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A BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY
SHORT STORIES

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUT1A
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

OF CANADA, LIMITED

TORONTO

A BOOK. OF
CONTEMPORARY

SHORT
STORIES

EDITED BY DOROTHY BREWSTER, PH.D.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
IV LW YORK CITY

With an Appendix on writing the Short Story by
LILLIAN BARNARD GILKES

NEW YORK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1936

Published December, 1936

SET UP AND ELECTROTYPED BY T. MOREY & SON
•PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA*

INTRODUCTION

WHEN the material was selected for The Book of
Modern Short Stories, published by The Mac-
millan Company in 1928, the chief interest for
several years in that field had been centred upon new
devices in technique, as part of the reaction against
standardization and formula. A story, it was pointed out,
might have an emotional pattern instead of a plot; it
might rely for its effect upon mood instead of action; it
might drift off down the stream of consciousness instead
of cracking the whip of the surprise ending. That col-
lection, therefore, was planned to illustrate different ways
of handling material, in stories ranging from one extreme
to the other of the types once defined in a book review by
Virginia Woolf: on the one hand, the self-sufficient and
compact type, in the manner of the French masters, with
no thread left hanging, the last sentence often lighting up
the whole circumference of the tale; and on the other
hand, the "loosely trailing rather than tightly furled'*
type, in the manner of Chekhov, the stories moving slowly
out of sight " like clouds in the summer air, leaving a wake
of meaning in our minds which gradually fades away."

Since the appearance of the 1928 collection, the annual
volumes edited by Mr. E. J. O'Brien and the O. Henry
Memorial Committee, besides all the anthologies that are
occasional rather than perennial, have continued to take
excellent care of the general run of interesting con-
temporary short stories. Meanwhile the preoccupation
of critics has been shifting, as the third decade of the
century has moved on into the fourth, from form to
subject-matter; or rather — since no serious critic regards
form and subject-matter in any other light than as two

I n trodu ction

aspects of the same entity — the emphasis has shifted.
And with the shifting of emphasis there have developed
sharp conflicts of opinion. Just as in politics it has be-
come more and more difficult for the indifferent and the
neutral to avoid being drawn to the Right or to the Left,
so in criticism lines of battle have been formed on what
had been only a pleasant parade-ground. The attack
comes from the critics of the Left: from Marxians in New
Masses and International Literature to such young revo-
lutionary poets as Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis,
they all have been insisting upon the obligation of the
artist, especially the writer, to concern himself with the
dominant issues of the day; with the way society is going,
or might go, or should go. In any era this obligation ex-
ists, they say. But it is less binding during periods of
relative stability. Stability, however, is far from char-
acterizing our era, filled as it is with the prospects and
portents of revolutionary change and counter-revolu-
tionary regression.

The attack is met by those who disagree profoundly
with such a view of the artist's obligation. To their mind
his duty is to keep himself as far as possible detached from
the current discontents and to remain beyond or above
the battle. As the first group of critics urge descent into
the Red Square of conflict — into the streets, comrades! —
those of the opposing camp counsel retreat to an ivory
tower of contemplation. The dust of the controversy gets
into our eyes and settles on the books and pictures over
which the dispute is waged. It is a small inconvenience in
comparison with the mental stimulation of the battle, but
it does demand that we do a good deal of dusting-off . Such
an office this present anthology is intended to perform for
certain kinds of stories. Here are the best examples the
editor could find (without restriction as to country, so far
as translations were available) of what may be roughly
labelled ivory tower stories, and the best of those with

Introduction

revolutionary themes or implications. After reading them
and enjoying them and contrasting the two groups in
theme and treatment, we shall have a better idea of the
issues at stake in criticism.

In the introduction to Francis Thompson's essay on
Shelley, George Wyndham says: "The older I get, the
more do I affect the two extremes of literature. Let me
have either pure Poetry, or else the statements of actors
and sufferers." This quotation may serve as a formulation
of the Ivory Tower, Red Square contrast. Actors and
sufferers are more likely to be on the squares, fighting and
making statements, than in the towers, distilling poetry
from life. To those wide fields of literary expression in
between the two extremes belong most of the stories in the
1928 collection. The experience they reflect has neither
the remoteness we associate with ivory towers nor the im-
mediacy of fighting at the barricades. They deal rather
with those emotions and incidents that show very little
fundamental change from generation to generation. One
can read them without being bothered about where
society is going and even without wondering very much
about the social order that conditioned the particular ex-
perience. Such stories, recording physical and spiritual
adventures that might happen to almost anybody, any-
where, in any period, lie between the extremes which
divide the present collection into two parts.

In choosing stories illustrative of these extremes, I
ruled out from "the statements of actors and sufferers"
that direct advocacy of causes and theories which belongs
to the platform, and that sensational — however authen-
tic— violence of incident which belongs to the field of
"reportage." And in the other group I set aside as not
to my purpose the stylistic experiments where the poets
talk to themselves rather than to the reader; I include no
"pigeons on the grass, alas." I had no preconceived ideas
about the differences that would appear when the two

vii

Introduction

groups were confronted, and I am going now to leave
most of them for the reader to discover. But no one can
miss the quality of remoteness from present urgencies in
the first group; a remoteness of theme or mood or both,
which comes from looking back to the past, near or dis-
tant; or from exploring rare emotional states, or very
exceptional personalities; or from turning up the soil of
primitive impulses and acts that lie beneath familiar sur-
faces, like the buried city of Miss Porter's story under the
revolutionary disturbances of modern Mexico. Some-
times it derives merely from an atmosphere of withdrawn
leisure in which the nice shades and the fine feelings may
be tracked down and fixed in a lovely phrase or image.
The tempo in this group is slower than in the other. The
stories are longer: although there are but fourteen of them
as against the twenty-two in the second section, the num-
ber of words in each section is about the same. It is in-
teresting— and the result of no intention on the editor's
part — that over half in the first group are concerned with
the old, the dying, the very young. They are full of
reverie, dreaming, retrospect; with few exceptions, the
people in them have their eyes turned within rather than
without. The people in the other group, however, are
mostly adults in the full tide of living, with their gaze
directed outward. And for riots, arrests, fighting, violent
death, executions, mass excitements, we must leave the
tower for the square.

Into the tower world, nevertheless, come echoes of the
conflict in the square. Schnitzler lays the scene of his
play, The Green Cockatoo , in a Paris tavern on the eve of
the fall of the Bastille. To this tavern in the slums certain
jaded aristocrats used to come in search of novel sensa-
tions, cleverly provided by the proprietor, an ex-actor.
Each night he staged an apparently impromptu Grand
Guignol kind of show, with crimes of passion enacted by
players who appeared until the denouement to be au-

viii

Introduction

thentic bravos and prostitutes of the lower world. Such a
performance was in progress on this night, as the mob
gathered headway outside in the streets. By dramatic
coincidence the mock intrigues of the play-world and a
fatal complication of the real world, involving a marquis,
a courtesan, and one of the actors, become so intertwined
that the players themselves are lost between truth and
illusion, and an actual murder is the climax. Even as a
knife thrust kills the marquis, the thunder of triumphant
revolution is at the door of the tavern.

In similar fashion we see in some of the stories of the
first section the threat or the actual impact of an invading
world of change and violence. Puryear's Hornpipe offers
only a mild intimation, conveyed by the figure of the
" relief lady" at the country store, of difficulties coming
closer and closer to the mountain folk in the secluded Vir-
ginia valley. In / Shall Decline My Head, the old man,
emerging briefly from the fantasy of wish-fulfillment which
at last possesses him completely, takes part in a drawing-
room discussion of impending revolutionary change; but
his contribution is only: all this has been before — there is
nothing new. Buchmendel, Stefan Zweig's old bibliog-
rapher, is destroyed by the cruel enmities of a world to
the very existence of which his own rare gift had blinded
him. In The Old Chevalier it is the Paris Commune of 1871
which creates the conditions and the atmosphere that
make possible the adventure the old man recalls with
such melancholy tenderness, though the adventure itself
is purely romantic. And in Rest Cure, the writer on his
Riviera terrace (an obvious prototype of D. H. Lawrence),
fighting against the death he feels approaching, calls on
his father to save him — the father he had always resented
and thought he could do without, who has the miner's
lamp strapped around his head and who brings with him
the dark and blind strength of the world below the sunlit
surface.

Introduction

In the remoteness of theme and the elaboration of treat-
ment that mark such stories as these, Left critics see at
work an " escapist" psychology. The term conveys op-
probrium and often irritates those to whom it is applied.
So it becomes important to distinguish between the point
of view of the author and that of the characters he has
chosen to depict. The editor is making no allegations
about escape to ivory towers on the part of the authors.
They may share the belief that it is their duty to turn
aside from the conflicts of the moment for the sake of af-
firming the eternal values. Or they may simply find
"escapist psychology" in other people a fascinating theme
for artistic interpretation. It may move them to pity or to
poetry or to laughter, but is in no manner to be confused
with their own way of meeting life. As a suggestion of
how complicated a matter the author's relation with his
theme may be, consider the reasons a writer like Naomi
Mitchison gives for choosing to write about ancient
Sparta, or Caesar's Gaul, or imperial Rome. Discussing
historical fiction in The Saturday Review (April 27, 1935)
she says: "Why then had I got to choose this period (first
century B. c.)? Because my mind was all stirred up with
the troubles in Ireland in my own year of grace — 1921 —
and the injustices committed by the Black and Tan troops
during the British military occupation. Yet I didn't want
to write directly about Ireland. I didn't feel as though I
could. The creative part of my mind jibbed at that, per-
haps because it was too afraid — it wanted to keep out of
the too real, too hard, too cruel world, for as long as I
would let it. After all, I, with my generation, had been
through the World War; we wanted rest from the present."
But in many of her stories we are aware that Mrs. Mitchi-
son, tracing out the old patterns of Sparta or Scythia, is
making an indirect, yet penetrating, comment upon the
present. In Black Sparta, for example, a story more ab-
sorbing and significant than the delicate idyl reprinted in

Introduction

this collection, but too long for the limits set, the claim of
his State upon the young Spartan's innermost thoughts
and feelings arouses in him a resistance as inexplicable to
himself as to those around him. He aids the escape of a
helot, who had moved him to unauthorized compassion
and to dangerous thoughts. His predicament — the
struggle between loyalty to something within himself
and loyalty to the State — is better understood now than
then; volumes of ethical and political discussion are
ranged on both sides of the question that tore at the
young Spartan like the famous hidden fox of the legend.
But though better understood, it is a no less bitter pre-
dicament for many thousands of the actors and sufferers
in the contemporary class-divided State.

Mrs. Mitchison's tower, then, is rather like that de-
scribed by Andre Gide in explaining his inability to take
part in the political activities of Communism in spite of
his sympathy with its aims: "I do not insist that the
tower where I take refuge be of ivory. But I am worth
nothing if I leave it. Tower of glass; observatory where I
receive all rays of light, all waves of sound; fragile tower
where I feel myself badly sheltered; sheltering I would
rather be without; vulnerable on all sides; confident in
despite of everything, with eyes set towards the east."
(Pages de Journal Jp2p-/pj2.) Passages in Mrs. Mitchi-
son's Vienna Diary dispel any notion that in turning to
the past for her themes she is evading the challenge of the
present.

All but half a dozen of the stories in this collection are
strictly contemporary; they are of this decade of the
1930*8; and of the remaining half a dozen only two are
of a date earlier than the 1920*5. A word remains to be
said about the reason for including these two: The Princess
by Anton Chekhov, and The Altar of the Dead by Henry
James, both written before the turn of the century.
James's story concludes the first section and Chekhov's

Introduction

opens the second — and with intention. That altar blazing
with candles, piously tended and consecrated to the dead,
may be regarded as symbolic of values guarded in ivory
towers. Few would wish those flames extinguished. And
to keep them alight in the turmoils that threaten or are
already upon us may exact as intensive and dedicated a
purpose as that which animated Henry James's odd
elderly hero. One can become a communist, said Lenin
in a sentence placed as a reminder in a Crimean palace
that is now a library and museum for citizens, one can
become truly a communist only when the memory has
been enriched with all that has been achieved by hu-
manity. If the word communist makes of this too special
a plea, put it this way: only on that condition can one go
on into the future with hope.

What, beyond the personal salvation of his hero, did
James intend to convey by his lighted altar? The story,
he explains in his preface, grew out of the sense of per-
sonality lost in the dehumanizing atmosphere of the
great mass. "It takes space to feel, it takes time to know;
and great organisms as well as small have to pause . . .
to possess themselves and to be aware. Monstrous masses
are by this truth so impervious to vibration that the
sharpest forces of feeling, locally applied, no more pene-
trate than a pin or a paper cutter penetrates an elephant's
hide. Thus the very tradition of sensibility would perish
if left only to their care. It has here and there to be
rescued, to be saved by independent, intelligent zeal.
. . . The sense of the state of the dead is but part of the
sense of the state of the living; and congruously with
that, life is cheated to almost the same degree of the
finest homage . . . that we fain would render it. We
clutch indeed at some shadow of these things . . . but
our struggle yields to the other arrayed things that defeat
the cultivation in such an air of the finer flowers — crea-
tures of cultivation as the finer flowers essentially are."

xii

Introduction

He describes the "bloom of myriad many-colored rela-
tions" as a precious plant that becomes rare indeed in the
multiplied contact and motion of the crowded life. The
Altar of the Dead commemorates an imagined case of the
"individual independent effort to keep it none the less
tended and watered, to cultivate it, as I say, with an ex-
asperated piety." Thus "the prime idea is that of an
invoked, a restorative reaction against certain general
brutalities."

James's altar, then, symbolizes the conscious effort to
preserve the flowers of a special sensibility — those in-
dividual values that, in the recurrent nightmares of our
more unhappy prophets, are threatened by the advance
of the proletariat. James realized that the effort to pre-
serve them had to fly in the face of conditions. He was
thinking of London, of monstrous aggregations of people,
and of the forgetfulness and callousness, not of the multi-
tudes only, who are indifferent to the sight of a funeral
train "bounding merrily by," but of the cultivated ladies
and gentlemen with whom he dined and who were not
immune to the general infection. What would he have
thought of conditions such as some of our stories portray?
Try to preserve a rare flower of personality in the white
man's town in Georgia where Candy-Man Beechum is
snuffed out just as a week-end precaution; or in Kentucky
during a strike, where naive liberals are caught in the
No-man's land between warring classes; or on the Man-
churian or Siberian frontier of tense watchfulness, espion-
age, and violence; or in the bare Hungarian village of
Wine, or the starved Cuban countryside or the tax-ridden
Italian montain hamlet; or in the midst of the civil war
brutalities of Liam O'Flaherty's and Frank O'Connor's
Ireland. It seems an impossible task. Yet we may note
for consolation how precious individual values live on
through the years of drab discipline, privation, long-
suffering and long-hoping of the idealistic socialists de-

xiii

Introduction

picted in May-Day Celebration and A Wreath for Toni.
But at what cost!

And now for the reason for introducing the second
group of stories with Chekhov's Princess. In the grounds
of such a monastery near Moscow as the little princess
used for a retreat when she wished spiritual dew to fall
upon her delicate egotism, there is a cemetery where
Chekhov, together with other writers, artists, and musi-
cians more recently dead, is buried. It is a carefully
tended place of grass, flowers, and trees. There are no
more monks and no more princesses in retreat in the
monastery and its grounds, but there is a day nursery for
the children of workers in nearby factories; and they were
playing or sleeping in the sun, with nurses to care for them,
when I saw the place last summer. A little girl was proud
to help us find Chekhov's grave. Much that he used to
dream of as coming to pass in perhaps two hundred years
has happened since he was buried there in 1904. Among
his stories, The Princess, free of the more obvious miseries
of the old order, yet tells as well as any of them why people
were driven to act and suffer for a new order; why they
had to destroy the intrenched and blinded privilege em-
bodied in the not unsympathetic figure of the little prin-
cess. The story is a concrete illustration of a condition
summed up in abstract terms by Harold Laski (The State
in Theory and Practise): "It can never be said too often,
especially of that material basis which is decisive in deter-
mining social relations, that men think differently who
live differently, and that the unity which gives endur-
ance and stability to a society is therefore unattaina-
ble where they live so differently that they cannot hope
to see life in the same terms. It is the poison of in-
equality which has wrought the ruin of all great empires
in the past. For what it does is to break the loyalty of
the masses to the common life and thereby to per-
suade them, not seldom rightly, that its destruction

xiv

Introduction

alone can clear the path to more just conceptions of state-
hood."

The Princess, which dramatizes the different thinking
of those who live differently and diagnoses the poison of
inequality working in a particular empire that presently
came to ruin, serves well to introduce the stories which
follow it. These range from east to west and north to
south, though no effort has been made to include all
countries or all phases of conflict. (The revolutionary
emotions of Spain, for example, seem to find their best
literary expression in poetry.) The stories are arranged
in a progression, roughly, from passive suffering to active
participation in struggles for a new order, and so on to
problems of adjustment arising after a successful revolu-
tion— such problems finding a place only in Soviet stories,
naturally enough, such as Black Fritters and The Cherry
Stone. This last story has a not wholly achieved atmos-
phere of fantasy and introspection. It is open to adverse
criticism in a way that a simple action story like The Tiger
is not; it tries to do a harder thing and does not quite
succeed. But it was deliberately chosen because it sug-
gests how, after mass movements and overturns pre-
sumably fatal to all those rare flowers of Henry James's
concern, and after Plans with all their imposed con-
centration upon mass objectives, individual sensibility
raises its head; rather feebly; and struggles to express
itself through a technique of reverie and image that is
mastered even by the novices in the ivory towers. But
the cherry stone is planted in the new garden; it will grow
into the blossoming tree of the Invisible country; and it
will be found to be, after all, a part of the Plan.

"It is the business of the artist," writes Stephen
Spender in The Destructive Element, "to insist on human
values. If there is need for a revolution, it is these human
values that will make the revolution."

In that richly ornate old palace of the Muscovite tsars

Introduction

within the Kremlin is a winding tower staircase with an
intricately designed window in a deep stone embrasure.
Through its panes of crimson, azure, topaz, and amber
glass one looks out upon an incredible rainbow vision of
domes and slender spires, twisted cupolas, and golden
crosses; and beyond all that strange beauty of the past
float the red banners over the Red Square. It is a pic-
torial juxtaposition of the processes of history that
kindles the imagination. Ivory Tower and Red Square:
let them stand for the human values which the stories in
this collection record and celebrate.

DOROTHY BREWSTER
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK CITY
November, 1936

XVI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WITH each story formal credit for reprinting ap-
pears in the copyright line. In addition, the
editor wishes to express her deep appreciation
to the following authors, agents, editors, and publishers
for generous and courteous cooperation in permitting the
use of copyrighted material: Dorothy Thompson, Mary
Heaton Vorse, Langston Hughes, George H. Corey, Leslie
Dykstra, Raymond Weaver, Jane Culver, Marjorie
Fischer, Lillian Gilkes; Whit Burnett, Alfred Dashiell,
the editors of Harper's Magazine; Eric S. Pinker and
Adrienne Morrison, Incorporated, Brandt and Brandt,
Ann Watkins, Incorporated, A. D. Peters, Morton Gold-
man, Maxim Lieber, Harold Ober, Ayako Ishigaki; Alfred
A. Knopf, Inc., Harper and Brothers, International Pub-
lishers Company, Inc., Harcourt, Brace and Co., Inc.,
Houghton Mifflin Co., Random House, The Hogarth
Press, The Viking Press, Inc., Robert McBride and Co.,
Macmillan and Co., Ltd., The Vanguard Press, Columbia
University Press. The editor is especially grateful to
Mr. Lewis H. Titterton for permission to use Nancy
Evans's story; for valuable suggestions in the selection
of stories, to Mr. Terence Holliday and Miss Jennie L.
Thomson; and for such suggestions and assistance in many
other ways, to Professor Angus Burrell.

XVll

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii

PART ONE

THE OLD CHEVALIER . . . Isak Dine sen ... 3

REST CURE Kay Boyle .... 35

PENTHOUSE Raymond Weaver . . 47

B(JRYEAR'S HORNPIPE . . . Leslie Dykstra ... 67

SILENT SNOW, SECRET SNOW . Conrad Aiken ... 93

BUCHMENDEL . > .- . . . . Stefan Zzueig . . . 117

THE MARCHESA K. Swinste ad-Smith . 151

THE HAND OF GOD .... Jane Culver . . . 171

I SHALL DECLINE MY HEAD . Nancy Evans . . . 187

REJUVENATION THROUGH JOY •'. Langston Hughes . . 205
*tHE POOR RELATION AND THE

SECRETARY Naomi Mitchison . . 229

MARIA CONCEPCION .... Katherine Anne Porter 249

TJIE APOSTATE Lillian Barnard Gilkes 275

THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD . . Henry James . . . 303

PART TWO

THE PRINCESS Anton Chekhov . . 347

WINE . . • Sandor Gergel . . . 365

THE PROTECTOR Marcelo Salinas . .373

AWAKENING Isaac Babel . . .379

CANDY-MAN BEECHUM . . . Erskine Caldwell . . 391

xiz

Contents

PAGE

MRS. KENT Robert Smith . . . 399

PROFESSOR Langston Hughes . . 413

$595 F. O. B. . ; (f. .... George H. Corey . . 423

RENDEZVOUS . ' ;. . . . . Mary Heaton Vorse . 455

RED OVER EUROPE .... George Weller . . . 473

SIMPLICIO . ^ £ Ignazio Silone . . . 493

THE MOUNTAIN TAVERN . . Liam 0' Flaherty . . 535

NIGHTPIECE WITH FIGURES . . Frank O'Connor . . 547

MAY-DAY CELEBRATION . . T. 0. Beachcroft . , 559

A WREATH FOR TONI . . . Dorothy Thompson . 575

COCOONS* Fusao Hayashi . . 599

OUTPOST . ' '. Denji Kuroshima . . 6ii'

THE MARTYR'S WIDOW . . . Agnes Smedley . . 625

THE TIGER F. Borokhvastov . . 645

BLACK FRITTERS Panteleimon Romanov. 657

THE CHERRY STONE .... Yuri Olesha . . . 671

THE SUN AND THE MOON . . Marjorie Fischer . . 685

APPENDIX

ON WRITING THE SHORT STORY Lillian Barnard Gilkes 699

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 754

THE OLD CHEVALIER

Isak Dinesen

ISAK DINESEN is the pen name of Baroness Blixen of
Rungstedlund, Denmark. Baroness Blixen is carrying on a
family tradition with her writing, for her father before her
made a considerable contribution to Danish literature. Much
of her life she has spent on a coffee plantation in British East
Africa^ now the Kenya Colony , where she went with her hus-
band in 1914, the year of their marriage. After their divorce
in 1921, she remained on the plantation for a little more than
ten years — until the coffee market declined. Then she returned
to her home in Denmark. It is her expressed hope to go back
to East Africa.

THE OLD CHEVALIER

MY father had a friend, old Baron von Brackel, who
had in his day traveled much and known many
cities and men. Otherwise he was not at all like
Odysseus, and could least of all be called ingenious, for he
had shown very little skill in managing his own affairs.
Probably from a sense of failure in this respect he carefully
kept from discussing practical matters with an efficient
younger generation, keen on their careers and success in
life. But on theology, the opera, moral right and wrong,
and other unprofitable pursuits he was a pleasant talker.

He had been a singularly good-looking young man, a
sort of ideally handsome youth, and although no trace of
this past beauty could be found in his face, the history of
it could be traced in a certain light-hearted dignity and
self-reliance which are the product of a career of good
looks, and which will be found, unaccountably, in the car-
riage of those shaking ruins who used to look into the
mirrors of the last century with delight. In this way one
should be able to point out, at a danse macabre, the skele-
tons of the really great beauties of their time.

One night he and I came to discuss an old theme, which
has done its duty in the literature of the past: namely,
whether one is ever likely to get any real benefit, any
lasting moral satisfaction, out of forsaking an inclination
for the sake of principle, and in the course of our talk he
told me the following story:

On a rainy night in the winter of 1874, on an avenue in
Paris, a drunken young girl came up and spoke to me. I

From Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen, copyright 1934. Reprinted by
permission of Random House, Inc., New York.

The Old Chevalier

was then, as you will understand, quite a young man. I
was very upset and unhappy, and was sitting bareheaded
in the rain on a seat along the avenue because I had just
parted from a lady whom, as we said then, I did adore,
and who had within this last hour tried to poison me.

This, though it has nothing to do with what I was going
to tell you, was in itself a curious story. I had not thought
of -it for many years until, when I was last in Paris, I saw
the lady in her box at the opera, now a very old woman,
with two charming little girls in pink who were, I was told,
her great-granddaughters. She was lovely no more, but I
had never, in the time that I had known her, seen her look
so contented. I was sorry afterward that I had not gone
up and called on her in her box, for though there had been
but little happiness for either of us in that old love affair
of ours, I think that she would have been as pleased to be
reminded of the beautiful young woman, who made men
unhappy, as I had been to remember, vaguely as it was,
the young man who had been so unhappy that long time
ago.

Her great beauty, unless some rare artist has been able
to preserve it in color or clay, now probably exists only
within a few very old brains like mine. It was in its day
something very wonderful. She was a blonde, the fairest,
I think, that I have ever seen, but not one of your pink-
and-white beauties. She was pale, colorless, all through,
like an old pastel or the image of a woman in a dim mirror.
Within that cool and frail form there was an unrivaled
energy, and a distinction such as women have no more,
or no more care to have.

I had met her and had fallen in love with her in the
autumn, at the chateau of a friend where we were both
staying together with a large party of other gay young
people who are now, if they are alive, faded and crooked
and deaf. We were there to hunt, and I think that I shall
be able to remember to the last of my days how she used

Isak Dinesen

to look on a big bay horse that she had, and that autumn
air, just touched with frost, when we came home in the
evenings, warm in cold clothes, tired, riding side by side
over an old stone bridge. My love was both humble and
audacious, like that of a page for his lady, for she was so
much admired, and her beauty had in itself a sort of dis-
dain which might well give sad dreams to a boy of twenty,
poor and a stranger in her set. So that every hour of our
rides, dances and tableaux vivants was exuberant with
ecstasy and pain, the sort of thing you will know yourself:
a whole orchestra in the heart. When she made me
happy, as one says, I thought that I was happy indeed. I
remembered smoking a cigar on the terrace one morning,
looking out over the large view of low, wood-covered blue
hills, and giving the Lord a sort of receipt for all the happi-
ness that I should ever have any claim to in my life.
Whatever would happen to me now, I had had my due,
and declared myself satisfied;

Love, with very young people, is a heartless business.
We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is
only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the indi-
viduality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially
enraptured by the forces within himself. You may come
back to that view again, in a second adolescence. I knew a
very old Russian in Paris, enormously rich, who used to
keep the most charming young dancers, and who, when
once asked whether he had, or needed to have, any illu-
sions as to their feelings for him, thought the question
over and said: "I do not think, if my chef succeeds in
making me a good omelette, that I bother much whether he
loves me or not." A young man could not have put his
answer into those words, but he might say that he did not
care whether his wine merchant was of his own religion or
not, and imagine that he had got close to the truth of
things. In middle age, though, you arrive at a deeper
humility, and you come to consider it of importance that

The Old Chevalier

the person who sells or grows your wine shall be of the
same religion as you yourself. In this case of my own, of
which I am telling you, my youthful vanity, if I had too
much of it, was to be taught a lesson very soon. For dur-
ing the months of that winter, while we were both living
in Paris, where her house was the meeting place of many
bel-esprits, and she herself the admired dilettante in
music and arts, I began to think that she was making use
of me, or of her own love for me, if such can be said, to
make her husband jealous. This has happened, I suppose,
to many young men down through the ages, without the
total sum of their experience being much use to the young
man who finds himself in the same position today. I be-
gan to wonder what the relations between those two were
really like, and what strange forces there might be in her
or in him, to toss me about between them in this way, and
I think that I began to be afraid. She was jealous of me,
too, and would scold me with a sort of moral indignation,
as if I had been a groom failing in his duties. I thought
that I could not live without her, and also that she did
not want to live without me, but exactly what she wanted
me for I did not know. Her contact hurt me as one is
hurt by touching iron on a winter day: you do not know
whether the pain comes from heat or from cold.

Before I had ever met her I had read about her family,
whose name ran down for centuries through the history of
France, and learned that there used to be werewolves
amongst them, and I sometimes thought that I should
have been happier to see her really go down on all fours
and snarl at me, for then I should have known where I
was. And even up to the end we had hours together of a
particular charm, for which I shall always be thankful to
hen During my first year in Paris, before I knew any
people there, I had taken up studying the history of the
old hotels of the town, and this hobby of mine appealed
to her, so that we used to dive into old quarters and ages

Isak Dinesen

of Paris, and dwell together in the age of Abelard or of
Moliere, and while we were playing in this way she was
serious and gentle with me, like a little girl. But at other
times I thought that I could stand it no longer, and would
try to get away from her, and any suspicion of this was
enough, I imagine, to make her lie awake at night thinking
out new methods of punishing me. It was between us the
old game of the cat and the mouse — probably the original
model of all the games of the world. But because the cat
has more passion in it, and the mouse only the plain in-
terest of existence, the mouse is bound to become tired
first. Toward the end I thought that she wished us to be
found out, she was so careless in this liaison of ours; and
in those days a love affair had to be managed with pru-
dence.

I remember during this period coming to her hotel on
the night of a ball to which she was going, while I had not
been asked, disguised as a hairdresser. In the 'seventies
ladies had large chignons and the work of a coiffeur took
time. And through everything the thought of her husband
would follow me, like, I thought, the gigantic shadow,
upon the white back-curtain, of an absurd little punchi-
nello. I began to feel so tired — not exactly of her, but really
exhausted in myself — that I was making up my mind to
have a scene and an explanation from her, even if I should
lose her by it, when suddenly, on the night of which I am
telling you, she herself produced both the scene and the
explanation, such a hurricane as I have never again been
out in; and all with exactly the same weapons as I had
myself had ready: with the accusation that I thought
more of her husband than I did of her. And when she said
this to me, in that pale blue boudoir of hers that I knew
so well — the silk-lined, upholstered and scented box, such
as the ladies of that time liked to keep themselves in, with,
I remember, some paintings of flowers on the walls, and
very soft silk cushions everywhere, and a lot of lilacs in

The Old Chevalier

the corner behind me, with the lamp subdued by a large
red shade — I had no reply, for I knew that she was right.

You would know his name if I told you, for he is still
talked about, though he has been dead for many years.
Or you would find it in any of the memoirs of that period,
for he was the idol of our generation. Later on, great un-
happiness came upon him, but at that moment — I believe
that he was then thirty-three years old — he was walking
quietly in the full splendor of his strange power. I once,
about that time, heard two old men talk about his mother,
who had been one of the beauties of the Restoration, and
one of them said of her that she carried all her famous
jewels as lightly and gracefully as other young ladies would
wear garlands of field flowers. "Yes," the other said after
he had thought it over for a moment, "and she scattered
them about her, in the end, like flowers, a la Ophelia."
Therefore I think that this rare lightness of his must have
been, together with the weakness, a family trait. Even in
his wildest whims, and in a sort of mannerism which we
then named fin de siecle and were rather proud of, he had
something of le grand siecle about him: a straight nobility
that belonged to the old France.

I have looked since at those great buildings of the
seventeenth century which seem altogether inexpedient
as dwellings for human beings, and have thought that
they must have been built for him — and his mother, I
suppose — to live in. He had a confidence in life, independ-
ent of the successes which we envied him, as if he knew
that he could draw upon greater forces, unknown to us,
if he wanted to. It gave me much to think about, on the
fate of man, when many years later I was told how this
young man had, toward the end of his tragic destiny,
answered the friends who implored him in the name of
God, in the words of Sophocles's Ajax: "You worry me
too much, woman. Do you not know that I am no longer
a debtor of the gods?"

Isak DInesen

I see that I ought not to have started talking about him,
even after all these years; but an ideal of one's youth will
always be a landmark amongst happenings and feelings
long gone. He himself has nothing to do with this story.

I told you that I myself felt it to be true that my feel-
ings for the lovely young woman, whom I adored, were
really light of weight compared to my feelings for the
young man. If he had been with her when we first met, or
if I had known him before I met her, I do not think that I
should ever have dreamed of falling in love with his wife.

But his wife's love for him, and her jealousy, were in-
deed of a strange nature. For that she was in love with
him I knew from the moment that she began to speak of
him. Probably I had known it a long time before. And
she was jealous. She suffered, she cried — she was, as I
have told you, ready to kill if nothing else would help her
— and all the time that fight, which was very likely the
only reality in her life, was not a struggle for possession,
but a competition. She was jealous of him as if he had been
another young woman of fashion, her rival, or as if she
herself had been a young man who envied him his tri-
umphs. I think that she was, in herself, always alone with
him in a world that she despised. When she rode so
madly, when she surrounded herself with admirers, she
had her eye on him, as a competitor in a chariot race
would have his eyes only on the driver just beside him. As
for the rest of us, we only existed for her in so far as we
were to belong to her or to him, and she took her lovers
as she took her fences, to pile up more conquests than the
man with whom she was in love.

I cannot, of course, know how this had begun between
them. Afterward I tried to believe that it must have arisen
from a desire for revenge, on her side, for something that
he had done to her in the past. But I had the feeling that
it was this barren passion which had burned all the color
out of her.

The Old Chevalier

Now you will know that all this happened in the early
days of what we called then the " emancipation of woman."
Many strange things took place then. I do not think that
at the time the movement went very deep down in the
social world, but here were the young women of the highest
intelligence, and the most daring and ingenious of them,
coming out of the chiaroscuro of a thousand years, blink-
ing at the sun and wild with desire to try their wings. I
believe that some of them put on the armor and the halo
of St. Joan of Arc, who was herself an emancipated virgin,
and became like white-hot angels. But most women, when
they feel free to experiment with life, will go straight to
the witches' Sabbath. I myself respect them for it, and do
not think that I could ever really love a woman who had
not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick.

I have always thought it unfair to woman that she has
never been alone in the world. Adam had a time, whether
long or short, when he could wander about on a fresh and
peaceful earth, among the beasts, in full possession of his
soul, and most men are born with a memory of that period.
But poor Eve found him there, with all his claims upon
her, the moment she looked into the world. That is a
grudge that woman has always had against the Creator:
she feels that she is entitled to have that epoch of paradise
back for herself. Only, worse luck, when chasing a time
that has gone, one is bound to get hold of it by the tail,
the wrong way around. Thus these young witches got
everything they wanted as in a catoptric image.

Old ladies of those days, patronesses of the church and
of home, said that emancipation was turning the heads of
the young women. Probably there were more young ladies
than my mistress galloping high up above the ground,
with their fair faces at the backs of their necks, after the
manner of the wild huntsman in the tale. And in the air
there was a theory, which caught hold of them there, that
the jealousy of lovers was an ignoble affair, and that no

Isak Dinesen

woman should allow herself to be possessed by any male
but the devil. On their way to him they were proud of
being, according to Doctor Faust, always a hundred steps
ahead of man. But the jealousy of competition was, as
between Adam and Lilith, a noble striving. So there you
would find, not only the old witches of Macbeth, of whom
one might have expected it, but even young ladies with
faces smooth as flowers, wild and mad with jealousy of
their lovers' mustachios. All this they got from reading —
in the orthodox witches' manner — the book of Genesis
backwards. Left to themselves, they might have got a
lot out of it. It was the poor, tame, male preachers of
emancipation, cutting, as warlocks always will, a miserable
figure at the Sabbath, who spoiled the style and flight of
the whole thing by bringing it down to earth and under
laws of earthly reason. I believe, though, that things have
changed by now, and that at the present day, when males
have likewise emancipated themselves, you may find the
young lover on the hearth, following the track of the
witch's shadow along the ground, and, with infinitely less
imagination, blending the deadly brew for his mistress,
out of envy of her breasts.

The part which had been granted to me, in the story of
my emancipated young witch, was not in itself flattering.
Still I believe that she was desperately fond of me, prob-
ably with the kind of passion which a little girl has for her
favorite doll. And as far as that goes I was really the cen-
tral figure of our drama. If she would be Othello, it was I,
and not her husband, who must take the part of Des-
demona, and I can well imagine her sighing, "Oh, the
pity of it, the pity of it, lago," over this unfortunate busi-
ness, even wanting to give me a kiss and yet another be-
fore finishing it altogether. Only she did not want to kill
me out of a feeling of justice or revenge. She wished to
destroy me so that she should not have to lose me and to
see a very dear possession belong to her rival, in the man-

The Old Chevalier

ner of a determined general, who will blow up a fortress
which he can no longer hold, rather than see it in the hands
of the enemy.

It was toward the end of our interview that she tried
to poison me. I believe that this was really against her
program, and that she had meant to tell me what she
thought of me when I already had the poison in me, but
had been unable to control herself for so long. There
was, as you will understand, something unnatural in
drinking coffee at that stage of our dialogue. The way in
which she insisted upon it, and her sudden deadly silence
as I raised the cup to my mouth, gave her away. I can
still, although I only just touched it, recall the mortal,
insipid taste of the opium, and had I emptied the cup, it
could not have made my stomach rise and the marrow in
my bones turn to water more than did the abrupt and
fatal conviction that she wanted me to die. I let the cup
drop, faint as a drowning man, and stood and stared at her,
and she made one wild movement, as if she meant to
throw herself at me still. Then we stood quite immovable
for a minute, both knowing that all was lost. And after a
little while she began to rock and whimper, with her hands
at her mouth, suddenly changed into a very old woman.
For my own part, I was not able to utter a sound, and I
think that I just ran from the house as soon as I had
strength enough to move. The air, the rain, and the street
itself met me like old forgotten friends, faithful still in the
hour of need.

And there I sat on a seat of the Avenue Montaigne,
with the entire building of my pride and happiness lying
around me in ruins, sick to death with horror and humili-
ation, when this girl, of whom I was telling you, came up
to me.

I think that I must have been sitting there for some
time, and that she must have stood and watched me be-
fore she could summon up her courage to approach. She

Isak Dinesen

probably felt herself in sympathy with me, thinking that
I was drunk too, as sensible people do not sit without a
hat in the rain, perhaps also because I was so near her
own age. I did not hear what she said, neither the first nor
the second time. I was not in a mood to enter into talk
with a little girl of the streets. I think that it must have
been from sheer instinct of self-preservation that I did in
the end come to look at her and to listen. I had to get
away from my own thoughts, and any human being was
welcome to assist me. But there was at the same time
something extraordinarily graceful and expressive about
the girl, which may have attracted my attention. She
stood there in the rain, highly rouged, with radiant eyes
like stars, very erect though only just steady on her legs.
When I kept on staring at her, she laughed at me, a low,
clear laughter. She was very young. She was holding up
her dress with one hand — in those days ladies wore long
trains in the streets. On her head she had a black hat with
ostrich feathers drooping sadly in the rain and overshad-
owing her forehead and eyes. The firm gentle curve of
her chin, and her round young neck shone in the light of
the gas lamp. Thus I can see her still, though I have an-
other picture of her as well.

What impressed me about her was that she seemed
altogether so strangely moved, intoxicated by the situa-
tion. Hers was not the conventional advance. She looked
like a person out on a great adventure, or someone keeping
a secret. I think that on looking at her I began to smile,
some sort of bitter and wild smile, known only to young
people, and that this encouraged her. She came nearer.
I fumbled in my pocket for some money to give her, but
I had no money on me. I got up and started to walk, and
she came on, walking beside me. There was, I remember,
a certain comfort in having her near me, for I did not want
to be alone. In this way it happened that I let her come
with me.

The Old Chevalier

I asked her what her name was. She told me that it
was Nathalie.

At this time I had a job at the Legation, and I was liv-
ing in an apartment on the Place Francois I, so we had
not far to go. I was prepared to come back late, and in
those days, when I would come home at all sorts of hours,
I used to keep a fire and a cold supper waiting for me.
When we came into the room it was lighted and warm,
and the table was laid for me in front of the fire. There
was a bottle of champagne on ice. I used to keep a bottle
of champagne to drink when I returned from my shep-
herd's hours.

The young girl looked around the room with a con-
tented face. Here in the light of my lamp I could see how
she really looked. She had soft brown curls and blue
eyes. Her face was round, with a broad forehead. She
was wonderfully pretty and graceful. I think that I just
wondered at her, as one would wonder at finding a fresh
bunch of roses in a gutter, no more. If I had been normally
balanced I suppose I should have tried to get from her
some explanation of the sort of mystery that she seemed to
be, but now I do not think that this occurred to me at all.

The truth was that we must both have been in quite a
peculiar sort of mood, such as will hardly ever have re-
peated itself for either of us. I knew as little of what moved
her as she could have known about my state of mind, but,
highly excited and strained, we met in a special sort of
sympathy. I, partly stunned and partly abnormally wide
awake and sensitive, took her quite selfishly, without any
thought of where she came from or where she would disap-
pear to again, as if she were a gift to me, and her presence
a kind and friendly act of fate at this moment when I
could not be alone. She seemed to me to have come as a
little wild spirit from the great town outside — Paris — -
which may at any moment bestow unexpected favors on
one, and which had in the right moment sent her to me.

Isak Dinesen

What she thought of me or what she felt about me, of
that I can say nothing. At the moment I did not think
about it, but on looking back now I Should say that I
must also have symbolized something to her, and that I
hardly existed for her as an individual.

I felt it as a great happiness, a warmth all through me,
that she was so young and lovely. It made me laugh again
after those weird and dismal hours. I pulled off her hat,
lifted her face up, and kissed her. Then I felt how wet she
was. She must have walked for a long time on the streets
in the rain, for her clothes were like the feathers of a wet
hen. I went over and opened the bottle on the table,
poured her out a glass, and handed it to her. She took it,
standing in front of the fire, her tumbled wet curls falling
down over her forehead. With her red cheeks and shining
eyes she looked like a child that has just awakened from
sleep, or like a doll. She drank half the glass of wine quite
slowly, with her eyes on my face, and, as if this half-glass of
champagne had brought her to a point where she could no
longer be silent, she started to sing, in a low, gentle voice,
hardly moving her lips, the first lines of a song, a waltz,
which was then sung in all the music halls. She broke it
off, emptied her glass, and handed it back to me. A votre
sante, she said.

Her voice was so merry, so pure, like the song of a bird
in a bush, and of all things music at that time went most
directly to my heart. Her song increased the feeling I
had, that something special and more than natural had
been sent to me. I filled her glass again, put my hand on
her round white neck, and brushed the damp ringlets
back from her face. "How on earth have you come to be
so wet, Nathalie?" I said, as if I had been her grand-
mother. " You must take off your clothes and get warm."
As I spoke my voice changed. I began to laugh again.
She fixed her starlike eyes on me. Her face quivered for a
moment. Then she started to unbutton her cloak, and let

The Old Chevalier

it fall onto the floor. Underneath this cloak of black lace,
badly suited for the season and faded at the edges into a
rusty brown, shtf had a black silk frock, tightly fitted
over the bust, waist and hips, and pleated and draped
below, with flounces and ruffles such as ladies wore at
that time, in the early days of the bustle. Its folds shone
in the light of my fire. I began to undress her, as I might
have undressed a doll, very slowly and clumsily, and she
stood up straight and let me do it. Her fresh face had a
grave and childlike expression. Once or twice she colored
under my hands, but as I undid her tight bodice and my
hands touched her cool shoulders and bosom, her face
broke into a gentle and wide smile, and she lifted up her
hand and touched my fingers.

The old Baron von Brackel made a long pause. "I think
that I must explain to you," he said, "so that you may be
able to understand this tale aright, that to undress a
woman was then a very different thing from what it must
be now. What are the clothes that your ladies of these
days are wearing? In themselves as little as possible — a
few perpendicular lines, cut off again before they have
had time to develop any sense. There is no plan about
them. They exist for the sake of the body, and have no
career of their own, or, if they have any mission at all, it
is to reveal.

"But in those days a woman's body was a secret which
her clothes did their utmost to keep. We would walk
about in the streets in bad weather in order to catch a
glimpse of an ankle, the sight of which must be as familiar
to you young men of the present day as the stems of these
wineglasses of ours. Clothes then had a being, an idea of
their own. With a serenity that it was not easy to look
through, they made it their object to transform the body
which they encircled, and to create a silhouette so far
from its real form as to make it a mystery which it was

Isak Dinesen

a divine privilege to solve. The long tight stays, the
whalebones, skirts and petticoats, bustle and draperies,
all that mass of material under which the women of my
day were buried where they were not laced together as
tightly as they could possibly stand it — all aimed at one
thing: to disguise.

"Out of a tremendous froth of trains, pleatings, lace,
and flounces which waved and undulated, secundum artem,
at every movement of the bearer, the waist would shoot
up like the chalice of a flower, carrying the bust, high and
rounded as a rose, but imprisoned in whalebone up to the
shoulder. Imagine now how different life must have ap-
peared and felt to creatures living in those tight corsets
within which they could just manage to breathe, and in
those fathoms of clothes which they dragged along with
them wherever they walked or sat, and who never dreamed
that it could be otherwise, compared to the existence of
your young women, whose clothes hardly touch them and
take up no room. A woman was then a work of art, the
product of centuries of civilization, and you talked of her
figure as you talked of her salon, with the admiration
which one gives to the achievement of a skilled and un-
tiring artist.

"And underneath all this Eve herself breathed and
moved, to be indeed a revelation to us every time she
stepped out of her disguise, with her waist still delicately
marked by the stays, as with a girdle of rose petals.

"To you young people who laugh at the ideas, as at
the bustles, of the 'seventies, and who will tell me that in
spite of all our artificiality there can have been but little
mystery left to any of us, may I be allowed to say that
you do not, perhaps, quite understand the meaning of the
word? Nothing is mysterious until it symbolizes some-
thing. The bread and wine of the church itself has to be
baked and bottled, I suppose. The women of those days
were more than a collection of individuals. They sym-

The Old Chevalier

bolized, or represented, Woman. I understand that the
word itself, in that sense, has gone out of the language.
Where we talked of woman — pretty cynically, we liked
to think — you talk of women, and all the difference lies
there.

"Do you remember the scholars of the middle ages who
discussed the question of which had been created first:
the idea of a dog, or the individual dogs? To you, who are
taught statistics in your kindergartens, there is no doubt,
I suppose. And it is but justice to say that your world
does in reality look as if it had been made experimentally.
But to us even the ideas of old Mr. Darwin were new and
strange. We had our ideas from such undertakings as
symphonies and ceremonials of court, and had been
brought up with strong feelings about the distinction be-
tween legitimate and illegitimate birth. We had faith in
purpose. The idea of Woman — of das ewig weibliche,
about which you yourself will not deny that there is some
mystery — had to us been created in the beginning, and
our women made it their mission to represent it worthily,
as I suppose the mission of the individual dog must have
been worthily to represent the Creator's idea of a dog.

"You could follow, then, the development of this idea
in a little girl, as she was growing up and was gradually,
no doubt in accordance with very ancient rules, inaugu-
rated into the rites of the cult, and finally ordained.
Slowly the center of gravity of her being would be shifted
from individuality to symbol, and you would be met with
that particular pride and modesty characteristic of the
representative of the great powers — such as you may find
again in a really great artist. Indeed, the haughtiness of
the pretty young girl, or the old ladies' majesty, existed
no more on account of personal vanity, or on any personal
account whatever, than did the pride of Michelangelo
himself, or the Spanish Ambassador to France. However
much greeted at the banks of the Styx by the indignation

Isak Dinesen

of his individual victims with flowing hair and naked
breasts, Don Giovanni would have been acquitted by a
board of women of my day, sitting in judgment on him,
for the sake of his great faith in the idea of Woman. But
they would have agreed with the masters of Oxford in
condemning Shelley as an atheist; and they managed to
master Christ himself only by representing him forever
as an infant in arms, dependent upon the Virgin.

"The multitude outside the temple of mystery is not
very interesting. The real interest lies with the priest
inside. The crowd waiting at the porch for the fulfillment
of the miracle of the boiling blood of St. Pantaleone —
that I have seen many times and in many places. But
very rarely have I had admittance to the cool vaults be-
hind, or the chance of seeing the priests, old and young,
down to the choirboys, who feel themselves to be the most
important persons at the ceremony, and are both scared
and impudent, occupying themselves, in a measure of
their own, with the preparations, guardians of a mystery
that they know all about. What was the cynicism of
Lord Byron, or of Baudelaire, whom we were just reading
then with the frisson nouveau, to the cynicism of these
little priestesses, augurs all of them, performing with the
utmost conscientiousness all the rites of a religion which
they knew all about and did not believe in, upholding, I
feel sure, the doctrine of their mystery even amongst
themselves. Our poets of those days would tell us how a
party of young beauties, behind the curtains of the
bathing-machine, would blush and giggle as they 'put
lilies in water.'

" I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who
saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder
barrel with her lighted torch, threatening to put fire to it,
and all the time knowing herself that it is empty? This
has seemed to me a charming image of the woman of my
time. There they were, keeping the world in order, and

The Old Chevalier

preserving the balance and rhythm of it, by sitting upon
the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there
was no mystery. I have heard you young people saying
that the women of old days had no sense of humor. Think-
ing of the face of my young girl upon the barrel, with
severely downcast eyes, I have wondered if our famous
male humor be not a little insipid compared to theirs. If
we were more thankful to them for existing than you are
to" your women of the present day, I think that we had
good reason for it.

"I trust that you will not mind," he said, "an old man
lingering over these pictures of an age gone by. It will be,
I suppose, like being detained a little in a museum, before
a montre showing its fashions. You may laugh at them, if
you like."

The old chevalier then resumed his story:

As I then undressed this young girl, and the layers of
clothes which so severely dominated and concealed her
fell one by one there in front of my fire, in the light of my
large lamp, itself swathed in layers of silk — all, my dear,
was thus draped in those days, and my large chairs had, I
remember, long silk fringes all around them and on the
tops of those little velvet pompons. Otherwise they would
not have been thought really pretty — until she stood
naked, I had before me the greatest masterpiece of nature
that my eyes have ever been privileged to rest upon, a
sight to take away your breath. I know that there may
be something very lovable in the little imperfections of
the female form, and I have myself worshiped a knock-
kneed Venus, but this young figure was pathetic, was
heart-piercing, by reason of its pure faultlessness. She was
so young that you felt, in the midst of your deep admira-
tion, the anticipation of a still higher perfection, and that
was all there was to be said.

All her body shone in the light, delicately rounded and

Isak Dinesen

smooth as marble. One straight line ran through it from
neck to ankle, as through the heaven-aspiring column of a
young tree. The same character was expressed in the high
instep of the foot, as she pushed off her old shoes, as in
the curve of the chin, as in the straight, gentle glance of
her eyes, and the delicate and strong lines of her shoulder
and wrist.

The comfort of the warmth of the fire on her skin, after
the clinging of her wet and tumbled clothes, made her sigh
with pleasure and turn a little, like a cat. She laughed
softly, like a child who quits the doorstep of school for a
holiday. She stood up erect before the fire; her wet curls
fell down over her forehead and she did not try to push
them back; her bright painted cheeks looked even more
like a doll's above her fair naked body.

I think that all my soul was in my eyes. Reality had
met me, such a short time ago, in such an ugly shape, that
I had no wish to come into contact with it again. Some-
where in me a dark fear was still crouching, and I took ref-
uge within the fantastic like a distressed child in his book
of fairy tales. I did not want to look ahead, and not at
all to look back. I felt the moment close over me, like a
wave. I drank a large glass of wine to catch up with her,
looking at her.

I was so young then that I could no more than other
young people give up the deep faith in my own star, in a
power that loved me and looked after me in preference to
all other human beings. No miracle was incredible to me
as long as it happened to myself. It is when this faith
begins to wear out, and when you conceive the possibility
of being in the same position as other people, that youth
is really over. I was not surprised or suspicious of this act
of favor on the part of the gods, but I think that my heart
was filled with a very sweet gratitude toward them. I
thought it after all only reasonable, only to be expected,
that the great friendly power of the universe should mani-

The Old Chevalier

fest itself again, and send me, out of the night, as a help
and consolation, this naked and drunk young girl, a mir-
acle of gracefulness.

We sat down to supper, Nathalie and I, high up there in
my warm and quiet room, with the great town below us
and my heavy silk curtains drawn upon the wet night,
like two owls in a ruined tower within the depth of the
forest, and nobody in the world knew about us. She leaned
one arm on the table and rested her head on it. I think
that she was very hungry, under the influence of the food.
We had some caviar, I remember, and a cold bird. She
began to beam on me, to laugh, to talk to me, and to listen
to what I said to her.

I do not remember what we talked about. I think we
were very open-hearted, and that I told her, what I could
not have mentioned to anybody else, of how I had come
near to being poisoned just before I met her. I also think
that I must have told her about my country, for I know
that at a time afterwards the idea came to me that she
would write to me there, or even come to look for me. I
remember that she told me, rather sadly to begin with, a
story of a very old monkey which could do tricks, and had
belonged to an Armenian organ-grinder. Its master had
died, and now it wanted to do its tricks and was always
waiting for the catchword, but nobody knew it. In the
course of this tale she imitated the monkey in the funniest
and most gracefully inspired manner that one can imagine.
But I remember most of her movements. Sometimes I
have thought that the understanding of some pieces of
music for violin and piano has come to me through the
contemplation of the contrast, or the harmony, between
her long slim hand and her short rounded chin as she held
the glass to her mouth.

I have never in any other love affair — if this can be
called a love affair — had the same feeling of freedom and
security. In my last adventure I had all the time been

Isak Dinesen

worrying to find out what my mistress really thought of
me, and what part I was playing in the eyes of the world.
But no such doubts or fears could possibly penetrate into
our little room here. I believe that this feeling of safety
and perfect freedom must be what happily married people
mean when they talk about the two being one. I wonder
if that understanding can possibly, in marriage, be as
harmonious as when you meet as strangers; but this, I
suppose, is a matter of taste.

One thing did play in to both of us, though we were not
conscious of it. The world outside was bad, was dreadful.
Life had made a very nasty face at me, and must have
made a worse at her. But this room and this night were
ours, and were faithful to us. Although we did not think
about it, ours was in reality a supper of the Girondists.

The wine helped us. I had not drunk much, but my
head was fairly light before I began. Champagne is a
very kind and friendly thing on a rainy night. I remember
an old Danish bishop's saying to me that there are many
ways to the recognition of truth, and that Burgundy is
one of them. This is, I know, very well for an old man
within his paneled study. But young people, who have
seen the devil face to face, need a stronger helping hand.
Over our softly hissing glasses we were brought back to
seeing ourselves and this night of ours as a great artist
might have seen us and it, worthy of the genius of a god.

I had a guitar lying on my sofa, for I was to serenade, in
a tableau vivant, a romantic beauty — in real life an Ameri-
can woman from the Embassy who could not have given
you an echo back from whatever angle you would have
cried to her. Nathalie reached out for it, a little later in
our supper. She shuddered slightly at the first sound, for
I had not had time or thought for playing it, and crossing
her knees, in my large low chair, she began to tune it.
Then she sang two little songs to me. In my quiet room
her low voice, a little hoarse, was clear as a bell, faintly

The Old Chevalier

giddy with happiness, like a bee's in a flower. She sang
first a song from the music halls, a gay tune with a striking
rhythm. Then she thought for a moment and changed
over into a strange plaintive little song in a language that
I did not understand. She had a great sense of music.
That strong and delicate personality which showed itself
in all her body came out again in her voice. The light
metallic timbre, the straightness and ease of it, corre-
sponded with her eyes, knees, and fingers. Only it was a
little richer and fuller, as if it had grown up faster or had
stolen a march somehow upon her body. Her voice knew
more than she did herself, as did the bow of Mischa Elman
when he 'played as a Wunderkind.

All my balance, which I had kept somehow while
looking at her, suddenly left me at the sound of her voice.
These words that I did not understand seemed to me more
directly meaningful than any I had ever understood. I
s#t in another low chair, opposite her. I remember the
silence when her song was finished, and that I pushed the
table away, and how I came slowly down on one knee
before her. She looked at me with such a clear, severe,
wild look as I think that a hawk's eyes must have when
they lift off his hood. I went down on my other knee and
put my arms around her legs. I do not know what there
was in my face to convince her, but her own face changed
and lighted up with a kind of heroic gentleness. Altogether
there had been from the beginning something heroic about
her. That was, I think, what had made her put up with
the young fool that I was. For du ridicule jusqu'au su-
blime, surely, il n'y a qu'un pas.

My friend, she was as innocent as she looked. She was
the first young girl who had been mine. There is a theory
that a very young man should not make love to a virgin,
but ought to have a more experienced partner. That is
not true; it is the only natural thing.

It must have been an hour or two later in the night that

Isak Dinesen

I woke up to the feeling that something was wrong, or
dangerous. We say when we turn suddenly cold that
someone is walking over our grave — the future brings
itself into memory. And as Von meurt en plein bonheur de
ses malheurs passes, so do we let go our hold of our present
happiness on account of coming misfortune. It was not
the omne animal affair only; it was a distrust of the future
as if I had heard myself asking it: "I am to pay for this;
what am I to pay?" But at the time I may have believed
that what I felt was only fear of her going away.

Once before she had sat up and moved as if to leave me,
and I had dragged her back. Now she said: "I must go
back," and got up. The lamp was still burning, the fire
was smoldering. It seemed to me natural that she should
be taken away by the same mysterious forces which had
brought her, like Cinderella, or a little spirit out of the
Arabian Nights. I was waiting for her to come up and let
me know when she would come back to me, and what I
was to do. All the same I was more silent now.

She dressed and got back into her black shabby dis-
guise. She put on her hat and stood there just as I had
seen her first in the rain on the avenue. Then she came
up to me where I was sitting on the arm of my chair, and
said: "And you will give me twenty francs, will you not?"
As I did not answer, she repeated her question and said:
"Marie said that — she said that I should get twenty
francs."

I did not speak. I sat there looking at her. Her clear
and light eyes met mine.

A great clearness came upon me then, as if all the illu-
sions and arts with which we try to transform our world,
coloring and music and dreams, had been drawn aside,
and reality was shown to me, waste as a burnt house.
This was the end of the play. There was no room for any
superfluous word.

This was the first moment, I think, since I had met her

The Old Chevalier

those few hours ago, in which I saw her as a human being,
within an existence of her own, and not as a gift to me. I
believe that all thoughts of myself left me at the sight,
but now it was too late.

We two had played. A rare jest had been offered me
and I had accepted it; now it was up to me to keep the
spirit of our game until the end. Her own demand was well
within the spirit of the night. For the palace which he
builds, for four hundred white and four hundred black
slaves all loaded with jewels, the djinn asks for an old
copper lamp; and the forest-witch who moves three
towns and creates for the woodcutter's son an army of
horse-soldiers demands for herself the heart of a hare.
The girl asked me for her pay in the voice and manner of
the djinn and the forest-witch, and if I were to give her
twenty francs she might still be safe within the magic
circle of her free and graceful and defiant spirit. It was I
who was out of character, as I sat there in silence, with all
the weight of the cold and real world upon me, knowing
well that I should have to answer her or I might, even
within these few seconds, pass it on to her.

Later on I reflected that I might have had it in me to
invent something which would have kept her safe, and
still have allowed me to keep her. I thought then that I
should only have had to give her twenty francs and to
have said: "And if you want another twenty, come back
tomorrow night." If she had been less lovely to me, if
she had not been so young and so innocent, I might per-
haps have done it. But this young girl had called, during
our few hours, on all the chivalrousness that I had in my
nature. And chivalrousness, I think, means this: to love,
or cherish, the pride of your partner, or of your adversary,
as you will define it, as highly as, or higher than, your own.
Or if I had been as innocent of heart as she was, I might
perhaps have thought of it, but I had kept company with
this deadly world of reality. I was practiced in its laws

Isak Dinesen

and had the mortal bacilli of its ways in my blood. Now it
did not enter my head any more than it ever has to alter
my answers in church. When the priest says: "O God,
make clean our hearts within us," I have never thought of
telling him that it is not needed, or to answer anything
whatever but, "And take not your holy spirit from us."

So, as if it were the only natural and reasonable thing
to do, I took out twenty francs and gave them to her.

Before she went she did a thing that I have never for-
gotten. With my note in her left hand she stood close to
me. She did not kiss me or take my hand to say good-by,
but with the three fingers of her right hand she lifted my
chin up a little and looked at me, gave me an encouraging,
consoling glance, such as a sister might give her brother
in farewell. Then she went away.

In the days that followed — not the first days, but later —
I tried to construct for myself some theory and explana-
tion of my adventure.

This happened only a short time after the fall of the
Second Empire, that strange sham millennium, and the
Commune of Paris. The atmosphere had been filled with
catastrophe. A world had fallen. The Empress herself,
whom, on a visit to Paris as a child, I had envisaged
as a female deity resting upon clouds, smilingly conduct-
ing the ways of humanity, had flown in the night, in a
carriage with her American dentist, miserable for the lack
of a handkerchief. The members of her court were crowded
into lodgings in Brussels and London while their country
houses served as stables for the Prussians' horses. The
Commune had followed, and the massacres in Paris by
the Versailles army. A whole world must have tumbled
down within these months of disaster.

This was also the time of Nihilism in Russia, when the
revolutionaries had lost all and were fleeing into exile.
I thought of them because of the little song that Nathalie
had sung to me, of which I had not understood the words.

The Old Chevalier

Whatever it was that had happened to her, it must
have been a catastrophe of an extraordinarily violent na-
ture. She must have gone down with a unique swiftness,
or she would have known something of the resignation,
the dreadful reconciliation to fate which life works upon
us when it gets time to impress us drop by drop.

Also, I thought, she must have been tied to, and dragged
down with, somebody else, for if she had been alone it
could not have happened. It would have been, I reflected,
somebody who held her, and yet was unable to help her,
someone either very old, helpless from shock and ruin, or
very young, children or a child, a little brother or sister.
Left to herself she would have floated, or she would have
been picked up near the surface by someone who would
have valued her rare beauty, grace, and charm and have
congratulated himself upon acquiring them; or, lower
down, by somebody who might not have understood them,
but whom they would still have impressed. Or, near the
bottom, by people who would have thought of turning
them to their own advantage. But she must have gone
straight down from the world of beauty and harmony in
which she had learned that confidence and radiance of
hers, where they had taught her to sing, and to move and
laugh as she did, where they had loved her, to a world
where beauty and grace are of no account, and where the
facts of life look you in the face, quite straight to ruin,
desolation and starvation. And there, on the last step of
the ladder, had been Marie, whoever she was, a friend who
out of her narrow and dark knowledge of the world had
given her advice, and lent her the miserable clothes, and
poured some sort of spirit into her, to give her courage.

About all this I thought much, and for a long time; but
of course I could not know.

As soon as she had gone and I was alone — so strange
are the automatic movements which we make within the
hands of fate — I had no thought but to go after her and

Isak Dinesen

get her back. I think that I went, in those minutes,
through the exact experience, even to the sensation of
suffocation, of a person who has been buried alive. But I
had no clothes on. When I got into some clothes and came
down to the street it was empty. I walked about in the
streets for a long time. I came back, in the course of the
early morning, to the seat on which I had been sitting when
she first spoke to me, and to the hotel of my former mis-
tress. I thought what a strange thing is a young man who
runs about, within the selfsame night, driven by the mad
passion and loss of two women. Mercutio's words to
Romeo about it came into my mind, and, as if I had been
shown a brilliant caricature of myself or of all young men,
I laughed. When the day began to spring I walked back
to my room, and there was the lamp, still burning, and the
supper table.

This state of mine lasted for some time. During the
first days it was not so bad, for I lived then in the thought
of going down, at the same hour, to the same place where
I had met her first. I thought that she might come there
again. I attached much hope to this idea, which only
slowly died away.

I tried many things to make it possible to live. One
night I went to the opera, because I had heard other
people talk about going there. It was clear that it was
done, and there might be something in it. It happened
to be a performance of Orpheus. Do you remember the
music where he implores the shadows in Hades, and where
Euridice is for such a short time given back to him? There
I sat, in the brilliant light of the entr'actes, a young man in
a white tie and lavender gloves, with bright people who
smiled and talked all around, some of them nodding to
me, closely covered and wrapped up in the huge black
wings of the Eumenides.

At this time I developed also another theory. I thought
of the goddess Nemesis, and I believed that had I not had

The Old Chevalier

the moment of doubt and fear in the night, I might have
felt, in the morning, the strength in me, and the right, to
move her destiny and mine. It is said about the highway-
men who in the old days haunted the forests of Denmark
that they used to have a wire stretched across the road
with a bell attached. The coaches in passing would touch
the wire and the bell would ring within their den and call
out the robbers. I had touched the wire and a bell had
rung somewhere. The girl had not been afraid, but I had
been afraid. I had asked: "What am I to pay for this?"
and the goddess herself had answered: "Twenty francs,"
and with her you cannot bargain. You think of many
things, when you are young.

All this is now a long time ago. The Eumenides, if
they will excuse me for saying so, are like fleas, by which
I was also much worried as a child. They like young blood,
and leave us alone later in life. I have had, however, the
honor of having them on me once more, not very many
years ago. I had sold a piece of my land to a neighbor,
and when I saw it again, he had cut down the forest that
had been on it. Where were now the green shades, the
glades and the hidden footpaths? And when I then heard
again the whistle of their wings in the air, it gave me, with
the pain, also a strange feeling of hope and strength — it
was, after all, music of my youth.

"And did you never see her again?" I asked him.

"No," he said, and then, after a little while, "but I had
a fantasy about her, a fantaisie macabre, if you like.

"Fifteen years later, in 1889, I passed through Paris
on my way to Rome, and stayed there for a few days to
see the exhibition and the Eiffel Tower which they had
just built. One afternoon I went to see a friend, a painter.
He had been rather wild as a young artist, but later had
turned about completely, and was at the time studying
anatomy with great zeal, after the example of Leonardo.

Isak Dinesen

I stayed there over the evening, and after we had discussed
his pictures, and art in general, he said that he would show
me the prettiest thing that he had in his studio. It was a
skull from which he was drawing. He was keen to explain
its rare beauty to me. 'It is really,' he said, 'the skull of
a young woman, but the skull of Antinoiis must have
looked like that, if one had been able to get hold of it.'

"I had it in my hand, and as I was looking at the broad,
low brow, the clear and noble line of the chin, and the clean
deep sockets of the eyes, it seemed suddenly familiar to
me. The white polished bone shone in the light of the
lamp, so pure. And safe. In those few seconds I was taken
back to my room in the Place Francois I, with the silk
fringes and the heavy curtains, on a rainy night of fifteen
years before."

"Did you ask your friend anything about it?" I said.

"No," said the old man, "what would have been the
use? He would not have known."

REST CURE

by
Kay Boyle

KAY BOYLE, born in 1903 in St. Paul, Minnesota, has
lived much since her marriage in France, England, and
Austria. Her very early writing dealt with social conditions,
"undoubtedly due to my mother's great interest in radical
politics and pacifism" "/ have never wholly liked the work
of women with the exception of Gertrude Stein. . . . They
don't write simply or violently enough for my taste. . . .
The short story and the novel are adequate finger exercises,
but I, for one, am working towards a broad and pure poetic
form." (Quoted from Authors Today and Yesterday.)
Among her novels are Plagued by the Nightingale, Gentle-
men, I Address You Privately, My Next Bride, and Death
of a Man (/pj(5). Her short stories appear in book form
under the titles: The First Lover, Wedding Day, and The
White Horses of Vienna.

REST CURE

HE sat in the sun with the blanket about him, con-
sidering, with his hands lying out like emaciated
strangers before him, that to-day the sun would
endure a little longer. Certainly it would survive until the
trees below the terrace effaced it, towards four o'clock,
like opened parasols. A crime it had been, the invalid
thought, turning his head this way and that, to have ever
built up one house before another in such a way that one
man's habitation cast a shadow upon another's. The
whole sloping coast should have been left a wilderness
with no order to it, stalked and leafed with the great
strong trunks and foliage of these parts. Cactus plants
with petals a yard wide and yucca tongues as thick as
elephant trunks were sullenly and viciously flourishing all
about the house. Upon the terrace had a further attempt
at nicety and precision been made: there his wife had seen
to it that geraniums were potted into the wooden boxes
that stood along the wall.

From his lounging chair he could reach out and, with
no effort beyond that of raising the skeleton of his hand,
finger the parched stems of the geraniums. The south, and
the Mediterranean wind, had blistered them past all be-
lief. They bore their rosy top-knots or their soiled white
flowers balanced upon their thick Italian heads. There they
were, within his reach, a row of weary washerwomen lean-
ing back from the villainous descent of the coast. What
parched scions had thrust forth from their stems now
served to obliterate in part the vision of the sun. With

From The First Lover and Other Stories, by Kay Boyle (Harrison Smith &
Robert Haas, copyright 1933, New York). Reprinted by permission of Ann
Watkins, Inc., New York,

Rest Cure

arms akimbo they surrounded him: thin burned Italian
women with their meager bundles of dirty linen on their
heads. One after another, with a flicker of irritation for
his wife lighting his eye, he fingered them at the waist a
moment, and then snapped off each stem. One after an-
other he broke their stalks in two and dropped them away
onto the pavings beneath his lounging chair. When he had
finished off what plants grew within his reach, he lay back
exhausted, sank, thin as an archer's bow, into the depths
of his cushions.

"They kept the sun off me," he was thinking in abso-
lution.

In spite of the garden and its vegetation, he would have
the last drops of sun. He had closed his eyes, and there
he lay looking straight ahead of him into the fathomless
black pits of his lids. Even here, in the south, in the sun
even, the coal-mines remained. His nostrils were sick
with the smell of them and on his cheeks he felt lingering
the slipping mantle of the English fog. He had not seen
the mines since he was a young man, but nothing he had
ever done between would alter them. There he sat in the
sun with his eyes closed, looking into their depths.

Because his father had been a miner, he was thinking,
the black of the pits had put some kind of blasphemy on
his own blood. He sat with his eyes closed looking directly
into the blank awful mines. Against their obscurity he set
the icicles of one winter when the war was on, when he
had spent his twilights seeking for pinecones under the
tall trees in the woods behind the house. In Cornwall.
What a vision! How beautiful that year, and many other
years, might have been had it not been for the sour thought
of war. Every time his heart had lifted for a hillside or a
wave, or for the wind blowing, the thought of the turmoil
going on had beset and stricken him. It had lain like a
burden on his conscience every morning when he was
coming awake. The first light moments of day coming had

Kay Boyle

warned him that despite the blood rising in his body, it
was no time to rejoice. The war. Ah, yes, the war. After
the mines, it had been the war. Whenever he had be-
lieved for half a minute in man, then he had remembered
that the war was going on.

For a little while one February, it had seemed that the
colors set out in Monte Carlo, facing the Casino, would
obliterate forever the angry memories his heart had
stored away. The great mauve, white, and deep royal
purple bouquets had thrived a week or more, as if rooted
in his eyes. Such banks and beds of richly petaled flowers
set thick as thieves or thicker on the cultivated lawns
conveyed the wish. Their artificial physiognomies masked
the earth as well as he would have wished his own features
to stand guard before his spirit. The invalid lifted his
hand and touched his beard. His mouth and chin, he
thought with cunning satisfaction, were marvelously
concealed.

The sound of his wife's voice speaking in the room that
opened behind him onto the terrace roused him a little as
he sat pondering in the sun. She seemed to be moving
from one long window to another, arranging flowers in the
vases, for her voice would come across the pavings, now
strong and close, now distant as if turned away, and she
was talking to their guest about some sort of shrub or fern.
A special kind, the like of which she could find nowhere
on the Riviera. It thrived in the cool brisk fogs of their
own land, she was saying. Her voice had turned towards
him again and was ringing clearly across the terrace.

"Those are beautiful ones you have there now," said
the voice of the gentleman.

"Ah, take care!" cried out his wife's voice, somewhat
dimmed as though she had again turned towards the room.
"I was afraid you had pierced your hand," she said in a
moment.

When the invalid opened his eyes, he saw that the sun

Rest Cu re

was even now beginning to glimmer through the upper
branches of the trees, was lolling along the prosperous dark
upper boughs as if in preparation for descent. Not yet,
he thought, not yet. He raised himself on his elbows and
scanned the sky. Scarcely three-thirty, surely, he was
thinking. The sun can't be going down at once.

uThe sun can't be going down yet awhile, can it?" he
called out to the house.

He heard the gravel of the pathway sparkling and
spitting out from under the soles of their feet as they
crossed it, and then his wife's heels and the boots of the
guest struck and advanced across the paving stones.

"Oh, oh, the geraniums — " said his wife suddenly by
his side.

The guest had raised his head and stood squinting up
at the sun.

"I should say it were going down," he said after a
moment.

He had deliberately stepped before the rays of it and
stood leaning back against the terrace-wall. His solid
gray head had served to cork the sunlight. Like a wooden
stopper, thought the invalid, painted to resemble a man.
With the nose of a wooden stopper. And the sightless eyes.
And the creases when he speaks or smiles.

"But think what it must be like in Paris now," said the
gentleman. "I don't know how you feel, but I can't find
words to say how grateful I am for being here." The
guest, thought the invalid as he surveyed him, was very
conscious of being a guest — of accepting meals, bed, tea,
society — and his smile was permanently set beneath his
nose.

"Of course you don't know how I feel," said the in-
valid. He lay looking sourly up at his guest. "Would you
mind moving out of the sun?" As the visiting gentleman
skipped out of the way, the invalid cleared his throat, dis-
solved the little pellet of phlegm which had leapt to being

Kay Boyle

on his tongue so as not to spit before them, and sank back
into his chair.

"The advantage — or rather one of the advantages of
being a writer," said the visiting gentleman with a smile,
"is that he can settle down wherever the fancy takes him.
Now a publisher — "

"Why be a publisher?" said the invalid in irritation.
He was staring again into the black blank mines.

His wife was squatting and stooping about his chair,
gathering up in her dress the butchered geraniums. She
said not a word, but crouched there picking them care-
fully up, one by one. By her side had appeared a little
covered basket, and within it rattled a pair of castanets.

"I am sure I can very easily turn these into slips," she
said gently, as if speaking to herself. "A little snip in the
right place and they'll be as good as new."

"You can make soup out of them," said the invalid
bitterly. "What's in the basket," he said, "making a
noise?"

"Oh, a langouste!" cried out his wife. She had just re-
membered. "We bought you a langouste, alive, at the
Beausoleil market. It's as lively as a rig!"

The visiting gentleman burst into laughter. The invalid
could hear him gasping with enjoyment by his side.

"I can't bear them alive," said the invalid testily. He
lay listening curiously to the animal rattling his jaws and
clawing under the basket's lid.

"Oh, but with mayonnaise!" cried his wife. "To-
morrow!"

"Why doesn't Mr. What-do-you-call-him answer the
question I put him?" asked the invalid sourly. His mind
was possessed with the thought of the visiting man. "I
asked him why he was a publisher," said the invalid.
What a viper, what a felon, he was thinking, to come
and live on me and not give me the satisfaction of a
quarrel! He was not a young man, thought the invalid,

Rest Cure

with his little remains of graying hair, but he had all the
endurance and patience of a younger man in the presence
of a master. All the smiling and bowing, thought the
invalid with contempt, and all the obsequious ways. The
man was standing so near to his chair that he could hear
his breath whistling through his nostrils. Maybe his eyes
were on him, the invalid was thinking. It gave him a turn
to -think that he was lying there exposed in the sun where
the visitor could examine him pore by pore. Hair by hair
could the visitor take him in and record him.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," said the gentleman. "I'm
afraid I owe you an apology. You see, I'm not acdus-
tomed to it."

"To what?" said the invalid sharply. He had flashed
his eyes open and looked suspiciously into the publisher's
face.

"To seeing you flat on your back," said the gentleman
promptly.

"You covered that over very nicely," said the invalid.
He clasped his hands across his sunken bosom. "You
meant to say something else. You meant to say DEATH,"
said the invalid calmly. " I heard the first letter of it on
your tongue."

He lay back in his chair again with his lids fallen. He
could distinctly smell the foul fumes of the pits.

"Elsa," he said, as he lay twitching in the light, "I
would like some champagne. JUST BECAUSE," he said
sitting up abruptly, "I've written a few books doesn't
mean that you have to keep the truth about me to your-
self."

His wife went off across the terrace, leaving the two
men together.

"Don't make a mistake," said the invalid smiling
grimly. "Don't make any mistake. I'm not quite finished.
Not QUITE. I still have a little more to write about," he
said. "Don't you fool yourself, my dear."

Kay Boyle

"Oh, I flatter myself that I don't," said the gentleman
agreeably. "I'm convinced there's an unlimited amount
still to come. And I hope to have the honor of publishing
some of it. I'm counting on that, you know." He ended
on a playful note and looked coyly at the invalid. But
every spark of life had suddenly expired in the ill man's
face.

"I didn't know the sun would be off the terrace so
soon," he said blankly. His wife had returned and was
opening the bottle, carefully and without error, with the
end of her pliant thumb. The invalid turned on his side
and regarded her: a great strong woman whom he would
never forget, never, nor the surprisingly slim crescent of
her flexible thumb. All of her fingers, he lay thinking as
he watched her, were soft as skeins of silk, and tied in at
the joints and knuckles by invisible satin bands of faintest
rose. And there was the visiting gentleman hovering about
her, with his oh-let-me-please-mrs-oh-do-let-me-now. But
her grip on the neck of the bottle was as tenacious as a
snake's. She lifted her head, smiled, and shook it at their
guest.

"Oh, no," she said, "I'm doing beautifully."

Just as she spoke the cork flew out and hit the gentle-
man square in the forehead. After it streamed a geyser of
purest gold.

"Oh, oh, oh," cried the invalid. He held out his hands
to the golden spray. "Oh, pour it here!" he cried. "Oh,
buckets of it going! Oh, pour it over me, Elsa!"

The color had flown into Elsa's face and she was laugh-
ing. Softly and breathlessly she ran from glass to glass.
There in the stems played the clear living liquid, like a
fountain springing upward. Ah, that, ah, that, in the
inwards of a man, thought the invalid joyfully! Ah, that,
springing again and again in the belly and heart! There
in the glass it ran, cascaded in needlepoints the length of
his throat, went whistling to his pulses.

Rest Cure

The invalid set down his empty glass.

"Elsa," he said gently, "could I have a little more
champagne?"

His wife had risen with the bottle in her hand, but she
looked doubtfully at him.

"Do you really think you should?" she asked.

"Yes," said the invalid. He watched the unbelievably
pure stuff flowing out all over his glass. "Yes," he said.
"Of course. Of course, I should."

A sweet shy look of love had begun to arch in his eyes.

"I'd love to see the langouste" he said gently. "Do
you think you could let him out and let me see him run
around?"

Elsa set down her glass and stooped to lift the cover of
the basket. There was the green armored beast lifting
its eyes, as if on hinges, to examine the light. Such an
expression he had seen before, thought the invalid imme-
diately. There was a startling likeness in those small au-
dacious eyes. Such a look had there been in his father's
eyes: that look, and the long smooth mustaches drooping
across the wee clefted chin, gave the langouste such a look
of his father that he exclaimed aloud.

"Be careful," said Elsa. "His claws are tied, but
still—"

"I must have him out," said the invalid. He gripped
the langouste firmly about the hips. He looks like my
father, he was thinking. I must have him out where I
can see.

In spite of its shackles, the animal contrived to wave
his wide pinions in the air as the invalid lifted him up and
set him on the rug across his knees. There was the same
line of sparkling dew-like substance pearling the langouste' s
lip, the same weak disappointed lip, like the eagle's lip,
and the bold suspicious eye. Across the sloping shoulders
of the beast lay a sprinkling of brilliant dust, as black as
coal dust and quite as luminous. Just as his father had

Kay Boyle

looked coming home at night, with the coal dust showered
across his shoulders like a deadly mantle. Just such a
deadly cloak of quartz and mica and the rotted roots of
fern. Even the queer blue toothless look of his father
about the jaws. The invalid took another deep swallow
of champagne and let it seep quietly through his flesh and
blood. Then he lifted his hand and stroked the langouste
gently. You've never counted, he was thinking mildly.
I've led my life very well without you in it. You better
go back to the mines where you belong.

When he lifted up the langouste to peer into his face,
the arms of the beast fell ludicrously open as if he were
seeking to embrace the ailing man. He could see his
father very well in him, coming home with the coal dirt
all over him in the evening, standing by the door that
opened in by halves, opening first the upper half and then
the lower, swaying a little as he felt for the latch of the
lower half of the door. With the beer he had been drink-
ing, or the dew of the Welsh mist shining on his long
mustaches. The invalid gave him a gentle shake and set
him down again.

I got on very well without you, he was thinking. He
sipped at his champagne and regarded the animal upon
his knees. As far as I was concerned. As far as I was
concerned you need never have been my father at all.
Slowly and warily the wondrous eyes and feelers of the
beast moved in distrust across the invalid's lap and
bosom. A lot of good you ever did me, he was thinking.
As he watched the langouste groping about as if in dark-
ness, he began to think of the glowing miner's lamp his
father had worn strapped upon his brow. Feeling about
in the dark and choking to death underground, he was
thinking impatiently. I might have been anybody's son.
The strong shelly odor of the langouste was seasoning the
air.

"I've got on very well without you," he was thinking

Rest Cure

bitterly. From his wife's face he gathered that he had
spoken aloud. The visiting gentleman looked into the
depths of his glass of champagne.

"Don't misunderstand me," said the guest with a for-
bearing smile. "I'm quite aware of the fact that, long
before you met me, you had one of the greatest publics
and followings of any living writer — "

The invalid looked in bewilderment at his wife's face
and at the face of the visiting man. If they scold me, he
thought, I am going to cry. He felt his underlip quivering.
Scold me! he thought suddenly in indignation. A man
with a beard! His hand fled to his chin for confirmation.
A man with a beard, he thought with a cunning evil gleam
narrowing his eye.

"You haven't answered my question," he said aggres-
sively to the visitor. "You haven't answered it yet, have
you?"

His hand had fallen against the hard brittle armor of
the langouste's hide. There were the eyes raised to his
and the canny feelers lifted. His fingers closed for com-
fort about the langoustis unwieldy paw. Father, he said
in his heart, father, help me. Father, father, he said, I
don't want to die.

PENTHOUSE
by

Raymond M. Weaver

RAYMOND WEAVER is Assistant Professor of English at
Columbia University in New York, where he has devoted
most of his study to classical antiquity and the so-called
"renaissance" in Italy. Besides critical and biographical
articles, he has published a life of Herman Melville, and a
novel, Black Valley, of Japan, where Mr. Weaver lived for
three years. He was born in 1888.

PENTHOUSE

A EX and I got off the bus at Fiftieth Street and
crossed over, along the shadow of the Cathedral,
towards Madison Avenue. For some reason of his
own that I had not particularly worried to figure out,
Niles never invited Alex to come to see him without first
booking me as a fourth of the party: a kind of chaperon
to the Trinity, Suzanne used to say. And if Alex was not
free, or indisposed for reasons of his own, there was no
party. This chaperonage was no hardship to me, for I
had come to be devoted to all three of them; and when so
together, they struck sparks and fire as never in a larger
company. Then, as at no other time, their barriers were
lowered, and with frequent brilliance, they talked almost
exclusively about themselves.

On this particular afternoon, as if from habit, Alex
stopped to pick me up on the way down. And as usual he
had swung at once into the topic that seemed never to lose
its freshness and mystery to him: Niles' sudden and un-
announced marriage to Suzanne, and the ensuing three
years of apparent perfection of happiness.

"I suppose there's no reason on either side of Hell why
they shouldn't be happy," Alex had gone on to say for yet
another time; "and if none but the rich deserve the fair,
they have got their full deserts. Even Suzanne can strug-
gle along rather comfortably on Niles' income. And she is,
moreover, an art-object worth an expensive housing. But
— really! — and after all!" And he dwindled into dots and
dashes.

"Well, and why not?" I asked. For there would have

Published by permission of the author.

Penthouse

been no conversation had I agreed with him. "It seems to
me all very wonderful. Blue Beard and the Happy
Prince—"

"To Hell with faery tales! You know Niles as well as I
do. He's without doubts and without scruples. He always
seems to have known precisely what he wanted to get out
of this world, — and with a cool eye coolly resolved to see
that he gets it, and in solid reality. And invariably he
does. Below the disarming surface of that 'sweetness'
and * charm' of his — lucidity and ice! — And that he should
be married to Suzanne! I tell you it doesn't make sense!
Him, listening adoringly to her brainless bilge — her
' poems9! O Holy Jesus! — on 'Lilting Love and passion's
red gardenia' — you've heard them, my God! — Him, see-
ing 'abstract plastic genius' in the 'transmigratory soul
portraits' that she slaps together out of plaster and soap
and shredded wheat! You've seen him smile sweetly, and
without one apparent symptom of nausea, through her
tirades on the 'anima' and the 'animus' and — what does
she call it? — 'the ghost-being of the double serpentine
coil.' And the cases of first-rate Scotch that he pours
down the stinking maws of the Gurus and the naturals
and the moth-eaten that Suzanne keeps dredging up from
God knows where! You remember that old girl at Su-
zanne's last farewell dinner party? — the one that ran her
salad fork through her hair and talked about 'in senso
mistico9! Hell, what's the use! Undoubtedly I'm — but it
doesn't matter. I like Niles, — and I like Suzanne. Hell,
everybody knows it!"

Alex always succeeded in working himself up to this
recantation of all venom by the time the bus stopped
before the Cathedral.

"I wonder where Suzanne is at this instant," Alex said
laughingly as we walked along. "I don't know precisely
what time it is in Thibet, but I doubt if she is lunching
with the Grand Llama. Maybe she's murmuring Um to

Raymond M. Weaver

her own Himalaya, or maybe she's airing herself by a
levitation over Ararat."

As we neared the entrance, Alex growled half under his
breath: "Announce us to that damned officious door-
man."

Silence in the elevator up the twelve flights to Niles'
apartment on the roof. The first time I went calling with
Alex he had elaborately denounced the impropriety of
ever uttering a word in an elevator.

In the music-room, a Duo-Art grand piano was in the
midst of the Romance of Chopin's Concerto in E-minor;
and beyond the French windows, reclining under the clear
June sky, and between hedges of Irish juniper and flower-
ing mountain laurel, Niles Kley gazed out between the
Cathedral spires.

Alex's sensibilities — especially to odors and sounds —
were as acute as those imputed to certain insects and
quadrupeds. Music and perfume seemed to provoke in
him the smoulderings of an enraged and incandescent
fascination. He paused by the piano and looked out at
Niles.

"Let's not violate his most austere devotions," Alex
said in a clipped tight-throated whisper.

But Niles had already heard us enter. Rising his full
height, and with a Roman salute and 'a glitter of teeth,
he hailed us out into the open.

"It lacks only Suzanne to be perfect," he said with
resonant warmth. "But she is really here, no matter. You
and Malcolm indulge me in my private assurances; so I
have told Hyacinthe to lay the table for four."

With ostentatious self-absorption Alex played a phan-
tom smile about his lips and eyes as he uncoiled the sprout
of a giant fern and declaimed softly: "And there is pansies.
That's for thoughts. But you must wear your tuberoses
and your Parma violets with a difference."

"You must admit, Alex, that he really does," Niles

Penthouse

answered laughing. "He's got used to it and even seems
to like it."

The key to this cryptic exchange of ideas was the butler
with the name of Hyacinthe, alias Peter Merdesen.
Suzanne's butlers came and went in multiple succession,
and Hyacinthe's tenure at the beginning had threatened
to be of the briefest, and all over an accident of nomen-
clature. "But I could never bring myself to repeat your
name in public," Suzanne had protested at their first inter-
view; "and if you should enter my mind when I was
thinking in French — !" Suzanne had recounted it all to
Niles and Alex and me. The poor man's face had gathered
even more complexion. "O sanguine flower inscribed with
woe": the Miltonic line had flashed into her mind as her
eyes had rested in questioning sympathy upon his violet
and troubled face, and to him, in triumphant illumination
she had exclaimed: "I have it! 'O sanguined flower in-
scribed with woe', your name is emblazoned for me on
your countenance! Your true name is Hyacinthe." —
"But it is Merdesen, Madame, — Merdesen — " Suzanne
had cut him short. "Hyacinthe, please! — spare me. You
have rebaptized yourself in your own blood. Consumma-
tum est. So now, Hyacinthe — ."

Hyacinthe's stalwart bulk approached with cocktails.

Alex winked and raised his glass ironically "to Su-
zanne" and the ritual of the afternoon was begun.

"With us four, as usual," Niles said, "I can relax into
being myself, and laugh at Alex's morbidities."

From this the conversation took its invariable shift to
Suzanne. Niles had the evening before telephoned to her
in Budapest. In her roadster she had crossed the Alps,
fled through Austria, and was headed for the Carpathians
and an indefinite seclusion in an abandoned Mohammedan
mosque on the outskirts of some unpronounceable place
in Poland. Thence, by widening digressions, a full circle
was swung back again to Suzanne, and Alex and Niles.

Raymond M. Weaver

"You know," Niles said, "most of the men that I have
the closest dealings with down town are, I suppose, what
would be rated as enviably successful. But look at them!
When I do I am glad that Suzanne has sustained my cour-
age to cross over to the other side. Each year they are a
million or so older and flabbier and deader and deadlier:
rank unburiable corpses. Theirs is at once a pathetic and
an evil failure. To be swift fated is not always to be woe-
ful beyond all. For youth — "

"To sentiment," Alex said, raising Suzanne's empty
glass, "and another round of failures to Niles."

"No, Alex," Niles said; "sentiment and success indeed,
to all four of us." He smiled across the table to Suzanne's
vacant chair. "Isn't she this afternoon more radiant than
ever before! If it were possible, a kind of utter frustration
transfigured."

"Don't you see, Niles," Alex said, "while you are
whiling away your semi-lucid intervals of 'failure' laugh-
ing at what you call so jauntily my 'morbidities,' Suzanne
is sending echoes of ha-ha up and down the Polish Corridor,
laughing at all of us — and at you in particular. But seri-
ously— almost too damned seriously for this communion
board of self-ostentation — you seem to me, Niles, the one
and only really and miraculously fortunate man I've ever
known. This is an offence few would be able to forgive in
you. But the rot you talk on occasion — especially the
cosy peeps you give me into that central refrigerating
valve you point to as your heart — they give me a smart
ache in the gut. Why can't you sit tranquil in your Eden,
under the showers of Providence that have so generously
sprinkled you, without sneaking in a few little badly
painted snakes and then thinking to consternate your
friends at your high-minded daring in wrestling with a
whole zoo of boa constrictors. Your cool brazen condescen-
sion to gamble in fortunes with Wall Street 'failures':
you, who have already 'f ailed ' to the debasement of a

Penthouse

mere roof on the East Side — not to specify your other
fiascos. Why don't you quit this back sliding into corrupt-
ible treasure? What with Suzanne, and your sensitive
soul, and the Vale of Cashmir — "

"Alex," Niles said, "you're romantic with a guilty con-
science. You are afraid to love anything — especially
yourself. You simply cannot conceive the possibility of
the kind of love between Suzanne and me — though I have
no doubt that you've got it neatly lettered and dia-
grammed. And Suzanne's being away since our marriage
for several months each year: I can hear you and the world
at large concluding from that fact that a perfect love could
dispense with such interludes. I'll grant you, that for
myself I never would have proposed it. What faith and
wisdom I have is Suzanne's. You have heard her speak of
the renunciation that heightens love's glamor. That, to a
romantic, must appear only rhetoric and self-deception:
as if you can never come to think that you've been in love
until you wake up to love among the ruins. What Suzanne
says is true. And it is true, too, that I might retire to-
morrow. But I shall not. That again would be playing the
romantic. You, of course, are convinced there are truer
and simpler and more obvious reasons. What do you
think they are? — Frankly, and without kid gloves, out
with them!"

Niles smiled gravely at Alex, waiting.

This I recognized to be my cue. For each evening that
we spent together seemed to follow an essentially identical
pattern. This friendship between Alex and Niles was one
of the strangest I have ever seen. Patently, they were
devoted to each other, and with what was doubtless the
most intimate approach to friendship in the life of either.
Only between themselves, and in the presence of me, were
they ever known, apparently, to sit and hold their pulses
and then to discuss the symptoms. In all their other con-
tacts outside of this closed circle the reserves of each were

Raymond M. Weaver

absolute. And yet, once together, and almost as if by
perversity and a deeply veiled mutual resentment, they
began reaching out probes into the quick of each other's
souls. And I am sure that their affection for me grew in
some large part out of my genuine interest in listening in
upon their self-exposures without any tragic concern, alert
to rescue them again to trivialities when poison and rapier
seemed imminent.

On this evening, to the second when I was about to
interrupt, the smothered buzz of the door bell instantane-
ously diverted Niles to an outspoken surprise at the
strangeness of the intrusion.

We sat silent, listening, while Hyacinthe opened the
front door, parleyed there for a moment, and in stately
silence presented Niles with a silver tray bearing a cable-
gram.

"Didn't I tell you she was with us all along?" Niles
exclaimed in glowing eagerness. "Wait and hear."

He tore open the envelope and read.

I saw the smile die from his eyes and lips, a barely
perceptible single twitch at the corner of his mouth, and
all color die from his face. An automobile horn tooted in
the street far below. A faint breeze rustled the leaves of
the mountain laurel outside.

Alex rose, and standing beside Niles reached out his
hand towards the cablegram.

"Give it to me," he said, as if in anger.

With a curious kind of silent and angular precision,
Niles rose, and with his eyes fixed upon Alex's, handed him
the message.

It seemed that suddenly, and without warning, I had
been plunged into some grotesque nightmare being en-
acted by automatons.

Niles walked around the table to Suzanne's empty
place, and bent his white lips over as if to kiss her hair.

And still nobody said anything.

Penthouse

Alex read, and turning towards Niles encircled him with
one arm. Niles recoiled, as if in infuriated contempt, and
burying his face in his hands, sank upon his knees before
Suzanne's chair, and with his face as if buried in her lap,
sobbed uncontrollably.

By that time I had recovered myself sufficiently to be
beside Alex. "Of course, I know it's Suzanne — but — "

"Bright of you to guess it!" Alex snapped me short.
"Killed — But what's the idea of standing around like
that! It's not decent for us to be here now. Come, let's
get out."

"But — " This manly shame of Alex's —

Before I could finish even my thought, Alex had re-
peated his command that we leave.

In the doorway we met Hyacinthe bearing in the des-
sert.

"To Hell with you, tool" Alex exclaimed. "Ask no
questions, but, God damn you, keep out of this room till
you're called!"

Once out of the elevator and on the street, Alex said:
"Well, Malcolm, that exhausts the conversation for this
afternoon. So let's part here. I'm walking home. I want
to get drunk — and I want to get drunk alone."

Little did I then guess that the ghastliness of the day
was then but half fulfilled.

Still dazed, I stood before the entrance of Niles' apart-
ment house, watching Alex walk up Madison Avenue until
he disappeared. Had I but known that I would never see
him again! — That night he would put a bullet in his head.

This double impact with death, and with death so wan-
ton, and unnecessary, and insanely cruel, engulfed me in a
turmoil of anxiety and guilt. I accused myself, of course,
for letting Alex go off as he had, in that curious mood,
alone; for leaving Niles so solitary in his grief, fearful, with

Raymond M. Weaver

growing anxiety, of some last hideous and sudden disaster
to him. The following afternoon, I called at Niies' apart-
ment. My name was telephoned up to the twelfth floor,
to bring back the curt announcement: "Not at home."
Confident that this was a lie, I entered the first telephone
booth, knowing that Hyacinthe would answer, and that at
worst I could make an indirect contact.

Hyacinthe did answer, and with his characteristic im-
perturbability stated: "Sorry, Sir, but Mr. Kley is at
business as usual."

"Impossible, Hyacinthe!" I protested, identifying my-
self and trying to explain my concern. "How does he
seem? — And don't you think he ought to have someone
there with him, especially of evenings?"

Hyacinthe assured me Niles was indeed at business,
that there were no reports to be made of Niles' behavior,
that Niles had left instructions that he was at home to
none.

Futile as it seemed, I did succeed in extracting from
Hyacinthe the promise that he would warn me promptly
the moment that Niles relented his prohibition against all
callers, or seemed in any way in need of help.

If Suzanne's marriage had been a choice morsel for
speculation and amateur prophecy, her sudden death was
an even more exhaustless and delectable item. Followed
immediately, as it had been, by Alex's suicide, there was a
renaissance of wonder and imagination in every congrega-
tion of her friends I entered. Only on one single point,
however, was opinion unanimous: that Alex's had been
a life embittered by a hopeless passion for Suzanne — a
poignant agony during her life, but with her destruction an
intolerable vacancy. On the surface of things, and by all
the orthodox superstitions that enshroud the mysteries
of the heart, this neat explanation was plausible enough.
Though I had no very direct and cogent evidence to offer
even to myself in refutation, it was my deepest conviction

Penthouse

nevertheless that it was false. But I soon learned the folly
of betraying any intimation of my doubt.

"Angel child," Eva Taglibue had boomed forth to me
in her deepest contralto, "if not for love of Suzanne, was
it for a white and drifted passion for your own seraphic
innocence? — Get me another cocktail, Malcolm, and tell
me the latest bulletin of Niles."

Miles!

Unhampered by any first hand information, Niles'
friends and acquaintances had haloed him with every
glamor of romance, and bestowed upon him a kind of
apotheosis. Transfigured into the mirror of husbands
wedded and bereft, a perfect blend of all manly strength
and manly tenderness, grief stricken, his very name be-
came at once a benediction and an aphrodisiac. The
Spartan stoicism with which he shielded from impious
eyes the pageant of his bleeding heart! Daily, with in-
vulnerable facade, he crossed the threshold of the sanctu-
ary of his sorrow, and faced the world of men; but within
that sanctuary, no mortal was privileged to tread.

Cut off from all direct communication with Niles, but
lonely to see him, I had written him, but without provok-
ing a syllable in reply; again I had telephoned Hyacinthe,
to meet stolid and loyal evasion; once again I had even
tried to call, but again Hyacinthe had effectively barred
the way. Months passed, but still I nursed the hope that
as the keenest edge of Niles' sorrow was subtly corroded
by time, he would come to remember me, and let me see
him as before.

In the early autumn, and to have my first immediate
delight quelled to alarm, Hyacinthe telephoned me one
morning, his voice freighted with doom: "I must see you,
Sir," he said. "It is serious; too serious for any but his
closest living friend to know." And this was all he would
say. Further revelations he reserved for the privacy of
bolted doors.

Raymond M. Weaver

"Tell me, Hyacinthe, please, at once — what is it,
Hyacinthe?" I began before he was fairly in my rooms.

He eyed me sedately, unperturbed by my haste.

Finally: "I beg your pardon, Sir, but the Sacrament of
Baptism and the rights of legitimate birth — "

"Yes, yes, forgive me. It's — eh?"

"I'd like to be thought of as Merdesen, Sir, if you don't
mind."

"Of course. Now, Merdesen — "

"It's a painful fact, and I've debated several months
before telling it, and I mean no slander in saying it, and
I've never said it before, but Mr. Kley is out of his mind."

"Out of his mind, Merdesen! It can't be, Merdesen!
He's been going to business daily, hasn't he? — and the one
thing that everybody who sees him says — "

"I've never seen him at business, Sir, so about that I
have no convictions. It's when he's not at business that
it's only me who sees him, Sir — so I'm the only person who
can say what I might think about that."

"Please go on, Merdesen! When he comes home — ?"

"I don't know if you are one of those, Sir, who believes
in ghosts — "

"Keep your ghost stories for later, Merdesen. — When
Mr. Kley gets home — ?"

"I'm coming to that, Sir. But first I must say that I
have no faith in ghosts myself. And when those about me
begin behaving as if they were seeing them, I find myself
being not quite comfortable either about myself or them.
For either I have lost control of my own reason, or she
that was Mrs. Kley is walking, or Mr. Kley is clean out of
his head. You will understand that as butler, Sir, I have
occasion to overhear much. And of evenings, after
Mr. Kley has unlatched his own front door, and almost
before he is well in his apartment, he calls out the first
name of the late Mrs. Kley, and rushes into what used to
be her room, and laughs, and talks, and rings for me to

Penthouse

bring in a vase for the flowers for Madame. Is that
natural, Sir? — And he sends packages to her — which
make me feel dishonest and confused to accept. All sorts
of other things like that, Sir. And ever since that time
when you three gentlemen dined at four places, Mr. Kley
has sat alone at a table set for two — and once or twice, Sir,
even for three. And there are times when he sits there by
himself and talks more than he eats. Not so long ago, as I
entered with the cheese, he turned to me and asked me
abruptly, but with great earnestness: 'Hyacinthe, what do
you think of all this? I suppose that you've decided quite
positively that I'm lunatic, haven't you, Hyacinthe?' "

He swallowed with great effort.

"What did you answer, Merdesen?"

"It was an embarrassing question, Sir."

"Granted. But what did you say?"

"I waited for some further comment from Mr. Kley,
Sir."

"And—?"

"He looked up as if he felt sorry for me, and rested his
eyes on me rather pathetically for a moment — and then
merely smiled. — That's the way he is, Sir. And what
makes it all the more the pity is, except for his behavior
that I've said, and his writing much of evenings at the
desk of her that was Mrs. Kley, he's in every way him-
self."

"You're all on the wrong track, Merdesen. What you're
calling madness — "

"I should be glad to think you were right, Sir. But if
you had once seen for yourself — "

"Haven't I tried to, Merdesen? And who but yourself
has seen to it very particularly that I did not get in?"

"Your pardon, Sir. That was then. But now — y

"This very evening," I exclaimed. And then in a burst
of gratitude and enthusiasm that heightened Merdesen's
complexion, I grasped his hand.

Raymond M. Weaver

III

That night Hyacinthe was as good as his word. With a
perfection of sardonic guile he admitted me beyond the
doorman, and into the entrance of the apartment as if I
were the merest casual uninvited stranger. Parading
ahead of me, Hyacinthe stood at attention on the threshold
of the music room, and like any major domo of a court
reception, pealed forth my name.

In an instant all my misgivings were allayed. Niles
greeted me with the warmest cordiality, as if indeed there
had been no upheaval in his life, no interruption to our
friendship, and as if he had been sitting in eager expecta-
tion of my arrival.

"How did you know that I was coming tonight?" I
asked.

"Dear old transparent and invariable Malcolm! — Ex-
pect you tonight? You are the single person that Suzanne
and I have never doubted. But don't behave as if you had
broken in upon a tete-d-tete. Come — join us."

Niles led me out upon the roof.

In the late twilight, and in the midst of a glimmering
space of huge copper-gold chrysanthemums, Niles had
been lingering at table. I was immediately struck by the
occasion of Hyacinthe's alarm: Niles had not dined alone.
Hyacinthe was instructed to bring me a third chair.

I began without preamble.

"See here, Niles," I said, "you've got to stop this sort
of thing. It's morbid. Cutting yourself off from all normal
human contacts — going to business each day with the
edge and warmth of a liquid air icicle — and coming home
each evening to a solitary performance like this. Some-
body's got to say it to you — so there it is. I don't want to
mess around in your private affairs — "

"You couldn't, Malcolm," he said in cool contempt;
"you don't know enough about them. — I'm sorry to have

Penthouse

said that, of course, and besides it's untrue after all.
And besides, you have, for once, seen me stripped down to
raw emotion, naked and ashamed. So try to pretend
Suzanne's chair was never there, if it offends you."

" That's the trouble, Niles — always to pretend! Just
for once, the novelty to me of the courage of a little truth ! "

Silently his wide eyes were defensively upon me, waiting
for me to proceed. It hurt me to wound him. But the
circumstances were desperate, and for once I had dared
to make the plunge. And now it was no longer possible
for me to bob smilingly to the surface, toss the water from
my hair, and call across to him as if both of us, afraid of
the water, needed assurance we were safe within the
ropes.

"While you've been shut up here, I've seen a lot of
people; and everybody that knows you, and who knew
Alex and Suzanne — "

I wished he would lose his temper — do anything to
relieve me of the cruelty of going on. The most offensive
way, I felt, would be the most summary and downright
and clean. I started again, plunging more wildly. Any-
thing to shatter that fagade!

"Everywhere I go, you should hear how they are all
saying how ideally married you and Suzanne were; how,
but for you, Alex would not have killed himself, but might
instead have married her himself just as happily as you
did." .

It was villainous to say this to him, I knew. Not a
sound from him. In the growing darkness I could dis-
tinguish only a pale slit oval for his face.

"This is the point, Niles. I know as well as you do that
all this gossip is nonsense. I don't of course know why
Alex killed himself — but it doesn't seem to me that it was
out of frustrated love for Suzanne. But she is dead, Niles.
Alex is dead, and Suzanne is dead too. It's terrible, Niles,
I know it. But to shut yourself up this way, with these

Raymond M. Weaver

lugubrious dinner parties, with the mockery of all this
pretence — "

"Shut up, God damn you! Close that dirty, lying, blas-
phemous mouth of yours, or I'll — I'll — "

His breath quivered, panting into silence, and in the
darkness the pale luminosity of his hands blotted out his
face.

"I'm sorry, Malcolm," he said finally, stemming the
backwash of receding rage. "And yet" — there was a new
vibrance in his voice, as if the whole lashing tide had
turned to boil again upon him, "whose business is it whom
Alex loved? — sweet God, the inalienable solitude of each
of us! And those stinking, grinning jackals, with the heat,
the hysteria, the gymnastics of their little recesses of
passion, befouling Alex's name, or Suzanne's, and trying
to mutilate all love to their pasture! The very blood of
Alex is scarlet upon them. And they lust that I do as Alex
did to seal and authenticate my love for Suzanne!"

He paused, struggling to master himself.

When he spoke again, his voice seemed to come from a
great distance.

"Poor dead Alex," he said. "And yet their myths about
him taint his memory less than the truth about him would.
And you, Malcolm, if you had been only a little more, or
a little less blind ! I do not say this to pain you, you must
believe me. But, Malcolm, hadn't you the eyes to see
that Suzanne loved Alex when some years ago they first
met? Suzanne herself has said so much to me. Did it mean
nothing to you that Alex did all he could to avoid Suzanne
until she was safely married to me ? — were you not aware
of his unaccountable resentment of me, both before and
after I came to love Suzanne? — and his tortured intimacy
with each of us after Suzanne and I were rated by the world
as man and wife? Did all this mean nothing to you? —
What happened in his heart the night he killed himself,
that we shall never know. But in imagination I have

Penthouse

again and again tried to follow in his footsteps as he walked
off alone that afternoon. The hideous suddenness of that
cablegram — my own brutal rebuff of his attempt at sym-
pathy— my burst of naked grief: how profoundly these
could tear up one so haunted and so ingrown as himself!
Then home, alone, and to get drunk — and with each drink
feeling sorrier and sorrier for me, and Suzanne, and sorriest
for himself, unloving and unloved. Till, melted to an
orgy of self pity, and self loathing — "

Abruptly he paused, as if in horrified expectation.
When he continued his voice had again receded.

"The blind, stupid malice of the world! Let them say
he loved Suzanne. You are right, Malcolm — in their sense
he certainly did not. Nor in my sense, either. In their
sense, love to him was a grossness and a betrayal that he
feared would leave his heart revolted and even more
desolate. It was in friendship rather than in love that he
more than half hoped to quench the aching irony of his
solitude. But he never dared frankly to look into the eyes
of the fact that this friendship which he craved was really
but a disguised love — and a love with no possible fulfill-
ment but in bitterness and shame. His murdered halves,
lacerated between themselves — my God, Malcolm, did
you never suspect that it was you that Suzanne hoped
might rescue him from his guilt and fears? You are not to
blame for the promiscuous clarity of your affections, Mal-
colm. Poor dead Alex! — And a grave, they say, is a fine
and private place/'

"But do you mean, Niles — ," I began, in dazed turmoil.

"I mean what I say," he interrupted. "That it is obtuse
and misguided insight on your part to try to persuade me
that it is the part of humanity and wisdom to go back
among vindictive sentimentalists that draw such sweet
solace from the hope that love will crush me to death as its
next victim, but with an agony more exquisitely pro-
longed than was Alex's. There I would be only a bored

Raymond M. Weaver

alien. Am I so ' morbid' in this isolation? Each day I
have many exciting contacts, vividly competitive, imper-
sonal— an absorbing game. Then I come home here to
Suzanne. Do you begrudge me that happiness, Malcolm?
And does it seem to you so terribly 'unnatural' that in my
love for Suzanne I might continue to grow, and prosper,
and exult? Are even you blind to the fullness and glamor
and truth potential in my love for Suzanne?"

Though he paused, I dared not answer.

"You were here, Malcolm, when I first learned of the
crushing news of Suzanne's death. It nearly felled me.
Under the initial impact of that, it seemed that her mortal
destruction had left an aching void at the very core of the
universe: a void which, when no longer filled by her serene
and radiant loveliness seemed to leave the world to col-
lapse into nothingness upon itself. Suzanne had always
encouraged me to the faith that love is, in its final mystery,
a resonance from within, and that all persons loved, at
best an answering echo from without. Ah, Malcolm, this
resonance, this echo, and the mystic blending into one
perfect melody that love craves! And to know that be-
tween no two living separate souls can there ever be this
miracle of consummation. Only solitude, and eternal dual-
ity. With Suzanne's death, and Alex's, every resonance
and every answering echo seemed at first to have forsaken
me. And yet, it was only in this dark night of my love
that the full splendor and immortality of Suzanne began
to gleam against the silent blackness. This little game I
have been playing, this pretense you despise, this dining
alone in company — it was my weakness to at first feel that
I needed this to fortify my love. But now, Malcolm, and
since you desire it, I can henceforth dispense with that
too. Love, I now know, can be stronger than the accidents
of life and death besides. Perfect love, I now know, is the
fullness of joy, of life — and life with ever greater abun-
dance. And death, I have now through sorrow learned,

Penthouse

can destroy only what divides us. Grief now would be
blasphemy. For what have I lost that is essential to love,
in lacking merely Suzanne herself?"

A black pool of shadow descended upon the table cloth
opposite me, and the smothered sound of deeply indrawn
breathing. In guilt, and shame, and inexpressible com-
passion, I bent towards Niles. But before I could touch
him, his teeth glittering through a radiant smile, his whole
manner transformed. With that smile it froze over me that
Niles was beyond the need of friendship.

PURYEAR'S HORNPIPE

by
Leslie Dykstra

LESLIE DYKSTRA has in her blood the mountain life of
which she writes, for she is descended from pioneers of
Tazewell and Smyth Counties near the western end of Vir-
ginia, where the state reaches into the mountains between
West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. She spends her
summers there and her winters in Washington, where her
husband is a staff member of the National Emergency Coun-
cil. She owns a fiddle, "hand-rived from the heart of a
maple," which was played successively by her great-grand-
father, grandfather, and father. Many of her poems have
been published, but Puryear's Hornpipe is her first published
story.

PURYEAR'S HORNPIPE

JUDY could hear the doves calling, and on a sudden
the sound was Granpy's fiddle.
She darted around the house and on to the porch,
stopping in front of him with eager demand. " Scotched
me a new jig-step by accident, outen the bean patch!"

Roused from his memories, he was pointedly surprised.

She made a heartsome picture for his faded eyes to
study. Her hair was smoothed back into twin shoulder
braids that held the gold light of sun on a brown leaf.
Her eyes were gray-hazel, deep-set and pleasant, and her
mouth seemed, like his, only wanting excuse to smile.

44 Hit's a pippin; want to see?"

"Sure-certain," he said with fond interest.

"I reaches straight up, hopperin' high, and comes down
twisty. Thisaway," she chirruped and made a sudden
leap, appeared to fall, but then righted herself with a glib
movement born of mountain grace, unmindful that her
apron-slip threatened to fall off any minute. "Aim to
weave it three spots in the hornpipe figure."

"Hit's foretold kain't no other youngun out-step my
bantling," he said proudly.

"Uncle Steuben wonders him ifn I didn't win wide
fame, come Festival time tomorrow," she owned. "Gin
judges and Sutherland's so minded. Case-happen a medal,
I'll pin it on your put-away suit, or a green-back dollar,
mammy can spend."

"Now ain't that handsome! . . . and has Melia fixed
victuals plentiful to last?"

"Victuals plentiful to stuff an army," answered the

Reprinted from Harper's Magazine, July 1936, by permission of the author
and of the editors.

Puryear's Hornpipe

crisp voice of Judy's mother from behind her. She stood
on the sunken sill, drying her hands on a starch-wilted
apron. "If two fried rooster-birds, ham-meat, boiled
eggs, strained greens, white bread, and new honey kain't
spread far enough — " and she broke off tartly, fretted by
cooking, "to keep four folks alive over two days — I'll
declare!"

Melia was the widow of Peter's only son. She was a
tall, comely person, with work-worn hands, but still un-
bowed, standing like some town lady in black silk. The
weather-browned face might have been called sharp from
its steadfast mien but for the eyes, deep-set and dark,
that could sparkle with enjoyment of being.

"Do for a regiment!" She leaned over and smoothed
the old man's long white locks that the breeze had riffled
and took up his fiddle. "Seems like my conscious tells
me Granpy's strength might fall short of the journey."

"Who you talkin' about — me?" Peter rose from his
chair bridling. "Never felt more able-bodied," he de-
clared, drawing himself up like an old soldier, but Judy
pulled him down again.

"Rest yourself, Granpy; take ye plenty of rest. Would
be nary a reason for travel did you fail to see me win
Puryear fame." And she turned to Melia with anxious
eyes. "Reckon he got peaked account'f no eggs for
breakfast this long while?"

Peter snorted at such a notion. " 'Twas no hardship*
But I hope they brought you good barter?"

"Fowls earned fair exchange," Melia said, "but eggs —
not powerful. Mr. Bonwick, he says, 'Hope these eggs air
fresh.' 'Fresh!' I tells him. 'Why, Judy has been hand-
pickin' these yer fresh eggs from under our hens every
single blessed day for nigh on three months' time!'"

"Got me a blue store dress and watered silk hair ribbons
to match," Judy said and paused with her lips earnestly
parted, showing even white teeth that had just finished

Leslie Dykstra

crowding out the baby set. "And blue socks, boy-style,
and black sateen for dancin' drawers."

" Seems like that last item air a luxury," Melia told
her. "But your white cotton ones bein' patched to pieces
from skinnin' the cat on the gate bar, kain't have people
scandalized."

"And no new brogues?" Peter asked.

"Kin dance a heap easier in old leather, anyhow," Judy
declared, and went in a whirl of cartwheels across the
porch, stirring a drift of leaves at the far end.

"Come, both," Melia said. "Contrive sleep now so to
be up and ready for Steuben in the morning."

Steuben was Melia's brother. He lived over in the
Garden settlement, and worked as a trucker, building
roads. But he was faithful to plow and help her plant
corn in the cleared patch and give seasonal advice.

Stars were paling when he drove his small truck up
"Four-foot Road" and on to the narrow cattle trail that
in old times was The Pike leading to Tennessee. There
was a lemon-yellow light flushing the mountain rim, and
by the fence where he stopped locust and aspen leaves
drew silver from dawn.

Fresh hay was packed in the truck body and over it a
straw mattress. It was a soft bed for Granpy to rest on
with a bolster for his back against the driver's high seat
where Melia climbed.

White mists bordered thickets of blackberry and sumac
when the car got under way. Judy, facing the wide log
cabin that was over-topped by giant sugar maples, felt
the pang of great enterprise at leaving home. Beyond
rose the slanting meadows, lush with bluegrass, where
Jill and her colt and the feeder-steers grazed. The house,
its rock chimneys, the encircling trees, the secret blue-
green meadows, together formed a strategic defence,
cupped lovely and remote, which she dimly felt and could
find no words for.

Puryear's Hornpipe

At the first ravine crossing Steuben halted the car and
filled two jugs at his favorite spring. The water came
gushing from a rocky fissure, sparkled for a little way
across a clearing, and mysteriously re-entered the dark
earth.

"Won't find water God-freshened as this anywhers
down yonder," he declared, and the sweep of his arm
took in the world, with Burke's Garden-valley below that
was beginning to shine like a colored patchwork quilt
spread for an airing.

As they joggled on again Judy could hear Melia telling
him how the fine green dress she wore had been come by.

"And the relief Lady entered whilst I bargained with
that old smoothie — Bon wick. Came close, smiling kindly-
handsome, a-lookin' on and a-listenin' in as if I might
be her special business like the Coon Hollow folks. Made
old Government-dawzzled Bonwick give half a yard more
than measured. . . . Then she went rummagin' and outen
a barrel of clothes, contributed me this, 'Here's a knitted
suit, a bit too large for you maybe, but little worn. Would
you like it?' Took me by surprise. Was near knocked
speechless. But I held up the skirt, lookin' at it thisaway
and that, and thinkin', 'Ain't no Puryear begged yet even
from Government after wartimes.' But I took further
thought: 'Ifn my old garments air so seedy a stranger
pities, woe-me. I best accept the gift and cause no shame
to Judy at the Festival.' Waited, clearin' my mind,
'twell Bonwick pushed forward. 'Well, do you want it?'
he pressed, 'or don't you want it? Tell the Lady.' . . .
So I said, 'Hit's mighty rump-sprung, ma'm, but I thank
you just the same.'"

Judy had never seen beyond the green bowl of Burke's
Garden. Now she found herself passing over its farther
rim, only to meet with another valley and still another
mountain and towns with names like early history. Ridin'
fast, time kain't be measured, she thought. No sooner

Leslie Dykstra

leave one strange sight than another smacks you in the
eye, and fades before its shape is known.

When they had dropped Chilhowie behind, Granpy
stretched out flat and went to sleep, and Judy closed
her eyes too, and only came awake when she heard
Steuben saying "Konnarock!" Saying "Konnarock" as
if 'twer a battle won. And then they started up the last
long grade that would come out on Flat Top, journey's
end.

Just ahead an unwieldy truck rattled, careless of King-
dom Come. Its wide bed grazed banks of shale on the
one side and on the other overlapped sheer nothing. In
it young women and men stood packed close together,
laughing and swaying with every fearsome lurch.

Trailing Steuben was a shiny automobile that held fine
town ladies who hid their faces in gay fluttering handker-
chiefs against the churned-up dust. Their driver wore a
special cap and yet looked worried; unlike Uncle, Judy
thought, who could close-curve a downgone place at
road's edge withouten qualms.

Then they were at road head, and a sentinel waved
Steuben to a stop. There was a sound of loud voices and
commotion.

"I'll pay you no dollar!" Steuben told him.

"I got to collect a dollar for every car passed," the
man said.

"Been invited, and aim to fiddle."

"Show your ticket then and get goin'! You're holdin5
up the line."

"Wasn't handed a ticket."

"In that case, pay me a dollar and go get a rotund
from Sutherland," the man ordered and cussed Steuben
good and plenty.

"See you in hell, first!" And Uncle, fightin' mad,
braked the car and began to climb down.

"Aw, keep your hickory shirt on, friend," the stranger

Pur year's Hornpipe

said, changin' his tune just in time, and made out to
laugh, passing them on; though whur else they could a
passed to was a question, Judy pondered.

Steuben drove by a mort of cars drawn close together
at a level place, paying other sentinels no mind, and took
a grass-slippy track to summit, a short journey on, there
to strike camp. All was happy excitement.

"Sis honey, redd yourself up now," Melia said, sweep-
ing them all free of dust and then filled a tin basin with
jug water. "Wash face and hands. . . . Hi, Granpy,
how you feelin'?"

"Fine as a fiddle, new-strung."

