 
Fat George picks himself up, lights a 
cigarette, and thumbs his nose to the offi- 
cers. 
"Raspberries," he calls back. 
It has become light. The shadow mys- 
teries of the city are now revealed as 
homely, every-day objects. Cleaning 
women bustle through the hospital corri- 
dors. The detectives climb into the 
police car. The streets are crowded with 
the seven o'clock rush of workers. The 
machine speeds through traffic, with its 
gong ringing. It stops at Police Head- 
quarters. 
Sergeant Shannon hurries to his desk. 
He has two reports to make out. As he 
writes, the 8 A. M. to 4 P. M. squad of 
detectives begins to appear. The build- 
ing is suddenly filled with confusion. 
Prisoners are led through the offices, on 
their way to the Identification Bureau, 
where they will be photographed and 
measured. A clerk appears to warn cer- 
tain detectives that they must appear in 
Supreme, County, or City Court as wit- 
nesses for the people. 
At three minutes before eight o'clock, 
Sergeant Shannon has finished. 
"James H. Halloran, Inspector. 
"Acting Chief of Detecti'j}es. 
" Sir: 
"I have the honor to submit the follow- 
ing report of acti1.'ities between 12 J.f. and 
8 A. kI.: 
" I. See special report on Libertore 
shooting. 
"2. It u'as a 'i)cry quiet night." 



Autumn Roses 


BY l\iARY RAY1VIOND SHIPMAN ANDREWS 


" 'l'. 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY H. VAN BUREN KLINE 


.'! LD maid 1" 
She leaned forward, 

 0 
... brown hair streaming 

 
 over shimmering rose 

 brocade of her dress- 
ing-gown. She scruti- 
nized the face which 
scrutinized back from 
the oval mirror of a bandy-legged French 
dressing-table. 
"Ugly old maid I" she repeated aloud, 
screwing the face into a gargoyle. A 
delicate tap at the door. 
"Come in, Yvonnec" The door opened 
and the smartest of gray-clad and white- 
trimmed maids appeared. "Yvonne, 
what do you mean by bursting in on my 
meditations with your awful, noisy, brutal 
tramplings? I was saying my prayers." 
"l.\'lademoiselle-pardon 1" Yvonne 
backed off with a pretty horror. And a 
smile behind it. "Mademoiselle's pray- 
ers 1 " She understood her mademoiselle. 
"Perhaps he will wait." 
"Wait? Who? Yvonne, I forbid you 
to talk. conundrums." The imitation 
rage, which was one of the discreet games 
between this lonely woman and her de- 
voted servant, dropped off like a top- 
coat. Mademoiselle laughed. "Not 
prayers; I meant swears, Yvonne. Who 
is it? The iceman for a check? He 
always comes in the middle of the night." 
The time was 4 P.M. of a June day. 
" lrf ais non, mademoiselle. Not the 
iceman. It is m'sieur Ie capitaine." 
The light chair rolled over as mademoi- 
selle sprang up. " The captain 1 Of 
course I'll see him. Bring him up. Toute- 
de-suite." 
Yvonne sprinkled a glance about, 
picked up the chair, gathered rosy silk. 
some things and retired them to cover, and 
advanced on her mademoiselle. She laid 
gentle but firm hands on the pink swans- 
down which edged the brocade, and the 
touch drew it together, fastened a ribbon. 
626 


.&
 


w.;- 


" Yvonne, let me alone. The captain's 
used to my rags. Don't I look nice any- 
way, Yvonne?" 
"Mademoiselle is ravissante in the new 
robe-de-chambre," Yvonne assured her, 
"But-" 
A bass note lifted down the hall. 
"Fifi!" called the young, deep voice. 
"Aren't you ever coming to? I've got a 
date. " 
"Oh, Adorablest," reasoned the woman 
one half moment later. "Why are you 
cross? It was Yvonne dolling up. I 
didn't care if you saw my Paris silk un- 
dies. You can, in shop windows, any 
day, only not as pretty. \Vhy are you 
rip-snorting? And why here?" 
"Prr ! " answered Adorablest. " Nasty 
red fur got in my nose. Prr !" 
"Oh, Rudy," reasoned the woman. 
"Don't you like me in it?" 
"Rudy," six feet two and powerful, 
grasped her by a wrist, shaking her con- 
sideringly as if testing a fish-rod. He 
suddenly smiled, and one perceived why 
she called him "Adorablest." He was. 
"Fifi," he announced, "you look great, 
I like it. Good stuff, too, isn't it?" He 
fingered it in an ignorant, masculine, win- 
ning manner. His glance roved. 
"Everything about you always looks 
shipshape and gay and expensive. And 
you smell delicious." Sniffing. 
"Vervaine," she answered, "Lemon 
verbena. I got it at Guerlain'sc It's 
hard to find this side." 
" Don't put it on me, in the name of the 
Board of Health! Gosh, they'd run me 
out of the mess. But it's nice on YOUc 
Now, Aunt Maria-" 
"Rudolph, why suddenly 'Aunt J\-Ia- 
ria' ? " 
"It's good for your soul. If I Fifi you 
all the time you get uppish." 
"If you knew how unuppish I am-how 
downish I was when you came!" 
"What for?" demanded the boy. "No 



AUTUMN ROSES 


reason. '\Vbatjer mean by it? I'll beat- 
jer." 
"Oh, Adorablest! I'm all alone, and 
I'm so old, and there's nobody to hold 
my hand if I die, and I'm not so very 
good-looking, and I'm a poor working 
woman-" 
"Truck. You know it's truck. No- 
body-what t'hell Freddie Miller? And 
me. I'll hold your hand when you step 
off-be delighted. And you're no gorilla, 
:Maria. No beauty, maybe, but easy to 
look at, and a shark on clothes." 
"I spend oodles on them because I will 
not be a badly dressed woman with my 
job. Owning a newspaper! Running it! 
I have to be a little pet to make up." 
"Don't talk drool," the tall boy or- 
dered. "The job's your salvation, and 
you're a wonder at it. Every woman 
should have a job, excepting she can 
prove ten kids under six. '\Vbere'd you 
be without The Daily Dullard?" 
"Rudolph, if you keep on calling my 
paper that it will get around and hurt 
business. " 
"Not as much as it burts me to be 
called Rudolph." 
"Rudolph is your name," she stated. 
" Your baptized name." 
"Worse luck. '\Vhat struck 'em-but 
it's too late now, by twenty-several years. 
Only, Aunt :Maria, I do loathe the Ger- 
man flavor. N early everybody calls me 
plain Tommy Ferguson. \Vhy should you 
elect-?" 
The rose sleeve was climbing his neck. 
"Because, Adorablest, you're the thing I 
love best, and if I didn't badger you 
sometimes I'd be soft and gummy. And 
your name is Rudolph. Christened. I 
saw 'em do it." 
"\Vhy in jinks didn't you stop it with a 
shotgun?" growled the lad. "But, Fifi, I 
can't stay while you babble. I'm a hard- 
working marine officer, and I've got to 
collect a distinguished colonel and drag 
him to the strawberry festival for a bunch 
of generals at the governor's. Aren't you 
coming? " 
"Of course. If ever you go away and 
let me get dressed. That's why you're in 
uniform. What colonel? I wish you'd 
always wear uniform, Adorablest. Why 
don't you?" 
The boy looked down at her with the 


627 


expression peculiar to an officer's face 
when asked that question-hopeless of 
explaining; incredible that it should need 
to be explained. "How anybody could 
think anyone would ever like to wear a 
uniform! " he murmured. And, letting it 
go at that: "I'm to call for Colonel 
Warrington, whom I served under in the 
Argonne. He's the first colonel to be secre- 
tary of war, ever-ever. One or two gen- 
erals, long years ago, and just for a spell. 
He was a West Point man, and dropped 
into civil life years before the war, and 
went back in I9I8. He was a power in 
his civil job, and so they made him secre- 
tary of war. Hope you have the luck to 
meet him. He's a very big bug and you 
may not get a look-in. Tag me; I'll try 
to snitch him a moment. The biggest 
man to-day-a peach too. You'd be crazy 
about him. I stopped to see if it was a 
date for your dinner and theatre party." 
" Yes, darling. Don't dare forget or 
slide out. And I wouldn't lift a finger to 
meet the Archangel Michael. You snip." 
The boy grinned. "Haughty lady." 
He kissed her, with a hug of an affection- 
ate bear. '''By, my Fifi. Wear the red 
fluffy-doodles and the men will scramble 
for you. It looks nice. Now I must 
beat it." He was gone. 
Certainly the adorablest nephew; too 
old for a son, too young for a brother, he 
fitted between and was comrade and play- 
mate incomparable. "It's so astonishing 
that he wants to be with me," Isabel Bar- 
ton addressed herself in the mirror; and 
reflected how youth didn't bother; and 
went on to reflect that probably nothing 
was worth bothering with that was not 
young; then to consider how she was 
forty-some; following that, she wondered 
what good it was, being so aged, to have 
beautiful clothes; the next step was a jerk. 
"Stop," she addressed the face in the 
mirror. "You're an ugly old maid; may- 
be you'll never have any fun again; all the 
same, you'll play the game--yes, now 
you'll go to that party and be nice to 
everybody. That's your knitting, and 
you'll attend to it." 
She then proceeded to do things effi- 
ciently with cold cream. 


It was rather perfect at the governor's 
garden party, given for a great English 



628 


AUTUl\1N ROSES 


general who had stopped on his way West. 
The executive garden was at its loveliest 
that day at the end of June. Men in the 
governor's quiet livery met the cars and 
led guests across a lawn and through an 
arch in a high hedge. Passing under, 
glory was spread. Masses of peonies 
rimmed a walk on either side; borders of 
pink peonies backed stone benches; pil- 
lars of roses, pink Dorothy Perkins, 
golden ones, crimson ones, sentinelled the 
far end; larkspurs, pale and deep and 
piercing azure, stood like blue lances back 
of white June lilies; everywhere was color 
and across the gravelled gray of walks and 
green of lawns a tent rose, covering food 
and drink; a band played, hidden some- 
where; women in gay dresses, men in uni- 
form or in summer clothes, strolled 
through the paths. It was like a sudden 
joyful shout, to leave the subdued glim- 
mer of the lawns and trees, to come at a 
step into this brilliancy. 
Isabel stopped in the arch. Color was 
her music and wine. She stood, drinking 
it, and as she stood the cream of her float- 
ing dress with its gay printed flowers, set 
into the green, seemed a sudden blossom- 
ing of the hedge. She was the high note 
of the kaleidoscopic picture. 
"Who's that?" It was asked of the 
governor's wife. 
"One of the people I like best," said 
Mrs. Seymour. "I want you to meet 
her." 
Isabel was looking about for her hos- 
tess now, and she brought up in front of 
the First Lady, standing by the man who 
had asked the question. Isabel didn't 
hear his name; it was all the same; to-day 
she was out to be nice to everybody. 
This man looked distinguished, looked 
thoroughbred, but he didn't look easy to 
be nice to. His mou th was grim; his eyes, 
gray in a lean face, met hers with a glance 
like a blow. Never mind; that wasn't 
her affair; she "aimed to please" for the 
good of her own soul. Quick now-a re- 
mark. 
"It gave me a shock," announced 
Isabel, all friendliness, and regretted it. 
Who would know what she was talking 
about! 
The keen eyes were serious, investigat- 
ing. Suddenly: "It might," stated the 
man. "It's shockingly lovely, this gar- 


den." And his whole face had broken 
into a smile, a grin of abandoned boyish- 
ness. 
Her pulse jumped. He was of the ini- 
tiated, who didn't need explanations. 
When you meet somebody in general you 
begin: "Isn't this an ideal place for a 
party!" or: "Aren't the flowers beautiful 
to-day!" Else, if one takes platitudes 
for granted and starts farther along, one 
has to back up and begin over. But this 
man- 
They were off. Never did she remem- 
ber what they talked about. "Happy 
nations have no history." The talk did 
itself and was absorbing. They strolled, 
they also, among flowers, and chuckled 
over a common lack of botany, they 
passed the time of day with the governor, 
who came up and frivolled, as always, with 
Isabel, and who glanced at the stranger 
searchingly. 
"I was coming for you," said the gov- 
ernor. "But you seem contented. I'll 
leave you a minute longer." 
Then she saw her boy across flower- 
beds, who waved at her and glanced at her 
ca valier as if surprised. The ca valier 
nodded at him. 
"Nice lad, Tommy Ferguson." 
"Why, he's mine," spoke Isabel, de- 
lighted. "My nephew. He's-he's ador- 
able." And that reminded her. "I want 
to see just one of the great men to-day. 
My boy thinks he's the greatest. You 
know them all?" 
"Mostly," agreed the man without a 
name. " Who ? " 
"Colonel \Varrington," said Isabel. 
"I ought to say Secretary Warrington, 
probably." 
No answer. Isabel had bent to touch a 
shell-pink, too-Iovely-to-be-true peony. 
She looked up. The gray eyes were a 
knife-bladec "I asked you to show me 
Colonel Warrington, the new secretary of 
war," she repeated. 
The grim mouth, which seemed to have 
other expressions, suddenly grinned. 
"You didn't get my name. It's War- 
rington," he said. 
One is not always conscious when hap- 
piness is holding one's hand. When the 
engine knocks or a cylinder skips one no- 
tices, but let the machine run perfectly 
and nobody thinks about it. Possibly 



AUTUl\IN ROSES 


that is an argument for the natural right 
of humans to smooth living; possibly 
there are opposing arguments. Isabel 
Barton drifted lightheartedly through the 
afternoon without a thought about enjoy- 
ing it. She had come with her teeth set 
to disregard her own pleasure, which is an 
almost sure prescription for a good time. 
But the good time came and went as un- 
emotionally as a butterfly in sunshine. 
\Vhen the great man was discovered to be 
himself she took steps, like a respectable 
woman of the world, not to keep him tied. 
There were younger women, prettier 
women-she looked about without bitter- 
ness and so decided, and gave him a 
chance at half a dozen. 
"Good-by, 1'Ir. Secretary," she nodded 
cheerfully. " Come and talk to me again 
if you're not too busy." 
Within ten minutes he was doing it. 
She put that down to accident; but she 
was glad. Shortly they were back on the 
gray stone bench behind the pink, tall 
peonies. Then the governor carried him 
off; in ten minutes again she looked up to 
see the erect figure, the lean strong shoul- 
ders, the gray unsmiling eyes that smiled 
suddenly, the mouth that was set as if it 
had often shut in pain. 
"Mr. Secretary! I know the name of 
another flower. That makes three. Two 
ahead of you." 
The afternoon went, and except for 
short intervals she spent it with "the big- 
gest man there," and he went with her 
across the shadows of the lawn and put 
her into her car. 
" Good-by," he said, standing by the 
door. And, with a grin: "I hope it won't 
be as long before I see you again." 
And they both laughed, and her fault- 
less Jennings at the wheel stirred a foot 
and a hand and she was speeding away. 
Speeding away. With a stab beneath the 
dress of the gay nowers. \Vhy-every 
minute-happy to the brim-she had not 
noticed. He had had chances to be with 

Iildred 
Iarston, and Emily Freemont, 
and Elizabeth Browning, and 
lrs. Jack 
Bullard, the youngest, the belles and the 
beauties. 
" Have to see him! 1 have to see him! " 
Soundless, insistent, the words repeated. 
Out of the blue pounced a gorgeous 
idea; if be would come to her party to- 


629 


morrow night! \Vould he be tied up; 
would he care about it? Horrid to be re- 
fused with perfunctory civility; she re- 
membered that the main banquet was 
Wednesday night in the arsenal. Also 
her number was full; her dining-room held 
ten only; then the spread of the wings of 
another magnificent thought-ask Adora- 
blest to stay away! 
All the way home the scheme wove and 
interwove, and she knew she was going to 
do it, and glowed with hope that he might 
come and shivered with fear that he 
might not want to. Then, as the car 
turned into the court of the Ruthven- 
Stuart Apartments, a last idea sprang at 
her, and she cried out: 
"Oh, my heavens!" 
Jennings jammed his foot on the brake; 
the machine came to a stop. "Madam? " 
asked Jennings reproachfully. 
"Oh, nothing, Jennings," 
liss Barton 
answered. "You didn't see-a cat?" 
"Oh, my heavens! I'm engaged. 
Engaged to Freddie :Miller." She mur- 
mured it as she marched to the elevator 
through ultra-sumptuous tapestried walls, 
over inlaid floors and Oriental rugs. But 
by the time the elevator was at the twelfth 
floor the murmur changed to: "Pooh! 
The man may have a dozen wives. I 
wonder-" A stab. Of course he had a 
dozen wives. Or one-worse. In any 
case what was it to I. Barton? 
" Yes, Yvonne, I did have de plai- 
sir - bealtcoup, beauco1lp. Oh, beaucouþ, 
Yvonne! You're a sweet thing to ask. 
And you're pretty as a picture in that 
gray, and the new tucked organdy apron 
and things." 
One could say anything to Yvonne and 
she never presumed; it suited Isabel Bar- 
ton's ménage, for she needed some one to 
explode to as much as some one to make 
her bed. Yet one could hardly discuss 
Freddie l\Iiller with Yvonne. And he 
was, in a flash, in the foreground. She 
had forgotten him whole-heartedly since 
after lunch. \Vhen his letter came. Dear 
old beautiful Freddie. How had she ever 
happened to get engaged to Freddie? 
After these years; the first time he had 
proposed to her having been at her com- 
ing out party. And her father had rather 
thought well of it. 
"He's a nice boy and a gentleman, and 



