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THE STORIES OF
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

THE STORIES OF

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Selection of 28 Stories

With an Introduction by

MALCOLM COWLEY

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

NEW YORK

1954

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION vii

/. EARLY SUCCESS

EDITOR'S NOTE

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz 5

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 39

The Ice Palace 61

May Day 83

Winter Dreams 127
"The Sensible Thing" • 146

Absolution i$9

II. GLAMOR AND DISILLUSIONMENT

EDITOR'S NOTE

The Rich Boy 177

The Baby Party 209

Magnetism 220

The Last of the Belles 240

The Rough Crossing 254

The Bridal Party 271

Two Wrongs 287

///. RETROSPECTIVE: BASIL AND JOSEPHINE

•

EDITOR'S NOTE

The Scandal Detectives 309

The Freshest Boy 326

The Captured Shadow 346

A Woman with a Past 364

vi Contents

IV. LAST ACT AND EPILOGUE

EDITOR'S NOTE

Babylon Revisited 385

Crazy Sunday 403

Family in the Wind 419

An Alcoholic Case 436

The Long Way Out 443

Financing Finnegan 448
Pat Hobby Himself

A Patriotic Short 456

Two Old Timers 459

Three Hours Between Planes 464

The Lost Decade 470

INTRODUCTION

who were lucky enough to be born a little before
the end of the old century, in any of the years from 1895
to 1900, went through much of their lives with a feeling
that the new century had been placed in their charge ; it
was like a business in financial straits that could now be rescued by
a change of management. As Americans and optimists they believed
that the business was fundamentally sound and would triumph over
its predecessors. They identified themselves with the century; its
teens were their teens, its world war was theirs to fight and its reck-
less twenties were their twenties. As they launched forward on their
careers they looked about them for spokesmen and the first they
found was F. Scott Fitzgerald.

At twenty-three, when he published his first novel, Fitzgerald had
the sort of background that his generation regarded as representative.
He was a Midwestern boy, born in St. Paul on September 24, 1896,
to a family of Irish descent that had some social standing and a very
small fortune inherited by the mother. The father was not a business
success, so that the fortune kept decreasing year by year, and the
Fitzgeralds, like all people in their situation, had to think a lot about
money. It was help from a maiden aunt that enabled Scott to fulfill
his early dream of going to an Eastern preparatory school and then
going to Princeton.

He liked to imagine himself as the hero of romantic dramas and
he worked hard to cut a figure among his classmates. At the Newman
School, after an interval of being the most unpopular boy, he had
redeemed himself by making the football team and winning first prize
in the field day. At Princeton he was taken into what he regarded as
the best of the eating clubs — the Cottage — after turning down bids
to three others, and he wrote a large part of two musical comedies
produced with success by the Triangle Club. The second of these was

vii

viii Introduction

The Evil Eye, with lyrics by Fitzgerald and libretto by Edmund
Wilson. The Daily Princetonian reported that when it was performed
in Chicago on January 7, 1916, "Three hundred young ladies occupied
the front rows of the house and following the show, they stood up,
gave the Princeton locomotive and tossed their bouquets at cast and
chorus."

They were among the first of Fitzgerald's flappers and he would
have loved them, all three hundred, but he didn't make the triumphal
tour with the Triangle show. He had withdrawn from college at the
end of November, largely because of illness, but also because his
marks had fallen so low that there was every chance of his being sus-
pended after the midyear examinations. He had to abandon his dream
of being president of the Triangle Club and a big man in his class.
"A year of terrible disappointments and the end of all college
dreams," he wrote in the ledger that served as a bookkeeping record
of his triumphs and defeats. "Everything bad in it was my own
fault." The next year, 1916-17, was described in the ledger as "A
pregnant year of endeavor. Outwardly a failure with moments of
danger but the foundation of my literary life." He was back at
Princeton and was paying more attention to his studies, besides
writing furiously for the Tiger and the Nassau Lit. At this time he
started a novel rightly called The Romantic Egotist.

In the fall of 1917, after passing a special examination, he received
a provisional commission as second lieutenant in the Regular Army.
He went off to training camp, where he finished most of the novel
during week-ends, and then served in Alabama as aide-de-camp to
Major General J. A. Ryan. It was at a dance in Montgomery that he
fell in love with a judge's daughter, Zelda Sayre, whom he described
to his friends as "the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia";
one state wasn't big enough to encompass his admiration. "I didn't
have the two top things : great animal magnetism or money," he wrote
years afterward in his notebook. "I had the two second things,
though : good looks and intelligence. So I always got the top girl."

He was engaged to the judge's daughter, but they couldn't marry
until he was able to support her. After being discharged from the
Army, Fitzgerald went to New York and looked for a job. The
Romantic Egotist had been rejected by Scribner's, with letters from
Maxwell Perkins that showed a real interest in Fitzgerald's future
work. His stories were coming back from the magazines and at one
time he had 122 rejection slips pinned in a frieze around his cheap
bedroom on Morningside Heights. The job he found was with an
advertising agency and his pay started at $90 a month, with not much
chance of rapid advancement; the only praise he received was for a
slogan written for a steam laundry in Muscatine, Iowa : "We Keep

Introduction ix

You Clean in Muscatine." He was trying to save money, but the girl
in Alabama saw that the effort was hopeless and broke off the engage-
ment on the score of common sense. Fitzgerald borrowed from his
classmates, stayed drunk for three weeks and then went home to
St. Paul to rewrite his novel under a new title. This time Scribner's
accepted it and the book was published at the end of March, 1920.

This Side of Paradise was a very young man's novel and memory
book. The author put into it samples of everything he had written
until that time : short stories, poems, essays, fragments of autobiog-
raphy, sketches and dialogues. Some of the material had already been
printed in the Nassau Lit, so that his friends described the book as
the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It also had suggestions of
being the collected works of Compton Mackenzie and H. G. Wells,
with more than a hint of Stover at Yale; but for all its faults and
borrowings it was held together by its energy, honesty, self-confidence
and it spoke in the voice of a new generation. His contemporaries
recognized the voice as their own and his elders listened.

Suddenly the magazines were eager to print Fitzgerald's stories
and willing to pay high prices for them. The result shows in his big
ledger: in 1919 he earned $879 by his writing; in 1920 he earned —
and spent — $18,850. Early success had been added to everything else
that made him stand out as a representative of his generation ; and
Fitzgerald himself was beginning to believe in his representative
quality. He was learning that when he wrote truly about his dreams
and misadventures and discoveries, other people recognized them-
selves in the picture.

The point has to be made that Fitzgerald was not "typical" of his
own age or any other. He lived harder than most people have ever
lived and acted out his dreams with an extraordinary intensity of
emotion. The dreams themselves were not at all unusual; in the
beginning they were dreams of becoming a football star and a big
man in college, of being a hero on the battlefield, of winning through
to financial success and of getting the top girl ; they were the com-
monplace aspirations shared by almost all the young men of his
time and social class. It was the emotion he put into them, and the
honesty with which he expressed the emotion, that made them seem
distinguished. By feeling intensely he made his readers believe in the
unique value, of the world in which they lived. Years afterward he
would say, writing in the third person, that he continued to feel
grateful to the Jazz Age because "It bore him up, flattered him and
gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling
people that he felt as they did."

At the beginning of April, 1920, Zelda came to New York and they
were married in the rectory of St. Patrick's Cathedral — although

x Introduction

Zelda's family was Episcopalian and Scott had ceased to be a good
Catholic. They set up housekeeping at the Biltmore. To their be-
wilderment they found themselves adopted, not as a Midwesterner
and a Southerner respectively, not even as detached observers, but —
Scott afterward wrote — "as the arch type of what New York wanted."
Arthur Mizener, in his biography of Fitzgerald, has vividly re-created
that year of the happy whirlwind. A new age was beginning and Scott
and Zelda were venturing into it innocently, hand in hand. Zelda said,
"It was always tea-time or late at night." Scott said, "We felt like
small children in a great bright unexplored barn."

Scott also said, "America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree
in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it." There
is still plenty to tell about it, in the light of a new age that is curious
about the 1920*3 and persistently misjudges them. The gaudiest spree
in history was also a moral revolt and beneath the revolt there were
social transformations. The 1920*5 were the age when Puritanism was
under attack, with the Protestant churches losing their dominant
position. They were the age when the country ceased to be English
and Scottish and when the children of later immigrations moved for-
ward to take their place in the national life. They were the age when
American culture became urban instead of rural and when New York
set the social and intellectual standards for the country — while its
own standards were being set by transplanted Southerners and Mid-
westerners like the two Fitzgeralds.

More essentially the i92o's were the age when a production ethic —
of saving and self-denial in order to accumulate capital for new enter-
prises— gave way to a consumption ethic that was needed to provide
markets for the new commodities endlessly streaming from the pro-
duction lines. Instead of being told to save, people were being in-
structed in a thousand ways to buy, enjoy, use once and throw away
in order to buy a later and more expensive model. They followed the
instructions, with the result that more goods were produced and con-
sumed and ftioney was easier to earn than ever before. "The Jazz Age
now raced along under its own power," Fitzgerald said, "served by
great filling stations full of money. . . . Even when you were broke
you didn't worry about money, because it was in such profusion
around you."

That explains the background of the 1920*5 and their sense of reck-
less freedom, but it does not explain the figures in the foreground.
The members of Fitzgerald's generation were not interested at the
time in underlying social movements, any more than they were in-
terested in local or international politic?. What they felt in their
hearts was that they had made an absolute break with the standards
of the older generation. There was not the sharp distinction between

Introduction xi

highbrow and lowbrow (or liberal and conservative) that would later
divide American society; in those days the real gulf was between
the young and the old. The younger set paid few visits to their parents*
homes and some of them hardly exchanged a social word with men
or women over forty. The elders were discredited in their eyes by
the war, by prohibition, by the Red £care of 1919-20 and by scandals
like that of Teapot Dome. So much the better : the youngsters had a
free field in which to test their own standards of the good life.

Those standards were simple and almost savage. The spokesmen
for the new generation recognized the value of food, travel, love and
intoxication, the value of honest craftmanship — when they had time
for it — and the value of truth ; absolutely anything seemed excusable
if one simply told the truth about it. They liked to say yes to every
proposal that promised excitement. Will you take a new job, throw
up the job, go to Paris and starve, travel round the world in a
freighter? Will you get married, leave your husband, spend a week-
end for two in Biarritz ? Will you ride around New York on the roof
of a taxi and then take a bath in the Plaza fountain? "WYBMADIITY?"
read a sign on the mirror behind the bar of the Dizzy Club. Late at
night you asked the bartender what it meant and he answered, "Will
you buy me a drink if I tell you?" The answer was yes, always yes,
and the fictional heroine of the 1920*5 was Serena Blandish, the girl
who couldn't say no. Or the heroine was Joyce's Molly Bloom as she
dreamed about her first lover: ". . . and I thought well as well him
as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and
then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and
first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he
could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like
mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

The masculine ideal of the 1920*5 was what Fitzgerald calls "the
old dream of being an entire man in the Goethe-Byron-Shaw tradi-
tion, with an opulent American touch, a sort of combination of
J. P. Morgan, Topham Beauclerk and St. Francis of Assisi." The
entire man would be one who "did everything," good and bad, who
realized all the potentialities of his nature and thereby achieved
wisdom. The entire man, in the 1920*5, was the one who followed the
Rule of the Thelemites as revealed to Pantagruel : Fais ce que voul-
draSj "Do what you will." But that rule implied a second imperative,
like an echo: "Will!" To be admired by the 1920*3 young men had
to will all sorts of actions and had to possess enough energy and
courage to carry out even their momentary wishes. They lived in the
moment with what they liked to call "an utter disregard of conse-
quences." In spirit they all made their pilgrimage to the Abbey of
Thelema; they consulted the oracle of the Divine Bottle and, like

xii Introduction

Pantagruel, they received for answer the one word Trinch. They
obeyed the oracle and drank, in those days of the Volstead Act when
drinking was a rite of comradeship and an act of rebellion. As Fitz-
gerald would say, they drank "cocktails before meals like Americans,
wines and brandies like Frenchmen, beer like Germans, whiskey-and-
soda like the English . . . this preposterous melange that was like
some gigantic cocktail in a nightmare." They drank and they also
worked, with something of the same desperation ; they worked to earn
social rank, to sell, to advertise, to organize, to invent and to create
enduring works of art. In ten years they gave a new tempo to Amer-
ican society.

The 1920*5 were a good age for works of art and in some ways they
were a bad age for artists as persons. The works of art have come
down to us and we are now finding again how honest and impressive
they were in their often fragmentary fashion. Some of the artists
have also survived while others have gone under ; in general the age
did not encourage them to develop steadily or to achieve unified
careers. The age is now being blamed for the relative failures of Fitz-
gerald and others like him, but a great deal of this talk is sentimental.
They did not fail as artists or we should not be rereading their works.
If they failed in their personal lives it was not because they were
victims of the historical environment ; it was — among other reasons—
because they acted on dangerous principles which happened to be
those of the age, but which they also took into themselves and ac-
cepted as their own. In that sense they succumbed like the age itself,
not so much to the pressure of exterior forces as by inner necessity.

Fitzgerald not only represented the age but came to suspect that
he had helped to create it, by setting the patterns of conduct that
were followed by persons a little younger than himself. "If I had
anything to do with creating the manners of the contemporary Amer-
ican girl I certainly made a botch of the job," he said in a 1925 letter.
In his notebook he observed that one of his relatives was still a
flapper in the 1930^. "There is no doubt," he added, "that she origi-
nally patterned herself upon certain immature and unfortunate writ-
ings of mine, so that I have a special indulgence for as for one

who has lost an arm or a leg in one's service." A drunken young man
teetered up to his door and said, "I had to see you. I feel I owe you
more than I can say. I feel that you formed my life." It was not the
young man — later a successful novelist — but Fitzgerald himself who
was the principal victim of his capacity for creating fictional types in
life. "Sometimes," he told another visitor late at night, "I don't know
whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of
my novels."

That was in the spring of 1933, a few weeks after the banks had

Introduction xiii

closed all over the country. The Fitzgeralds were living at La Paix,
a brown wooden late- Victorian lodge on a thirty-acre estate near Bal-
timore— "La Paix (my God!)" Scott wrote at the head of a letter.
In the afternoon the house had been filled with little sounds of life —
the colored cook and her relatives arguing in the kitchen, Zelda
talking to her nurse or rustling about her studio as she painted furi-
ously, Scott somewhere in a back room dictating to his secretary,
then their daughter coming home from school and playing under the
big oak trees on the lawn. Zelda wasn't well enough to come down
to dinner, but the visitor was taken to see her afterward ; her face
was emaciated and twitched as she talked and her mouth twisted
itself into unhappy shapes. After dinner the sounds of life died away
from the house. Little Scottie was put to bed, the cook and her
friends went home, Zelda had to rest and big Scott wandered from
room to room with a glass in his hand, explaining that it was water ;
then, as he started another trip to refill the glass in the kitchen, he
confessed that it was gin. There was not enough furniture, there were
no carpets to absorb the inhuman noises of the night. Everything
creaked and echoed. The visitor sat alone in the one big chair in
the almost empty living room and thought that the house was the
perfect setting for a ghost story, with Scott and Zelda as ghosts, the
golden boy of 1920 and the belle of two states. Their generation had
been defeated by life — so it seemed at the time — and yet in their
own defeat they were still its representative figures.

In victory and defeat Fitzgerald retained a quality that very few
writers are able to acquire: a sense of living in history. Manners
and morals were changing all through his life and he set himself the
task of recording the changes. They were revealed to him, not by
statistics or news reports, but in terms of living characters, and the
characters were revealed by gestures, each appropriate to a certain
year. He wrote: "One day in 1926 we" — meaning the members of his
generation — "looked down and found we had flabby arms and a fat
pot and couldn't say boop-boop-a-doop to a Sicilian. ... By 1927
a wide-spread neurosis began to be evident, faintly signaled, like a
nervous beating of the feet, by the popularity of cross-word puzzles.
... By this time" — also in 1927 — "contemporaries of mine had
begun to disappear into the dark maw of violence. ... By 1928
Paris had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans
spewed up by the boom the quality fell off, until toward the end
there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads."

He tried to find the visible act that revealed a moral quality in-

xiv Introduction

herent in a certain moment of time. He was haunted by time, as if
he wrote in a room full of clocks and calendars. He made lists by the
hundred, including lists of the popular songs, the football players,
the top debutantes (with the types of beauty they cultivated), the
hobbies and the slang expressions of a given year ; he felt that all
these names and phrases belonged to the year and helped to reveal
its momentary color. "After all," he said in an otherwise undistin-
guished magazine story, "any given moment has its value ; it can be
questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains. The
young prince in velvet gathered in lovely domesticity around the
queen amid the hush of rich draperies may presently grow up to be
Pedro the Cruel or Charles the Mad, but the moment of beauty was
there."

Fitzgerald lived in his great moments, and lived in them again
when he remembered their drama ; but he also stood apart from them
and coldly reckoned their causes and consequences. That is his
doubleness or irony and it is one of his distinguishing marks as a
writer. He took part in the ritual orgies of his time, but he also kept
a secretly detached position, regarding himself as a pauper living
among millionaires, a Celt among Sassenachs and a sullen peasant
among the nobility; he said that his point of vantage "was the
dividing line between two generations," prewar and postwar. Always
he cultivated a double vision. In his novels and stories he was trying
to present the glitter of life in the Princeton eating clubs, on the
North Shore of Long Island, in Hollywood and on the French
Riviera ; he surrounded his characters with a mist of admiration, and
at the same time he kept driving the mist away. He liked to know
"where the milk is watered and the sugar sanded, the rhinestone
passed for diamond and the stucco for stone." It was as if all his
stories described a big dance to which he had taken, as he once wrote,
the prettiest girl :

"There was an orchestra — Bingo-Bango
Playing for us to dance the tango
And the people all clapped as we arose
For her sweet face and my new clothes — "

and as if at the same time he stood outside the ballroom, a little Mid-
western boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the
tickets cost and who paid for the music. But it was not a dance he
was watching so much as it was a drama of conflicting manners and
aspirations in which he was both the audience and the leading actor.
As audience he kept a cold eye on the actor's performance. He wrote
of himself when he was twenty, "I knew that at bottom I lacked the

Introduction xv

essentials. At the last crisis, I knew I had no real courage, persever-
ance or self-respect." Sixteen years later he was just as critical, if in
a more discriminating fashion, and he said to the visitor at La Paix,
"I've got a very limited talent. I'm a workman of letters, a profes-
sional. I know when to write and when to stop writing." It was the
maximum of critical detachment, but it was combined with the maxi-
mum of immersion in the drama. He said in his notebook, and with-
out the least exaggeration, "Taking things hard, from Ginevra to Joe
Mank — ," mentioning the names of his first unhappy love and of a
Hollywood producer who, so he thought, had ruined one of his best
scripts: "That's the stamp that goes into my books so that people
can read it blind like Braille."

The drama he watched and in which he played — and overplayed —
a leading part was a moral drama leading to rewards and punish-
ments. "Sometimes I wish I had gone along with that gang," he said
in a letter that discussed musical comedies and mentioned Cole
Porter and Rogers and Hart ; "but I guess I am too much a moralist
at heart and want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather
than to entertain them." The morality he wanted to preach was a
simple one, in the midst of the prevailing confusion. Its four cardinal
virtues were Industry, Discipline, Responsibility (in the sense of
being kind to people and meeting one's obligations) and Maturity
(in the sense of learning to regard failure as inevitable, and yet of
making one's best efforts always). The good people in his stories had
these virtues and the bad ones had the corresponding vices. "All I
believe in in life," he wrote to his daughter, "is the rewards for virtue
(according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling
your duties, which are doubly costly."

The handle by which he took hold of his characters was their
dreams. These, as I said, might be commonplace or even cheap, but
almost always Fitzgerald managed to surround them with an atmos-
phere of the mysterious and illimitable or of the pitifully doomed.
His great scenes were, so to speak, played to music : sometimes the
music from a distant ballroom, sometimes that of a phonograph play-
ing a German tango, sometimes the wind in the leaves, sometimes the
stark music of the heart. When there was no music at least there
were pounding rhythms : "The city's quick metropolitan rhythm of
love and birth and death that supplied dreams to the unimaginative" ;
"The rhythm of the week-end, with its birth, its planned gaieties and
its announced end" ; "New York's flashing, dynamic good looks, its
tall man's quick-step." Fitzgerald's dream of his mature years, after
he had outgrown the notion of becoming a big man in college, was
also set to a sort of music, perhaps that of the Unfinished Symphony ;
it was the dream of becoming a great writer, specifically a great

xvi Introduction

novelist who would do for American society in our time what Turge-
niev, for example, had done for the old regime in Russia.

It was not his dream to be a poet, yet that was how he started and
in some ways he remained a poet primarily. He said of himself, "The
talent that matures early is usually of the poetic type, which mine
was in large part." His favorite author was Keats, not Turgeniev or
Flaubert. "I suppose IVe read it a hundred times," he said about the
"Ode on a Grecian Urn." "About the tenth time I began to know
what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner
mechanics. Likewise with the 'Nightingale,' which I can never read
without tears in my eyes ; likewise 'The Pot of Basil/ with its great
stanzas about the two brothers. . . . Knowing these things very
young and granted an ear, one could scarcely ever afterwards be
unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read."
When his daughter was learning to be a writer he advised her to read
Keats and Browning and try her hand at a sonnet in iambic pentam-
eter. He added, "The only thing that will help you is poetry, which
is the most concentrated form of style."

Fitzgerald himself was a poet who never learned some of the ele-
mentary rules for writing prose. His grammar was shaky and his
spelling definitely bad; for example he wrote "ect." more often than
"etc." and misspelled the name of his friend Monsignor Fay on the
dedication page of This Side of Paradise. In his letters he always
missspelled the given names of his first and last loves. He was not
a student, for all the books he read ; not a theoretician and perhaps
one should flatly say, not a thinker. He counted on his friends to do
much of his thinking for him ; at Princeton it was John Peale Bishop,
he said, who "made me see, in the course of a couple of months, the
difference between poetry and non-poetry." Twenty years later, at the
time of his crack-up, he was compelled to re-examine his scale of
values and found thinking incredibly difficult ; he compared it to "the
moving about of great secret trunks." He was then forced to the con-
clusion "That I had done very little thinking, save within the
problems of my craft. For twenty years a certain man had been my
intellectual conscience. That man was Edmund Wilson." Another
contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, "had been an artistic conscience
to me. I had not imitated his infectious style, because my own style,
such as it is, was formed before he published anything, but there was
an awful pull toward him when I was on a spot."

Fitzgerald was making the confession in order to keep straight
with himself, not to forestall any revelation that might have been
made by his critics. The critics would have said that there was little
of Hemingway's influence in his work, and hardly more of Wilson's —
although he once wrote a story about two dogs, "Shaggy's Morning,"

Introduction xvii

that is a delicate and deliberate burlesque of the Hemingway man-
ner. By listening hard one can overhear a few, a very few, suggestions
of Hemingway in the dialogue of other stories, especially the later
ones, but Fitzgerald was faithful to his own vision of the world and
his own way of expressing it. His debt to Hemingway and Wilson is
real, but hard to define. In spite of what he said, they didn't supply
him with an artistic or intellectual conscience, since he had always
possessed a lively conscience of his own; but they did serve as
models of literary conduct by which he tested his moral attitude
toward the problems of his craft.

To satisfy his conscience he kept trying to write, not merely as
well as he could, like an honest literary craftsman, but somehow
better than he was able. There was more than one occasion when he
actually surpassed himself — that is, when he so immersed himself in
a subject that it carried him beyond his usual or natural capacities
as demonstrated in the past. The writing of The Great Gatsby was
among the first of these occasions. There are scenes in the novel —
like Nick's first conversation with Daisy, like the party at Gatsby's,
like Nick's farewell to Gatsby and like his final meditations on the
story — that are not only better than anything Fitzgerald had previ-
ously written but are not even foreshadowed in his earlier work. "I
can never remember the times when I wrote anything," he said in his
notebook — "This Side of Paradise time or Beautiful and Damned or
Gatsby time, for instance. Lived in story." By living in the story he
became wiser, so it seemed, than he was in ordinary life. He said that
sometimes he went back and read his own books for advice on his
problems : "How much I know sometimes — how little at others," he
added.

By choice and fate he wrote what might be called the novel of
centrality, that is, the novel dealing with representative young men
and women in what seemed to be a central situation. The characters
would not be hopeless people chained by their prejudices and at the
mercy of social and economic forces — "creatures of their environ-
ment," in a favorite phrase of the naturalistic writers. Instead they
would have talent and opportunities and at least an apparent free-
dom of movement, so that the decisions they made would have an
effect not only on their own careers but on the lives of others, by
giving examples to be shunned or followed : like himself his heroes
would be exemplary. The story, of whatever length, would be con-
cerned with how they prospered in the world, how they fell in love
and how they made or failed to make an adjustment with life. It is
the story that Stendhal told in The Red and the Black and Dickens
told in Great Expectations : given a society with many false stand-
ards, how will a young man rise in it, by what advantages, what

xviii Introduction

stratagems ? Fitzgerald laid the story in his own time and his social
observation was not much inferior to that of the masters.

I do not find it a serious flaw in his work that the heroes ended by
resembling himself or that he gave most of them Irish names or at
least (to Dick Diver, of Tender Is the Night) a faint Irish melody in
the voice in order to make the identification stronger. Sometimes
the heroes started as very different persons and were transformed
imperceptibly, as he worked over them, into an image of the author.
When his friend Bishop wrote him a critical letter about The Great
Gatsby Fitzgerald answered, "Also you are right about Gatsby being
blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself —
for he started out as one man I knew and then changed into myself —
the amalgam was never clear in my mind." Actually the book gains
as well as loses by the blurredness of Gatsby ; it gains in mystery
what it loses in definition. Dick Diver also started out as one man
Fitzgerald knew "and then changed into myself" — changed so com-
pletely that Dick's fate was a prophecy of what would happen to the
author ; but again the change adds a new quality to the novel. Fitz-
gerald's personal life, enlarged as it was by his sympathies and his
gift for putting himself in others' places, was more interesting than
other lives he might have invented or merely observed ; he had every
reason for writing disguised autobiographies, as authors have done
from the beginning. "There never was a good biography of a good
novelist," he said in his notebook. "There couldn't be. He is too many
people, if he's any good." What he meant was that the heroes of his
stories were never himself as he was in life, but himself as projected
into different situations, such as might have been encountered by
members of his spiritual family. "Books are like brothers," he said.
"I am an only child. Gatsby my imaginary eldest brother, Amory" —
in This Side of Paradise — "my younger, Anthony" — in The Beautiful
and Damned — "my worry, Dick my comparatively good brother,
but all of them far from home."

In life and art Fitzgerald set a high value on persistent effort.
"After all, Max, I am a plodder," he said in one of his letters to
Maxwell Perkins. "One time I had a talk with Ernest Hemingway,
and I told him, against all logic that was then current, that I was the
tortoise and he was the hare, and that's the truth of the matter, that
everything I have ever attained has been through long and per-
sistent struggle while it is Ernest who has a touch of gehius which
enables him to bring off extraordinary things with facility. I have no
facility. I have a facility for being cheap, if I want to indulge that
. . . but when I decided to be a serious man, I tried to struggle over
every point until I have made myself into a slow-moving Behemoth."
Moving slowly with Tender Is the Night he wrote a manuscript of

Introduction xix

400,000 words and put aside three-fourths of it, including a number
of scenes that were as good as any in the finished novel. After the
book was published and was apparently forgotten he started revising
it again, for a new edition that might or might not be printed.
The Last Tycoon would have been a short novel of 50,000 words
and it was only half-finished at his death, but his notes and drafts
and synopses and character sketches are valuable in themselves.
There are three drafts of the first chapter and the third draft is an
extremely effective piece of writing that struck into new territory for
Fitzgerald. But he wrote at the head of the chapter, "Rewrite from
mood. Has become stilted with rewriting. Don't look [at previous
draft]. Rewrite from mood." On the fourth and the tenth revision he
still would have been unsatisfied, unless the chapter fitted exactly to
the outlines of his dream.

He devoted less care to his stories than to his novels, since he re-
garded himself as a novelist primarily. "Stories are best written in
either one jump or three, according to the length," he told his daugh-
ter. "The three-jump story should be done on three successive days,
then a day or so for revise and off she goes. This of course is an
ideal — " and in his later years Fitzgerald seldom achieved it. There
were stories that he kept revising for months or even years, but he
never regarded them as his best. Writing stories paid him better than
any other literary work. In 1929, for example, he earned $27,000 by
his stories and only $5,450 from all other sources, including $31.77
described as "royalty from book." Books were, however, his first
interest and it was the novel, not the short story, that he described as
"the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and
emotion from one human being to another."

His publishers used to bring out a collection of Fitzgerald's stories
one or two seasons after the appearance of each of his novels. It was
a wise custom because, in a sense, the stories clustered around
the novel that was written during the same period. Most of the early
ones might have dealt with the further adventures of Amory and
Isabelle and Rosalind, the three so-wicked youngsters in This Side
of Paradise. His first long story, "May Day" (1920), was in some
respects a preliminary sketch for his second novel, The Beautiful
and Damned. Fitzgerald said that "Winter Dreams" (1922) was a
first version of The Great Gatsby, and "Absolution" (1924) was
originally intended as a prologue to Gatsby. During the next seven
years he wrote many stories about Americans in Paris, on the Riviera
and in Switzerland — the backgrounds he would use in Tender Is
the Night — and among them is "One Trip Abroad" (1930), which,
though it is one of the weaker stories in the group, would serve as a
preview of the finished novel.

xx Introduction

The stories contributed to the novels in still another fashion. On
the magazine clip sheets of a very early one, "The Smilers," Fitz-
gerald wrote in a bold hand, "This story has been stripped of any
phrases of interest and is positively not to be republished in any
form/7 The "phrases of interest" were copied into his notebook,
where they were classified alphabetically under various headings — A
for Anecdotes, B for Bright Clippings, C for Conversation and Things
Overhead — and were thus kept in dead storage, but readily available,
until the day when he might be able to incorporate them into a novel.
The clip sheets were then consigned to a big folder marked "Junked
and Dismantled Stories." Not only the failed stories but many that
deserved better treatment were stripped of their useful parts like a
worn-out automobile. He was willing to sacrifice a whole story, some-
times a good one, for the sake of a sentence or two that might
strengthen a scene in Tender Is the Night or The Last Tycoon.