"Here, swallow this drop o' pick-me-up, and I hope it
won't knock you off'n a cliff backward. . . . Steuben,
light into the victuals now and eat hearty."

Steuben was grumbling, half boastfully, "You heered
me tell him! * Unused mountain-tops air free for all.' "

"Steub, he's too quick on the trigger," Melia said
laughing. "But a dollar a car — gracious! Who-all gets
the money?" And Granpy said, "Man whut owns the
mountain, likely, and no wonder he failed to put a fence
around it!" And Steuben laughed fit to bust.

Then he stood Judy on a high rock where five States
could be seen on a clear day. "But we'd best brogue it
down to the doin's now," he said. "Might-nigh time for
the music. I'll guide Granpy whilst you-all tag clost."

It didn't take long to get to the Festival tent, but
there was a great stir of people in and out of the entrances
and going back and forth from the refreshment shelter.
After much pushing they found themselves on one side
of the platform with other mountain talent, but the four
rows of benches were already taken, and they had to
stand alongside; authorities and music judges sat in a
row of chairs opposite.

Jim Sutherland, red-faced and breathing hard, rushed
up to check Steuben's name on a paper, together with

Leslie Dykstra

Judy's who would dance to his fiddling. Though mountain
born, Jim had the dress and manners of town, and it
was said he had got himself in a spraddle-fix, with one
foot set on a mountain and t'other in a city, and him
not knowin' which way to jump. He played a tricky
banjo himself, and today served well as linkster, coupling
mountain and city understanding, for the music promoters.
But he was a good showman, and now he started off
the preliminary contests in banjo, ballad-singing and
fiddle music by introducing a man who gave them a
party-piece, quick and devilish:

When a man falls in love with a little turtle dove,

He will linger all around her under jaw;

He will kiss her for her mother and sister and brother

Until her daddy comes and kicks him from the door,

Draws the pistol from his pocket,

Pulls the hammer back to cock it,

And vows he will blow away his giddy brains;

Oh, his ducky says he mustn't

'Tisn't loaded, and he doesn't,

And they're kissing one another once again.

Everybody applauded, even those jammed in the walk-
ways below where no breeze could wend through.

Next came an infare song, then a sorrowful strain that
gave way in turn to a wistful air of love.

Judy knew many of them and joyfully called each by
name to Granpy. "That's 'Leather Britches/" and
"that's ' Cripple Creek,'" and "that's 'Herald's Mur-
der'"; and even town folks, who had come to listen,
joined in singing the old favorite, "Barbara Ellen," a
courting song that began gayly enough, and ended in
heart-break.

Songs followed one after another so fast it left no time
betwixt to think on a one. There were quick tunes made
you feel upsy-daisy, and others like the crack o' doom;
verses fast as skip-the-rope, and songs with many stanzas

Puryear's Hornpipe

weary as freight cars — empties foldin' back on theirselves;
but Granpy clapped his hands for each singer till he was
tuckered, and a fat woman gave him her part of a bench
with room for Judy too.

Jim Sutherland, in a nimble bearm, prodded singers
forward, one by one, only to hold the watch on each,
bound to finish and make way for the next, even though
applause was lavish, and compliments plentiful.

But now to the central chair of honor came a strong
yet gaunt mountain man that would not be hurried.
The very sight of his kind homeliness smoothed Judy's
spirit.

He took a firm position, squared to the world, his great
head fixed like a winter-weary hound that sits in pale
sunlight sniffing at spring. Two long ginger-colored locks
of hair covered his ears, and his eyes, that were mild and
brown, drooped at the outward corners. Beneath them
hung dewlaps of paunchy skin.

He hummed no note before. His mouth opened, and
began the tune on a midway pitch. With the timeless
air of a large soul he sat, and his voice gathered full
volume to the vibrant chord of his guitar, and then
quieted down to the end of each stanza. He was no more
conscious of listening people than distant waters of a
creek's flowing; and as the ballad glided to its due crest,
Judy glided with it, carried away by the melancholy
twang whose repetition was the secret of spellbinding,
felt only by those with minds easy enough to give over.
The words were not so important as the feeling invoked,
with colors of fantastic pioneer romance and all that
darkling mountain memory held.

Judy saw two lovers by a graveside. The air seemed
fragrant with cinnamon pinks. A survigrous sun burst
through racing clouds and orange-lighted a gliminery
tombstone. Slowly the lovers embraced beside it, and
slowly moved away. Smiling — sad, then happy, they

Leslie Dykstra

took a leafy crested Pike beyond — The Wilderness Road.
In mind's eye, she saw them walking steadily through
misty woodland and purple glen amid the wayside flowers
and rare bird-twitter. Two lovers, lovely forevermore,
haunting The Wilderness Road. . . .

The rapt child was fere with the singer. . . . But sud-
denly the spell was broken.

Jim Sutherland had stepped forth, and stood whisper-
ing in one majestic ear; and the people out front restlessed
on their bench seats, and those standing in walkways
were wilting.

But the singer would not be hindered. Another verse
began and traveled on, though the lovers were lost now
and the colors faded. Judy felt indignant at Sutherland
for shummacking with papers in his hand, and Granpy
whispered, "That singer holds to his spoiled song, clamped
resolute as a hound to a wild shoat's ear!" And not till
it came to a proper ending did the man leave off and bow
himself away.

Hardly any but home folks clapped their pleasure, and
Granpy's hands were the last to quit, because he felt
sorry for the big man.

"That Sutherland's an unmannerly cuss," he said, and
his neighbor answered, " Might better kick him off en V
outthrust rock as pointedly stop a singer plumb in the
midst."

But now a fiddler with a rakish air came and struck
up a lusty tune.

"'Way Up On Clinch Mountain'," Judy named, her
eyes dancing, and Granpy unkinked himself and stood up.
"Hit's like a gift from home," he said, and everywhere
feet began to tap the ground.

I'll tune up my fiddle, I'll rosin my bow
Fll make myself welcome where ever I go.

And folks yelled, "Yip-ee!" and joined in the refrain.

Puryear's Hornpipe

Lay down boys and take a little nap,

They're raisin' hell in Cumberland Gap.
Hic-cup! Oh, Lor-dy, how slee-py I feel
Hic-cup! Oh, Lor-dy, how sleep-y I feel!

And Judy swayed with the others.

Cumberland Gap is a noted place

There's three kinds of water to wash your face.

"Wow!" voices called. "Yip-ee!"

Cumberland Gap with its cliffs and rocks,
Home of the panther, bear and fox

And again the people joined in, singing the refrain.

Hic-cup! Oh, Lor-dy, how slee-py I feel
Hic-cup! Oh, Lor-dy, how sleep-y I feel!

But at last Jim Sutherland filled the platform with his
ownself, full of eager talk, giving and taking thanks,
"Until after dinner. . . . More talent than time
for. . . ." And folks streamed outside making out to
hiccup, "How slee-py I feel!"

"No sense in Granpy broguin' all the way to summit
and back," Melia told Judy. "Steub and I'll fetch victuals
and drink, whilst you stay by him and mind he takes a
nap o' sleep." And Granpy stretched out under a tree
and Judy rested by turns, between practice of Hornpipe
steps, so to be ready when called.

The sun was hot but the air stayed cool, and she felt
terribly hungry, and the meat and bread and Steuben's
bought pop-water tasted better than any victuals known.
After his sleep Peter was up-and-coming, and he got him
a special chair with a back so to keep rested while the
tent was filling. Soon it had over-flowed, and common
folks kept sitting down in chairs opposite the mountain

Leslie Dykstra

talent, and were asked to get up again; but none bothered
Granpy till two men began to push, making way for music-
judges to pass in.

Then, at row's end, a lady in a sleezy-silky dress, yellow
as a daffodil, stood behind him with her red lips puckered,
and her suitor-man laid impatient hands on the chairback.

"You'll have to get up; these seats are reserved."

But Peter was puzzled and turned around, and the
fellow took firm hold and lifted him to his feet so the
lady could have her place. And Steuben, with his face
colored by a certain fierceness of blood, rushed up and
warned him, "H5-you!" in a smoulder. "Take keer how
you quick rough-handle a grandsir, mister, happen you
prize tomorrow's grace!" But the man only smiled and
turned his back on Steuben and begged pardon of the
lady as if he asked pardon for Steuben. And she smiled
back at him and sat down. And Jim Sutherland rushed
up in another bearm, telling Uncle, "Cross over."

So Steuben took Granpy's arm and drew him to his
old place with other mountain folks, and a girl gave him
her bench-seat and excitement died down. Yet there was
muttering, and some spoke their minds out loud with
downright displeasure. "No able-bodied young woman,
however fine, need bid an aged man stand."

Judy felt downcast till a fiddler began to play and two
young fellows clogged in white canvas shoes. The music
made her toes tingle, and Granpy perked up happily.
Other tunes and dances followed, and she stood like a
race-colt straining at the rope barrier, hardly able to hold
back. "I'll be next," she thought each time a dancer
was called.

A small girl with a red cotton dress danced buck-and-
wing; her shiny black shoes had cut out places in front
and they stepped it proud, and it seemed the tent would
split open to rid itself of sound when people clapped their
compliments. Judy's heart pumped and swelled with

Puryear's Hornpipe

pride for the stranger. "Now!" she told herself, bubbling
over. "My time, certain." But still another was called,
and Judy had never seen anything like her outside an
almanack. Surely a dolly cherished for her beauty. A
city creature strayed to the mountains by mischance.
Dress and drawers were a short smother of pink ruffles
matching the pink of plump bare legs ending in pink
leather. Her eyes were wide morning glory-blue, and her
hair new cornsilk-yellow. The small feet tapped out a
simple story, but their meaning was less clever than the
wide silken bow that poised like a butterfly on her head
and made a flutter-dance all its own.

"Such loveliness would shame a flower-thing jigging on
its roots," she thought, adoring even as her heart sank
recalling her own dark looks. That this small dolly would
win the medal was not a matter of doubt. Yet polite
noise that followed was less than prodigious.

Wave after wave of banjo and fiddle music fared forth,
and Peter sat with his eyes closed and a happy smile on
his face.

"Pore Granpy. A-lovin' music so and disabled to play
more. . . . Yet just happy to be and not in a swivet to
do," she tried to whisper Uncle who paid her no attention.
And even while figuring thus, she saw Granpy's fingers
begin to twitch and he cupped an ear forward as if doubt-
ing a rumor heard, and his eyes strained hard like a man
on a far peak searching home's familiar landmark.

Then it came to Judy that the tune begun the moment
past was none other than the Puryear Hornpipe —
Granpy's own! — the tune woven inside his own head
when he was young and the same later taught to Steuben,
who meant to play it here for her to dance.

A handsome young man was fiddling it with passion,
and as Granpy's glory of youth was unravelled, the
ground began to quake with heel-stomping and the plat-
form quivered.

Leslie Dykstra

Granpy got up from the bench liken a man gone agley,
and Uncle Steuben came and whispered and got hold of
Jim Sutherland and whispered, and the music stopped
on a sudden, and people clapped the tent upside down.
The fiddler bowed and stepped quickly back, and the
noise went on, louder than before, while Sutherland and
Steuben brought him over to Granpy. And the old man's
gray eyes peered into the young man's face, and he stam-
mered, "Be you Christopher Buchan?"

"Christopher's grandson, sir; my name is Charles
Buchan." And the fiddler took Granpy's hand in a tight
clasp, saying, "Can it be true that Peter Puryear, the
man my grandsir loved above all other men, is found at
last?"

"'Tis a miracle," Peter said, and his eyes went misty
and the two stood there still clasping hands whilst people
called and whistled.

Then Sutherland prodded Charles Buchan out to the
front, and again the Hornpipe sounded, and people
swayed to its magic rhythm as before, and all of Judy's
body was just one crave to dance. "I wish, I wish,"
tap-tapping in her heart to the music's beat.

Uncle Steuben, good player though he was, would
never fiddle the same piece after this master, she knew,
and a bold thought struck her. Should I leap right out
in face of reason, could not a soul stop my heel-and-toe.
And her feet, near past control, would have done that
sin of brazenness directly had not the music closed in
mid-air. But this time Charles, with up-raised hand,
put a stop to clamor. And the tent grew quiet as a church.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said in a voice held-back
and dream-struck. " I wish to give you thanks for hearten-
ing praise. . . . The music you seem to favor is a piece
called Puryear's Hornpipe, and it was composed by a
man of that name. Now Peter Puryear was the greatest
fiddler of his day, and my grandsir's beloved friend of

Puryear's Hornpipe

long ago. They traveled far together, shared many strange
adventures, till my kinsman married and settled down,
and Peter shogged off on another road and lost himself
to sight; but my grandsir kept his memory green, and
taught me the famous Hornpipe when I was still a
youngun. . . .

" Friends, they-two will n'er meet again on any moun-
tain road of earth, though here at this Folk Festival today
I feel them near united. But — "

And the people waited in deep quiet as Charles stepped
swiftly backward. He put one strong young arm around
frail Granpy's shoulder and brought him slowly forward.

"Friends, I want you to meet that famous man — Peter
Puryear, right now."

There was a moment of hushed surprise, then such a
thunder of approval as made old Peter sway. Men threw
up their hats, careless of how their property fell, and
women waved bright pocket handkerchiefs. " Hurrah!
Hurrah for Peter Puryear!" they called, and Judy was
dizzy with pride.

Granpy touched his eyes with the clean blue handker-
chief Melia had given him three years ago come Christmas;
then, mistily smiling, he gave them a low bow of ancient
manners, and let Charles guide him back to his platform
place.

" Now for me," Judy thought excitedly. " I'll do Granpy
so proud he'll ne'er again have cause to mourn havin' no
son with talent of a sort. I kain't fiddle, but I kin dance
good as any yet seen, 'spite o' my looks."

Applause that had died down started up once more,
the people clapping out a rhythm of their own invention,
slow yet pleasantly determined not to give over until
Charles would come back to play the Puryear Hornpipe.

Sutherland and Uncle were whispering together. Un-
doubtedly they were planning for Judy to dance while
Charles pleasured the folks. She smoothed her dress,

Leslie Dykstra

quivering like a leggy high-breed before it leaps in pas-
ture.

But close on the heels of this happening, all fiddlers
were judged, and the people's choice easily giving Charles
Buchan first prize, he pinned the medal on Granpy's coat
without ado, declaring he himself owned medals enough
for any man, and this one was earned by the Hornpipe
more than the fiddling.

Judy could hardly believe there was nothing more to
come, until she found herself lagging behind Melia, in a
daze, as they went toward summit.

"Come, baby," Melia was saying, "we'll hurry ahead
and lay out victuals for the men folks." But there were
little spiders weaving first webs in Judy's heart, closing
out sunlight, so that she, so light-stepping by wont,
brogued slow, as though blinded.

Then they were at the truck, where Charles Buchan
drank many toddicks of pure home-brew with Uncle and
Granpy, celebrating inherited friendship, till Melia called
them to sup, and she told how Judy's dance had got lost
in the shuffle. And the visitor said it was a shame, and
she would have to dance to his playing when he came soon
to visit with Granpy and talk family history. But she
felt empty as a skeleton leaf that can make no whisper of
song; and before she could gather breath for a word of
politeness, he was gone, and Uncle Steuben said Charles
was a popular man and company awaited him.

Later Melia fixed blankets and pillows, and Granpy
was hoisted into the truck bed, with Melia and Judy on
either side, and Steuben went off in search of cronies. It
was cold on this high peak, and she pulled up the quilts
saying, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord — "
but then thought fearfully, "maybe God doesn't love me
any more," yet sleep came soon as head touched pillow,
and dreams:

"Your turn next," said the lady-judge, dressed in dove-

Puryear's Hornpipe

gray, and next thing Judy was dancing; but her leather
shoes that curled up slightly at the toes began to grow
longer and tripped her up at last.

Quivering, Judy sat up on the straw bed in the truck
and came wide awake. The sky was a silver meadow,
yet brimmed with sadness, and a sorrow hammered on
her heart to be loosed. The prime reason for her folks
coming here had been to see her dance. But afterward,
foreign thoughts seemed to crowd her out of their minds
much as she had been forgotten by the program makers.

Melia and Uncle had scarcely named her disappoint-
ment to her, and even Granpy was like a stranger, and
she was lost in misery, wishing herself safe home on her
own mountain.

Thin ribbons of cloud drifted across the moon, yet it
lighted the dark shapes of trees whose limbs stuck straight
out or downward, uncaring to shelter a body like home
maples; trees that made themselves small, wary as men
on a height, marked for target. And the mountain itself
was unfriendly, standing apart from fellow-peaks. Small
wonder if common-sweet posies feared to grow a-top, and
flowing water kept hid. 'Twould be a poor place for a
morning ramble in the dew.

"Here be I — Judy Puryear, traveled to the tallest
summit, only to get me a hurt. . . . Grandling of a famous
man, and me only a one to laugh at." Then she saw that
Peter's eyes were wide, staring up at the violet-silver
sky.

"Granpy, you see yon flying moon?" she asked, choking
back a sob. And when he answered her with, " Three
moons, I been seein', come moon time, this long while,
'count o' short-sightedness," she said, "Must be a star
for each and every gathered on this yer Mount. See ary
a one singly?"

"They flow together in my sight; but ifn you glimpse
one fairer than all others, 'twell bear the name of Nancy

Leslie Dykstra

Wynne — her that chose my best friend, Christopher
Buchan, for a bridegroom."

"Now ain't that a sompin'," Judy thought, recalling
how Granpy's own true wife-woman was birth-named
Martha Stone. And she said, "Granpy, was that why
you shogged off on another road?"

" Reckon," he said, closing his eyes peacefully. "Sheep's
in meadow, and cow's in corn."

Two weeks had passed in special quiet since the journey,
and Granpy still counted on Christopher Buchan's grand-
son, now a day overdue. But a cattle-buyer who com-
bines business with fiddling cannot be expected to toe a
calendar mark.

The mountainside flourished with green and hot suns
drank up heavy fogs, for nights were cool, with much
rain fallen.

Melia had put off the green store-suit, and with it
bundled out of sight all dreams of rich dress goods and
lowland women's finery, and contented herself with
braiding a rug. Judy could see how she rejoiced in each
new round of sameness.

Granpy vegetated in the shade for such long hours un-
moving, "Hit wouldn't surprise me none were his head
to send up silver sprouts," she told Judy. "I misdoubt
me he's ailing some. A body'd never devyse, for all he'd
tell, unwishful to cause me trouble."

Peter came to life on a sudden and his mouth puckered
into a denial; but after a puff or two of smoke he put the
pipe down. "Baccy distastes me somehow."

So Melia went to the spring-shelter, chose a dew-rimmed
jug small as a syrup pitcher, and plucked a sprig of mint.

"Might's well get the good of this now as ever," she
said, offering his glass with the manner of politeness
that had always held between them, and sat down for a
gossip.

Puryear's Hornpipe

He took a sip. "Whoo-^/ M-m. ... I rate that
master. Must save some for Charles and Steuben."

"Steub's in love," she said, and Peter stared. "Hit
beats all. Here was he, a counted-on bachelor, payin'
him no mind to home girls. Standin' word-haltered and
lackluster frontin' the prettiest. Had to go climb the
highest mount to come on romance."

Granpy tilted back, suddenly jubilant at this piece of
news. " Mankind! What like?"

"A stylish one from over near Baptist Valley. No whit
better-favored than ary a home girl. First claps eyes on
her, whispers me, 'There's my woman!' Courtship trav-
eled faster'n a March hare. Tips her a 'howdy' at noon-
time, and the same night bespeaks her to wed."

"That's courtin*! . . . What I mean: courtin'. . . .
'Twas the starlight. . . . Music."

"Aims to go see after her next week."

Peter's eyes glowed with interest. "We'll have another
party." And he lifted his head lilting:

"We'll give the bride-and-groom a happy wedding-
infare — " And broke off to laugh with childish de-
light.

"Granpy, my gracious! You're a scandal," she said
smiling and brought him his fiddle.

"Then my old age ain't wasted," he made boast, im-
mensely pleased. "Melia-girl, I been a-studyin' over
Government news-tales Steub told us, and wove words
to fit, steppin' up an old ballad to match new times.
Seems as though our songs air too behind. Heark now."
And he swept the bow across strings with unwonted ease
and sang to the tune of Cumberland Gap:

Wake up boys, you been too long a nappin',
Ain't a thing in Cumberland likely now to happen.

"Wouldn't wonder me you could fight yore weight in
wildcats this minute," Melia said laughing. And Peter

Leslie Dykstra

paused and took another sip, and his voice got strong
and he sawed right on through six-to-a-dozen stanzas:

Rise up boys, big times are gone,
Hell's done moved up to D.C.-town.
Make yourselves welcome to Roos-e-velt
With a coonskin cap and a panther-pelt.
Fetch along a fiddle, a Clinch Mountain fox,
Horn full o' powder with your old flintlocks
And three kinds of water to wash your face
When you arrive at the President-place.
Hic-cup! Oh, Lor-dy, how slee-py I feel
Hic-cup! Oh, Lor-dy, how sleep-y I feel.

Melia was bent over with laughter when he put down
his fiddle, scant of breath. "Whur at's Judy?"

"Settin' right behind ye."

"What makes her so quiet?"

"I'm unknowin'. That child no longer contents herself.
She's a worry. Past starvation, yet withouten room for
good corn bread. Seems like we all got benefitted by the
Music Festival except my lambkin. I sells my rug — ain't
nobody goin' to climb these ycre back hills a-searchin'
out my handiwork, Steub finds himself a wife-woman,
and you get bestowed a medal."

Judy rose from the steps and started moseying along
on the smoke-house path where a hantle of chickens
roamed, separately gawking. The close dappled shadows
of branches turned gray, and the sun moved over toward
Tazewell, making a fozy smear in the distant sky.

But Melia called, " Jude" in a tone that best be obeyed.
"Come stay by Granpy."

So she moseyed back, and stood leaning against the
old man's chair.

"I'm a tunin' up fer a hornpipe," he wared her in-
vitingly. But she was heedless of music.

"Heark now to the voice of my fiddle; guess what like
is this?" — and Peter drew his bow again and the strings
answered with a lilting lament : " Whip ! whip ! whip ! —

Puryear's Hornpipe

whip-<?<?-r-will," and the sound was so blithesome-lonely
it made her heart skip a beat.

"Hit's the long-lost, askin' why," she said.

"'Tain't so," and his smile twinkled. "Baby, sposen
you cut me a caper? Remember the jiggin' step you
scotched outen the bean patch, day before journey?"

"Kain't recall. Anyways I aim to sew me a seam and
get grown, leavin' off dancin'."

"Leave off dancin'!" The old man stared in unbelief.
Then he drew her head down to rest on his shoulder.
"Why, you got a lifefull o' dancin' before you. 'Course
by courtin' time you'll leave off hornpipe antics, and'll
swing yore partner; and later join in play-games with the
olduns. But a bonnie lass, light-footed and glad-hearted
by nature, air bound to reel it 'twell she's trembly."
And he began a shaking movement with his foot like a
jiggery ancient, and Judy was obliged to laugh; but she
held onto downgone feelings that could no more be named
than the name of straw-flowers in general.

"Kain't dance theseadays. Do I try, my feet get
tangled. Old ankle bones won't rock me clever."

"Ifn you would dance, yore spirit would ease."

"You darling Granpy," she said, giving him a quick
hug. "Guess I'll go fix a mash-feed for Jill."

The sun came back, and Granpy stared downward at
the Garden-valley as if his thoughts had turned wandery;
but when Judy was half-way up the slant meadow she
could hear his fiddle speaking lonesomely; calling, "Whip!
whip ! — whip — ^-r-will — ? "

The dusk was like every other, with birds here and there
in the trees and a dewy perfume of roses stirred by a faint
wind.

But when Judy went to the porch to say supper was
ready she found he was asleep. He sat in his chair, propped
by the fiddle, with his chin resting on the smooth wood,
as if ready to pitch a new tune.

Leslie Dykstra

So she tiptoed away; but when Melia came, she knew
he would never wake more.

"Withouten a sound, or a chime o' warnin'," she whis-
pered, "more than the ghostly call o' a whippoorwill."

The nearest settlement preacher being smit with an
illness, 'twas left for Steuben to carry the funeral service
bravely forward. Near-boundary neighbors were seated
on chairs and boxes in the long front room, waiting while
he studied what, for a sermon. The day was beautiful
with sun and lively chirping and the whir of a lone katy-
did, but inside gloom crept over Judy.

Steuben failing of words to begin, the company saw
his trouble, and some one pitched a tune, and all lornly
voices raised a doleful hymn. And when the dreary notes
had sighed themselves to a close, silence grew, with the
mourners staring straight ahead as if they, too, failed of
thinking.

Then another melancholy tune was begun. It bade all
wicked sinners heed and offered lasting torment.

And when it seemed he would speak at last, a widow-
cumberworld in sable weeds put up her frousty veil and
picked her a ballad to suit her mind's condition; she
stretched her neck and quavered a note, and neighbors
took the pitch and carried it forward. The words were
roundabout and awesome. They dug up smouldering
sorrows best left be, and the long-drawn chant made
Judy sob, and Steuben frowned like a thunderstorm. He
loomed by the windowside, both hands thrust into britches
pockets, as might a man wrestling in outer darkness.
Then he stepped free on a sudden, and his face cleared
and the wailing was cut off.

"Friends," he said simply, "hit's hard to speak private
feelings in public, and I'm fair puzzled to choose a text
fitten for Uncle Peter. But my religion tells me there's
no call for high palamity of grief. Seems how such a

Puryear's Hornpipe

gladsome spirit owns far less need o' prayer than our own
frecket souls. . . . You'll bear me out, remembering his
golden rule: 'Be happy — case bein'-so runs up no bill for
other men to foot.' . . .

"I got no fear he'll fail o' heaven. I'm bold to believe
he got a call from there. . . . Must be a mort o' folks
been broguin' the golded streets, cravin' a change from
hymns, might petition the Lord for Peter Puryear, with
his mountain-fetched fiddle that he hand-rived from the
heart o' a maple . . . cronies, and folks what 'bal-
anced all' — dancin' when here, to his tune times un-
numbered." . . .

The mourners were not scandalized at this, but listened
solemnly, as if considering how well the words might be
taken.

And Steuben was suddenly drawn up into something
finer than his own rough-hewn self. His voice, by nature
harsh and contentious, now richened, full of persuasion,
and grew deep with feeling.

"What I aim to say: hit's certain-sure St. Peter won't
leave his namesake standin' outen whilst he gives him
word-o'-a-sort. No. . . . All is — when Peter, fiddler and
happy spinner of tales, stands before Peter, serious Saint,
he'll hear, 'Enter withingatesS And might even call,
'Choose yore partners; we^ll run a set.'"

And "Amen!" "Fair enough," and "Likely-undoubt-
edly," was answered.

" Folks — say we give Uncle Peter a happy outfare? . . .
Ifn his spirit lingers close, regretful of leavin' his home-
place, say we fiddle him close to the pearly gates with
music that matched him?"

And the company gathered Steuben's meaning whole-
somely and only waited to rejoice with him.

Straight-off he settled himself and started a galloping
ballad-song commonly known and enjoyed. And with
this change of music, the room's funereal darkness became

Leslie Dy ks tra

festal; grief brightening into gladness, and fear into
hope — all growing together as if to show how like are
gay things and sorrowful.

Judy's tears had stopped, yet her own heart was still
lavish with grief, recalling how she had denied Granpy
when he bade her cut a caper but two days gone. And
not till Uncle Steuben shogged off into a lively jig-tune
did the hurt give over. Feet softly tapped the floor in a
wide half-circle, and her own black leather brogues tapped
with company.

When the tune was near done a latecomer entered
quietly. He paused for a moment beside the smooth-
boarded box that rested at the farther hearth, then turned
to Steuben, who took his hand in a fervent grasp.

Judy's eyes blinked in amaze at seeing Charles Buchan
once again.

"I come too late," he said regretfully.

"Happen not," Steuben said, offering the fiddle to
Charles.

"I'd be proud," Charles answered, and directly the
strings sang with a melody of woodland sounds. And
every stroke of the bow conjured something new: tree-
tops in a gale, music of bubbling rain, waterfalls rushing,
myriad voices of birds.

Then, as if this Forest Medley had served him only to
test the instrument, he waded point-blank into the Pur-
year Hornpipe; and as Charles Buchan played, the tone
of Peter's beloved fiddle grew proud and full. The box
quivered and came fully alive and gave out everything
it had to master hand. Company's heels were set afire
keeping time to that marvelous beat, and Judy felt lifted
and spun in a sudden dizziness, light as a leaf in a puff of
wind.

"Oh! I crave to pleasure my Granpy too," she cried,
and Uncle nodded.

Next thing, radiant, she leaped to front and went

Puryear's Hornpipe

whirling east and west across the floor like the flicker of
a dancing sunbeam.

It was almost as if Granpy had laid his summons on
her spirit; for she danced religiously, obeying harmony's
pure demand. And as the rhythmic waves of hilarious
sound pulsated through her being, Judy could feel a
Holiness above her. Each sportive leap in the Hornpipe
figures was begun with her arms wide as if they were
broad fans of a fairy angel opening for flight.

The mourner's faces shone with reverence for the
child's unconscious act of grace and simplicity — their
healthy mountain senses rejoicing in the natural. They
watched, whispering, two and two, — of Charles and Judy:

"Fiddlin' and dancin' Peter's spirit up to the pearly
gates." — "Never seen a service more fitten to a body's
character."

"And she, spry as a hopper a-scizzorin' air." — "Leaped
so high, feared me she'd get herself hung from the rafter —
time that long string o' herbs wropped her round."

"Could no angel tap out sweeter hallelujahs though did
they come down to earth and try." — "Unless inspired by
that one's music."

"'Twould make a gouty oak tree hobble." — "Way she
ankles it cautions me go limber up my ownself before
life's fire quenches."

And when, at last, the Hornpipe bade her reel in a
magic rope, all the little spiders that had enshrouded
Judy's heart wound up their silken threads and were
blown away.

SILENT SNOW, SECRET SNOW
by

Conrad Aiken

CONRAD AIKEN was born in 1889 in Savannah, Georgia.
At Harvard University he distinguished himself in poetry,
and in 1930 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his Se-
lected Poems. Although primarily a poet, he has written
a novel, Blue Voyage, that displays mastery of the "stream
of consciousness" technique, and many distinguished short
stories.

SILENT SNOW, SECRET SNOW

JUST why it should have happened, or why it should
have happened just when it did, he could not, of
course, possibly have said; nor perhaps would it even
have occurred to him to ask. The thing was above all a
secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother
and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part
of its deliciousness. It was like a peculiarly beautiful trin-
ket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser-pocket, — a
rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden
out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a
sea shell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot
or stripe, — and, as if it were any one of these, he carried
around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and
increasingly beautiful sense of possession. Nor was it only
a sense of possession — it was also a sense of protection.
It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a
fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly
seclusion. This was almost the first thing he had noticed
about it — apart from the oddness of the thing itself — and
it was this that now again, for the fiftieth time, occurred
to him, as he sat in the little schoolroom. It was the half
hour for geography. Miss Buell was revolving with one
finger, slowly, a huge terrestrial globe which had been
placed on her desk. The green and yellow continents
passed and repassed, questions were asked and answered,
and now the little girl in front of him, Deirdre, who had a
funny little constellation of freckles on the back of her
neck, exactly like the Big Dipper, was standing up and

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

telling Miss Buell that the equator was the line that ran
round the middle.

Miss Buell's face, which was old and greyish and kindly,
with grey stiff curls beside the cheeks, and eyes that swam
very brightly, like little minnows, behind thick glasses,
wrinkled itself into a complication of amusements.

"Ah! I see. The earth is wearing a belt, or a sash. Or
someone drew a line round it!"

"Oh no — not that — I mean — "

In the general laughter, he did not share, or only a very
little. He was thinking about the Arctic and Antarctic
regions, which of course, on the globe, were white. Miss
Buell was now telling them about the tropics, the jungles,
the steamy heat of equatorial swamps, where the birds
and butterflies, and even the snakes, were like living jewels.
As he listened to these things, he was already, with a
pleasant sense of half-effort, putting his secret between
himself and the words. Was it really an effort at all? For
effort implied something voluntary, and perhaps even
something one did not especially want; whereas this was
distinctly pleasant, and came almost of its own accord.
All he needed to do was to think of that morning, the first
one, and then of all the others —

But it was all so absurdly simple! It had amounted to
so little. It was nothing, just an idea — and just why it
should have become so wonderful, so permanent, was a
mystery — a very pleasant one, to be sure, but also, in an
amusing way, foolish. However, without ceasing to listen
to Miss Buell, who had now moved up to the north tem-
perate zones, he deliberately invited his memory of the
first morning. It was only a moment or two after he had
waked up — or perhaps the moment itself. But was there,
to be exact, an exact moment? Was one awake all at once?
or was it gradual? Anyway, it was after he had stretched
a lazy hand up towards the headrail, and yawned, and
then relaxed again among his warm covers, all the more

Conrad Aiken

grateful on a December morning, that the thing had
happened. Suddenly, for no reason, he had thought of the
postman, he remembered the postman. Perhaps there was
nothing so odd in that. After all, he heard the postman
almost every morning in his life — his heavy boots could be
heard clumping round the corner at the top of the little
cobbled hill-street, and then, progressively nearer, pro-
gressively louder, the double knock at each door, the cross-
ings and re-crossings of the street, till finally the clumsy
steps came stumbling across to the very door, and the
tremendous knock came which shook the house itself.

(Miss Buell was saying "Vast wheat-growing areas in
North America and Siberia."

Deirdre had for the moment placed her left hand across
the back of her neck.)

But on this particular morning, the first morning, as he
lay there with his eyes closed, he had for some reason
waited for the postman. He wanted to hear him come
round the corner. And that was precisely the joke — he
never did. He never came. He never had come — round the
corner — again. For when at last the steps were heard, they
had already, he was quite sure, come a little down the hill,
to the first house; and even so, the steps were curiously
different — they were softer, they had a new secrecy about
them, they were muffled and indistinct; and while the
rhythm of them was the same, it now said a new thing —
it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.
And he had understood the situation at once — nothing
could have seemed simpler — there had been snow in the
night, such as all winter he had been longing for; and it
was this which had rendered the postman's first footsteps
inaudible, and the later ones faint. Of course! How lovely!
And even now it must be snowing — it was going to be a
snowy day — the long white ragged lines were drifting and
sifting across the street, across the faces of the old houses,
whispering and hushing, making little triangles of white in

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

the corners between cobblestones, seething a little when
the wind blew them over the ground to a drifted corner;
and so it would be all day, getting deeper and deeper and
silenter and silenter.

(Miss Buell was saying uLand of perpetual snow.")

All this time, of course (while he lay in bed), he had kept
his eyes closed, listening to the nearer progress of the post-
man, the muffled footsteps thumping and slipping on the
snow-sheathed cobbles; and all the other sounds — the
double knocks, a frosty far-off voice or two, a bell ringing
thinly and softly as if under a sheet of ice — had the same
slightly abstracted quality, as if removed by one degree
from actuality — as if everything in the world had been
insulated by snow. But when at last, pleased, he opened
his eyes, and turned them towards the window, to see for
himself this long-desired and now so clearly imagined
miracle — what he saw instead was brilliant sunlight on a
roof; and when, astonished, he jumped out of bed and
stared down into the street, expecting to see the cobbles
obliterated by the snow, he saw nothing but the bare bright
cobbles themselves.

Queer, the effect this extraordinary surprise had had
upon him — all the following morning he had kept with
him a sense as of snow falling about him, a secret screen
of new snow between himself and the world. If he had not
dreamed such a thing — and how could he have dreamed it
while awake? — how else could one explain it? In any case,
the delusion had been so vivid as to affect his entire be-
haviour. He could not now remember whether it was on
the first or the second morning — or was it even the third?
— that his mother had drawn attention to some oddness in
his manner.

"But my darling — " she had said at the breakfast
table — "what has come over you? You don't seem to be
listening. ..."

And how often that very thing had happened since!

Conra d Aiken

(Miss Buell was now asking if anyone knew the differ-
ence between the North Pole and the Magnetic Pole.
Deirdre was holding up her flickering brown hand, and
he could see the four white dimples that marked the
knuckles.)

Perhaps it hadn't been either the second or third morn-
ing— or even the fourth or fifth. How could he be sure?
How could he be sure just when the delicious progress had
become clear? Just when it had really begun? The inter-
vals weren't very precise. . . . All he now knew was,
that at some point or other — perhaps the second day, per-
haps the sixth — he had noticed that the presence of the
snow was a little more insistent, the sound of it clearer;
and, conversely, the sound of the postman's footsteps more
indistinct. Not only could he not hear the steps come
round the corner, he could not even hear them at the first
house. It was below the first house that he heard them;
and then, a few days later, it was below the second house
that he heard them; and a few days later again, below the
third. Gradually, gradually, the snow was becoming
heavier, the sound of its seething louder, the cobblestones
more and more muffled. When he found, each morning,
on going to the window, after the ritual of listening, that
the roofs and cobbles were as bare as ever, it made no
difference. This was, after all, only what he had expected.
It was even what pleased him, what rewarded him: the
thing was his own, belonged to no one else. No one else
knew about it, not even his mother and father. There,
outside, were the bare cobbles; and here, inside, was the
snow. Snow growing heavier each day, muffling the world,
hiding the ugly, and deadening increasingly — above all —
the steps of the postman.

"But my darling — " she had said at the luncheon
table — "what has come over you? You don't seem to
listen when people speak to you. That's the third time I've
asked you to pass your plate. , . ."

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

How was one to explain this to Mother? or to Father?
There was, of course, nothing to be done about it: nothing.
All one could do was to laugh embarrassedly, pretend to
be a little ashamed, apologize, and take a sudden and
somewhat disingenuous interest in what was being done
or said. The cat had stayed out all night. He had a curi-
ous swelling on his left cheek — perhaps somebody had
kicked him, or a stone had struck him. Mrs. Kempton
was or was not coming to tea. The house was going to be
house cleaned, or "turned out," on Wednesday instead of
Friday. A new lamp was provided for his evening work —
perhaps it was eyestrain which accounted for this new and
so peculiar vagueness of his — Mother was looking at him
with amusement as she said this, but with something else
as well. A new lamp? A new lamp. Yes Mother, No
Mother, Yes Mother. School is going very well. The
geometry is very easy. The history is very dull. The
geography is very interesting — particularly when it takes
one to the North Pole. Why the North Pole? Oh, well, it
would be fun to be an explorer. Another Peary or Scott or
Shackleton. And then abruptly he found his interest in
the talk at an end, stared at the pudding on his plate,
listened, waited, and began once more — ah how heavenly,
too, the first beginnings — to hear or feel — for could he
actually hear it? — the silent snow, the secret snow.

(Miss Buell was telling them about the search for the
Northwest Passage, about Hendrik Hudson, the Half
Moon.)

This had been, indeed, the only distressing feature of the
new experience: the fact that it so increasingly had brought
him into a kind of mute misunderstanding, or even con-
flict, with his father and mother. It was as if he were trying
to lead a double life. On the one hand he had to be Paul
Hasleman, and keep up the appearance of being that per-
son— dress, wash, and answer intelligently when spoken
to — ; on the other, he had to explore this new world which

Conrad Aiken

had been opened to him. Nor could there be the slightest
doubt — not the slightest — that the new world was the
profounder and more wonderful of the two. It was ir-
resistible. It was miraculous. Its beauty was simply
beyond anything — beyond speech as beyond thought —
utterly incommunicable. But how then, between the two
worlds, of which he was thus constantly aware, was he to
keep a balance? One must get up, one must go to break-
fast, one must talk with Mother, go to school, do one's
lessons — and, in all this, try not to appear too much of a
fool. But if all the while one was also trying to extract the
full deliciousness of another and quite separate existence,
one which could not easily (if at all) be spoken of — how
was one to manage? How was one to explain? Would it
be safe to explain? Would it be absurd? Would it merely
mean that he would get into some obscure kind of trouble?
These thoughts came and went, came and went, as
softly and secretly as the snow; they were not precisely a
disturbance, perhaps they were even a pleasure; he liked
to have them; their presence was something almost pal-
pable, something he could stroke with his hand, without
closing his eyes, and without ceasing to see Miss Buell
and the school-room and the globe and the freckles on
Deirdre's neck; nevertheless he did in a sense cease to see,
or to see the obvious external world, and substituted for this
vision the vision of snow, the sound of snow, and the slow,
almost soundless, approach of the postman. Yesterday, it
had been only at the sixth house that the postman had
become audible; the snow was much deeper now, it was
falling more swiftly and heavily, the sound of its seething
was more distinct, more soothing, more persistent. And
this morning, it had been — as nearly as he could figure —
just above the seventh house — perhaps only a step or two
above: at most, he had heard two or three footsteps before
the knock had sounded. . . . And with each such narrow-
ing of the sphere, each nearer approach of the limit at

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

which the postman was first audible, it was odd how
sharply was increased the amount of illusion which had
to be carried into the ordinary business of daily life. Each
day, it was harder to get out of bed, to go to the window,
to look out at the — as always — perfectly empty and snow-
less street. Each day it was more difficult to go through
the perfunctory motions of greeting Mother and Father at
breakfast, to reply to their questions, to put his books to-
gether and go to school. And at school, how extraordinar-
ily hard to conduct with success simultaneously the public
life and the life that was secret. There were times when he
longed — positively ached — to tell everyone about it — to
burst out with it — only to be checked almost at once by a
far-off feeling as of some faint absurdity which was in-
herent in it — but was it absurd? — and more importantly
by a sense of mysterious power in his very secrecy. Yes:
it must be kept secret. That, more and more, became clear.
At whatever cost to himself, whatever pain to others —

(Miss Buell looked straight at him, smiling, and said,
"Perhaps we'll ask Paul. Pm sure Paul will come out of
his day-dream long enough to be able to tell us. Won't
you, Paul." He rose slowly from his chair, resting one
hand on the brightly varnished desk, and deliberately
stared through the snow towards the blackboard. It was
an effort, but it was amusing to make it. "Yes," he said
slowly, "it was what we now call the Hudson River. This
he thought to be the Northwest Passage. He was dis-
appointed." He sat down again, and as he did so Deirdre
half turned in her chair and gave him a shy smile, of
approval and admiration.)

At whatever pain to others.

This part of it was very puzzling, very puzzling. Mother
was very nice, and so was Father. Yes, that was all true
enough. He wanted to be nice to them, to tell them every-
thing— and yet, was it really wrong of him to want to have
a secret place of his own?

100

Conrad A?ken

At bedtime, the night before, Mother had said, "If this
goes on, my lad, we'll have to see a doctor, we will! We
can't have our boy — " But what was it she had said?
" Live in another world " ? " Live so far away " ? The word
"far" had been in it, he was sure, and then Mother had
taken up a magazine again and laughed a little, but with
an expression which wasn't mirthful. He had felt sorry
for her. . . .

The bell rang for dismissal. The sound came to him
through long curved parallels of falling snow. He saw
Deirdre rise, and had himself risen almost as soon — but
not quite as soon — as she.

On the walk homeward, which was timeless, it pleased
him to see through the accompaniment, or counterpoint, of
snow, the items of mere externality on his way. There
were many kinds of brick in the sidewalks, and laid in
many kinds of pattern. The garden walls too were various,
some of wooden palings, some of plaster, some of stone.
Twigs of bushes leaned over the walls: the little hard green
winter-buds of lilac, on grey stems, sheathed and fat;
other branches very thin and fine and black and desiccated.
Dirty sparrows huddled in the bushes, as dull in colour
as dead fruit left in leafless trees. A single starling creaked
on a weather vane. In the gutter, beside a drain, was a
scrap of torn and dirty newspaper, caught in a little delta
of filth: the word ECZEMA appeared in large capitals, and
below it was a letter from Mrs. Amelia D. Cravath, 2100
Pine Street, Fort Worth, Texas, to the effect that after
being a sufferer for years she had been cured by Caley's
Ointment. In the little delta, beside the fan-shaped and
deeply runnelled continent of brown mud, were lost twigs,
descended from their parent trees, dead matches, a rusty
horse-chestnut burr, a small concentration of sparkling
gravel on the lip of the sewer, a fragment of egg-shell, a

101

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

streak of yellow sawdust which had been wet and now was
dry and congealed, a brown pebble, and a broken feather.
Further on was a cement sidewalk, ruled into geometrical
parallelograms, with a brass inlay at one end commemo-
rating the contractors who had laid it, and, halfway across,
an irregular and random series of dog-tracks, immortalized
in synthetic stone. He knew these well, and always stepped
on them; to cover the little hollows with his own foot had
always been a queer pleasure; today he did it once more,
but perfunctorily and detachedly, all the while thinking
of something else. That was a dog, a long time ago, who
had made a mistake and walked on the cement while it
was still wet. He had probably wagged his tail, but that
hadn't been recorded. Now, Paul Hasleman, aged twelve,
on his way home from school, crossed the same river, which
in the meantime had frozen into rock. Homeward through
the snow, the snow falling in bright sunshine. Homeward?

Then came the gateway with the two posts surmounted
by egg-shaped stones which had been cunningly balanced
on their ends, as if by Columbus, and mortared in the very
act of balance: a source of perpetual wonder. On the brick
wall just beyond, the letter H had been stenciled, pre-
sumably for some purpose. H? H.

The green hydrant, with a little green-painted chain
attached to the brass screw-cap.

The elm tree, with the great grey wound in the bark, kid-
ney-shaped, into which he always put his hand — to feel
the cold but living wood. The injury, he had been sure,
was due to the gnawings of a tethered horse. But now it
deserved only a passing palm, a merely tolerant eye. There
were more important things. Miracles. Beyond the
thoughts of trees, mere elms. Beyond the thoughts of
sidewalks, mere stone, mere brick, mere cement. Beyond
the thoughts even of his own shoes, which trod these side-
walks obediently, bearing a burden — far above — of elab-
orate mystery. He watched them. They were not very

102

Conrad Aiken

well polished; he had neglected them, for a very good
reason: they were one of the many parts of the increasing
difficulty of the daily return to daily life, the morning
struggle. To get up, having at last opened one's eyes, to
go to the window, and discover no snow, to wash, to dress,
to descend the curving stairs to breakfast —

At whatever pain to others, nevertheless, one must per-
severe in severance, since the incommunicability of the
experience demanded it. It was desirable of course to be
kind to Mother and Father, especially as they seemed to
be worried, but it was also desirable to be resolute. If
they should decide — as appeared likely — to consult the
doctor, Doctor Howells, and have Paul inspected, his
heart listened to through a kind of dictaphone, his lungs,
his stomach — well, that was all right. He would go
through with it. He would give them answer for question,
too — perhaps such answers as they hadn't expected? No.
That would never do. For the secret world must, at all
costs, be preserved.

The bird-house in the apple-tree was empty — it was the
wrong time of year for wrens. The little round black door
had lost its pleasure. The wrens were enjoying other
houses, other nests, remoter trees. But this too was a
notion which he only vaguely and grazingly entertained —
as if, for the moment, he merely touched an edge of it;
there was something further on, which was already assum-
ing a sharper importance; something which already teased
at the corners of his eyes, teasing also at the corner of his
mind. It was funny to think that he so wanted this, so
awaited it — and yet found himself enjoying this momen-
tary dalliance with the bird-house, as if for a quite deliber-
ate postponement and enhancement of the approaching
pleasure. He was aware of his delay, of his smiling and
detached and now almost uncomprehending gaze at the
little bird-house; he knew what he was going to look at
next: it was his own little cobbled hill-street, his own

103

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

house, the little river at the bottom of the hill, the grocer's
shop with the cardboard man in the window — and now,
thinking of all this, he turned his head, still smiling, and
looking quickly right and left through the snow-laden
sunlight.

And the mist of snow, as he had foreseen, was still on
it — a ghost of snow falling in the bright sunlight, softly
and steadily floating and turning and pausing, soundlessly
meeting the snow that covered, as with a transparent
mirage, the bare bright cobbles. He loved it — he stood
still and loved it. Its beauty was paralyzing — beyond all
words, all experience, all dream. No fairy-story he had
ever read could be compared with it — none had ever given
him this extraordinary combination of ethereal loveliness
with a something else, unnameable, which was just faintly
and deliciously terrifying. What was this thing? As he
thought of it, he looked upward toward his own bedroom
window, which was open — and it was as if he looked
straight into the room and saw himself lying half awake
in his bed. There he was — at this very instant he was still
perhaps actually there — more truly there than standing
here at the edge of the cobbled hill-street, with one hand
lifted to shade his eyes against the snow-sun. Had he
indeed ever left his room, in all this time? since that very
first morning? Was the whole progress still being enacted
there, was it still the same morning, and himself not yet
wholly awake? And even now, had the postman not yet
come round the corner? . . .

This idea amused him, and automatically, as he thought
of it, he turned his head and looked toward the top of the
hill. There was, of course, nothing there — nothing and no
one. The street was empty and quiet. And all the more
because of its emptiness it occurred to him to count the
houses — a thing which, oddly enough, he hadn't before
thought of doing. Of course, he had known there weren't
many — many, that is, on his own side of the street, which

104

Conrad Aiken

were the ones that figured in the postman's progress — but
nevertheless it came to him as something of a shock to find
that there were precisely six, above his own house — his
own house was the seventh.

Six!

Astonished, he looked at his own house — looked at the
door, on which was the number thirteen — and then real-
ized that the whole thing was exactly and logically and
absurdly what he ought to have known. Just the same,
the realization gave him abruptly, and even a little fright-
eningly, a sense of hurry. He was being hurried — he was
being rushed. For — he knit his brows — he couldn't be
mistaken — it was just above the seventh house, his own
house, that the postman had first been audible this very
morning. But in that case — in that case — did it mean that
tomorrow he would hear nothing? The knock he had heard
must have been the knock of their own door. Did it mean —
and this was an idea which gave him a really extraordi-
nary feeling of surprise — that he would never hear the
postman again? — that tomorrow morning the postman
would already have passed the house, in a snow by then
so deep as to render his footsteps completely inaudible?
That he would have made his approach down the snow-
filled street so soundlessly, so secretly, that he, Paul
Hasleman, there lying in bed, would not have waked in
time, or, waking, would have heard nothing?

But how could that be? Unless even the knocker should
be muffled in the snow — frozen tight, perhaps? . . . But
in that case —

A vague feeling of disappointment came over him; a
vague sadness, as if he felt himself deprived of something
which he had long looked forward to, something much
prized. After all this, all this beautiful progress, the slow
delicious advance of the postman through the silent and
secret snow, the knock creeping closer each day, and the
footsteps nearer, the audible compass of the world thus

105

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

daily narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, as the snow sooth-
ingly and beautifully encroached and deepened, after all
this, was he to be defrauded of the one thing he had so
wanted — to be able to count, as it were, the last two or
three solemn footsteps, as they finally approached his own
door? Was it all going to happen, at the end, so suddenly?
or indeed, had it already happened? with no slow and sub-
tle.gradations of menace, in which he could luxuriate?

He gazed upward again, toward his own window which
flashed in the sun: and this time almost with a feeling that
it would be better if he were still in bed, in that room; for in
that case this must still be the first morning, and there
would be six more mornings to come — or, for that matter,
seven or eight or nine — how could he be sure? — or even
more.

Ill

After supper, the inquisition began. He stood before
the doctor, under the lamp, and submitted silently to the
usual thumpings and tappings.

"Now will you please say 'Ah!'?"

"Ah!"

"Now again please, if you don't mind."

"Ah."

"Say it slowly, and hold it if you can — "

"Ah-h-h-h-h-h— "

"Good."

How silly all this was. As if it had anything to do with
his throat! Or his heart or lungs !

Relaxing his mouth, of which the corners, after all this
absurd stretching, felt uncomfortable, he avoided the doc-
tor's eyes, and stared towards the fireplace, past his
mother's feet (in grey slippers) which projected from the
green chair, and his father's feet (in brown slippers) which
stood neatly side by side on the hearth rug.

"Hm. There is certainly nothing wrong there . . ."

106

Con rad Aiken

He felt the doctor's eyes fixed upon him, and, as if
merely to be polite, returned the look, but with a feeling
of justifiable evasiveness.

"Now, young man, tell me, — do you feel all right?"

"Yes, sir, quite all right."

"No headaches? no dizziness?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Let me see. Let's get a book, if you don't mind — yes,
thank you, that will do splendidly — and now, Paul, if
you'll just read it, holding it as you would normally hold
it—"

He took the book and read:

"And another praise have I to tell for this the city our
mother, the gift of a great god, a glory of the land most
high; the might of horses, the might of young horses, the
might of the sea. . . . For thou, son of Cronus, our lord
Poseidon, hast throned herein this pride, since in these
roads first thou didst show forth the curb that cures
the rage of steeds. And the shapely oar, apt to men's
hands, hath a wondrous speed on the brine, following the
hundred-footed Nereids. . . . O land that art praised
above all lands, now is it for thee to make those bright
praises seen in deeds."

He stopped, tentatively, and lowered the heavy book.

"No — as I thought — there is certainly no superficial
sign of eye-strain."

Silence thronged the room, and he was aware of the
focused scrutiny of the three people who confronted
him. . . .

"We could have his eyes examined — but I believe it is
something else."

"What could it be?" This was his father's voice.

"It's only this curious absent-mindedness — " This was
his mother's voice.

In the presence of the doctor, they both seemed irritat-
ingly apologetic.

107

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

" I believe it is something else. Now Paul — I would like
very much to ask you a question or two. You will answer
them, won't you — you know I'm an old, old friend of
yours, eh? That's right! . . ."

His back was thumped twice by the doctor's fat fist, —
then the doctor was grinning at him with false amiability,
while with one finger-nail he was scratching the top button
of his waistcoat. Beyond the doctor's shoulder was the
fire, the fingers of flame making light prestidigitation
against the sooty fireback, the soft sound of their random
flutter the only sound.

"I would like to know — is there anything that worries
you?"

The doctor was again smiling, his eyelids low against the
little black pupils, in each of which was a tiny white bead
of light. Why answer him? why answer him at all? "At
whatever pain to others" — but it was all a nuisance, this
necessity for resistance, this necessity for attention: it
was as if one had been stood up on a brilliantly lighted
stage, under a great round blaze of spotlight; as if one were
merely a trained seal, or a performing dog, or a fish, dipped
out of an aquarium and held up by the tail. It would serve
them right if he were merely to bark or growl. And mean-
while, to miss these last few precious hours, these hours of
which each minute was more beautiful than the last, more
menacing — ? He still looked, as if from a great distance,
at the beads of light in the doctor's eyes, at the fixed false
smile, and then, beyond, once more at his mother's slip-
pers, his father's slippers, the soft flutter of the fire. Even
here, even amongst these hostile presences, and in this
arranged light, he could see the snow, he could hear it — it
was in the corners of the room, where the shadow was
deepest, under the sofa, behind the half-opened door which
led to the dining-room. It was gentler here, softer, its
seethe the quietest of whispers, as if, in deference to a
drawing-room, it had quite deliberately put on its "man-

108

Conrad Aiken

ners"; it kept itself out of sight, obliterated itself, but
distinctly with an air of saying, "Ah, but just waiti Wait
till we are alone together! Then I will begin to tell you
something new! Something white! something cold! some-
thing sleepy! something of cease, and peace, and the long
bright curve of space! Tell them to go away. Banish them.
Refuse to speak. Leave them, go upstairs to your room,
turn out the light and get into bed — I will go with you,
I will be waiting for you, I will tell you a better story than
Little Kay of the Skates, or The Snow Ghost — I will
surround your bed, I will close the windows, pile a deep
drift against the door, so that none will ever again be able
to enter. Speak to them! . . ." It seemed as if the little
hissing voice came from a slow white spiral of falling
flakes in the corner by the front window — but he could
not be sure. He felt himself smiling, then, and said to the
doctor, but without looking at him, looking beyond him
still—

"Oh no, I think not—"

"But are you sure, my boy?"

His father's voice came softly and coldly then — the
familiar voice of silken warning. . . .

"You needn't answer at once, Paul — remember we're
trying to help you — think it over and be quite sure, won't
you?"

He felt himself smiling again, at the notion of being
quite sure. What a joke! As if he weren't so sure that re-
assurance was no longer necessary, and all this cross-
examination a ridiculous farce, a grotesque parody! What
could they know about it? these gross intelligences, these
humdrum minds so bound to the usual, the ordinary?
Impossible to tell them about it! Why, even now, even
now, with the proof so abundant, so formidable, so im-
minent, so appallingly present here in this very room,
could they believe it? — could even his mother believe it?
No — it was only too plain that if anything were said about

109

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

it, the merest hint given, they would be incredulous —
they would laugh — they would say " absurd!" — think
things about him which weren't true. . . .

"Why no, I'm not worried — why should I be?"

He looked then straight at the doctor's low-lidded eyes,
looked from one of them to the other, from one bead of
light to the other, and gave a little laugh.

The doctor seemed to be disconcerted by this. He drew
back in his chair, resting a fat white hand on either knee.
The smile faded slowly from his face.

"Well, Paul!" he said, and paused gravely, "I'm afraid
you don't take this quite seriously enough. I think you
perhaps don't quite realize — don't quite realize — " He
took a deep quick breath, and turned, as if helplessly, at a
loss for words, to the others. But Mother and Father were
both silent — no help was forthcoming.

"You must surely know, be aware, that you have not
been quite yourself, of late? don't you know that? . . ."

It was amusing to watch the doctor's renewed attempt
at a smile, a queer disorganized look, as of confidential
embarrassment.

"I feel all right, sir," he said, and again gave the little
laugh.

"And we're trying to help you." The doctor's tone
sharpened.

"Yes sir, I know. But why? I'm all right. I'm just
thinking, that's all."

His mother made a quick movement forward, resting a
hand on the back of the doctor's chair.

"Thinking?" she said. "But my dear, about what?"

This was a direct challenge — and would have to be
directly met. But before he met it, he looked again into the
corner by the door, as if for reassurance. He smiled again
at what he saw, at what he heard. The little spiral was
still there, still softly whirling, like the ghost of a white
kitten chasing the ghost of a white tail, and making as

Conrad Aiken

it did so the faintest of whispers. It was all right! If only
he could remain firm, everything was going to be all
right.

"Oh, about anything, about nothing, — you know the
way you do!"

"You mean — day-dreaming?"

"Oh, no— thinking!"

"But thinking about what?"

"Anything."

He laughed a third time — but this time, happening to
glance upward towards his mother's face, he was appalled
at the effect his laughter seemed to have upon her. Her
mouth had opened in an expression of horror. . . . This
was too bad! Unfortunate! He had known it would cause
pain, of course — but he hadn't expected it to be quite so
bad as this. Perhaps — perhaps if he just gave them a tiny
gleaming hint — ?

"About the snow," he said.

"What on earth!" This was his father's voice. The
brown slippers came a step nearer on the hearth-rug.

"But my dear, what do you mean!" This was his
mother's voice.

The doctor merely stared.

"Just snow, that's all. I like to think about it."

"Tell us about it, my boy."

"But that's all it is. There's nothing to tell. You know
what snow is?"

This he said almost angrily, for he felt that they were
trying to corner him. He turned sideways so as no longer
to face the doctor, and the better to see the inch of black-
ness between the window-sill and the lowered curtain, —
the cold inch of beckoning and delicious night. At once he
felt better, more assured.

"Mother — can I go to bed, now, please? I've got a head-
ache."

"But I thought you said — "

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

"It's just come. It's all these questions — ! Can I,
mother?"

" You can go as soon as the doctor has finished."

"Don't you think this thing ought to be gone into thor-
oughly, and now?" This was Father's voice. The brown
slippers again came a step nearer, the voice was the well-
known "punishment" voice, resonant and cruel.

"Oh, what's the use, Norman — "

Quite suddenly, everyone was silent. And without pre-
cisely facing them, nevertheless he was aware that all three
of them were watching him with an extraordinary inten-
sity— staring hard at him — as if he had done something
monstrous, or was himself some kind of monster. He
could hear the soft irregular flutter of the flames; the cluck-
click-cluck-click of the clock; far and faint, two sudden
spurts of laughter from the kitchen, as quickly cut off as
begun; a murmur of water in the pipes; and then, the
silence seemed to deepen, to spread out, to become world-
long and worldwide, to become timeless and shapeless, and
to center inevitably and rightly, with a slow and sleepy
but enormous concentration of all power, on the beginning
of a new sound. What this new sound was going to be, he
knew perfectly well. It might begin with a hiss, but it
would end with a roar — there was no time to lose — he must
escape. It mustn't happen here —

Without another word, he turned and ran up the stairs.

Not a moment too soon. The darkness was coming in
long white waves. A prolonged sibilance filled the night —
a great seamless seethe of wild influence went abruptly
across it — a cold low humming shook the windows. He
shut the door and flung off his clothes in the dark. The
bare black floor was like a little raft tossed in waves of
snow, almost overwhelmed, washed under whitely, up
again, smothered in curled billows of feather. The snow

112

Conrad Aiken

was laughing: it spoke from all sides at once: it pressed
closer to him as he ran and jumped exulting into his bed.

"Listen to us!" it said. "Listen! We have come to tell
you the story we told you about. You remember? Lie
down. Shut your eyes, now — you will no longer see
much — in this white darkness who could see, or want to
see? We will take the place of everything. . . . Listen — "

A beautiful varying dance of snow began at the front of
the room, came forward and then retreated, flattened out
toward the floor, then rose fountain-like to the ceiling,
swayed, recruited itself from a new stream of flakes which
poured laughing in through the humming window, ad-
vanced again, lifted long white arms. It said peace, it said
remoteness, it said cold — it said —

But then a gash of horrible Hght fell brutally across the
room from the opening door — the snow drew back hiss-
ing— something alien had come into the room — something
hostile. This thing rushed at him, clutched at him, shook
him — and he was not merely horrified, he was filled with
such a loathing as he had never known. What was this?
this cruel disturbance? this act of anger and hate? It was
as if he had to reach up a hand toward another world for
any understanding of it, — an effort of which he was only
barely capable. But of that other world he still remem-
bered just enough to know the exorcising words. They tore
themselves from his other life suddenly —

"Mother! Mother! Go away! I hate you!"

And with that effort, everything was solved, everything
became all right: the seamless hiss advanced once more, the
long white wavering lines rose and fell like enormous whis-
pering sea-waves, the whisper becoming louder, the
laughter more numerous.

"Listen!" it said. "We'll tell you the last, the most
beautiful and secret story — shut your eyes — it is a very
small story — a story that gets smaller and smaller — it
comes inward instead of opening like a flower — it is a

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

flower becoming a seed — a little cold seed — do you hear?
we are leaning closer to you — "

The hiss was now becoming a roar — the whole world was
a vast moving screen of snow — but even now it said peace,
it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.

114

BUCHMENDEL

Stefan Zzveig

STEFAN ZWEIG (1881- ) is Viennese by birth. He is
internationally known for his biographical and critical writ-
ing (Adepts in Self-Portraiture, Three Masters, Mental
Healers, Joseph Fouche, Marie Antoinette, Romain
Rolland, etc.}; his plays (Jeremiah, Volpone); and his
novelettes and short stories, in such collections as Conflicts
and Kaleidoscope.

BUCHMENDEL

HAVING just got back to Vienna, after a visit to
an out-of-the-way part of the country, I was
walking home from the station when a heavy
shower came on, such a deluge that the passers-by has-
tened to take shelter in doorways, and I myself felt it
expedient to get out of the downpour. Luckily there is
a cafe at almost every street-corner in the metropolis, and
I made for the nearest, though not before my hat was
dripping wet and my shoulders were drenched to the skin.
An old-fashioned suburban place, lacking the attractions
(copied from Germany) of music and a dancing-floor to
be found in the centre of the town; full of small shop-
keepers and working folk who consumed more newspapers
than coffee and rolls. Since it was already late in the eve-
ning, the air, which would have been stuffy anyhow, was
thick with tobacco-smoke. Still, the place was clean and
brightly decorated, had new satin-covered couches, and
a shining cash-register, so that it looked thoroughly at-
tractive. In my haste to get out of the rain, I had not
troubled to read its name — but what matter? There I
rested, warm and comfortable, though looking rather im-
patiently through the blue-tinted window panes to see
when the shower would be over, and I should be able to
get on my way.

Thus I sat unoccupied, and began to succumb to that
inertia which results from the narcotic atmosphere of the
typical Viennese cafe. Out of this void, I scanned various
individuals whose eyes, in the murky room, had a greyish
look in the artificial light; I mechanically contemplated

From Kaleidoscope, by Stefan Zweig. Copyright 1934 by The Viking Press,
Inc., New York. Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press, Inc.

117

Buchmendel

the young woman at the counter as, like an automaton,
she dealt out sugar and a teaspoon to the waiter for each
cup of coffee; with half an eye and a wandering attention
I read the uninteresting advertisements on the walls —
and there was something agreeable about these dull occu-
pations. But suddenly, and in a peculiar fashion, I was
aroused from what had become almost a doze. A vague
internal movement had begun; much as a toothache
sometimes begins, without one's being able to say whether
it is on the right side or the left, in the upper jaw or the
lower. All I became aware of was a numb tension, an
obscure sentiment of spiritual unrest. Then, without
knowing why, I grew fully conscious. I must have been
in this cafe once before, years ago, and random associa-
tions had awakened memories of the walls, the tables,
the chairs, the seemingly unfamiliar smoke-laden room.

The more I endeavoured to grasp this lost memory, the
more obstinately did it elude me; a sort of jellyfish glisten-
ing in the abysses of consciousness, slippery and unseiz-
able. Vainly did I scrutinize every object within the range
of vision. Certainly when I had been here before the
counter had had neither marble top nor cash- register; the
walls had not been panelled with imitation rosewood;
these must be recent acquisitions. Yet I had indubitably
been here, more than twenty years back. Within these
four walls, as firmly fixed as a nail driven up to the head
in a tree, there clung a part of my ego, long since over-
grown. Vainly I explored, not only the room, but my
own inner man, to grapple the lost links. Curse it all,
I could not plumb the depths!

It will be seen that I was becoming vexed, as one is
always out of humour when one's grip slips in this way,
and reveals the inadequacy, the imperfections, of one's
spiritual powers. Yet I still hoped to recover the clue. A
slender thread would suffice, for my memory is of a
peculiar type, both good and bad; on the one hand stub-

118

Stefan Zweig

bornly untrustworthy, and on the other incredibly de-
pendable. It swallows the most important details, whether
in concrete happenings or in faces, and no voluntary
exertion will induce it to regurgitate them from the gulf.
Yet the most trifling indication — a picture postcard, the
address on an envelope, a newspaper cutting — will suffice
to hook up what is wanted as an angler who has made a
strike and successfully imbedded his hook reels in a lively,
struggling, and reluctant fish. Then I can recall the
features of a man seen once only, the shape of his mouth
and the gap to the left where he had an upper eye-tooth
knocked out, the falsetto tone of his laugh, and the
twitching of the moustache when he chooses to be merry,
the entire change of expression which hilarity effects in
him. Not only do these physical traits rise before my
mind's eye, but I remember, years afterwards, every
word the man said to me, and the tenor of my replies.
But if I am to see and feel the past thus vividly, there
must be some material link to start the current of asso-
ciations. My memory will not work satisfactorily on the
abstract plane.

I closed my eyes to think more strenuously, in the
attempt to forge the hook which would catch my fish.
In vain! In vain! There was no hook, or the fish would
not bite. So fierce waxed my irritation with the inefficient
and mulish thinking apparatus between my temples that
I could have struck myself a violent blow on the forehead,
much as an irascible man will shake and kick a penny-in-
the-slot machine which, when he has inserted his coin,
refuses to render him his due.

So exasperated did I become at my failure, that I could
no longer sit quiet, but rose to prowl about the room. The
instant I moved, the glow of awakening memory began.
To the right of the cash-register, I recalled, there must
be a doorway leading into a windowless room, where the
only light was artificial. Yes, the place actually existed.

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Buchmendel

The decorative scheme was different, but the proportions
were unchanged. A square box of a place, behind the bar —
the card-room. My nerves thrilled as I contemplated the
furniture, for I was on the track, I had found the clue,
and soon I should know all. There were two small billiard-
tables, looking like silent ponds covered with green scum.
In the corners, card-tables, at one of which two bearded
men of professorial type were playing chess. Beside the
iron stove, close to a door labelled "Telephone," was an-
other small table. In a flash, I had it! That was Mendel's
place, Jacob Mendel's. That was where Mendel used to
hang out, Buchmendel. I was in the Cafe Gluck! How
could I have forgotten Jacob Mendel. Was it possible
that I had not thought about him for ages, a man so
peculiar as wellnigh to belong to the Land of Fable, the
eighth wonder of the world, famous at the university and
among a narrow circle of admirers, magician of book-
fanciers, who had been wont to sit there from morning
till night, an emblem of bookish lore, the glory of the
Cafe Gluck? Why had I had so much difficulty in hooking
my fish? How could I have forgotten Buchmendel?

I allowed my imagination to work. The man's face and
form pictured themselves vividly before me. I saw him
as he had been in the flesh, seated at the table with its
grey marble top, on which books and manuscripts were
piled. Motionless he sat, his spectacled eyes fixed upon
the printed page. Yet not altogether motionless, for he
had a habit (acquired at school in the Jewish quarter of
the Galician town from which he came) of rocking his
shiny bald pate backwards and forwards and humming
to himself as he read. There he studied catalogues and
tomes, crooning and rocking, as Jewish boys are taught
to do when reading the Talmud. The rabbis believe that,
just as a child is rocked to sleep in its cradle, so are the
pious ideas of the holy text better instilled by this rhyth-
mical and hypnotizing movement of head and body. In

1 20

Stefan Zweig

fact, as if he had been in a trance, Jacob Mendel saw and
heard nothing while thus occupied. He was oblivious to
the click of billiard-balls, the coming and going of waiters,
the ringing of the telephone bell; he paid no heed when
the floor was scrubbed and when the stove was refilled.
Once a red-hot coal fell out of the latter, and the flooring
began to blaze a few inches from Mendel's feet; the room
was full of smoke, and one of the guests ran for a pail of
water to extinguish the fire. But neither the smoke, the
bustle, nor the stench diverted his attention from the
volume before him. He read as others pray, as gamblers
follow the spinning of the roulette board, as drunkards
stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption
that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary
mortals has seemed a pastime. This Galician second-
hand book dealer, Jacob Mendel, was the first to reveal
to me in my youth the mystery of absolute concentration
which characterizes the artist and the scholar, the sage
and the imbecile; the first to make me acquainted with
the tragical happiness and unhappiness of complete
absorption.

A senior student introduced me to him. I was studying
the life and doings of a man who is even today too little
known, Mesmer the magnetizer. My researches were
bearing scant fruit, for the books I could lay my hands
on conveyed sparse information, and when I applied to
the university librarian for help he told me, uncivilly,
that it was not his business to hunt up references for a
freshman. Then my college friend suggested taking me to
Mendel.

"He knows everything about books, and will tell you
where to find the information you want. The ablest man
in Vienna, and an original to boot. The man is a saurian
of the book-world, an antediluvian survivor of an extinct
species."

We went, therefore, to the Cafe Gluck, and found

121

Buchmendel

Buchmendel in his usual place, bespectacled, bearded,
wearing a rusty black suit, and rocking as I have de-
scribed. He did not notice our intrusion, but went on
reading, looking like a nodding mandarin. On a hook
behind him hung his ragged black overcoat, the pockets
of which bulged with manuscripts, catalogues, and books.
My friend coughed loudly, to attract his attention, but
Mendel ignored the sign. At length Schmidt rapped on
the table-top, as if knocking at a door, and at this Mendel
glanced up, mechanically pushed his spectacles on to his
forehead, and from beneath his thick and untidy ashen-
grey brows there glared at us two dark, alert little eyes.
My friend introduced me, and I explained my quandary,
being careful (as Schmidt had advised) to express great
annoyance at the librarian's unwillingness to assist me.
Mendel leaned back, laughed scornfully, and answered
with a strong Galician accent:

"Unwillingness, you think? Incompetence, that's what's
the matter with him. He's a jackass. I've known him (for
my sins) twenty years at least, and he's learned nothing in
the whole of that time. Pocket their wages — that's all
such fellows can do. They should be mending the road,
instead of sitting over books."

This outburst served to break the ice, and with a friendly
wave of the hand the bookworm invited me to sit down
at his table. I reiterated my object in consulting him;
to get a list of all the early works on animal magnetism,
and of contemporary and subsequent books and pamphlets
for and against Mesmer. When I had said my say, Mendel
closed his left eye for an instant, as if excluding a grain of
dust. This was, with him, a sign of concentrated attention.
Then, as though reading from an invisible catalogue, he
reeled out the names of two or three dozen titles, giving
in each case place and date of publication and approximate
price. I was amazed, though Schmidt had warned me
what to expect. His vanity was tickled by my surprise,

122

Stefan Zweig

for he went on to strum the keyboard of his marvellous
memory, and to produce the most astounding biblio-
graphical marginal notes. Did I want to know about
sleepwalkers, Perkins's metallic tractors, early experi-
ments in hypnotism, Braid, Gassner, attempts to conjure
up the devil, Christian Science, theosophy, Madame
Blavatsky? In connexion with each item there was a
hailstorm of book-names, dates, and appropriate details.
I was beginning to understand that Jacob Mendel was
a living lexicon, something like the general catalogue of
the British Museum Reading Room, but able to walk
about on two legs. I stared dumbfounded at this biblio-
graphical phenomenon, which masqueraded in the sordid
and rather unclean domino of a Galician second-hand
book dealer, who, after rattling off some eighty titles
(with assumed indifference, but really with the satisfac-
tion of one who plays an unexpected trump), proceeded
to wipe his spectacles with a handkerchief which might
long before have been white.

Hoping to conceal my astonishment, I inquired:

"Which among these works do you think you could
get for me without too much trouble?"

"Oh, I'll have a look round," he answered. "Come
here tomorrow and I shall certainly have some of them.
As for the others, it's only a question of time, and of
knowing where to look."

"Pm greatly obliged to you," I said; and, then, wishing
to be civil, I put my foot in it, proposing to give him a
list of the books I wanted. Schmidt nudged me warningly,
but too late. Mendel had already flashed a look at me —
such a look, at once triumphant and affronted, scornful
and overwhelmingly superior — the royal look with which
Macbeth answers Macduff when summoned to yield
without a blow. He laughed curtly. His Adam's apple
moved excitedly. Obviously he had gulped down a
choleric, an insulting epithet.

123

Buchmendel

Indeed he had good reason to be angry. Only a stranger,
an ignoramus, could have proposed to give him, Jacob
Mendel, a memorandum, as if he had been a bookseller's
assistant or an underling in a public library. Not until
I knew him better did I fully understand how much my
would-be politeness must have galled this aberrant gen-
ius— for the man had, and knew himself to have, a titanic
memory, wherein, behind a dirty and undistinguished-
looking forehead, was indelibly recorded a picture of the
title-page of every book that had been printed. No matter
whether it had issued from the press yesterday or hun-
dreds of years ago, he knew its place of publication, its
author's name, and its price. From his mind, as if from
the printed page, he could read off the contents, could
reproduce the illustrations; could visualize, not only what
he had actually held in his hands, but also what he had
glanced at in a bookseller's window; could see it with the
same vividness as an artist sees the creations of fancy
which he has not yet reproduced upon canvas. When a
book was offered for six marks by a Regensburg dealer,
he could remember that, two years before, a copy of the
same work had changed hands for four crowns at a
Viennese auction, and he recalled the name of the pur-
chaser. In a word, Jacob Mendel never forgot a title or a
figure; he knew every plant, every infusorian, every star,
in the continually revolving and incessantly changing
cosmos of the book-universe. In each literary specialty,
he knew more than the specialists; he knew the contents
of the libraries better than the librarians; he knew the
book-lists of most publishers better than the heads of the
firms concerned — though he had nothing to guide him
except the magical powers of his inexplicable but in-
variably accurate memory.

True, this memory owed its infallibility to the man's
limitations, to his extraordinary power of concentration.
Apart from books, he knew nothing of the world. The

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Stefan Zweig

phenomena of existence did not begin to become real for
him until they had been set in type, arranged upon a
composing stick, collected and, so to say, sterilized in a
book. Nor did he read books for their meaning, to extract
their spiritual or narrative substance. What aroused his
passionate interest, what fixed his attention, was the
name, the price, the format, the title-page. Though in
the last analysis unproductive and uncreative, this spe-
cifically antiquarian memory of Jacob Mendel, since it
was not a printed book-catalogue but was stamped upon
the grey matter of a mammalian brain, was, in its unique
perfection, no less remarkable a phenomenon than Na-
poleon's gift for physiognomy, Mezzofanti's talent for
languages, Lasker's skill at chess-openings, Busoni's
musical genius. Given a public position as teacher, this
man with so marvellous a brain might have taught
thousands and hundreds of thousands of students, have
trained others to become men of great learning and of
incalculable value to those communal treasure-houses we
call libraries. But to him, a man of no account, a Galician
Jew, a book-pedlar whose only training had been received
in a Talmudic school, this upper world of culture was a
fenced precinct he could never enter; and his amazing
faculties could only find application at the marble-topped
table in the inner room of the Cafe Gluck. When, some
day, there arises a great psychologist who shall classify
the types of that magical power we term memory as
effectively as Buffon classified the genera and species of
animals, a man competent to give a detailed description
of all the varieties, he will have to find a pigeonhole for
Jacob Mendel, forgotten master of the lore of book-
prices and book-titles, the ambulatory catalogue alike of
incunabula and the modern commonplace.

In the book-trade and among ordinary persons, Jacob
Mendel was regarded as nothing more than a second-hand
book dealer in a small way of business. Sunday after

Buchmendel

Sunday, his stereotyped advertisement appeared in the
"Neue Freie Presse" and the "Neues Wiener Tagblatt."
It ran as follows: "Best prices paid for old books, Mendel,
Obere Alserstrasse." A telephone number followed, really
that of the Cafe Gluck. He rummaged every available
corner for his wares, and once a week, with the aid of a
bearded porter, conveyed fresh booty to his headquarters
and got rid of old stock — for he had no proper bookshop.
Thus he remained a petty trader, and his business was
not lucrative. Students sold him their textbooks, which
year by year passed through his hands from one " genera-
tion" to another; and for a small percentage on the price
he would procure any additional book that was wanted.
He charged little or nothing for advice. Money seemed
to have no standing in his world. No one had ever seen
him better dressed than in the threadbare black coat. For
breakfast and supper he had a glass of milk and a couple
of rolls, while at midday a modest meal was brought him
from a neighbouring restaurant. He did not smoke; he
did not play cards; one might almost say he did not live,
were it not that his eyes were alive behind his spectacles,
and unceasingly fed his enigmatic brain with words,
titles, names. The brain, like a fertile pasture, greedily
sucked in this abundant irrigation. Human beings did
not interest him, and of all human passions perhaps one
only moved him, the most universal — vanity.

When someone, wearied by a futile hunt in countless
other places, applied to him for information, and was in-
stantly put on the track, his self-gratification was over-
whelming; and it was unquestionably a delight to him
that in Vienna and elsewhere there existed a few dozen
persons who respected him for his knowledge and valued
him for the services he could render. In every one of
these monstrous aggregates we call towns, there are here
and there facets which reflect one and the same universe
in miniature — unseen by most, but highly prized by con-

126

Stefan Zweig

noisseurs, by brethren of the same craft, by devotees of
the same passion. The fans of the book-market knew
Jacob Mendel. Just as anyone encountering a difficulty
in deciphering a score would apply to Eusebius Man-
dyczewski of the Musical Society, who would be found
wearing a grey skull-cap and seated among multifarious
musical MSS., ready, with a friendly smile, to solve the
most obstinate crux; and just as, today, anyone in search
of information about the Viennese theatrical and cultural
life of earlier times will unhesitatingly look up the poly-
histor Father Glossy; so, with equal confidence did the
bibliophiles of Vienna, when they had a particularly hard
nut to crack, make a pilgrimage to the Cafe Gluck and lay
their difficulty before Jacob Mendel.

To me, young and eager for new experiences, it became
enthralling to watch such a consultation. Whereas ordi-
narily, when a would-be seller brought him some ordinary
book, he would contemptuously clap the cover to and
mutter, "Two crowns"; if shown a rare or unique volume,
he would sit up and take notice, lay the treasure upon a
clean sheet of paper; and, on one such occasion, he was
obviously ashamed of his dirty, ink-stained fingers and
mourning finger-nails. Tenderly, cautiously, respectfully,
he would turn the pages of the treasure. One would have
been as loath to disturb him at such a moment as to break
in upon the devotions of a man at prayer; and in very
truth there was a flavour of solemn ritual and religious
observance about the way in which contemplation, pal-
pation, smelling, and weighing in the hand followed one
another in orderly succession. His rounded back waggled
while he was thus engaged, he muttered to himself, ex-
claimed "Ah" now and again to express wonder or ad-
miration, or "Oh, dear" when a page was missing or
another had been mutilated by the larva of a book-beetle.
His weighing of the tome in his hand was as circumspect
as if books were sold by the ounce, and his snuffling at it

127

Buchmendel

as sentimental as a girl's smelling of a rose. Of course it
would have been the height of bad form for the owner to
show impatience during this ritual of examination.

When it was over, he willingly, nay enthusiastically,
tendered all the information at his disposal, not forgetting
relevant anecdotes, and dramatized accounts of the prices
which other specimens of the same work had fetched at
auctions or in sales by private treaty. He looked brighter,
younger, more lively at such times, and only one thing
could put him seriously out of humour. This was when a
novice offered him money for his expert opinion. Then he
would draw back with an affronted air, looking for all the
world like the skilled custodian of a museum gallery to
whom an American traveller has offered a tip — for to
Jacob Mendel contact with a rare book was something
sacred, as is contact with a woman to a young man who
has not had the bloom rubbed off. Such moments were
his platonic love-nights. Books exerted a spell on him,
never money. Vainly, therefore, did great collectors
(among them one of the notables of Princeton University)
try to recruit Mendel as librarian or book-buyer. The
offer was declined with thanks. He could not forsake his
familiar headquarters at the Cafe Gluck. Thirty-three
years before, an awkward youngster with black down
sprouting on his chin and black ringlets hanging over his
temples, he had come from Galicia to Vienna, intending
to adopt the calling of rabbi; but ere long he forsook the
worship of the harsh and jealous Jehovah to devote him-
self to the more lively and polytheistic cult of books. Then
he happened upon the Cafe Gluck, by degrees making it
his workshop, headquarters, post-office — his world. Just
as an astronomer, alone in an observatory, watches night
after night through a telescope the myriads of stars, their
mysterious movements, their changeful medley, their ex-
tinction and their flaming-up anew, so did Jacob Mendel,
seated at his table in the Cafe Gluck, look through his

128

S tef a n Zweig

spectacles into the universe of books, a universe that lies
above the world of our everyday life, and, like the stellar
universe, is full of changing cycles.

It need hardly be said that he was highly esteemed in
the Cafe Gluck, whose fame seemed to us to depend far
more upon his unofficial professorship than upon the god-
fathership of the famous musician, Christoph Willibald
Gluck, composer of Alcestis and Iphigenia. He belonged
to the outfit quite as much as did the old cherrywood
counter, the two billiard-tables with their cloth stitched
in many places, and the copper coffee-urn. His table was
guarded as a sanctuary. His numerous clients and cus-
tomers were expected to take a drink "for the good of the
house," so that most of the profit of his far-flung knowledge
flowed into the big leathern pouch slung round the waist
of Deubler, the waiter. In return for being a centre of
attraction, Mendel enjoyed many privileges. The tele-
phone was at his service for nothing. He could have his
letters directed to the cafe, and his parcels were taken in
there. The excellent old woman who looked after the
toilet brushed his coat, sewed on buttons, and carried a
small bundle of underlinen every week to the wash. He
was the only guest who could have a meal sent in from
the restaurant; and every morning Herr Standhartner,
the proprietor of the cafe, made a point of coming to his
table and saying "Good morning!" — though Jacob Men-
del, immersed in his books, seldom noticed the greeting.
Punctually at half-past seven he arrived, and did not
leave till the lights were extinguished. He never spoke to
the other guests, never read a newspaper, noticed no
changes; and once, when Herr Standhartner civilly asked
him whether he did not find the electric light more agree-
able to read by than the malodorous and uncertain kero-
sene lamps they had replaced, he stared in astonishment
at the new incandescents. Although the installation had
necessitated several days' hammering and bustle, the in-

129

Buchmendel

troduction of the glow-lamps had escaped his notice.
Only through the two round apertures of the spectacles,
only through these two shining and sucking lenses, did
the milliards of black infusorians which were the letters
filter into his brain. Whatever else happened in his vicinity
was disregarded as unmeaning noise. He had spent more
than thirty years of his waking life at this table, reading,
comparing, calculating, in a continuous waking dream,
interrupted only by intervals of sleep.

A sense of horror overcame me when, looking into the
inner room behind the bar of the Cafe Gluck, I saw that
the marble top of the table where Jacob Mendel used to
deliver his oracles was now as bare as a tombstone. Grown
older since those days, I understood how much disappears
when such a man drops out of his place in the world,
were it only because, amid the daily increase in hopeless
monotony, the unique grows continually more precious.
Besides, in my callow youth a profound intuition had
made me exceedingly fond of Buchmendel. It was through
the observation of him that I had first become aware of
the enigmatic fact that supreme achievement and out-
standing capacity are only rendered possible by mental
concentration, by a sublime monomania that verges on
lunacy. Through the living example of this obscure genius
of a second-hand book dealer, far more than through the
flashes of insight in the works of our poets and other
imaginative writers, had been made plain to me the per-
sistent possibility of a pure life of the spirit, of complete
absorption in an idea, an ecstasy as absolute as that of an
Indian yogi or a medieval monk; and I had learned that
this was possible in an electric-lighted cafe and adjoining
a telephone box. Yet I had forgotten him, during the war
years, and through a kindred immersion in my own work.
The sight of the empty table made me ashamed of my-
self, and at the same time curious about the man who
used to sit there.

130

Stefan Zweig

What had become of him? I called the waiter and in-
quired.

"No, Sir," he answered, "I'm sorry, but I never heard
of Herr Mendel. There is no one of that name among the
frequenters of the Cafe Gluck. Perhaps the head-waiter
will know."

"Herr Mendel?" said the head-waiter dubiously, after
a moment's reflection. "No, Sir, never heard of him.
Unless you mean Herr Mandl, who has a hardware store
in the Florianigasse?"

I had a bitter taste in the mouth, the taste of an irre-
coverable past. What is the use of living, when the wind
obliterates our footsteps in the sand directly we have gone
by? Thirty years, perhaps forty, a man had breathed,
read, thought, and spoken within this narrow room; three
or four years had elapsed, and there had arisen a new king
over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. No one in the Cafe
Gluck had ever heard of Jacob Mendel, of Buchmendel.
Somewhat pettishly I asked the head-waiter whether I
could have a word with Herr Standhartner, or with one
of the old staff.

"Herr Standhartner, who used to own the place? He
sold it years ago, and has died since. . . . The former
head-waiter? He saved up enough to retire, and lives
upon a little property at Krems. No, Sir, all of the old
lot are scattered. All except one, indeed, Frau Sporschil,
who looks after the toilet. She's been here for ages, worked
under the late owner, I know. But she's not likely to re-
member your Herr Mendel. Such as she hardly know
one guest from another."

I dissented in thought.

"One does not forget a Jacob Mendel so easily!"

What I said was:

" Still, I should like to have a word with Frau Sporschil,
if she has a moment to spare,"

The "Toilettenfrau" (known in the Viennese vernacular

Buchmendel

as the "Schocoladefrau") soon emerged from the base-
ment, white-haired, run to seed, heavy-footed, wiping her
chapped hands upon a towel as she came. She had been
called away from her task of cleaning up, and was ob-
viously uneasy at being summoned into the strong light
of the guest-rooms — for common folk in Vienna, where an
authoritative tradition has lingered on after the revolution,
always think it must be a police matter when their "su-
periors3' want to question them. She eyed me suspiciously,
though humbly. But as soon as I asked her about Jacob
Mendel, she braced up, and at the same time her eyes
filled with tears.

"Poor Herr Mendel ... so there's still someone who
bears him in mind?"

Old people are commonly much moved by anything
which recalls the days of their youth and revives the
memory of past companionships. I asked if he was still
alive.

"Good Lord, no. Poor Herr Mendel must have^died
five or six years ago. Indeed, I think it's fully seven since
he passed away. Dear, good man that he was; and how
long I knew him, more than twenty-five years; he was
already sitting every day at his table when I began to
work here. It was a shame, it was, the way they let him
die."

Growing more and more excited, she asked if I was a
relative. No one had ever inquired about him before.
Didn't I know what had happened to him?

"No," I replied, "and I want you to be good enough
to tell me all about it."

She looked at me timidly, and continued to wipe her
damp hands. It was plain to me that she found it em-
barrassing, with her dirty apron and her tousled white hair,
to be standing in the full glare of the cafe. She kept look-
ing round anxiously, to see if one of the waiters might be
listening.

132

Stefan Zweig

"Let's go into the card-room," I said, "Mendel's old
room. You shall tell me your story there."

She nodded appreciatively, thankful that I understood,
and led the way to the inner room, a little shambling in
her gait. As I followed, I noticed that the waiters and
the guests were staring at us as a strangely assorted pair.
We sat down opposite one another at the marble-topped
table, and there she told me the story of Jacob Mendel's
ruin and death. I will give the tale as nearly as may be
in her own words, supplemented here and there by what
I learned afterwards from other sources.

"Down to the outbreak of war, and after the war had
begun, he continued to come here every morning at half-
past seven, to sit at this table and study all day just as
before. We had the feeling that the fact of a war going
on had never entered his mind. Certainly he didn't read
the newspapers, and didn't talk to anyone except about
books. He paid no attention when (in the early days of
the war, before the authorities put a stop to such things)
the newspaper-venders ran through the streets shouting,
'Great Battle on the Eastern Front' (or wherever it might
be), 'Horrible Slaughter,' and so on; when people gath-
ered in knots to talk things over, he kept himself to him-
self; he did not know that Fritz, the billiard-marker, who
fell in one of the first battles, had vanished from this
place; he did not know that Herr Standhartner's son had
been taken prisoner by the Russians at Przemysl; never
said a word when the bread grew more and more uneatable
and when he was given bean-coffee to drink at breakfast
and supper instead of hot milk. Once only did he express
surprise at the changes, wondering why so few students
came to the cafe. There was nothing in the world that
mattered to him except his books.

"Then disaster befell him. At eleven one morning, two
policemen came, one in uniform, and the other a plain-
clothes man. The latter showed the red rosette under

133

Buchmendel

the lapel of his coat and asked whether there was a man
named Jacob Mendel in the house. They went straight
to Herr Mendel's table. The poor man, in his innocence,
supposed they had books to sell, or wanted some informa-
tion; but they told him he was under arrest, and took
him away at once. It was a scandal for the cafe. All the
guests flocked round Herr Mendel, as he stood between
the two police officers, his spectacles pushed up under his
hair, staring from each to the other bewildered. Some
ventured a protest, saying there must be a mistake — that
Herr Mendel was a man who wouldn't hurt a fly; but the
detective was furious, and told them to mind their own
business. They took him away, and none of us at the
Cafe Gluck saw him again for two years. I never found
out what they had against him, but I would take my dying
oath that they must have made a mistake. Herr Mendel
could never have done anything wrong. It was a crime
to treat an innocent man so harshly."

The excellent Frau Sporschil was right. Our friend Jacob
Mendel had done nothing wrong. He had merely (as I
subsequently learned) done something incredibly stupid,
only explicable to those who knew the man's peculiarities.
The military censorship board, whose function it was to
supervise correspondence passing into and out of neutral
hands, one day got its clutches upon a postcard written
and signed by a certain Jacob Mendel, properly stamped
for transmission abroad. This postcard was addressed to
Monsieur Jean Labourdaire, Libraire, Quai de Crenelle,
Paris — to an enemy country, therefore. The writer com-
plained that the last eight issues of the monthly "Bulletin
bibliographique de la France" had failed to reach him,
although his annual subscription had been duly paid in
advance. The jack-in-office who read this missive (a high-
school teacher with a bent for the study of the Romance
languages, called up for "war-service" and sent to employ
his talents at the censorship board instead of wasting

134

Stefan Zweig

them in the trenches) was astonished by its tenor. "Must
be a joke," he thought. He had to examine some two
thousand letters and postcards every week, always on the
alert to detect anything that might savour of espionage,
but never yet had he chanced upon anything so absurd
as that an Austrian subject should unconcernedly drop
into one of the imperial and royal letter-boxes a postcard
addressed to someone in an enemy land, regardless of the
trifling detail that since August 1914 the Central Powers
had been cut off from Russia on one side and from France
on the other by barbed-wire entanglements and a network
of ditches in which men armed with rifles and bayonets,
machine-guns and artillery, were doing their utmost to
exterminate one another like rats. Our schoolmaster en-
rolled in the Landsturm did not treat this first postcard
seriously, but pigeon-holed it as a curiosity not worth
talking about to his chief. But a few weeks later there
turned up another card, again from Jacob Mendel, this
time to John Aldridge, Bookseller, Golden Square, London,
asking whether the addressee could send the last few
numbers of the "Antiquarian" to an address in Vienna
which was clearly stated on the card.

The censor in the blue uniform began to feel uneasy.
Was his "class" trying to trick the schoolmaster? Were
the cards written in cipher? Possible, anyhow; so the
subordinate went over to the major's desk, clicked his
heels together, saluted, and laid the suspicious documents
before "properly constituted authority." A strange
business, certainly. The police were instructed by tele-
phone to see if there actually was a Jacob Mendel at the
specified address, and, if so, to bring the fellow along.
Within the hour, Mendel had been arrested, and (still
stupefied by the shock) brought before the major, who
showed him the postcards, and asked him with drill-
sergeant roughness whether he acknowledged their au-
thorship. Angered at being spoken to so sharply, and

Buchmendel

still more annoyed because his perusal of an important
catalogue had been interrupted, Mendel answered tartly:

"Of course I wrote the cards. That's my handwriting
and signature. Surely one has a right to claim the de-
livery of a periodical to which one has subscribed?"

The major swung half-round in his swivel-chair and ex-
changed a meaning glance with the lieutenant seated at
the adjoining desk.

"The man must be a double-distilled idiot" was what
they mutely conveyed to one another.

Then the chief took counsel within himself whether he
should discharge the offender with a caution, or whether
he should treat the case more seriously. In all offices,
when such doubts arise, the usual practice is, not to spin
a coin, but to send in a report. Thus Pilate washes his
hands of responsibility. Even if the report does no good,
it can do no harm, and is merely one useless manuscript
or typescript added to a million others.

In this instance, however, the decision to send in a
report did much harm, alas, to an inoffensive man of
genius, for it involved asking a series of questions, and the
third of them brought suspicious circumstances to light.

"Your full name?"

"Jacob Mendel."

"Occupation?"

"Book-pedlar" (for, as already explained, Mendel had
no shop, but only a pedlar's license).

"Place of birth?"

Now came the disaster. Mendel's birthplace was not
far from Petrikau. The major raised his eyebrows. Petri-
kau, or Piotrkov, was across the frontier, in Russian
Poland.

"You were born a Russian subject. When did you
acquire Austrian nationality? Show me your papers."

Mendel gazed at the officer uncomprehendingly through
his spectacles.

136

Stefan Zweig

"Papers? Identification papers? I have nothing but
my hawker's license."

"What's your nationality, then? Was your father
Austrian or Russian?"

Undismayed, Mendel answered:

"A Russian, of course."

"What about yourself?"

"Wishing to evade Russian military service, I slipped
across the frontier thirty-three years ago, and ever since
I have lived in Vienna."

The matter seemed to the major to be growing worse
and worse.

"But didn't you take steps to become an Austrian
subject?"

"Why should I?" countered Mendel. "I never troubled
my head about such things."

"Then you are still a Russian subject?"

Mendel, who was bored by this endless questioning,
answered simply:

"Yes, I suppose I am."

The startled and indignant major threw himself back
in his chair with such violence that the wood cracked pro-
testingly. So this was what it had come to! In Vienna,
the Austrian capital, at the end of 1915, after Tarnow,
when the war was in full blast, after the great offensive, a
Russian could walk about unmolested, could write letters
to France and England, while the police ignored his
machinations. And then the fools who wrote in the news-
papers wondered why Conrad von Hotzendorf had not
advanced in seven-leagued boots to Warsaw, and the
general staff was puzzled because every movement of the
troops was immediately blabbed to the Russians.

The lieutenant had sprung to his feet and crossed the
room to his chiefs table. What had been an almost
friendly conversation took a new turn, and degenerated
into a trial.

137

Buchmendel

"Why didn't you report as an enemy alien directly the
war began?"

Mendel, still failing to realize the gravity of his position,
answered in his singing Jewish jargon:

"Why should I report? I don't understand."

The major regarded this inquiry as a challenge, and
asked threateningly:

"Didn't you read the notices that were posted up every-
where?"

"No."

"Didn't you read the newspapers?"

"No."

The two officers stared at Jacob Mendel (now sweating
with uneasiness) as if the moon had fallen from the sky
into their office. Then the telephone buzzed, the type-
writers clacked, orderlies ran hither and thither, and
Mendel was sent under guard to the nearest barracks,
where he was to await transfer to a concentration camp.
When he was ordered to follow the two soldiers, he was
frankly puzzled, but not seriously perturbed. What could
the man with the gold-lace collar and the rough voice
have against him? In the upper world of books, where
Mendel lived and breathed and had his being, there was
no warfare, there were no misunderstandings, only an
ever-increasing knowledge of words and figures, of book-
titles and authors' names. He walked good-humouredly
enough downstairs between the soldiers, whose first charge
was to take him to the police station. Not until, there,
the books were taken out of his overcoat pockets, and the
police impounded the portfolio containing a hundred im-
portant memoranda and customers' addresses, did he lose
his temper, and begin to resist and strike blows. They
had to tie his hands. In the struggle, his spectacles fell off,
and these magical telescopes, without which he could not
see into the wonderworld of books, were smashed into a
thousand pieces. Two days later, insufficiently clad (for

138

Stefan Zweig

his only wrap was a light summer cloak), he was sent to
the internment camp for Russian civilians at Komorn.

I have no information as to what Jacob Mendel suffered
during these two years of internment, cut off from his
beloved books, penniless, among roughly nurtured men,
few of whom could read or write, in a huge human dung-
hill. This must be left to the imagination of those who
can grasp the torments of a caged eagle. By degrees,
however, our world, grown sober after its fit of drunken-
ness, has become aware that, of all the cruelties and
wanton abuses of power during the war, the most needless
and therefore the most inexcusable was this herding to-
gether behind barbed-wire fences of thousands upon
thousands of persons who had outgrown the age of mili-
tary service, who had made homes for themselves in a
foreign land, and who (believing in the good faith of their
hosts) had refrained from exercising the sacred right of
hospitality granted even by the Tunguses and Arauca-
nians — the right to flee while time permits. This crime
against civilization was committed with the same un-
thinking hardihood in France, Germany, and Britain, in
every belligerent country of our crazy Europe.

Probably Jacob Mendel would, like thousands as inno-
cent as he, have perished in this cattle-pen, have gone
stark mad, have succumbed to dysentery, asthenia, soft-
ening of the brain, had it not been that, before the worst
happened, a chance (typically Austrian) recalled him to
the world in which a spiritual life became again possible.
Several times after his disappearance, letters from dis-
tinguished customers were delivered for him at the Cafe
Gluck. Count Schonberg, sometime lord-lieutenant of
Styria, an enthusiastic collector of works on heraldry;
Siegenfeld, the former dean of the theological faculty,
who was writing a commentary on the works of St.
Augustine; Edler von Pisek, an octogenarian admiral on
the retired list, engaged in writing his memoirs — these

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Buchmendel

and other persons of note, wanting information from Buch-
mendel, had repeatedly addressed communications to him
at his familiar haunt, and some of these were duly for-
warded to the concentration camp at Komorn. There
they fell into the hands of the commanding officer, who
happened to be a man of humane disposition, and was
astonished to find what notables were among the corre-
spondents of this dirty little Russian Jew, who, half-blind
now that his spectacles were broken and he had no money
to buy new ones, crouched in a corner like a mole, grey,
eyeless, and dumb. A man who had such patrons must
be a person of importance, whatever he looked like. The
C.O. therefore read the letters to the short-sighted Mendel,
and penned answers for him to sign — answers which were
mainly requests that influence should be exercised on his
behalf. The spell worked, for these correspondents had
the solidarity of collectors. Joining forces and pulling
strings they were able (giving guarantees for the "enemy
alien's" good behaviour) to secure leave for Buchmendel's
return to Vienna in 1917, after more than two years at
Komorn — on the condition that he should report daily to
the police. The proviso mattered little. He was a free
man once more, free to take up his quarters in his old
attic, free to handle books again, free (above all) to return
to his table in the Cafe Gluck. I can describe the return
from the underworld of the camp in the good Frau Spor-
schil's own words:

"One day — Jesus, Mary, Joseph; I could hardly believe
my eyes — the door opened (you remember the way he had)
little wider than a crack, and through this opening he
sidled, poor Herr Mendel. He was wearing a tattered
and much-darned military cloak, and his head was covered
by what had perhaps once been a hat thrown away by
the owner as past use. No collar. His face looked like a
death's head, so haggard it was, and his hair was pitifully
thin. But he came in as if nothing had happened, went

140

Stefan Zweig

straight to his table, and took off his cloak, not briskly
as of old, for he panted with the exertion. Nor had he
any books with him. He just sat there without a word,
staring straight in front of him with hollow, expression-
less eyes. Only by degrees, after we had brought him the
big bundle of printed matter which had arrived for him
from Germany, did he begin to read again. But he was
never the same man."

No, he was never the same man, not now the miraculum
mundi, the magical walking book-catalogue. All who saw
him in those days told me the same pitiful story. Some-
thing had gone irrecoverably wrong; he was broken; the
blood-red comet of the war had burst into the remote,
calm atmosphere of his bookish world. His eyes, accus-
tomed for decades to look at nothing but print, must have
seen terrible sights in the wire-fenced human stockyard,
for the eyes that had formerly been so alert and full of
ironical gleams were now almost completely veiled by the
inert lids, and looked sleepy and red-bordered behind the
carefully repaired spectacle-frames. Worse still, a cog
must have broken somewhere in the marvellous machinery
of his memory, so that the working of the whole was im-
paired; for so delicate is the structure of the brain (a sort
of switchboard made of the most fragile substances, and
as easily jarred as are all instruments of precision) that a
blocked arteriole, a congested bundle of nerve-fibres, a
fatigued group of cells, even a displaced molecule, may
put the apparatus out of gear and make harmonious work-
ing impossible. In Mendel's memory, the keyboard of
knowledge, the keys were stiff, or — to use psychological
terminology — the associations were impaired. When,
now and again, someone came to ask for information,
Jacob stared blankly at the inquirer, failing to understand
the question, and even forgetting it before he had found
the answer. Mendel was no longer Buchmendel, just as
the world was no longer the world. He could not now

141

Buchmendel

become wholly absorbed in his reading, did not rock as
of old when he read, but sat bolt upright, his glasses
turned mechanically towards the printed page, but per-
haps not reading at all, and only sunk in a reverie. Often,
said Frau Sporschil, his head would drop on to his book
and he would fall asleep in the daytime, or he would gaze
hour after hour at the stinking acetylene lamp which
(in the days of the coal famine) had replaced the electric
lighting. No, Mendel was no longer Buchmendel, no
longer the eighth wonder of the world, but a weary, worn-
out, though still breathing, useless bundle of beard and
ragged garments, which sat, as futile as a potato-bogle,
where of old the Pythian oracle had sat; no longer the
glory of the Cafe Gluck, but a shameful scarecrow, evil-
smelling, a parasite.

That was the impression he produced upon the new
proprietor, Florian Gurtner from Retz, who (a successful
profiteer in flour and butter) had cajoled Standhartner
into selling him the Cafe Gluck for eighty thousand rapidly
depreciating paper crowns. He took everything into his
hard peasant grip, hastily arranged to have the old place
redecorated, bought fine-looking satin-covered seats, in-
stalled a marble porch, and was in negotiation with his
next-door neighbour to buy a place where he could ex-
tend the cafe into a dancing-hall. Naturally while he was
making these embellishments, he was not best pleased by
the parasitic encumbrance of Jacob Mendel, a filthy old
Galician Jew, who had been in trouble with the authorities
during the war, was still to be regarded as an "enemy
alien," and, while occupying a table from morning till
night, consumed no more than two cups of coffee and
four or five rolls. Standhartner, indeed, had put in a
word for this guest of long standing, had explained that
Mendel was a person of note, and, in the stock-taking,
had handed him over as having a permanent lien upon
the establishment, but as an asset rather than a liability.

142

Stefan Zweig

Florian Gurtner, however, had brought into the cafe, not
only new furniture, and an up-to-date cash register, but
also the profit-making and hard temper of the post-war
era, and awaited the first pretext for ejecting from his
smart coffee-house the last troublesome vestige of sub-
urban shabbiness.

A good excuse was not slow to present itself. Jacob
Mendel was impoverished to the last degree. Such bank-
notes as had been left to him had crumbled away to
nothing during the inflation period; his regular clientele
had been killed, ruined, or dispersed. When he tried to
resume his early trade of book-pedlar, calling from door
to door to buy and to sell, he found that he lacked strength
to carry books up and down stairs. A hundred little signs
showed him to be a pauper. Seldom, now, did he have a
midday meal sent in from the restaurant, and he began
to run up a score at the Cafe Gluck for his modest break-
fast and supper. Once his payments were as much as
three weeks overdue. Were it only for this reason, the
head-waiter wanted Gurtner to "give Mendel the sack."
But Frau Sporschil intervened, and stood surety for the
debtor. What was due could be stopped out of her wages!

This staved off disaster for a while, but worse was to
come. For some time the head-waiter had noticed that
rolls were disappearing faster than the tally would account
for. Naturally suspicion fell upon Mendel, who was
known to be six months in debt to the tottering old porter
whose services he still needed. The head-waiter, hidden
behind the stove, was able, two days later, to catch Mendel
red-handed. The unwelcome guest had stolen from his
seat in the card-room, crept behind the counter in the
front room, taken two rolls from the bread-basket, re-
turned to the card-room, and hungrily devoured them.
When settling-up at the end of the day, he said he had
only had coffee; no rolls. The source of wastage had been
traced, and the waiter reported his discovery to the pro-

Buchmendel

prietor. Herr Gurtner, delighted to have so good an
excuse for getting rid of Mendel, made a scene, openly
accused him of theft, and declared that nothing but the
goodness of his own heart prevented his sending for the
police.

"But after this," said Florian, "you'll kindly take
yourself off for good and all. We don't want to see your
face again at the Cafe Gluck."

Jacob Mendel trembled, but made no reply. Abandon-
ing his poor belongings, he departed without a word.

"It was ghastly," said Frau Sporschil. "Never shall I
forget the sight. He stood up, his spectacles pushed on to
his forehead, and his face white as a sheet. He did not
even stop to put on his cloak, although it was January,
and very cold. You'll remember that severe winter, just
after the war. In his fright, he left the book he was reading
open upon the table. I did not notice it at first, and then,
when I wanted to pick it up and take it after him, he had
already stumbled out through the doorway. I was afraid
to follow him into the street, for Herr Gurtner was stand-
ing at the door and shouting at him, so that a crowd had
gathered. Yet I felt ashamed to the depths of my soul.
Such a thing would never have happened under the old
master. Herr Standhartner would not have driven Herr
Mendel away for pinching one or two rolls when he was
hungry, but would have let him have as many as he
wanted for nothing, to the end of his days. Since the
war, people seem to have grown heartless. Drive away a
man who had been a guest daily for so many, many years.
Shameful! I should not like to have to answer before God
for such cruelty!"

The good woman had grown excited, and, with the
passionate garrulousness of old age, she kept on repeating
how shameful it was, and that nothing of the sort would
have happened if Herr Standhartner had not sold the
business. In the end I tried to stop the flow by asking

144

Stefan Zweig

her what had happened to Mendel, and whether she had
ever seen him again. These questions excited her yet
more.

"Day after day, when I passed his table, it gave me the
creeps, as you will easily understand. Each time I thought
to myself: 'Where can he have got to, poor Herr Mendel?'
Had I known where he lived, I would have called and
taken him something nice and hot to eat — for where could
he get the money to cook food and warm his room? As
far as I knew, he had no kinsfolk in the wide world. When,
after a long time, I had heard nothing about him, I began
to believe that it must be all up with him, and that I
should never see him again. I had made up my mind to
have a mass said for the peace of his soul, knowing him
to be a good man, after twenty-five years' acquaintance.

"At length one day in February, at half-past seven in
the morning, when I was cleaning the windows, the door
opened, and in came Herr Mendel. Generally, as you
know, he sidled in, looking confused, and not ' quite all
there'; but this time, somehow, it was different. I noticed
at once the strange look in his eyes; they were sparkling,
and he rolled them this way and that, as if to see every-
thing at once; as for his appearance, he seemed nothing
but beard and skin and bone. Instantly it crossed my
mind: 'He's forgotten all that happened last time he was
here; it's his way to go about like a sleepwalker noticing
nothing; he doesn't remember about the rolls, and how
shamefully Herr Gurtner ordered him out of the place,
half in mind to set the police on him.' Thank goodness,
Herr Gurtner hadn't come yet, and the head-waiter was
drinking coffee. I ran up to Herr Mendel, meaning to
tell him he'd better make himself scarce, for otherwise
that ruffian" [she looked round timidly to see if we were
overheard, and hastily amended her phrase], "Herr Gurt-
ner, I mean, would only have him thrown into the street
once more. 'Herr Mendel,' I began. He started, and

I4S

Buchmendel

looked at me. In that very moment (it was dreadful), he
must have remembered the whole thing, for he almost
collapsed, and began to tremble, not his fingers only, but
to shiver and shake from head to foot. Hastily he stepped
back into the street, and fell in a heap on the pavement
as soon as he was outside the door. We telephoned for
the ambulance, and they carried him off to hospital, the
nurse who came saying he had high fever directly she
touched him. He died that evening. 'Double pneumonia,'
the doctor said, and that he never recovered conscious-
ness— could not have been fully conscious when he came
to the Cafe Gluck. As I said, he had entered like a man
walking in his sleep. The table where he had sat day
after day for thirty-six years drew him back to it like a
home."

Frau Sporschil and I went on talking about him for a
long time, the two last persons to remember this strange
creature, Buchmendel: I to whom in youth the book-
pedlar from Galicia had given the first revelation of a life
wholly devoted to the things of the spirit; she, the poor
old woman who was caretaker of a cafe-toilet, who had
never read a book in her life, and whose only tie with this
strangely matched comrade in her subordinate, poverty-
stricken world had been that for twenty-five years she
had brushed his overcoat and had sewn on buttons for
him. We, too, might have been considered strangely
assorted, but Frau Sporschil and I got on very well to-
gether, linked, as we sat at the forsaken marble-topped
table, by our common memories of the shade our talk had
conjured up — for joint memories, and above all loving
memories, always establish a tie. Suddenly, while in the
full stream of talk, she exclaimed:

"Lord Jesus, how forgetful I am. I still have the book
he left on the table the evening Herr Gurtner gave him
the key of the street. I didn't know where to take it.
Afterwards, when no one appeared to claim it, I ventured

146

Stef a n Zweig

to keep it as a souvenir. You don't think it wrong of me,
Sir?"

She went to a locker where she stored some of the
requisites for her job, and produced the volume for my
inspection. I found it hard to repress a smile, for I was
face to face with one of life's little ironies. It was the
second volume of Hayn's Bibliotheca Germanorum erotica
et curiosa, a compendium of gallant literature known to
every book-collector. "Habent sua fata libelli!" This
scabrous publication, as legacy of the vanished magician,
had fallen into toilworn hands which had perhaps never
held any other printed work than a prayer-book. Maybe
I was not wholly successful in controlling my mirth, for
the expression of my face seemed to perplex the worthy
soul, and once more she said:

"You don't think it wrong of me to keep it, Sir?"

I shook her cordially by the hand.

"Keep it, and welcome," I said. "I am absolutely sure
that our old friend Mendel would be only too delighted
to know that someone among the many thousand he has
provided with books, cherishes his memory."

Then I took my departure, feeling a trifle ashamed
when I compared myself with this excellent old woman,
who, so simply and so humanely, had fostered the memory
of the dead scholar. For she, uncultured though she was,
had at least preserved a book as a memento; whereas I, a
man of education and a writer, had completely forgotten
Buchmendel for years — I, who at least should have known
that one only makes books in order to keep in touch with
one's fellows after one has ceased to breathe, and thus
to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that
lives — transitoriness and oblivion.

THE MARCHESA
by

K. Swinste ad-Smith

K. SWINSTEAD-SMITH has had stories published in
Lovat Dickson's Magazine, Everyman, The Tatler, and
The English Review, but The Marchpsa and Other Stories
is her first published book. Calabria, which she knows
well, is the scene of some of her most interesting stories.

THE MARCHESA

MARY was wakened by Viti.
"Come," he whispered. "It is being born."
On his brooding Italian little face there was min-
gled mystery and awe. His eyes, with their blue whites
and starry brilliancy, pleaded and impelled at the same
time. His pyjama legs were falling off, and he clutched at
them with one hand.

Mary had no need to be told what was being born. All
day yesterday the children had talked of nothing but
Meline, the cow; and Giacomo, the eldest boy, to whom
she belonged, had sat with her until half past ten stroking
her silky ears. As Mary put on her kimono and twisted
her golden plait of hair into a knot, she felt Viti's eager
little hand pulling her towards the doorway.

"I'm coming, dear," she said, feeling for his hand in
the dark.

Outside, Calabria lay grey and unawakened. Soon
the sun would come out of the Ionian Sea, turning the
dead waters to living pearl and then to aquamarine and
azure; the grass round the olive trees would ren$w its
emerald perfection, and the lizards who lived there would
wake up and dart from tree to tree like green lightning;
the colour would flow back into the little blue gentians,
and the old stone villa in which Mary was staying would
glow with a golden warmth. Life — throbbing, pulsing
life. This would the sun accomplish. Now life was
smudged and dreamy; only below in one of the huts Mary
heard a faint lowing, and knew that even in this greyness
new life was struggling.

From The Marchesa and Other Stories, by K. Swinstead-Smith, published by
The Hogarth Press, London, 1936, and reprinted by permission of The Hogarth
Press.

The Marchesa

"Listen how she cries!" whispered Viti as they went
carefully down the stone stairs together, Mary carrying
a candle because it was dark still. They passed out
through the three-hundred-year-old stone doorway into
the modern garage. Two tiny, yellow-breasted birds flew
out from the eaves and vanished, tweeting, into the grey-
ness beyond.

The barn was a poor, tumble-down place, very like the
adjoining huts, which were occupied by the Marchesa's
peasant workers. A white mule and a brown horse were
tethered to a piece of fence, and listened, turning restless,
frightened eyes, to the dull lowing within.

Giacomo, who was nearly twelve, came up to them. He
looked like an angel in the light of the candle he carried;
the sweet brooding adolescence of his face was heightened
by a look of anguish; he would throw a stone at a stray
dog, but the cow Meline was his, and he suffered with
her. Mary understood this, and did not speak to him.

Round the barn stood a silent group of people. In the
dark grey dawn and against the star-strewn sky they
looked indeed as if they were waiting for a message. Mary
knew them all, but in the drama of this early morning
they were all different. There stood seventy-year-old
Seraphina, wrinkled and yellow, her head tied up in its
black rag, motionless, her claw-like hands grasping a
stump of candle. Next to her was Maria, her daughter, a
superb Calabrian peasant woman. How often Mary had
seen her swinging through the olives, her lusty baby on
her back, and half a ton of water balanced fearlessly on
her head. Now she stood like a Greek statue, her naked
feet planted deeply into the earth, holding her great soft
breast to her child, her eyes fixed attentively on the
closed door of the barn.

So they all stood and waited.

"It won't be long now, Miss Graham," whispered the
Marchesa.

K. Swinstead-Smith

She had a black coat wrapped round her up to the chin
— her dusty, badly kept hair hung down on either side of
her white, heavy, youngish face. She spoke English
huskily with a beautiful accent.

She took Viti's hand and felt it quivering.

"Little excited boy," she said, smiling her strange,
slow smile.

Viti struggled to get his hand away, his eyes fixed on
the barn.

The elder boys were creeping in and out of the barn.
They had always known the meaning of birth and death.

"I want to see, too," said Viti, breathlessly, turning up
his eyes to Mary. "Let me go."

She let him go and he darted away. Presently he came
back breathing rather hard. Mary put her arm round
him; he was trembling — he was only seven.

Luigi, the second boy, left off going into the barn. He
stood among the peasants, his heavy, cupped, dark eyes
half shut. He looked older than Giacomo, although he
was only ten. Once he picked up a stone and hurled it at
the little pariah puppy that was standing shivering at the
entrance of the vineyard.

" Basta" said Mary under her breath at him. "Capite,
basta."

He looked her up and down with his somnolent brown
eyes.

Mary drew her kimono tighter round her and bent
to speak to Viti. Luigi must never know that she minded
his eyes — a child of ten — it was ridiculous!

Suddenly Brunone came out of the barn smiling. He was
brown as the earth, and he had a strange grace about him.

" Ecco" he said straightening himself. "Tutto e bene,
Signora Marchesa. Com'e carina la vitella!" and he went
away to the well to wash his hands.

Each in turn they went into the dark foetid barn to
see the little new life. Giacomo stood in the doorway, and

IS3

The Marchesa

the peasants took their orders from him quietly and doc-
ilely. Viti went in with Mary. Meline stood tied up at
one end of the barn, her eyes still rolling with fright. In
the dark hay lay the little calf trembling with new life.
Viti stood rigid, looking down at it.

"Born," he said wonderingly, and gave a great shud-
dering sigh of delight.

Going back to the house, Mary saw that the sun was
already up. Viti had left her suddenly, tearing away to
join the others. She knew that it was no use going to bed
again, for soon the children would go shouting into the
strange primitive bathroom and the tutor would turn on
the shower. She had not seen the tutor at the barn —
perhaps, poor young man, he had no dressing-gown. But
surely such a little thing as that would not matter in
Calabria. Still, he was very shy. She washed and dressed.
It was time to go and bath Viti, if Seraphina had got the
stove going, throwing in twig after twig with her old
gnarled hands as if for a sacrifice.

She had to go through the Marchesa's room to get to
him, for all the rooms in the house led out of one another.
The Marchesa had evidently been to sleep again, for as
Mary went in she was waking up, pushing the blue crepe
de Chine sheets down to her waist, shaking her dull hair
out of her eyes, stretching and yawning again and again,
her large white teeth snapping between every yawn. With
her long white Italian hand she began to scratch her back
and her right breast, large and curved under the soiled
nightdress — Calabrian fleas were persistent, and although
everyone in the house had scarves pinned round their
beds, which kept off the multitude, there were always a
few stray ones.

"Is that you, Miss Graham?" she said in her slow
Southern drawl. She lay still, her hands clasped behind
her neck, the long dark silky hairs in her arm-pits glisten-
ing with perspiration.

154

K. Swinstead-Smith

"I'm just going to bath Viti," said Mary.

"How excited he was — my baby." The Marchesa's
great purple-blue eyes softened. "How am I going to
leave them for a fortnight, Miss Graham?"

"What time is your train?"