630 


AUTUIVIN ROSES 


sweet-tempered and good looking," her 
father had reasoned. "And rich." 
All of that. A mild recommendation, 
however, from an eminent journalist for 
his only child's husband. And the child 
knew, even then, that she was not and 
could not be in love with big, handsome 
Freddie Miller. And now, after the years, 
a month ago, in an impulsive, lonely, af- 
fectionate moment she had accepted him. 
It meant home and somebody belonging, 
and she didn't love anybody else more. It 
came to her to-night that she had never 
yet let Freddie kiss her. She couldn't. 
Something about his mouth- 
"Yvonne! " Yvonne was there. " I 
want that lavender and jade mink-edged 
thing. Yes, the very best, newest tea- 
gown. I want it to get back my self- 
respect. " 
Yvonne hadn't the least idea what that 
meant, but she often hadn't. She didn't 
wear down her brain trying to follow 
mademoiselle. She only worshipped her 
and took care of her. 
Dinner alone on a small table by the 
fire, for it was cool to-night; the mink- 
trimmed tea-gown rainbowing languidly 
about her slimness. Then, after dinner, 
her cigarette burning to ashes in her 
fingers, and her coffee getting cold, she 
thought profoundly. She looked at the 
clock, picked up an evening paper. 
'" The distinguished strangers '-m- 
nn-'in town for two days--entertained 
at dinner-Forward Club this evening- 
eight-thirty. General Harries-Redding, 
of England-guest of the Governor- 
Executive 
lansion. General Simpson, 
General '-m-m," she read it aloud, freely 
skipping. '" Also stopping with Govern- 
or'-Dh! 'General McLennan and Secre- 
tary of War Warrington, who was a colo- 
nel in France and was-' We know that, 
old top. Oh, he's staying at the San An- 
tonio? Oh! That's simpler." 
The clock. Eight-five. He wouldn't 
be gone quite yet. The psychological 
second. "Oh !" Being alone with her 
cold coffee and her galloping cigarette, she 
tossed out arms and drew in a breath. "I 
hate to be turned down," she remarked. 
"But I want to ask him, and why should- 
n't I, and I will." 
The many-splendored tea-gown dropped 
in front of a telephone-table. "Univer- 


sitY-3300," she remarked. "San An- 
tonio Hotel," came back in a thin, bitterly 
displeased voice. 
"Will you please give me Secretary of 
\Var Warrington?" Isabel continued, and 
made faces at the wall. "That can't be 
the way to ask for him over the wire. 
Sounds sub-half-witted," she reflected. 
The usual desperate duel with the usual 
telephone-girl determined on outwitting 
subscribers; then a cold shiver of appre- 
hension as a crisp, deep word or two 
dropped across space. Then: 
" Mr. Secretary, this is l\Iiss Barton 
whom you met this afternoon at the gov- 
ernor's. Do you remember?" 
A breath of pause. Then: "Yes. I 
remember. " 
Oh, my Lordy! Was that the way he 
took it? On she plunged. "I expect 
you're deep in dates and you'll think me 
quite mad, but-would you dine at my 
house and go on to the theatre to-morrow 
nigh t ? " Silence. Silence. \V ould he 
never speak again? At least he might- 
Ah! 
"Thank you very much, Miss Barton. 
I'd be delighted." 
The world flopped up and down. 
Quiet tones continued: "There's a large 
affair on at the arsenal, but I only have to 
put in my nose during the evening, and if 
you'd allow me, I could jump into a taxi 
and drive there between the acts." 
"I'll have my car waiting. I'm so 
glad- Awfully nice to get you-Dh, 
seven-thirty! " 
It was done. "I give you my word," 
remarked Isabel to nobody, "I wouldn't 
go through that strain again for a button." 
She tossed off the cold coffee. "Now for 
Adorablest. " 
"Who?" inquired Adorablest peevishly 
down the wire. "Oh! Want anything? 
I'm off to the club this second." Rapid 
remarks for a moment, then: 
"My breakfast is at seven-thirty." 
"I'll be in for breakfast," said Adora- 
blest. "Real food, now. 'Night Fifi." 
The lamb! And he wanted to see the 
play. She almost wept at the thought of 
inviting her best beloved to stay away 
from her house. 
Adorablest for breakfast [ In he sailed, 
radiant. "What's the game, Aunt 
Maria? " 



AUTUMN ROSES 


With stammering and apologies she 
told him. And he mingled the news with 
iced melon, with pints of double cream on 
shredded wheat, with slabs of fresh butter 
on hominy muffins, with three cups of 
dripped Porto Rican coffee and curls of 
bacon and shirred eggs and marmalade, 
and things that Isabel Barton never 
thought of eating for her own breakfast. 
So mingled, the news did not affect him 
seriously. 
"Of course I'll drop out. I told you he 
was a peach. I saw you gunning for him 
yesterday." 
"I did not," indignantly. "It just 
happened. But I had a bee-yutiful 
time," she conceded; '"and he's full of 
charm down to his finger-tips. And in 
'em." 
"\\fiat do you know about his finger- 
tips, woman?" demanded the captain 
suspiciously, takîng two more muffins. 
"Look here, Aunt :l\laria. You've had 
beaux all your days, and you're forever 
gleaning a new one. If that's all, so be 
it. But there's a drunken light in your 
left eye as of the great god Love--" 
"Disgusting," interpolated Isabel. 
"There is. Someth'n' fierrce. Maybe 
I'll telegraph Freddie to come on. He 
could make it by six. You're a betrothed 
woman, :Maria. A chattel-Freddie's 
chattel. Bound, chained, tied up for 
lif " 
e. 
"Rudy," moaned Isabel, "Rudy, don't I 
You'll make me break it by telegraph this 
second." - 
"'VeIl, I always told you I wouldn't be 
engaged to Freddie :Miller. He's too soft 
around the chin," set forth Rudolph re- 
morselessly. "But you would do it, and 
now you've got to behave. All right to 
play around with Colonel \Varrington, 
and I don't blame you for falling for him. 
He's corking. 'Vonderful officer and a 
bully man. As you say, he's got a twist 
on him-you'd call it charm. 11:aybc. 
The men all like him, and the women- 
oh, my I" 
"I don't believe he's a lady-killer," 
considered Isabel. 
"Oh, you don't? :1\lore bacon, please. 
In a way you're right. Not strictly a 
lady-killer." :Þvlunching. "He could be, 
only he doesn't give a damn. He's had a 
hell of a life, anyhow. Coffee, pleasec" 


631 


'" A hell of a life?'" Isabel re
eated it. 
"Here! Give up the marmalade, can 
you?" demanded Rudolph. 
Then he stood up. "Full," he stated. 
"Can't do with the marmalade. RemPli. 
ComPlete You've given me proper eats, 
Fin, and I love you for it." He took her 
by one ear to be kissed. 
"Rudy I You can't go till you tell me 
what hell of a life he's had." 
"He? \Vho?" Rudolph's soul with- 
out reservation was on food. "Oh, the 
colonel? \Vhy, he- Oh, it's too long. 
All you need to know is that he's worried 
through his hell creditably, and now he's 
alone in the world, and a good thing it is. 
Fifi, why are you standing on your toes 
lapping up that stuff? It's none of your 
business, woman. Freddie's your busi- 
ness, and you leave the colonel alone. Be 
faithful. How full of food I am, Aunt 
:Maria ! Kiss me. I hope you have a 
horrid time." He was gone. 
The dinner was like other dinners, but 
the guest of honor made it a more brilliant 
little dinner than it had dreamed of being. 
He fitted into the combination of the Jack 
Ballairs and the rest, and appeared to like 
them all. In fifteen minutes they were all 
quite mad about him. Isabel was burst- 
ing with pride. 
"You don't seem homesick for the ar- 
senal party, l\Ir. Secretary." 
And the very sufficient answer which 
she got was a straight, hard look from 
gray eyes. There was apparently, with 
this man, a small proportion of words to 
the amount of things he said. 
The lights went low in the theatre; the 
play was on. It was one of the few won- 
derful plays of late years. 
There was not a syllable from the man 
in the chair next her whose broad shoulder 
touched hers. The play went on. She 
was in a world more real, infinitely more 
important than her everyday world; was 
he there with her, the man whom she 
never saw till yesterday? Did this play 
stir him as it did her? The curtain went 
down on act one. Lights rippled up, 
She turned her head. 
"Did you like it?" 
" Like it! What a word!" He shot it 
at her with narrowed eyes. "It's tremend- 
ous." 
The universe, which had held its breath, 



.. 


632 


AUTU1VIN ROSES 


hummed along, He was himself. She 
had guessed right the riddle behind the 
screen of his face. 
That was all that there was of the eve- 
ning to Isabel. 1\1:ost of us live in salient 
points; one doesn't remember the unim- 
portant in-betweens. But as he said 
good night he grinned a little, not mirth- 
fully, rather perfunctorily. "I'll be in 
Washington a while now-till they elect 
a new President, anyhow. Let me know 
if you come there, won't you? Maybe 
you'll take it in on your wedding trip. 
People do." 
Again the queer, forced grin. So he 
knew. Mrs. Seymour had told him, 
probably, or maybe Rudolph. In any 
case he knew. And he was gone. The 
incident was closed. 
So she believed. Why then should a 
ship which, supposedly, had passed in the 
night, anchor close by and stay there? 
For so it happened in her memory. She 
set her will against it, and her will was a 
feather in a gale. One might as well be 
in a forest and decide not to smell balsam. 
Likely he forgot, the next day; she knew 
that; she repeated it in a number of 
forms a number of times. 
Till at last, months later, when the ob- 
session did not stop, and when Freddie 
Miller, plunging into her dream, as he had 
every right to plunge, had come to be a 
daily agony, she finally wrote a letter. 
As kindly, as affectionate a letter as one 
can write to break with one's fiancé. She 
told Freddie with a very real ache that 
it had been a mistake. The doing was 
not pleasant, and the aftermath was 
wretched, but yet it was a huge relief. 
She was not, at least, living a lie. For the 
rest of her days now she would be alone, 
but there are worse fates, and Yvonne was 
a Rock of Gibraltar, and Adorablest a 
spring of fresh water in a dry land. But 
-tragedy of an officer's career-Adora- 
blest was going away; ordered to the ends 
of the earth; hardly could she face it to 
carry on without him. Very little had 
been said of the broken engagement, but 
Adorablest approved, and in some un- 
spoken way she gathered that Adorablest 
understood. A boy who loves one and 
who understands is one of the outstanding 
best things. And with that, about two 
weeks before he was due to leave, she was 
illc Not particularly ill to begin with, 


and quite unregenerate as to seeing a 
doctor. 
"Don't be a darned little ass," coun- 
selled Adorablest affectionately. "What 
do you think you know about your works? 
Plain nothing. Suppose you're mizzable 
like this, or worse, when I go-I'll be 
comfy, won't I? Have to go just the 
same, you know. If you're dying I'll just 
trot along; that's the charm of naval life. 
Can't stay to hold your fist, as we ar- 
ranged, " 
That evening, alone in her apartment, 
feverish a little, restless with a queer rest- 
lessness which she had never before 
known, the boy's words came back. She 
really might die. People did. And if she 
did- "Oh, he's got to know. I can't 
leave it at loose ends," she whispered. 
An old delightful mahogany desk, her 
great-grandmother's in Virginia, faced her 
with just the right low light for writing, 
with orderly pigeonholes of engraved 
paper-brown and blue and gray edges, 
every sort of lovely paper. "Not to be 
delivered till after death," she began ad- 
dressing an envelope. 
Two weeks later, on his last evening, 
Captain Ferguson stood in the living- 
room of the apartment with the color gone 
out of his face and his blue eyes wild. 
"I don't believe a word of it," he 
gasped at the nurse. "It can't be. Last 
night you told me she was better." 
The nurse shook her head. "Not bet- 
ter. I said she wasn't worse than at noon. 
She was very ill last night, but to- 
night-" The nurse stopped. 
"I don't believe it ! You don't any of 
you know a thing. Isn't there any ty- 
phoid expert? Can't I get some more 
doctors? My God, somebody has to save 
her. It's all dumb stupidity to let her 
die, I tell you. Nobody does so much for 
everybody else; she's the woman who can't 
die; she means everything to bunches of 
people; she's-all I've got." The deep, 
fresh voice trailed into a sob unashamed, 
"She can't," whispered Adorablest de- 
fiantly. 
"Here's the doctor coming from her 
room," spoke the nurse, shaken by the 
boy's despair. "Talk to him, captain." 
"She can't die, doctor." The lad faced 
him wrathfully. "She's too game. And 
too necessary. And too full of life." He 
choked; went on. "I've got to leave with 



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"I asked you to show me Colonel \\'arrington, the new secretary of \Var.n-Page 628. 


YOLo LXX\'III.-4ó 


633 



634 


.'\UTUl\IN ROSES 


my ship at midnight, doctor. I can't, by 
any means, stay on. I've got to be out 
of here in ten minutes. 'Von't you give 
me hope to help me leave her?" 
The doctor, his wise, kind eyes on the 
distracted face, only laid a hand on the 
bov's arm. 
"You won't? You won't?" Adora- 
blest cried. "Oh, damn everything." 
He dropped into a chair by a table and 
flung out his arms, and his head fell be- 
tween them, and he cried out loud like a 
little child. 
The doctor put an arm around the 
broad shoulders. "1\ly dear boy," he 
said. "1\1y dear boy, I wish I might give 
you hope. She may live a day possibly," 
he said, "for her vitality is amazing, but 
I think-J think to-night." 
Rudolph got up, mopped his poor face 
with no attention to doctor or nurse. He 
swayed, standing before them. "I've got 
a letter of hers," he began, stammering 
with the effort for control. "It's to be 
sent if-when-" 
" Yes," said the doctor. 
"I'm off in three hours. I'll be heaven 
knows where. Shall I send it to-night, 
d-doctor? " 
"Yes," nodded the doctor. 
"I'm g-going in there?" 
The doctor nodded again. "It can't 
hurt her, now." 
Five minutes, and the boy stumbled 
out half blind, dazed, to meet Yvonne 
with scarlet eyes in the hall, who kissed 
his hand and gave him his hat. And then 
somehow the officer of the United States 
went back and did his duty. 


The secretary of war had been a way on 
the President's yacht. There was mail 
when he got back to his office which had 
not been sent on. An envelope was ad- 
dressed in a handwriting which he did not 
know, but he caught the circle of blotty 
letters of the postmark and opened it 
quickly, flapping over to the signature. 
Copperthwaite, his secretary, attentive, 
waiting, saw without looking that he slid 
the sheets back into the envelope and put 
the letter into an inner pocket; he saw 
also, being observing, that the secretary 
of war was agitated. \\nich was not his 
affair. The special letter did not get to 
be taken out of that pocket for half an 
hour, and then a hard-pressed official 


might count on fifteen minutes alone. 
What he read was as follows: 


"Dear AIr. Secretary. If you ever read 
this I shall be dead. So I'm as free as a 
bird to say what I choose. I'm ill, and I 
have a something-tells-you by which I 
think that I'm to be very ill. I couldn't 
settle comfortably beyond without your 
knowing what you meant to me, 1\laybe 
you do know. 1\faybe it isn't possible 
that one personality could so draw an- 
other and so hold it without knowing. I 
know nothing of your life; I was tied. 
I hadn't a right to that state of mind. 
I put you outside my thoughts. And 
found you at the core of them. As if you 
were the air and I had to breathe you. 
You were there. Before I opened my 
eyes mornings. In the middle of busi- 
ness- At night. Your big shoulders- 
the right one against mine at the play. I 
was conscious of it all the time. What 
am I writing? But I'm dead, you know. 
Dead as Cheops when you read this. I 
can say what pleases me, and it pleases me 
to tell you. You'll see I couldn't be en- 
gaged to somebody else with you- So 
after I'd clawed and bitten to be free of 
you for months and you wouldn't budge, 
I broke my engagement. I'm free now to 
dream. Do you remember the people in 
that play-'Outward Bound'? How real 
they were, how exactly as they had made 
themselves to be year after year on earth? 
I've insisted that I'll be dead, but I won't. 
I'll be like that, going on much as I am 
now, so that, however things are, you'll be 
in my heart, And I'm guessing that 
some day out there I'll look up and see 
you standing by me, with the held-in- 
leash smile and the grim, wistful mouth, 
and, somehow, inscrutably, it will be all 
right. The Bon Dieu will manage. So 
in this letter I come to you out of the 
shadows, not dead, only outward bound." 
The signature. 


Three months after this letter was re- 
ceived there was a meeting of governors 
of many States in 'Vashington. The 
great of the land were asked here and 
there to meet the visiting dignitaries, and 
on an evening, in a drawing-room, Gov- 
ernor and 1\frs. Seymour found the secre- 
tary of war. Polite and bromide re- 
marks were made, with, however, a feel- 



;\[ "1'( \f
 ROSES 


ing not bromide, for these were real peu- 
pIe and thought well of each other. 
"Aren't we going to lure you to our 
country soon again?" the governor in- 
quired. "If I cook up a political crisis 
won't you come and toboggan about it? 
Our garden's quite as nice in winter as in 
summer. l\Irs. Seymour does bonfires 
and lanterns and hot food in it. Also 
drinks. On top of a bit of stiff exercise. 
But I can't hold out hopes of l\Iiss Barton 
this time. I remember you liked her." 
The face of the secretary of war was a 
controlled face. :l\Irs. Seymour wondered 
if he really went pale. And why. 
"She's gone, l\Iiss Barton," the gov- 
ernorwent on regretfully. "'Yemiss her." 
'Yarrington's eyes flashed angrily. He 
stared at the governor. 
"Y ou know," l\Irs. Seymour took up 
the thread, "Isabel Barton had a severe 
illness. They thought she was dying; 
gave up hope. And then, in a surprising 
way, she rallied. But the minute she was 
able she went away, with only her maid, 
and left no address for anybody. She's 
simply dropped out. ' She'll come back 
sometime,.but meanwhile it's a grieyance. 
She ought to let us know." 
The secretary was staring at :Mrs. Sey- 
mour in a queer way. It was embarrass- 
ing, almost rude. She had said nothing 
out of the common; merely she had told 
him casual news of a casual acquaintance 
of his, a friend of hers. She decided, not 
being an inquisitive person, that the secre- 
tary was tired and could not focus on 
small talk. "How are you, yourself?" 
She spoke with friendliness. "Xot work- 
ing too hard for your country, I hope?" 
Warrington certainly was odd. "She's 
alive," hé said in a hard voice. And said 
no more. 
" Alive? Oh!- Isabel. Yes indeed, but 
I wish I knew where," answered :\Irs. 
Sevmour. "Nice of vou to take an in- 
te;est. I'll tell her 
 when I see her." 
The waves of the sea of society swept 
them apart. 