But that wasn't Fitzgerald's final judgment on the stories as a
group. Like other serious American writers he had the old and usually
unsatisfied ambition to leave behind him a definitive body of work.
There would be, so he planned, a uniform edition of his writings and
in it the stories would occupy almost as much space as the novels.
The Collected Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald would fill seventeen
volumes. There would be seven novels, including three still to be
written, and one of these, In the Darkest Hour, would be in two
volumes. Besides the novels there would be seven volumes of short
stories, one volume of poetry and plays and a final volume of essays.
Nor was this all : at the age of fifty-five or sixty Fitzgerald was to
prepare a Revised Edition in twelve volumes — probably in dull, rich
bindings like the New York Edition of Henry James — and once again
the stories would be given their full place. He must have felt as we
do today, that many of them are as good in their more impulsive
fashion as the novels he rewrote so often. They are like the sketches
of a gifted artist, sharp and immediate in their perceptions, so that
they bring us face to face with the artist's world. Even the worst of
the stories have sudden insights that are like flinging back curtains
from windows hidden in what had seemed to be flimsily decorated
walls, while the best stories are suffused with emotion and their in-
sights are everywhere. "I have asked a lot of my emotions — one hun-
dred and twenty stories," Fitzgerald said in a prose poem that he
wrote two years before leaving for Hollywood. "The price was high,
right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something
—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than
these, in every story, it was the extra I had." And he added, because
he was then in a state of physical illness and nervous exhaustion,
"Now it has gone and I am just like you now."

Introduction xxi

During the years 1935 and 1936 he suffered from a complete physi-
cal and emotional breakdown. It was never a secret and Fitzgerald
described it at the time, in "The Crack-Up" and two other articles
printed by Esquire in the spring of 1936. The articles revealed the
intimate worries of an author who had come to regard himself "as a
cracked plate, the kind that one wonders whether it is worth pre-
serving. ... It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled
with the other plates in the dishpan ; it will not be brought out for
company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the
ice box under left-overs."

The causes of his breakdown are not mysterious and Arthur
Mizener has described them with great understanding in The Far
Side of Paradise. The symptoms were described by Fitzgerald him-
self and they were excruciatingly painful, but by no means unusual.
We have been living through an age of emotional breakdowns. By
now the case records of brilliant men, hundreds and thousands of
them, who have gone to pieces are available to physicians and there
is nothing suffered by Fitzgerald that has not been Greek-named and
catalogued in the medical textbooks. There are, however, two
features of his experience that make it something more than a com-
monplace case history. The first feature is the unusual candor with
which he wrote about it. He was, it is true, a little less than com-
pletely honest about his alcoholism, but that is a symptom of the
disease itself and one he tried hard to overcome. He revealed every-
thing else, on condition that it did not hurt others but only himself.

I do not think it is fair to use the cant word "exhibitionism" in con-
nection with the three articles he wrote for Esquire. They contain
no hint that he was deriving a twisted pleasure from torturing him-
self in public. What they do suggest is a sense of duty. It is as if he
was saying, "When I undertook to be a certain type of writer I also
undertook to tell the essential truth about my world and myself.
The task has been pleasant at moments in the past and now that it is
supremely painful I still must tell the truth at the cost of losing my
self-respect if I fail to do so." Without bravado and with fewer
excuses than he might well have offered, he simply told his story.
Writers have done that before, but usually they have waited until
long afterward, when the story was no longer shameful and they
could even boast of having found a path back to health. They have
offered all sorts of self-degrading confessions, but on one point they
have remained silent; they have admitted everything except the
possibility Of having lost their talent. Fitzgerald told the story in the

xxii Introduction

midst of his crack-up, with no cure for it in sight, and he truly
shocked his literary colleagues by suggesting that his talent might
have vanished with his emotional vitality.

In his memorial poem to Fitzgerald, John Peale Bishop set down
his memory of those tortured years :

"I have lived with you the hour of your humiliation,
I have seen you turn upon the others in the night
And of sad self-loathing
Concealing nothing

Heard you cry: I am lost. But you are lower!
And you had that right.
The damned do not so own to their damnation."

Fitzgerald for all his tortures was still in purgatory and not in those
cold circles of hell where the heart congeals. Because he clung to his
honesty and his sense of values he suffered more than the truly
damned. "It was despair, despair, despair — despair day and night/'
said a nurse who cared for him in 1936. He spent his sleepless nights
brooding over what he had failed to accomplish. About three o'clock,
he said, the real horror "would develop over the roof-tops, and in the
strident horns of night-owl taxis and the shrill monody of revelers'
arrival over the way. Horror and waste —

" — Waste and horror — what I might have been and done that is
lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable." "In a real dark night
of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
At times like these a man keeps his sanity by force of will or loses it
by what amounts to a deliberate decision. Fitzgerald did not retreat
into dreams or delusions or any other substitutes for the maternal
womb. There was a hard core in his character — call it Midwestern
Puritanism if you will, or middle-class Irish Catholicism, or simple
obstinacy — and it kept him from denying his obligations to his
family and his creditors and his talent as an artist. He met the obli-
gations, and that is the second truly remarkable feature of Fitz-
gerald's case: not his symptoms or his sufferings, but his sense of
duty and his will to survive.

He had suffered a permanent defeat and he did not try to hide its
consequences from himself or the world. "A man does not recover
from such jolts," Fitzgerald said in one of his articles for Esquire —
"he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds
new things to care about." In the summer of 1937 the new person was
strong enough to make a trip to Hollywood. Fitzgerald had been
given a six months' contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and when
the contract expired in January 1938 it was renewed for a year at an

Introduction xxiii

increased salary. He was drinking very little and proved to be a
capable screen craftsman, although his best scenarios were not pro-
duced in the form in which he wrote them. During his first eighteen
months in Hollywood he earned $88,391, paid off his big debts and
put his insurance policies in order.

The story is not a simple one of moral redemption and success in a
new field. At the beginning of February 1939, a week after the M-G-M
contract ran out, he was sent East by Walter Wanger ; with the help
of Budd Schulberg he was to write a film about the Dartmouth
Winter Carnival. He began drinking on the eastbound plane, got into
a violent disagreement with Wanger and continued drinking at Dart-
mouth and in New York ; it was his biggest, saddest, most desperate
spree. But that wasn't his end, even though it was the end of the prin-
cipal character in Schulberg's novel about the trip, The Disenchanted \
Fitzgerald's story went on.

He found a new studio job and quickly lost it; then Zelda was
well enough for a vacation from the sanitarium and he took her on a
trip to Havana, where he began drinking again. Back in Holly-
wood he couldn't find another job and suspected that the producers
had put his name on an informal blacklist. He took to his bed ; for
three months he was under the care of day and night nurses. It was
a recurrence of tuberculosis, he told his friends (who suspected a
recurrence of alcoholism), and it was complicated by "a nervous
breakdown of such severity that for a long time it threatened to
paralyze both arms — or to quote the doctor : The Good Lord tapped
you on the shoulder.' " After a partial recovery in the summer he
faced another crisis, to which he referred obliquely in his letters ; it
was "that personally and publicly dreary month of Sept. last [when]
about everything went to pieces all at once" — and still it wasn't the
end of the story.

In the past he had often exaggerated his physical troubles for
dramatic effect, but it seems that he wasn't exaggerating when he said
that all through the winter of 1939-40 he suffered from "the awful
lapses and sudden reverses and apparent cures and thorough poison-
ing effect of lung trouble. Suffice to say there were months with a
high of 99.8, months at 99.6 and then up and down and a stabilization
at 99.2 every afternoon when I could write in bed." His Hollywood
friends report that he was gray-faced and emaciated and seldom left
his room, but he was writing again — if only for a few hours each day
— and that was the important news. Although seven of his books were
still in print nobody was buying them, and his name was almost
forgotten ; now he was setting out to regain his place in literature.

His record of production for the last year of his life would have
been remarkable for a man in perfect health. He began the year by

xxiv Introduction

making plans for a novel and, simultaneously, by writing twenty
stories for Esquire, including seventeen in the Pat Hobby series.
Most of the Hobby stories weren't very good by his own standards,
but they caught the Hollywood atmosphere and they also made fun
uf the author's weaknesses, thereby proving that Fitzgerald hadn't
lost his ironic attitude toward himself or his gift of double vision.
Suddenly he resumed his interrupted correspondence with his friends
and he sent his daughter an extraordinary series of letters that con-
tinued all through the year ; perhaps they were too urgent and too
full of tired wisdom for a girl in college, but then Fitzgerald was
writing them as a sort of personal and literary testament. In the
spring he wrote — and twice rewrote from the beginning — a scenario
based on his story, "Babylon Revisited"; it was the best of his
scenarios and, according to the producer who ordered it, the best he
ever read. Shirley Temple wasn't available for the part of Honoria
and the story has never been filmed. Once more Fitzgerald began
drinking; then he sobered up and went to work for a studio in
September, earning enough, he thought, to carry him through the
writing of The Last Tycoon. Work on it was delayed by a serious
heart attack in November, but for most of the month he was writing
steadily. He had said in a letter to his daughter, "I wish now I'd never
relaxed or looked back — but said at the end of The Great Gatsby:
'I've found my line — from now on this comes first. This is my imme-
diate duty — without this I am nothing.' " In the year 1940 he had
found his line again, and had found something more than that, since
he now possessed a deeper sense of the complexities of life than he
had when writing Gatsby. He was doing his best work of the year in
December and it was some of the best he ever did. He had been sober
for a long time and seemed to be less worried about illness, when
suddenly, four days before Christmas, there was a second coronary
attack and he died — not like a strayed reveler but like a partner of
the elder J. P. Morgan, working too hard until his heart gave out.

At the time of his death Fitzgerald had written about 160 stories
in all ; the exact number would be hard to determine because some of
his work was on the borderline between fiction and the informal essay
or "magazine piece." The forty-six stories that went into his four
published collections include most of the best ones, but not all of
them, because Fitzgerald was a shrewd but erratic judge of his own
work. The last collection, Taps at Reveille, appeared in 1935 and the
stories of the last years have never been reprinted.

That is the background of the present selection, in which I have
tried to gather together the best stories written at all stages of Fitz-
gerald's career. If the selection has any virtues except those of the

Introduction xxv

stories themselves, it owes them to the help I received from several
friends and students of Fitzgerald — as notably from his daughter,
Mrs. Samuel J. Lanahan, who made several useful suggestions ; from
Harold Ober, his literary agent, who supplied me with many items
of information, including a list of Fitzgerald's published work ; from
Alexander Clark, curator of manuscripts at the Princeton University
Library, who is presently in charge of Fitzgerald's notes and corre-
spondence ; from Charles Scribner's Sons, his publishers, who made
the volume possible (and patiently waited for it) ; and from Arthur
Mizener, who let me read his fine biography of Fitzgerald in manu-
script and showed me his notes on the circumstances in which many
of the stories were written. The faults of the selection are strictly
mine.

I thought it best to devote the bulk of the volume to the work of
the middle period, 1926-31, when Fitzgerald was giving most of his
time to shorter fiction. His first two volumes, Flappers and Philoso-
phers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), received full atten-
tion in their own age and from these I have taken only four stories in
all (after hesitating a long time before including "May Day"). From
All the Sad Young Men (1926) I have taken five, or a little more than
half the book. From Taps at Reveille (1935), which was underesti-
mated by the reviewers, I have taken nine and to these I have added
three other stories written at the same period as those in Taps but
omitted from the volume, I think mistakenly. The selection ends with
seven of the shorter pieces that Fitzgerald wrote after his crack-up.

Taken together the twenty-eight stories compose an informal his-
tory of two decades in American life, or rather of one decade with its
long aftermath. The history is more intimate than anything in the
textbooks and it is in some ways more vivid than the picture of the
time that we find in Fitzgerald's novels, where the material was com-
posed and recomposed ; the stories were written closer to the scene
and retain the emotion of the moment. But they do more than merely
speak for their time, since they also speak for the author ; and taken
together they form a sort of journal of his whole career. It was a
different career from the one we had expected to find after reading
his first books and hearing about his decline. What seems important
in it now is not the early success and not the neglect and heartbreak
of his later years, and not even the contrast between them that lends
an easy point to other men's novels; it is above all the struggle
against defeat and the sort of qualified triumph he earned by the
struggle. Fitzgerald remains an exemplar and archetype, but not of
the 1920*8 alone; in the end he represents the human spirit in one of
its permanent forms.

MALCOLM COWLEY

Early Success

EDITOR'S NOTE

THE seven stories in this first group belong to the period of Fitz-
gerald's early success and have as background his first loves, his
marriage to Zelda Sayre (after their engagement had been broken
because of his poverty) and the glitter of their new life among the
rich. The stories were written between the fall of 1919, when he was
twenty-three and heard the great news that his novel had been ac-
cepted, and the spring of 1924, when the Fitzgeralds decided to live
in Europe. Two of them were reprinted in Flappers and Philosophers
(1920), two in Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) and the last three in All
the Sad Young Men (1926).

The book opens with the best of Fitzgerald's fantasies, "The Dia«
mond as Big as the Ritz." Although it was written in the winter ol
1921-22, it is printed out of its chronological order because it clearly
states a theme that would often recur in his work. A middle-class boy
falls in love with the heiress to a great fortune and she returns his
love, but the boy is murdered by her family or destroyed by her
wealth. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" can have a happy ending
— at least for the lovers — because it is a fantasy ; but the plot would
reappear in The Great Gatsby and there it would be carried to its
tragic conclusion. Having fallen in love with the rich Mrs. Buchanan,
Gatsby would be murdered as efficiently as were the visitors to Brad-
dock Washington's diamond mountain.

The other six stories in the group are reprinted in the order of their
magazine publication. "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is the best of the
flapper stories that made Fitzgerald's reputation as a popular writer.
When it was published in the spring of 1920, bobbed hair was a
national issue like the Volstead Act, and the young author received
hundreds of letters from excited readers of the Saturday Evening
Post. Many were shocked by the "line" that Marjorie invented to
make her cousin popular. It was copied from life, or at least from

4 Early Success

the remarks that Fitzgerald himself had composed for his pretty
young sister Annabel when she was going to her first big dances. . . .
"The Ice Palace" (1920) grew out of his worries in the autumn before
his marriage, when he was living at home in St. Paul and was making
frantic visits to Zelda in Alabama. The contrast between North
and South was one of his favorite themes ; he would return to it in
"The Last of the Belles" and in several uncollected pieces. . . .
"May Day" (1920) is the longest and most ambitious of his early
stories. It catches the spirit of the crazy spring when we were all
coming back from the wars and when Fitzgerald, besides looking
vainly for a job, was drinking too much with his classmates at the
Knickerbocker bar ; he projected his sense of failure into the char-
acter of Gordon Sterrett. More than that, he interwove two other
plots into that of Sterrett's failure with greater skill than he had
shown before and would usually show in the future ; he never learned
to be a good engineer of plots. Soon, however, he became a better
judge of persons and situations than he was when writing "May
Day."

There is more depth of feeling in the last three stories. "Winter
Dreams" (1922) was suggested by an earlier episode in the author's
life: at Princeton he had been in love with a debutante who was
something like Judy Jones in the story (later she would reappear as
the heroine of the Josephine series). In other respects "Winter
Dreams" is not at all a copy of Fitzgerald's life, but it offers a re-
vealing summary of his early feelings about love and money and
social position. . . . "The Sensible Thing" (1924) is autobiographi-
cal in the strict sense; it is the story of his broken and renewed
engagement to Zelda Sayre. . . . "Absolution" (1924) is rich in
memories of his Catholic boyhood and his propensity for living in
an imaginary world. At first it was intended as a prologue to The
Great Gatsby ; then Fitzgerald decided it was better to leave Gatsby's
background wrapped in mist. But the story retains its connection
with the novel, which was a turning point in his career. He was work-
ing on a deeper level of experience than he had attempted to reach
in the past, and he continued to work on it in the best of the stories
that followed.

THE DIAMOND AS BIG
AS THE RITZ

JOHN T. UNGER came from a family that had been well known in
Hades — a small town on the Mississippi River — for several genera-
tions. John's father had held the amateur golf championship through
many a heated contest; Mrs. Unger was known "from hot-box to
hot-bed," as the local phrase went, for her political addresses ; and
young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had danced all
the latest dances from New York before he put on long trousers.
And now, for a certain time, he was to be away from home. That
respect for a New England education which is the bane of all provin-
cial places, which drains them yearly of their most promising young
men, had seized upon his parents. Nothing would suit them but that
he should go to St. Midas' School near Boston — Hades was too small
to hold their darling and gifted son.

Now in Hades — as you know if you ever have been there — the
names of the more fashionable preparatory schools and colleges mean
very little. The inhabitants have been so long out of the world that,
though they make a show of keeping up to date in dress and manners
and literature, they depend to a great extent on hearsay, and a func-
tion that in Hades would be considered elaborate would doubtless be
hailed by a Chicago beef-princess as "perhaps a little tacky."

John T. Unger was on the eve of departure. Mrs. Unger, with
maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of linen suits and electric
fans, and Mr. Unger presented his son with an asbestos pocket-book
stuffed with money.

"Remember, you are always welcome here," he said. "You can be
sure, boy, that we'll keep the home fires burning."

"I know," answered John huskily.

"Don't forget who you are and where you come from," continued
his father proudly, "and you can do nothing to harm you. You are an
Unger — from Hades."

So the old man and the young shook hands and John walked away
with tears streaming from his eyes. Ten minutes later he had passed
outside the city limits, and he stopped to glance back for the last
time. Over the gates the old-fashioned Victorian motto seemed

6 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

strangely attractive to him. His father had tried time and time again
to have it changed to something with a little more push and verve
about it, such as "Hades — Your Opportunity," or else a plain "Wel-
come" sign set over a hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights.
The old motto was a little depressing, Mr. linger had thought —
but now. . . .

So John took his look and then set his face resolutely toward his
destination. And, as he turned away, the lights of Hades against the
sky seemed full of a warm and passionate beauty.

St. Midas' School is half an hour from Boston in a Rolls-Pierce
motor-car. The actual distance will never be known, for no one,
except John T. linger, had ever arrived there save in a Rolls-Pierce
and probably no one ever will again. St. Midas7 is the most expen-
sive and the most exclusive boys' preparatory school in the world.

John's first two years there passed pleasantly. The fathers of all
the boys were money-kings and John spent his summers visiting at
fashionable resorts. While he was very fond of all the boys he visited,
their fathers struck him as being much of a piece, and in his boyish
way he often wondered at their exceeding sameness. When he told
them where his home was they would ask jovially, "Pretty hot down
there?" and John would muster a faint smile and answer, "It cer-
tainly is." His response would have been heartier had they not all
made this joke — at best varying it with, "Is it hot enough for you
down there?" which he hated just as much.

In the middle of his second year at school, a quiet, handsome
boy named Percy Washington had been put in John's form. The
newcomer was pleasant in his manner and exceedingly well
dressed even for St. Midas', but for some reason he kept aloof from
the other boys. The only person with whom he was intimate was
John T. Unger, but even to John he was entirely uncommunicative
concerning his home or his family. That he was wealthy went without
saying, but beyond a few such deductions John knew little of his
friend, so it promised rich confectionery for his curiosity when Percy
invited him to spend the summer at his home "in the West." He
accepted, without hesitation.

It was only when they were in the train that Percy became, for the
first time, rather communicative. One day while they were eating
lunch in the dining-car and discussing the imperfect characters of
several of the boys at school, Percy suddenly changed his tone and
made an abrupt remark.

"My father," he said, "is by far the richest man in the world."

"Oh," said John, politely. He could think of no answer to make to
this confidence. He considered "That's very nice," but it sounded

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 7

hollow and was on the point of saying, "Really?" but refrained since
it would seem to question Percy's statement. And such an astound-
ing statement could scarcely be questioned.

"By far the richest," repeated Percy.

"I was reading in the World Almanac" began John, "that there
was one man in America with an income of over five million a year
and four men with incomes of over three million a year, and "

"Oh, they're nothing," Percy's mouth was a half-moon of scorn.
"Catch-penny capitalists, financial small-fry, petty merchants and
money-lenders. My father could buy them out and not know he'd
done it."

"But how does he "

"Why haven't they put down his income tax? Because he doesn't
pay any. At least he pays a little one — but he doesn't pay any on his
real income."

"He must be very rich," said John simply. "I'm glad. I like very
rich people.

"The richer a fella is, the better I like him." There was a look of
passionate frankness upon his dark face. "I visited the Schnlitzer-
Murphys last Easter. Vivian Schnlitzer-Murphy had rubies as big
as hen's eggs, and sapphires that were like globes with lights inside
them "

"I love jewels," agreed Percy enthusiastically. "Of course I
wouldn't want any one at school to know about it, but I've got quite
a collection myself. I used to collect them instead of stamps."

"And diamonds," continued John eagerly. "The Schnlitzer-
Murphys had diamonds as big as walnuts "

"That's nothing." Percy had leaned forward and dropped his voice
to a low whisper. "That's nothing at all. My father has a diamond
bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."

The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic
bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned
sky. An immense distance under the sky crouched the village of Fish,
minute, dismal, and forgotten. There were twelve men, so it was said,
in the village of Fish, twelve sombre and inexplicable souls who
sucked a lean milk from the almost literally bare rock upon which
a mysterious populatory force had begotten them. They had become
a race apart, these twelve men of Fish, like some species developed
by an early whim of nature, which on second thought had abandoned
them to struggle and extermination.

Out of the blue-black bruise in the distance crept a long line of

8 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

moving lights upon the desolation of the land, and the twelve men
of Fish gathered like ghosts at the shanty depot to watch the passing
of the seven o'clock train, the Transcontinental Express from Chi-
cago. Six times or so a year the Transcontinental Express, through
some inconceivable jurisdiction, stopped at the village of Fish, and
when this occurred a figure or so would disembark, mount into a
buggy that always appeared from out of the dusk, and drive off
toward the bruised sunset. The observation of this pointless and pre-
posterous phenomenon had become a sort of cult among the men of
Fish. To observe, that was all ; there remained in them none of the
vital quality of illusion which would make them wonder or speculate,
else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious visita-
tions. But the men of Fish were beyond all religion — the barest and
most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that
barren rock — so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice ; only each
night at seven the silent concourse by the shanty depot, a congrega-
tion who lifted up a prayer of dim, anaemic wonder.

On this June night, the Great Brakeman, whom, had they deified
any one, they might well have chosen as their celestial protagonist,
had ordained that the seven o'clock train should leave its human (or
inhuman) deposit at Fish. At two minutes after seven Percy Wash-
ington and John T. linger disembarked, hurried past the spellbound,
the agape, the fearsome eyes of the twelve men of Fish, mounted into
a buggy which had obviously appeared from nowhere, and drove
away.

After half an hour, when the twilight had coagulated into dark, the
silent negro who was driving the buggy hailed an opaque body some-
where ahead of them in the gloom. In response to his cry, it turned
upon them a luminous disk which regarded them like a malignant
eye out of the unfathomable night. As they came closer, John saw
that it was the tail-light of an immense automobile, larger and more
magnificent than any he had ever seen. Its body was of gleaming
metal richer than nickel and lighter than silver, and the hubs of the
wheels were studded with iridescent geometric figures of green and
yellow— John did not dare to guess whether they were glass or
jewel.

Two negroes, dressed in glittering livery such as one sees in pic-
tures of royal processions in London, were standing at attention
beside the car and as the two young men dismounted from the buggy
they were greeted in some language which the guest could not under-
stand, but which seemed to be an extreme form of the Southern
negro's dialect.

';Get in," said Percy to his friend, as their trunks were tossed to
the ebony roof of the limousine. "Sorry we had to bring you this far

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 9

in that buggy, but of course it wouldn't do for the people on the train
or those Godforsaken fellas in Fish to see this automobile."

"Gosh! What a car!" This ejaculation was provoked by its
interior. John saw that the upholstery consisted of a thousand minute
and exquisite tapestries of silk, woven with jewels and embroideries,
and set upon a background of cloth of gold. The two armchair seats
in which the boys luxuriated were covered with stuff that resembled
duvetyn, but seemed woven in numberless colors of the ends of ostrich
feathers.

"What a car!" cried John again, in amazement.

"This thing?" Percy laughed. "Why, it's just an old junk we use for
a station wagon."

By this time they were gliding along through the darkness toward
the break between the two mountains.

"We'll be there in an hour and a half," said Percy, looking at the
clock. "I may as well tell you it's not going to be like anything you
ever saw before."

If the car was any indication of what John would see, he was pre-
pared to be astonished indeed. The simple piety prevalent in Hades
has the earnest worship of and respect for riches as the first article
of its creed — had John felt otherwise than radiantly humble before
them, his parents would have turned away in horror at the blasphemy.

They had now reached and were entering the break between the
two mountains and almost immediately the way became much
rougher.

"If the moon shone down here, you'd see that we're in a big gulch,"
said Percy, trying to peer out of the window. He spoke a few words
into the mouthpiece and immediately the footman turned on a search-
light and swept the hillsides with an immense beam.

"Rocky, you see. An ordinary car would be knocked to pieces in
half an hour. In fact, it'd take a tank to navigate it unless you knew
the way. You notice we're going uphill now."

They were obviously ascending, and within a few minutes the car
was crossing a high rise, where they caught a glimpse of a pale moon
newly risen in the distance. The car stopped suddenly and several
figures took shape out of the dark beside it — these were negroes also.
Again the two young men were saluted in the same dimly recogniz-
able dialect ; then the negroes set to work and four immense cables
dangling from overhead were attached with hooks to the hubs of the
great jeweled wheels. At a resounding "Hey-yah!" John felt the car
being lifted slowly from the ground — up and up — clear of the tallest
rocks on both sides — then higher, until he could see a wavy, moonlit
valley stretched out before him in sharp contrast to the quagmire of
rocks that they had just left. Only on one side was there still rock —

io The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

and then suddenly there was no rock beside them or anywhere around.

It was apparent that they had surmounted some immense knife-
blade of stone, projecting perpendicularly into the air. In a moment
they were going down again, and finally with a soft bump they were
landed upon the smooth earth.

"The worst is over," said Percy, squinting out the window. "It's
only five miles from here, and our own road — tapestry brick — all the
way. This belongs to us. This is where the United States ends,
father says."

"Are we in Canada?"

"We are not. We're in the middle of the Montana Rockies. But
you are now on the only five square miles of land in the country
that's never been surveyed."

"Why hasn't it? Did they forget it?"

"No," said Percy, grinning, "they tried to do it three times. The
first time my grandfather corrupted a whole department of the State
survey ; the second time he had the official maps of the United States
tinkered with — that held them for fifteen years. The last time was
harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses were in the strong-
est magnetic field ever artificially set up. He had a whole set of sur-
veying instruments made with a slight defection that would allow
for this territory not to appear, and he substituted them for the ones
that were to be used. Then he had a river deflected and he had what
looked like a village built up on its banks — so that they'd see it, and
think it was a town ten miles farther up the valley. There's only one
thing my father's afraid of," he concluded, "only one thing in the
world that could be used to find us out."

"What's that?"

Percy sank his voice to a whisper.

"Aeroplanes,' he breathed. "We've got half a dozen anti-aircraft
guns and we've arranged it so far — but there've been a few deaths and
a great many prisoners. Not that we mind that, you know, father and
I, but it upsets mother and the girls, and there's always the chance
that some time we won't be able to arrange it."

Shreds and tatters of chinchilla, courtesy clouds in the green
moon's heaven, were passing the green moon like precious Eastern
stuffs paraded for the inspection of some Tartar Khan. It seemed to
John that it was day, and that he was looking at some lads sailing
above him in the air, showering down tracts and patent medicine
circulars, with their messages of hope for despairing, rockbound ham-
lets. It seemed to him that he could see them look down out of the
clouds and stare — and stare at whatever there was to stare at in this
place whither he was bound — What then? Were they induced to
land by some insidious device there to be immured far from patent

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz n

medicines and from tracts until the judgment day — or, should they
fail to fall into the trap, did a quick puff of smoke and the sharp
round of a splitting shell bring them drooping to earth — and "upset"
Percy's mother and sisters. John shook his head and the wraith of a
hollow laugh issued silently from his parted lips. What desperate
transaction lay hidden here? What a moral expedient of a bizarre
Croesus ? What terrible and golden mystery ? . . .

The chinchilla clouds had drifted past now and outside the Mon-
tana night was bright as day. The tapestry brick of the road was
smooth to the tread of the great tires as they rounded a still, moonlit
lake ; they passed into darkness for a moment, a pine grove, pungent
and cool, then they came out into a broad avenue of lawn and John's
exclamation of pleasure was simultaneous with Percy's taciturn
"We're home."

Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite chateau rose from the
borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an
adjoining mountain, then melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in
translucent feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest of
pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets,
the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs
and hectagons and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of
the intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all trembled on
John's spirit like a chord of music. On one of the towers, the tallest,
the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top
made a sort of floating fairyland — and as John gazed up in warm en-
chantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in a
rococo harmony that was like nothing he had ever heard before.
Then in a moment the car stopped before wide, high marble steps
around which the night air was fragrant with a host of flowers. At
the top of the steps two great doors swung silently open and amber
light flooded out upon the darkness, silhouetting the figure of an
exquisite lady with black, high-piled hair, who held out her arms
toward them.