"I leave here at twelve. I reach Naples tomorrow. If
only it wasn't necessary for me to go! But I must go — I
am going to try and get a man acquitted — a negro. My
friends say, Why bother about a negro; but I say, a negro
is a man, and he is in my service, and if he is convicted he
will get ten years in prison, so my lawyers and I are going
to make a fight."

"It's wonderful of you to take such an interest," mur-
mured Mary.

"What else could a civilized person do."

A civilized person! Mary looked at her. No, she
thought, intelligent, interesting, cultured even, but not
civilized. Suddenly her eyes met those of the Marchesa.
They had turned almost black, they held her mesmerized;
they wandered from her golden plaits of hair neatly coiled
to the fresh washing silk frock and the slim, straight-
drawn silk stockings.

"Go and bath Viti now, please, Miss Graham," she
said, smiling still, but hissing the words between her shut
teeth. Quietly Mary went.

"She's like an animal," thought the English girl, as
she stood looking out of the window in the bathroom with
her back to Viti.

Viti was easily shamed.

"No, no, no, no, no," he cried as she turned round,
clutching his pyjamas round his skinny little boy's body.
He did not mind her ministrations when he was in the
bath, for he thought the water covered him up, and by
the time he was out of it he had forgotten to be ashamed.

"Why do I feel as if something is going to happen?"
thought Mary, as she rubbed the little boy under his arms.

155

The Marchesa

He stood like a baby Christ with his arms outstretched,
his blue eyes mysteriously dark and brooding, his bright
pink lips parted. He watched intently the little drops of
water that fell plonk, plonk, on to the floor from his hair.
He bent down and put his finger wonderingly into one of
the drops, and then showed the finger to Mary and
laughed. His tiny milk teeth were like a calf's. He
jumped about the bathroom in his combinations, singing
little bits, calling to himself, making little imaginary
birds fly away from his fingers. Suddenly he came up to
Mary and punched her with a doubled-up fist. She
smacked his hand and he laughed again.

"Animals," thought Mary again, " interesting enough,
but just animals."

As she came down to breakfast she caught glimpses at
every window of the Ionian Sea, blue-purple now like a
piece of rich cloth with a white selvage. She passed
Brunone staggering into the kitchen with two water-
barrels on his back. His eyes were bright blue in his
brown face, his muscles rippled all over his body.

They were already seated at the long trestle table when
she came in, except for the Marchesa, who breakfasted
in bed.

This room had been a refectory in olden times; there
were still frescoes on the walls, but the little cells of the
monks had been turned into glass-pantries and linen-
cupboards. Two slender carved pillars stood near to-
gether in the middle of the room and took the weight of
the ceiling. Beside each of these stood a Sicilian water-
barrel, brightly decorated, filled with decaying orange-
peel and cigarette ends. These were never emptied from
year's end to year's end. Everybody ate oranges — they
lay about all over the house — the barrels were convenient
for disposing of the peel. The tutor and the boys stood
up when she came in. She said good-morning to the
tutor in French, for he did not speak English, and her

156

K. Swinstead-Smith

Italian was still far from perfect. She would have liked
to have spoken Italian with him for practice, but
somehow she did not quite like to leave off speaking
French.

He was a strange, quiet young man. He seemed to
have no possessions except his Dante and commentary,
and a pair of carpet slippers, which he kept under an old
Italian grammar. Mary had to go through his room every
time to reach the bathroom, but she never saw anything
personal about. And yet he dressed quite well, but more
like an estate agent than a tutor. He liked to dictate to
the peasants, and was in his element dealing out the seeds
to them, which he did once a week on the old brown table
in the refectory where the seeds were kept. Sometimes he
rolled his shirt-sleeves up to weigh them out, and his arms
were boyish and thin and well-shaped. He always pulled
them down directly Mary came into the room. His hair
was exuberant and refused to lie flat, so he cut it very
short, almost like a convict. He had full Italian lips and
nice, kind, hazel eyes. He came from the north, from
Milan. He used to cut figures out of magazines sometimes
and made them walk about and talk. Viti would sit on
the edge of his knee and watch these figures breathlessly,
and sometimes he got quite as excited as the little boy.
He had a framed medallion of the Virgin hanging over his
bed, but he never appeared to go to Mass. He kept a
photo of all the children in his pocket-book, but he boxed
their ears for next to nothing, and he had much too vio-
lent a temper to be a good teacher.

"Good-morning, Miss," said Luigi. In his sleepy
almond-shaped eyes there was a hint of mockery. "Viti,
silly ass," he remarked in execrable English. They learnt
those kinds of remarks in English very quickly.

"Good-for-nothing fool!" shouted the tutor. "Rude,
saucy imp!"

Luigi grovelled, but recovered immediately.

IS7

The Marchesa

"Beautiful Miss," he remarked over the top of his cup
of coffee and milk.

Mary turned away and asked the tutor why he had not
been at the barn, and Giacomo, feeding Ivan, the wolf-
hound, under the table with bread and marmalade,
launched into a description of the little calf and the
difficulty Meline had had in producing her. It seemed im-
possible to Mary that it was only three hours ago — that
grey, dim silence. Through the window she watched five
peasants move languorously across the fields, their soft,
swinging limbs as rhythmical as the burling splash of the
waves. In the distance two thin oxen had started their
pitiful, blindfolded circle.

They had barely finished breakfast when the Marchesa
came downstairs. She walked beautifully from the hips,
and her large round breasts hung loose inside her dress.
The dress had once come from the Rue de la Paix, but hard
usage had sadly altered its lines; there were marks too
down the front where she had spilt food. Mary wondered
whether she had even brushed her hair, and her sleepy
white face might or might not have seen water. And yet
she was beautiful — strangely, terribly beautiful, as Ca-
labria was beautiful. And with her came that strange dis-
turbing atmosphere, that sense of tremendous vitality
and power, that like an animal lay sleeping in the sun,
but which could wake viciously, fiercely. And she always
looks like this, thought Mary, thinking of the luxurious
flat she had been to in Naples, of the Palazzo in Florence.

The Marchesa stood for a while lifting the little bags of
grain on the grain table, opening some and letting the
seeds trickle through her fingers. At intervals she asked
the tutor some questions sharply, and then the boys came
tumbling in and into the store-room to get their bicycles.
Mary began to think that it was the incongruity of the
life which fascinated her most. There they hung, those
bicycles, in that tumble-down crumbling Calabrian barn,

158

K. S wins tead-Smith

a filthy place, crumbling as it had been crumbling since
the fifteenth century, most likely, and now on the walls
hung the bicycles like a Carnage's show-room, each on its
proper rest, with its proper equipment lying beneath it.
They should have been dirty and uncared for and rusty,
and there they were, glistening and oiled and perfect.
There was a great tinkling of bells, and out they came into
the refectory, pedalling round and round the table like
three furies, and the Marchesa and the tutor went on
sifting little bags of grain, and only Mary wanted to
laugh because everything was so mad.

"I have time to walk with you all to the drinking-pool
and back," said the Marchesa, picking up a fox fur and
slinging it round her shoulders. In it her swinging, stealthy
walk seemed to become intensified, as if she had festooned
herself with her prey.

"I'm being fantastic," thought Mary, but the thought
persisted.

They went out into the bright sunlight.

"You know, I'm really more English than Italian,"
said the Marchesa to Mary, as they strolled along the
little zigzag path through the olives. "I was always the
favourite of the head-mistress when I was at school at
Brighton — she used to ask me into her room on Sunday
afternoons to pour out tea for her guests."

"Did you like Brighton?" asked Mary. The sun, the
bitter-sweet smell of the olives, and the rhythm of the
sheep-bells coming on little gusts of scented wind, made
her drowsy and quiescent.

The tutor walked a little behind, his hands behind his
back. Now and again he would stop and examine the tiny
fruit of an olive tree. Every time he stopped, Ivan, the
wolf-hound, stopped too. The young man never seemed
to notice the dog, but the animal was always close beside
him.

"Yes, everything English always — I feel I am half

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The Marchesa

English," went on the Marchesa, and her soft, slow voice
seemed full of the sun. "How I wish I could have married
an Englishman!"

Brunone and a boy passed them, leading the white horse
loaded with faggots.

"Signora Marchesa," he murmured, bowing low and
whipping the horse off the pathway.

"One moment we are in the twentieth century and the
next in the Middle Ages!" thought Mary.

"He was a dreadful man, my husband," went on the
Marchesa. "Sometimes he would bring home a carozza
with nearly naked women in it. Just think of it — the
humiliation!"

"You are not divorced?" asked Mary.

"No. One must think — the children. And then it is
very difficult in Italy. We are separated — he lives in Paris,
and I send him money that he may not disgrace our name.
I care nothing for myself now — I live my life for my chil-
dren."

They came bicycling back along the track, three mad
things, beautiful with health.

"Mamma, Mamma," shrieked Viti, his feet on the
handle-bars. "Look, look!" His eyes were like two
blue gentians.

"They are splendid, yes?" said the Marchesa. *'I
should like them to go to Oxford — yes, very much. Now
everything falls on me, and when one has property,
Miss Graham, there is always so much to do, to see to

They climbed to the old stone wall which bounded
the Marchesa's estate. There was always, even on the
hottest day, a clean strong wind blowing here from the
sea. To the right in the distance lay a huddled black vil-
lage, and behind lay the sea of olive trees and the old
yellow house with its courtyard slumbering in the heat.
They turned to the right, keeping to the top of the hill,

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and then slowly descended. Now they were walking
along a sinister path edged with giant cactus. One great
leaf lay broken and rotting in the way. There was some-
thing terribly wicked about it, with its spikes like giant
needles and its yellow, rotting, spongy pulp. Overhead
the sky grew every minute more intense. Now there was
no trace of the early morning purity; it looked like a great
solid dome of purple-blue. But Mary, who knew the walk
well, knew that soon the cactus walk would end and then
would come the deliciousness of the surprise. Always
when she came this way she held her breath and got the
same thrill of beauty, for suddenly the cactus ended and
the path wandered along the edge of the orange grove;
and now all was young again like the setting of a fairy
tale, for only fairies could dance in and out among those
gentians and the little wild strawberry plants and the
yellow flowers that had no name and the wild sweet
clover and the brilliant fronds of fern. Some blue-and-
white butterflies were playing here, and the bees were
droning in the clover.

"How bewildering Calabria is!" said Mary suddenly,
and then more suddenly came the thought — "and how
like the Marchesa!"

It was nearly 11.30 when they got back to the house.

"I must pack," said the Marchesa. "Good fellow,"
she said to Ivan, stroking him, and then she told Mary
how much Ivan loved her — "like my servants," she said,
"they always adore me. Carlotta will be heartbroken
when I go."

Suddenly the hand that was stroking him stopped its
motion.

"This dog has not been groomed," she said, the soft
laziness of her gone, her body rigid.

Brunone was in the corner of the garage. He stam-
mered a few words, looking up at her blindly. She hit
him across the cheek with her open palm. She was swept

161

The Marchesa

with fury. She stood with her arms akimbo on her waist
and her voice, out of control, shrieked and whispered.
The children huddled behind the car, and Mary stood
white-faced and trembling and disgusted. And then it
was all over — her arms drooped, her black staring pupils
burned into soft blue-purple once more. She shook her
hair out of her eyes.

"These peasants!" she said to Mary, smiling. "Will
you come and help me pack, Miss Graham?"

The lovely spoiled gowns were pushed into the two
suitcases. The Marchesa put on a black travelling dress
and a black hat with a veil — there were buttons missing,
and Mary lent her safety-pins out of her work-bag.

"Such a nuisance having to dress well," said the Mar-
chesa, "but when one has a position " Her hair was

bundled away under the veil, her strong white neck shone
out of the black.

The boys crowded round her in the car to say good-
bye. She kissed each one, tears in her eyes. The two
maids came out to kiss her hand, and then she shook
hands with the tutor. Mary stood trying to feel indif-
ferent, trying to see how stupid and sentimental it all
was.

"Good-bye, Miss Graham," said the Marchesa.

"We shall all miss you," said Mary, almost before she
knew she had said it.

"But you are so wonderful with the children," the
Marchesa's voice had turned honey-sweet. "I trust them
with you so utterly "

The car moved away and she was gone. The house
seemed strangely different. Mary kept the children busy
playing and reading, and in the late afternoon took them
for another walk, for she felt restless and unable to settle
to anything.

Evening came, a heavy dusk, as if the sky were thick
blue-black powder; and with it came a strange smell, a

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K. Swinstead-Smith

smell that came welling out of the volcanic earth like
some strange incense — a slumberous, pagan smell.

Dinner was an hour late, and directly afterwards the
children went to bed. Viti pranced backwards and for-
wards with the candle, now to put out his shoes for Ser-
aphina in the morning, now through the yellow curtain
into the bathroom to do his teeth. In the sitting-room,
through the open door, Mary could see the tutor reading,
his book near his eyes, the two candles in the forked brass
candlestick flickering about in the draught made by the
boys as they rushed in and out.

"Why aren't you two in bed?" he shouted at them.

"Going now, Professor," shouted Giacomo back to
him.

Luigi poked his nose round the curtain of Viti's room
and saw Mary sitting on the bed.

"Beautiful Miss," he said again, and his eyes looked at
her sensually over the candle. Mary, with annoyance,
found her colour rising.

"Go to bed at once, Luigi," she said, turning to open
Viti's bed. "Little boys of ten should be asleep at this

time."

Back came Viti from the bathroom, chattering to
himself.

"Look, Miss," he piped. He gave one bound on to the
bed, shrieking with laughter. He pushed his feet impa-
tiently inside the bedclothes, threw out the pillow on to
the floor, rolled on to his tummy, turned his head on one
side, placed one grubby little hand beneath it. His black
eyelashes fluttered and fell. Viti was asleep.

Mary went out softly through Luigi's room. He was
sitting up in bed reading. He gave her the peculiarly
sweet sensual smile that stirred her. She went to her room
and brought him back two chocolates. After she had given
them to him she wished she had not. She went back and
got two more, and laid them by Viti's bed. She had meant

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The Marchesa

to give them all chocolates, of course. Viti would find his
in the morning.

Passing through the sitting-room, she said good night
to the Professor. He stood up politely, and then settled
down again to his Purgatorio, holding the tiny print into
the candle-light.

In the passage Giacomo was tying up Ivan for the night.

"How he howls, poor fellow!" he said. And then he
added, for Mary's enlightenment, "They always do at this
time of the year, you know."

Mary liked Giacomo. He looked almost like an Eng-
lish boy, with the candle-light showing up his fair hair
and blue eyes.

"Do you require anything, Miss?" he asked. In his
mother's absence, he was the head of the house.

"Nothing, thank you, Giacomo. Good night."

Mary opened her shutters. There was Brunone undress-
ing in the dim yellow courtyard. A candle was burning in
his hut, but he was outside it, letting the soft coolness
play about him. With slow, lazy movements he lowered
his blue dungarees and pulled the red jersey over his head.
His shirt looked snow-white in the darkness. She saw
his great arm go over his head and worry it off him, bend-
ing forward from the waist. He drew a stool out into the
yard and sat there naked to the waist. Then he threw
back his head and laughed, just for the full joy of living.
He stretched out his legs and felt them carefully. In the
dim shadow Mary could see him scratching his back, his
thighs, his arms. Then suddenly he stretched and went
into the hut.

In the middle of the night Ivan howled. The noise
wakened Mary, and almost immediately afterwards she
heard a car pull up somewhere on the road. Then every-
thing was very still. She must have dozed again, and this
time it was a light that waked her — a little aura of light,
pale chrome yellow with a pin-prick of wavering fire in

K. Swinstead-Smith

the centre. Mary suddenly became wide awake. The
dressing-room door was open, and in the doorway stood
a man, and she saw that it was her candle that he was
holding.

She sat up in bed.

"Who are you? What do you want?" she said in a
whisper.

The man's face was white and long and inhuman in the
candle-light. He spoke softly in English.

"I am the Marchese. I have come to see my son."

"The Marchese! But the Marchesa is in Naples. Be-
sides, why have you come like this — like a thief?"

"It is seven years since I have seen him," said the man.
"I am on my way to Sicily, and I thought — she has
altered the house a good deal — this used to be the hall, I
remember. I suppose I shouldn't have come in through
the front door at all."

"No, we don't use it. But please go — the children are
asleep; and besides — the Marchesa "

"How many children are there now?" asked the Mar-
chese, placing the candle on the table.

"How many? What do you mean? There are three, of
course!"

"So — there is another! And you teach them, made-
moiselle?"

He turned his head slowly as padding steps came
along the passage.

"Signorina," came Brunone's hoarse voice on the other

side of the curtain, "I thought I saw someone come in

Mary saw his brown feet under the short curtain illu-
minated by the candle he carried.

"Yes, it is I, the Master," said the Marchese impa-
tiently. He pulled the curtain back, and from the light
of Brunone's candle Mary saw him for a moment clearly —
a haggard, finely cut face and strange, restless eyes.

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The Marchesa

"Signore Marchese!" Brunone was on his knees kissing
the long white hand. "Ah, Signore Marchese, to see you
again — to touch you!" He had pulled on brown earth-
yellow trousers over his nightshirt; his eyes were bright
with sleep and very blue.

Softly the Marchese took his candle from him and held
it close to his brown wild face.

"So she has gone at last to the very soil," he murmured.

""Is the third one yours, Brunone?" he asked.

"// bambino? Sz, Signore Marchese — the Marchesa

did me the honour " He cringed as if for a blow, but

when it did not come he laughed.

Softly the door at the end of the passage opened. It
was the Professor. His face looked wan and pinched in
the shadowy light. He had put on a dressing-gown and
slippers hastily, and the cord of the gown trailed behind
him like a flail. He came towards the little group, holding
his candlestick high and blinking near-sightedly.

"I thought I heard — is anything the matter, Made-
moiselle?" He clutched his dressing-gown round him.
His white young face looked drawn, as if he did not sleep
too well at night.

"Why, it is the Professor," said the Marchese. "We
are quite a party! And how is your son, Professor?"
he added ironically. "He was three years old when I last
saw him — took after his mother, I remember."

Mary still sat up in bed, too bewildered to move or
speak. Was she dreaming that these three men were
standing unconcernedly in her candle-lit bedroom in the
middle of the night parcelling out the Marchesa's children
amongst them? It was incredible, unbelievable!

"Now take me to my son," commanded the Marchese
to the two men, picking up his candle. " I have not much
time."

They passed out, and Mary, wrapping her kimono round
her, followed the strange little procession.

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Brunone went first and the Marchese followed, a worn,
bent figure, holding his candle high and walking deliber-
ately, as if he were performing some religious rite. It was
as well that he did so, for the Professor, who came behind
him, had forgotten his. He peered ahead of him, running
his hand over his unshaven chin and unruly hair, his
carpet slippers, which were too big for him, floundering
along the floor.

Brunone held his candle negligently. He was smiling,
perhaps at some dream he had had. He was perfectly
happy. If the Signore Marchese had not been there he
would have hummed a song. Like a lithe panther he
walked soundlessly and magnificently, a mighty frame
stored with sun and wind, untrampled and unconquered.
As they passed through Viti's room he paused and looked
at his child. He had many others, but this one, with
its white night-clothes, its aristocratic little head, its deli-
cate round baby cheeks — oh, he was proud of this one!
He must not own it as his — did not want to own it. If
the Signora Marchesa wished one night to come to his
hut, he was her peasant; and besides, their bodies had been
good together — that was all it was. He took one of Viti's
hands in his own immense brown one. It lay there, small
and grubby. He bent down and kissed it roughly. "Fine
little Signore," he muttered and joined the others.

The Professor too had stopped, and stood gazing down
upon the sleeping Luigi. "Mary, Mother of God," Mary
heard him murmur, and knew him to be saying a prayer.
Perhaps, she thought with surprise, he often prayed for
his little boy. Even in sleep Luigi did not lose his mocking
expression. Mary hoped very much that those heavy-
lidded eyes would not open and rest upon her as she was.
She flushed a little. "He's only ten," she thought, and
shuddered. She saw the Professor make the sign of the
Cross over the sleeping boy. A tear splashed on to the
coverlet. For a moment it glittered and then soaked into

The Marchesa

the cloth. Luigi stirred and threw out an arm. Did he
subconsciously feel that tear — a tear, all that could ever
pass from strange father to stranger son!

But the Marchese noticed none of these things. He
walked stiffly into Giacomo's room and closed the door.
He was there for ten minutes, and then he came out
quietly and put out his hand to Mary.

"I thank you, Mademoiselle," he said. "I am very
proud of him. When he is a little older I shall have him
with me. Good-bye."

Brunone held his coat for him, and the tutor handed
him his grey Homburg hat. The three men passed slowly
down the passage. Brunone led the way again with the
candle. Mary heard a door opening, a faint hum of voices,
the engine of a car on the road.

She went back to her own room. The courtyard lay out-
side, a ghostly thing of black shapes, and beyond nothing-
ness— a black void. A single star hung over the blackness
that was the sea. The muffled sound of the waves was as
regular as a heartbeat.

168

THE HAND OF GOD

by
Jane Culver

JANE CULVER is one of the younger American writers,
whose novel, So Stood I, was published in 1934. She was
born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and has, with her husband,
Thomas Polsky, gone to Weaverville, N. C., where she is
completing her second novel.

THE HAND OF GOD

DARK leaves blew by the window, and far beyond, in
the sky, the sunset ran. It was a deep time, Nancy
thought, with doves and vespers in it. And she was
all alone in the music room. She began to play a quite
grave piece — "The Funeral March for a Pet Bird," it was
named. And she was not nervous about the octaves, for
Paula, who played so well, was not here to listen. She
had gone to meet a train with someone on it whom she
loved.

This morning Paula had come from New York, where
she lived at a club and took music lessons from a famous
teacher; she would be at home all the summer. And she
had brought a rather large bottle of perfume for Nancy.
"It's very heady and nice, Fm sure," Nancy's grateful
voice had said. But Paula had not listened much while
she was being thanked; she was practically nineteen and
almost beautiful. She'd kept on looking thoughtful, spill-
ing evening dre&ses over her bed for ever so long. For she
owned perhaps a dozen evening dresses, velvet and chiffon,
all different colors. She had chosen them herself, in a
Httle room, while a salesgirl bowed round her. She hadn't
felt exposed and looked at while their mother pinched the
shoulder straps, wondering and worrying about her daugh-
ter's type. And Paula had worn the most exciting dress
of all, and some man> with a moustache perhaps, had
lifted his hand to his cheek and said she was lovely as some
sort of flower. Then they'd gone off together, in a taxi, in
a soft night that had a lemon of a moon at the top, to
applaud a little, in their gloves, at a concert.

From So Stood 7, by Jane Culver (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1934).
Used by permission of, and by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company.

171

The Hand of God

Nancy understood; she knew the bright round shape of
Paula's life. But Paula kept things very private. This
afternoon she'd sat by her window giving herself a slow
manicure, not noticing Nancy. And she had expected that
Paula would be different this time. For Nancy was. She
no longer wore Peter Thompsons, and rose only when
much older women came into the room. She was going to
a- convent in the autumn. And she had read — "Jane
Eyre" and "David Copperfield" — a good many classics.

Paula had not changed. She still patronized people and
whispered Dear Gods. That was one thing about her that
wasn't nice. She swore. And this morning she hadn't
gone to church. She was simply devitalized, she had said —
a poor excuse. Paula was sure to know in her intimate
heart that that was a sin — sadder, more serious, than any
sin of Nancy's.

Nancy looked at the sunset, at the leaves, and let a
chord sing to them. She felt safe and good, as if she kept
a warm secret with God, and He was remembering the
sacrifices she had made about writing paper and ice-cream
in order that she might light candles at the Virgin's altar.
As if He were remembering how she thought of Him in the
middle of dancing school, though the music did not match
Him at all and her partner talked of fishing and Indians
and things.

She dropped her hands and watched the shadows
slanted on the rug, and realized, in a surprise, that she was
hungry.

In the dim kitchen, with its smell of soap and summer,
Effie sat, her hands folded round each other in their black
silk gloves. She was going to church.

"Good evening, Effie. I thought I ought to have some-
thing to eat."

"Surely you'd ought to," Effie said.

Nancy got a large piece of cake and a bottle of ginger ale.

172

Jane Culver

"Take care," warned Effie. "You'll spill. There'd
ought to be a light on."

"Let's not, Effie. It's such a deep time."

"Well, take care." The voice sighed itself away.

The ginger ale was sweet and prickly. Nancy wanted it
to last a long, long time. She was very comfortable, sitting
by the table, drinking, watching the pattern of her voile
dress repeat itself over her, almost to her ankles, in a rhyme
she liked.

"Hardly anyone looks smart in Peter Thompsons, do
they?"

But Effie seemed not to feel like talking.

Outside, the tall trees were standing under their dark
umbrellas. It was very still; no sound was caught in the
silence. And then a little wind began to comb the grass,
to tip the dim flowers at the edge of the lawn. The eve-
ning, all softly lighted, came in to touch Nancy and Effie
together.

" Look, Effie, what a nice night it is."

"Because it's Sunday."

And they were silent for a long time.

"Have you ever had a burning desire?" Effie whispered.

"I'm afraid I haven't." For she wasn't yet old enough;
you had to be eighteen. "I expect Paula has, though."

"A desire to see God."

"Oh . . ."

That desire had happened to people Nancy's age.
Saint Agnes had been martyred when she was fourteen;
ashamed soldiers had put their swords away and waited
for her death, and watched her pale, brave face, her eyes
bright with wanting to see God, her hands of the same size
and shape as Nancy's, folded on her breast like Nancy's.

She set the ginger ale down. She saw the trees pointing
to the timid stars that lit the edge of heaven, that were
the beginning of the beauty and music and God beyond
them. And the warm wind paused. She knew.

The Hand of God

"Yes, I have," she said.
"It's sweet," sighed Effie.

"Oh, I know. A dreadful heart-beating goes all through
you and you're quite nervous in such a pleasant way."
"Well" — Effie rose — "I got to get going. It's quarter

to."

"Would you light a candle for me?"
-"Surely. I'd be glad to," Effie said.
Nancy went up to her room to get the money.

On her dressing-table was a small statue of the Virgin
that had been brought from Italy. Long ago, before
Nancy had begun to be pious, and had had it for one of
her dolls, a hand had been broken off and lost. And now,
when she saw the severed wrist and the serene face above
it, she felt a sharp, sad pain. Then she lifted the statue.
Underneath was hidden quite a lot of money — a dollar
bill and several dimes. "I have enough for a mass, prac-
tically." It was wonderful to think about. She took a dime
and put the rest of the money back.

She stood before the dressing-table and thought of nuns
kneeling in yellow light, of catacombs, and tall candles
burning, of the lambs and doves in heaven. And of the
saints with lovely names — Cyprian and Damon and Mag-
dalen— whose love of God had begun to bud like flowers
when they lived on the earth. Now they were dividing
with Him the harmony that lay in heaven, free of the
spiders and puddles and illnesses that waited in the world
for people.

Nancy noticed some favors she had kept from dancing
school on the table-top, and a movie actor's photograph.
She put these in a drawer. Then she crossed herself and
said a Hail Mary because it was quite short and Effie was
waiting. But after Effie had gone, she would come back
and worship. Long prayers would sing through her.

She went down the back stairs because she had often

Jane Culver

felt close to God in that steep darkness. She stopped and
prayed, "Dear God." And then she remembered Paula's
oath and pitied her.

Effie leaned by the kitchen door.

"Thank you very much," Nancy said.

"Surely," said Effie, opening the door.

Nancy asked her — it seemed a fearfully intimate thing
at first, and not quite nice — to pray for her.

Slowly Nancy wandered across the kitchen, loving the
cozy zest of worshipping. She opened her hand so that
God might come and hold it. Then she went to the sink
and washed her hands and dried them carefully on the
roller towel in order that He might find them pure. She
knew that He was here, in the pantry, beside her, and had
taken her hand. She strolled with Him through the dining
room, into the hall. It was the best thing by far that had
ever happened to her. All through her life, when she was
nineteen, and thirty-two, and an old woman, it would
happen all over again.

And then Paula's voice, soft and intense as if she prayed,
blew out to her from the music room. "But my love
hasn't turned out to be pseudo, you know, even if yours
has. If I'm expected to live out my life thinking up fancy
sublimations and having good stares at the Rodin col-
lection, instead — "

Nancy drew her hands over her ears to close out the
words she knew were immodest, a mortal sin dark as
adultery, because they, too, were forbidden by the Sixth
Commandment. She asked God to remind Paula of the
Judgment Day, for that at least would frighten her sin
away . . . God risen from His throne, His hallowed head
bent, His fingers pointing to the damned, His great voice
telling them they couldn't live in heaven. Hundreds and
hundreds of thieves with soiled, twisted faces, and gam-
blers in evening clothes, and all the women who had ever
lived and had not been modest. The stillness after God

The Hand of God

had spoken, with the rhythm of their scared hearts beating
in it. And then their loud prayers for mercy roaring too
late. Down the slow, reluctant steps into hell, where the
day grew thick and smoke rose into it ...

Nancy dropped her hands. She couldn't seem to help
listening now, though she didn't want to, really.

A man's voice, sorry and tired, said, "But, Paula — "

She was not polite enough to let him finish: "For the
love of God, please don't tell me again that I don't under-
stand, as if we were in the movies. I ought to be bitter. I
am. I'm terribly bitter. Oh, my dear — "

Nancy felt afraid that Paula was kissing him. And she
was, standing by him in the middle of the music room. A
blushing went over Nancy. She began to hurry through
the hall.

They must have heard her, for they turned around.

"Hello," said Nancy.

"Hello." Paula seemed not nearly so embarrassed as
Nancy would have been.

"Is she your little sister?" asked the young man.

"Yes." She waved her hand toward Nancy. "This is
Mr. Morris."

Paula always introduced people by their last names,
separating you from the world, with its taxis and gar-
denias, that she shared with them, leaving you to wonder
if they were David or George or even Cyril, until at last
she called casually the real name, and you felt a huge
relief.

"Aren't you coming in?" The young man smiled at
Nancy. He looked kind and dark and uncomfortable and
would be quite tall if he stood straight. He was probably
named David.

"Well, I don't know." She said it like a question.

"Please come in for a minute at least." He seemed so
earnest, inviting her.

"Don't rush off," Paula said. She was being polite on

Jane Culver

purpose for Mr. Morris; she didn't want her to come in
really.

And Nancy walked into the music room, where Paula
had been kissing the dark man, where God had not been
thought of since she had played the piano. No one seemed
able to think of anything to say.

Paula looked in magazines that were full of pictures of
Asia. She pretended to be absorbed and mystified, and
made her eyes wide to see. And her earrings trembled a
little on their silver chains. (For she always wore earrings,
even at noon. They were a wretched vanity of hers.)

Mr. Morris stood beside Nancy. "Won't you sit down?"
he said. She chose a chair by the fireplace and folded her
hands. She was afraid it was going to be one of those
nervous times when she would have to clear her throat.
And she could not seem to realize God just now.

At last Mr. Morris sat on a footstool and said, "She's
rather like you, Paula."

"Do you think so?" Paula answered, not looking up.
"Personally I've never been able to see the slightest
resemblance."

You would think from Paula's voice that there was
something the matter with the way Nancy looked. In the
mirror by the piano she saw her image, and there was
nothing wrong with it at all. Paula was unkind. Nancy
would stay; she'd be in no hurry, for Paula of course
wanted to be alone with Mr. Morris, though he didn't
want to be alone with her.

After a while he asked if they would mind his smoking.

"Heavens, no," said Paula rather crossly.

He lighted a cigar.

"Are you going to smoke a cigar, Donald?" Paula asked.

He was called Donald. Nancy liked his name; it
matched him very well.

He put his cigar out, but he didn't seem to mind. He
smiled at Nancy.

177

The Hand of God

"Rochester smoked cigars," she said, for no one else
said anything. And she remembered him, walking on the
veranda with white circles of smoke curling after him.
And she thought how Jane Eyre had saved his life, wak-
ing him in his flamy bed. "Are you going to stay all
night?"

Donald shook his head and smiled again. "I must be in
Chicago in the morning."

"Do you have to be? I thought you might stay quite a
long time. Didn't you bring a valise or something?" She
pointed to the corner.

"I earn my living with that," he said. "It isn't a valise.
It's what I play."

They had begun to talk at last. Donald seemed glad,
and she was. He lighted a cigarette and looked more
comfortable.

"Of course it is," Nancy laughed. "What a faux pas
of me. It's some sort of a bass — affair, I suppose."

"It's called Charlotte, the virgin 'cello," said Paula.

Paula shouldn't say virgin in that open way. You
prayed to virgins. Nancy thought of the statue on her
dressing-table, and kept again a pity for the broken wrist.
Soon she would be kneeling before it — after she had pushed
Paula's impiety far behind in their talk.

"Why don't you play a piece?" Nancy asked Donald.

"Shall we? Shall we play together, Paula?"

Paula sat at the piano. If people passed on the terrace
they'd perhaps have a feeling like poetry when they saw
her. They'd think of Spanish countries late at night, and
stars, and sighs, and so on, because her hair shone very
black, and on her face the light touched carefully as if she
were a painting. But they wouldn't have the least idea
how she usually behaved. She did not even answer Donald
now; instead she began to play softly.

"I know that," said Nancy. "That's a piece of
mine."

178

Jane Culver

And she could not help being pleased because Paula
made it all grown-up and astonishing.

"It's by Debussy," Nancy explained to Donald. "It's
called 'The Girl with Flaxen Hair.' "

"How silly you are, Paula." Donald rose an8 went over
by the piano. "Why won't you believe that isn't why?
I don't even know any blondes."

"It's a rather dumb piece," Paula said. "It's so soppy."

"I think I ought to go," said Nancy quietly.

Donald turned around to her. "Don't go." He seemed
quite anxious. "We'll play something, won't we, Paula."

"Why don't you and Nancy play? She has a very
snappy repertoire."

That was terribly rude of Paula. She was cruel and
patronizing. And Donald had been listening. Nancy
hated her. She wanted to fly at her and bite her arm until
she screamed for mercy. But Nancy could only promise
herself never to forgive. She couldn't even answer. In the
morning, when Paula would try as usual to make peace,
it would be too late. She would stroll yawning into
Nancy's room, and sit on the bed, not thinking how pale
she was, nor how uninteresting she looked in water waves.
"Would you like these stockings, Nancy? They've never
been worn." And she would display the price tag so that
Nancy would not doubt her. (Mean people always ex-
pected you to be suspicious of them.) But Nancy would
not look. (She was not looking at Paula now, nor listening
to her music.) "Nancy, you know I didn't mean anything
last night about your repertoire. I wasn't making fun."
"I don't want your old stockings, Paula. Give them to the
poor." . . . Nancy saw a quick picture of the poor, who
knelt at the back of churches, reading prayer-books dark
with germs. They were the people who always spoiled the
holy water in the fonts because their fingers weren't
clean . . . That was unchristian of Nancy, and so was
her rage at Paula. She began an act of contrition in her

179

The Hand of God

mind: "Oh, my God, Fm heart'ly sorry for having
offended—"

But Donald interrupted. "I'd like you to play. I know
you must play well, Nancy."

He made'her name sound very nice, as if he liked it.

" She does play well. She's really talented." Paula tried
to be agreeable at last. "Only she never practices. You
know how they are at that age."

She had spoiled everything again.

Nancy rose. And she would have to say another act of
contrition.

"Are you going?" Paula said. "Donald and I are going
to play."

It was probably a sort of invitation. Nancy stayed,
because it would be simple to find God to music. She
looked at her empty hand and opened it.

Donald sat beside Paula and tuned his 'cello.

"It's the nicest time, I think, just before the music
starts and everybody is getting their key. You always
think it's going to be so beautiful then," Nancy said.

Donald said he thought so, too.

They were going to play Chopin nocturnes because they
did not need notes for them, although Paula believed they
were unpardonably sentimental.

"I like them, though, don't you, Nancy?" Donald said.

"Awfully well."

They began to play, and Donald looked at her and did
not smile. He had dark, deep eyes that were beautiful, and
she would remember them, because his thin face was not
at all good-looking otherwise, there were so many lines in
it, and she would like to think of him as being handsome
as possible. There was a rim of light around his head
because he sat near a lamp. It made a halo for him. If he
had a beard he would look rather like God.

God became quite simple to realize. There were the
shapes of the trees that His eyes saw, too, and the blue

1 80

Jane Culvef

color of the night. And this music, pleading as a dove's
song, He knew about.

All of a sudden life seemed so good that it was hard to
believe in, at first, as a marvelous surprise. Best of every-
thing, of course, there was God. And then there was the
world. People like Donald lived in it. And there was
music in it like this, as if harmony reached over every-
thing. It was very easy, not disappointing, even, to forgive
Paula now. Her anger, too, lay underneath the music and
did not matter . . . Nancy would grow older and be
manicured in beauty salons. She would own slippers
trimmed with ostrich feathers. She would be given gar-
denias by young men. And on some summer night she
would go on the river in a canoe, and watch the willow
trees leaning over the banks, and become engaged to a
person who loved her. They would be happy ever after-
wards and have many children. There'd be years and
years as gay as light to live in. And then she would be
lifted into heaven. The stars would lie beneath her then,
and the world so far away that it would look like a map in
a geography — colored countries with lines for rivers run-
ning through, and rough stripes of mountains, and spots of
blue for oceans. It would be so far away that the wonder
in it would not be real, only half-remembered, like a picnic
she had had when she was very young, with nothing left
over from it now, though she knew there had been grapes
and sandwiches and wading . . .

It seemed a sad thing not to remember the times you
had liked, to waste them with forgetting. But that would
not happen any more to Nancy. She would make this
scene real and keep it all her life. She would remember
even the pictures on the walls, and Paula's earrings, and a
theme of this song. And Donald's hands. They were
narrow, with long, strong fingers that had round nails at
the end. And they were very clean/ She watched them for
a long time, stretching on the strings, shaking out music.

181

The Hand of God

When she said good night, she would take his hand for just
a moment . . . And he would lock his 'cello in its case
and close the door and go away. In Chicago he would
laugh with people who had never heard of Nancy. He
would keep their telephone numbers in a little book and
call them any time he liked. He might never think of this
night again . . . Very soon he would turn out to be only
somebody Paula had once been in love with. Tomorrow
and the day after she would play sad Scriabin things on his
account. And then his picture would be put in a bottom
drawer with ice skates and old music, and Paula would
write letters to two or three men and one of them would
come to visit her. They would stay in the music room,
at night, until Paula had to be spoken to.

Their three lives, Donald's and Paula's and Nancy's,
would all be different. They would be aware of Christmas
and summer separately. But now they were together until
the music stopped. This time was much realer than yes-
terday or tomorrow. Nancy listened, and watched Don-
ald's hands, and thought of nothing but now, because it
was a good way to be happy.

But after a little while Paula said they had had enough,
and Donald leaned his 'cello against a chair.

" 'Cellos sound beautiful, I think," said Nancy.

"Another of the 'cello-minded," Paula said.

Nancy rose. She would go before anyone began to be
cross.

Donald rose, too. She looked at his hands. They seemed
remote and private, not for her.

"I'm glad we know each other," he said, and smiled at
her.

"So am I. I'm awfully glad."

Finally she reached out her hand, and he took it. It had
seemed too exciting to come true, but it was happening.
His strong fingers reached around hers. His hand was
warm and real. She looked at his face, and moved a little

182

Jane Culver

toward him. Her heart began to beat faster, to make her
nervous in a pleasant way. She wished he would say her
name again.

"We'll see each other sometime, I know, Nancy."

"Do you really think so?"

"Of course." He answered as if he were sure.

She looked down at their hands. "I suppose I ought to
go," she said.

"It's not very late."

"I know. I expect I'll read in bed ... I wish I had a
good French novel."

The immodest words hung shaking in the air; she could
never, never draw them back again. But somehow she was
not sorry.

The Virgin's statue was very cold when Nancy lifted it.
She counted the money. If she asked someone for thirty
cents she could buy some earrings at Fleming's. Tomorrow
she'd have owned them for a whole day, and Paula would
perhaps have asked to borrow them. For years Paula
hadn't asked to borrow anything of hers, but when she
did, she wouldn't be able to patronize Nancy any more.
They would be equals . . .

But Nancy must think of God, of thorns and crucifixes,
of the Pope's robes and rings. She saw them as if they were
pictures on a postal card, raggedly printed, not nearly
real enough to believe in. She thought of the church,
stained with shadows now, a smell of old air over every-
thing. Little red lights were burning in the gloom, and her
candle had been a long time consumed. There was nothing
left of it but a little pool of wax.

But what of the Poor Souls, who longed to have masses
sung for them? She must think of the smoke, the poor
choked voices crying. Nancy could not hear them. But
downstairs Donald's voice was real.

For a test she opened her hand to see if God would come

183

The Hand of God

to hold it. She waited quite a little while, but He didn't
come. She closed it and caught again the warmth of
Donald's hand.

But what about the Judgment Day?

It was as far away as God.

184

J SHALL DECLINE MY HEAD

by
Nancy Evans

NANCY EVANS (Mrs. L. H. Titterton) was at the beginning
of what promised to be an interesting career as a writer of
fiction when she died in New York in April 1936. Her child-
hood was spent in Dayton, Ohio.

I SHALL DECLINE MY HEAD

NOW in the warm afternoon he was wrapped in a
cocoon of peace and the unfurled tree above the
bench sheltered him. His life lay like a rosary in his
hands. He looked about him and he was eased by the
thought that to the nurses and the children he was a part
of the place — no more than the gravel paths and the close-
cut grass.

When he awoke that morning he had wondered what
had happened. Then he remembered the tree. It had
rained all night, falling through his sleep, and yesterday
afternoon the buds were ready and warm to open. He
rang the bell for Anne and before she could bring his glass
of water he told her to pull the curtains. The sun rayed
across the carpet and he thought that it was like the
flashing of a sword. There could be no doubt! He raised
himself, pressing his hands against the mattress, and while
Anne gathered his clothes he felt his heart flutter as if it
were blown by the wind. He made her hurry and he was
not troubled by her gentleness with his frailty. The day
expanded before him.

He always went out on fine days. He would be impatient
with the ritual of breakfast and when Anne warned him
not to tire himself he would nod obediently like a child
angelic to be gone. And released he would walk happily,
resting from time to time on his smooth stick. When it
was windy he bent double to anchor himself to the pave-
ment. The walk was very important ^and if denied it he
felt aimless as he had in the old days when he stayed away
from the office.

Reprinted from Story, August 1935, by permission of the editors of Story
and of Mr. Lewis H. Titterton.

187

I Shall Decline My Head

He looked across at the house with the two boxed privets
standing like sentinels at the door. But the outside was
less powerful. Sitting there under the chestnut tree with
the luminous flowers above him he felt aloof from his way
of remembering and trying to fathom the past. It was
like being a stranger to himself. When he was inside it was
not so easy. The rooms were unchanged, they were just
as they had been when Eugenia was alive, and they were
like a spell laid upon him. Anne kept the house as she
thought he wanted it to be and she did not know that
the red and green portieres, the Tiffany glass vases in the
damask-walled drawing-room, and the painted fans made
a monument to failure.

Stephen accepted the house and it did not occur to him
to ask that it be different. Indeed he liked it as it was for
it was his own, bought with his money, and the loneliness
was his too, rightly his, as it had been before. But when-
ever he closed the leaf-frosted doors and stood above the
wide steps he felt as if he were winged. The street was a
curtain dropped on his life and if he remembered, it was as
if he were puzzling over the meaning of some story remote
and dim.

The square was an old friend. They shared a secret, the
secret of change, and each though overshadowed was
unshaken. Stephen respected the park and he felt dignified
by the iron fence and the hedge closing out the mushroom
buildings newsprung and arrogant like towers of Babel.
Not even the predatory cleverness of real estate brokers
had destroyed it. Children came through the gates shep-
herded by nursemaids who kept their keys in careful
pockets, but there were few others. The apartment houses
cast shadows, there was the sound of motor cars, and most
of the old houses were gone, but the park remained. It
was a confusion of time.

Sometimes he thought that it was an island lost in a
strange sea. That was when he took the walk through the

188

Nancy Evans

warehouse lined streets, the streets noisy with trucks and
men. He had been there today wandering, a pale anach-
ronism, smelling it and taking it as he went along and fore-
seeing what would be his when he crossed the swift street
and came to his corner. The park was there and when he
saw it with the tree flowering it was a revelation.

The sun went through him like an X-ray. His hands
were transparent, like the fins of a fish seen through
water, and the veins made a design. The fingers were
curved and knobbed and he thought the nails looked
brittle like yellowed ivory. His stick lay beside him on the
bench and his legs were crossed with his hands fallen upon
them. They moved slightly with a life of their own and he
wondered at them holding them in the air to examine.
"The hands of an old man — my hands — " he said.

A boy bent over a wagon in the middle of the path,
stooping there with his feet apart. He looked around and
saw Stephen.

"I fixed it once and now it won't go!" he said.

Stephen leaned forward, "Bring it here," he said. "Per-
haps I can help you." The boy stared at him as if amazed
that he could speak. Another boy came along the path.

"Look, Peter, my wagon's broken!" he called. Then
the two of them turned the wagon upside down disregard-
ing Stephen. It looked odd like that, Stephen thought,
helpless like a beetle on its back. He smiled watching
them and he saw the way Peter's hair made a point in the
little hollow at the back of his neck. He felt as if he were a
part of them, limb of their limb, and feeling that he
drowsed in the sun. After a while the sun changed and he
lowered his head away from the glare.

Stephen saw himself as a young man — Stephen Prentiss,
large-grown and straight. He saw himself fresh from the
war and sorry it was ended when he met her in Virginia.
(If he had gone home he might never have known her!

189

I Shall Decline My Head

She might have lived, lived and died without him, and he
would never have missed her!) But he could not compre-
hend his life lived without Eugenia. "How was I to know
she would never forgive me?" he wondered. "Would I
have been different if I had been born in Kentucky in-
stead of Ohio?"

What was the relation between a man and the place
where he was born? Well, he had been born above the
- Mason and Dixon Line and that was enough for Rich-
mond. He was one of the enemy. He told them how his
father came to settle on that piece of unsurveyed backland
spread out on the folded hills, and he told them how he
had worked and how he bought the land rightly from the
government at public auction. But they didn't listen; it
was enough for them to know that he, Stephen, was born
there.

He remembered the time his father took him back to the
place. He was ten or maybe twelve and they walked a long
distance up a dry creek-bed careful to step on the steady
rocks. Crows made flying shadows and they passed two
or three poor clearings. Once they saw a girl in a blue dress
sitting on the porch of a cabin. Her bare feet hung down
to the ground and behind her a man sagged in the door-
way. Neither of them answered his father's "Howdy!"
and suddenly uneasy Stephen took his father's hand. He
felt that he and not the girl, was sitting there silent.
After that he marveled at his father who had taken them
away from the back-country to the elm-grown town on
the river.

When they got there they found the house like a derelict
with plaster dropped from between the logs and the roof
fallen. His father took him around to the side and showed
him where the staircase to the loft had been and he told
Stephen how he used to run down it and across the snow-
covered yard to the warm kitchen. He carrried his clothes
in a bundle and his feet would sting from the snow.

190

Nancy Evans

They pushed open the springhouse door hanging by one
hinge and they saw a blacksnake stretched on the stones
by the water. Sunlight fell through open places in the roof
and made spots on its back. After that they went to the
pine-ringed place on the hill and Stephen stepped around
the mounds. He thought the earth would give way and he
would fall through. He read the stones but he did not feel
that they belonged to him. "To the memory of Hannah
Prentiss, beloved wife of John Prentiss," he read his
mother's stone and he thought that it leaned over as if it
were tired. And he thought of his two brothers -as two
lambs like the carving on the stone. When he looked at his
father he knew that he was forgotten.

Richmond taught Stephen Prentiss that he was a
Yankee. It reminded him that the first station of the
Underground Railway was in his town and it made him
responsible for that too. After a while he knew what
hatred was like. Living with Eugenia's people he was like a
spy and he asked himself over and over why they had
ever married. He felt himself hiding like a dog skulking
under chairs and he could not remember why he was there.
At first their life was a dream, but slowly, like poison, her
mother's passion worked in her until she almost believed
that Stephen was the murderer of her Confederate
brother. Between them they robbed him of his manhood.
And yet out of some knowledge he understood their hate
and understanding that he knew more than he had ever
thought to learn.

When finally he told her that he must go she went with
him. But it was too late then. His father welcomed them
to the brick house standing in the middle of placid lawns
and Stephen was proud. "She will see that it is good," he
thought. But Eugenia said, "It's as fine a prison as any!"

" She was like a queen," he thought. Anne had little of
that long-limbed grace. Stephen wondered whether his
son would have been like Eugenia. After Anne's birth

191

I Shall Decline My Head

Eugenia said the doctor had warned her, but Stephen
never forgot that he wanted a son. And in New York,
where he made his own way, he had missed his son the
most of all. Stephen Prentiss saw himself as a part of a
great land, strong and forward, leading to a new world
and he wanted his son to carry his name. John, he would
call him for his father, John Prentiss. How else could he
live? People said that Anne was like a son to him. Cer-
tainly she was an able woman — "one of the best publishers
in New York" — and she was good too, a good woman, but
it was not the same. Stephen could not imagine his son
like Anne.

Anne was kind. She always wanted him at the head of
the table, she said she was used to it that way, and he knew
that she was proud of his rare age. She was proud of him
and proud of her way of making him a part, and for her
sake Stephen was glad of his unspotted clothes like the
clothes of youth. He sometimes sat with a mirror and
combed his beard until it was silk-smooth and, even
though his fingers trembled, he knew how to eat without
spilling his food.

Stephen's Latin had given Anne a new sort of respect
for him; it was the sort of respect she would have for a
precocious child. One day Stephen found some of the
Latin books put aside in youth and he felt that they were
an unfinished task before him. He opened one of them but
the words were hieroglyphics. He turned to the title page
and it was like an echo —

P. Virgiln Maronis

Bucolica, Georgica

ET A EN El S

The title page was dated 1857. Stephen thought back
to what he would have been then. He read the preface by
one Francis Bowen and he fingered through the supple-
ment which had been arranged so that "the young student

192

Nancy Evans

may be able to read Virgil as a poet, and find pleasure in
the task, instead of poring over the work of a crabbed and
difficult exercise in Latin." That pleased Stephen and he
ordered a Latin dictionary from the bookshop near the
square. After that he worked tediously back and forth
between the text and the supplement, the supplement
and the dictionary, until finally the first page was his
and the lines moved through his mind like a drum
beating.

He often said the lines aloud partly to make his mem-
ory certain and partly for the exhilaration they made him
feel. One evening before dinner he sat in the library saying
them over and hearing their strange sound. He was facing
the door and suddenly, silhouetted there by the light from
the square, he saw Anne staring at him and he knew that
she was afraid.

"Father!" she came forward. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, Anne, I'm saying my Latin, that's all."
She flashed on the lights and with his fingers between
the pages of the book Stephen spoke to her —

Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso,
Quidve dolens, regina deum tot volvere casus
Insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores
Impulerit: tantaem animis coelestibus irae!

After that Anne would tell her guests — "He has taught
himself, you know. And at his age! He'll be ninety
soon — " Then they would look at him with wonder.

Stephen raised his head and saw the tree. It was like
seeing infinity. He felt buoyant, as if the mistakes of his
life belonged to someone else and he had no thought, only
a sense of deep delight, the same feeling he had known as a
child when he lay in bed watching the lighted steamboats
go down the river. "O world!" he said. He sat like that
long after the children and the nursemaids had gone
across the streets and into the new buildings.

193

I Shall Decline My Head

They were talking and Stephen forgot that he was a
curiosity fragile and ancient as a mummy. He strained his
hearing to the words that glimmered through his deafness.
He could not always hear, and then he would pretend
understanding, smiling when they smiled and looking
grave when they were grave.

"We're in the midst of a revolution — a revolution
against democracy/' the red-faced author said. His
starched shirt bowed out above his waistcoat. "Look at
the farmers out in Iowa and think of what's happening
down in Washington ! "

"Yes, we've seen about enough of what uncontrolled
individualism can do for us. It's nothing but exploita-
tion."

"Jefferson never meant the people to have power," the
young woman replied.

"We must have men who are strong enough to be ruth-
less," the lawyer said. "Democracy is impossible without
a dictator — that's the anomaly! Someone has to force
capital to share with labor or we're lost — a sinking ship."

"It can never be done. Labor can never consume its
produce like a serpent eating its own tail," the author said.

Stephen leaned forward, feeling the carved arms of the
chair beneath his hands. His face flushed and he saw
Anne watching him, cautioning him. She tried to hold
him back but he looked away. "My father had a fine busi-
nes^ trading tobacco up and down the Ohio river," he said.
"I was a boy during the first years of the war, and then
before it was over I went too. When I came back he took
me into the business and we doubled the profits." They
were listening to him. "Everything was fine. I went to
Cincinnati every two or three weeks — I traveled sixty
miles on a river boat — to sell to the wholesalers." Stephen
remembered what it was like walking down the brick-

194

Nancy Evans

paved path to the wharf. "I was very certain, and then
suddenly it was all different." He stopped, out of breath.

"What happened?" the young woman asked. She sat
at his right and when he turned toward her Stephen looked
full into her eyes. He felt confused. What had happened?
He felt as if he had forgotten his name. Then he knew
again and the past broke over him like a wave.

"Banks failed — Jay Cooke failed — prices dropped and
we couldn't sell to the eastern markets. That was in '73.
After that people were out of work and there was trouble
all over the country. Have you ever heard of the Molly
Maguires? Workers organized and in '77 the country was
paralyzed by the great railway strike. Nobody knew what
would happen next, but finally it was settled and the
forces of industry were in control." He paused. "The
trouble was that the war was like a fever; it brought
prosperity and then confusion and after that a panic." He
knew there was more to say but he couldn't think what
it was,

"It's different now," the lawyer said. "It's not the
same — the whole world is upset."

Stephen thought of the time before Cleveland was
elected. How he had despaired! He leaned forward and
they were quiet before his quavering voice, "'Is there
anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new/" He
felt uplifted as if he were a prophet. He glanced trium-
phant about the table to see their acceptance of this
wisdom. "Don't you see?" he was insistent. "The same
things happen over and over — in every age — they hap-
pened in Egypt and Rome, they happened when I was a
young man and now you have it all over again — the same
old problems of bread and men."

The lawyer wiped his mouth, pursing his lips. He held
his waterglass in the ain "Rome fell, sir, maybe that's our
course too!" He smiled, making Stephen know that he
was too old to have judgment as a man. He was a child

195

I Shall Decline My Head

in the company of experience. Made irrelevant, he sat
silent.

While they talked Stephen saw a procession of people
following each other and the generations of men were like a
frieze across his mind; he saw them making the same mis-
takes and he felt himself impotent, caught along in the
parade, moving with that flow of people. "Does it always
seem different and is it always the same?" he wondered.
"Does it have to be done with blood blindly and are there
forces over which man has no more control than over his
own birth?"

He watched them, animated about the table, and he
saw them powerless in the midst of life. They had no
power to save themselves and they were afraid; like Lot's
wife they could only turn and stare.

"I read somewhere that their Chancellor said, 'War is
to man as motherhood is to woman!'"

"They're mad! All Europe is mad!" Anne said.

"It's more complicated than we know; it's rooted deep
in the dissatisfaction of years. What do we know about
Poland? It's a racial problem for which we have no
parallel — we might have had if the Indians hadn't been
quietly annihilated."

"The thing we won't face is that the powers of the
world are bankrupt. All except Russia. At one time or
another all of them have refused their obligations and now
they're against the wall — " the lawyer said.

Stephen thought that their knowledge of their war had
taught them to see the future as if it were already written
in a book. How could they disregard those signs like
clouds in the sky?

"An international government is the only solution."

"Impossible!" Anne exclaimed.

Stephen could not go on with the problem. It was a
labyrinth and he had no thread to lead him to the light.
He sought his memory of the tree; it was as if he needed a

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landmark and he tried to sense it flowering above him.
For an instant it was there and he put back his head and
gazed at the white-yellow flowers glowing in clusters like
lanterns.

After that he did not try to follow. They talked and
he had no wish to hear what they were saying. Once or
twice the young woman spoke to him, doling a suitable
remark separately, and each tiqae he felt humbled by her
kindness.

Finally the women went away leaving their chairs dis-
ordered, and sitting there alone with the men Stephen was
at peace. One of them, an Englishman, drew his chair close.

Stephen motioned to a box on the table. "The vices of
an old man are limited," he said, "but I still have my
cigar after dinner. I pride myself on their quality — per-
haps you will have one with me?" He relished the man's
surprise at his enthusiasm.

They talked of London and Stephen told him what it
was like in 1887 at the time of the Queen's Jubilee. "My
wife and I were there," he said. "We stood on the balcony
of our room and watched the parade pass along the street.
They raised the hotel rates, I remember that, and I remem-
ber I wanted to go on to Paris when they told me. But my
wife wanted to stay!"

They laughed together in the way of men. " It was a fine
sight to see," Stephen said.

Ill

They were gone! During the long waste of the evening
Stephen had sat upright wondering whether Anne would
notice if he were to leave them. He thought how he would
go, quietly without making a stir. There was something
he wanted to hear on the radio — what was it? He recalled
checking the newspaper before dinner. He saw the library
solitary and comforting and he longed to be in his leather
chair. The newspaper was there on the table — What was

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I Shall Decline My Head

it he wanted to hear? Stephen frowned in his effort to
remember and he saw Anne looking at him, solicitous.
Yes, it was music, songs from The Mikado — "a wandering
minstrel 7, a thing of shreds and patches" — that was it!
Did he dare?

But he sat on among them and at the end he got up and
stood at the door with Anne.

Now they were gone. §tephen lay in bed and his eyes
looked with satisfaction at the door closed between him
and the hall. The light by the bed shone down and spot-
lighted his hands moving across the rough-surfaced quilt.
Lying there in his bed, the bed of years, he felt secure in his
being. The tall mahogany posts recognized him and
acknowledged his identity. An elevated sounded and
faded into the silence and Stephen thought that it was
like a rocket spouting in a dark sky. He turned off the
light and lay in the night.

"Eugenia," he said, "I saw a boy today — a boy with
your eyes and your fair hair — "

His heart jerked and he sat startled in his sleep. What
was wrong? He strained to hear but the house was quiet.
Stephen waited taut like one about to run a race. Then,
distinctly, there was the sound of sobbing. It came from
the next room.

"John!" he called. "John! What's the matter?"

The sobs stopped. Stephen called Eugenia but she lay
without moving. The sobs started again, louder now, and
he felt himself jump out of bed and run to the nursery.
The door was open and inside a nightlamp made a blot of
light in the corner.

The room was silent except for the sobbing. Stephen
saw himself dart to the bed and he leaned over it looking
at John. He lay uncovered and his flannel pajamas were
twisted about his body. His hair was damp and his eyes
were black. When he saw Stephen he stopped with his
mouth open.

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Nancy Evans

" Are you ill, John?"

The sobs began once again. "No ... I ... had . . .
a dream . . ."

Stephen was relieved and with that he began to tremble.
" What did you dream, son?" he asked.

"It was about you — " John hesitated, looking up
at him and then he turned over onto his stomach. "I
dreamed you were an old man — I can't remember the
rest," he said.

Stephen smiled, "Well, you see I'm not, and I guess I
shan't be either for a long time. Why, you'll have a boy
of your own before then!"

"Will I be old enough to run a train?"

"Yes, you'll be old enough to run a train and to sail a
boat too."

John lay quiet, amazed with the future.

"Now John, how about some sleep?" Stephen said.

"I think I could go to sleep if I had something to eat —
I'm hungry," John replied.

Stephen knew he should be firm. Eugenia would not
allow it, but dreams were disturbing — "All right," he said,
"if you're really hungry I'll get a glass of milk and some
crackers. Cover up now while I go down to the kitchen."
John smiled and pulled the blanket up to his chin.

Stephen stumbled over the stuffed spaniel lying stiff on
the floor by the banisters. He shrank from it. What
pleasure could Eugenia get from such an effigy of her dead
pet? Stephen was surprised at himself seen angry in the
mirror at the head of the stairs and he stepped softly,
anxious not to wake Eugenia.

It was dark in the lower hall; it was as if he were in a
strange house. He felt along the wall for the button and
when the light came it was like a blow.
. A pile of letters lay on the bench below the hatrack.
The envelopes were small — Eugenia's. What did she say
in those long letters to her family and the Richmond peo-

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I Shall Decline My Head

pie? "The only joy she ever feels is over the arrival of her
mail," he thought.

The kitchen was a cave and he couldn't find the light
cord. He felt like a thief. After a while he began to see
by the light from the street and he found the cracker-tin
in the pantry. He put it on the table and went to the
icebox for the milk. "I must remember to tell him to
drink it slowly," he thought.

He searched for John's mug, the china one with the cat
for a handle, and when he had almost decided to do with-
out it, there it was in the cupboard behind a pile of plates.
It was like finding a treasure. He put it on a tray with the
milk and some crackers.

Stephen started upstairs and then he stopped. "I guess
I might as well have some too," he thought. He got him-
self a glass and somehow that made the thing more regular,
less a conspiracy with John. They were both hungry, that
was all.

He walked up the stairs to the first floor and when he
reached the hall he heard voices in the dining-room. The
red velvet curtains were drawn but he could just see them
sitting about the table. Anne and her people and himself
there at the end. They were talking and laughing while he
looked on. Stephen felt elated like a truant and he tiptoed
down the hall and past the drawing-room so they should
not hear him. "They think they know," he thought. "Let
them talk — mine not theirs — my John!"

He went up the second flight of stairs, past the library
and on up to the floor above. The clock chimed twice as
he opened the nursery door. He was surprised to find the
room dark. Had Eugenia been there?

He pressed the button and put the tray on the table
near the door. "Here we are, my man!" he said, "I'm
going to have some with you." He opened the bottle. " It
was quite an adventure getting it — they were there, and you
should have seen the hatrack stare at me as I passed!"

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Nancy Evans

John said nothing. Stephen took the mug in his
hand and turned towards the bed. "Look!" he said, "I
managed to find your mug — and what a search that
was!"

But the bed was not there! Yes, it was there but not
where it had been before — it stood empty against the wall,
the covers smooth.

"John!"

Stephen put the mug on a chair and he felt himself
stand like stone. Then he began to fumble about the room.
He felt the curtains, he moved the chairs and he opened
the wardrobe. All of the time he cried, "John! John!
Where are you, John ? "

"I must wake Eugenia, she will know," he thought and
he stood gazing about the room. It ignored him, uncaring
of his words as if he had no reason to be there. He called
Eugenia with all his voice, louder and louder, until he
sensed nothing but his own sound.

But she did not come and Stephen saw himself rooted
there waiting. Finally he moved and he got to their room
and looked at the bed. After that he sat on a low chair and
bent over resting his elbows on his knees. He rocked
slowly with his head in his hands, "John, my John,"
"John, John, my son," he repeated like a chant. When he
got up he braced himself against the wall and moved along
to the nursery door.

He stood there and he saw one glass of milk and a plate
of crackers on a table by the hall door and there was
another glass on a chair in the middle of the room. The
milk had spilled on the seat and it made a wet ring.
Stephen thought of the china mug and the glass blurred
through his tears.

He stood like one in a dream. The faded animal parade
marched around the walls of Anne's nursery as it had for
fifty years and Stephen saw that the windowshades were
pricked with points of light. "It's daybreak — I must try

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I Shall Decline My Head

to sleep," he murmured. "Anne would be worried if she
found me."

Stephen got back to the bed and gripping the post he
lifted himself. Stretched there with closed eyes it was as
if he were dead. He thought of the glasses and the tray
in the nursery, "If Anne should find them! Before her — I
must get them in the morning — "

202

REJUVENATION THROUGH JOY

by
Langston Hughes

LANGSTON HUGHES was born in 1902, in Joplin, Mis-
souri. He is the author of The Ways of White Folks, a
volume of short stories from which Rejuvenation through
Joy is taken; The Weary Blues (poems); Not Without
Laughter, a novel; Mulatto, a successful play of the 1935—
1936 theatrical season in New York, etc. He has trans-
lated short stories and poems by Cuban, Mexican, ana
Haitian writers, and is a contributor to New Masses,
Esquire, Scribner's Magazine, The New Republic, etc.

REJUVENATION THROUGH JOY

MR. EUGENE LESCHE in a morning coat, hand-
some beyond words, stood on the platform of
the main ballroom of the big hotel facing Cen-
tral Park at 59th Street, New York. He stood there
speaking in a deep smooth voice, with a slight drawl, to a
thousand well dressed women and some two or three
hundred men who packed the place. His subject was
"Motion and Joy," the last of his series of six Friday
morning lectures, each of which had to do with something
and Joy.

As the hour of his last lecture approached, expensive
chauffeured motors turned off Fifth Avenue, circled
around from the Park, drew up at the 59th Street en-
trance, discharged women. In the elevators leading to
the level of the hotel ballroom, delicate foreign perfumes
on the breasts of befurred ladies scented the bronze
cars.

"I've just heard of it this week. Everybody's talking
about him. Did you hear him before?"

"My dear, I shall have heard all six. ... He sent me
an announcement."

"Oh, why didn't I ... ?"

"He's marvellous!"

"I simply can't tell you ..."

The great Lesche speaking.

As he spoke, a thousand pairs of feminine eyes gazed
as one. The men gazed, too. Hundreds of ears heard,
entranced: Relax and be happy. Let Lesche tell you

From The Ways of White Folks, by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1934 by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Reprinted by permission of and special arrangement
with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorized publishers.

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Rejuvenation through Joy

how to live. Lesche knows. Look at Lesche in a morning
coat, strong and handsome, right here before you. Listen!

At $2.50 a seat (How little for his message!) they
listened.

"J°7>" said the great Lesche, "what is life without
joy? . . . And how can we find joy? Not through sitting
still with our world of troubles on our minds; not through
taking thought — too often only another phrase for brood-
ing; not by the sedentary study of books or pamphlets,
of philosophies and creeds, of ancient lore; not through
listening to me lecture or listening to any other person
lecture," this was the last talk of his series, "but only
through motion, through joyous motion; through life in
motion! Lift up your arms to the sun," said Lesche. "Lift
them up now! Right now," appealing to his audience.
"Up, up, up!"

A thousand pairs of female arms, and some few hun-
dred men's, were lifted up with great rustle and move-
ment, then and there, toward the sun. They were really
lifted up toward Lesche, because nobody knew quite
where the sun was in the crowded ballroom — besides
all eyes were on Lesche.

"Splendid," the big black-haired young man on the
platform said, "beautiful and splendid! That's what
life is, a movement up!" He paused. "But not always
up. The trees point toward the sun, but they also sway
in the wind, joyous in the wind. . . . Keep your hands
skyward," said Lesche, "sway! Everybody sway! To
the left, to the right, like trees in the wind, sway!" And
the huge audience began, at Lesche's command, to sway.
"Feet on the floor," said Lesche, "sway!"

He stood, swaying too.

"Now," said Lesche suddenly, "stop! Try to move
your hips! . . . Ah, you cannot! Seated as you are in
chairs, you cannot! The life-center, the balance-point,
cannot move in a chair. That is one of the great crimes

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Langston Hughes

of modern life, one of the murders of ourselves, we sit
too much in chairs. We need to stand up — no, not now,
my friends." Some were already standing. "Not just
when you are listening to me. I am speaking now of a
way of life. We need to live up, point ourselves at the
sun, sway in the wind of our rhythms, walk to an inner
and outer music, put our balance-points in motion. (Do
you not remember my talk on c Music and Joy'?) Primi-
tive man never sits in chairs. Look at the Indians! Look
at the Negroes! They know how to move from the feet
up, from the head down. Their centers live. They walk,
they stand, they dance to their drum beats, their earth
rhythms. They squat, they kneel, they lie — but they
never, in their natural states, never sit in chairs. They
do not mood and brood. No! They live through motion,
through movement, through music, through joy! (Re-
member my lecture, ' Negroes and Joy'?) Ladies, and
gentlemen, I offer you today — rejuvenation through joy."

Lesche bowed and bowed as he left the platform. With
the greatest of grace he returned to bow again to applause
that was thunderous. To a ballroom that was full of
well-dressed women and cultured men, he bowed and
bowed. Black-haired and handsome beyond words, he
bowed. The people were loath to let him go.

Lesche had learned to bow that way in the circus. He
used to drive the roan horses in the Great Roman Chariot
Races — but nobody in the big ballroom of the hotel
knew that. The women thought surely (to judge from
their acclaim) that he had come fullblown right out of
heaven to bring them joy.

Lesche knew what they thought, too, for within a
month after the closing of his series of Friday Morning
Lectures, they all received, at their town addresses, most
beautifully written personal notes announcing the open-
ing in Westchester of his Colony of Joy for the rebuilding
of the mind, the body, and the soul.

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Rejuvenation through Joy

Unfortunately, we did not hear Lesche's lecture on
"Negroes and Joy" (the third in the series) but he said,
in substance, that Negroes were the happiest people on
earth. He said that they alone really knew the secret of
rhythms and of movements. How futile, he said, to study
Delsarte in this age! Go instead, he said, to Cab Galloway,
Brick Top's, and Bill Robinson! Move to music, he said,
to -the gaily primitive rhythms of the first man. Be
Adam again, be Eve. Be not afraid of life, which is a
garden. Be all this not by turning back time, but merely
by living to the true rhythm of our own age, to music as
modern as today, yet old as life, music that the primitive
Negroes brought with their drums from Africa to
America — that music, my friends, known to the vulgar
as jazz, but which is so much more than jazz that we know
not how to appreciate it; that music which is the Joy of
Life.

His letter explained that these rhythms would play a
great part in leading those — who would come — along
the path to joy. And at Lesche's initial Westchester
colony, the leader of the music would be none other than
the famous Happy Lane (a primitif de luxe), direct from
the Moon Club in Harlem, with the finest Negro band
in America. To be both smart and modern in approaching
the body and soul, was Lesche's aim. And to bring
gaiety to a lot of people who had known nothing more
joyous than Gurdjieff was his avowed intention — for
those who could pay for it.

For Lesche's proposed path to life was not any less
costly than that of the now famous master's at Fontaine-
bleau. Indeed, it was even slightly more expensive. A
great many ladies (and gentlemen, too) who received
Lesche's beautifully written letter gasped when they
learned the size of the initial check they would have to
draw in order to enter, as a resident member, his Colony
of Joy.

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Langston Hughes

Some gasped and did not pay (because they could not),
and so their lives went on without Joy. Others gasped,
and paid. And several (enough to insure entirely Lesche's
first season) paid without even gasping. These last were
mostly old residents of Park Avenue or the better section
of Germantown, ladies who had already tried everything
looking toward happiness — now they wanted to try Joy,
especially since it involved so new and novel a course as
Lesche proposed — including the gaiety of Harlem Negroes,
of which most of them knew nothing except through the
rather remote chatter of the younger set who had prob-
ably been to the Cotton Club.

So Lesche opened up his house on an old estate in
Westchester with a mansion and several cottages thereon
that the crash let him lease for a little or nothing. (Or
rather, Sol, his manager, did the leasing.) Instead of
chairs, they bought African stools, low, narrow, and
backless.

"I got the best decorator in town, too," said Sol, "to
do it over primitive — modernistic — on a percentage of
the profits, if there are any/'

"It's got to be comfortable," said Lesche, "so people
can relax after they get through enjoying themselves."

"It'll be," said Sol.

"We're admitting nobody west of Fifth Avenue," said
Lesche.

"No Broadwayites," said Sol.

"Certainly not," said Lesche. "Only people with souls
to save — and enough Harlemites to save 'em."

"Ha! Ha!" said Sol.

All the attendants were French — maids, butlers, and
pages. Lesche's two assistants were a healthy and hard
young woman, to whom he had once been married, a
Hollywood Swede with Jean Harlow hair; and a young
Yale man who hadn't graduated, but who read Ronald

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Rejuvenation through Joy

Firbank seriously, adored Louis Armstrong, worshipped
Dwight Fisk, and had written Lesche's five hundred
personal letters in a seven-lively-arts Gilbert Seldes style.

Sol, of course, handled the money, with a staff of secre-
taries, bookkeepers, and managers. And Happy Lane's
African band, two tap dancers, and a real blues singer
were contracted to spread joy, and act as the primordial
pulse beat of the house. In other words, they were to
furnish the primitive.

Within a month after the Colony opened in mid-
January, its resident guests numbered thirty-five. Appli-
cations were legion. The demand for places was very
great. The price went up.

"It's unbelievable how many people with money are
unhappy," said Sol.

"It's unbelievable how they need what we got,"
drawled Lesche.

The press agents wrote marvellous stories about Lesche;
how he had long been in his youth at Del Monte a student
of the occult, how he had turned from that to the primi-
tive and, through Africa, had discovered the curative
values of Negro jazz.

The truth was quite otherwise.

Lesche had first worked in a circus. He rode a Roman
chariot in the finale. All the way across the U. S. A. he
rode twice daily, from Indianapolis where he got the job
to Los Angeles where he quit, because nobody knew him
there, and he liked the swimming at Santa Monica —
and because he soon found a softer job posing for the
members of a modernistic art colony who were modeling
and painting away under a most expensive teacher at a
nearby resort, saving their souls through art.

Lesche ate oranges and posed and swam all that sum-
mer and met a lot of nice, rich, and slightly faded women.
New kind of people for him. Cultured people. He met,
among others, Mrs. Oscar Willis of New Haven, one of

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Langston Hughes

the members of this colony of art expression. Her husband
owned a railroad. She was very unhappy. She was lonely
in her soul — and her pictures expressed that loneliness.
She invited Lesche to tea at her bungalow near the beach.

Lesche taught her to swim. After that she was less
unhappy. She began a new study in the painting class.
She painted a circle and called it her impression of Lesche.
It was hard to get it just right, so she asked him to do
some extra posing for her in the late afternoons. And she
paid him very well.

But summers end. Seasonal art classes too, and
Mrs. Willis went back East.

Lesche worked in the movies as an extra. He played
football for football pictures. Played gigolos for society
films. Played a sailor, a cave man, a cop. He studied tap
dancing. He did pretty well as far as earning money
went, had lots of time for cocktails, parties, and books.
Met lots of women.

He liked to read. He'd been a bright boy in high school
back home in South Bend. And now at teas out Wilshire
way he learned what one ought to read, and what one
ought to have read. He spent money on books. Women
spent money on him. He swam enough to keep a good
body. Drank enough to be a good fellow, and acted well
enough to have a job at the studios occasionally. He got
married twice, but the other women were jealous, so di-
vorces followed.

Then his friend Sol Blum had an idea. Sol ran a gym
for the Hollywood elite. He had a newly opened swim-
ming pool that wasn't doing so well. He asked Lesche
if he would take charge of the lessons.

"Don't hurt yourself working, you know. Just swim
around a little and show 'em that it looks easy. And be
nice to the women," Sol said.

The swimming courses boomed. The fees went up.
Sol and Lesche made money. (Lesche got a percentage

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Rejuvenation through Joy

cut.) He swam more and drank less. His body was swell,
even if licker and women, parties and studio lights had
made his face a little hard.

"But he's so damn nice/' the women would say —
who took swimming lessons for no good reason but to be
held up by the black-haired Lesche.

Then one summer Lesche and Sol closed the gym and
went to Paris. They drank an awful lot of licker at Harry's
bar. And at Bricktop's they met an American woman
who was giving a farewell party. She was Mrs. Oscar
Willis, the artist — again — a long way from California.

"What's the idea?" said Lesche. "Are you committing
suicide, Mrs. Willis, or going home, or what? Why a
farewell party?"

"I am retiring from life," said Mrs. Willis, shouting
above the frenzy of the Negro band. "I'm giving up art.
I'm going to look for happiness. I'm going into the colony
near Digne."

"Whose colony?" said Lesche. He remembered how
much colonies cost, thinking of the art group.

"Mogador Bonatz's colony," said Mrs. Willis. "He's
a very great Slav who can do so much for the soul. (Art
does nothing.) Only one must agree to stay there six
months when one goes."

"Is it expensive?" Lesche asked delicately. "I'm
feeling awfully tired, too."

"Only £30 a day," said Mrs. Willis. "Have a drink?"

They drank a lot of champagne and said farewell to
Mrs. Willis while the jazz band boomed and Bricktop
shouted an occasional blues. Then Sol had an idea. After
all, he was tired of gyms — why not start a colony? He
mentioned it to Lesche when they got out into the open
air.

"Hell, yes," said Lesche as they crossed Pigalle. "Let's
start a colony."

From then on in Paris, Sol and Lesche studied soul

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Langston Hughes

cults. By night they went to Montmartre. By day they
read occult books and thought how much people needed
to retire and find beauty — and pay for it. By night they
danced to the Negro jazz bands. And all the time they
thought how greatly they needed a colony.

"You see how much people pay that guy Bonatz?"
said Sol.

"Um-huh!" said Lesche, drinking from a tall glass at
Josephine's. "And you see how much they'll spend on
Harlem jazz, even in Paris?"

"Yeah," said Sol, "we're spending it ourselves. But
what's that got to do with colonies?"

"Looks like to me," said Lesche, "a sure way to make
money would be, combine a jazz band and a soul colony,
and let it roll from there — black rhythm and happy
souls."

"I see," said Sol. "That's not as silly as it sounds."

"Let 'em be mystic and have fun, too," said Lesche.

"What do you mean, mystic?" asked Sol.

"High brow fun," said Lesche. "Like they get from
Bonatz. What do you suppose he's got we can't get?"

"Nothing," said Sol, who learned to sell ideas in Holly-
wood. "Now, you got the personality. With me for
manager, a jazz band for background, and a little show-
manship, it could be a riot."

"A riot is right," said Lesche.

When they returned to America, they stayed in
New York. Sol got hold of a secretary who knew a lot of
rich addresses and some rich people. Together they got
hold of a smart young man from Yale who prepared a
program of action for a high brow cult of joy — featuring
the primitive. Then they got ready to open a Colony.

They cabled Mrs. Willis at Digne for the names of
some of her friends who might need their souls fixed up —
in America. They sent out a little folder. And they had

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the young Yale man write a few articles on Contentment
and Aboriginal Rhythms for Lesche to try on the high
brow magazines.

They really had a lot of nerve.

Lesche learned his lectures by heart that the college
boy wrote. Then, he improvised, added variations of his
own, made them personal, and bought a morning coat.
Nightly he went to Harlem, brushing up on the newer
rhythms. In November, they opened cold in the grand
ballroom of the hotel facing the Park, without even a
try-out elsewhere: Six lectures by Eugene Lesche on
Joy in Relation to the Mind, Body, and Soul.

"Might as well take a big chance," said Sol. "Win
or lose."

They won. In Sol's language, they wowed 'em. When
the Friday Morning Series began, the ballroom was half
full. When it ended, it was crowded and Sol had already
signed the lease for the old Westchester estate.

So many people were in need of rejuvenating their
souls and could seemingly still afford to pay for it that
Sol gave up the idea for returning immediately to his
gym in Hollywood. Souls seemed more important than
bodies.

"How about it, Lesche?"

The intelligentsia dubbed their highly publicized efforts
neo-paganism; others called it one more return to the
primitive; others said out loud, it was a gyp game. Some
said the world was turning passionate and spiritual; some
said it was merely a sign of the decadence of the times.
But everybody talked about it. The papers began to
write about it. And the magazines that winter, from the
Junior League Bulletin to the Nation, even the New
Masses, remarked — usually snootily — but nevertheless
remarked — about this Cult of Joy. (Harlem Hedonism,
the Forum called it.) Lesche's publicity men who'd
started it all, demanded higher wages, so Sol fired them.

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Langston Hughes

The thing went rolling of its own accord. The world was
aware — of Joy! The Westchester Colony prospered.

Ten days before the January opening of the Colony,
the huge mansion of the once aristocratic estate hummed
with activity. It looked like a Broadway theatre before
a premiere. Decorators were working for big effects.
(They hoped House and Garden, Vogue, or Vanity Fair
would picturize their super-modernistic results.) The
house manager, a former hotel-head out of work, was
busy getting his staff together — trying to keep them
French — for the swank of it.

The bed-rooms were receiving special attention. At
Lesche's, sleep also was to be a joy. And each private
bathroom was being fitted with those special apparatus
at colonies necessary for the cleansing of the body — for
Sol and Lesche had hired a doctor to tell them what the
best cults used.

"Body and soul," said Sol. "Body and soul."

"Gimme the body," said Lesche, "and let the Yale
man take care of the soul."

Occult assistants, chefs and waitresses, masseurs and
hairdressers, began to arrive — for the house was to be
fully staffed. And there were plenty of first-class people
out of work and willing to take a chance, too.

Upstairs in a third floor room, Lesche, like an actor
preparing for a role, studied his lectures word for word.
His former wife listened to him daily, reciting them by
heart, puzzling over their allusions.

In another room was the Yale man, surrounded by books
on primitive art, spiritual guidance, Negro jazz, German
eurythmics, psychoanalysis, Yogi philosophy, all of
Krishnamurti, half of Havelock Ellis, and most of Freud,
besides piles of spirituals, jazz records, Paul Robeson,
and Ethel Waters, and in the midst of all this — a type-
writer. There sat the Yale man creating lectures —

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Rejuvenation through Joy

preparing, for a month in advance, twenty-minute daily
talks for the great Lesche.

On the day when the Negroes arrived for their rehears-
als, just prior to the opening of the place, Sol gave them
a lecture. " Fellows/' he said, addressing the band, "and
Miss Lucas," to the blues-singing little coal-black dancer,
"listen! Now I want to tell you about this place. This
will not be no night club. Nor will it be a dance hall.
This place is more like a church. It's for the rebuilding
of souls — and bodies. It's for helping people. People
who are wore out and tired, sick and bored, ennui-ed in
other words, will come here for treatments, the kind of
treatments, that Mr. Lesche and I have devised, which
includes music, the best music, jazz, real primitive jazz
out of Africa (you know, Harlem) to help 'em learn to
move, to walk, to live in harmony with their times and
themselves. Now, I want you all to be ladies and gentle-
men (I know you are), to play with abandon, to give 'em
all you got, but don't treat this like a rough house, nor
like the Moon Club either. We allow only champagne
drinkers here, cultured ladies, nice gentlemen, the best,
the very best. Park Avenue. You know what I mean.
. . . Now this is the order of the day. In the morning
at eleven, Mr. Lesche will lecture in the Palm Garden,
glass-enclosed, on the Art of Motion and Rhythm. You,
Miss Tulane Lucas, and you two tap dancers there, will
illustrate. You will show grace in modern movements,
aliveness, the beat of Africa as expressed through the
body. Mr. Lesche will illustrate, too. He's one of Bill Rob-
inson's disciples, you know! You all know how tap-
dancing has preserved Bill. A man of his age, past fifty!
Well, we want to show our clients how it can preserve
them. But don't do no stunts now, just easy rhythm
stuff. We got to start 'em off slow. Some of 'em is old.
And I expect some is Christian Scientists. . . . Then

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Langston Hughes

in the late afternoon, we will have tea-dancing, just for
pleasure. We want to give 'em plenty of exercise, so
they won't be bored. And so they will eat. We expect
to make money on our table, and on massages, too. In
the evening for one hour, put on the best show you got,
singing and dancing — every week we gonna bring up
new specialties — send 'em to bed feeling happy, before
Mr. Lesche gives his goodnight and sweet dreams talk.
. . . Now, you boys understand, you'll be off early here,
by ten or eleven. Not like at the Club. You got your
own cottage here on the estate to live in, you got your
cars. Don't mind you driving to town, if you want to,
but I want you back here for the eleven o'clock services
in the morning. And I don't want you sleepy, either.
This house is dedicated to Joy, and all who work here
have got to be bright and snappy. That's what our
people are paying for. . . . Lesche! Where is Lesche,
Miss Boxall?"

The secretary looked startled. "He was in the halls
talking to the new French maids."

"Well, get him in here. Tell him to explain to these
boys how he wants to fix up his routine for his lectures.
Let's get down to business now."

"What kind of clothes you want us to wear?" Happy
Lane, the Negro leader, asked.

"Red," said Sol. "Red is the color of Joy."

"Lord!" said the blues singer, "I'm too dark to wear
red!"

"That's what we want," said Sol, "darkness and light!
We want to show 'em how much light there is in darkness."

"Now, here!" said the blues singer to herself, "I don't
like no white folks talkin' 'bout me being dark."

"Lesche," Sol called to his partner strolling in through
the door, "let's get going."

"O. K.," Lesche said. "Where's my boy?" meaning
the Yale man.

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Rejuvenation through Joy

"Right here, Gene."

"Now, how does that first lecture go?"

"My Gawd!" said Sol.

The Yale man referred to his notes. "Joy" he read,
"Joy, springing from the dark rhythm of the primitive. . . ."

"Oh, yes," said Lesche, turning to the band. "Now
for that, give me Mood Indigo, you know, soft and synco-
pated, moan it soft and low. Then you, Miss Lucas," to
the dancer, "you come gliding on. Give it plenty hip
movement. I want 'em to learn to use their life-center.
Then I'm gonna say . . . what's that, boy-friend?" to
the Yale man.

"See how the ..."

"Oh, yes . . . See how the Negroes live, dark as the
earth, the primitive earth, swaying like trees, rooted in the
deepest source of life. . . . Then I'm gonna have 'em all
rise and sway, like Miss Lucas here. . . . That ought
to keep 'em from being bored until lunch time."

"Lawd," said Miss Lucas, muttering to herself, "what
is this, a dancing school or a Sunday school?" And louder,
"All right, Mr. Lesche, sounds like it might be a good
act."

"Act, nothing," said Sol. "This is the art of life."

"Must be, if you say so," said Miss Lucas.

"Well, let's go," commanded the great Lesche. "Let's
rehearse this first lecture now. Come on, boys."

The jazz band began to cry Mood Indigo in the best
manner of the immortal Duke Ellington. Lesche began
to speak in his great soft voice. Bushy-haired Tulane
Lucas began to glide across the floor.

"Goddamn!" said Sol, "It's worth the money!"

"Hey! Hey!" said Miss Lucas.

" Sh-ss-ss-s ! " said Lesche. "Be dignified . . . rooted
in the deepest source of life . . . er-r-r?"

"...(?, early soul in motion . . ." prompted the
Yale man.

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Langston Hughes

"0, early soul . . ." intoned Lesche.

The amazing collection of people gathered together in
the Colony of Joy astounded even Lesche, whose very
blase-ness was what really made him appear so fresh. His
thirty-seven clients in residence came almost all from
families high in the Social Register, and equally high
in the financial world. When Mrs. Carlos deed's check
of entrance came in, Sol said, "Boy, we're made" . . .
for of society there could be no higher — blue blood straight
out of Back Bay.

The opening of the Colony created a furor among all
the smart neurasthenics from Park Avenue right on up
to New England. Dozens applied too late, and failed to
get in. Others drove up daily for the lectures.

Of those who came, some had belonged formerly to the
self-denial cults; others to Gurdjieff; others had been
analyzed in Paris, Berlin, Vienna; had consulted Adler,
Hirschfeld, Freud. Some had studied under famous Yogi.
Others had been at Nyack. Now they had come to the
Colony of Joy.

Up and down Park Avenue miraculous gossip flew.

Why, Mrs. Charles Duveen Althouse of Newport and
Paris — feeling bad for years — is said to look like a cherub
since she's gone into the Colony. . . . My dear, the
famous Oriental fan-painter, Vankulmer Jones — he's
another man these days. The rhythms, he says, the
rhythms have worked wonders! And just the very pres-
ence of Lesche . . . Nothing America has ever known —
rumor flew about the penthouses of the East River —
nothing is equal to it. ... The Baroness Langstrund
gasped in a letter to a talkative friend, "My God, it's
marvellous!"

Far better than Indian thought, Miss Joan Reeves,
the heiress of Meadow Brook, was said to have said by
her best friends. "The movement is amazing."

Almost all of them had belonged to cults before — cults

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Rejuvenation through Joy

that had never satisfied. Some had even been injured by
them. To a cult that based the soul-search on self-denial —
deny what you like best, have it around you all the time,
but never touch it, never — then you will be strong —
Mrs. Duveen Althouse had belonged. She denied choc-
olates for a whole year; kept fresh candy sitting in each
corner of her boudoir — resisted with all her soul — and
at the end of a year was a wreck.

Mr. Jones, the fan-painter, had belonged to a group
on Cape Cod that believed in change through change:
that is, whatever you want to be, you can. And all the
members, after they had paid their fees, were told by
the Mystic Master to change their names to whatever
they most wished to be, or whoever, past or present, they
admired. Some, without much depth, chose Napoleon
or Cleopatra. But others, Daphne or Zeus or Merry
del Val. Mr. Jones chose Horse. He'd always wanted to
be an animal, to possess their strength and calm, their
vigor, their ways. But after a whole summer at the Cape
he was even less of a horse than before. And greatly mos-
quito bitten.

Mrs. Ken Prather, II, a member of Lesche's group,
had once spent entire months kneeling holding her big
toes behind her, deep in contemplation. A most hand-
some Indian came once a week to her home on East 64th,
for an enormous consideration, and gave her lessons in
silence, and in positions of thought. But finally she just
couldn't stand it any more.

Others of the Colony of Joy had been Scientists in their
youth. Others had wandered, disappointed, the ways of
spiritualism, never finding soul-mates; still others had
gazed solemnly into crystals, but had seen nothing but
darkness; now, they had come to Joy!

How did it happen that nobody before had ever offered
them Rejuvenation through Joy? Why, that was what
they had been looking for all these years! And who would

220

Langston Hughes

have thought it might come through the amusing and
delightful rhythms of Negroes ?
Nobody but Lesche.

In the warm glass-enclosed Palm Garden that winter,
where the cupid fountain had been replaced by an en-
largement of an African plastic and where a jazz band
played soft and low behind the hedges, they felt (those
who were there by virtue of their check books) all
a-tremble in the depths of their souls after they had done
their African exercises looking at Lesche — those slow,
slightly grotesque, center-swaying exercises that he and
Tulane Lucas from the Moon Club had devised. When
they had finished, the movement, the music, and Lesche's
voice, made them feel all warm and close to the earth,
and as though they never wanted to leave the Colony of
Joy or to be away from their great leader again.

Of course, there were a few who left, but their places
were soon filled by others more truly mystic in the prim-
itive sense than those whose arteries had already hard-
ened, and who somehow couldn't follow a modern path
to happiness, or sit on African stools. Clarence Lochard,
for one, with his spine, had needed actual medical treat-
ment not to be found at the Colony of Joy. And
Mrs. J. Northcliff Hill, in the seventies, was a little too
old for even the simple exercises that led to center-swaying,
But for the two or three who went away, four or five
came. And the house was full of life and soul. Every
morning, ensemble, they lifted up their hands to the sun
when the earth-drums rang out — and the sun was Lesche,
standing right there.

Lesche was called the New Leader. The Negro band-
master was known as Happy Man. The dancers were
called the Primitives. The drummer was ritualized as
Earth-Drummer. And the devotees were called New
Men, New Women — for the Yale man had written in

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Rejuvenation through Joy

one of the lectures, "and the age-old rhythm of the earth
as expressed by the drums is also the ever new rhythm of life.
And all you who walk to it, dance to it, live to it, are New
Men and New Women. You shall call one another, not by
the old names but only New Man, New Woman, New One,
forgetting the past."

They called Lesche, Dear New Leader.

"For," continued the gist of that particular lecture,
"newness, eternal renewal, is the source of all growth, all
life, and as we grow from day to day here in this colony, we
shall be ever new, ever joyous and new"

"Gimme sweet jazz on that line," Lesche had instructed
at rehearsals. So on the thrilling morning of that lecture,
the saxophones and clarinets moaned so beautiful and
low, the drum beats called behind the palms with such
wistful syncopation, that everybody felt impelled to
move a new way as Lesche said, "Let us rise this morning
and do a new dance, the dance of our new selves." And
thirty-nine life-centers began to sway with the greatest
of confidence in the palm court, for by now many inhibi-
tions had fallen away, and the first exercise had been
learned perfectly.

Who knows how long all might have gone on splendidly
with Lesche and Sol and their Colony of Joy had not a
most unhappy monster entered in to plague them. "The
monster that's in every man," wrote the Yale man later
in his diary, "the monster of jealousy — came to break
down joy."

For the various New Ones became jealous of Lesche.

" It's your fault," stormed Sol. " Your fault. I told you
to treat 'em all the same. I told you if you had to walk in
the snow by moonlight, walk with your used-to-be wife, and
leave the rest of these ladies alone. You know how women
are. I told you not to start that Private Hour in the after-
noon. I knew it would make trouble, create jealousy."

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Langston Hughes

For out of the Private Hour devoted to the problems
of each New One once a fortnight, where Lesche never
advised (he couldn't) but merely received alone in con-
fidence their troubles for contemplation, out of this pri-
vate hour erelong, howls, screams, and recriminations
were heard to issue almost daily. And in late March,
New Woman Althouse was known to have thrown an
African mask at New Leader Lesche because he kept her
waiting a whole hour overtime while he devoted his
attentions to the Meadow Brook heiress, New Woman
Reeves.

"My Gawd!" said Sol, "the house is buzzing with
scandal — I heard it all from Vankulmer Jones."

"These damn women," said Lesche, "I got to get rid
of some of these women."

"You can't," said Sol. "They've all paid."

"Well, I will," said Lesche, "I'm tired! Why even my
divorced wife's in love with me again. Fire her, will
you?"

"Don't be foolish," said Sol, "she's a good secretary."

"Well, I'm gonna quit," said Lesche.

"You can't," said Sol. "I got you under contract."

"Oh, yeah?" said Lesche. "Too much is enough! And
sometimes enough is too much! I'm tired, I tell you."

So they fell out. But Lesche didn't quit. It might have
been better if he had, for Spring that year was all too
sudden and full of implications. The very earth seemed
to moan with excess of joy. Life was just too much to
bear alone. It needed to be shared, its beauty given to
others, taken in return. Its eternal newness united.

To the Colony, Lesche was their Leader, their life. And
they wanted him, each one, alone. In desperation, he
abolished the Private Hour. But that didn't help any.
Mrs. Duveen Althouse was desperately in love with him
now. (She called him Pan.) Miss Joan Reeves could not
turn her eyes away. (He was her god.) Mrs. Carlos Gleed

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Rejuvenation through Joy

insisted that he summer at her island place in Maine.
Baroness Langstrund announced quite definitely she
intended to many him — whereupon Mrs. Althouse, who
had thrown the mask, threatened, without ceremony,
to wring at once the Baroness's neck. Several other New
Ones stopped speaking to each other over Lesche. Even
the men members were taking sides for or against Lesche,
or against each other. That dear soul Vankulmer Jones
said he simply couldn't stand it any more — and left.

In the city, the Broadway gossip columns got hold of
it — this excitement over Joy — and began to wisecrack.
Then suddenly a minister started a crusade against the
doings of the rich at the Colony and the tabloids sent
men up to get pictures. Blackmailers, scenting scandal,
began to blackmail. The righteous and the racketeers
both sprang into action. And violets bloomed in April.

Sol tore his hair. "We're ruined!"

"Who cares?" said Lesche, "let's go back to the Holly-
wood gym. We made plenty on this. And I've still got
the Hispano Mrs. Hancock donated."

"But we could've made millions."

"We'll come back to it next year," said Lesche. "And
get some fresh New Ones. I'm damn tired of these old
ones." And so they bickered.

But the final fireworks were set off by Miss Tulane
Lucas, the dusky female of the Primitives. They began
over the Earth-Drummer, and really had nothing to do
with the Colony. But fire, once started, often spreads
beyond control.

The drummer belonged to Miss Lucas. But when Spring
came, he got a bad habit of driving down to New York
after work every night and not getting back till morning.

"Another woman," said Tulane to herself, "after all
I've done." She warned him, but he paid her no mind.

One April morning, just in time to play for the eleven
o'clock lecture, with Lesche already on the platform, the

224

Langston Hughes

little colored drummer arrived late and, without even
having gone by the cottage to greet Tulane — rushed into
the palm court and took his place at the earth-drums.

"Oh, no!" said Tulane suddenly from among the palms
while all the New Ones, contemplating on their African
stools, started at the unwonted sound. "Oh, no, you
don't," she said. "You have drummed for your last
time." And she took a pistol from her bosom and shot.

Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang!

Screams rent the palm court. As the drummer fled,
bang! a bullet hit somewhere near his life-center, but he
kept on. Pandemonium broke out.

"My Gawd!" said Sol. "Somebody grab that gun."
But Mrs. Duveen Althouse beat him to it. From Tulane,
she snatched the weapon for herself and approached the
great Lesche.

"How right to shoot the one you love!" she cried.
"How primitive, how just!" And she pointed the gun
directly at their dear Leader.

Again shots rang out. One struck the brass curve of
the bass horn, glanced upward toward the ceiling, and
crashed through the glass of the sun court, showering
slivers on everybody.

But by that time, Baroness Langstrund had thrown
herself on Duveen Althouse. "Aw-oo!" she screamed.
"You wretch, shooting the man I love." Her fingers
sought the other's hair, her nails tore at her eyes. Mean-
while, Mrs. Carlos Gleed threw an African stool.

Mrs. Althouse fired once more — but Lesche had gone.
The final bullet hit only the marble floor, flew upward
through the piano, and sounded a futile chord.

By this time, Sol had grabbed the gun. The screams
died. Somebody separated the two women. Little French
maids came running with water for the fainting. Happy
Lane emerged from behind the bass-viol, pale as an
African ghost — but nobody knew where the rest of the

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Rejuvenation through Joy

jazz band had disappeared, nor Lesche either. They were
long gone.

There was no lecture that morning. Indeed, there
were never any more lectures. That was the end of the
Colony of Joy.

The newspapers laughed about it for weeks, published
pictures and names of the wealthy inmates; the columnists
wisecracked. It was all very terrible! As a final touch,
one of the tabloids claimed to have discovered that the
great Lesche was a Negro — passing for white!

226

THE POOR RELATION AND
THE SECRETARY

by
Naomi Mitchison

MRS. NAOMI HALDANE MITCHISON, born in England in
is the author of a remarkable historical novel with a
$rd century B. c. Scythian-Greek-Egyptian setting, The
Corn King and the Spring Queen, and several volumes of
short stories, among them Black Sparta, When the Bough
Breaks, and The Delicate Fire; also the novel Cloud
Cuckoo Land.

THE POOR RELATION AND THE SECRETARY

UNTIL they were a mile outside Rome, Claudia kept
the curtains of the litter drawn. She did not like
crowds and was bad at answering back if someone
was rude. Those always seemed to be the moments the
bearers chose to go slowest. Naturally she had been given
the oldest and slowest bearers, but she did not expect
anything else; she was lucky to have that. In the half light
of the jolting litter, she looked through her tablets, con-
sidering the long list of things she was to do when she got
to the country house. Which room Lady Quintilia was to
have, and which Lady Rufa, and all the rest of them;
what curtains were to go where; what provisions she was
to get in; which of the country slaves were to be told to do
what; she was to see that the fountains were started — no,
Phillos could do that, it was a man's job — and have the
aviary cleaned up and if necessary re-stocked; the garden
was to look nice for the guests. And so on and so forth.
She thought she could manage it all, though she had not
been given much time. They wouldn't for instance notice
about the aviary for days! But she was a competent
person, as they all said. If one was a poor relation whose
parents had been Unfortunate — as one always said — dur-
ing the Civil Wars, it was as well to be competent. Or
beautiful. But she was not that. And the family standard
was particularly high. Was there not the exquisite Lady
Norbana whom the Emperor himself — well, better not
mention it perhaps, considering she was to be married next
month. Some conventions are better kept up.

Once out on the road beyond the houses, she drew the

From The Delicate Fire by Naomi Mitchison. Reprinted by permission of
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

229

The Poor Relation and the Secretary

curtains a little. Phillos, the secretary, was walking level
with her. The baggage mules were behind. She looked out
across acres of green vineyard, not very interesting, but
still, the country would be pleasant after all these months
in town. Phillos looked up and smiled a little, but said
nothing; it was not his place to speak first. He seemed to
be walking rather lame. She asked him if he would see to
the fountains, and he said yes, but would she give him
authority? The country slaves never saw any reason why
they should do what he said. "It's bad enough with the
bailiff," he said, "but at any rate they know I'm there to
do accounts. Still, he makes it as difficult as possible."

Claudia leaned over the edge of the litter and laughed.
"He's a horrid man!" she said, "but I don't mind dealing
with him if there's any special difficulty, Phillos. He
remembers father, so he's still got a little respect for me!"

"Thank you, Miss Claudia," said Phillos gratefully,
"I think I may want a little help. It was bad enough last
time. I can't work when he stands over me and grins."

A flock of sheep went by just then, raising a cloud of
dust. She drew her curtains against it. The bearers swore
and jolted worse than ever. She shut her eyes for a few
minutes; she was sorry for her cousins' secretary. A dog's
life, being a slave, if you had any kind of perceptions and
fine feelings. She wondered if they were going to free him.
Perhaps later on, when he was middle-aged; then he would
stay on with them. Probably he was saving up to buy his
freedom now, but it would mean a good deal of money,
more than he was likely to have for a long time. Middle
age. A grim business to grow old with no home of your
own, no one to look after you or be kind to you. One would
go on being competent up to middle age. But what about
later on? When all the young cousins were married off,
like Norbana, before or after the Emperor — well, well, she
mustn't be catty about it! But it must be wonderful to
have men wanting you like that. Anyone wanting you for

230

Naomi Mitchison

anything except — well, competence. Somebody wanting
you just to be kind to them.

When she drew the curtains again, the hills were in
sight. She cried out with pleasure: "Aren't they lovely,
Phillos! So cool and big and shadowy! It makes one think
one's a child again."

He looked at them unenthusiastically. Abruptly he
said : " I'd like some day to see the Greek hills. My mother
used to tell me about them. Much higher than these
and more beautiful shapes. But I don't suppose I ever
shall."

She hardly knew what to say to that. It was such an
odd outburst, from Phillos of all people, who one never
remembered was a Greek at all! Then she noticed he was
really walking very lame. "What's the matter?" she said.
"Have you cut yourself?"

"No," he said. "It's only my knee, Miss Claudia. It
goes like that after a few miles."

"Does it hurt?"

"Not very much," he said, "thank you all the same for
asking."

She was rather distressed, though; the man looked
whiteish, like someone in pain. "You'd better get up into
the litter for a mile or two; that'll ease it." She called
down to the bearers to halt. "Get in at the other end;
it'll take you easily."

Phillos protested, and so, more loudly, did the litter
bearers, one of whom produced a sore shoulder.

"Nonsense," said Claudia. "Am I the mistress here, or
not? No, you are merely being lazy! Change to the other
pole. Men that can't carry a litter are only fit for field
work — shall I tell Lady Quintilia that? Pretty it would be
for your mistress's secretary to be lamed just because you
are a set of good-for-nothing dogs! Up you get, Phillos."
The litter jolted sullenly on again. "I've got that much
authority," she said, satisfied. "Now, Phillos, what about

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The Poor Relation and the Secretary

this knee? What's wrong with it? Why haven't I known
before?"

"It's an old blow," he said. "Really Miss Claudia, you
shouldn't have bothered! It's only the body. The stupid,
unimportant body."

"Don't go trying any of your stoicism on me!" said
Claudia. "I've read all the books. A pack of nonsense.
One can't get away from the body. When was it done?"

"Some time ago," he said, "my last place. One must
have some philosophy, and that's the only one for slaves."

"If I were you," said Claudia, "I should have a nice
exciting mystery religion. However, I can't talk, I haven't
got one myself! What about these Christians one's begin-
ning to hear about? — wouldn't that be comforting?"

"A lot of dirty Jews!"

"Well, very likely. They're all much alike, I dare say.
Or there's Isis. I've got a certain feeling for Isis myself.
If one were the kind of person who liked religions. — But
about this knee, did someone hit you?"

"Yes, Miss Claudia. My master. I suppose I'd been
stupid. But he did know where to get one. My knee
swelled and I was lame for a long time. Now it only gets
me when I'm tired."

He put both hands down on his knee, pressing over it;
he had broad, clean hands, each finger separately tensed.
The other leg was curled under him and he sat rather up-
right, so as not to take up too much room. She reached
over and handled the knee-cap herself; it was rather
swollen. She was used to dealing with sick slaves — it was
part of her job. But he leant back away from her, half
shutting his eyes, as though abstracting himself, leaving
nothing with her but the knee. His legs were very dusty
from the road, but not stickily engrained like some of the
slave skins she had to handle.

When they got to the villa, she became immersed in
jobs, and was startled to find it was supper-time when they

232

Naomi Mitchison

came to tell her. She had rather enjoyed being busy and
competent and talking to a lot of people; she wanted to go
on talking. "Tell the secretary he is to have his supper
with me," she said, "I've a lot to talk over with him."
Phillos came in shyly, bringing in his tray, which looked
rather unappetising. "This is very kind of you, Miss
Claudia," he said. "Nonsense!" she said, rather surprised,
because she had really had no idea of being kind, and told
them sharply to bring him up the remains of the bird she
was having. She told him all the things she had been
doing and the obstacles which she had been successfully
overcoming. He had started on the estate accounts, but
was a little depressed about them. His knee seemed to
have settled down again, and he didn't take her suggestion
of a hot poultice. After a time they drifted into a rather
pleasant philosophical discussion, seasoned with quota-
tions. At dusk they wished each other good night and
separated.

Claudia was enjoying herself. She liked having this
large house to herself before the others arrived. She went
through all the rooms with a lamp, talking to herself, wel-
coming or speeding imaginary guests, not quite daring to
go the whole way and make herself husband or children.
She wished the others weren't coming to-morrow to shatter
her images against their own brilliant reality.

The next morning she got up early and went on putting
things to order; she found Phillos had got the fountains to
work, which reminded her to go and tackle the bailiff for
him. The man was, as usual, being extremely rude and
obstructive about his accounts, but caved in to her at
once, with reminiscences of her father. They walked out
of the room together and as he passed the secretary
crouched over his desk and the rows of semi-legible figures,
he tweaked his ear rather hard. Phillos said nothing, only
frowned more deeply, and Claudia said nothing either, but
it annoyed her. "That impudent little Greek!" said the

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The Poor Relation and the Secretary

bailiff, "I can't stand the fellow. Why Lady Quintilia has
a man like that! Ah, your father, now, he always stuck to
his own people and didn't get cheated out of a quarter so
much." But Claudia preferred to discuss with him the
rapid bedding out of damask roses and blue daisies to fill
up the gaps in the garden.

She put flowers in the rooms, changed her dress and pre-
pared to receive the cousins, but instead got a messenger
on mule-back with a letter to say that they weren't coming
till the next day, after all. A party had materialized. They
did hope she wasn't too bored! She sent the messenger in
for a drink, and stood for a moment with the letter in her
hand. No, she wasn't bored! She could have her own
shadow party again to-night. And this afternoon? She
would go out into the hills where she and her cousins had
played hide-and-seek and teased the shepherds — a long
time ago, when they were all equals, more or less. A long
time ago, under old Emperor Claudius, before the worst of
the Troubles. She picked up her cloak and started out
through the garden, but she walked slower and slower and
at last came to a stop. She had discovered that she was
rather frightened of going by herself into the hills now. So
many evil things had happened since those days; she
couldn't go all alone and be play-haunted by herself fifteen
years ago! She ran back suddenly to the house and into the
old library where the secretary was still in the thick of
accounts. "They are not arriving till to-morrow," she
said, "and I am going to walk in the hills. Escort me,
please. There are dogs." Obediently Phillos put his lists
to one side and got up. They went through the garden
and out into the hills. She found she remembered the paths
wonderfully well. She was not frightened now.

Phillos followed a couple of paces behind, as was proper.
Suddenly she wondered if it was bad for his knee, and
turned sharply to look, at a crossways between hill pasture
and olives. He did not seem to be walking lame, and he

234

Naomi Mitchison

had his hands full of flowers, the dry, long-stemmed sum-
mery things from the sides of the paths and cracks in the
walls, coloured daisies and thin red and purple spikes.
As she looked at them, his fingers closed on them with
whitening knuckles. She smiled: "We'll go down through
the fields here; there used to be a stream. You'll find

more."

It was a beautiful pasture, with oaks and a few great
rocks, not yet cropped dry. Half-way down she stopped in
a patch of shade under one of the trees and lay down on
the grass. Her hands fingered about among the warm
grass blades, just as they had done fifteen years ago. The
smell of wild dust and leaves was the same. Phillos stood
in the edge of the shade, rubbing the bunch of pretty
colours against his face.. She beckoned him to come farther
under the tree and sit down. He stretched out his knee a
little stiffly among the grasses; she felt suddenly rather
guilty and spoke friendlily to him about the country, and
poked a cricket to jump towards his hand. He rolled over
on to his face, his head turned away from her, and lay
breathing in the summer out of the hillside. After a time
she became aware, more by his silence than by any noise,
that he was crying. He had probably strained the knee
after all. She wondered how it had been damaged. The
idiocy of some masters, spoiling a valuable possession,
changing the thing from useful to less useful, the man from
friend to enemy! Even women were sometimes both fools
and cruel with their slaves, but at least they didn't, on the
whole, do things to them when they were drunk!

She reached over and patted his head, which twitched
and withdrew itself like a snail's eye. "My poor Phillos!"
she said, "is it hurting so much?" A kind of negative
movement appeared in the body. "Was it the bailiff
then?" she asked. "You shouldn't take any notice of him.
He's an uneducated man, honest, rough. He doesn't
understand you're a person, at all." Phillos answered with

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The Poor Relation and the Secretary

something quite inaudible, but that had the effect of a
child's unhappiness. She moved nearer and put her hand
on his head. For a moment it quivered, too; then lay
passive under her fingers like a tame beast. "Poor thing!"
she said, rubbing into the base of the hair and then down
onto the forehead, a new surface, warmer and softer. It
amused her to go on. Suddenly she remembered coming
here before with a puppy the children had, and stroking it
as it lay on the grass, panting after play; that was the
touch that had come back into her fingers. They felt on,
checking at a line of eyebrow, and stroked it to the corner
of the eye; the skin stayed curiously still — she thought he
must be holding his breath. Then at the corner of the eye
they came on something fresh, the wet of tears, checking
the finger tips with something new and unlike the puppy
that had grown up into a big hound and died years and
years ago. Something human.

"What is it?" she said, "has someone been unkind to
you? Tell me, Phillos." And again: "You'd better tell me.
Probably I can put it right." He was one of her cousin's
most valuable slaves; she mustn't let him be damaged.
A hand came up over the face and covered hers, pulling
at it a little. For a moment she almost lost her balance,
leaning over, but then recovered it. She felt his lips against
the inside of her fingers: very odd, a man's lips, scarcely
kissing, just touching in some very pathetic way, as the
dog had dropped his muzzle into one's hand fifteen years
ago. It was more dignified to let it be, not to withdraw it
hurriedly. An uncomfortable position, all the same. The
tension on her arm spread from wrist to shoulder. "Now,
Phillos," she said, "that'll do. Sit up and tell me what
you're crying about."

He obeyed almost at once, let go her hand and sat
up. He must have lain with the flowers under his chin,
for there were squashed petals and leaves on his neck
still. "I'm sorry, Miss Claudia," he said, "but I don't

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Naomi Mitchison

often have time off in the country. It gets one some-
how."

"Sure it's not your knee?" she said. He shook his head,
even smiling. "Or the bailiff?"

"No, no! At least, hardly. But I only save up so
slowly."

"Save up — ? To buy your freedom?" He nodded.
" What would you do if you were free ? "

It seemed a difficult question to answer. At last he said:
"I'd stop being so lonely."

"But are you?" she asked, surprised. "In a big house-
hold like this? Surely you've got plenty of friends?"

"No," he said.

And she considered that, after all, he hadn't much in
common with most of them — always looked out of it at
the slaves' festival, the Saturnalia, when there were games
and little presents, and she went round, encouraging them
to laugh and sing and do things all together and be jolly.
She had found him reading a book once that day, in a
corner of the big library, hunched up between two chests
of book rolls; she remembered how she had packed him
out, cheerfully but firmly, and partnered him with one of
the Lady Rufa's maids for a singing game.

"What would you do?" she repeated.

He said: "You'll think it silly, Miss Claudia." Then:
"Well, I've got one friend, a Greek like me. He keeps a
book shop by the new baths. You know it, perhaps.
Meno's. He told me if I ever got free he'd give me a
regular job there, copying or dictating or selling. There
would be several of us working at it together. I'd like that.
And perhaps some day to see Greece."

"Yes," she said, "it seems very sensible. Not terribly
exciting perhaps. I'm sorry you feel so lonely, Phillos.
We must see what can be done about it."

"Oh, don't bother, Miss Claudia," he said, "mostly I
haven't time to bother myself. It was being out here. It's

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The Poor Relation and the Secretary

very beautiful country. Is this really your home, Miss
Claudia? It must be fine for you, coming back, and then
to-morrow the others will come, too, and you'll be all
together. You ladies will come out here, I suppose, to this
field, and laugh and talk and remember times you've
shared."

"I doubt it," said Claudia, dryly, and laughed a little.
"No. YouVe got it wrong, Phillos. The others have got
now: the present, all bright and sparkling and jolly. And
this hill, this stupid hill is only then: the dull, unimportant
past. So I'm alone on it."

"Are you?" he said, looking directly at her, for almost
the first time, "but you're never lonely, Miss Claudia?"

She prepared to smile at this ridiculousness, but the
smell of turf came up at her, making her act blindly and
childishly. "You stupid!" she said, and beat on it with
her fists. "Why did you think I made you come with
me?"

He stared at her for nearly a minute, then dropped his
eyes and began picking out the least squashed flowers.
She watched his hands doing it and tried to forget what
she had said. She saw them making a wreath, pretty and
mixed and funny, a child's crown. He offered it uncer-
tainly, but she bent her head for it, in some way glad to
hide her face. "Now," she ordered, "you get me some."
He jumped up and went quickly from patch to patch,
moving in the sun mostly; she had never seen him moving
so easily before. She put her hands up over her own
cheeks; they were hot; she felt the corners of her mouth
twitching and smiling and tried to compose herself to
gravity — what was there to smile at? Her cousins' slave
secretary doing what he was told ? Because he was a slave,
not because she was a woman. Obviously he was not re-
garding her in that light. Stupid to suppose he might be.
And dangerous impudence if he did! But what would be
happening if she had a face and figure like Norbana's? —

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Naomi Mitchison

well, she wouldn't be sitting on a dry bank miles from
Rome staring at a slave coming back with flowers — com-
mon, wild flowers — and thinking he needed a new pair of
sandals!

He stood in front of her and dropped them into her lap;
she began naming them to him — he did not know their
country names. She stopped thinking about Norbana and
what it would be like, and fell to threading the flowers
together on a long grass. Her wreath was much better
than his, thick and close and competently made so that it
didn't come to pieces and hang over the left ear as the one
on her own head was doing already! He knelt apologet-
ically, to put it right, touching her hair; her head stayed
tremulously still, determined not to slant itself towards a
slave's hands. She put the last touches to her own wreath,
admiring it as it dangled from her hand. He admired it,
too, but from a distance, obviously refusing t6 consider in
his own mind what she meant to do with it. "Here,
Phillos!" she said, "take it, you stupid creature!" Even
so, he did not dare duck his head for her to crown him, but
took it in his hands and put it on himself. She jumped up.
"You've got it quite crooked. Now, stand still, I'll do it."
It was possible to retain an air of complete mastery still.
She put it straight.

He had the right shaped head for it, as she had known,
squarish, with hair that stood up springily under the
leaves. The shadow of it seemed to brighten his eyes, too.
He reached out, gently, hesitatingly, and took her hand
and swung it for a moment in the sweet air between them.
She asked him what books his friend published — poetry,
history, astronomy, cookery books ? He began very eagerly
to tell her, and about the excitement of a new book, the
polished tops of the rolls, the ruled lines in scarlet, bright
and shiny, the thrill of who would come the first day to
buy, reading it oneself and getting the points clear in one's
head for customers who asked ! And then the copying of

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The Poor Relation and the Secretary

books, poetry especially, getting the feel of a new metre —
some phrase that jumped out at one like a jewel! And
fresh editions of the old: philosophy, mathematics. They
talked about it all the way back, walking side by side along
the hill paths this time.

The cousins came and everything went according to
plan. And then, towards the end of their stay, something
really awkward and annoying happened. Lady Norbana
lost her sapphire brooch. The whole of the villa was
turned upside down. Claudia worried about it dreadfully,
feeling that its loss was a reflection on her own competence.
As, indeed, it was in some odd way made out to be. She
began to suspect any and all the slaves, had them up,
questioned them, bullied them, searched their bedding.
All no good. And then suddenly she found it herself in the
box edging of a flower bed.

She picked it up and looked at it angrily for having
given her so much trouble. It stared back out of her palm
in the odd, calm way that round polished stones have; it
had been there all the time, waiting, in no hurry. She
liked handling jewels; it did not happen often. She tried
it on herself, pinning it first on the shoulder of her mantle,
then at the cross-over of her dress. Lady Norbana, her
cousin, was already ceasing to fuss about it. A jeweller
had come that morning from town, sent by her betrothed
with an assortment of even more beautiful brooches for
her to choose from; the only difficulty lay in the decision!
Would she, after all, be so very glad to get this sapphire
back?

What was it worth, Claudia wondered? The price of one
of the rose terraces. The price of a painted summer-house.
The price of a skilled slave. Some people would give their
ears for it. She jumped it up and down in the palm of her
hand. The price of a skilled slave. Supposing a slave had
found it and not told, but sold it in Rome — at one of the
little jewellers in the Suburra. Who would have been any

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Naomi Mitchison

the worse? Not really Lady Norbana with her new one
which was going to be the envy of all her friends! Perhaps
the slave himself would be hurt: by the doing of something
wrong and concealment of it. Wrong? Against the laws.
The laws are there to defend property, to defend the
owners, the innocent owners, the stupid owners, the care-
less owners who would just as soon have something else
if they could get it! Supposing the slave who had found it
and sold it used the money, not slavishly for mean little
pleasures and gratifications of the body, but to buy his
freedom and be a free man among his friends? Yes.
Claudia pinned her cousin's sapphire brooch into her own
dress under the belt, and went back to the house. Then
she locked it in a box with her few valuable possessions
and managed to forget about it quite successfully almost
all the time. Norbana's taste had changed. She was tired
of large, plain stones. She preferred them engraved; there
was an amethyst with a winged cupid dancing and carrying
torches — when you held it up to the light it seemed to
waver with a translucent life and gaiety of its own: a piece
of Alexandrian work. That was the final choice.

When the cousins were all there, Claudia had very little
time to herself. There was a constant bustle and laughter
and things to be arranged, or cleared up after they had
been disarranged. On a quiet day, they wanted her usually
to read aloud to them while they embroidered, all sitting
under a holm oak by one of the fountains. She had a good
voice with plenty of expression; she brought out the points.
And there were so many books coming out now! Lady
Quintilia had a taste for philosophy and the vaguer mathe-
matics, but the others preferred poetry or poetic romances.

Phillos was busy, too. Between doing accounts and
writing business letters he had to copy out their grand-
father's memoirs of campaigning and politics in the early
years of the Empire, occasionally expanding or annotating
when they seemed too obscure. He was getting on with it

241

The Poor Relation and the Secretary

steadily, but there was plenty left. Every evening he had
to bring out what he had copied that day to Lady Quin-
tilia and read it aloud to her. Usually Claudia was there,
too, and the others pretended to be interested sufficiently
to come in from time to time and comment wittily. Oc-
casionally Quintilia made corrections in the manuscript,
which had then to be recopied. Claudia gave Phillos most
of his orders, and there might be a few minutes' conversa-
tion, all very much as it should be, diffident from him and
assured from her. He did not look at her directly during
their interviews, but kept his eyes down on his tablets;
and she would have been ashamed to do her hair more
carefully or wear her new fringed mantle just to talk to the
secretary! They were going back to Rome in a week.