Three weeks later. Yenice. Hotel 
Europa. The old Palazzo Giustiniani 
sitting where it has sat for a thousand 
years, dreaming into the glitter of the 
Grand Canal. Outside, sunshine and 
rippling water; gondolas and launches and 
water craft by the hundred gliding past; 


635 


inside at a corner table in the dining-room 
Isabel Harton poring over the bill of fare 
for lunch; Amadeo, the head waiter, by 
her side, recommending. 
"Si, si, signora. La signora parla ben' 
l'italiano. Oggi il piatto speziale è-" and 
the rest. 
A shadow across the printed card; some 
one halted close by her table; this hotel 
was getting too crowded; tourists stand- 
ing about waiting for a table! The 
shadow did not move. Isabel tossed up 
her head, her eyes. And her eyes were 
clamped as if by a vise to gray, unstirring 
eyes, which held them as if never, never 
were they to be let go. Amadeo glanced 
from one to the other, and slipped out of 
the picture. 
"Go home!" whispered Isabel, turning 
a slow red. "Oh, go home!" 
Warrington sat down. "I've just ar- 
rived," he said. "I can't go home yet. 
"'nen I do you're going with me." 
"No!" She flung it back with an effort 
at conviction. "I won't have you chival- 
rous. At me. Sacrificing yourself. I 
came six thousand miles- I mean three. 
Or ten. I came millions of miles. I 
didn't leave any address. 'Vhy should 
you hunt me to earth, when I don't want 
you? \Vhen I tried so to lose myself?" 
"On this planet," remarked the quiet 
voice, "you won't lose yourself so I won't 
find you." 
Isabel tried to hold her face quiet, to be 
decent and possible to the view of the 
interested Americans at the next table. 
Warrington went on. giving not one con- 
tinental for the Americans at the next 
table. 
"Don't you want me?" he inquireà. 
There was no answer. '" Chivalrous at' 
you!" He shook with sudden low laugh- 
ter; his whole face lighted the way she re- 
membered. " 'Chivalrous! Sacrificing!' 
The last wav I am is chivalrous. I'm 
a lot of other things, if you want to 
know. I'm happy, happy. I've been 
looking for you all my life." His eyes 
were rivets of gray brilliancy. "I knew 
I'd found you the first day; that play, 
'Outward Bound,' settled it. Your shoul- 
der- Your mind, catching thoughts by 
the same handle as mine. Then- T ommv 
told me you were engaged. But-now if 
vou think you're going to lose me, know- 
Ing what I know, you're mistaken." 



636 


AUT{Tl\l
 ROSES 


"Y ou don't know a thing. I was 
dotty. I didn't mean a word of it. I had 
typhoid and was raving. And yóu taunt 
me !" 
"Taunt-!" Delighted laughter 
caught him, lighted him, once again. 
" Raving! You've raved once too often. 
I've got the letter. It hasn't been three 
inches from me since it came. I'll hold 
you to the last word. I'll-" 
" Don't. You can't talk that way. 
People are looking." 
"Perfectly true. No place for us." 
He stood up and his eyes of a soldier shot 
orders. Amadeo was on the spot. 
"The signore has not lunched?" 
"Yes. No. I don't know"; the signore 
considered; an astonishing bit of paper 
slid to Amadeo's not reluctant fingers. 
"Grazie. Afitle graziel" So Amadeo. 
"I'll be-we'll be back here for dinner. 
Save this table. We like it." The si- 
gnore, with that, grinned at Amadeo out 
of all proportion, and stood back to let the 
signora pass. 
"\'ny should I go without my lunch?" 
demanded Isabel in the hall. ., Cave 
man. Bully. Never was I held up and 
beaten down like this before." 
"Varrington stopped short, laughed a 
little. "I'm a brute beast," he said peni- 
tently. "Go back; you're hungry; I'll 
wait." 
Isabel was. helpless before the sudden 
humility. She shook her head. A. touch, 
light and strong, was on her arm. She 
caught her breath and stood trembling. 
His shoulder at the play; his hand now, 
guiding her as they came out. All that 
had happened over and over in her 
dreams, but here, now, real, always. His 
eyes answered her thought; he under- 
stood. 
., Good for your lines to go without 
lunch anyhow," he remarked cold-blood- 
edly, pulling up emotionalness with a 
strong hand. "Come out in one of those 
gondola things; dozens outside." 
Isabel, dazed, proceeded rather un- 
steadily through the old, high doorway of 
the Giustinianis, and down steps of which 
the last two were awash, and, not noticing 
such small matters, set her gray-shod and 
silver-buckled feet before her and walked 
straight into the Adriatic Sea. Not very 
far; only the buckled gray shoes. An ex- 
clamation from the liveried boat-porter, 


then a quick grip, a grip of a strong hand 
already familiar and dear; she was back 
on terra firma. As firm as it grows in 
Venice. The porter was the only person 
who said anything, and that was in 
Italian; till, after a gondola was backing 
out of the anchored fleet on its tortuous 
way to them, there was a tentative mur- 
mur about" dry shoes." 
"Just one more bullying word-" 
Isabel looked up with a quiver of laughter 
and then: "I never wear dry shoes. I 
always walk off the steps. I prefer my 
feet wet." 
The distressed porter was holding the 
dressy little gangway with particular care 
from the steps to the long black craft for 
the feet that had just been in the sea, that 
were preferred wet. 
"I like 'em wet too," agreed "Varring- 
ton, staring down with appealing mas- 
culine helplessness. 
Isabel's pulse executed one more jump. 
Only Adorablest had ever known, before, 
the moment to stop coddling. It was a 
miracle; this strange man understood all 
around the clock. V nderstood how it 
tickled her sense of humor to have him dis- 
regard her lunch; how it pleased her pro- 
foundly to have him become cold-blooded 
when emotion was getting too thick; how 
big tips, if tipping must be, seemed to her 
comfortable and seemly; and now-not to 
bother if she did catch cold; not to nag! 
Everything he did was startlingly right. 
So: 
. ., What did you come to Europe for?" 
The gondola was sliding out into the 
incredibly vivid traffic of the Grand 
Canal. They were side by side on scarlet 
cushions of carved and gilded tall black 
oak seats; a red carpet lay beneath their 
feet, and a strip of lovely black carving 
ran along the inside of the boat. This 
had been evidentlv the water-car of some 
great lord before it descended to business; 
the finishings were exquisite and it was 
still well kept. The cushions were clean 
and the gunwale brass shone like gold. 
"'What did you come to Europe for?" 
Out of depths of joy she asked it with rep- 
rehensible rudeness, as a woman will do 
sometimes when she isn't sure. And yet 
is sub-sure. But can't, for her life, let 
down all the barricades, not knowing- 
not knowing if it is indeed thf' king about 
to enter. "\Vhat did you come for?" 



AlTTU
I:\f ROSES 



 

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And she got her answer as straight as he 
could fire it at her. 
"I came to ask you to be my wife." 
Silence. All the world holding its 
breath. Around them the stir and the 
joyousness of a thousand boats going up 
and down past the long rows of imme- 



 
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637 


forbore to tell them, in gutteral Venetian, 
which one was Browning's palace, and 
which the Spanish ex-king's, and where 
the Princess de Polignac spent her win- 
ters, They were as alone as in a forest. 
The deep tones of the gondolier sent out a 
heart-rending call, which probably meant 


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The low, wide seat of a gondola, backs to the gondolier. is as safe a place to make )O\"e in public 
as ever has been arranged. 


morial palaces; voices calling; bustle and 
bedlam of an excursion steamer drawing 
into a wharf; plashing of waves under 
great oars of gondolas; long weird cries of 
gondoliers as they passed or turned into 
piccoli canali. All this stir and tumult of 
the world's sea-city of a bright afternoon. 
Yet silence. All the earth keeping silence 
before the supreme moment of these two. 
With a thousand eyes around, his hand 
held hers on the red cushion between 
them; the strong grip hurt her fingers, and 
she loved the hurt. The low, wide seat 
of a gondola, backs to the gondolier, is as 
safe a place to make love in public as ever 
has been arranged. Quite accustomed, 
the Italian at the oar took no interest in 
what was not his business, and somehow 


"left," or maybe ,. right. .. It was a gay 
boatload of the interested Americans, 
now still more interested, who passed 
close; the two did not see them. 
,. "Till you?" 
His voice seemed to have been familiar 
and dear all her days. Out of a reeling 
brain she fished up stammering words. 
"Vou don't-don't know me," she whis- 
pered. "You're quite mad. You've never 
seen me but twice. I-I mav be a devil. 
I am," How could a man l(;ok so hard? 
,. And anyhow you're doing it to--to be 
noble. Because-you're chivalrous. _\TId 
-I'm in your power." 
An impatient jerk of the proudly set 
head. "If you say 'chivalrous' again-" 
Then: "It's too silly. As for being in my 



638 


AUTUMN ROSES 


power- 1 wish you were. Do you know 
what would happen? I'd carry you off 
in this very boat to the American consul, 
and we'd be married in an hour. Will 
you? " 
She disregarded that, for all the cold 
shiver of happiness that caught her. 
"How did you know 1 was here?" 
"Tommy Ferguson, of course. The de- 
partment got his address. 1 talked to 
him in California." 
Her eyes widened. Talked to Adora- 
blest-California! "How did you know 
1 wasn't dead?" 
"The Seymours; 1 ran into them. Any 
more information needed?" 
"Yes. How do 1 know-you'd be- 
Himself? " 
The entire traffic of the Grand Canal, 
of Venice, of the world once more halted 
for a second. Then Warrington spoke 
very gently-and the cosmos swung on. 
"1\1 y belovedest," he said, "you're taking 
a risk. But I'll give my life to keep you 
from regretting it." 
Suddenly-barricades all down-lower 
the flag-clear the way for the king! She 
turned her face, and the look in it was 
such as all the populace of Venice could 
not mistake, and she neither knew nor 
cared. "Don't you know," she asked 
softly, "don't you know, 0 you stupid, 
that there's no risk for me? That you've 
been the only manalways-only-1 didn't 
know you were there. And if there's any- 
thing you want me to do-any little thing 
like dying for you or marrying you-I'd 
rather-rather-" The stumbling words 
stopped. 
"Say it," the man ordered. "1 can't 
do without it." 
"I'd rather-do anything-you want 
than-eat," finished the passionate sen- 
tence with a bump. 
\Varrington, almost crying with sudden 
suppressed laughter, caught up her hand, 
before Venice, and held it against his 
mouth. 
"Then," he said swiftly, "since you'll 
do "-his voice broke a little-" anything 
-1 want-will you let me tell this blessed 
I talian to step on the juice and make for 
the consul's?" He turned his head 
toward the gondolier, holding her hand 
fast. 
But: "Oh, no," laughed Isabel trem- 
blingly. '" This is so sudden!' I won't. 


1 want-to be engaged-to you-a little. 
J want a new dress. And we couldn't do 
it like that, like a shot out of a gun, 1 
don't believe." 
"Likely not," agreed the secretary of 
war. "But we're not youngsters; we 
ought not to delay and delay. It's quite 
a while now we've been engaged." And 
they broke into happy laughter. "It's 
not so bad being engaged a day or two," 
he conceded. 
"A day or two nothing!" She went on 
in a halting, breathless way. "You know 
-Christmas roses? They come-out 
from under-dead leaves. Snow, some- 
times. They're lovely-more than-fat 
June flowers. Whi te-unexpected-pink 
flame tips. They thrill-you." She 
stopped, her eyes questioning. 
" Yes," the secretary of war answered 
attentively. Then in his controlled, 
quiet voice, but halting a bit, he also: 
"From under-dead leaves. White flowers 
-flame-tipped. Love. Ours." 
"1\Iaybe blooming through snow, 
even?" whispered Isabel. 
"They will," he assured her. Christ- 
mas roses. "Ours will, always." 
It was two weeks later when the little 
Taormina, the only boat on which they 
could get passage, steamed out of Naples 
Bay. On the strip of forward deck, what- 
ever its name may be, stood 1\1rs. War- 
rington, of three days, waiting for the cen- 
tral personality of the solar system, gone 
now to see about deck-chairs and dining- 
room seats. There were only a dozen or 
two first-class passengers; it was like 
crossing on one's yacht. And in a mo- 
ment he was there beside her, the central 
personality, and they were silent a breath 
of time, searching each the face of the 
other for an assurance that this thing, 
beyond earthly happiness, could be true. 
It was hard to adjust to it as a common- 
place. 
Then: "Yvonne is unpacking," he said, 
"and we're not at the captain's table, and 
the chairs are in the corner you specified. 
Everything's right; we're passing Sor- 
rento; Capri's close; we're sailing out 
fast." He stopped for a second, then 
caugh t her fingers in his hard grip, and the 
grim, wistful controlled mouth twisted 
with difficult words of emotion. "Every- 
thing's right; we're sailing out fast; to- 
gether; outward bound." 



Mrs. Arnold's Smile 


BY .l\IcCREA DY Hl
STOX 
.\uthor of "\Yrath," "Dottie," etc. 


ILLUSTRATIO
S BY JOHN S. CCRRY 


wn-Q
)o.o
W HE peace boom was at 
X

X its height when I went 
1 T r to New lIIanchester, so 
. ". 
. one of the under-secre- 
. 
 I g. taries of the Chamber 

 
 of Commerce drove 
Ä
1Ç1Ä me over the city to 
show me what it of- 
fered as a place to live. That first after- 
noon I saw the new pumping-station, the 
new high school, the new boulevards, the 
new motor works, the new hotel, the new 
theatres, and many other marks of growth 
and prosperity-all new. But when I sat 
down that night in my room in the new 
hotel to write to my wife and prepare her 
mind for moving to New lVlanchester, of 
all the things I had seen the only one that 
I remembered vividly and with curiosity 
was the smile worn by a woman sitting on 
a porch on a street the name of which I 
had forgotten. I sat over the page of 
hotel writing-paper with that smile be- 
fore me. It was that kind. On the face 
of a woman of middle age it demanded an 
explanation. 
As finding a suitable home in N ew 
Ian- 
chester immediatelv was out of the ques- 
tion, so rapidly håd the thriving indus- 
tries attracted new families, I decided to 
ask my wife to spend the summer at an 
Eastern resort with the children. Looking 
about then for an agreeable place to stay, 
and pursuing the address of a possible 
rooming-house, I had my second contact 
with that smile. It was the woman her- 
self who received me and led me to the 
room in which I slept for the next two 
months. I recognized her instantly by her 
smile. Her name was l\Irs. Caleb Arnold. 
l\Ir. ,Arnold was an insurance salesman, 
a man of about fifty-five, tall and spare, 
who seemed to spend most of his time 
slipping in and out of business places in 
which he buttonholed clerks and minor 


officials with the contents of a bulky, 
frayed pocketbook from which pamph- 
lets and tables of figures were forever 
falling, to be pawed at on the floor and re- 
covered by clumsy, large-knuckled fingers 
that were never clean. He seemed to be- 
long to all of the to\\î1'S luncheon and 
dining clubs, and there were a great many, 
for the popular passion for speeches which 
swept the nation during and just after the 
war had caused a weedy growth of so- 
cieties the principal object of which was 
to meet, eat a hotel luncheon as quickly 
as possible, and listen to some local or 
visiting celebrity declaim a message. 
This was the heyday of boosting; and 
Caleb Arnold was a high priest of the new 
cult of exciting civic pride. That he was 
a failure in his personal endeavors was not 
a hindering inconsistency; successes and 
failures alike could and did boost. It was 
numbers that counted, and nobody was 
barred because he himself had not found 
New l\Ianchester profitable. 
If 
Irs. Arnold was eating a slice of 
bread and butter at the kitchen-table 
while her husband was down-town con- 
suming with marked gusto a chicken-and- 
mushroom patty and clapping his soiled 
hands after a prominent bore, she did not 
show that she resented the situation. She 
smiled all the time. She had the most 
beatific smile I had ever seen; and it 
lighted her face, the matured, experi- 
enced face of a woman of fifty, to some- 
thing suggesting beauty. People I came 
to know in the neighborhood talked about 
l\Irs. Arnold's smile. She was the model 
wife and the contented woman. 
"There's an ideal couple for you. No 
frills; no extravagances. Don't even keep 
a car. Good church members. And .Mr. 
Arnold is a great booster for New :\lan- 
chester. Now, it e"oerybody was as loyal 
as Caleb Arnold-" 


639 



640 


l\IRS. ARNOLD'S Sl\IILE 


Talk ran like that among the men. 
\Yomen would say: 
"Dear 1\Irs. Arnold is so happy; she 
just radiates it. Now, if some of our 
younger women were as contented and as 
faithful as she is; just stays at home and 
goes to church. She doesn't even belong 
to the Centennial Club. She's an exam- 
ple to us all." 
New 1\Ianchester was a large town of 
many communities that had been formed 
as divisions were added by real-estate 
promoters-realtors they were begin- 
ning to be called when I first knew the 
place. Each community was organic, 
with its own society and usually its small 
trading centre, with a drug-store or mar- 
ket that as often as not was the clearing- 
house for neighborhood information. In 
Aster Place, where I roomed, ]vIrs. Arnold 
and her smile were topics of conversation 
among all the people, as was Caleb's zeal 
for his native city. Both 1\Ir. and Mrs. 
Arnold were definitely classified and cata- 
Jogued as excellent citizens and happy 
folk, and any other version of either of 
them would have brought instant resent- 
ment. 
After my original acute interest in 1\1rs. 
Arnold, finding no substantial ground for 
a certain scepticism that I had felt upon 
moving in, I accepted the neighborhood 
estimate of the couple and speculated no 
more about them, even though when I 
passed through the darkened hall unex- 
pectedly one day I saw Arnold turn from 
his wife rudely and heard his curt refusal 
of a petition for money. She suspected 
that I had registered an impression of a 
family scene, for as I went up the stairs 
she turned toward me from the shadows 
below an almost roseate glance, intending, 
I knew, to disarm me of my suspicions. I 
concluded that I was too inquisitive and 
decided that the New :l\Ianchester people, 
having known the Arnolds for years, were 
correct in their appreciation of their vir- 
tues and in their conclusions about their 
congeniali t y. 
It was not until well into the summer, 
when my stay in the house was almost at 
an end, that I had anything definite on 
which to base a new estimate of the re- 
lationships existing in that house. It 
carne at half past two one morning and 
found me sitting up in bed listening 


strainedly as one will when sounds are de- 
feated by walls and distance, yet carrv 
the foreboding note of piteous human suf- 
fering and dark danger. 
The room where the Arnolds slept was 
down a narrow hall from mine, three doors 
distant. They were, evidently, having a 
hideous quarrel, which 1\frs. Arnold was 
hoping to suppress, stifling her own crying 
and trying to still the abominable abuse 
of her husband. Stillness ensued sud- 
denly, to be broken presently by two un- 
mistakable sounds, a blow and a fall. I was 
out of bed and down the hall instantly, 
trembling with fury. I seized the door- 
knob and twisted it to enter; but it did not 
turn, and no further sound came from in- 
side the room. Then I heard a snore, 
obviously simulated by this brutish man, 
but a snore nevertheless. He had de- 
tected my hand on the door-knob. The 
pretended snore' stopped me, giving me 
time to visualize the disadvantage of my 
position, outside the locked bedroom of 
two whose private concerns were not 
mine. Besides, I could not prove my 
convictions. The episode evidently was 
over; and I might have been mistaken. 
I saw myself standing there with my 
hand on the knob--a rather silly picture. 
There was nothing for me to do but go 
back to bed and try to forget the inci- 
dent. 
Arnold appeared below when I did 
next morning and ambled along beside 
me under the maples toward the street- 
car line; and as we walked he talked 
piously of home life in New 1\1anchester, 
hoping that I would soon find a vacant 
house and bring my family to stay. 
"It's a great city for homes. Sixty per 
cent of the families here own their 
houses. \Ve're a great church town, too. 
You wouldn't believe there were sixty- 
eight churches here, would you? New 
1\Ianchester is as strong on schools as any 
city in the State, too. I want you to come 
to our Bible class some Sundav soon as 
my guest. \Ve've got a contestron; every 
member bring a member with the losing 
side buying the winners a dinner. \Ve're 
out to double our enrolment. Y ou'lllike 
our teacher; he's a great talker. I've 
been a 
ember sixteen years now. I hope 
you and your wife'll join our church." 
He was still talking about the moral 