"Mother," Percy was saying, "this is my friend, John linger, from
Hades."

Afterward John remembered that first night as a daze of many
colors, of quick sensory impressions, of music soft as a voice in love,
and of the beauty of things, lights and shadows, and motions and
faces. There was a white-haired man who stood drinking a many-
hued cordial from a crystal thimble set on a golden stem. There was
a girl with a flowery face, dressed like Titania with braided sapphires
in her hair. There was a room where the solid, soft gold of the walls
yielded to the pressure of his hand, and a room that was iike a
platonic conception of the ultimate prison — ceiling, floor, and all, it

12 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

was lined with an unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds of every
size and shape, until, lit with tall violet lamps in the corners, it
dazzled the eyes with a whiteness that could be compared only with
itself, beyond human wish or dream.

Through a maze of these rooms the two boys wandered. Sometimes
the floor under their feet would flame in brilliant patterns from light-
ing below, patterns of barbaric clashing colors, of pastel delicacy, of
sheer whiteness, or of subtle and intricate mosaic, surely from some
mosque on the Adriatic Sea. Sometimes beneath layers of thick crystal
he would see blue or green water swirling, inhabited by vivid fish and
growths of rainbow foliage. Then they would be treading on furs of
every texture and color or along corridors of palest ivory, unbroken
as though carved complete from the gigantic tusks of dinosaurs
extinct before the age of man. . . .

Then a hazily remembered transition, and they were at dinner —
where each plate was of two almost imperceptible layers of solid
diamond between which was curiously worked a filigree of emerald
design, a shaving sliced from green air. Music, plangent and unob-
trusive, drifted down through far corridors — his chair, feathered and
curved insidiously to his back, seemed to engulf and overpower him
as he drank his first glass of port. He tried drowsily to answer a
question that had been asked him, but the honeyed luxury that
clasped his body added to the illusion of sleep — jewels, fabrics, wines,
and metals blurred before his eyes into a sweet mist. . . .

"Yes," he replied with a polite effort, "it certainly is hot enough
for me down there."

He managed to add a ghostly laugh; then, without movement,
without resistance, he seemed to float off and away, leaving an iced
dessert that was pink as a dream. ... He fell asleep.

When he awoke he knew that several hours had passed. He was in
a great quiet room with ebony walls and a dull illumination that was
too faint, too subtle, to be called a light. His young host was stand-
ing over him.

"You fell asleep at dinner/' Percy was saying. "I nearly did, too —
it was such a treat to be comfortable again after this year of school.
Servants undressed and bathed you while you were sleeping."

"Is this a bed or a cloud?" sighed John. "Percy, Percy — before you
go, I want to apologize."

"For what?"

"For doubting you when you said you had a diamond as big as
the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."

Percy smiled.

"I thought you didn't believe me. It's that mountain, you know."

"What mountain?"

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 13

"The mountain the chateau rests on. It's not very big. for a moun-
tain. But except about fifty feet of sod and gravel on top it's solid
diamond. One diamond, one cubic mile without a flaw. Aren't you
listening? Say "

But John T. linger had again fallen asleep.

Ill

Morning. As he awoke he perceived drowsily that the room had at
the same moment become dense with sunlight. The ebony panels of
one wall had slid aside on a sort of track, leaving his chamber half
open to the day. A large negro in a white uniform stood beside his
bed.

"Good-evening," muttered John, summoning his brains from the
wild places.

"Good-morning, sir. Are you ready for your bath, sir? Oh, don't
get up — I'll put you in, if you'll just unbutton your pajamas — there.
Thank you, sir."

John lay quietly as his pajamas were removed — he was amused
and delighted; he expected to be lifted like a child by this black
Gargantua who was tending him, but nothing of the sort happened ;
instead he felt the bed tilt up slowly on its side — he began to roll,
startled at first, in the direction of the wall, but when he reached the
wall its drapery gave way, and sliding two yards farther down a
fleecy incline he plumped gently into water the same temperature as
his body.

He looked about him.. The runway or rollway on which he had
arrived had folded gently back into place. He had been projected
into another chamber and was sitting in a sunken bath with his head
just above the level of the floor. All about him, lining the walls of the
room and the sides and bottom of the bath itself, was a blue aqua-
rium, and gazing through the crystal surface on which he sat, he
could see fish swimming among amber lights and even gliding with-
out curiosity past his outstretched toes, which were separated from
them only by the thickness of the crystal. From overhead, sunlight
came down through sea-green glass.

"I suppose, sir, that you'd like hot rosewater and soapsuds this
morning, sir — and perhaps cold salt water to finish."

The negro was standing beside him.

"Yes," agreed John, smiling inanely, "as you please." Any idea of
ordering this bath according to his own meagre standards of living
would have been priggish and not a little wicked.

The negro pressed a button and a warm rain began to fall, appar-
ently from overhead, but really, so John discovered after a moment,

14 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

from a fountain arrangement near by. The water turned to a pale
rose color and jets of liquid soap spurted into it from four miniature
walrus heads at the corners of the bath. In a moment a dozen little
paddle-wheels, fixed to the sides, had churned the mixture into a
radiant rainbow of pink foam which enveloped him softly with its
delicious lightness, and burst in shining, rosy bubbles here and there
about him.

"Shall I turn on the moving-picture machine, sir?" suggested the
negro deferentially. "There's a good one-reel comedy in this machine
to-day, or I can put in a serious piece in a moment, if you prefer it."

"No, thanks," answered John, politely but firmly. He was enjoying
his bath too much to desire any distraction. But distraction came.
In a moment he was listening intently to the sound of flutes from
just outside, flutes dripping a melody that was like a waterfall, cool
and green as the room itself, accompanying a frothy piccolo, in play
more fragile than the lace of suds that covered and charmed him.

After a cold salt-water bracer and a cold fresh finish, he stepped
out and into a fleecy robe, and upon a couch covered with the same
material he was rubbed with oil, alcohol, and spice. Later he sat in
a voluptuous chair while he was shaved and his hair was trimmed.

"Mr. Percy is waiting in your sitting-room," said the negro, when
these operations were finished. "My name is Gygsum, Mr. Unger,
sir. I am to see to Mr. Unger every morning."

John walked out into the brisk sunshine of his living-room, where
he found breakfast waiting for him and Percy, gorgeous in white kid
knickerbockers, smoking in an easy chair.

This is a story of the Washington family as Percy sketched it for
John during breakfast.

The father of the present Mr. Washington had been a Virginian,
a direct descendant of George Washington, and Lord Baltimore. At
the close of the Civil War he was a twenty-five-year-old Colonel with
a played-out plantation and about a thousand dollars in gold.

Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, for that was the young
Colonel's name, decided to present the Virginia estate to his younger
brother and go West. He selected two dozen of the most faithful
blacks, who, of course, worshipped him, and bought twenty-five
tickets to the West, where he intended to take out land in their
names and start a sheep and cattle ranch.

When he had been in Montana for less than a month and things
were going very poorly indeed, he stumbled on his great discovery.
He had lost his way when riding in the hills, and after a day without

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 15

food he began to grow hungry. As he was without his rifle, he was
forced to pursue a squirrel, and in the course of the pursuit he noticed
that it was carrying something shiny in its mouth. Just before it van-
ished into its hole — for Providence did not intend that this squirrel
should alleviate his hunger — it dropped its burden. Sitting down to
consider the situation Fitz-Norman's eye was caught by a gleam in
the grass beside him. In ten seconds he had completely lost his
appetite and gained one hundred thousand dollars. The squirrel,
which had refused with annoying persistence to become food, had
made him a present of a large and perfect diamond.

Late that night he found his way to camp and twelve hours later
all the males among his darkies were back by the squirrel hole dig-
ging furiously at the side of the mountain. He told them he had dis-
covered a rhinestone mine, and, as only one or two of them had ever
seen even a small diamond before, they believed him, without ques-
tion. When the magnitude of his discovery became apparent to him,
he found himself in a quandary. The mountain was a diamond — it
was literally nothing else but solid diamond. He filled four saddle
bags full of glittering samples and started on horseback for St. Paul.
There he managed to dispose of half a dozen small stones — when he
tried a larger one a storekeeper fainted and Fitz-Norman was arrested
as a public disturber. He escaped from jail and caught the train for
New York, where he sold a few medium-sized diamonds and received
in exchange about two hundred thousand dollars in gold. But he did
not dare to produce any exceptional gems — in fact, he left New York
just in time. Tremendous excitement had been created in jewelry
circles, not so much by the size of his diamonds as by their appear-
ance in the city from mysterious sources. Wild rumors became cur-
rent that a diamond mine had been discovered in the Catskills, on
the Jersey coast, on Long Island, beneath Washington Square. Excur-
sion trains, packed with men carrying picks and shovels began to
leave New York hourly, bound for various neighboring El Dorados.
But by that time young Fitz-Norman was on his way back to
Montana.

By the end of a fortnight he had estimated that the diamond in the
mountain was approximately equal in quantity to all the rest of the
diamonds known to exist in the world. There was no valuing it by any
regular computation, however, for it was one solid diamond — and if
it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the
market, but also, if the value should vary with its size in the usual
arithmetical progression, there would not be enough gold in the
world to buy a tenth part of it. And what could any one do with a
diamond that size ?

It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one sense, the richest

1 6 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

man that ever lived — and yet was he worth anything at all ? If his
secret should transpire there was no telling to what measures the
Government might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well
as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately and insti-
tute a monopoly.

There was no alternative — he must market his mountain in secret.
He sent South for his younger brother and put him in charge of his
colored following — darkies who had never realized that slavery was
abolished. To make sure of this, he read them a proclamation that
he had composed, which announced that General Forrest had reor-
ganized the shattered Southern armies and defeated the North in
one pitched battle. The negroes believed him implicitly. They passed
a vote declaring it a good thing and held revival services imme-
diately.

Fitz-Norman himself set out for foreign parts with one hundred
thousand dollars and two trunks filled with rough diamonds of all
sizes. He sailed for Russia in a Chinese junk and six months after
his departure from Montana he was in St. Petersburg. He took ob-
scure lodgings and called immediately upon the court jeweller, an-
nouncing that he had a diamond for the Czar. He remained in St.
Petersburg for two weeks, in constant danger of being murdered,
living from lodging to lodging, and afraid to visit his trunks more
than three or four times during the whole fortnight.

On his promise to return in a year with larger and finer stones, he
was allowed to leave for India. Before* he left, however, the Court
Treasurers had deposited to his credit, in American banks, the sum
of fifteen million dollars — under four different aliases.

He returned to America in 1868, having been gone a little over
two years. He had visited the capitals of twenty-two countries and
talked with five emperors, eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan,
and a sultan. At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own wealth
at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently against the dis-
closure of his secret. No one of his larger diamonds remained in the
public eye for a week before being invested with a history of enough
fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied it from the
days of the first Babylonian Empire.

From 1870 until his death in 1900, the history of Fitz-Norman
Washington was a long epic in gold. There were side issues, of course

he evaded the surveys, he married a Virginia lady, by whom he

had a single son, and he was compelled, due to a series of unfortunate
complications, to murder his brother, whose unfortunate habit of
drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor had several times endan-
gered their safety. But very few other murders stained these happy
vears of progress and expansion.

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 17

Just before he died he changed his policy, and with all but a few
million dollars of his outside wealth bought up rare minerals in bulk,
which he deposited in the safety vaults of banks all over the world,
marked as bric-a-brac. His son, Braddock Tarleton Washington,
followed this policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals were
converted into the rarest of all elements — radium — so that the equiva-
lent of a billion dollars in gold could be placed in a receptacle no
bigger than a cigar box.

When Fitz-Norman had been dead three years his son, Braddock,
decided that the business had gone far enough. The amount of wealth
that he and his father had taken out of the mountain was beyond
all exact computation. He kept a note-book in cipher in which he set
down the approximate quantity of radium in each of the thousand
banks he patronized, and recorded the alias under which it was held.
Then he did a very simple thing — he sealed up the mine.

He sealed up the mine. What had been taken out of it would sup-
port all the Washingtons yet to be born in unparalleled luxury for
generations. His one care must be the protection of his secret, lest in
the possible panic attendant on its discovery he should be reduced
with all the property-holders in the world to utter poverty,

This was the family among whom John T. linger was staying. This
was the story he heard in his silver-walled living-room the morning
after his arrival.

After breakfast, John found his way out the great marble entrance,
and looked curiously at the scene before him. The whole valley, from
the diamond mountain to the steep granite cliff five miles away, still
gave off a breath of golden haze which hovered idly above the fine
sweep of lawns and lakes and gardens. Here and there clusters of
elms made delicate groves of shade, contrasting strangely with the
tough masses of pine forest that held the hills in a grip of dark-blue
green. Even as John looked he saw three fawns in single file patter
out from one clump about a half mile away and disappear with awk-
ward gayety into the black-ribbed half-light of another. John would
not have been surprised to see a goat-foot piping his way among the
trees or to catch a glimpse of pink nymph-skin and flying yellow hair
between the greenest of the green leaves.

In some such cool hope he descended the marble steps, disturbing
faintly the sleep of two silky Russian wolfhounds at the bottom, and
set off along a walk of white and blue brick that seemed to lead in no
particular direction.

He was enjoying himself as much as he was able. It is youth's

1 8 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present,
but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly
imagined future — flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only pre-
figurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young
dream.

John rounded a soft corner where the massed rosebushes filled the
air with heavy scent, and struck off across a park toward a patch of
moss under some trees. He had never lain upon moss, and he wanted
to see whether it was really soft enough to justify the use of its name
as an adjective. Then he saw a girl coming toward him over the grass.
She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

She was dressed in a white little gown that came just below her
knees, and a wreath of mignonettes clasped with blue slices of
sapphire bound up her hair. Her pink bare feet scattered the dew
before them as she came. She was younger than John — not more than
sixteen.

"Hello," she cried softly, "I'm Kismine."

She was much more than that to John already. He advanced
toward her, scarcely moving as he drew near lest he should tread on
her bare toes.

"You haven't met me," said her soft voice. Her blue eyes added,
"Oh, but you've missed a great deal!" . . . "You met my sister,
Jasmine, last night. I was sick with lettuce poisoning," went on her
soft voice, and her eyes continued, "and when I'm sick I'm sweet —
and when I'm well."

"You have made an enormous impression on me," said John's eyes,
"and I'm not so slow myself" — "How do you do?" said his voice. "I
hope you're better this morning." — "You darling," added his eyes
tremulously.

John observed that they had been walking along the path. On her
suggestion they sat down together upon the moss, the softness of
which he failed to determine.

He was critical about women. A single defect — a thick ankle, a
hoarse voice, a glass eye — was enough to make him utterly indiffer-
ent. And here for the first time in his life he was beside a girl who
seemed to him the incarnation of physical perfection.

"Are you from the East?" asked Kismine with charming interest.

"No," answered John simply. "I'm from Hades."

Either she had never heard of Hades, or she could think of
no pleasant comment to make upon it, for she did not discuss it
further,

"I'm going East to school this fall," she said. "D'you think 111 like
it? I'm going to New York to Miss Bulge's. It's very strict, but you
see over the weekends I'm going to live at home with the family in

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 19

our New York house, because father heard that the girls had to go
walking two by two."

"Your father wants you to be proud," observed John.

"We are," she answered, her eyes shining with dignity. "None of
us has ever been punished. Father said we never should be. Once
when my sister Jasmine was a little girl she pushed him down-stairs
and he just got up and limped away.

"Mother was — well, a little startled," continued Kismine, "when
she heard that you were from — from where you are from, you know.
She said that when she was a young girl — but then, you see, she's a
Spaniard and old-fashioned."

"Do you spend much time out here?" asked John, to conceal the
fact that he was somewhat hurt by this remark. It seemed an unkind
allusion to his provincialism.

"Percy and Jasmine and I are here every summer, but next sum-
mer Jasmine is going to Newport. She's coming out in London a year
from this fall. She'll be presented at court."

"Do you know," began John hesitantly, "you're much more
sophisticated than I thought you were when I first saw you?"

"Oh, no, I'm not," she exclaimed hurriedly. "Oh, I wouldn't think
of being. I think that sophisticated young people are terribly com-
mon, don't you? I'm not at all, really. If you say I am, I'm going
to cry."

She was so distressed that her lip was trembling. John was impelled
to protest :

"I didn't mean that ; I only said it to tease you."

"Because I wouldn't mind if I were" she persisted "but I'm not.
I'm very innocent and girlish. I never smoke, or drink, or read any-
thing except poetry. I know scarcely any mathematics or chemistry.
I dress very simply — in fact, I scarcely dress at all. I think sophisti-
cated is the last thing you can say about me. I believe that girls ought
to enjoy their youths in a wholesome way."

"I do too," said John heartily.

Kismine was cheerful again. She smiled at him, and a still-born
tear dripped from the corner of one blue eye.

"I like you," she whispered, intimately. "Are you going to spend
all your time with Percy while you're here, or will you be nice to me ?
Just think — I'm absolutely fresh ground. I've never had a boy in
love with me in all my life. I've never been allowed even to see boys
alone — except Percy. I came all the way out here into this grove hop-
ing to run into you, where the family wouldn't be around."

Deeply flattered, John bowed from the hips as he had been taught
at dancing school in Hades.

"We'd better go now," said Kismine sweetly. "I have to be with

20 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

mother at eleven. You haven't asked me to kiss you once. I thought
boys always did that nowadays."

John drew himself up proudly.

"Some of them do," he answered, "but not me. Girls don't do that
sort of thing — in Hades."

Side by side they walked back toward the house.

John stood facing Mr. Braddock Washington in the full sunlight.
The elder man was about forty with a proud, vacuous face, intelligent
eyes, and a robust figure. In the mornings he smelt of horses —
the best horses. He carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch
with a single large opal for a grip. He and Percy were showing John
around.

"The slaves' quarters are there." His walking-stick indicated a
cloister of marble on their left that ran in graceful Gothic along the
side of the mountain. "In my youth I was distracted for a while from
the business of life by a period of absurd idealism. During that time
they lived in luxury. For instance, I equipped every one of their
rooms with a tile bath."

"I suppose," ventured John, with an ingratiating laugh, "that they
used the bathtubs to keep coal in. Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy told me
that once he "

"The opinions of Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy are of little importance,
I should imagine," interrupted Braddock Washington, coldly. "My
slaves did not keep coal in their bathtubs. They had orders to bathe
every day, and they did. If they hadn't I might have ordered a sul-
phuric acid shampoo. I discontinued the baths for quite another
reason. Several of them caught cold and died. Water is not good for
certain races — except as a beverage."

John laughed, and then decided to nod his head in sober agreement.
Braddock Washington made him uncomfortable.

"All these negroes are descendants of the ones my father brought
North with him. There are about two hundred and fifty now. You
notice that they've lived so long apart from the world that their
original dialect has become an almost indistinguishable patois. We
bring a few of them up to speak English — my secretary and two or
three of the house servants.

"This is the golf course," he continued, as they strolled along the
velvet winter grass. "It's all a green, you see — no fairway, no rough,
no hazards."

He smiled pleasantly at John.

"Many men in the cage, father ?" asked Percy suddenly.

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 21

Braddock Washington stumbled, and let forth an involuntary
curse.

"One less than there should be," he ejaculated darkly — and then
added after a moment, "We've had difficulties."

"Mother was telling me," exclaimed Percy, "that Italian
teacher "

"A ghastly error," said Braddock Washington angrily. "But of
course there's a good chance that we may have got him. Perhaps he
fell somewhere in the woods or stumbled over a cliff. And then there's
always the probability that if he did get away his story wouldn't be
believed. Nevertheless, I've had two dozen men looking for him in
different towns around here."

"And no luck?"

"Some. Fourteen of them reported to my agent that they'd each
killed a man answering to that description, but of course it was prob-
ably only the reward they were after "

He broke off. They had come to a large cavity in the earth about
the circumference of a merry-go-round and covered by a strong iron
grating. Braddock Washington beckoned to John, and pointed his
cane down through the grating. John stepped to the edge and gazed.
Immediately his ears were assailed by a wild clamor from below.

"Come on down to Hell ! "

"Hello, kiddo, how's the air up there?"

"Hey! Throw us a rope!"

"Got an old doughnut, Buddy, or a couple of second-hand sand-
wiches?"

"Say, fella, if you'll push down that guy you're with, we'll show
you a quick disappearance scene."

"Paste him one for me, will you?"

It was too dark to see clearly into the pit below, but John could
tell from the coarse optimism and rugged vitality of the remarks and
voices that they proceeded from middle-class Americans of the more
spirited type. Then Mr. Washington put out his cane and touched a
button in the grass, and the scene below sprang into light.

"These are some adventurous mariners who had the misfortune
to discover El Dorado," he remarked.

Below them there had appeared a large hollow in the earth shaped
like the interior of a bowl. The sides were steep and apparently of
polished glass, and on its slightly concave surface stood about two
dozen men clad in the half costume, half uniform, of aviators. Their
upturned faces, lit with wrath, with malice, with despair, with
cynical humor, were covered by long growths of beard, but with the
exception of a few who had pined perceptibly away, they seemed to
be a well-fed, healthy lot.

22 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

Braddock Washington drew a garden chair to the edge of the pit
and sat down.

"Well, how are you, boys?" he inquired genially.

A chorus of execration in which all joined except a few too dis-
pirited to cry out, rose up into the sunny air, but Braddock Wash-
ington heard it with unruffled composure. When its last echo had died
away he spoke again.

"Have you thought up a way out of your difficulty?"

From here and there among them a remark floated up.

"We decided to stay here for love ! "

"Bring us up there and well find us a way!"

Braddock Washington waited until they were again quiet. Then
he said :

"IVe told you the situation. I don't want you here. I wish to
heaven I'd never seen you. Your own curiosity got you here, and any
time that you can think of a way out which protects me and my inter-
ests I'll be glad to consider it. But so long as you confine your efforts
to digging tunnels — yes, I know about the new one you've started —
you won't get very far. This isn't as hard on you as you make it out,
with all your howling for the loved ones at home. If you were the
type who worried much about the loved ones at home, you'd never
have taken up aviation."

A tall man moved apart from the others, and held up his hand to
call his captor's attention to what he was about to say.

"Let me ask you a few questions ! " he cried. "You pretend to be a
fair-minded man."

"How absurd. How could a man of my position be fair-minded
toward you ? You might as well speak of a Spaniard being fair-minded
toward a piece of steak."

At this harsh observation the faces of the two dozen steaks fell,
but the tall man continued :

"All right!" he cried. "We've argued this out before. You're not
a humanitarian and you're not fair-minded, but you're human — at
least you say you are — and you ought to be able to put yourself in
our place for long enough to think how — how — how "

"How what?" demanded Washington, coldly.

" — how unnecessary "

"Not to me."

"Well— how cruel "

"We've covered that. Cruelty doesn't exist where self-preserva-
tion is involved. You've been soldiers: you know that. Try
another."

"Well, then, how stupid."

"There," admitted Washington, "I grant you that. But try to think

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 23

of an alternative. I've offered to have all or any of you painlessly
executed if you wish. I've offered to have your wives, sweethearts,
children, and mothers kidnapped and brought out here. I'll enlarge
your place down there and feed and clothe you the rest of your lives.
If there was some method of producing permanent amnesia I'd have
all of you operated on and released immediately, somewhere outside
of my preserves. But that's as far as my ideas go."

"How about trusting us not to peach on you?" cried some one.

"You don't proffer that suggestion seriously," said Washington,
with an expression of scorn. "I did take out one man to teach my
daughter Italian. Last week he got away."

A wild yell of jubilation went up suddenly from two dozen throats
and a pandemonium of joy ensued. The prisoners clog-danced and
cheered and yodled and wrestled with one another in a sudden up-
rush of animal spirits. They even ran up the glass sides of the bowl
as far as they could, and slid back to the bottom upon the natural
cushions of their bodies. The tall man started a song in which they
all joined

"Oh, we'll hang the kaiser
On a sour apple tree "

Braddock Washington sat in inscrutable silence until the song was
over.

"You see," he remarked, when he could gain a modicum of atten-
tion. "I bear you no ill-will. I like to see you enjoying yourselves.
That's why I didn't tell you the whole story at once. The man — what
was his name? Critchtichiello ? — was shot by some of my agents in
fourteen different places."

Not guessing that the places referred to were cities, the tumult of
rejoicing subsided immediately.

"Nevertheless," cried Washington with a touch of anger, "he tried
to run away. Do you expect me to take chances with any of you after
an experience like that?"

Again a series of ejaculations went up.

"Sure ! "

"Would your daughter like to learn Chinese?"

"Hey, I can speak Italian! My mother was a wop."

"Maybe she'd like t'learna speak N'Yawk!"

"If she's the little one with the big blue eyes I can teach her a lot
of things better than Italian."

"I know some Irish songs — and I could hammer brass once't."

Mr. Washington reached forward suddenly with his cane and
pushed the button in the grass so that the picture below went out

24 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

instantly, and there remained only that great dark mouth covered
dismally with the black teeth of the grating.

"Hey!" called a single voice from below, "you ain't goin' away
without givin' us your blessing?"

But Mr. Washington, followed by the two boys, was already stroll-
ing on toward the ninth hole of the golf course, as though the pit and
its contents were no more than a hazard over which his facile iron
had triumphed with ease.

VII

July under the lee of the diamond mountain was a month of blanket
nights and of warm, glowing days. John and Kismine were in love.
He did not know that the little gold football (inscribed with the
legend Pro deo et patria et St. Mida) which he had given her rested
on a platinum chain next to her bosom. But it did. And she for her
part was not aware that a large sapphire which had dropped one day
from her simple coiffure was stowed away tenderly in John's jewel
box.

Late one afternoon when the ruby and ermine music room was
quiet, they spent an hour there together. He held her hand and she
gave him such a look that he whispered her name aloud. She bent
toward him — then hesitated.

"Did you say 'Kismine'?" she asked softly, "or "

She had wanted to be sure. She thought she might have misunder-
stood.

Neither of them had ever kissed before, but in the course of an
hour it seemed to make little difference.

The afternoon drifted away. That night when a last breath of
music drifted down from the highest tower, they each lay awake,
happily dreaming over the separate minutes of the day. They had
decided to be married as soon as possible.

VIII

Every day Mr. Washington and the two young men went hunting
or fishing in the deep forests or played golf around the somnolent
course — games which John diplomatically allowed his host to win —
or swam in the mountain coolness of the lake. John found Mr. Wash-
ington a somewhat exacting personality — utterly uninterested in any
ideas or opinions except his own. Mrs. Washington was aloof and re-
served at all times. She was apparently indifferent to her two daugh-
ters, and entirely absorbed in her son Percy, with whom she held
interminable conversations in rapid Spanish at dinner.

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 25

Jasmine, the elder daughter, resembled Kismine in appearance —
except that she was somewhat bow-legged, and terminated in large
hands and feet — but was utterly unlike her in temperament. Her
favorite books had to do with poor girls who kept house for widowed
fathers. John learned from Kismine that Jasmine had never recov-
ered from the shock and disappointment caused her by the termina-
tion of the World War, just as she was about to start for Europe as
a canteen expert. She had even pined away for a time, and Braddock
Washington had taken steps to promote a new war in the Balkans —
but she had seen a photograph of some wounded Serbian soldiers and
lost interest in the whole proceedings. But Percy and Kismine seemed
to have inherited the arrogant attitude in all its harsh magnificence
from their father. A chaste and consistent selfishness ran like a pat-
tern through their every idea.

John was enchanted by the wonders of the chateau and the valley.
Braddock Washington, so Percy told him, had caused to be kidnapped
a landscape gardener, an architect, a designer of state settings, and a
French decadent poet left over from the last century. He had put
his entire force of negroes at their disposal, guaranteed to supply
them with any materials that the world could offer, and left
them to work out some ideas of their own. But one by one they had
shown their uselessness. The decadent poet had at once begun bewail-
ing his separation from the boulevards in spring — he made some
vague remarks about spices, apes, and ivories, but said nothing that
was of any practical value. The stage designer on his part wanted to
make the whole valley a series of tricks and sensational effects — a
state of things that the Washingtons would soon have grown tired
of. And as for the architect and the landscape gardener, they thought
only in terms of convention. They must make this like this and that
like that.

But they had, at least, solved the problem of what was to be done
with them — they all went mad early one morning after spending
the night in a single room trying to agree upon the location of a
fountain, and were now confined comfortably in an insane asylum at
Westport, Connecticut.

"But," inquired John curiously, "who did plan all your wonderful
reception rooms and halls, and approaches and bathrooms ?"

"Well," answered Percy, "I blush to tell you, but it was a moving-
picture fella. He was the only man we found who was used to playing
with an unlimited amount of money, though he did tuck his napkin in
his collar and couldn't read or write."

As August drew to a close John began to regret that he must soon
go back to school. He and Kismine had decided to elope the follow-
ing June.

26 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

"It would be nicer to be married here," Kismine confessed, "but
of course I could never get father's permission to marry you at all.
Next to that I'd rather elope. It's terrible for wealthy people to be
married in America at present — they always have to send out bulle-
tins to the press saying that they're going to be married in remnants,
when what they mean is just a peck of old second-hand pearls and
some used lace worn once by the Empress Eugenie."

"I know," agreed John fervently. "When I was visiting the
Schnlitzer-Murphys, the eldest daughter, Gwendolyn, married a man
whose father owns half of West Virginia. She wrote home saying what
a tough struggle she was carrying on on his salary as a bank clerk —
and then she ended up by saying that 'Thank God, I have four good
maids anyhow, and that helps a little.' "

"It's absurd," commented Kismine. "Think of the millions and
millions of people in the world, laborers and all, who get along with
only two maids."