Sometimes she regretted that she had seen no more of
the hills. But it had not seemed possible. There had been
occasional tours of the estate on mule-back, mostly by
Lady Quintilia and herself, and one or two excursions to
the lake by the whole party. But after all, why be un-
comfortable? Hill paths are rough and dusty and tear
one's best dress, and the garden was always expectant and
delicious — the damask roses really the greatest success! —
and one could keep in the shade, and send back to the
house for anything one had forgotten, and feed the gold
fish and tame swans, and everything was just so, and one
felt deep in oneself that one had power over it. The garden
with the fountains was man-made and docile and friendly
like a beautiful riding-horse, but the hills were wild and
separate from man, enemies, dark wild bulls with tossing
crests like horns! Why try to get companionship out of
such alien forms?

A few days after they got back, when the household was
all settled in again, Claudia unlocked her box, took out the
brooch, and went with it to the little shop in the Suburra
which she had decided on. She wore a solid brown cloak
and walked quickly; no one spoke to her. While the jewel-

242

Naomi Mitchison

ler handled and weighed the brooch, she sat on a stool
beside his table, looking with quite a real interest at the
specimens of his craftsmanship. She knew from Norbana
about what the jewel was worth, but did not suppose she
would get that. The first offer, of course, was ridiculously
low, but she had always found bargaining quite pleasant
and easy when it was a business matter: she had been the
one to settle most of the estate business three years ago
when Lady Quintilia had been so upset over the Troubles.
The thing settled itself between her and the jeweller to
their mutual satisfaction. She counted the money and put
it into the purse she had brought with her.

On the way back she suppressed firmly all kinds of un-
pleasant images. The brooch recognised: the jeweller
questioned: herself described. Nonsense. If she denied it
completely — and they would hardly even have the face to
accuse her! — it was her word against the jeweller's. There
was nothing to be anxious about. The difficult part was
over.

She sent for Phillos and gave him instructions about
some letters he was to write. Then she said: "You still
want to go and shop-keep with your book-seller friends?"

"Yes, Miss Claudia," he said, "but there's not much
chance of it yet."

"How much have you saved so far?"

He told her, rather dully; it was all in the remote future
and he was getting older every day; and they were back
in Rome where he couldn't even look out over his desk at
sunlight on blue daisies. "Another six or seven years, if
I'm lucky."

"I think we can do better than that," she said, and slid
the money out of her purse on to the table.

He stared at it and then at her, straight into her face
this time. "Do you mean — you'll lend it to me, Miss
Claudia?"

"No," she said, "it would take you too long to pay me

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The Poor Relation and the Secretary

back. I'm giving it to you." He did not answer at all, only
his eyes went back to the money and stared and stared;
his hands began to shake and then his body; he shut his
eyes. "Don't be stupid!" she said sharply, "it won't be as
nice as you think, being free!"

"But why are you doing this," he said, "why, why?
What do you get for it?"

"It's only some money that — came to me — lately," she
said, "a windfall. I don't need it. I gathered that you
did."

Then he slid suddenly down to his knees and took her
hands and began kissing them. She disentangled one and
laid it on his head; it was odd how she remembered the feel
of his hair. This way, he could not look up suddenly and
see her face. She could let it wear any expression it chose.
She could let her other hand soak for a minute in these
kisses, which were, rightly and properly, nothing but
gratitude. Gratitude. A pretty emotion as between lady
and slave. Kisses not of the lips and senses but of the
whole mind and body. Looking down at him, it seemed to
her that they were being shaken out from under his
shoulders, from the heart itself. And all for Norbana's
brooch! Her cousin's brooch and her own presence of
mind: no one any the worse. Presence of mind and absence
of fear: a slave's emotion. Phillos would have been too
frightened to do it himself — even though he might think
he was a Stoic!

The cousins would need to get a new secretary now. If
she had not acted as she had, Phillos would still be their
secretary for years and years, never go off to his book-shop
and his Greek friends. She would still be seeing him every
day, having that few minutes' talk. Not that it mattered.
She would train the new secretary to take her orders just as
quickly. Perhaps it would be better if they got a Latin of
some kind, rather than a Greek. Better with the bailiff
and the estate people. It would be the new secretary who

244

Naomi Mitchison

would stay for years and years: till she was old herself.
Well, well, why think about unpleasant subjects?

"That'll do, Phillos!" she said cheerfully. Her right
hand pulled itself away from his lips, her left hand from
his hair. They would never stay like that again. "Now,"
she said, "we'll count the money. You must go to Lady
Quintilia this evening and tell her you have the price. I
think I would rather you did not say it had anything to do
with me, Phillos. We'll get the Quaestor in to-morrow and
free you. The next time I'm buying a book I shall cer-
tainly come to your book-shop. And I hope you will make
a great success of it ! "

245

MARfA CONCEPCI(3N

Katherine Jlnne Porter

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER was born in Texas in 1894.
In the year after the publication of her volume of short stories,
Flowering Judas (jpjo), she received a Guggenheim Fellow-
ship, and has since lived the greater part of the time in Paris.
The new collection under the same title contains four new
stories in addition to those printed in the original limited
edition.

MARIA CONCEPCION

MARIA CONCEPCION walked carefully, keeping
to the middle of the white dusty road, where
the maguey thorns and the treacherous curved
spines of organ cactus had not gathered so profusely. She
would have enjoyed resting for a moment in the dark
shade by the roadside, but she had no time to waste draw-
ing cactus needles from her feet. Juan and his chief would
be waiting for their food in the damp trenches of the
buried city.

She carried about a dozen living fowls slung over her
right shoulder, their feet fastened together. Half of them
fell upon the flat of her back, the balance dangled uneasily
over her breast. They wriggled their benumbed and
swollen legs against her neck, they twisted their stupefied
eyes and peered into her face inquiringly. She did not see
them or think of them. Her left arm was tired with the
weight of the food basket, and she was hungry after her
long morning's work.

Her straight back outlined itself strongly under her
clean bright blue cotton rebozo. Instinctive serenity
softened her black eyes, shaped like almonds, set far
apart, and tilted a bit endwise. She walked with the free,
natural, guarded ease of the primitive woman carrying
an unborn child. The shape of her body was easy, the
swelling life was not a distortion, but the right inevitable
proportions of a woman. She was entirely contented.
Her husband was at work and she was on her way to
market to sell her fowls.

Her small house sat half-way up a shallow hill, under

From Flowering Judas and Other Stories by Katherine Anne Porter. Reprinted
by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

249

Maria Concepcion

a clump of pepper-trees, a wall of organ cactus enclos-
ing it on the side nearest to the road. Now she came
down into the valley, divided by the narrow spring,
and crossed a bridge of loose stones near the hut where
Maria Rosa the beekeeper lived with her old godmother,
Lupe the medicine woman. Maria Concepcion had no
faith in the charred owl bones, the singed rabbit fur, the
cat entrails, the messes and ointments sold by Lupe to
the ailing of the village. She was a good Christian, and
drank simple herb teas for headache and stomachache,
or bought her remedies bottled, with printed directions
that she could not read, at the drugstore near the city
market, where she went almost daily. But she often
bought a jar of honey from young Maria Rosa, a pretty,
shy child only fifteen years old.

Maria Concepcion and her husband, Juan Villegas,
were each a little past their eighteenth year. She had a
good reputation with the neighbors as an energetic re-
ligious woman who could drive a bargain to the end.
It was commonly known that if she wished to buy a new
rebozo for herself or a shirt for Juan, she could bring out a
sack of hard silver coins for the purpose.

She had paid for the license, nearly a year ago, the
potent bit of stamped paper which permits people to
be married in the church. She had given money to the
priest before she and Juan walked together up to the
altar the Monday after Holy Week. It had been the
adventure of the villagers to go, three Sundays one after
another, to hear the banns called by the priest for Juan
de Dios Villegas and Maria Concepcion Manriquez, who
were actually getting married in the church, instead of
behind it, which was the usual custom, less expensive,
and as binding as any other ceremony. But Maria Con-
cepcion was always as proud as if she owned a hacienda.

She paused on the bridge and dabbled her feet in the
water, her eyes resting themselves from the sun-rays

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Katherine Anne Porter

in a fixed gaze to the far-off mountains, deeply blue
under their hanging drift of clouds. It came to her that
she would like a fresh crust of honey. The delicious
aroma of bees, their slow thrilling hum, awakened a
pleasant desire for a flake of sweetness in her mouth.

"If I do not eat it now, I shall mark my child," she
thought, peering through the crevices in the thick hedge
of cactus that sheered up nakedly, like bared knife blades
set protectingly around the small clearing. The place
was so silent she doubted if Maria Rosa and Lupe were
at home.

The leaning jacal of dried rush- withes and corn sheaves,
bound to tall saplings thrust into the earth, roofed with
yellowed maguey leaves flattened and overlapping like
shingles, hunched drowsy and fragrant in the warmth of
noonday. The hives, similarly made, were scattered
towards the back of the clearing, like small mounds of
clean vegetable refuse. Over each mound there hung a
dusty golden shimmer of bees.

A light gay scream of laughter rose from behind the
hut; a man's short laugh joined in. "Ah, hahahaha!"
went the voices together high and low, like a song.

"So Maria Rosa has a man!" Maria Concepcion
stopped short, smiling, shifted her burden slightly, and
bent forward shading her eyes to see more clearly through
the spaces of the hedge.

Maria Rosa ran, dodging between beehives, parting
two stunted jasmine bushes as she came, lifting her knees
in swift leaps, looking over her shoulder and laughing in
a quivering, excited way. A heavy jar, swung to her
wrist by the handle, knocked against her thighs as she
ran. Her toes pushed up sudden spurts of dust, her half-
raveled braids showered around her shoulders in long
crinkled wisps.

Juan Villegas ran after her, also laughing strangely,
his teeth set, both rows gleaming behind the small soft

251

Maria Concepcion

black beard growing sparsely on his lips, his chin, leaving
his brown cheeks girl-smooth. When he seized her, he
clenched so hard her chemise gave way and ripped from
her shoulder. She stopped laughing at this, pushed him
away and stood silent, trying to pull up the torn sleeve
with one hand. Her pointed chin and dark red mouth
moved in an uncertain way, as if she wished to laugh
again; her long black lashes flickered with the quick-
moving lights in her hidden eyes.

Maria Concepcion did not stir nor breathe for some
seconds. Her forehead was cold, and yet boiling water
seemed to be pouring slowly along her spine. An un-
accountable pain was in her knees, as if they were broken.
She was afraid Juan and Maria Rosa would feel her eyes
fixed upon them and would find her there, unable to move,
spying upon them. But they did not pass beyond the
enclosure, nor even glance towards the gap in the wall
opening upon the road.

Juan lifted one of Maria Rosa's loosened braids and
slapped her neck with it playfully. She smiled softly,
consentingly. Together they moved back through the
hives of honey-comb. Maria Rosa balanced her jar on
one hip and swung her long full petticoats with every
step. Juan flourished his wide hat back and forth, walk-
ing proudly as a game-cock.

Maria Concepcion came out of the heavy cloud which
enwrapped her head and bound her throat, and found
herself walking onward, keeping the road without know-
ing it, feeling her way delicately, her ears strumming as
if all Maria Rosa's bees had hived in them. Her careful
sense of duty kept her moving toward the buried city
where Juan's chief, the American archeologist, was taking
his midday rest, waiting for his food.

Juan and Maria Rosa! She burned all over now, as if
a layer of tiny fig-cactus bristles, as cruel as spun glass,
had crawled under her skin. She wished to sit down

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Katherine Anne Porter

quietly and wait for her death, but not until she had
cut the throats of her man and that girl who were laugh-
ing and kissing under the cornstalks. Once when she
was a young girl she had come back from market to find
her jacal burned to a pile of ash and her few silver coins
gone. A dark empty feeling had filled her; she kept mov-
ing about the place, not believing her eyes, expecting
it all to take shape again before her. But it was gone,
and though she knew an enemy had done it, she could
not find out who it was, and could only curse and threaten
the air. Now here was a worse thing, but she knew her
enemy. Maria Rosa, that sinful girl, shameless! She
heard herself saying a harsh, true word about Maria Rosa,
saying it aloud as if she expected someone to agree with
her: "Yes, she is a whore! She has no right to live."

At this moment the gray untidy head of Givens ap-
peared over the edges of the newest trench he had caused
to be dug in his field of excavations. The long deep cre-
vasses, in which a man might stand without being seen,
lay crisscrossed like orderly gashes of a giant scalpel.
Nearly all of the men of the community worked for
Givens, helping him to uncover the lost city of their
ancestors. They worked all the year through and pros-
pered, digging every day for those small clay heads and
bits of pottery and fragments of painted walls for which
there was no good use on earth, being all broken and
encrusted with clay. They themselves could make better
ones, perfectly stout and new, which they took to town
and peddled to foreigners for real money. But the un-
earthly delight of the chief in finding these wornout things
was an endless puzzle. He would fairly roar for joy at
times, waving a shattered pot or a human skull above his
head, shouting for his photographer to come and make a
picture of this!

Now he emerged, and his young enthusiast's eyes wel-
comed Maria Concepcion from his old-man face, covered

2S3

Maria Concepcion

with hard wrinkles and burned to the color of red earth.
"I hope you've brought me a nice fat one." He selected a
fowl from the bunch dangling nearest him as Maria Con-
cepcion, wordless, leaned over the trench. "Dress it for
me, there's a good girl. I'll broil it."

Maria Concepcion took the fowl by the head, and
silently, swiftly drew her knife across its throat, twisting
the head off with the casual firmness she might use with
the top of a beet.

"Good God, woman, you do have nerve," said Givens,
watching her. "I can't do that. It gives me the creeps."

"My home country is Guadalajara," explained Maria
Concepcion, without bravado, as she picked and gutted
the fowl.

She stood and regarded Givens condescendingly, that
diverting white man who had no woman of his own to
cook for him, and moreover appeared not to feel any
loss of dignity in preparing his own food. He squatted
now, eyes squinted, nose wrinkled to avoid the smoke,
turning the roasting fowl busily on a stick. A mysterious
man, undoubtedly rich, and Juan's chief, therefore to be
respected, to be placated.

"The tortillas are fresh and hot, seiior," she murmured
gently. "With your permission I will now go to market."

"Yes, yes, run along; bring me another of those to-
morrow." Givens turned his head to look at her again.
Her grand manner sometimes reminded him of royalty
in exile. He noticed her unnatural paleness. "The sun is
too hot, eh?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. Pardon me, but Juan will be here soon?"

"He ought to be here now. Leave his food. The others
will eat it."

She moved away; the blue of her rebozo became a danc-
ing spot in the heat waves that rose from the gray-red
soil. Givens liked his Indians best when he could feel a
fatherly indulgence for their primitive childish ways.

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Katharine Anne Porter

He told comic stories of Juan's escapades, of how often
he had saved him, in the past five years, from going to
jail, and even from being shot, for his varied and always
unexpected misdeeds.

"I am never a minute too soon to get him out of one
pickle or another," he would say. "Well, he's a good
worker, and I know how to manage him."

After Juan was married, he used to twit him, with
exactly the right shade of condescension, on his many
infidelities to Maria Concepcion. "She'll catch you yet,
and God help you!" he was fond of saying, and Juan
would laugh with immense pleasure.

It did not occur to Maria Concepcion to tell Juan she
had found him out. During the day her anger against
him died, and her anger against Maria Rosa grew. She
kept saying to herself, "When I was a young girl like
Maria Rosa, if a man had caught hold of me so, I would
have broken my jar over his head." She forgot completely
that she had not resisted even so much as Maria Rosa, on
the day that Juan had first taken hold of her. Besides she
had married him afterwards in the church, and that was a
very different thing.

Juan did not come home that night, but went away
to war and Maria Rosa went with him. Juan had a rifle
at his shoulder and two pistols at his belt. Maria Rosa
wore a rifle also, slung on her back along with the blankets
and the cooking pots. They joined the nearest detach-
ment of troops in the field, and Maria Rosa marched
ahead with the battalion of experienced women of war,
which went over the crops like locusts, gathering provi-
sions for the army. She cooked with them, and ate with
them what was left after the men had eaten. After battles
she went out on the field with the others to salvage clothing
and ammunition and guns from the slain before they
should begin to swell in the heat. Sometimes they would

255

Maria Concepcion

encounter the women from the other army, and a second
battle as grim as the first would take place.

There was no particular scandal in the village. People
shrugged, grinned. It was far better that they were gone.
The neighbors went around saying that Maria Rosa was
safer in the army than she would be in the same village
with Maria Concepcion.

Maria Concepcion did not weep when Juan left her;
and when the baby was born, and died within four days,
she did not weep. "She is mere stone," said old Lupe,
who went over and offered charms to preserve the baby.

"May you rot in hell with your charms," said Maria
Concepcion.

If she had not gone so regularly to church, lighting
candles before the saints, kneeling with her arms spread
in the form of a cross for hours at a time, and receiving
holy communion every month, there might have been
talk of her being devil-possessed, her face was so changed
and blind-looking. But this was impossible when, after
all, she had been married by the priest. It must be, they
reasoned, that she was being punished for her pride.
They decided that this was the true cause for everything:
she was altogether too proud. So they pitied her.

During the year that Juan and Maria Rosa were gone
Maria Concepcion sold her fowls and looked after her
garden and her sack of hard coins grew. Lupe had no
talent for bees, and the hives did not prosper. She began
to blame Maria Rosa for running away, and to praise
Maria Concepcion for her behavior. She used to see
Maria Concepcion at the market or at church, and she
always said that no one could tell by looking at her now
that she was a woman who had such a heavy grief.

"I pray God everything goes well with Maria Con-
cepcion from this out," she would say, "for she has had
her share of trouble."

When some idle person repeated this to the deserted

256

Katherine Anne Porter

woman, she went down to Lupe's house and stood within
the clearing and called to the medicine woman, who sat
in her doorway stirring a mess of her infallible cure for
sores: "Keep your prayers to yourself, Lupe, or offer them
for others who need them. I will ask God for what I want
in this world."

"And will you get it, you think, Maria Concepcion?"
asked Lupe, tittering cruelly and smelling the wooden
mixing spoon. "Did you pray for what you have now?"

Afterward everyone noticed that Maria Concepcion
went oftener to church, and even seldomer to the village
to talk with the other women as they sat along the curb,
nursing their babies and eating fruit, at the end of the
market-day.

"She is wrong to take us for enemies," said old Soledad,
who was a thinker and a peace-maker. "All women have
these troubles. Well, we should suffer together."

But Maria Concepcion lived alone. She was gaunt, as
if something were gnawing her away inside, her eyes were
sunken, and she would not speak a word' if she could help
it. She worked harder than ever, and her butchering knife
was scarcely ever out of her hand.

Juan and Maria Rosa, disgusted with military life, came
home one day without asking permission of anyone.
The field of war had unrolled itself, a long scroll of vexa-
tions, until the end had frayed out within twenty miles
of Juan's village. So he and Maria Rosa, now lean as a
wolf, burdened with a child daily expected, set out with
no farewells to the regiment and walked home.

They arrived one morning about daybreak. Juan was
picked up on sight by a group of military police from
the small barracks on the edge of town, and taken to
prison, where the officer in charge told him with impersonal
cheerfulness that he would add one to a catch of ten
waiting to be shot as deserters the next morning.

257

Maria Concepcion

Maria Rosa, screaming and falling on her face in the
road, was taken under the armpits by two guards and
helped briskly to her jacal, now sadly run down. She
was received with professional importance by Lupe, who
helped the baby to be born at once.

Limping with foot soreness, a layer of dust concealing
his fine new clothes got mysteriously from somewhere,
Juan appeared before the captain at the barracks. The
captain recognized him as head digger for his good friend
Givens, and dispatched a note to Givens saying: "I am
holding the person of Juan Villegas awaiting your fur-
ther disposition."

When Givens showed up Juan was delivered to him
with the urgent request that nothing be made public
about so humane and sensible an operation on the part
of military authority.

Juan walked out of the rather stifling atmosphere of
the drumhead court, a definite air of swagger about him.
His hat, of unreasonable dimensions and embroidered
with silver thread, hung over one eyebrow, secured at
the back by a cord of silver dripping with bright blue
tassels. His shirt was of a checkerboard pattern in green
and black, his white cotton trousers were bound by a
belt of yellow leather tooled in red. His feet were bare,
full of stone bruises, and sadly ragged as to toenails. He
removed his cigarette from the corner of his full-lipped
wide mouth. He removed the splendid hat. His black
dusty hair, pressed moistly to his forehead, sprang up
suddenly in a cloudy thatch on his crown. He bowed
to the officer, who appeared to be gazing at a vacuum.
He swung his arm wide in a free circle upsoaring to-
wards the prison window, where forlorn heads poked
over the window sill, hot eyes following after the lucky
departing one. Two or three of the heads nodded, and
a half dozen hands were flipped at him in an effort to
imitate his own casual and heady manner.

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Katherine Anne Porter

Juan kept up this insufferable pantomime until they
rounded the first clump of fig-cactus. Then he seized
Givens' hand and burst into oratory. "Blessed be the
day your servant Juan Villegas first came under your
eyes. From this day my life is yours without condition,
ten thousand thanks with all my heart!"

"For God's sake stop playing the fool," said Givens
irritably. "Some day I'm going to be five minutes too
late."

"Well, it is nothing much to be shot, my chief — cer-
tainly you know I was not afraid — but to be shot in a
drove of deserters, against a cold wall, just in the mo-
ment of my home-coming, by order of that . . ."

Glittering epithets tumbled over one another like ex-
plosions of a rocket. All the scandalous analogies from
the animal and vegetable worlds were applied in a vivid,
unique and personal way to the life, loves, and family
history of the officer who had just set him free. When
he had quite cursed himself dry, and his nerves were
soothed, he added: "With your permission, my chief!"

"What will Maria Concepcion say to all this?" asked
Givens. "You are very informal, Juan, for a man who
was married in the church."

Juan put on his hat.

"Oh, Maria Concepcion! That's nothing. Look, my
chief, to be married in the church is a great misfortune
for a man. After that he is not himself any more. How
can that woman complain when I do not drink even
at fiestas enough to be really drunk? I do not beat her;
never, never. We were always at peace. I say to her,
Come here, and she comes straight. I say, Go there, and
she goes quickly. Yet sometimes I looked at her and
thought, Now I am married to that woman in the church,
and I felt a sinking inside, as if something were lying
heavy on my stomach. With Maria Rosa it is all different.
She is not silent; she talks. When she talks too much, I

Maria Concepci5n

slap her and say, Silence, thou simpleton! and she weeps.
She is just a girl with whom I do as I please. You know
how she used to keep those clean little bees in their hives?
She is like their honey to me. I swear it. I would not harm
Maria Concepcion because I am married to her in the
church; but also, my chief, I will not leave Maria Rosa,
because she pleases me more than any other woman."

"Let me tell you, Juan, things haven't been going as
well as you think. You be careful. Some day Maria
Concepcion will just take your head off with that carv-
ing knife of hers. You keep that in mind."

Juan's expression was the proper blend of masculine
triumph and sentimental melancholy. It was pleasant to
see himself in the role of hero to two such desirable
women. He had just escaped from the threat of a dis-
agreeable end. His clothes were new and handsome, and
they had cost him just nothing. Maria Rosa had collected
them for him here and there after battles. He was walk-
ing in the early sunshine, smelling the good smells of
ripening cactus-figs, peaches, and melons, of pungent
berries dangling from the pepper-trees, and the smoke
of his cigarette under his nose. He was on his way to
civilian life with his patient chief. His situation was in-
effably perfect, and he swallowed it whole.

"My chief," he addressed Givens handsomely, as one
man of the world to another, "women are good things,
but not at this moment. With your permission, I will
now go to the village and eat. My God, how I shall eat!
Tomorrow morning very early I will come to the buried
city and work like seven men. Let us forget Maria Con-
cepcion and Maria Rosa. Each one in her place. I will
manage them when the time comes."

News of Juan's adventure soon got abroad, and Juan
found many friends about him during the morning.
They frankly commended his way of leaving the army.
It was in itself the act of a hero. The new hero ate a

260

Katherine Anne Porter

great deal and drank somewhat, the occasion being bet-
ter than a feast-day. It was almost noon before he re-
turned to visit Maria Rosa.

He found her sitting on a clean straw mat, rubbing
fat on her three-hour-old son. Before this felicitous vision
Juan's emotions so twisted him that he returned to the
village and invited every man in the "Death and Resur-
rection" pulque shop to drink with him.

Having thus taken leave of his balance, he started
back to Maria Rosa, and found himself unaccountably
in his own house, attempting to beat Maria Concepcion
by way of reestablishing himself in his legal household.

Maria Concepcion, knowing all the events of that un-
happy day, was not in a yielding mood, and refused to be
beaten. She did not scream nor implore; she stood her
ground and resisted; she even struck at him. Juan,
amazed, hardly knowing what he did, stepped back and
gazed at her inquiringly through a leisurely whirling film
which seemed to have lodged behind his eyes. Certainly
he had not even thought of touching her. Oh, well, no
harm done. He gave up, turned away, half-asleep on
his feet. He dropped amiably in a shadowed corner and
began to snore.

Maria Concepcion, seeing that he was quiet, began to
bind the legs of her fowls. It was market-day and she
was late. She fumbled and tangled the bits of cord in
her haste, and set off across the plowed fields instead
of taking the accustomed road. She ran with a crazy
panic in her head, her stumbling legs. Now and then
she would stop and look about her, trying to place her-
self, then go on a few steps, until she realized that she
was not going towards the market.

At once she came to her senses completely, recognized
the thing that troubled her so terribly, was certain of
what she wanted. She sat down quietly under a shelter-
ing thorny bush and gave herself over to her long devour-

261

Maria Concepcion

ing sorrow. The thing which had for so long squeezed her
whole body into a tight dumb knot of suffering suddenly
broke with shocking violence. She jerked with the in-
voluntary recoil of one who receives a blow, and the
sweat poured from her skin as if the wounds of her whole
life were shedding their salt ichor. Drawing her rebozo
over her head, she bowed her forehead on her updrawn
knees, and sat there in deadly silence and immobility.
From time to time she lifted her head where the sweat
formed steadily and poured down her face, drenching the
front of her chemise, and her mouth had the shape of
crying, but there were no tears and no sound. All her
being was a dark confused memory of grief burning in her
at night, of deadly baffled anger eating at her by day,
until her very tongue tasted bitter, and her feet were as
heavy as if she were mired in the muddy roads during the
time of rains.

After a great while she stood up and threw the rebozo
off her face, and set out walking again.

Juan awakened slowly, with long yawns and grumblings,
alternated with short relapses into sleep full of visions
and clamors. A blur of orange light seared his eyeballs
when he tried to unseal his lids. There came from some-
where a low voice weeping without tears, saying mean-
ingless phrases over and over. He began to listen. He
tugged at the leash of his stupor, he strained to grasp
those words which terrified him even though he could
not quite hear them. Then he came awake with frighten-
ing suddenness, sitting up and staring at the long sharp-
ened streak of light piercing the corn-husk walls from
the level disappearing sun.

Maria Concepcion stood in the doorway, looming
colossally tall to his betrayed eyes. She was talking
quickly, and calling his name. Then he saw her clearly.

"God's name!" said Juan, frozen to the marrow, "here

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Katherine Anne Porter

I am facing my death!" for the long knife she wore habit-
ually at her belt was in her hand. But instead, she threw
it away, clear from her, and got down on her knees,
crawling toward him as he had seen her crawl many times
toward the shrine at Guadalupe Villa. He watched her
approach with such horror that the hair of his head
seemed to be lifting itself away from him. Falling forward
upon her face, she huddled over him, lips moving in a
ghostly whisper. Her words became clear, and Juan
understood them all.

For a second he could not move nor speak. Then he
took her head between both his hands, and supported
her in this way, saying swiftly, anxiously reassuring, al-
most in a babble:

"Oh, thou poor creature! Oh, madwoman! Oh, my
Maria Concepcion, unfortunate! Listen. . . . Don't be
afraid. Listen to me! I will hide thee away, I thy own
man will protect thee! Quiet! Not a sound!"

Trying to collect himself, he held her and cursed under
his breath for a few moments in the gathering darkness.
Maria Concepcion bent over, face almost on the ground,
her feet folded under her, as if she would hide behind him.
For the first time in his life Juan was aware of danger.
This was danger. Maria Concepcion would be dragged
away between two gendarmes, with him following helpless
and unarmed, to spend the rest of her days in Belen Prison,
maybe. Danger! The night swarmed with threats. He
stood up and dragged her up with him. She was silent and
perfectly rigid, holding to him with resistless strength,
her hands stiffened on his arms.

"Get me the knife," he told her in a whisper. She
obeyed, her feet slipping along the hard earth floor, her
shoulders straight, her arms close to her side. He lighted
a candle. Maria Concepcion held the knife out to him.
It was stained and dark even to the handle with drying
blood.

263

Maria Concepcion

He frowned at her harshly, noting the same stains on
her chemise and hands.

"Takeoff thy clothes and wash thy hands," he ordered.
He washed the knife carefully, and threw the water wide
of the doorway. She watched him and did likewise with
the bowl in which she had bathed.

"Light the brasero and cook food for me," he told
her in the same peremptory tone. He took her garments
and went out. When he returned, she was wearing an
old soiled dress, and was fanning the fire in the charcoal
burner. Seating himself cross-legged near her, he stared
at her as at a creature unknown to him, who bewildered
him utterly, for whom there was no possible explana-
tion. She did not turn her head, but kept silent and still,
except for the movements of her strong hands fanning
the blaze which cast sparks and small jets of white smoke,
flaring and dying rhythmically with the motion of the
fan, lighting her face and darkening it by turns.

Juan's voice barely disturbed the silence: "Listen to
me carefully, and tell me the truth, and when the gen-
darmes come here for us, thou shalt have nothing to
fear. But there will be something for us to settle between
us afterward."

The light from the charcoal burner shone in her eyes;
a yellow phosphorescence glimmered behind the dark
iris.

"For me everything is settled now," she answered, in
a tone so tender, so grave, so heavy with suffering, that
Juan felt his vitals contract. He wished to repent openly,
not as a man, but as a very small child. He could not
fathom her, nor himself, nor the mysterious fortunes of
life grown so instantly confused where all had seemed
so gay and simple. He felt too that she had become in-
valuable, a woman without equal among a million women,
and he could not tell why. He drew an enormous sigh
that rattled in his chest.

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Katharine Anne Porter

"Yes, yes, it is all settled. I shall not go away again.
We must stay here together."

Whispering, he questioned her and she answered
whispering, and he instructed her over and over until
she had her lesson by heart. The hostile darkness of the
night encroached upon them, flowing over the narrow
threshold, invading their hearts. It brought with it
sighs and murmurs, the pad of secretive feet in the near-by
road, the sharp staccato whimper of wind through the
cactus leaves. All these familiar, once friendly cadences
were now invested with sinister terrors; a dread, formless
and uncontrollable, took hold of them both.

"Light another candle," said Juan, loudly, in too res-
olute, too sharp a tone. "Let us eat now."

They sat facing each other and ate from the same dish,
after their old habit. Neither tasted what they ate. With
food half-way to his mouth, Juan listened. The sound
of voices rose, spread, widened at the turn of the road
along the cactus wall. A spray of lantern light shot
through the hedge, a single voice slashed the blackness,
ripped the fragile layer of silence suspended above the
hut.

"Juan Villegas!"

"Pass, friends!" Juan roared back cheerfully.

They stood in the doorway, simple cautious gendarmes
from the village, mixed-bloods themselves with Indian
sympathies, well known to all the community. They
flashed their lanterns almost apologetically upon the
pleasant, harmless scene of a man eating supper with
his wife.

"Pardon, brother," said the leader. "Someone has
killed the woman Maria Rosa, and we must question her
neighbors and friends." He paused, and added with an
attempt at severity, "Naturally!"

"Naturally," agreed Juan. "You know that I was a
good friend of Maria Rosa. This is bad news."

265

Maria Concepcion

They all went away together, the men walking in a
group, Maria Concepcion following a few steps in the
rear, near Juan. No one spoke.

The two points of candlelight at Maria Rosa's head
fluttered uneasily; the shadows shifted and dodged on the
stained darkened walls. To Maria Concepcion everything
in the smothering enclosing room shared an evil restless-
ness. The watchful faces of those called as witnesses, the
faces of old friends, were made alien by the look of specula-
tion in their eyes. The ridges of the rose-colored rebozo
thrown over the body varied continually, as though the
thing it covered was not perfectly in repose. Her eyes
swerved over the body in the open painted coffin, from the
candle tips at the head to the feet, jutting up thinly, the
small scarred soles protruding, freshly washed, a mass of
crooked, half-healed wounds, thorn-pricks and cuts of
sharp stones. Her gaze went back to the candle flame, to
Juan's eyes warning her, to the gendarmes talking among
themselves. Her eyes would not be controlled.

With a leap that shook her her gaze settled upon the
face of Maria Rosa. Instantly her blood ran smoothly
again: there was nothing to fear. Even the restless light
could not give a look of life to that fixed countenance.
She was dead. Maria Concepcion felt her muscles give
way softly; her heart began beating steadily without
effort. She knew no more rancor against that pitiable
thing lying indifferently in its blue coffin under the fine
silk rebozo. The mouth drooped sharply at the corners in
a grimace of weeping arrested half-way. The brows were
distressed; the dead flesh could not cast off the shape of its
last terror. It was all finished. Maria Rosa had eaten
too much honey and had had too much love. Now she
must sit in hell, crying over her sins and her hard death
forever and ever.

Old Lupe's cackling voice arose. She had spent the

266

Katherine Anne Porter

morning helping Maria Rosa, and it had been hard work.
The child had spat blood the moment it was born, a bad
sign. She thought then that bad luck would come to the
house. Well, about sunset she was in the yard at the back
Df the house grinding tomatoes and peppers. She had left
mother and babe asleep. She heard a strange noise in the
house, a choking and smothered calling, like someone
wailing in sleep. Well, such a thing is only natural. But
there followed a light, quick, thudding sound —

"Like the blows of a fist?" interrupted an officer.

"No, not at all like such a thing."

"How do you know?"

"I am well acquainted with that sound, friends," re-
torted Lupe. "This was something else."

She was at a loss to describe it exactly. A moment
ater, there came the sound of pebbles rolling and slip-
Ding under feet; then she knew someone had been there
ind was running away.

"Why did you wait so long before going to see?"

"I am old and hard in the joints," said Lupe. "I cannot
•un after people. I walked as fast as I could to the cactus
ledge, for it is only by this way that anyone can enter.
There was no one in the road, sir, no one. Three cows,
vith a dog driving them; nothing else. When I got to
Vlaria Rosa, she was lying all tangled up, and from her
leek to her middle she was full of knife-holes. It was
i sight to move the Blessed Image Himself! Her eyes

"Never mind. Who came oftenest to her house before
;he went away? Did you know her enemies?"

Lupe's face congealed, closed. Her spongy skin drew
nto a network of secretive wrinkles. She turned with-
Irawn and expressionless eyes upon the gendarmes.

" I am an old woman. I do not see well. I cannot hurry
>n my feet. I know no enemy of Maria Rosa. I did not
;ee anyone leave the clearing."

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Maria Concepcion

"You did not hear splashing in the spring near the
bridge?"

"No, sir."

"Why, then, do our dogs follow a scent there and lose
it?"

"God only knows, my friend. I am an old wo — "

" Yes. How did the footfalls sound ? "

,"Like the tread of an evil spirit!" Lupe broke forth
in a swelling oracular tone that startled them. The In-
dians stirred uneasily, glanced at the dead, then at Lupe.
They half expected her to produce the evil spirit among
them at once.

The gendarme began to lose his temper.

"No, poor unfortunate; I mean, were they heavy or
light? The footsteps of a man or of a woman? Was the
person shod or barefoot?"

A glance at the listening circle assured Lupe of their
thrilled attention. She enjoyed the dangerous importance
of her situation. She could have ruined that Maria Con-
cepcion with a word, but it was even sweeter to make
fools of these gendarmes who went about spying on
honest people. She raised her voice again. What she had
not seen she could not describe, thank God! No one
could harm her because her knees were stiff and she
could not run even to seize a murderer. As for knowing
the difference between footfalls, shod or bare, man or
woman, nay, between devil and human, who ever heard
of such madness?

"My eyes are not ears, gentlemen," she ended grandly,
"but upon my heart I swear those footsteps fell as the
tread of the spirit of evil!"

"Imbecile!" yapped the leader in a shrill voice. "Take
her away, one of you! Now, Juan Villegas, tell me — "

Juan told his story patiently, several times over. He
had returned to his wife that day. She had gone to mar-
ket as usual. He had helped her prepare her fowls. She

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Katherine Anne Porter

had returned about mid-afternoon, they had talked,
she had cooked, they had eaten, nothing was amiss.
Then the gendarmes came with the news about Maria
Rosa. That was all. Yes, Maria Rosa had run away
with him, but there had been no bad blood between him
and his wife on this account, nor between his wife and
Maria Rosa. Everybody knew that his wife was a quiet
woman.

Maria Concepcion heard her own voice answering
without a break. It was true at first she was troubled
when her husband went away, but after that she had not
worried about him. It was the way of men, she believed.
She was a church-married woman and knew her place.
Well, he had come home at last. She had gone to market,
but had come back early, because now she had her man
to cook for. That was all.

Other voices broke in. A toothless old man said: "She
is a woman of good reputation among us, and Maria
Rosa was not." A smiling young mother, Anita, baby at
breast, said: "If no one thinks so, how can you accuse
her? It was the loss of her child and not of her husband
that changed her so." Another: "Maria Rosa had a
strange life, apart from us. How do we know who might
have come from another place to do her evil?" And old
Soledad spoke up boldly: "When I saw Maria Concep-
cion in the market today, I said, 'Good luck to you,
Maria Concepcion, this is a happy day for you!'" and
she gave Maria Concepcion a long easy stare, and the
smile of a born wise-woman.

Maria Concepcion suddenly felt herself guarded, sur-
rounded, upborne by her faithful friends. They were
around her, speaking for her, defending her, the forces
of life were ranged invincibly with her against the beaten
dead. Maria Rosa had thrown away her share of strength
in them, she lay forfeited among them. Maria Concep-
cion looked from one to the other of the circling, intent

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Maria Concepcion

faces. Their eyes gave back reassurance, understanding,
a secret and mighty sympathy.

The gendarmes were at a loss. They, too, felt that
sheltering wall cast impenetrably around her. They were
certain she had done it, and yet they could not accuse
her. Nobody could be accused; there was not a shred
of true evidence. They shrugged their shoulders and
snapped their fingers and shuffled their feet. Well, then,
good night to everybody. Many pardons for having in-
truded. Good health!

A small bundle lying against the wall at the head of the
coffin squirmed like an eel. A wail, a mere sliver of sound,
issued. Maria Concepcion took the son of Maria Rosa in
her arms.

"He is mine," she said clearly, "I will take him with
me."

No one assented in words, but an approving nod, a bare
breath of complete agreement, stirred among them as
they made way for her.

Maria Concepcion, carrying the child, followed Juan
from the clearing. The hut was left with its lighted candles
and a crowd of old women who would sit up all night,
drinking coffee and smoking and telling ghost stories.

Juan's exaltation had burned out. There was not an
ember of excitement left in him. He was tired. The
perilous adventure was over. Maria Rosa had vanished,
to come no more forever. Their days of marching, of
eating, of quarreling and making love between battles,
were all over. Tomorrow he would go back to dull and
endless labor, he must descend into the trenches of the
buried city as Maria Rosa must go into her grave. He
felt his veins fill up with bitterness, with black unendurable
melancholy. Oh, Jesus! what bad luck overtakes a man!

Well, there was no way out of it now. For the moment
he craved only to sleep. He was so drowsy he could

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Katherine Anne Porter

scarcely guide his feet. The occasional light touch of the
woman at his elbow was as unreal, as ghostly as the brush-
ing of a leaf against his face. He did not know why he had
fought to save her, and now he forgot her. There was
nothing in him except a vast blind hurt like a covered
wound.

He entered the jacal, and without waiting to light a
candle, threw off his clothing, sitting just within the door.
He moved with lagging, half-awake hands, to strip his
body of its heavy finery. With a long groaning sigh of
relief he fell straight back on the floor, almost instantly
asleep, his arms flung up and outward.

Maria Concepcion, a small clay jar in her hand, ap-
proached the gentle little mother goat tethered to a
sapling, which gave and yielded as she pulled at the rope's
end after the farthest reaches of grass about her. The
kid, tied up a few feet away, rose bleating, its feathery
fleece shivering in the fresh wind. Sitting on her heels,
holding his tether, she allowed him to suckle a few mo-
ments. Afterward — all her movements were deliberate
and even — she drew a supply of milk for the child.

She sat against the wall of her house, near the door-
way. The child, fed and asleep, was cradled in the hollow
of her crossed legs. The silence overfilled the world,
the skies flowed down evenly to the rim of the valley,
the stealthy moon crept slantwise to the shelter of the
mountains. She felt soft and warm all over; she dreamed
that the newly born child was her own, and she was
resting deliciously.

Maria Concepcion could hear Juan's breathing. The
sound vapored from the low doorway, calmly; the house
seemed to be resting after a burdensome day. She
breathed, too, very slowly and quietly, each inspiration
saturating her with repose. The child's light, faint breath
was a mere shadowy moth of sound in the silver air.
The night, the earth under her, seemed to swell and re-

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Maria Concepcion

cede together with a limitless, unhurried, benign breath-
ing. She drooped and closed her eyes, feeling the slow
rise and fall within her own body. She did not know
what it was, but it eased her all through. Even as she was
falling asleep, head bowed over the child, she was still
aware of a strange, wakeful happiness.

272

THE APOSTATE
by

Lillian Barnard Gilkes

LILLIAN BARNARD GILKES, who was born in Jackson-
ville, Florida, in 1902, studied at Columbia University,
and taught a course in the writing of the short story in the
Home Study Department of University Extension for
several years. Under the supervision of the English Depart-
ment of Columbia University, she wrote the course in the
technique of the short story which is still in use in the Home
Study work. She has done editorial and free lance writing,
and lecturing.

THE APOSTATE

r • iHE autobus was to start from the Piazza Venezia

I at two o'clock sharp. Thomas took out his watch.
•*• " Seven minutes yet!"

The plain, practical face of Sarah sitting beside him
in the bus bloomed out in a proud smile. "Danny got
us here in plenty of time — he said we ought not to
hurry "

"Uh-huh."

But Thomas wished they hadn't been ahead of time.
He reached for his handkerchief and mopped his bald
forehead which still had a few briary gray hairs roost-
ing there, and then he wiped round his collar which had
wilted during luncheon. After that he flung on his hat —
a gesture to let the world know it was time to be moving
on. But the driver was nowhere in sight.

Two young ladies in the party wanted to know what
the building was across the street, with all those naked
figures leaning over the fountain and a thing like a
summer-house perched at the top of the steps.

Danny could tell them, Sarah thought — if they really
wanted to know. Danny knew everything about Rome.
He was studious like that from a little chap — and every
bit as good as an encyclopaedia. My, but a delicate boy!
She could smile now to think how scared she'd been about
him, but she thought she would never raise him. Feeling
so thankful he had been spared to them — she couldn't
help it, whenever she thought of that time — she leaned
toward the young ladies and said pleasantly, "It's dread-
fully warm, isn't it!"

Reprinted from Scribner's Magazine, January 1933, by permission of the au-
thor and of the editors.

275

The Apostate

"Something fierce!"

Thomas said "Whew!" and hit his knee with the brim
of his straw hat.

"Are you staying long in Rome?"

The young ladies said they wanted to get out of that
heat. And they didn't care for the Italian cooking.

Everything has its disadvantages, of course — even
when dreams surprisingly turn into facts. Sarah and
Thomas had saved to take this trip, to come over and
see Danny. In anticipation they had dwelled on it as
some astounding climax of their lives, a rich holiday
conferred by the same goodness of fortune that gave
them their splendid son. Now they actually were hav-
ing the time of their lives. But travelling is not so easy
— not what it seems when you are sitting on your own
verandah. Sarah had never known how tired she could
get, which proved she was getting old. Especially her
feet — how they did ache, the whole time! And she had
expected Rome, somehow, would be much bigger and
grander than it was. But it was all so different from
New England — the scenery, the lovely gardens — wasn't
it just like a dream to be here with Danny? Thinking of
this, she felt distressed to hear people complain about
the food.

"We have been here three days and we've seen pretty
nearly everything. It's wonderful how much you can
do, when you've got some one to take you around! Our
son knows all the places — he's at one of the seminaries.
We came over to see him, but tomorrow we've got to

take the train "

She broke off. She would not think about taking the
train tomorrow. She would have the courage to be happy
for Danny's sake, every minute of the time now. Surely,
yes — for they would have this wonderful time to look

back on, she and Thomas

A man shoved a tray of souvenirs in through the win-

276

Lillian Barnard Gilkes

dow of the bus, and stepping on the running-board he
put his head inside after the tray.

"Post-card, souvenir — ten lire, signora. Real coral!"
He held up a chain, and fondling the beads, let them
drip through the fingers of his other hand. "Very cheap!"

Sarah hesitated. She had never seen so much to buy
as there was in Rome — everything from beads to the
bones of martyrs and the peace of heaven after you were
dead. Sacrilegious, that was — but you couldn't tell about
these foreigners. And she did love beads! At home, she
wouldn't have dared spend money like this. She looked
from the beads to the man, and saw Danny coming back
with the tickets.

He waved the tickets in front of him and said very
firmly, "Don't take any more of those things — you've
got enough, I think "

"No, thank you — " she told the man. "No, I don't
want anything "

Danny waved the man away, and climbed into the
bus.

"Here — " said Thomas, moving over. "Sit between
us, boy "

"You have to be sharp with those fellows — they'll
do you if they can!" Danny was smiling, but he sounded
terribly serious. "The Italians have got a mean streak
in them that way — hard after the dollar, you know.
Well, we'll be off in a minute now "

Sure enough, the driver strolled out of a tobacco shop
and cranked up the bus. The conductor on the driver's
seat turned round to count the heads. The bus rolled
out of the Piazza.

"For Pete's sake!" One of the young ladies pointed
out of the window. "Look at all those cats!"

Sarah looked. And Thomas stared as if he saw, that
instant, the ghost of a Roman emperor, clad in the toga
and waving the imperial sceptre, spring out of the stones

277

The Apostate

and order him to be flung to the lions. In a long rectan-
gular space, fifteen or twenty feet below the street level —
why, there must have been a hundred cats! Pink olean-
ders bloomed against the walls of the enclosure, and
whole families of cats dozed in the shade of them. Some,
going apart from the crowd, stalked with tremendous
feline indifference across the sun-beaten area; others re-
clined in narrow strips of shade made by fallen capitals.

"Well, I never!" Sarah gasped.

As the bus curved past the place, she caught sight of
a battle in progress over in one corner. A black midget
advanced and bowed its back at an orange tiger, and
lifting one paw, planted a swat on the jaw of its yellow
enemy.

"How do they get out of there?" Thomas wanted to
know. "Too high to jump, I should think "

Danny was feeling self-conscious, very much annoyed
because the young women were listening. "We've just
left Trajan's Forum behind — " He leaned forward,
raising his voice, and his manner instantly became a
reproof to the two girls for their common behavior.

"The Romans, you know, put those forums — fora,
rather — all over the city. The emperors did it to impress
the people, and each emperor tried to do something more
elaborate than the last man. The column in the centre
used to have at the top a statue of the Emperor Trajan,
but about twenty-five years ago, when they started to
excavate Trajan's Forum, the Pope had a statue of
Saint Paul put there. The cats occupy the forum now.
They are protected there, people feed them — and they
never go out. It's quite an accepted fact, the cats in
Trajan's Forum — one of the landmarks of Rome. You
find that kind of thing quite often in this country.
Simple-hearted people, the Italians, you know — just like
children!"

"Oh, yes—" said Thomas. "Oh, sure!"

278

Lillian Barnard Gilkes

Sarah nodded her head. But neither of them quite
took it in. They listened attentively to all Danny told
them about the customs of Italy, and while they hung
on every word their minds were on something else. What
did they know of the contents of books ? They were old
folks. But their son was a great student. Look where
his application and learning had gotten him — and he'd
go right on up to the top !

But if only he were somewhere nearer home — not
with an ocean between. It took so long for letters to
get to America. Sarah would feel better about it all if
he were just where she could look after him, to see that
he got enough good food and plenty of sleep. He neglected
himself so. Why, when he got with a book he'd sit up
till all hours — and many a time it was broad daylight
when she found him, still reading. She thought he looked
peaked, dreadfully thin, and so — so sort of hollow-eyed.
He was so nervous — he seemed excited all of the time.
It wasn't natural. While he was talking his eyes shone,
a flush came on his face — and he had a feverish unnatural
look, as though something were burning him up inside.
When he thought he wasn't watched he would go quite
limp, staring in front of him at nothing. She had seen
that look — that queer strained look on his face — as they
leaned out of the train window in the station and saw him
coming along the platform. It had gone right to her
heart. She turned round to find Thomas and gave a cry
of fear. "Oh, he's sick! Thomas, look — oh, what's the
matter with him?" "Looks a bit seedy — " Thomas
agreed with her. But as soon as she had kissed him, when
she felt his arms come around her in a loving embrace
she forgot everything else in the one fact — the thrilling,
comforting fact that she had him back again and he was
her own boy. Then she stole a long look at him and tried
to make her question sound matter-of-fact. "Are you
all right, Danny? Do you feel well?" And right away

279

The Apostate

he was on edge, impatient of her worrying about him.
"Why, of course, mother — you aren't going to be silly
about my health!"

But his white face, his eyes like burnt shadows — they
hurt her to see. She couldn't put that stretched look out
of her mind.

The bus crept out of a winding black street where the
houses almost met overhead, and the Colosseum stood
up grandly before them. Danny told them about the
great theatre that held eighty thousand people, pointing
out the emperor's box, explaining how on the days of the
great shows a canvas awning was stretched overhead to
protect the spectators from the sun.

Thomas said, "Some size!"

"Right! When you think of such things "

Danny paused, emotion stopping his thought. The
pagan monuments exercised a fascination his vulnerable
mind could not resist, though he knew them to have
been reared in abomination. For the symbolism of the
Christian victory was here — spirit over flesh, the Empire
of Christ, the Holy Church triumphant in the seat of
the heathen gods. His mind was tuned in symbols.

What was it? Seeing his abstraction, the question be-
gan to beat again in Sarah's mind. What was the matter
with him? Why, when he spoke like that — in that tranced
voice — did he seem so changed? Not her son any more,
but some grave stranger whom she was in awe of.

"It's very chastening — " he went on. "There's a
great lesson for us in modern times — not to let our cor-
rupt pride carry us too far. The vanity of the Roman
builders — ah, but think of the American skyscrapers!"

Beside the Arch of Constantine the bus stopped for
two priests to get on. One was a young man, with a lean
strong body and faded blue eyes that made his sallow
face look tarnished. He was wearing a black gown and

280

Lillian Barnard Gllkes

a little hard flat hat, and his finger-nails were bitten off
and dirty. The other, in plain black clothes, had a rosary
hung round his neck. He bowed to the people in the bus.
His appearance was quite ordinary, but as he seated
himself every one turned to look at him — feeling, no doubt,
that it would be a bad thing to come into conflict with a
man whose eye emitted such a cool and cunning beam.
His self-possession, that was almost insolence, would
make people afraid of his will. He spoke in English to
his companion; and as he talked, there came on his face
a look of sarcastic but not unfriendly amusement.

Staring past the priests, Thomas sighed and forgot
he was in Rome. A long aisle of backward-turning years
unrolled before him — that aisle of time down which he
and Sarah had walked hand in hand, starting from their
courtship and taking them past the few scattered mile-
stones that humped above the uneventful level of their
mingled lives. The first mile-stone, quite near the starting-
place, was a grave — the dim mound which held the sad
little ghost that had flown away from them so soon after
it put on mortal flesh. The next mile-stone was Danny's
birth. Thomas stared out of the window at the smooth
brown foreground of the Roman Campagna, from which
a haze of dust rose up to the sky making the road and the
distance one, and an old vexation troubled him again.
Too bad the boy had mixed himself up with the Roman
Catholics! None of that in his family, or Sarah's. Plain
Protestant folks on both sides, right back to Plymouth
Rock. Unaccountable where the boy got it from! But
he was always deep. There was something dead earnest
about him, some quality that seemed to lift him up and
put him out of reach. He said it was his faith. Well

Another mile-stone loomed on the smooth horizon of
his past, and Thomas heard Sarah's voice calling him to
come into the front parlor. Like the majority of village
front parlors this was an ungracious room, frigid and

281

The Apostate

tidy, as becomes the apartment dedicated to unused and
useless possessions. But somehow, the parlor had seemed
the right place to discuss this thing. He walked in and
found Sarah standing in the middle of the room. "Look
here!" She spoke queerly. And then she showed him a
crucifix and a rosary she had found in Danny's things
when she was looking for his socks to mend. They looked
at each other, voiceless. And Sarah said after a bit,
"Well, what do you make of this?" But he could only
gape at her, "What do you?" Then he burst out, "Good
Lord! How long do you suppose — he's had those things
in the house?" She answered, as full of incredulity, "I'm
sure I don't know!" Again their looks met over the
question neither spoke: what's come over him? If Danny
had turned himself into a Chocktaw Indian, or a sun-
worshipping heathen, it could not have been a harder
thing to understand. When Thomas found his voice,
light broke over the dark upheaval of his mind. "Sarah,
this means — it means he's got another religion — he
doesn't believe as we do!" The realization burnt like
flame. "He's got hold of some nonsense — !" he shouted
in his dismay. "Sh-sh!" Sarah shook him by the arm;
her touch steadied him a little. "Let him alone, Thomas.
You know you can't force him — you won't do any good — "
Ah, he felt very baffled and miserable then. Not in the
boy's confidence at all. But Sarah was right — you couldn't
force him. He wouldn't give in.

There was a bump. Hey! Thomas was flung hard
against the invisible angularities of the young woman
next to him. The bus had stopped.

A gabbling confusion quickly arose, all on account of a
goat in the road. The goat which was being driven by a
peasant woman stood boldly in the way, its legs spread
apart, immovable and baffling, while a bitter altercation
in impassioned Italian raged between the driver and the
peasant woman concerning the right to advance. When

282

Lillian Barnard Gilkes

at length the mischievous animal was induced to budge a
trifle to one side, so the bus could pass, it appeared that
defendant and plaintiff both were equally vindicated.
Thomas grinned.

By Jake, that animal got the best of it — you couldn't
turn a goat from his fixed intention! Why, that goat
made him feel at home in Italy. Now who would have
expected that? Here he was, and Sarah, in this foreign
land — and Danny showing them the sights like the king's
agent. No, it would be the Pope's. Well, he guessed it
was all right. Danny was a good boy, and no notions
about incense and the rest of it could unsettle that. Never
had given them any trouble or anxiety about — about a
young man's difficulties — oh, nothing like that! Thomas,
smiling at such a thought, felt a glow like a warm perspi-
ration coming out all over him. That boy would make
good — and his dad would stand by him, sure!

"Say, what's that over there?" He asked the question
without interest in knowing, but because — well, he was
proud of the boy. Liked to hear him talk.

Danny said there were ruins like those everywhere in
the teeming vicinity of Rome. You couldn't step but
you came upon a bit of wall, or a piece of the aqueduct.

"The things tourists come to see — putting post-card
atmosphere before the eternal spirit — the spirit of the
Christian martyrs! Yes, people go abroad to look at
architecture — but how little interest they take in the
first monuments of our faith, which are as ancient —
as ancient as the monuments of the Roman Forum!"

"Ah! But remember — " The dark-eyed priest had
been listening. "The stone of our monuments came off
the pagan temples — a most regrettable fact "

"Oh, if you look at it that way — !" Danny was sud-
denly very angry. What right had this fellow to chal-
lenge him? He turned on the priest, hating him and
feeling that the spirit of the martyrs had somehow been

283

The Apostate

impugned. "I should call that being disloyal to the
Church!"

"Some of us think differently "

"There can be no difference of opinion touching the
Church's infallibility!"

Thomas looked at Sarah, and she looked at him. He
said "Gosh!" under his breath. And she felt as if she
were waiting for a fire-cracker to go off. She didn't know
what they were arguing about, but for strangers to
quarrel — churchmen too! Danny used not to be like
that — so touchy and ready to fly off the handle. It was —
it must be because he wasn't well.

"If you are discussing doctrine — " The priest spoke
in a quiet, slow voice. "That's a different matter — quite.
Church doctrine must be held infallible — only so can
discipline be maintained within the ecclesiastical organiza-
tion. But I'm not here as a churchman now — I'm on a
holiday — you see, I'm not speaking from the ecclesiastical
point of view. And — " he added with a queer smile —
"as a spectator — a tourist — I probably have some feel-
ings in common with the layman."

"Well — " said Danny, shocked quite beyond discre-
tion— "If you mean that you hold private convictions
contrary to the Church's teaching, that's very serious —
that makes you a hypocrite!"

"Oh, not necessarily!" The priest laughed.

"But you believe in compromise "

"Naturally. And don't you? Is not the Church's his-
tory a record of judicious and enlightened compromise?
Indeed, how are you going to bring the masses of erring
mankind to the faith and keep them there if you do not
compromise with human weakness?"

Still smiling, he turned to Thomas and said very cor-
dially, "If it's of interest to you — the ruin you were
asking about is what's left of a house where Saint Gregory
— that was Gregory the Great — lived as a monk. As a

284

Lillian Barnard Gilkes

pope, too, he taught there. They've got a table there
now of the second century — just think of that! — from
which Saint Gregory gave food to the poor."

"You don't say!" Thomas was astounded. But — if
the table had hung on that long, the saint hadn't. He
wondered if they had got any of his whiskers and finger-
nails around anywhere.

"It would be worth your while to make another trip
out here and go into that house "

"Oh, I'm sure!" Sarah was extremely relieved to find
something she could agree with. If the argument were
begun again it would become a quarrel and this time,
surely, something terrible would happen. Obscurely,
she felt that Danny was in the wrong and she wanted to
protect him, to rescue his dignity for him, if he would not
himself. Apologizing, she added, "But I'm afraid there
isn't time "

"Oh! Well, there never is — nobody ever has time
enough in Rome."

Really he means well, she thought. But remembering
that they were leaving tomorrow, suddenly home seemed
terribly far away. Would they ever reach home again?
She tried to picture home and, strangely, she could form
no image of her accustomed life. It seemed incalculably
remote — more distant, even, than that foreign destina-
tion they could not imagine, when she and Thomas
boarded the giant ship that was to take them to the other
side of the world. Nonsense! Home was right there
where it had always been — it wouldn't have walked away
in their absence! But she felt afraid — of what, she did
not know. And now she did not want to visit the Cata-
combs or do any more of the fatiguing things people do
in Rome. They had not come all that journey across the
ocean to look at Roman relics or at churches the Chris-
tians had built. They had come to see their son. The

285

The Apostate

time was going — all but a few hours gone — and they had
seen hardly anything of him. There was so much to do,
and he wouldn't have them miss anything. But — why,
they had not had a real good talk together yet! And
tomorrow — tomorrow they must say good-by to Danny.
Why, why was it so? Her health was good, but you never
know — she might die without ever seeing her son again.
And now that dry landscape out there — the Appian
Way — though the sun was shining full on it, seemed to
go under a shadow which made it monstrous and alien
and ugly; and hot as the temperature was, she shivered
looking at it.

Danny was staring angrily out of the window. The
priest, with a peculiar crafty smile on his face, continued
talking to Sarah.

"I walked out here the other day in the early morn-
ing— " he said with a wave of his hand toward the road.
"The sun was just coming up and we walked along in
the glow of the sky. Bare-footed, you know — I thought
of the martyrs! We had an archbishop along with us — "
He said that as you might have said, "We had Johnny
along with us." . . . "You know, it's very pleasant at
that hour. Several of us were going out to say a mass in
the Catacombs and we all walked along singing hymns —
bare-footed — " He laughed. "Just like the martyrs!"

The bus stopped in front of a plain little church with
a dusty white plaster facade. Danny said they were to
get out and go inside. Sarah was glad he gave her his
arm to lean on, for she had not even yet got over the
nervous feeling she had about going into Catholic
churches. Not that she expected anything dreadful to
happen — of course not! But she felt as though God were
watching her.

Inside the church it smelled of wax and garlic. The
white walls looked strange, though they were ordinary;
but the candles burning in bright clusters warmed them

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Lillian Barnard Gilkes

and hid their squalor. The uneasiness that troubled
Sarah increased as she glanced about. The sight of a
woman with a pinched sorrowful face, dressed in black
and kneeling before one of the shrines, affected her with
a kind of shock. She was used to making her supplica-
tions to God in the decent privacy of a church pew, and
she thought she never could get used to the foreigner's
ways of worshipping and love-making in public, not even
if she lived over here. When she saw Danny go down on
his knees and make the sign of the cross she began to
tremble queerly. A nameless emotion burst from her
heart and she wanted to cry out, "My son! O my son!"

Thomas came and stood close to her, and she put her
hand in his. The bus conductor came in, followed by
the rest of the party, and when he had got them all
around him he began to speak an oration about the
church. The priest who had talked to her in the bus was
standing in the group, and she saw him turn away with a
shrug, as much as to say, "That's all nonsense!"

"Come this way!" Danny called to them. He took
hold of Sarah's arm and Thomas's other one, and walk-
ing between them guided them to a spot where there
was a little iron cross standing up in the stone floor.
"Look!" he said, pointing to the floor. They both looked,
and saw the perfect imprint of a human foot graven in
the stone.

"You know the story?" Danny asked, looking from
one to the other. "This is where Our Lord met Peter
as He was going out from Rome, and that is the spot
where He stood. There you see His footprints — there
are two of them, one a little fainter — left behind in the
stone. Of course you can believe it or not — as you like.
But there is the proof! Can you stand on a piece of
granite in your bare feet and make an impression like
that? Of course not! I say there's no question about it —
it's a fact that can't be denied. Peter said to Our Lord,

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The Apostate

4 Quo vadis? Quo vadis — where are you going?' And
Our Lord replied, 'I'm going forth to suffer again because
thou art going away from Rome '"

Sarah bent forward to see. Thomas exclaimed,
"Humph! Well!" Hand in hand they stood together
in wonder, gazing down at the divine mark.

"Quo vadis — where are you going?" Danny repeated
it like a chant, like an invocation. It seemed to Sarah
his voice sang with a passionate tenderness that smote
her strangely; and Thomas stood ill at ease, fingering his
hat.

"There it is, you see — you'd better kiss it before you

"Yes — oh, yes!" she cried, too much moved to say
more. Thomas murmured, "Oh, sure!"

Danny knelt down and touched his lips to the stone.
Dismayed, she clung tighter to Thomas's hand — and
while her son stood by, whipping her on with his un-
bending will, impeded by her stoutness she stooped and
did as he commanded her. Thomas came down stiffly
on one knee beside her.

Out-of-doors the sun was bright, too bright — it made
black spots come before Sarah's eyes. Thomas blinked
and rubbed his. The priest who had argued before got
into the bus beside him, and remarked, "Of course, that's
not an article of dogma — it's a tradition. But it could
have been. He could have done it — He might even
have done it deliberately. Over here I have seen many
things I never expected to see. A piece of the true cross,
a fragment of the cross of the good thief — three of the
nails from the cross of Our Lord, and two thorns "

It was all very marvellous. Thomas agreed with the
priest. But you couldn't be sure it was true unless you
had faith. His own faith didn't cover quite as much as
that — not by a good deal! But what was that fellow

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Lillian Barnard Gilkes

always putting in his oar for? He didn't exactly trust
'em, those priests.

A monk in a brown robe, sandals on his bare feet, led
them through the Catacombs. He was an old man and
he had a wan sad face, and a long gray beard which gave
him an early Christian appearance. Now and then when
he was speaking, his voice would die away and he seemed
to forget what he was saying, but his dreaming eyes
looked to be full of memories. He addressed everything
he said to Danny. Sarah and Thomas didn't mind that —
didn't mind not understanding. Danny translated every-
thing promptly, and it made them feel pleased and proud
to hear him reply to the monk in Italian.

It was chilly in the passages, and black dark. The
brother handed them each a wax taper to light their way.
When they came to the place where the infants had been
entombed in the rock wall, Sarah was suddenly overcome
with misery and panic at the thought of how little they
were to suffer in that grim place. And she asked herself,
how could people do the cruel, wicked things the Romans
had done? Once they heard voices ahead of them and
saw the tapers of another party moving up through the
gloom, a poor little glow bobbing about precariously in
the choking dark. Presently the corridor broadened out
into a chamber where, in a recess behind a grill, several
candles were burning on an altar that held some bits of
vestments under glass. The candles shed their yellow
light upon a woman's figure, on a bier in front of the altar.
The face frozen in youthful innocence seemed moulded
of moonlight, an expression rapt of the moon lying like
frost upon the marbled features, the high arched nose
thinned and sculptured by death.

"Oh!" Sarah drew back, uttering a soft scream.

"It's all right — nothing to be afraid of," said Danny,
genuflecting and crossing himself. "That's only a plaster

cast."

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The Apostate

Thomas coughed in relieved embarrassment.

Fearfully they went up to the bier and looked into
the face. It seemed impossible even yet that the likeness
of martyred flesh was plaster, the cold moon-color of
the features but the reflection of candle-light in a hollow
cave. This was the tomb of Saint Cecelia.

Holding his taper high to throw the light farther, Danny
told them the story of Saint Cecelia — how she was the
daughter of a Roman noble family and was betrothed
by her heathen parents to a Roman youth named Valerian,
and how, filled with her influence, her parents became
Christians and Valerian suffered martyrdom. Danny's
eyes were lit with a strange dark fire, and as he related
the frightful defamations to which the beautiful body
of Saint Cecelia was subjected his voice rang with a fervor
that seemed to lift him to some tremendous climax of
transcendent feeling. One could believe that his own veins
took fire with the agony and the rapture of the Roman
girl's martyrdom.

"She was just a slip of a girl! Frail, and lovely, and
afraid — afraid of the soldiers — " With a swift movement
he raised his hands; the knuckles showed white. "They
must have torn her white flesh — they probably violated
her — " His body tense, he seemed about, to throw him-
self forward upon some invisible form. His face was
very pale. Then he took a step backward and dropped
his hands. "Just a slip of a girl "

"For a long time — a great many ages — " he went on
with the story, "her body was lost. It disappeared and
couldn't be found. But finally it was recovered, and
then — " He lowered his voice significantly. "It was
found to be absolutely uncorrupted — absolutely uncor-
rupted!" The word "uncorrupted" had a pulpy sound
as he uttered it, as if it came from under his tongue.
And he repeated it with a kind of joy, as though it sig-
nified for him a supreme and secret ecstasy.

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Lillian Barnard Gilkes

His voice pealing forth in the weird dusk woke an old
echo in Sarah's heart. Strange, how familiar! And then
she remembered those tones — Thomas, in the days
of their courtship, had used them speaking to her of
love. Momentarily her youth returned upon her, and a
warm flush streamed down her throat under the neck
of her dress. Love had seemed (such a horrifying thing.
But there are things in life that don't seem real or right
until you have accepted them, and then you wonder
how they could have been anything but natural.

A wild excitement shone in Danny's eyes, and his
face — so pale — made her again afraid for him. He lived
too much on his nerves — ah, that was it! — and too much
alone. Some way it injures folks to have too much of one
thing, be it religion, getting rich, or love. As a boy he
was restless, in the house and out — he couldn't settle to
anything. And Thomas was strict with him — wouldn't
have him dawdling about when there was work to do.
Once she had found him out in the barn, sitting humped
over on the stool beside the cow he had been milking —
the cow switching her tail, disgruntled, and rumbling to
herself; the milk pail standing only a quarter full. He'd
been crying. . . . "What is it? What trouble have you
got, my son?" She did not often show feeling. But the
sight of his distress afflicted her keenly. She folded her
arms around him, half lifting him from the stool; and for
an instant he laid his face against her bosom. In silence
they stayed so, his head pressed in to her shoulder; and
it seemed her very self that she held there clasped in a
tight embrace, her separate flesh united mysteriously
with his, melted in compassionate love. The mare began
munching straw in the next stall, and as though that
external sound put an end to their communion, a single
sob burst from him — an uncouth, terrifying sound. "Oh,
mother — I want something — I don't know what!" And
she never knew, either, what that desire was. But she

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The Apostate

remembered she, too, once had felt a yearning after some-
thing, nameless and unattainable. The feeling was gone
before she could identify it, displaced by other feelings;
for then she met Thomas and married him.

She drew her breath in a deep, slow sigh. That instant
she felt a touch of heart-burn. It must be the heat —
and all this going — she wasn't used to it. She reached
in her hand-bag for her little bottle of soda-mints, and
poured a heap of the tablets into her palm. Swallowing one,
she put the others back and corked up the bottle again.

Danny motioned to the brother, and led the way out
of the dusk-filled chamber again into swallowing dark-
ness. "Better go along now! You can spend all sorts of
time in these places, but you've got to pack "

They groped through black corridors, airless and dank,
and inhospitable as a grave. Sarah was afraid of falling.
Danny held her arm, but she stumbled several times
before they got outside. They had a moment to wait for
the bus. An ancient vehicle it was, and subject to spasms
of exploding noise. They bumped forward, nearly thrown
off the seats, a cloud of dust kicked up behind which
whitened the grass along the edges of the road. Then
the bus took a run of speed, like a young horse going to
take a hurdle. But the leap didn't come, and presently
they drew up outside a trattoria. The driver got down
to get himself a drink.

Danny asked if they wouldn't like something. "Wa-
ter— or lemonade?"

"Anything'll suit me, so it's wet — " Thomas declared.
"I never was so plumb dry in my life."

"Lemonade's good to quench thirst," Sarah said.
"That's what I'll have."

"Make it three, then. Hey! Wait a minute — "Thomas
grabbed in his pocket for some coins.

"Oh, that's all right — " Danny started off. But Thomas
wouldn't allow it.

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Lillian Barnard Gilkes

"You're crazy, boy — keep your money!"

In a minute Danny came back and announced, "He
wants a lira each — I think it's too much "

But Thomas laughed. Out of a great guffaw he said,
"Sure, go ahead — I guess a nickel won't break me up!"
Still chuckling, when Danny had gone he turned to Sarah.
"What do you think of that!"

She shook her head, smiling. But she knew. She knew
it was because he didn't have the money to spend. Regret-
fully, she tried to remember whether they had let him
pay any of the admissions to the places he had taken
them. She hoped not, but she couldn't be sure. He was
so quick at attending to things. She guessed Thomas
could spare a bit of money to leave with him — five dollars
or so would at least buy him some warm gloves for the
winter. He used to suffer because his hands got so cold.
And people said it was a disagreeable climate in Rome
in the wintertime — the dampness was the thing.

"He's learned a thing or two. He's learned how to
hold on to his money, all right! He'll get along !"

They exchanged glances, their faces softly aglow with
admiration of his shining qualities. Their splendid son!
Then Thomas's countenance turned sober.

"Say — do you suppose they give 'em enough to eat
in that place?"

"What place?"

"I'm talking about that seminary!" He didn't know
why he was suddenly angry. But he thought she knew —
well enough — what place he meant. "You know, these
Catholics are great on fasting — I thought, maybe "

She had the same thought. Maybe, in the interests of
piety, his body was not being cared for.

Danny came out of the trattoria carrying the lemon-
ades, straws sticking up in the glasses. But there were
only two.

"Where's yours?" Thomas asked quickly.

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The Apostate

"Thanks, I'm not going to take any — I had some
water inside. Here's your change "

"I don't want it."

"It's your change, Father "

"I said I don't want it — " He was shouting now.
"Don't give me any more of that tin money!"

In his impatience he struck Danny's hand that held
the money, knocking a two-lira piece to the ground. It
jingled on the pavement. "Lot of foolishness!" he mut-
tered under his breath. Danny stooped and picked up the
two-lira piece, and dropped it carefully into his pocket.

The Roman dusk was coming down — the rich, fanci-
ful, gold-brown dusk that spreads over the darkening
olive trees a mauve obscurity and blackens the pines,
stooping gaunt on the yellow rim of eternity. Swallows
were going to and fro overhead, dashing against the
eaves and dropping their faint twitterings.

Danny leaned back, sucking air into his lungs. There
was a pain in his chest. He drew his lips into a rigid,
tight line to stop the pain. Words came into his mind —
"the Power and the Glory" — and he felt them in his
blood like a canticle. He looked away at the Sabine Hills,
loping along with the motion of the bus like a procession
of gray rabbits on the horizon, hopping one behind another
endlessly; and he grew aware of an exultation in his soul,
concocted of some subtle chemistry of atmosphere.
Something acrid and sharp, yet sweetly disturbing. He
often felt that at this hour, in Rome. He felt as if his
naked body were enveloped in a burning, transfiguring
light. To be near that light, seared and uplifted by it
forever, was the utmost desire of his soul.

He remembered his childhood, that wintry time of
toil spent in a harsh endeavor to make the earth give
up its fruits. And he recoiled from the memory as he
had done from the haunted emptiness of the life he had

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Lillian Barnard Gilkes

had to lead. He saw himself a small boy in patched
overalls, going unwillingly between the new furrows to
drop in the seed. How bitterly then he had felt the
binding village horizon shut down upon his straining
spirit like some immense lid screwed down from the sky!
Beyond that horizon he had thought there must be a
place where it was possible to gain the things his mind
visioned as so richly desirable — splendor and power and
ceremony, and the purity of God. The books he read,
though not many, were as wings that admitted him to
the huge inviting realm encircling the mean restricted
world he moved in. He read them lying up aloft in the
hay, in moments filched from the chores — books about
the missionaries of God who converted idolaters and kings.
When no one was by he used to take them from the shelf
in the kitchen that was between the brass clock and the
heavy Bible which stood uptilted, clasped in a metal
holder, feeling queerly ashamed to publish his preoccupa-
tion with the mysteries of the soul. His parents, in their
simple devout minds, at first had seemed pleased with
his interest in unworldly subjects; but soon they per-
ceived in such things an encouragement to idleness, and
commanded him to leave books alone except on Sundays.
He felt the privacy of his soul ruthlessly invaded when
his father ascended to the hay-loft and discovered him
reading on a week-day. From negligence he had let the
pigs get into the beans and banquet, to their agony and
his humiliation, upon four superb rows of Kentucky
Wonders. It was the one time in his life his father had
laid a hand on him, but the memory of it still was obses-
sionally horrifying. He had but to turn and walk away
and his father, a physically small man though wiry,
would not have been able to use force on him. But some
other subtler, inexplicable force rendered him powerless
to defy his father; and so he stood up and let himself be
whipped.

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The Apostate

Mysterious power that the physical personality wields
over minds in conflict! But he had broken out of that
bondage. The day that Father Connolly came into his
life he had ceased to feel himself in subjection to any
authority outside himself, save only Divine Authority.
A lad of seventeen he was then, and the priest came
walking around a bend in the road. He marched up to
Danny — on his way into town with the calf to be sold —
and inquired how far it was to a place called Quimby.
He had never heard of Quimby nor any such place, but
he offered the priest a lift into town — and it was just like
taking a ride with his destiny beside him! A magisterial,
inspired man was Father Connolly, possessed of an elo-
quence that could conquer anything. A stranger appari-
tion than a figure of a Roman priest was hardly to be
found upon a New England highway. But out of oddities
and strangeness have sprung many of God's most cunning
miracles — what is incredible to heretics and blind men
is to the man of faith the most immaculate, the only true
reality. When the priest went away he left with him a
crucifix and a breviary.

He saw ahead now the city coming into view, its domes
phantasmagorial in the dusk. Watching the houses grow
upon the skyline, he felt that the memory of his childhood
stirred in him nothing but a sense of bitter alienation.
He turned and looked at the old man sitting beside him,
dressed in out-moded clothes of some thick material
and having about him a scrubby, formal, old-fashioned
gentility; and he felt strange to his own flesh and blood in
his parents. What was it, he asked himself, that divided
flesh from flesh? What made the difference? What had
opened this immeasurable gulf between their lives and
his, between their passions and his passions? He did not
know. He only knew he would be glad to be alone again
when his parents had gone from Rome — quite alone. It
was distracting, the obligation to look after the old people

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Lillian Barnard Gilkes

and find them entertainment. Their mute boundless
affection, which he felt unable to reciprocate, was burden-
some.

"Look here !"

His father's voice dropped into his thought like a stone
falling into a still pool; and with the sound in his ears his
broken thought went rippling and curveting away to the
covert quarters of his mind. He answered, "What?"

Thomas had been nerving himself to put a question;
but now that he had it on the end of his tongue he didn't
know what to do with it. He wished he might fling it
away somewhere, where it wouldn't be found. All the
same, he wanted to know for sure. Sarah and he had
tackled it in secret. He cleared his throat and went for
it now, adopting a voice that proclaimed him the head of
the family.

"Er-ah — you've been three years over here. I suppose
you'll be getting through soon and coming home?"

Danny turned, instantly resenting it that his father
should use such a tone with him. As though he were a
lad in college! Then it flashed through his mind that the
old man probably meant this as a slight to his religion.
They never would learn not to bring up that subject. He
was sorry if it was painful to them, but he didn't see how
he could help it. He was not going to discuss his faith
with them. He thought what his faith was to him, and
he wondered at other people's weak beliefs.

In that moment, he felt his isolation acutely. He could
not live in his own country, and he was out of sympathy
with his time. An exile, lost out of time, stranded among
a race of aliens who were hostile to him — his soul was
swept by nostalgic passions that resisted human ties.
He felt as though a wintry blast, cold and lonely, had
rushed at the windows of his spirit. He knew himself
cut off. Then it struck him that such had always been

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The Apostate

the lot of the Church's people, to be reviled and misunder-
stood. And all at once his feeling changed; he felt uplifted
again, exhilarated by pride and resistance and a pas-
sionate self-assurance. His soul was as a mediaeval gar-
rison having contempt for the besieging enemy, exulting
confidently in the power behind four walls to endure
forever. He felt that he understood his destiny, that his
personal relation to destiny was a secret matter between
him and his Creator, and he was even glad that others
understood it not — scornfully glad to be alone as he was,
because it gave him a superior strength. His feeling
cleaved to the teaching of religion that this strength
comes from God, and it made him incapable of perceiving
that God's strength is in the hearts of men. As he turned
and faced his parents now, thinking of their wish to draw
him and bind him to them, his heart was choked with ice.

"When are you coming home?"

"I'm not coming home," he replied coldly. "My work
is over here. I have no other home but in that "

"Eh?"

Thomas heard the words. But his mind cast them
back in his ears where they simply rattled without sense.
The blood rushed to his head and he was conscious only
of an overwhelming fury that hummed about his ears,
an enveloping rage against what he did not know.

"So, that's it! Oh— well "

But he could not get command of his voice to speak
because his thought was incoherent, pitching about in
the darkness of his mind like a ship stricken in a tempest.
He did not know what he thought. But more than any-
thing else in life — the bit of life that remained to him —
he wanted his son at home again. He was suddenly bit-
terly conscious of his age. That was true — he was an old
man now, and he needed his son. Soon he would have to
give up altogether. And when his time came, it would
be hard to go out with his son not by. His only son was

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Lillian Barnard Gilkes

stripped from, him and given to God. What for, he
thought, what for? His mind was full of blasphemy. For
the first time in his life he doubted there was a God in
heaven. He could not reconcile the two things — a Heav-
enly Father and the loss of his son. But he was a religious
man instinctively, an old man besides, and used to be-
lieving. Whatever was done to him he could no more
cease to have faith in the Might of God, whose benev-
olence it was not permitted men to question, than he
could call back his youth and begin his life over. He
sighed heavily; his head dropped forward. But his son
thought he was only moving his position on the seat
against the jolting of the bus.

Sarah started, hearing those blasting words spoken
in her son's voice, "not coming home." How could he
say such a thing to his father and mother, that he had
no home! Had he no love, then, for the home of his
people? Oh, why was it given to a woman to bear children
and they to leave their parents comfortless in their old
age? A sharp sound between a gasp and a moan came
from her throat, and leaning forward, not to miss any
word of what was so incredible and painful, her groping
hand came against Thomas's knee. His hand closed over
hers.

And Thomas remembered Job. He remembered it
was the fate of old men, one way or another, to lose their
sons. He pressed Sarah's hand, and in that moment
something struck him, the first scourge of that pain they
would endure the rest of their lives together in the loss
of their living son.

"Why should I go back to America?" Danny, his
voice tense with frigid passion, was speaking to them
both. "What is America to me? The life there has be-
come so utterly material — people cutting one another's
throats for gain — I feel choked at the thought of it! I

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The Apostate

can understand the bitterness in the Master's heart when
he wept over Jerusalem. I — " He struck himself on the
breast. "I — have felt that!"

Thomas raised his eyes and looked timidly into his
son's face. His head felt heavy, and there was a queer
trembling in his neck.

"All I want to know is — if you're happy over here —
that's all I want to know "

Danny's face which had been radiant clouded momen-
tarily. He was gazing in front of him with a fixed, wild
stare. Then a light blazed up in his eyes which became a
look of reckless passion.

"Happy — yes, I'm happy !"

The old people, still with hands clasped, looked again
at their son. Their eyes strove to penetrate behind the
impassive pale features to the inexplicable purpose nestled
within his brain. But only the physical countenance
they had created out of their bodies met their gaze — an
aloof set of features that no longer confided the intimate
processes of their son's life.

They turned away their eyes to the dusty, disordered
plain spreading back from the road, with the dim gray
ghosts of the Sabine Hills trailing behind in the distance.
They heard the swallows speaking together from the
house-tops.

300

THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD

by
Henry James

HENRY JAMES (1843-1916), though his distinguished
place in American letters has never been questioned was
somewhat less highly regarded for some years after his death
than he is now (1936). His reputation has revived surpris-
ingly as a result of the interest displayed in his ideas and his
technique by young writers whose sympathies are quite as
likely to be radical as conservative. See for example Stephen
Spender's The Destructive Element (1935) and the Henry
James number of Hound and Horn (April- June 1934).

THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD

HE had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean
anniversaries, and loved them still less when they
made a pretence of a figure. Celebrations and sup-
pressions were equally painful to him, and but one of the
former found a place in his life. He had kept each year in
his own fashion the date of Mary Antrim's death. It
would be more to the point perhaps to say that this occa-
sion kept him: it kept him at least effectually from doing
anything else. It took hold of him again and again with a
hand of which time had softened but never loosened the
touch. He waked to his feast of memory as consciously as
he would have waked to his marriage-morn. Marriage had
had of old but too little to say to the matter: for the girl
who was to have been his bride there had been no bridal
embrace. She had died of a malignant fever after the
wedding-day had been fixed, and he had lost before fairly
tasting it an affection that promised to fill his life to the
brim.

Of that benediction, however, it would have been false
to say this life could really be emptied: it was still ruled
by a pale ghost, still ordered by a sovereign presence. He
had not been a man of numerous passions, and even in all
these years no sense had grown stronger with him than the
sense of being bereft. He had needed no priest and no
altar to make him for ever widowed. He had done many
things in the world — he had done almost all but one: he
had never, never forgotten. He had tried to put into his
existence whatever else might take up room in it, but had

From Terminations, by Henry James. Copyright by Harper & Brothers,
New York, and reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers.

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The Altar of the Dead

failed to make it more than a house of which the mistress
was eternally absent. She was most absent of all on the
recurrent December day that his tenacity set apart. He
had no arranged observance of it, but his nerves made it
all their own. They drove him forth without mercy, and
the goal of his pilgrimage was far. She had been buried in a
London suburb, a part then of Nature's breast, but which
he. had seen lose one after another every feature of fresh-
ness. It was in truth during the moments he stood there
that his eyes beheld the place least. They looked at an-
other image, they opened to another light. Was it a
credible future? Was it an incredible past? Whatever the
answer it was an immense escape from the actual.

It's true that if there weren't other dates than this there
were other memories; and by the time George Stransom
was fifty-five such memories had greatly multiplied. There
were other ghosts in his life than the ghost of Mary Antrim.
He had perhaps not had more losses than most men, but he
had counted his losses more; he hadn't seen death more
closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply. He had
formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: it
had come to him early in life that there was something one
had to do for them. They were there in their simplified
intensified essence, their conscious absence and expressive
patience, as personally there as if they had only been
stricken dumb. When all sense of them failed, all sound of
them ceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still
on earth: they asked so little that they got, poor things,
even less, and died again, died every day, of the hard
usage of life. They had no organised service, no reserved
place, no honour, no shelter, no safety. Even ungenerous
people provided for the living, but even those who were
called most generous did nothing for the others. So on
George S transom's part had grown up with the years a
resolve that he at least would do something, do it, that is,
for his own — would perform the great charity without

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reproach. Every man had his own, and every man had, to
meet this charity, the ample resources of the soul.

It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke
for them best; as the years at any rate went by he found
himself in regular communion with these postponed pen-
sioners, those whom indeed he always called in his thoughts
the Others. He spared them the moments, he organised the
charity. Quite how it had risen he probably never could
have told you, but what came to pass was that an altar,
such as was after all within everybody's compass, lighted
with perpetual candles and dedicated to these secret rites,
reared itself in his spiritual spaces. He had wondered of
old, in some embarrassment, whether he had a religion;
being very sure, and not a little content, that he hadn't
at all events the religion some of the people he had known
wanted him to have. Gradually this question was straight-
ened out for him: it became clear to him that the religion
instilled by his earliest consciousness had been simply the
religion of the Dead. It suited his inclination, it satisfied
his spirit, it gave employment to his piety. It answered his
love of great offices, of a solemn and splendid ritual; for no
shrine could be more bedecked and no ceremonial more
stately than those to which his worship was attached. He
had no imagination about these things but that they were
accessible to anyone who should feel the need of them. The
poorest could build such temples of the spirit — could make
them blaze with candles and smoke with incense, make them
flush with pictures and flowers. The cost, in the common
phrase, of keeping them up fell wholly on the generous heart.

He had this year, on the eve of his anniversary, as
happened, an emotion not unconnected with that range of
feeling. Walking home at the close of a busy day he was
arrested in the London street by the particular effect of a
shop-front that lighted the dull brown air with its mer-

305

The Altar of the Dead

cenary grin and before which several persons were gath-
ered. It was the window of a jeweller whose diamonds and
sapphires seemed to laugh, in flashes like high notes of
sound, with the mere joy of knowing how much more
they were "worth" than most of the dingy pedestrians
staring at them from the other side of the pane. Stransom
lingered long enough to suspend, in a vision, a string of
pearls about the white neck of Mary Antrim, and then
was kept an instant longer by the sound of a voice he knew.
Next him was a mumbling old woman, and beyond the old
woman a gentleman with a lady on his arm. It was from
him, from Paul Creston, the voice had proceeded: he was
talking with the lady of some precious object in the win-
dow. Stransom had no sooner recognised him than the old
woman turned away; but just with this growth of opportu-
nity came a felt strangeness that stayed him in the very
act of laying his hand on his friend's arm. It lasted but
the instant, only that space sufficed for the flash of a wild
question. Was not Mrs. Creston dead? — the ambiguity
met him there in the short drop of her husband's voice, the
drop conjugal, if it ever was, and in the way the two figures
leaned to each other. Creston, making a step to look at
something else, came nearer, glanced at him, started and
exclaimed — behaviour the effect of which was at first only
to leave Stransom staring, staring back across the months
at the different face, the wholly other face, the poor man
had shown him last, the blurred ravaged mask bent over
the open grave by which they had stood together. That
son of affliction wasn't mourning now; he detached his arm
from his companion's to grasp the hand of the older friend.
He coloured as well as smiled in the strong light of the shop
when Stransom raised a tentative hat to the lady. Stran-
som had just time to see she was pretty before he found
himself gaping at a fact more portentous. "My dear
fellow, let me make you acquainted with my wife."

Creston had blushed and stammered over it, but in half

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Henry James

a minute, at the rate we live in polite society, it had prac-
tically become, for our friend, the mere memory of a shock.
They stood there and laughed and talked; Stransom had
instantly whisked the shock out of the way, to keep it for
private consumption. He felt himself grimace, he heard
himself exaggerate the proper, but was conscious of turn-
ing not a little faint. That new woman, that hired per-
former, Mrs. Creston? Mrs. Creston had been more living
for him than any woman but one. This lady had a face
that shone as publicly as the jeweller's window, and in the
happy candour with which she wore her monstrous char-
acter was an effect of gross immodesty. The character of
Paul Creston's wife thus attributed to her was monstrous
for reasons Stransom could judge his friend to know per-
fectly that he knew. The happy pair had just arrived from
America, and Stransom hadn't needed to be told this to
guess the nationality of the lady. Somehow it deepened
the foolish air that her husband's confused cordiality was
unable to conceal. Stransom recalled that he had heard of
poor Creston's having, while his bereavement was still
fresh, crossed the sea for what people in such predicaments
call a little change. He had found the little change indeed,
he had brought the little change back; it was the little
change that stood there and that, do what he would, he
couldn't, while he showed those high front teeth of his, look
other than a conscious ass about. They were going into the
shop, Mrs. Creston said, and she begged Mr. Stransom to
come with them and help to decide. He thanked her, open-
ing his watch and pleading an engagement for which he
was already late, and they parted while she shrieked into
the fog "Mind now you come to see me right away!"
Creston had had the delicacy not to suggest that, and
Stransom hoped it hurt him somewhere to hear her scream
it to all the echoes.

He felt quite determined, as he walked away, never in
his life to go near her. She was perhaps a human being,

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The Altar of the Dead

but Creston oughtn't to have shown her without precau-
tions, oughtn't indeed to have shown her at all. His pre-
cautions should have been those of a forger or a murderer,
and the people at home would never have mentioned ex-
tradition. This was a wife for foreign service or purely
external use; a decent consideration would have spared
her the injury of comparisons. Such was the first flush of
George Stransom's reaction; but as he sat alone that night
— there were particular hours he always passed alone — the
harshness dropped from it and left only the pity. He could
spend an evening with Kate Creston, if the man to whom
she had given everything couldn't. He had known her
twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom he
might perhaps have been unfaithful. She was all cleverness
and sympathy and charm; her house had been the very
easiest in all the world and her friendship the very firmest.
Without accidents he had loved her, without accidents
every one had loved her: she had made the passions about
her as regular as the moon makes the tides. She had been
also of course far too good for her husband, but he never
suspected it, and in nothing had she been more admirable
than in the exquisite art with which she tried to keep every
one else (keeping Creston was no trouble) from finding it
out. Here was a man to whom she had devoted her life and
for whom she had given it up — dying to bring into the
world a child of his bed; and she had had only to submit to
her fate to have, ere the grass was green on her grave, no
more existence for him than a domestic servant he had
replaced. The frivolity, the indecency of it made Stran-
som's eyes fill; and he had that evening a sturdy sense that
he alone, in a world without delicacy, had a right to hold
up his head. While he smoked, after dinner, he had a book
in his lap, but he had no eyes for his page: his eyes, in the
swarming void of things, seemed to have caught Kate
Creston's, and it was into their sad silences he looked. It
was to him her sentient spirit had turned, knowing it to

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Henry James

be of her he would think. He thought for a long time of
how the closed eyes of dead women could still live — how
they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after
they had looked their last. They had looks that survived —
had them as great poets had quoted lines.

The newspaper lay by his chair — the thing that came in
the afternoon and the servants thought one wanted; with-
out sense for what was in it he had mechanically unfolded
and then dropped it. Before he went to bed he took it up,
and this time, at the top of a paragraph, he was caught by
five words that made him start. He stood staring, before
the fire, at the "Death of Sir Acton Hague, K.C.B.," the
man who ten years earlier had been the nearest of his
friends and whose deposition from this eminence had prac-
tically left it without an occupant. He had seen him after
their rupture, but hadn't now seen him for years. Standing
there before the fire he turned cold as he read what had
befallen him. Promoted a short time previous to the
governorship of the Westward Islands, Acton Hague had
died, in the bleak honour of this exile, of an illness conse-
quent on the bite of a poisonous snake. His career was
compressed by the newspaper into a dozen lines, the pe-
rusal of which excited on George Stransom's part no warmer
feeling than one of relief at the absence of any mention of
their quarrel, an incident accidentally tainted at the time,
thanks to their joint immersion in large affairs, with a hor-
rible publicity. Public indeed was the wrong Stransom
had, to his own sense, suffered, the insult he had blankly
taken from the only man with whom he had ever been
intimate; the friend, almost adored, of his University
years, the subject, later, of his passionate loyalty: so
public that he had never spoken of it to a human creature,
so public that he had completely overlooked it. It had
made the difference for him that friendship too was all
over, but it had only made just that one. The shock of
interests had been private, intensely so; but the action

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The Altar of the Dead

taken by Hague had been in the face of men. Today it all
seemed to have occurred merely to the end that George
Stransom should think of him as "Hague" and measure
exactly how much he himself could resemble a stone. He
went cold, suddenly and horribly cold, to bed.

Ill

The next day, in the afternoon, in the great grey suburb,
he knew his long walk had tired him. In the dreadful
cemetery alone he had been on his feet an hour. Instinc-
tively, coming back, they had taken him a devious course,
and it was a desert in which no circling cabman hovered
over possible prey. He paused on a corner and measured
the dreariness; then he made out through the gathered
dusk that he was in one of those tracts of London which are
less gloomy by night than by day, because, in the former
case, of the civil gift of light. By day there was nothing,
but by night there were lamps, and George Stransom was
in a mood that made lamps good in themselves. It wasn't
that they could show him anything, it was only that they
could burn clear. To his surprise, however, after a while,
they did show him something: the arch of a high doorway
approached by a low terrace of steps, in the depth of
which — it formed a dim vestibule — the raising of a curtain
at the moment he passed gave him a glimpse of an avenue
of gloom with a glow of tapers at the end. He stopped and
looked up, recognising the place as a church. The thought
quickly came to him that since he was tired he might rest
there; so that after a moment he had in turn pushed up
the leathern curtain and gone in. It was a temple of the
old persuasion, and there had evidently been a function —
perhaps a service for the dead; the high altar was still a
blaze of candles. This was an exhibition he always liked,
and he dropped into a seat with relief. More than it had
ever yet come home to him it struck him as good there
should be churches.

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Henry James

This one was almost empty and the other altars were
dim; a verger shuffled about, an old woman coughed, but
it seemed to Stransom there was hospitality in the thick
sweet air. Was it only the savour of the incense or was it
something of larger intention? He had at any rate quitted
the great grey suburb and come nearer to the warm centre.
He presently ceased to feel intrusive, gaining at last even
a sense of community with the only worshipper in his
neighbourhood, the sombre presence of a woman, in
mourning unrelieved, whose back was all he could see of
her and who had sunk deep into prayer at no great distance
from him. He wished he could sink, like her, to the very
bottom, be as motionless, as rapt in prostration. After a
few moments he shifted his seat; it was almost indelicate
to be so aware of her. But Stransom subsequently quite
lost himself, floating away on the sea of light. If occasions
like this had been more frequent in his life he would have
had more present the great original type, set up in a myr-
iad temples, of the unapproachable shrine he had erected
in his mind. That shrine had begun in vague likeness to
church pomps, but the echo had ended by growing more
distinct than the sound. The sound now rang out, the type
blazed at him with all its fires and with a mystery of radi-
ance in which endless meanings could glow. The thing
became as he sat there his appropriate altar and each
starry candle an appropriate vow. He numbered them,
named them, grouped them — it was the silent roll-call of
his Dead. They made together a brightness vast and in-
tense, a brightness in which the mere chapel of his thoughts
grew so dim that as it faded away he asked himself if he
shouldn't find his real comfort in some material act, some
outward worship.

This idea took possession of him while, at a distance, the
black-robed lady continued prostrate; he was quietly
thrilled with his conception, which at last brought him to
his feet in the sudden excitement of a plan. He wandered

The Altar of the Dead

softly through the aisles, pausing in the different chapels,
all save one applied to a special devotion. It was in this
clear recess, lampless and unapplied, that he stood longest
— the length of time it took him fully to grasp the con-
ception of gilding it with his bounty. He should snatch it
from no other rites and associate it with nothing profane;
he would simply take it as it should be given up to him
and make it a masterpiece of splendour and a mountain
of fire. Tended sacredly all the year, with the sanctifying
church round it, it would always be ready for his offices.
There would be difficulties, but from the first they pre-
sented themselves only as difficulties surmounted. Even
for a person so little affiliated the thing would be a matter
of arrangement. He saw it all in advance, and how bright
in especial the place would become to him in the intermis-
sions of toil and the dusk of afternoons; how rich in assur-
ance at all times, but especially in the indifferent world.
Before withdrawing he drew nearer again to the spot
where he had first sat down, and in the movement he met
the lady whom he had seen praying and who was now on
her way to the door. She passed him quickly, and he had
only a glimpse of her pale face and her unconscious, almost
sightless eyes. For that instant she looked faded and
handsome.

This was the origin of the rites more public, yet certainly
esoteric, that he at last found himself able to establish. It
took a long time, it took a year, and both the process and
the result would have been — for any who knew — a vivid
picture of his good faith. No one did know, in fact — no one
but the bland ecclesiastics whose acquaintance he had
promptly sought, whose objections he had softly overrid-
den, whose curiosity and sympathy he had artfully
charmed, whose assent to his eccentric munificence he had
eventually won, and who had asked for concessions in
exchange for indulgences. Stransom had of course at an
early stage of his enquiry been referred to the Bishop, and

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Henry James

the Bishop had been delightfully human, the Bishop had
been almost amused. Success was within sight, at any
rate, from the moment the attitude of those whom it con-
cerned became liberal in response to liberality. The altar
and the sacred shell that half encircled it, consecrated to
an ostensible and customary worship, were to be splendidly
maintained; all that Stransom reserved to himself was the
number of his lights and the free enjoyment of his inten-
tion. When the intention had taken complete effect the
enjoyment became even greater than he had ventured to
hope. He liked to think of this effect when far from it,
liked to convince himself of it yet again when near. He
was not often indeed so near as that a visit to it hadn't
perforce something of the patience of a pilgrimage; but
the time he gave to his devotion came to seem to him more
a contribution to his other interests than a betrayal of
them. Even a loaded life might be easier when one had
added a new necessity to it.

How much easier was probably never guessed by those
who simply knew there were hours when he disappeared
and for many of whom there was a vulgar reading of what
they used to call his plunges. These plunges were into
depths quieter than the deep sea-caves, and the habit had
at the end of a year or two become the one it would have
cost him most to relinquish. Now they had really, his
Dead, something that was indefeasibly theirs; and he liked
to think that they might in cases be the Dead of others, as
well as that the Dead of others might be invoked there
under the protection of what he had done. Whoever bent
a knee on the carpet he had laid down appeared to him to
act in the spirit of his intention. Each of his lights had a
name for him, and from time to time a new light was
kindled. This was what he had fundamentally agreed for,
that there should always be room for them all. What those
who passed or lingered saw was simply the most resplend-
ent of the altars called suddenly into vivid usefulness,

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The Altar of the Dead

with a quiet elderly man, for whom it evidently had a fas-
cination, often seated there in a maze or a doze; but half
the satisfaction of the spot for this mysterious and fitful
worshipper was that he found the years of his life there,
and the ties, the affections, the struggles, the submissions,
the conquests, if there had been such, a record of that
adventurous journey in which the beginnings and the
endings of human relations are the lettered mile-stones.
He had in general little taste for the past as a part of his
own history; at other times and in other places it mostly
seemed to him pitiful to consider and impossible to repair;
but on these occasions he accepted it with something of
that positive gladness with which one adjusts one's self
to an ache that begins to succumb to treatment. To the
treatment of time the malady of life begins at a given
moment to succumb; and these were doubtless the hours
at which that truth most came home to him. The day was
written for him there on which he had first become ac-
quainted with death, and the successive phases of the
acquaintance were marked each with a flame.

The flames were gathering thick at present, for Stran-
som had entered that dark defile of our earthly descent in
which some one dies every day. It was only yesterday that
Kate Creston had flashed out her white fire; yet already
there were younger stars ablaze on the tips of the tapers.
Various persons in whom his interest had not been intense
drew closer to him by entering this company. He went
over it, head by head, till he felt like the shepherd of a
huddled flock, with all a shepherd's vision of differences
imperceptible. He knew his candles apart, up to the colour
of the flame, and would still have known them had their
positions all been changed. To other imaginations they
might stand for other things — that they should stand for
something to be hushed before was all he desired; but he
was intensely conscious of the personal note of each and of
the distinguishable way it contributed to the concert.

Henry James

There were hours at which he almost caught himself wish-
ing that certain of his friends would now die, that he might
establish with them in this manner a connexion more
charming than, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy
with them in life. In regard to those from whom one was
separated by the long curves of the globe such a connexion
could only be an improvement: it brought them instantly
within reach. Of course there were gaps in the constella-
tion, for Stransom knew he could only pretend to act for his
own, and it wasn't every figure passing before his eyes into
the great obscure that was entitled to a memorial. There
was a strange sanctification in death, but some characters
were more sanctified by being forgotten than by being
remembered. The greatest blank in the*shining page was
the memory of Acton Hague, of which he inveterately
tried to rid himself. For Acton Hague no flame could ever
rise on any altar of his.

Every year, the day he walked back from the great
graveyard, he went to church as he had done the day his
idea was born. It was on this occasion, as it happened,
after a year had passed, that he began to observe his altar
to be haunted by a worshipper at least as frequent as him-
self. Others of the faithful, and in the rest of the church,
came and went, appealing sometimes, when they dis-
appeared, to a vague or to a particular recognition; but
this unfailing presence was always to be observed when he
arrived and still in possession when he departed. He was
surprised, the first time, at the promptitude with which it
assumed an identity for him — the identity of the lady
whom two years before, on his anniversary, he had seen so
intensely bowed, and of whose tragic face he had had so
flitting a vision. Given the time that had passed, his
recollection of her was fresh enough to make him wonder.
Of himself she had of course no impression, or rather had

3*5

The Altar of the Dead

had none at first: the time came when her manner of trans-
acting her business suggested her having gradually guessed
his call to be of the same order. She used his altar for her
own purpose — he could only hope that, sad and solitary
as she always struck him, she used it for her own Dead.
There were interruptions, infidelities, all on his part, calls
to other associations and duties; but as the months went
on he found her whenever he returned, and he ended by
taking pleasure in the thought that he had given her almost
the contentment he had given himself. They worshipped
side by side so often that there were moments when he
wished he might be sure, so straight did their prospect
stretch away of growing old together in their rites. She
was younger than he, but she looked as if her Dead were
at least as numerous as his candles. She had no colour, no
sound, no fault, and another of the things about which he
had made up his mind was that she had no fortune. Al-
ways black-robed, she must have had a succession of
sorrows. People weren't poor, after all, whom so many
losses could overtake; they were positively rich when they
had had so much to give up. But the air of this devoted
and indifferent woman, who always made, in any attitude,
a beautiful accidental line, conveyed somehow to Stransom
that she had known more kinds of trouble than one.

He had a great love of music and little time for the joy
of it; but occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled
by Saturday afternoons, it used to come back to him that
there were glories. There were moreover friends who re-
minded him of this and side by side with whom he found
himself sitting out concerts. On one of these winter after-
noons, in St. James's Hall, he became aware after he had
seated himself that the lady he had so often seen at church
was in the place next him and was evidently alone, as he
also this time happened to be. She was at first too ab-
sorbed in the consideration of the programme to heed him,
but when she at last glanced at him he took advantage of

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Henry James

the movement to speak to her, greeting her with the re-
mark that he felt as if he already knew her. She smiled as
she said "Oh yes, I recognise you"; yet in spite of this
admission of long acquaintance it was the first he had seen
of her smile. The effect of it was suddenly to contribute
more to that acquaintance than all the previous meetings
had done. He hadn't "taken in," he said to himself, that
she was so pretty. Later, that evening — it was while he
rolled along in a hansom on his way to dine out — he added
that he hadn't taken in that she was so interesting. The
next morning in the midst of his work he quite suddenly
and irrelevantly reflected that his impression of her, begin-
ning so far back, was like a winding river that had at last
reached the sea.

His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by the
sense of what had now passed between them. It wasn't
much, but it had just made the difference. They had
listened together to Beethoven and Schumann; they had
talked in the pauses, and at the end, when at the door, to
which they moved together, he had asked her if he could
help her in the matter of getting away. She had thanked
him and put up her umbrella, slipping into the crowd with-
out an allusion to their meeting yet again and leaving him
to remember at leisure that not a word had been ex-
changed about the usual scene of that coincidence. This
omission struck him now as natural and then again as per-
verse. She mightn't in the least have allowed his warrant
for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn't he would have
judged her an underbred woman. It was odd that when
nothing had really ever brought them together he should
have been able successfully to assume they were in a
manner old friends — that this negative quantity was some-
how more than they could express. His success, it was
true, had been qualified by her quick escape, so that there
grew up in him an absurd desire to put it to some better
test. Save in so far as some other poor chance might help

3*7

The Altar of the Dead

him, such a test could be only to meet her afresh at church.
Left to himself he would have gone to church the very
next afternoon, just for the curiosity of seeing if he should
find her there. But he wasn't left to himself, a fact he dis-
covered quite at the last, after he had virtually made up
his mind to go. The influence that kept him away really
revealed to him how little to himself his Dead ever left
him. He went only for them — for nothing else in the world.
The force of this revulsion kept him away ten days : he
hated to connect the place with anything but his offices or
to give a glimpse of the curiosity that had been on the
point of moving him. It was absurd to weave a tangle
about a matter so simple as a custom of devotion that
might with ease have been daily or hourly; yet the tangle
got itself woven. He was sorry, he was disappointed: it
was as if a long happy spell had been broken and he had
lost a familiar security. At the last, however, he asked
himself if he was to stay away for ever from the fear of this
muddle about motives. After an interval neither longer
nor shorter than usual he re-entered the church with a
clear conviction that he should scarcely heed the presence
or the absence of the lady of the concert. This indifference
didn't prevent his at once noting that for the only time
since he had first seen her she wasn't on the spot. He had
now no scruple about giving her time to arrive, but she
didn't arrive, and when he went away still missing her he
was profanely and consentingly sorry. If her absence made
the tangle more intricate, that was all her own doing. By
the end of another year it was very intricate indeed; but
by that time he didn't in the least care, and it was only his
cultivated consciousness that had given him scruples.
Three times in three months he had gone to church with-
out finding her, and he felt he hadn't needed these occa-
sions to show him his suspense had dropped. Yet it was,
incongruously, not indifference, but a refinement of deli-
cacy that had kept him from asking the sacristan, who

Henry James

would of course immediately have recognised his descrip-
tion of her, whether she had been seen at other hours. His
delicacy had kept him from asking any question about her
at any time, and it was exactly the same virtue that had
left him so free to be decently civil to her at the concert.
This happy advantage now served him anew, enabling
him when she finally met his eyes — it was after a fourth
trial — to predetermine quite fixedly his awaiting her re-
treat. He joined her in the street as soon as she had moved,
asking her if he might accompany her a certain distance.
With her placid permission he went as far as a house in the
neighbourhood at which she had business: she let him
know it was not where she lived. She lived, as she said, in a
mere slum, with an old aunt, a person in connexion with
whom she spoke of the engrossment of humdrum duties
and regular occupations. She wasn't, the mourning niece,
in her first youth, and her vanished freshness had left
something behind that, for Stransom, represented the
proof it had been tragically sacrificed. Whatever she gave
him the assurance of she gave without references. She
might have been a divorced duchess — she might have been
an old maid who taught the harp.

They fell at last into the way of walking together almost
every time they met, though for a long time still they
never met but at church. He couldn't ask her to come and
see him, and as if she hadn't a proper place to receive him
she never invited her friend. As much as himself she knew
the world of London, but from an undiscussed instinct of
privacy they haunted the region not mapped on the social
chart. On the return she always made him leave her at the
same corner. She looked with him, as a pretext for a pause,
at the depressed things in suburban shop-fronts; and there
was never a word he had said to her that she hadn't
beautifully understood. For long ages he never knew her

The Altar of the Dead

name, any more than she had ever pronounced his own;
but it was not their names that mattered, it was only their
perfect practice and their common need.

These things made their whole relation so impersonal
that they hadn't the rules or reasons people found in or-
dinary friendships. They didn't care for the things it was
supposed necessary to care for in the intercourse of the
world. They ended one day — they never knew which of
th£m expressed it first — by throwing out the idea that
they didn't care for each other. Over this idea they grew
quite intimate; they rallied to it in a way that marked a
fresh start in their confidence. If to feel deeply together
about certain things wholly distinct from themselves didn't
constitute a safety, where was safety to be looked for?
Not lightly nor often, not without occasion nor without
emotion, any more than in any other reference by serious
people to a mystery of their faith; but when something had
happened to warm, as it were, the air for it, they came as
near as they could come to calling their Dead by name.
They felt it was coming very near to utter their thought
at all. The word "they" expressed enough; it limited the
mention, it had a dignity of its own, and if, in their talk,
you had heard our friends use it, you might have taken
them for a pair of pagans of old alluding decently to the
domesticated gods. They never knew — at least Stransom
never knew — how they had learned to be sure about each
other. If it had been with each a question of what the
other was there for, the certitude had come in some fine
way of its own. Any faith, after all, has the instinct of
propagation, and it was as natural as it was beautiful that
they should have taken pleasure on the spot in the imag-
ination of a following. If the following was for each but a
following of one it had proved in the event sufficient. Her
debt, however, of course was much greater than his, be-
cause while she had only given him a worshipper he had
given her a splendid temple. Once she said she pitied him

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Henry James

for the length of his list — she had counted his candles al-
most as often as himself — and this made him wonder what
could have been the length of hers. He had wondered
before at the coincidence of their losses, especially as from
time to time a new candle was set up. On some occasion
some accident led him to express this curiosity, and she
answered as if in surprise that he hadn't already under-
stood. "Oh for me, you know, the more there are the
better — there could never be too many. I should like
hundreds and hundreds — I should like thousands; I should
like a great mountain of light."

Then of course in a flash he understood. "Your Dead
are only One?"

She hung back at this as never yet. "Only One," she
answered, colouring as if now he knew her guarded secret.
It really made him feel he knew less than before, so diffi-
cult was it for him to reconstitute a life in which a single
experience had so belittled all others. His own life, round
its central hollow, had been packed close enough. After
this she appeared to have regretted her confession, though
at the moment she spoke there had been pride in her very
embarrassment. She declared to him that his own was the
larger, the dearer possession — the portion one would have
chosen if one had been able to choose; she assured him she
could perfectly imagine some of the echoes with which his
silences were peopled. He knew she couldn't: one's relation
to what one had loved and hated had been a relation too
distinct from the relations of others. But this didn't affect
the fact that they were growing old together in their piety.
She was a feature of that piety, but even at the ripe stage
of acquaintance in which they occasionally arranged to
meet at a concert or to go together to an exhibition she was
not a feature of anything else. The most that happened
was that his worship became paramount. Friend by friend
dropped away till at last there were more emblems on his
altar than houses left him to enter. She was more than any

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other the friend who remained, but she was unknown to all
the rest. Once when she had discovered, as they called it,
a new star, she used the expression that the chapel at last
was full.

"Oh no," Stransom replied, "there's a great thing want-
ing for that! The chapel will never be full till a candle is
set up before which all the others will pale. It will be the
tallest candle of all."

Her mild wonder rested on him. "What candle do you
mean?"

" I mean, dear lady, my own."

He had learned after a long time that she earned money
by her pen, writing under a pseudonym she never disclosed
in magazines he never saw. She knew too well what he
couldn't read and what she couldn't write, and she taught
him to cultivate indifference with a success that did much
for their good relations. Her invisible industry was a con-
venience to him; it helped his contented thought of her,
the thought that rested in the dignity of her proud obscure
life, her little remunerated art and her little impenetrable
home. Lost, with her decayed relative, in her dim sub-
urban world, she came to the surface for him in distant
places. She was really the priestess of his altar, and when-
ever he quitted England he committed it to her keeping.
She proved to him afresh that women have more of the
spirit of religion than men; he felt his fidelity pale and faint
in comparison with hers. He often said to her that since he
had so little time to live he rejoiced in her having so much;
so glad was he to think she would guard the temple when
he should have been called. He had a great plan for that,
which of course he told her too, a bequest of money to keep
it up in undiminished state. Of the administration of this
fund he would appoint her superintendent, and if the spirit
should move her she might kindle a taper even for him.

"And who will kindle one even for me?" she then seri-
ously asked.

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Henry J a m e s

She was always in mourning, yet the day he came back
from the longest absence he had yet made her appearance
immediately told him she had lately had a bereavement.
They met on this occasion as she was leaving the church,
so that postponing his own entrance he instantly offered
to turn round and walk away with her. She considered,
then she said: "Go in now, but come and see me in an
hour." He knew the small vista of her street, closed at the
end and as dreary as an empty pocket, where the pairs of
shabby little houses, semi-detached but indissolubly
united, were like married couples on bad terms. Often,
however, as he had gone to the beginning he had never
gone beyond. Her aunt was dead — that he immediately
guessed, as well as that it made a difference; but when she
had for the first time mentioned her number he found him-
self, on her leaving him, not a little agitated by this sudden
liberality. She wasn't a person with whom, after all, one
got on so very fast: it had taken him months and months
to learn her name, years and years to learn her address.
If she had looked, on this reunion, so much older to him,
how in the world did he look to her? She had reached the
period of life he had long since reached, when, after separa-
tions, the marked clock-face of the friend we meet an-
nounces the hour we have tried to forget. He couldn't
have said what he expected as, at the end of his waiting,
he turned the corner where for years he had always paused;
simply not to pause was a sufficient cause for emotion. It
was an event, somehow; and in all their long acquaintance
there had never been an event. This one grew larger when,
five minutes later, in the faint elegance of her little draw-
ing-room, she quavered out a greeting that showed the
measure she took of it. He had a strange sense of having
come for something in particular; strange because literally
there was nothing particular between them, nothing save

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The Altar of the Dead

that they were at one on their great point, which had long
ago become a magnificent matter of course. It was true
that after she had said "You can always come now, you
know/' the thing he was there for seemed already to have
happened. He asked her if it was the death of her aunt
that made the difference; to which she replied: "She never
knew I knew you. I wished her not to." The beautiful
clearness of her candour — her faded beauty was like a
summer twilight — disconnected the words from any image
of deceit. They might have struck him as the period of a
deep dissimulation; but she had always given him a sense
of noble reasons. The vanished aunt was present, as he
looked about him, in the small complacencies of the room,
the beaded velvet and the fluted moreen; and though, as
we know, he had the worship of the Dead, he found himself
not definitely regretting this lady. If she wasn't in his long
list, however, she was in her niece's short one, and Stran-
som presently observed to the latter that now at least, in
the place they haunted together, she would have another
object of devotion.

"Yes, I shall have another. She was very kind to me.
It's that that's the difference."

He judged, wondering a good deal before he made any
motion to leave her, that the difference would somehow be
very great and would consist of still other things than her
having let him come in. It rather chilled him, for they had
been happy together as they were. He extracted from her
at any rate an intimation that she should now have means
less limited, that her aunt's tiny fortune had come to her,
so that there was henceforth only one to consume what had
formerly been made to suffice for two. This was a joy to
Stransom, because it had hitherto been equally impossible
for him either to offer her presents or contentedly to stay
his hand. It was too ugly to be at her side that way,
abounding himself and yet not able to overflow — a demon-
stration that would have been signally a false note. Even

Henry James

her better situation too seemed only to draw out in a sense
the loneliness of her future. It would merely help her to
live more and more for their small ceremonial, and this
at a time when he himself had begun wearily to feel that,
having set it in motion, he might depart. When they had
sat a while in the pale parlour she got up — "This isn't my
room: let us go into mine." They had only to cross the
narrow hall, as he found, to pass quite into another air.
When she had closed the door of the second room, as she
called it, he felt at last in real possession of her. The place
had the flush of life — it was expressive; its dark red walls
were articulate with memories and relics. These were
simple things — photographs and water-colours, scraps of
writing framed and ghosts of flowers embalmed; but a
moment sufficed to show him they had a common meaning.
It was here she had lived and worked, and she had already
told him she would make no change of scene. He read the
reference in the objects about her — the general one to
places and times; but after a minute he distinguished
among them a small portrait of a gentleman. At a distance
and without their glasses his eyes were only so caught by
it as to feel a vague curiosity. Presently this impulse
carried him nearer, and in another moment he was staring
at the picture in stupefaction and with the sense that some
sound had broken from him. He was further conscious
that he showed his companion a white face when he turned
round on her gasping: "Acton Hague!"

She matched his great wonder. "Did you know him?"

"He was the friend of all my youth — of my early man-
hood. And you knew him?"

She coloured at this and for a moment her answer failed;
her eyes embraced everything in the place, and a strange
irony reached her lips as she echoed: "Knew him?"

Then Stransom understood, while the room heaved like
the cabin of a ship, that its whole contents cried out with
him, that it was a museum in his honour, that all her later

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years had been addressed to him and that the shrine he
himself had reared had been passionately converted to this
use. It was all for Acton Hague that she had kneeled
every day at his altar. What need had there been for a
consecrated candle when he was present in the whole
array? The revelation so smote our friend in the face that
he dropped into a seat and sat silent. He had quickly felt
her shaken by the force of his shock, but as she sank on the
sofa beside him and laid her hand on his arm he knew al-
most as soon that she mightn't resent it as much as she'd
have liked.

VII

He learned in that instant two things: one being that
even in so long a time she had gathered no knowledge of
his great intimacy and his great quarrel; the other that in
spite of this ignorance, strangely enough, she supplied on
the spot a reason for his stupor. "How extraordinary,"
he presently exclaimed, "that we should never have
known!"

She gave a wan smile which seemed to Stransom stranger
even than the fact itself. "I never, never spoke of him."

He looked again about the room. "Why then, if your
life had been so full of him?"

"Mayn't I put you that question as well? Hadn't your
life also been full of him?"

"Any one's, every one's life who had the wonderful
experience of knowing him. / never spoke of him,"
Stransom added in a moment, "because he did me — years
ago — an unforgettable wrong." She was silent, and with
the full effect of his presence all about them it almost
startled her guest to hear no protest escape her. She
accepted his words; he turned his eyes to her again to see
in what manner she accepted them. It was with rising
tears and a rare sweetness in the movement of putting out
her hand to take his own. Nothing more wonderful had

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Henry James

ever appeared to him than, in that little chamber of re-
membrance and homage, to see her convey with such ex-
quisite mildness that as from Acton Hague any injury was
credible. The clock ticked in the stillness — Hague had
probably given it to her — and while he let her hold his
hand with a tenderness that was almost an assumption
of responsibility for his old pain as well as his new, Stran-
som after a minute broke out: "Good God, how he must
have used you!"

She dropped his hand at this, got up and, moving across
the room, made straight a small picture to which, on ex-
amining it, he had given a slight push. Then turning round
on him with her pale gaiety recovered, "I've forgiven
him!" she declared.