1\IRS. AR
OLD'S S
IILE 


benefits of life in New l\Ianchester when 
my car came along. 
I was impatient to see l\Irs. Arnold 
that day. I was certain that she would 
show the marks of cruelty; but when I 
went up the porch steps late in the after- 
noon she was sitting in the swing, placid 



 '-... 
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6-H 


when he learned where I was staying. 
"Did you ever see anything like that 
woman's smile? Arnold isn't any whirl- 
wind at the insurance business, but he's 
devoted to his wife and he's a loyal 
booster for the city. It does a fellow good 
just to see her and realize what she's been 


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The principal object . . . was . , . to eat a hotel luncheon as quickly as possible, and listen to some 
local or visiting celebrity declaim a message.-Page 639. 


and contemplative. I had intended to 
talk to her, to give her a chance to ex- 
plain, if she suspected that I had over- 
heard her weeping in the night; but her 
look of composure and content as she sat 
there in her blue gingham dress, the eve- 
ning paper on her lap, sent me on up to 
my room disturbed and puzzled. 
It developed that the two Arnold chil- 
dren were dead. The son had been killed 
in action the year before and the daughter 
had been a victim of the great epidemic 
within a month after the arrival of the 
'" ar Department's telegram. Knowledge 
of those devastations in ::\lrs. Arnold's 
life gave her habitual mien a touch of the 
heroic to the neighbors. 
"There's a case where the husband 
and wife save each other," one of the New 
:Manchester bankers said to me one day 


through, with the loss of her children and 
all. .Makes a fellow think better of 
marriage. " 
She had the photographs of the children 
side by side on an oval marble-topped 
table in the front room down-stairs, one of 
the few parlors that survived the era of 
living-rooms bulging with stuffed tapestry 
davenports and ann chairs. The room 
was kept shaded-
Irs. Arnold told me the 
sun would fade the carpet; and I pene- 
trated it only once. That time I blundered 
in, having taken a parcel at the door; and 
there I found l\Irs. Arnold in the twilight, 
with her children's pictures in her hands. 
She was gazing down at them fixedly. She 
heard me and turned around, and at that 
moment I was sure I was about to see her 
face in repose or desolation. 
She was not to be surprised, however, 



6.12 


l\IRS. ARNOLD'S Sl\IILE 


for whatever her expression in contem- 
plation of her dead children she turned 
to me, over her shoulder, her famous 
smile. I laid the parcel on the mantel and 
backed out, wondering. 
That very night I was roused again by 
her low moaning, and again I started up, 
only to return, angry and puzzled, to my 
bed when the sounds of distress ceased, 
I was so disturbed by the situation that 
I made up my mind to leave the next day 
and go to a hotel for the month that was 
left before my family was expected. I 
decided I could not endure the baffiing 
and sinister contradictions of the situa- 
tion any longer. The household was be- 
coming too much a part of my daily 
thinking. I was impelled toward break- 
ing through to a solution, and when I was 
away from l\Irs. Arnold I imagined it 
wouid be easy to do so. Then, when I 
came within her range, I was repelled, 
held at a distance. The affairs of the 
Arnold house were, flatly, none of .my 
business. I was justified on my own ac- 
count in leaving. 
I had a hard time finding :1\Irs. Arnold 
to tell her I was about to go. I groped 
around the house for some time before I 
discovered her. The" place was larger 
than it looked from the street, running 
hack through a series of rooms which 
evidently had been tacked on by some 
owner or owners as they were 
eeded, 
without regard to co-ordination with the 
original building. The house had been 
the home of 1\1r5. Arnold's father and it 
had passed to her. I felt her husband 
had never acquired such a place by his 
own efforts, and so I had gratified my 
curiosity by inquiries. \Vhen I came upon 
her in one of those rear rooms, in which 
the furniture and fittings seemed to have 
decayed through lack of care, she dropped 
her smile for the first time in my experi- 
ence with her. I paid her two weeks' rent 
in advance, and she stood there with the 
check in her hand-soiled, for she had 
been trying to clean the room. But her 
smile was gone only a moment, and when 
I said something about how easy it would 
be for her to get a new roomer, she as- 
sented brightly. Then she added in a 
moment: 
"But they all leave. They never stay 
much longer than you have." 


She looked at me steadily' as, if chal- 
lenging me to speak, to allude to my rea- 
son for going; and as I returned her look 
I felt pity and shame for moving. I knew 
that she knew why I was leaving. What 
I gathered from her surroundings in those 
lower rooms that had once been devoted 
to the pleasant occupations of living was 
that her life had stopped some years be- 
fore. She was in the control of the habits 
of a household drudge, cooking, dusting, 
moving furniture and old ornaments 
ahout; but she had ceased to feel what she 
was doing. \Vhat she did was without 
significance. 
I guessed that her reason for being had 
departed with her children, and that she 
was actually operating a kind of tread- 
mill that moved the machinery of a home 
for Caleb Arnold merely because he was 
labelled her husband. That was what I 
was sure of in the moment she was off her 
guard, without her smile. 
I turned and went out, leaving her 
standing there with my check between 
her fingers, a dusting-cloth drooping be- 
side her. Pausing in the dark entrance- 
hall, where the light came through red 
and blue panes beside the front door, I 
searched a small table where the letters 
of the day were usually found. The only 
piece of mail there was a typewritten 
postal card notifying Caleb Arnold nQt to 
fail to attend the annual outdoòr steak 
fry of the Bible class of which he was such 
an ardent member, 


The next day Arnold was struck by a 
motor-car, quite accidentally, a moment 
after he had left the weekly luncheon of 
the Chamber of Commerce. I heard about 
it much as I had heard about his wife's 
smile, for the accident and its peculiar 
result became immediately the town talk 
of the hour. 
Caleb was not killed. No bones were 
broken, and there was no blood. He and 
everybody who ran up as he was tossed 
against the curb thought he had been 
knocked down and stunned; and when a 
policeman examined him and saw he was 
apparently not hurt, he joked with him on 
his narrow escape. The policeman was a 
member of the Bible class, and it served 
him as humor to tell Mr, Arnold that the 
flower fund was nearly exhausted and 



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From a drawing by John S. Curry. 


He organized a mission Sunday-school a\\ay out on Pine Avenue 1.15t year and spent a good man} of his 
Sundays out there.-Page Ó4-J. 


643 



6
4 


IVIRS. ARNOLD'S Sl\HLE 


that Arnold had chosen a poor time to 
step in front of an automobile. The vic- 
tim had not a mark to show that he had 
been struck. But he was paralyzed. 
He could not move his legs or speak. 
He was taken home immediately in the 
police wagon, carried into the house, and 
up to his bed. On the journey up the 
stairs the bearers were preceded by Mrs. 
Arnold, who had been warned by the 
minister of her church, telephoned to 
instantly by one of those persons who 
always turn up to attend to such matters. 
All who described the home-going of 
Caleb Arnold-and many repeated the 
story to me because I had lived in the 
house-said the same thing. :Mrs. Ar- 
nold was a brave woman. She had 
greeted the paralyzed man with her com- 
radely, sympathetic smile, and it had 
never left her. She was a wonderful 
woman and an example to everybody. 
I went to see her, of course. She 
opened the door and led me up-stairs to 
where Caleb lay. He had been moved to 
a bedroom of one of the dead children, 
that of the son who had gone to the war. 
He was conscious and suffered no pain. 
He simply could not walk or speak, and, 
according to the doctor, there was nothing 
to do but wait and see. He might recover 
fully; he might, eventually, walk or creep 
about; or he might never move again. I 
went out as quickly as I dared. The 
tragic implications were those of a living 
death. Mrs. Arnold followed me to the 
porch and stood in the doorway with her 
hands knotted in her gingham apron. 
"I wanted to explain about the room 
the other day," she said. " You've 
seemed so close to me, for a stranger. I 
knew you'd leave when your family came 
on, but I wanted to keep you as long as I 
could. The rent from that room was all 
I've had to live on for a good while." 
She said it simply, looking up and down 
the pleasant street and contradicting all 
of the conventional ideas about the proper 
manner for a woman afflicted. She wore 
her smile. A neighbor passed, looked up, 
and said good morning, adding an inquiry 
about Caleb. l\lrs. Arnold returned the 
greeting cheerfully and said he was as 
well as could be expected. I knew what 
that neighbor would say: What a wonder- 
ful woman; what Christian fortitude. 


"He's been wanting to mortgage this 
house for the last year," she went on 
quietly. "It's my house and I've fought 
his touching it. If you heard anything at 
night while you were here, it was mostly 
about that. Of course, there were other 
things. He organized a mission Sunday- 
school away out on Pine Avenue last year 
and spent a good many of his Sundays out 
there. One night a woman came to the 
house. It seems as if she was the organist 
at the mission." 
She paused, seemed to be considering 
just how much she might say on that 
point. 
"I really thought," she went on, "that 
all of that sort of thing had stopped long 
ago. I kind of quit expecting it after the 
children died, anyway. Funny how a 
woman'll expect what she wants and 
imagine things are the way she thinks 
they ought to be. So when this woman 
came here looking for Caleb and .making 
threats, I was almost frantic; it was such a 
setback. I thought I was going to have 
to begin all over again with him." 
That was about enough on that score, 
evidently. She went on: 
"But our troubles have been mostly 
about .money. He was possessed to get 
his clutches on the house and borrow on it 
or sell it; and I wouldn't even discuss it. 
He would tell me how the town was boom- 
ing and how he could use this house as a 
starter for getting into the real-estate 
business. But I wouldn't listen. I want 
to keep the children's place. They were 
both born here and their things are here." 
She stopped. I didn't urge her further. 
She had yielded to some hidden impulse 
to unburden herself a little and that was 
enough fOl; me. She shook hands, asked 
me to come again sometime, and closed 
the door. 
The man who lived opposite was just 
backing his automoþile out of his garage, 
and motioned for me to get in if I was 
going down-town. 
"Pathetic," he commented gloomily, 
jerking a thumb toward the Arnold house, 
., I've known them for twenty years. 
Nice people. Devoted to one another. 
He'd have done anything for his wife, 
especially since they lost their children. 
And now they say he's paralyzed; can't 
speak or movec Terrible for that poor 




IRS. ARNOLD'S S:\tILE 


woman. 1\1 y wife and I have been in- 
tending to go and see them." 
He seemeò to enjoy enlarging on 1\lr. 
Arnold's misfortune and .1\lrs. Arnold's 
burden in choppy periods composed of 


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645 



ould end wit
 a fine hypothetical ques- 
tlon about an mcome from insurance. It 
seemed to be taken for granted that :Mr. 
Arnold, having been in insurance, must 
have been thoroughly protected, so the 


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She waits on :\Ir. Arnold hand and Cout, murnings, evenings, and Sundays.-Page 646. 


syrupy generalities. I was glad to get out 
of the car. 
At the club where many of the profes- 
sional men of New 1\lanchester lunched, 
Caleb Arnold's laying low was discussed 
over two or three noons. It brought the 
insurance men into consideration. l\Ien 
quizzed them over the coffee and cigars 
about indemnities for accidents that left 
their victims totally and permanently 
disabled. "Now, suppose I was walking 
back to my office and a cornice should 
fall on my head," one would begin, and 


talk could drift comfortably and rather 
aimlessly with men who were covered by a 
variety of expensive policies expatiating 
sagely upon the merits of their favorite 
forms. 
The doctors were drafted, too. Expert 
testimony on 1\1r. Arnold's chances of 
getting about was wanted. The talkers 
seemed to draw a feeling of having done 
their duty by the, ictim from discussing 
his case. And when the doctors, their 
cigars cocked toward the ceiling, would 
say, "Well, of course I haven't seen the 



646 


l\IRS. ARNOLD'S Sl\IILE 


case, but from what I've heard I should 
say his chances were about even," the 
groups in the lounge of the little club 
would separate for bridge or billiards 
with a sense of obligation fully discharged. 
I soon satisfied myself about the insur- 
ance on my next visit to the Arnold home. 
He had no accident policies and no sav- 
ings. An overdraft at one bank and a 
small note, due in three months, at an- 
other were the essential details of what 
amounted, practically, to insolvency. It 
passed through my mind that J\frs. Ar- 
nold might have to convert her house into 
cash. The neighbors, however, assumed 
that the Arnolds would be comfortable. 
The druggist of Aster Place said, as I 
waited for a car at his corner: 
"He's always been thrifty; a plain 
li\"er and a saver. And they have that 
house. It isn't as if they'd be broke." 


I was away from New l\lanchester for 
a month, getting my family ready to 
mO\"e, and three weeks passed after I 
came back before I could go to see Mrs. 
Arnold. I took early leave of the office 
one afternoon in the middle of October 
and drove out there. Caleb was seated on 
the porch in a comfortable rocking-chair 
and beside him was a stand on which were 
magazines, newspapers, and a tablet. He 
recognized me, of course, but he did not 
speak. Nodding, he fumbled at the tab- 
let, and in a moment had scrawled a 
message. 
"lVlrs. Arnold is down-town," he wrote. 
"She works at the freight-office now." 
He handed it to me and waited for me 
to reply. I started to write and then 
caught myself. Of course, he could hear 
perfectly. He looked clean and well kept. 
I sat with him a few minutes, receiving his 
pencilled messages and answering them in 
the careful way one drops into when talk- 
ing with the sick. I told him I would come 
back and bring him some new magazines 
and some cigars. 
"It's mighty hard at my age," he com- 
mented in writing as I was saying good-by. 
I did not understand whether he meant it 
was hard because he was old or considered 
himself young. Recalling what his wife 
had said about the angry descent of the or- 
ganist from Pine Avenue, I concluded that 
Caleb did not think of himself as aged. 


Getting him a glass of water, I cov- 
ered the lower rooms to the kitchen; and, 
going and coming, I was struck by the 
change in their appearance. They were 
cleaner, brighter, and more livable. Even 
the old parlor was different. It was open; 
the blinds were raised and it had an 
air of vitality and cheer. Certainly, the 
house was not mournful now, though be- 
fore it had given me the impression that 
it had been blighted. Mrs. Arnold some- 
how was managing to give it more atten- 
tion now than she had when her husband 
was well. I stood on the porch, looking 
back through the hall. Perhaps that was 
not it; perhaps what she did now, morn- 
ings and evenings, in addition to her work 
in the freight-station and in attendance on 
the invalid, was more effective. 
I turned to the man in the chair again. 
He wrote that he could get into the house 
in five minutes by holding on to things, 
but he could not speak and never would 
work again. He wrote that he was 
through; all he could do easily was to sit 
and read. 
"Poor J\Irs. Arnold," the woman next 
door said, hailing me as I started away. 
"She's such a good soul. She's so bright 
and cheery with all her troubles. Waits 
on l\1r. Arnold hand and foot, mornings, 
evenings, and Sundays. She's got a real 
nice job down at the freight-office, though. 
Clerical work. Gets ninety dollars a 
month, they say. I don't see how she ever 
does it, but she's never lost her smile a 
minute". Seems like it's a shame, though, 
for her to be gone all day and him just 
sitting there helpless. But I guess maybe 
they ain't as well fixed as everybody 
thought." 
I had a hard time finding l\lrs. Arnold 
at the freight-station. Such places al- 
ways seem arranged by an involved plan 
as baffling to laymen as it is clear and 
natural to railroad people. Dozens of 
clerks were to be seen by peering through 
windows marked for various steps in the 
process of sending and receiving goods; 
and they all seemed to be doing the same 
thing to stacks and sheaves of yellow and 
pink papers. I t was chilly on the plat- 
fonn from which I looked across a wooden 
sill, wide enough for truckmen to rest 
their corduroyed anns upon while they 
signed their names. 



1\iRS. ARNOLD'S srvnLE 


647 


The rooms were gloomy and none of the would soon strip her face of that smile; 
men and women insiòe looked very happy. the more quickly because she must begin 
I knew they were, probably. I had once and end every day with the nursing of her 
worked in railroad offices and had dis- mute and helpless husband. I thought, 
covered that if a person has the railroad here, at last, I shall see her as she really is. 