One afternoon late in August a chance remark of Kismine's
changed the face of the entire situation, and threw John into a state
of terror.

They were in their favorite grove, and between kisses John was
indulging in some romantic forebodings which he fancied added
poignancy to their relations.

"Sometimes I think we'll never marry," he said sadly. "You're too
wealthy, too magnificent. No one as rich as you are can be like other
girls. I should marry the daughter of some well-to-do wholesale hard-
ware man from Omaha or Sioux City, and be content with her half-
million."

"I knew the daughter of a wholesale hardware man once," re-
marked Kismine. "I don't think you'd have been contented with her.
She was a friend of my sister's. She visited here."

"Oh, then you've had other guests?" exclaimed John in surprise.

Kismine seemed to regret her words.

"Oh, yes," she said hurriedly, "we've had a few."

"But aren't you — wasn't your father afraid they'd talk outside?"

"Oh, to some extent, to some extent," she answered. "Let's talk
about something pleasanter."

But John's curiosity was aroused.

"Something pleasanter ! " he demanded. "What's unpleasant about
that? Weren't they nice girls?"

To his great surprise Kismine began to weep.

"Yes — th — that's the — the whole t-trouble. I grew qu-quite
attached to some of them. So did Jasmine, but she kept inv-viting
them anyway. I couldn't understand it."

A dark suspicion was born in John's heart.

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 27

"Do you mean that they told, and your father had them — re-
moved?''

"Worse than that," she muttered brokenly. "Father took no
chances — and Jasmine kept writing them to come, and they had such
a good time ! "

She was overcome by a paroxysm of grief.

Stunned with the horror of this revelation, John sat there open-
mouthed, feeling the nerves of his body twitter like so many sparrows
perched upon his spinal column.

"Now, I've told you, and I shouldn't have," she said, calming sud-
denly and drying her dark blue eyes.

"Do you mean to say that your father had them murdered before
they left?"

She nodded.

"In August usually — or early in September. It's only natural for
us to get all the pleasure out of them that we can first."

"How abominable! How — why, I must be going crazy! Did you
really admit that "

"I did," interrupted Kismine, shrugging her shoulders. "We can't
very well imprison them like those aviators, where they'd be a con-
tinual reproach to us every day. And it's always been made easier
for Jasmine and me, because father had it done sooner than we
expected. In that way we avoided any farewell scene "

"So you murdered them ! Uh ! " cried John.

"It was done very nicely. They were drugged while they were
asleep — and their families were always told that they died of scarlet
fever in Butte."

"But — I fail to understand why you kept on inviting them!"

"I didn't," burst out Kismine. "I never invited one. Jasmine did.
And they always had a very good time. She'd give them the nicest
presents toward the last. I shall probably have visitors too — I'll
harden up to it. We can't let such an inevitable thing as death stand
in the way of enjoying life while we have it. Think how lone-
some it'd be out here if we never had any one. Why, father
and mother have sacrificed some of their best friends just as we
have."

"And so," cried John accusingly, "and so you were letting me make
love to you and pretending to return it, and talking about marriage,
all the time knowing perfectly well that I'd never get out of here
alive "

"No," she protested passionately. "Not any more. I did at first.
You were here. I couldn't help that, and I thought your last days
might as well be pleasant for both of us. But then I fell in love with
you, and — and I'm honestly sorry you're going to — going to be put

28 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

away — though I'd rather you'd be put away than ever kiss another
girl."

"Oh, you would, would you?" cried John ferociously.

"Much rather. Besides, I Ve always heard that a girl can have more
fun with a man whom she knows she can never marry. Oh, why did
I tell you? IVe probably spoiled your whole good time now, and we
were really enjoying things when you didn't know it. I knew it would
make things sort of depressing for you."

"Oh, you did, did you?" John's voice trembled with anger. "I've
heard about enough of this. If you haven't any more pride and de-
cency than to have an affair with a fellow that you know isn't much
better than a corpse, I don't want to have any more to do with you ! "

"You're not a corpse!" she protested in horror. "You're not a
corpse ! I won't have you saying that I kissed a corpse ! "

"I said nothing of the sort!"

"You did ! You said I kissed a corpse ! "

"I didn't I"

Their voices had risen, but upon a sudden interruption they both
subsided into immediate silence. Footsteps were coming along the
path in their direction, and a moment later the rose bushes were
parted displaying Braddock Washington, whose intelligent eyes set
in his good-looking vacuous face were peering in at them.

"Who kissed a corpse?" he demanded in obvious disapproval.

"Nobody," answered Kismine quickly. "We were just joking."

"What are you two doing here, anyhow?" he demanded gruffly.
"Kismine, you ought to be — to be reading or playing golf with your
sister. Go read ! Go play golf ! Don't let me find you here when I
come back ! "

Then he bowed at John and went up the path.

"See?" said Kismine crossly, when he was out of hearing. "You've
spoiled it all. We can never meet any more. He won't let me meet
you. He'd have you poisoned if he thought we were in love."

"We're not, any more!" cried John fiercely, "so he can set his
mind at rest upon that. Moreover, don't fool yourself that I'm going
to stay around here. Inside of six hours I'll be over those mountains,
if I have to gnaw a passage through them, and on my way East."

They had both got to their feet, and at this remark Kismine came
close and put her arm through his.

"I'm going, too."

"You must be crazy "

"Of course I'm going," she interrupted impatiently.

"You most certainly are not. You "

"Very well," she said quietly, "we'll catch up with father now and
talk it over with

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 29

Defeated, John mustered a sickly smile.

"Very well, dearest," he agreed, with pale and unconvincing affec-
tion, "well go together."

His love for her returned and settled placidly on his heart. She
was his — she would go with him to share his dangers. He put his
arms about her and kissed her fervently. After all she loved him;
she had saved him, in fact.

Discussing the matter, they walked slowly back toward the chateau.
They decided that since Braddock Washington had seen them to^
gether they had best depart the next night. Nevertheless, John's lips
were unusually dry at dinner, and he nervously emptied a great
spoonful of peacock soup into his left lung. He had to be carried into
the turquoise and sable card-room and pounded on the back by one
of the under-butlers, which Percy considered a great joke.

Long after midnight John's body gave a nervous jerk, and he sat
suddenly upright, staring into the veils of somnolence that draped
the room. Through the squares of blue darkness that were his open
windows, he had heard a faint far-away sound that died upon a bed
of wind before identifying itself on his memory, clouded with uneasy
dreams. But the sharp noise that had succeeded it was nearer, was
just outside the room — the click of a turned knob, a footstep, a
whisper, he could not tell ; a hard lump gathered in the pit of his
stomach, and his whole body ached in the moment that he strained
agonizingly to hear. Then one of the veils seemed to dissolve, and he
saw a vague figure standing by the door, a figure only faintly limned
and blocked in upon the darkness, mingled so with the folds of the
drapery as to seem distorted, like a reflection seen in a dirty pane of
glass.

With a sudden movement of fright or resolution John pressed the
button by his bedside, and the next moment he was sitting in the
green sunken bath of the adjoining room, waked into alertness by
the shock of the cold water which half filled it.

He sprang out, and, his wet pajamas scattering a heavy trickle of
water behind him, ran for the aquamarine door which he knew led
out onto the ivory landing of the second floor. The door opened noise-
lessly. A single crimson lamp burning in a great dome above lit the
magnificent sweep of the carved stairways with a poignant beauty.
For a moment John hesitated, appalled by the silent splendor massed
about him, seeming to envelop in its gigantic folds and contours the
solitary drenched little figure shivering upon the ivory landing. Then
simultaneously two things happened. The door of his own sitting-

30 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

room swung open, precipitating three naked negroes into the hall —
and, as John swayed in wild terror toward the stairway, another
door slid back in the wall on the other side of the corridor, and John
saw Braddock Washington standing in the lighted lift, wearing a fur
coat and a pair of riding boots which reached to his knees and dis-
played, above, the glow of his rose-colored pajamas.

On the instant the three negroes — John had never seen any of them
before, and it flashed through his mind that they must be the pro-
fessional executioners — paused in their movement toward John, and
turned expectantly to the man in the lift, who burst out with an im-
perious command :

"Get in here ! All three of you ! Quick as hell ! "

Then, within the instant, the three negroes darted into the cage,
the oblong of light was blotted out as the lift door slid shut, and
John was again alone in the hall. He slumped weakly down against
an ivory stair.

It was apparent that something portentous had occurred, some-
thing which, for the moment at least, had postponed his own petty
disaster. What was it? Had the negroes risen in revolt? Had the
aviators forced aside the iron bars of the grating ? Or had the men of
Fish stumbled blindly through the hills and gazed with bleak, joyless
eyes upon the gaudy valley? John did not know. He heard a faint
whir of air as the lift whizzed up again, and then, a moment later,
as it descended. It was probable that Percy was hurrying to his
father's assistance, and it occurred to John that this was his oppor-
tunity to join Kismine and plan an immediate escape. He waited
until the lift had been silent for several minutes ; shivering a little
with the night cool that whipped in through his wet pajamas, he re-
turned to his room and dressed himself quickly. Then he mounted a
long flight of stairs and turned down the corridor carpeted with Rus-
sian sable which led to Kismine's suite.

The door of her sitting-room was open and the lamps were lighted.
Kismine, in an angora kimono, stood near the window of the room in
a listening attitude, and as John entered noiselessly, she turned
toward him.

"Oh, it's you ! " she whispered, crossing the room to him. "Did you
hear them?"

"I heard your father's slaves in my "

"No," she interrupted excitedly. "Aeroplanes ! "

"Aeroplanes? Perhaps that was the sound that woke me."

"ThereVe at least a dozen. I saw one a few moments ago dead
against the moon. The guard back by the cliff fired his rifle and that's
what roused father. We're going to open on them right away."

"Are they here on purpose ?"

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 31

"Yes— it's that Italian who got away "

Simultaneously with her last word, a succession of sharp cracks
tumbled in through the open window. Kismine uttered a little cry,
took a penny with fumbling fingers from a box on her dresser, and
ran to one of the electric lights. In an instant the entire chateau was
in darkness — she had blown out the fuse.

"Come on ! " she cried to him. "We'll go up to the roof garden,
and watch it from there ! "

Drawing a cape about her, she took his hand, and they found their
way out the door. It was only a step to the tower lift, and as she
pressed the button that shot them upward he put his arms around
her in the darkness and kissed her mouth. Romance had come 10
John Unger at last. A minute later they had stepped out upon the
star-white platform. Above, under the misty moon, sliding in and
out of the patches of cloud that eddied below it, floated a dozen dark-
winged bodies in a constant circling course. From here and there in
the valley flashes of fire leaped toward them, followed by sharp
detonations. Kismine clapped her hands with pleasure, which a
moment later, turned to dismay as the aeroplanes at some pre-
arranged signal, began to release their bombs and the whole of the
valley became a panorama of deep reverberate sound and lurid light.

Before long the aim of the attackers became concentrated upon
the points where the anti-aircraft guns were situated, and one of them
was almost immediately reduced to a giant cinder to lie smouldering
in a park of rose bushes.

"Kismine," begged John, "you'll be glad when I tell you that this
attack came on the eve of my murder. If I hadn't heard that guard
shoot off his gun back by the pass I should now be stone dead "

"I can't hear you ! " cried Kismine, intent on the scene before her.
"You'll have to talk louder ! "

"I simply said," shouted John, "that we'd better get out before
they begin to shell the Chateau ! "

Suddenly the whole portico of the negro quarters cracked asunder,
a geyser of flame shot up from under the colonnades, and great frag-
ments of jagged marble were hurled as far as the borders of the
lake.

"There go fifty thousand dollars' worth of slaves," cried Kismine,
"at prewar prices. So few Americans have any respect for property."

John renewed his efforts to compel her to leave. The aim of the
aeroplanes was becoming more precise minute by minute, and only
two of the anti-aircraft guns were still retaliating. It was obvious
that the garrison, encircled with fire, could not hold out much
longer.

"Come on?" cried John, pulling Kismine's arm, "we've got to

32 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

go. Do you realize that those aviators will kill you without question
if they find you?"

She consented reluctantly.

" We'll have to wake Jasmine ! " she said, as they hurried toward
the lift. Then she added in a sort of childish delight: "Well be poor,
won't we ? Like people in books. And 111 be an orphan and utterly
free. Free and poor ! What fun ! " She stopped and raised her lips to
him in a delighted kiss.

"It's impossible to be both together," said John grimly. "People
have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of
the two. As an extra caution you'd better dump the contents of your
jewel box into your pockets."

Ten minutes later the two girls met John in the dark corridor and
they descended to the main floor of the chateau. Passing for the last
time through the magnificence of the splendid halls, they stood for a
moment out on the terrace, watching the burning negro quarters and
the flaming embers of two planes which had fallen on the other side
of the lake. A solitary gun was still keeping up a sturdy popping, and
the attackers seemed timorous about descending lower, but sent their
thunderous fireworks in a circle around it, until any chance shot
might annihilate its Ethiopian crew.

John and the two sisters passed down the marble steps, turned
sharply to the left, and began to ascend a narrow path that wound
like a garter about the diamond mountain. Kismine knew a heavily
wooded spot half-way up where they could lie concealed and yet be
able to observe the wild night in the valley — finally to make an
escape, when it should be necessary, along a secret path laid in a
rocky gully.

It was three o'clock when they attained their destination. The
obliging and phlegmatic Jasmine fell off to sleep immediately, lean-
ing against the trunk of a large tree, while John and Kismine sat, his
arm around her, and watched the desperate ebb and flow of the dying
battle among the ruins of a vista that had been a garden spot that
morning. Shortly after four o'clock the last remaining gun gave out
a clanging sound and went out of action in a swift tongue of red
smoke. Though the moon was down, they saw that the flying bodies
were circling closer to the earth. When the planes had made certain
that the beleaguered possessed no further resources, they would land
and the dark and glittering reign of the Washingtons would be over.

With the cessation of the firing the valley grew quiet. The embers
of the two aeroplanes glowed like the eyes of some monster crouch-

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 33

ing in the grass. The chateau stood dark and silent, beautiful without
light as it had been beautiful in the sun, while the woody rattles of
Nemesis filled the air above with a growing and receding complaint.
Then John perceived that Kismine, like her sister, had fallen sound
asleep.

It was long after four when he became aware of footsteps along
the path they had lately followed, and he waited in breathless silence
until the persons to whom they belonged had passed the vantage-
point he occupied. There was a faint stir in the air now that was not
of human origin, and the dew was cold ; he knew that the dawn would
break soon. John waited until the steps had gone a safe distance up
the mountain and were inaudible. Then he followed. About half-way
to the steep summit the trees fell away and a hard saddle of rock
spread itself over the diamond beneath. Just before he reached this
point he slowed down his pace, warned by an animal sense that there
was life just ahead of him. Coming to a high boulder, he lifted his
head gradually above its edge. His curiosity was rewarded ; this is
what he saw :

Braddock Washington was standing there motionless, silhouetted
against the gray sky without sound or sign of life. As the dawn came
up out of the east, lending a cold green color to the earth, it brought
the solitary figure into insignificant contrast with the new day.

While John watched, his host remained for a few moments ab-
sorbed in some inscrutable contemplation ; then he signalled to the
two negroes who crouched at his feet to lift the burden which lay
between them. As they struggled upright, the first yellow beam of the
sun struck through the innumerable prisms of an immense and ex-
quisitely chiselled diamond — and a white radiance was kindled that
glowed upon the air like a fragment of the morning star. The bearers
staggered beneath its weight for a moment — then their rippling
muscles caught and hardened under the wet shine of the skins and
the three figures were again motionless in their defiant impotency
before the heavens.

After a while the white man lifted his head and slowly raised his
arms in a gesture of attention, as one who would call a great crowd
to hear — but there was no crowd, only the vast silence of the moun-
tain and the sky, broken by faint bird voices down among the trees.
The figure on the saddle of rock began to speak ponderously and
with an inextinguishable pride.

"You out there — " he cried in a trembling voice. "You — there — !"
He paused, his arms still uplifted, his head held attentively as though
he were expecting an answer. John strained his eyes to see whether
there might be men coming down the mountain, but the mountain
was bare of human life. There was only sky and a mocking flute of

34 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

wind along the tree-tops. Could Washington be praying? For a
moment John wondered. Then the illusion passed — there was some-
thing in the man's whole attitude antithetical to prayer.

"Oh, you above there ! "

The voice was become strong and confident. This was no forlorn
supplication. If anything, there was in it a quality of monstrous
condescension.

"You there "

Words, too quickly uttered to be understood, flowing one into the
other. . . . John listened breathlessly, catching a phrase here and
there, while the voice broke off, resumed, broke off again — now strong
and argumentative, now colored with a slow, puzzled impatience.
Then a conviction commenced to dawn on the single listener, and as
realization crept over him a spray of quick blood rushed through his
arteries. Braddock Washington was offering a bribe to God !

That was it — there was no doubt. The diamond in the arms
of his slaves was some advance sample, a promise of more to
follow.

That, John perceived after a time, was the thread running through
his sentences. Prometheus Enriched was calling to witness forgotten
sacrifices, forgotten rituals, prayers obsolete before the birth of
Christ. For a while his discourse took the form of reminding God of
this gift or that which Divinity had deigned to accept from men —
great churches if he would rescue cities from the plague, gifts of
myrrh and gold, of human lives and beautiful women and captive
armies, of children and queens, of beasts of the forest and field, sheep
and goats, harvests and cities, whole conquered lands that had been
offered up in lust or blood for His appeasal, buying a meed's worth of
alleviation from the Divine wrath — and now he, Braddock Wash-
ington, Emperor of Diamonds, king and priest of the age of gold,
arbiter of splendor and luxury, would offer up a treasure such as
princes before him had never dreamed of, offer it up not in suppliance,
but in pride.

He would give to God, he continued, getting down to specifications,
the greatest diamond in the world. This diamond would be cut with
many more thousand facets than there were leaves on a tree, and
yet the whole diamond would be shaped with the perfection of a
stone no bigger than a fly. Many men would work upon it for many
years. It would be set in a great dome of beaten gold, wonderfully
carved and equipped with gates of opal and crusted sapphire. In the
middle would be hollowed out a chapel presided over by an altar of
iridescent, decomposing, ever-changing radium which would burn out
the eyes of any worshipper who lifted up his head from prayer — and
on this altar there would be slain for the amusement of the Divine

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 35

Benefactor any victim He should choose, even though it should be
the greatest and most powerful man alive.

In return he asked only a simple thing, a thing that for God would
be absurdly easy — only that matters should be as they were yester-
day at this hour and that they should so remain. So very simple ! Let
but the heavens open, swallowing these men and their aeroplanes —
and then close again. Let him have his slaves once more, restored to
life and well.

There was no one else with whom he had ever needed to treat or
bargain.

He doubted only whether he had made his bribe big enough. God
had His price, of course. God was made in man's image, so it had
been said : He must have His price. And the price would be rare —
no cathedral whose building consumed many years, no pyramid con-
structed by ten thousand workmen, would be like this cathedral, this
pyramid.

He paused here. That was his proposition. Everything would be up
to specifications and there was nothing vulgar in his assertion that
it would be cheap at the price. He implied that Providence could
take it or leave it.

As he approached the end his sentences became broken, became
short and uncertain, and his body seemed tense, seemed strained to
catch the slightest pressure or whisper of life in the spaces around
him. His hair had turned gradually white as he talked, and now he
lifted his head high to the heavens like a prophet of old — magnifi-
cently mad.

Then, as John stared in giddy fascination, it seemed to him that a
curious phenomenon took place somewhere around him. It was as
though the sky had darkened for an instant, as though there had been
a sudden murmur in a gust of wind, a sound of far-away trumpets,
a sighing like the rustle of a great silken robe — for a time the whole
of nature round about partook of this darkness: the birds' song
ceased ; the trees were still, and far over the mountain there was a
mutter of dull, menacing thunder.

That was all. The wind died along the tall grasses of the valley.
The dawn and the day resumed their place in a time, and the risen
sun sent hot waves of yellow mist that made its path bright before
it. The leaves laughed in the sun, and their laughter shook the trees
until each bough was like a girl's school in fairyland. God had refused
to accept the bribe.

For another moment John watched the triumph of the day. Then,
turning, he saw a flutter of brown down by the lake, then another
flutter, then another, like the dance of golden angels alighting from
the clouds. The aeroplanes had come to earth.

36 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

John slid off the boulder and ran down the side of the mountain to
the clump of trees, where the two girls were awake and waiting for
him. Kismine sprang to her feet, the jewels in her pockets jingling,
a question on her parted lips, but instinct told John that there was
no time for words. They must get off the mountain without losing
a moment. He seized a hand of each, and in silence they threaded the
tree-trunks, washed with light now and with the rising mist. Behind
them from the valley came no sound at all, except the complaint of
the peacocks far away and the pleasant undertone of morning.

When they had gone about half a mile, they avoided the park land
and entered a narrow path that led over the next rise of ground. At
the highest point of this they paused and turned around. Their eyes
rested upon the mountainside they had just left — oppressed by some
dark sense of tragic impendency.

Clear against the sky a broken, white-haired man was slowly de-
scending the steep slope, followed by two gigantic and emotionless
negroes, who carried a burden between them which still flashed and
glittered in the sun. Half-way down two other figures joined them —
John could see that they were Mrs. Washington and her son, upon
whose arm she leaned. The aviators had clambered from their ma-
chines to the sweeping lawn in front of the chateau, and with rifles
in hand were starting up the diamond mountain in skirmishing forma-
tion.

But the little group of five which had formed farther up and was
engrossing all the watchers' attention had stopped upon a ledge of
rock. The negroes stooped and pulled up what appeared to be a trap-
door in the side of the mountain. Into this they all disappeared, the
white-haired man first, then his wife and son, finally the two negroes,
the glittering tips of whose jeweled head-dresses caught the sun for
a moment before the trap-door descended and engulfed them all.

Kismine clutched John's arm.

"Oh," she cried wildly, "where are they going? What are they
going to do?"

"It must be some underground way of escape "

A little scream from the two girls interrupted his sentence.

"Don't you see?" sobbed Kismine hysterically. "The mountain is
wired ! "

Even as she spoke John put up his hands to shield his sight. Before
their eyes the whole surface of the mountain had changed suddenly
to a dazzling burning yellow, which showed up through the jacket
of turf as light shows through a human hand. For a moment the in-
tolerable glow continued, and then like an extinguished filament it
disappeared, revealing a black waste from which blue smoke arose
slowly, carrying off with it what remained of vegetation and of human

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz 37

flesh. Of the aviators there was left neither blood nor bone — they
were consumed as completely as the five souls who had gone inside.
Simultaneously, and with an immense concussion, the cMteau
literally threw itself into the air, bursting into flaming fragments as
it rose, and then tumbling back upon itself in a smoking pile that lay
projecting half into the water of the lake. There was no fire — what
smoke there was drifted off mingling with the sunshine, and for a few
minutes longer a powdery dust of marble drifted from the great
featureless pile that had once been the house of jewels. There was no
more sound and the three people were alone in the valley.

At sunset John and his two companions reached the high cliff which
had marked the boundaries of the Washingtons' dominion, and
looking back found the valley tranquil and lovely in the dusk. They
sat down to finish the food which Jasmine had brought with her in a
basket.

"There ! " she said, as she spread the table-cloth and put the sand-
wiches in a neat pile upon it. "Don't they look tempting? I always
think that food tastes better outdoors."

"With that remark," remarked Kismine, "Jasmine enters the
middle class."

"Now," said John eagerly, "turn out your pocket and let's see what
jewels you brought along. If you made a good selection we three ought
to live comfortably all the rest of our lives."

Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and tossed two
handfuls of glittering stones before him.

"Not so bad," cried John, enthusiastically. "They aren't very big,
but — Hello ! " His expression changed as he held one of them up to
the declining sun. "Why, these aren't diamonds ! There's something
the matter ! "

"By golly!" exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look. "What an
idiot I am ! "

"Why, these are rhinestones I " cried John.

"I know." She broke into a laugh. "I opened the wrong drawer.
They belonged on the dress of a girl who visited Jasmine. I got her
to give them to me in exchange for diamonds. I'd never seen anything
but precious stones before."

"And this is what you brought ?"

"I'm afraid so." She fingered the brilliants wistfully. "I think I
like these better. I'm a little tired of diamonds."

"Very well," said John gloomily. "Well have to live in Hades. And
you will grow old telling incredulous women that you got the wrong

38 The Diamond As Big As the Ritz

drawer. Unfortunately your father's bank-books were consumed with
him."

"Well, what's the matter with Hades?"

"If I come home with a wife at my age my father is just as liable
as not to cut me off with a hot coal, as they say down there."

Jasmine spoke up.

"I love washing," she said quietly. "I have always washed my own
handkerchiefs. I'll take in laundry and support you both."

"Do they have washwomen in Hades?" asked Kismine innocently.

"Of course," answered John. "It's just like anywhere else."

"I thought — perhaps it was too hot to wear any clothes."

John laughed.

"Just try it!" he suggested. "They'll run you out before you're
half started."

"Will father be there ?" she asked.

John turned to her in astonishment.

"Your father is dead," he replied somberly. "Why should he go to
Hades ? You have it confused with another place that was abolished
long ago."

After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread their
blankets for the night.

"What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars.
"How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless
fiance !

"Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed the stars before.
I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to
some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all
a dream, all my youth."

"It was a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's youth is a
dream, a form of chemical madness."

"How pleasant then to be insane ! "

"So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know any longer. At
any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's
a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only
diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift
of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing
of it." He shivered. "Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night's
full of chill and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who first
invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."

So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.

1922 Tales of the Jazz Age

BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR

AFTER DARK on Saturday night one could stand on the first tee
of the golf-course and see the country-club windows as a yellow
expanse over a very black and wavy ocean. The waves of this ocean,
so to speak, were the heads of many curious caddies, a few of the
more ingenious chauffeurs, the golf professional's deaf sister — and
there were usually several stray, diffident waves who might have
rolled inside had they so desired. This was the gallery.

The balcony was inside. It consisted of the circle of wicker chairs
that lined the wall of the combination clubroom and ballroom. At
these Saturday-night dances it was largely feminine; a great babel
of middle-aged ladies with sharp eyes and icy hearts behind lor-
gnettes and large bosoms. The main function of the balcony was
critical. It occasionally showed grudging admiration, but never
approval, for it is well known among ladies over thirty-five that
when the younger set dance in the summer-time it is with the very
worst intentions in the world, and if they are not bombarded with
stony eyes stray couples will dance weird barbaric interludes in the
corners, and the more popular, more dangerous, girls will some-
times be kissed in the parked limousines of unsuspecting dowa-
gers.

But, after all, this critical circle is not close enough to the stage
to see the actors' faces and catch the subtler byplay. It can only
frown and lean, ask questions and make satisfactory deductions
from its set of postulates, such as the one which states that every
young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge.
It never really appreciates the drama of the shifting, semicruel
world of adolescence. No; boxes, orchestra-circle, principals, and
chorus are represented by the medley of faces and voices that sway
to the plaintive African rhythm of Dyer's dance orchestra.

From sixteen-year-old Otis Ormonde, who has two more years at
Hill School, to G. Reece Stoddard, over whose bureau at home hangs
a Harvard law diploma; from little Madeleine Hogue, whose hair
still feels strange and uncomfortable on top of her head, to Bessie
MacRae, who has been the life of the party a little too long — more
than ten years — the medley is not only the centre of the stage but

40 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

contains the only people capable of getting an unobstructed view
of it.

With a flourish and a bang the music stops. The couples exchange
artificial, effortless smiles, facetiously repeat "la-de-da-da dum-dum"
and then the clatter of young feminine voices soars over the burst
of clapping.

A few disappointed stags caught in midfloor as they had been
about to cut in subsided listlessly back to the walls, because this
was not like the riotous Christmas dances — these summer hops were
considered just pleasantly warm and exciting, where even the younger
marrieds rose and performed ancient waltzes and terrifying fox trots
to the tolerant amusement of their younger brothers and sisters.

Warren Mclntyre, who casually attended Yale, being one of the
unfortunate stags, felt in his dinner-coat pocket for a cigarette and
strolled out onto the wide, semidark veranda, where couples were
scattered at tables, filling the lantern-hung night with vague words
and hazy laughter. He nodded here and there at the less absorbed
and as he passed each couple some half-forgotten fragment of a
story played in his mind, for it was not a large city and every one
was Who's Who to every one else's past. There, for example, were
Jim Strain and Ethel Demorest, who had been privately engaged
for three years. Every one knew that as soon as Jim managed to
hold a job for more than two months she would marry him. Yet
how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim
sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her
affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.

Warren was nineteen and rather pitying with those of his friends
who hadn't gone East to college. But, like most boys, he bragged
tremendously about the girls of his city when he was away from it.
There was Genevieve Ormonde, who regularly made the rounds of
dances, house-parties, and football games at Princeton, Yale, Wil-
liams, and Cornell ; there was black-eyed Roberta Dillon, who was
quite as famous to her own generation as Hiram Johnson or Ty
Cobb ; and, of course, there was Marjorie Harvey, who besides hav-
ing a fairylike face and a dazzling, bewildering tongue was already
justly celebrated for having turned five cart-wheels in succession
during the past pump-and-slipper dance at New Haven.

Warren, who had grown up across the street from Marjorie, had
long been "crazy about her." Sometimes she seemed to reciprocate
his feeling with a faint gratitude, but she had tried him by her in-
fallible test and informed him gravely that she did not love him.
Her test was that when she was away from him she forgot him and
had affairs with other boys. Warren found this discouraging, espe-
cially as Marjorie had been making little trips all summer, and for

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 41

the first two or three days after each arrival home he saw great
heaps of mail on the Harveys' hall table addressed to her in various
masculine handwritings. To make matters worse, all during the
month of August she had been visited by her cousin Bernice from
Eau Claire, and it seemed impossible to see her alone. It was always
necessary to hunt round and find some one to take care of Bernice.
As August waned this was becoming more and more difficult.