"I know what you've done," said Stransom; "I know
what you've done for years." For a moment they looked
at each other through it all with their long community of
service in their eyes. This short passage made, to his sense,
for the woman before him, an immense, an absolutely
naked confession; which was presently, suddenly blushing
red and changing her place again, what she appeared to
learn he perceived in it. He got up and "How you must
have loved him!" he cried.

"Women aren't like men. They can love even where
they've suffered."

"Women are wonderful," said Stransom. "But I assure
you I've forgiven him too."

"If I had known of anything so strange I wouldn't have
brought you here."

"So that we might have gone on in our ignorance to the
last?"

"What do you call the last?" she asked, smiling still.

At this he could smile back at her. "You'll see — when

it comes."

She thought of that. "This is better perhaps; but as we
were — it was good."

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The Altar of the Dead

He put her the question. "Did it never happen that he
spoke of me?"

Considering more intently she made no answer, and he
then knew he should have been adequately answered by
her asking how often he himself had spoken of their ter-
rible friend. Suddenly a brighter light broke in her face
and an excited idea sprang to her lips in the appeal: "You
have forgiven him?"

"How, if I hadn't, could I linger here?"

She visibly winced at the deep but unintended irony of
this; but even while she did so she panted quickly: "Then
in the lights on your altar ?"

"There's never a light for Acton Hague!"

She stared with a dreadful fall, "But if he's one of your
Dead?"

"He's one of the world's, if you like — he's one of yours.
But he's not one of mine. Mine are only the Dead who
died possessed of me. They're mine in death because they
were mine in life."

"He was yours in life then, even if for a while he ceased
to be. If you forgave him you went back to him. Those
whom we've once loved "

"Are those who can hurt us most," Stransom broke in.

"Ah it's not true — you've not forgiven him!" she wailed
with a passion that startled him.

He looked at her as never yet. "What was it he did to
you?"

"Everything!" Then abruptly she put out her hand in
farewell. "Good-bye."

He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read
the man's death. "You mean that we meet no more?"

"Not as we've met — not there!"

He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at the
renouncement that rang out in the word she so expressively
sounded. " But what's changed — for you ? "

She waited in all the sharpness of a trouble that for the

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Henry James

first time since he had known her made her splendidly
stern. "How can you understand now when you didn't
understand before?"

" I didn't understand before only because I didn't know.
Now that I know, I see what I've been living with for
years," Stransom went on very gently.

She looked at him with a larger allowance, doing this
gentleness justice. "How can I then, on this new knowl-
edge of my own, ask you to continue to live with it?"

"I set up my altar, with its multiplied meanings,"
Stransom began; but she quickly interrupted him.

"You set up your altar, and when I wanted one most I
found it magnificently ready. I used it with the gratitude
I've always shown you, for I knew it from of old to be
dedicated to Death. I told you long ago that my Dead
weren't many. Yours were, but all you had done for them
was none too much for my worship! You had placed a
great light for Each — I gathered them together for
One!"

"We had simply different intentions," he returned.
"That, as you say, I perfectly knew, and I don't see why
your intention shouldn't still sustain you."

"That's because you're generous — you can imagine and
think. But the spell's broken."

It seemed to poor Stransom, in spite of his resistance,
that it really was, and the prospect stretched grey and
void before him. All he could say, however, was: "I hope
you'll try before you give up."

"If I had known you had ever known him I should have
taken for granted he had his candle," she presently an-
swered. "What's changed, as you say, is that on making
the discovery I find he never has had it. That makes my
attitude" — she paused as thinking how to express it, then
said simply — "all wrong."

"Come once again," he pleaded.

"Will you give him his candle?" she asked.

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He waited, but only because it would sound ungracious;
not because of a doubt of his feeling. "I can't do that!"
he declared at last.

"Then good-bye." And she gave him her hand again.

He had got his dismissal; besides which, in the agitation
of everything that had opened out to him, he felt the need
to recover himself as he could only do in solitude. Yet he
lingered — lingered to see if she had no compromise to
express, no attenuation to propose. But he only met her
great lamenting eyes, in which indeed he read that she was
as sorry for him as for any one else. This made him say:
"At least, in any case, I may see you here."

"Oh yes, come if you like. But I don't think it will do."

He looked round the room once more, knowing how little
he was sure it would do. He felt also stricken and more and
more cold, and his chill was like an ague in which he had to
make an effort not to shake. Then he made doleful reply:
"I must try on my side — if you can't try on yours." She
came out with him to the hall and into the doorway, and
here he put her the question he held he could least answer
from his own wit. "Why have you never let me come
before?"

"Because my aunt would have seen you, and I should
have had to tell her how I came to know you."

"And what would have been the objection to that?"

"It would have entailed other explanations; there would
at any rate have been that danger."

"Surely she knew you went every day to church,"
Stransom objected.

"She didn't know what I went for."

"Of me then she never even heard?"

"You'll think I was deceitful. But I didn't need to be!"

He was now on the lower door-step, and his hostess held
the door half-closed behind him. Through what remained
of the opening he saw her framed face. He made a supreme
appeal. "What did he do to you ? "

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Henry James

"It would have come out — she would have told you.
That fear at my heart — that was my reason!'* And she
closed the door, shutting him out.

VIII

He had ruthlessly abandoned her — that of course was
what he had done. Stransom made it all out in solitude,
at leisure, fitting the unmatched pieces gradually together
and dealing one by one with a hundred obscure points.
She had known Hague only after her present friend's rela-
tions with him had wholly terminated; obviously indeed
a good while after; and it was natural enough that of his
previous life she should have ascertained only what he
had judged good to communicate. There were passages
it was quite conceivable that even in moments of the
tenderest expansion he should have withheld. Of many
facts in the career of a man so in the eye of the world there
was of course a common knowledge; but this lady lived
apart from public affairs, and the only time perfectly clear
to her would have been the time following the dawn of her
own drama. A man in her place would have "looked up"
the past — would even have consulted old newspapers. It
remained remarkable indeed that in her long contact with
the partner of her retrospect no accident had lighted a
train; but there was no arguing about that; the accident
had in fact come: it had simply been that security had
prevailed. She had taken what Hague had given her, and
her blankness in respect of his other connexions was only
a touch in the picture of that plasticity Stransom had
supreme reason to know so great a master could have been
trusted to produce.

This picture was for a while all our friend saw: he caught
his breath again and again as it came over him that the
woman with whom he had had for years so fine a point of
contact was a woman whom Acton Hague, of all men in
the world, had more or less fashioned. Such as she sat

The Altar of the Dead

there to-day she was ineffaceably stamped with him. Be-
neficent, blameless as Stransom held her, he couldn't rid
himself of the sense that he had been, as who should say,
swindled. She had imposed upon him hugely, though she
had known it as little as he. All this later past came back
to him as a time grotesquely misspent. Such at least were
his first reflexions; after a while he found himself more
divided and only, as the end of it, more troubled. He
imagined, recalled, reconstituted, figured out for himself
the truth she had refused to give him; the effect of which
was to make her seem to him only more saturated with
her fate. He felt her spirit, through the whole strangeness,
finer than his own to the very degree in which she might
have been, in which she certainly had been, more wronged.
A woman, when wronged, was always more wronged than
a man, and there were conditions when the least she could
have got off with was more than the most he could have
to bear. He was sure this rare creature wouldn't have got
off with the least. He was awestruck at the thought of such
a surrender — such a prostration. Moulded indeed she had
been by powerful hands, to have converted her injury into
an exaltation so sublime. The fellow had only had to die
for everything that was ugly in him to be washed out in a
torrent. It was vain to try to guess what had taken place,
but nothing could be clearer than that she had ended
by accusing herself. She absolved him at every point, she
adored her very wounds. The passion by which he had
profited had rushed back after its ebb, and now the tide
of tenderness, arrested for ever at flood, was too deep even
to fathom. Stransom sincerely considered that he had
forgiven him; but how little he had achieved the miracle
that she had achieved! His forgiveness was silence, but
hers was mere unuttered sound. The light she had de-
manded for his altar would have broken his silence with a
blare; whereas all the lights in the church were for her too
great a hush.

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Henry James

She had been right about the difference — she had spoken
the truth about the change: Stransom was soon to know
himself as perversely but sharply jealous. His tide had
ebbed, not flowed; if he had "forgiven" Acton Hague, that
forgiveness was a motive with a broken spring. The very
fact of her appeal for a material sign, a sign that should
make her dead lover equal there with the others, presented
the concession to her friend as too handsome for the case.
He had never thought of himself as hard, but an exorbitant
article might easily render him so. He moved round and
round this one, but only in widening circles — the more
he looked at it the less acceptable it seemed. At the same
time he had no illusion about the effect of his refusal; he
perfectly saw how it would make for a rupture. He left
her alone a week, but when at last he again called this
conviction was cruelly confirmed. In the interval he had
kept away from the church, and he needed no fresh assur-
ance from her to know she hadn't entered it. The change
was complete enough: it had broken up her life. Indeed it
had broken up his, for all the fires of his shrine seemed to
him suddenly to have been quenched. A great indifference
fell upon him, the weight of which was in itself a pain;
and he never knew what his devotion had been for him till
in that shock it ceased like a dropped watch. Neither did
he know with how large a confidence he had counted on
the final service that had now failed : the mortal deception
was that in this abandonment the whole future gave way.

These days of her absence proved to him of what she
was capable; all the more that he never dreamed she was
vindictive or even resentful. It was not in anger she had
forsaken him; it was in simple submission to hard reality,
to the stern logic of life. This came home to him when he
sat with her again in the room in which her late aunt's
conversation lingered like the tone of a cracked piano.
She tried to make him forget how much they were es-
tranged, but in the very presence of what they had given

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up it was impossible not to be sorry for her. He had taken
from her so much more than she had taken from him. He
argued with her again, told her she could now have the
altar to herself; but she only shook her head with pleading
sadness, begging him not to waste his breath on the im-
possible, the extinct. Couldn't he see that in relation to her
private need the rites he had established were practically
an elaborate exclusion? She regretted nothing that had
happened; it had all been right so long as she didn't know,
and it was only that now she knew too much and that from
the moment their eyes were open they would simply have
to conform. It had doubtless been happiness enough for
them to go on together so long. She was gentle, grateful,
resigned; but this was only the form of a deep immove-
ability. He saw he should never more cross the threshold
of the second room, and he felt how much this alone would
make a stranger of him and give a conscious stiffness to his
visits. He would have hated to plunge again into that well
of reminders, but he enjoyed quite as little the vacant
alternative.

After he had been with her three or four times it struck
him that to have come at last into her house had had the
horrid effect of diminishing their intimacy. He had known
her better, had liked her in greater freedom, when they
merely walked together or kneeled together. Now they
only pretended; before they had been nobly sincere. They
began to try their walks again, but it proved a lame imita-
tion, for these things, from the first, beginning or ending,
had been connected with their visits to the church. They
had either strolled away as they came out or gone in to rest
on the return. Stransom, besides, now faltered; he couldn't
walk as of old. The omission made everything false; it
was a dire mutilation of their lives. Our friend was frank
and monotonous, making no mystery of his remonstrance
and no secret of his predicament. Her response, what-
ever it was, always came to the same thing — an implied

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invitation to him to judge, if he spoke of predicaments, of
how much comfort she had in hers. For him indeed was no
comfort even in complaint, since every allusion to what
had befallen them but made the author of their trouble
more present. Acton Hague was between them — that was
the essence of the matter, and never so much between them
as when they were face to face. Then Stransom, while still
wanting to banish him, had the strangest sense of striving
for an ease that would involve having accepted him.
Deeply disconcerted by what he knew, he was still worse
tormented by really not knowing. Perfectly aware that it
would have been horribly vulgar to abuse his old friend or
to tell his companion the story of their quarrel, it yet vexed
him that her depth of reserve should give him no opening
and should have the effect of a magnanimity greater even
than his own.

He challenged himself, denounced himself, asked himself
if he were in love with her that he should care so much
what adventures she had had. He had never for a moment
allowed he was in love with her; therefore nothing could
have surprised him more than to discover he was jealous.
What but jealousy could give a man that sore contentious
wish for the detail of what would make him suffer? Well
enough he knew indeed that he should never have it from
the only person who to-day could give it to him. She let
him press her with his sombre eyes, only smiling at him
with an exquisite mercy and breathing equally little the
word that would expose her secret and the word that would
appear to deny his literal right to bitterness. She told
nothing, she judged nothing; she accepted everything but
the possibility of her return to the old symbols. Stransom
divined that for her too they had been vividly individual,
had stood for particular hours or particular attributes —
particular links in her chain. He made it clear to himself,
as he believed, that his difficulty lay in the fact that the
very nature of the plea for his faithless friend constituted

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The Altar of the Dead

a prohibition; that it happened to have come from her
was precisely the vice that attached to it. To the voice of
impersonal generosity he felt sure he would have listened;
he would have deferred to an advocate who, speaking from
abstract justice, knowing of his denial without having
known Hague, should have had the imagination to say:
"Ah, remember only the best of him; pity him; provide for
him." To provide for him on the very ground of having
discovered another of his turpitudes was not to pity but
to glorify him. The more Stransom thought the more he
made out that whatever this relation of Hague's it could
only have been a deception more or less finely practised.
Where had it come into the life that all men saw? Why
had one never heard of it if it had had the frankness of
honourable things? Stransom knew enough of his other
ties, of his obligations and appearances, not to say enough
of his general character, to be sure there had been some
infamy. In one way or another this creature had been
coldly sacrificed. That was why at the last as well as the
first he must still leave him out and out.

And yet this was no solution, especially after he had
talked again to his friend of all it had been his plan she
should finally do for him. He had talked in the other days,
and she had responded with a frankness qualified only by
a courteous reluctance, a reluctance that touched him, to
linger on the question of his death. She had then prac-
tically accepted the charge, suffered him to feel he could
depend upon her to be the eventual guardian of his shrine;
and it was in the name of what had so passed between them
that he appealed to her not to forsake him in his age. She
listened at present with shining coldness and all her habit-
ual forbearance to insist on her terms; her deprecation was
even still tenderer, for it expressed the compassion of her
own sense that he was abandoned. Her terms, however,

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Henry James

remained the same, and scarcely the less audible for not
being uttered; though he was sure that secretly even more
than he she felt bereft of the satisfaction his solemn trust
was to have provided her. They both missed the rich
future, but she missed it most, because after all it was to
have been entirely hers; and it was her acceptance of the
loss that gave him the full measure of her preference for
the thought of Acton Hague over any other thought what-
ever. He had humour enough to laugh rather grimly when
he said to himself: "Why the deuce does she like him so
much more than she likes me?" — the reasons being really
so conceivable. But even his faculty of analysis left the
irritation standing, and this irritation proved perhaps the
greatest misfortune that had ever overtaken him. There
had been nothing yet that made him so much want to give
up. He had of course by this time well reached the age of
renouncement; but it had not hitherto been vivid to him
that it was time to give up everything.

Practically, at the end of six months, he had renounced
the friendship once so charming and comforting. His
privation had two faces, and the face it had turned to him
on the occasion of his last attempt to cultivate that friend-
ship was the one he could look at least. This was the priva-
tion he inflicted; the other was the privation he bore. The
conditions she never phrased he used to murmur to himself
in solitude: "One more, one more — only just one." Cer-
tainly he was going down; he often felt it when he caught
himself, over his work, staring at vacancy and giving voice
to that inanity. There was proof enough besides in his
being so weak and so ill. His irritation took the form of
melancholy, and his melancholy that of the conviction that
his health had quite failed. His altar moreover had ceased
to exist; his chapel, in his dreams, was a great dark cavern.
All the lights had gone out — all his Dead had died again.
He couldn't exactly see at first how it had been in the
power of his late companion to extinguish them, since it

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The Altar of the Dead

was neither for her nor by her that they had been called
into being. Then he understood that it was essentially in
his own soul the revival had taken place, and that in the
air of this soul they were now unable to breathe. The
candles might mechanically burn, but each of them had
lost its lustre. The church had become a void; it was his
presence, her presence, their common presence, that had
made the indispensable medium. If anything was wrong
everything was — her silence spoiled the tune.

Then when three months were gone he felt so lonely
that he went back; reflecting that as they had been his best
society for years his Dead perhaps wouldn't let him forsake
them without doing something more for him. They stood
there, as he had left them, in their tall radiance, the bright
cluster that had already made him, on occasions when he
was willing to compare small things with great, liken them
to a group of sea-lights on the edge of the ocean of life. It
was a relief to him, after a while, as he sat there, to feel
they had still a virtue. He was more and more easily tired,
and he always drove now; the action of his heart was weak
and gave him none of the reassurance conferred by the
action of his fancy. None the less he returned yet again,
returned several times, and finally, during six months,
haunted the place with a renewal of frequency and a
strain of impatience. In winter the church was unwarmed
and exposure to cold forbidden him, but the glow of his
shrine was an influence in which he could almost bask. He
sat and wondered to what he had reduced his absent asso-
ciate and what she now did with the hours of her absence.
There were other churches, there were other altars, there
were other candles; in one way or another her piety would
still operate; he couldn't absolutely have deprived her of
her rites. So he argued, but without contentment; for he
well enough knew there was no other such rare semblance
of the mountain of light she had once mentioned to him as
the satisfaction of her need. As this semblance again

338

Henry James

gradually grew great to him and his pious practice more
regular, he found a sharper and sharper pang in the imag-
ination of her darkness; for never so much as in these
weeks had his rites been real, never had his gathered com-
pany seemed so to respond and even to invite. He lost
himself in the large lustre, which was more and more what
he had from the first wished it to be — as dazzling as the
vision of heaven in the mind of a child. He wandered in
the fields of light; he passed, among the tall tapers, from
tier to tier, from fire to fire, from name to name, from the
white intensity of one clear emblem, of one saved soul, to
another. It was in the quiet sense of having saved his
souls that his deep strange instinct rejoiced. This was no
dim theological rescue, no boon of a contingent world;
they were saved better than faith or works could save
them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk from
dying to, for actuality, for continuity, for the certainty of
human remembrance.

By this time he had survived all his friends; the last
straight flame was three years old, there was no one to add
to the list. Over and over he called his roll, and it appeared
to him compact and complete. Where should he put in
another, where, if there were no other objection, would
it stand in its place in the rank? He reflected, with a want
of sincerity of which he was quite conscious, that it would
be difficult to determine that place. More and more, be-
sides, face to face with his little legion, reading over endless
histories, handling the empty shells and playing with the
silence — more and more he could see that he had never
introduced an alien. He had had his great compassions,
his indulgences — there were cases in which they had been
immense; but what had his devotion after all been if it
hadn't been at bottom a respect? He was, however, him-
self surprised at his stiffness; by the end of the winter
the responsibility of it was what was uppermost in his
thoughts. The refrain had grown old to them, that plea

339

The Altar of the Dead

for just one more. There came a day when, for simple
exhaustion, if symmetry should demand just one he was
ready so far to meet symmetry. Symmetry was harmony,
and the idea of harmony began to haunt him; he said to
himself that harmony was of course everything. He took,
in fancy, his composition to pieces, redistributing it into
other lines, making other juxtapositions and contrasts.
He shifted this and that candle, he made the spaces differ-
ent, he effaced the disfigurement of a possible gap. There
were subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross-
reference, and moments in which he seemed to catch a
glimpse of the void so sensible to the woman who wandered
in exile or sat where he had seen her with the portrait of
Acton Hague. Finally, in this way, he arrived at a con-
ception of the total, the ideal, which left a clear opportu-
nity for just another figure. "Just one more — to round it
off; just one more, just one," continued to hum in his head.
There was a strange confusion in the thought, for he felt
the day to be near when he too should be one of the Others.
What in this event would the Others matter to him, since
they only mattered to the living? Even as one of the
Dead what would his altar matter to him, since his par-
ticular dream of keeping it up had melted away? What
had harmony to do with the case if his lights were all to be
quenched ? What he had hoped for was an instituted thing.
He might perpetuate it on some other pretext, but his
special meaning would have dropped. This meaning was
to have lasted with the life of the one other person who
understood it.

In March he had an illness during which he spent a fort-
night in bed, and when he revived a little he was told of
two things that had happened. One was that a lady whose
name was not known to the servants (she left none) had
been three times to ask about him; the other was that in
his sleep and on an occasion when his mind evidently
wandered he was heard to murmur again and again: "Just

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Henry James

one more — just one." As soon as he found himself able to
go out, and before the doctor in attendance had pro-
nounced him so, he drove to see the lady who had come to
ask about him. She was not at home; but this gave him
the opportunity, before his strength should fail again, to
take his way to the church. He entered it alone; he had
declined, in a happy manner he possessed of being able to
decline effectively, the company of his servant or of a
nurse. He knew now perfectly what these good people
thought; they had discovered his clandestine connexion,
the magnet that had drawn him for so many years, and
doubtless attached a significance of their own to the odd
words they had repeated to him. The nameless lady was
the clandestine connexion — a fact nothing could have
made clearer than his indecent haste to rejoin her. He
sank on his knees before his altar while his head fell over
on his hands. His weakness, his life's weariness overtook
him. It seemed to him he had come for the great surrender.
At first he asked himself how he should get away; then,
with the failing belief in the power, the very desire to move
gradually left him. He had come, as he always came, to
lose himself; the fields of light were still there to stray in;
only this time, in straying, he would never come back. He
had given himself to his Dead, and it was good: this time
his Dead would keep him. He couldn't rise from his knees;
he believed he should never rise again; all he could do was
to lift his face and fix his eyes on his lights. They looked
unusually, strangely splendid, but the one that always
drew him most had an unprecedented lustre. It was the
central voice of the choir, the glowing heart of the bright-
ness, and on this occasion it seemed to expand, to spread
great wings of flame. The whole altar flared — dazzling and
blinding; but the source of the vast radiance burned clearer
than the rest, gathering itself into form, and the form was
human beauty and human charity, was the far-off face of
Mary Antrim. She smiled at him from the glory of heaven

The Altar of the Dead

— she brought the glory down with her to take him. He
bowed his head in submission and at the same moment
another wave rolled over him. Was it the quickening of
joy to pain? In the midst of his joy at any rate he felt his
buried face grow hot as with some communicated knowl-
edge that had the force of a reproach. It suddenly made
him contrast that very rapture with the bliss he had re-
fused to another. This breath of the passion immortal
was all that other had asked; the descent of Mary Antrim
opened his spirit with a great compunctious throb for the
descent of Acton Hague. It was as if Stransom had read
what her eyes said to him.

After a moment he looked round in a despair that made
him feel as if the source of life were ebbing. The church
had been empty — he was alone; but he wanted to have
something done, to make a last appeal. This idea gave him
strength for an effort; he rose to his feet with a movement
that made him turn, supporting himself by the back of a
bench. Behind him was a prostrate figure, a figure he had
seen before; a woman in deep mourning, bowed in grief or
in prayer. He had seen her in other days — the first time of
his entrance there, and he now slightly wavered, looking at
her again till she seemed aware he had noticed her. She
raised her head and met his eyes: the partner of his long
worship had come back. She looked across at him an
instant with a face wondering and scared; he saw he had
made her afraid. Then quickly rising she came straight to
him with both hands out.

"Then you could come? God sent you!" he murmured
with a happy smile.

"You're very ill — you shouldn't be here," she urged in
anxious reply.

"God sent me too, I think. I was ill when I came, but
the sight of you does wonders." He held her hands, which
steadied and quickened him. "I've something to tell you."

"Don't tell me!" she tenderly pleaded; "let me tell you.

34*

Henry James

This afternoon, by a miracle, the sweetest of miracles, the
sense of our difference left me. I was out — I was near,
thinking, wandering alone, when, on the spot, something
changed in my heart. It's my confession — there it is. To
come back, to come back on the instant — the idea gave
me wings. It was as if I suddenly saw something — as if it
all became possible. I could come for what you yourself
came for: that was enough. So here I am. It's not for my
own — that's over. But I'm here for them" And breath-
less, infinitely relieved by her low precipitate explanation,
she looked with eyes that reflected all its splendour at the
magnificence of their altar.

"They're here for you," Stransom said, "they're present
to-night as they've never been. They speak for you —
don't you see? — in a passion of light; they sing out like a
choir of angels. Don't you hear what they say? — they
offer the very thing you asked of me."

"Don't talk of it — don't think of it; forget it!" She
spoke in hushed supplication, and while the alarm deep-
ened in her eyes she disengaged one of her hands and
passed an arm round him to support him better, to help
him to sink into a seat.

He let himself go, resting on her; he dropped upon the
bench and she fell on her knees beside him, his own arm
round her shoulder. So he remained an instant, staring up
at his shrine. "They say there's a gap in the array — they
say it's not full, complete. Just one more," he went on,
softly — "isn't that what you wanted? Yes, one more, one

more."

"Ah no more — no more!" she wailed, as with a quick
new horror of it, under her breath.

"Yes, one more," he repeated, simply; "just one!"
And with this his head dropped on her shoulder; she felt
that in his weakness he had fainted. But alone with him
in the dusky church a great dread was on her of what might
still happen, for his face had the whiteness of death.

343

THE PRINCESS
by

Anton Chekhov

ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV (1860-1904) was equally
distinguished as playwright and writer of fiction. The best
translation of his stories is that by Constance Garnett, in
Jj volumes. His plays, like the First Moscow Art Theatre
which produced them, have survived the Revolution; they
have become classics of the Soviet theatre. His home at
Yalta, in the Crimea, is maintained as a museum of his
personal and literary life.

THE PRINCESS

A CARRIAGE with four fine sleek horses drove in at
the big so-called Red Gate of the N Mon-
astery. While it was still at a distance, the priests
and monks who were standing in a group round the part
of the hostel allotted to the gentry, recognized by the
coachman and horses that the lady in the carriage was
Princess Vera Gavrilovna, whom they knew very well.

An old man in livery jumped off the box and helped
the princess to get out of the carriage. She raised her
dark veil and moved in a leisurely way up to the priests
to receive their blessing; then she nodded pleasantly to
the rest of the monks and went into the hostel.

"Well, have you missed your princess?" she said to
the monk who brought in her things. "It's a whole month
since I've been to see you. But here I am; behold your
princess. And where is the Father Superior? My good-
ness, I am burning with impatience! Wonderful, won-
derful old man! You must be proud of having such a
Superior."

When the Father Superior came in, the princess uttered
a shriek of delight, crossed her arms over her bosom, and
went up to receive his blessing.

"No, no, let me kiss your hand," she said, snatching it
and eagerly kissing it three times. "How glad I am to see
you at last, holy Father! I'm sure you've forgotten your
princess, but my thoughts have been in your dear mon-
astery every moment. How delightful it is here! This
living for God far from the busy, giddy world has a special

From The Duel and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance
Garnett and published by The Macmillan Company, New York, from whom
permission to reprint has been obtained.

347

The Princess

charm of its own, holy Father, which I feel with my whole
soul although I cannot express it!"

The princess's cheeks glowed and tears came into her
eyes. She talked incessantly, fervently, while the Father
Superior, a grave, plain, shy old man of seventy, remained
mute or uttered abruptly, like a soldier on duty, phrases
such as:

"Certainly, Your Excellency. . . . Quite so. I under-
stand."

"Has Your Excellency come for a long stay?" he in-
quired.

"I shall stay the night here, and to-morrow I'm going
on to Klavdia Nikolaevna's — it's a long time since I've
seen her — and the day after to-morrow I'll come back to
you and stay three or four days. I want to rest my soul
here among you, holy Father. . . ."

The princess liked being at the monastery at N .

For the last two years it had been a favourite resort of
hers; she used to go there almost every month in the
summer and stay two or three days, even sometimes a
week. The shy novices, the stillness, the low ceilings,
the smell of cypress, the modest fare, the cheap curtains
on the windows — all this touched her, softened her, and
disposed her to contemplation and good thoughts. It was
enough for her to be half an hour in the hostel for her to
feel that she, too, was timid and modest, and that she,
too, smelt of cypress-wood. The past retreated into the
background, lost its significance, and the princess began
to imagine that in spite of her twenty-nine years she was
very much like the old Father Superior, and that, like
him, she was created not for wealth, not for earthly gran-
deur and love, but for a peaceful life secluded from the
world, a life in twilight like the hostel.

It happens that a ray of light gleams in the dark cell
of the anchorite absorbed in prayer, or a bird alights on
the window and sings its song; the stern anchorite will

348

Anton Chekhov

smile in spite of himself, and a gentle, sinless joy will
pierce through the load of grief over his sins, like water
flowing from under a stone. The princess fancied she
brought from the outside world just such comfort as the
ray of light or the bird. Her gay, friendly smile, her
gentle eyes, her voice, her jests, her whole personality
in fact, her little graceful figure always dressed in simple
black, must arouse in simple, austere people a feeling of
tenderness and joy. Everyone, looking at her, must think:
"God has sent us an angel. . . ." And feeling that no
one could help thinking this, she smiled still more cordially,
and tried to look like a bird.

After drinking tea and resting, she went for a walk.
The sun was already setting. From the monastery garden
came a moist fragrance of freshly watered mignonette,
and from the church floated the soft singing of men's
voices, which seemed very pleasant and mournful in the
distance. It was the evening service. In the dark windows
where the little lamps glowed gently, in the shadows, in
the figure of the old monk sitting at the church door with
a collecting-box, there was such unruffled peace that the
princess felt moved to tears.

Outside the gate, in the walk between the wall and the
birch-trees where there were benches, it was quite eve-
ning. The air grew rapidly darker and darker. The
princess went along the walk, sat on a seat, and sank into
thought.

She thought how good it would be to settle down for
her whole life in this monastery where life was as still
and unruffled as a summer evening; how good it would
be to forget the ungrateful, dissipated prince; to forget
her immense estates, the creditors who worried her every
day, her misfortunes, her maid Dasha, who had looked
at her impertinently that morning. It would be nice to
sit here on the bench all her life and watch through the
trunks of the birch-trees the evening mist gathering in

349

The Princess

wreaths in the valley below; the rooks flying home in a
black cloud like a veil far, far away above the forest; two
novices, one astride a piebald horse, another on foot driv-
ing out the horses for the night and rejoicing in their
freedom, playing pranks like little children; their youthful
voices rang out musically in the still air, and she could
distinguish every word. It is nice to sit and listen to the
silence : at one moment the wind blows and stirs the tops
of the birch-trees, then a frog rustles in last year's leaves,
then the clock on the belfry strikes the quarter. . . .
One might sit without moving, listen and think, and
think. . . .

An old woman passed by with a wallet on her back.
The princess thought that it would be nice to stop the
old woman and to say something friendly and cordial to
her, to help her. . . . But the old woman turned the
corner without once looking round.

Not long afterwards a tall man with a grey beard and
a straw hat came along the walk. When he came up to
the princess, he took off his hat and bowed. From the
bald patch on his head and his sharp, hooked nose the
princess recognized him as the doctor, Mihail Ivanovitch,
who had been in her service at Dubovki. She remembered
that someone had told her that his wife had died the year
before, and she wanted to sympathize with him, to console
him.

"Doctor, I expect you don't recognize me?" she said
with an affable smile.

"Yes, Princess, I recognized you," said the doctor,
taking off his hat again.

"Oh, thank you; I was afraid that you, too, had for-
gotten your princess. People only remember their en-
emies, but they forget their friends. Have you, too, come
to pray?"

"I am the doctor here, and I have to spend the night
at the monastery every Saturday."

350

Anton Chekhov

"Well, how are you?" said the princess, sighing. "I
hear that you have lost your wife. What a calamity!"

"Yes, Princess, for me it is a great calamity."

"There's nothing for it! We must bear our troubles
with resignation. Not one hair of a man's head is lost
without the Divine Will."

"Yes, Princess."

To the princess's friendly, gentle smile and her sighs
the doctor responded coldly and dryly: "Yes, Princess."
And the expression of his face was cold and dry.

"What else can I say to him?" she wondered.

"How long it is since we met!" she said. "Five years!
How much water has flowed under the bridge, how many
changes in that time; it quite frightens one to think of it!
You know, I am married. ... I am not a countess now,
but a princess. And by now I am separated from my
husband too."

"Yes, I heard so."

"God has sent me many trials. No doubt you have
heard, too, that I am almost ruined. My Duboyki,
Sofyino, and Kiryakovo have all been sold for my un-
happy husband's debts. And I have only Baranovo and
Mihaltsevo left. It's terrible to look back: how many
changes and misfortunes of all kinds, how many mis-
takes!"

"Yes, Princess, many mistakes."

The princess was a little disconcerted. She knew her
mistakes; they were all of such a private character that
no one but she could think or speak of them. She could
not resist asking:

"What mistakes are you thinking about?"

"You referred to them, so you know them . . ." an-
swered the doctor, and he smiled. "Why talk about them!"

"No; tell me, doctor. I shall be very grateful to you.
And please don't stand on ceremony with me. I love to
hear the truth."

The Princess

"I am not your judge, Princess."

"Not my judge! What a tone you take! You must
know something about me. Tell me!"

"If you really wish it, very well. Only I regret to say
I'm not clever at talking, and people can't always under-
stand me."

The doctor thought a moment and began:

"A lot of mistakes; but the most important of them,
in my opinion, was the general spirit that prevailed on
all your estates. You see, I don't know how to express
myself. I mean chiefly the lack of love, the aversion for
people that was felt in absolutely everything. Your whole
system of life was built upon that aversion. Aversion
for the human voice, for faces, for heads, steps ... in
fact, for everything that makes up a human being. At
all the doors and on the stairs there stand sleek, rude,
and lazy grooms in livery to prevent badly dressed per-
sons from entering the house; in the hall there are chairs
with high backs so that the footmen waiting there, during
balls and receptions, may not soil the walls with their
heads; in every room there are thick carpets that no hu-
man step may be heard; everyone who comes in is infal-
libly warned to speak as softly and as little as possible,
and to say nothing that might have a disagreeable effect
on the nerves or the imagination. And in your room you
don't shake hands with anyone or ask him to sit down —
just as you didn't shake hands with me or ask me to
sit down. . . ."

"By all means, if you like," said the princess, smiling
and holding out her hand. "Really, to be cross about
such trifles . . ."

"But I am not cross," laughed the doctor, but at once
he flushed, took off his hat, and waving it about, began
hotly: "To be candid, I've long wanted an opportunity
to tell you all I think. . . . That is, I want to tell you
that you look upon the mass of mankind from the Napo-

35*

Anton Chekhov

Iconic standpoint as food for the cannon. But Napoleon
had at least some idea; you have nothing except aver-

sion."

"I have an aversion for people?" smiled the princess,
shrugging her shoulders in astonishment. "I have!"

"Yes, you! You want facts? By all means. In Mihalt-
sevo three former cooks of yours, who have gone blind
in your kitchens from the heat of the stove, are living
upon charity. All the health and strength and good looks
that is found on your hundreds of thousands of acres is
taken by you and your parasites for your grooms, your
footmen, and your coachmen. All these two-legged cattle
are trained to be flunkeys, overeat themselves, grow coarse,
lose the 'image and likeness,' in fact. . . . Young doctors,
agricultural experts, teachers, intellectual workers gen-
erally— think of it! — are torn away from their honest
work and forced for a crust of bread to take part in all
sorts of mummeries which make every decent man feel
ashamed! Some young men cannot be in your service
for three years without becoming hypocrites, toadies,
sneaks. ... Is that a good thing? Your Polish superin-
tendents, those abject spies, all those Kazimers and Kaet-
ans, go hunting about on your hundreds of thousands of
acres from morning to night, and to please you try to
get three skins off one ox. Excuse me, I speak discon-
nectedly, but that doesn't matter. You don't look upon
the simple people as human beings. And even the princes,
counts, and bishops who used to come and see you, you
looked upon simply as decorative figures, not as living
beings. But the worst of all, the thing that most revolts
me, is having a fortune of over a million and doing nothing
for other people, nothing!"

The princess sat amazed, aghast, offended, not knowing
what to say or how to behave. She had never before been
spoken to in such a tone. The doctor's unpleasant, angry
voice and his clumsy, faltering phrases made a harsh

353

The Princess

clattering noise in her ears and her head. Then she began
to feel as though the gesticulating doctor was hitting her
on the head with his hat.

"It's not true!" she articulated softly, in an imploring
voice. "I've done a great deal of good for other people;
you know it yourself!"

"Nonsense!" cried the doctor. "Can you possibly go
on thinking of your philanthropic work as something
genuine and useful, and not a mere mummery? It was a
farce from beginning to end; it was playing at loving your
neighbour, the most open farce which even children and
stupid peasant women saw through! Take for instance
your — what was it called? — house for homeless old women
without relations, of which you made me something "like
a head doctor, and of which you were the patroness. Mercy
onus! What a charming institution it was! A house was
built with parquet floors and a weathercock on the roof;
a dozen old women were collected from the villages and
made to sleep under blankets and sheets of Dutch linen,
and given toffee to eat."

The doctor gave a malignant chuckle into his hat, and
went on speaking rapidly and stammering:

"It was a farce! The attendants kept the sheets and
the blankets under lock and key, for fear the old women
should soil them — 'Let the old devil's pepper-pots sleep
on the floor.' The old women did not dare to sit down on
the beds, to put on their jackets, to walk over the polished
floors. Everything was kept for show and hidden away
from the old women as though they were thieves, and the
old women were clothed and fed on the sly by other peo-
ple's charity, and prayed to God night and day to be
released from their prison and from the canting exhorta-
tions of the sleek rascals to whose care you committed
them. And what did the managers do? It was simply
charming! About twice a week there would be thirty-five
thousand messengers to say that the princess — that is,

354

Anton Chekhov

you — were coming to the home next day. That meant that
next day I had to abandon my patients, dress up and be
on parade. Very good; I arrive. The old women, in every-
thing clean and new, are already drawn up in a row, wait-
ing. Near them struts the old garrison rat — the super-
intendent with his mawkish, sneaking smile. The old
women yawn and exchange glances, but are afraid to
complain. We wait. The junior steward gallops up. Half
an hour later the senior steward; then the superintendent
of the accounts' office, then another, and then another
of them . . . they keep arriving endlessly. They all have
mysterious, solemn faces. We wait and wait, shift from
one leg to another, look at the clock — all this in monu-
mental silence because we all hate each other like poison.
One hour passes, then a second, and then at last the car-
riage is seen in the distance, and . . . and . . ."

The doctor went off into a shrill laugh and brought
out in a shrill voice:

"You get out of the carriage, and the old hags, at the
word of command from the old garrison rat, begin chant-
ing: 'The Glory of our Lord in Zion the tongue of man
cannot express. . . .' A pretty scene, wasn't it?"

The doctor went off into a bass chuckle, and waved his
hand as though to signify that he could not utter another
word for laughing. He laughed heavily, harshly, with
clenched teeth, as ill-natured people laugh; and from his
voice, from his face, from his glittering, rather insolent
eyes it could be seen that he had a profound contempt
for the princess, for the home, and for the old women.
There was nothing amusing or laughable in all that he
described so clumsily and coarsely, but he laughed with
satisfaction, even with delight.

"And the school?" he went on, panting from laughter.
"Do you remember how you wanted to teach peasant
children yourself? You must have taught them very well,
for very soon the children all ran away, so that they had

355

The Princess

to be thrashed and bribed to come and be taught. And
you remember how you wanted to feed with your own
hands the infants whose mothers were working in the fields.
You went about the village crying because the infants
were not at your disposal, as the mothers would take
them to the fields with them. Then the village foreman
ordered the mothers by turns to leave their infants behind
for your entertainment. A strange thing! They all ran
away from your benevolence like mice from a cat! And
why was it? It's very simple. Not because our people
are ignorant and ungrateful, as you always explained it
to yourself, but because in all your fads, if you'll excuse
the word, there wasn't a ha'p'orth of love and kindness!
There was nothing but the desire to amuse yourself with
living puppets, nothing else. ... A person who does
not feel the difference between a human being and a lap-
dog ought not to go in for philanthropy. I assure you,
there's a great difference between human beings and
lap-dogs!"

The princess's heart was beating dreadfully; there was
a thudding in her ears, and she still felt as though the
doctor were beating her on the head with his hat. The
doctor talked quickly, excitedly, and uncouthly, stammer-
ing and gesticulating unnecessarily. All she grasped was
that she was spoken to by a coarse, ill-bred, spiteful,
and ungrateful man; but what he wanted of her and what
he was talking about, she could not understand.

"Go away!" she said in a tearful voice, putting up her
hands to protect her head from the doctor's hat; "go
away!"

"And how you treat your servants!" the doctor went
on, indignantly. "You treat them as the lowest scoundrels,
and don't look upon them as human beings. For example,
allow me to ask, why did you dismiss me? For ten years
I worked for your father and afterwards for you, honestly,
without vacations or holidays. I gained the love of all for

356

Anton Chekhov

more than seventy miles round, and suddenly one fine
day I am informed that I am no longer wanted. What
for? I've no idea to this day. I, a doctor of medicine, a
gentleman by birth, a student of the Moscow University,
father of a family — am such a petty, insignificant insect
that you can kick me out without explaining the reason!
Why stand on ceremony with me? I heard afterwards
that my wife went without my knowledge three times to
intercede with you for me — you wouldn't receive her. I
am told she cried in your hall. And I shall never forgive
her for it, never!"

The doctor paused and clenched his teeth, making an
intense effort to think of something more to say, very
unpleasant and vindictive. He thought of something,
and his cold, frowning face suddenly brightened.

"Take your attitude to this monastery!" he said with
avidity. "You've never spared anyone, and the holier
the place, the more chance of its suffering from your
loving-kindness and angelic sweetness. Why do you come
here? What do you want with the monks here, allow me
to ask you? What is Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba?
It's another farce, another amusement for you, another
sacrilege against human dignity, and nothing more. Why,
you don't believe in the monks' God; you've a God of your
own in your heart, whom you've evolved for yourself at
spiritualist seances. You look with condescension upon
the ritual of the Church; you don't go to mass or vespers;
you sleep till midday. . . . Why do you come here ? . . .
You come with a God of your own into a monastery you
have nothing to do with, and you imagine that the monks
look upon it as a very great honour. To be sure they do!
You'd better ask, by the way, what your visits cost the
monastery. You were graciously pleased to arrive here
this evening, and a messenger from your estate arrived
on horseback the day before yesterday to warn them of
your coming. They were the whole day yesterday getting

357

The Princess

the rooms ready and expecting you. This morning your
advance-guard arrived — an insolent maid, who keeps run-
ning across the courtyard, rustling her skirts, pestering
them with questions, giving orders. ... I can't endure
it! The monks have been on the lookout all day, for if
you were not met with due ceremony, there would be
trouble! You'd complain to the bishop! 'The monks
don't like me, your holiness; I don't know what I've done
to displease them. It's true I'm a great sinner, but I'm
so unhappy!' Already one monastery has been in hot
water over you. The Father Superior is a busy, learned
man; he hasn't a free moment, and you keep sending for
him to come to your rooms. Not a trace of respect for
age or for rank! If at least you were a bountiful giver
to the monastery, one wouldn't resent it so much, but all
this time the monks have not received a hundred roubles
from you!"

Whenever people worried the princess, misunderstood
her, or mortified her, and when she did not know what
to say or to do, she usually began to cry. And on this
occasion, too, she ended by hiding her face in her hands
and crying aloud in a thin treble like a child. The doctor
suddenly stopped and looked at her. His face darkened
and grew stern.

"Forgive me, Princess," he said in a hollow voice.
"I've given way to a malicious feeling and forgotten my-
self. It was not right."

And coughing in an embarrassed way, he walked away
quickly, without remembering to put his hat on.

Stars were already twinkling in the sky. The moon
must have been rising on the further side of the monastery,
for the sky was clear, soft, and transparent. Bats were
flitting noiselessly along the white monastery wall.

The clock slowly struck three quarters, probably a
quarter to nine. The princess got up and walked slowly
to the gate. She felt wounded and was crying, and she

358

Anton Chekhov

felt that the trees and the stars and even the bats were
pitying her, and that the clock struck musically only to
express its sympathy with her. She cried and thought
how nice it would be to go into a monastery for the rest
of her life. On still summer evenings she would walk
alone through the avenues, insulted, injured, misunder-
stood by people, and only God and the starry heavens
would see the martyr's tears. The evening service was
still going on in the church. The princess stopped and
listened to the singing; how beautiful the singing sounded
in the still darkness! How sweet to weep and suffer to the
sound of that singing!

Going into her rooms, she looked at her tear-stained
face in the glass and powdered it, then she sat down to
supper. The monks knew that she liked pickled sturgeon,
little mushrooms, Malaga and plain honey-cakes that left
a taste of cypress in the mouth, and every time she came
they gave her all these dishes. As she ate the mushro6ms
and drank the Malaga, the princess dreamed of how she
would be finally ruined and deserted — how all her stew-
ards, bailiffs, clerks, and maid-servants for whom she had
done so much, would be false to her, and begin to say
rude things; how people all the world over would set upon
her, speak ill of her, jeer at her. She would renounce her
title, would renounce society and luxury, and would go
into a convent without one word of reproach to anyone;
she would pray for her enemies — and then they would all
understand her and come to beg her forgiveness, but by
that time it would be too late. . . .

After supper she knelt down in the corner before the
ikon and read two chapters of the Gospel. Then her maid
made her bed and she got into it. Stretching herself under
the white quilt, she heaved a sweet, deep sigh, as one sighs
after crying, closed her eyes, and began to fall asleep.

In the morning she waked up and glanced at her watch.
It was half-past nine. On the carpet near the bed was a

359

The Princess

bright, narrow streak of sunlight from a ray which came
in at the window and dimly lighted up the room. Flies
were buzzing behind the black curtain at the window.
"It's early," thought the princess, and she closed her
eyes.

Stretching and lying snug in her bed, she recalled her
meeting yesterday with the doctor and all the thoughts
with which she had gone to sleep the night before: she
remembered she was unhappy. Then she thought of her
husband living in Petersburg, her stewards, doctors, neigh-
bours, the officials of her acquaintance ... a long pro-
cession of familiar masculine faces passed before her im-
agination. She smiled and thought, if only these people
could see into her heart and understand her, they would
all be at her feet.

At a quarter past eleven she called her maid.

"Help me to dress, Dasha," she said languidly. "But
go first and tell them to get out the horses. I must set off
for Klavdia Nikolaevna's."

Going out to get into the carriage, she blinked at the
glaring daylight and laughed with pleasure: it was a
wonderfully fine day! As she scanned from her half-closed
eyes the monks who had gathered round the steps to see
her off, she nodded graciously and said:

"Good-bye, my friends! Till the day after to-morrow."

It was an agreeable surprise to her that the doctor was
with the monks by the steps. His face was pale and severe.

"Princess," he said with a guilty smile, taking off his
hat, "I've been waiting here a long time to see you.
Forgive me, for God's sake. ... I was carried away
yesterday by an evil, vindictive feeling, and I talked . . .
nonsense. In short, I beg your pardon."

The princess smiled graciously, and held out her hand
for him to kiss. He kissed it, turning red.

Trying to look like a bird, the princess fluttered into
the carriage and nodded in all directions. There was a

360

Anton Chekhov

gay, warm, serene feeling in her heart, and she felt herself
that her smile was particularly soft and friendly. As the
carriage rolled towards the gates, and afterwards along
the dusty road past huts and gardens, past long trains of
waggons and strings of pilgrims on their way to the mon-
astery, she still screwed up her eyes and smiled softly.
She was thinking there was no higher bliss than to bring
warmth, light, and joy wherever one went, to forgive
injuries, to smile graciously on one's enemies. The peas-
ants she passed bowed to her, the carriage rustled softly,
clouds of dust rose from under the wheels and floated
over the golden rye, and it seemed to the princess that
her body was swaying not on carriage cushions but on
clouds, and that she herself was like a light, transparent
little cloud. . . .

"How happy I am!" she murmured, shutting her eyes.
"How happy I am!"

WINE

Sandor Gergel

SANDOR GERGEL is a Hungarian novelist and short-story
writer. He is the author of an anti-war novel relating his
own experience of two years of complete blindness.

WINE

A SHORT STORY OF HUNGARY

EfTLE Mary is ten years old. Hair and complexion,
brown; eyes, blue. A city doctor would say: under-
nourished. Country folk only say: the thin thing.
Little Mary has been head of the family now for two
weeks. From five o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock
at night. At five o'clock in the morning father and
mother are already on their way to the rich farmer's.
For the past two weeks they have been working there
and the "home" is managed byjittle Mary.

Sleeping on two old straw mattresses are Hans, nine,
Martin, seven, and Julie, four. The two straw mattresses
are really only bags of straw-dust, but towards dawn,
when the old folks have gotten up from them, it is lovely
and comfortable there. Once in a while little Mary has
to go away too. She puts on her rags, sticks her feet into
the boots tied around with straps; picks up the lead ewer
and goes. The ewer is very heavy and the place far, but
by six o'clock she is at the railway station. At six o'clock
the Pester passenger train comes. It stops there for ten
minutes.

Mary is always on time. Even in winter she comes on
time, if she is there at all. For it is not always there is
something to bring. Last winter she went twice for two
weeks. When the old folks went to work. . . . That
means they had work twice during the winter, for two
weeks at a time. They get paid not in money or even in
lard, flour or meat — that comes only once in a long while —
but in wine. Two liters of wine is a day's wages. Nowadays

From International Literature, March 1935. Reprinted by permission of In-
ternational Publishers Co., Inc., New York.

365

Wine

that's what they pay. . . . The two of them earn four
liters of wine daily. A good part of it they drink them-
selves, particularly when there is nothing to eat in the
house. But little Mary takes a four-liter ewer of wine
every morning to meet the Pester passenger train. Her
thin little voice chirps to meet the inrushing train:

"Wine, please. . . . Fresh, fine wine, please. . . ."

But she is not the only one that waits for the Pester
passenger train, chilled to the bone. Big men in boots
and with moustaches throw themselves upon the train,
enter the cars, run up and down inside them while little
Mary has to rely only on the few passengers that come
out on the platform for fresh air. She shivers with the
cold, her teeth chatter. Occasionally more than necessary
when, with her uncanny knowledge of people, she is
drawn to someone in particular.

"Uncle, buy some. It is the best wine. . . ,"

"Auntie, I wash the ewer every morning with soda, it
is clean, buy some. . . ."

"Only ten hellers a glass. . . ."

Sometimes she sells as many as five glasses.

Once, in winter, a man with a great big paunch drank
right out of the ewer. He drank almost half the ewer and
gave her a whole pengo. Mostly, however, Mary gets
only forty or fifty hellers. For this she buys bread in the
village, at thirty hellers the kilo.

"Well, little one," the baker said once, "do you take
care of the family?"

"Sure. But not for long now."

"Is that so! Till when then?"

But to this Mary did not answer. She only thought of
father's curses and the angry whispers of the poor folk:
one of these days we'll take these lords by the scruff of
the neck!

Only things like this one must not tell the baker or
any of the others that have money.

366

Sandor Gergel

And so she goes every morning and buys bread for the
money she gets for wine, smiling confidently.

But the business gets harder and harder. The wine
sellers go along with the train now from station to station.
They buy themselves tickets, board the train, wake the
sleeping ones and offer them drinks. Hardly anyone buys
wine at the station. Little Mary stands between the
tracks in the rain like a big wet bird. Despair sounds
hoarsely in her "Uncle. . . ."

She thinks of the family entrusted to her. Hans, Martin,
and Julie will go without bread today again. And, cough-
ing, she lags behind the other wine sellers' in her hour-long
trot. All the others are grown up, only she is small. But
Mary is glad of this. So long as she has to carry the wine
to the railway station, it is good : if father or mother were
to do it, that would mean they were unemployed and could
only sell the remains of the wine. And they would also
be coming back with full ewers, curse, and stop to take
long draughts. Just as the others do.

Today she has not sold a single glassful. There is not
a crumb of bread at home. Trouble presses on her brain,
the heavy ewer presses on her shoulder, the deep mud
pulls at her boots.

She collects the loose bricks lying about, makes a little
pile near the door and gets upon it. That's how she reaches
the window sill where the key is hidden. She unlocks the
door and then scatters the bricks again. The children
are up already. She drags them out of their rags. The
older ones tend themselves. The little one she has to wash.

They sit down to the table. ^— — s.

Mary puts the ewer down in thq^centerj>f the table.
She puts a tin plate and spoon in ntmt 01 each of the
children. All fold their hands and repeat their morning
prayer.

"There is no bread today," Mary says when the prayers
are over.

367

Wine

She swallows a laugh as she had put one over again on
Martin. That little godless fellow had announced yester-
day:

"If there is no bread again tomorrow, I'm not going to
say my prayers."

She pours the wine into the plates. The children fall
to and drink hungrily. Julie doesn't feel like drinking the
wine. Mary takes her on her lap and smiling slyly talks
her into drinking her breakfast. After they are through
they get up feeling dizzy , stagger and hiccup.

Rain is pouring. Hans and Martin go to school. Bare-
foot and hatlessT

Mary washes the dishes. She herself had not used either
plate or spoon. She drank out of the ewer in deep, heavy
draughts. Then she also goes out, her sleeping little sister
in her arms. She feels somewhat dizzy, staggers a little and
has to lean against the door. She looks about the yard.

Standing in the doorway of their neighbor's house is
another little Mary, also ten years old. To distinguish
between them the neighbors call her Marilyn.

"I have shipped them off to school," says Mary.

"I too. All three," answers Marilyn and sticks her two
little fists under her apron, just as the grown-ups do. She
is silent a while, then she asks:

"Did they all have their breakfast?"

"All. But there was no bread again today."

"We had no bread either," Marilyn nods. "And I got

no wine."

"I have no bread, darling," Mary says, "but I can
give you some wine."

So Marilyn comes over to Mary. They go inside. The
ewer of wine stands on the table. Marilyn falls upon it
and drinks in deep, heavy draughts. After she is through
she holds on to the table.

"I always get dizzy" she says in a murmur, "whenever
I drink wine."

368

Sandor Gergel

"I too. And she always goes to sleep from it," Mary
points to the child in her arms.

So they stand there, feeling dizzy, their eyes sad with
family troubles. They drowse off. Their heads hang down
heavily. They lean over against the table. Then they
slide down to the floor. The child in Mary's arms rolls
out, almost stifled, on the floor beside them. Mary and
Marilyn now let themselves go altogether and the little
heads, so heavy with family cares, sink in sleep on the
straw mattress.

369

THE PROTECTOR

Marcelo Salinas

MARCELO SALINAS is a young Cuban writer, some of
whose stories Langston Hughes has translated into English.

THE PROTECTOR

THE man, bending over the long rows, worked rap-
idly as though in a great hurry to finish. His little
boy, scarcely ten years old, went behind him picking
up the sweet potatoes and putting them in piles. The
Cuban earth was hard and very dry. In spite of the fact
that the night was cool, the man was sweating.

"Enough yet?"

The child measured with a glance the piles and an-
swered, "'Bout half a sack."

"Let's fill up then and get goin'. The moon'll be
coming out."

While the boy held the sack open, the man threw in
the sweet potatoes. From time to time, fearful of being
taken by surprise, he looked around on both sides, across
the big field, and down toward the road some two hundred
meters away.

The sack was over half full. Then the man tied its
mouth with a bit of palm fiber, put his knife in his belt,
tightened his waist and started to raise the bag.

The little boy, frantic with hunger, gnawed on a root
he had picked up.

"Throw that away. When we get to the village, we'll
have bread."

The boy obeyed, sure that the promise would be kept.
They would sell the sweet potatoes at Justo's store and
then they would not only have bread but a piece of candy
as well. That's what happened three days ago when they
went to steal bananas. That's what had been happening
ever since his father had been out of work, almost a month

Translated by Langston Hughes, and reprinted by his permission. From
New Masses, February 25, 1936.

373

The Protector

now. The rural guards hadn't caught them yet. And
even if they should catch them he would not be afraid of
anything beside his father, not even of the darkness which
was the only thing that really frightened him now.

The man, having dragged his sack to a stone wall, put
it up, turned and bent his back beneath the load. When he
stood up tall with his burden, the heart of the child swelled
with pride and admiration. How strong his father was!
And how brave!

They took a short cut that the cattle followed and came
out through a hole in the wall into the road which ran
between two steep slopes like a dry river. They walked
very fast, the father panting beneath his load, the little
boy beside him, jumping over the bumps in the road.

A rooster crowed, then another and several more an-
swered them. Soon the whole countryside vibrated with
their awareness.

"Two o'clock! Soon the moon will be out," thought the
thief. And he made up his mind not to rest until he was
near the village. There he felt that he would be out of
danger.

"Hurry up," he said to the child.

They came to a place where, in a violent curve, the
road seemed to end. Above, like a mile-stone near the
wall, a big tree spread its shadow.

Suddenly, a man jumped out and planted himself di-
rectly in front of them.

"Halt!" he said sternly.

The father and the son stopped. The man with the
sack recognized him at once as a private watchman belong-
ing to the plantation he had just robbed.

He stood there with his gun raised. "Ah, you robber!
Now, I've got you!"

The prisoner threw his load down as if to run, but the
guard said, "Don't move or I'll kill you!" And he cocked
his gun.

374

Marcelo Salinas

They stood a moment in silence, face to face, the threat-
ening watchman and the unhappy prisoner overcome by
the shame of having been caught. The child clung to the
legs of his father, but he was more filled with curiosity
than with fear. He did not even suspect that they had
been getting their bread and their candy in the wrong
way.

"You dirty thief! I've been on your trail a long time!"

From these harsh insults the unfortunate Creole felt a
wave of blood sting his face. Half-blind, he began to look
for the knife at his belt.

" Keep still! . . . Raise your hands!"

The fear of danger overcame him and giving way to
discretion, he raised his arms. The guard approached
and, as he took the knife away from him, he ordered,
"Get ahead, and take care not to try to run away."

Filled with sorrow and despair, the hopeless man began
to walk slowly, with the now frightened child beside him.
Behind them, with military stride, they could hear the
big boots of the guard on the road.

For seven or eight minutes they walked in horrible si-
lence. In the distance the little yellow lights of the village
could be seen.

The prisoner stopped suddenly as if rooted to the
earth. "Watchman," he said, without turning his head,
" I will not go into that village as a prisoner. If you want
to, you can kill me, but I will not go in like this."

The guard had stopped, too, very near the prisoner.
For a moment he was troubled by the latter' s attitude.
Then, thinking it was a trick to mislead him, he reasserted
himself. "What do you mean, you won't go in? I bet
you will!"

"No, I won't."

There was a terrific pause. One of those fleeting mo-
ments that concentrate a whole tragedy. The prisoner
turned around and stood looking resolutely at his captor.

375

The Protector

The little boy, with his eyes very wide open, did not fully
understand what was happening.

The guard cursed and raised his gun, but he dropped
it without firing. "Get away! Get away quick!" He
yelled. "I don't want to commit murder!"

And as if he himself was escaping from the danger of
his own wrath, the watchman gave a half turn and started
off, almost running, in the direction from which they
had come. Soon the sound of his footsteps was lost in the
night.

Then the unfortunate stealer of sweet potatoes sat
down on the grass at the edge of the road, sighed deeply
and hid his face in his hands. Close behind him, seeking
cover from the dampness of the night, the child snuggled.

They remained like that a long time: the man very
still with his hands to his temples as if he were afraid
they were going to burst, the child close to him seeking
protection from the cold.

"Papa, let's go."

The man seemed to awaken.

"Yes, let's go."

But he made no move to get up, so the child took his
chin gently in his hands.

"Papa!"

As the father turned his head, a ray of moonlight
through the branches of the trees lit up his face, and you
saw that his eyes were bathed in tears.

"Little boy! My little boy!" He embraced him ten-
derly, with all his soul, and a deep sob trembled in his
throat.

The child threw his arms around the man's neck. He
put his soft little cheek against the rough cheek of his
father and quietly, very gently, he whispered in his ear,
"Don't cry, papa! When I get big, I'll protect you. You'll
see how nobody'll bother you then."

376

AWAKENING

by
Isaac Babel

ISAAC BABEL, born 1894 in Odessa, of Jewish middle-class
parentage, dates the beginning of his literary career to en-
couragement from Maxim Gorky, whom he met in 1916.
He served in the army on the Rumanian front; later in the
army in the north against Yudenich; then as a reporter on
Petrograd and Tifiis papers, as a worker in a printing shop,
etc. His best-known short stories, which began to appear in
1924., deal with the civil war in Russia, and particularly
with Budenny's Red Cavalry.

AWAKENING

A"L the people of our class: brokers, shopkeepers,
and employees in banks and shipping-offices, had
their children taught music. Our parents, who
saw no bright prospects before them, devised a lottery,
which they built up on the bones of little folk. This mad-
ness attacked Odessa much more violently than other
towns. And sure enough, for years our town supplied
the concert platforms of the world with infant prodigies.
It was from Odessa that Mischa Elman, Zimbalist and
Gabrilovich came, and Yasha Heifetz began with us, too.

As soon as a boy had reached four or five years of age,
his mother took the puny little creature to Mr. Zagurski.
Zagurski kept a factory of infant prodigies, a factory of
Jewish dwarfs in lace collars and patent-leather slippers.
He discovered them in the slums of the Moldavanka quar-
ter, in the evil smelling yards of the Old Bazaar. Zagurski
set them on the right track and then delivered them over
to Professor Auer in St. Petersburg. A mighty harmony
dwelt in the souls of these miserable mites with blue,
swollen heads. They became famous musicians. One day
my father decided to join in the race. Although somewhat
over the infant prodigy age — I was almost fourteen —
I was so small and puny that I could easily pass as an
eight year old child. All our hopes hung on this.

I was taken to Zagurski. Out of respect for my grand-
father he agreed to teach me for a ruble a lesson, an ex-
tremely low rate. My grandfather, Levy Idzhok, was at
once the laughing stock and the pride of the town. He
walked about in a top hat, with his feet bound in linen
strips instead of socks, and dispersed people's doubts upon

From International Literature, No. 3, March 1935. Reprinted by permission of
International Publishers Co., Inc., New York.

379

Awakening

the most obscure points. He was applied to for informa-
tion on Gobelin tapestries, on the reasons for the Jacobins'
betrayal of Robespierre, on the production of artificial
silk, and the exact method of making a Caesarean section.
My grandfather could answer all these questions. Out of
respect for his learning and madness Zagurski charged us
no more than a ruble a lesson. And the trouble he took
with me he took solely from fear of my grandfather, for
it was clearly a waste of time. Sounds like iron filings crept
out of my violin, sounds that cut me to the very heart,
but my father would not give up. At home the talk was
all of Mischa Elman, who had been exempted from mili-
tary service by the Tsar himself. Zimbalist, according
to my father's information, had been presented to the
King of England, and had played in Buckingham Palace;
Gabrilovich's parents had bought two houses in St. Peters-
burg. These infant prodigies had brought their parents
wealth. My father would have borne poverty patiently,
but glory was a necessity to him.

"It could not be," whispered the people who dined at
his expense, "it could not be that the erandson of such a
man. . . ."

I had something quite different in mind. While I played
my exercises I placed some work of Turgenyev's or Dumas'
on the music-stand before me and devoured page after page
as I sawed away at the violin. In the day time I spun
yarns to the neighbors' children, and spent the night com-
mitting them to paper.

Story-telling was an hereditary passion in our family.
My grandfather, who became a little crazy in his old age,
had been writing a story entitled The Headless John all
his life. I took after him.

Three times a week I had to trail off, weighed down
with my violin and music, to Zagurski's. Against the wall,
awaiting their turn, sat a row of Jewesses in a state of
almost hysterical animation. The violins they clutched

380

Isaac Babel

on their weak knees were much larger than those who were
to perform on them in Buckingham Palace.

The door of the holy of holies would open and freckled
children with large heads on thin necks like stalks of flow-
ers and an epileptic flush on their cheeks would emerge.
The door closed again after swallowing up the next dwarf.
On the other side of the wall the teacher with the carrotty
curls, the bow-tie, and the thin legs, chanted and con-
ducted till he was ready to burst. The manager of this
monstrous lottery, he populated the Moldavanka quarter
and the black alleys of the Old Bazaar with the spectres
of pizzicato and cantilena. Later this polish was to be
heightened to an infernal brilliance by old Professor
Auer.

I had nothing in common with this sect. Though I
was a dwarf like them, I hearkened to a different inspira-
tion in the voice of my ancestors.

The first stage was hard for me. One day I left the
house loaded with my violin in its case, my music, and
twelve rubles, the fee for the month's lessons. I went
along Nejin Street, and should have turned into Dvorian-
skaya Street to get to Zagurski's, but instead, I went up
Tirasspol Street, and found myself in the port. The hours
appointed for my lesson flew by at the docks. That was
the beginning of my liberation. Zagurski's waiting-room
never saw me again. More important business occupied
my mind now. Together with a playmate of mine named
Nemanov, I visited an old sailor, Mr. Trottyburn, on
the steamship Kensington. Nemanov was a year younger
than I, but from the age of eight he had been engaged in
the most complicated trading operations in the world. He
had a genius for trade and fulfilled all that he promised.
Now he is a New York millionaire, a director of the Gen-
eral Motors Company, a firm no less powerful than Ford's.
Nemanov took me about with him everywhere simply
because I obeyed him implicitly. He bought the tobacco

Awakening

pipes smuggled in by Mr. Trottyburn. These pipes were
made by the old sailor's brother in Lincoln.

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Trottyburn to us, "mark my
words, children should be made by hand. ... To smoke
a factory-made pipe is like sticking a syringe in your
mouth. . . . Have you ever heard of Benvenuto Cellini?
There was a real craftsman. My brother in Lincoln could
tell you all about him. My brother doesn't believe in
poking his nose into anyone's business. But he's a rooted
conviction that children and pipes ought to be made by
one's own hands and not by strangers. We can't but agree
with him, gentlemen . . ."

Nemanov used to resell Trottyburn's pipes to bank-
directors, foreign consuls and wealthy Greeks. He made
a profit of a hundred per cent on them.

The pipes of the Lincoln craftsman breathed poetry.
There was a thought in each of them, a drop of eternity.
A yellow eye shone in every mouthpiece, every case was
lined with satin. I tried to imagine how Matthew Trotty-
burn, the last pipe-craftsman, the man who had withstood
the march of things, lived away over in Old England.

"We cannot but agree with him, gentlemen, that chil-
dren should be made by hand. . . ."

The heavy breakers at the jetty divided me more and
more from a home that smelt of onions and of Jewish fate.
From the docks I migrated to the breakwater. There
was a little sandy patch inhabited by the boys from
Primorskaya Street. There they could play from morning
till night without putting on their trousers; they dived
under the rafts, stole coconuts for their dinner, and waited
till the string of barges laden with water-melons would
arrive from Kherson and Kamenka and the melons could
be split on the capstans.

To be able to swim became the dream of my life. I
shrank from admitting to these bronzed lads that although
I had been born in Odessa, I had never set eyes on the sea

382

Isaac Babel

until I was ten and at the age of fourteen was unable to
swim.

How late I learnt the most essential things! In my early
years I sat nailed to the Talmud, living the life of a sage,
and I was almost grown-up when I began to climb trees.

Swimming proved beyond my powers. The phobia of
my ancestors, Spanish rabbis and Frankfurt money-
changers, drew me inexorably down to the bottom of
the sea. The water would not support me. Soused with
salt water, I returned to the shore, to my violin and music.
I was attached to these witnesses of my crimes and dragged
them everywhere with me. The struggle of the rabbis
and the sea continued until the sea-god of those parts,
one Ephim Nikitich Smolich, a proof-reader on the Odessa
News, took pity on me. In that athletic bosom dwelt a
great compassion for the small Jewish boy. He was the
leader of a mob of rickety weaklings. Nikitich had gath-
ered them from the bug-ridden tenements in the Molda-
vanka quarter, had led them to the sea, rolled them in
the sand, drilled them, dived with them, taught them to
sing songs, and, roasting alongside them in the direct rays
of the sun, told them stories of fishermen and animals.
To grown-ups Nikitich explained that he was a lover of
philosophy and nature. Nikitich's tales made the Jewish
children cry with laughter; they squealed and cuddled
up to him like puppies. The sun bespattered them with
freckles that melted into one another, freckles the color
of a lizard.

The old man silently watched my single-handed fight
with the breakers out of the corner of his eye. Seeing
that there was no hope of my ever learning to swim, he
included me in the circle of those to whom he had opened
his heart. His whole heart was laid open to us and it
was a merry heart, that knew neither pride nor greed nor
worry. With copper-colored shoulders, the head of an
aging gladiator, the bronzed legs — a little bowed, he lay

383

Awakening

in our midst behind the breakwater — the sovereign of
those melon-strewn, kerosene-tainted waters. I came to
love this man as only a boy constantly suffering from
hysteria and headaches can love an athlete. I would not
leave him alone; I was always trying to do something
for him. "Don't fuss about so much," he said to me.
"Strengthen your nerves first. Then swimming will come
naturally to you. . . . What do you mean by saying the
watef won't hold you up. . . . Why shouldn't it hold
you up?"

When he saw how hard I tried, Nikitich singled me out
of all his pupils and asked me to come and see him in his
clean, spacious attic with its straw matting. There he
showed me his dogs, hedgehog, tortoise and pigeons. By
way of exchange for all these riches I brought him the
tragedy I had written the day before.

"I knew it. I knew you wrote," said Nikitich. "You've
got that sort of a glance. You never look anywhere. ..."

He read my manuscript, gave a twitch of his shoulders,
passed his hand over his stiff grey curls, and walked the
length of the attic.

"One must come to the conclusion," he said very softly,
pausing after every word, "that you have the divine
spark in you. . . ."

We went out into the street. The man stood still,
thumped his stick on the pavement and fixed his eyes on
me.

"What is it you lack? . . . Youth is no hindrance, it'll
pass with the years. . . . It's the feeling for nature that
you haven't got."

He pointed with his stick to a low tree with a reddish
trunk.

"What tree is that?"

I did not know.

"What grows on this bush?"

I did not know that either. We were passing through

384

Isaac Babel

the square in Alexander Avenue. The old man pointed
out all the trees with his stick, caught me by the shoulder
whenever a bird flew by, and made me listen to the differ-
ent bird-notes.

"What bird is singing now?"

I could give no reply. The names of trees and birds,
the division of them into species, where they were flying,
where the sun rises, when the dew falls the heaviest, all
these things were hidden from me.

"And yet you dare to write? ... A man who doesn't
live in nature like a stone or an animal lives in it, will
never write two lines worth anything. . . . Your land-
scapes are like descriptions of stage scenery. Devil take
me, but what were your parents thinking about for
fourteen years?"

What were they thinking about? . . . About unpaid
I. O. U.'s and the mansions bought by Mischa Elman. . . .
I did not tell Nikitich this. I held my tongue.

At dinner-time, at home, I would not touch the food.
It would not go down my throat.

"The feeling for nature," I thought. "My God, why
did it never enter my head before? . . , Where can I
find someone to interpret the different bird-notes for me
and the names of trees? Let me see, what do I know
about them? I might possibly recognize a lilac-bush and
then only when it's in blossom. Lilac and acacia. Deribas-
sovskaya and Greek Streets are lined with acacias, . . ."

At dinner-time father told us a new story about Yascha
Heifetz. He had met Mendelsohn, Yascha's uncle. The
boy, it seemed, was being paid eight hundred rubles for
every appearance. How much does that work out at
fifteen concerts a month?

I worked it out. It came to twelve thousand rubles a
month. As I multiplied and carried four in my head, my
glance wandered to the window. Across the cement yard
my music teacher, Mr. Zagurski, was marching, leaning

385

Awakening

on his stick. He came on with the breeze gently swelling
his Inverness cape, his auburn ringlets escaping from under
th'e brim of his soft hat. He was none too soon. Over
three months had gone by since my violin first rested on
the sand behind the breakwater. . . .

Zagurski was approaching the front door. I rushed for
the back door, but it had been boarded up for fear of
thieves only the day before. Then I locked myself in the
lavatory. In half-an-hour's time the whole family had
assembled outside my doon The women were crying.
Aunt Bobka rubbed her greasy shoulders against the door
wailing and sobbing. My father was silent. Then he spoke,
more quietly and distinctly than I had ever heard him
speak before:

"I'm an officer, am I?" said my father. "I have an
estate. I hunt. The peasants pay me rent, don't they?
I have sent my son to a military school. I do not need to
worry about my son any more."

He ceased speaking. The women snuffled. Then the
door of the lavatory was shaken by a terrific blow. My
father threw himself upon it bodily. He ran back a few
paces and rushed at it again.

"I'm an officer!" he shrieked. "I hunt, do I? I'll kill
him. . . . It's the end. . . ."

The latch sprang off the door, but there still remained
the bolt, which hung by one nail. The women rolled on
the floor, trying to catch my father by the legs; he tore
himself free; he was in a frenzy. An old woman came
tottering out at last to the noisy scene. It was my father's
mother.

"My child," she said to him in Yiddish, "our sorrow is
great. It knows no bounds. There has been all but blood-
shed in our house. I do not want to see blood in my
house. . . ."

My father groaned. I heard his footsteps receding.
The bolt was still hanging by the last nail.

Isaac Babel

I sat in my fortress till night-fall. When everyone had
gone to bed, Aunt Bobka led me away to my grand-
mother's. We had a long way to go. The moonlight lay
numb on unknown bushes, on nameless trees. . . . An
invisible bird gave a whistle and faded into silence, per-
haps into slumber. . . . What bird was it? What was it
called? Did the dew fall of an evening? . . . Where did
the constellation of the Great Bear lie? Where did the
sun rise?

We went along Post Office Street. Aunt Bobka held
me firmly by the hand so that I could not run away. She
was quite right. I was thinking of escape.

387

CANDY-MAN BEECHUM

by
Erskine Caldwell

ERSKINE CALDWELL (1903- ), born in Georgia, the son
of a Presbyterian pastor, is best known for his novel Tobacco
Road and for the play based upon it. A somewhat irregular
education, made necessary by the migratory life of his family,
included three years at the University of Virginia and the
University of Pennsylvania. Then he took up newspaper
work. He resides in Maine, when not in California, Georgia,
Virginia, or Florida. He writes chiefly of the poor whites in
the Southern mountains, especially in Georgia. His stories
have appeared in many magazines — among them The Amer-
ican Mercury, Esquire, New Masses, Scribner's Maga-
zine, Story, Vanity Fair; efforts to suppress his second
novel, God's Little Acre (ipjj), made him better known,
but the quality of his work needed no such assistance.

CANDY-MAN BEECHUM

OWLS in the trees began to take on life. Those
whooing birds were glad to see the setting sun.
The black boy in the mule yard scratched his
head and watched the sun go down. If he didn't have all
those mules to feed, and if he had had a two-bit piece
in his pocket, he'd have liked to tag along with Candy-
Man. It was Saturday night, and there'd be a barrelful
of catfish frying in town that evening. He wished he had
some of that good-smelling cat.

"Before the time aint long," Little Bo said, "I'm
going to get me a gal."

"Just be sure she aint Candy-Man's, boy, and I'll
give you a helping hand."

He flung the other leg over the split-rail fence and
struck out for the high land. Ten miles from the swamps
to the top of the ridge, and his trip would be done. The
bushes whipped around his legs, where his legs had been.
He couldn't be waiting for the back-strike of no swamp-
country bushes. Up the log road, and across the bottom
land, taking three corn rows at a stride, Candy-Man
Beechum was on his way.

There were some colored boys taking their time in
the big road. He was up on them before they had time
to turn their heads around.

"Make way for these flapping feet, boys," he shouted.
"Here I come!"

"Where you going, Candy-Man?"

They had to do a lot of running to keep up with him.

From Kneel to the Rising Sun, by Erskine Caldwell. Copyright 1935. Pub-
lished by The Viking Press, Inc., and reprinted by permission of The Viking
Press, Inc.

391

Candy-Man Beechum

They had to hustle to match those legs four feet long. He
made their breath come short.

"Somebody asked me where I'm going," Candy-Man
said. "I got a yellow gal, and I'm on my way to pay her

some attention."

"You'd better toot your horn, Candy-Man, before
you open her door. The yellow gals don't like to be taken
by surprise."

"Boy, you're tooting the truth, except that you don't
know the why-for of what you're saying. Candy-Man's
gal always waits for him right at the door."

"Saturday-night bucks sure have to hustle along. They
have to strike pay before the Monday-morning whistle
starts whipping their ears."

The boys fell behind, stopping to blow and wheeze.
There was no keeping up, on a Saturday night, with the
seven-foot mule skinner on his way.

The big road was too crooked and curvy for Candy-
Man. He struck out across the fields, headed like a plumb-
line for a dishful of frying catfish. The lights of the town
came up to meet him in the face like a swarm of lightning-
bugs. Eight miles to town, and two more to go, and he'd
be rapping on that yellow gal's door.

Back in the big road, when the big road straightened
out, Candy-Man swung into town. The old folks rid-
ing, and the young ones walking, they all made way for
those flapping feet. The mules to the buggies and the
sports in the middle of the road all got aside to let him
through.

"What's your big hurry, Candy-Man?"

"Take care my dust don't choke you blind, niggers.
I'm on my way."

"Where to, Candy-Man?"

"I got a gal what's waiting on her toes. She don't like
for to be kept waiting."

"Better slow down and cool those heels, Candy-Man,

392

Erskine Caldwell

because you're coming to the white-folks' town. They
don't like niggers stepping on their toes."

"When the sun goes down, I'm on my own. I can't
be stopping to see what color people be."

The old folks clucked, and the mules began to trot.
They didn't like the way that big coon talked.

"How about taking me along, Candy-Man?" the
young bucks begged. "I'd like to grab me a chicken off a
henhouse roost."

"Where I'm going I'm the cock of the walk. I gouge
my spurs in all strange feathers. Stay away, black boy,
stay away."

Down the street he went, sticking to the middle of the
road. The sidewalks couldn't hold him when he was in a
hurry like that. A plateful of frying catfish, and he would
be on his way. That yellow gal was waiting, and there was
no time to lose. Eight miles covered, and two short ones
to go. That saw-mill fireman would have to pull on that
Monday-morning whistle like it was the rope to the
promised land.

The smell of the fish took him straight to the fish-
house door. Maybe they were mullets, but they smelled
just as good. There wasn't enough time to order up a
special dish of fins.

He had his hand on the restaurant door. When he
had his supper, he would be on his way. He could see
that yellow gal waiting for him only a couple of miles
away.

All those boys were sitting at their meal. The room
was full of hungry people just like him. The stove was
full of frying fish, and the barrel was only half-way used.
There was enough good eating for a hundred hungry men.

He still had his hand on the fish-house door, and his
nose was soaking it in. If he could have his way about
it, some of these days he was going to buy a barrel of
catfish and eat them every one.

393

Candy-Man Beechum

"What's your hurry, Candy-Man?''

"No time to waste, white-boss. Just let me be."

The night policeman snapped open the handcuffs,
and reached for his arms. Candy-Man stepped away.

"I reckon I'd better lock you up. It'll save a lot of
trouble. I'm getting tired of chasing fighting niggers
all over town."

"I never hurt a body in all my life, white-boss. And
I sure don't pick fights. You must have the wrong nig-
ger, white-boss. You sure has got me wrong. I'm just
passing through for to see my gal."

"I reckon I'll play safe and lock you up till Monday
morning just the same. Reach out your hands for these
cuffs, nigger."

Candy-Man stepped away. His yellow gal was on
his mind. He didn't feel like passing her up for no iron-
bar jail. He stepped away.

"I'll shoot you down, nigger. One more step, and I'll
blast away."

"White-boss, please just let me be. I won't even stop
to get my supper, and I'll shake my legs right out of
town. Because I just got to see my gal before me Monday-
morning sun comes up."

Candy-Man stepped away. The night policeman
threw down the handcuffs and jerked out his gun. He
pulled the trigger at Candy-Man, and Candy-Man fell
down.

"There wasn't no cause for that, white-boss. I'm
just a big black nigger with itching feet. I'd a heap
rather be traveling than standing still." >

The people came running, but some of them turned
around and went the other way. Some stood and looked
at Candy-Man while he felt his legs to see if they could
hold him up. He still had two miles to go before he could
reach the top of the ridge.

The people crowded around, and the night police-

394

Erskjne Caldwell

man put away his gun. Candy-Man tried to get up so
he could be getting on down the road. That yellow gal
of his was waiting for him at her door, straining on the
tips of her toes.

" White-boss, I sure am sorry you had to go and shoot
me down. I never bothered white-folks, and they sure
oughtn't bother me. But there aint much use in living
if that's the way it's going to be. I reckon I'll just have to
blow out the light and fade away. Just reach me a blanket
so I can cover my skin and bones."

"Shut up, nigger," the white-boss said. "If you keep
on talking, I'll just have to pull out my gun again and
hurry you on."

The people drew back, so they would not stand too
close. The night policeman put his hand on the butt
of his gun, where it would be handy in case.

"If that's the way it's to be, then make way for Candy-
Man Beechum, because here I come."

395

MRS. KENT

by
Robert Smith

ROBERT SMITH was born in Boston in 1905 and studied at
Brown University. His stories have appeared in Hound and
Horn, Esquire, Story, etc., and in the 1933 anthology of the
O. Henry Memorial Committee.

MRS. KENT

MRS. KENT, bulging fatly from her corset and
garters, stood before the long mirror in her own
bedroom, and brushed with grim vigor at the
sparse graying hank of her hair. The window near her was
open and an infrequent breeze puffed the long curtain
faintly. The window gave on an asphalt court with a
picket fence beyond it and a vacant lot with a big For
Sale sign in the center. In the noon sun, the sign cast a
brief shadow where a fat tiger cat drowsed. Mrs. Kent
could see him. Their apartment was on the third floor.

As she turned to put hairpins in her mouth, some move-
ment outside caught her eye. She turned quickly in time
to see a boy with a stick creeping on tiptoe toward Peter,
the cat. For a moment she was too horrified to move.
Then she spit all the hairpins into her hand and, clutching
the kimono in front of her, she leaned to the window.

"Go away!" she screamed. "Go away!"

The boy, startled, turned a small narrow face toward
her for a brief instant, looking directly into her eyes. His
own eyes were little dead black holes. Then he was gone,
scuttling away like a roach in the light.

Mrs. Kent, her exasperation not half spent, clung to the
window frame and gazed down in horror.

"Oh, dear heaven," she gasped. "Dear!"

She slipped her arms into her kimono and then, bending
close to the screen, she called :

'"Kitty! Here kitty, kitty, kitty! Here kitty! Kitty,
kitty, kitty!"

The cat came awake at once, uncoiling lazily, and then,

Reprinted from Story, November 1935, with the permission of the editors, and
of the author, through his agent, Mr. Morton Goldman.

399

Mrs. Kent

recognizing the source of the call, trotted toward the
backstairs, tail erect. Mrs. Kent went to open the back
door for him; and when he slid in she picked him up and
held him close for a moment, stroking and consoling him.
He struggled out of her arms finally and she poured him
some cream. Then she went to look out the window again,
as if she might pick up scfrne sign of the boy. She tried to
remember which way he had gone.

"That awful, awful face," she whispered.

The gentle bong of the living-room clock came to her.
She hurried into the bedroom to finish her hair, whispering
frequently to herself. She put on a flowered gown that
made her seem rather tall and a hat that was not new.
She took her string gloves and a plain white purse and
started out. As she opened the front door, Peter slid out
ahead of her and scurried down the stairs.

" Peter!" she called. But he was gone toward the cellar;
and when she reached the lobby there was no sign of him.

" Oh dear!" she whispered.

Then she lifted her chin slightly and strode out, down
the three steps, with a brief survey of the street, and
started toward the car tracks. The sun was hot, glinting
from the cement and quivering up from the asphalt. Two
men went by with their coats on their arms and sweat
darkening their shirts. Mrs. Kent could feel the moisture
beginning to gather on her face; and her gown stuck to her.

The car stop was a post with a white band on it. It was
in the direct sun with no tree or building near enough to
make a shadow. Mrs. Kent stopped, patting her chin with
her handkerchief, breathless. She looked for a policeman,
so she might report the boy who had stalked Peter. There
was one far up the street, at the corner, waving autos oh.
It was uphill in the sun and Mrs. Kent did not feel equal
to it. She gazed far up the tracks for the street car that
did not come. She fluttered the handkerchief weakly to
fan her* face.

400

Robert Smith

Finally the car came and Mrs. Kent climbed aboard
with great effort, to sink puffing in her seat. She had only a
few blocks to go, and most people would have walked;
but it didn't seem right to Mrs. Kent to walk from her
own nice apartment into the slums.

She got off at a dreary corner at the bottom of a long
slope. There was a vacant store with grimy windows and
in the doorway half a dozen little boys were playing a
game with cards they dropped fluttering to the walk.
They kept screaming at each other:

"Ya muzzier!"

"Yadopeya! Gida-a-aht!"

Mrs. Kent, descending without grace from the street
car, eyed them dubiously and kept clear of them as she
went by. She made her way down the crowded hot street.
These people all seemed to live on the sidewalk or on their
stoops; and Mrs. Kent had to pick a path through little
groups that fell silent as she passed. Boys were knocking
rubber balls against the walls of houses and frequently
Mrs. Kent paused to let a ball bounce in front of her.
Girls of all ages chased in the middle of the street or
lounged on the hot stairways, often showing their gray and
tattered underclothes. A big girl in green jostled against
Mrs. Kent as she struggled with a small boy for a stick.

"Oh!" said Mrs. Kent. But the children did not see her
and she hurried on, shaking her head angrily.

Number 115 was a doorway about ten steps above the
street. The door was wide open and the hallway was in
darkness except that the beginning of a staircase was
visible. There were three dirty little girls on the steps
playing jacks. They took up most of the steps; and
Mrs. Kent, after pausing for them to move, had to make
her way around them. At the top of the steps a thin man
in his undershirt was leaning against the doorjamb. Could
that be he? thought Mrs. Kent. She glanced at him and
he very carefully avoided meeting her gaze, his pale eyes

401

Mrs. Kent

staring vacantly ahead. She hurried in quickly, excited
and a little frightened. If that had been he ... the
agitator! And if he had known . . .!

The stairs inside were creaky and dim. On the walls and
woodwork hung a smell of stale grease, a sweetish smell
that had grown old and decayed. It was a familiar odor
now to Mrs. Kent. She labored up the staircase. There
were doors at each landing, all with round holes where
the locks should have been and light shining through. On
each floor the toilet door stood open, giving out a smell
that made Mrs. Kent hold her breath. She was puffing and
nearly blinded with sweat when she reached the top floor.
It was darker up here and only light through a square of
crinkled glass showed the Rolfe's door. Mrs. Kent paused
outside for a long moment, getting her breath, tucking
wet strands of hair beneath her hat. A growing sense of
triumph gladdened her. Now! She rapped briefly on the
glass. There was no movement inside, although she could
hear a baby fretting. She rapped again; and finally some-
one stirred. The door, which had no latch or knob, swung
back noiselessly. A little girl with solemn black eyes faced
her. She stared, frightened, and gave Mrs. Kent no greet-
ing. Then without turning her head or changing her
expression she shouted:

"Ma!"

There was no answer; and the little girl did not move
from the doorway. Mrs. Kent pushed the door back a
little farther.

"All right, dear," she said, authoritatively. "Mother
expects me."

The girl gave ground and Mrs. Kent came in. The girl
still faced her, staring.

"Ma!" she yelled again. "It's the welfare lady!"

There was a sudden movement in the next room and
the baby began to yell. Mrs. Rolfe appeared. She looked
just like the girl, except that she was leaner and more

402

Robert Smith

hollow-eyed. She wore a wrinkled flimsy Mother Hubbard
and had no shoes on. She seemed to glide across the floor,
the long garment almost hiding her feet, and when she
stood still her stockings turned up. She smiled wanly,
showing only three or four teeth.

"Hello, Mrs. Kent," she said in a flat voice.

"Tend to the little fellow first, Mrs. Rolfe," said
Mrs. Kent. "I can wait."

Mrs. Rolfe shook her head.

"No," she breathed. "He's all right. He always yells."

Mrs. Kent smiled very determinedly.

"No, no," she snapped. "Don't let him cry so. See
what he wants. I'll just wait."

She sat down on a chair without any back, setting her
mouth. But Mrs. Rolfe sat down opposite her, folding her
blue-white hands quietly in her lap.

"No," she said. "He cries all the time."

Mrs. Kent pressed her lips together in exasperation,
then she sighed heavily, dabbing at her moist chin with
her soggy handkerchief. Mrs. Rolfe waited for her to
speak. The girl made off and there was scuffling and
whispering in the -kitchen where the other children were.
The baby's cries subsided gradually.

"Now," said Mrs. Kent. "I've a number of questions I
must ask."

Mrs. Rolfe lowered her eyes.

"First of all, about the money you're getting. You still
feel it's not sufficient?"

Mrs. Kent's tone made the question rhetorical. Mrs.
Rolfe barely nodded.

"Well," said Mrs. Kent. "I want you to understand
this. The money you are getting is allowed on the basis of
having one child. The others , . . we cannot . . . the
State, that is, certainly cannot undertake to give its sanc-
tion to such things. I mean by that, the ones born before
you and Mr. Rolfe. . . ."

403

Mrs. Kent

Mrs. Rolfe lifted pained eyes.

"They have to eat/' she murmured.

"They have to eat. Of course," said Mrs. Kent. "But
that is something that should have been considered. You
must see that the State, if it were to recognize, that is,
seem to make it legal — such things — well, you can readily
see. It would lead to all sorts of things. It's just impossi-
ble. . There are homes of course. But . . . well, I'm sure
you can see."

Mrs. Rolfe shook her head wearily but did not look up.
She unfolded her hands and plucked at her faded apron.
Mrs. Kent looked around the dingy room. There seemed
to be new dark streaks on the walls as if water were seeping
down inside the paper. There was no carpet but the bare
floor was unpainted where a carpet had been. The light
fixture was a green knotted cord with an unshaded bulb.

"And I'm wondering," Mrs. Kent went on," if we're
being just as careful as we could be. So many simple meals
may now be prepared. I mean, for very little. And just as
good in every way — nourishing, that is. We mustn't
pamper ourselves you know."

Mrs. Rolfe shook her head without looking up.

"And then," Mrs. Kent went on, "I understand you
have been keeping a cat. Now I shouldn't need to tell
you that the State is in no position to give relief to families
that can afford cats — for certainly. . . . Well, such an
unnecessary expense simply can't be permitted."

Mrs. Rolfe looked up quickly, and her eyes were moist.

"That cat just come," she said. "It eats only scraps.
And mice. It ain't no expense. The kids would die with-
out that cat."

Mrs. Kent's mouth made a firm straight line.

"I'm afraid I'll have to be quite definite," she said.
" Keeping that cat would be sufficient grounds. We should
be forced to discontinue relief. I'm very sorry."

Mrs. Rolfe's head drooped a trifle more.

404

Robert Smith

"Is that clear?" said Mrs. Kent.

Mrs. Rolfe nodded slightly.

Mrs. Kent cleared her throat and the corners of her
mouth twitched a little. Her eyes brightened.

"And now," she said, "About Mr. Rolfe. . . ."

Her tone made Mrs. Rolfe look up quickly.

"What about him?" she whispered.

"Why," said Mrs. Kent with studied innocence, "that's
precisely what I wish to know. What about him ? Do you
hear from him?"

Mrs. Rolfe shook her head dully.

"And of course he's not in town? You don't know
where he is?"

"I ain't heard."

"I see." Mrs. Kent paused again, a hint of triumph in
her eyes. "Of course you understand why I'm interested?"

Mrs. Rolfe raised her eyes, but did not answer.

"Mr. Rolfe," said Mrs. Kent, "who can't seem to find
work of any sort, has found time to go stirring up trouble.
And I think he will find that he has stirred up a good deal.
He has got himself mixed up with these anarchists and
bolsheviks up at'Haverhill. Perhaps you read about it.
Two were killed."

Mrs. Kent was practically out of breath. Her nostrils
were dilated. Mrs. Rolfe did not stir or make a sound.

"Well," said Mrs. Kent, "you have no idea where he
can be? You're sure he hasn't been around here?"

Mrs. Rolfe shook her head again.

"The police would like to talk with him," said
Mrs. Kent.

Still Mrs. Rolfe showed no emotion. Mrs. Kent took a
deep breath and studied how best to reveal what she had
to say.

There were sudden thumping footsteps on the stairs;
and Mrs. Kent frowned in annoyance. The door banged
open, admitting a boy about sixteen. He had on khaki

405

Mrs. Kent

trousers and an undershirt. His face was white as pie-
dough and his arms were lank and white as peeled sticks.
He stopped short on seeing Mrs. Kent and then dropped
his head sulkily and trudged toward the kitchen.

"Anything to eat, ma?" he asked.

"There may be some bread. If the kids haven't eat it."

The boy stopped and looked back, his brooding eyes
resting for a moment on Mrs. Kent.

"I don't suppose there's any butter or anything?"

"No," said Mrs. Rolfe.

"My God!" said the boy. "I thought there'd be some-
thing to eat. I'll kill those damn kids. . . ."

"Billy! "Mrs. Rolfe gasped.

The boy pulled his mouth down at the corners and
started back for the kitchen again. His shoulder blades
were like wings on his back. He went through the door
and they heard him banging around in the kitchen, open-
ing drawers and shifting pans. The scuffling and whisper-
ing grew louder.

"You God damn chiselers!" the boy's voice said.

"Billy!" Mrs. Rolfe cried, half-turning.

Mrs. Kent shifted in her chair.

"Isn't that young fellow old enough to be working?"
she demanded. "Something on part time?"

Mrs. Rolfe shook her head.

"He mustn't work," she said. "He ruptured him-
self."

"He what?"

"Ruptured," said Mrs. Rolfe. "Down here."

Mrs. Kent turned crimson, her face and neck and the V
of her chest.

"Oh," she said.

She was annoyed and angry at the interruption. She
had forgotten how she meant to start. She got up, slightly
confused, and began to unstick her dress where she had
been sitting on it. The kitchen door opened and Billy

406

Robert Smith

stalked through and out, trotting down the stairs. Mrs.
Kent waited; and Mrs. Rolfe studied her hands.

"Perhaps/' Mrs. Kent began at last, " perhaps you
may be surprised to know that Mr. Rolfe has been seen —
that we have reason to believe. . . ."

The effect on Mrs. Rolfe was electric and Mrs. Kent
felt a sort of grim pleasure. The little woman straightened
and stared, wide-eyed.

"Who seen him?" she demanded.

Mrs. Kent tried to determine whether the woman was
surprised or frightened.

"That doesn't matter," she said, biting her words off.
"What I'm here to tell you is that unless you give us some
definite help in locating this man your name must come
off the relief rolls at once."

Patches of color showed on Mrs. Rolfe's wan face and
tears stood in her eyes. Her lips trembled; and it was
several seconds before she could talk.

" I don't know where he is," she muttered.

"Come now," said Mrs. Kent. "Certainly you must
have some idea where he is. You can't expect us to be-
lieve. ... I mean it simply isn't normal for a man with a
family. The boy, perhaps. He must have seen him."

There was real terror in the woman's eyes now.

"He ain't seen him. There ain't none of us seen him.
We don't know where he is."

"Well, I'm afraid you must make some effort to find
him. The State is putting it right up to you, Mrs. Rolfe.
If you are to continue to receive aid you must help us
find this trouble-maker. We are determined to put a stop
to his activities."

Mrs. Rolfe's face now was whiter than ever. Her blood-
less lips were a thin line.

"I ain't going to see Frank in jail," she said, "no matter
what."

"Very well," said Mrs. Kent. She turned briskly away,

407

Mrs. Kent

then paused, expecting some word from Mrs. Rolfe. But
the little woman got up silently and padded ahead of her to-
ward the door. Mrs. Kent flushed angrily, then bustled out.

"Be careful of the stairs," Mrs. Rolfe murmured.

Mrs. Kent said nothing. She went down slowly, holding
tight to the banister. These people! She thought. They
needed a lesson!

She blinked in the bright light outside. The thin man
had not moved from the door and she had to pick her way
through the little girls again. She glanced back at the
man. No. Surely not standing there so boldly. She hur-
ried up the street, through and around the little gatherings,
avoiding the scampering children. A big boy in his under-
shirt ran on to the sidewalk ahead of her, after a ball.
It was Billy. He turned and threw the ball far down the
street, yelling as he did so. Mrs. Kent had an inspiration.
She hurried up to him.

"You're the Rolfe boy, aren't you?" she said.

He turned and glared at her suspiciously.

"Yeh,"hesaid.

She made herself as pleasant as she could.

"I wonder if you kids wouldn't like some ice cream,"
she said. "It's so hot."

His face brightened at once.

"Sure," he said. "We never get none."

Mrs. Kent opened her purse and took some dimes from
it. She dropped them into his grimy hand.

"There," she said. "Will that be enough?"

"Oh sure," he said. "Sure. That's swell."

"Be sure to get enough," she smiled. "And now, Billy.
I'm going to see your dad. I think I have something for
him. What's the easiest way to get there?"

Billy answered promptly, anxious to be away.

"We usually walk," he said. "It ain't so far. But you
could take the street car. He's out to grandma's — out on
Vinton Street."

408

Robert Smith

Mrs. Kent beamed.

"That's fine!" she said. "Fine! What number was
that?"

He wrinkled his brow at her. Then suddenly a little girl
began to yell:

"Billee! Bill-eee!"

Mrs. Kent turned to see the Rolfe girl running toward
them. She nodded quickly to Billy and started away.
She would find it. Vinton Street. She heard the little girl:

"Ma says you ain't to tell her! Don't you tell her noth-
ing!"

Mrs. Kent quickened her pace. It wouldn't do to run.
Undignified. She heard the boy yell angrily:

"I told her already!"

There were confused shouts behind her. People standing
on the sidewalk ahead of her looked back in surprise.
Several men and women moved down from their steps.
Fear clutched at Mrs. Kent's heart. She lowered her eyes
and hurried grimly along. These people! If they should
all. ... If they should all be in it together. . . . She
glanced wildly around for a policeman. They should have
more in these terrible districts. Suddenly a hand clutched
her sleeve and she screamed, without meaning to. A
hundred faces turned toward her.

Bill's white face was near her.

"God damn you!" he yelled. "You made me tell!"

She tore herself out of his grasp, and her lovely sleeve
ripped. She began to moan in terror and practically
clawed her way through the crowd. She heard the swelling
voices :

"What's the matter? What'd she do?"

Oh! Oh! If they should all be in on it together! If they
should all decide. . . . They were all around her. She
fought her way along, running now. Billy was beside her
again and she beat at him madly. She could no longer
make out what the voices said. She felt her hat slip and

409

Mrs. Kent

heard her gown tear again. Something struck. They
couldn't! The beasts! This couldn't happen to her! What
had she ever. . .? She had always done good. . . .
Blood pounded in her ears. Oh, I mustn't run. The doctor!
Oh, mercy! Oh, don't kill me! She was aware of her own
screams.

Then suddenly there was a policeman, and she clung
to him. His buttons scratched her face. His voice rum-
bled. He should shoot, she thought madly. He should
shoot the beasts. The beasts! Her heart seemed to fill
her chest and her head spun in a purpling swirl. She
felt herself slide . . . away . . . away . . . away.

410

PROFESSOR
by

Langston Hughes

For biographical note about Langston Hughes, see page 204.

PROFESSOR

PROMPTLY at seven a big car drew up in front of
the Booker T. Washington Hotel, and a white chauf-
feur in uniform got out and went toward the door,
intending to ask at the desk for a colored professor named
T. Walton Brown. But the professor was already there,
sitting in the lobby, a white scarf around his neck and
his black overcoat ready to button over his dinner clothes.

As soon as the chauffeur entered, the professor ap-
proached. "Mr. Chandler's car?" he asked hesitantly.

"Yes, sir," said the white chauffeur to the clean little
Negro. "Are you Dr. Walton Brown?"

" I am," said the professor, smiling and bowing a little.

The chauffeur opened the street door for Dr. Brown,
then ran to the car and held the door open there too.
Inside the big car the lights came on, and on the long black
running-board as well. The professor stepped in among
the soft cushions, the deep rug and the cut glass vases
holding flowers. With the greatest of deference the chauf-
feur quickly tucked a covering of fur about the profes-
sor's knees, closed the door, entered his own seat in front,
beyond the glass partition, and the big car purred away.
Within the lobby of the cheap hotel, a few ill-clad Negroes
watched the whole procedure in amazement.

"A big shot!" somebody said.

At the corner as the car passed, two or three ash-colored
children ran across the street in front of the wheels, their
skinny legs and cheap clothes plain in the glare of the
headlights as the chauffeur slowed down to let them pass.

Reprinted from The Anvil (May- June 1935), where it appeared under the
title Dr. Brown's Decision, by permission of the author, and his agent, Mr.
Maxim Leiber.

413

Professor

Then the car turned and ran the whole length of a Negro
street that was lined with pawn shops, beer joints, pig's
knuckle stands, ten cent movies, hair-dressing parlors
and other ramshackle places of business patronized by
the poor blacks of the district. Inside the big car the
professor, Dr. Walton Brown, regretted that in all the
large cities where he had lectured on his present tour in
behalf of his college, the main Negro streets presented
this same sleazy and disagreeable appearance: pig's
knuckle joints, pawn shops, beer parlors — and houses of
vice, no doubt — save that these latter, at least, did not
hang out their signs.

The professor looked away from the unpleasant sight
of this typical Negro street, poor and unkempt. He
looked ahead through the glass at the dignified white neck
of the uniformed chauffeur in front of him. The professor
in his dinner clothes, his brown face even browner above
the white silk scarf at his neck, felt warm and comfortable
under the fur rug — but he felt, too, a little unsafe at being
driven through the streets of this city on the edge of the
South in an expensive car, by a white chauffeur.

"But then," he thought, "this is the wealthy
Mr. Ralph P. Chandler's car, and surely no harm can
come to me here. The Chandlers are a power in the
Middle West, and in the South as well. Theirs is one of
the great fortunes of America. In philanthropy, nobody
exceeds them in well-planned generosity on a large and
highly publicized scale. They are a power in Negro educa-
tion, too, and that is why I am visiting them tonight, at
their invitation."

Just now, the Chandlers were interested in the little
Negro college at which the professor taught. They wanted
to make it one of the major Negro colleges of America.
And in particular the Chandlers were interested in fiis
Department of Sociology. They were thinking of endow-
ing a chair of research there, and employing a man of

414

Langston Hughes

ability for it. A Ph. D. and a scholar. A man of some
prestige, too, like the professor. For his The Sociology oj
Prejudice (that restrained and conservative study of
Dr. T. Walton Brown's) had recently come to the atten-
tion of the Chandler Committee, and a representative of
their philanthropies, visiting the campus, had conversed
with the professor at some length about his book and his
views. This representative of the Committee found
Dr. Brown highly gratifying, because in almost every
case the professor's views agreed with the white man's
own.

"A fine, sane, dependable young Negro," was the
description that came to the Chandler Committee from
their traveling representative.

So now the power himself, Mr. Ralph P. Chandler,
and Mrs. Chandler, learning that he was lecturing at the
colored churches of the town, had invited him to dinner
at their mansion in this city on the edge of the South.
Their car had come to call for him at the colored Booker T.
Washington Hotel — where the hot water was always cold,
the dresser drawers stuck and the professor shivered as
he got into his dinner clothes; and the bellboys, anxious
for a tip, had asked him twice if he needed a half pint or a
woman.

But now he was in a big warm car and they were mov-
ing swiftly down a wide boulevard, the black slums far
behind them. The professor was glad. He had been very
much distressed at having the white chauffeur call for
him at this cheap Negro hotel in what really amounted
to the red light district of the town. But then none of
the white hotels in this American city would keep Negroes,
no matter how cultured they might be. Roland Hayes
himself had been unable to find decent accommodations
there, so the colored papers said, on the day of his concert.

Sighing, the professor looked out of the car at the wide
lawns and fine homes that lined the beautiful and well-

Professor

lighted boulevard where white people lived. After a
time the car turned into a fashionable suburban road,
and one saw no more houses, but only ivy-hung walls
and shrubs and box woods that indicated not merely
homes beyond, but vast estates. Shortly the car whirled
into a paved driveway, past a small lodge, through a
park full of fountains and trees and up to a private house
as large as a hotel. From a tall portico a great hanging
lantern cast a soft glow on the black and nickel of the
body of the big car. The white chauffeur jumped out
and deferentially opened the door for the colored pro-
fessor. An English butler welcomed him at the entrance,
and took his coat and hat and scarf. Then he led the
professor into a large drawing room where two men and
a woman were standing chatting near the fireplace.

The professor hesitated, not knowing who was who;
but Mr. and Mrs. Chandler came forward, introduced
themselves, shook hands and in turn presented their
other guest of the evening, Dr. Bulwick of the Municipal
College — a college that Dr. Brown recalled did not admit
Negroes.

"I am happy to know you," said Dr. Bulwick. "I am
also a sociologist."

"I have heard of you," said Dr. Brown graciously.

The butler came with sherry in a silver pitcher. They
sat down, and the whites began to talk politely, to ask
Dr. Brown about his lecture tour, if his audiences were
good, if they were mostly Negro or mixed, and if there
was much interest in his college, much money being given.

Then Dr. Bulwick began to ask about his book, The
Sociology of Prejudice, where, he got his material, under
whom he had studied, and if he thought the Negro Prob-
lem would ever be solved.

Dr. Brown said genially, "We are making progress,"
which was what he always said, though he often felt as
if he were lying.

Langston Hughes

"Yes," said Dr. Bulwick, "that is very true. Why, at
our city college here we have been conducting some fine
inter-racial experiments. I have had several colored
ministers and high school teachers visit my classes. We
found them most intelligent people."

In spite of himself Dr. Brown had to say, "But you
have no colored students at your college, have you?"

"No," said Dr. Bulwick, "and that is too bad! But
that is one of our difficulties here. There is no Municipal
College for Negroes — although nearly forty percent of
our population is colored. Some of us have thought it
might be wise to establish a separate junior college for
our Negroes, but the politicians opposed it on the score
of no funds. And we cannot take them as students on our
campus. That, at present, is impossible. It's too bad."

"But do you not think, Dr. Brown," interposed
Mrs. Chandler, who wore diamonds on her wrists and
smiled every time she spoke, "do you not think your
people are happier in schools of their own — that it is
really better for both groups not to mix them?"

In spite of himself Dr. Brown replied, "That depends,
Mrs. Chandler. I could not have gotten my degree in
any schools of our own."

"True, true," said Mr. Chandler. "Advanced studies,
of course, cannot be gotten. But when your colleges are
developed — as we hope they will be, and as our Com-
mittee plans to aid in their development — when their
departments are headed by men like yourself, for instance,
then you can no longer say, 'That depends'."

"You are right," Dr. Brown agreed diplomatically,
coming to himself and thinking of his mission in that
house. "You are right," Dr. Brown said, thinking too of
that endowed chair of sociology and himself in the chair,
the six thousand dollars a year that he would probably
be paid, the surveys he might make and the books he
could publish. "You are right," said Dr. Brown diplo-

417

Professor

matically to Mr. Ralph P. Chandler — but in the back of
his head was that ghetto street full of sleazy misery he
had just driven through, and the segregated hotel where
his hot water was always cold, and the colored churches
where he lectured to masses of simple folks exploited by
money-grabbing ministers he dared not warn them against,
and the Jimcrow schools where Negroes always got the
worst of it — less equipment and far less money than the
white institutions; and that separate justice of the South
where his people sat on trial but the whites were judge
and jury forever — like Scottsboro; and all the segregated
Jimcrow things that America gave Negroes and that
were never better, or even equal to the things she gave
the whites. But Dr. Brown said, "You are right,
Mr. Chandler," for, after all, Mr. Chandler had the
money!

So he began to talk earnestly to the Chandlers there
in the warm drawing room about the need for bigger and
better black colleges, for more and more surveys of Negro
life, and a well-developed department of sociology at
his own little institution.

" Dinner is served," said the butler.

They rose and went into a dining room where there
were flowers on the table, and candles, and much white
linen and silver, and where Dr. Brown was seated at the
right of the hostess, and the talk was light over the soup,
but serious and sociological again by the time the meat
was served.

"The American Negro must not be taken in by Com-
munism," Dr. Bulwick was saying with great positiveness
as the butler passed the peas.

"He won't," agreed Dr. Brown. "I assure you, our
leadership stands squarely against it." He looked at the
Chandlers and bowed. "Dr. Kelly Miller stands against
it, and Dr. Du Bois, Dr. Hope and Dr. Morton. All the
best people stand against it."

418

Langston Hughes

"America has done too much for the Negro," said
Mr. Chandler, "for him to seek to destroy it."

Dr. Brown bobbed and bowed.

"In your Sociology of Prejudice" said Dr. Bulwick,
"I highly approve of the closing note, your magnificent
appeal to the old standards of Christian morality and the
simple concept of justice on which America was founded."

"Yes," said Dr. Brown, nodding his dark head and
thinking suddenly how on six thousand dollars a year,
he might take his family to Paris in the summer, where
for three months they wouldn't feel like Negroes. "Yes,
Dr. Bulwick," he nodded, "I firmly believe as you do
that if the best elements of both races came together in
Christian fellowship, we would solve this problem of
ours."

"How beautiful," said Mrs. Chandler.

"And practical, too," said her husband. "But now
to come back to your college — university, I believe you
call it — to bring that institution up to really first class
standards you would need . . . ?"

"We would need . . . ," said Dr. Brown, speaking
as a mouthpiece of the administration, and speaking,
too, as mouthpiece for the Negro students of his section
of the South, and speaking for himself as a once ragged
youth who had attended the college when its rating was
lower than that of a Northern high school and when he
had to study two years in Boston before he could enter
a white college, when he had worked nights as red cap
in the station and then as a waiter for seven years until
he got his Ph. D. and couldn't get a job in the North
but had to go back down South to the work he had
now — but which might develop into a glorious oppor-
tunity at six thousand dollars a year to make surveys
and put down figures that other scholars might study
to get their Ph. D.'s, and that would bring him in enough
to just once take his family to Europe where they

419

Professor

wouldn't feel that they were Negroes. "We would need,
Mr. Chandler. . . ."

And the things Dr. Brown's little college needed were
small enough in the eyes of the Chandlers. And the sane
and conservative way in which Dr. Brown presented his
case delighted the philanthropic heart of the Chandlers.
And Mr. Chandler and Dr. Bulwick both felt that instead
of building a junior college for Negroes in their own town
they could rightfully advise colored students from now
on to go down South to that fine little campus where
they had a man of their own race like Dr. Brown.

Over the coffee, in the drawing room, they talked
about the coming theatrical season and Four Saints In
Three Acts. And Mrs. Chandler spoke of how she loved
Negro singers, and smiled and smiled.

In due time, the professor rose to go. The car was
called, and he shook hands with Dr. Bulwick and the
Chandlers. The white people were delighted with
Dr. Brown. He could see it in their faces, just as in the
past he could always tell as a waiter when he had pleased
a table full of whites by tender steaks and good service.

"Tell the president of your college he shall hear from
us shortly," said the Chandlers. "We'll probably send
a man down again soon to talk to him about his expansion
program." And they bowed farewell.

A few moments later in the car as it sped him back
toward town, Dr. Brown sat under the soft fur rug among
the deep cushions and thought how with six thousand
dollars a year earned by jigging properly to the tune of
Jimcrow education, he could carry his whole family to
Europe where just once for a summer they wouldn't need
to feel like Negroes.

420

$595 F. O. B.

by
George H. Corey

GEORGE HARVE COREY, American born and now in his
early thirties, has had a career of what he calls "strange
occupational patterns," of which the following may be men-
tioned: bell-hop, cabin boy, worker in a garage, seller of
Fuller brushes and magazines, sailor, dock-hand, assembler
in a Ford factory, handyman to a race track bookmaker.
"Discouraged with these efforts" he writes in a biographical
note in Story, which published his first short story, $595
F. O. B., "7 entered dental school, graduated in the course
of time and became licensed to practice. Unable to finance
an office I accepted an appointment to teach and practice
oral surgery at the Shantung Christian University, a mis-
sionary school in Tsinan, China. War, famine, alcohol
and missionaries concluded this incident and I wandered
about China supporting myself writing for news press
services, newspapers, practising dentistry and for a while
operating a motion picture show in an interior Chinese
city." Continuing his career as reporter and press agent
in China, Japan, and South America, he finally came back
to the United States in 1932 and entered the advertising
business, first in New York and then in Chicago.

#595 F. O. B.

KNOW what this is?" asked the Police Lieutenant.
"Sure, it's a metal rasp," replied Slim.
"Ever see one like it before?" queried the officer.

"Certainly, we use them all the time out at the auto
plant," Slim answered.

"Ever see this particular file before?"

The Lieutenant pushed the rasp over the edge of the
desk close to the faces of the two men standing before
him. Slim, young and straight, turned to the bent figure
of Monahan at his side. The old man's eyes were intent
upon the file. The Lieutenant raised his voice and re-
peated:

"I asked you if you'd ever seen this particular file
before?"

Light, ochreous and feeble, from a lamp on the police
desk fell across the two men's puzzled faces. Their eyes
were fixed upon the smooth, sweat-stained handle of the
rasp held in the policeman's outstretched arm. On its
blackened, circular end they read the letters, TINY, crudely
scratched into the greasy wood. The old man twisted his
head and stared at the bare, green wall behind the desk.
Slim lifted his eyes to the level of the officer's tense face.

"Recognize it, now?" asked the Lieutenant.

"It's Tiny's, I guess," Slim said.

Monahan nodded his spotty, bald head "slowly up and
down. The policeman relaxed and leaned back into his
chair. He dropped the heavy file onto the top of the
desk and picked up two pieces of typewritten paper.

"I want you to sign these papers," he said. "All it

Reprinted from Story, September 1935, by permission of the editors and of
the author.

423

$595 F. O. B.

says on them is that you have identified this file as one
used by this fellow Tiny Cady at the auto plant."

He handed each of the men a paper and continued :

"Sign them and go home to bed. If you want to think
it over, we've got a couple of cells downstairs for thinking."

Slim looked dumbly at Monahan as the old man
shrugged his shoulders and said:

"There's no out on that. Give us a pen."

"Seems like a hell of a lot of rumpus over a guy stealin'
a lousy fifty-cent file," murmured Slim.

The Lieutenant blotted the signatures and rose from
his chair. He stepped down from the dais, walked around
in front of the desk and stood beside the two men.

"You've got nothing to worry about, boys. Go on
home now."

Obediently Slim and Monahan moved off toward the
door to the street.

Monahan and Slim walked along in silence until they
reached the corner of Canal and Royal Streets. The
hands on a big clock in front of a jewelry store pointed
to 6:30. It was light now and the street cars rattling
down toward the river were crowded with factory workers.
Monahan looked at the clock and said:

"Crise, Slim, we can just about make it to the factory."

Slim didn't answer him.

"C'mon, Slim, we got to step on it," repeated Monahan.

"I'm not going back to the factory, Monahan. If
they ask you about me tell 'em I'm through. Tell 'em
I've quit," replied Slim.

Slim turned quickly and crossed the street. He con-
tinued down Canal Street and turned off at Tehopatoulas.
A few doors from the corner he entered a saloon crowded
with longshoremen. They were gathered round a small
bar and seated at tables drinking sugar mash whiskey.
Slim slid into a chair at a table in a corner and ordered

424

George H. Corey

a double shot. The first swallow tasted like all the evil-
smelling sweet things his nose had ever encountered.
The whiskey's sickening, sweet smell was dissipated by
the knife-like burn it set up in his throat. The next drink
went easier.

Quick warmth and a loosening of tension followed the
next glass. The jumbled happenings of the past twelve
hours became fused with the events of the last year.

Tiny's friendly, grinning face was a haven of refuge
on that first day in the auto factory. Slim tagged along
behind the big Texan as he showed the newcomer where
to stow his clothes and where to get his tools. Clad in
makeshift work clothes worn shabby by his bulging knees
and elbows, Tiny pointed out Slim's locker and gave him
the key. The Texan's head, which towered a foot above
Slim's, was topped with the battered crown of a soft hat
that had once been gray. The brim had been carefully
cut away and its original color was lost under heavy
smudges of grease and dirt. Other workmen passed
through the locker room while Slim got into his overalls.
Tiny's face, red and alive, seemed ever set to break into
a great roar of laughter. Slim looked at the faces of other
workmen. In the colorless light coming through the frosted
glass windows they were grim, the color of green slate.

"Ever done this kind of work before?" asked Tiny.

"Never in my life," said Slim. "I was a sailor last
thing I did."

"You're goin' to be a metal finisher now, kid," con-
tinued Tiny. "You've got to learn to sling a file, see?
It's a hell of a job, but you'll get onto it."

"I hope so," Slim smiled.

"You'll get wise to everything in quick order," added
Tiny.

"I'm kind of light to swing a file and do much good,
ain't I?" added Slim.

425

$595 F. O. B.

"That's all right. There ain't room enough on that
damned line for many guys as big as me."

"Okay, I'm all set. Where do we go?" said Slim, but-
toning his pants.

"Wait a minute, kid, or what do they call you?"

"My name's Slim. Slim Ewell."

"Okay then, Slim, but wait a second. These here
lockers, see them? Well, never put nothin' in them you
don't want the superintendent to see. The bastards go
through 'em every once in a while lookin' for Union Cards,
Wobbley tickets, and booze. They'll fire you cold for
findin' any of 'em. Watch your step on that stuff."

"Who's our boss?" asked Slim.

"I'm head of the crew you'll work in, but a big Polack
named Krakowski's foreman of the whole line. He ain't
a bad guy, but he's gettin' old and cranky. Raises hell
sometimes, but don't pay no attention to him."

"I'm scared I'll bugger things up there at first," said
Slim.

"Don't worry 'bout that. There's lots of new guys
turnin' to on the line, these days."

"Who else's in your crew, Tiny?"

"I got four good guys that's been here quite a while.
A young guy named Joey, an Irishman 'bout your size
named Monahan, a German called Gus, and a big Greek.
That makes six of us now. We get a dime apiece for every
unit that comes over the line. Did they explain that part
to you?"

"A dime apiece for each car?" asked Slim.

Tiny burst into a deep belly-laugh.

"Crise, no. Not a dime apiece. The six of us splits a
dime."

"That don't seem like much money, does it?"

"It ain't, Slim, but we bats off a hell of a lot of dimes.
Right now the line ain't goin' so fast on account they got
a lot of green men startin' in. We're runnin' 'bout fifty

426

George H. Corey

bodies an hour just now, but I hear they're goin' to step
it up today yet."

"Step it up more than fifty?"

"Wait'll you see the line when that Polack turns that
ol' switch so's she's rollin' seventy and eighty jobs an
hour along her back. It's a bitch-kitty, then, I'll tell ya."

Tiny opened the door leading to the factory and a
wave of sounds enveloped them. They walked through
a maze of machinery clustered thick with men. Tiny
raised an arm in a friendly salute as he passed each group.
The workmen lifted their faces from their tasks to return
the greeting. Slim followed carefully behind the big
Texan until they drew up to a long steel track that ran
from one end of the factory to the other. Tiny put his
hands to his mouth and shouted into Slim's ear:

"That's the line, Kid. Half a mile long."

Slim stepped back a few feet to look at the other end.
Directly in front of him he saw two steel tracks, several
feet apart, across which were suspended steel rollers. In a
narrow fissure down the center and parallel with the
tracks an endless chain moved slowly forward. On both
sides of the "line" as far as he could see hundreds of men
were working on the gray metal shells which crudely re-
sembled the bodies of automobiles.

"This is the sedan line," Tiny roared. "The bodies roll
off the other end all finished, painted and everything."

Slim's eyes fell upon a thick white mark painted on the
floor at right angles to the line. Twenty feet farther down
he noticed a similar line. He nudged Tiny and pointed
to the white marking nearest him. Tiny glanced at his
pointing finger and yelled:

"Got to finish your job this side of that mark. Other
side of it the bodies belong to the grinders. Let's 'go now!
Watch me for a minute and then you can start."