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"Ten dollars a month-it's the first moncy I've ever had of my own in my life."-Polge 648. 


feeling he can be as happy in a freight- 
office as anywhere else; but the railroad 
feeling is indispensable, and not eyery- 
body has it. One must be born with it or 
begin to acquire it very young; and so I 
was sceptical about l\Irs. Arnold. Poring 
over car numbers and bills of lading in a 
drafty, dark office, amid infinite detail, 
laborious reports, and irritating red tape, 


She came to meet me across a vast and 
dismal room, a room that carried the 
acrid scent of locomotive smoke. She had 
already taken on the air of the gray- 
headed woman clerk, thrusting a pencil 
through her sparse back hair and fidget- 
ing with the brown paper cuffs that were 
still strange enough to her to make her 
uncomfortable, Her features were yeiled 



648 


l\lRS. ARNOLD'S Sl\lILE 


by the twilight that usually pervades such 
places, and she was close to the window 
before I could distinguish her face with 
conviction. She reached above the open- 
ing on her side and turned on a bright 
electric lamp of the harsh mill type. The 
light flooded downward, revealing her face 
to me in every fine tracing. 
She still smiled. And the smile was 
genuine; there could be no doubting that. 
1 was immediately puzzled and embar- 
rassed. 
"I have just come from the house," I 
said. "]\;Ir. Arnold told me you were 
working here, and your next-door neigh- 
bor said you had a good position. Of 
course I am glad that it is good." 
"l\lrs. Simpson was very curious, and 
when I wouldn't give her the details, she 
fixed the salary herself. She probably 
told you what I am getting." 
I nodded. 
"\Vell, the wages are actually seventy 
dollars a month instead of the ninety she 
mentions to people. But Caleb thinks I 
am getting sixty. I thought it best to let 
him think that. I thought that at my 
time of life I was entitled to something of 
my own that I wouldn't have to account 
for. Ten dollars a month-it's the first 
money I've ever had of my own in my 
life." 
We confronted each other across the 
ledge. 
" Your house looks as if you are manag- 
ing to meet things; and your patient, I 
can see, lacks nothing. How about the 
work here-tedious? I have had some 
experience in offices like this." 
"I ought to think so. The girls who 
work here do, and they are always quit- 
ting. But I actually enjoy it. I love it. 
It's mine; and I'm let alone eight hours 
every day, six days a week. Nobody can 
take that from me. The house looks bet- 
ter because I'm free 'now. I have more 
energy now than I ever had, although I 
can't let on to anyone. I am not un- 
happy. " 


= 


"I expected your smile would be gone 
by this time. You know it made you 
famous in New ]\;Ianéhester." 
She looked' across my shoulder, think- 
ingc and did not answer immediately. 
"Caleb thinks it's put on now," she an- 
swered presently. "So does the preacher. 
So do the neighbors who come in. They 
think I'm a heroine now. But I'm not 
anything of the kin'd." 
"I can believe your smile isn't put on 
now. It looks like the real thing." 
"That's what it is. Don't you see how 
it is? The smile I wore around this town 
for thirty years, up till the time of Caleb's 
accident-that was false. It was the one 
that was put on. The one people notice 
now and talk about to each other-it's 
natura1." 
She paused and for a moment her face 
became grave. She laid a hand over one 
of mine as it lay on the seamed wooden 
counter. 
"I was sort of waiting for you to come 
back to town. I had an idea you had just 
about made up your mind how things 
were, but I wanted to let you know. 
With Caleb dumb and laid up, I can 
really smile now for the first time in 
years. And with people thinking I'm a 
heroine and all that, why, that gives me a 
chance to be happy without thinking how 
I look. Let them all go on feeling sorry 
for me and admiring my courage if they 
want to-I'm living my life at last." 
"Mrs. Arnold! Mrs. Arnold! Tele- 
phone! " The shrill, slightly quarrelsome 
voice of a girl clerk came to us from the 
room behind. 
" WelJ, I must get back to work; come 
and see us sometime." She withdrew a 
few steps among the array of desks. I 
started down the long, dusky platform 
toward the street. After I had gone a 
little distance I glanced back through the 
window into the lighted-office; and as I 
did so I thought Mrs. Arnold turned for an 
instant, raised a hand toward me in fare- 
well, and smiled, 


H 


ä: 



Bread and Stones 


BY CAROL PARK 
Author of "President Vergilius Alden Cook of Harmonia College" 


HE congregation rose. 
Doctor Hubert Daniel 
Gray, with uplifted 
hand, began the bene- 
diction: "May the 
Lord lift up His face." 
His voice, honeyed, 
soft-pitched, caressed 
the words. " May the Lord be with you 
and give you peace. Amen." 
The amen had scarcely left his lips 
when the organ (eighteen-thou sand-dollar 
gift of the Brandons in memory of their 
daughter), played by Jacques Fuller (five 
thousand dollars a year just for his church 
services), broke into a hearty recessional. 
Doctor Gray descended from his pulpit to 
greet the members of his congregation. 
Doctor Gray rather prided himself upon 
the way he had built up such personal 
contacts in the Sixth Street Church. The 
number of worshippers who stayed after 
service to exchange touch-and-go remarks 
with their pastor had grown steadily. 
Children came up in an eager line, receiv- 
ing-not as a reward, Doctor Gray in- 
sisted, but as a recognition-little greet- 
ing cards, adorned with wreaths and doves 
and sublimated by a Biblical quotation. 
(At the end of the church year, Doctor 
Gray gives a prize to the child with the 
largest number of cards. Last year, the 
little boy who won it had more cards than 
there had been church services,) Women 
with nodding plumes and lorgnettes, suf- 
ficiently sure of their social position to be 
able to withstand any whim of style, held 
his hand and allowed him to smile his 
Sabbath greeting into their eyes. 
Irs. 
Brandon, flushed by her weekly senti- 
mental orgy, told him how wonderful his 
sermon had been and invited him to din- 
ner Thursday night. Men in cutaways 
and gray trousers slapped him on the 
back and allowed only a sly" Do you re- 
member?" look to suggest the secret 
week-day pleasures they shared with him. 
Yes, Doctor Gray told himself, he had 
VOL. LXXVIII.-47 


built up his congregation into a live, 
socializing force. If he noticed at all that 
the young men and women, the college 
students, the professional men, the social 
workers, were falling off in attendance; 
or if he saw that those of them whom 
habit and need still brought to his weekly 
service hastened away without talking to 
him; or if he recalled their restless move- 
ments during his sermons; he dismissed 
his misgivings and made a mental note 
that he must organize a new society to 
bring the young folks together. 
Doctor Gray believed in organization. 
As he hurried to his study to exchange 
gown for overcoat, and thence to :Mr. 
Seaton's limousine, which was to carry 
him to the Sea tons' elaborate Sunday din- 
ner, he had his plans for the new society 
sufficiently well formulated so as to re- 
quire no further thought. 


II 


DOCTOR GRAY'S church, itself, is a 
happy tribute to the man's faculty for 
organization. When he came to it, eigh- 
teen years ago, it was a small congrega- 
tion worshipping fervently enough in an 
old, sadly neglected building. Doctor 
Henderson, whose death had left their 
pulpit vacant, had felt that pews and roofs 
were less important than spirit and soul; 
and his congregation, enthralled by their 
leader's personality, had been willing to 
accede to his opinion. A certain com- 
munity reputation for earnestness and 
even for aristocracy sustained them. But 
when it came to the point of choosing a 
successor, they became a ware of an un- 
dercurrent of feeling, never definitely ex- 
pressed. only rarely suggested, a dread of 
being called old-fashioned and retrogres- 
sive. 
Doctor Gray, through what seemed a 
ready facility of language and through 
references to contemporary religious and 
social conditions, was able in his trial ser- 
649 



650 


BREAD AND STONES 


mon to impress a sufficient number of 
influential board members to be called to 
the waiting pulpit. Their choice gave the 
congregation a sense of being progressive. 
As for the elements of earnestness and of 
aristocracy, Doctor Gray seized upon 
them as selling points to bring outsiders 
into his church and to build a bigger and 
better congregation. 
Mr. Brandon, the wealthy lawyer and 
politician, who found it more profitable to 
refuse than to accept nominations to of- 
fice; and Mr. Seaton, the equally wealthy 
manufacturer of bottle caps, known as the 
Man Behind the Mayor, were induced to 
take a more active interest in church af- 
fairs than could be manifested by the mere 
act of sending their children to Sunday- 
school and their wives to Sunday service. 
The congregation grew. At Doctor Gray's 
suggestion, Mr. Brandon was made chair- 
man of its board of trustees. There is 
some advantage in having well-known 
men at the head of any institution. Doc- 
tor Gray was aware of this fact and made 
the most of it. 11en, realizing the value 
of being able to call Mr. Brandon and 
1fr. Seaton "brother," joined the growing 
group. Women, hoping to sew aprons and 
drink tea with Mrs. Brandon and with 
Mrs. Seaton, flocked to church and brought 
their husbands with them. Only a few, a 
very few, of the oldest members failed to 
welcome this infusion of new blood. 
Doctor Gray was jubilant. He was now 
a religious force in the community. But 
he felt cramped by the material condi- 
tions about him. So, as the number of his 
members increased, his plans developed 
for an elaborate building to house his 
worshippers. A valuable site was bought, 
a money-raising campaign begun, and a 
building erected. 
It is a most impressive building, the 
subject for a series of post-card views. It 
contains a kitchen and dining-room for 
community dinners; a gymnasium and a 
swimming-pool; meeting-rooms; an audi- 
torium with a stage well equipped for the- 
atricals; and--oh, yes- a church for Sun- 
day services. The building is only five 
years old; but the church has just been 
redecorated. If the result is somewhat 
suggestive of the very newest and very 
loudest moving-picture palace, nobody 
but the most conservative element ob- 


jects. Possibly such an intention was 
in the mind of the building committee, of 
which Doctor Gray is naturally a member. 
"We must do what we can to get the 
young people to come" is the principle 
underlying most of his decisionsc 
In line with this policy, Doctor Gray 
chooses modern, vital subjects for his 
weekly sermonsc The latest play he has 
seen, the newest best-seller he has read, 
serves as his text. The exposition of his 
views is usually-well, interesting. 
For he has a naïve mind. Every intel- 
lectual idea impresses him with new won- 
der and each seems as great to him as any 
other. His fonnal education has been 
superimposed upon a background widely 
vacant of learning and of culture. Am- 
bition and energy enabled him to out- 
grow a family greatly impressed with the 
thought of having a son at university and 
seminary. The result of this combination 
is a willing receptivity, an eagerness to 
welcome Plato and Trine, Karl Marx and 
Henry Ford, Meredith and Kyne, St. 
Augustine, Roosevelt, Michael Angelo, 
and Carpentier within the same loving cir- 
cle of what he calls his mindc 
His inability to reject leads to curious 
concatenations in his sermons. A train of 
ideas must be followed laboriously and 
painstakingly to its end, regardless of 
what that end may be. The oratory 
which first impressed his hearers has not 
developed with age. Symbols and catch- 
words assume a greater importance than 
the ideas they represent. As a result, his 
sermons are a garbled mixture of plati- 
tudes and quotations, hurled into in- 
choate sentences, and decorated with 
studied phrases lik:e: "glorious fulness of 
womanhood," "dedication in purse and 
person," "somehow, somewhere, some- 
when." Doctor Gray has one particularly 
pathetic discourse in which he is wont to 
tell the Lord of the death of some young 
child. His reference to the tiny bud 
plucked so early before it had a chance to 
flower in the noonday sun, but gathered 
to a perfumed spot in its Father's lovelier 
garden, invariably moves some of the 
mourners seeking the consolation of 
religion. 
Some few of his members are able to 
sit quietly through his sermons only by 
listening for words that show the influence 



BREAD AND STONES 


of the crossword puzzle. But Mrs. An- 
trim, whose diamond necklace is the boast 
of the congregation, whose husband made 
his second million rather suddenly after 
the prohibition amendment, and whose 
own schooling stopped at the eighth grade, 
thinks his sermons are" just lovely," and 
tells him so. 
"I am so glad, my dear lady, that they 
bring you help and-may I be bold 
enough to say?-inspiration," is Doctor 
Gray's invariable reply. 


III 


AN active church cannot fulfil its pur- 
pose simply by having services on one day 
of the we.:k. The Sixth Street Church is 
a very centre of activity and so has a num- 
ber of groups deriving incentive from it, 
and from Doctor Gray. 
Its Sabbath-school, for example, is quite 
wonderful. Little boys and girls, more 
or less protestingly dressed in Sunday 
best, are sent with maid or family chauf- 
feur to the school. (The lines of waiting 
machines are quite impressive.) Doctor 
Gray is supervisor, and for superintendent 
to assist him in working out the details of 
pedagogy and of routine he has chosen the 
principal of one of the city schools. To- 
gether, they have built up a fine organiza- 
tion. An electric bell has been installed 
to sound the end of periods. Volunteer 
teachers brought up in the tradition of the 
school and the congregation have been 
replaced by others, "paid teachers," Doc- 
tor Gray says with no unworthy pride, 
"over whom we have control. They are 
all trained in pedagogy." An elaborate 
system of fire-drills
 too, has been arranged 
and a most efficient method of recording 
lateness and absence. 
The school has been organized into a 
self-governing body, with mayor, council, 
party platforms, and elaborate election 
campaigns. This year it was found neces- 
sary to limit the amount of money a can- 
didate might spend in his campaign for 
office. Because religion is active and can- 
not neglect the body, there is a school 
basket-ball team, which competes with 
other teams; and this spring there is to 
be a baseball nine. Things are done in 
no half-hearted way; so there has been 
chosen a full corps of cheer leaders. 


651 


The first cheer they submitted to the 
school Doctor Gray objected to. It ran: 


"Rah, rah, rah, 
Sis boom bah, 
Hot dog, hot dog, 
Bow, wow, wow. 
Our Sunday-sehool's 
The eat's meow." 


His objections, however, were met by 
substituting "our basket-ball team" for 
"our Sunday-school." One morning a 
month the closing assembly is devoted to 
practising school songs and cheers. 
If the student-government announce- 
ments, if the lengthy directions to children 
and teachers, if the discussions of game 
schedules take up much time from the 
religious assembly, there is still sufficient 
time left for a short talk by Doctor Gray 
on his last trip to the Holy Land and for 
the salute to the flag. "Our country is 
our religion" Doctor Gray announces 
beamingly as the school color-guard ad- 
vances to the platform. 
The children in their franker moments 
openly declare a preference for the mov- 
ing-picture version of the Ten Command- 
ments and for Charlie Chaplin over Doc- 
tor Gray. But, soothed by occasional 
ice-cream treats, they attend sessions 
without too much struggling. 
Doctor Gray enjoys the sight of three 
hundred young, enthusiastic soldiers of 
the Lord assembled before him. In words 
calculated to appeal to the heart and 
mind of the child, he tells them how 
much religion means to them. They, 
squirming and restless, are unable to deny 
the truth of what he says. His interest 
in them, however, is personal as well as 
professional. \Vith a fatherly pat on the 
head or a chuck under the chin he is con- 
fident he wins his way to their affections. 


IV 
THE kindly, paternal attitude which 
Doctor Gray maintains toward his Sab- 
bath-school scholars can be-not dis- 
carded, but modified for his purposes 
in the Men's Club. There Doctor Gray 
is a regular he-man, 
The ostensible object of this club is that 
of building up interest in the church. One 
must not, however, thrust this purpose 
flauntingly before the men-one must 



652 


BREAD AND STONES 


first win the men over, So there are 
monthly social meetings, with talks by 
more or less distinguished citizens. The 
address on the "Transit Situation" and 
that on "How to Get Distance on the 
Radio" were well attended. But perhaps 
the talk most enthusiastically received 
was the one on "How to Cure Your Slice 
and Drive." At the meetings there is very 
loud and spirited group-singing in which 
Doctor Gray's thin tenor rises a little out 
of key. There are cigars and mild, very 
mild, beer and soft drinks. 
The meetings are a success. ]\;Ien en- 
joy them. They enjoy the jokes which 
the speakers make, jokes which the men 
do not repeat to their wives, but which 
Doctor Gray laughs at, and by laughing 
at proves himself no mollycoddle. 
The club is large. At the last annual 
convention of Men's Church Clubs of 
America it reported the largest number 
of paid members and the largest number 
of representatives. A month before the 
convention a call had gone out: "Every 
member get a member. Eight hundred 
before April IS." By April IS there 
were eight hundred and thirteen members, 
fifty of whom were men of other faiths 
than that of the Sixth Street Church. 
But they were all Boosters and Rooters 
for Religion. 
Doctor Gray knows that his club is 
making religion more and more vital to 
its members. For has it not adopted as 
its slogan "Sunday is church day"? 


v 


IT is, however, with the women of his 
congregation that Doctor Gray feels his 
personality best expresses itself. He has 
organized them into a guild which is not 
without influence in getting him proper 
floral decorations and musical settings 
for his services and even increases in sal- 
ary for himself. He never fails to attend 
the meetings, jocosely calling attention to 
his masculine presence. "But then I am 
only a minister ," he whimsically adds. He 
loves being consulted upon matters of 
parliamentary procedure and being asked 
his opinion of the best way to serve supper 
at the Harvest Festival. 
He has, perhaps, an eVen greater success 
with the women away from the more im- 


mediate activities of the church. He pos- 
sesses a social manner, an ease of inter- 
course. He is quick to pick up informa- 
tion and never slow to whisper delicious 
bits of gossip. Above all, he has a ready 
sympathy in asking details about one's 
latest illness. 
It must not be imagined that it is only 
women as a group who are interesting to 
Doctor Gray. That is to get a wrong 
conception of the man. He is a con- 
noisseur of individual throats and ankles. 
And he has a way, not always heavy- 
handed, of conveying a compliment. 
He is fond of picking out some young, 
attractive woman to explain to her his 
theories of womanly grace and its relation 
to masculine genius. "Every genius," 
he declares, "must indulge in some-er- 
sexual-er-indiscretions. In fact, the 
number is, perhaps, a gauge of his genius." 
He glances at his hearer for some indica- 
tion of her reception of his views. " I'm 
so glad you understand and are not falsely 
embarrassed. It is rare to find some one 
who appreciates the unshackled inter- 
course of pure minds." And feeling that 
the woman must realize the compliment 
he is paying her, he goes on at great 
length until he seeks his ration of stimula- 
tion and asks whether she objects to his 
holding her hand. 
Mrs. Gray, meanwhile, has not been 
able to outgrow the worried look which 
she acquired as the wife of a minister with 
a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year 
and five children to bring up as they 
should be brought up. The children have 
not been quite the success they were 
meant to be. The oldest daughter, di- 
vorced after three intermittent years of 
marriage, is living at home. The oldest 
son is unable to find any work which he 
can endure. The other children are 
rather disgracefully stupid and wilful at 
school. 
Doctor Gray does not feel that he is in 
any way to blame. A genius, and partic- 
ularly a religious genius, should not be 
hampered by domestic restrictions. 
What time Doctor Gray has to spare 
from the duties with which he believes 
his church charges him, he is devoting to 
a book. It is to be the epitome of his 
philosophy. "Who touches this touches 
a man" is to be the quotation on the title 



AN OHIO FABLE 


page. That he has decided upon. But 
he is somewhat in doubt about the title. 
"This Religion of Business" or "This 
Business of Religion" both suggest them- 
selves and make choosing difficult. 
It might surprise Doctor Gray to know 
that a group of young men and women 
children of the older and more conserva
 
tive members of his congregation, have 


653 


formed a study group. They have chosen 
for their subject Religion and are planning 
a course of reading and study that may 
help them to answer their religious ques- 
tionings. Doctor Gray might be a little 
hurt should he be told that, although they 
have not yet decided upon a group leader, 
they are not even considering the possi- 
bility of choosing him. 