Much as Warren worshipped Marjorie, he had to admit that
Cousin Bernice was sorta dopeless. She was pretty, with dark hair
and high color, but she was no fun on a party. Every Saturday
night he danced a long arduous duty dance with her to please Mar-
jorie, but he had never been anything but bored in her company.

"Warren" — a soft voice at his elbow broke in upon his thoughts,
and he turned to see Marjorie, flushed and radiant as usual. She laid
a hand on his shoulder and a glow settled almost imperceptibly
over him.

"Warren," she whispered, "do something for me — dance with
Bernice. She's been stuck with little Otis Ormonde for almost an
hour."

Warren's glow faded.

"Why — sure," he answered half-heartedly.

"You don't mind, do you? I'll see that you don't get stuck."

"'Sail right.".

Marjorie smiled — that smile that was thanks enough.

"You're an angel, and I'm obliged loads."

With a sigh the angel glanced round the veranda, but Bernice
and Otis were not in sight. He wandered back inside, and there
in front of the women's dressing-room he found Otis in the centre
of a group of young men who were convulsed with laughter. Otis
was brandishing a piece of timber he had picked up, and discours-
ing volubly.

"She's gone in to fix her hair," he announced wildly. "I'm waiting
to dance another hour with her."

Their laughter was renewed.

"Why don't some of you cut in?" cried Otis resentfully. "She
likes more variety."

"Why, Otis," suggested a friend, "you've just barely got used to
her."

"Why the two-by-four, Otis?" inquired Warren, smiling.

"The two-by-four? Oh, this? This is a club. When she comes out
I'll hit her on the head and knock her in again."

Warren collapsed on a settee and howled with glee.

"Never mind, Otis," he articulated finally. "I'm relieving you this
time."

42 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Otis simulated a sudden fainting attack and handed the stick to
Warren.

"If you need it, old man," he said hoarsely.

No matter how beautiful or brilliant a girl may be, the reputation
of not being frequently cut in on makes her position at a dance
unfortunate. Perhaps boys prefer her company to that of the butter-
flies with whom they dance a dozen times an evening, but youth
in this jazz-nourished generation is temperamentally restless, and
the idea of fox-trotting more than one full fox trot with the same
girl is distasteful, not to say odious. When it comes to several dances
and the intermissions between she can be quite sure that a young
man, once relieved, will never tread on her wayward toes again.

Warren danced the next full dance with Bernice, and finally,
thankful for the intermission, he led her to a table on the veranda.
There was a moment's silence while she did unimpressive things
with her fan.

"It's hotter here than in Eau Claire," she said.

Warren stifled a sigh and nodded. It might be for all he knew
or cared. He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist
because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a
poor conversationalist.

"You going to be here much longer?" he asked, and then turned
rather red. She might suspect his reasons for asking.

"Another week," she answered, and stared at him as if to lunge
at his next remark when it left his lips.

Warren fidgeted. Then with a sudden charitable impulse he de-
cided to try part of his line on her. He turned and looked at her
eyes.

"You've got an awfully kissable mouth," he began quietly.

This was a remark that he sometimes made to girls at college
proms when they were talking in just such half dark as this. Bernice
distinctly jumped. She turned an ungraceful red and became clumsy
with her fan. No one had ever made such a remark to her before.

"Fresh!" — the word had slipped out before she realized it, and
she bit her lip. Too late she decided to be amused, and offered him
a flustered smile.

Warren was annoyed. Though not accustomed to have that re-
mark taken seriously, still it usually provoked a laugh or a para-
graph of sentimental banter. And he hated to be called fresh, except
in a joking way. His charitable impulse died and he switched the
topic.

"Jim Strain and Ethel Demorest sitting out as usual," he com-
mented.

This was more in Bernice's line, but a faint regret mingled with

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 43

her relief as the subject changed. Men did not talk to her about
kissable mouths, but she knew that they talked in some such way
to other girls.

"Oh, yes," she said, and laughed. "I hear they've been mooning
round for years without a red penny. Isn't it silly?"

Warren's disgust increased. Jim Strain was a close friend of his
brother's, and anyway he considered it bad form to sneer at people
for not having money. But Bernice had had no intention of sneer-
ing. She was merely nervous.

When Marjorie and Bernice reached home at half after mid-
night they said good night at the top of the stairs. Though cousins,
they were not intimates. As a matter of fact Marjorie had no female
intimates — she considered girls stupid. Bernice on the contrary all
through this parent-arranged visit had rather longed to exchange
those confidences flavored with giggles and tears that she considered
an indispensable factor in all feminine intercourse. But in this re-
spect she found Marjorie rather cold ; felt somehow the same dif-
ficulty in talking to her that she had in talking to men. Marjorie
never giggled, was never frightened, seldom embarrassed, and in fact
had very few of the qualities which Bernice considered appropri-
ately and blessedly feminine.

As Bernice busied herself with tooth-brush and paste this night
she wondered for the hundredth time why she never had any atten-
tion when she was away from home. That her family were the
wealthiest in Eau Claire ; that her mother entertained tremendously,
gave little dinners for her daughter before all dances and bought
her a car of her own to drive round in, never occurred to her as
factors in her home-town social success. Like most girls she had
been brought up on the warm milk prepared by Annie Fellows
Johnston and on novels in which the female was beloved because of
certain mysterious womanly qualities, always mentioned but never
displayed.

Bernice felt a vague pain that she was not at present engaged in
being popular. She did not know that had it not been for Marjorie's
campaigning she would have danced the entire evening with one
man; but she knew that even in Eau Claire other girls with less
position and less pulchritude were given a much bigger rush. She
attributed this to something subtly unscrupulous in those girls. It
had never worried her, and if it had her mother would have assured
her that the other girls cheapened themselves and that men really
respected girls like Bernice.

44 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

She turned out the light in her bathroom, and on an impulse
decided to go in and chat for a moment with her aunt Josephine,
whose light was still on. Her soft slippers bore her noiselessly down
the carpeted hall, but hearing voices inside she stopped near the
partly opened door. Then she caught her own name, and without
any definite intention of eavesdropping lingered — and the thread of
the conversation going on inside pierced her consciousness sharply
as if it had been drawn through with a needle.

"She's absolutely hopeless 1" It was Marjorie's voice. "Oh, I know
what you're going to say I So many people have told you how pretty
and sweet she is, and how she can cook ! What of it ? She has a bum
time. Men don't like her."

"What's a little cheap popularity?"

Mrs. Harvey sounded annoyed.

"It's everything when you're eighteen," said Marjorie emphati-
cally. "I've done my best. I've been polite and I've made men dance
with her, but they just won't stand being bored. When I think of
that goregous coloring wasted on such a ninny, and think what
Martha Carey could do with it — oh 1 "

"There's no courtesy these days."

Mrs. Harvey's voice implied that modern situations were too
much for her. When she was a girl all young ladies who belonged to
nice families had glorious times.

"Well," said Marjorie, "no girl can permanently bolster up a
lame-duck visitor, because these days it's every girl for herself. I've
even tried to drop her hints about clothes and things, and she's been
furious — given me the funniest looks. She's sensitive enough to know
she's not getting away with much, but I'll bet she consoles herself
by thinking that she's very virtuous and that I'm too gay and fickle
and will come to a bad end. All unpopular girls think that way. Sour
grapes ! Sarah Hopkins refers to Genevieve and Roberta and me as
gardenia girls! I'll bet she'd give ten years of her life and her Euro-
pean education to be a gardenia girl and have three or four men
in love with her and be cut in on every few feet at dances."

"It seems to me," interrupted Mrs. Harvey rather wearily, "that
you ought to be able to do something for Bernice. I know she's not
very vivacious."

Marjorie groaned.

"Vivacious! Good grief! I've never heard her say anything to a
boy except that it's hot or the floor's crowded or that she's going to
school in New York next year. Sometimes she asks them what kind
of car they have and tells them the kind she has. Thrilling ! "

There was a short silence, and then Mrs. Harvey took up her
refrain :

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 45

"All I know is that other girls not half so sweet and attractive
get partners. Martha Carey, for instance, is stout and loud, and her
mother is distinctly common. Roberta Dillon is so thin this year
that she looks as though Arizona were the place for her. She's danc-
ing herself to death."

"But, mother," objected Marjorie impatiently, "Martha is cheer-
ful and awfully witty and an awfully slick girl, and Roberta's a
marvellous dancer. She's been popular for ages!"

Mrs. Harvey yawned.

"I think it's that crazy Indian blood in Bernice," continued Mar-
jorie. "Maybe she's a reversion to type. Indian women all just sat
round and never said anything."

"Go to bed, you silly child," laughed Mrs. Harvey. "I wouldn't
have told you that if I'd thought you were going to remember it.
And I think most of your ideas are perfectly idiotic," she finished
sleepily.

There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether
or not convincing her mother was worth the trouble. People over
forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen
our convictions are ills from which we look ; at forty-five they are
caves in which we hide.

Having decided this, Marjorie said good night. When she came
out into the hall it was quite empty.

Ill

While Marjorie was breakfasting late next day Bernice came into
the room with a rather formal good morning, sat down opposite,
stared intently over and slightly moistened her lips.

"What's on your mind?" inquired Marjorie, rather puzzled.

Bernice paused before she threw her hand-grenade.

"I heard what you said about me to your mother last night."

Marjorie was startled, but she showed only a faintly heightened
color and her voice was quite even when she spoke.

"Where were you?"

"In the hall. I didn't mean to listen— at first."

After an involuntary look of contempt Marjorie dropped her eyes
and became very interested in balancing a stray corn-flake on her
finger.

"I guess I'd better go back to Eau Claire — if I'm such a nuisance."
Bernice's lower lip was trembling violently and she continued on a
wavering note: "I've tried to be nice, and — and I've been first
neglected and then insulted. No one ever visited me and got such
treatment."

46 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Marjorie was silent.

"But I'm in the way, I see. I'm a drag on you. Your friends don't
like me." She paused, and then remembered another one of her
grievances. "Of course I was furious last week when you tried to
hint to me that that dress was unbecoming. Don't you think I know
how to dress myself?"

"No," murmured Marjorie less than half-aloud.

"What?"

"I didn't hint anything," said Marjorie succinctly. "I said, as I
remember, that it was better to wear a becoming dress three times
straight than to alternate it with two frights."

"Do you think that was a very nice thing to say?"

"I wasn't trying to be nice." Then after a pause : "When do you
want to go?"

Bernice drew in her breath sharply.

"Oh ! " It was a little half-cry.

Marjorie looked up in surprise.

"Didn't you say you were going?"

"Yes, but "

"Oh, you were only bluffing ! "

They stared at each other across the breakfast-table for a moment.
Misty waves were passing before Bernice's eyes, while Marjorie's
face wore that rather hard expression that she used when slightly
intoxicated undergraduates were making love to her.

"So you were bluffing," she repeated as if it were what she might
have expected.

Bernice admitted it by bursting into tears. Marjorie's eyes showed
boredom.

"You're my cousin," sobbed Bernice. "I'm v-v-visiting you. I was
to stay a month, and if I go home my mother will know and she'll
wah-wonder "

Marjorie waited until the shower of broken words collapsed into
little sniffles.

"I'll give you my month's allowance," she said coldly, "and you
can spend this last week anywhere you want. There's a very nice
hotel "

Bernice's sobs rose to a flute note, and rising of a sudden she fled
from the room.

An hour later, while Marjorie was in the library absorbed in com-
posing one of those non-committal, marvellously elusive letters that
only a young girl can write, Bernice reappeared, very red-eyed and
consciously calm. She cast no glance at Marjorie but took a book at
random from the shelf and sat down as if to read. Marjorie seemed

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 47

absorbed in her letter and continued writing. When the clock showed
noon Bernice closed her book with a snap.

"I suppose I'd better get my railroad ticket."

This was not the beginning of the speech she had rehearsed up-
stairs, but as Marjorie was not getting her cues — wasn't urging her
to be reasonable; it's all a mistake — it was the best opening she
could muster.

"Just wait till I finish this letter," said Marjorie without looking
round. "I want to get it off in the next mail."

After another minute, during which her pen scratched busily, she
turned round and relaxed with an air of "at your service." Again
Bernice had to speak.

"Do you want me to go home?"

"Well," said Marjorie, considering, "I suppose if you're not hav-
ing a good time you'd better go. No use being miserable."

"Don't you think common kindness "

"Oh, please don't quote 'Little Women'!" cried Marjorie impa-
tiently. "That's out of style."

"You think so?"

"Heavens, yes! What modern girl could live like those inane
females?"

"They were the models for our mothers."

Marjorie laughed.

"Yes, they were — not ! Besides, our mothers were all very well in
their way, but they know very little about their daughters' prob-
lems."

Bernice drew herself up.

"Please don't talk about my mother."

Marjorie laughed.

"I don't think I mentioned her."

Bernice felt that she was being led away from her subject.

"Do you think you've treated me very well ?"

"I've done my best. You're rather hard material to work with."

The lids of Bernice's eyes reddened.

"I think you're hard and selfish, and you haven't a feminine
quality in you."

"Oh, my Lord ! " cried Marjorie in desperation. "You little nut !
Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless mar-
riages ; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities.
What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the
beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals round,
and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affec-
tations!"

48 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Bernice's mouth had slipped half open.

"The womanly woman!" continued Marjorie. "Her whole early
life is occupied in whining criticisms of girls like me who really do
have a good time."

Bernice's jaw descended farther as Marjorie's voice rose.

"There's some excuse for an ugly girl whining. If I'd been irre-
trievably ugly I'd never have forgiven my parents for bringing me
into the world. But you're starting life without any handicap — "
Marjorie's little fist clinched. "If you expect me to weep with you
you'll be disappointed. Go or stay, just as you like." And picking
up her letters she left the room.

Bernice claimed a headache and failed to appear at luncheon.
They had a matinee date for the afternoon, but the headache per-
sisting, Marjorie made explanations to a not very downcast boy. But
when she returned late in the afternoon she found Bernice with a
strangely set face waiting for her in her bedroom.

"I've decided," began Bernice without preliminaries, "that maybe
you're right about things — possibly not. But if you'll tell me why
your friends aren't — aren't interested in me I'll see if I can do what
you want me to."

Marjorie was at the mirror shaking down her hair.

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes."

"Without reservations? Will you do exactly what I say?"

"Well, I "

"Well nothing! Will you do exactly as I say?"

"If they're sensible things."

"They're not ! You're no case for sensible things."

"Are you going to make — to recommend "

"Yes, everything. If I tell you to take boxing lessons you'll have
to do it. Write home and tell your mother you're going to stay
another two weeks."

"If you'll tell me "

"All right — I'll just give you a few examples now. First, you have
no ease of manner. Why ? Because you're never sure about your per-
sonal appearance. When a girl feels that she's perfectly groomed
and dressed she can forget that part of her. That's charm. The more
parts of yourself you can afford to forget the more charm you have."

"Don't I look all right?"

"No ; for instance, you never take care of your eyebrows. They're
black and lustrous, but by leaving them straggly they're a blemish.
They'd be beautiful if you'd take care of them in one-tenth the time
you take doing nothing. You're going to brush them so that they'll
grow straight."

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 49

Bernice raised the brows in question.

"Do you mean to say that men notice eyebrows?"

"Yes — subconsciously. And when you go home you ought to
have your teeth straightened a little. It's almost imperceptible,
still "

"But I thought," interrupted Bernice in bewilderment, "that you
despised little dainty feminine things like that."

"I hate dainty minds/' answered Marjorie. "But a girl has to be
dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk
about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away
with it."

"What else?"

"Oh, I'm just beginning ! There's your dancing."

"Don't I dance all right?"

"No, you don't — you lean on a man ; yes, you do — ever so slightly.
I noticed it when we were dancing together yesterday. And you
dance standing up straight instead of bending over a little. Probably
some old lady on the side-line once told you that you looked so
dignified that way. But except with a very small girl it's much
harder on the man, and he's the one that counts."

"Go on." Bernice's brain was reeling.

"Well, you've got to learn to be nice to men who are sad birds.
You look as if you'd been insulted whenever you're thrown with any
except the most popular boys. Why, Bernice, I'm cut in on every
few feet — and who does most of it? Why, those very sad birds. No
girl can afford to neglect them. They're the big part of any crowd.
Young boys too shy to talk are the very best conversational prac-
tice. Clumsy boys are the best dancing practice. If you can follow
them and yet look graceful you can follow a baby tank across a
barb-wire sky-scraper."

Bernice sighed profoundly, but Marjorie was not through.

"If you go to a dance and really amuse, say, three sad birds that
dance with you ; if you talk so well to them that they forget they're
stuck with you, you've done something. They'll come back next
time, and gradually so many sad birds will dance with you that the
attractive boys will see there's no danger of being stuck — then
they'll dance with you."

"Yes," agreed Bernice faintly. "I think I begin to see."

"And finally," concluded Marjorie, "poise and charm will just
come. You'll wake up some morning knowing youVe attained it, and
men will know it too."

Bernice rose.

"It's been awfully kind of you — but nobody's ever talked to me
like this before, and I feel sort of startled,"

5O Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Marjorie made no answer but gazed pensively at her own image
in the mirror.

"You're a peach to help me," continued Bernice.

Still Marjorie did not answer, and Bernice thought she had
seemed too grateful.

"I know you don't like sentiment," she said timidly.

Marjorie turned to her quickly.

"Oh, I wasn't thinking about that. I was considering whether we
hadn't better bob your hair."

Bernice collapsed backward upon the bed.

On the following Wednesday evening there was a dinner-dance at
the country club. When the guests strolled in Bernice found her
place-card with a slight feeling of irritation. Though at her right sat
G. Reece Stoddard, a most desirable and distinguished young bache-
lor, the all-important left held only Charley Paulson. Charley lacked
height, beauty, and social shrewdness, and in her new enlightenment
Bernice decided that his only qualification to be her partner was
that he had never been stuck with her. But this feeling of irritation
left with the last of the soup-plates, and Marjorie's specific instruc-
tion came to her. Swallowing her pride she turned to Charley Paul-
son and plunged.

"Do you think I ought to bob my hair, Mr. Charley Paulson?"

Charley looked up in surprise.

"Why?"

"Because I'm considering it. It's such a sure and easy way of
attracting attention."

Charley smiled pleasantly. He could not know this had been re-
hearsed. He replied that he didn't know much about bobbed hair.
But Bernice was there to tell him.

"I want to be a society vampire, you see," she announced coolly,
and went on to inform him that bobbed hair was the necessary prel-
ude. She added that she wanted to ask his advice, because she had
heard he was so critical about girls.

Charley, who knew as much about the psychology of women as he
did of the mental states of Buddhist contemplatives, felt vaguely
flattered.

"So I've decided," she continued, her voice rising slightly, "that
early next week I'm going down to the Sevier Hotel barber-shop, sit
in the first chair, and get my hair bobbed." She faltered, noticing
that the people near her had paused in their conversation and were
listening ; but after a confused second Marjorie's coaching told, and

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 51

she finished her paragraph to the vicinity at large. "Of course I'm
charging admission, but if you'll all come down and encourage me
I'll issue passes for the inside seats."

There was a ripple of appreciative laughter, and under cover of it
G. Reece Stoddard leaned over quickly and said close to her ear : "I'll
take a box right now."

She met his eyes and smiled as if he had said something surpass-
ingly brilliant.

"Do you believe in bobbed hair?" asked G. Reece in the same
undertone.

"I think it's unmoral," affirmed Bernice gravely. "But, of course,
you've either got to amuse people or feed 'em or shock 'em." Mar-
jorie had culled this from Oscar Wilde. It was greeted with a ripple
of laughter from the men and a series of quick, intent looks from the
girls. And then as though she had said nothing of wit or moment
Bernice turned again to Charley and spoke confidentially in his ear.

"I want to ask you your opinion of several people. I imagine you're
a wonderful judge of character."

Charley thrilled faintly — paid her a subtle compliment by over-
turning her water.

Two hours later, while Warren Mclntyre was standing passively in
the stag line abstractedly watching the dancers and wondering
whither and with whom Marjorie had disappeared, ah unrelated per-
ception began to creep slowly upon him — a perception that Bernice,
cousin to Marjorie, had been cut in on several times in the past five
minutes. He closed his eyes, opened them and looked again. Several
minutes back she had been dancing with a visiting boy, a matter
easily accounted for ; a visiting boy would know no better. But now
she was dancing with some one else, and there was Charley Paulson
headed for her with enthusiastic determination in his eye.
Funny — Charley seldom danced with more than three girls an
evening.

Warren was distinctly surprised when — the exchange having been
effected — the man relieved proved to be none other than G. Reece
Stoddard himself. And G. Reece seemed not at all jubilant at being
relieved. Next time Bernice danced near, Warren regarded her in-
tently. Yes, she was pretty, distinctly pretty ; and to-night her face
seemed really vivacious. She had that look that no woman, however
histrionically proficient, can successfully counterfeit — she looked as
if she were having a good time. He liked the way she had her hair
arranged, wondered if it was brilliantine that made it glisten so. And
that dress was becoming— a dark red that set off her shadowy eyes
and high coloring. He remembered that he had thought her pretty
when she first came to town, before he had realized that she was

52 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

dull. Too bad she was dull — dull girls unbearable — certainly pretty
though.

His thoughts zigzagged back to Marjorie. This disappearance
would be like other disappearances. When she reappeared he would
demand where she had been — would be told emphatically that it was
none of his business. What a pity she was so sure of him ! She basked
in the knowledge that no other girl in town interested him ; she defied
him to fall in love with Genevieve or Roberta.

Warren sighed. The way to Marjorie's affections was a labyrinth
indeed. He looked up. Bernice was again dancing with the visiting
boy. Half unconsciously he took a step out from the stag line in her
direction, and hesitated. Then he said to himself that it was charity.
He walked toward her — collided suddenly with G. Reece Stod-
dard.

''Pardon me," said Warren.

But G. Reece had not stopped to apologize. He had again cut in
on Bernice.

That night at one o'clock Marjorie, with one hand on the electric-
light switch in the hall, turned to take a last look at Bernice's
sparkling eyes.

"So it worked?"

"Oh, Marjorie, yes ! " cried Bernice.

"I saw you were having a gay time."

"I did 1 The only trouble was that about midnight I ran short of
talk. I had to repeat myself — with different men of course. I hope
they won't compare notes."

"Men don't," said Marjorie, yawning, "and it wouldn't matter if
they did — they'd think you were even trickier."

She snapped out the light, and as they started up the stairs
Bernice grasped the banister thankfully. For the first time in her life
she had been danced tired.

"You see," said Marjorie at the top of the stairs, "one man sees
another man cut in and he thinks there must be something there.
Well, we'll fix up some new stuff to-morrow. Good night."

"Good night."

As Bernice took down her hair she passed the evening before her
in review. She had followed instructions exactly. Even when Charley
Paulson cut in for the eighth time she had simulated delight and had
apparently been both interested and flattered. She had not talked
about the weather or Eau Claire or automobiles or her school, but
had confined her conversation to me, you, and us.

But a few minutes before she fell asleep a rebellious thought was
churning drowsily in her brain — after all, it was she who had done

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 53

it. Marjorie, to be sure, had given her her conversation, but then
Marjorie got much of her conversation out of things she read. Bernice
had bought the red dress, though she had never valued it highly
before Marjorie dug it out of her trunk — and her own voice had
said the words, her own lips had smiled, her own feet had danced.
Marjorie nice girl — vain, though — nice evening — nice boys — like

Warren — Warren — Warren — whafs-his-name — Warren

She fell asleep.

To Bernice the next week was a revelation. With the feeling that
people really enjoyed looking at her and listening to her came the
foundation of self-confidence. Of course there were numerous mis-
takes at first. She did not know, for instance, that Draycott Deyo
was studying for the ministry ; she was unaware that he had cut in
on her because he thought she was a quiet, reserved girl. Had she
known these things she would not have treated him to the line which
began "Hello, Shell Shock ! " and continued with the bathtub story —
"It takes a frightful lot of energy to fix my hair in the summer —
there's so much of it — so I always fix it first and powder my face
and put on my hat ; then I get into the bathtub, and dress afterward.
Don't you think that's the best plan?"

Though Draycott Deyo was in the throes of difficulties concerning
baptism by immersion and might possibly have seen a connection, it
must be admitted that he did not. He considered feminine bathing
an immoral subject, and gave her some of his ideas on the depravity
of modern society.

But to offset that unfortunate occurrence Bernice had several
signal successes to her credit. Little Otis Ormonde pleaded off from
a trip East and elected instead to follow her with a puppylike devo-
tion, to the amusement of his crowd and to the irritation of G. Reece
Stoddard, several of whose afternoon calls Otis completely ruined by
the disgusting tenderness of the glances he bent on Bernice. He even
told her the story of the two-by-four and the dressing-room to show
her how frightfully mistaken he and every one else had been in their
first judgment of her. Bernice laughed off that incident with a slight
sinking sensation.

Of all Bernice's conversation perhaps the best known and most
universally approved was the line about the bobbing of her hair.

"Oh, Bernice, when you goin' to get the hair bobbed?"

"Day after to-morrow maybe," she would reply, laughing. "Will
you come and see me? Because I'm counting on you, you know."

"Will we? You know! But you better hurry up."

54 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Bernice, whose tonsorial intentions were strictly dishonorable,
would laugh again.

"Pretty soon now. You'd be surprised."

But perhaps the most significant symbol of her success was the
gray car of the hypercritical Warren Mclntyre, parked daily in front
of the Harvey house. At first the parlor-maid was distinctly startled
when he asked for Bernice instead of Marjorie ; after a week of it
she told the cook that Miss Bernice had gotta holda Miss Marjorie's
best fella.

And Miss Bernice had. Perhaps it began with Warren's desire to
rouse jealousy in Marjorie ; perhaps it was the familiar though un-
recognized strain of Marjorie in Bernice's conversation; perhaps it
was both of these and something of sincere attraction besides. But
somehow the collective mind of the younger set knew within a week
that Marjorie's most reliable beau had made an amazing face-about
and was giving an indisputable rush to Marjorie's guest. The question
of the moment was how Marjorie would take it. Warren called
Bernice on the 'phone twice a day, sent her notes, and they were fre-
quently seen together in his roadster, obviously engrossed in one of
those tense, significant conversations as to whether or not he was
sincere.

Marjorie on being twitted only laughed. She said she was mighty
glad that Warren had at last found some one who appreciated him.
So the younger set laughed, too, and guessed that Marjorie didn't
care and let it go at that.

One afternoon when there were only three days left of her visit
Bernice was waiting in the hall for Warren, with whom she was
going to a bridge party. She was in rather a blissful mood, and when
Marjorie — also bound for the party — appeared beside her and began
casually to adjust her hat in the mirror, Bernice was utterly unpre-
pared for anything in the nature of a clash. Marjorie did her work
very coldly and succinctly in three sentences.

"You may as well get Warren out of your head," she said coldly.

"What ?" Bernice was utterly astounded.

"You may as well stop making a fool of yourself over Warren
Mclntyre. He doesn't care a snap of his fingers about you."

For a tense moment they regarded each other — Marjorie scornful,
aloof; Bernice astounded, half-angry, half-afraid. Then two cars
drove up in front of the house and there was a riotous honking. Both
of them gasped faintly, turned, and side by side hurried out.

All through the bridge party Bernice strove in vain to master a
rising uneasiness. She had offended Marjorie, the sphinx of sphinxes.
With the most wholesome and innocent intentions in the world she
had stolen Marjorie's property. She felt suddenly and horribly guilty.

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 55

After the bridge game, when they sat in an informal circle and the
conversation became general, the storm gradually broke. Little Otis
Ormonde inadvertently precipitated it.

"When you going back to kindergarten, Otis?" some one had
asked.

"Me? Day Bernice gets her hair bobbed."

"Then your education's over," said Marjorie quickly. "That's only
a bluff of hers. I should think you'd have realized."

"That a fact?" demanded Otis, giving Bernice a reproachful glance.

Bernice's ears burned as she tried to think up an effectual come-
back. In the face of this direct attack her imagination was paralyzed.

"There's a lot of bluffs in the world," continued Marjorie quite
pleasantly. "I should think you'd be young enough to know that,
Otis."

"Well," said Otis, "maybe so. But gee! With a line like Ber-
nice's "

"Really?" yawned Marjorie. "What's her latest bon mot?"

No one seemed to know. In fact, Bernice, having trifled with her
muse's beau, had said nothing memorable of late.

"Was that really all a line?" asked Roberta curiously.

Bernice hesitated. She felt that wit in some form was demanded of
her, but under her cousin's suddenly frigid eyes she was completely
incapacitated.

"I don't know," she stalled.

"Splush ! " said Marjorie. "Admit it ! "

Bernice saw that Warren's eyes had left a ukulele he had been
tinkering with and were fixed on her questioningly.

"Oh, I don't know ! " she repeated steadily. Her cheeks were glow-
ing.

"Splush ! " remarked Marjorie again.

"Come through, Bernice," urged Otis. "Tell her where to get off."

Bernice looked round again — she seemed unable to get away from
Warren's eyes.

"I like bobbed hair," she said hurriedly, as if he had asked her a
question, "and I intend to bob mine."

"When?" demanded Marjorie.

"Any time."

"No time like the present," suggested Roberta.

Otis jumped to his feet.

"Good stuff!" he cried. "We'll have a summer bobbing party.
Sevier Hotel barber-shop, I think you said."

In an instant all were on their feet. Bernice's heart throbbed
violently.

"What?" she gasped.

56 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Out of the group came Marjorie's voice, very clear and con-
temptuous.