Tiny picked up a huge file and walked to the end of the
line where four other men, files in hand, stood waiting.

427

$595 F. O. B.

No one noticed Slim as he stepped back to watch Tiny.
A body had just moved over the white marking leaving
the line vacant directly in front of Tiny's men. The crew
stood rigid looking upward toward the welding-room.

The deafening noise of thousands of men under a
single roof, beating, scraping and grinding raw metal
was suddenly augmented by the piercing screech of an
overhead crane which slung the next body onto the line.
The body was hardly free of the crane before the five men,
led by Tiny, attacked it with their files. Slim watched
the big Texan maneuver for a position behind the moving
steel shell. This crew's job was to smooth the rough,
welded seams on the rear panel of the bodies. Tiny was
first to swing into action. Legs apart, the file held in his
two massive hands, he lunged upon the narrow strip of
crickly steel. A deep rasping sound rose over the fac-
tory's unending rumble as his file bit into the raw, blue
metal. Tiny hurled himself against the welt of steel
again and another sliver of metal peeled off. His face
became tense; globules of sweat dropped from his fore-
head onto his dirt-caked arms. The lunging movement
fell into a rhythm. One, two-lunge. Quickly the huge
rasp under Tiny's mighty arms sliced the rough weld into
a sleek glistening seam. As the body moved over the
white marking on the floor, Tiny, followed by the other
four men, withdrew from it and ran to cast themselves
upon the next unit already in place behind them. As the
crew backed away from the finished body another gang
crowded in to take their places. This crew carried electric
grinders that filled the air with showers of white sparks
as their whirling emery stones slid across the metal.

Tiny shoved a file into Slim's hands and pushed him
into petition behind the waiting body. He shouted to
him:

"You got the idea, now. Eat 'em up."

The big file mocked at Slim. It slipped over the brittle

428

George H. Corey

surface of the metal, hardly making a scratch. The arms
of the other men in the crew were in his way and the body
moved out of reach before he could swing his file across
the weld. Desperately he beat his file against the seam,
but the metal remained rough and blue. Gently, Tiny
swept him to one side just as the body approached the
white marking and with quick, powerful strokes of his
file ground the weld even and shiny.

Krakowski, the pig-eyed Polish foreman, stood along-
side the line watching the new man. Now and then he
barked a command that was drowned in the thunder of
thousands of tools beating against metal.

Slim's confused nervousness became a paralyzing
fright at the sight of the Polish foreman, Krakowski.
The chunky figure of the boss of the line leaned heavily
against a packing crate abreast the metal finisher's
sector. In quick glances stolen between strokes of his
file, Slim's eyes took in the Pole's bald, pumpkin-shaped
head set upon a massive, beef-red neck. Two small, mis-
shapen ears broke its symmetry. His eyes, shoe-button
shaped and set wide apart, were fixed upon the moving
forms of the metal finishers.

The fright that had seized Slim fled as he noted that
the foreman's attention was directed toward Tiny and
not upon himself. The Pole's squatty head and bulbous
eyes followed the rhythmic motions of the giant metal
finisher's body. His heavy lips rolled inward tight against
his teeth.

The superintendent of the plant, a cat-faced man wear-
ing thick, sweat-smeared glasses, tapped Krakowski's
shoulder. The foreman turned quickly, bowed stiffly and
smiled. The superintendent's attention was riveted upon
the big metal finisher. The two men stood beside each
other watching Tiny's arms move machine-like over a
rough seam. They saw the crude blue weld become smooth
and bright beneath the powerful strokes of his rasp. The

429

#595 F. O. B.

superintendent cupped his hands to his mouth and
shouted in a voice loud enough for Slim, at the end of the
line, to hear.

"Keep an eye on him, Krakowski. He's got the mak-
ings of a foreman."

Tiny, aware now that he was being watched, expanded
his effort with savage attacks upon the brittle metal.

When Slim looked up from his task next, the two bosses
had moved down the assembly line to the next operation.

The metal finishing crew sat eating their lunches in
the material storage yard outside the plant. In grease-
smudged work clothes they lolled over wooden packing
cases, stuffing lumps of bread and meat into their mouths.
Slim emptied his mouth enough to talk, and said to the
group:

"Honest to Crise, Tiny, I heard him. The boss said it
loud enough for me to hear, 'Keep an eye on him, Kra-
kowski. He's got the makin's of a foreman.' I heard him
say it to the foreman."

"Dot's no more tan right," said the diabetic German,
Gus.

"Eferyone knows Tiny's the bes' goddamned man on
the line."

A slice of bread crust between the big metal finisher's
lips swerved upward as his mouth tightened into a grin.
He made an awkward gesture with his free hand to pro-
test his embarrassment. Steve, the taciturn Greek, an-
other member of the crew, nodded his head in agreement.
Joey, a youngster whose face was ancient with dissipation
and hard work, emptied his mouth with a hurried swallow
and said:

"I wouldn't want to be in your shoes, Tiny. Not with
that bastard Krakowski for a foreman. He's goin' to ride
your tail till you're plain nuts. You just watch."

Gus nodded his head up and down and added:

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George H. Corey

"The kid's right, Tiny. Ffe been in dis place a lonk
time and I know dot Polack. I know how he figures
tinks."

"He can't hurt me any," laughed Tiny.

"Don't kit yourself, poy," replied Gus. "I vas here ten
years ago ven dot bastard started on de lines. Efery time
I sees Krakowski lookin' at you I tinks of ven he vas a
metal finisher. Dot ain't so long ago. He vas like a bull, so
strong. Jost de same like dis boss looks at you vorkin' so
fine now, da bosses used to look at Krakowski. In tree
years dey made from him a foreman."

Tiny listened to Gus and answered slowly.

"He ain't got no reason to ride me. I ain't goin' to get
his job. He's been here for years."

"Dot's chust de trouble, Tiny. Vot you tink dis damned
Polack tink vhen de boss says you make a goot foreman?"

Tiny shrugged his shoulders and answered lazily.

"I don't know what the hell he's liable to think."

"Youse younk mans don't know vot old man tink.
Krakowski's gettin' old. Maybe he's forty already. Dot's
old for de line. How many foremans hass ve got? It's de
same always. Seven foremans. For ten years ve haff al-
ways seven foremans. Now you know vot dot guy tinks?"
asked Gus.

"Gus is right," interrupted Joey, "the Polack's figurin*
you're after his job from now on. Who wouldn't? There
ain't no signs of their needin' an extra foreman."

"Dot's right Choey," replied Gus. "Krakowski's old
and soft now. Vot you tink happen to him if de boss say
'back on de line you go Krakowski?' Dot vould kill him.
You know vhere is Svenson, now, vot vas foreman on
number six? Ven dey put dat collich poy in Svenson's chob
and pushed de Svede back on de line he chumped in de
river. Vot else could he do?"

The crew sat silent over their crumpled sandwich wrap-
pings. The German's words ended the conversation. The

#595 F. O. B.

five minute warning whistle sent them scurrying into the
factory.

The feud between Krakowski and Tiny become a sub-
ject of guarded conversation among the men. Each day's
gossip brought fresh evidence of bitter combat. Only
yesterday Tiny had retaliated to the Pole's constant heck-
ling with a barbed gesture. As the power was shut off for
the noon hour and Krakowski walked away from the metal
finishing sector, Tiny broke into a loud whistle to the tune
of "The Old Gray Mare, She Ain't What She Used To Be."
The workmen on the opposite side took up the tune. The
infuriated Pole flushed crimson and shuffled his feet clum-
sily in an attempt to fall out of step with the beat of the
refrain. The whistling pursued him along the assembly
line for a hundred yards.

Krakowski stood beside Tiny's crew scrutinizing its
work for flaws. The crew was working smoothly and he
found nothing with which to torment Tiny. Slim watched
the big Texan cast quick glances at the Pole. The boss
metal finisher knew the foreman had his eyes on him and
he swung into an exhibition demonstration. The back-
breaking task of pulling a huge file across a rough seam
kept the other five men in the crew tense and hurried.
The giant Tiny made it seem like an effortless, almost
playful task. His sinewy arms dragged the big rasp over
the steel with uncanny ease, the sound of his file above the
others, and beat a steady rhythm. One, two — one, two, the
crisp metal seemed to turn soft under Tiny's great arms.

The serpentine procession of steel-gray hulls moved
along the assembly line at a rate of fifty units an hour. At
this speed the metal finishers were hard pressed for time
to complete their tasks. Krakowski left their sector and
moved to a place beneath the overhead crane. He shouted
up to the man in the control box above him. As the man
poked his head through a little window in the box, the

432

George H. Corey

foreman raised two fingers on his right hand. The crane
operator returned the signal and rolled the screeching hoist
back to the welding-room. Slim saw the Pole give the
signal. He nudged Tiny with his elbow and said:

"He's pushing her up to seventy an hour."

Tiny passed the word through the crew. They cursed
the foreman with vicious grunts that were lost in the deaf-
ening noise. The raw steel shells moved faster, the noise
grew louder.

Krakowski walked back along the line and surveyed the
chaos in the metal finishing crew. Seventy units an hour
called for an inhuman expenditure of effort. Slim, a com-
petent workman now, wallowed in sweat and confusion.
Furiously he swung his rasps over the seam as he battled
to clip a few seconds from each unit of work. One, two —
one, two — a stroke of the file every two seconds; twenty
strokes for every unit, seventy bodies an hour; a cent and
a half for Slim, a cent and a half for Tiny; one, two — one,
two — thirty strokes every minute, one, two — one, two;
fourteen hundred strokes every hour. Economical trans-
portation at $595 F. O. B. the factory.

The noon whistle blew and the men dropped their tools
before the machinery stopped. Exhausted from the mur-
derous pace of the past hour they flopped onto the material
cases flanking the line. Tiny and Slim, the last to leave
the job, looked about the place to rest. Slim found a big,
unopened box and raised himself wearily onto it. As the
big metal finisher heaved his tired frame over the crate
Krakowski appeared alongside of him.

"I'm goin' to have to put two more men in your crew,
Cady," said the Pole.

"What's wrong with our gang?" asked Tiny.

"Can't keep up. You see for yourself," replied Kra-
kowski.

"Give us a while to get used to the new speed," pleaded
Tiny.

433

#595 F. O. B.

"Adding two men will cut hell out of our pay," added
Slim.

"Not while we're running at seventy an hour it won't,"
said Krakowski.

"You know damned well we won't hold that rate long,"
argued Tiny. "We'll be back at fifty in no time. You know
that."

"That's not my fault. Two new men will report to you
after lunch. You break them in." Krakowski turned and
walked away, leaving the two metal finishers sullen with
futility and anger.

Warm weather came and the metal finishing crew sat
about the material yard eating lunch. With the late spring
came the end of the peak production period and work on
the line lagged. There were still eight men in the crew,
though the amount of work had dwindled. Slim lay on a
bale of cushion padding and stuffed the remainder of a
sandwich into his mouth. He mopped his moist head and
body with a blackened towel wrapped around one hand.
With eight men in the crew instead of six and production
down the lunch hour had become a surly lull in the day's
labor. The two new men tried vainly to overcome the
unfriendliness with which the rest of the crew had ac-
cepted them. Tiny defended them but his arguments
angered the rest of the crew. Two extra men cut the old
crew's pay one quarter.

The two new men finished their lunches and invented an
excuse to move off from the old-timers. As they passed out
of sight Tiny spoke up:

"I feel sorry for those poor bastards. They can't help
being shoved into our crew."

No one answered the crew boss. Slim and the others
knew it was true but that didn't help their pay checks.
Gus, the German, daubed his dirty towel over the endless
stream of sweat pouring from his face and said:

43*

George H. Corey

"It's dot goddamned Krakowski's fault. Dis business
can't go on, Tiny. Efery day it's gettin' worser. Last veek
ve draw how much?"

"A lousy nineteen bucks, that's all," answered Slim.

The German continued: "Und for J^ou, Tiny, it is vorser
dan for us. How much did dey dock you for dose files vot
vas missing?"

"Eight smackers!" said Tiny bitterly.

"Eight dollars! Crise, that's half your pay," exclaimed
Joey.

Joey and the Greek rose and started off toward the
tobacco shop across the street.

"Where you goin'?" asked Slim.

"Healey, that Union organizer's givin' a speech today
across the street in the lunch room. We're goin' to listen to
him," said Joey.

Tiny sat across from Gus and Slim and watched Joey
and the Greek pass through the factory gate. When they
had disappeared from sight Tiny leaned over close to the
other two men and said:

"Gus, I'm worried about the crew. Krakowski keeps
them so cussed mad all the time that they're gettin'
sloppy."

"I've seen it comin'," said Gus.

"What in hell can I do? I can't fire these two extra
men. And even with the line runnin' slow, I can't do every-
one's work. It's gettin' so sloppy the inspectors had me on
the carpet this mornin'."

"Dot's dangerous, Tiny," warned the German. "Ven
de vork gets sloppy den Krakowski can do anythink to you
and it's all right mit de boss. Vonce he shows de boss qual-
ity is missink in de vork den he can make from you a
sveeper, a ' privy man ' ; or maybe shoff you into de paint
boot."

"What would you do, Gus?" asked Slim.

" Dot I couldn't tell you. Dere is nottink to do mit a guy

435

$595 F. O. B.

like Krakowski. I'm old und I know sometink vot goes on
in de Polack's head. Only an olt man can 'furshay' dis
tink. De Polack is olt. He's got no money, vot mit eight
kits to raise. All his life he vorked hard for de bosses. Vun
day he hears de boss say you make a goot foreman. In dot
tick head he tinks — 'Vot becomes of Krakowski if dey
makes dis Tiny a foreman?' Beck to de line, he tinks and
den-7-out on de street — or de river, like Svenson.

"Maybe Choey and de Greek got de right idea," con-
tinued Gus rising from his box. "Maybe Healey and his
Union beesiness is vot ve haf to get first. I don't know.
Anyvay, vy don't you and Slim come to his meetink to-
night? De rest of de crew iss goink."

Slim and Tiny sat without talking. The German walked
away toward the assembly building.

"Maybe that's an idea," said Slim.

"Won't do no harm findin' out what it's all about,"
agreed Tiny.

"I'll find out from Joey where Healey's holdin' tonight's
meetin'," said Slim as he rose to his feet. The warning
whistle blew and the two men joined the stream of workers
returning to the assembly lines.

Tiny and Slim took their seats in the dirty meeting hall
and looked around for the familiar faces of their crew.
About fifty men were gathered in the room when Healey
rose to the platform and called for silence. He surveyed his
audience for a moment and then began to talk. Piece by
piece he built the background of labor's struggle against
capital. Then he launched into his immediate cause.

"And how long are you sniveling idiots going to slave
for the pittance your bloated bosses toss you each week?
How much longer are you going to let them treat you like
animals? No, not even animals suffer the abuses heaped
upon you.

"What animal do you know of that must pull a 'privy

436

George H. Corey

cord' so that some other slave will take his place on the
line while he rushes to the toilet? Does any animal live by
a system of work so inhuman that it allows not even time
for a man to perform a fundamental act of nature? Name
me any other animal than your poor selves who is so mis-
trusted, so driven and persecuted that his master must
make him perform these acts of nature on a stage set in the
center of the factory, on a stage so that his hirelings may
count the seconds he is away from his work?"

Short, angry laughs told Healey he was on the right
track. He continued:

"In the yard where you eat lunch are piles of raw mate-
rial, men. Close your eyes and think of it for a moment.
It's covered carefully with tarpaulins and guarded day and
night. The wood stacked in the timber yard is covered
and watched. Even the great piles of coal are protected
from the wind and rain. These raw materials are valuable;
the company paid out money for them and they're cared
for.

"But you — you laborers, what care or protection do you
get? When that pile of sheet metal can't be used it is
soaked in grease and guarded. But, you, when the factory
is through with you, at the end of the season, what hap-
pens ? Out you go. Onto the street. Like a mangy dog, an
unwanted whore. Out you go to starve, steal or die until
you are wanted again.

"We don't ask for much, men. We're not asking for
their riches. We ask for as much care as they give the raw
materials; the sheet metal, the steel or the wood they use
in the cars we build. Is that too much to ask for? To be
treated as well as a piece of steel?"

A roar of approval went up from Healey's audience.

"What ill-begotten swine are you that your bosses must
spy on you like thieves? That you should let them steal
into your lockers and search your clothes? That you
should squirm before them and pray not to be fired for

437

#595 F. O. B.

their findings on these marauding, illegal entries into your
personal effects ?

"You call yourselves men and yet you consent to these
slave-driving bosses' denying you the rights your fore-
fathers fought and died to get. The right to unite for pro-
tection from starvation and death. The right to work like
human beings and not beasts."

The little Irishman darted back and forth across the
platform. The dull, thirsty minds of his listeners soaked
up his words. Tiny, seated next to Slim, shifted uneasily
on his chair.

Indignation spread slowly through the crowd. Healey
halted for an instant and drank a glass of water. While he
paused, the smoke of discontentment burst into flames in
scattered sections of the room.

"That means the foreman, too," one of the men
yelled.

"That's right, Krakowski, and the others. They're
worse than the bosses," yelled another workman.

Healey held his hands above his head, begging for si-
lence. Desperately he pounded a table with a water glass
and shouted for order. The men could not be silenced.
The Union organizer let the outburst run its course.

In a few minutes it subsided. There was no one with
whom to argue. Quiet established, Healey took a short
cut to his goal. He stepped out to the edge of the platform
and called out:

"Who's going to be the first to join, then? Who's going
to get card number one and fire the first shot in the battle
against the slave-drivers?"

This challenge threw the assemblage into an angry
demonstration. The clumsy workmen pushed and shoved
one another to reach the platform firsL In the disorder of
the movement, Tiny and Slim slipped out of the hall
unnoticed.

They walked along the cool, dark street in silence for

438

George H. Corey

more than a block. Under the flickering glare of a street
lamp Slim looked up at the big metal finisher and said:

"Healey's right, Tiny. We're gettin' rooked."

"Sure we are, but we'd lose what little we're not gettin'
rooked out of if we signed up with the Union."

"How do you figure that, Tiny?"

"Krakowski and the bosses knew about that meetin'."

"What can they do? Ain't no law against goin' to a
meetin'," Slim argued.

"No, but there is against joinin' the Union. The com-
pany had half a dozen stools in that crowd. The poor saps
who sign up will be out on their tails before the ink's dry
on their Union Cards."

"What the hell's the difference, Tiny? We're not gettin'
anywhere workin'."

"No, but we're eatin' and that's somethin'. No sir,
they don't get my job, now! Not with a thousand guys
waitin' at that factory gate every mornin'. Waitin' for
someone to get fired."

"Healey told us yesterday not to be so scared of that
gang waiting at the gate every morning. He says they
ain't workmen at all. Just a bunch of bums hired by
the company to keep us scared of our jobs," continued
Slim.

"Maybe they are bums. What's the difference? It
don't take a hell of a lot of brains to sling a file, does it?
That's the trouble with the Union. I know we're gettin'
a rooking, same as I know the Polack's trying to get my
job, but what's the sense of fightin'?" added Tiny.

"But Healey says if we all get together we've got a
chance."

"Healey's talkin' through his hat, Slim. What chance
have we got? In any other business maybe he's right, but
in the auto business we've got no chance. The company's
got the jobs broken down so simple that they can take the
dumbest cluck in the world, shove a tool in his hand,

439

$595 F. O. B.

throw him on the line and in two days they've got an autc
worker."

"But if we all struck at the same time, we might tie
them up."

"That's more of the Irishman's pipe dreams. The bosses
ain't sleepin'. Look at the green men they're pourin' into
the factory every day. Where are they comin' from?
Down here in New Orleans? Not on your life! Georgia
Crackers, Hill-billys from up North, poor bastards that
never seen more'n a dollar in their lives. Think Healey
can get those guys to strike?"

"Not right away, maybe," argued Slim.

"Damned right. And when they get wise to themselves
there'll be more mountain boys to shove into their
jobs."

"The way you see it then, there ain't nothin' we can
do?"

"Not while the company's holdin' all the aces, Slim.
Only thing to do is to play their game for all you can get
out of it, then get out. I've missed more than one meal
tryin' to beat the bosses. Twice I've been busted higher
'an a kite fightin' for Unions. Once in Galveston in the
dock strike and once in the mine war in Georgia. Besides,
Slim, maybe I'll get a break at the plant. Joinin' the Union
won't help my chances of gettin' one."

The two men arrived in front of Tiny's tottering, two-
storied shack and turned up the cinder path to the porch
stairs. As Tiny slipped the key into the lock Slim lowered
his voice to a whisper and said :

"I hope you get a break from the bastards, Tiny. You
got it comin' to you."

The Union organizer's work took its toll along the line.
In the weeks that followed Healey's first appearance out-
side the factory gates, dozens of men lost their jobs.
Mysteriously, but quickly the names on the Union roster

440

George H. Corey

had found their way into the company's office. Swiftly
these names were sliced from the payroll.

The crew leaders and foremen sweated and raged to
break in the army of green men hired to fill the vacant
places. Most of them had never had tools in their hands
before. Yesterday they were farmers, banjo players, race
track touts, or vacuum cleaner salesmen. Tomorrow they
would be skilled auto workers.

In crews such as Tiny's where some degree of skill was
needed, the green men brought chaos and confusion. The
experienced Greek and Gus had been fired. A flabby-
armed piano tuner and a pot-bellied bartender struggled
in their places. Tiny pleaded for replacements. Krakowski
shook his head understandingly, shrugged his shoulders
and did nothing.

The great snake of blue-gray steel slid stealthily onward.
Tiny tore off his workshirt and pitched into the work with
a fiendish burst of effort. Slim and Monahan, too, battled
to cover the green men's work. It was futile. Farther and
farther they lagged, holding the succeeding crews from
their work. This kept up all day. Every half hour the
metal finishers fell so far behind that the line had to be
halted. During one of the long halts in the afternoon the
superintendent stopped beside the metal finishers and
surveyed the confusion. Krakowski close at his side, ex-
plained it to him.

Half an hour after the plant had closed down Tiny's
crew was still hard at it. Groggy with fatigue, they com-
pleted the last unit of the schedule. Tiny and Slim
dropped onto a bench to rest before washing up. They
were alone but a few seconds before Krakowski appeared
from the other side of the factory.

"Finally finished up, eh?" said the Pole.

"Yeh! Finally! "grunted Tiny.

"Bad business, this holding up the line, Cady," con-
tinued the foreman. "Costs the company a lot of money."

441

$595 F. O. B.

"Why the hell don't you give me some men who can
work?" said Tiny.

"Those two birds will never make finishers," added
Slim.

"Wot can I do, Cady? That's all they hire; green men.
Other crews get along with green men," the Pole coun-
tered.

"You better get us better men tomorrow, Krakowski,"
threatened Tiny.

"That's what I came to tell you about," the foreman
replied. "The superintendent gave me orders to transfer
you and Slim to the paint booth tomorrow. Both of you
start there in the morning."

Tiny jumped to his feet.

"The paint booth? Why you son ." He was

shouting.

"I've checked you off this operation. In the morning
you'll get new cards from the boss of the paint booth."

The Pole wheeled about and walked away.

Muffled beneath grotesque equipment suggestive of deep
sea divers, Slim and Tiny walked heavily toward the paint
spraying booth. The thickly padded, paint-stiffened
clothes made their movements robot-like. Slim followed
Tiny into the long enclosure where the finished bodies
received the widely advertised "Gorgeous New Colors"
They stopped before a huge, mirrored, incandescent bulb
that flooded the line with hot, sharp light. Before them,
on the inert line, stood a body heavily pregnated with a
dull gray priming coat. The atmosphere was still and hot.
A dozen men, clad in the same thick uniforms, passed
silently along the line. Tiny and Slim greeted them with
stiff, upward movements of their arms.

A warning bell rang and the two men set up their equip-
ment ready for work. Slim flicked on three more powerful
flood lamps and watched Tiny test his spray gun. The big

442

George H. Corey

Texan wore a bulky pair of coveralls, the legs of which were
tucked into the tops of heavy overshoes. Stout cords
bound the open ends of his sleeves tight around his wrists.
The coarse coveralls encircled his neck snugly, making the
costume airtight. Over Tiny's forehead was drawn a
piece of rough toweling that extended back over his head
and neck in the manner of a hood. Its ends were tucked
under his close-fitting collar. Only that part of his face
between chin and eyes was exposed to the murderous irri-
tation of the paint-laden atmosphere.

As the line began to move Tiny slipped a breathing-
mask over his mouth, leaving only his eyes and patches of
his face exposed. Over these areas he rubbed a thick layer
of vaseline. Slim adjusted his breathing mask, signaling
Tiny the equipment was ready and stepped back from the
glare of the floodlamps.

The Texan grasped the spray gun in his gloved hands
and pressed the control trigger.

A hissing explosion burst from the nozzle and a fine
spray of paint rained upon the smooth body panels. Some
of the paint hit its goal, covering the sleek, gray sheets of
metal with a layer of bright green pigment. Much of it,
however, missed its mark and shot out into the still air.
This same operation was taking place at half a dozen
places down the line. Across from Tiny, on the other side
of the line another sprayer was covering the other half of
the body. In a few minutes the booth was choked with a
dense precipitation of multi-colored paint. Overhead a
whining exhaust fan whisked bits of the contaminated air
out of the shed. Most of the pigment that missed its goal
settled upon the dust in the air and hung suspended in the
atmosphere.

In the dazzling light the pupils of Tiny's eyes contracted
into narrow slits and floating particles of pigment settled
on his vaseline-coated face mottling it with the colors of
the spectrum. Beneath the thickly padded worksuit his

443

$595 F. O. B.

body pumped a flood of hot sweat that sought escape from
the airtight uniform in thick streams that ran down his
back and legs. Slim saw brown circular stains appear at
his crotch and knees.

Outside on the line Krakowski was having trouble. Tiny
and Slim knew it was serious as they stood idly by the
motionless conveyor waiting for the line to move. Delays
grew more frequent. During the precious noon periods
when, for an hour, they were free of the booth, workers
on the line outside told them of Krakowski's problems.
One day it was the metal finishing crew. Then it was the
grinders, or the door hangers whose work lagged until the
line had to be halted. The delays were costly and the
management hounded the befuddled Pole. Hour after
hour Krakowski rushed up and down the line shouting
orders, goading the men to greater effort, wresting tools
from their hands.

Frantically he struggled to instill order and speed. Tiny
and Slim knew his effort was futile. The experienced men
were disgruntled and shirked deliberately; the green men,
confused and frightened, accomplished little. Patiently
the two men waited for the superintendent to return them
to the metal finishing section.

Tiny and Slim were back slinging their files again. For
three weeks the big metal finisher had been laboring to
keep his crew abreast the mounting work. Tiny's return
to the line as boss metal finisher became a personal victory
to each of the old-timers on the line — a victory of the men
over the bosses. They speeded up their work and helped
the green men. Delays became infrequent and the line
approached its normal swift pace.

They were in production on a new model car. "Amaz-
ingly New" Slim read in the newspaper advertisements.
"The Car That Has Revolutionized Motoring" at $595
F. O. B. the factory. The finishers' jobs hadn't changed,

444

George H. Corey

though. The welded seams on the rear panels were a little
wider and took longer to trim smooth.

Slim pulled the privy cord and waited for a relief man
to take his place at the line. In a few minutes he appeared
and Slim handed him his file. Then he started off in the
direction of the toilet in the center of the plant. He
wanted to smoke a cigarette and there was only one safe
place to do it. Halfway to the overhead toilet Slim
doubled back on his trail, cut across two assembly lines
and headed toward the superintendent's office. When the
superintendent's office had been built a narrow space had
been left between it and the end of the factory. Slim
looked carefully to see that no one was watching and
slipped into the open end of the hiding place. Stealthily he
opened a fresh pack and lit up. He inhaled a thick mouth-
ful of smoke and felt it flood his lungs. As he exhaled he
watched the blue spirals of smoke curl upward toward the
roof. The place was doubly safe because the superintend-
ent's office was roofless and he smoked continuously. Flat
on his back, Slim lay on the concrete floor, cigarette in his
hand. He listened to the noise of voices in the superin-
tendent's office. From the other side of the open-topped
office Slim heard a strange voice say:

"We can't have another series of delays again. De-
troit's raising hell with me already."

Slim held his cigarette motionless as he listened to the
voice of the superintendent reply:

"No need to worry, Chief. I think I've got it licked."

"What was it?" asked the Chief.

"One of my foremen fell down on the job. He's getting
old and I guess I've got to ease him out," continued the
superintendent.

Slim stabbed the lighted end of his butt onto the con-
crete and listened eagerly.

"I hope that solves it. Are you going to have to send to
Detroit for a new foreman?"

445

#595 F. O. B.

"I don't think so, Chief. IVe got a big metal finisher
here who's a demon for work. I'm checking up on him now.
If he's clear of the Union I'm going to give him a try at
the job."

Swiftly and noiselessly Slim rose and slipped out of the
fissure between the office and the factory wall. He sought
the shortest route back to the line. He could still hear the
bosses talking as he approached the open space in front of
the offices. His eyes swept the clearing as he prepared to
step out into the open space. Suddenly he stopped short
and stepped back. Leaning against a pillar, a few feet in
front of the boss' office Slim saw Krakowski. His thick
neck was rigid and his hands shuffled a batch of time cards
clumsily.

The conversation inside ended and the Pole walked
hurriedly toward the opposite end of the factory. Slim
waited until he was out of sight, then he started back to
the crew.

For an hour the line had been moving at a stiff pace.
The metal finishing crew was working feverishly. Tiny
held his hot file between handfuls of cotton waste. A
warning nudge in his ribs from a workman in the next
crew told him the boss was coming. Silent elbows prodded
into ribs telegraphed the news from one end of the plant
to the other. Tiny nudged Slim and he in turn put the
man next to him on guard.

Slim looked up and saw Krakowski's chunky form weav-
ing through clumps of workmen a hundred feet ahead of
him. Deftly the foreman slipped through the knots of
men. A few feet ahead of the metal finishers he stopped
and tapped a stubby finger on the shoulder of a man in the
next crew. The lazy Georgian grinder looked up at the
foreman and smiled. He was a well known character in
the auto plant whose defiance of the company's stringent
rules against loafing had won him a reputation for brav-
ery. At least twice a day he was to be found seated on

446

George H. Corey

the debris-littered floor of the half-exposed toilet, the
sport sheet of the Times-Picayune on his knee and his
back resting against the cool, circular tile of the water
closet.

The big grinder looked up at Krakowski and raised his
ear to the Pole's moving lips. The foreman turned away
as the grinder dropped his rasp and reached for a piece of
cotton waste.

Tiny had just completed the seam in front of him as
Krakowski's hand touched his wrist. The big metal fin-
isher looked up and the foreman leaned over and spoke
to him. Slim's elbow, pressed quickly into the ribs of a
man in the next crew, started the telegraphic nudge toward
the other end of the line. Krakowski moved off in the di-
rection of the superintendent's office. Tiny and the grinder
followed close behind him. Two relief men answered the
signal on the privy cord. They took the two vacated
places.

It was almost time to knock off for the day and Tiny
hadn't returned. Anxiously the metal finishers watched
for him. Slim tried to dissipate his concern by thinking of
a lot of good things that might have happened. Maybe
they had made Tiny an inspector or a foreman. The
peculiarly fixed squint in the Pole's eyes when he led Tiny
away an hour before made these pleasantries hard to
believe. A grinder in the crew ahead pressed his flexed
arm into Slim's back. He raised his eyes, but could not
see Tiny. Between strokes of his file he darted quick
glances in the direction of the other end of the factory. At
last the familiar hulk came into sight.

Tiny moved rapidly toward his crew. Abreast them he
reached out, grabbed the relief man's arm and snatched
the file from the surprised worker's hands. Tiny's eyes
seemed to be focused on some far-off object. His smile
was gone and the lean muscles of his face were drawn un-
comfortably snug over their framework. Lips pressed

447

$595 F. O. B.

tight against teeth and strangely expressionless eyes for-
bade questioning. Slim tried to catch his eye. The crew
went on with its work.

Tiny snatched up a piece of cord and broke it in two.
He tied one piece around the wooden handle of his file,
placed it on the edge of a bench at his side and then
slipped out of his overalls. Slim looked at the clock on the
wall, but it was still a half hour before quitting time. The
big metal finisher picked up the file again, took a deep
breath and dropped the rasp between his pants and his
belly. Then he tied the loose end of string on the file
handle to his pants belt. The heavy end of the rasp
slid down his right trouser leg. With the other piece of
string he fastened the dangling end of the file tight
against his leg. The rest of the crew looked at one an-
other with bewilderment. Tiny shook his leg, made cer-
tain the file was secure, and strode off toward the locker
room.

A few minutes before quitting time the Georgian grinder
from the next crew returned and took off his overalls.
Slowly he rolled them into a bundle. The five o'clock
whistle blew and Slim hastened over to him.

"What happened?"

"Got fired," drawled the grinder.

"Not Tiny, too?"

"Sure, canned both of us."

"I don't believe it. What happened?" continued Slim.

"Honest to Crise, Slim, we got fired."

"What for?"

"Union cards. Both of us."

"You're nuts. Tiny didn't belong to the Union."

"I know it. They framed the poor bastard."

"Who framed him?" asked Slim.

"Krakowski," replied the Grinder. "He knew they were
goin' through the lockers this mornin' an' he planted a
green card in Tiny's coat pocket. Tiny's name was signed

448

George H. Corey

on it and it was stamped paid with the Union seal. I seen
it up in front, just now."

"But Tiny could prove he didn't belong. We all know
he didn't."

"Not a chance. Krakowski had Healey up there and he
swore Tiny was a member."

"The dirty bastard," mumbled Slim. "What did Tiny
say?"

"After Healey spoke up, he didn't say nothin'. He just
stood there kind of dumb-like."

A sudden kick against the leg of Slim's chair bolted the
parade of scenes from his mind. He looked up and saw a
dirty apron drawn tight around a bartender's distended
belly.

"Whatcha goin' to have, kid? Can't sit here all day on
a coupl'a shots."

"Nothin' more, thanks," Slim answered. "I'm leaving
now."

He rose and walked quietly over the sawdust-covered
floor to the street. Aimlessly he drifted toward Canal
Street. At the corner of Tehoupatoulas, a kid selling news-
papers yelled and waved a bundle of papers. Absently,
Slim fished a nickel out of his pants pocket and dropped it
into the outstretched black hand.

Across the street the benches in front of the station were
empty. Slim crossed the street, chose a dry seat and slid
onto it. Listlessly he opened the damp newspaper on his
lap, flipped it right-side-up and started to read. In
huge letters sprawled across the sheet's eight columns he
spelled out:

LABOR RED SLAYS AUTO FOREMAN

A three-column picture of Tiny filled the center of the
page. Under the picture was a single word caption —

449

#595 F. O. B.

WANTED. A two-column bulletin at the right of the page was
headed with:

DISGRUNTLED RED LABOR AGITATOR

SLAYS BOSS ON EVE OF DISMISSAL
POLICE COMB CITY FOR AUTO WORKER

Special — The body of Otto Krakowski, a foreman in the
. River Auto Plant, was found early this morning in a
passageway at the side of his home at 2348 Ponce de
Leon Avenue. Almost simultaneously a police net
was thrown over New Orleans and surrounding par-
ishes to apprehend the man believed to be his assail-
ant, Tiny Cady, 30, discharged worker formerly em-
ployed in the River Auto Plant. Krakowski's body
was discovered just before dawn this morning by
Joseph Kline, a milkman. The victim's head had been
brutally battered with a huge file which has already
been identified by two of Cady's fellow employees
as one used by the former worker at the auto plant.
A careful check-up by the police of the Eighth Pre-
cinct Station revealed that Cady had stolen the file
following his discharge late yesterday.

Factory officials name Cady as a dangerous Red
labor agitator who has been responsible for much of
the Union trouble experienced recently at the River
plant. Police were told by factory officials of Cady's
discharge yesterday, following their discovery of a
quantity of Communistic literature in his possession.
The missing labor Red was also prominent in the
illicitly organized labor union discovered a short time
ago at the auto plant. Chief of Police Davis is con-
fident he will have the man suspected of Krakowski's
murder in custody before nightfall. A police cordon
has been thrown around all exits from the city and a
careful guard is being kept at the suspected man's
home at ^l^l^ Bottom Street. Chief Davis believes

450

George H. Corey

Cady's arrest will solve one of the most brutal mur-
ders this city has experienced in many years.

Factory officials are lending every aid to the police
in their effort to locate Cady who is described as a
powerful man, six feet, three inches in height. Accord-
ing to information furnished the police this morning,
Cady harbored a grudge against his former foreman,
Krakowski, for the latter's having brought to light
the Communistic labor activities which resulted in his
discharge from the factory.

4SI

RENDEZVOUS

by
Mary Heaton Vorse

MARY HEATON VORSE has recently published in A Foot-
note to Folly her reminiscences of many years of activity in
literary and radical circles, including experiences in Europe
during and after the Great War and in the United States
during certain famous strikes and labor trials. She calls
the book "not a biography" but "a picture of the world as I
saw it during an important moment of history; a record of
what happened to the little people and their children in war
time and peace" Much of her childhood was spent in the
college town of Amherst, where, so far as labor unions and
industrial struggles were concerned, "we might have been
the original dwellers in the garden of Eden. . . . But if in
Amherst we knew nothing about the conditions under which
cloth was woven or coal mined or steel made, yet it was in
the quiet of Amherst that my mind was prepared for
thought. . . . My early training taught me not to fear the
'pain of a new idea.'" Mrs. Vorse*s stories and articles
have appeared in many magazines, such as Harper's and
Story and The Woman's Home Companion; her novel,
Strike, is based on the Gastonia textile strike.

RENDEZVOUS

A they drove along in the spring sunshine, Sidney
Moore couldn't get out of his mind that because
they had come, a young New York boy named
Harry Grimm lay dying now in a hospital fifty miles away.

Harry Grimm had come across the mountain to meet
the New York men who were bringing food to the miners.
Deputies had shot him. He was a "foreigner." He was
organizing the miners. The deputies shot him because
of this. He was going over the mountain to meet the
other "foreigners" bringing in the food truck. The miners
had telephoned the news just before they started from
Knoxville.

The road wound around the mountain. From where
he was, Sidney could see all four cars of their little caravan,
and, lagging behind, the food truck. It was a queer busi-
ness, he thought, their being there at all. They'd come, a
dozen of them, to bring food to striking miners; it was a
sort of test.

Miners had been murdered by deputies in two counties
in the past months. Miners had been taken from their
homes and from jails, beaten, and sent naked across the
mountains. Soup kitchens had been blown up, and the
relief workers' car dynamited. The miners' food trucks
had been blockaded. Relief workers had been arrested
on the charge of criminal syndicalism. Reporters, even,
had been shot at and wounded. . . .

Sidney could hear the two men in back — Quinn, an
editor of a magazine, and a liberal writer named Sander-
son— talking about holding meetings with the miners.
They were driving directly toward the threat which the

Reprinted from Story, December 1933, by permission of the editors and of the
author.

455

Rendezvous

mayor of Mapleton had sent them. He had telegraphed
them that neither "they nor their ilk were wanted around
here."

In spite of this threat, these innocent men were babbling
about holding meetings and visiting mining camps. Sidney
felt as if he possessed some dark truth that he could not
communicate to the others. They were innocent. They
did not know the South. There would be no meetings.
No need to test constitutional rights: there were none. . . .
What was it the cashier in the coffee shop in Knoxville
had asked him:

"What nationality are these people? I hear they're
going up into the mountains in Kentucky, to set up some
new kind of government." He looked at the other men.
Quinn was sandy and compact, with an open clear-cut
countenance and small, New England features. Sanderson
had pronounced dark features; although young, he was
inclined to be heavy. People often took Sidney for a
square-head. He reflected that they all looked "foreign" —
different from the natives of the South.

The road wound past blackened shacks without chim-
neys. Up a creek a cluster of these shacks was hanging
on the cliff as by an eyelash. A mining camp. These
mining camps, Sidney thought, were the most desolate
habitations in the world.

"What do you think's going to happen, Moore?" Quinn
asked, leaning forward.

"I think anything might," Sidney answered.

"They won't dare to do anything to us, though," said
Quinn. Sidney knew that Quinn was thinking: "We're
too distinguished a crowd, too well known; they wouldn't
dare do anything to us!"

"I don't see why you think they'll feel any differently
toward us than they did toward Harry Grimm," said
Sidney. "He was coming to meet us — so in a roundabout
way we're responsible for his getting shot. . . ."

456

Mary Heaton Vorse

The road made a swift turn. A new vista opened. They
were going through a series of narrow valleys with swift,
gay creeks running down them. High granite mountains
rose abruptly from the creek bed. They were beautifully
wooded, and already touched with spring in mid-February.
The maples were in red bloom. The road did not run
straight for twenty yards. Sidney had a feeling, as they
drove swiftly through the brilliant spring morning, that
they were making straight for the hate that had shot
Harry Grimm at daybreak.

"What can we do? Why have we come? To bring
food; to advertise what is happening in this remote place.
Why have I come?" While he thought this, the white
road slipped under their wheels. On one side of them
the mountains rose steeply above; and below, on the
other, were fields of yellow-ochre earth with bright green
grass sprouting.

"We'll be passing into Kentucky in a minute," the
taxi-driver remarked. "I wonder if they'll stop us at the
border?" They all felt a little apprehensive. There was
a mounting feeling of insecurity. No one felt quite smug.
Each one felt uncertain and a little ridiculous.

Two cars were drawn up at the state line. It was an
imaginary line, and yet, thought Sidney, dividing one
state of mind from another state of mind. . . . The
little procession of cars had been dispersed, and the
food truck was now far behind. Two of their cars had
stopped at the Kentucky line. Sidney felt a growing ex-
citement.

"Likely deputies stopped them," said Sanderson. But
there were no deputies, the way was open. Sidney felt
a light sense of disappointment. The other cars were
merely waiting for the rest to come up. Newman, their
spokesman, called out from his roadster —

"We think four of us had better go ahead and see the
mayor first and find out what he'll let us do."

457

Rendezvou s

"Find out what he won't let us do," thought Sidney.
The band of crusaders seemed to him absurd. He reflected
that they would be grotesque, but for the tragedy of
Harry Grimm. Murder had been committed because of
them. Death had made them authentic; it made their
mission dangerous, gave them a burnish of heroism.

A platform from which one might see far distant views
had been cut out in the mountain shelf. A large placard
was placed there, which said that Daniel Boone had first
passed through this place in search of freedom and lib-
erty. The little procession stopped to look at the view.
They read with cynicism the placard about Daniel Boone
and liberty; then they went on their way unmolested.

At Centreville they stopped to wait for the food truck
to catch up, so that they could convoy it into Mapleton.
It was a thrifty little town with long, wide streets shaded
with trees. A truck full of clothes was to have joined
them there. It had been sent by the workers of a mid-
Western city. Their taxicab driver, who had been a miner
and who was in sympathy with them, reported :

"That truck's been taken down a side road somewhere
and overturned. They say the truck driver is shot, but
he ain't hurt bad."

The little crowd of Northerners looked at each other.
The invisible menace was taking form. They had seen
nothing, no one had stopped them or hindered them on
their way — yet. Still Harry Grimm lay dying, shot as
he was coming to meet them; and now here was an un-
known man — a man whose name they didn't even know,
a truck driver from a mid-Western city, probably paid
to drive the truck — shot, possibly killed, by the invisible
enemy.

Sidney looked at the others. "I wonder they don't
see what we're up against. I wonder they don't know it's
white terror." They were still innocent; they were indig-
nant about the truck.

458

Mary Heaton Vorse

On the road ahead of them was a blot of blue. Hundreds
of miners in trucks and on foot, waiting to greet them.
Another group stood behind the miners — armed deputies
and the chief of police. They stopped the trucks, they
stopped the cars. Sidney had a sense of fatality, of some-
thing happening that he had been waiting for. But there
was, as yet, no relief in its having happened.

They got out of their cars, the food truck between the
deputies and the miners. The Miners' Union had a store-
house in Mapleton. Quinn talked to the chief of police.

"Why can't we store our food in the storehouse?" he
asked, reasonably. The chief looked at him, a little puz-
zled. Quinn was a pleasant-spoken fellow.

"It's against orders," he said. "You drive right through
the town. You can't stop in Mapleton. There ain't going
to be no meetings." Deputies mounted the cars and
deputies swarmed on the food trucks.

Mapleton was built around a courthouse and a square.
It was the county seat. In the square were hundreds of
miners. They made clots of blue as they drifted around
the square, as they formed uneasy groups together. A
great many deputies ostentatiously armed were strutting
around. Up in the cupola of the courthouse there was a
nest of machine-guns. The Northerners got out of their
cars. Sanderson said to Sidney:

"I haven't seen so many guns since Chateau-Thierry!
I didn't know this was a war that we were coming to!
I thought we were coming just to hold a meeting with the
miners, and bring them some food."

"Well, you're in a war all right," said Sidney. "This
is the class war. We've walked right into it." That was
what had happened. They had stumbled into the class
war. That was why there were machine-guns in the court-
house and why deputies bristled with guns. "They've
found out — partly," thought Sidney. He had seen a
Southern mob in a killing mood. . . . Now everything

459

Rendezvous

was quiet, waiting. He wondered if they didn't know yet
that the hate which had killed Harry Grimm might
attack them.

The little band divided. Part of them went down with
the food trucks to the outskirts of the town. Sidney went
over to the hotel, where the advance guard were meeting
with the mayor. Around the room sat the principal men
of the town and the mayor, who was a veterinary. They
were big rangy men, men of consequence in their com-
munity, men proud of themselves and sure of themselves.
They knew they were right. They were coal operators
here, the attorney of the Rocky Creek Mining Company.
A benevolent looking Baptist pastor sat to one side. The
veterinary mayor was a small, unimpressive looking
person.

Sidney looked around swiftly. A peculiar feeling — not
of apprehension and not of fear, but rather like a knowl-
edge of evil — came over him. There is a murderous qual-
ity about white terror. White terror was what emanated
from these men who had assembled to meet them at the
Mapleton Hotel.

The lounge was a comfortable room of good proportions,
and it had an open fire. The four men comprising the
committee were at one end. Twenty men faced them.
Two civilizations aligned against each other. The North-
erners looked small and young in the face of their oppo-
nents, who were keeping up a tone of insolent and polite
ceremony. Like the ceremony of wolf dogs who walk
around and around with their hackles up. The elaborate
courtesy was just cracking.

The atmosphere grew dense with the hatred of these
men. This was the sort of impersonal hate which was
like the paralysis of snake bite. Some day, Sidney thought,
they will measure a current like this.

The mayor, an insignificant man, felt himself warm
and backed by the powerful bigger men around him.

460

Mary Heaton Vorse

"Watch your step," he said. "Don't have any meetings,
or it will be my pleasure to have you all arrested, and to
keep you in jail as long as I can!"

The meeting was breaking up. Everyone was standing.
The mayor ran out into the hall, consulted someone, and
ran back.

"Moreover, a group of you loitering on the street corner
talking to miners, I'll call that a meeting!" Again he
ran out. At someone's bidding he returned, with further
orders:

"If you have any miners in your room, I'll call that a
meeting too; and it will be my pleasure to arrest you."

"You mean that we can't entertain our friends in a
private sitting-room which we've hired?" asked Newman.

"I mean just that/' the mayor gave back with triumph.

"We are not here, I have told you," said Newman
formally, "to go against your ordinances. But we shall
broadcast your terrorism and your disregard for consti-
tutional rights from one end of America to the other."
A tall man towered over Newman.

"I admire your nerve, coming down here where you
don't know any of the conditions," he said slowly.
"You've talked and read a lot about terrorism down here,
but you'll find that when we get ready to be ugly, we can
be real ugly. And you can have your stenographer write
that down. I'll sign to that."

"I'll sign to that!"

"I'll sign to that!" others echoed.

"That means they're ready to lynch us," Sidney told
Newman.

"Not quite so bad as that," said Newman mildly. He
was keeping himself in hand, keeping his rising excitement
from brimming over. He was spokesman, and had done
a good job. A reporter from Knoxville came over to
Sidney.

"Say, don't they know, don't they see," he inquired

461

Rendezvous

in a low tone, "that these men mean business? They'll
do anything! You'd better get your food distributed and
get out of town!"

The square was empty of miners, who had ebbed away
toward the food trucks. But there were the deputies
with their guns, and there were the machine-gun nests
in the courthouse.

Newman asked Sidney, "Are you coming to the County
Attorney's office?" The mayor had told them they would
have to get permission to hold meetings even outside of
town.

"No," said Sidney. "I'm going to see what's become
of the trucks." All of a sudden the little studious band
seemed to Sidney like a high comedy, as it wandered
around from the mayor and operators to the County At-
torney to get legal permission for a meeting. They would
no more be given permission than the Germans would
have given permission to cross No Man's Land with
provisions for the French.

Sidney walked down a dirt road leading out of town.
A bridge led over a creek. A granite mountain rose sheer
above it. The mud was thick and gummy on the road,
ochre-colored. The houses dwindled off as he walked
along, and became less prosperous. Shacks of a mining
community appeared on the mountain side. Down the
road at last was a blue group of men again — the food truck.

They were, after all, holding a meeting of sorts. Food
was being distributed. Someone was standing on the truck
speaking, holding the crowd. Trouble makers and curious
people were prowling on the edge of the crowd. Deputies
with their guns were everywhere.

And punctuating it all, the fantastic sheriff, an embodi-
ment of pure evil, so evil that he became theatrical and
comic. Lean, long, with claw-like hands, and unclean as
a hairy spider. How had the clean hills uttered such a one?
Yellow eyes, with a malevolent, terrifying sideways glance.

462

Mary Heaton Vorse

A killer. The movies' unnatural exaggeration of evil.
Yet there, horribly, he was, in the flesh, his venom di-
rected against this innocent little company none of whom
were agitators, none of them with experience even in the
labor movement. This absurd little band of mercy which
had come up into this war to quibble over constitutional
rights and the right of relief trucks to bring food undis-
turbed.

Harry Grimm had been shot at dawn by a deputy, by a
killer. . . .

A man named Nichols was talking. Nichols was talking
like a fool, so Sidney thought from what words he could
hear. "You'll get arrested," thought Sidney. A girl who
belonged to the relief organization talked too. Now a
miner was talking. Now someone shouted to the speaker
from the crowd, something provocative —

"Your own brother is a deputy," cried the voice.

"Whoever says that about my brother is a god-damned
liar!" This was fighting talk. The incredible sheriff
whipped out two guns in his claws. The deputies stood
there, evil, triumphant. The crowd began to run. People
had drawn guns on both sides. For a moment every thing
hung suspended — murder in the air, war in the air.

"I'm going to round up and arrest every goddam one
of you!" the sheriff was shouting. The onlookers were
flying.

"Let's get out of here," Quinn said, "no use of us all
getting shot."

And now suddenly guns were put up. The menace had
momentarily passed. They were arresting the girl, and
Nichols.

"I'll go back and see that they don't take the food,"
Quinn said, "and see that it gets distributed. You go
and find Newman and the others." They will have been
arrested, thought Sidney. And I'll probably be arrested.

A woman drove up and spoke to Sidney.

463

Rendezvous

"Are you one of the crowd that came up here?" she
asked. "Did you hear what they were saying just now?
Did you hear how they were stirring up the miners to
riot? We got everything all quieted down — and they're
stirring up the miners to riot, they're telling them they've
got a right to organize, they've got a right to picket! I
heard that girl myself, telling them to hang on and not
give up. They don't know what they're doing, coming
down here and stirring up those people. I'd like to take
you and show you how these folks live. They live like
animals, whole families in a room. — I'm a doctor's wife. —
There is more incest and feeble-mindedness in this county
than anywhere!" She was almost crying in her emotion,
a big woman, kind-faced. Her words tumbled over each
other.

"We're none of us rich people," she said. "These mines
are locally owned, and the mines — you know what they
are. They're ruined. We had a depression before anyone
else did. We're doubly hit. A hundred and fifty dollars
a month is a big income here. A hundred a month is good.
And we give ten per cent to our community chest. I
never turn away anyone from my door. Days I feed some-
times six — eight people. We all do. When they come
down from the hills hungry, we feed them. And I work
all day sewing — we've got the miners' wives and the
women coming in sewing, to try and clothe them. And
now you come disturbing us, stirring them up. You take
my husband, you take me: We come from poor, mountain
folks. But we got out and we got ourselves an educa-
tion— " Her words flowed over Sidney, overwhelming
him. He could see the little band as the community, as
this undoubtedly kind woman, saw them, with her classic
cry: "The workers like to live like pigs!"

She was the voice of the comfortable population. She
was not one of the combatants. She was supporting her
side behind the lines.

464

Mary Heaton Vorse

"I wonder if she thought Harry Grimm should be
killed?" thought Sidney. He felt sure she would, because
this was a war, and all people who stirred up the miners
were evidently Bolshevists, and all Bolshevists should be
shot as enemies of society.

Quinn came hurrying up to Sidney. "They've arrested
fifty of the miners. They're holding them for criminal
syndicalism. They've got Nichols, and Mary Ray."

"Is the food distributed?" asked Sidney.

"Deputies got about one hundred pounds, the miners
got the rest," said Quinn. They had arrived at the square.
The elegant county attorney was just saying goodbye to
Newman and the other three. He had kept them there,
purposely. He was beautifully dressed, the picture of a
courteous Southern gentleman, and he grinned a sardonic
goodbye.

Looking back on it afterwards, it seemed humorous
that they sat that evening, all of them in the sitting room,
discussing their plans for the next day — how they were
going to take food into the next county, and how they
were going to visit the mining camps there. While they
were discussing their plans, a knock came at the door.
Two miners came in.

"We come to tell you about Harry Grimm," one of
them said. "Seems like he's dying. We thought maybe
someone of you might like to come over to the hospital.
Someone from his own home town, maybe."

Newman asked, "Do you know how it happened? All
we heard was that he was wounded." One of the miners,
a young fellow in his early twenties with a clear profile
and bright hair answered —

"Harry was staying to my house last night, and he didn't
know if he'd go over the mountain path or by the jitney
railway. I said, ' I hate for you to go by the railway. You
best keep to the mountain. For I fear they'll try and
get you.'

465

Rendezvous

"He said, 'I've got no time for the mountain. I've got
to go by the shortest way if I'm to meet them.' He was
coming, picking up miners along the way, to meet you."

Thoughts spun in Sidney's head. All his life, coming
nearer and nearer to him, had been Harry Grimm. All
their lives they had been approaching each other. They
had walked around New York's streets at the same time.
At -the same time, seeing the same things, viewing the
same spectacles, maybe, been together without knowing
each other in the same places. All the time they had been
walking along different roads which converged, closer and
closer. Sidney felt he knew Harry Grimm very well, as
though he had always known him.

"We jest thought, seeing how he was coming to meet
you, you'd like maybe one of you to go over to the hos-
pital," the boy repeated.

"How far is it?" asked Quinn.

"'T'ain't fur," said Jim. "Maybe twenty mile."

"How did it happen?" Newman asked again.

"He was a-walkin' down by the track with two other
fellas. Two deputies come by on the hand car that runs
the railways. The deputies backed up the car and stopped
in front of the boys. Then Art Dillon shot Harry, and
Ned Travers covered the other boys. They loaded Harry
on the truck and arrested the others. They set Harry on
a stone outside the hospital. He set there an hour, bleed-
ing from the stomach. They wouldn't take him in unless
someone went responsible for his doctor's bill. I heard
he was shot, and I went to see him at the hospital.

"I said, 'Buddy, I'm shore sorry I wasn't with you.'
He was awful sleepy. I touched his face with my hand
and asked if he knew me. He said he did.

"'But I got a hurtin' pain in my side, and I feel awful
sleepy,' he said.

"Then I said, 'I got word that my house is raided, and
they're looking for me, so I'll have to clear out and go,

466

Mary Heaton Vorse

because they're after me.' They tole me when I come
away that he was sinkin' fast, so I come here for you."

Newman asked, "What did they raid you for? Why do
they want you?"

"I'd been speakin' to the miners — organizin'. Ef you're
hongry, you're a Red, in Dell county. Ef you tell about
it, you're a criminal syndicalist and a Bolshevik. I said,
4 We miners are hongry' — so they raided my house and
got a warrant out for me."

"You oughtn't be here now," said Quinn.

"I expect not; but they won't be watchin' for me yere.
I had to come and git one of you."

"I'd like to go," said Sidney. He rose, and no one
stopped him. This suddenly seemed to him the most
important thing to do. He felt as though this were why
he had come — that he had had an appointment all his
life with Harry Grimm as they came together on their
converging paths, as though Harry Grimm had something
of deep importance to tell him. "He knows why he came;
he'll tell me why I. came," Sidney thought.

"All right," Newman said. "You go, Moore, if you
want to." He seemed relieved. It wasn't important to
anyone else, with all their concern.

"Lem Carter's got his Ford downstairs on the street,"
said Jim. The lobby was full of loafing men. Some of
them Sidney recognized from the afternoon. They turned
their heads to stare at Jim and the older miner, who
hadn't talked at all, who had come to drive Jim. They
could feel the hate of these men streaming out toward
them. They got into the car; Jim and Sidney sat behind,
and Lem Carter drove. Lem spoke for the first time.

"I don't like the looks o' them men," he said. "They's
too many men for this time o' night. I heered talk of
night riders."

A feeling of cold crawled up Sidney's back. Not appre-
hension, but as though he were steeling himself for an

467

Rendezvous

attack. There was silence in the car, then Lem Carter
turned his head slightly —

"I heered how they might kidnap the lot o' you and ride
you out o' the State."

"I'll be glad when yore out," said Jim. "I'll certainly
be more easy in my mind when yore over the line. I ben
mighty worried about you sense they shot Harry. He
was the nicest feller you ever knew. They wasn't any-
body around here but whut liked Harry. We felt like
he was kin. He talked awful nice and awful sensible. He
was the only foreign organizer they was. That's why
they shot him. It's an awful pity. My sister's goin' to
feel awful bad. When she went North to collect money,
she said to me —

"'Honey, look out for Harry. Don't let them git him.
I kin feel he don't sense the danger yere.' That was it.
We couldn't make him see. He wouldn't believe that
they was out to git him. But they was, and they got
him."

They were silent. The car bumped on through the
darkness. Sidney felt as though he knew all about this
boy he had never seen. He was a little younger than
himself. He belonged to the youth movement, and he
had come here to organize.

"I hope we git there in time," said Jim. "I hope he's
conscious. It'll mean an awful lot to his folks if someone
from his home was with him."

Lem Carter said, "Yeah, I'll sure be glad when you git
over the line. That crowd in the hotel lobby warn't
there for no good." A spreading sense of imminent evil
flowed over Sidney. Life was becoming simplified, as it
was to Jim, as it was to Lem. It was becoming black and
white.

"Here we are," said Lem Carter. They were going
through the streets of a tidy town. They drew up in front
of a new brick building, and went in.

468

Mary Heaton Vorse

"How is he?" Jim asked the nurse.

"He's conscious just now. He's rallied." Jim stared
at the nurse. A look of deep intelligence passed between
the two. She shook her head gravely.

"Not for long," she said.

The boy Harry Grimm was lying with open eyes. All
color had drained away under his tan, and his lips were
pale. He had thick black hair. Jim and Sidney stood there,
the nurse on one side. Harry Grimm looked at them with
sightless eyes. Jim spoke gently.

"Buddy, do you know me?" he asked. The boy smiled
very slightly, his lips outlined, "Yes, Jim."

"Buddy," said Jim, "I brought a friend from yore
home town. Don't you want to send a message to yore
folks? He's one o' the fellers you was goin' to meet to-
day." The dying boy's face brightened. He spoke very
low, so that Sidney had to bend close to him.

"Tell them," he said, "I'm some lucky they didn't kill
me." The effort had been too great. He closed his eyes.
A frightful pain gripped Sidney, a sense of anguish and
loss and fury came over him. It was as if indeed this boy
had been his childhood friend, from his home town. The
nurse held the boy's pulse. She shook her head gently.
She said in a low tone —

"You'd best go now."

They walked out quietly. Sidney's heart filling, over-
flowing with grief, with fury, grieving for a friend, a
murdered friend.

"We kin 'venge him," Jim said gently.

Now Sidney knew what he had come for. He had come
up to find that his world was divided into two camps.
He was on the side of his murdered friend Harry Grimm,
on the side of his friend Jim, the miner. Lem Carter came
to meet them.

"Git in," he said. "I'm goin' to take you over the line.
I ben phonin' to Mapleton. The night riders has rounded

469

Rendezvous

up all yore friends and taken them away. I'll git you out
of Kintucky over another road." Sidney got in without
answering.

"They're right," he thought. "Why shouldn't they
kidnap me? I am their enemy. I am in a war against
them."

470

RED OVER EUROPE

by
George Wetter

GEORGE WELLER, well-known among foreign correspond-
ents in Europe and at present (/pj<5) in Greece, is the au-
thor of a brilliant Harvard novel, Not to Eat, Not for
Love (1934).

RED OVER EUROPE

FOR fifteen years, practically since the end of the war,
during which he lost his little German weekly in a
Wisconsin city, Eric Wolf had been correspondent
in Vienna for the Traynor World Service. He used to
stay on duty in the one room office in the Burggasse later
than any other American newspaperman. In that way he
sometimes picked up a revolution or a royal love affair
that came in late from the southern Balkans. It might
be too late for Morton Traynor' s morning newspaper in
New York, but it could always be used in the Traynor
papers in Chicago, or Denver, or Los Angeles, on account
of their later deadlines.

Sometimes Eric went to sleep on his desk. Then the
bicycle boy from the radio office would let himself in
with the key that hung outside the door behind the pic-
ture of Morton Traynor. He would read the despatch,
and if it did not seem important he would not awaken
Eric, but simply put an overcoat on the shoulders of the
sleeping man and turn off the gas heater so that nothing
could happen.

Eric was nearly twenty years older than any of the
other Traynor men, but he was never fired because he
knew how to write precisely what Morton Traynor wanted
from the Balkans. Traynor wanted the Balkans always
to be "the breeding place of wars." He wanted royal love
affairs to have a revolution looming behind them, and at
least a kiss in every revolution. After sending a story
about the Roumanian wheat situation Eric would get a
telegram from New York: "Traynor says always put

Reprinted from Story, July 1935, by permission of the editors, and of the
author's representative, Harold Ober.

473

Red over Europe

Madame Lupescu in your Bucharest." Christmas after-
noon he regularly heard from home: "Why you missed
Christmas Eve boy princes throughout Balkans hanging
up stockings awaiting Santa Claus?"

Traynor' s newspapers sold love, politics and science,
poisoned with unreality to make them more palatable
to the ignorant and poor of America, for whose clogged
perpetual fatigue the acids of Traynor were the cheapest
antidote. What Traynor wanted from his foreign corre-
spondents was not information about Europe but forget-
fulness of America.

But he also wanted co-ordination. For example, when
the Traynor newspapers were backing the bonus lobby
of the veterans in Washington everyone in Europe, from
Amsterdam to Warsaw, received orders to send New York
three hundred words about how easily veterans in other
countries obtained bonuses. None of the countries had a
bonus resembling the American proposal, and many of
them were repudiating their pensions. It was particularly
difficult to write a bonus story from chronically neutral
countries like Switzerland and Sweden, but the Traynor
correspondents had their orders and they carried them out.

Another hard time came for the Traynor World Service
when Morton Traynor got a frightened feeling that the
government was going to nationalize the oil fields, just
when he was doing rather well with some stuff he owned
out Long Beach way. Thereupon the Traynor correspond-
ent in Geneva missed several League of Nations tea parties
while he hunted for something Swiss that was being nation-
alized just as pessimistically as oil threatened to be. He
chose watches, and oiled them well before winding.

Eric Wolf knew he could never explain the Traynor
investment scheme, of which he had a confidential copy,
to his subcorrespondents in Belgrade, Budapest, Sofia,
Bucharest and Athens, whose ordinary despatches were
written in British English, broken German and bastard

474

George Weller

French, varied with odd phrases in Serbo-Croat, Walla-
chian and the slang of Macedonian nationalism. So he
wrote a sketch about the discovery of oil fields in Hun-
gary, which emphatically would not be federalized, another
short one from Belgrade about the Yugoslav bean oil
industry, six hundred majestic words about Roumanian
petroleum, two hundred witty ones about olive oil for
Athens, and finally a long piece for himself from Austria
about Vienna as a center of Balkan oil nationalism,
which was breeding another war.

A week later he heard from New York: "Traynor says
fire Sofia man for neglecting oil coverage." Eric telephoned
Sofia and arranged with the man there to write his stories
for the next three months under his cousin's name, though
he had already been fired by Traynor so many times that
he had few relatives left.

Eric Wolf, with the fifties of his years mounting upon
him, sitting in his unpressed clothes in the office in the
Burggasse, had too many capitals to handle, too many
palace love affairs memorized, too many fallen cabinets
incompletely forgotten. He was always overlooking either
Sofia or Budapest.

The only job harder than Eric's was to be Traynor' s
correspondent in Moscow after he started his Americanist
campaign against the Communists. If the correspondent's
stories were not sufficiently anti-Communist he would be
fired for disobeying orders, left in Moscow without a job.
If they were anti-Communist the correspondent would be
successively warned, then censored, then expelled from
the country. But an expelled correspondent was no heroic
martyr to Traynor; he was rather an awkward failure,
deserving demotion or discharge. Traynor had the true
sportsman's spirit of always wanting to be on friendly
terms with the enemy: France, repudiator of her debts,
and Morton Traynor; the red star of Moscow and Mor-
ton Traynor, demon publisher and bond-holding patriot;

475

Red over Europe

the little people of the Land of the Rising Sun and
Morton Traynor, the American yellow peril.

One night in May Eric Wolf was writing the regular
Bulgarian revolution story. Sofia itself was deathly silent.
For hours there had been no communication but breathless
hints, bloody shrieks and hoarse whispers from the Yugo-
slav, Roumanian and Greek borders. What was happening
in Bulgaria? Nothing was certain but the name of the
leading actor, General Revodoff, but that was enough
for Eric. He knew the General and he knew what he would
say. He took a big drink of beer, stared across the street
at a man and woman who had entered a room in the Rit-
terhof Hotel and immediately pulled down the curtain
tight against the windowsill, and began to write:

"In an exclusive interview to the correspondent of the
Traynor World Service in Sofia today General Revodoff,
Bulgaria's new strong man, predicted that his regime
would continue the friendly foreign policy of former gov-
ernments and would stabilize the national currency, but
would crush mercilessly any attempt by Marxists, Reds,
or Communists to seize the reins of power."

I hope nothing bad has happened to the General, Eric
thought, staring at the Ritterhof Hotel. He wrote on:

" When asked if hints that Olga Popoff, platinum blonde
who has been named for a Hollywood contract, had put
her vermilion tinted fingernail in the palace pie, were
based on facts, General Revodoff said: 'Naturally not.
The new government is in the hands of sober army officers,
not blonde Hollywood aspirates.'"

Eric was erasing "aspirates" to put in " aspirants"
when Byron Bean walked into the office.

Byron Bean was the greatest radical shooter on the
Traynor staff. His start had been made four years earlier,
covering the Los Angeles red squad, and his subsequent
rise was speedy. He had been in Europe hardly six months

476

George Weller

but he was a boulevardier already, carried a yellow cane,
wore gloves all but the hottest days of summer, and
turned on his hips whenever a beautiful woman passed,
lacking only a spade-shaped beard to point at her. But
he would never have that beard. His face was smooth and
bald all over, and he looked more like a wornout chorus
man than the alert discoverer of a dozen Communist
plots.

"Don't let me interrupt your story, Mr. Wolf," he said
familiarly. "Byron Bean of the Moscow office."

"Glad to see you," said Eric, ready to sympathize.
"Sit down. I'm just doing a little piece for tomorrow."

Bean leaned over the typewriter, though uninvited,
and said, "Oh, yes, Bulgaria." It was as though he said,
oh, of course, that Sarajevo murder. He seated himself
and held his cane between his knees, rotating it in his
fingers with his egg-like chin close above.

"How do you like Vienna after Moscow?" asked Eric,
putting the Pester Lloyd under his beer mug and unob-
trusively wiping away the ring.

"I believe," said Byron Bean after consideration, "that
I am going to like Vienna." He smiled with a kind of
Tia Juana urbanity. "The beauty of the women of Vienna
is famous the world over," he said without a blink.

That was destined to be the lead of Byron Bean's first
story from the Balkans. The London office telephoned
that night to say that Mr. Bean would replace Mr. Wolf
as correspondent in Vienna, upon orders from Mr. Traynor
in New York. Mr. Wolf was to complete the remaining
nine days of the month, and would receive a fortnight's
salary in advance,

Byron Bean said he thought he would take a week's
rest in the Tyrol, and checked out of his hotel. Three
days later Eric got a confidential letter from the cor-
respondent in Belgrade saying that Mr. Bean had made

477

Red over Europe

an unannounced visit at his home. Later there followed
letters from the Traynor World Service correspondents in
Sofia, Athens, Bucharest and Budapest, enabling Eric to
trace the itinerary of Byron Bean's journey.

"How did you like the Tyrol, Mr. Bean?" he inquired,
when the new correspondent came in and hung up his
hat on the last night of the month.

" I had a short trip into Yugoslavia and a nice long rest,
thank you," said Byron Bean.

"If you can," said Eric, "you ought to try to visit some
of these Balkan capitals personally."

"I hope to have that opportunity," pronounced Byron
Bean gravely, peeling off his tight gloves.

Some ceremony seemed to be called for, so they shook
hands. Then Byron Bean quickly sat down at the type-
writer. Eric wrapped up his beer mug in a copy of the
Abendblatt and left the office for the last time.

Eric planned to go back to Milwaukee and look for a job
and see if any of the girls and fellows of the old German-
American crowd he used to know were still around. But
it was not easy to leave Vienna, nor did it seem a trifle
to say farewell to all those Balkan capitals over whose
tumbling destinies he had watched for fifteen years. He
decided to make a farewell tour and perhaps give his
former assistants some pointers on how to get along with
Byron Bean.

In Budapest the Hungarian correspondent made him
stay at his home and wanted to try to get him a soft job
on the publicity staff of the "Justice for Hungary" revi-
sionist committee. In Belgrade the Serbian Racich, who
had an apartment with one of the dancers at the Opera,
made him stay with his mother's family. Eric soon found
himself getting into a complicated way with Racich's
sister Olga, who was about thirty years old, with eye-
brows so black and mouth so red and expectant that he

478

George Weller

did not stop worrying about himself until he was aboard
the Simplon-Orient for Athens.

At Skolpje, in southern Serbia, he changed his plans
and turned off for Bulgaria. That night he was unpacking
his suitcases at the house of Igor Gradoff, correspondent
of the Traynor World Service in Sofia.

Gradoff, a tall gentle man with an easily surprised face,
had once been a distributor of American films in Sofia
but was now wholly dependent on the Traynor job and
his wife's small inheritance. What little confidence he had
in himself had dissolved in the face of Byron Bean's
searching questions, and Eric found him shaken.

Gradoff led Eric into a little parlor filled with pictures
of his relations, many of whom had been nominally cor-
respondents of the Traynor World Service and fired in
his name. They drank a little wine and stared out the
window, wondering what would become of them, whose
knowledge and whose ignorance had always so perfectly
dovetailed.

They had been sad together only a short time when
Gradoff abruptly threw up his head, loosing a wild tear-
drop from his cheek, and crossed the room to the slender-
legged desk. He handed Eric a letter. "This came by the
plane today," he said bravely. "Mr. Bean's first orders.
Perhaps you could explain to me. . . ."

The letter read :

"TO ALL SUBCORRESPONDENTS IN THE BALKANS:

"The New York office has sent orders to this office to
get busy on some more red stories. Mr. Traynor is again
taking up his fight against extremist agitation in the
schools and universities of the United States, and all offices
in the Balkans are asked to do their share by coming
through with long fresh stories, to be sent by mail to
Vienna.

"What is wanted are stories of how each country has
fought the menace of the reds, with details of the methods

479

Red over Europe

used in each country. This in order to explain what
measures should be taken against them in the schools
and universities of the United States."

Eric put the letter down and found Gradoff's face close
to his own.

"I thought," said Gradoff, "that you knew already
how to take care of the reds in the United States. I thought
you either put them all together in one place, or you
killed them."

"Killed them?" said Eric, who came from a fine old
American brewery family. "Where did you get the idea
we treat anyone like that?"

"Why, in the movies when I used to be in that busi-
ness . . ." began Gradoff.

"Those were gangsters, not reds," said Eric. "Listen,
this letter is dated Tuesday. That means Mr. Bean will
need your story in Vienna by Thursday night so that it
can get in next week's Sunday scandal sheet. You have
to hurry."

"Of course I must hurry," said Gradoff, motionlessly.
A troop of bicycle soldiers pedalled rapidly down the
street. "Mr. Wolf, I naturally hesitate to think of asking
your help. I am too indebted with you already. But I
wonder what you would charge me to write that story?
I must be very stupid. I cannot understand what
Mr. Traynor — I mean Mr. Bean — really wants."

"When does your next air mail plane leave?" asked
Eric. The idea of writing a final story for Gradoff, after
his own discharge, went pleasantly as wine to the bottom
of his stomach.

"Oh, we know all the fliers," said Gradoff quickly.
"There is one leaving tomorrow. If we could arrange
something tonight there would be plenty of time before
they go out to the field at dawn — I often stay up all
night — I love long walks at night — "

Mrs. Gradoff came in with her hair down her back and

480

George Weller

made coffee for them. Then she kissed her husband good
night like a plump and dutiful daughter and went to bed.
Then they started on the story.

" First of all," said Eric, "how many reds are there in
this whole country?"

Mr. Gradoff stared idiotically at him. "Why,- none
whatever," he said blankly.

"None?" said Eric. "What do you mean? What about
the wild young people?"

"There are neither youngs nor olds," said Mr. Gradoff
positively.

"But when they can't find any work worth doing, don't
they get extreme ideas? Don't they begin talking around
loose about revolution?"

"Oh, revolution!" said Gradoff, enlightened. His voice
fell away. "I myself am working for a revolution here,"
he whispered, "but our revolution has nothing to do with
any reds."

Eric sighed. "Look here, Mr. Gradoff," he said, "in
all your experience as an inactive revolutionary, have you
never come upon some radical, some foreigner, some agi-
tator, some trouble maker, some red who tried to make
trouble here in Sofia? Never? Never?"

Mr. Gradoff's pale brown eyes severely perused the
past, with slow waggings of his head giving it a negative,
negative, negative diagnosis.

Suddenly he leaped to his feet, agape. His eyes were
starting from his head. He could not speak. He rapped
his forehead mercilessly with his knuckles and thus beat
himself into articulacy. "Fool!" he said. "Fool, fool,
fool!"

He sank heavily into his chair, took a quick sip of coffee,
pushed the cup away, and spoke, repentantly confessing
his sin. "Mr. Wolf, I have not told you the truth. Right
here in Sofia is the man we need for our red story. Not
only is he a red!" Eric tried to speak but Gradoff held

Red over Europe

him off with both hands, crying, "Not only is he a red!
Not only is he a red, but he is an American red!"
Eric smelt the news immediately.
"Let's get a taxi and find him, right now," he said.
But Gradoff caught his arm. "No, he'd be out of town.
He was invited out to a party at a villa. He is an Amer-
ican red, very tough and experienced, but still he loves
going- on parties! Isn't that funny? But never mind!
I know all about him. Sit down, Mr. Wolf."

Eric spoke gravely. "Gradoff, you have a better story
here than any you ever sent me in Vienna. If we handle
it right — you know what I mean, along the lines of Amer-
ican Extremist Sows Strife In Bulgaria — we ought to be
able to make Mr. Traynor in New York very much pleased
with your work." He ruffled through the soft sheets of
paper and tried the pencils on his trembling thumb, se-
lecting one. "Now, don't get excited, whatever you do.
We'll simply handle it as though it was any other ordinary
story, won't we?" He took a drink of water. "Now, first
of all, what's his name? He has a name, hasn't he?" he
scolded sharply, to curb the nervousness in both of
them.

"His name." The directness of the assault caught
Gradoff unawares. "His name is something like Patasee.
Yes — Patasee. A name that is just like Patasee."

"You're sure it isn't Genesee?"

"No, Patasee." His doubt diminished as he repeated
the word, and he continued the practice. "John Patasee.
Mr. — John — Patasee." He beamed.

Eric remained stern. "Where does he come from?"

"Mr. John Patasee comes from Olakoma."

"You mean Oklahoma. Is it Oklahoma City?"

Mr. Gradoff enjoyed being pressed, grew brighter under
it. "Certainly. His city is in the territory of Oklahoma."

"State of Oklahoma," Eric corrected.

"State of Oklahoma," Gradoff parroted. "Territory

482

George Weller

of Oklahoma/' he repeated in an indulgently gentle under-
tone.

"I have his address," said Eric tartly. "Now then,
what are his chief activities?"

"Well," said Mr. Gradoff, leaning back and narrowing
his eyes thoughtfully to show that he was an old Traynor
correspondent and knew exactly when the acme of any
narrative was reached, "I should say that Mr. Patasee's
chief activity is drinking. Yes — yes. Mr. Patasee is very
much of a drinker. When we take him into a bar and offer
to him, he will drink and drink and drink. And yet,"
he shook his finger under Eric's nose, giving reproof for
reproof, "Mr. Patasee is never drunk. He will drink
all that is bought for him, and yet never be drunk," he
concluded in a kind of tender reverence.

"When did he get here?" Eric shot out.

"Two months ago," pronounced Mr. Gradoff slowly
and dreamily. Perceiving that more was expected of him
he continued, "Drinking, drinking, drinking. . . . Oh, but
Mr. Patasee can support it! He is a great dark man of at
least a hundred kilos. I have seen him take four packs
of playing cards at once — then rrrr-ii-ip — he tored them
all to pieces!"

"But how does he work? That's the story."

"Mr. Patasee does not have to work. He just travels
through Europe. He has many friends."

"I mean, how does he work the red propaganda?"

"Oh, that?" said Gradoff, with a look of deep con-
spiracy. "You mean how does he propagandize for the
other reds?"

"Does he propagandize, as you call it, against the
United States?"

"All the time! He says no red can live there and he
much rather live in Europe."

"He sounds like a pretty clever man," said Eric.

"Clever? He is like a diplomat! All the time he talks

483

Red over Europe

against the government of Washington, and immediately
after he tells us how beautiful was his life in the territory
of Oklahoma, where every man used to be equal, just like
his neighbor, until the Washington government interfered."

"So Oklahoma was just like Russia, eh?" smiled Eric.

"A real soviet, it was," said Gradoff lyrically. "Every-
body equal. Everybody going out hunting together."

"How do his ideas catch on?" asked Eric.

"Wonderful!" cried Mr. Gradoff. "Every one of the
best people in Sofia all want to be red — the Moussorgoffs,
the Probikoffs, the retired railroad director Diploff and
his daughter — all want to go to Oklahoma."

Eric looked the Bulgarian straight in the eye. "Has it
occurred to Director Diploff to wonder why the rest of
the United States haven't gone red like the place where
Mr. Patasee claims he comes from?"

"But they think it is very foolish!" exploded Gradoff,
spreading his hands helplessly. "They would like to know
why. . . ."

"Never mind," said Eric, patting his hand gently.
"That's enough for our story. You sign yourself Igor Gra-
doff now, don't you?"

Gradoff unhooded his heavy old French typewriter,
but at Eric's first experimental pickings his wife com-
plained through the door that she couldn't sleep. So they
went out and hired a hotel room and wrote the story
there, Gradoff lying on the bed with a cigarette repeating
musingly: "Mr. John — Patasee — state — Oklahoma — ter-
ritory— Oklahoma — drinking — drinking. . . ."

Two nights later Gradoff got a telegram from Byron
Bean: "Good story send another next week stop make it
about woman communist stop if possible royal angle also."

"Mr. Wolf," said Gradoff, "what would you advise?"

"Is Mr. Patasee married?" asked Eric.

"No," Gradoff replied. "All the girls in Sofia are in

484

George Weller

love with him, but he don't marry any. He just make
love to those he can."

"Then you're out of luck," said Eric. "All you can do
is to write about some lady no one ever heard of and call
her the Lupescu of Bulgaria, or the Redheaded Red."
For himself the fun was over; he had written his last
story for Morton Traynor.

There was a hopeless look in Mr. GradofFs face. He
put his lank hand on the lever of the parlor door, uttered
confusedly and irresponsibly the words, "Mr. Patasee
has only black hairs," and went out.

Mr. Gradoff persuaded Eric to go away with him into
the long fragrant valley below the Shipka Pass, the Val-
ley of the Wild Rose. They stayed at a little tavern where
mountains peered in at their window and they shouted
from one room to the other when they were shaving in
the morning. They loafed before luncheon, while fragrant
rose oil from the pressing sheds made heavy all the sun
drenched air. They ate, they took a nap, and in the
afternoon they took a long walk. After dinner they would
start to read, but soon Gradoff would say, "Come on,
Mr. Wolf, let us go down the stairs and kid the peasants."
Then there would be wine and constellations of jokes, and
when they went up to bed the roosters would be summon-
ing the dawn over the mountain.

When finally they returned to Sofia they were invited
to a party in honor of Mr. Patasee, given by the son of
the rose oil king, a young man who planned soon to visit
the United States. Eric would have preferred to depart
immediately for Greece, but he thought also that he might
be able to get an idea for GradofFs next story by talking
cleverly to Mr. Patasee.

At the host's villa there were many people standing
around holding cups in their hands, commencing the long
adventure of eating and drinking that is a Balkan party.

485

Red over Europe

"Mr. Patasee has already started," whispered Mrs. Gra-
doff. "They have telephoned his hotel and he is coming."

Soon there was heard, above, beyond and outside the
whirlpool of conversation, a deep bass voice. It drew
nearer and more portentous. Still indistinguishable, it
already sounded foreign to the gathering, yet more Amer-
ican than Eric's. "Hello, hello," it proved to be saying,
"hello, how's everybody, how are you all, my friends,
how are you?"

There entered, on the arm of the hostess, a large and
unquestionably genuine Osage Indian.

He was not wearing war paint; otherwise, however, his
attire and appearance were as spectacular and complete
as if his tepee were pitched on the sidewalk. His blanket
was on his arm, his war bonnet with bright bold feathers
on his head, and his somewhat plump face showed the
confident appetite for greeting of a man long used to
being the guest of honor.

"This is Mr. Patasee," whispered Gradoff.

It was Tuesday evening, and the article on Mr. Patasee
had appeared in all the newspapers of the Traynor World
Service on Sunday.

The guests pressed warmly around Mr. Patasee. He
was induced to take his place in the largest upholstered
chair in the room. A lady whispered a request, audible
to all. Immediately the guests pressed closer than ever,
the bare necks and arms of the women entreating him,
the high foreheads of the men pleadingly in earnest while
their voluble lips agitated their distinguished moustaches.

Mr. Patasee at first gave no favoring sign. At last,
however, he yielded, and held up his hand for silence.
He arose to his feet with a slight murmur of beads. Then
he placed his feet wide apart, lifted high his dusky chin,
and seared the creamy wainscoting with a war whoop.

The guests shrank back, their reason temporarily un-
seated, their veins delighting in this absolutely safe terror.

486

George Weller

Mr. Patasee merely smiled, sat down, and allowing his
hand to fall naturally to his host's cigar box, quickly
demonstrated that he could smoke three large cigars
simultaneously.

This lighter manner of his won their hearts totally. They
were his slaves. Mrs. Gradoff whispered something for
her husband to tell Eric. Gradoff passed it on: "Olga says,
the most popular foreigner who ever came to Bulgaria."

Mr. Patasee suddenly swept all three cigars away from
his mouth and held them, smoking formidably, in his open
hand. " Listen, folks," he said pontifically. "I know all
the educated ones among you speak English. I got some-
thing to tell you and I want you to tell it to your friends.
I been entertained in Budapest, in Belgrade, and in
Bucharest, but nowheres else in the Balkans have I been
entertained like in Sofia. I could stay with you here in
Sofia till the day I go to the happy hunting grounds."

There was applause, and a rapid susurration of foot-
notes to his last expression.

Mr. Patasee nodded matter-of-factly, drew deeply on
all three cigars, and pushed back the warbonnet on his
forehead before expelling the smoke over the heads of
the guests, most of whom had settled themselves camp-
fire style at the foot of his lounging chair.

"Now I want to tell you something," said Mr. Patasee
severely. "And I want those of you who understand plain
English to explain it to those who don't know anything
but Hungarian — I should say Bulgarian." Several more
persons squatted down, and there was a secretive and
savage hunch to their shoulders as they leaned forward.

"I got a telegram from home today," said Mr. Patasee.
"What do you suppose it said? It said some newspaper-
man here in Sofia has just sent a story to the Oklahoma
Territory about my spreading trouble, trouble for you
people here!"

There were cries of mystified indignation.

487

Red over Europe

"Yes, it seems I been trying to agitate you, I been
trying to overthrow the Bulgarian government, I been
trying to make propaganda for the Communists here."

"For the Communists?" expostulated Mr. Diploff of
the National Railways. "Why, you couldn't do that, my
chief. That's against the law."

Mr. Patasee bountifully blew away another triple size,
rolling cloud of smoke from his pursed mouth. Then,
suddenly as Zeus the Thunderer, he leaped to his feet
and smashed one fist in the palm of the other hand. His
war whoop scourged the air, leaving two glass eardrops
of the chandelier tinkling. Several guests lost their bal-
ance, falling on their elbows.

"I'm going to wire my lawyer tonight for the name of
that reporter!" proclaimed Mr. Patasee in a terrible
voice.

At carefully arranged intervals Mr. and Mrs. Gradoff
and Eric Wolf left the party. Gradoff, though pale, in-
sisted on being the last to leave, but he did not tell them
he climbed out by a bathroom window.

"You cannot go away from Sofia now," said Gradoff,
when the three were reunited in the parlor of his apart-
ment. "You cannot go to Greece at this time."

"Why not?" demanded Eric.

"Because he would follow you, and you would be all
alone against him. Two are better than one. You are
an American, like Tom Mix, like Richard Dix, like
George O'Brien. You know what to do with the reds. I
know nothing. It is better we face him together."

"I can't stay more than three days," said Eric.

"Stay three days," said Gradoff. "Please stay only
three days."

Nothing happened. Mrs. Gradoff kept the safety chain
on the door and told the cook to watch the garden wall
all the time. During the day it was not so bad, because

488

George Weller

there were usually some soldiers going by in the streets
who could be depended upon to protect the life of a
Bulgarian against any foreigner, even an Osage. But at
night the tension was great. Once Eric looked from the
window of his bedroom into the garden and under the full
moon saw Gradoif practising lasso throws with the clothes-
line.

Friday morning the telephone rang. It was their de-
fensive plan that Mrs. Gradoif answer all messages, tele-
phones, bells and letters.

She gasped. "It is a telephone call from — from Lon-
don— for Mr. Wolf," she said with her hand over the
mouthpiece.

"Not here — went away to Albania — not here now,"
prompted her husband.

"Let me answer it," said Eric, taking the instrument.

"Hello— hello— is this Eric Wolf?" said a reedy but
distinct voice. "Hello — this is the London office calling —
Mr. Traynor wants to know if you are prepared to take
up your job in Vienna again. We've been trying every —
hello? — we've been trying every country in southeastern
Europe to get you. Hello? Hello? Did you get that?
Traynor wants you back in Vienna. What do you want
us to tell him?"

"What's the matter with Bean's work?" asked Eric.
In the bottom of his stomach he was weighing the German-
American crowd in Milwaukee against the smell of the
new leaves on the Ring when it is raining in Vienna.

"Bean has resigned," said the London voice guardedly.
"That's what we hear from the states and that's all we
know. Do you want to take back your job in Vienna?"

"I'll go back tomorrow," said Eric. "How's that?"

"That's all right with us and I presume it's all right
with Mr. Traynor," said the voice without enthusiasm.
"Glad we could find you. . . . Oh, and say, in case Bean
should be gone when you get there, remember this:

489

Red over Europe

Mr. Traynor doesn't want any more red stories from
Europe until further orders.''

"Not even if there's a woman in them?" demurred
Eric.

The man on the other end considered a moment, then
he said: "If there's a woman in them I'd send them by
mail." The operator interrupted and the man in London
hung up without farewell.

There was an accumulation of mail waiting at the
Vienna office. As Eric shovelled it up he picked out the
Sunday newspaper, newest and fattest arrival from New
York. Quickly he found the article: "JOHN PATASEE, THE

OKLAHOMA RED WHO TRIED TO UPSET BULGARIA." There

was a picture of a mean looking little man with his coat
off, his fist raised in harangue above the heads of several
composographed Tyrolese mountaineers. It was signed,
"by Byron Bean"

On the financial page of the Paris Herald he found a
bulletin that Mr. Morton Traynor, the American pub-
lisher, had acquired the salient oil wells of the southern
Osage district. " It is understood that he will soon open
negotiations with Mr. John Patasee, one of the leading
private owners of the district, who is now traveling
abroad."

There was also a telegram, two days old. It came from
New York. It read: "Beginning immediately stories
favoring federalization oil resources will be favorably
received . Traynor. ' '

490

SIMPLICIO

Ignazio Silone

IGNAZIO SILONE, a native of the Abruzzi mountain region
of Italy, has been living in Zurich, Switzerland, where he
has been active in anti-Fascist activities. His first published
short story in the United States appeared in the April 1935
number of Story; it was Journey to Paris, reprinted in
the volume Mr. Aristotle. He is the author of the peasant
novel Fontamara, on which was based the play Bitter Stream
produced by the Theatre Union in New York in 1935.

SIMPLICIO

THE first alarm was given by a washerwoman.
Through the open door of his carpenter's shop,
Simplicio could hear her shouting:

"Quick! Run! Run! Hide! Quick!"

The washerwoman's words, which held no meaning for
Simplicio, were accompanied by gesticulations implying
that he should flee, hide himself, run for his life. Still
shouting at him, the woman disappeared behind a build-
ing in course of construction.

"What's the matter with her?" said Simplicio to him-
self. " Is she crazy ? Can it be the heat's gone to her head ? "

Simplicio had been at work all day long in his carpen-
ter's shop. He had not left the shop for a single moment;
he had not quit his work for a single moment. He had
seen no one, spoken to no one. He had attended strictly
to his own business.

A goatherd appeared shortly after, making the same
crazy gestures as the washerwoman and shouting the same
meaningless words:

"Run! Run! What are you waiting for? For Christ's
sake and the Madonna's, why don't you hide?"

The goatherd seemed very excited, and he too kept on
shouting as he disappeared. It was as if a big storm were
approaching. But the heavens were as bright and calm
as they are at the end of May. Simplicio had worked all
day long in his carpenter's shop. All day long he had at-
tended to his own affairs. He had spent the entire day
in finishing a kneading-trough which had been ordered by

From Mr. Aristotle, copyright 1935, translated from the Italian by Samuel
Putnam, published by Robert M. McBride & Co., New York, by whose per-
mission it is reprinted.

493

S implicio

Rosa, the dye-woman, for her daughter who was about
to be married.

"Can that goatherd be crazy, too?" Simplicio asked
himself. "Can it be that, up there all alone with his
flocks, he's lost his reason?"

He now noticed that the masons and laborers on the
building that was under construction near by had left
off work and were holding whispered consultations. It
couldn't be more than four o'clock in the afternoon. It
wasn't time to stop work. Yet the masons and the la-
borers had left off work, and stood there whispering. One
of the workmen now came running over to Simplicio.

"Is that the signal?" he shouted as he came. "Is it
starting now? Holy Mother of God, why don't you
answer? Is that the signal? Is it starting?"

Simplicio made no response. He had worked all day
in his shop. All day long he had worked on that kneading-
trough for Rosa, the dye-woman. He had attended strictly
to his own business.

"Are those masons out of their wits?" he wondered
now. "Can it be the June sun has gone to their heads?"

He now saw the stone-diggers leaving the quarry and
making for the village. It couldn't be more than four
o'clock in the afternoon. It wasn't yet time to stop work.
But there the quarrymen were, scampering down from
the mountainside, talking and gesticulating with great
animation. In the little provincial road which runs along
the riverside at the foot of the hill, Simplicio could see
groups of peasants on their way to the town. It certainly
was not any later than four o'clock, and it was not time
to stop .work. Yet there were the peasants, hastening
along, urging on with blows and kicks their donkeys,
laden with bags.

It was then that Simplicio began to be scared. He
had worked all day long in his carpenter's shop. He had
minded his own affairs, being concerned with nothing

494

Ignazio Sllone

other than that kneading-trough for Rosa, the dye-woman.
But in the meantime, something undreamed of must
have happened. Something he had not seen. Something
terrible —

It was then he began to be scared.

An elderly mason, surrounded by his fellow masons
and the workmen, as they stood there among the building
material for the dock that was going up near by, now
called out to Simplicio.

"Is that the signal? Does that mean it's starting?
Saints alive, man, why don't you answer!"

"Signal? What signal?" was the question Simplicio
put to himself. He had not left his carpenter's shop for
a moment. All day long, he had not given a thought to
anything but that trough for Rosa, the dye-woman. Why
couldn't they leave him in peace?

The men whom Simplicio had seen coming down from
the stone-quarry a short while before now went past the
shop. They appeared astonished at seeing him there,
going quietly about his business.

"Is it starting?" they shouted at him. "Is it starting
at last? It was about time for it to start!"

It was at this moment that Simplicio beheld, rising
from the center of the town, an enormous column of smoke
and flame. The town hall was on fire! The town hall was
burning! It was then that Simplicio understood what it
was all about. He could see a group of carabineers, with
bayonets fixed, making for his carpenter's shop from the
center of the village. It was then that Simplicio under-
stood what it was all about.

"They are coming to get me!" he said.

He did not take time to close his shop door, nor even
to snatch up his hat and coat. He did not lose an instant,
but ran for the mountain for dear life.

The conflagration was in the middle of New Town,
which was situated at the foot of the hill and inhabited

495

Simplicio

almost exclusively by merchants, land-owners and arti-
sans. On the top of the hill was the Old Town, known as
Purgatory. It was made up of a hundred or more hovels
and stables where only peasants dwelt. About the flaming
municipal building, the inhabitants of New Town were
now swarming like ants, when an ant-hill has been kicked
over. The peasants, on the other hand, were enjoying
the spectacle from every point of vantage that Purgatory
afforded. From down in New Town, those who were in
charge of the work of putting out the fire, would from
time to time shout up and gesticulate to the residents of
the upper town, by way of signifying that they ought to
lend a hand.

"Come down! Come on down!"

But the peasants pretended not to understand.

"What's the matter?" they shouted back. "Fire?
What fire? Where's the fire?"

Now, the New Town residents were a little more thin-
skinned than the Purgatory peasants, and those among
the artisans, merchants, and land-owners who ventured
to draw near the flames speedily drew back again, finding
the atmosphere a little too hot for them. It was for this
reason that the constables and carabineers were urging
those up in Purgatory to come down, but the latter did
not get their meaning. It could now be seen how fierce
and relentless was that hatred which for years had been
piling up between Purgatory and New Town. The former
place was now transformed into a sort of grandstand.
In those spots from which the view was best, the peas-
ants could be seen squatting about on the ground, smoking
their pipes and telling funny stories as they watched the
fire. Round about, the young lads were cutting capers
out of sheer exuberance.

The fire in the town hall had started on the top floor
where the offices of the civilian authorities were.

"Just think," said Donato Frascone, in a half-jesting

496

Ignazio Silone

tone, "of all the birth certificates, marriage certificates,
and death certificates that are going up in smoke down
there! It's terrible, I tell you! Why, it means that the
dead are no longer dead, those that are born have not
yet been born, and those that are married are unmarried — •
it's terrible! It means that we no longer exist!"

The fire by this time had got down to the second floor,
where the office of the bureau of grazing rights was.

"That means," remarked the Ortonese, "that there's
no grass left! There are no mountains any more. All the
records are burned. What are the poor sheep going to
do?"

But it was as the fire reached the first floor, where the
tax offices were, that the peasants' mourning took on a
lyric quality.

"What are we going to do if we can't pay taxes any
more? How's a body to go on living if he doesn't get his
little notice from the assessor at the end of the month?"
And old lady Continenza sobbed and tore at her hair.

"And to think that this very evening I was going down
to pay up my back taxes!" Old Geremia turned his empty
pockets inside out. "Yes, sir, this very evening — and
now, the office is burned! Oh, what have I done that
the Lord should punish me like this?"

Each of them had his say, and their lamentations were
accompanied by the chorus of lads: "Oh, what are we
going to do! What are we going to do!"

The peasants stayed there until late at night, their
eyes on the smoldering town hall. They stayed until the
last rafter had dropped. And then, the show being over,
the lanes of Purgatory were once more deserted.

"Good night! Pleasant dreams!" the peasants said to
one another with an understanding smile on their lips.
There was no need of saying anything more. But Sab-
batino, the frog-catcher, had to have his say: "As a be-
ginning, it wasn't bad." All were agreed on this but felt

497

Simplicio

there was no need of saying so. "As a beginning, it wasn't
bad," Sabbatino, the frog-catcher, repeated. "No, of
course not! Of course not!" the others replied, feeling
that there was no need of all this talk.

"What I mean to say," Sabbatino insisted, "is that a
beginning is one thing, and keeping it up is another."

"That's right! That's right!" the others replied. What
was the use, anyway, of putting it into words?

"Do you think for a minute," the Ortonese asked
Sabbatino, "that Simplicio needs any advice from you?"

Sabbatino dropped to his knees, bent his bearded face
to the ground, and kissed the earth.

"May the Heavenly Father be his guide!" he said.

Simplicio eluded the search of carabineers and peasants
alike. The former had received orders to fire on him, in
case he should be found and should refuse to surrender
or should attempt to escape. The peasants, on the con-
trary, were endeavoring to get into touch with him, in
order to furnish him with food and ammunition.

"If he's started the thing, he'll certainly see it through,"
they assured one another. In many of the mountain
villages of southern Italy the only history that the peas-
ant knows is that having to do with bandits. That is the
only political experience he has had. The ownership of
a small piece of land or a vineyard commonly serves to
sever any bond of solidarity. The wrongs and injustices
inflicted by employers are almost always looked upon as
individual calamities, calamities which the peasant, if he
has a stout heart, must face as an individual. The bandit
tales which each learns at his mother's knee invariably
have to do with the fate of one of hie kind who has been
wrongfully persecuted, and who, by way of "taking jus-
tice into his own hands," has committed some crime or
other. In order to flee arrest, the hero is thereupon con-
strained to take to the mountains. And in order to throw

498

Ignazio Silone

the carabineers off the track, punish the defection of his
false friends, and procure for himself something to eat,
he is thereafter forced to certain other "acts of justice,"
until the total number of crimes chalked up against him
mounts so high that there is no longer hope of a reconcilia-
tion between him and society. Every peasant is aware of
all this, but the thing he never forgets is that initial cause
which spurred the bandit on to "take justice into his own
hands"; and inasmuch as "there was no other way,"
everything that the outlaw afterwards is led to do not
only is not regarded as blameworthy but is even admired
as heroism. And so, inspired by this tradition, the Purga-
tory peasants now began making preparations to aid and
succor Simplicio.

"Before starting out," they said to one another, "Sim-
plicio must have made his calculations. The first act of
justice has been accomplished; the others will follow."

The peasants are acquainted with many stories of
brigands, but what above all aroused their admiration
in this case, was the calm manner in which Simplicio had
kept his revolutionary plans concealed. It was for this rea-
son that the carabineers had always been suspicious of him.

When he was a young man, Simplicio had been an
anarchist; he had let his hair and beard grow, and had
dreamed of the equality of all beings.

"Man is good," he would preach to the peasants; "man
has no need of carabineers."

Simplicio was good, he had no need of carabineers;
but the carabineers had need of him. Carabineers exist
for the purpose of defending institutions, and against
whom would they defend them, if not against the enemies
of institutions? Simplicio accordingly had been placed
upon the list of such enemies; and on the eve of every
patriotic celebration, he was regularly put in jail by way
of avoiding possible conspiracies and disorders. After the

499

Simplicio

celebration was over, he was given his freedom again.
Free institutions had been saved.

"The business of carabineers is to prevent trouble, so
that they won't have to put it down," the marshal in
charge of the carabineers would always explain to Simplicio
on the eve of patriotic events, when he repaired to the
carpenter's shop with a warrant for arrest.

"Man is good," Simplicio would reply; but he did not
venture to add that, in order to be good and remain good,
man had no need of carabineers; for the marshal might
have taken offense at this. In those days the peasants still
could emigrate, still could go to try their luck in Argentine
or Brazil; and for this reason they did not pay very much
attention to Simplicio.

"If it wasn't for the carabineers," they would object to
him, "where would we go for our passports when we want
to leave the country?"

"Man is good," Simplicio still would say, "and has no
need of a passport when he wants to travel."

"But without a passport, they'll put you in jail!" was
the peasants' irrefutable logic.

Simplicio himself would very much have liked to go over-
seas, but he had given up this idea so that he would not be
forced to ask the carabineers for a passport. What is more,
he was the one anarchist of the region, the one avowed
enemy of institutions; and the carabineers, whose business
it is to defend institutions, would not have liked very well
to see him go. He was good, he had no need of carabineers,
but the carabineers had need of him. The result was, he
had stayed on in his native village, always kind and gentle,
always ready to do anyone a favor, always sympathetic,
with advice for each of life's emergencies and with a good
word for all who came his way. Many of the peasants had
taken advantage of him, and had carpenter work done for
which they had not paid. With the approach of age, how-
ever, Simplicio had become a little more prudent.

500

Ignazio Silone

"Man is almost always good," was now as far as he
would go. Or, "Man could be good." Or, more prudently
still: "They say that man once upon a time was good."

Yes, with the approach of age, Simplicio had become a
little more wary; he no longer talked anarchism, nor com-
mitted himself as to the innate goodness of mankind. He
worked from morning to evening in his carpenter's shop
and minded his own business. He had never married, but
looked after his own household needs; and this had left a
certain mild, timid, feminine imprint upon his character.
Nevertheless, by reason of his youthful opinions, he re-
mained a marked man; he was down in the police books as
the dangerous element of the community. Just before each
big patriotic festival the village carabineers would receive
a telegram from Aquila, ordering Simplicio's arrest as a
preventive measure. The marshal would personally at-
tend to this little ceremony, and the courteousness he dis-
played in executing it appeared to grow with the years.

"It's a formality," he would say to Simplicio, "a mere
formality."

"I understand, I understand," Simplicio would reply;
"your duty is your duty."

He would then go to spend, without remonstrance, a few
days behind bars. This happened three or four times a
year, his detention lasting, according to circumstance,
from three to five days. When the celebration was over,
he was set at liberty, and free institutions once again were
saved. Those institutions, in the course of time, came to
be altered; but Simplicio's periodic arrest as a preventive
measure continued. It even happened more frequently
than ever now, since a new government naturally means
new anniversaries to celebrate. The taking of Simplicio
into temporary custody was, it might be said, the sole
echo which reached the village of the patriotic celebrations
in the metropolis.

"There must be big doings in the city," the peasants

Si mplicio

would remark when word ran around that the marshal had
come for Simplicio.

But Simplicio had no complaints to make. "Your duty
is your duty," was all he would say, when shown the
telegram from Aquila. In the jail he was treated with
respect. The jailer's wife would sometimes slip a tomato
into his soup, and he in turn would promise to mend her
chairs for her.

"Man could be good," he would observe on such occa-
sions.

"If I had a daughter, I'd give her to you for a wife,"
the jailer's spouse once said to him in a moment of com-
passion. As it happened, she had no daughter. Simplicio
thought he would catch the ball on the bounce.

"Couldn't you," he ventured to ask, "give me another
tomato?"

The good dame looked at him in amazement.

"Another tomato! Have you any idea what tomatoes
are worth?"

The price of tomatoes had gone up. Everything had
gone up. The peasants could no longer leave the country,
and with the new government, poverty had increased to a
point where it had become utterly unbearable. Wages
were low, land rents were high. The famous Southland
Law, absolving the poverty-stricken small-farmers from
certain taxes, had been abolished.

It was at this time that something happened which was
to have a great influence on Simplicio's life. At Sulmona
there was an uprising of the peasants against the local
authorities. It was put down by force in two or three days,
but the feeling of excitement remained and spread round
about Sulmona, all the way to the villages of Marsica. In
the watercloset of the railway station of Simplicio's village,
there was found a bundle of smuggled leaflets containing
an appeal to the peasants. All efforts to find out where
these leaflets came from were in vain, and it was likewise

502

Ignaz?o Silone

impossible to determine the individual of the locality to
whom they had been sent. The carabineers knew only one
man who had ever taken a hand in politics, and that was
Simplicio. They arrested him.

"Is it some new anniversary?" he asked the marshal.
This time the marshal was not alone but had with him
four carabineers. No, this was once when it wasn't a case
of some new anniversary. Simplicio at the time was busy
making a table for Crescenza Noce.

"I only have a few hours more work on this," he said to
the armed men who stood in front of him. "Just wait till
I finish this table, and I'll go wherever you like."

The marshal, however, was shortspoken on this occasion.

"Grab your coat and a pair of pocket-handkerchiefs
and come along," he said. Simplicio was hand-cuffed and
taken off to Aquila.

This occurrence made a new man of him in the eyes of
all the peasants of Marsica; he became an exalted figure.

"He was just playing the goody-goody," they said when
they spoke of him; "he was just playing possum, and all
the while he was stirring up a revolution at Sulmona."

"But why did he have to begin at Sulmona?" was the
question that Sabbatino, the frog-catcher, put to everyone
he met. "Why couldn't he have started it here?"

"If he started it at Sulmona," the other peasants an-
swered him, "he had his own reasons for it."

"The powder magazine is at Sulmona," was Raffaele
Piunzo's afterthought one day; "every revolution begins
with taking the munitions supply."

They did not keep Simplicio in prison but deported him
to a small island near Tripoli. The poverty of the peas-
ants, meanwhile, increased from day to day, now that the
outlet provided by emigration had been cut off. The
gentry were treating them worse and worse all the time,
and there was no way of getting justice.

" If Simplicio were only here ! "

503

Simpliclo

"That fellow will be back one of these days," the peas-
ants kept saying to themselves.

After a year spent in repairing the tables, windows,
doors, and chairs on the little island to which he had been
deported, Simplicio had been paroled "for good conduct,"
and was sent back to his native village. He got off at the
station, crossed the village and went straight to his shop;
and since it was still daylight, he took off his coat, just as
if he had never been out of the shop, and at once fell to
work finishing Crescenza Noce's table. He was rather pale
and coughed a little but was as calm and gentle as ever in
aspect.

"He hasn't a word to say, not a word," Sabbatino, the
frog-catcher, informed his acquaintance from house to
house. "It's no use to try to talk to him, it's no use to be
getting him into trouble with foolish chatter."

"Did you have a good look at him?" Raffaele Piunzo
went around saying. "Did you notice that way he has of
smiling to himself? He's got something up his sleeve, you
can bank on that!"

Simplicio went back to work. He worked in his shop
from morning to night. He minded his business. He saw
no one. He was sober, mild, and gentle. Under pretext
of asking him for some sticks of wood for the fire, some of
the women folk from time to time would go around to his
shop, in order to tell him what was happening in the town
and the neighboring locality; they told him of the wide-
spread poverty and how insolent the gentry were. It was
no use appealing to the authorities, since those who were
guilty of these injustices had themselves become the ones
in power. What were they to do, then? Simplicio let them
tell him what was on their minds ; he listened with a com-
passionate smile upon his lips but made no reply, although
once or twice his eyes filled with tears; and after that he
would accompany them to the door. It was not only the
peasants without land, but sometimes the small land-

504

Ignazio Silone

holders, or even occasionally a well-to-do farmer who
would come like this, stealthily, to Simplicio.

"There's no use getting him into trouble with a lot of
fool woman's talk!" Sabbatino, the frog-catcher, became
angry on the subject. "He's only biding his time."

Simplicio's tranquillity and apparent indifference merely
served to strengthen this supposition on the part of the
peasants. He worked from morning to night and saw no
one outside his shop. Why should anyone want to lead a
life like that unless he had some hidden purpose? The
carabineers for their part did not let him out of their sight
and made it a point to pass his shop at frequent intervals,
but they saw nothing which might arouse their suspicions.
Several months went by, and when at last the fire broke
out in the town hall, there was no longer any doubt.

"It's Simplicio beginning again!" was the thought that
went through every peasant's mind. "That's his signal!"

The young fellows and the women marveled greatly at
the fact that, a week after the firing of the town hall,
Simplicio had as yet committed no further "act of jus-
tice"; but this was no cause for wonderment to the old
men.

"It's a good method," they would say. "He's now
getting ready his base of operations and his hiding places.
That's the way real bandits always do. There's no need
to be too hasty about it."

And indeed, after about a week, reports began to come
that Simplicio had been seen in this place or that. Along
the road from Luco to Trasacco, he had stopped to ask for
a drink, and a woman had recognized him, despite the fact
that he was disguised in a monk's hood. At Celano, he had
been glimpsed at the entrance of the town dressed as a
beggar. At Lecce, by way of contrast, he had been sighted
in a soldier's uniform. The fact of the matter is, Simplicio
was beginning to be seen just about everywhere at once*

SOS

Simplicio

"He's reconnoitering, that's what he's doing," the old
peasants would shake their heads and say.

These appearances of Simplicio were not always peace-
ful ones; they sometimes left damage in their wake. In the
neighborhood of Ortucchio, one night, he set fire to the
wheat field of a landowner whom the peasants loathed. A
couple of days later he made his way into the shrine of the
Madonna of Venere and carried off all the treasury, in-
cluding the ciborium from the tabernacle. The women
folk were a little put out over this.

"If the Madonna lets herself be robbed, it means that
she wants to be robbed," Sabbatino, the frog-catcher, took
it on himself to explain. "Otherwise, she would have
worked a miracle to protect her treasure."

Another night Simplicio poisoned four cows belonging
to a doctor of Trasacco. The nerve that he displayed won
the peasants' admiration.

"He was only playing the goody-goody; he was playing
possum," they said. It got to the point where the gentry
did not dare leave their houses any more of an evening.
And every day brought them threatening letters of this sort:
"You had better lower your rents, or you'll have Sim-
plicio to deal with." "Fifty per cent interest is disgrace-
ful. Is Simplicio going to have to take a hand?" "The
time has come now for an accounting, you old skinflint."

A dozen carabineers were sent down from Sulmona as
a reenforcement, but Simplicio remained uncaptured. Nor
were the peasants any more successful in their attempt to
establish relations with him. A number of young fellows
would have liked to find him, in order to ask him if he
would consent to take them as his armed followers; but they
were unable to secure a bona fide contact. Among these
were two or three who felt like taking to the mountains as a
means of avoiding a deserved prison sentence for thefts
which they had committed, but others were really spurred
on by a hatred of their employers and the authorities.

506

Ignazio Silone

Simplicio kept on making his appearance in regions far
and wide, but all the efforts of his well-wishers to track him
down proved unavailing.

"Why does he treat us that way?" the village lads de-
manded; "why doesn't he send for us?"

"You can never be too cautious in such matters," their
elders reminded them. "Simplicio knows his history, and
history is clear on the subject: bandits have always been
betrayed by some one of their own followers."

"Does he think we're going to betray him?" asked the
indignant youths. But their elders were firm: "History is
clear on the subject."

The weapons on which the youths might count, in case
Simplicio did send for them, were not many in number.
Fernando Perzica had at his disposition the knives that he
used in sticking pigs in winter time; Peppino Cicerchia
could supply a pistol without any ammunition; Giacinto
Barile and Antonio Lenticchia could each furnish a hunt-
ing rifle, with powder and shot, which they used in hunting
wolves. That was about all.

"But once you take to the mountains, you can always
disarm a constable or two," was Antonio Carrito's pat
observation.

Taking to the mountains, however, without knowing
where Simplicio was to be found, was out of the question.
Mountain life is hard, and the brigand's trade is a difficult
one and not to be thought of without a leader.

"Supposing Simplicio doesn't want us?" said Raifaele
Piunzo.

"The thing to do is to ask him; we've simply got to get
a message to him," Antonio Carrito insisted.

Simplicio's appearances kept up; he was seen by many
here and there, especially at night, but not by any of those
who wanted a word with him, that they might enroll as his
followers.

" It would be better to think about getting some victuals

507

Simplicio

to him," said Sabbatino, the frog-catcher. "If he's out of
victuals, he'll be obliged to come in too close, and the
carabineers will get him."

"But how are we going to do it," said the youths, "if
we don't know where he is?"

"What do you mean, where he is? Do you think a ban-
dit has a house to live in?" replied Sabbatino. "A bandit
never stays two hours in the same spot. He has certain
places that he operates from and visits occasionally, but
he keeps an eye out and changes them from week to week,
depending on what the carabineers are up to. So there's no
use asking 'where is he?' The thing to do is find out those
places that he visits or might visit."

Tales of the past were then recalled, and the oldest in-
habitants were consulted, those who knew the story of
Viola, of Marco Sciarra, and of Sciabolone, the brigand of
Santa Fede. The larger part of the guesses hit upon a
certain grotto which was situated on the road from Pescina
to Pescasseroli. Seeing that Simplicio had paid a visit one
night to the shrine of Our Lady of Venere, it was more
than likely that the famous grotto, which is on the same
highway, was one of his bases of operation. In any event,
all they could do was to try an experiment. Antonio
Carrito volunteered to put it into execution. Leaving
Purgatory one night with a basket of provisions, he set out
along the road to Pescasseroli.

When he came to the place in question, he saw a large
vertical cleft in the side of the mountain. He thereupon
left the wagon-road and began clambering up a small rocky
footpath, which led him to a point at about the center of
the opening, where there was a large pile of flint-stone. This
concealed from the sight of anyone passing along the road
the entrance of a deep cave. It was the famous Brigands'
Cave. There was no one inside, but the burnt branches
lying about showed that someone had been there recently.

Antonio set his basket down at the entrance; it con-

508

Ignazio Silone

tained some corn bread, a few onions, and a little honey,
accompanied by a pencil-scrawled note which said, sim-
ply: "Do you need us?"

Two days later Antonio went back to the cave, to see
what had happened. The bread, the onions, and the
honey had disappeared! Weighted down by a stone was a
piece of paper with these words: "Thanks, but I didn't
care for the onions." This was the first time that Simplicio
had communicated with the peasants of his village. Not a
word as to whether he needed any help or not. The piece
of paper with his message was handed about like a re-
ligious relic. Everyone felt a little hurt by that remark
about the onions.

"Onions!" exclaimed the young fellows. "To think of
our sending onions to a man like Simplicio! To a fellow
who lives up on the mountain and sleeps on the bare
ground — we send onions!"

"Simplicio knows very well that we are not rich," the
women folk answered.

Nevertheless, sou by sou, a few lire were scraped to-
gether, and with them Antonio Carrito bought a salame.
The following night the sausage, with a box of honey and
a long loaf of corn bread, was deposited at the entrance of
the cave, and beside it a note was left, saying: "Please
excuse the onions. But do you need us?" The us was
underlined three times.

Two days again went by, and Antonio returned to in-
vestigate. Once more, the food was gone, and under the
usual stone was found a note: "Couldn't you send me
wheat bread in place of corn bread?"

There was general mortification over this, as over the
preceding communication.

"Corn bread!" said the village lads. "To think of our
sending corn bread to a man like Simplicio!"

"Has Simplicio forgotten how poor we are?" the women
wanted to know.

509

Simplicio

But for all of that, sou by sou, they got together the
money to buy a little white bread and a fresh sausage, and
to it they added another box of honey. Antonio took the
packet to the entrance of the cave, and beside it left the
penciled lines: "When are you coming back to town?"
Upon his return visit, in two days, Antonio found the food
gone, and the answer waiting for him under the stone:
"On St. Louis' Day."

So that was that; on St. Louis' Day, Simplicio would be
back.

This news produced the greatest excitement imaginable
among the peasants.

"And now," remarked Sabbatino, the frog-catcher,
"we've got to settle that business about the wages for the
next harvest. The bosses had better come straight out and
say what they mean to do, and not be waiting till the last
day—"

Harvest-time was, indeed, drawing near, and it was not
as yet known whether the peasants would receive the same
wages as they had the year before, or whether those wages
were to be increased or diminished. The excitement oc-
casioned by the announcement that Simplicio was about
to put in an appearance in the town, led to the feeling that
this was a good time to bring up the question. And so,
on the night of June 2Oth, on the eve of the feast of St.
Louis, Sabbatino and the Ortonese and Donato Frascone
and one or two others proceeded to call on a few of the
landowners, with the object of finding out what the latter
intended paying in the harvest field. They received the
same answer all around.

"This year everything depends on the Corporation."

"We don't fix the wages any more; it's the Corporate
Committee that does that."

"Better go make inquiries of the Corporation."

The peasants did not understand a word of all this.

"What is the Corporation?" they asked.

Ignazio Silone

"Why," replied the owners, "there's been talk of it all
these years, and you mean to say you haven't heard of it?"

This was not a very clear explanation; but the chief
thing was, the peasants were glad to learn that it was not
the bosses who were to fix the harvest scale.

"That's Simplicio's doings!" Sabbatino went about tell-
ing everybody.

This was around Hail Mary time. At one o'clock that
night the word spread that the wages for the harvest had
been posted up, and the peasants at once started making
for the center of the town. On the door of the prefecture,
opposite the carabineers' barracks, and on the door of the
bureau of salt and tobacco, there was a small notice, put
up by the Corporation, which stated that the wages for
the coming harvest, "by common agreement between
peasants, owners, and the authorities, and in the interest
of the national economy," were to be reduced by three
lire. Wherever one of these notices was posted, a group of
peasants gathered, protesting loudly.

"So they are cutting us again, are they? What do they
expect us to do, starve to death?"

"Better let the grain rot in the fields than take another
cut in wages!" others said.

"Talk doesn't get you anywhere," Antonio Carrito
reminded them. "Don't you think it might be better to
wait and hear what Simplicio has to say about it?"

The very mention of Simplicio's name brought a feeling
of calm and trust.

"But I'd like to know what that Corporation is, any-
way," Sabbatino insisted. "And what's the national
economy? What's it got to do with the harvest?"

Accompanied by Geremia, by the Ortonese, by Fras-
cone, and some others, Sabbatino set out to look up one
Peppino Cicerchia, who was known to ha'/e served several
months in the Fascist militia, and who had been expelled
for insubordination.

Simplicio

"Can you tell us what the Corporation or the national
economy is?" was the question they put to him.

"Oh, that's only a new-fangled way of talking," was
Cicerchia's reply.

"What do you mean, a new-fangled way of talking?"
Sabbatino was bent on knowing.

"Why," Cicerchia tried to explain, "you know very
well that there are new ways of saying things. Instead of
saying 'Good-by,' for instance, you can say 'So long/ but
it amounts to the same thing. It's just as if, instead of
saying 'Tighten up your belt,' you was to say, 'Better
take the horse in and give the grass a chance to grow/
The Corporation, you see, is a new word."

This explanation did not satisfy them.

"We know it's a new word," said Donato Frascone,
"but what does it mean?"

"I tell you what," suggested Cicerchia, "let's go see
Niccodemo. Niccodemo's been in the Fascist militia, too;
he was discharged 'for absolute failure to grasp the new
corporative spirit'; so he certainly ought to know what's
what."