An Ohio Fable 


BY THOMAS BOYD 
Author of "Through the Wheat," "Points of Honor," etc. 


c.. 
 : c. au will find (he said) 
. _ 
 
 W almost any kind of 
I:) Y 
r..! I ,,:eather in O
io, pa!- 
.;t 
' tlcularly up m thIS 
.':i g. northwestern part. 
Itl 
 There are floods in the 

 Ä spring, droughts in the 
summer, and a cyclone 
is likely to surprise you at any season of 
the year; hail-storms are frequent, often 
jagged bolts of lightning strike down peo- 
ple traversing the mud roads or make 
some outbuilding crackle and light up the 
sky with its flames. 
Still (he went on) it must have been 
lovely once, as fitting a stage for the Eden 
scene as any in the world. But that was 
when the Indians were there, when the 
country was a great forest of black wal- 
nut, butternut, sugar-maple, hickory, and 
oak; and when the game was thick be- 
neath the branches of the trees. The 
country was like that the morning Gen- 
eral Wayne-old Mad Anthony-stood at 
the fork made by the J\Iaumee and Au- 
glaize Rivers meeting, the day he set forth 
to fight the battle of Fallen Timbers. The 
country was like that when our grand- 
fathers, floating up the river in a pirogue 
or striking through a long and ill-marked 
woodland trail, came to settle it. 
They built their cabins and they reared 
their broods, and thought it a luxury to be 
enabled to move from a rough log house 
into a house whose logs were hewn. They 
made roads called corduroy, which meant 
that trees had been felled over the bottom- 


less mud and viscous clay in order that 
vehicles might pass. They cleared some 
ground and planted grain; and by cease- 
less labor and tight economy some of them 
honestly prospered. 
Well (he went on) there were others who 
didn't do so well. And George Goodrich 
was one of them. He lived 'way up in the 
northeast corner of the county, miles 
from anywhere. He had a one-room cabin, 
in which himself, his wife, and their three 
children ate and slept; he had a barn, 
a granary, and several acres of cleared 
ground. He worked as hard as the next 
man, from sunup to sunset, but he never 
had more than enough to last him through 
the winter. But George never borrowed: 
if he ran short of flour or meal, his family 
lived on what he could bring down with 
his musket. 
Well, one year the com-crop failed, and 
that increased the bleakness of the follow- 
ing winter. And when spring came George, 
and many other farmers, had an empty 
granary. George hadn't a solitary ear of 
seed-corn for planting. And he was pretty 
lean around the middle. The ground had 
thawed, and the roads were softer than 
axle-grease; you could flounder over them, 
but you couldn't make much headway. 
That was the shape George Goodrich was 
in, but no worse off than a good many 
other farmers. In fact, it seemed as if Bill 
Evans and Emmett Lang were the only 
two farmers in the county who did have 
seed-corn. 
But Bill Evans and Emmett Lang al- 



654 


AN OHIO FABLE 


ways had plenty of everything. Emmett 
ploughed with a span of horses instead of 
oxen; he had also a driving team (nice, fat- 
bellied, sleek-limbed bays), and he lived in 
a big frame house. You had only to look 
at Emmett and you knew he was a man 
of consequence in those parts. He had 
begun to get stout, had a red face and a 
fan-shaped beard, wore a broad-brimmed 
hat and a long coat. Bill Evans was of 
less girth and height than Emmett; his 
forehead was a polished dome of such 
dimensions that it made his chin, partly 
obscured by a villainous mustache, look 
small. But he could reap, bind, and shock 
with the best man in the county, and his 
hewn log house was, for those days and 
parts, spacious. 
George Goodrich heard that Emmett 
Lang and Bill Evans had seed-corn to 
spare. Emmett's fann lay twelve miles 
west, while the Evans property was fif- 
teen miles to the south. And the quality 
of the roads being equal-mud with cor- 
duroy stretches through a wilderness- 
George Goodrich decided to get his seed- 
corn from Emmett Lang. 
So one morning he got out his yoke of 
oxen and hitched them to the wagon. As 
it would be an all-day trip, his wife fried 
some pork, gave him a loaf of salt-rising 
bread, and advised him about crossing the 
swelling creeks before she let him go. 
Then he turned out the lane just as the 
sun was coming up over the wood behind 
him, and the oxen pushed stolidly along 
through the path of mud which wound 
intenninably among the great branched 
trees. Pflug-ka-pflug went the deadened 
sound of the hoofs of the oxen; pflap- 
hsst splashed the mud up over the wheels 
and against the wagon-box as the team 
slowly lumbered forward. And George 
Goodrich sat motionless, thinking that he 
would soon be planting the seed-corn, hop- 
ing to have got it into the earth in time for 
an early crop. Meanwhile the mud was 
deep and thick; from time to time the 
oxen stumbled. And George Goodrich 
sat on the bespattered wagon-box, mov- 
ing through the forest in the freshness of 
spring, unmindful of the call of the black- 
birds whose heads in the noonday sun 
showed green. He had his thoughts on 
the seed-corn, the possession of which 
meant so much to him. 


It was noon when he reached the farm 
of Emmett Lang and saw the frame build- 
ings-the house, barn, granaries, corn- 
crib-and the green fields of placidly un- 
dulating wheat which had been sown the 
previous November. The sight gladdened 
him, for- with such evidence of plenty be- 
fore him he knew that his long ride had 
not been for nothing. 
As he stopped his oxen in the barnyard 
and climbed down from the wagon-box, 
Emmett Lang came out of the house, re- 
moving with the back of his hand the 
generous stains of dinner from his fan- 
shaped whiskers. He met George midway 
between the house and the barn, stood 
with his hands on his hips and his head 
thrown back, so that he seemed to look 
down his nose as he asked: " Well, George, 
what can I do for you?" 
The question was easily answered. 
George said: "I calc'lated I'd git a couple 
sacks of seed-corn from you, Emmett." 
Then Emmett teetered back on his heels 
and said: "I reckon you got the cash in 
your pocket to pay for it?" 
"Why, no," said George, "I calc'lated 
to pay you back in corn when I husked 
next fall." 
At that Emmett not only teetered on 
his heels but sagely nodded his head. 
After a while he said: " Well, George, I 
can't let you have any seed-corn. There's 
plenty of folks around here who want seed- 
corn and have got the cash to pay for it." 
And he turned and walked back to the 
house. George answered over his shoul- 
der, "Reckon you're right, Emmett," and, 
turning his oxen around in the middle of 
the yard, he began his twelve-mile journey 
homeward through that slimy mess of 
mud. 
Well, George got home in good enough 
shape, but he was worse off than he had 
been in the morning. A day was gone and 
there was no seed-corn-which he had to 
have. He had to have it so much that he 
got up at four o'clock the next morning to 
go after it. But this time he would go 
preparedc When Bill Evans asked him if 
he had the money with which to buy the 
seed-corn he would jerk it out of his pocket 
so quickly that it would make Bill's head 
swim. 
After George hitched up the next morn- 
ing he loaded on a couple of fat shoats 



AN OHIO FABLE 


which Jim Barlow, who had the next farm 
south of his, had asked for. And while 
Jim hadn't any seed-corn to spare he did 
have money. 
Barlow's farm was not on the road that 
led to Bill Evans; and thus George Good- 
rich had before him a trip somewhat longer 
than fifteen miles. And again the oxen 
went down the lane, dragging the wagon 
over the ruts and stumps in the light of 
dawn. And George sat on the wagon-box, 
the squealing and grunting of the pigs re- 
minding him of the money which Jim 
Barlow would give for them and of the 
seed-com which Bill Evans would ex- 
change for the money. 
There is no mode of travel known slower 
than that furnished by a yoke of oxen. 
And though the distance to Barlow's farm 
was only five miles, the day was brightly 
advanced when George reached it. He 
found Jim in the barn, tinkering with his 
plough, and said: "Jim, I brought these 
shoats along because I've got to have 
some cash this morning. Reckon you can 
let me have it?" Jim could, and did; and 
George Goodrich turned back to the main 
road with silver dollars clinking in his 
pocket. 
On he went, the feel of the money dis- 
tracting his mind from the ineffable dul- 
ness of the ride. And as he looked over the 
dumb crowns of the heads of the oxen, 
beating out the distance more slowly than 
a requiem, he doubtless felt that hard 
work on the next day, with a grain-sack 
caught near his middle and one of the 
boys behind him covering up the golden 


655 


kernels which he dropped, would more 
than make up for those two days spent in 
tedious travel. 
He came to the Bean Creek ford, where 
the swirling water rifiled the wagon- 
spokes, climbed the green bank, dense 
with leafage, and two miles farther was 
driving along the swiftly running 1-Iaumee 
River. It was afternoon when he reached 
Bill Evans's farm. And as the oxen 
dragged up the road he saw Bill plough- 
ing on a knoll that was dry enough for 
the sod to be turned over by the shares. 
Stopping the team in the lane, he struck 
off across the fields, the silver dollars 
jangling one against another in his pocket 
as he climbed the rail fences. 
Bill Evans waited for him in the middle 
of a furrow; he stood with his hat off, 
wiping the sweat from his high forehead 
with his shirt-sleeve. Bill said, "Howdy, 
George," and George answered: "Howdy, 
Bill, hear you got some seed-corn?" 
"Yes, I got some left," said Bill Evans. 
" I'd like a couple sacks-" 
Bill looked at George and said after a 
moment: "\Vell now, George, you got the 
money to pay for this here corn?" 
George thrust his hand into his pocket 
and whipped out the silver dollars. Bill 
looked at them, saw the sunlight shining 
on them as they lay in the palm of 
George's hand. He sighed. "Well now, 
George, I'm sorry I can't let you have 
that seed-corn. There's plenty of folks 
around here who need seed-corn and 
ain't got the money to buy it with. I'm 
sorry, but I got to give it to them." 



The Holy Earth 
BY JOHN HALL WHEELOCK 


IN the immense cathedral of the holy earth, 
Whose arches are the heavens and the great vault above 
Groined with its myriad stars-what miracles of birth, 
What sacraments of death, what rituals of love! 


Her nave is the wide world and the whole length of it, 
One flame on all her altars kindles her many fires; 
\Vherever the clear tapers of trembling life are lit 
Resound for joy the old, indomitable choirsc 


The holy church of earth with clamorous worshippers 
Is crowded and fierce hungers, faithful everyone 
To the one faith; that stern and simple faith of hers 
Contents the heart that asks no pity, giving none. 


Each on the other feeds, and all on each are fed, 
And each for all is offered-a living offering, where 
In agony and triumph the ancient feast is spread, 
Life's sacramental supper, that all her sons may share. 


They mingle with one another, blend-mingle-merge, and flow 
Body into wild body, in rapture endlessly 
Weaving, with intricate motions of being to and fro, 
The pattern of all Being, one mighty harmony. 


One Body of all bodies, woven and interwrought- 
One Self in many selves, through their communion 
In love and death, made perfect; wherein each self is nought 
Save as it serve the many, mysteriously made One. 


And all are glad for life's sake, and all have found it good 
From the beginning; all, through many and warring ways, 
In savage vigor of life and wanton hardihood 
Live out, like a brave song, the passion of their days. 


With music woven of lust and music woven of pain, 
Chapel and aisle and choir, the great cathedral rings- 
One voice in all her voices chaunting the old disdain 
Of pity, the clean hunger of all primal things. 


656 



THE HOLY EARTH 


657 


From the trembling of Arcturus even to the tiny nest 
Of the grey mouse the glories of her vast frame extend: 
The span of her great arches stretching from east to west 
Is endless-the immense reaches are without end. 


Evening closes: the light from heaven's high window falls 
Vaguer and softer now; in vain the twilight pleads 
With stubborn night, his shadow looms on the massive walls- 
Darkness. The immemorial ritual proceeds. 


The spider in her quivering web watches and waits; 
The moth flutters entangled, in agony of fear 
He beats amid the toils that bind him; she hesitates 
Along the trembling wires-she pauses--she draws near. 


She weaves her delicate bondage around him; in the net 
As in a shroud he labors-but, labor as he will, 
The cunning threads hold fast; her drowsy mouth is set 
Against the body that shivers softly, and is still. 


And through the leafy dark the owl with noiseless flight 
110ves, peering craftily among the tangled trees 
And thiékets of the wood all slumbrous in the night- 
The fledgling's bitter cry comes sharp upon the breeze. 


With dreadful ceremony all things together move 
To the one end: shrill voices in triumph all around 
Prolong deliriously their monotone of love- 
Arches and aisles are heavy with incense and dim sound. 


Hush-the whole world is kneeling! J\Iurmurous is the air- 
The Host is lifted up. Upon the altar lies 
The sacramental Body. The wind breathes like a prayer- } 
Solemnly is renewed the eternal sacrifice, 


\Vith mingled moan and might of warring wills made one 
The vast cathedral shudders. From chancel, nave and choir 
Sounds the fierce hymn to life: her holy will be done! 
t:pon her myriad altars flames the one sacred fire. 



I HAVE known opera singers to be over- 
come by a sore throat, by sickness of 
the body, by acute nervousness, by 
stage-fright, so that in each and all of 
these instances the voice refused to obey 
the will, and the performance was a fail- 
ure. But I have never known of any 
singer who was overcome by emotion-a 
fact that has puzzled me for many years, 
and for which I can find no explanation. 
All of us who are sensitive to beauty are 
physically shaken by it. There are many 
passages in poetry that I cannot possibly 
read aloud-the sound of the words 
touches some nerve, my voice breaks, 
and although I despise myself for this 
lack of self-control, it makes no difference 
-I can't go on. So far from being proud 
of this, I regard it as an affliction; but it 
is not an uncommon experience. We 
know that Doctor Johnson could not 
read in the "Dies Iræ" 
Quaerens me sedisti lassus; 
Redemisti crucem passus; 
without crying. We know that when 
Nathaniel Hawthorne tried to read the 
minister's dying confession in "The Scar- 
let Letter," his voice rose and fell, as en- 
tirely beyond his control as the waves of 
the sea. Once I was sitting in the audi- 
ence when John Masefield was reading 
from his poems; he asked if there was 
anything in particular that we should like 
to hear, and a lady asked him to read 
"August, 1914." He repeated four or 
five stanzas with ever increasing diffi- 
culty, then broke down, apologized, and 
said he would have to read something else. 
The transporting power of music is so 
powerful that I am often overcome. I 
read in the" Song of Solomon," 
my soul failed when he spake, 


and I read in the poet \Valler: 
While I listen to thy voice, 
Chloris! I feel my life decay. 
65 8 


Neither of these verbs exaggerates my 
emotion. 
Now if I am so melted by hearing 
music, and if there is so much poetry that 
I cannot read aloud, why is it that the 
ballad and opera singers can sing the most 
ravishing music with absolute voice con- 
trol? It is fortunate both for them and 
for me that they are able to accomplish 
this; for how distressing it would be if 
an artist appearing as Elsa were so over- 
come by the melody and passion of the 
music that she could not go on ! 
So far as I know, such a misfortune has 
never happened. But why not? If she 
sings it mechanically, overcoming her 
own feelings by thinking of something 
else, the result will be ineffective; no, the 
passion and emotion and beauty must be 
fully expressed, and at the same time with 
technical correctness. She must feel it 
intensely, and yet the feeling must not 
make her inarticulate. 
Does this control come through in- 
numerable rehearsals and repetitions? 
If so, why does not repeated re-reading 
of certain passages of poetry give the 
same immunity? And it does not. Is it 
because it is a matter of art, and the artist 
must learn to give and produce full mea- 
sure of emotion, while remaining coolly in 
control of it? I wonder. 
Is it just possible that among the thou- 
sands who try for success without attain- 
ing it, there are a few who have the req- 
uisite voice, correctness of ear, intelli- 
gence, and health-and yet fail because 
they feel too deeply? I wonder. 
I have asked several prima donnas 
about this and never received a satisfac- 
tory reply. 
When I was six years old, we celebrated 
Christmas at school by giving each other 
presents. An anonymous gift came to 
my desk, and I gazed at it in silence. 
The other children were venting vocifera- 
tions of delight. The teacher was stupid 
enough to chide me-" Why, Willie, don't 



AS I LIKE IT 


you like it? "-when I was really so over- 
come with surprise and pleasure that I 
could not have uttered a word. 
In a few minutes a tough Irish lad 
sitting near me spoke with derision of 
the gift I received, and as he exhibited 
his own, he tauntingly declared how much 
better his was. Not to this day does he 
know that I had given it to him. 
In the recently published autobiog- 
raphyof J. G. Swift MacNeill, professor 
of law and Irish member of Parliament, 
called ""Vhat I Have Seen and Heard," 
there are many good stories of politics 
and law-courts, and many clever sketches 
of prominent men: Gladstone, Balfour, 
Parnell, Healy, Chamberlain, Campbell- 
Bannerman, etc. Like Oscar Wilde, Mr. 
:I\lacNeill studied at Trinity College, 
Dublin, and at Oxford, taking honors in 
classics at both places. He seems to have 
the blessed Irish geniality without its hair- 
trigger sensitiveness; he has come along 
through the hell of the twentieth cen- 
tury with his cheerfulness, optimism, and 
good will to man unimpaired. He proves, 
although he does not say so, that it is 
possible to love one's enemies. He is a 
fresh-hearted man, and although he is 
now nearly eighty, he will die young. 
He supplies a new explanation why men 
who are to be hanged in the morning pre- 
pare for the ordeal by a good night's rest. 
I had always supposed that, in the words 
of Donne, they practised dying by a little 
sleep; but :MacNeill says: 


Another shunted queen's counsel, when 
the conversation turned on the strange cir- 
cumstance of criminals sleeping soundly on 
the eve of their execution, which was ex- 
plained by several recondite theories, said 
that he did not think it remarkable that 
persons should sleep well in such circum- 
stances. " They know," he said, "that they 
will be called in time in the morning." 