"Don't worry— shell back out!"

"Come on, Bernice!" cried Otis, starting toward the door.

Four eyes — Warren's and Marjorie's — stared at her, challenged
her, defied her. For another second she wavered wildly.

"All right," she said swiftly, "I don't care if I do."

An eternity of minutes later, riding down-town through the late
afternoon beside Warren, the others following in Roberta's car close
behind, Bernice had all the sensations of Marie Antoinette bound
for the guillotine in a tumbrel. Vaguely she wondered why she did
not cry out that it was all a mistake. It was all she could do to keep
from clutching her hair with both hands to protect it from the sud-
denly hostile world. Yet she did neither. Even the thought of her
mother was no deterrent now. This was the test supreme of her
sportsmanship ; her right to walk unchallenged in the starry heaven
of popular girls.

Warren was moodily silent, and when they came to the hotel he
drew up at the curb and nodded to Bernice to precede him out.
Roberta's car emptied a laughing crowd into the shop, which pre-
sented two bold plate-glass windows to the street.

Bernice stood on the curb and looked at the sign, Sevier Barber-
Shop. It was a guillotine indeed, and the hangman was the first bar-
ber, who, attired in a white coat and smoking a cigarette, leaned
nonchalantly against the first chair. He must have heard of her ; he
must have been waiting all week, smoking eternal cigarettes beside
that portentous, too-often-mentioned first chair. Would they blind-
fold her ? No, but they would tie a white cloth round her neck lest
any of her blood — nonsense — hair — should get on her clothes.

"All right, Bernice," said Warren quickly.

With her chin in the air she crossed the sidewalk, pushed open
the swinging screen-door, and giving not a glance to the uproarious,
riotous row that occupied the waiting bench, went up to the first
barber.

"I want you to bob my hair."

The first barber's mouth slid somewhat open. His cigarette dropped
to the floor.

"Huh?"

"My hair— bob it!"

Refusing further preliminaries, Bernice took her seat on high. A
man in the chair next to her turned on his side and gave her a glance,
half lather, half amazement. One barber started and spoiled little
Willy Schuneman's monthly haircut. Mr. O'Reilly in the last chair
grunted and swore musically in ancient Gaelic as a razor bit into his

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 57

cheek. Two bootblacks became wide-eyed and rushed for her feet.
No, Bernice didn't care for a shine.

Outside a passer-by stopped and stared ; a couple joined him ; half
a dozen small boys' noses sprang into life, flattened against the glass ;
and snatches of conversation borne on the summer breeze drifted
in through the screen-door.

"Lookada long hair on a kid ! "

"Where'd yuh get 'at stuff? 'At's a bearded lady he just finished
shavin'."

But Bernice saw nothing, heard nothing. Her only living sense
told her that this man in the white coat had removed one tortoise-
shell comb and then another ; that his fingers were fumbling clumsily
with unfamiliar hairpins ; that this hair, this wonderful hair of hers,
was going — she would never again feel its long voluptuous pull as it
hung in a dark-brown glory down her back. For a second she was
near breaking down, and then the picture before her swam mechani-
cally into her vision — Marjorie's mouth curling in a faint ironic
smile as if to say :

"Give up and get down! You tried to buck me and I called your
bluff. You see you haven't got a prayer."

And some last energy rose up in Bernice, for she clinched her hands
under the white cloth, and there was a curious narrowing of her eyes
that Marjorie remarked on to some one long afterward.

Twenty minutes later the barber swung her round to face the mir-
ror, and she flinched at the full extent of the damage that had been
wrought. Her hair was not curly, and now it lay in lank lifeless blocks
on both sides of her suddenly pale face. It was ugly as sin — she had
known it would be ugly as sin. Her face's chief charm had been a
Madonna-like simplicity. Now that was gone and she was — well,
frightfully mediocre — not stagy; only ridiculous, like a Greenwich
Villager who had left her spectacles at home.

As she climbed down from the chair she tried to smile — failed
miserably. She saw two of the girls exchange glances ; noticed Mar-
jorie's mouth curved in attenuated mockery — and that Warren's eyes
were suddenly very cold.

"You see" — her words fell into an awkward pause — "I've done it."

"Yes, you've — done it," admitted Warren.

"Do you like it?"

There was a half-hearted "Sure" from two or three voices, another
awkward pause, and then Marjorie turned swiftly and with serpent-
like intensity to Warren.

"Would you mind running me down to the cleaners?" she asked.
"I've simply got to get a dress there before supper. Roberta's driving
right home and she can take the others."

58 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Warren stared abstractedly at some infinite speck out the window.
Then for an instant his eyes rested coldly on Bernice before they
turned to Marjorie.

"Be glad to," he said slowly.

Bernice did not fully realize the outrageous trap that had been set
for her until she met her aunt's amazed glance just before dinner.

"Why, Bernice ! "

"I've bobbed it, Aunt Josephine."

" Why, child!"

"Do you like it?"

"Why, Ber-nice ! "

"I suppose I've shocked you."

"No, but what'll Mrs. Deyo think to-morrow night? Bernice, you
should have waited until after the Deyos' dance — you should have
waited if you wanted to do that."

"It was sudden, Aunt Josephine. Anyway, why does it matter to
Mrs. Deyo particularly?"

"Why, child," cried Mrs. Harvey, "in her paper on The Foibles
of the Younger Generation' that she read at the last meeting of the
Thursday Club she devoted fifteen minutes to bobbed hair. It's her
pet abomination. And the dance is for you and Marjorie ! "

"I'm sorry."

"Oh, Bernice, what'll your mother say? She'll think I let you
do it."

"I'm sorry."

Dinner was an agony. She had made a hasty attempt with a
curling-iron, and burned her finger and much hair. She could see that
her aunt was both worried and grieved, and her uncle kept saying,
"Well, I'll be darned!" over and over in a hurt and faintly hostile
tone. And Marjorie sat very quietly, intrenched behind a faint smile,
a faintly mocking smile.

Somehow she got through the evening. Three boys called ; Mar-
jorie disappeared with one of them, and Bernice made a listless un-
successful attempt to entertain the two others — sighed thankfully
as she climbed the stairs to her room at half past ten. What a day!

When she had undressed for the night the door opened and Mar-
jorie came in.

"Bernice," she said, "I'm awfully sorry about the Deyo dance. I'll
give you my word of honor I'd forgotten all about it."

" 'Sail right," said Bernice shortly. Standing before the mirror she
passed her comb slowly through her short hair.

Bernice Bobs Her Hair 59

"111 take you down-town to-morrow," continued Marjorie, "and
the hairdresser'll fix it so you'll look slick. I didn't imagine you'd
go through with it. I'm really mighty sorry."

"Oh, 'sail right!"

"Still it's your last night, so I suppose it won't matter much."

Then Bernice winced as Marjorie tossed her own hair over her
shoulders and began to twist it slowly into two long blond braids
until in her cream-colored negligee she looked like a delicate painting
of some Saxon princess. Fascinated, Bernice watched the braids grow.
Heavy and luxurious they were, moving under the supple fingers like
restive snakes — and to Bernice remained this relic and the curling-
iron and a to-morrow full of eyes. She could see G. Reece Stoddard,
who liked her, assuming his Harvard manner and telling his dinner
partner that Bernice shouldn't have been allowed to go to the movies
so much ; she could see Draycott Deyo exchanging glances with his
mother and then being conscientiously charitable to her. But then
perhaps by to-morrow Mrs. Deyo would have heard the news ; would
send round an icy little note requesting that she fail to appear — and
behind her back they would all laugh and know that Marjorie had
made a fool of her ; that her chance at beauty had been sacrificed
to the jealous whim of a selfish girl. She sat down suddenly before
the mirror, biting the inside of her cheek.

"I like it," she said with an effort. "I think it'll be becoming."

Marjorie smiled.

"It looks all right. For heaven's sake, don't let it worry you!"

"I won't."

"Good night, Bernice."

But as the door closed something snapped within Bernice. She
sprang dynamically to her feet, clinching her hands, then swiftly and
noiselessly crossed over to her bed and from underneath it dragged
out her suitcase. Into it she tossed toilet articles and a change of
clothing. Then she turned to her trunk and quickly dumped in two
drawerfuls of lingerie and summer dresses. She moved quietly, but
with deadly efficiency, and in three-quarters of an hour her trunk was
locked and strapped and she was fully dressed in a becoming new
travelling suit that Marjorie had helped her pick out.

Sitting down at her desk she wrote a short note to Mrs. Harvey,
in which she briefly outlined her reasons for going. She sealed it, ad-
dressed it, and laid it on her pillow. She glanced at her watch. The
train left at one, and she knew that if she walked down to the Mar-
borough Hotel two blocks away she could easily get a taxicab.

Suddenly she drew in her breath sharply and an expression flashed
into her eyes that a practised character reader might have con-
nected vaguely with the set look she had worn in the barber's chair —

60 Bernice Bobs Her Hair

somehow a development of it. It was quite a new look for Bernice —
and it carried consequences.

She went stealthily to the bureau, picked up an article that lay
there, and turning out all the lights stood quietly until her eyes be-
came accustomed to the darkness. Softly she pushed open the door
to Marjorie's room. She heard the quiet, even breathing of an un-
troubled conscience asleep.

She was by the bedside now, very deliberate and calm. She acted
swiftly. Bending over she found one of the braids of Marjorie's hair,
followed it up with her hand to the point nearest the head, and then
holding it a little slack so that the sleeper would feel no pull, she
reached down with the shears and severed it. With the pigtail in
her hand she held her breath. Marjorie had muttered something in
her sleep. Bernice deftly amputated the other braid, paused for an
instant, and then flitted swiftly and silently back to her own room.

Down-stairs she opened the big front door, closed it carefully be-
hind her, and feeling oddly happy and exuberant stepped off the
porch into the moonlight, swinging her heavy grip like a shopping-
bag. After a minute's brisk walk she discovered that her left hand
still held the two blond braids. She laughed unexpectedly — had to
shut her mouth hard to keep from emitting an absolute peal. She was
passing Warren's house now, and on the impulse she set down her
baggage, and swinging the braids like pieces of rope flung them at
the wooden porch, where they landed with a slight thud. She laughed
again, no longer restraining herself.

"Huh!" she giggled wildly. "Scalp the selfish thing!"

Then picking up her suitcase she set off at a half-run down the
moonlit street.
1920 Flappers and Philosophers

THE ICE PALACE

THE SUNLIGHT dripped over the house like golden paint over an
art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified
the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses
flanking were intrenched behind great stodgy trees ; only the Happer
house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street
with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in
southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.

Up in her bedroom window Sally Carrol Happer rested her nine-
teen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year-old sill and watched Clark
Darrow's ancient Ford turn the corner. The car was hot — being
partly metallic it retained all the heat it absorbed or evolved — and
Clark Darrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained,
strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, and
rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the
wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a
terrifying expression he gave the steering-gear a final wrench and
deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer steps.
There was a plaintive heaving sound, a death-rattle, followed by a
short silence ; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle.

Sally Carrol gazed down sleepily. She started to yawn, but finding
this quite impossible unless she raised her chin from the window-sill,
changed her mind and continued silently to regard the car, whose
owner sat brilliantly if perfunctorily at attention as he waited for
an answer to his signal. After a moment the whistle once more split
the dusty air.

"Good mawnin7."

With difficulty Clark twisted his tall body round and bent a dis-
torted glance on the window.

" Tain't mawnin', Sally Carrol."

"Isn't it, sure enough?"

"What you doin'?"

"Eatin' 'n apple."

"Come on go swimmin' — want to?"

"Reckon so."

"How 'bout hurryin' up?"

62 The Ice Palace

"Sure enough."

Sally Carrol sighed voluminously and raised herself with profound
inertia from the floor, where she had been occupied in alternately
destroying parts of a green apple and painting paper dolls for her
younger sister. She approached a mirror, regarded her expression
with a pleased and pleasant languor, dabbed two spots of rouge on
her lips and a grain of powder on her nose, and covered her bobbed
corn-colored hair with a rose-littered sunbonnet. Then she kicked
over the painting water, said, "Oh, damn!"— but let it lay — and
left the room.

"How you, Clark?" she inquired a minute later as she slipped
nimbly over the side of the car.

"Mighty fine, Sally Carrol."

"Where we go swimmin'?"

"Out to Walley's Pool. Told Marylyn we'd call by an' get her an'
Joe Ewing."

Clark was dark and lean, and when on foot was rather inclined
to stoop. His eyes were ominous and his expression somewhat petu-
lant except when startlingly illuminated by one of his frequent
smiles. Clark had "a income" — just enough to keep himself in ease
and his car in gasoline — and he had spent the two years since he
graduated from Georgia Tech in dozing round the lazy streets of his
home town, discussing how he could best invest his capital for an
immediate fortune.

Hanging round he found not at all difficult ; a crowd of little girls
had grown up beautifully, the amazing Sally Carroll foremost among
them ; and they enjoyed being swum with and danced with and made
love to in the flower-filled summery evenings — and they all liked
Clark immensely. When feminine company palled there were half
a dozen other youths who were always just about to do something,
and meanwhile were quite willing to join him in a few holes of golf,
or a game of billiards, or the consumption of a quart of "hard yella
licker." Every once in a while one of these contemporaries made a
farewell round of calls before going up to New York or Philadelphia
or Pittsburgh to go into business, but mostly they just stayed round
in this languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and
noisy niggery street fairs — and especially of gracious, soft-voiced
girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.

The Ford having been excited into a sort of restless resentful life
Clark and Sally Carrol rolled and rattled down Valley Avenue into
Jefferson Street, where the dust road became a pavement; along
opiate Millicent Place, where there were half a dozen prosperous,
substantial mansions; and on into the down-town section. Driving
was perilous here, for it was shopping time; the population idled

The Ice Palace 63

casually across the streets and a drove of low-moaning oxen were
being urged along in front of a placid street-car; even the shops
seemed only yawning their doors and blinking their windows in the
sunshine before retiring into a state of utter and finite coma.

"Sally Carrol," said Clark suddenly, "it a fact that you're en-
gaged?"

She looked at him quickly.

"Where'd you hear that?"

"Sure enough, you engaged?"

" 'At's a nice question ! "

"Girl told me you were engaged to a Yankee you met up in Ashe-
ville last summer."

Sally Carrol sighed.

"Never saw such an old town for rumors."

"Don't marry a Yankee, Sally Carrol. We need you round here."
Sally Carrol was silent a moment.

"Clark," she demanded suddenly, "who on earth shall I marry?"

"I offer my services."

"Honey, you couldn't support a wife," she answered cheerfully.
"Anyway, I know you too well to fall in love with you."

" 'At doesn't mean you ought to marry a Yankee," he persisted.

"S'pose I love him?"

He shook his head.

"You couldn't. He'd be a lot different from us, every way."

He broke off as he halted the car in front of a rambling, dilapidated
house. Marylyn Wade and Joe Ewing appeared in the doorway.

" 'Lo, Sally Carrol."

"Hi!"

"Howyou-all?"

"Sally Carrol," demanded Marylyn as they started off again, "you
engaged?"

"Lawdy, where'd all this start? Can't I look at a man 'thout every-
body in town engagin' me to him?"

Clark stared straight in front of him at a bolt on the clattering
wind-shield.

"Sally Carrol," he said with a curious intensity, "don't you like
us?"

"What?"

"Us down here?"

"Why, Clark, you know I do. I adore all you boys."

"Then why you gettin' engaged to a Yankee?"

"Clark, I don't know. I'm not sure what I'll do, but — well, I want
to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live
where things happen on a big scale."

64 The Ice Palace

"What you mean ?"

"Oh, Clark, I love you, and I love Joe here, and Ben Arrot, and
you-all, but you'll — you'll "

"We'll all be failures?"

"Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of — of in-
effectual and sad, and — oh, how can I tell you?"

"You mean because we stay here in Tarleton?"

"Yes, Clark; and because you like it and never want to change
things or think or go ahead."

He nodded and she reached over and pressed his hand.

"Clark," she said softly, "I wouldn't change you for the world.
You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail I'll
love always — the living in the past, the lazy days and nights you
have, and all your carelessness and generosity."

"But you're goin' away?"

"Yes — because I couldn't ever marry you. You've a place in my
heart no one else ever could have, but tied down here I'd get restless.
I'd feel I was — wastin' myself. There's two sides to me, you see.
There's the sleepy old side you love ; an' there's a sort of energy —
the feelin' that makes me do wild things. That's the part of me that
may be useful somewhere, that'll last when I'm not beautiful any
more."

She broke off with characteristic suddenness and sighed, "Oh,
sweet cooky I " as her mood changed.

Half closing her eyes and tipping back her head till it rested on the
seat-back she let the savory breeze fan her eyes and ripple the fluffy
curls of her bobbed hair. They were in the country now, hurrying
between tangled growths of bright-green coppice and grass and tall
trees that sent sprays of foliage to hang a cool welcome over the
road. Here and there they passed a battered Negro cabin, its oldest
white-haired inhabitant smoking a corncob pipe beside the door, and
half a dozen scantily clothed pickaninnies parading tattered dolls
on the wild-grown grass in front. Farther out were lazy cotton-fields,
where even the workers seemed intangible shadows lent by the sun
to the earth, not for toil, but to while away some age-old tradition
in the golden September fields. And round the drowsy picturesque-
ness, over the trees and shacks and muddy rivers, flowed the heat,
never hostile, only comforting, like a great warm nourishing bosom
for the infant earth.

"Sally Carrol, we're here!"

"Poor chile's soun' asleep."

"Honey, you dead at last outa sheer laziness ?"

"Water, Sally Carrol ! Cool water waitin' for you ! "

Her eyes opened sleepily.

"Hi ! she murmured, smiling.

The Ice Palace 65

In November Harry Bellamy, tall, broad, and brisk, came down
from his Northern city to spend four days. His intention was to settle
a matter that had been hanging fire since he and Sally Carrol had
met in Asheville, North Carolina, in midsummer. The settlement
took only a quiet afternoon and an evening in front of a glowing open
fire, for Harry Bellamy had everything she wanted ; and, besides, she
loved him — loved him with that side of her she kept especially for
loving. Sally Carrol had several rather clearly defined sides.

On his last afternoon they walked, and she found their steps tend-
ing half-unconsciously toward one of her favorite haunts, the ceme-
tery. When it came in sight, gray-white and golden-green under the
cheerful late sun, she paused, irresolute, by the iron gate.

"Are you mournful by nature, Harry?" she asked with a faint
smile.

"Mournful? Not I."

"Then let's go in here. It depresses some folks, but I like it."

They passed through the gateway and followed a path that led
through a wavy valley of graves — dusty-gray and mouldy for the
fifties ; quaintly carved with flowers and jars for the seventies ; ornate
and hideous for the nineties, with fat marble cherubs lying in sodden
sleep on stone pillows, and great impossible growths of nameless
granite flowers. Occasionally they saw a kneeling figure with trib-
utary flowers, but over most of the graves lay silence and withered
leaves with only the fragrance that their own shadowy memories
could waken in living minds.

They reached the top of a hill where they were fronted by a tall,
round head-stone, freckled with dark spots of damp and half grown
over with vines.

"Margery Lee," she read; "1844-1873. Wasn't she nice? She died
when she was twenty-nine. Dear Margery Lee," she added softly.
"Can't you see her, Harry?"

"Yes, Sally Carrol."

He felt a little hand insert itself into his.

"She was dark, I think ; and she always wore her hair with a rib-
bon in it, and gorgeous hoop-skirts of alice blue and old rose."

"Yes."

"Oh, she was sweet, Harry ! And she was the sort of girl born to
stand on a wide, pillared porch and welcome folks in. I think perhaps
a lot of men went away to war meanin' to come back to her ; but
maybe none of 'em ever did."

He stooped down close to the stone, hunting for any record of
marriage.

66 The Ice Palace

"There's nothing here to show."

"ftf course not. How could there be anything there better than
just 'Margery Lee/ and that eloquent date?"

She drew close to him and an unexpected lump came into his
throat as her yellow hair brushed his cheek.

"You see how she was, don't you, Harry?"

"I see," he agreed gently. "I see through your precious eyes. You're
beautiful now, so I know she must have been."

Silent and close they stood, and he could feel her shoulders trem-
bling a little. An ambling breeze swept up the hill and stirred the
brim of her floppidy hat.

' Let's go down there!"

She was pointing to a flat stretch on the other side of the hill where
along the green turf were a thousand grayish-white crosses stretch-
ing in endless, ordered rows like the stacked arms of a bat-
talion.

"Those are the Confederate dead," said Sally Carrol simply.

They walked along and read the inscriptions, always only a name
and a date, sometimes quite indecipherable.

"The last row is the saddest — see, 'way over there. Every cross
has just a date on it, and the word 'Unknown.' "

She looked at him and her eyes brimmed with tears.

"I can't tell you how real it is to me, darling — if you don't know."

"How you feel about it is beautiful to me."

"No, no, it's not me, it's them — that old time that I've tried to
have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they
wouldn't have been 'unknown' ; but they died for the most beautiful
thing in the world — the dead South. You see," she continued, her
voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, "people have these
dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that
dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any
disillusions comin' to me. I've tried in a way to live up to those past
standards of noblesse oblige — there's just the last remnants of it,
you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us — streaks
of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an' stories
I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a
few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was some-
thing! I couldn't ever make you understand, but it was there."

"I understand," he assured her again quietly.

Sally Carrol smiled and dried her eyes on the tip of a handker-
chief protruding from his breast pocket.

"You don't feel depressed, do you, lover? Even when I cry I'm
happy here, and I get a sort of strength from it."

Hand in hand they turned and walked slowly away. Finding soft

The Ice Palace 67

grass she drew him down to a seat beside her with their backs against
the remnants of a low broken wall. *

"Wish those three old women would clear out," he complained. "I
want to kiss you, Sally Carrol."

"Me, too."

They waited impatiently for the three bent figures to move off,
and then she kissed him until the sky seemed to fade out and all her
smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.

Afterward they walked slowly back together, while on the corners
twilight played at somnolent black-and-white checkers with the end
of day.

"You'll be up about mid- January," he said, "and youVe got to stay
a month at least. It'll be slick. There's a winter carnival on, and if
you've never really seen snow it'll be like fairy-land to you. There'll
be skating and skiing and tobogganing and sleigh-riding, and all
sorts of torchlight parades on snow-shoes. They haven't had one for
years, so they're going to make it a knock-out."

"Will I be cold, Harry?" she asked suddenly.

"You certainly won't. You may freeze your nose, but you won't
be shivery cold. It's hard and dry, you know."

"I guess I'm a summer child. I don't like any cold I've ever seen."

She broke off and they were both silent for a minute.

"Sally Carrol," he said very slowly, "what do you say to —
March?"

"I say I love you."

"March?"

"March, Harry."

Ill

All night in the Pullman it was very cold. She rang for the porter
to ask for another blanket, and when he couldn't give her one she
tried vainly, by squeezing down into the bottom of her berth and
doubling back the bedclothes, to snatch a few hours' sleep. She
wanted to look her best in the morning.

She rose at six and sliding uncomfortably into her clothes stumbled
up to the diner for a cup of coffee. The snow had filtered into the
vestibules and covered the floor with a slippery coating. It was in-
triguing, this cold, it crept in everywhere. Her breath was quite visible
and she blew into the air with a nai've enjoyment. Seated in the
diner she stared out the window at white hills and valleys and
scattered pines whose every branch was a green platter for a cold
feast of snow. Sometimes a solitary farmhouse would fly by, ugly
and bleak and lone on the white waste ; and with each one she had

68 The Ice Palace

an instant of chill compassion for the souls shut in there waiting
for spring.

As she left the diner and swayed back into the Pullman she experi-
enced a surging rush of energy and wondered if she was feeling the
bracing air of which Harry had spoken. This was the North, the
North — her land now!

"Then blow, ye winds, heigho!
A-roving I will go,"

she chanted exultantly to herself.

"What's 'at?" inquired the porter politely.

"I said: 'Brush me off.'"

The long wires of the telegraph-poles doubled ; two tracks ran up
beside the train — three — four; came a succession of white-roofed
houses, a glimpse of a trolley-car with frosted windows, streets —
more streets — the city.

She stood for a dazed moment in the frosty station before she saw
three fur-bundled figures descending upon her.

"There she is!"

"Oh, Sally Carrol!"

Sally Carrol dropped her bag.

"Hi!"

A faintly familiar icy-cold face kissed her, and then she was in a
group of faces all apparently emitting great clouds of heavy smoke ;
she was shaking hands. There were Gordon, a short, eager man of
thirty who looked like an amateur knocked-about model for Harry,
and his wife, Myra, a listless lady with flaxen hair under a fur auto-
mobile cap. Almost immediately Sally Carrol thought of her as
vaguely Scandinavian. A cheerful chauffeur adopted her bag, and
amid ricochets of half-phrases, exclamations, and perfunctory list-
less "my dears" from Myra, they swept each other from the
station.

Then they were in a sedan bound through a crooked succession of
snowy streets where dozens of little boys were hitching sleds behind
grocery wagons and automobiles.

"Oh," cried Sally Carrol, "I want to do that! Can we, Harry?"

"That's for kids. But we might "

"It looks like such a circus!" she said regretfully.

Home was a rambling frame house set on a white lap of snow, and
there she met a big, gray-haired man of whom she approved, and a
lady who was like an egg, and who kissed her — these were Harry's
parents. There was a breathless indescribable hour crammed full of
half-sentences, hot water, bacon and eggs and confusion ; and after

The Ice Palace 69

that she was alone with Harry in the library, asking him if she dared
smoke.

It was a large room with a Madonna over the fireplace and rows
upon rows of books in covers of light gold and dark gold and shiny
red. All the chairs had little lace squares where one's head should
rest, the couch was just comfortable, the books looked as if they
had been read — some — and Sally Carrol had an instantaneous vision
of the battered old library at home, with her father's huge medical
books, and the oil-paintings of her three great-uncles, and the old
couch that had been mended up for forty-five years and was still
luxurious to dream in. This room struck her as being neither attrac-
tive nor particularly otherwise. It was simply a room with a lot of
fairly expensive things in it that all looked about fifteen years old.

"What do you think of it up here?" demanded Harry eagerly.
"Does it surprise you? Is it what you expected, I mean?"

"You are, Harry," she said quietly, and reached out her arms to
him.

But after a brief kiss he seemed anxious to extort enthusiasm from
her.

"The town, I mean. Do you like it? Can you feel the pep in the
air?"

"Oh, Harry," she laughed, "you'll have to give me time. You can't
just fling questions at me."

She puffed at her cigarette with a sigh of contentment.

"One thing I want to ask you," he began rather apologetically;
"you Southerners put quite an emphasis on family, and all that —
not that it isn't quite all right, but you'll find it a little different
here. I mean — you'll notice a lot of things that'll seem to you sort of
vulgar display at first, Sally Carrol ; but just remember that this is
a three-generation town. Everybody has a father, and about half
of us have grandfathers. Back of that we don't go."

"Of course," she murmured.

"Our grandfathers, you see, founded the place, and a lot of them
had to take some pretty queer jobs while they were doing the found-
ing. For instance, there's one woman who at present is about the
social model for the town ; well, her father was the first public ash
man — things like that."

"Why," said Sally Carrol, puzzled, "did you s'pose I was goin' to
make remarks about people?"

"Not at all," interrupted Harry; "and I'm not apologizing for any
one either. It's just that — well, a Southern girl came up here last
summer and said some unfortunate things, and — oh, I just thbught
I'd tell you."

Sally Carrol felt suddenly indignant — as though she had been un-

70 The Ice Palace

justly spanked — but Harry evidently considered the subject closed,
for he went on with a great surge of enthusiasm.

"It's carnival time, you know. First in ten years. And there's an
ice palace they're building now that's the first they've had since
eighty-five. Built out of blocks of the clearest ice they could find — on
a tremendous scale."

She rose and walking to the window pushed aside the heavy
Turkish portieres and looked out.

"Oh ! " she cried suddenly. "There's two little boys makin' a snow
man! Harry, do you reckon I can go out an' help 'em?"

"You dream ! Come here and kiss me."

She left the window rather reluctantly.

"I don't guess this is a very kissable climate, is it? I mean, it
makes you so you don't want to sit round, doesn't it?"

"We're not going to. I've got a vacation for the first week you're
here, and there's a dinner-dance to-night."

"Oh, Harry," she confessed, subsiding in a heap, half in his lap,
half in the pillows, "I sure do feel confused. I haven't got an idea
whether I'll like it or not, an' I don't know what people expect, or
anythin'. You'll have to tell me, honey."

"I'll tell you," he said softly, "if you'll just tell me you're glad to
be here."

"Glad — just awful glad ! " she whispered, insinuating herself into
his arms in her own peculiar way. "Where you are is home for me,
Harry."

And as she said this she had the feeling for almost the first time in
her life that she was acting a part.

That night, amid the gleaming candles of a dinner-party, where
the men seemed to do most of the talking while the girls sat in a
haughty and expensive aloofness, even Harry's presence on her left
failed to make her feel at home.

"They're a good-looking crowd, don't you think?" he demanded.
"Just look round. There's Spud Hubbard, tackle at Princeton last
year, and Junie Morton — he and the red-haired fellow next to him
were both Yale hockey captains ; Junie was in my class. Why, the
best athletes in the world come from these States round here. This is
a man's country, I tell you. Look at John J. Fishburn ! "

"Who's he?" asked Sally Carrol innocently.

"Don't you know?"

"I've heard the name."

"Greatest wheat man in the Northwest, and one of the greatest
financiers in the country."

She turned suddenly to a voice on her right.

"I guess they forgot to introduce us. My name's Roger Patton."

The Ice Palace 71

"My name is Sally Carrol Happer," she said graciously.

"Yes, I know. Harry told me you were coming."

"You a relative?"