They accordingly hunted up Niccodemo.

"I wish," said Cicerchia, "that you would tell these
fellows what the Corporation is."

"The Corporation is the bosses," Niccodemo answered.

"There have always been bosses," said the Ortonese,
"but this Corporation is a new word."

"The Corporation is the bosses," was Niccodemo's curt
rejoinder. "When there's any dirty work to be done, the
bosses don't do it individually any more; individualism is
a thing of the past; nowadays, when there's dirty work, it's
like this: three of the bosses get together; one represents
the peasants, another the Super-Class Authority, and a
third boss represents the bosses, and the three of them are
the Corporation — "

"Then," spoke up Geremia, "it's just like Holy Friday

512

fgnazio Silone

in the Cathedral at Pescina when they're putting on the
Passion Play; one priest is Pilate, another is Caiaphas,
another is Barabbas, one is Christ, and one is the howling
mob; yet they're all five of them priests, and everybody
knows how the story's going to end."

"But isn't there at least one peasant in the Corporation
— one from the militia, anyway?" Sabbatino asked.

"Well," said Niccodemo, "I'll tell you how it was.
When the Corporation met last year, it was winter time,
and so they sent for me. They sent for me to keep the
stove going and to serve the wine while the gentlemen
talked—"

"But what's the national economy?" Sabbatino broke
in on him. Niccodemo racked his brain.

"If I'm not mistaken," he began, "the national economy
must be the demijohn; because when the Corporation met,
in a little room next to the one where the meeting was
held, there was a demijohn of red wine, and on it were the
words CORPORATIVE ECONOMY. Tending the stove the way
I was, I naturally got thirsty oftener than the gentlemen
did, and so I kept going back and forth to the demijohn,
until the first thing I knew it was empty. When the three
gentlemen on the Corporation found this out, there was
one devil of a stink. The one who was hotter under the
collar about it than anybody else was the Super-Class
Authority. He gave me a kick in the belly that knocked
the wind out of me and sent me over into one corner of
the room.

" 'You wretch!' the Super-Class Authority shouted at
me, 'you traitor! The only thing that keeps me from kill-
ing you outright is the fact you are too ignorant to know
what you were doing! You worm of the earth! You miser-
able peasant! So you'd dare to drink up the CORPORATIVE
ECONOMY, would you?'

"The result was, I was discharged from the militia 'for
absolute failure to grasp the new corporative spirit.' "

Simplicio

"That's all the explanation we need!" Sabbatino de-
cided.

Meanwhile, the news that harvest wages were to be cut
was evoking loud protests, even from the ranks of the
Fascist militia, which had been called out by the author-
ities to reenforce the carabineers, in case that Simplicio
should come back to town the next day. No sooner was it
mobilized than the squad was at once drawn up behind the
carabineers' barracks with Loreto Ciccuzzo, a corporal, at
the head. The marshal in charge of the carabineers then
came out to read the men the orders of the day.

"For some weeks past," he began, "a bloodthirsty
bandit has been terrorizing the entire population — "

"Nobody but the bosses!" one of the soldiers, Gauden-
zio del Pinto, interrupted him. The marshal tried to go on.

"A dangerous criminal, a desperado — "

"Why not talk about the harvest wages?" It was
Gaudenzio again.

"That's right! Let's talk about the harvest!" the other
militiamen chimed in.

"If that's the way you feel about it," the marshal re-
plied, "the mobilization orders for this squad are revoked.
You may go home. I shall report to my superiors at once!"

Two hours later three truckloads of carabineers arrived
from Avezzano, to take the place of the militia squad.

From Purgatory the peasants followed the movements
of the carabineers in the new part of the town, about the
barracks, the prefecture, and what once had been the
town hall. They were too excited to go to bed, but stood
about discussing the cut in harvest wages and speculating
as to what would happen when Simplicio came and took
a hand. Numerous clusters were to be seen here and there,
wherever there was a good view of what was going on
below. The largest group of all was seated on the ground
about Sabbatino, the frog-catcher, at a point directly
opposite Simplicio's closed shop. They were discussing

Ignazio Silone

what was to be done the next day, a question as to which
there was some disagreement. They fell silent when some-
one drew attention to a couple of carabineers who were
making their way up to Purgatory.

"What are you doing here at this hour?" the cara-
bineers asked as they came up.

"Tomorrow is a feast day," Rosa, the dye- woman,
replied, "and we're just sitting around here telling stories."

There was a prolonged silence. The peasants were wait-
ing for the carabineers to go away, but the latter showed
no signs of doing so.

"Go ahead and tell that one about the Bandit and the
King's Daughter," Giacinto Barile said to Rosa.

"No bandit stories allowed!" said one of the cara-
bineers.

"Then I," said Geremia, "will tell the one that's called
'Troubles aren't always troubles.' " Inasmuch as the
carabineers made no objection to this, the old fellow
began, as all sat listening intently:

The postman came

and said to the folks:

"A terrible thing

has happened at Rome;

the post-office flag

they've put at half-mast!"

The poor peasant

was not excited,

but the hen in the belfry

rang the bells,

the mouse in the key-hole

whistled a tune,

the ass in the stable

strummed the guitar,

the ox in his stall

played the two-stringed lute,

and the sheep at the fountain

grew a star on their foreheads.

SImplicio

The postman came back
and said to the folks:
"What's the meaning of all
this jubilee?
A terrible thing
has happened at Rome;
the post-office flag
they've put at half-mast!"

But the poor peasant

was unexcited still,

to hear the same story again.

The she-goat on the mountain

played the trumpet,

as the pig kept time

with bagpipe and grunt;

the dogs in the kennel

beat on the drum;

and the porcupine

down in the wheat

laughed to himself:

"That's very neat."

The postman came back

and said to the folks:

"What's the meaning of all

this jubilee?"

And the animals answered

in a chorus:

"A terrible thing

has happened at Rome."

"That will be enough of that!" said one of the cara-
bineers to old Geremia. "What's all this about a 'terrible
thing'?"

"History is history," the old man answered him; "he
who has understanding will understand."

"Tell the story about the true miracle that happened
to St. Bernard," Peppino Cicerchia said to Geremia.

"No discussion of miracles allowed!" a carabineer
warned them.

516

Ignazio Silone

"Well, then," said Donate Frascone, "maybe you
won't mind if I tell the story, 'One and one don't always
make two'?"

"What's it about?" the carabineers asked; for they had
not the faintest idea.

"Here's what it's about," said Frascone:

One, two and three,

the Pope's not a king,

the king's not a Pope,

the bee is not a wasp,

the wasp is not a bee,

the cat is not a rabbit,

the rabbit is not a cat,

the umbrella is not a cane,

the cane is not an umbrella,

the worker is not boss,

the boss is not a worker.

One, two and three,

the Pope's been made king,

but the king's not a pope,

the bee stings like the wasp,

but the wasp gives no honey like the bee,

the cat often plays the rabbit,

but the rabbit never plays the cat,

an umbrella may serve as a cane,

but a cane cannot serve as an umbrella,

the worker can be a boss,

but the boss cannot be a worker.

One and one do not always make two,

but one and two are always three.

"That will do!" shouted the carabineers. "What's
the meaning of all this?"

"History is history," Frascone replied; "he who has
understanding will understand."

"Do you mind if I tell the one about the Three Friars
who went a-hunting?" asked old Sabina.

"What's it about?"

"Listen," said Sabina; and there was a hush:

Simplicio

There were three friars,

one naked and two stripped,

who went a-hunting without a gun

and knocked on a house without a door:

"We are three friars,

one naked and two stripped,

we are a-hunting without a gun,

and we have caught three rabbits;

two got away and the other escaped."

"Come in, come in,"

from behind the door

answered the one

who was not there,

"to cook your rabbits,

there's a burnt-out fire,

and here are three pots,

one broken and two of them smashed."

They all burst into a laugh, which tended to make the
carabineers more suspicious than ever, since they had not
been able to make head or tail of it all.

"Clear out of here! Get out!" they now began shouting.
"You're making light of the law and of religion. If you
don't go home at once, every last one of you, we'll send
down below for help!"

"That's fair enough," said Sabbatino approvingly;
"let's go to bed. The sweetest stories are those that are
never told."

And they all got to their feet and went off home.

On the morning of St. Louis' Day all the Purgatory
peasants were out in the street and on their way to church.
It was the first time they had ever shown so heartfelt a
devotion to this particular saint. For it should be stated
that St. Louis Gonzaga is the patron saint of the young
and, more especially, of the chaste; and the peasants
accordingly have always been inclined to make light of
him. This turnout on the part of the inhabitants of the
upper town had been anticipated by the authorities, who
had taken strict measures to prevent any trouble. On

518

Ignazio Silone

every corner in New Town carabineers were standing
sentry. The peasants, however, pretended not to notice
this, but acted just as if it were a daily and normal occur-
rence. Liberato Boccella, the butcher, in front of his shop,
was the only one to make a fool of himself, as if he did not
know what it was all about.

"You old fox, you," he called to Sabbatino, as he caught
sight of the frog-catcher among the other churchward-
bound peasants, "you don't mean to tell me you've got
religion on St. Louis' Day?"

Sabbatino, to tell the truth, did not look any too devout.
He had on the rags that he wore to work, he had not
shaved, and there were circles under his eyes, as if he had
not slept all night, but he had an answer for the butcher:

"Better late than never, you old robber, you!"

With Sabbatino were Antonio Carrito, Niccodemo,
Peppino Cicerchia, and some of the other lads. They were
going quietly to church, as if they knew perfectly well what
they were up to. The butcher turned to a group of cara-
bineers and started orating:

"There ought to be a law against all these devotions to
St. Louis, if the government is as interested as it pretends
to be in having children — "

Some of the carabineers laughed at this; for St. Louis'
name was often used as a popular synonym for that vice
which is called after Onan, the second son of Judah, who,
according to the Bible, refusing Tamar, his brother's
widow, spilled his seed on the ground, which brought down
on him Jehovah's wrath and led to his death. St. Louis
Gonzaga, when he was alive, not only had nothing to do
with his sisters-in-law, for he had none, but kept away
from women in general and died a virgin; and for this,
being more fortunate than Onan, he was made a saint, and
is held up by the Church as a model for the young.

When the services began, the New Town church was
unusually packed. Upon the great altar was St. Louis'

S impli cio

image, which appeared bent upon lending confirmation to
what the people commonly said, the Saint being repre-
sented as a tall, skinny youth with deep eye-sockets and
with his eyes constantly fixed on the ground. In the first
rows, up against the railing of the great altar, were the
so-called " Little Brothers of St. Louis," lads between the
ages of eight and fourteen, who had recently made their
first communion, or who were getting ready to make it.
Next came a few rows of the Daughters of Mary, young
girls of the same age as the boys, or a trifle older. In be-
hind them was a throng of kneeling women, while at the
back of the church, near the door, and about the Holy
Water fonts, were the men folk, a few stone-masons, and
the rest, peasants. Sabbatino with his following was
standing near the baptismal fount. The sound of the bell
which marked the beginning of the Mass was drowned out
by the buzz of voices and almost unnoticed. In the
churches of southern Italy, while services are going on, the
faithful — and especially the women — are in the habit of
chattering as if they were at market; and it would have
been a strange thing indeed if, on this particular day, when
so great an event was looked forward to, the women had
seen fit to remain silent. None uttered his name, but all
spoke of him; some told of having seen him in a dream,
while others had seen him in real life the day before, not
far from the town.

The only group to remain silent was the one about
Sabbatino. He must have organized something in the
nature of a liaison service; for every so often a young lad
would come into the church and come running up to him,
would whisper something in his ear, and then would leave.
The messages could not have been very important, for
Sabbatino stuck to his post, motionless and unperturbed.
Once only was there an alarm. That was when Donato
Frascone's son, who had been on guard up in the belfry,
came bursting in.

520

Ignazio Silone

"A man disguised as a monk has just come into town!"

The frog-catcher had Carrito and Niccodemo go out at
once to make sure; and in the meantime, Peppino Cicerchia
silently made the rounds of the church, going to all the
corners where the men from Purgatory were stationed.

"Be ready!" was the whispered word he gave them.

The stir that followed Cicerchia's announcement served
to make plain in what manner it was the residents of
Purgatory meant to be ready; everything they had been
able to find at home which had a sharp point or was ca-
pable of dealing a heavy blow — old knives, hedgebills,
sickles, razors, hammers, mallets — they had brought with
them to church, concealing these weapons under their
clothes. Upon Cicerchia's announcement, each one now
brought out whatever it was he had with him, or at least
saw to it that he had it within arm's reach. The Mass
went on, but no one, not even the lay-sisters, was any
longer paying the least bit of attention, and the women's
voices rose to a shrill pitch. Carrito and Niccodemo now
came back into the church.

"He's a real monk; it's the preacher from Luco."

Cicerchia once more made the rounds of the church.

"It's a false alarm," he said.

It was, as a matter of fact, the preacher of the day, who
at this moment came in and made straight for the sacristy.
Inasmuch as the Mass had already got along as far as the
Gospel, he reappeared at once in his surplice and went up
into the pulpit for the sermon. He certainly did not look
the least bit like Simplicio. He was a real Capuchin, and a
tall, lean one with a white beard. Once in the pulpit, he
did not at once begin preaching, but stood for a long while
gazing about him from right to left, in astonishment at the
unexpected size of the congregation. He was smiling and
almost weeping. It was as if he could not believe his eyes.
This pause on the part of the preacher impressed every-
body. A woman who had been kneeling directly under the

521

Simplicio

pulpit now rose and was on the point of screaming:
"That's who it is!" when the Capuchin suddenly began.

Addressing himself to the peasants, he started in by
confessing that the sermon he had prepared was one for
children, while on the other hand his heart was rejoiced
at seeing that, though there were so few children present,
there were so very many adults.

"This is a great day in Heaven," the preacher contin-
ued, raising his voice and his arms at one and the same
time. "I can see from your eyes what it is that brings you
to St. Louis and to purity; it is out of disgust for the sins
of the flesh that you have come here. The flesh — that is
the enemy that we have to fight!"

At this moment, Donato Frascone's son came back
from the belfry.

"A man is coming to town from the direction of the
cemetery!" he told Sabbatino. The latter at once dis-
patched Carrito and Niccodemo to find out if it was the
one; and in the interim, Cicerchia slowly circled the church
for a third time, by way of giving the signal to all those
from Purgatory: "Be ready!"

"Heretofore," the Capuchin was droning on, "you have
yielded to the Devil's temptings, you have yielded to all
the temptations of the flesh, you have wallowed in the sin
of gluttony, the sin of impurity and of lust; and now, listen
to what St. Louis has to say to you — "

The peasants, following Cicerchia's warning signal, had
again produced or placed within arm's reach, those weap-
ons which they had concealed in coat or trousers. Carrito
and Niccodemo were slow in returning, and Sabbatino
grew impatient.

"The pleasures of the body are a deception and a snare.
Stop and think, what have you left to show for all these pleas-
ures in the past? What is left you of all the succulent meals
and banquets at which you have sat, what of all those luxu-
rious garments by which your hearts set so great a store ?— "

522

Ignazio Silone

Carrito and Niccodemo came in.

"It's a beggar from Celano," they announced; "he's
come here to beg during the procession."

Cicerchia went around again saying: "It's a false
alarm!"

"The flesh — the flesh is our enemy!" The Capuchin
was concluding his sermon.

"Right you are," was Sabbatino's comment, "the
butcher sure wants enough for his."

The sermon over, the Mass went on. When the Mass
was finished, St. Louis' image was brought down from the
altar, the main door of the church was opened, and the
procession started. First of all came a young lad bearing
the Cross; after him, by twos, came the "Little Brothers
of St. Louis," then the Daughters of Mary, and after them
the image of St. Louis, borne on the shoulders of four
young fellows; behind the Saint came the priest with the
sacristan, and a crowd of men and women brought up the
rear. As the procession emerged into the square, it could
be seen that the carabineers were there in force. The
"Little Brothers," with their childish voices, were singing:

Thy glance bend on me,
Louis on high;
One of the angel choir to be,
Here at thy feet I lie.

And from the tail end of the procession, bellowing hor-
ribly, the peasants responded :

Let thy soul's light, O Louis,
Shine down on me.

The Daughters of Mary, in their turn, wailed:

A fragrant wreath we bring thee,
The Lily and the Rose,
Whose beauty doth disclose
Thy purity.

5*3

Sim.plicio

And once again from the end of the procession, came the
bovine rumble:

Let thy contempt of the world,
O Louis, come to me.

The procession sprawled down the streets of New Town
and struck off in the direction of Purgatory, without any-
thing untoward happening. From the elevation afforded
by Purgatory, squads of carabineers could be seen, scour-
ing the countryside; they were obviously on the lookout
for Simplicio before he could enter the town. But there
were to be seen also a number of strapping lads, whose
duty it probably was to pass the word along to Sabbatino.
For it was to be expected that, even in case he should be
arrested, Simplicio would put up a resistance while they
were engaged in taking him down the street to the bar-
racks, and this would give the peasants time to come in on
it. The important thing was to be there at the right time.

The procession made its way through Purgatory and
started back down to New Town. The priest was chanting
the litany of the saints, and after the name of each saint,
the women would respond with a "Pray for us." The men,
restless and impatient, were scanning the landscape round
about, but could see nothing which would indicate Sim-
plicio's presence. Slowly, the procession came back to
New Town and entered the square. At this moment
Donato Frascone's son, who had remained on watch in the
belfry, began gesticulating violently. At one end of the
square was the church, and to the right of it was the cara-
bineers' barracks. That was all the peasants, who were
bringing up the end of the procession, were able to see.
But Frascone's boy was still waving his arms like a crazy
man.

" Where? Where is he? Which direction?" they all
shouted at once.

The lad replied by pointing toward the square; but in

524

Ignazio Silone

the square there was only the procession and a few cara-
bineers. At the other end of the square was the church,
its main door open to let the procession come in again, and
to the right was the barracks. No sign of Simplicio. Yet
Frascone's boy kept on waving his arms.

The cross-bearer, who led the procession, and the "Little
Brothers" were already in the church, when out of the
main street, which ran along directly beneath the belfry,
there appeared a man riding a small ass and dressed like a
beggar. Instantly the procession broke up.

"Simplicio! Simplicio! He's here! He's here!" cried
the peasants from the far end of the square, bringing out
their hidden weapons from their trousers and their coats,
and brandishing them in the air. The Daughters of Mary
ran into the church as fast as their legs would carry them,
like hens in a hail storm. St. Louis' image, which had been
abandoned by the four young fellows who had borne it
on their shoulders, was now swaying perilously and ended
by flopping over on one side, its plaster head striking
against Liberate Boccella's butcher shop sign, as the priest
and lay-sisters screamed: "Sacrilege! Sacrilege!"

The man on the ass had been by this time surrounded
by carabineers, and he and his ass along with him were
dragged into the barracks a few feet away. Instead of
running at once to Simplicio's rescue, Sabbatino and his
lads made a dive for St. Louis' image, which in falling had
lost its head and the Saint's lily; they proceeded to strip
off the robe and from the papier-mache body they ex-
tracted four large pistols and a hunting rifle. At sight of
these weapons the priest and lay-sisters, frightened out of
their wits, ran into the church and closed the door behind
them. In the square there were now left only the men from
Purgatory, who were clustered about Sabbatino; there
were something like a hundred of them in all.

"If anyone is afraid, let him get out of here!" cried
Sabbatino, turning to the other peasants; but no one

Simplicio

stirred. Then Sabbatino, hunting rifle in hand, made for
the barracks, with his followers a few steps behind him.
He went all the way up to the door and knocked the butt
of his rifle against it.

"Bring that man out!" he called.

The door immediately opened and out came the man
with the ass. It was not Simplicio. It was a blind man.
It was the blind man of Trasacco. He had come to beg
during the procession.

"Alms," he said, throwing back his tattered hood, "for
the love of St. Louis, give me alms!"

"Back to Purgatory!" Sabbatino ordered his men.
"Back to Purgatory, before the other carabineers get
here!"

The peasants left New Town on the run and sought
refuge in the cluster of huts and stables that went to make
up Purgatory. They had abandoned all hope of Simplicio's
coming for that day. While Simplicio had given them his
word that he would come, he quite possibly had not fore-
seen such a show of force on the part of the authorities;
and so, even supposing that he had approached the town,
it was possible that he had gone away without trying to
enter. It was not Simplicio's coming that the peasants
were thinking of now, but of a possible attack on Purga-
tory by the carabineers.

"After that torn-foolishness that Sabbatino got us into
down there in the square, with weapons and everything,
they'll certainly be here!" said the Ortonese.

"If only Simplicio were here," said Fernando Perzica,
"we would know how to set about defending ourselves;
but without Simplicio, who is there who knows what's
to be done?"

Without Simplicio, no one knew. The majority of the
peasants were angry with Sabbatino.

"And Simplicio, when he hears of it," said Geremia,
"will be angrier than anybody else. Bandits do everything

526

Ignazio Silone

by acting quick and taking the other fellow by surprise;
they've always done that."

"To go to jail just when the harvest's beginning
wouldn't be so sweet," reflected Donato Frascone.

Niccodemo carried all this back to Sabbatino, and the
latter was very downcast about it. The afternoon went
by and evening came, and still the carabineers had
launched no attack on Purgatory. Each one had quickly
seen to hiding away his improvised weapons; and each
kept telling himself that the carabineers would not come
after all, while in case they did come, everyone must have
a good story ready to prove he had not been in the square.

"To go to jail in winter, that's not so bad; but in the
month of June, just as the harvest is about to begin, that's
terrible!" the peasants kept saying to one another.

The next day was a work day; and with such thoughts
as these, everybody went to bed early; but this was more
of an excuse to get away from the others than anything
else. It was by no means impossible that the carabineers
would come during the night, and the mere thought of
such a thing was sufficient to keep everyone awake. The
roosters crowed three times, and the carabineers had not
come. At daybreak, Purgatory was deserted within a
shorter space of time than usual. One by one, and being
careful not to go through New Town, the peasants went
out into the country. For most of the men from Purga-
tory, this was one work day that was all too short. Sab-
batino had gone to sprinkle disinfectant in a little vineyard
which he had behind the cemetery. He had no sooner filled
his pump, than four carabineers stood before him.

"Please come with us," they said; "the marshal wants
to talk to you."

Sabbatino offered no resistance. In the street they were
overtaken by a truck into which the Ortonese, Nicco-
demo, Donato Frascone and his son, Peppino Cicerchia
and others already had been put. They had all been

527

Simplicio

picked up, one by one, on their way to work. Sabbatino
had to climb up on the truck, and they were all driven
away to the barracks. As soon as the door had closed on
them, the truck was off again to pick up the rest.

The next day the carabineers succeeded in discovering
Simplicio's hiding place. He was found dead near a shep-
herd's hut at a point near the Forca Caruso Pass in a valley
between Mt. Treppa and Mt. Ventrino. He had died
there on the night of St. Louis' Day in the company of
only a few shepherds of the vicinity. As soon as he had
breathed his last, a shepherd had gone down to Collarmele
to notify the carabineers. The man told how Simplicio
had arrived in the neighborhood of Forca Caruso at the
end of May, on St. Augustine's Day, and had stayed on
until the day of his death, on the evening of St. Louis'
Day. He had a high fever at the time he arrived and was
coughing much; and after two or three days he had begun
to spit blood and was too weak to stand on his feet.

When the news of Simplicio's death spread abroad, a
large number of carabineers came to Forca Caruso from
Pescina, Collarmele and Castelvecchio Subequo, to take
possession of the much feared bandit's remains and to ver-
ify the story of the shepherd who had notified the authori-
ties, and who had immediately been placed under arrest.

Simplicio was lying on the ground with his arms and legs
sprawled out, like one who has dropped exhausted after
having made his way through a forest of bramble bushes.
His shirt and trousers were in shreds; and through the
tatters there could be seen, upon both arms and legs, the
red and blue marks left by dogs' teeth. His head was as
devoid of flesh as that of a skeleton and was a frightful
object to behold. His beard had grown, and was matted
with dirt and blood. His mouth was half open, as if he
were suffering from a desperate thirst. The eyelids were
not entirely closed over the huge, empty sockets; it was as

528

Ignazio Silone

if he were still keeping an eye on what was going on about
him and waiting, perhaps, for the moment to escape.

The authorities came and proceeded to divide up the
work between them. Four carabineers with rifles on their
shoulders were stationed about the corpse, as if to say,
"If you try to get away, we'll shoot!" But Simplicio had
no thought of trying to get away. In the presence of the
body the officials opened an inquest concerned with Sim-
plicio's residence at Forca Caruso. One by one, the shep-
herds, all of whom had been taken into custody, came up
for questioning. Each of them told the same story. The
principal witness was Carmine Massaro, the shepherd at
whose place Simplicio had died.

"On the evening of St. Augustine's Day," his story ran,
" I heard the loud barking of dogs down in the valley and
a man's cries. When I got there, I found a man in his shirt
sleeves, surrounded by large dogs that were leaping on
him from all sides and which had bitten him on the legs
and arms — "

"By the way, when is St. Augustine's Day?" inquired a
sergeant of carabineers.

"The day after the Feast of the Holy Trinity," replied
Carmine Massaro.

"And when is Trinity Day?"

"Trinity Day is Trinity Day," stoutly asserted Car-
mine, marveling that an educated person could ask such a
question.

With the aid of a country constable who was present, it
was possible to establish the fact that Simplicio had ar-
rived at Forca Caruso some two days after the firing of
the town hall.

"He asked me to let him sleep in my hut for the night,"
Carmine went on. "His teeth were chattering with fever,
and so I let him come into my hut."

"He didn't tell you why it was he had taken to the
mountains?"

529

Simplicio

"I asked him: ' What have you done that you're running
away? Have you robbed somebody? Did you kill some-
one?' He answered: 'I was making a kneading-trough for
Rosa, the dye-woman. Her daughter is going to be
married, and how can she marry without that trough?'
I didn't bother him any more about it, because I thought
he would soon be gone. He didn't get a wink of sleep, but
coughed all night long."

"And it was the day after that he left?" the officials
asked.

"The next day his fever was higher still; he was like a
bag of straw that someone had set fire to, and I did not
know what to do with the man; so I called in some of the
other shepherds near here. He understood that I didn't
want to get into trouble on his account. 'Let me stay here
until tomorrow,' he said, 'and I'll leave in the morning.'
I gave him some bread to eat, and he started to cry; he
took my hand and kissed it and said, 'Man is good after
all!' I talked it over with the other shepherds. 'He's cer-
tainly not a thief,' one of them said, 'he doesn't look as if
he had sense enough for that.' — 'And he's not a murderer,
either,' said another, 'he looks like a good-hearted fellow.'
— 'Maybe he's murdered his wife,' somebody said. That
seemed the most likely of all; so I went up to him and said:
'Tell me the truth now; did you murder your wife?' He
shook his head. 'I never had a wife,' he said."

"And the day after he left?" asked the sergeant of
carabineers.

"The next day," continued Carmine, "he was worse
than ever; but seeing that he had promised me he would
leave, he got on his feet, thanked me, said good-by, and
started to walk away. He hadn't gone more than ten feet
when he sank down. I stood watching him for a minute
or so, waiting to see if he would get up; but he kept on
coughing and wasn't able to get on his feet. I went over to
him, and I saw that he was spitting blood. 'Just let me

530

Ignazio Silone

stay here alongside your hut,' he said to me; 'if I'm not
inside your hut, you're not responsible, for the mountain
doesn't belong to you, it belongs to everybody.' I helped
him to get up and took him over into the shade beside my
hut. 'Do whatever you like,' I told him; 'if you want to
stay, all right; and if you want to leave, all right; the
mountain belongs to everybody.' He then said to me:
'When I'm well again and back in my shop, the first thing
I must do is finish that kneading-trough for Rosa, the dye-
woman, because her daughter is going to be married, and
she can't be married without it; but after that, I'll make
you a table, or a couple of chairs, or a window-frame, or a
chest, or anything you need.' With this understanding I
kept on giving him a little bread every day, and every
evening I would give him a glass of milk. But one day I
happened to think of something; and I said to him, 'Sup-
posing you don't get well?' He knew what I meant and
thought it over for a minute. 'Haven't you a little some-
thing here that I could do? Not having any wife, I know
how to cook, for one thing.' After that, I gave him some
old clothes to mend; and when I saw that he did it very
well, I told the other shepherds about it, and they began
sending in their old clothes, and would pay him with
bread or milk. All this time he had a high fever; but this
didn't keep him from working, and he was in good spirits,
you might say. Once in a while he would call me over,
take my hand, and say, 'You know, man could be good!'
It was at times like this that I tried to get the truth out of
him. 'You don't need to be afraid to tell me,' I would say;
'did you kill your wife?' But he would shake his head."

"Well, then," the sergeant of carabineers interrupted
him, "as I understand it, you are testifying that, from
St. Augustine's Day on, this man never left the neighbor-
hood of your hut?"

Carmine Massaro dropped to the ground, kissed the
earth, then rose again.

Simplicio

"Not once! "he said.

"And how do you explain, then," the officer went on,
"the fact that he was seen after that at Luco, at Trassacco,
at Venere, and at Celano, and that yesterday, they were
expecting him in his own village?"

"This man/' the shepherd maintained, "never once left
here after St. Augustine's Day."

"Why didn't you notify the authorities at once?" he
was asked. "Didn't you realize the risk you were running
by affording shelter to a dangerous anarchist?"

"I didn't shelter anybody," was Carmine's answer.
"All the time he was here, he stayed right where you see
him now, outside my hut like that. He's on a rock of the
mountain, and the mountain belongs to everybody, car-
penters as well as anybody else."

The other shepherds there present bore out Carmine
Massaro's testimony. But for all of that, Carmine was
placed under arrest and had to go to Pescina with the
officers. Four carabineers were left on the spot, rifles on
their shoulders, stationed about Simplicio's corpse. They
seemed to be saying: " If you try to get away, we'll shoot!"

But Simplicio had made his get-away.

THE MOUNTAIN TAVERN

by
Liam 0* Flaherty

LIAM O'FLAHERTY, author of The Mountain Tavern,
Spring Sowing, The Tent, and many other short stories,
and of the novels The Informer, The Assassin, etc., was born
in the Aran Islands in 1897. As a youth he was a volunteer
in the Irish Republican Army; during the Great War he
joined the British Army; in France a Scotsman converted
him to Socialism. He attributes the awakening of his con-
scious mind to the experience during the War of contact
with all sorts of workingmen, including German prisoners.
After the War, becoming bored with Irish Republicanism, he
spent several roving years at sea, in the United States, Canada,
and elsewhere (recorded in the autobiographical Two Years),
returning to Ireland about 1920 to fight the Black and Tans
(British troops}. By that time he was a Communist. He
attributes much of the success of his subsequent literary
career to timely encouragement and criticism from Edward
Garnett.

THE MOUNTAIN TAVERN

SNOW was falling. The bare, flat, fenceless road had
long since disappeared. Now the white snow fell
continuously on virgin land, all level, all white, all
silent, between the surrounding dim peaks of the moun-
tains. Through the falling snow, on every side, squat
humps were visible. They were the mountain peaks.
And between them, the moorland was as smooth as a
ploughed field. And as silent, oh, as silent as an empty
church. Here, the very particles of the air entered the
lungs seemingly as big as pebbles and with the sweetness
of ripe fruit. An outstretched hand could almost feel the
air and the silence. There was absolutely nothing, nothing
at all, but falling flakes of white snow, undeflected, falling
silently on fallen snow.

Up above was the sky and God perhaps, though it was
hard to believe it; hard to believe that there was anything
in the whole universe but a flat white stretch of virgin
land between squat mountain peaks and a ceaseless
shower of falling snow-flakes.

There came the smell of human breathing from the
east. Then three figures appeared suddenly, dark, al-
though they were covered with snow. They appeared
silently, one by one, stooping forward. The leading man
carried his overcoat like a shawl about his head, with a
rifle, butt upwards, slung on his right shoulder and two
cloth ammunition belts slung across his body. He wore
black top boots. His grim young eyes gazed wearily into
the falling snow and his boots, scarcely lifted, raked the
smooth earth, scattering the fallen snow-flakes.

Reprinted from The Mountain Tavern and Other Stories, by permission of the
author and the American publishers, Harcourt, Brace & Co.

535

The Mountain Tavern

The second man wore a belted leather coat, of which
one arm hung loose. With the other hand he gripped his
chest and staggered forward, with sagging, doddering
head. A pistol, pouched in a loose belt, swung back and
forth with his gait. There was blood on his coat, on his
hand and congealed on his black leggings, along which
the melting snow ran in a muddy stream. There was a
forlorn look in his eyes, but his teeth were set. Sometimes
he bared them and drew in a deep breath with a hissing
sound.

The third man walked erect. He wore no overcoat and
his head was bare. His hair curled and among the curls
the snow lay in little rows like some statue in winter. He
had a proud, fearless face, bronzed, showing no emotion
nor weariness. Now and again, he shook his great body
and the snow fell with a rustling sound oif his clothes and
off the heavy pack he carried. He also had two rifles
wrapped in a cape under his arm; and in his right hand he
carried a small wooden box that hung from a leather
strap.

They walked in each other's tracks slowly. Rapidly the
falling snow filled up the imprints of their feet. And when
they passed there was silence again.

The man in front halted and raised his eyes to look
ahead. The second man staggered against him, groaned
with pain and gripped the other about the body with his
loose hand to steady himself. The third man put the
wooden box on the ground and shifted his pack.

"Where are we now?" he said.

His voice rang out, hollow, in the stillness and several
puffs of hot air, the words, jerked out, like steam from a
starting engine.

"Can't say," muttered the man in front. "Steady,
Commandant. We can't be far now. We're on the road
anyway. It should be there in front. Can't see, though.
It's in a hollow. That's why."

536

Liam O'Flaherty

"What's in a hollow, Jack?" muttered the wounded
man. "Let me lie down here. It's bleeding again."

"Hold on, Commandant," said the man in front.
"We'll be at the Mountain Tavern in half a minute.
Christ!"

"Put him on my back," said the big man. "You carry
the stuff."

"Never mind. I'll walk," said the wounded man. "I'll
get there all right. Any sign of them?"

They peered into the falling snow behind them. There
was utter silence. The ghostly white shower made no
sound. A falling curtain.

"Lead on then," said the big man. "Lean on me,
Commandant."

They moved on. The wounded man was groaning now
and his feet began to drag. Shortly he began to rave in a
low voice. Then they halted again. Without speaking,
the big man hoisted his comrade, crosswise, on his shoul-
ders. The other man carried the kit. They moved on again.

The peak in front became larger. It was no longer a
formless mass. Gradually, through the curtain of snow, it
seemed to move towards them and upwards. The air
became still more thin. As from the summit of a towering
cliff, the atmosphere in front became hollow; and soon,
through the haze of snow, they caught a glimpse of the
distant plains, between two mountain peaks. There
below it lay, like the bottom of a sea, in silence. The
mountain sides sank down into it, becoming darker; for
it did not snow down there. There was something, after
all, other than the snow. But the snowless, downland
earth looked dour and unapproachable.

"It must be here," the leading man said again. "Why
can't we see it? It's just under the shelter of that moun-
tain. There is a little clump of pine trees and a barn with a
red roof. Sure I often had a drink in it. Where the name of
God is it, anyway?"

537

The Mountain Tavern

"Go on. Stop talking," said the curly-headed man.

"Can't you be easy?" muttered the leading man, mov-
ing ahead and peering into the snow that made his eyelids
blink and blink. "Supposing this is the wrong road, after
all. They say people go round and round in the snow.
Sure ye could see it from the other end, four miles away in
clear weather, two storey high and a slate roof with the
sun. shining on it. It's facing this way too, right on the
top of the hill, with a black board, 'Licensed to Sell.'
Man called Galligan owns it. I'd swear by the Cross of
Christ we must be up on it."

"Hurry on," snapped the curly man. "There's a gurgle
in his throat. Jesus! His blood is going down my neck.
Why can't you hurry on, blast it?"

"Hey, what place is that?" cried the leading man, in a
frightened voice. "D'ye see a ruin?"

They halted. A moment ago there had been nothing in
front but a curtain of falling snow, beyond which, as in a
child's sick dream, the darkening emptiness of the snow-
less lowland approached, tumbling like a scudding black
cloud. Now a crazy blue heap appeared quite close. Sud-
denly it heaved up out of the snow. It was a ruined house.
There was a smell from it too. From its base irregular
tufts of smoke curled up spasmodically; dying almost as
soon as they appeared and then appearing again.

The two men watched it. There was no emotion in their
faces. They just looked, as if without interest. It was too
strange. The Mountain Tavern was a smoking ruin.

"It's gone west," murmured the leading man.

"Eh?" shouted the curly man. "Gone did ye say?"

"Aye. Burned to the ground. See?"

"Well?"

"God knows. We're up the pole."

Suddenly the curly man uttered a cry of rage and
staggered forward under his load. The other man opened
his mouth wide, drew in an enormous breath and dropped

538

Liam O'Flaherty

his head wearily on his chest. Trailing his rifle in the
snow behind him, he reeled forward, shaking his head
from side to side, with his under lip trembling. Then he
began to sing foolishly under his breath. There were
people around the ruined house. And as the two men,
with their dying comrade, came into view, quite close,
these people stopped and gaped at them. There was a
woman in front of the house, on the road, sitting on an
upturned barrel. She was a thin woman with a long
pointed nose and thin black hair that hung in disorder on
her thin neck, with hairpins sticking in it. She had a long
overcoat buttoned over her dress and a man's overcoat
about her shoulders. She held a hat with red feathers on
it in her right hand, by the rim. Two children, wrapped in
queer clothes, stood beside her, clinging to her, a boy and a
girl. They also were thin and they had pointed noses
like their mother. One man was pulling something out of a
window of the ruined house. Another man, within the
window, had his head stuck out. He had been handing out
something. Another man was in the act of putting a tin
trunk on a cart, to which a horse was harnessed, to the
right of the house. All looked, gaping, at the newcomers.

"God save all here," said the curly man, halting near
the woman.

Nobody replied. The other man came up and staggered
towards the woman, who was sitting on the upturned
barrel. The two children, silent with fear, darted around
their mother, away from the man. They clutched at her,
muttering something inaudibly.

"Is that you, Mrs. Galligan?"

"It is then," said the woman in a stupid, cold voice.
"And who might you be?"

"We're Republican soldiers," said the curly man. "I
have a dying man here."

He lowered the wounded man gently to the ground.
Nobody spoke or moved. The snow fell steadily.

539

The Mountain Tavern

" Mummy, mummy," cried one of the children, "there's
blood on him. Oh! mummy."

The two children began to howl. The dying man began
to throw his hands about and mutter something. A great
rush of blood flowed from him.

"In the name of the Lord God of Heaven," yelled the
curly man, "are ye savages not to move a foot? Eh? Can't
ye go for a doctor? Is there nothing in the house?"

He stooped over the dying man and clutching him in his
arms, he cried hoarsely:

"Easy now, Commandant. I'm beside ye. Give us a
hand with him, Jack. We'll fix the bandage."

The two of them, almost in a state of delirium, began to
fumble with the dying man. The children wept. The
dying man suddenly cried out:

"Stand fast. Stand fast boys. Stand. . . ."

Then he made a violent effort to sit up. He opened his
mouth and did not close it again.

The woman looked on dazed, with her forehead wrinkled
and her lips set tight. The three men who had been doing
something among the ruins began to come up slowly. They
also appeared dazed, terrified.

"He's gone," murmured the curly man, sitting erect
on his knees. "God have mercy on him."

He laid the corpse flat on the ground. The blood still
flowed out. The other soldier took off his hat and then,
just as he was going to cross himself, he burst into tears.
The three men came close and looked on. Then they
sheepishly took off their hats.

"Is he dead?" said one of them.

The curly man sat back on his heels.

"He's dead," he said. "The curse o' God on this
country."

"And what did he say happened?"

"Ambush back there. Our column got wiped out.
Haven't ye got anything in the house?"

540

Liam O'Flaherty

• The woman laughed shrilly. The children stopped cry-
ing.

"Is there nothing in the house, ye daylight robber?" she
cried. "Look at it, curse ye. It's a black ruin. Go in.
Take what ye can find, ye robber."

"Robbers!" cried the soldier who had been weeping.
"Come on, Curly. Stand by me. I'm no robber. God!
Give me a drink. Something to eat. Christ! I'm dyin'."

He got to his feet and took a pace forward like a drunken
man. The curly-headed soldier caught him.

"Keep yer hair on, Jack," he said.

"Look at what ye've done," cried the woman. "Ye've
blown up the house over me head. Ye've left me homeless
and penniless with yer war. Oh! God, why don't ye drop
down the dome of Heaven on me?"

"Sure we didn't blow up yer house," cried the curly
soldier. "An' we lookin' for shelter after trampin' the
mountains since morning. Woman, ye might respect the
dead that died for ye."

The woman spat and hissed at him.

"Let them die. They didn't die for me," she said.
"Amn't I ruined and wrecked for three long years with
yer fightin', goin' back and forth, lootin' and turnin' the
honest traveller from my door? For three long years have
I kept open house for all of ye and now yer turnin' on one
another like dogs after a bitch."

"None o' that now," cried the hysterical soldier, trying
to raise his rifle.

"Hold on, man," cried one of the other men. "She has
cause. She has cause."

He grew excited and waved his hands and addressed his
own comrades instead of addressing the soldiers.

"The Republicans came to this house this morning,"
he cried. " So Mr. Galligan told me an' he goin' down the
road for McGilligan's motor. The Republicans came, he
said. And then . . . then the Free Staters came on top

The Mountain Tavern

of them and the firing began. Women and children out,
they said, under a white flag. So Galligan told me. 'They
damn near shot me,' says he to me, 'harbourin' Irregulars
under the new act.' Shot at sight, or what's worse, they
take ye away on the cars, God knows where. Found in a
ditch. None of us, God blast my soul if there is a word of a
lie in what I am sayin', none of us here have a hand or
part in anything. Three miles I came up in the snow when
Mr. Galligan told me. Says he to me, 'I'll take herself and
the kids to aunt Julia's in McGilligan's motor.'"

"Where did they go?" said the curly soldier.

"I was comin' to that," said the man, spitting in the
snow and turning towards the woman. "It's with a bomb
they did it, Galligan said to me. Something must have
fallen in the fire. They stuck it out, he said. There were
six men inside. Not a man came out without a wound.
So he said. There were two dead. On a door they took
'em away. They took 'em all off in the cars. And they
were goin' to take Mr. Galligan too. There you are now.
May the Blessed Virgin look down on here. An' many's
a man '11 go thirsty from this day over the mountain
road."

"Aye," said the woman. "For twenty years in that
house, since my father moved from the village, after
buyin' it from Johnny Reilly."

"Twenty years," she said again.

"Can't ye give us something to eat?" cried the hysteri-
cal man, trying to break loose from the curly soldier, who
still held him.

"There's nothing here/' muttered a man, "until
Mr. Galligan comes in the motor. He should be well on
the way now."

"They were all taken," said the curly soldier.

"All taken," said the three men, all together.

"Sit down, Jack," said the curly soldier.

He pulled his comrade down with him on to the snow.

542

Liam O'Flaherty

He dropped his head on his chest. The others looked at the
soldiers sitting in the snow. The others had a curious,
malign look in their eyes. They looked at the dazed, ex-
hausted soldiers and at the corpse with a curious apathy.
They looked with hatred. There was no pity in their eyes.
They looked steadily without speech or movement, with
the serene cruelty of children watching an insect being
tortured. They looked patiently, as if calmly watching a
monster in its death agony.

The curly-headed soldier suddenly seemed to realize
that they were watching him. For he raised his head and
peered at them shrewdly through the falling snow. There
was utter silence everywhere, except the munching sound
made by the horse's jaws as he chewed hay. The snow
fell, fell now, in the fading light, mournfully, blotting out
the sins of the world.

The soldier's face, that had until then shown neither
fear nor weariness, suddenly filled with despair. His lips
bulged out. His eyes almost closed. His forehead gathered
together and he opened his nostrils wide.

"I'm done," he said. "It's no use. Say, men. Send
word that we're here. Let them take us. I'm tired fightin'.
It's no use."

No one spoke or stirred. A sound approached. Strange
to say, no one paid attention to the sound. And even
when a military motor lorry appeared at the brow of the
road, nobody moved or spoke. There were Free State
soldiers on the lorry. They had their rifles pointed. They
drew near slowly. Then, with a rush, they dismounted and
came running up.

The two Republican soldiers put up their hands, but
they did not rise to their feet.

"Robbers," screamed the woman. "I hate ye all.
Robbers."

Her husband was there with them.

"Mary, we're to go in the lorry," he said to her. They're

543

The Mountain Tavern

goin' to look after us they said. Fr. Considine went to the
barracks."

"The bloody robbers," she muttered, getting off the
barrel.

"Who's this?" the officer said, roughly handling the
corpse.

He raised the head of the corpse.

"Ha!" he said. "So we got him at last. Eh? Heave
him into the lorry, boys. Hurry up. Chuck 'em all in."

They took away the corpse and the prisoners. There
was a big dark spot where the corpse had lain. Snow began
to fall on the dark spot.

They took away everybody, including the horse and
cart. Everybody went away, down the steep mountain
road, into the dark lowland country, where no snow was
falling. All was silent again on the flat top of the moun-
tain.

There was nothing in the whole universe again but the
black ruin and the black spot where the corpse had lain.
Night fell and snow fell, fell like soft soothing white
flower petals on the black ruin and on the black spot where
the corpse had lain.

544

NIGHTPIECE WITH FIGURES

by
Frank O'Connor

FRANK O'CONNOR, author of Guests of the Nation and
another volume of short stories, Bones of Contention, was
born in Cork, Ireland, in 1903, and began his career with
productions of Ibsen and Chekhov in his native city.

NIGHTPIECE WITH FIGURES

PRELUDED by one short squeak of its hinges, a
door opens slowly and quietly into a dark and empty
barn.

Framed in the doorway is the glow of an autumn night,
figured with a faint tracery of starlight. It is evident that
the barn is pitched high above some valley because nothing
obscures the lower portion of the doorway but the shadow
of heaped straw. At last, and only after a whispered con-
versation outside, the upper portion too is filled, this time
by a man's figure seen in dim silhouette. He stumbles
headlong into the barn, his feet catching in and rustling
the dry straw; and now the bright oblong becomes the
setting for a shadow show in which a second, third, and
fourth figure take part. Somewhere very near a cow moos,
and hooves clatter with a light thud. The first man trip-
ping in the darkness utters an oath, and flings himself
wearily on to a heap of straw in one corner. The whispered
conversation outside continues, but more animatedly;
then a light flares up and the face of a young man, dark,
sardonic, and reckless is seen, bent for a moment above
the rosy vessel of his cupped hands. He smokes, shading
the glow of the cigarette as he does so.

"What is it, Peter?" the first man whispers from his
corner.

"Nothing, nothing. Do you want to smoke?"

"Not now — why?"

"We mustn't smoke inside because of the straw."

"Oh, is that all!"

A second man comes and sits beside the first, and they

From Guests of the Nation, by Frank O'Connor. Copyright 1931, published by
The Macmillan Company, New York, and reprinted with their permission.

547

Nightpiece with Figures

converse under their breath with subdued chuckles. Still
another voice is heard outside, also in a whisper, but
gradually rising as the speaker gives rein to his excitement.

"Believe you me, comrade, that man have us all taped.
Twiced I seen him outside the gate here after dark and
never was there rhyme nor raison for his presence. I said
nothing but I thought the more. Then I got the first
threatening letter I was telling you about signed 'Black
Hand Gang' in red ink — pretending it was blood! — and
three days later comes another signed 'I. R. A.' Mind you,
I had no proof it was himself that wrote them, but I
followed my natural reasonings and seduced the fact.
'So-ho! my esteemed friend,' says I, 'this is how you carry
on. But I have no cause to be afraid of the Irish Republi-
can Army. . . .' So I sent him a threatening letter
signed 'O. C.' letting him know pretty plain that he was
being watched too, and since that day he never darkened
this gate of ours . . . never! Now that's strange, isn't
it, comrade?"

"Yes," yawns the man who is smoking, "ye-e-e-s, that's
strange. Good God, how tired I am!"

"Naturally, naturally. So what I say is: You send him a
letter on printed paper, paper with I. R. A. printed on the
top and see what effect that will have. Say 'You are being
closely observed,' or words to that effect; 'a trusty friend
of ours has constantly noted your movements and re-
ported them to the proper quarter.' You see, I've thought
it out, and if you leave me wan sheet of official paper I'll
guarantee to give him many a sleepless night."

They are interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps.
The young men sit up and listen tensely, but the one who
has been speaking reassures them with a backward wave
of his hand. Meanwhile, the slow footsteps come nearer;
they are the noisy clatter of loose footwear. The young
man Peter, who has been smoking, tops the cigarette
between his fingers and stands inside the door. A faint

548

Frank O'Connor

yellow light begins to stream around the doorway, and
as it is swung backward and forward it projects a gradually
widening circle of visibility over the loose cobbles among
which the rain is still lodged from yesterday; while, with
each jolt given to the lantern, the young men hear a loud,
rhythmical sigh, a sigh that expresses habit rather than
necessity. Then a figure stands framed in the doorway,
carrying in one hand a lighted lantern and in the other a
basket. The young man who is standing there, takes off
his hat and says politely, "Good night, Sister," and the
two men in the corner bend forward until their faces are
revealed by the lantern, smiling and respectful, and do
likewise.

The nun — for it is a nun — is dressed all in white. She
is an old woman with bright, crustlike, apple-red cheeks,
and her skirts are now drawn up about her knees. Every-
thing she does is done slowly, with the pronounced em-
phasis of old age, as at this moment when she stands look-
ing in, the lantern held a foot or less before her, her little
blue eyes screwed up, each inside a score of wrinkles, and
her breath coming in dry, wheezy, asthmatic pants.

" Dia bhur mbeatha, a dhaoine maithe" she says after a
moment and the Gaelic salutation that means "God be
your life" is followed by a quaint gust of antique mirth.

Still chuckling she lays down her basket inside the
door, raises herself slowly with yet another sigh, and
turns to the man who has been speaking.

"Two of the loveliest calves you ever seen, Dan," she
says. "Two little jewels, praise be to you, God! So now
that old caubogue, Jer Callaghan, won't be putting the
milk of the cow we bought from him on the Department
sheet."

"I was telling our young friends what a grand farm we
had here, Sister," he says.

"Teh! Teh! Teh! . . . Nothing for fifty miles around
to equal it. Nothing. . . ."

549

Nightpiece with Figures

She looks at the young men, and in the half-light which
the lantern casts up on her round, red, toothless, laughing
face there is an extravagance of pride and joy. Her voice
as she continues startles them by its masculine resonance.
"I don't know what they'll do without me at all at all
when the Lord God calls me home! I don't indeed know
what they'll do without me. I say to Reverend Mother
when she comes round to Galilee — that's what we calls
our end of the building, Galilee — I say to her, 'Ach, wait
till I'm growing purty daisies in the ploteen beyond, and
you'll see how fond of me ye were — then you'll see!'"

She is chuckling again, but continues in a lower tone
and more tenderly.

"Ach, sure, I do be only taking a rise out of her, boys.
They're all fond of me though I speaks saucy enough to
them at times, the creatures — that's when things go agin
me. But then we must be saying something, hey?"

"We're all fond of you, Sister," Dan the farm labourer
says unctuously, and then dodges out of the way of her
hand which she raises at him in mock indignation.

"Ach, go 'way, y'ould hypocrite and you're nothing
else!" She turns on the young men once more, pointing a
bony forefinger at the basket. "There's bread and mate
for ye there, boys, and if ye want anything else ye've only
to ask for it. And ye've my prayers as well, so that's mate
for body and soul. . . . Ye night-walking blackguards!"

She is off again into her deep, merry, asthmatic chuckle.
As it subsides into a prolonged fit of coughing she raises the
lantern to the handsome reckless face of the young man
standing beside the door. He is clearly the leader of the
trio.

"What's your name?"

" Peter Mulcahy, Sister."

"There's none of ye there I know?"

"No, Sister."

"None of ye was here before?"

550

Frank O'Connor

"No, Sister."

"I hope ye'll come again, God bless ye! I'm Sister
Alophonsus, and though I likes me little joke I'm a good-
natured old woman, so I am. And I've a great gradh for
anyone that lifts his hand for Holy Ireland. My father
was a friend of Bryan Dillon. Did you ever hear tell of
Bryan Dillon, young man?"

" I did, Sister. He was the Fenian."

"So he was, the Fenian. Brienie Dill we called him.
My father — the Heavens be his bed — was a great friend
of his. Many's the night they talked powder and shot
until the break of day. Brienie Dill was a little hunchback,
but the neatest little hunchback you ever seen. I remem-
ber well the day he was left out of gaol, though I was
only a slip of a girl then. There was stones flying that day
in the Barrack Sthream I can tell you. . . . And my
father was one of the men that buried the pikes in the
Quakers' graveyard. Did you know there was pikes buried
there, young man?"

"No, Sister."

"There was then. Pikes buried in the Quakers' grave-
yard. And 'God send,' says Brienie Dill, 'God in Heaven
send they rise before the Quakers do!'"

They all laugh at this. She laughs with them, and
shaken by her gusty mirth the lantern rocks to right and
left in her hand. Suddenly the men start at the sound of
light, quick footsteps, followed immediately by the
rustling of a dress against the wall of the barn. In a
moment a second woman's figure is upon them. The light
just catches the dainty forehead and the rim of starched
cloth beneath her veil. The old nun, who has heard noth-
ing, has just raised her apron to her eyes to wipe away
the slow tears of laughter that fill them when her arm is
caught from behind by the newcomer.

"Don't be afraid, Sister!" a young voice whispers good-
humouredly. "It's only me."

55'

Nightpiece with Figures

There is something grotesque about the way in which
Sister Alphonsus proceeds to assure herself of the young
nun's identity. She lifts the lantern until it is shining full
into the other's face, and before the young nun in laughing
protest has forced it aside, the men have received a picture
of her that impresses itself forever on their memories.
Unlike the farm sister she is dressed in black, and is
obviously a choir nun. Her face is unusually broad at the
jaw, but this instead of making her features appear harsh
makes them appear curiously tender. Her face is almost
colourless, her nose short; her eyes are jet black under
long black lashes that give them a dreamy look; but over
all her features is a strange expression which is not at all
dreamy or tender, but anxious, abrupt and painfully,
sensitively, wide awake. Yet she is very girlish, slim and
sprightly; and her appearance as she stands in the doorway
suggests to the three hunted men a visionary, enchanted
youth, that wakes a sort of pang within them, a pang of
desire and loss. She is carrying some rugs on her arm and
hands them to the other nun; then with one hand on the
jamb of the door in an attitude that more than suggests
flight, she looks in.

"I must rush back, Sister," she whispers hastily. "Good
night, boys, and God bless you!"

"Good night, Sister," they reply, and Dan, standing in
the background hat in hand, chimes in with a respectful
"Goodnight."

"Nobody there that I know?" she asks, delaying, her
dark eyes puckered up in an attempt to pierce the shadows.
"You are all from the city?"

"Yes, Sister."

"How have the city fellows gone? What about Dan
Lahy? Jo Godwin?"

"Free State Army."

"And Denny, Michael Denny?"

"The same."

552

Frank O'Connor

"God forgive them! Anyone else of that crowd gone
over?"

"All but two."

"They used to stay out here in the old days — you knew
that?"

"Have you heard about Sean Clery ?"

A sudden bitterness has crept into the voice that
speaks from the corner of the barn, a bitterness that
communicates itself immediately to the other men, and
dramatises the instant in their minds as well as in the
mind of the young nun, so that her reply when it comes
brims the cup of emotion for all.

"My sister told me. Poor Sean — God have mercy on
him!"

"God save us from our own!" the bitter voice corrects
her quietly. "Taken out the road and shot to pieces like a
mad dog! Did you know him, Sister?"

"A little — oh, yes I did; of course I knew him when he
was a boy. . . . They gave him a dreadful end. . . ."

"It's a cruel, cruel thing, this fighting!" the old nun
puts in loudly and vehemently. "A cruel, silly thing!
They must be wicked men to do a deed like that. Ah,
if they were here now Sister Alophonsus would give them
a bit of her mind, so she would!"

"Be quiet, Sister!" the other says fearfully. "You talk
too loud you know."

Sister Alphonsus sighs.

"Ach, sure they don't mind how loud I talk. They
hears me talking always to the cows."

"And do you talk to the cows, Sister?" the young man
called Peter asks, as though to change the conversation.

"Of course I do, talk to them. Cows are foolish beasts —
they're foolisher than pigs, cows are, and you'd get no
good of them at all if you didn't talk sensibly to them and
tell them what you want."

There is a heavy silence broken only by the stirring of

553

Nightpiece with Figures

beasts in a nearby byre, and something in the silence sug-
gests that the young nun is suffering deeply. After a little
she breaks the stillness that has already grown too oppres-
sive for all but the old woman immersed in her angry
maternal dreams.

"And the people?"

"Indifferent," says Peter hardily.

""Against us," says the bitter voice from the darkness.

"Just as it is with us here. In the old days we were all
united — we knew that the boys were sleeping in the out-
houses; we sent them out food and medals and scapulars;
before we went to bed each night we said a prayer for
them. Now there's no one left to pray for you but old
Sister Alphonsus and myself."

"No one, no one!" chimes in Sister Alphonsus. "'Tis
true for you, alanna, they all reneged. But Sister Alophon-
sus, the ould Fenian, didn't renege. She's as true to her
counthry now as ever she was."

"If you were out with us for a day or two you'd see it
all," the voice from the darkness continues. "Where is the
sovereign Irish people we used to hear so much about a
year or two ago? Sorry, Sister, we haven't any heroes left,
but we can always find you a few informers." A revolver
clacks open in the darkness and the voice continues half-
humorously, "Holy Ireland! Holy Ireland, how are you?"

"Oh, chuck it! Chuck it for Heaven's sake!" the young
man called Peter says irritably.

"Or A, a Dhe! Och, a Dhe!" Sister Alphonsus sighs,
turning away.

"Oh, informers, hadn't we always our share of them?"
the young nun asks quickly. "But never mind what
happens to us, never mind the people, never mind the
informers! Ireland will outlive them all."

There is a sudden throb of male passion in the voice, a
sudden bursting out of emotions that have been too long
suppressed.

554

Frank O'Connor

"Ireland?" the young man in the corner asks cynically.

"Yes. Ireland. We haven't been the first and we
won't be the last."

Dan, the old farmhand, weary of the conversation that
goes on so far above his head, moves away on tiptoe over
the cobbles, downhill, and watching his retreating figure
sink down against the autumnal sky she shivers slightly.

"What are your names?" she asks suddenly, and her
voice has lost its overtone of passion. The three men tell
her their names shyly, one after another.

"Michael . . . Peter . . . Liam," she repeats, letting
each name sink into her memory. "I'll remember your
names, and pray that you'll come safely out of it all — and
be happy," she adds as an afterthought. "And you'll pray
for me, won't you? Sister Josephine is my name."

"And Sister Alophonsus! Don't forget old Sister
Alophonsus!" the old woman says warningly.

"Good night, boys."

"Good night, Sister."

"Good night, Peter," she says with a quick, dainty
movement of her head to the young man standing by the
door; a gesture that seems unerringly to separate him from
the others and predict for him some experience richer than
theirs — then, as silently and swiftly as she had come, the
young nun goes.

Sister Alphonsus, sighing with the same antique ve-
hemence, hangs the lantern on a hook from the low roof
of the barn.

"The light of Heaven to our souls on the last day!"
she mumbles earnestly. "... There's your rugs. . . .
The child is supposed to be nursing old Mother Agatha.
She must have slipped out when she was asleep and got the
rugs on the sly. . . . Hot blood! Hot blood! . . . She's
not happy. . . . She's too hasty. I tell her not to take
things to heart so, but she do, she do! Hot blood! . . .
Why should she mind what they say to her? I've put up

555

Nightpiece with Figures

with them now these forty year. Forty years on the
fifteenth of February, boys, if the good God lets me live to
see the day."

Sighing still she bids them good night in her soft West
Munster Gaelic and goes, latching the door noisily behind
her. The lantern barely illumines the little barn and the
three figures stretched upon the straw. They eat, ex-
changing an occasional word that does not express at all
what is in their minds. Then Peter quenches the lamp and
everything is dark and silent but for the stirring of beasts
in a nearby byre. But neither the silence, nor the fragrance
of the straw on which they lie, nor the food they have
taken brings sleep to them — not for a long time.

They are all happy as though some wonderful thing had
happened to them, but what the wonderful thing is they
could not say, and with their happiness is mixed a mel-
ancholy as strange and perturbing, as though life itself
and all the modes of life were inadequate. It is not a bitter
melancholy like the melancholy of defeat, and in the
morning, when they take to the country roads again, it
will have passed.

But the memory of the young nun will not pass so
lightly from their minds.

556

MAY-DAY CELEBRATION

by
T. O. Beachcroft

T. O. BEACHCROFT has had stories in The London Mer-
cury, Criterion, The Adelphi, and a number of other English
magazines^ and has also appeared in one or two newspapers.
A Young Man in a Hurry and You Must Break Out
Sometimes are the titles of two volumes of stories recently
published by Boriswood. Mr. Beachcroft is (1936) thirty-
three years old.

MAY-DAY CELEBRATION

IT would be about now they would be coming,
Mabel thought, and her heart beat somewhat faster.
Thomas's face was all about her, wherever she turned;
changing, changing from the boy with black hair and vio-
lent ways to the elderly man with the patient look; the
waiting look; and the eyes deeper and deeper set with
something in them of failure, and something in them of
sticking to it.

Now she saw the red and white cheeks he used to have
in his teens; now the grey face with heavy lines, and the
stubble turning grey, and the shaggy eyebrows — and his
eyes, which looked tired.

She heard the band now in the distance — the marchers
were coming into the gardens. The crowd grew more dense
every moment, and tremors of excitement shuddered
through it, like gusts of wind in high corn. Mabel was
carried sideways against her will over towards the plat-
forms and the banners. A dense crowd was waiting there
for the marchers and the speakers.

There were two platforms under the trees at the corner
of the Gardens. Round them the red banners were
stretched. Overhead clouds were racing in a stormy sky,
and the branches threshing and weaving in the wind.

Mabel found herself carried in the crowd into the arms
of an old friend. The two women greeted each other.

"It's a good muster," said Mabel. "The numbers are
very good."

"Who's going to speak? Is your husband speaking?"

Mabel shook her head.

Reprinted from The Criterion, London, July 1935, by permission of Eric S.
Pinker and Adrienne Morrison, Inc., representatives of Mr. Beachcroft.

559

May-Day Celebration

"He's going to start it off," she said. "He's taking
things a bit easy. This fellow Hardy's going to speak."

The crowd was massed solid round the platforms now,
and policemen's helmets seemed to float everywhere
among the heads. And beyond the crowd she could see
the heads and shoulders of mounted policemen gliding
about. Mabel knew there were almost as many policemen
as there were demonstrators and marchers. There always
were at a big meeting.

There came a wavering cheer, taken up uncertainly here
and there: and the marchers began to file past the plat-
forms. On each side of them marched a rank of policemen.
Mabel saw first the bobbies' red faces, purple and red with
the full blood of health — and their red fleshy necks and
their upright carriage; each man of them carrying his
twelve and fourteen stone like a boy athlete. She saw beef
as they went by: and roasting fires. She saw steaks sizzling
in grills and frying-pans. She saw gravy, and crusty chunks
of bread and butter and foaming pints of beer and stout.

Then she saw the marchers; and she was watching pale,
ill faces grey and yellowish: she saw the dragging feet and
ragged clothes. Here and there a man squared his shoul-
ders and stuck his jaw out. In every face she saw sadness
and old despair: she saw the drawn lines that she had seen
so often, and the patient, stern look of the men who were
brave. She saw rain-soaked street corners, and men lean-
ing motionless against street posts with the rain drifting
over the cobblestones. The word hunger transfixed her like
a spear, a pain that ached in her own body. Hunger
marchers, she thought — men who marched under the
banner of Hunger. They were hungry: and they marched,
because there was nothing else for them to do.

Leading a section, her Thomas passed, looking stead-
fastly ahead. She pushed her way with purpose now to-
wards the platforms. Thomas mounted the platform and
held up his hand for silence. A hush fell.

560

T. O. Beachcroft

For a moment or two he looked about him at the march-
ers. What were his feelings? Mabel knew he was not
thinking of himself, nor of her, nor of anything but of
them. As he waited and looked from one side to the other
a low mutter of recognition began to arise; it was a rough
growl of friendship that never rose to a cheer: something
more friendly than a cheer. Thomas's grave deeply lined
face looked round on the crowd, and he held up a strong
square hand.

"Comrades," said Thomas, with slow Lancashire em-
phasis, "you know me well. You know something of what
I have done for you in these thirty years. I wish it were
more," he suddenly cried, "by God I wish it were more."

A sudden silence spread now.

"I'm not come here to speak for myself," Thomas went
on more calmly. "I want to present to you Mark Hardy.
He has been to Russia. Once he talked with Lenin himself.
He is going to speak of our plans for the coming year."

Hardy stood up. He was a man of about thirty-five —
over six feet. His face was thin and handsome, with deep
set eyes. His hair was black and untidy. He wore a black
coat and trousers and a red shirt open at the throat.

Before speaking he suddenly flung off his coat — and held
his two arms towards the crowd. The murmur of talk
round the platform died away. He began to speak at once
swiftly and in loud, clear tones that carried far and com-
pelled the attention.

"Friends," he said, "comrades — fellow workers. Dur-
ing the last five years we have passed through a century of
experience in our long struggle: events have moved: and
we have made a tremendous advance towards the inevi-
table downfall of capitalist misrule, and the building up of
the workers' united and world-wide front.

"In this five years we have seen every capitalist country
sucked far down in the economic maelstrom. We have
seen their foundations splitting and cracking. We have

561

May-Day Celebration

seen the feverish and insane efforts of Nazi and Fascist
reactionaries in their despairing effort to shore them up."

Mabel's mind began to wander: now she had seen the
marchers and heard Thomas speak, she began to edge
away towards the back of the crowd.

Presently a burst of applause called her mind back to the
speaker. Hardy was saying:

"We are asked this year to celebrate King George's
Jubilee. You know as well as I do that all this Empire
hullabaloo in the lickspittle press is propaganda: cold
blooded propaganda, aimed to divert peoples' eyes from
the sickening state of present affairs.

"What have we in truth to celebrate? First that after
twenty-five years of the present reign we accept that
millions of men in every capitalist country continue in
permanent unemployment. A glorious achievement in-
deed! Millions of workers condemned to a standard of life
that would be despised by primitive savages. Secondly,
we celebrate that since 1926, Trade Unions have been
placed in a weaker position than they have occupied since
the days of Castlereagh and the Six Acts. Another great
capitalist victory! Thirdly, that England continues to
exploit by bloodshed, force and cruelty the Asiatic na-
tions. Fourthly, that insane quarrels over the illgotten
Imperialist gains among the nations lead us to the very
brink of another horrible war, to which the workers will
once again be driven: a war which brings to the workers
nothing but torture, degradation, horror. And the next
war will carry every fiendish device of slaying and torture
into the workers' own homes among their women and
children."

Hardy poured all this out in a torrent of clear and un-
hesitating speech. Suddenly he paused and looked round.
Then he went on with slow measured emphasis:

"Stop it: stop it before it is too late. Remember Inver-
gordon. Think of the power of the massed will of the

562

T. O. Beachcroft

people, the same needs, the same enemies in every coun-
try. There is no hope for you in nationalism. . . ."

While he was speaking the sky darkened: clouds and
gusty rain came spinning through the air. The trees
swayed, and men tightened their collars round their
throats.

" Let's go," said Mabel to Beth. "Let's get back. I'd
like to have some tea ready when Thomas comes in. He'll
need some warming up."

They slowly edged their way out of the crowd. When
they reached its distant scattered fringe, they turned
round and looked back. The outer groups of people were
talking together: many were breaking off and going away
as the rain came on. From here the voice of Hardy could
still be faintly heard.

"This form of state will go: be assured of it: war will
go "_

Nearer in round the platform the crowd pressed silent,
unmoving. Mabel looked back at the platform, and saw
Hardy using his arms as he spoke, though his voice no
longer reached her: and she saw Thomas sitting beside
him: and the crowd packed round them.

The platform seemed like a heart or core of life, sending
its own pulse through the silent, waiting crowd that
pressed round to drain life from it. Her mind became filled
with the image: she saw it as a brazier of coals in the dark,
and men pressing round it, with the light gleaming on
their hands and faces and clothes: she saw it as the pay
office at the mills when she was a girl, with scores of men
struggling round to draw their money. She saw it as a
multitude of flowing, changing pictures, with light break-
ing through the clouds. She saw it as a stone sending silent
ripples across the surface of a pond.

Both women were silent as the 'bus took them away
from the parks and shopping streets to the grime-covered
parts of the town beyond the two railway stations, where

563

May-Day Celebration

there were factories and warehouses and poor men's
homes.

Mabel led the way through the dark arches which car-
ried one of the stations above the streets and houses. They
came out into a street of small houses, which lay for ever
under the shadow of the enormous viaduct. Their walls
were crusted with sooty deposit, so thick that it fell away
at the touch of a hand. The air was filled with smoke,
white, grey and brown. And the little houses shook to the
unending clamour of the trains overhead.

Mabel led the way up a bare boarded passage and un-
carpeted stairs: the walls of the passage were thick with
railway grime. She had two rooms. When they got inside,
Beth looked round at the linoleum, worn and polished, and
at the bareness of everything. She was used to rooms in
which beds and tables and upholstered chairs jostled
against each other.

"We've got another room here," said Mabel. "This is
only the sitting-room."

She hung her mackintosh and hat on the door: she
stooped down and put a penny in the gas meter and lit a
small gas ring for the kettle. They settled themselves to
talk. They sat with their knees apart and their hands
resting in the outspread laps. Mabel and Beth had led
hard lives; but time had brought their bodies a roundness
which gave a placid dignity to all they said and did.

"It's a grubby place, this," Mabel said. She began to
put out cups and plates. "I hope you'll overlook my not
spreading a cloth: it'd only be black by the end of tea.
The blacks get in even with the windows shut."

As she spoke a long goods train rumbled past, filling the
room with clanking.

"I don't like living in Railway Street," she went on.
"It ain't exactly my idea of a country cottage with nice
roses to smell. But Thomas has got to find a place for his
little printing press. It's what they call a platten. We can

564

T. O. Beachcroft

put it down in the basement on a stone floor here. It's not
every street they'd let you have a printing press."

"Does he print the Worker's Clarion on it?" said Beth.

"No; it wouldn't take that," said Mabel. "That's got
much too big an affair — which is all to the good. But they
want him to issue a lot of small pamphlets all the time."

She opened a cupboard door and showed, instead of cups
and saucers, piles of papers and pamphlets. A cascade of
papers came sliding out on the floor: they began to fall
from the shelves, manuscripts, printed sheets, blank
paper, all confused together.

"What do you think of that for a larder?" said Mabel.

Beth shook her head.

"Well," she said, after a long silence, "you would have
him."

Mabel pushed the papers back into the cupboard, moved
another pile from a wooden chair, and sat down.

"Don't think I meant that for a complaint against
Thomas, or the way we live," she said. "You're right. I
would have him — and perhaps my people were doing right
in trying to stop me. I was only nineteen. But I've never
lived to regret it. I was quite right, Beth, young as I was.
There are some things the young ones know. He's a good
husband and a good man: and I say that after forty years
of married life. What more can a woman say than that?
How many can say that much?"

Beth nodded.

"Forty years, is it? We're getting old. I can remember
it all so clear, too: as if it was only last year. It seems
funny."

They both fell to thinking of other days and times:
far off scenes, when they were young slim girls in white
muslin who ran with flying feet; who were caught by the
waist on summer nights.

Mabel began to put out a loaf and butter on the bare
table top.

565

May-Day Celebration

"You'll stay and have a bite, won't you?" she said.
"We don't live very high: but there's some bread and
butter and jam: the butter's as cheap nowadays as the
marge."

"Unless you have the fivepenny marge," said Beth.

Mabel went on talking as she set out the tea with slow,
quiet movements.

"Mind you," she said, "my married life hasn't been all
honey and jujubes. I'm not complaining. Why should 1 ?
But when a man lives for something beyond the ordinary
things of life, home can't be his be-all and end-all."

Beth nodded.

"That's it," she said.

Mabel paused with a plate in her hand. "But take your-
self too," she said. "It cuts all ways. Your Arthur's been
a good steady worker always. But you haven't been too
happy with him."

Beth nodded again.

"To all outward appearance," Beth said, slowly and
decidedly, "Arthur looks like a 'usband to be proud of.
But there it is. I got my crying over early in my married
life. I did plenty of it then. He's a bully, that's the
trouble: and he's never thought for anyone but himself.
He's selfish to the bone. The first ten years of my marriage
were all babies and black eyes."

"There have been times when I've felt it hard, too,"
said Mabel. "I've never had what I should call a home.
Never in all these forty years. I've had to see my young
ones go hungry and cold, when they were little. And I've
never been able to give them a farthing to help them now
they're older. We never know where we may be from one
week to the next. Years ago I used to cry too, when
Thomas's views and meetings kept getting him the sack
from good jobs. Many's the time I've said to him, * What's
the use of going on?' Then every time he got a new job
I used to think to myself, 'Now I'll have a proper home.7

566

T. O. Beachcroft

But just as we was getting things together something
always went bust. We've lived in fourteen different towns,
let alone all the rooms: they're more than I can remem-
ber."

"But he's settled in a good job now, isn't he?" said
Beth. "He's been there for a year or two."

"Yes, we're really better off now than we've ever been
yet. I'm really beginning to hope now that I'm going to
get a home together. We'll be out of this pigsty in a year.
Thomas is beginning to take it easier now. He doesn't
do so much — not all day and every day, like he used to."

"Well, he's getting on in years/' said Beth.

"Yes, he says he feels he isn't in the forefront any more:
he looks to leave things to the younger men. But he can
still earn good money. He always could. He's a foreman
compositor now on the Morning News — working on the
advertisements. It's a good job. I'm beginning to think
we'll settle down yet, Beth: I'll be asking you to see me in
a nice little place one of these days, in a little peace and
comfort."

Beth nodded.

"I'm sure I need it," said Mabel. "The kettle's on the
boil now. Til make tea. If he's late, I can make some
fresh."

"Is that the fourpenny," said Beth, "from the Stores
round the corner?"

" It's the threepence-halfpenny. Tell me what you think
of it. The only thing I wonder is whether he'll ever be
happy if he gives it up. His one grumble has always been
'e's never been able to do enough for the cause. He's said
that every day for the last twenty years, I should think."

"What did you think of that fellow's speech this after-
noon?" asked Beth.

Mabel sat silent for a little while.

"He seems a nice enough man," she said at length.

"Yes, but what about all that he was talking about?"

567

May-Day Celebration

"I don't know quite what to make of it," said Mabel.
"And I've heard enough speeches in my time. He always
talks that sort of thing. He means it when he says it.
But I don't quite trust it somehow. What's he got to do
with it all? He's a chap with a lot of money behind him.
In Thomas's young days it was a fight against the owners:
men understood what they were making for — and knew
who was against them. Thomas spoke to the men about
their own towns and factories and homes, and what they'd
better do next week: not about the whole of this world and
kingdom come. I sometimes think speech-makers like him
get so full of the new plans in front of them and all to that,
they forget what these poor fellows want is just food and
dry clothes."

"But he's an important man, isn't he?" said Beth.
"He's been an M. P., hasn't he? He'll be somebody one
of these days."

"Yes, I daresay he'll be someone," said Mabel, "on one
side or the other. But it can't mean the same to him as it
did to my Thomas when he was a young man. Yet he
pushes forward and takes the limelight — and Thomas
takes a back seat."

"Well," said Beth, "you oughtn't to mind that: only a
moment ago you were saying you'd be thankful if only he
would drop out of things a bit and keep a steady job for

once."

"Yes," said Mabel, "but sometimes I feel — seeing all
the work he's done — giving his whole life to it — he deserves
something a bit more out of it."

"You persuade him to give it up," said Beth, "and have
a little peace and quiet for once in your life. I saw a little
house out our way in Welcome's Fields a week back. You
could have got it on the money he's making now. Let him
spend it on you and his home for once."

Mabel drew breath and compressed her lips: then she
let it out as a slow, thoughtful sigh.

568

T. O. Beachcroft

"We'll see," she said. " We'll see what happens."

"It's time you had your way for once," said Beth.
"You take my advice."

"Here he is," Mabel said.

They heard his footsteps in the passage, then on the
bare boards of the stairs.

Thomas came in and greeted his wife and Beth a little
absently. He sat down on a chair with a grunt. He was
dressed in a dark serge suit with a muffler at his neck. His
grey hair was closely cut and his face once full of fire and
expression, had grown dour and set and stubborn.

" I'm getting old," he said.

"That's just what we've been saying," said Beth.
"We're all getting old."

"I'll just have time for some tea," said Thomas, "then
I want to get down to the paper. I shan't be back till
we've put her to bed. I'll be back about one. Then I shall
have a full day on to-morrow, till late again. I had to work
it that way so as to get off this afternoon."

"You'll be worn out," said Mabel.

"It won't be the first time," said Thomas.

Beth said: "You ought to think of your health a bit more
at your age."

"I've got better things to think of," he said.

"Not for Mabel."

Thomas ignored her answer. Presently she said good-
bye and went.

"I wanted to get downstairs to-night," Thomas said.
"We want another thousand of those Invergordon pam-
phlets. That's been doing good work. But I can't manage
it now — it's too late. Then they're asking me to do
Hardy's speech later on. My Vanguard Press is getting
well known."

"What did you think of that speech of Hardy's?" said
Mabel. " I only heard the first part."

"It was good," said Thomas. "My job nowadays is to

569

May- Day Celebration

go and print what better men say. I sometimes think I've
never really done anything worth while for our cause."

"Don't be silly. Isn't it anything to have given your
whole life to it?"

"Idunno . . ." Thomas began: but stopped.
Mabel started up.

There was a loud knock at the street door. They heard
it- pushed open, and the tread of two or three men in the
passage.

" They're coming up here," said Thomas. " Hardy said
he might come round."

There was a loud knock at the door.
"Come in," said Thomas. He went to the door and
opened it.

When he did so a police constable stepped into the room:
behind him a plain clothes detective.

They stared at Thomas for a moment, seeming to dwarf
him by their height and heavy bulk.

"Well," said Thomas, after a bit, "any trouble?"
The detective stepped forward.

"There's no need for me to ask if you're Thomas
Devlin," he said, "because I know you by sight."
"Yes, I'm Thomas Devlin."

"I'm afraid, Mr. Devlin, I've got a warrant here for
your arrest — and a search warrant too."

"What for? I'm an honest man. There must be some
mistake."

"No mistake," said the detective. "You work a small
hand press down in the basement here. Whoever's at the
back of you, the imprint's yours."
Thomas nodded.

"And you've been issuing a lot of very foolish pamphlets
lately. There's one of my men downstairs just found a
pile of these Invergordon leaflets — with your imprint on
them. I've got to arrest you under the new Act. There's
the warrant."

570

T. O. Beachcroft

There was a pause.

"Well," said Thomas, "do you want me to come with
you now?"

"Yes," said the detective.

"Can't you give me time to make a few arrangements
first?"

"I must ask you to come at once, please. We don't
want a crowd of people round here. And I must search this
room before we go, too. I'm under orders to confiscate all
the printed matter I find here."

Mabel opened the cupboard door and showed the stores
of pamphlets. In a surprisingly short time they had
searched the room and made a clean sweep.

Thomas began to make rapid arrangements with Mabel.

"We're going to the Central Police Station," he said.
"Will you tell them what's happened at the paper at once?
Go and see them yourself. Then come along and we'll see
what we can arrange about bail."

"I wouldn't count on bail, Mr. Devlin," said the de-
tective. "The authorities at headquarters aren't playing.
I'm afraid this is a serious business for you."

"I'll come, anyhow," said Mabel.

Before going, Thomas kissed her and held her in his
arms.

"It'll be all right," he said.

"Good-bye," said Mabel. "I'll be along directly."

The door closed: and she was alone.

She stood silent for a long time, thinking and seeing
nothing.

Then she slowly walked to the window and pulled the
curtains. How grimy they were. Then she sat down beside
the table which still carried the remains of tea. Many
pictures of her broken and tattered life passed before her.
She saw her hopes of the future torn in ragged dirty pieces,
fluttering away. She knew now that she would never have
a home: that from now on she need never hope for a home.

571

May-Day Celebration

The pictures of the little house she had begun to see
changed to pictures of rooms in worse and worse streets:
to fierce poverty, bare boards, and fireless grates, to com-
fortless old age.

Yet she felt calm and almost joyful. She had seen the
look in Thomas's eyes. She knew he was living through
the proudest and happiest moments of his whole life. She
fell to thinking of the red and white cheeks, the wild black
hair, he used to have. And gradually her heart grew light.

For a long time she sat silent and still until the penny in
the gas was used up and the fire flickered out into cold,
lifeless grey. Then she rose and put on her mackintosh to
go out again. It was still wet from the afternoon's rain.

57*

A WREATH FOR TONI

by
Dorothy Thompson

DOROTHY THOMPSON, in private life Mrs. Sinclair Lewis,
was foreign correspondent of the Philadelphia Public Ledger
and the New York Evening Post from 1920 to 1928, and for
half of this time (1920-1924) she was in Vienna where she
became acquainted with the characters in A Wreath for Toni.
She is a frequent contributor to American periodicals, and
conducts (1936) the special column On the Record in the
New York Herald Tribune.

A WREATH FOR TONI

WE met first on the stairs, but we became friends
because he had the kitchen and I had the bath-
room. That was in 1920 when Vienna was
very sad, and when domestic life was ruled by the Woh-
nungsamt (the dwellings bureau). Our house was in the
Margareten district. A little lower down on the same
street there were gray and yellow palaces in weedy gar-
dens, and in some of them lived officers of the military
missions, members of foreign embassies, and even Austrian
princes; but most of the palaces were appropriated as
offices. At our end of the street though the houses were
very modest — tiny groceries or sausage shops in their
ground floors, or butcher shops advertising horse meat.
The stone stairs were worn and uncarpeted; the stencilled
walls had not been painted for a long time; the paint was
peeling from them and sometimes the plaster. In our
house lived cabinet makers and other artisans and the
family that kept the sausage shop. There was always a
smell of mold and cabbage — the house porter's cabbage
probably, because he and his wife lived in an airless niche
off the dark stairs and usually cooked with the door open.
We met on the stairs because I had forgotten my key.
On our floor there were just the two apartments, and I
had often seen him coming out in the morning and going
in at night, sometimes with a paper parcel that looked
like a coffee cake from the confectioner's. He was not
prepossessing, and I had not been interested in him. He
wore neat but cheap-looking clothes, probably bought in
the Mariahilfestrasse — the Rue de la Paix of the poor.

Reprinted from Harper's Monthly Magazine, July 1934, with the permission
of the editors and the author.

575

A Wreath for Toni

Department-store clothes are very bad indeed in a town
where all who can afford to do so have their boots made to
order and buy even sheets and blankets in tiny shops
which for generations have specialized in just those things.
He was thin, and shy, with rough tow-colored hair and
gray eyes behind very thick glasses. He was probably
suspicious of me; for what in the world was an American
girl doing, living alone in a proletarian house in Vienna of
1920?

But there I was, stuck without a key, just as he was
putting his into the lock of the opposite door. It was a
drizzly, typical Vienna autumn day, and I did not know
the German word for locksmith nor where I should be
likely to find one; my clothes were damp and I very much
wanted a cup of tea.

"Do you think your key might fit my lock? I've lost
mine," I ventured in what I hoped was correct German.
Either the words or my obvious plight communicated the
facts to him, and he came across and tried. When the key
failed to turn, he invited me into his apartment, and I
gladly went in.

It was, so far as space was concerned, an exact duplicate
of mine. There was the same tiny hall, with a toilet at
one end, and at the other, a small parlor. Off the parlor
was a bedroom. Beyond that there was a tiny cubicle —
not more than six by nine, with a window looking upon a
dark narrow court, the kind of room called in Vienna a
cabinet. The hall had a jog in it, and off the jog and,
likewise on a court, was a kitchen. "I have a bathroom
where you have a kitchen," I exclaimed; for all the doors
were open and the whole tiny apartment was visible at a
glance. "Yours was a kitchen first," my host replied, and
explained the history of our floor.

It seemed that a minor ballet dancer from the opera
and a minor clerk from a government office had once
occupied the two apartments and, falling in love, had had a

576

Dorothy Thompson

door cut between them. Eventually the ballet dancer had
been promoted and the pair had enjoyed relative pros-
perity, so they had married and converted the two apart-
ments into one and changed one kitchen into a bathroom.
"But after the War, when Vienna was crowded, what with
all the missions, and people pouring in from the country,
and no repairs having been made on any of the buildings
for all the war years, there was a shortage of flats; and the
dwelling commission ruled that two people could not have
four rooms and two cabinets" explained the young man,
gravely. " So they had to give up one of them, and I got it,
together with my mother and father."

I glanced round the apartment, trying not to seem
curious. There was little to see. In the parlor was a large
ottoman, which probably turned into a bed at night,
covered with a plush rug. There was a center table, with a
green-shaded hanging lamp above it, which could be
pulled down for reading, and about it stood several not
very good Biedermeier chairs. In a corner there was an
overstuffed easy chair. The room was used, it seemed, as a
general living room, and there were dishes in a deal corner
cabinet. The bedroom had two high black walnut beds
covered with red counterpanes, with a night table between,
and two large wardrobes, and a dressing bureau. What
surprised me was the tiny cabinet, for it was lined with
books in shabby bindings as though they had been bought
from second-hand book stalls.

"You have lots of books," I remarked, wandering over
to them, and was surprised to read the titles: Herbert
Spencer, and Locke and Hume, the German classics,
Engels and Lassalle, and what seemed pedagogical books.
I noticed Pestalozzi. There was nothing else in the room
except a shabby walnut writing desk strewn with pa-
pers, pushed up against the window to catch the murky
light.

"I am a school-teacher," he explained, not without a

577

A Wreath for Toni

trace of pride. And suddenly he introduced himself stiffly
with a little bend from the waist, "Anton Murbacher."

"I am a journalist — at least I hope I shall be one. Now
I free-lance," I tried to explain, using the English word
for my dubious profession.

"Ah, you study Vienna — Austria?" Herr Murbacher
tried English, but with rather less success than I with Ger-
man. I nodded. " I have not been here long. Now I study
the German language. I hope later to go to Germany."

"If I could help you — you must get a true picture of our
Austria. It is very sad, but not all sad."

This was all very interesting but not getting me into
my flat, as he suddenly became aware. "If you will sit
down I will get a locksmith, though there is none in our
street, I think," he said, and then — "unless, of course, the
door between the two apartments might be open or could
be forced."

The door was behind the ottoman in the sitting room.
A poor Balkan rug hung over it, and Herr Murbacher
moved it aside. "It seems to have a common lock," he
remarked, and took a key from the bedroom door. "Per-
haps" . . . and sure enough it turned, opening into my
apartment, pushing out a portiere which on my side con-
cealed the door from view. He gravely gave me the key.
"You can lock it again from your side," he said.

So that was the end of our interview, but not the end of
our acquaintance. Herr Anton Murbacher was the first
authentic Viennese I had met. I had met, to be sure, a few
eminent politicians, a few people with grand titles to whom
I had letters and who had tentatively invited me to tea,
where I had felt very provincial and out of it. Still, they
belonged to the cosmopolitan world. Herr Anton Mur-
bacher belonged exclusively, I was sure, to Vienna. I had
wanted "to get about among the people," and I had found
that for a stranger in any foreign country that is precisely
the hardest thing to do.

578

Dorothy Thompson

After that when we passed each other on the stairs we
bowed and exchanged remarks about the weather. Some-
times a little round woman emerged from the neighboring
apartment, wearing a shawl thrown over her head and
carrying a shopping bag, and sometimes a spare man, well
past middle age, with a wise kind face and a workman's
hands, and they nodded to me too. I took it that they were
the parents of the school-teacher.

"Don't you know someone who would give me German
lessons — cheap? I have very little money/' I said one day
to the young man, meeting him again on the stairs. His
face beamed. "But, yes, indeed ... I have a friend.
She speaks English very well. Her father is a professor!"

That was splendid! Hugo's grammar and the daily
newspapers with a dictionary were all very well in their
way, but at this rate it would be years before I could
conduct an interview in German. "I will ask her to come
to you ... or perhaps you will come to us one evening
for supper?"

The question was put so shyly and tentatively that I
replied robustly, "I should love to."

The friend was there a few days later, and Herr Anton
knocked on the door. And across the narrow hall I went.
The lamp was pulled down over the round table, which
had a checked cloth on it and a platter of salami and cold
veal. There was a potato salad and a big sugary Gugel-
hupf — I have never been sure how to spell that exclusively
Viennese word for the most superior of all coffee cakes —
and a large pitcher of milk. Father Murbacher was there,
looking very scrubbed and clean, as workmen do who
clean themselves up with brushes and coarse soap. Mother
Murbacher hovered over us all, beaming upon us with her
brown eyes, waiting on us with roughened hands pro-
truding from a much washed flannelette shirtwaist. She
had taken off her apron because there was company, but
absent-mindedly she would wipe her hands on her serge

579

A Wreath for Toni

skirt. "The Friend" was a girl about my own age —
twenty-one or two — dressed in a plaid skirt and a cheap
woolen jumper, but obviously cultivated, with a pleasant
voice and fluent English, which she explained she had
learned in England, where she had gone to live for several
winters with a colleague of her father's. Her name was
Maria, but everyone called her "Maridl." She had short
smooth hair, good straight features, and a body that
looked as though she exercised it. She would give me
three German lessons a week, for which I agreed to pay a
dollar. She was pleased and I was delighted, I was sure
I should learn German quickly with her and I hoped that
she would be my friend.

Anton poured me out milk and then, suddenly abashed,
"Perhaps you would like beer," he asked, "or a carafe of
wine?"

"Toni!" exclaimed his mother, much perturbed, "we
should have thought of it!"

"I would much rather have milk," I said. "Only I
thought all Viennese drank beer or wine — what do you
call it — Heurige?"

"Herr Murbacher is a socialist," explained Maridl.
"He believes that drink is the curse of working people.
All his family are teetotalers. More and more Viennese
people, especially the workers, drink only milk. The
Party encourages it."

Father Murbacher seemed to understand the tenor of
the conversation. "Alcohol — it is all right for the rich,
who have plenty of good food," he explained gently.
"For us it is a great waste. Our children grow up pale and
have rickets. It is better that we should spend our money
for true food."

This was indeed a Vienna about which I knew nothing.
I was curious about what bound these four people to-
gether. The father was a workman. The mother, un-
questionably a peasant. The son had gone up a step. He

580

Dorothy Thompson

was a school-teacher, and belonged to the "intellectuals";
but it was clear that his rise into another social class had
in no respect weakened the tie with his family. As for the
girl, she was obviously different. In her looks, her bearing,
her greater poise, and simple self-assurance there was no
trace of a proletarian past. Yet all of them seemed to be on
the same economic level. I guessed that the son earned no
more, and possibly less than the father, and the girl's
clothes gave no indication that she was better off than the
others. Later I was to see that two things bound them
together — love and The Party. Not only filial love, but
love between these two young people; the professor's
daughter, and the workman's son. Anton had spoken of
Maria as his " Freundin" (his friend), and before the first
evening was over, I believed that he had employed the
word in the tenderer and more specifically German sense.

What with Maridl coming thrice a week for the German
lessons and my proximity to the Murbacher family, we
came eventually to have a sort of communal life. Frau
Murbacher would often knock at my door at supper-time,
carrying a plate under a clean checked napkin, which would
reveal a cake or a little pudding. " Because you have no
kitchen," she would explain. She knew how I struggled
with two rings of gas upon which I made breakfast and
sometimes supper in my bathroom. And if I was going
out in the evening, I would stop at my neighbor's and
leave the key. "In case anyone of the family would like a
hot bath," I'd explain. This intimacy was never imposed
on. They assured me with a smile that the bath was very
often used, and I would sometimes suspect it from the
exceptional whiteness of the tub and neatness of the bath-
room.

Most of all, I liked to talk with the old man. He did not
drink and was no frequenter of cafes, as most Viennese
are, but he enjoyed a game of euchre; and sometimes of an

581

A Wreath for Toni

evening I would stop across to play with him on the round
table, under the green-shaded lamp. There was a fine self-
reliance and pride about him. I learned that he was a
valve maker very skilled, and thus relatively well paid
and fairly sure of work as long as the factories did not shut
down altogether.

"You should be a socialist, young woman," he would
'say, mildly distressed at my insouciance about political
affiliations. For him The Party was the center of life.
Once a week he went to the party Fersammlung, or meeting
of the trade union, of which he was treasurer, and once a
week he attended the committee meeting of the People's
University. I learned that it was arranged and financed
by the workers themselves, through their trade unions,
and that it dated from long before the War. This organiza-
tion gave lectures, and he would drive the whole family,
even "Mutti," to them. "Education," he would say,
"that is the hope of the working class, that is the hope of
all the people. When a man can't learn any more then
he may as well be dead."

Herr Alurbacher was a freethinker, although he had
been brought up a Catholic. His wife, who came from
the Wachau, from a poor peasant family, remained faith-
ful to the church, and was out for early mass every Sunday
morning. Her husband had tried to read Renan to her,
but she had only smiled. He was tolerant of her religious
leanings. "Women are sometimes foolish that way," he
would say, "and you can't change things all at once."

He worked in an engine works in the Favoriten district,
which was not very far, and he walked there every day,
carrying his lunch, of coffee, black bread, and a few
pennies' worth of fat bacon, thickly encrusted with
paprika. At night when he returned there would be a hot
supper of thick soup and bread, and on Sundays, boiled
brisket of beef or roast pork with potatoes or rice or
dumplings. When they had Marillenknoedel, in summer —

582

Dorothy Thompson

light dumplings wrapped round apricots and steamed and
sprinkled with ground nuts and sugar — that was a very
great treat and 1 would be invited over. He went to work
at seven-thirty in the morning and came home at five-
thirty.

That he had been able to send Toni to the Gymnasium
(the classical high school) and afterward to the university
was his great pride. It was a tremendous sacrifice, for it
meant feeding Toni until he was twenty-two. Toni told
me that during all those years his father had had a single
suppressed desire — for a cheap but complete edition of
Darwin. But he could not afford it. Toni had bought it for
him with the first money he had earned after graduation.

"Mutti" accepted her husband's socialism as he ac-
cepted her piety. After all, she had grown up under the
shadows of the Melk monastery, where her father had
worked in the vineyards belonging to the monks. What
could you expect?

The coming of the Republic, after the War was over,
Herr Murbacher had accepted as an inevitable step in
human progress. Curiously, he cherished not the slightest
animosity toward the monarchy and, indeed, spoke with
tenderness and respect of the old Emperor, Franz Josef.
"The Kaiser never wanted the War," he would say with
conviction. "The military party forced it on him. 'God
is my witness, I have not willed this/ he said when he
signed the Declaration." He told me many stories of the
old days. He had often seen the Emperor buttoned tight
in his uniform, with his pink face and white whiskers,
passing down the Mariahilfestrasse from Schoenbrunn, in
an open landau with gilded spokes drawn by two white
Lipiziner horses with a flunky sitting beside the driver.
Once Herr Murbacher had gone as a delegate to a Party
congress, and had met Victor Adler, the great leader of
The Party, and Dr. Adler had borrowed a pencil from him
and had never returned it. He spoke of this several times

583

A Wreath for Toni

with amusement and pride. He told me that Adler had
worn eyeglasses and a mustache and had had kind eyes.
"He looked like a college professor," Herr Murbacher
would say, which was praise from him. The old Kaiser and
Victor Adler were both wreathed with laurel and bay in his
remembrance, and he seemed to find no paradox in the
association.

For Herr Murbacher was a constitutionalist. He had
never opposed the monarchy; in those days he had looked
upon universal franchise as the liberator of the working
class. He believed profoundly and without question in
human progress, and he thought he saw evidence of it in
his own times. After all, there was his son, Toni. Toni had
moved upward; the state had given him a scholarship;
Toni was educated and was still loyal to his own people.
The working people needed more men like Toni. Herr
Murbacher smoked his pipe, ruminated, and on the whole
was satisfied with the world.

That his own life had been sadly limited — all day in the
factory, the meager meals at night, the close quarters in a
shabby house, and no amusements whatever except the
Party meetings, the free lectures, the game of euchre, and
the Sunday excursions — seemed of no consequence to
him. There were the long, free Sundays, when he sat
in his shirtsleeves after a breakfast with fresh rolls, and
read the Sunday Arbeiterzeitung, the Social Democrat
newspaper. He would spend hours over the cultural
edition. After the midday meal he and the old woman
would go by tram to the Wienerwald and lie under the
trees, or walk in the Prater — right down the main thor-
oughfare to the Danube, and back again. Then they would
sit on benches and watch the carriages pass. And finally
they would have afternoon coffee with whipped cream on
top and a roll with it. This was the treat of the week.
Younger men, he confessed, sometimes went to cafes
where green wine was served and where there were zither

584

Dorothy Thompson

players from the Tyrol; but in the stern puritanism of his
socialism Herr Murbacher scorned such amusements.
What impressed me was that his standards were all for
himself and fellow-party members. He had no intolerance
and no envy.

For Toni, to be sure, he had higher cultural ambitions.
Once a week, even as a young boy, Toni was sent to the
opera or the state theater, there to stand in the queue
for two or three hours for a balcony seat to see "Wilhelm
Tell," or "Don Carlos," " Lohengrin," or "Hamlet."

Of course there had been the War. Toni was too young
for that, but his father was not too old. He was in the
Landsturm, second reserve, and called to the colors only
when Italy entered the War. He fought up in the Alps
for the rest of the War and was returned home without
wounds but with a bad cough which lasted always after-
ward. He hadn't minded that so much, but he had minded
what the War had done to Toni. Toni was in school and
throughout the four years he had been fed on corn mash,
with pieces of straw in it, and turnips. On the wall of the
Murbacher apartment there was a class picture in which
Toni appeared, taken in 1915, showing him in shorts and
very large hobnailed boots — bought so that he could grow
into them — pale and thin, with the gray look of proletarian
children, slightly overgrown, in a jacket of poor thin cloth
and a cotton singlet, because it was cheaper than a shirt.
Already he was wearing glasses.

"We never had any sports," Toni once confessed wist-
fully, "Two hours in the gymnasium doing exercises,
that was all." Whenever they had it to give him he took a
slice of bread to school to eat at ten o'clock, and at night
he did his homework in the kitchen. Afterward he went
to the library of the People's University, because the
public library did not have the books he wanted and he
felt out of place there. Of course he thought it his duty to
study the socialist writers, and at eighteen knew all the

S8S

A Wreath for Ton!

differences between Marx and Lassalle and Engels and
Sorel, between the British guild socialists and the French
syndicalists.

Oh, well, Toni had come through all right — "with
honors." His father, to be sure, had wanted him to be a
lawyer, perhaps a judge. But Toni shared his father's
passion for education. He intended all along to be a school-
teacher.

Toni was twenty-one when the Republic was pro-
claimed. To Herr Murbacher the Republic was an inevi-
table development. All the socialist writers had predicted
it. Everything was coming out as promised. Things
did come out all right if you only had patience — and kept
on educating. There were hard times right after the War,
of course. Lots of days lost at the shop, and not much
food, and Toni still a year to go at the university. But the
Republic was generous to the workers. There were mani-
fold signs of progress.

Frau Murbacher was also aware of progress. The death
of the old Emperor had upset her much more than that of
Victor Adler, though she shook her head from side to side
in commiseration, out of respect for her husband. She
was rather worried about Toni, who was a freethinker like
his father, and, like his father, careful not to hurt his
mother's feelings.

"I do not believe in the church," he said to me precisely.
"It is a substitute for thinking. Still, it is not necessary
yet to have a fight with God." His mother, I was sure,
prayed for him. And once she confessed that she had
saved a little money for her funeral. The socialists favored
cremation, but she had a horror of it. To be buried in the
good earth was right. Nevertheless, she was aware of
changes under the Republic, and they were all to the good
for Frau Murbacher.

First of all, the rents. It was very fine to live in two

586

Dorothy Thompson

rooms, a cabinet, and a kitchen, and the rooms looking
upon the street, instead of the two narrow cubicles upon a
courtyard which they had had before, with Toni sleeping
in the same room as his parents. The Republic could be
thanked for that, for it controlled the rents. And Toni?
Toni had a library — seventy-five books perhaps — and
taught in the secondary schools. Frau Murbacher shared
his enthusiasm without quite understanding what it was
all about. Vaguely perhaps she understood that class
distinctions had been abolished in the schools. How very
different they were than they had been under the mon-
archy she could not possibly understand, for she had never
been to school at all after she was ten years old — and that
had been in the country. Still Toni was happy, and when
they could get an apartment Toni was going to marry
Maria, who was a professor's daughter, and she was a
fine girl too. Frau Murbacher, alone, felt strongly that
Maria was above them.

Sometimes when I went into the city Toni would walk
along at my side, full of enthusiasm for his work, his near-
sighted eyes beaming behind his spectacles, his bony hands
gesturing. "Your country is so poor," I would say. "The
state is so poor. All the other people whom I know com-
plain so bitterly."

"Patience," he would reply. "We must have patience."
(The words might have been his father's.) "In many,
many ways things are better than they ever were. We are
bringing up a better generation. The children of the
workers are better fed than I was, even under the rich
monarchy. Sports! Don't you see the children going off
with rucksacks or skis every Sunday? All we could do was
to sit in the park and watch the carriages pass! There's
medical inspection in the schools. This generation won't
have bad teeth and poor eyesight — like mine." He smiled
modestly, as pleased as though the teeth and sight of his

587

A Wreath for Toni

students were complete compensation for his own weak-
ness. "After all, no country is better or stronger than its
people," he would say.

" Your opponents say the taxes are too high. They say
the peasants are resentful. They say all these reforms cost
too much, at the expense of the business men and the
landowners, Toni," I would warn.

"There's no other way," Toni would say. "You come
and see our schools."

I did go to see them, and admired and wondered.

Then for some years I was not in Vienna. But I had
letters. Toni was going to marry Maria "just as soon as
we can get a flat to ourselves. We have been promised one
in the new apartments which the municipality is build-
ing."

As a matter of fact they were married earlier, but they
lived apart. There was not space enough in the two rooms
and cabinet for four people. Toni went to his schoolroom
each day, and Maria to the biological laboratory where
she was a technician. Once when I was in Vienna for a
few days she confided to me, "Soon we shall get the apart-
ment. When we get the apartment we can have a baby."

I saw them last only a year ago. Again I climbed the
stone stairs. There was the same smell of mold and cab-
bage and the same house porter, though he did not recog-
nize me, but nodded affirmatively when I asked whether
the Murbachers still lived on the third floor. But Frau
Murbacher recognized me. She drew me into the living
room, where the class picture, the green-shaded lamp, and
the Biedermeier chairs still stood. She was not so round
as she had been and her laugh of pleasure broke her face
into many wrinkles as we embraced. "Toni? Maridl?
They live now in their new apartment. They have a son.

588

Dorothy Thompson

He is a fine boy. Only five years, and he comes up to
here." She measured his height proudly against her chest.
"My husband?" Her mouth grew a little smaller. "Ach,
Johann. He is not so well. He still goes to the works
though, but he is failing. The cough is worse too."

Then I went to see Toni and Maridl, on a Sunday, when
there was no school and no laboratory, and I was sure they
would be at home. Why, it was a palace where they lived!
One went through a great archway into a wide, grassy
court, where there was an open splash pool, and children
in sun-suits bathing and squealing. Up a clean, wide
staircase, lighted by large windows. Maridl came to the
apartment door, all excitement, all happiness.

So this was their new home, for which the baby had
waited so long. It was hardly larger than the Murbacher
apartment, but everywhere there was sunshine, and from
every window one saw green trees. The kitchen was
white and gleaming, and modern, and in an alcove stood a
white table and chairs. There was a sunny bedroom with
light walls and painted furniture, and a sitting room with
a little day-bed in it, hidden by a screen. "For Victor, our
son," said Maridl.

"Do you still go to work?" I asked. "But of course,"
she replied, "and I'm very lucky still to have a job. Now
I only work half-time because of Victor. But I can leave
him in the kindergarten. You must see the whole house!
Think of it! We have our own public baths — they couldn't
afford to give us each a bathroom, but we have our own
lavatory, and there's a branch of the public kindergartens
here, and of the public library, and lots of co-operative
shops, and the most wonderful laundry. You must see
what our Party has done!"

And down the stairs we went again, to look at the
library where some children were reading, and the sunny
kindergarten with its lovely murals, done by some children
from one of the art schools, and the modern, well-lighted

589

A Wreath for Toni

and ventilated laundry. "I can do two weeks' washing
and most of the ironing in half a day here," said Maridl,
pointing out the electric washers and the gas "dryers,"
the large and small mangling machines, and the tall
windows. And then we were out again in the courtyard,
with its chestnut trees and loggias, and flowers and splash
pool. And there was Toni, playing with his son. Same
old Toni, with the beaming eyes and thick glasses and
bony hands and cheap clothes. And playing with him,
half naked, a tall, brown little boy, with hair as tow-
colored and as stiff as Toni's, but with his mother's straight
features and a proud, direct look. "Bow to your Auntie,"
said Toni. "She comes all the way from America." The
boy stuck out his small hand and made a diener. "From
America?" he asked, wonderingly, and went back to his
sand-pile.

We had a long talk, Toni, Maridl, and I, mostly about
politics, when congratulations about the flat and the
child were over with. Hitler was in power in Germany,
and the German republic was gone. "And your German
Party colleagues?" I asked. "Where are they now?"
Worry creased a line in Toni's forehead. "It is a dread-
ful time," he said. "They say everywhere that democracy
is finished in the world. They say no one believes in it
any more. But our people all still believe. It is bad here,
too. But the Austrians are not like the Germans. The
people are different. They are more civilized. We have
an old culture. It will never be here as it was in Ger-
many!"

I wondered. In the town, among people not like Toni,
I had heard other things. "They have taken away a lot
of power from the municipal government where our Party
has control," said Toni. (He referred to the Federal
government as "they.") "We won't be building more
houses like this one. But think of it! Tens of thousands of
people now live the way we do! And look at the children!

590

Dorothy Thompson

If only this generation gets a chance to grow up ! It's the
healthiest generation that Austria has ever had, and the
freest. And the best educated."

I had just come from Germany. "Don't be too optimis-
tic, Toni," I said. "The middle classes are tired of all this
and the peasants too. And the people who ruled before the
War. You've never won them over. And you've been too
tolerant to eliminate them. They believe the whole coun-
try is ruled in the interest of your class, and they are
likely to turn against you as they did in Germany."

"I know how they talk," said Maria bitterly. "As
though we were parasites! Don't we work? Whenever we
can, and for very little. Toni and I together don't earn
more than three hundred schillings a month. Not fifty
dollars! Without all this" — her arm gestured to the bal-
conied house, its courtyards and gardens — "for which we
pay only the upkeep cost, which is almost nothing, we
could barely survive. Just the same, we couldn't afford
tomato juice for Victor or fresh vegetables even in summer
if we didn't grow them."

"Grow them! Where?" I asked.

"Out in the suburbs, near the Danube, where we got a
free allotment from the city. We have a fine garden there.
Toni works there after school hours, and we all do on
Sundays. Sometimes, in school vacation, we even live
there in our * country house.' We built it — out of tar paper
mostly, and some old boards.

"Oh, we are in luck!" she added. "We have work. Lots
of the people in this house haven't more than the roof
over their heads and the merest pittance of an unemploy-
ment dole. And the peasants are poor too. It is marvelous
how good-natured people are. When there is so little to go
round, people usually get ugly. They begin to kill one
another for what little there is. And our situation is so
desperate — the situation of the country itself, I mean.
All around us are bigger or richer countries who want to

A Wreath for Toni

absorb us or to keep control here for strategical reasons —
France with money, keeping us just on a subsistence level.
Why wouldn't she let us join Germany years ago, when
the Republic was new, and when we might have helped to
keep it? And Germany now, with the Nazis, no longer
wanting union with us, wanting to gobble us up. And
Italy too. Only here in Vienna, where our Party is in
•power, we have lived out of our own pockets, paid as we
went; and now our opponents in the other parties say it is
costing too much. I am afraid. I am afraid."

"If we can only get through these bad times," said
Toni, "it must get better after a while!"

"I am afraid," Maridl repeated. "Sooner or later we
shall have to fight for all this." Again her gaze swept the
green court and the pleasant building.

"Not in Austria!" Toni averred stoutly. "Austrians
aren't violent. We know how to get on with one another.
Why, we've never even had any communist movement.
The Party wouldn't allow it."

Maria veered to another angle of the subject.

"Toni doesn't know the old-fashioned people as well as I
do," she said. "I was brought up among them. They
don't see — the people who are fixed in their ways, who
can't grasp how our circumstances have changed, our cir-
cumstances as a nation, I mean — they don't see that our
only hope is to work out a new way of life. It isn't just
what we believe or what party we say we belong to or what
we call ourselves that really divides us from the old ones.
It's a different form of life. My aunts still live in stuffy
over-furnished flats and let out rooms to lodgers rather
than lose a single room or a single silver teaspoon. They
think it is dreadful that I do my own washing, even
though I do it in a marvelous modern laundry. They
wouldn't live in this house at any price, because working
people live here, and yet they say that the city only lets
the working people live here and is too favorable to our

592

Dorothy Thompson

Party members! They tell me I have married into the
proletariat, and are still shocked. But what's the use of
calling yourself middle class or proletarian when you be-
long to a proletarianized nation! Toni is like his father.
He always says to have patience. But already they have
dissolved parliament, and there are three private armies
in Austria now. . . ."

"The Heimwehr," I said, "and the Storm Troops of the
Nazis."

"And our own Defense Corps," said Maria gloomily.

"It's never been used for violence," said Toni. "It was
started at the beginning, to defend the Republic and the
Constitution. We all belong to it — to show how we
stand."

"And all of them supported from the outside," said
Maria. "Italy behind the Heimwehr, and Germany be-
hind the Storm Troops."

"And the Little Entente behind you?" I asked.

"Half-heartedly," said Maria. "They would never
help us in a show-down."

"One must have faith," said Toni.

"Some day we shall have to fight," said Maria. "You
will see. I used to think, like Toni, that you can change
the whole world by reason and good will. Now I won-
der . . ."

Even when she went away and brought coffee, and we
drank it on the benches in the sunshine, and talked of
other things, with the handsome child playing about our
feet, her words lingered like a chill.

Ill

When the government tried to oust the Mayor from the
City Hall with the aid of the Heimwehr, the workers went
on a general strike, and when their leaders were arrested
the workers resisted with arms. Then the cannon came
out and the Party Headquarters were bombarded and the

593

A Wreath for Toni

municipal houses too. I read about it on the front pages
of the New York papers: Civil War in Vienna! they
screamed. It was the unanimous opinion of the corre-
spondents that the workers did not have a chance. Many
of the reporters referred to them as the "rebels."

I saw a small item in a long account of the fighting:

A leader of the resistance in one of the municipal apartment
houses, Anton Murbacher, was sentenced to death for High
Treason and hanged this afternoon. He walked coolly to the
gallows, saying that he had always been willing to give his life
for the Austrian Republic and the Social Democratic Party.

Yesterday I had a letter from Toni's mother. It was
written in an uneducated hand, in the difficult German
script, and it took me several hours to decipher it.

Dear Gracious Lady:

We want to thank our dear friend very much for the letter
she wrote. We have had a real bad time. But it was a very
nice letter. Our poor Toni would have been happy if he could
have read the letter. It is now almost a month since then.
He was in the apartment house where they lived the whole
time. Maridl was there and Victor too, and for three days
they didn't have any milk for him. Toni was commander of
the defense department. On the day before they were at our
house for supper and Toni ate a whole half of a Gugelhupf.
When the troops marched in he had got the order to defend
the house. Maridl says he was on the roof the whole time,
but nothing happened to him, but many others were hit, also
Franz, the Schroeders' boy that you know, but they think
he will get well. Then when they began to shoot with cannon
Toni wanted that Maridl and Frau Norbaschek should go
in the cellar, but they did not go because they were helping
with the guns. Frau Norbaschek got hit when she went to get
water for one of the men. She is real bad. She was a good
dressmaker and her boy goes to the Gymnasium. A shell hit
Toni's flat and smashed all the things in it and his books too.
Then they did not have any more cartridges and then Herr
Stiegler put up a towel for a white flag. The police took them
all away. They took him to a court, only it was a war court
really. The Holy Father said Toni did not defend himself at

594

Dorothy Thompson

all. He said the others weren't to blame, only he, because he
ordered them. He said he wasn't sorry because he had only
defended his home and his rights.

Maridl took Victor to Toni so he could still see him. The
officer allowed that and the good God will count it to his
credit. Maridl said that Toni had broken his glasses so he did
not know them when they first came in the waiting room.
We couldn't go though because it was too late.

They did it right away like in war. Frau Ribanek, she who
lives where you used to live, she was with me when they did
it. I went to the Holy Father and paid for five masses for
Toni. I had my funeral money, so Toni will have his masses.
He did not go to church but he was a good boy. The Holy
Father says God will remember that. Maridl sends love. She
is living with us now because she had to go away from the new
apartment. Other people are going to be put in when the
building is fixed. We wrill be all right because we still have the
two rooms and cabinet. Maridl says she will write you too,
later. My husband would like to write but since it happened
he does not go out any more. He doesn't talk any more nor
read his books either. May the dear God protect the gracious
lady.

Respectfully,
JOSEPHINE MURBACHER.

The stairs are dark, and smell of mold and cabbage, and
the sun hardly ever comes in that street. They will make
a bed for Victor, I suppose, in the cabinet where Toni's
books used to be.

595

COCOONS

by
Fusao Hayashi

FUSAO HAYASHI was born in 1903 and is the author of
many short stories and novels, among them a recent work
entitled Seinen (Youth). He has been arrested several times
for his activities in the Left Wing movement in Japan.

COCOONS

WHENEVER I see cocoons I am reminded of
Yasuo Sakai. Of late I have become so com-
pletely a city-dweller that it is only by the
patterns of autumn grasses on fabrics in the shop-windows
that I know the autumn has come. No longer can I wander
along country lanes where migrant crows drop seeds as
they fly, the baskets of live cocoons swaying on the
carts as if they would topple off at any minute.

Sakai and I were bosom pals in the middle school.
We shared a room and with our two little desks, side by
side, were as inseparable as Siamese twins.

At the back of the school rose hills covered with low
pines; whenever summer drew near wild-flowers blossomed
round the roots of these trees.

"Funny little guys; beauties, aren't they?" I remember
him remarking solemnly one day as we watched a little
snake, all its scales shining in the sunlight, disappear
noiselessly under a bush.

There was a tinge of bitterness in his words. He himself
was always called "the dirty guy" by the bullies of the
class, as he was always in rags. Were he a spineless chap,
that nickname alone would have been enough to humiliate
him. Their scorn, however, probably contained a strain of
jealousy since he was unusually intelligent, and was
generally at the top of the class. He combined the ex-
tremes of cleverness and poverty. In this we were strongly
contrasted, for I was remarkable neither for brains nor

From The Cannery Boat, by Takiji Kobayashi; and other Japanese short stories.
International Publishers Co., Inc., New York, 1933, and reprinted by permissioa
of International Publishers.

599

Cocoons

poverty. I was his only friend and whenever he got behind
with his school fees I would offer part of my allowance as a
matter of course.

Yes, in that class-room at the foot of those hills, with
our desks side by side, we were as inseparable as twins.

From the hills you could see the sea. We two boys
would often climb up and, lying down facing that blue
paint-dish of sea under the sky, try vainly to throw stones
into it, or hallo down at it the duet "River of Love" in
voices strangely out of tune.

One day, under a wild briar bush, we found a snake
eating a grass-green frog. Out of the open jaws of the
snake only the little suckers on the end of the frog's hind
legs stuck out, waving as if sending out S. O. S. signals. I
noticed Sakai's eyebrows twitch, and then he let fly with
his dusty boot and kicked the snake fiercely right in the
belly. Then, squashing it with his heel, he watched it
intently as a thin trickle of crimson blood came out of the
yellow distended mouth.

"The devil," he snarled.

The frog had been rescued and it lay motionless on the
grass with the snake's slimy saliva still clinging to it.

"The rotten devil," he repeated.

I remember another incident.

One of the abuses of middle school life was that the
older boys invariably bullied the younger ones. One prac-
tice they delighted in was to get their miserable victim in
some lonely field and, on some trumped-up charge, lay
into him savagely with their fists. As we were wandering
over the hills one day we had the bad luck to be caught by
a gang of bullies.

One of them — his father owned a silk mill in our town —
a rough, stupid fellow, called Okawa, came rushing at us.

"Look here, Sakai, you've been getting too cheeky
lately."

600

Fusao Hayashi

Sakai gazed into his face for some time and then
blurted out impulsively, "How do you make that out?"

The big boy suddenly gave him a punch in the chest.

" I'll teach you to answer back a senior. That's cheeky."

Sakai rolled over on the grass, but soon picked himself
up and made a mad rush at his assailant's chest. But he
was much smaller and, anyhow, it was three to one. The
next minute he was on the ground again and was beaten
like a dog. When he rose a second time I saw the glint of
steel. It was his new penknife he held in his right hand.

The colour left Okawa's lips. Sakai's face, too, seemed
to go a shade paler. Swiftly as a rat Okawa scurried, but
Sakai ran him down near the place where he had once
squashed the snake. The patch stopped there. Okawa
stood waiting with the strength of one at bay.

"Stab me if you dare." Peeling off his coat, Okawa
threw it on the grass and in the manner of all bluffers he
bared his breast and extended both arms.

"You think I won't stab you?" Sakai's voice sounded
strangely calm and collected. The gleam of cold steel rent
the air.

"Oh!" All my blood went cold within me and this cry
sprang from me as I saw how Okawa fell prone on the
grass.

His fellow bullies ran to him to pick him up and carry
him away. Sakai, limp and apathetic, followed them with
his eyes, but once their figures had disappeared behind the
bushes, he collapsed and lay motionless on the grass.

When I regained my presence of mind I hurried anx-
iously over to him. His face was buried in the summer
grass and his shoulders were heaving.

Why? — I could not understand the reason.

Talking about not understanding reasons, there was
another thing about Sakai that I could never fathom. In
his desk he always kept a single white silkworm cocoon.
Once I asked him why he kept it, but he refused to answer,

601

Cocoons

so out of spite I cut it up into little bits with my scissors.
For a whole day after that he did not speak to me. A
week later a similar cocoon was in his drawer again.
Later these two riddles were solved together.

I think it was on the second or third day after this
incident. Sakai suddenly asked me to go with him to the
town, and took me to a small silk mill that stood near the
water-front. He seemed to be no stranger there, for with
just a nod to the doorkeeper he hurried into the mill. I
followed after him.