It is possible that they sleep well be- 
cause they have a good conscience; by a 
good conscience I 'mean one that never 
gives its owner any trouble. Ibsen called 
it a robust conscience. 
An entertaining book of travel and ob- 
servation is "From :M:elbourne to 
Ios- 
cow," by G. C. Dixon. He has the eye 
and the sense of emphasis characteristic 
of the born journalist. What impressed 


659 


him in Java was the contrast; Hat one 
moment entranced by something pecu- 
liar to the East, at another coming with 
delight upon a proof of the universality 
of things-more especially the films." 
The first poster he saw was 
V anaf Zaterdag 14 J uni 
HAROLD LLOYD 
In Zijn Nieuwste Lachsucces 
GROOTMOEDER'S JO
GEN 
Jackie Coogan is a household word among 
the natives. When I returned from Eu- 
rope a year ago, it so happened that 
Rudolph Valentino and Jackie Coogan 
were on the same ship. It was interest- 
ing one night to see a motion picture with 
Jackie as hero, while Jackie himself sat 
in the front row gazing at his counterfeit 
presentment. The boy is as healthy as 
he looks. N ever have I seen boy or man 
with a more insatiable appetite for games 
-he was an expert at shuffleboard. 
'Who shall delimit the range of books? 
Mr. Dixon says that while walking around 
a squalid inland town in Java "on a 
shabby street stall I noticed Galsworthy's 
'To Let,' such signs of civilization as 
'Tarzan van de Apen' and (of course) 
'Als de \Vinter Koml.' " 
Harvey Cushing tells me that as a pro- 
fessional surgeon, he is almost ashamed 
at having written so well-received a biog- 
raphy of Osler. He says it is almost as 
damaging as playing a first-rate game of 
golf. Therefore he has been pleased when 
a few reviews have said it wasn't good at 
all. A reviewer in The Nation (London) 
called it a Biographical Bran Tub, which 
gave Cushing unaffected pleasure. "I 
don't know what a Bran Tub may be, but 
it's something disgraceful, I'm sure." 
Frank Scudamore's " A Sheaf of :Memo- 
ries" is a stirring account of his dangerous 
and adventurous life as a war correspon- 
dent. Scudie must be a marvellous racon- 
teur, and I would fain hear him talk some 
more in a second volume. He has out- 
lived his profession; the old-fashioned 
war correspondent can never again ap- 
pear. I am glad therefore that here we 
have the record of the life he lived in 
Turkey, Egypt, the Balkans, and other 
peace-hating localities. Next to his 
brains and courage, his greatest asset has 
been his tiny frame; had he been of aver- 



660 


AS I LIKE IT 


age size, he would have been killed long 
ago. Low visibility saved his life. 
Eric Parker's "Life of Hesketh Prich- 
ard" is, on the other hand, the story of a 
man six feet and a half high, who was 
hunter, explorer, naturalist, cricketer, 
author, soldier, and all the time a splen- 
did example of the English gentleman. 
He was a sniper in the Great War, where 
he acquired an "obscure form of blood- 
poisoning," which after several years of 
agony, during which he submitted to 
fourteen operations, killed him. But 
more terrible than his bodily suffering 
was his wounded spirit. In reading this 
graphic account of his life, which up to 
1914 is a record of daily happiness, I feel 
certain that what ruined his health was 
the memory of the German sharpshooters 
whom he was forced to kill. It was his 
duty as a soldier, and instead of shrink- 
ing from it, he did it as effectively as pos- 
sible. But it is one thing to shoot and 
stab in hot blood and indiscriminately, 
and quite another to calculate mathemat- 
ically, then deliberately to kill individu- 
als, and watch their death agony. This 
he had to do-if he could oIÙY have lost 
his memory! All's foul in war. 
The late Charles E. Perkins, of Hart- 
ford, an eminent lawyer, whose chief 
recreation was shooting big and little 
game, said to me once: "I wonder how 
it would seem to shoot a man. I have 
shot at nearly everything else." It is for- 
tunate he never knew. Anyone who has 
any curiosity on the subject will in the 
biography of Prichard have it allayed. 
Among the new novels, one of the best 
is "The Virtuous Husband," by Freeman 
Tilden. Without abandoning Sinclair 
Lewis, I wish both Americans and for- 
eigners would read this. It is an excellent 
plea for and not against Main Street 
people; a defense of healthy life in the 
village as compared with the fever-called- 
living in New York; an exposition of the 
joys of editing a country newspaper as 
compared with the excitement of metro- 
politan journalism; above all, it is the 
glorification of the country madonna as 
contrasted with the citified, sophisticated, 
hard-as-nails-panetela-shaped young fe- 
male who is trying to express herself. It 
is a thoroughly good novel, with nearly 
five hundred pages of unabated interest, 
filled with common sense, humor, shrewd 


observation of life, and contammg the 
same moral as that set forth in "This 
Freedom." That it will effect any last- 
ing reform is doubtful. Girls will be 
boys. 
William J. Locke has turned off another 
competent piece of work in "The Great 
Pandolfo," an agreeable, entertaining, and 
even captivating story-one of the best 
he has written since his vein of whimsical 
originality gave out. Mr. Locke is a good 
"money" player, as they say of Billy 
Johnston, and if you can forget that he 
wrote" Septimus," he will never disap- 
point you. Cosmo Hamilton, in his "Un- 
written History," says: 


In those days W. J. Locke was, as he still 
is, probably the one English novelist to be 
read by canons, schoolmasters, and inveter- 
ate maiden ladies of high culture without 
being ashamed to admit it, and I used to 
think that he bore a close resemblance to all 
these three himself. 


\Vell, there are worse classes of people. 
To Americans, the most interesting 
pages in" A Prime Minister and His Son," 
containing the correspondence of the Earl 
of Bute with General Sir Charles Stuart, 
edited by the Honorable Mrs. E. Stuart 
Wortley, are those that deal with the 
American War of the Revolution. Young 
Stuart fought here as a British officer, and 
although he served his king like a gallant 
gentleman, his letters to his father show 
why the British failed. He was one of the 
soldiers who invaded Connecticut, and he 
was amazed at the courage, resolution, 
and dignity of the colonists. The rebels 
were men who must be treated very dif- 
ferently, he thought, from the measures 
thus far employed by the directors of the 
Crown forces. In fact, it is clear that 
contact with the Connecticut inhabitants, 
short as it was, was long enough to give 
him at the core of his heart the chill of 
ultimate defeat. He wrote: 


This expedition may nearly paint for you 
the power the Americans have in case you 
mean to force them by arms. Our General 
must make his movements with great ex- 
pedition and caution, for if he makes the 
least faux pas, Great Britain, with the most 
strenuous exertions, can not be sure of 
finishing this war in two years. 
And when that happy time comes we have 
to hope that accommodating differences, or 



AS I LIKE IT 


rather, forming a Constitution for this 
Country may not be left to the present 
Heads, but for the honour of England that 
people of very superior ability may be sent 
to establish a mode of Government which 
may firmly attach the Americans to the 
Crown, both from inclination and depen- 
dence. 


How hopeless to imagine that statesmen 
and diplomats will ever give up the old 
game, though, to the eternal credit of 
human nature, the old game always fails. 
"Twenty-five Years," by Grey of Fal- 
lodon, should be attentively read by every 
man who prides himself on being a citizen 
of the world. The style is as clear as 
spring water, and if the orthodox lan- 
guage of diplomatists is intended to con- 
ceal thought, here is the exception that 
proves the rule. In the entire course of 
the two volumes, I found only one am- 
biguous sentence, which, on a second 
reading, seems plain. In fact it means 
exactly the opposite of what it says: 
"While one nation arms, other nations 
cannot tempt it to aggression by remain- 
ing defenseless" (I, 89). 
The most exciting pages to me are those 
(II, I34-I36) where he discusses Wilson's 
overtures for peace in 19I6-with the con- 
clusion that it 'might have been better for 
the living as well as the dead if Wilson 
had succeeded in stopping the war. 
The book emanates from a noble and 
sincere mind; but it is melancholy, even 
tragic, in its import. There is little indi- 
cation that the world has learned any- 
thing from this disaster, although Grey 
says that such an assumption is unreason- 
able. It may be unreasonable, but the 
striking difference between the religion 
of Christianity and the religion of nation- 
alism is that the former is reasonable 
and the latter is not. At present the re- 
ligion of nationalism dominates the world. 
Thousands profess Christianity who do 
not practise it; millions profess nation- 
alism, and they are eager to die for it. 
I greet with joy a new translation of the 
essays of 110ntaigne. This is in four large 
volumes, attractively printed. The Eng- 
lish is by George B. I ves, with Introduc- 
tions by one of the most sprightly and in- 
teresting women in America, Grace Nor- 
ton, the sister of Charles Eliot Norton. I 
believe there has been no other English 


661 


version of Montaigne since Cotton's in 
1670; although Florio's splendid Eliza- 
bethan work has been reprinted in many 
forms. Montaigne (died 1592) was one 
of the most civilized men of whom we 
have any record; his intellectual curiosity 
was matched by magnanimity. He hated 
cruelty, prejudice, violence, and stupid- 
ity; his love of life was so great that it 
illumined every object in the world of 
sense and in the world of thought. His 
style was so original that his remarks on 
little things have outlived thousands of 
works dealing soberly with portentous 
ideas. He could write on trivial themes 
without becoming trivial. Moral-every 
one should own a copy of Montaigne. 
An original and valuable contribution 
to Elizabethan scholarship has come out 
of Australia. This is a quarto of nearly 
600 pages, called "A Topographical Dic- 
tionary to the \V orks of Shakespeare and 
His Fellow Dramatists," by Doctor Ed- 
ward H. Sugden, of J\lelbourne. Places 
mentioned in the plays have their geo- 
graphical location given, followed by an 
interesting historical sketch, with plenty 
of illustrative comment. Fabulous places 
receive recognition; and inns, churches, 
and other buildings are given as much 
space as towns, Although this is prima- 
rily intended as a reference book, it makes 
such fascinating reading that it is dan- 
gerous to open it. Doctor Sugden was 
formerly associate at Owens College, 
Manchester, and this volume is one of the 
publications of the University of 1Ian- 
chester. 
Now that books are so expensive, it is 
good to observe an increasing fashion of 
Collected IV orks in one volume. All of 
John Galsworthy's short stories are avail- 
able in one tome, called " Caravan"; his 
selected plays are in a single book; a 
similar volume of Barrie's plays will 
shortly appear; Vachel Lindsay's poems, 
illustrated by the author, are in the same 
convenient form available. And speaking 
of reprints, I am glad to see a cheaper 
edition of Pupin's remarkable autobi- 
ography, "From Immigrant to Inven- 
tor." 


One thing that distresses me is the re- 
version to heavy books. Formerly I could 
tell by lifting it whether a volume was 



662 


AS I LIKE IT 


published in England or in America; the 
English books were so light. Then our 
American publishers imitated the excel- 
lent example. But during the last two 
years both English and American books 
are growing heavier and heavier. 


Among the innumerable nonsense- 
books ostensibly written for children, 
but, like "Alice," more appreciated 
by others, one of the best new ones is 
"Pegeen and the Potamus; or, The Sly 
Giraffe," by Lee Wilson Dodd, illustrated 
by Clarence Day. This is altogether 
lovely. Mr. Dodd is a poet, playwright, 
and novelist; all three sides here appear 
attractively. As for Clarence Day, his 
skill, intelligence, and humor are as irre- 
pressible through the crayon as through 
the typewriter. 
One of the greatest undertakings in the 
history of printing is Everyman's Libra- 
ry. Everyman should certainly have at 
hand the catalogue. It is well that three 
of the latest volumes contain works by 
R.L.S. 


Two queries about music. Shall we 
ever produce great American composers, 
and will the best American works already 
performed and published ever receive due 
recognition abroad? The other day I was 
talking with my friend Professor Ernest 
Kroeger, composer and concert pianist, 
director of the Kroeger School of Music 
in St. Louis. On my table lay five new 
works on music, written by Europeans- 
a new edition of Streatfeild's "The 
Opera," which is "revised, enlarged, and 
brought down to date," by Edward J. 
Dent; "The History of Orchestration," 
by Adam Carse; " Arnold Schönberg," by 
Egon Wellesz; "Musical Taste and How 
to Form It," by M. D. Calvocoressi; and 
"The Term's Music," by C. H. Glover, 
giving a four-year proposed course in 
music, with specimen examination ques- 
tions. After Mr. Kroeger had glanced 
through these, and studied the indexes, 
he remarked on the absence of American 
references. Carse makes a passing allu- 
sion to MacDowell, but, with that meagre 
exception, the history of the world's mu- 
sic, so far as these apparently authorita- 
tive works are aware of it, would have 
been exactly the same if America had 


never emerged from the ice age. Is it 
their ignorance or our incompetence? 


With reference to my (quoted) state- 
ment that the statue of Huck and Tom 
"is believed to be the first of its kind 
erected to a literary character in the 
United States," Mr. S. R. Spencer, of the 
good old town of Suffield, Conn., writes: 
"Brownell Gage and I saw a fine bronze 
statue to 'The Barefoot Boy' in Ash- 
burnham, Mass., near Cushing Acade- 
my," and Mrs. T. R. Elcock, of Princeton, 
and B. W. Mitchell, of Philadelphia, say 
there is a statue of Dickens and Little 
Nell in Clark Park, West Philadelphia. 
Benjamin Webster, of N ew York, writes 
that W. A. Tinsley, of Waterbury, has 
undertaken a dramatic composition for an 
orchestra, of "The Wreck of the Hes- 
perus." He and Mr. Tinsley differ as to 
the number of people who are acquainted 
with the poem. One estimates it to be 
100,000, the other 2,000,000. The ques- 
tion being referred to me, I hand down 
a decision for 2,000,000. A few months 
ago I saw a news item stating that the 
schooner H esper'lts was not wrecked, after 
all. There goes another legend. 
William A. White, the Man of Em- 
poria, issues the following cruel challenge 
to me. We are both correspondents of 
country newspapers, he being on the Em- 
poria Gazette, in Kansas, and I on the 
Huron County Tribune, of Bad Axe, 
Mich. 


As one country correspondent to another, 
I greet you. As one country preacher to a 
better one I salute you. As one picnic visi- 
tor to a fellow marauder of fried chicken I 
kowtow before you and challenge you to a 
contest of prowess. You may beat me writ- 
ing, you may beat me preaching, but I will 
beat you eating fried chicken at any picnic 
between the Alleghanies and the Rockies 
north of Thirty-six, for money, marbles, or 
chalk. Anybody who will take a dare will 
steal a sheep! 
Alas! Although my heart is in the High- 
lands, my digestion is at the Tour d'Ar- 
gent in Paris. I left it there last October, 
and if no one has claimed it, it is there 
still. 


Even as I expected, my citation of the 
remarks of Edward Everett on cows' ears 
have awakened the echoes, and the end is 



AS I LIKE IT 


not yet. Mr. H. H. Bridgman, of Nor- 
folk, Conn., writes: "If you have occa- 
sion to inquire about cows' ears again, 
couple it with an inquiry as to their teeth, 
if they have any and if so, on both jaws?" 
How about this? I am sure that if the 
cows have any devitalized or crowned 
teeth, there are plenty of dentists who 
will advise their removal. 
:Mrs. John A. Collier, of :Macdonough 
Lodge, Vermont, writes: "Since your 
conundrum about the cow's horns and 
ears, . . . I have amused myself by not- 
ing the guesses here in Vermont. Not one 
of the dozens has been wrong . . . you 
see, Vermonters do observe. Now ask- 
When a cow gets up, does it rise first on 
its front or hind legs?" 
To add to the torment of my readers, 
I select one of the vulgar errors beloved 
by old Sir Thomas Browne. You can al- 
ways arouse a company by this question: 
Has a mole eyes or has it not? 
There are plenty of travellers who as- 
sert that sharks will never eat human 
beings, and that wolves will not chase 
them. There go two legends of the sea 
and land. Does anybody know anything 
about anything? 


Doctor James Hosmer Penniman, of 
Philadelphia, scholar, author, and Cattist 
-his book "The Alley Rabbit," is an ex- 
quisite tribute to cats-has received the 
following letter from the distinguished 
playwright and actor, William Gillette, 
written from his beautiful home, Seven 
Sisters, in Connecticut. 


I have bestowed upon you the highest 
honor in the repertoire of the Seventh Sister 
Establishment. I have named a cat after 
you and it wasn't a gelding either but a fine 
sturdy Thomas cat. This superb animal 
has been baptized, not with the name of 
James alone but with your middle and last 
names as well. Also we call him Dick for 
short, and the old boy seems perfectly de- 
lighted, throwing his tail about in the air 
with joyful jerks-which is a darn sight 
more than you could do. Ever since we 
have been addressing this cat as Dr. James 
Hosmer Penniman, he has been leaving 
carefully selected rats in the Seventh Sister 
Penniman J\1emorial Library. 


663 


He dined once at the country house of a 
mutual friend, rose in the middle of dinner 
ran out into the garden and stood trembling 
on the lawn because a yellow-eyed Angora 
kitten had poked an inquisitive head round 
the door. 
His fear was well-founded; for the next 
moment the kitten would have leaped on 
his knee. Cats have a sure instinct for 
those who fear or dislike them, and they 
will invariably leap upon them or rub 
against them, in the endeavor to dispel 
prejudice. 


.l\Iiss Elizabeth Kebbe, of Hanover, 
:Mass., and Sidney .l\liller, the distin- 
guished lawyer, of Detroit, both take 
issue with me in my hatred of darkness. 
Miss Kebbe loves the mystery and sooth- 
ing quality of night, and .l\lr. 
filler calls 
my attention to the beautiful poem, 
" Auld Daddy Darkness," by James Fer- 
guson, which will be found in that mag- 
nificent armory of poetry, "The Home 
Book of Verse for Young Folks." Dark- 
ness is kinder to children than to adults. 


Sir Edmund Gosse, having recently had 
bad luck in inquiring for certain standard 
books at London bookshops, wrote a 
wrathful letter to the London Times Lit- 
erary Supplement, in which he denounced 
the English public for not reading any- 
thing good, and indeed for remaining in 
ignorance about literature. He was an- 
swered by several meliorists; but while I 
was reflecting on his animadversions, I 
found an article in The Clzris/ia1t Scie1lce 
AIonitor by Doctor Paul Kaufman, which 
would seem to gainsay the deduction 
made by Sir Edmund. This American 
gentleman was startled to see recently in 
London posters advertising the following 
list of books for "holiday reading": 


"Jane Eyre," "The IVlill on the Floss," 
"'Vuthering Heights," "Sylvia's Lovers," 
"Lorna Doone," "Aylwin," "'Vild 'Vales," 
"The Scarlet Letter," ":\-Ioby Dick," 
Trollope's Autobiography, "The "Toman 
in White," l\Iorier's "Haiji ßaba," Aksa- 
kov's "A Russian Gentleman," "Tales by 
Tolstoi," "Selected English Short Stories." 


Doctor Kaufman comments that the 
Lord Roberts, the great soldier, had an latest volume in the list appeared twenty- 
ungovernable fear of cats. Says Cosmo six years ago; with three exceptions, they 
Hamilton: are works of fiction. He then says that 



664 


AS I LIKE IT 


such a list would never be advertised in 
America, but, on the other hand, a holi- 
day list on our side would show a greater 
variety of topics. 


]vir. and Mrs. Mansfield Ferry, of New 
York, are the latest recruits in the Asolo 
Club; they spent in that hill town an "en- 
trancing afternoon." 