"No, I'm a professor."

"Oh," she laughed.

"At the university. You're from the South, aren't you?"

"Yes ; Tarleton, Georgia."

She liked him immediately — a reddish-brown mustache under
watery blue eyes that had something in them that these other eyes
lacked, some quality of appreciation. They exchanged stray sen-
tences through dinner, and she made up her mind to see him again.

After coffee she was introduced to numerous good-looking young
men who danced with conscious precision and seemed to take it for
granted that she wanted to talk about nothing except Harry.

"Heavens," she thought, "they talk as if my being engaged made
me older than they are — as if I'd tell their mothers on them!"

In the South an engaged girl, even a young married woman, ex-
pected the same amount of half-affectionate badinage and flattery
that would be accorded a debutante, but here all that seemed banned.
One young man, after getting well started on the subject of Sally
Carrol's eyes, and how they had allured him ever since she entered
the room, went into a violent confusion when he found she was visit-
ing the Bellamys — was Harry's fiancee. He seemed to feel as though
he had made some risque and inexcusable blunder, became imme-
diately formal, and left her at the first opportunity.

She was rather glad when Roger Patton cut in on her and suggested
that they sit out a while.

"Well," he inquired, blinking cheerily, "how's Carmen from the
South?"

"Mighty fine. How's — how's Dangerous Dan McGrew? Sorry, but
he's the only Northerner I know much about."

He seemed to enjoy that.

"Of course," he confessed, "as a professor of literature I'm not
supposed to have read Dangerous Dan McGrew."

"Are you a native?"

"No, I'm a Philadelphian. Imported from Harvard to teach French.
But I've been here ten years."

"Nine years, three hundred an' sixty-four days longer than me."

"Like it here?"

"Uh-huh. Sure do!"

"Really?"

"Well, why not? Don't I look as if I were bavin' a good time?"

"I saw you look out the window a minute ago — and shiver."

"Just my imagination," laughed Sally Carrol. "I'm used to havin'

72 The Ice Palace

everythin' quiet outside, an' sometimes I look out an' see a flurry of
snow, an' it's just as if somethin' dead was movin'."

He nodded appreciatively.

"Ever been North before?"

"Spent two Julys in Asheville, North Carolina."

"Nice-looking crowd, aren't they?" suggested Patton, indicating
the swirling floor.

Sally Carrol started. This had been Harry's remark.

"Sure are ! They're — canine."

"What?"

She flushed.

"I'm sorry; that sounded worse than I meant it. You see I always
think of people as feline or canine, irrespective of sex."

"Which are you?"

"I'm feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an' most of
these girls here."

"What's Harry?"

"Harry's canine distinctly. All the men I've met to-night seem to be
canine."

"What does 'canine' imply? A certain conscious masculinity as
opposed to subtlety?"

"Reckon so. I never analyzed it — only I just look at people an'
say 'canine' or 'feline' right off. It's right absurd, I guess."

"Not at all. I'm interested. I used to have a theory about these
people. I think they're freezing up."

"What?"

"I think they're growing like Swedes — Ibsenesque, you know. Very
gradually getting gloomy and melancholy. It's these long winters.
Ever read any Ibsen?"

She shook her head.

"Well, you find in his characters a certain brooding rigidity.
They're righteous, narrow, and cheerless, without infinite possibilities
for great sorrow or joy."

"Without smiles or tears?"

"Exactly. That's my theory. You see there are thousands of Swedes
up here. They come, I imagine, because the climate is very much like
their own, and there's been a gradual mingling. There're probably
not half a dozen here to-night, but — we've had four Swedish gover-
nors. Am I boring you?"

"I'm mighty interested."

"Your future sister-in-law is half Swedish. Personally I like her,
but my theory is that Swedes react rather badly on us as a whole.
Scandinavians, you know, have the largest suicide rate in the world."

"Why do you live here if it's so depressing?"

The Ice Palace 73

"Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose
books mean more than people to me anyway."

"But writers all speak about the South being tragic. You know —
Spanish seiioritas, black hair and daggers an' haunting music."

He shook his head.

"No, the Northern races are the tragic races — they don't indulge
in the cheering luxury of tears."

Sally Carrol thought of her graveyard. She supposed that that was
vaguely what she had meant when she said it didn't depress her.

"The Italians are about the gayest people in the world — but it's a
dull subject," he broke off. "Anyway, I want to tell you you're mar-
rying a pretty fine man."

Sally Carrol was moved by an impulse of confidence.

"I know. I'm the sort of person who wants to be taken care of
after a certain point, and I feel sure I will be."

"Shall we dance? You know," he continued as they rose, "it's
encouraging to find a girl who knows what she's marrying for. Nine-
tenths of them think of it as a sort of walking into a moving-picture
sunset."

She laughed, and liked him immensely.

Two hours later on the way home she nestled near Harry in the
back seat.

"Oh, Harry," she whispered, "it's so co-old!"

"But it's warm in here, darling girl."

"But outside it's cold ; and oh, that howling wind ! "

She buried her face deep in his fur coat and trembled involuntarily
as his cold lips kissed the tip of her ear.

The first week of her visit passed in a whirl. She had her promised
toboggan-ride at the back of an automobile through a chill January
twilight. Swathed in furs she put in a morning tobogganing on the
country-club hill; even tried skiing, to sail through the air for a
glorious moment and then land in a tangled laughing bundle on a soft
snowdrift. She liked all the winter sports, except an afternoon spent
snow-shoeing over a glaring plain under pale yellow sunshine, but she
soon realized that these things were for children — that she was being
humored and that the enjoyment round her was only a reflection of
her own.

At first the Bellamy family puzzled her. The men were reliable
and she liked them; to Mr. Bellamy especially, with his iron-gray
hair and energetic dignity, she took an immediate fancy, once she
found that he was born in Kentucky ; this made of him a link between

74 The Ice Palace

the old life and the new. But toward the women she felt a definite
hostility. Myra, her future sister-in-law, seemed the essence of spirit-
less conventionality. Her conversation was so utterly devoid of per-
sonality that Sally Carrol, who came from a country where a certain
amount of charm and assurance could be taken for granted in the
women, was inclined to despise her.

"If those women aren't beautiful," she thought, "they're nothing.
They just fade out when you look at them. They're glorified domes-
tics. Men are the centre of every mixed group."

Lastly there was Mrs. Bellamy, whom Sally Carrol detested. The
first day's impression of an egg had been confirmed — an egg with a
cracked, veiny voice and such an ungracious dumpiness of carriage
that Sally Carrol felt that if she once fell she would surely scramble.
In addition, Mrs. Bellamy seemed to typify the town in being in-
nately hostile to strangers. She called Sally Carrol "Sally," and
could not be persuaded that the double name was anything more
than a tedious ridiculous nickname. To Sally Carrol this shortening
of her name was like presenting her to the public half clothed. She
loved "Sally Carrol"; she loathed "Sally." She knew also that
Harry's mother disapproved of her bobbed hair ; and she had never
dared smoke down-stairs after that first day when Mrs. Bellamy had
come into the library sniffing violently.

Of all the men she met she preferred Roger Patton, who was a
frequent visitor at the house. He never again alluded to the Ibsen-
esque tendency of the populace, but when he came in one day and
found her curled upon the sofa bent over "Peer Gynt" he laughed
and told her to forget what he'd said — that it was all rot.

And then one afternoon in her second week she and Harry hovered
on the edge of a dangerously steep quarrel. She considered that he
precipitated it entirely, though the Serbia in the case was an un-
known man who had not had his trousers pressed.

They had been walking homeward between mounds of high-piled
snow and under a sun which Sally Carrol scarcely recognized. They
passed a little girl done up in gray wool until she resembled a small
Teddy bear, and Sally Carrol could not resist a gasp of maternal
appreciation.

"Look! Harry!"

"What?"

"That little girl— did you see her face?"

"Yes, why?"

"It was red as a little strawberry. Oh, she was cute ! "

"Why, your own face is almost as red as that already! Every-
body^ healthy here. We're out in the cold as soon as we're old
enough to walk. Wonderful climate ! "

The Ice Palace 75

She looked at him and had to agree. He was mighty healthy-look-
ing ; so was his brother. And she had noticed the new red in her own
cheeks that very morning.

Suddenly their glances were caught and held, and they stared for
a moment at the street-corner ahead of them. A man was standing
there, his knees bent, his eyes gazing upward with a tense expression
as though he were about to make a leap toward the chilly sky. And
then they both exploded into a shout of laughter, for coming closer
they discovered it had been a ludicrous momentary illusion produced
by the extreme bagginess of the man's trousers.

"Reckon that's one on us," she laughed.

"He must be a Southerner, judging by those trousers," suggested
Harry mischievously.

"Why, Harry!"

Her surprised look must have irritated him.

"Those damn Southerners ! "

Sally Carrol's eyes flashed.

"Don't call 'em that!"

"I'm sorry, dear," said Harry, malignantly apologetic, "but you
know what I think of them. They're sort of — sort of degenerates —
not at all like the old Southerners. They've lived so long down
there with all the colored people that they've gotten lazy and shift-
less."

"Hush your mouth, Harry I " she cried angrily. "They're not ! They
may be lazy — anybody would be in that climate — but they're my
best friends, an' I don't want to hear 'em criticised in any such
aweepin' way. Some of Jem are the finest men in the world."

"Oh, I know. They're all right when they come North to college,
but of all the hangdog, ill-dressed, slovenly lot I ever saw, a bunch
of small-town Southerners are the worst ! "

Sally Carrol was clinching her gloved hands and biting her lip
furiously.

"Why," continued Harry, "there was one in my class at New
Haven, and we all thought that at last we'd found the true type of
Southern aristocrat, but it turned out that he wasn't an aristocrat
at all — just the son of a Northern carpetbagger, who owned about
all the cotton round Mobile."

"A Southerner wouldn't talk the way you're talking now," she said
evenly.

"They haven't the energy I "

"Or the somethin' else."

"I'm sorry, Sally Carrol, but I've heard you say yourself that
you'd never marry "

"That's quite different. I told you I wouldn't want to tie my life

76 The Ice Palace

to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made
any sweepin' generalities."

They walked along in silence.

"I probably spread it on a bit thick, Sally Carrol. I'm sorry."

She nodded but made no answer. Five minutes later as they stood
in the hallway she suddenly threw her arms round him.

"Oh, Harry," she cried, her eyes brimming with tears, "let's get
married next week. I'm afraid of having fusses like that. I'm afraid,
Harry. It wouldn't be that way if we were married."

But Harry, being in the wrong, was still irritated.

"That'd be idiotic. We decided on March."

The tears in Sally Carrol's eyes faded ; her expression hardened
slightly.

"Very well — I suppose I shouldn't have said that."

Harry melted.

"Dear little nut!" he cried. "Come and kiss me and let's forget."

That very night at the end of a vaudeville performance the orches-
tra played "Dixie" and Sally Carrol felt something stronger and
more enduring than her tears and smiles of the day brim up inside
her. She leaned forward gripping the arms of her chair until her
face grew crimson.

"Sort of get you, dear?" whispered Harry.

But she did not hear him. To the spirited throb of the violins and
the inspiring beat of the kettledrums her own old ghosts were march-
ing by and on into the darkness, and as fifes whistled and sighed
in the low encore they seemed so nearly out of sight that she could
have waved good-by.

"Away, away,

Away down South in Dixie !
Away, away,
Away down South in Dixie ! "

It was a particularly cold night. A sudden thaw had nearly cleared
the streets the day before, but now they were traversed again with a
powdery wraith of loose snow that travelled in wavy lines before the
feet of the wind, and filled the lower air with a fine-particled mist.
There was no sky — only a dark, ominous tent that draped in the
tops of the streets and was in reality a vast approaching army of
snowflakes — while over it all, chilling away the comfort from the
brown-and-green glow of lighted windows and muffling the steady

The Ice Palace 77

trot of the horse pulling their sleigh, interminably washed the north
wind. It was a dismal town after all, she thought — dismal.

Sometimes at night it had seemed to her as though no one lived
here — they had all gone long ago — leaving lighted houses to be cov-
ered in time by tombing heaps of sleet. Oh, if there should be snow
on her grave ! To be beneath great piles of it all winter long, where
even her headstone would be a light shadow against light shadows.
Her grave—a grave that should be flower-strewn and washed with
sun and rain.

She thought again of those isolated country houses that her train
had passed, and of the life there the long winter through — the cease-
less glare through the windows, the crust forming on the soft drifts
of snow, finally the slow, cheerless melting, and the harsh spring of
which Roger Patton had told her. Her spring — to lose it forever —
with its lilacs and the lazy sweetness it stirred in her heart. She was
laying away that spring — afterward she would lay away that sweet-
ness.

With a gradual insistence the storm broke. Sally Carrol felt a film
of flakes melt quickly on her eyelashes, and Harry reached over a
furry arm and drew down her complicated flannel cap. Then the
small flakes came in skirmish-line, and the horse bent his neck
patiently as a transparency of white appeared momentarily on his
coat.

"Oh, he's cold, Harry," she said quickly.

"Who? The horse? Oh, no, he isn't. He likes it!"

After another ten minutes they turned a corner and came in sight
of their destination. On a tall hill outlined in vivid glaring green
against the wintry sky stood the ice palace. It was three stories in
the air, with battlements and embrasures and narrow icicled windows,
and the innumerable electric lights inside made a gorgeous trans-
parency of the great central hall. Sally Carrol clutched Harry's hand
under the fur robe.

"It's beautiful!" he cried excitedly. "My golly, it's beautiful,
isn't it ! They haven't had one here since eighty-five ! "

Somehow the notion of there not having been one since eighty-five
oppressed her. Ice was a ghost, and this mansion of it was surely peo-
pled by those shades of the eighties, with pale faces and blurred
snow-filled hair.

"Come on, dear," said Harry.

She followed him out of the sleigh and waited while he hitched the
horse. A party of four — Gordon, Myra, Roger Patton, and another
girl — drew up beside them with a mighty jingle of bells. There were
quite a crowd already, bundled in fur or sheepskin, shouting and
calling to each other as they moved through the snow, which was

78 The Ice Palace

now so thick that people could scarcely be distinguished a few yards
away.

"It's a hundred and seventy feet tall," Harry was saying to a
muffled figure beside him as they trudged toward the entrance;
"covers six thousand square yards."

She caught snatches of conversation: "One main hall" — "walls
twenty to forty inches thick" — "and the ice cave has almost a mile
of— "—"this Canuck who built it "

They found their way inside, and dazed by the magic of the great
crystal walls Sally Carrol found herself repeating over and over
two lines from "Kubla Khan":

"It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice ! "

In the great glittering cavern with the dark shut out she took a
seat on a wooden bench, and the evening's oppression lifted. Harry
was right — it was beautiful ; and her gaze travelled the smooth sur-
face of the walls, the blocks for which had been selected for their
purity and clearness to obtain this opalescent, translucent effect.

"Look ! Here we go — oh, boy 1 " cried Harry.

A band in a far corner struck up "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here ! "
which echoed over to them in wild muddled acoustics, and then the
lights suddenly went out ; silence seemed to flow down the icy sides
and sweep over them. Sally Carrol could still see her white breath
in the darkness, and a dim row of pale faces over on the other side.

The music eased to a sighing complaint, and from outside drifted
in the full-throated resonant chant of the marching clubs. It grew
louder like some paean of a viking tribe traversing an ancient wild ; it
swelled — they were coming nearer ; then a row of torches appeared,
and another and another, and keeping time with their moccasined
feet a long column of gray-mackinawed figures swept in, snowshoes
slung at their shoulders, torches soaring and flickering as their voices
rose along the great walls.

The gray column ended and another followed, the light streaming
luridly this time over red toboggan caps and flaming crimson
mackinaws, and as they entered they took up the refrain ; then came
a long platoon of blue and white, of green, of white, of brown and
yellow.

"Those white ones are the Wacouta Club," whispered Harry
eagerly. "Those are the men youVe met round at dances."

The volume of the voices grew ; the great cavern was a phantas-
magoria of torches waving in great banks of fire, of colors and the
rhythm of soft-leather steps. The leading column turned and halted,

The Ice Palace 79

platoon deployed in front of platoon until the whole procession
made a solid flag of flame, and then from thousands of voices burst
a mighty shout that filled the air like a crash of thunder, and sent
the torches wavering. It was magnificent, it was tremendous! To
Sally Carrol it was the North offering sacrifice on some mighty altar
to the gray pagan God of Snow. As the shout died the band struck up
again and there came more singing, and then long reverberating
cheers by each club. She sat very quiet listening while the staccato
cries rent the stillness ; and then she started, for there was a volley
of explosion, and great clouds of smoke went up here and there
through the cavern — the flash-light photographers at work — and the
council was over. With the band at their head the clubs formed
in column once more, took up their chant, and began to march
out.

"Come on ! " shouted Harry. "We want to see the labyrinths down-
stairs before they turn the lights off ! "

They all rose and started toward the chute — Harry and Sally
Carrol in the lead, her little mitten buried in his big fur gantlet. At
the bottom of the chute was a long empty room of ice, with the ceil-
ing so low that they had to stoop — and their hands were parted. Be-
fore she realized what he intended Harry had darted down one of
the half-dozen glittering passages that opened into the room and was
only a vague receding blot against the green shimmer.

"Harry! "she called.

"Come on ! " he cried back.

She looked round the empty chamber ; the rest of the party had
evidently decided to go home, were already outside somewhere in the
blundering snow. She hesitated and then darted in after Harry.

"Harry!" she shouted.

She had reached a turning-point thirty feet down; she heard a
faint muffled answer far to the left, and with a touch of panic fled
toward it. She passed another turning, two more yawning alleys.

"Harry!"

No answer. She started to run straight forward, and then turned
like lightning and sped back the way she had come, enveloped in a
sudden icy terror.

She reached a turn — was it here ? — took the left and came to what
should have been the outlet into the long, low room, but it was only
another glittering passage with darkness at the end. She called again
but the walls gave back a flat, lifeless echo with no reverberations.
Retracing her steps she turned another corner, this time following
a wide passage. It was like the green lane between the parted waters
of the Red Sea, like a damp vault connecting empty tombs.

She slipped a little now as she walked, for ice had formed ou tif

8o The Ice Palace

bottom of her overshoes ; she had to run her gloves along the half-
slippery, half-sticky walls to keep her balance.

"Harry!"

Still no answer. The sound she made bounced mockingly down to
the end of the passage.

Then on an instant the lights went out, and she was in complete
darkness. She gave a small, frightened cry, and sank down into a
cold little heap on the ice. She felt her left knee do something as she
fell, but she scarcely noticed it as some deep terror far greater than
any fear of being lost settled upon her. She was alone with this
presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose
from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless
wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure. It was
an icy breath of death ; it was rolling down low across the land to
clutch at her.

With a furious, despairing energy she rose again and started
blindly down the darkness. She must get out. She might be lost in
here for days, freeze to death and lie embedded in the ice like corpses
she had read of, kept perfectly preserved until the melting of a
glacier. Harry probably thought she had left with the others — he had
gone by now ; no one would know until late next day. She reached
pitifully for the wall. Forty inches thick, they had said — forty inches
thick !

"Oh!"

On both sides of her along the walls she felt things creeping, damp
souls that haunted this palace, this town, this North.

"Oh, send somebody — send somebody ! " she cried aloud.

Clark Darrow — he would understand ; or Joe Ewing ; she couldn't
be left here to wander forever — to be frozen, heart, body, and soul.
This her — this Sally Carrol ! Why, she was a happy thing. She was
a happy little girl. She liked warmth and summer and Dixie. These
things were foreign — foreign.

"You're not crying," something said aloud. "You'll never cry any
more. Your tears would just freeze ; all tears freeze up here ! "

She sprawled full length on the ice.

"Oh, God .'"she faltered.

A long single file of minutes went by, and with a great weariness
she felt her eyes closing. Then some one seemed to sit down near her
and take her face in warm, soft hands. She looked up gratefully.

"Why, it's Margery Lee," she crooned softly to herself. "I knew
you'd come." It really was Margery Lee, and she was just as Sally
Carrol had known she would be, with a young, white brow, and
wide, welcoming eyes, and a hoop-skirt of some soft material that
was quite comforting to rest on.

The Ice Palace 81

"Margery Lee."

It was getting darker now and darker — all those tombstones ought
to be repainted, sure enough, only that would spoil 'em, of course.
Still, you ought to be able to see 'em.

Then after a succession of moments that went fast and then slow,
but seemed to be ultimately resolving themselves into a multitude
of blurred rays converging toward a pale-yellow sun, she heard a
great cracking noise break her new-found stillness.

It was the sun, it was a light ; a torch, and a torch beyond that,
and another one, and voices ; a face took flesh below the torch, heavy
-arms raised her, and she felt something on her cheek — it felt wet.
Some one had seized her and was rubbing her face with snow. How
ridiculous — with snow 1

"Sally Carrol ! Sally Carrol ! "

It was Dangerous Dan McGrew ; and two other faces she didn't
know.

"Child, child ! We've been looking for you two hours ! Harry's half-
trazy ! "

Things came rushing back into place — the singing, the torches, the
great shout of the marching clubs. She squirmed in Patton's arms
and gave a long low cry.

"Oh, I want to get out of here! I'm going back home. Take me
home" — her voice rose to a scream that sent a chill to Harry's heart
as he came racing down the next passage — "to-morrow ! " she cried
with delirious, unrestrained passion — "To-morrow ! To-morrow !
To-morrow ! "

The wealth of golden sunlight poured a quite enervating yet
oddly comforting heat over the house where day long it faced the
dusty stretch of road. Two birds were making a great to-do in a cool
spot found among the branches of a tree next door, and down the
street a colored woman was announcing herself melodiously as a pur-
veyor of strawberries. It was April afternoon.

Sally Carrol Happer, resting her chin on her arm, and her arm on
an old window-seat gazed sleepily down over the spangled dust
whence the heat waves were rising for the first time this spring. She
was watching a very ancient Ford turn a perilous corner .and rattle
and groan to a jolting stop at the end of the walk. She made no
sound, and in a minute a strident familiar whistle rent the air. Sally
Carrol smiled and blinked.

"Good mawninV

A head appeared tortuously from under the car-top below.

82 The Ice Palace

"Tain't mawnin', Sally Carrol."

"Sure enough!" she said in affected surprise. "I guess maybe not."

"What you doin'?"

"Eatin' green peach. 'Spect to die any minute."

Clark twisted himself a last impossible notch to get a view of her
face.

"Water's warm as a kettla steam, Sally Carrol. Wanta go swim-
min'?"

'Hate to move," sighed Sally Carrol lazily, "but I reckon so."
1920 Flappers and Philosophers

MAY DAY

THERE had been a war fought and won and the great city of the
conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with
thrown flowers of white, red, and rose. All through the long spring
days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind
the strump of drums and the joyous, resonant wind of the brasses,
while merchants and clerks left their bickerings and figurings and,
crowding to the windows, turned their white-bunched faces gravely
upon the passing battalions.

Never had there been such splendor in the great city, for the vic-
torious war had brought plenty in its train, and the merchants had
flocked thither from the South and West with their households to
taste of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments
prepared — and to buy for their women furs against the next winter
and bags of golden mesh and varicolored slippers of silk and silver
and rose satin and cloth of gold.

So gaily and noisily were the peace and prosperity impending
hymned by the scribes and poets of the conquering people that more
and more spenders had gathered from the provinces to drink the
wine of excitement, and faster and faster did the merchants dispose
of their trinkets and slippers until they sent up a mighty cry for
more trinkets and more slippers in order that they might give in
barter what was demanded of them. Some even of them flung up their
hands helplessly, shouting :

"Alas ! I have no more slippers 1 and alas ! I have no more trinkets I
May Heaven help me, for I know not what I shall do ! "

But no one listened to their great outcry, for the throngs were far
too busy — day by day, the foot-soldiers trod jauntily the highway
and all exulted because the young men returning were pure and
brave, sound of tooth and pink of cheek, and the young women of the
land were virgins and comely both of face and of figure.

So during all this time there were many adventures that happened
in the great city, and, of these, several — or perhaps one — are here
set down.

84 May Day

At nine o'clock on the morning of the first of May, 1919, a young
man spoke to the room clerk at the Biltmore Hotel, asking if Mr,
Philip Dean were registered there, and if so, could he be connected
with Mr. Dean's rooms. The inquirer was dressed in a well-cutf
shabby suit. He was small, slender, and darkly handsome ; his eyes
were framed above with unusually long eyelashes and below with the:
blue semicircle of ill health, this latter effect heightened by an un-
natural glow which colored his face like a low, incessant fever.

Mr. Dean was staying there. The young man was directed to a
telephone at the side.

After a second his connection was made; a sleepy voice hello'd
from somewhere above.

"Mr. Dean?" — this very eagerly — "it's Gordon, Phil. It's Gordon
Sterrett. I'm down-stairs. I heard you were in New York and I had
a hunch you'd be here."

The sleepy voice became gradually enthusiastic. Well, how was
Gordy, old boy ! Well, he certainly was surprised and tickled ! Would
Gordy come right up, for Pete's sake !

A few minutes later Philip Dean, dressed in blue silk pajamas,
opened his door and the two young men greeted each other with a
half-embarrassed exuberance. They were both about twenty-four,
Yale graduates of the year before the war ; but there the resemblance
stopped abruptly. Dean was blond, ruddy, and rugged under his thin
pajamas. Everything about him radiated fitness and bodily comfort.
He smiled frequently, showing large and prominent teeth.

"I was going to look you up," he cried enthusiastically. "I'm tak-
ing a couple of weeks off. If you'll sit down a sec I'll be right with
you. Going to take a shower."

As he vanished into the bathroom his visitor's dark eyes roved
nervously around the room, resting for a moment on a great English
travelling bag in the corner and on a family of thick silk shirts lit-
tered on the chairs amid impressive neckties and soft woollen socks.

Gordon rose and, picking up one of the shirts, gave it a minute
examination. It was of very heavy silk, yellow with a pale blue
stripe — and there were nearly a dozen of them. He stared involun-
tarily at his own shirt-cuffs — they were ragged and linty at the edges
and soiled to a faint gray. Dropping the silk shirt, he held his coat-
sleeves down and worked the frayed shirt-cuffs up till they were out
of sight. Then he went to the mirror and looked at himself with list-
less, unhappy interest. His tie, of former glory, was faded and
thumb-creased — it served no longer to hide the jagged buttonholes of

May Day 85

his collar. He thought, quite without amusement, that only three
years before he had received a scattering vote in the senior elections
at college for being the best-dressed man in his class.

Dean emerged from the bathroom polishing his body.

"Saw an old friend of yours last night," he remarked.

"Passed her in the lobby and couldn't think of her name to save my
neck. That girl you brought up to New Haven senior year."

Gordon started.

"Edith Bradin? That whom you mean?"

" 'At's the one. Damn good looking. She's still sort of a pretty
doll — you know what I mean : as if you touched her she'd smear."

He surveyed his shining self complacently in the mirror, smiled
faintly, exposing a section of teeth.

"She must be twenty-three anyway," he continued.

"Twenty-two last month," said Gordon absently.

"What ? Oh, last month. Well, I imagine she's down for the Gamma
Psi dance. Did you know we're having a Yale Gamma Psi dance
to-night at Delmonico's? You better come up, Gordy. Half of New
Haven'll probably be there. I can get you an ;r-'xation."

Draping himself reluctantly in fresh underwear, Dean lit a ciga-
rette and sat down by the open window, inspecting his calves and
knees under the morning sunshine which poured into the room.

"Sit down, Gordy," he suggested, "and tell me all about what
you've been doing and what you're doing now and everything."

Gordon collapsed unexpectedly upon the bed ; lay there inert and
spiritless. His mouth, which habitually dropped a little open when
his face was in repose, became suddenly helpless and pathetic.

"What's the matter?" asked Dean quickly.

"Oh, God!"

"What's the matter?"

"Every God damn thing in the world," he said miserably. "I've
absolutely gone to pieces, Phil. I'm all in."

"Huh?"

"I'm all in." His voice was shaking.

Dean scrutinized him more closely with appraising blue eyes.

"You certainly look all shot."

"I am. I've made a hell of mess of everything." He paused. "I'd
better start at the beginning — or will it bore you?"

"Not at all ; go on." There was, however, a hesitant note in Dean's
voice. This trip East had been planned for a holiday — to find Gordon
Sterrett in trouble exasperated him a little.

"Go on," he repeated, and then added half under his breath, "Get
it over with."

"Weil," began Gordon unsteadily, "I got back from France in

86 May Day

February, went home to Harrisburg for a month, and then came
down to New York to get a job. I got one — with an export company.
They fired me yesterday."

"Fired you?"

"I'm coming to that, Phil. I want to tell you frankly. You're about
the only man I can turn to in a matter like this. You won't mind if
I just tell you frankly, will you, Phil?"

Dean stiffened a bit more. The pats he was bestowing on his knees
grew perfunctory. He felt vaguely that he was being unfairly saddled
with responsibility; he was not even sure he wanted to be told.
Though never surprised at finding Gordon Sterrett in mild difficulty,
there was something in this present misery that repelled him and
hardened him, even though it excited his curiosity.

"Go on."

"It's a girl."

"Hm." Dean resolved that nothing was going to spoil his trip. If
Gordon was going to be depressing, then he'd have to see less of
Gordon.

"Her name is Jewel Hudson," went on the distressed voice from
the bed. "She used to be 'pure/ I guess, up to about a year ago. Lived
here in New York — poor family. Her people are dead now and she
lives with an old aunt. You see it was just about the time I met her
that everybody began to come back from France in droves — and all
I did was to welcome the newly arrived and go on parties with 'em.
That's the way it started, Phil, just from being glad to see everybody
and having them glad to see me."

"You ought to've had more sense."