Inside the mill, murky with steam and dark like the
inside of a kitchen on a rainy day, the old-fashioned spin-
dles turned noisily. The foul smell of dead grubs and the
heavy humid air almost suffocated you. Before each girl
stood two pots full of boiling water, one big and one small;
in the small pot white cocoons kept bobbing up and down.
One or two boiled cocoons would be transferred by the
girl's hand into the bigger pot and, as they danced round
in the hot water, they gradually became thinner. At the
same time an almost invisible thread passed from them,
above the girls' heads, and was wound round the droning
spindles behind. With the revolutions of the belt the reels
of silk became fatter and the cocoons thinner. When one
cocoon had been completely unwound, the little black
grub would appear floating dead on the surface. I watched
it all with unaccustomed eyes.

"Wait just a minute." Sakai hurriedly disappeared
behind the machines, coming back after a time with an
elderly woman wearing a mill-girl's uniform.

"This is my mother."

"Eh?" I was completely taken back and bowed my
head in confusion.

"Now, mother, thank him."

Sakai's mother was about fifty and had smooth brows,
unlike the woman of to-day. Bowing her head, in which

602

Fusao Hayashi

white hairs had begun to show, she kept thanking me for
my kindnesses to Sakai, and implored me to remain his
friend. This made me very bashful. I blushed scarlet,
and could do nothing but keep bowing too, unable to look
up into that face, so full of brooding and humility.

On the way home Sakai related his early history. Of
how, during his fourth year at the primary school, his
mother and he had been left alone through his father's
death and reduced from comfortable circumstances to
poverty; of how she had started working in this mill to
help him enter the middle school. He had stuck out
against going, but the teachers urged it on him, saying it
was a pity to leave off at that point, and his mother, her
eyes full of tears, tried to persuade him, saying there was
no one but him to restore the fortunes of the Sakais, so he
finally yielded; but when he saw his mother wearing out
her aged body in that unhealthy mill in order to pay his
school fees, he could not feel much like school; with her
whole month's wages they just managed to pay the mini-
mum fees; but if he left school it would only sadden his
mother, who was straining herself to keep on working, and
would shatter her last hopes; so partly as there seemed no
way out of it, and partly out of gratitude to her, he kept
on at school.

"I've never told anyone these things. I've never felt
it necessary. But you — you've always been so decent to
me. And then sometimes I've told my mother about you
and she has said, with tears in her eyes, how much she
wanted to meet you and thank you, and that's why I
brought you to-day.

"And also," he soon continued, "there was another
reason for bringing you to the mill. Perhaps you know
that the owner of that mill is the father of that Okawa I
knifed the other day?"

"Yes," I nodded.

"That's why I think I was in the wrong the other day.

603

Cocoons

Of course, it's mean to bully younger boys, but defiance,
when a personal grievance enters into it, is worse, it seems
to me. If Okawa had been alone that day — that Okawa
who is always jeering at me just because my mother
works in his mill — I don't think I would have gone so far
as to use a knife. When I realized what I had done, I
howled at my own meanness."

I watched the red evening sun between the roofs of the
town as it sank into the sea.

Two or three years passed. We both became students of
the same high school. Sakai received a scholarship from
the prefecture, while I, somehow or other, succeeded in
passing the entrance examination.

We were lying in the grass on a hill that overlooked the
school building and talking idly as the summer sun shone
down pleasantly on our faces and our new gold buttons.

"I still keep my cocoon," said Sakai, as if he had sud-
denly called it to mind.

"Do you ? Is your mother still in that mill ? "

"I can't get her to leave. She says she'll keep on, no
matter what happens, until I graduate. Of course in a
way she has reason on her side, for as long as I stay at
school there is no other way for her to live except the mill."

Sakai bit his lips as he plucked stalks of grass, and his
voice became thoughtful.

"Lately I've begun to have doubts about life," he said.
"For instance, take that mill: now there are about 300
girls working there. They're mostly from fifteen to twenty-
four years of age, all farmers' daughters from the neigh-
bouring villages. When they come they're young, country
girls with good strong bodies, but after a year or two they
begin bandaging up their throats and coughing sus-
piciously; their eyes become red and swollen, and their
fingers whitish and rotten, and then they return home.
Some of them wither and die while in the mill, and you

604

Fusao Hayashi

hear sometimes of girls getting their hair caught in the
machines.

"The humid air; the long hours from morning right on
into the night; insufficient food — when I see those girls
under such conditions, wearing out their young bodies
before my very eyes, I think of the kettles and of the
cocoons which the girls reel.

"Each one, boiled in the hot water, becoming thinner
and thinner; its life drained from it by that single invisible
thread, until finally the black grub — now a useless dead
thing — is cast up on the surface of the water.

"But on the other hand — and this is what you've got to
notice isn't there — exactly corresponding to the reels wind-
ing and winding above the girls' heads, a group of men who
grow continually fatter and fatter!"

Sakai paused for a minute to wipe the sweat from his
brow, and then in a voice deliberately lowered, went on.

"And you know, I have a feeling — it's horrible to think
about it — but still I have the feeling that something will
happen to mother in that mill before I get safely through
the university. My mother holds to it almost like a religion
that the ruin of the Sakai family is our fault and that we
must somehow restore it. Not only that, but, as a mother,
she naturally feels a deep joy and an object in life in giving
a proper education to her only child. I can understand
that feeling quite well.

"But so long as she's in that mill, isn't she, too, just one
of those miserable silkworm cocoons? An invisible silken
thread is drawing, drawing at her life, too. ..."

Words seemed futile as an answer.

We were third-year high school students. It was a
winter's day with graduation close at hand. Late at
night, in spite of the snow, Sakai came to my lodgings.

"What's the matter?" Looking at his face, bloodless
and like that of a man just come from a tomb, I felt in-
tuitively that something serious was wrong.

605

Cocoons

"My mother is dead. . . . Too late, too late."

Almost snatching from him the telegram he had re-
ceived, I recalled his prophetic words and a cold shiver
ran down my spine.

My voice failed to utter a word. For a moment that
face which I had seen in the silk mill, among all those
droning spindles, with its smooth brows, so unlike the
women of to-day, rose before me and then was gone.

"Too late. In the New Year vacation I begged her to
let me leave school. I told her no son could bear to send
his mother out into a mill like that, and that there was no
rest for me while I knew she was surrounded by all sorts
of dangers, and helpless against them. It was the first time
I'd been back home for a long while and I realized with a
shock the great change in her. She wept, but would not
hear me."

His lips quivering, he brushed away the tears that welled

up'

"But talking like this won't do any good now. I'm

going home by the night train. Would you mind lending
me the fare?"

I put together all the money I had and gave it to him,
and walking through the snow saw him off at the station.

About a week later I got a letter from him.

"This morning we gathered up my mother's ashes.
They all went nicely into an urn less than seven inches
high. Sitting with it before me, I realize more deeply than
ever the terrible blow I have suffered. More than ten
girls from the mill came to the funeral. They were girls
whom my mother had been kind to. More had asked to be
allowed off just to attend the funeral, but, as you can
imagine, permission was not granted. Those who came
had managed to escape knowing they would be punished
for it. I was deeply moved by this.

"When in the New Year vacation I was stopped by
mother from leaving school, I thought out a plan of my

606

Fusao Hayashi

own. Were I to enter university, I would try to find work
to do in my spare time. If I succeeded, even if I got mother
to leave the mill, we would have enough for the two of us.
But as things turned out, this too has ended in nothing.

" Sitting before this urn, my thoughts turn to the system
which silently, with subtle force, destroyed my mother's
life.

"The cocoons getting thinner, the reels fatter — the dead
black body of the grub.

"My mother wanted me to get on in the world. That
was her only wish. I, too, tried to comply with it and
exerted all my energies towards that goal — and see what's
happened.

"But I will not despair. In the crematorium in the hills,
just as I was getting together her ashes by the light of a
candle, suddenly an idea came to me. It seemed a new
road opened up before me. There was not only one cocoon.
My mother was not the only sufferer.

"In this land of ours alone, how many millions, no, tens
of millions of human beings, like the cocoons in the boil-
ing water, are having their life-blood sucked away from
them?

"It may sound funny to you to say it abruptly like this.
But I know the enemy I have to fight. I expect I shall have
a chance of talking this out with you more in detail some
time. I remember how once in our middle school days I
used my knife against one fellow who bullied me. The road
I am taking now is not a mean, cowardly one like that.
This work is work fit for men which I must give up my
whole life to. It would please mother, too, I think.

"I'm not coming back to school. It will be some time
before I'm able to meet you again, probably. I hope you'll
take care of yourself and study hard.

"One other thing — in the left-hand drawer of my desk
you will find a white cocoon. It's a funny sort of keepsake,
but I'd like you to keep it in memory of my mother."

607

Cocoons

That must have been ten years ago.

Whenever I see cocoons I am reminded of Yasuo Sakai.
But there are few chances for me to see them, since I have
become so completely a city-dweller, knowing that the
autumn has come only by the patterns of grasses on fabrics
in the shop-windows.

There is no need of cocoons to remind me of Sakai now.
I, too, have joined the ranks of those he calls "Comrades."

608

OUTPOST

Denji Kuroshima

DENJI KUROSHIMA was born in Japan in 1898. Drafted
into the army, he was sent on the Siberian expedition during
the civil war in the U. S. S. R. Since then he has become well
known for stories about the life of soldiers.

OUTPOST

I
PIGS

A DROVE of black pigs was snouting and digging the
debris from the swamp. A company of the Japanese
expeditionary army was stationed at a Chinese
village a few miles away from the Taohon railway line.
It was early in November. When this company departed
from Mukden, the vast Manchurian plains were green,
but now only gray, monotonous, endless fields stretched
before them.

From beyond the hills an outpost of the Manchurian
army strained their vigilant eyes over the plain. The
Japanese side eagerly waited for the moment to open the
attack. They had crossed the Eastern Siberian railway,
occupied the Chahar fortress, and taken possession of the
Taohon railway. It was preparation for an attack on the
Soviet border. Well known is this story of Japanese
aggression.

For two weeks this company of the Japanese army had
been quartered in a Chinese village, waiting with the keen
attention of a bird of prey for a chance to advance. But
among the soldiers in these quarters, there was apparent
an effort to forget the tense atmosphere of the war. They
sought diversion, some amusement which would never be
permitted under the strict army rule even in time of peace.
Pale yellow sunlight appeared in the far-away sky. On
the roof of the billet where the Japanese army was quar-
tered, a watch tower had been erected to observe the

Reprinted with the permission of the author, the translator, Naru Matsui,
and the editors of The Fight against War and Fascism where the story appeared in
the issue of September 1936.

Outpost

enemy. A Japanese soldier, Hamada, was on duty at the
watch tower, but he too was restless.

"Look there!" he shouted to the idle soldiers on the
ground. " Some surprises are coming over the swamp."

"What is it?" The soldiers down below lifted their heads
and looked at Hamada. They saw in his face a mischie-
vous joy. "Tell us! Are they women?" All the soldiers
were thirsty for women.

"No, not women, pigs."

"What did you say? Pigs? Pigs? Well, that wouldn't
be so bad. Come on, fellows."

The soldiers were not well fed. They received only the
most monotonous food. The meat, which was served
seldom, was canned and tasteless. The thought of fresh
juicy meat stimulated their imaginations and their mouths
watered. They hatched up a plan.

About five minutes later, several soldiers with rifles on
their shoulders marched across the wild open fields towards
the swamp. At about a hundred yards from the swamp,
they fell on their knees on the dried grass and took aim.
The black pigs were wandering in search of food, not
sensing the soldiers. They missed their usual food from
the farmers who had fled before the advance of the Japa-
nese army. The soldiers aimed their rifles at the pigs. It
was easy and safe to shoot, not a human being, but non-
resisting and helpless animals. The pigs fell one by one.
It was a pleasant game. But Goto, a new recruit, missed
his aim and merely wounded the pig. It howled in sharp,
piercing cries and leaped up, then rolled violently on the
ground.

"Look, it is wounded." All the soldiers gazed upon the
wounded pig, which was jumping and rolling with the
blind power of madness.

Again Goto aimed his rifle and again he missed. The
pig, in desperation, made another fierce turn. Goto aimed
his rifle, but a third time missed.

612

Denji Kuroshima

"If that were a human being, we could not stand it,"
one of the soldiers murmured. "Even to do it to a pig is
cruel enough."

"Do you know Ishizuka and Yamaguchi were murdered
like that?" said Onishi.

"Were they really murdered by our officers?"

"Yes, sure, I know the fellow who was assigned to the
duty of shooting them. He told me what he saw himself."

Presently the soldiers returned to their billet, carrying
the pigs, still warm, tied to a pole by the hind legs. Blood
running from the pigs' mouths drew a long red line on the
gray field.

At the entrance of the billet the company sergeant-
major stood with a stern and sulky look.

"Didn't you see a Chinese before you went out?" he
asked.

"No, sir. Has something happened, Sergeant-Major?"

"Yes, but you fools don't know anything. All right."
He cast a sidelong glance at the pigs, still dripping blood,
but he said nothing. The soldiers filed past him and laid
the pigs beside the mud wall of the billet.

"Hamada, what has happened?" Onishi asked Hamada,
who had come down from the watch tower.

"A Chinese soldier has done a smart, quick job. He was
here and has gone, leaving behind him leaflets. Nobody
noticed him."

"Where are the leaflets?"

"All the leaflets have been taken away by the sergeant-
major. We are not allowed to read them. Don't you know?"

But later Hamada brought out a sheet of folded paper
from his rice-pot and showed it to the soldiers.

"Though Ishizuka and Yamaguchi were killed, we have
our friends like them right here among the Chinese soldiers.
Wasn't that Chinese soldier wonderful? He did not fear to
come here to give us the leaflets and he left without a
sound. How smart he was!"

613

Outpost

II
COMFORT-BAGS

The Chinese house where the Japanese company was
stationed had a thick wall and a low ceiling. It was steam-
heated. At night the soldiers slept on the floor, rolled in a
few blankets. A foul smell of body odor filled the air.
The soldiers had not taken a bath in more than twenty
days.

Hamada and several other soldiers were lying on a
blanket after a day's duty. They were waiting for the
mail. The officers were nervous about anti-war leaflets
which were not only brought by the Chinese soldiers, but
had often been found in the mail sent to the soldiers from
their homes, and in the comfort-bags. The strictness of the
censorship had been intensified.

The steam-heat warmed the soldiers; but the place was
infested with fleas. It was five in the evening and already
dark. In North Manchuria days were very short. A
thick, grayish-white candle stood on the edge of a shelf
without a candle-stick. The room itself expressed the
desolate and dull life of soldiers at the front. The rifles
leaning against the wall smelled of gun-powder. The
muddy and torn shirts hung down like cerements. The
gray wall, from which plaster was falling, was decorated
with the pictures of two popular movie actresses. They
were pasted up with rice. The officers were pleased to see
that the soldiers were comforted in their lonely life by such
things.

The rattle of wheels mingled with the neighing of horses
approached. Clumping steps sounded on the stone road.
The soldiers lying on the floor lifted their heads. Ten
soldiers had returned, who had gone out to the railway
line, two miles away, to receive food, mail, and comfort-
bags.

The billet suddenly became lively. As soon as the

614

Denji Kuroshima

soldiers, warmly dressed, with deep-crowned hats and
gloves, opened the door of the room, those who had been
patiently waiting for their return asked, "Did you bring
mail, too?"

"No."

"What was the matter?"

"The letters are held at Mukden."

"Why?"

"They were opened up and censored."

"God damn it! We are not even allowed to read the old
man's letter without being censored!"

The comfort-bags were divided among them. They
knew that these bags would be packed with the same old
stuff: shorts, towels and soap. Yet they expected each
time to find something different. It was a joy to guess the
contents of the bag. They were as excited as if they were
drawing for a prize. They had received many comfort-
bags before and were able to judge the contents from the
appearance of the white cotton bag. The bulgy ones were
not exciting, for they always had the worst things.

This time, as always, a towel, a pair of shorts, and tooth
powder were all there was in the bag. They took the
articles out one by one, spreading out and shaking them in
expectation of finding entirely different things between
them. A folded paper dropped to the floor.

"Good Lord ! " shouted one of the soldiers. He displayed
his gift under the candle-light.

"What is it?" All the soldiers turned to see.

"Wait! Let me see." Quickly he picked up the paper
and unfolded it under the dim light.

"Is it a leaflet?"

"No. What nonsense. This is only a letter from school
children written by order of the teachers. . . . Damn it!"

At that moment the door creaked. Sword and spurs
clinked. The conversation suddenly stopped. A news-
paper reporter, dressed in a gown thickly stuffed with

615

Outpost

cotton and with fur around his neck, entered with an
officer.

"The soldiers here are treated well. Even in cold Man-
churia they are housed in a warm room," the officer ex-
plained.

"How wonderful!" the reporter answered, despite the
fact that he felt sick in the stinking room.

"I think this company holds the honor of leading our
army across the Nomi River, doesn't it?" He looked
around the room and observed the silent soldiers.

"Yes, it was this company," the officer replied.

" I suppose in that battle all of you had interesting ex-
periences. Will you tell me about them?" He waited for
an answer from the crowd.

But the soldiers kept their mouths closed. They looked
at one another. The reporter inquired what they had
found in the comfort-bags, and about the letter from the
school children. Yet the soldiers only silently exchanged
glances among themselves. The reporter took a picture of
the soldiers and left the room with the officer.

"Damn it! He came to see us only because he wanted to
collect special news for his paper. Instead, he should bring
us news of Japan."

"That's right. Fm always worried about my parents.
They may starve to death."

Ill

OUTPOST

The clinking shoes of marching soldiers could be heard
across the frozen fields. Seven soldiers had gone out scout-
ing under the leadership of Sergeant Fukayama. They had
left the village behind and advanced towards an outpost
three miles beyond the main army in the village. Onishi
and Hamada were in the group.

Trees were rare. No hills, but swamps and kaoliang

616

Denji Kuroshima

fields. The vast plain sloped. The scouts marched forward.
The village where the main army was stationed had
dropped from sight behind the slope. In the deserted
field they felt desolate. Yet pride forced them to deny
their fear. It was shameful to show cowardice.

They knew that the Chinese soldiers were laborers and
peasants like themselves and forced to take up arms
against their will. The Chinese soldiers were paid little
and did not want to fight. Yet the Japanese scouts, im-
bued with fear, imagined sudden attacks. Stories of the
cruelties of Chinese bandits clung to their minds, though
they did not believe them at all. The closer* they advanced
to the enemy's zone, the more their fear increased. Now
the scouts were completely isolated from the main army.

North Manchuria was an endless field. Ahead an iso-
lated house came into sight. The sergeant, who was trac-
ing a road with the help of a map, understood that the
scouts had reached the outpost. Trenches dug by the
Manchurian army were frozen with mud. The deserted
house was to be occupied by the scouts and they were
glad to find shelter from the freezing, biting air.

The house was built of clay, the roof also covered with
clay. The door was broken. Inside there was no bed, no
chair, no shelf, no wood to burn. Only newly burned
ashes. Perhaps it had been looted.

"There is another hut over there," Onishi shouted to
the others when he came out after inspecting the house.
The other hut, which was within fifty metres, stood low in
the trench and was of a protective earth color.

"We must inspect that house, too." Hamada ap-
proached it carelessly. To his surprise a Chinese soldier
appeared at the door.

The sight of a Chinese made his blood run cold. He
instinctively clutched his rifle, but wondered whether he
should shoot him at once or wait. Other Japanese soldiers
also stood erect at a loss what to do, and gazed upon a

617

Outpost

Chinese. It was easy to shoot him alone. But it would be
dangerous if the Chinese battalion were hidden somewhere,
or posted near. There was such a possibility. The Japa-
nese main army would be useless in that case. All of them,
from the sergeant to the new recruit, realized that they
were powerless.

The Chinese soldier at the door smiled at them. An-
• other Chinese appeared behind the first with the same
friendly smile.

"Why! They are greeting us."

The tension on the part of the Japanese relaxed. They
decided to take no action against the Chinese, though
they were watchful.

That day passed without any trouble. Neither side
sent any report to their main army. Yet fear was not ex-
tinguished in the minds of the Japanese soldiers. They
could not sleep throughout the night. They were irritated
and depressed.

The next morning, the Chinese were still there. They
made their appearance at the window whenever the Japa-
nese soldiers looked in, the good-natured smile always on
their faces. The Japanese could not return a sulky look,
and they, too, began to smile. During the whole morning
both sides peered at each other through the windows and
exchanged smiles.

After lunch, there still remained a piece of ham cooked
by a former cook, Yoshida. Hamada wrapped it in a fresh
towel and threw it towards the window of the Chinese
hut.

"A nice present to you!" he shouted in Chinese.

"Thank you!" a voice answered.

The present was dropped on the ground near the Chinese
house. Three Chinese soldiers rushed out and picked it up
with a yell of delight.

In return for the present, the Chinese soldiers sent a
bundle to the Japanese.

618

Denji Kuroshima

"Here is a bottle of rice wine for you !"

"What is it?" The Japanese did not understand the
Chinese. They spoke too fast. But a package, shoot-
ing through the air like an arrow, dropped in front of
Hamada. In the package was a bottle of Chinese rice
wine.

The sergeant was opposed to accepting presents from
the Chinese, and when Hamada opened the bottle, he
uttered the suggestive word, "Poison!"

"No, Sergeant, I don't believe it. Give me the bottle.
I will taste it first," said Onishi.

"No, the first is mine." Hamada insisted on drinking his
first. The bottle was passed to Onishi, who licked his lips,
pleased with the good taste. Then it was passed among the
eight soldiers, one by one — to all except the sergeant. The
sake made them happy. The sergeant could no longer
refrain from drinking and finally joined the others. He got
drunk and his eyes turned red.

The evening of that day was different from the preced-
ing one. They were no longer conscious of fear. A fire was
lighted from the wood collected during the daytime. They
sat in a circle and talked. The centre of the talk was
Onishi, who had worked in a foundry before he was
drafted. He was bold and fearless. He told about the
distress of his mother and sister.

"Even though I am serving my country in Manchuria,
nobody takes care of or helps my family in their destitu-
tion. We are told that we fight for our country, but
our country has been doing nothing for us or for the
poor."

"You are right. War is no good for us."

"Manchurian railway stock went up higher because of
the war. But who is getting the profit? It is not for us
who have not a single share."

The sergeant attempted to change the subject. "Onishi,
shut up. Talk about something else."

619

Outpost

"No, Sergeant, I am not telling a lie. This is a fact."
Onishi did not care what the sergeant said. The soldiers
here were not afraid of him. They ignored army rule.

It was after nine o'clock and the wood had burned out.
Hamada stood up, and asked the new recruit, Goto, to go
with him around the house to get wood. "I will carry my
rifle in case of emergency. You don't need yours. If both
of us are armed, we cannot carry wood."

"Is it safe for two of you to go out?" Onishi asked
worriedly.

"Sure. Nothing will happen."

But another soldier stood up, prepared to follow the
two who had already left. He did not take his rifle. The
three soldiers marched together. The moonlight was re-
flected on the white field covered with frost. The land was
frozen as hard as a rock. The ice crunched under their
steps.

Near a ditch beyond their hut, Hamada was picking and
gathering wood. He stretched himself to try to get dried
branches of trees. Beyond the ditch he saw a black crowd
of animals moving across the slope. It looked like a herd
of small cattle.

"Look!" called Hamada with a yell of horror to the
other two. "Mongolian dogs!"

Goto, facing an army of dogs, dropped the bundle of
wood. The Mongolian dogs made a sudden attack like an
infantry attack. Hamada aimed his rifle at them. The
others held their swords. The dogs, snarling, bore down
upon them. They rushed at the soldiers, jumped on their
backs, at their throats and chests. Hamada recalled the
bodies of soldiers torn by the Mongolian dogs on the
battle fields. He fired at them as fast as he could and tried
to run. But the army of dogs blocked his retreat. At first
sight through the dim moonlight, he saw only twenty or
thirty of them. Now he found them increased to more than
fifty. The other soldiers were helpless without rifles. They

620

Denji Kuroshima

tried to defend themselves with swords. But the dogs were
stronger than the men. The three soldiers fought des-
perately.

Suddenly Hamada heard a sound of shooting. Behind
the Chinese hut he saw black shadows aiming rifles at the
dogs.

In the other hut, six Japanese soldiers looked out
through the window. The army of fierce dogs was ad-
vancing towards their hut like rolling waves. Soon the hut
was encircled with snarling dogs. Their eyes glistened in
the moonlight. The Japanese soldiers seized their guns
and ran out. The dogs were aggressive and did not re-
treat. When one was shot to death, another rushed to
attack, jumping over the dead bodies of dogs. Sounds of
firing echoed over the desolate fields.

Finally Hamada and the other two cut their way
through the dogs and dashed to the rescuers.

"Thanks for your help! Now we are safe." Hamada
thought they were the Japanese. But the answer was in a
different tongue. He looked at them in the dim moonlight,
and saw before him the Chinese who had sent the present
of sake in the afternoon.

"Thank you! Thank you!" Hamada repeated.

The dogs gradually retreated, casting black shadows on
the white field. The Chinese stood side by side with the
Japanese and drove them back.

Three days later, the Japanese army made a sudden
attack on all sections of the battle front. The company to
which the scouts belonged also advanced.

The company commander was furious when he found
that his soldiers had become friendly with the Chinese
scouts. The Chinese and Japanese were eating together
out of the same pot when the commander arrived.

"What are you doing here?" he shouted to his men.
"Who do you think they are? Shoot them!"

621

Outpost

But his order was not carried out. All stood still. An
expression of hatred was on the faces of the soldiers.

" Shoot them!" the commander repeated.

There was a moment of tense silence, suddenly broken
by the sound of shots. Onishi and Hamada had taken aim,
not at the Chinese, but at the commander.

622

THE MARTYR'S WIDOW

by
Agnes Smedley

AGNES SMEDLEY has had a career which embraces every-
thing from school teaching among the Colorado miners to
^newspaper work in China. Shortly after she was born in
Oklahoma, her family moved to Colorado, where her father
was a piece-work laborer and carpenter in the mining camps.
Her education was fragmentary, but since teaching standards
were not high in those days, she got a job at the age of fourteen
teaching school. A jew years later she went to California,
worked her way through the normal school, and made her
first contacts with the " Freedom for India " movement, which,
later, especially during the War, played an important part in
her life. For several years she covered Chinese news in China
for the Indian press and for German newspapers. Her two
volumes on China — Chinese Destinies and China's Red
Army Marches — contain incidents, sketches of people, and
interpretations of events, that are journalism of a high quality
and that in many instances pass over into the class of short
stories. Her Daughter of Earth is autobiographical. At
present (/pj<5) she resides in Shanghai doing free lance
writing.

THE MARTYR'S WIDOW

A Deng Yin-chu sat in prison in Nanking awaiting
death, he reviewed the troubled, harassed years he
had spent with his wife. Her one visit had revived
memories. They were not pleasant ones. But now she
had paid the prison director one hundred dollars for the
privilege of talking with him for a few minutes, and she
had told him that she had raised thirty thousand dollars
to save him. With this money she had arranged with the
prison director and judges to manage his escape. He had
glowed with joy and sat waiting for the consummation of
her promise.

Deng felt conscience-stricken when he recalled his treat-
ment of Hwa-chuan in the past. Yet there had been reason
enough for his actions. For years he had struggled with
her. The revolution had pulled him in one direction, she
in the other. A wife of his family's choice, he had still
learned to love her. This love had remained unbroken
until 1925, one year before his arrest. Their three children
had bound her more closely to him. He had never under-
stood her even though he had loved her. She spent most
of her time gossiping at tea and mah-jong parties, decorat-
ing herself with new gowns, and caring for her complexion.
But this was perhaps the way of women.

Also, she loved money, but perhaps this was not so bad,
for he himself had no conception of its value, and during
the ten years of his marriage he had turned his entire salary
over to her. This money she had deposited in a Shanghai
bank in her own name, and through an agent had loaned
it out at such usurious rates of interest that she had nearly

From Chinese Destinies by Agnes Smedley, copyright 1933 by The Vanguard
Press, Inc., and reprinted by permission of The Vanguard Press.

625

The Martyr's Widow

doubled it. With the eyes of a greedy gambler she had
watched it grow. But Deng had excused her, saying this
was only to guard the family from hardships. He felt
certain now that it was this money she was using to save
his life.

He recalled how he had tried to interest her in public
affairs. First he had bought books and magazines for her
to read and with enthusiasm had tried to impart some of
his thoughts and knowledge to her. But his books and
magazines she hid in a box in the store-room where they
mildewed and rotted. And when he tried to impart his
ideas to her, she turned to him a fretful and resentful
face.

"What business is it of yours who rules China?" she
complained. " You have a good position and you are earn-
ing a good salary. If you get mixed up in these dangerous
plots, it will only endanger me and our children."

Of the men friends who came to see him she had first
been suspicious, and when she heard them talking of the
same things Deng had tried to impart to her, she became
so hostile that gradually she drove them one by one from
his home.

Deng sought in her a friend and comrade, as well as a
wife. From his friends with their teeming thoughts and
their secret plans he would repeatedly return to try to con-
vince Hwa-chuan. His friends, wiser, repeatedly warned
him to keep his affairs from her, but he loved her and it
was not easy. As the revolutionary movement spread his
conflicts with her grew, and only when the tears rolled
down her face would he repent. With her in his arms he
would finally sink into their bed, and, smothered by her
caresses, he would promise to protect her, to sever himself
from all friends or activities that endangered her. For a
time she would rest content, their life would be peaceful,
and then he would be drawn back to his own thoughts and
plans. The conflict at home would be renewed; again it

626

Agnes Smedley

would end by his wife's weeping in his arms in bed; and he,
mastered by her body, would give her new promises.

Sometimes he had awakened at night to think of this
harassing struggle. His friends were right, his wife wrong.
Yet he did not have the strength to follow his convictions.
Then his mind would travel back to the first woman who
had mastered him. This woman had been his father's
concubine and his father had paid many thousands of
dollars for her. Nearly ten years his senior, it was this
concubine who taught him the secrets of what is called
love.

He had been a youth of seventeen at the time. For four
years after that he had secretly waited to do her bidding,
as a tailless dog awaits the command of its master.
Watching her with jealous eyes, he had grown into a
morose, silent young man laden with sickly passion and
guilt. Then his father, as if sensing something at last,
suddenly sent him abroad to continue his studies. Even
when, a short time afterwards, he learned that the con-
cubine had sickened and mysteriously died, her power over
him was not broken. He sought her in every woman he
met. And when he agreed to the wife his family chose for
him, he dreamed of her only as the first woman in another
form.

Deng recalled how he had often sat up in bed at night
and gazed into the dim face of his sleeping wife, seeking in
her some resemblance to the other woman. There was
none. She was short of stature, fair of skin, and with small
eyes. Hers was a dead, stupid beauty, like the face of a
doll. She worked hard to preserve a certain prettiness.
But the first woman had been tall and slender, with long
black eyes that could burn with passion when he held her
to him. Her body had been like a slender bamboo swaying
in the breeze, responding to every breath of his desire. He
could recall nothing she had ever said — but then women
are supposed to have nothing to say. She was the begin-

627

The Martyr's Widow

ning and the end of his expectation from woman. Yet
there was something in his wife that recalled this woman.
When he held her in amorous embrace, his memory of the
past revived and he lay again in the arms of the concubine.
For these precious memories he had for years slighted his
friends and the revolution.

Deng recalled the night he finally freed himself from his
wife, the night a new passion took the place of his old
memories. It was on the evening of May 30, 1925, when
the news of the Shanghai massacre flashed through all
China. All work had ceased and everywhere men stood
talking of strikes, boycotts, fighting. That evening he had
returned late, expecting to find his wife as excited and
determined as was he. She met him, smiling prettily. She
had heard nothing of the news. And when he told her of it,
she looked vacantly into his face.

"These people are always doing something bad," she
said fretfully. "They are always trying to stir up
trouble!"

"What do you mean?" he asked, confused and as-
tounded.

"Down there in Shanghai — the workingmen and stu-
dents. They have no sense of responsibility. Your friends
are the same — they are a bad influence upon you."

His arms hung lifelessly at his sides and he stood staring
into her empty face.

"Now what have I done?" she began, her lips quivering,
tears gathering in her eyes. She placed her hands on him,
clung to him. But he continued staring at her as if she
were a strange woman. Then he firmly and slowly released
her arms, and without a word or a backward glance turned
and left the house.

From this time he had worked in secret, always silent in
her presence. Her fretfulness, her resentment, and her
tears crystallized into a hard, mean hatred for his friends
and the movement that was sweeping China. She peddled

628

Agnes Smedley

her grief from one tea-table to the other in Nanking, and
her gossip reached the ears of Deng's friends. Deng merely
replied to them: " She knows nothing of our work. I never
speak to her of it." But they worried, for her tongue
wagged.

Finally an impetuous man by the name of Wu decided
to act. One day he appeared in her home and spoke di-
rectly: "I hear what you are saying about Deng's political
activities. I warn you — you are endangering his life. If
your gossip reaches the ears of the militarists he will be
arrested and killed."

She was white with fury. "You are all Reds! It is you
who are endangering his life. What right have you to
force him into these activities? He is my husband!"

"I have warned you, seriously. The militarists have
ears at every keyhole. Nobody complains of him but you."

"You are a bad man — leave my house at once!" she
screamed.

Hwa-chuan peddled her new injury over the city. Wu,
the Red, had insulted her! When Wu heard her new at-
tack, he quietly packed up and moved, fearing his own
days would be few. And when Deng raised his firm voice
in protest at her conduct, she had screamed in fury at him
and run from the room.

Then had come Deng's arrest and within a few hours his
sentence to death charged with high treason. Hwa-chuan
was stricken not so much by grief as by resentment and
anger. When his friends called and asked her, as his wife,
to go to the prison and negotiate with the authorities about
bribery, she had first accused them of every crime. They
waited only for her to finish. Then, in straight, hard
words, they asked her to recall that even were all she said
true, still the problem now was to free her husband. This
she could do, but none of his friends would dare risk their
lives by negotiating for him.

"And who will pay this bribery?" she furiously asked.

629

The Martyr's Widow

"We will," they assured her.

Her fury slackened as they spoke of the money. And at
last she agreed.

Hwa-chuan passed in and out of many doors in Nan-
king, and finally thirty thousand dollars was fixed upon as
the sum that would make Deng's escape from prison pos-
sible. It was a huge figure, for Deng's friends were poor.
Hwa-chuan had more than this in the Shanghai bank but
not a breath of it passed her lips. It was Deng's friends
who had got him into this trouble, it was they who should
pay for it! Then the money began to pour into her lap.
First Deng's old father wired fifteen thousand dollars from
Szechuen and prepared to leave for Nanking to help his
son. Deng's friends collected money in driblets — one
thousand here, five thousand there.

Finally the entire sum lay in Hwa-chuan's hands. She
gazed at it and thought what a shame it was to give so
much money to the authorities. Hwa-chuan felt her
power, and money also meant power. She began bargain-
ing with the judges and jailers, just as she bargained with
shop-keepers.

"Thirty thousand is too much — we are poor ... we
do not have so much money ... I will give you five
thousand . . . seven thousand then."

Then as the days and threats heaped themselves one on
the other she offered ten thousand. The execution was
twice announced and twice postponed as the authorities
waited for the money. But they demanded the full thirty
thousand. More, they were insulted that she tried to make
them lose face by bargaining with them just as if they were
common men of the street instead of high and powerful
officials.

Friends, with perspiration standing out on their fore-
heads, haunted Hwa-chuan's house. Pay the full thirty
thousand, they pleaded. Pay it! Hwa-chuan smiled when

630

Agnes Smedley

she saw their dependence on her, these men who had
treated her so badly but a week before !

"If I free Yin-chu," she said, "will you promise to leave
him alone and not draw him into your traitorous activities
in the future?" The men looked at her with black eyes
filled with some emotion that might have been fear or
hatred.

"Yes, we promise," they answered. "We promise you
anything — only pay the money and free him."

"I will pay," she said, "but these authorities will take
less if we hold out a little longer. I know how to deal with
them."

The situation was altogether a most interesting and
exciting one for Hwa-chuan — just like some of the novels
she had read. She often pictured herself in the role of a
heroine in a novel — one of the great beauties who held the
destiny of empires in the palm of their fair hand. She
recalled how by cunning and sex charm women of the past
had raised their own families to eminent positions and
destroyed their enemies. She recalled a more modern
novel in which a traitor had been shot. The traitor's
friends rescued his body and found it had only one bullet
wound, and it not fatal. They had brought the man to
consciousness and nursed him back to health. In fantasy
Hwa-chuan saw herself doing the same thing. She would
charm the authorities — thereby saving ten to fifteen thou-
sand dollars — she would smash the friends of Deng who
were responsible for his imprisonment, and if in the end
her husband was shot, she would bring his body in a motor
car to a hospital and nurse him back to life.

Hwa-chuan set about the realization of her dreams.
Returning from the prison one day after fruitless bargain-
ing and tea drinking, she felt she should adopt new tactics.
She went to a silk shop and bought a number of new gowns,
then drove by ricksha to her tailor's and gave instructions
for their immediate preparation. She would appear in

The Martyr's Widow

ravishing new gowns before the authorities. But, emerging
from the tailor shop, she could not endure the thought of
returning home to face the perspiring men who haunted
her house day and night, urging, pleading, promising.
Her life was hard enough without hearing their voices
each day! Upon her shoulders rested the whole burden of
saving Deng's life and of saving half the money! Harassed
-by these difficulties, she drove to a fruit-store and selected
a basket of choice mangoes. With these she went to the
home of a friend, where she spent the weary hours of the
afternoon eating mangoes and relating her sorrows and
problems.

The next morning Hwa-chuan arose languidly to con-
front her difficulties again. But, outside, the city was astir
with the report that on this day Deng Yin-chu was to be
shot. Some one sent Hwa-chuan a note informing her of
this, but she took it lightly, shrugging her shoulders and
thinking, "This is the third threat. They are merely trying
to squeeze the thirty thousand dollars out of me!"

Within an hour the streets of Nanking were lined with
people. Others streamed from every direction. Foreigners
mingled with the crowds of the curious. Down the streets
came marching a long line of soldiers — and in their midst,
his hands tied behind his back, the tall, slender figure of
Deng Yin-chu. He was without a hat, and his thin, sensi-
tive face was pale and desperate. To the gaping thousands
that did not lift a finger to save him from the soldiers, he
cried :

"I am being taken to execution! I am a member of the
Kuomintang! I have worked for the revolution! Down
with Sun Chuan-fang! Down with all the oppressors of the
people!" Through one street after the other his hoarse
voice shouted.

The crowds stared, now and then a man snorting a short
laugh. Thousands fell in behind the procession, pressing
close to the marching soldiers, struggling to see just how a

632

Agnes Smedley

man acts on his way to death. At the place chosen for the
execution, the dense mass of people formed a semi-circle.
With the same expectant excitement that they would
watch an old feudal play, they now watched the soldiers
line up and await the moment of firing. Men fought to get
in a front row that they might see better.

Deng Yin-chu was marched to a cleared space before the
soldiers. Standing alone before the firing squad, but facing
tens upon tens of thousands of men and women who stood
and gaped, he raised his head and cried into the spiritual
desert of China:

"Down with Sun Chuan-fang! Down with the oppres-
sors of the people! Long live the rev ... !"

A volley of shots cut his last word short. His body
trembled, then crumpled together and sank to the earth,
his face burrowing a small groove in the dust. Another
volley of shots buried themselves in the prostrate form.
Then an officer strode forward, kicked the body over until
it lay face upward, lifted his pistol and buried a shot
right through the mouth of the dead man.

In the crowd a man fell to the earth, unconscious. The
crowd gave way to his falling body, then stood staring
down at him stupidly, laughing a bit. Nobody bent even
to touch him. Some one reached out and kicked him in the
side with his foot to see if he was dead. The body did not
move. A small circle stared down at him for a few seconds,
then turned to the greater drama again. . . .

The soldiers were marching away, the body of Deng
Yin-chu left to be devoured by dogs. It was forbidden to
remove it, for Deng was a revolutionary. The crowd
moved forward, stared its fill at the body, then began to
seep away into the city to relate the drama to their friends
and families.

Finally there remained but a small group of the in-
satiably curious, also one prostrate body of an unconscious
man, and one man who stood as if petrified, staring into

633

The Martyr's Widow

the void. At last the man of stone came to life and began
to walk away. His eyes fell upon the prostrate figure.
With a gasp he knelt down, turned it over, and cried,
"Wu . . . Wu!" The unconscious man returned to the
earth again, the man of stone cried for rickshas, lifted the
limp figure, and drove away with it.

Among those who turned and dashed from the crowd of
gaping thousands was Hwa-chuan, Deng's wife. When the
news had finally reached her that Deng was being marched
through the streets to execution, she had telephoned a
garage for a motor car. In her mind was the story in
which a man was shot, rescued by his friends, and nursed
back to health. She would rescue her husband in the same
dramatic manner! But when she reached the execution
grounds she could not break through the dense crowd.
She had heard not one shot, but a whole volley. There
had followed the second, as if a whole army was in action.
Then a final pistol shot. A man, perched on the shoulders
of another, said: "Well, there's not much left of that
fellow!" Confused, astounded, Hwa-chuan had turned
and rushed home in her motor car. When the chauffeur
demanded a forty cent tip, she shouted at him, "You've
got wind in the head!" and left him sitting with his hand
outstretched.

That night through a rain storm that drenched Nanking
a number of dark figures crept through the darkness over
the place where Deng's body lay. They halted, whispered,
heaved something up, and crept onward. Where Deng's
body had lain outstretched was a long dry spot that soon
blended with the surrounding mud. The next day the
press reported that the body of the traitor had been stolen
in the night. The dogs of Nanking had been robbed of a
feast.

Deng's father arrived two days afterwards. He remained
for a week. At the end of that time he returned to Hwa-
chuan's house, packed up his bundle, and then, with a face

634

Agnes Smedley

that looked like that of a corpse, said to her: "It is you
who have killed my son!"

Hwa-chuan began to cry. "It is not my fault! It is Wu
and Tsai and Wang and their crowd who have done this.
They led Yin-chu astray. I tried to save him. ... I
worked like a slave! It is easy for them to accuse me now.
I am only a woman and a widow. I am defenseless, with
three little children! If Yin-chu were alive, they would not
dare attack me like this!''

The old father waited for her to cease raving. Then once
more he said: "You have killed my son! You would not
even pay the fifteen thousand dollars I sent to save him!"

Her eyes red from weeping, the woman bitterly sobbed:
"I suppose you even want that money back now. . . .
You would even take it from Yin-chu's children!"

The old man turned and with slow, dragging steps left
her house.

Hwa-chuan was left alone. Deng's friends who had
formerly haunted her house seemed to have been swal-
lowed up in a void. To the women friends who came to
console her — and there were few — she wept out her grief.
It was those Red friends of Deng who had killed her
husband! She named them repeatedly. And when her
accusations reached their ears, one by one they packed up
their belongings and disappeared from Nanking.

In the great historical events of the period the details of
Deng's killing were forgotten. His name, the name of a
Kuomintang martyr, remained. And gradually Hwa-
chuan became known as the widow of a martyr, the mother
of a martyr's sons.

The revolution rolled and seethed, the southern army
captured Nanking, the old militarist army fled. The year
1927 rolled on; the revolution broke on the cliffs of the
class struggle; and in the place of the old, the new mili-
tarists established their own government in Nanking.

635

The Martyr's Widow

The Kuomintang was purified of everyone but the mili-
tarists, the landlords, and their intellectual apologists.
Many of Deng's friends led the lives of hunted animals.

The new militarists claimed Deng as one of their mar-
tyrs, and upon his widow and children they settled life
pensions. To his widow they gave large sums for his
funeral and for a memorial. And when she murmured that
-the pensions were enough only for ordinary living, they
gave her additional sums that his children might later be
sent abroad for university education.

Hwa-chuan, the widow, became known as the true and
faithful wife of a revolutionary, as a woman who had stood
like a rock by the side of her husband aiding him in all his
work. She herself often recalled the trials of secret revo-
lutionary work of the past. Officials called upon her, she
was showered with presents and attention. She was asked
to honor the government with her presence — "to continue
Deng's work where he had left it."

With her new official duties, it was impossible for the
widow of a martyr to be burdened with Deng's children.
She wrote Deng's old father in Szechuen and suggested
that he take his grandchildren and rear them. For now
she was only a widow, it was hard for her to support herself
and her children on her meager salary. After all, she wrote,
the children belonged to the Deng family. So one day a
member of the family appeared in Nanking and took the
three children back with him to Szechuen.

Hwa-chuan was now free to "continue Deng's work
where he had left it." In preparation for this difficult task
she went to Shanghai and bought a number of new gowns
and a good store of foreign perfume, cold cream, powder
and rouge. She had her hair permanently waved. With
these aides she was able to remove all trace of her former
sorrows and difficulties.

So completely did she succeed in her duties that the
eyes of an old official fell admiringly upon her. He had

636

Agnes Smedley

formerly been an official in Hunan and was an old Kuo-
mintang member. He, by name Fu Kwang-chuang, was so
rich that Hwa-chuan's heart almost ceased beating when she
thought of him. A henchman of the new militarists, he had
been one of those who had helped " purify" the province of
Hunan when the counter-revolution began. The press re-
ported at the time that "he had put his thumb down on
the Reds in his own district — and it was a heavy thumb."

Hwa-chuan demurely returned Fu Kwang-chuang's ad-
miring gaze. True, he was married to an old-fashioned
woman whom he had left on his estate in Hunan; and true,
he had ten children. But in these revolutionary days di-
vorce is not difficult for an official.

A short time afterwards the chauffeur in the employ of
Fu Kwang-chuang told the porter in Fu's department some
news. The porter told another friend, and the friend told a
lower official. Sometimes, he said, the old boss called on
Hwa-chuan in the evening and left only the next morning!
This news went the rounds and in time reached the ears
of Hwa-chuan herself. One day she called to interview
the powerful and honorable Fu, and as she passed down
the corridor the brushes of many of the clerks came to a
standstill. She turned resentfully as some one laughed.
At the end of the month two men on whom her unfortu-
nate eyes had fallen were informed by their chief that their
work was so bad that they would have to find employment
elsewhere. The guilty chauffeur lost his job and the porter
found himself on the street.

Then came the incident at Shanghai. The head of one
of the sub-bureaus in Fu Kwang-chuang's offices went to
Shanghai over one week-end to take in the latest movies,
dance halls, and visit the sing-song houses. One night when
he returned to his hotel he came face to face with the old
official and Hwa-chuan. They were just entering a room,
and when they heard steps they had turned. He was so
astonished that he had halted and stared. Returning to

63?

The Martyr's Widow

Nanking on the following Monday, he was at once called
to the office of his powerful chief. The old man made a
little speech about the principles of their late master, Sun
Yat-sen, and expressed his appreciation of the young
man's devotion to duty. Such devotion should not go
unrewarded under the new revolutionary regime. The
young man was promoted to be head of one of the chief
.bureaus in the department. For continued devotion to
duty further advance would be equally rewarded.

The young official expressed his deep gratitude and
assured his chief that he was willing to give his life for the
revolution and for the party to which they both belonged.
His chief could depend upon him in all emergencies.

Next, the accountant for the department began to have
considerable trouble. The expenses were mounting with
each month. Shanghai firms from which the department
bought supplies were sending blanket accounts, and some-
times false ones. Here were two of the latest bills he was
asked to pay. One was itemized and included twelve
ladies' handkerchiefs at three dollars each. The second
included two tablecloths with napkins, a bolt of silk, and a
box of silk stockings. 3

The old official looked in surprise at the accounts. There
was some mistake! He would investigate. A few days
later the accountant was called in and given two new bills.
The one for the handkerchiefs was changed to a dozen
hand-towels for the department, and the second one was a
blanket account marked miscellaneous. At the same time
Fu Kwang-chuang arose and delivered a little speech. He
was delighted to have under him an accountant who kept
his eyes open and looked after the expenditure of the de-
partment. This honesty was rare in officials these days, as
Chiang Kai-shek had said in his recent speech. Henceforth
the accountant's salary would be increased forty dollars a
month, and further devotion to duty would meet with like
reward !

638

Agnes Smedley

The accountant expressed his appreciation for the raise
afid said that although he was not working for money and
found it highly humiliating to have to accept any salary
at all for his service to the party, still with famine, floods
and Communist depredations in the interior, he was forced
to depend upon money for his existence. In the future, as
in the past, he would continue his unselfish labors!

Hwa-chuan, one of the choicest flowers of the Kuomin-
tang, "continued the work that Deng had left unfinished"
in many ways. There was the time she came face to face
on a public street with Wu, the former friend of Deng who
had warned her that her gossip would yet lead to his death,
the same Wu who had fallen unconscious when Deng had
been shot. He was now dressed in a disgraceful old foreign
suit and hat, and across his upper lip was a scar as if some
one had smashed him in the mouth. Elegantly gowned, a
picture of Shanghai art, she had still halted and smiled
charmingly at him. But instead of returning her smile, he
greeted her ironically by her maiden name, saying:

"I hear you are a great revolutionary now, Sun Hwa-
chuan!"

She looked at him suspiciously and then resentfully.
"I am doing my duty!" she replied.

"As in the past!" he remarked.

Hwa-chuan's resentment turned into anger. "I have
heard that you, as in the past, are still a Red ! Still working
against the government!"

Wu smiled. Furiously, to show her knowledge and
power, Hwa-chuan continued: "In fact I have seen your
name on the list of men the government intends to
execute!"

"Perhaps you will help them, Sun Hwa-chuan — as in
the past!" Wu replied. Then he scornfully walked past
her and made his way down a narrow street.

That evening Hwa-chuan wept. Fu Kwang-chuang
could not endure to see tears in the eyes of his little

639

The Martyr's Widow

treasure. It was all because of the insult of this man Wu
whom she had met on the street, she told him. Wu Chung-
hwa was a Red and was one of those who had caused
Deng's arrest. Now he insulted her in the streets!

The old man became furious. Before another night had
passed the man should be in the hands of the police! But
his little treasure should not weep her eyes out because of
"such a bandit. She should have those jade earrings she had
so much admired, and she should have anything else she
wanted.

The tears continued rolling down her face: "It is only
because I am a poor woman, and alone, that people can
treat me like this," she gulped. "If Deng Yin-chu were
alive, he would protect me. . . . But to you also I am only
a widow to play with. Your old wife has the protection of
your name and position — I have nothing!"

Fu Kwang-chuang protested. He loved her. But his
wife was old, the mother of his ten children. It would look
bad if he took a young wife.

"Yes," she wept, "I am but the widow of a martyr! I
am good enough to give my life for the revolution but not
good enough for you to marry!"

The old man sought to kiss her tears away. And at last
he lay trembling in her arms, smothered by her caresses,
promising to do anything she wished.

At another time Hwa-chuan complained to him:
"Everybody is gossiping about us. But I know who is
responsible. It is Professor Wen Fu-an. He tries to deny
that he is a Red, but Deng Yin-chu told me in secret
that he was. This is the reason he is creating a scandal
against us!"

A few days later a friend called to warn Wen Fu-an that
he should leave Nanking at once or face arrest as a Com-
munist. Wen was astonished. He was not a Communist at
all, he said. That did not matter, the friend declared, con-
sidering the source of the rumor. When Wen heard the

640

Agnes Smedley

name of Fu Kwang-chuang, he recalled the death of Deng
Yin-chu at the hands of the old militarists. The old mili-
tarists killed by the dozens, the new militarists by the thou-
sands. That night he took the night train for Shanghai.

Finally the day came when Hwa-chuan's long years of
suffering for the revolution came to an end. Fu Kwang-
chuang divorced his old wife and settled a part of his fortune
upon her and a part upon his children. Upon Hwa-chuan
he settled a large sum of money and some of his Shanghai
real estate. This he had done before he and she were
married, for, weeping in his arms, she had expressed the
fear that unless she had the property in her own name, his
children might one day challenge her right to any of his
fortune. She did not wish to suggest that he would die
before she did — she would rather die than think of such a
possibility! But in case he did, it was best to be prepared.

Following the divorce and the settlement Hwa-chuan
walked to the table where a modern marriage ceremony
was gone through, the old man proudly at her side, claim-
ing as his own the revolutionary widow of a revolutionary
martyr. There were many speeches about the benefits of
modern marriage, marriage based upon love, and about
the birth of a new society as expressed in such unions as
this. "In this marriage," one speaker poetically cried,
"we have love presiding over the revolution. Could
anything be more hopeful for the future of China?"

One of the speakers was the young official from the old
man's offices. This man had taken up a collection from all
the employees of Fu Kwang-chuang and had bought a
present of great value. Representing his colleagues, he
delivered an oration on old Fu's self-abnegation in official
life. As he spoke tears sprang to the eyes of many a guest
and even the old man himself cried.

After the wedding Hwa-chuan spoke with deep feeling
to friends who congratulated her: "Now I feel that I can
be of more service than ever to the revolution!"

641

THE TIGER

by
V. Borokhvastov

V. BOROKHVASTOV is a young Soviet writer whose stories
have appeared in International Literature.

THE TIGER

A SOVIET SHORT STORY OF THE FAR EAST

THE weather was on parade before Nature that day.
The sun led the procession in all his dazzling glory
with a golden march. After him came the heavy
artillery of the thunder. Then the wind howled like the
siren of an interceptor. Then the slow bombers, the
clouds, rolled up, and after that a steady downpour of rain
marched by the windows.

It lasted a long time, the drops keeping step evenly and
regularly. It smoothed out the ruts and creases of the
roads, picked out high lights on the trees. It tarried.

The parade concluded with the rain. Days like this are
not uncommon in the Far East. Towards evening the sun
shone out from behind the hills and splashed the tree-tops
with light till the earth looked as though it had been
plunged into the depths of the merciless blue.

Nature seemed to have been freshened with a spray.
Everything gave off a sharp, unexpected odor. The scents
were strong and sticky. Even the iron roof of the house
where the frontier troops were quartered emitted its own
peculiar smell.

The men were sitting peacefully cleaning their rifles and
standing them, with a tug at the strap, like horses in their
stalls for the night.

By the window, at a table as long as a file of soldiers, sat
a seasoned fighter named Devitsin. He was holding part
of the rifle-lock in his hand. It looked like the bolt of a
casement window. Then he began to test the sear-spring.

Translated from the Russian by Anthony Wixley. Reprinted from Interna-
tional Literature, May 1935, with the permission of International Publishers
Co., Inc.

645

The Tiger

Opposite to him sat the platoon commander Brikin, who
had only lately arrived from distant Kazan. Another of
the men was crawling about on the floor, looking for a
swab he had dropped.

Outside the window the moon hung like a target. The
men aimed their rifles at it and peered down the barrels.
The screwthread wound like a corkscrew right up to the
steady attentive eye. The barrels were clean.

The door opened, admitting the night scents, the com-
mander of the frontier defence corps, and a woman. Devit-
sin gave the man who was kneeling on the floor a little
nudge with his foot and said :

"Somebody's come to see you, Vanya."

"No, indeed I haven't," said the woman. "I've come
to see the commander."

"That is, not to see me, but Comrade Devitsin," ex-
plained the corps commander.

Devitsin rose and laid his rifle aside.

"At your service," he said.

"Well, it's like this — there's a tiger annoying us again
out at the collective farm," the woman began. "It stole
a calf last night. It's got so that the cattle have no place
left to breathe. Well, so at the general meeting they picked
me to go and talk to your chief about it and he's sent me to
you."

"Oh, all right, then," replied Devitsin, picking up his
rifle once more. " It won't be the first time I've taken on a
job like this. See those over there!"

He pointed in the direction of the Red Corner, where
three tiger skins, his trophies, hung on the wall.

"Maybe, Comrade Devitsin, you wouldn't mind going
tonight — it would save a head or so of cattle, eh?" said
the chief.

"All right, Comrade Commander," replied Devitsin.
"Fll start getting ready this minute."

He finished the cleaning of his rifle. Brikin unexpectedly

646

V. Borokhvastov

hurried over the cleaning of his, too. When Devitsin stood
up and stretched himself, putting his great body to rights,
the platoon commander was already fitting the lock in his
rifle.

"Take me along with you, will you?" he asked.

" Right. Come on."

"On one condition, though: give me a chance to kill
the beast. I want to send my wife the skin as a present."

"Right. I'll charge you a cigarette for that," Devitsin
said. "If I should happen to kill it, it'll be yours all the
same. I've got enough of them."

People said of him jokingly that he began to play with
things like flatirons when he was ten months old. Nowa-
days, if the piano had to be moved from one place to an-
other, Devitsin managed it alone, to the accompaniment
of the men's jokes.

While they were completing the cleaning of their rifles,
the conversation turned on tiger hunting.

"Where's Lavrukhin these days?" asked Brikin. "I've
heard a lot about him."

Lavrukhin had been famed throughout all the army as
the very best marksman. His eye was absolutely true; his
hand as steady as a rock. It was said of him that while he
cocked the trigger, he not only held his breath, but could
even stop his heart beating.

With a shot-gun he could knock out a row of matches
stuck in the ground at a distance of ten paces and not miss
a single one, beginning from the right.

"Yes," replied Devitsin sadly, oiling the outside of the
lock. "He was the best tiger hunter in these parts. He
always shot his game in the eye, so as not to spoil the skin.
I learnt the trick from him. You should always aim at the
eye."

"And where is he now?" asked Brikin.

"Dead."

"What did he die of?"

647

The Tiger

"That's a long story."

"Tell me, though," Brikin persisted.

"You see, it was like this," Devitsin began, testing the
lock once more. "If you come across a tiger and start to
track it down, it'll start to track you down, watching for a
convenient moment to attack you. It knows that it's
easier to attack from the rear. Or for instance, if you kill
'either the male or the female, the remaining half of the
family is certain to track you down and fall on you from
the rear. That's what happened with Lavrukhin. He
killed a tiger and as he was on his way back, the other got
on his scent and killed him."

"Was it a male or a female that killed him?" asked
Brikin.

"It was a — a male," replied Devitsin, stammering for
some reason or other. The other men, who knew the story
of Lavrukhin's end, sat with bowed heads cleaning their
rifles.

No one spoke.

Nothing disturbed the silence but the sharp smells of the
night and the energetic rubbing of the men at the rifles.

"Well, let's go, shall we?" said Devitsin, bestirring
himself.

"Come on," said Brikin, giving a twitch to his Russian
blouse.

They wandered about for a long time over bumpy, cut
up ground. They endeavored, military fashion to keep
out of the moon-light and in the shade of the trees. On
his back Brikin carried a knapsack containing a small pig
which was to serve as a decoy for the tiger. The darkness
and the unevenness of the ground under the feet of the
man carrying it terrified the pig and its squeals rent the
silence of the woods.

"And what if the tiger should mistake me for the
pig?" asked Brikin of Devitsin, who was just ahead of
him.

648

V. Borokhvastov
"It might easily happen. Have a look round from time

to time."

They both kept their rifles ready. The iron was pleas-
antly cool to the touch, the feel of a faithful rifle quieted
all alarms and kept the pulse normal.

They moved noiselessly along like scouts. Only the pig
betrayed their presence, he tossed about, gnawing the
sack and squealing. The track they took was only for the
experienced. No outsider could have found it for it was
almost imperceptible. Brikin wondered about it as he
tramped on silently. At first he thought Devitsin was
going at random, but after a while he realized that they
were making in a definite direction all the time. Devitsin
would suddenly halt from time to time and give a rapid
glance round. All was quiet. The forest was full of in-
explicable night sounds: cries that resembled the voice
of neither bird nor beast followed by a kind of variegated
hissing and sucking and clicking and squeaking. And
occasionally the almost inaudible sigh of the wind.

Brikin was only a step behind the other man, so that
every time Devitsin halted unexpectedly, Brikin involun-
tarily bumped into him. Each time he gave vent to some
exclamation, such as:

"Back hoss!" or "Hey up, a train smash!"

When they had ascertained that there was no sign of
pursuit, they went on further. The track wound among
the trees. Even a very experienced hunter could only
guess at it. But Devitsin had been reared in the Volga
forests and learned to hunt from childhood. The forest
had no secrets for him. He might lose his way in a town,
but in the woods — never.

"They make good violins out of this wood," he said,
tapping the trunk of a tree as he passed.

Brikin glanced at the top of it, but could not say what
kind it was.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

649

The Tiger

"Pm a joiner by profession. And I do a bit of wood
carving — just for love of the thing. I like to do small,
delicate stuff in my spare time. Minute work. I read up
about violins. Stradivarius — he was a good craftsman.
He used to saw up the wood for his violins himself and
only used the side of the trunk that caught the sun. He
threw away the rest."

"Imagine that!" said Brikin, surprised. "Pm a black-
smith myself. There's nothing delicate about our work.
Strength is mostly all that's wanted for it."

The night called for silence. The men obeyed. Only the
little pig resisted the silence. He kept trying to jump off
the divisional commander's back and thus at times was
no weight at all. Whenever he jumped, he gave a squeal
that pierced the stillness. Whenever he ceased, the stillness
became almost tangible.

It was oppressive.

"Have we a long way to go yet?" asked Brikin.

"Well, about two kilometres. The woman said that it
was mostly on the eastern side of the farm that the cattle
were lost. I believe there's a path. We'll lie in wait on it.
The tiger can't miss us."

The forest grew denser, more ancient. The almost in-
visible track they followed was strewn with dead trees
that kept their shape like wooden mummies, as they
rotted. Like human beings, they preserved their outer
shell, while inwardly rotting.

The track of the hunter's prey lay through the hosts of
the fallen. The mouldy wood gave off a rather pleasant
smell that smothered all others. It was the smell of centu-
ries. Ancient churches, towers and castles smell the same.

A snake rustled underfoot, unseen. Only the grass un-
dulated where it passed. Devitsin gazed after it.

"Everything living is rounded," he was thinking.
"There's no such thing as an angular creature."

Brikin could think of nothing but the tiger. He was

650

V. Borokhvastov

longing to kill the King of the Jungle of whom he had read
so much. He called up a picture in his mind's eye. His
wife would receive a huge parcel from him by post. She
would open it and give a gasp of astonishment, and then
rush off to her mother and then to the neighbors.

She would invite all her relatives, friends and acquaint-
ances to see her. Then she would spend all day trying to
hang it to the best advantage. And, having hung it at
last, would step back to admire it, as if she was at a picture
exhibition.

She would even run out into the yard, to observe the
effect through the window.

Brikin glowed as he stared at the picture he had called
up. He walked as if in a dream, clutching his rifle tightly.

Reality squealed again behind his back, Brikin came to
himself and looked about him.

The stars glimmered like spikes in the sole of a boot.
Falling stars went out like matches. Clouds screened the
face of the moon. There was a mirage-like radiance but
the source of the light was hidden. It lost its color as it
filtered through the wooly clouds.

The forest was wrapped in twilight. The trees lost their
contours.

"That's bad," said Devitsin. "You'll have to wait till
you see the eyes flash before you take aim, otherwise you
won't be able to distinguish a thing in this dusk. It's
terrible."

"All right."

They moved on blindly. The shrubs looked like animals,
the tree stumps, like people. Fancy supplied any trifling
deficiency in the resemblance.

Devitsin came to a sudden standstill, glanced down
between his feet and said :

"Here."

As Brikin took off the knapsack, the pig let out a blood
curdling shriek. He knew what that word "here" meant;

651

The Tiger

he had heard it before. He was tired of being a decoy. He
wanted to be a tiger for a change, this little pig was cov-
ered with as many scars as a warrior who had seen much
service.

Devitsin always took great care of his decoy. He shot
the tigers when they were about to spring, so that the pig
got nothing more than a little mauling while the beasts
were in their dying convulsions.

The decoy knew well how to squeal with terror, and
tigers came at his call. With every beast that was killed
the pig grew wiser. While he was being tied by the leg,
he ceased squealing. He knew that the tiger might come
any moment.

It was the same now. As soon as Brikin pulled him out
of the knapsack by the leg, the pig grew dumb. He strug-
gled and tried to escape on his three ridiculous legs, but all
in a desperate silence.

Brikin tied him to a tree stump.

"Now let's climb a tree," said Devitsin.

They moved away to choose a convenient tree to climb,
while waiting for the tiger.

"Let's try this one," said Devitsin.

They climbed it.

The pig had grown accustomed to his surroundings by
now and wandered under the bushes.

"The scamp!" growled Devitsin.

"Who?"

"That pig. He's gone and hidden himself in the
bushes."

Brikin looked in that direction. The pig was a vague
spot of grey in the thick dusk. There was no moon. A
dim, fitful light filtered through the clouds.

"Shoot when I give the word," Devitsin warned Brikin.
"If possible, aim at the eyes. You'll save on cartridges and
you won't spoil the skin."

"All right."

652

V. Borokhvastov

They perched like birds on the boughs. The alert
barrels of the two rifles were directed to the grey patch
that indicated the whereabouts of the pig.

Brikin was excited. He breathed heavily as he fidgeted
about trying to find a more comfortable position. He kept
shifting his rifle from one hand to the other.

"The dirty, little blackguard," said Devitsin. "He'll
ruin the whole show for us that way."

"Who?" asked Brikin once more, absently.

"Why, the pig, of course. Look at him, he won't even
open his mouth, the rogue!"

"I'll just go down and tease him a bit, shall I?" Brikin
suggested, starting to climb down.

The pig unexpectedly uttered a squeal without waiting
for Brikin. Terror had overcome fear. Devitsin clutched
Brikin by the shoulder.

"Sh— sh!"

Brikin, who was half-way down already, stopped dead,
and dropped his cheek to his rifle barrel, steadying it on a
branch. The pig was twisting and turning; its tether had
got entangled in the bushes. The forest was silent.

"Look out!" whispered Devitsin.

Out of the gloom of the bushes rushed a shadow that
swallowed up the grey spot of the little pig. He uttered a
piercing shriek that died out almost immediately.

A greenish phosphorescent eye gleamed in the darkness.

"Fire!" ordered Devitsin.

Brikin fired. Then both the men all but lost their bal-
ance out of sheer amazement. For the shot was followed
by a tinkling of broken glass, and the eye disappeared.

"What the devil's this!" Devitsin cried in amazement.
"It's the first time in my life I've ever met a tiger with a
glass eye. Shoot again!"

Brikin fired, aiming this shot at a sound like a death
rattle. The tinkling was not repeated, and neither was the
hoarse gasp.

653

The Tiger

"Let's go down and have a look," suggested Brikin,
unable to contain himself any longer. He jumped down.

"Where are you going? Are you mad, or tired of life, or
what?"

The other man pulled up short.

"In their death agony tigers usually rip out the insides
of hunters like you," Devitsin explained, pulling out his
- electric torch.

He flashed the light on the spot where the pig was, and
gave a gasp of astonishment. Then he leaped down and
rushed towards the bushes before Brikin had time to move.

A dead man lay there, flat on his back. Near him they
saw a knife and the dead pig.

Devitsin flashed his lamp on the man's face.

"A real tiger, it seems," he remarked.

He turned the body over, searching for a clue to the
riddle of the tinkling glass. It appeared that the first
bullet had struck the camera straight in the lens, which
had glittered like an eye in the moonlight, and passed
through the man's chest. The second bullet had gone
through his head.

In the barracks on the frontier, the film found in the
camera was duly developed, and proved to be a photo
of the railway bridges and fortification in our frontier
zone.

After the corpse had been examined, it was discovered
that the man had eaten nothing for five days. He had
evidently lost his way in the Soviet forests. His stomach
still contained undigested grass.

As they were burying the corpse, Devitsin said to Brikin:

"It was this kind of a tiger that killed Lavrukhin. He'd
shot a female tiger and was on his way home when some
blackguard tracked him down and finished him off in a
secluded spot."

6S4

BLACK FRITTERS

Panteleimon Romanov

PANTELEIMON ROMANOV, born in the government of Tula,
Russia, in 1884, began to write long before the Revolution,
and is regarded as a writer of the transition from the old to
the new; Soviet critics have considered him not wholly eman-
cipated from the outlook of "the typical bourgeois pre-
revolutionary intellectual" In English translation we have
the novel, Three Pairs of Silk Stockings (/pj/)5 and the
book of short stories, Without Cherry Blossom

BLACK FRITTERS

the train was only thirty miles away from
Moscow, Katerina could sit still no longer. It
seemed to her that she would never reach the
place. Her heart beat faster and faster with every mile.

Yesterday she had found out that Andrei, who had
worked for the last five years in a Moscow factory, had
begun to live with another woman.

He himself had written nothing to her and their rela-
tionship had not changed in the least; he still sent her
money for the holidays, and now and then a letter. It was
said that he was some sort of chairman now and lived
well.

Maybe it meant nothing to him to give her the hundred
rubles he was sending; he lived on the other four or five
hundred with the other woman. The sum of one hundred
rubles, which had seemed so large to her before, suddenly
became insultingly small.

What should she do when she arrived in Moscow? Break
into his place, unmask him on the spot, make a scandal?

Let people see that he was a scoundrel and a cad. . . .
She would break the window panes — and with her bare
hands, so that there might be blood. . . . And she would
tear the other woman's hair out.

"Oh, Lord, Lord, — what has he done! And all on ac-
count of a bit of red ribbon. . . ." It was not so long ago,
it seemed, that they had lived happily together, had gone
for hay to the meadow by the river in the evenings; the
sun would set, the corn crakes cry in the swamp beyond
the river, blurred voices coming from the village through

From AiMrc Cities, Stories of New Russia, copyright 1929 by International
Publishers Co., Inc., and reprinted with their permission.

657

Black Fritters

the evening air. She would stand on the wagon, and he,
with his shirt collar unbuttoned, with dry, sunbaked hair,
with small drops of sweat on his shaven upper lip, would
lift the damp, fragrant hay with a pitchfork and throw
it up into her hands as she stood on the wagon. Then he
would lead the horse to the water, and she would lie on the
hay in the wagon, chew a grass-blade, and know that after
supper both of them, tired with their work, but happy and
lively, would walk barefoot across the yard to the barn to
sleep in the fresh hay. Storm would break from a sudden
summer cloud, lightning would flare through the cracks
in the gates, and the fresh air would smell even more of
hay and the fustian of her sarafan.

And now it was all gone.

She felt she was capable of anything.

But when she walked out of the railroad station with a
large crowd of people, she was overwhelmed, lost in the
great city. What she had wanted to do was to sweep down
on him like a tempest, tell him everything, but instead
she had to ask how to reach the street where he lived. She
was shown the tram, but when she bought her ticket she
forgot to ask where she had to get off, and she sat in the
tram until it reached a suburb of the city.

She had to ride back and then walk and ask for the
number of the house, for she could not read. She would be
told — and she would go, afraid to ask again, and when
she did ask she would find that she had passed by the house
and would have to retrace her steps.

She walked more and more quickly, thinking that while
she was walking they would leave the house.

When she found the place, a house with enormous doors
and windows, all the apartments were locked, and she had
to knock and ring. And which bell was she to ring, how
was she to guess which door was his?

" Auntie, what are you doing here?" a man in an apron,
holding a chisel in his hand, asked her.

658

Panteleimon Romanov

Katerina told him.

"He isn't here. He doesn't live here."

"What do you mean he doesn't live here? Good Lord,
what am I to do now?"

She had only one ruble with her, tied in a corner of her
kerchief. This was not enough for her fare home.

An old woman with a pail appeared from a door under
the stairway, and on finding out what was wanted, said
that Andrei Nikanorich had moved to the suburbs.
Katerina had to take a train to get there.

Katerina was so happy that she had found a clue, that
she almost ran out of the doorway. Because she was
happy she had forgotten to ask exactly where he was, and
so, when she came to the suburb, she knew the street, but
not the number of the house.

Evening was approaching, and clouds. She ran from
one end of the street to the other, asking and asking, but
she could find out nothing. In her hands she had a kerchief
with black fritters. She did not remember why she had
taken them. She had come to make a scandal, but she had
taken a present along, according to custom, — black rye
fritters.

She had only eleven kopeks left now. The place was
strange, night approached, a wind began to blow. Her
face sweaty and bewildered, she ran along the grassy sub-
urban street flanked by pine trees, and waved her hands in
desperation, as she held on to the kerchief with the black
fritters.

At the moment when she was most bewildered, when she
was in the last throes of despair and fear, she turned into a
little alley, and saw a familiar crown of dry hair beyond
the railing of a fence.

It was he, Andrei. His tunic unbuttoned, he was squat-
ting near a flower bed and digging the ground.

Katerina could only cry:

"Andriushechka, my dear!"

659

Black Fritters

She ran through the garden gate, and when Andrei rose
in surprise from the ground, she embraced him and pressed
her head to his breast, powerless to hold back her tears.

"Look who's here! How did you come here? Did you
fall from heaven?" Andrei asked in amazement and joy.

Katerina could not answer as she wanted to. She said :

"I was very frightened. I thought I would never find
you. I looked for you all day. And I had nowhere to go."

And she wept again.

"Why are you crying?"

Conscience-stricken, she wiped her eyes with the back
of her hand, and smiled guiltily. Then she suddenly re-
membered why she had come. But after what had just
occurred when she rushed to him as to her salvation and
refuge and had wept with joy on his breast, it was im-
possible to start a scandal and pass from joyful tears to
wild outcries.

And then, when she had seen his familiar crown of hair
in the garden like a sudden, wonderful image, her heart
was filled with a joy which she had never known, not even
when they went haying together and slept in the barn.

He had not at all shown what she had expected from
him, from a man to whom had come his deserted wife, a
woman from the village, in a fustian sarafan, while he was
dressed in city clothes and lived in a suburb.

She could not catch the slightest shade of dislike or
perturbation in his face or voice. He was placid, the same
slightly patronising caress was in his voice, especially when
he said:

"Why are you crying? Come, I will tell them to put up
the samovar."

He preceded her on the path that led to the new cottage
painted a fresh yellow, which stood near the fence among
tree stumps.

But on the way he stopped, and cried to a passerby in a
civilian coat:

660

Panteleimon Romanov

" Ivan Kuzmich, you must send to the city for the goods
tomorrow. I will write you a note."

His manner of speaking to the man, the way in which
the man said "all right" in reply, made Katerina feel
that he was the old, clever, practical and kind Andrei, and
yet at the same time another Andrei, on whom people de-
pended, who arranged and gave orders in this strange,
unknown place just as he had done at home. And he did
it so simply and quietly, as if it could never be other-
wise.

She approached the cottage with a failing heart. Sud-
denly she would meet the other woman, dressed like a lady,
of course. Involuntarily, Katerina glanced at her own
holiday sarafan, and felt a hot wave of shame flood her
cheeks because of her village clothes.

When they entered a roomy chamber with new pine
walls and partitions, the first things she saw were two
beds. Her heart began to beat so that her legs grew weak
and almost gave way under her, and her throat went dry.

Everything in the room was so unlike the house where
she had lived with him. Near a window was a table cov-
ered with a newspaper tacked down at the corners, an
inkwell, a pen, a row of books, some papers on a long nail
in the wall. Clean city towels near the washstand in the
corner.

"Are there no ikons here?" she asked, just to say
something.

"No," Andrei answered simply.

He washed his hands, standing with his back to his
wife, and wiped them unhurriedly on the clean white
towel.

Katerina, sitting uncomfortably on the first chair she
had found when she entered, which stood almost in the
center of the room, with her bundle in her hands, looked
around, and her eyes searched eagerly for signs of the
other woman's presence.

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Black Fritters

Suddenly she saw an old straw hat on the top of a closet.
She quickly lowered her eyes so Andrei might not notice
that she had seen the hat.

"Well, we are going to drink tea right away," said
Andrei, and began to gather up the newspapers and manu-
scripts from the dining table.

Katerina felt she did not know what to say in order to
break the uncomfortable silence. And what was felt most
terribly in this silence was that something of which neither
of them had said a word still lay between them.

In the old home she would always talk of the same
things — of the cow, of the children (there were three of
them), of the bad weather.

Now she was trying hard to find something to say to
him, but she could find nothing. Suddenly she remembered
about their cow, and grew happy.

"Our Lyska calved the other day. It was a fine calf, —
just like her."

At the words "our Lyska" she looked involuntarily at
the straw hat. With beating heart, she waited for Andrei
to speak.

"Just like her?" Andrei echoed mechanically. Still
seeming to be engrossed in something, he slowly continued
to remove the newspapers from the table and to put them
on the bookshelf. Suddenly he looked at his wife with a
new expression on his face, as if he had decided to tell her
something important.

The terrible moment had arrived.

"Katiusha," said Andrei, looking not at his wife, but
out of the window, " I did not write to you because that
would not have meant anything. I do not live alone, but
with a comrade. A fine, honest girl. She will come from
work right away, so don't you hurt her. I never chased
after women, the thing came about honestly. That is
all. . . ."

Katerina looked at him in silence, without blinking, —

662

Panteleimon Romanov

only her throat was convulsed as she swallowed hard
occasionally.

This was the right moment to jump up, rip the shawl
from her head, tear out a handful of her hair, shriek like a
madwoman with insult and grief. And then smash the
window panes.

Instead, she said quietly, she did not know why:

"And what about me now?"

"You will live as you have always lived," answered
Andrei. "I shall send you money, and I shall come to help
you with the harvest."

Katerina did not answer. Tears suddenly filled her eyes,
fell on her hands. She did not dry her eyes; she wiped the
tears from her hands with a sleeve.

"Why should you cry? It will be settled somehow,"
said Andrei, and glancing out of the window, added:
"There she comes now. Her name is Katerina too —
Katya. Wipe your eyes. I have told her about you."

Hurriedly, obediently, Katerina wiped her eyes.

She expected to see a large woman with plump elbows
and big breast, with a white face, grown fat on the four
or five hundred rubles while she, his lawful wife, was
drying up, feeding and nursing his children, harvesting
wheat in the fields where her arms had become rough and
tanned, and her elbows, once round and white, had grown
sharp.

And again a burning, jealous hatred surged darkly from
her heart to her head. But her eyes suddenly rounded
with surprise when a thin, emaciated girl in a white waist,
a short blue skirt, and worn tan slippers entered the room.
The girl's blond hair was bobbed like a boy's and held in
place by a round horn comb.

The girl, a bundle of papers in her hands, stopped short
in surprise.

"What did he find in her? She has a chest like a board, "
thought Katerina.

663

Black Fritters

"Katya, we have a guest," said Andrei, noticing the
girl's questioning glance. "Katerinushka is here."

Katya smiled, blushing confusedly, and offered the
guest a thin, pale hand.

"I did not guess at once," she said, smiling again,
guiltily and yet at the same time kindly. And recovering
almost at once, she added: "I suppose you want to eat
.after your long journey."

"I told the landlady to put up the samovar," said
Andrei.

"Good. ... I just came from work," Katya turned
to Katerina. Then for a fleeting moment she looked at
herself in a hand mirror which hung on the wall near the
towels, fixed her hair, and disappeared behind the partition.

Katerina still sat uncomfortably on the same chair in
the middle of the room. She did not know what to say,
and how to treat her husband when his wife was there,
behind the partition. She spoke against her own will:

"She is small and thin."

"That is nothing. She is a fine, kind person," Andrei
answered.

As if suddenly remembering something, Katerina hur-
riedly unwound her bundle, and took out the black
fritters.

"Here, presents. . . ."

And when Katya, with an apron on, and with hands
black from charcoal, entered the room, Katerina, still
against her will, said to her too, as if ashamed of the black
fritters :

"Here, a village present."

Katya blushed again and glanced at Andrei.

"Take them, take them," said the latter, busy with
something in a corner. "She is a fine woman."

"Why did you bring them? It's too much, really."
And Katya added at once: "But I love them terribly.
Are they with buttermilk?"

664

Panteleimon Romanov

"With buttermilk, with buttermilk," Katerina answered
quickly, overjoyed that the girl knew what buttermilk
was.

Later the three of them drank tea together.

"Ivanov was kicked out anyway," Katya said, turning

to Andrei. "There was a general meeting, a lot of noise
»)

"You don't say? It was time long ago," Andrei an-
swered, livening up. He wanted to say something else,
but Katya cut him short, and turned to Katerina.

"You have calluses on your palms. I have them on
my fingers. I bang all day long on the typewriter."

Katerina also wanted to say something that would
interest and enliven Andrei as much as Katya's words
about Ivanov had done. She wanted to tell him about her
railroad journey and what she had seen, but she did not
know how to begin. All that she could say when she
looked at Katya, was:

"Our Lyska calved, — our cow. I sat up with her all
that night. The calf is just like her."

"I love calves," said Katya.

There was a silence.

"I've got warts on my hands," said Katya suddenly.

Katerina was glad that warts had been mentioned, for
she knew of a remedy for them, — some acid. She began
at once to tell how they were to be removed, and tried to
keep on talking, for fear that she would soon end and have
nothing else to speak about.

After supper, which tormented Katerina because she
could not manage her knife and fork, dropping now one,
now the other, Katya removed the dishes, and Katerina
began guessing where they would put her to sleep. They
would take her to the neighbor's, she thought, and would
stay here by themselves.

This thought raised a dark wave of jealousy and resent-
ment from the bottom of her soul. But Katya brought a

665

Black Fritters

folding bed from somewhere and began to put it up in the
room.

Katerina, approaching the table and looking at the
papers lying on it, said:

"Lord, I can understand nothing. How do you make
head or tail of it?"

Before bedtime, Katya sent Andrei out of the room.
-He put on his cap and went out.

"Now you can lie down," said Katya with the same
confused smile, turning to Katerina, and pointed at her
own bed in which she had just changed the linen.

Katerina, feeling that she was expected to say some-
thing polite, uttered :

"Why should you bother yourself? I can lie down on
the floor."

"No, no, why?"

Katerina took off her boots, glad that she had not come
in her best shoes. Then she pulled the sarafan off over her
head, and ashamed of her coarse village shirt, covered
herself hurriedly.

Katya got some acid from a closet, and sitting next to
Katerina, applied it amateurishly to her warts with a
feather. Katerina showed her how to do it and helped her.

Then Katya undressed. Katerina looked with involun-
tary, strange, painful curiosity at the bony legs and the
thin abdomen. Her eyes grew dark again.

"What tempted him?" She, Katerina, could carry a
full barrel of swill to the pigs with her own hands. This
girl couldn't even lift a pail of milk.

"Well, are you settled yet?" they heard Andrei's voice
outside the door.

"Come in, come in," cried Katya.

Andrei came in, hung his cap on a nail, and looking
around the room, sat down on the folding bed. He asked:

"Shall I put out the light?"

"Put it out."

666

Panteleimon Romanov

The room was dark. They could hear the bed creak
under him when he lay down.

Katerina, blinking now and then, looked into the dark-
ness to the side where Andrei's bed stood, and heavy
thoughts crept into her mind about him, about Katya,
about Lyska. . . .

Katerina was to go home in the morning. Andrei took
her to the station. Katya overtook them when they were
already out of the house, and gave a package to Katerina,
saying:

"A present — for the children."

"Why should you bother?"

"But you must," insisted Katya. Then she added:
"Maybe you will stay a little longer?"

"I must go home," answered Katerina. She wondered
if it were possible that she should leave without speaking
to Andrei. But what could she say to him, when Lyska
always turned up on her tongue for some reason or other?
She was also bothered by the fact that she had only eleven
kopeks. Would he give her money himself, or would she
have to ask for it?

Andrei, who was walking in silence, suddenly turned to
Katya, and said:

"Ivan Kuzmich is going to the city. Go and write a
note to the co-operative."

Katya understood that he wished to be alone with his
wife, offered her thin hand to Katerina, and wishing her a
pleasant journey, walked off. She waved her handkerchief
to them from the distance.

Katerina walked at her husband's side on the soft,
mossy path between the tall, scattered pine trees, and
avoiding the stumps on her way, waited — perhaps he
would begin to speak himself about the most important
thing between them. They had lived together twelve
years. Was it possible they would find nothing to say to
each other at such a moment in their lives ?

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Black Fritters

Andrei, on reaching the crossroads from which he would
have to turn back, voiced nothing of what she had ex-
pected, but stopped, and said:

"Well. ... If you need anything, write, and at harvest
time I will come to help you."

He gave her two gold pieces, worn at the edges, and
kissed her.

• Katerina hugged his neck awkwardly with her left arm,
holding the gold pieces in her right hand, and kissed him.

"Good-bye. Come and see Lyska."

"Good-bye. I shall come."

She walked away. But after she took several steps she
looked around. Andrei still stood in the same place, and
she could see that he had left something unsaid, that he
was sorry to let her go without telling her something more.

She stopped, her heart sinking, and leaned forward.

Andrei stood for a few moments, as if looking for words,
then, waving his hand, cried:

"Take care of Lyska!"

"I will take care of her," Katerina answered, sighing.

Andrei turned in his tracks, and made off.

"They fixed the old woman. They met her with kindly
words and sealed her mouth so that she couldn't even
move her tongue. In the village people will ask: 'Well, did
you fix that good-for-nothing husband of yours? Did you
tear the harlot's hair out? Did you smash the windows?'
But she — not only had she not broken the window panes
— she had made a present of the black fritters to the other
woman. And they had given her two gold pieces and a
package for the children. Never fear, the girl is laughing
now over her black fritters — even white ones are not good
enough for her with her four or five hundred rubles."

Katerina even stopped, as if ready to return. But she
remembered the thin, weak hands of Katya and her con-
fused, caressing smile. Waving her hand in final farewell,
Katerina crossed herself, and went her way.

668

THE CHERRY STONE

by
Yuri Olesha

YURI OLESHA is a prominent Soviet writer, author of
many volumes of stories, sketches, and plays.

THE CHERRY STONE

I WENT into the country on Sunday to see Natasha.
There were three more guests besides myself: two girls
and Boris Mikhailovich. Natasha's brother, Erastus,
took the two girls for a sail on the river, while we others —
Natasha, Boris Mikhailovich and I — went off into the
woods. We sat down to rest in a sunlit clearing. Natasha
raised her head and suddenly her face looked to me a shin-
ing porcelain saucer.

Natasha treated me as an equal, but with Boris Mik-
hailovich she behaved as if he was much older; she looked
up to him in fact. She knew that I found this very dis-
agreeable, and that I envied Boris Mikhailovich, so, from
time to time, she would take me by the hand and, no
matter what was said, ask me:

" That's true, Fedya, isn't it?"

As if she was asking my forgiveness in a roundabout
way.

We started to talk about birds, because a funny bird-
note had rung out just then from the thicket. I remarked
that I had never seen a thrush in my life and asked what it
looked like.

At that moment a bird flew out across the clearing and
perched on a branch over our heads. It did not so much
sit as stand, swinging, on the bough. It blinked and I
decided that birds' eyes were not in the least pretty, be-
cause they had no brows, but the lids were strongly
marked,

"What's that?" I asked in a whisper. "Is it a thrush?"

Translated from the Russian by Anthony Wixley. Reprinted from Inter-
national Literature, February 1935, by permission of International Publisher*
Co,, Inc.

67I

The Cherry Stone

There was no reply. I turned my back to them, so that
my jealous glance removed, they might enjoy their tete-a-
tete in peace. I watched the bird. Glancing round sud-
denly, I caught a glimpse of Boris Mikhailovich stroking
Natasha's cheek. The hand seemed to say: let the poor
slighted young fellow watch the birds, if he likes. But I
no longer saw the bird. I was listening. I caught the
.sound of a kiss as their lips parted. I did not look
around, but they knew they had been caught for they saw
me start.

"Is that a thrush?" I asked again.

The bird took flight — up through the tree-tops. It was
a difficult flight; the leaves rustled as she flew.

Natasha offered us cherries. Following a childish cus-
tom, I kept one cherry-stone in my mouth, rolling it about
until I had sucked it clean. When I took it out it looked
like wood.

I left the country cottage that day with the stone in my
mouth.

I traveled through an invisible country.

I returned from the country to the town. The sun was
setting. I went in an easterly direction. I was making a
double journey but only one-half of it was visible. The
passers-by could see a man crossing a deserted green
common. But what was really happening to this person
who walked along, to all appearances, so peacefully? He
could see his shadow going before him, sprawling over the
ground; the shadow had long, pale legs. I crossed the
common and all of a sudden the shadow climbed a brick
wall and lost its head. This the passer-by did not see,
only I saw it. I entered as it were a corridor between two
wings of a building. The corridor was infinitely lofty and
shadowy. The ground here was rotten and gave like garden
soil under foot. A wild, forlorn looking dog ran towards
me, sidling against the wall. We passed each other. Then

672

Yuri Olesha

I glanced round. Far behind me the threshold was bright.
For a moment the dog formed a dark protuberance in the
brightness. Then it ran off across the common, and only
then I saw that it was a rusty-colored animal.

All this happened in an invisible country. What hap-
pened in the country visible to the ordinary eye was that
a man and a dog passed each other, at sunset, on a green
common. . . .

The Invisible Country was the country of attention and
imagination. Two sisters walked beside our traveler and
led him by the hand. The names of the sisters were
Attention and Imagination.

Well, then, what about it? It appeared that, in direct
opposition to society and the established order, I was
creating a world of my own, subject to no laws but the
shadowy laws of my own sensations. But what did that
mean? There were two known worlds: the old and the
new. But what sort of a world was this? A third world?
There were two roads, but what sort of a road was this
third one?

Natasha makes an appointment with me but does not
keep it.

I am there half-an-hour before time. There is a train-
clock at the crossing that reminds me of a barrel. They
are really like barrels, aren't they, those street clocks?
Two faces. Two ends. Oh, empty barrel of time, I might
exclaim.

Natasha made the appointment for half-past three.

I wait. Oh, she isn't coming, of course. Ten minutes
past three. . . .

I stand by the train stop. All around me people are
bustling about. I tower above the crowd. Those who have
lost their way espy me from afar. Now it is beginning.
. . . An unknown woman approaches me.

"Would you be so kind," pleads the unknown one, "as

673

The Cherry Stone

to tell me if Number 27 car will take me all the way to
Kudrinsk Square?"

No one must know that I am keeping an appointment.
Better to let them think: "That young man who is smiling
broadly has come to this corner expressly for the con-
venience of other people. He'll tell you all you want to
know, he'll direct you, he'll calm your fears. . . . Go to
.him."

"Yes," I reply, brimming over with civility. "The 27
will take you to Kudrinsk Square. . . ."

Then suddenly remembering the right number, I fling
myself after the woman, calling out:

"No, no! You'll have to take a 16!"

Let us forget about the appointment. I am not a man in
love at all. I am the good genius of the street. Come to
me! This way, this way!

A quarter past three. The hands of the clock unite and
lie horizontal. Looking at them, I think:

"Like a fly twiddling its legs. The restless fly of time."

How silly! As if there was such a thing! She will not
come. She will not come. A Red Army soldier comes up
to me.

"Can you tell me where the Darwin Museum is?" he
asks me.

"I don't know. . . . Over there, I think . . . Wait a
minute, though . . . Wait ... a ... min — No, I'm
afraid I don't know."

Next. Who's the next? Don't be shy. A taxi describes
a curve and glides up to me. You ought to see how that
driver despises me. Not out of strength of mind. No, I
should think not. As if he would condescend so far as to
waste strength of mind on me. No, no. He shows it by
his glove . . . the contempt is conveyed by his glove.
Comrade driver, believe me, I'm only an amateur, I
really don't know which way to direct your car. . . .

I am not standing here for the purpose of directing

674

Yuri Olesha

people. I have my own business to attend to. ... My
loitering here is enforced, and rather pathetic. ... I am
not smiling out of sheer good nature. If you look closer
you will see it is a forced, strained smile.

"Which way to Varsonofievski Lane?" the taxi-driver
flings over his shoulder to me.

I hasten to explain: "This way and then that way and
then—"

Oh, well, if it comes to that, why should I not stand in
the middle of the road and take up in good earnest the
work that is thrust upon me?

A blind man approaches.

He simply shouts at me. He pokes with his stick.

"Is that a Number 10 coming?" he demands. "Eh?
Ten, is it?"

"No," I reply, almost stroking him. "It's not a 10. It's
a two. But there's a 10 just coming behind."

Ten minutes over the appointed hour have passed.
Why should I wait any longer? Perhaps she is hurrying to
get here, though, flying as fast as she can?

"Oh, I'll be late— oh, I'll be late . . ."

The woman who wanted to get to Kudrinsk Square has
caught the 16, the Red Army soldier is wandering through
the cool galleries of the museum, the taxi-driver is trumpet-
ing in Varsonofievski Lane, the blind man is climbing in his
touchy, egoistic fashion, with his stick held out before
him, up the front steps of the Number 10.

Everyone is satisfied. Everyone is happy. Only I re-
main there with a vacant smile on my face.

More people approach me with enquiries: an old woman,
a drunken man, a group of children with a flag. I begin to
slash the air with my arms, I no longer merely indicate
the desired direction by a jerk of my chin as a passer-by
casually inquired of might. No, no. I stretch out my
hands, the edge of the palm cutting the air. . . . Another
moment and a baton will appear in my fist.

675

The Cherry Stone

"Back!" I shall shout. "Stop! That way to Varsono-
fievskiLane. Turn. To the right, old lady. Stop!"

Oh, look! here is a whistle clinging to my lips. I whistle
... I have the right to whistle . . . Children, you may
well envy me. Back! Oho . . . look here! I can stand
between two trams going in opposite directions. I'm
standing, you can see, at ease, with my arms crossed be-
hind my back and the red baton touching my shoulder-
blades.

Congratulate me, Natasha. I have turned into a militia-
man.

Suddenly I catch sight of Avel standing some way off,
watching me. (Avel is my neighbor.)

Natasha is obviously not coming. I beckon to Avel.

I: "Did you see that, Avel?"

Avel: "Yes, I did. You must be crazy."

I: "Oh, so you saw me, Avel? I've turned into a militia-
man."

(A pause. I cast another glance at the clock. Ten to
four.)

I: "Of course, you cannot understand. My transforma-
tion into a militiaman took place in an Invisible Country."

Avel: "Your Invisible Country is all a lot of idealistic

nonsense."

I: "And do you know, the most surprising thing about
it, Avel, is that I should figure as a militiaman in that en-
chanted country. . . . By right, I should be marching
through it calmly and majestically, as its owner, with the
flowering staff of the sage in my hand. . . . And instead
of that, look here, this is the militiaman's baton I'm
holding. What a curious mixture of two worlds, the every-
day and the imaginary."

Avel: (says nothing).

I: "And what is still stranger is that the initial cause of
my transformation into a militiaman, is — unrequited
love."

676

Yu ri Olesha

Avel: "I can't understand a single thing. It's some sort
of Bergsonism, I suppose."

I resolved to plant my cherry-stone in the ground.

I chose a suitable spot and planted it. "Upon this spot,"
I said to myself, "a cherry tree will grow up, planted by
me in memory of my love for Natasha. Perhaps, some day
— say five years hence — Natasha will meet me under this
new tree in the springtime. We shall stand one on each
side of it. Cherry trees never grow very tall; you can
touch the topmost leaf if you raise yourself on your tip-
toes. There will be bright sunshine and the spring will be
a little bare still, for it will be just the time when the run-
ning gutters tempt children out to play and the tree is
bursting into blossom."

I shall say:

"Natasha, the day is bright and joyous, the breeze
blows and fans the light to a brighter radiance. The
breeze sways my tree and makes its shining boughs creak.
Each of its blossoms will lift and then droop, showing pink
and then white. That is a kaleidoscope of spring, Natasha.
Five years ago you gave me some cherries, do you remem-
ber? Unrequited love has made the memory humble and
very clear. I remember even to this day how the palm of
your hand was purple from cherry juice and how you made
a funnel of it as you poured the cherries into my palm. I
took away a cherry stone in my mouth, and I planted it in
memory of my unrequited love. It is blossoming now. So
you see: I was slighted then. Boris Mikhailovich was more
manly than I was and he won you. I was dreamy and
puerile. I sought for a thrush, while you two kissed. I was
romantic. But you see — a fine, firm, mature tree has
grown up from the romantic seed. You know that the
Japanese think, a cherry blossom is the soul of man. See,
this is a short, sturdy Japanese tree. Believe me, Natasha,
romance can be manly, too, you should not laugh at it.

677

The Cherry Stone

. . . The whole point is how to approach it. If Boris
Mikhailovich caught me squatting on the common plant-
ing a puerile little cherry stone, he would feel his triumph
once more over me, the triumph of the man over the
dreamer. And it was just about that time I planted the
kernel. It has burst and sprouted into a tree of dazzling
beauty. I buried a seed in the soil. This tree is our child,
Natasha. Bring me the son that Boris Mikhailovich gave
you. Let me see whether he is as healthy, pure and aloof
as the tree produced by an infantile person like myself."

As I returned home from the country, Avel appeared
from the other side of the wall. He works in a Trade
Union. He is small. He wears a Tolstoi blouse made of a
cotton imitation of covert coating, sandals, and blue
socks. He is clean-shaven but his cheeks look swarthy. He
gives the impression of being overgrown with hair. One
might almost think that he had not two skins but only
one, a black one. He has a hooked nose and a black cheek.

Avel: "What's the matter with you lately? As I was
passing in one of the suburban trains today, I caught sight
of you squatting on your heels somewhere on the perma-
nent way, scraping up the earth with your hands. What
was up?"

I: (I make no reply).

Avel: (pacing up and down the room). "A man sits on
his heels and digs the earth with his hands. What can he
be doing? There's no knowing. Is he making an experi-
ment? Or has he got the colic? There's absolutely no
knowing. Are you subject to attacks of colic?"

I: (after a pause). "Do you know what I was thinking,
Avel? I was thinking that a dreamer should never have
children. What does the new world want with a dreamer's
children? Better for the dreamers to produce trees for the
new world."

Avel: "It's not in the Plan."

678

Yuri Olesha

The world of attention begins at the head of your bed,
with the chair which you draw up to it as you are undress-
ing. To awake early in the morning, while the house is
still. The room is flooded with sunshine. Silence reigns.
You lie without stirring, for fear of disturbing the im-
mobile light. A pair of socks lies on the chair. They are
brown. But in the steady brilliance you suddenly detect
among the brown threads tiny wisps of variegated hair
— crimson, blue, and orange, stirred by the air.

It is a Rest Day morning. Once more I am taking the
familiar route to Natasha's. I ought to write Travels in an
Invisible Country. Here is a specimen chapter; it might be
entitled:

"The Man Who Was in a Hurry to Throw a Stone."

Some shrubs grew under a brick wall. I passed them as I
went along the path. I caught sight of a niche in the wall,
and wanted to throw some pebbles at it. I stooped. A
stone lay at my feet. . . . Then I saw an ant-hill.

The last time I saw an ant-hill was twenty years ago.
Oh, of course, I had stepped over ant-hills many a time
during those twenty years. And I suppose I had seen them,
but had merely thought, "I am walking over ant-hills,"
and the word "ant-hills" was all that stood out clearly in
my consciousness. All the living image was pushed into
insignificance by the word that leapt so readily to my
service.

Oh, I remembered now: ant-heaps can only be discov-
ered by a casual glance. One . . . Then . . . here's an-
other. Then — look here — there's another. That was how
it happened now. Three ant-hills appeared one after the
other.

My height hindered me from seeing the ants properly;
all my eye could catch was a certain restlessness in a form
that might easily have been taken for immobile. The eye
was willing to be deceived. As I looked I was quite ready
to think that it was not a multitude of ants swarming

679

The Cherry Stone

round their ant-hills but the ant-hills themselves that
were crumbling away like sand dunes.

I stood about four paces from the wall with the stone in
my hand. The stone was intended to lodge in the niche. I
flung it. The stone flew out and struck the bricks. A spiral
of dust arose. I had missed the mark. The stone fell into
the bushes at the foot of the wall. Only then did the ex-
clamation uttered by the stone before I opened my palm
reach my ears.

"Wait," cried the stone. "Look at me!"

I had been in too much of a hurry. I should have ex-
amined the stone first. There was no doubt about it, the
stone was a remarkable thing. And now it had disappeared
into the shrubs. And I, who had held the thing in my hand,
could not even say what color it had been. Maybe it had
been of a purplish tint. Possibly it had not been mono-
lithic but made up of several different bodies. Maybe it
had contained the fossilized skeleton of a flying beetle or
a cherry stone; maybe — it had not been a stone at all,
but a bit of mouldy bone.

I encountered an excursion on the way. Twenty persons
were walking across the common where I had planted my
cherry stone. They were led by Avel. I stepped aside.
Avel did not see me, or rather, did not understand. He
saw me without perceiving me; he gulped me down, so to
speak, like any fanatic, without waiting for either my
agreement or resistance.

Avel detached himself from his flock and turned to face
it. His back was towards me. Flinging out an arm with a
powerful gesture, he cried:

"Nowhere! Here you are! Here!"

A pause. Silence.

"Comrades from Kursk!" bawled Avel, "I hope you
have some imagination. Imagine as much as you like,
don't be afraid."

So Avel was trying to invade the Country of the Imagi-

680

Yuri Olesha

nation? Would he even go as far as to show the excursion-
ists the cherry tree planted in memory of unrequited
love? Avel was seeking a way to the Invisible Country.

He strode along. Then he halted and shook his leg.
Then he shook it again; he was evidently trying to free
himself from some twining shrub which had wound itself
around his foot as he was walking. He stamped his foot
and the plant crackled and scattered in little balls of
yellow. (How many plants and trees and shrubs there are
in this story!)

"The huge concrete works I was telling you about will
be setup here."

"Dear Natasha, I forgot the principal thing: the Plan.
I acted without consulting the Plan. In five years' time
a huge concrete works will have risen on this deserted spot
where now you can see nothing but useless walls and
ditches. My sister — Imagination — is an imprudent crea-
ture. They will begin to lay the foundations in the spring-
time and then — what will become of my poor silly little
cherry stone? Yes — for a tree planted in your honor will
blossom there in the Invisible Country some day. . . .

"And excursionists will come to see the concrete giant.

"They will not see your tree. Surely the Invisible Coun-
try could be rendered visible. ... ? "

This letter is an imaginary one. I never wrote it. But
I might have written it if Avel had not said what he did.

"The building will be laid out in a semi-circle," said
Avel. "And the inner side of the semi-circle will be de-
voted to a garden. Have you any imagination?"

"Yes," I said, "I have. I can see it, Avel. I can see it
all quite clearly. There will be a garden just here. And on
the very spot where you are standing now, a cherry tree
will grow up."

681

THE SUN AND THE MOON
by

Marjorie Fischer

MARJORIE FISCHER, a New Yorker by birth and resi-
dence, is the author of Street Fair, stories for children pub-
lished in 1934- Palaces on Monday (1936), from which
The Sun and the Moon is reprinted, grew out of a trip to
the U. S. S. R. taken by Miss Fischer in the summer of 1935.

Of the selection included here, Miss Fischer says: "The
Sun and the Moon is a story from a book about the Soviet
Union. The book is written for children, and perhaps also
for grown-ups; that depends on what became of them as they
grew up. It is certainly easier to write about the Soviet
Union for children. Children know what makes sense, and
what does not make sense. It never makes sense to a girl child
to find that most of her abilities must be shelved because she is
a girl. It never makes sense to a boy child to find that most of
his abilities must be shelved because there are no jobs. But in
the process of growing up, our children are taught that human
nature can't be changed, that economic problems can't be
solved, that it is good for human beings to suffer. These
errors have been swept out in the Soviet Union, and any child
can see that it makes sense to sweep them out"

This story is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Frankwood
E. Williams, who fought for the future, and helped others
to do so. Dr. Williams wrote about the Soviet child: —
"Life does not confuse and terrify him for the reason that
the principles upon which his social system is based — no ex-
ploitation, mastery of the world through knowledge, united
effort in the interests of all — are easily comprehensible to him,
agreeable to him, in fact, seem eminently sensible to him."

THE SUN AND THE MOON

JUDY woke in her upper berth on the Soviet ship and
saw the water reflected in ripples of light on the ceiling.
It must be early, because the three ladies who shared
the cabin were still asleep. Judy had not seen them yet; she
and Peter had stayed up late, until they had left London
and the Thames far behind. Judy had crept in, undressed
in the dark, and struggled silently with the blanket and
top sheet until she discovered they were folded into a sort
of sleeping-bag.

Judy leaned out from her berth and looked down at the
lady in the berth below. She had a round, pleasant face,
which would look older when she woke, and she wore a
netted cap tied under her chin to keep her wavy hair
wavy. English, thought Judy. Just then the lady opened
her eyes and saw Judy's face and shoulders hanging over
her.

"Good morning," said the lady, and sure enough, she
was English.

"Morning," said Judy, swinging up again. She dressed
rapidly, getting to the washbasin ahead of the ladies, who
watched her drowsily.

"Gracious heavens, child!" said one of them. "Surely
you can't be traveling alone to Russia."

"Alone with my brother," said Judy. "We're going to
meet our mother and father. Father's an engineer. He's
working in some place called Erivan." He's working,
thought Judy; oh, thank goodness, he's working after all
this time.

Judy ran out into the sunshine flooding the ship and

Reprinted from Palaces on Monday by Marjorie Fischer, copyright 1936, by
permission of the publishers, Random House, Inc.

685

The Sun and the Moon

stood on tiptoe, throwing up her hands through the warm
liquid air. A shiver of excitement rippled through her.
Far away on every hand the fluted sea spread out, and
light rose from the small waves like spray. The North
Sea, the North Sea, thought Judy, marching across the
deck in rhythm to the North Sea.

"What do you think you're doing, may I ask?" said
Peter, leaning against the rail and watching two seamen
swab down the deck. He gestured. "Did you ever!"

"What?" asked Judy.

"That one's a girl," said Peter.

One of the seamen was a girl; she had a beautiful girl's
body, firm and strong, and yellow hair showed under her
blue beret. She wore a yellow and black sleeveless jersey,
black pants, and high rubber boots. Judy was astonished
and delighted.

"Why not?" she said.

"It certainly seems crazy," said Peter, who was aston-
ished and not delighted. "Come on, let's get some break-
fast."

They were first in the dining-room, and the steward put
out a cigarette when he saw them.

"Sit here, please," he said, and he gave them seats at
the long center table. The room was full of sunlight,
splashing over the white tablecloths and breaking against
the shining glasses.

"What do you think we'll get?" said Judy. "I hope it's
something new."

The steward brought grapefruit and omelet. Then he
brought plates of yellow cheese, sausage like sliced red mar-
ble, smoked salmon, pale pink and finely grained, white and
black bread, and tea in glasses with metal holders.

"I don't think I'll bother with omelet," said Judy, ar-
ranging cheese, sausage, and salmon around her plate.

"That's crazy to eat for breakfast," said Peter, sticking
to omelet.

686

Marjorie Fischer

" It's just what mother wrote," said Judy. " Everything
upside-down. For instance we'd eat this for supper."

"How will you like it if you get oatmeal for supper?"
said Peter, but Judy paid no attention to him. He helped
himself to salmon in an offhand way, and he liked it and
took more. Judy was decent enough not to say anything
about that, or maybe she hadn't noticed. She was watch-
ing the steward smoke a cigarette with a paper holder.

After breakfast they went out on deck and found that
someone had strung up a rope and marked out a court for
deck tennis. Four passengers were playing, and the
others sat on the hatches and watched, or practised Rus-
sian out of books.

"Here comes the girl from Lancashire," said Judy.
"The one we were talking to last night."

"First of all she's really Russian now," said Peter.
"She's been living there six years. And second of all I
don't like her. She thinks she knows everything."

"Hi, Susan!" called Judy, sticking her elbow into
Peter.

"Morning," said Susan. She sat down beside Judy.
"Let's bide here a while and have a game. Later I'll show
you about ship."

"O.K.," said Judy.

Peter simply pretended he hadn't heard. If there was
one thing he didn't want it was to have Susan show him
anything.

Now and then the hoop of rope for deck tennis was
tossed too far or too hard, and it went spinning out into
the sea. The girl sailor came along with more hoops and
set them down beside Susan.

"Spasibo," said Susan.

"Spasibo" called the studying passengers.

"That means thank you," said Susan. "If tha wishes
I'll teach you some Russian. First I'll show you ship.
I know Captain and everything."

687

The Sun and the Moon

Peter thought she was certainly stuck on herself, and he
pulled his harmonica out of his pocket and began to play
Yankee Doodle. Everyone turned to smile, and the game
went on livelier than ever. Peter took the harmonica
away from his mouth long enough to ask Susan if she could
play. She shook her head no, and Peter played Yankee
Doodle over again.

"Spasibo, thank you," said Judy. "How do you say I
want?"

" Ya khochu" said Susan.

"Ya khochu" said Judy. "Sounds like a sneeze. How
do you say please?"

" Pozhaluista," said Susan.

"What?" asked Judy. "Oh, Peter, you could shut up
for a minute! Such a racket!"

Peter stood up and walked away, playing as long as he
thought they could hear him; who did Judy think she was,
he'd like to know. He climbed to the top deck and heard a
wireless tapping; he looked through an open door and saw
that the radiographer was a woman. If she's a radiog-
rapher she must be an officer, thought Peter, stricken,
and he moved away fast.

He wandered forward and came to the bow of the ship,
where he found mostly sailors. None of them were women.
A boy stood in front of the deck-house cleaning chickens;
he motioned to Peter to step inside.

Peter went past the sailors' galley to the crew dining-
room; it was like the room in which they had eaten, except
that it was smaller. Plants stood on the two long tables,
and sunlight cast their shadows on the polished wood. A
very large photograph of a man in a cap hung on one wall.

Another room opened off the dining-room, and Peter
went inside. The room held a piano, a phonograph, a
table with books and magazines, and a large chart of an
airplane, with details of the engine along the sides. Peter
leaned both elbows on the table and studied the chart.

688

Marjorie Fischer

He looked up when a young man in a blue suit came in; he
smiled at Peter.

"You are American?" asked the young man. "I have
heard you playing very good nice song."

"That's Yankee Doodle," said Peter.

"Yankee Doodle," said the young man, with some
difficulty. "How do you like our Red Corner?"

"What's that?" asked Peter.

"This room," said the young man. "How do you like
our ship? We have succeed to build many ships like this,
but not yet enough. I am second mate; in few years will
be captain. I see you are studying airplane engine. You
are interested for engines?"

"You bet," said Peter. "I'm going to be an engineer.
Listen, would you do me a big favor? Could you take me
to see the engine-room sometime?"

"I take you all over," said the second mate. "At three
o'clock I am free, and I meet you here. My name is
Vladimir."

"Mine's Peter. Thanks a lot," said Peter, " Spasibo."

Vladimir laughed and went away. Peter hurried back
to Judy and Susan. They were playing deck tennis.

"Hi, Judy," he called. " Wait'll you hear!"

Susan was beating Judy all hollow, and Judy didn't
mind interrupting the game.

"What? "she asked.

"I just fixed it up with the second mate to see the en-
gine-room this afternoon. He's going to show me the whole
boat."

"Oh, take me! "said Judy.

"He only said me," said Peter. "Maybe I could work it,
though, but I can't promise. His name's Vladimir."

"Vladimir!" said Susan. "He's a champion lad. He'll
take all of us. I know him very well."

"Then that's all right," said Judy, turning back to
Susan.

689

The Sun and the Moon

Peter felt angry in a way he couldn't mention; the sun
was too hot, the boat was too small, women were all over,
and Susan knew everything.

"I'll play you both," he said. He did, and beat them,
but it didn't make him feel much better.

After lunch they met Vladimir and started with the
dining-room and Red Corner. Then they went below to
see the crew's quarters. Judy stopped on the stairs.

"I don't know — " she said. "We saw them on the other
boat coming over. They smell, and I had so much caviar
and everything for lunch — "

"This is entirely different," said Peter.

Judy thrust out her head to sniff. It was true that noth-
ing smelled bad so far, and she went on. Vladimir knocked
on the door of a cabin, and when there was no answer he
opened the door, and they peeped in.

"Why, it's just like ours!" said Judy. "Except it's
really better because they have two in a cabin instead of
four."

"Maybe this is for officers," said Peter.

"Nowt of the sort," said Susan. "This is for sailors."

"Is this for the crew?" Peter asked Vladimir, as if
Susan hadn't spoken.

"That is correct," said Vladimir.

"It's just simply and solely for the sailors," said Judy,
"and it certainly makes more sense."

"Yes," said Vladimir.

When they went upstairs again they heard music com-
ing from an upper deck.

"Let's go up there next," said Judy. She was already
half-way up the ladder. The others followed, and there
they found an open deck with an awning over it. Four
sailors sat about a table playing guitars and a banjo, and
something larger than a guitar like a beautiful pear-shaped
triangle.

"That is a balalaika," said Vladimir.

690

Marjorie Fischer

A yellow-haired sailor in blue denims came up the
ladder; he began to dance at once, as though he was in
such good spirits that he had to dance. He crossed his
arms, and flung them wide apart, moving his feet in com-
plicated and lively patterns.

"Oh, teach me!" cried Judy, and Vladimir translated.
The sailor grinned and slowed up, and so did the music;
Judy began to learn the steps.

The girl seaman arrived, wearing a white flounced dress
and with her golden hair curling about her shoulders. She
was very pretty, you could see now; her face was all sun-
burned except where her lids opened over her blue eyes.
She joined Judy and the sailor, and gradually they speeded
up, and Judy was dancing deftly and crying Hah! when
the others did.

" We have show last night before Leningrad," said Vlad-
imir. ujudy must dance then. She is very good nice
dancer."

Judy pretended not to hear, but Peter saw how she
bounced more lightly than ever, and he thought she was
showing off.

"Now let's see the engines," he said. "Come on,
Judy."

" I don't want to see any old engines," cried Judy. " I'm
going to stay here."

They went off without her, and stood on the iron grill
above the engines, and Vladimir talked about them
proudly; they had been made in Leningrad. The engines
were painted bright blue, and they shone smoothly and
cleanly with oil where they were not painted. Here was
the rhythm and rumble, strong and regular, that stood for
planned power. Peter felt deeply excited, and he asked
Vladimir question after question.

Susan interrupted, talking Russian, and it was like a
door swung shut in Peter's face.

"Happen I'll be engineer on ship when I'm grown," said

691

The Sun and the Moon

Susan, "Or railroad engineer. I've not decided, except
that I'll be engineer."

"Nonsense!" said Peter. "Girls aren't engineers."

"Why not?" said Susan. "I can be anything I want to
be, and I want to be engineer."

"Can she?" Peter asked Vladimir, his voice almost
cracking with annoyance.

"Da, da, da!" said Vladimir. "Yes, indeed. We have
now woman engineer on board, and we have already two
women sea captains."

Peter couldn't speak; he thought of mother writing how
everything was upside-down in the Soviet Union, and it
was no help at all.

They went back to the sun-deck, where Judy was still
dancing, and everybody was singing.

"Susan," Judy cried, "Susan, they keep saying some-
thing like this — Tovarishch Judy, Tovarishch Judy. What
does it mean?"

"It's rare and strange you don't even know that!" said
Susan. "That means Comrade Judy."

"Then he's Tovarishch Vladimir, isn't he?" said Judy.
"And they're Tovarishch—"

The sailors laughed and called:

"Dmitri."

"Alexei."

"Viktor."

"Anna."

"Wonderful!" cried Judy, dancing.

Susan began to speak Russian, and Peter felt perfectly-
alone and lost. It made him cross.

"Listen, Peter," said Judy, "will you do me a favor?"

"Maybe," said Peter.

"There's going to be a show," said Judy. "I want you
to play Greensleeves on the harmonica for me to dance

to."

Til think it over," said Peter.

692

Marjorie Fischer

"Well, for heavens sakes!" said Judy.

"Maybe I will and maybe I won't," said Peter, feeling
less cross every minute.

"Oh, never mind!" said Judy. "I'll get someone
else."

The next few days they played deck tennis and danced :
they put on bathing-suits and ran yelling in and out of the
great spout of water that poured from a hose on deck.
They ate caviar and smoked salmon, and drank tea with
preserved cherries in it. They watched the days growing
longer and the nights shorter as they voyaged through the
Baltic Sea to the North, to Leningrad.

Judy never spoke about Greensleeves, which was the
tune she needed for her dance, but Peter knew that she
had gone all over the ship trying to find someone who knew
it, and that there was no one. Peter felt mean and pleased
about this; of course if Judy had asked him again — but
she never mentioned it. Just stubborn, thought Peter.

The last afternoon he heard someone playing the piano,
and he went into the salon. An English lady was playing,
and a stewardess was dusting the chairs and tables. The
English lady spoke to the stewardess, and she put her
dust-rag under her arm and sang beautifully. Another
stewardess came in and sat down to listen.

It sure is upside-down, thought Peter; but this time it
was nice, he liked it. Susan came along and leaned over a
table, resting.

"Judy's on deck singing tune to sailors," said Susan,
"but they can't catch on to it. It's Greensleeves, isn't it?
I learned it in England. Peter."

"What?" said Peter.

"Peter, England's rare and beautiful. I've not been
there since six years ago, when we went to Soviet Union."

"You been visiting this time?" asked Peter.

"I've been visiting my grandmother," said Susan.
"She's that poor!"

693

The Sun and the Moon

After a while everyone went away, and Peter and Susan
were left alone. Susan sang:

For O Greensleeves was all my joy,
And O Greensleeves was my delight,
And O Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but my Lady Greensleeves.

It was a gay song, but Susan looked sad.

"I love England," she said. "Happen someday I'll go
back; it'll be all right there someday. But we were that
poor. Father's a miner. Half the time there was no work,
and father just sort of sat around."

"I know," said Peter. "But it's all right now, so let's
forget it."

"Tha's right," said Susan. "It's all right now."

They sat up straight and sang:

Alas my love, you do me wrong

To cast me off discourteously,
And I have loved you so long,

Delighting in your company.

For O Greensleeves . . .

Judy came in.

"Oh, Peter, how can you be so mean," she said.

"I didn't say I wouldn't play," said Peter. "I said
maybe I would and maybe I wouldn't."

"Peter! Will you?" said Judy.

"Naturally," said Peter. "And Susan knows Green-
sleeves so she can sing."

Judy burst out crying and stopped at once.

"We better practise right away," she said.

At nine o'clock red rays of sunlight were still slanting
across the deck, and the crew and the passengers were
sitting on the hatches and leaning along the rail to see the
show. A stewardess sang, and a sailor recited, and four
sailors danced a sword dance.

694

Marjorie Fischer

Then Judy danced and Peter played and Susan sang
Greensleeves, dancing and singing and playing with all
their hearts. Peter blew the lively tune out of his har-
monica, as if his good spirits broke into song for everyone
to share. It was wonderful! Everybody cried Encore! and
clapped, and they had to repeat the whole performance
twice over.

The moon rose in the sky which was still bright with
day, taking on weight as it took on color and light, until at
last it shone, round and full, like a luminous gold coin.
Phosphorescence rose to the surface of the water, one light
answering another, instead of reflecting.

When the show was over someone brought out a phono-
graph and started playing Hallelujah five times too fast,
.and sailors and stewardesses and officers and passengers
trotted briskly around together.

Peter and Judy and Susan leaned against the rail.
Suddenly they were all hungry. They went to the dining-
room and ate sandwiches and cake and apples until they
couldn't eat any more. They walked out on deck again,
where everyone was still dancing. They watched Dmitri
bow to one of Judy's English ladies and say "Bos-tone?",
and then the pair went dancing around and around.

Judy leaned over the rail and looked at the water which
was heavy and without color, now, like a liquefied metal.

"I bet you this is the latest I ever stayed up," she said.

"It's good and late, I bet you," said Peter, without
wanting to know just what time it was. He hung over the
rail thinking that this was a real ship, with the deck low
and open, near the waves.

"Look," said Susan.

They looked up at the masts and spars against the sky
half silver still with moonlight, and dimly colored with
dawn before them. Overhead, from horizon to horizon,
stretched a map of Time; the ship voyaged between the
past and the future, with both of them plain in the sky.

695

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