Of all the efforts in America to improve 
conditions in tbe theatre and to awaken 
interest in the drama and to give those 
who love good plays the opportunity to 
hear them, none is more notable for its 
ideals and its success in approaching them 
than the work of Mr. and Mrs. Henry 
Jewett in Boston. In a recent number of 
SCRIBNER'S, I regretted that we had in 
America no genuine Repertory Theatre; 
but I am happy to say that we are going 
to have one. "The Repertory Theatre 
of Boston," under the management of the 
Henry Jewett Company, will live up to 
its name. When, in former years, the 
Jewett Company were in control of the 
Copley Square Theatre, I always went 
there, when in Boston, in preference to aU 
others. I was sure to see a good play well 
acted. On my annual pilgrimage from 
New Haven to speak at Andover and at 
Exeter on some Sunday morning, I got off 
the train at the Back Bay station on 
Saturday afternoon, attended the Jewett 
matinee in the theatre, almost next door, 
and took the five plus train north. The list 
of plays produced in that small theatre is 
the history of the best things in modern 
drama. Now at last they are to have a 
new building, on Huntington Avenue, and 
on the handsome façade will be these sen- 
sational words: 


THE REPERTORY THEATRE OF 
BOSTON 
Furthermore, to the eternal honor of Bos- 
ton, and to the encouragement of Ameri- 
can dramatic art, this theatre is tax-exempt. 
The Honorable J. Weston Allen, who has 
been for years an ardent worker in the 
good cause, writes me; 


The theatre is now being plastered and 
finished and will open in the late fall. It 
has been held tax-exempt by the Common- 
wealth and is the first theatre in this coun- 
try which has received official recognition 
as having a place in the educational field 
and equally entitled with the Art 1\1 useum 
and the Library to exemption from taxation. 
Incorporated as an educational institution 
under the charitable corporations act, with- 
out stockholders and conducted by trustees 
like the Art Museum, every dollar of net 
income is available to increase the endowed 
fund and promote the interests of the drama. 
Our latest move to make the theatre a 
power in the educational field in direct con- 
tact with the public schools is to take a 
99-year lease of The Chro1licles of America 
Photoplays and establish a permanent, an- 
nual course of free Saturday-morning illus- 
trated historical talks for the children of 
greater Boston. The 1\1ayor of Boston has 
nominated 1\1r. O'Hare of the School Com- 
mittee to represent the city on our Board 
and Governor Fuller has nominated Payson 
Smith to represent the Commonwealth, and 
both have accepted. 
It is the autumnal equinox, the sun is 
crossing the line. 
Nor Spring nor Summer's beauty hath such 
grace 
As I have seen in one autumnal face. 
The cottages in Huron County are being 
boarded up for the winter, and their mi- 
gratory inhabitants are flocking and flit- 
ting. The whistle of the steam-thresher 
is heard in the land. I must leave my 
pleasant library, with its outlook on Lake 
Huron, and depart for academic activi- 
ties. One of the innumerable pleasures of 
the summer at Huron City is my constant 
association with the American poet, Ed- 
gar Guest, whose country home is about 
eight miles away from mine, a mere trifle 
for his balloon tires. Eddie and I have 
formed an offensive and defensive alli- 
ance, and will fight any pair on any links, 
Eddie's rhythm in the golf-swing is as 
perfect as the swing of his verse. He also 
contrives to put a top spin on the ball, so 
that after a prolonged flight in the air, the 
moment it touches the ground, it leaps 
forward like a springbok or hartebeest. 


[Christmas suggestions of Book Gifts, including those mentioned by Professor William Lyon Phelþ6, will be found among 
the announcements of the leading publishers on front ad\'ertising pages,) 




 


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f 



till-lifc decoration, 
From the painting by Fr,mk \\". Uen"on, 


I ill VE a grudge against my delightful 
colleague on the left, the author of 
"As I Like It." Some time ago he 
had the excellent idea of in\"enting what 
he called an Ignoble Prize, and he has 
frequently warmed my heart by awarding 
it in just the right direction. Indeed, r 
have felt profoundly grateful to him, be- 
lieving that he had, as they say, filled a 
long-felt want. But if you've got a prize 
to award, you get very keen on a\varding 
it-the first thing you know you are 
searching the highways and byways for 
prize-winners. Thus betrayed by his ar- 
dor, Professor Phelps took a rope and 
went out and perpetrated this perfectly 
awful iridescent howler: 
VOL. LXXYIII.-48 


.\s a candidate for the Ignoble Prize, I su
gcst 
all pictures of Still Life. You know what I 
mean, for it is, for some unknown reason, a com- 
mon mural decoration, especially in dining-rooms. 
There is a table, usually co\"Cred with a checked 
table-cloth. On this stands a large basket of 
fruit: oranges, peaches, bananas, apples, and 
grapes. This basket is usually o\"crset; so that 
out of it come tumbling apples, peaches, oranges, 
hananas, and grapes. This is thought to be 
.\rt; it is in reality so stupid and tiresome that 
how people can endure looking at it three times 
a day, and evcry day in the year, is an unanswer- 
able question. There is only one thin
 worse 
in a dining-room than pictures of fruit, and that 
is pictures of huge dead fish, with their horrible 
mouths agape. 
That was in April, 1924. I let it pass 
at the time because I realiæd that we are 
all prone to error as the sparks fly upward. 
665 



666 


THE FIELD OF ART 


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Virgin anù Child Enthroned. 
From the painting by Crivelli in the Brera at Milan. 


t;: 


To every man his howler, once in so often, 
within decent and reasonable limits. Be- 
sides, there was always hope that by some 
fluke Professor Phelps might suffer en- 
lightenment. The Fates might lead him 
into a dining-room adorned by a type of 
still life different from that which he so 
feelingly describes. On the other hand, 
let us not forget the sweeping nature of 
his howler, complete, flawless, as perfect, 
to use Swinburne's phrase, as the big 
round tear of a child. He says: "As a 
candidate for the Ignoble Prize I suggest 
all pictures of Still Life." The italics are 
mine. But they do not do full justice to 
the horror of the thing, nor am I through 
with the tale of the crime committed un- 
der the seemingly innocent and jocund 
rubric of "As I Like It." Returning to 
the subject, more than a year later, to be 
exact, in August, 1925, Professor Phelps 
quotes a sympathetic correspondent, and 
when she asks him if he shouldn't restrict 
his candidates to the baser sort of still 
life, he shows that time has wrought no 
change for the better in his views, Re- 
iterating his heresy, he says: "l\Iy Scrib- 
nerian colleague, Royal Cortissoz, should 
answer this 'question; as for me, I never 
saw a picture of still life that I cared for." 
Ill-equipped as I am for a major opera- 
tion, I shall do my best for this unhappy 
man. 


.-,1 
I 
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; 
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I X - the first place, I would ask him to 
consider the fact that from a certain 
legitimate point of view the master of 
still life may be said to exercise the art 
of painting a little more in its isolated 
essence than any other practitioner of 
the brush. In every other category the 
subject as subject must, in a measure, 
preoccupy the technician. \Vhen John 
Oliver Hobbes wished to describe the 
effect of boredom upon one of her char- 
acters, she used a figure that has always 
staved in mv mind. "He looked," she 
wr
te, "like -Saint Lawrence on his grid- 
iron, saying to the bystanders, 'Turn me, 
this side is done.' " Now the painter 
would be bound to feel that. His merely 
human emotions would be engaged. But 
before a dead fish his pulse does not skip 
a single beat. He goes right on painting, 
and, all things being equal, he paints like 



THE FIELD OF ART 


667 


an angel. No painter is ever going to lose ill-luck has taken him into dining-rooms 
his I;>oise before a basket of fruit or a por- decorated with artistic lies, that is, with 
celam vase. On the contrary, he sees his baskets of fruit painted to give such an 
6ubject steadily and sees it whole; he sees iI
usion that the beholder wants to help 
the form and the color in it as though in a hImself to an apple anrl bite it. That 


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Georg Gisze. 
From the portrait by HfJlbein in the museum at Berlin 


dry light, and in the celebration of these 
things he can press his capacities to the 
utmost, striving unhurried-for still life 
stays very still-undistracted. and with 
absolute intensity toward something like 
perfection. He is engaged in affirming the 
art of painting as painting. Says Alfred 
Stevens, that brilliant oracle among art- 
ists: "Painting which produces an illu5ion 
of reality is an artistic lie." The only ex- 
cuse I can find for Professor Phelps is that 


isn't still life. That is color photography. 
If, after he had accepted an invitation to 
one of these chambers of horrors, Pro- 
fessor Phelps had telephoned me, I would 
have urged him to get out of it somehow, 
and then I would have told him where to 
dine. 
I would have conjured him, in the 
first place, to lay siege to the hospitality 
of the late James \V, Ellsworth. You 
had an extraordinary experience if you 



668 


THE FIELD OF ART 


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N O\V the point 
is tha t this 
sort of thing has 
been going on for 
ages. Painters 
have painted still 
life with loving 
zeal even when, if 
I may use a not 
inapposite figure, 
t.hey have had 
other fish to frv. 
It has entered into 
portrait-painting. 
It has counted in 
the treatment of 
mythoÌogical 
themes. \\'hy, it 
has even played a 
part, a considera- 
ble part, in the 
painting of re- 
ligious subjects. 
Ask, for example, 
any student of re- 
ligious art why he remembers Crivelli's 
Virgin and Child Enthroned, the slender 
upright panel in the Brera. He will talk. 
to you about the figures, it is true, but he 
will talk also about the marble throne and 
the brocade at its base, and perhaps his 
most fervid dithyramb will be for the fruits 


'- 


. . 


.. 


d 


Lc Déjeuner. 
From the painting by Chardin. 


went to break bread with that exact- 
ing connoisseur. As you stood in the 
central hall of his piano nobile you could 
turn to the left and catch sight, on the 
further wall of the drawing-room; of a 
great portrait of a man by Rembrandt, 
one of the greatest he ever painted. 
Turning to the right, on the 
further wall of the dining- 
room, hung so that it was 
directly opposite the fair- 
ly distant but still clearly 
visible Rembrandt, there 
was a migh ty golden pump- 
kin, an heroic pumpkin, the 
father and mother of all 
pumpkins, painted by the 
modern Frenchman, V ollon. 
And, oh! glory be, that 
pumpkin held its own! It 
held its own not because 
V ollon had sought to make 
it look ineffably like a 
pumpkin, but because his 
sense of color and his brush- 
work, his technique and his 
style had so operated as to 
lift a vegetable out of it- 
self and cause it to exhale 
be aut y in something like 
sp]endor. 


.......: 


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Pumpkin. 
From the painting by Antoine Yollon. 



THE FIELD OF ART 


with which the 1Iadonna is engarlanded. 
Crivelli was enamored of still life. In his 
Annunciation in the X ational Gallery the 
Virgin and her visitant are almost 
ub- 
merged in accessories. She kneels behind 
a great carven doorway, and above, to the 
ornamentation of the architecture there 
are added the hues of a peacock and an 


669 


\\Then he has visited the Xational Gal- 
lery, in London, he has, I am sure re- 
joiced in Jan van Eyck's Jan Arn
lfini 
and his \\ïfe, and I'll warrant that his 
rejoicing has looked in part to the mirror 
and the chandelier. in the back of the pic- 
ture. Similarly, his enjoyment of Hol- 
bein's Georg Gisze, at Berlin, has sprung 


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La Femme am: Chrys.luthi.-mes, 
FrOin the p.lintinl; Ly Dega;" 


Oriental rug. It may oe obsen'ed that] 
am now talking about pictorial acces- 
sories. Very well, but I am also talking 
about still-life painting. That is where 
the art began, ill the passion of artists to 
exploit their craftsmanship through the 
delineation of inanimate things. Per- 
haps Professor Phelps will better realize 
the enormity of his conduct when he re- 
alizes that in condemning all pictures of 
still life he condemns a myriad of master- 
pieces. But I begin to feel myself relent- 
ing. I don't think pe has been as wicked 
as all that. In' fact, I will go further amI 
say that I believe that he has, all unwit- 
tingly, gi\"en himself up on occasion to 
the whole-hearted enjoyment of still-life 
painting. 


not only from the personality of the mer- 
,chant- but from the vase of tIowers on the 
rug-co\'ered table. I might multiply in- 
definitely the illustrations to be drawn 
frain piCtures in which the still life, though 
subordinated, magnificently asserts itself, 
but I will add only one more. It is the 
picture by Velasqú'ez in the Prado whkh 
is called The Forge of Vulcan. There is 
much to fill the eve in this famous com- 
position. There -is the golden Apollo, 
and, before him, the bewildered Vulcan 
and his men. You look upon the group 
as'a group. But presently on a shelf in 
the baèkground above the fire you notice 
a bit of pottery, dull white against gray. 
It is the humblest of details. But it fills 
an important part in fixing the equilib- 



670 


THE FIELD OF ART 


rium of the design, and, what is more, what Rembrandt could do with the car- 
when Velasquez has come to it he has cass of an animal, or what Vermeer of 
lavished upon it all of his technical mas- Delft could do with a rug or a glass or a 
tery. He has turned, for the nonce, a map, I must touch upon the exploits of 
virtuoso of still life and gives you one of those old masters in the Low Countries 


- 


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.... 


Wild Roses and \Yater-Lily. 
From the painting by John La Farge. 


the noblest passages in pure painting that 
you will find anywhere. 

 
 
 
P ICTURES such as those I have cited 
make an inalienable part of the his- 
tory of still life, and I commend them to 
the attention of Professor Phelps, because 
I commend to him an art as an art. I 
would like to go on discussing them, for 
the subject is really inexhaustible, but my 
space isn't, so I must speak instead of the 
paintings in which still life has the whole 
canvas to itself. Instead of dwelling upon 


who dealt with still life utterly for its own 
sake. Their name is legion. Snyders, 
Jan Fyt, Jan \Veenix, Hondecoeter, Seg- 
hers, De Heem
 and Van Huysum are 
some of the leading lights in a shining 
company. They brought to their art cer- 
tain elements to which I have already 
alluded, color and brush work-this last 
highly polished-and they brought two 
more, composition and a feeling for dec- 
oration. If Professor Phelps were to stray 
into a Dutch museum and observe there 
a panel by Van Huysum, he wouldn't 
feel about it as he has felt about thoes 



THE FIELD OF ART 


unconscionable fruit-baskets of his; on the 
contrary, he would want to steal it and 
hang it up in his own dining-room to con- 
template three times a day, year in and 
year out. Imagination boggles at what 
would happen if he explored the French 
museums and got really acquainted with 
Charclin. He 
wouldn't stop at 
the dining-room. 
He would want 
to furnish his 
library and 
his bedroom 
with Chardins. 
\\-hv? Because 
that worker of 
miracles co u I d 
take a loaf of 
bread and a 
bottle of wine, 
or a copper ket- 
tIe and a dead 
fish, or an apple 
and a bowl, or 
even an unim- 
portant egg, 
and, by the 
sheer beauty of 
his painting. 
transform these 
insensate ob- 
jects into things 
of pure enchan t- 
ment. That is 
all he did. He 
never tried to 
tell a story 
about a pear, õ'r 
to dramatize an 
onion. He nev- 
er didned any pathos in a leg of mutton. 
He simply said to himself: ,. Phæbus Apol- 
lo! \Vhat a muffled radiance there is in 
that flask of Burgundy! ''"hat browns 
and whites there are in that crusted bread 
 
"That paintable textures there are in a 
spread napkin!" \\Tith that he loosed the 
batteries of genius upon a few comestibles. 
Yes, "genius" is the \\>oord. There is al- 
ways genius in the greatest painting, for in 
it craftsmanship is enriched by individual- 
ityand takes on that mysterious investi- 
ture which we have in mind when we 
talk about style. There are all kinds of 
genius, There is the kind that 
Iichael 


I 
[ 


671 


Angelo and Raphael had when they 
painted their sublime decorations, and so 
on through many categories. Creative 
imagination is inseparable from some of 
them, and when we come to still life it 
seems as if we were in another world. 'Ve 
are, but it is an authentic world, in which 
genius still pre- 
vails, having in 
common with all 
the others the 
power of su- 
premely good 
technique. 
The French 
ha ve had no sec- 
ond Chardin, 
but they have 
had modern 
painters not un- 
worthy of him. ' 
Courbet was one 
of them. From 
the great exhibi- 
tion of his works 
which was held 
at the :\Ietro- 
politan :\Iuseum 
a few years ago, 
I recall nothing 
more vividly 
than a certain 
sumptuous flow- 
er-piece. X early 
all the Impres- 
sionis ts have 
done well with 
still life. Degas 
ne\Oer did any- 
thing finer than 
the flowers in La 
Femme aux Chrvsanthèmes. The woman 
giving this pictúre its title is beautifully 
drawn, but she is not the cru"{ of the mat- 
ter; that is found in the chrysanthemums. 
.Manet did some superb still-life painting, 
and there are things in this field by::\Ionet 
and Renoir which are \'ery good to look 
upon. It amuses me to remember that 
while many of the works of Cé7anne and 
Van Gogh leave me stone-cold, I have 
found them more persuasive than usual 
\vhen they ha\Oe painted still life. The 
sanest things by ::\Iatisse that I have seen 
were the flower-paintings that were shown 
ill X ew York only last season, There 


., 


From the painting by \Iuen Weir. 


Roses. 



6ï2 


THE FIELD OF _'\RT 


are other Frenchmen of high ability as 
painters of still life, not forgetting Fantin- 
Latour, and I have already mentioned him 
of the immortal pumpkin, Antoine V ollon. 
But I am less inclined to remind Professor 
Phelps of these numerous brilliant for- 
eigners than of the leaders of our own 
school. 



 
 
 


T HE greatest of them was John La 
Farge. That versatile man of genius 
could do anything, and when he painted 
flowers he beat Fantin-Latour on his own 
ground. A picture of a water-lily by him 
is so subtle a thing, so penetrating an in- 
terpretation of the spirit of the flower, 
that it seems an affair of necromancy. 
He painted the scarlet hibiscus as he 
found it in the South Sea Islands. I last 
saw it years ago, but the clangor of its 
glorious reds and greens rings in my mem- 
ory to this day. \\Ïth La Farge in flower- 
painting I would associate l\ilaria Oakey 
Dewing and the late Alden \\T eir, both 
consummate in still life. Chase was ex- 
traordinarily skilful in his fish. Professor 
Phelps especially woke in my mind a recol- 
lection of Chase when he paid his compli- 
ments to "pictures of huge dead fish, with 
their horrible mouths agape." There is 
nothing horrible about a cod as Chase 


paints it. It is, indeed, a tO'llr de force 
in the evocation of beauty. Emil Carl- 
sen has painted chiefly hard substances. 
objects in glass, metal, and porcelain, anrl 
has painted them with exquisite skill and 
an equally exquisite sense of beauty. 
There are divers other Americans who 
come to mind. I recall the bewitching 
pastels of flowers that John H. Twacht- 
man used to make, and, in a very different 
vein, but likewise very beautiful, certain 
still-life paintings by Frank W. Benson. 
That artist has done some fascinating pic- 
tures in this field, true testimonies to the 
value of those immemorial qualities at 
which I have glanced, the technical quali- 
ties, the sterling workmanship in form and 
color that will bring almost any subject 
into the sphere of pure delight, As I 
think of the host of great achievements in 
still life, as I think of the beauty and the 
charm that they possess, I look back at 
the allusions I have made to the author 
of "As I Like It" and I marvel at my 
forbearance. I am a kind-hearted man, 
and I do not ask too much of him in 
reparation. But I think he ought at 
least to hurry off to the nearest depart- 
ment store, equip himself with sheet and 
candle, and duly make penitential obei- 
sance before. Antoine V ollon his pump- 
kin. 


A calendar of current art nhibitions will be found in the Fifth .\nnue Section. 


J 
\ 



,.,.. , 


-.. 



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