"I know," Gordon paused, and then continued listlessly. "I'm on
my own now, you know, and Phil, I can't stand being poor. Then
came this darn girl. She sort of fell in love with me for a while and,
though I never intended to get so involved, I'd always seem to run
into her somewhere. You can imagine the sort of work I was doing for
those exporting people — of course, I always intended to draw; do
illustrating for magazines ; there's a pile of money in it."

"Why didn't you ? You've got to buckle down if you want to make
good," suggested Dean with cold formalism.

"I tried, a little, but my stuff's crude. I've got talent, Phil ; I can
draw — but I just don't know how. I ought to go to art school and I
can't afford it. Well, things came to a crisis about a week ago. Just
as I was down to about my last dollar this girl began bothering me.
She wants some money ; claims she can make trouble for me if she
doesn't get it."

"Can she?"

"I'm afraid she can. That's one reason I lost my job — she kept

May Day 87

calling up the office all the time, and that was sort of the last straw
down there. She's got a letter all written to send to my family. Oh,
she's got me, all right. I've got to have some money for her."

There was an awkward pause. Gordon lay very still, his hands
clenched by his side.

"I'm all in," he continued, his voice trembling. "I'm half crazy,
Phil. If I hadn't known you were coming East, I think I'd have
killed myself. I want you to lend me three hundred dollars."

Dean's hands, which had been patting his bare ankles, were sud-
denly quiet — and the curious uncertainty playing between the two
became taut and strained.

After a second Gordon continued :

"I've bled the family until I'm ashamed to ask for another nickel."

Still Dean made no answer.

"Jewel says she's got to have two hundred dollars."

"Tell her where she can go."

"Yes, that sounds easy, but she's got a couple of drunken letters I
wrote her. Unfortunately she's not at all the flabby sort of person
you'd expect."

Dean made an expression of distaste.

"I can't stand that sort of woman. You ought to have kept away."

"I know," admitted Gordon wearily.

"You've got to look at things as they are. If you haven't got money
you've got to work and stay away from women."

"That's easy for you to say," began Gordon, his eyes narrowing.
"You've got all the money in the world."

"I most certainly have not. My family keep darn close tab on what
I spend. Just because I have a little leeway I have to be extra care-
ful not to abuse it."

He raised the blind and let in a further flood of sunshine.

"I'm no prig, Lord knows," he went on deliberately. "I like
pleasure — and I like a lot of it on a vacation like thisr but you're —
you're in awful shape. I never heard you talk just this way before.
You seem to be sort of bankrupt — morally as well as financially."

"Don't they usually go together?"

Dean shook his head impatiently.

"There's a regular aura about you that I don't understand. It's a
sort of evil."

"It's an air of worry and poverty and sleepless nights," said Gor-
don, rather defiantly.

"I don't know."

"Oh, I admit I'm depressing. I depress myself. But, my God, Phil,
a week's rest and a new suit and some ready money and I'd be like —
like I was. Phil, I can draw like a streak, and you know it. But half

88 May Day

the time I haven't had the money to buy decent drawing materials
— and I can't draw when I'm tired and discouraged and all in. With
a little ready money I can take a few weeks off and get started."

"How do I know you wouldn't use it on some other woman?"

"Why rub it in?" said Gordon quietly.

"I'm not rubbing it in. I hate to see you this way."

"Will you lend me the money, Phil?"

"I can't decide right off. That's a lot of money and it'll be darn
inconvenient for me."

"It'll be hell for me if you can't — I know I'm whining, and it's all
my own fault but — that doesn't change it."

"When could you pay it back?"

This was encouraging. Gordon considered. It was probably wisest
to be frank.

"Of course, I could promise to send it back next month, but — I'd
better say three months. Just as soon as I start to sell drawings."

"How do I know you'll sell any drawings?"

A new hardness in Dean's voice sent a faint chill of doubt over
Gordon. Was it possible that he wouldn't get the money?

"I supposed you had a little confidence in me."

"I did have — but when I see you like this I begin to wonder."

"Do you suppose if I wasn't at the end of my rope I'd come to
you like this? Do you think I'm enjoying it?" He broke off and bit
his lip, feeling that he had better subdue the rising anger in his voice.
After all, he was the suppliant.

"You seem to manage it pretty easily," said Dean angrily. "You
put me in the position where, if I don't lend it to you, I'm a sucker
— oh, yes, you do. And let me tell you it's no easy thing for me to get
hold of three hundred dollars. My income isn't so big but that a
slice like that won't play the deuce with it."

He left his chair and began to dress, choosing his clothes care-
fully. Gordon stretched out his arms and clenched the edges of the
bed, fighting back a desire to cry out. His head was splitting and
whirring, his mouth was dry and bitter and he could feel the fever
in his blood resolving itself into innumerable regular counts like a
slow dripping from a roof.

Dean tied his tie precisely, brushed his eyebrows, and removed a
piece of tobacco from his teeth with solemnity. Next he filled his
cigarette case, tossed the empty box thoughtfully into the waste
basket, and settled the case in his vest pocket.

"Had breakfast?" he demanded.

"No ; I don't eat it any more."

"Well, we'll go out and have some. We'll decide about that money
later. I'm sick of the subject. I came East to have a good time.

May Day 89

"Let's go over to the Yale Club," he continued moodily, and then
added with an implied reproof: "You've given up your job. You've
got nothing else to do."

"I'd have a lot to do if I had a little money," said Gordon
pointedly.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake drop the subject for a while ! No point in
glooming on my whole trip. Here, here's some money."

He took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and tossed it over to
Gordon, who folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. There was
an added spot of color in his cheeks, an added glow that was not
fever. For an instant before they turned to go out their eyes met and
in that instant each found something that made him lower his own
glance quickly. For in that instant they quite suddenly and definitely
hated each other.

Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street swarmed with the noon
crowd. The wealthy, happy sun glittered in transient gold through
the thick windows of the smart shops, lighting upon mesh bags and
purses and strings of pearls in gray velvet cases ; upon gaudy feather
fans of many colors ; upon the laces and silks of expensive dresses ;
upon the bad paintings and the fine period furniture in the elaborate
show rooms of interior decorators.

Working-girls, in pairs and groups and swarms, loitered by the
windows, choosing their future boudoirs from some resplendent dis-
play which included even a man's silk pajamas laid domestically
across the bed. They stood in front of the jewelry stores and picked
out their engagement rings, and their wedding rings and their plati-
num wrist watches, and then drifted on to inspect the feather fans
and opera cloaks ; meanwhile digesting the sandwiches and sundaes
they had eaten for lunch.

All through the crowd were men in uniform, sailors from the great
fleet anchored in the Hudson, soldiers with divisional insignia from
Massachusetts to California wanting fearfully to be noticed, and
finding the great city thoroughly fed up with soldiers unless they
were nicely massed into pretty formations and uncomfortable under
the weight of a pack and rifle.

Through this medley Dean and Gordon wandered; the former
interested, made alert by the display of humanity at its frothiest
and gaudiest ; the latter reminded of how often he had been one of
the crowd, tired, casually fed, overworked, and dissipated. To Dean
the struggle was significant, young, cheerful; to Gordon it was
dismal, meaningless, endless.

go May Day

In the Yale Club they met a group of their former classmates who
greeted the visiting Dean vociferously. Sitting in a semicircle of
lounges and great chairs, they had a highball all around.

Gordon found the conversation tiresome and interminable. They
lunched together en masse, warmed with liquor as the afternoon be-
gan. They were all going to the Gamma Psi dance that night — it
promised to be the best party since the war.

"Edith Bradin's coming," said some one to Gordon. "Didn't she
used to be an old flame of yours? Aren't you both from Harris-
burg?"

"Yes." He tried to change the subject. "I see her brother occa-
sionally. He's sort of a socialistic nut. Runs a paper or something
here in New York."

"Not like his gay sister, eh?" continued his eager informant.
"Well, she's coming to-night with a junior named Peter Himmell."

Gordon was to meet Jewel Hudson at eight o'clock — he had prom-
ised to have some money for her. Several times he glanced nervously
at his wrist watch. At four, to his relief, Dean rose and announced
that he was going over to Rivers Brothers to buy some collars and
ties. But as they left the Club another of the party joined them, to
Gordon's great dismay. Dean was in a jovial mood now, happy, ex-
pectant of the evening's party, faintly hilarious. Over in Rivers' he
chose a dozen neckties, selecting each one after long consultations
with the other man. Did he think narrow ties were coming back?
And wasn't it a shame that Rivers couldn't get any more Welsh
Margotson collars? There never was a collar like the "Covington."

Gordon was in something of a panic. He wanted the money imme-
diately. And he was now inspired also with a vague idea of attend-
ing the Gamma Psi dance. He wanted to see Edith — Edith whom he
hadn't met since one romantic night at the Harrisburg Country Club
just before he went to France. The affair had died, drowned in the
turmoil of the war and quite forgotten in the arabesque of these three
months, but a picture of her, poignant, debonnaire, immersed in her
own inconsequential chatter, recurred to him unexpectedly and
brought a hundred memories with it. It was Edith's face that he had
cherished through college with a sort of detached yet affectionate
admiration. He had loved to draw her — around his room had been a
dozen sketches of her — playing golf, swimming — he could draw her
pert, arresting profile with his eyes shut.

They left Rivers' at five-thirty and paused for a moment on the
sidewalk.

"Well," said Dean genially, "I'm all set now. Think I'll go back
to the hotel and get a shave, haircut, and massage."

"Good enough," said the other man, "I think I'll join you."

May Day 91

Gordon wondered if he was to be beaten after all. With difficulty
he restrained himself from turning to the man and snarling out, "Go
on away, damn you ! " In despair he suspected that perhaps Dean had
spoken to him, was keeping him along in order to avoid a dispute
about the money.

They went into the Biltmore — a Biltmore alive with girls — mostly
from the West and South, the stellar debutantes of many cities
gathered for the dance of a famous fraternity of a famous university.
But to Gordon they were faces in a dream. He gathered together his
forces for a last appeal, was about to come out with he knew not
what, when Dean suddenly excused himself to the other man and
taking Gordon's arm led him aside.

"Gordy," he said quickly, "I've thought the whole thing over care-
fully and I've decided that I can't lend you that money. I'd like to
oblige you, but I don't feel I ought to — it'd put a crimp in me for a
month."

Gordon, watching him dully, wondered why he had never before
noticed how much those upper teeth projected.

" — I'm mighty sorry, Gordon," continued Dean, "but that's the
way it is."

He took out his wallet and deliberately counted out seventy-five
dollars in bills.

"Here," he said, holding them out, "here's seventy-five ; that makes
eighty all together. That's all the actual cash I have with me, besides
what I'll actually spend on the trip."

Gordon raised his clenched hand automatically, opened it as though
it were a tongs he was holding, and clenched it again on the money.

"I'll see you at the dance," continued Dean. "I've got to get along
to the barber shop."

"So-long," said Gordon in a strained and husky voice.

"So-long."

Dean began to smile, but seemed to change his mind. He nodded
briskly and disappeared.

But Gordon stood there, his handsome face awry with distress, the
roll of bills clenched tightly in his hand. Then, blinded by sudden
tears, he stumbled clumsily down the Biltmore steps.

Ill

About nine o'clock of the same night two human beings came out
of a cheap restaurant in Sixth Avenue. They were ugly, ill-nourished,
devoid of all except the very lowest form of intelligence, and with-
out even that animal exuberance that in itself brings color into life ;
they were lately vermin-ridden, cold, and hungry in a dirty town of

92 May Day

a strange land ; they were poor, friendless ; tossed as driftwood from
their births, they would be tossed as driftwood to their deaths. They
were dressed in the uniform of the United States Army, and on the
shoulder of each was the insignia of a drafted division from New
Jersey, landed three days before.

The taller of the two was named Carrol Key, a name hinting that
in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration,
ran blood of some potentiality. But one could stare endlessly at the
long, chinless face, the dull, watery eyes, and high cheek-bones, with-
out finding a suggestion of either ancestral worth or native resource-
fulness.

His companion was swart and bandy-legged, with rat-eyes and a
much-broken hooked nose. His defiant air was obviously a pretense,
a weapon of protection borrowed from that world of snarl and snap,
of physical bluff and physical menace, in which he had always lived.
His name was Gus Rose.

Leaving the cafe they sauntered down Sixth Avenue, wielding
toothpicks with great gusto and complete detachment.

"Where to ?" asked Rose, in a tone which implied that he would not
be surprised if Key suggested the South Sea Islands.

"What you say we see if we can getta holda some liquor?" Pro-
hibition was not yet. The ginger in the suggestion was caused by the
law forbidding the selling of liquor to soldiers.

Rose agreed enthusiastically.

"I got an idea," continued Key, after a moment's thought, "I got a
brother somewhere."

"In New York?"

"Yeah. He's an old fella." He meant that he was an elder brother.
"He's a waiter in a hash joint."

"Maybe he can get us some."

"I'll say he can!"

"B'lieve me, I'm goin' to get this darn uniform off me to-morra.
Never get me in it again, neither. I'm goin' to get me some regular
clothes."

"Say, maybe I'm not."

As their combined finances were something less than five dollars,
this intention can be taken largely as a pleasant game of words, harm-
less and consoling. It seemed to please both of them, however, for
they reinforced it with chuckling and mention of personages high in
biblical circles, adding such further emphasis as "Oh, boy!" "You
know ! " and "I'll say so ! " repeated many times over.

The entire mental pabulum of these two men consisted of an
offended nasal comment extended through the years upon the institu^
tion — army, business, or poorhouse — which kept them alive, and

May Day 93

toward their immediate superior in that institution. Until that very
morning the institution had been the "government" and the immedi-
ate superior had been the "Cap'n" — from these two they had glided
out and were now in the vaguely uncomfortable state before they
should adopt their next bondage. They were uncertain, resentful, and
somewhat ill at ease. This they hid by pretending an elaborate relict
at being out of the army, and by assuring each other that military
discipline should never again rule their stubborn, liberty-loving wills,
Yet, as a matter of fact, they would have felt more at home in a
prison than in this new-found and unquestionable freedom.

Suddenly Key increased his gait. Rose, looking up and following
his glance, discovered a crowd that was collecting fifty yards down
the street. Key chuckled and began to run in the direction
crowd; Rose thereupon also chuckled and his short bandy
twinkled beside the long, awkward strides of his companion.

Reaching the outskirts of the crowd they immediately became an
indistinguishable part of it. It was composed of ragged civilians
somewhat the worse for liquor, and of soldiers representing many
divisions and many stages of sobriety, all clustered around a gesticu-
lating little Jew with long black whiskers, who was waving his arms
and delivering an excited but succinct harangue. Key and Rose, hav-
ing wedged themselves into the approximate parquet, scrutinized him
with acute suspicion, as his words penetrated their common con-
sciousness.

" — What have you got outa the war ?" he was crying fiercely. "Look
arounja, look arounja! Are you rich? Have you got a lot of money
offered you? — no; you're lucky if you're alive and got both your
legs ; you're lucky if you came back an' find your wife ain't gone off
with some other fella that had the money to buy himself out of the
war ! That's when you're lucky ! Who got anything out of it except
J. P. Morgan an' John D. Rockerfeller?"

At this point the little Jew's oration was interrupted by the hostile
impact of a fist upon the point of his bearded chin and he toppled
backward to a sprawl on the pavement.

"God damn Bolsheviki !" cried the big soldier-blacksmith who had
delivered the blow. There was a rumble of approval, the crowd closed
in nearer.

The Jew staggered to his feet, and immediately went down again
before a half-dozen reaching-in fists. This time he stayed down,
breathing heavily, blood oozing from his lip where it was cut within
and without.

There was a riot of voices, and in a minute Rose and Key found
themselves flowing with the jumbled crowd down Sixth Avenue under
the leadership of a thin civilian in a slouch hat and the brawny sol-

94 May Day

dier who had summarily ended the oration. The crowd had marvel-
ously swollen to formidable proportions and a stream of more non-
committal citizens followed it along the sidewalks lending their moral
support by intermittent huzzas.

"Where we goin'?" yelled Key to the man nearest him.

His neighbor pointed up to the leader in the slouch hat.

"That guy knows where there's a lot of 'em! We're goin' to
show 'em ! "

"We're goin' to show 'em!" whispered Key delightedly to Rose,
who repeated the phrase rapturously to a man on the other side.

Down Sixth Avenue swept the procession, joined here and there by
soldiers and marines, and now and then by civilians, who came up
with the inevitable cry that they were just out of the army them-
selves, as if presenting it as a card of admission to a newly formed
Sporting and Amusement Club.

Then the procession swerved down a cross street and headed for
Fifth Avenue and the word filtered here and there that they were
bound for a Red meeting at Tolliver Hall.

"Where is it?"

The question went up the line and a moment later the answer
floated back. Tolliver Hall was down on Tenth Street. There was a
bunch of other sojers who was goin' to break it up and was down there
now!

But Tenth Street had a faraway sound and at the word a general
groan went up and a score of the procession dropped out. Among
these were Rose and Key, who slowed down to a saunter and let
the more enthusiastic sweep on by.

"I'd rather get some liquor," said Key as they halted and made
their way to the sidewalk amid cries of "Shell hole ! " and "Quitters ! "

"Does your brother work around here?" asked Rose, assuming the
air of one passing from the superficial to the eternal.

"He oughta," replied Key. "I ain't seen him for a coupla years. I
been out to Pennsylvania since. Maybe he don't work at night any-
how. It's right along here. He can get us some o'right if he ain't
gone."

They found the place after a few minutes' patrol of the street — a
shoddy tablecloth restaurant between Fifth Avenue and Broadway.
Here Key went inside to inquire for his brother George, while Rose
waited on the sidewalk.

"He ain't here no more," said Key emerging. "He's a waiter up to
Delmonico's."

Rose nodded wisely, as if he'd expected as much. One should not
be surprised at a capable man changing jobs occasionally. He knew
a waiter once — there ensued a long conversation as they walked as

May Day 95

to whether waiters made more in actual wages than in tips — it was
decided that it depended on the social tone of the joint wherein the
waiter labored. After having given each other vivid pictures of mil-
lionaires dining at Delmonico's and throwing away fifty-dollar bills
after their first quart of champagne, both men thought privately of
becoming waiters. In fact, Key's narrow brow was secreting a resolu-
tion to ask his brother to get him a job.

"A waiter can drink up all the champagne those fellas leave in
bottles," suggested Rose with some relish, and then added as an after-
thought, "Oh, boy I "

By the time they reached Delmonico's it was half past ten, and
they were surprised to see a stream of taxis driving up to the door
one after the other and emitting marvelous, hatless young ladies, each
one attended by a stiff young gentleman in evening clothes.

"It's a party," said Rose with some awe. "Maybe we better not go
in. He'll be busy."

"No, he won't. He'll be o'right."

After some hesitation they entered what appeared to them to be
the least elaborate door and, indecision falling upon them immedi-
ately, stationed themselves nervously in an inconspicuous corner of
the small dining-room in which they found themselves. They took
off their caps and held them in their hands. A cloud of gloom fell
upon them and both started when a door at one end of the room
crashed open, emitting a comet-like waiter who streaked across the
floor and vanished through another door on the other side.

There had been three of these lightning passages before the seekers
mustered the acumen to hail a waiter. He turned, looked at them sus-
piciously, and then approached with soft, catlike steps, as if pre-
pared at any moment to turn and flee.

"Say," began Key, "say, do you know my brother? He's a waiter
here."

"His name is Key," annotated Rose.

Yes, the waiter knew Key. He was up-stairs, he thought. There was
a big dance going on in the main ballroom. He'd tell him.

Ten minutes later George Key appeared and greeted his brother
with the utmost suspicion ; his first and most natural thought being
that he was going to be asked for money.

George was tall and weak chinned, but there his resemblance to
his brother ceased. The waiter's eyes were not dull, they were alert
and twinkling, and his manner was suave, in-door, and faintly
superior. They exchanged formalities. George was married and had
three children. He seemed fairly interested, but not impressed by
the news that Carrol had been abroad in the army. This disappointed
Carrol.

96 May Day

"George," said the younger brother, these amenities having been
disposed of, "we want to get some booze, and they won't sell us none.
Can you get us some ?"

George considered.

"Sure. Maybe I can. It may be half an hour, though."

"All right," agreed Carrol, "well wait."

At this Rose started to sit down in a convenient chair, but was
hailed to his feet by the indignant George.

"Hey! Watch out, you! Can't sit down here! This room's all set
for a twelve o'clock banquet."

"I ain't goin' to hurt it," said Rose resentfully. "I been through
the delouser."

"Never mind," said George sternly, "if the head waiter seen me
here talkin' he'd romp all over me."

"Oh."

The mention of the head waiter was full explanation to the other
two; they fingered their overseas caps nervously and waited for a
suggestion.

"I tell you," said George, after a pause, "I got a place you can
wait ; you just come here with me."

They followed him out the far door, through a deserted pantry and
up a pair ot dark winding stairs, emerging finally into a small room
chietty turnished by piles of pails and stacks of scrubbing brusnes,
and illuminated by a single dim electric light. There he left them,
after soliciting two dollars and agreeing to return in half an hour
with a quart of whiskey.

"George is makin' money, I bet," said Key gloomily as he seated
himself on an inverted pail. "I bet he's making fifty dollars a week."

Rose nodded his head and spat.

"I bet he is, too."

"What'd he say the dance was of?"

"A lot of college fellas. Yale College."

They both nodded solemnly at each other.

"Wonder where that crowda sojers is now?"

"I don't know. I know that's too damn long to walk for me."

"Me too. You don't catch me walkin' that far."

Ten minutes later restlessness seized them.

"I'm goin' to see what's out here," said Rose, stepping cautiously
toward the other door.

It was a swinging door of green baize and he pushed it open a
cautious inch.

"See anything?"

For answer Rose drew in his breath sharply.

"Doggone! Here's some liquor I'll say!"

May Day 97

"Liquor?"

Key joined Rose at the door, and looked eagerly.

"I'll tell the world that's liquor," he said, after a moment of con-
centrated gazing.

It was a room about twice as large as the one they were in — and in
it was prepared a radiant feast of spirits. There were long walls of
alternating bottles set along two white covered tables ; whiskey, gin,
brandy, French and Italian vermouths, and orange juice, not to men-
tion an array of syphons and two great empty punch bowls. The
room was as yet uninhabited.

"It's for this dance they're just starting," whispered Key ; "hear
the violins playin'? Say, boy, I wouldn't mind havin' a dance."

They closed the door softly and exchanged a glance of mutual
comprehension. There was no need of feeling each other out.

"I'd like to get my hands on a coupla those bottles," said Rose
emphatically.

"Me too."

"Do you suppose we'd get seen?"

Key considered.

"Maybe we better wait till they start drinkin' 'em. They got 'em
all laid out now, and they know how many of them there are."

They debated this point for several minutes. Rose was all for get-
ting his hands on a bottle now and tucking it under his coat before
any one came into the room. Key, however, advocated caution. He
was afraid he might get his brother in trouble. If they waited till
some of the bottles were opened it'd be all right to take one, and
everybody'd think it was one of the college fellas.

While they were still engaged in argument George Key hurried
through the room and, barely grunting at them, disappeared by way
of the green baize door. A minute later they heard several corks pop,
and then the sound of crackling ice and splashing liquid. George was
mixing the punch.

The soldiers exchanged delighted grins.

"Oh, boy ! " whispered Rose.

George reappeared.

"Just keep low, boys," he said quickly. "I'll have your stuff for you
in five minutes."

He disappeared through the door by which he had come.

As soon as his footsteps receded down the stairs, Rose, after a
cautious look, darted into the room of delights and reappeared with
a bottle in his hand.

"Here's what I say," he said, as they sat radiantly digesting their
first drink. "We'll wait till he comes up, and we'll ask him if we
can't just stay here and drink what he brings us — see. We'll tell him

98 May Day

we haven't got any place to drink it — see. Then we can sneak in
there whenever there ain't nobody in that there room and tuck a
bottle under our coats. We'll have enough to last us a coupla days —
see?"

"Sure," agreed Rose enthusiastically. "Oh, boy ! And if we want to
we can sell it to sojers any time we want to."

They were silent for a moment thinking rosily of this idea. Then
Key reached up and unhooked the collar of his O. D. coat.

"It's hot in here, ain't it?"

Rose agreed earnestly.

"Hot as hell."

She was still quite angry when she came out of the dressing-room
and crossed the intervening parlor of politeness that opened onto the
hall — angry not so much at the actual happening which was, after
all, the merest commonpleace of her social existence, but because it
had occurred on this particular night. She had no quarrel with her-
self. She had acted with that correct mixture of dignity and reticent
pity which she always employed. She had succinctly and deftly
snubbed him.

It had happened when their taxi was leaving the Biltmore — hadn't
gone half a block. He had lifted his right arm awkwardly — she was
on his right side — and attempted to settle it snugly around the crim-
son fur-trimmed opera cloak she wore. This in itself had been a mis-
take. It was inevitably more graceful for a young man attempting
to embrace a young lady of whose acquiescence he was not certain, to
first put his far arm around her. It avoided that awkward movement
of raising the near arm.

His second faux pas was unconscious. She had spent the afternoon
at the hairdresser's; the idea of any calamity overtaking her hair
was extremely repugnant — yet as Peter made his unfortunate attempt
the point of his elbow had just faintly brushed it. That was his
second faux pas. Two were quite enough.

He had begun to murmur. At the first murmur she had decided
that he was nothing but a college boy — Edith was twenty-two, and
anyhow, this dance, first of its kind since the war, was reminding
her, with the accelerating rhythm of its associations, of something
else — of another dance and another man, a man for whom her feel-
ings had been little more than a sad-eyed, adolescent mooniness.
Edith Bradin was falling in love with her recollection of Gordon
Sterrett.

So she came out of the dressing-room at Delmonico's and stood

May Day 99

for a second in the doorway looking over the shoulders of a black
dress in front of her at the groups of Yale men who flitted like dig-
nified black moths around the head of the stairs. From the room she
had left drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the passage to and
fro of many scented young beauties — rich perfumes and the fragile
memory-laden dust of fragrant powders. This odor drifting out ac-
quired the tang of cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled sensu-
ously down the stairs and permeated the ballroom where the Gamma
Psi dance was to be held. It was an odor she knew well, exciting,
stimulating, restlessly sweet — the odor of a fashionable dance.

She thought of her own appearance. Her bare arms and shoulders
were powdered to a creamy white. She knew they looked very soft
and would gleam like milk against the black backs that were to
silhouette them tonight. The hairdressing had been a success; her
reddish mass of hair was piled and crushed and creased to an arro-
gant marvel of mobile curves. Her lips were finely made of deep
carmine; the irises of her eyes were delicate, breakable blue, like
china eyes. She was a complete, infinitely delicate, quite perfect
thing of beauty, flowing in an even line from a complex coiffure to
two small slim feet.

She thought of what she would say to-night at this revel, faintly
presaged already by the sounds of high and low laughter and slip-
pered footsteps, and movements of couples up and down the stairs.
She would talk the language she had talked for many years — her
line — made up of the current expressions, bits of journalese and col-
lege slang strung together into an intrinsic whole, careless, faintly
provocative, delicately sentimental. She smiled faintly as she heard a
girl sitting on the stairs near her say : "You don't know the half of
it, dearie 1 "

And as she smiled her anger melted for a moment, and closing her
eyes she drew in a deep breath of pleasure. She dropped her arms to
her side until they were faintly touching the sleek sheath that covered
and suggested her figure. She had never felt her own softness so
much nor so enjoyed the whiteness of her own arms.

"I smell sweet," she said to herself simply, and then came another
thought — "I'm made for love."

She liked the sound of this and thought it again ; then in inevitable
succession came her new-born riot of dreams about Gordon. The
twist of her imagination which, two months before, had disclosed to
her her unguessed desire to see him again, seemed now to have been
leading up to this dance, this hour.

For all her sleek beauty, Edith was a grave, slow-thinking girl.
There was a streak in her of that same desire to ponder, of that
adolescent idealism that had turned her brother socialist and pacifist.

ioo May Day

Henry Bradin had left Cornell, where he had been an instructor in
economics, and had come to New York to pour the latest cures for
incurable evils into the columns of a radical weekly newspaper.

Edith, less fatuously, would have been content to cure Gordon
Sterrett. There was a quality of weakness in Gordon that she wanted
to take care of ; there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to
protect. And she wanted someone she had known a long while, some-
one who had loved her a long while. She was a little tired ; she wanted
to get married. Out of a pile of letters, half a dozen pictures and as
many memories, and this weariness, she had decided that next time
she saw Gordon their relations were going to be changed. She would
say something that would change them. There was this evening. This
was her evening. All evenings were her evenings.

Then her thoughts were interrupted by a solemn undergraduate
with a hurt look and an air of strained formality who presented him-
self before her and bowed unusually low. It was the man she had
come with, Peter Himmel. He was tall and humorous, with horned-
rimmed glasses and an air of attractive whimsicality. She suddenly
rather disliked him — probably because he had not succeeded in kiss-
ing her.

"Well/' she began, "are you still furious at me?"

"Not at all."

She stepped forward and took his arm.

"I'm sorry," she said softly. "I don't know why I snapped out that
way. I'm in a bum humor to-night for some strange reason. I'm
sorry."

"S7all right," he mumbled, "don't mention it."

He felt disagreeably embarrassed. Was she rubbing in the fact of
his late failure ?

"It was a mistake," she continued, on the same consciously gentle
key. "We'll both forget it." For this he hated her.

A few minutes later they drifted out on the floor while the dozen
swaying, sighing members of the specially hired jazz orchestra in-
formed the crowded ballroom that "if a saxophone and me are left
alone why then two is com-pan-ee ! "

A man with a mustache cut in.

"Hello," he began reprovingly. "You don't remember me."

"I can't just think of your name," she said lightly — "and I know
you so well."

"I met you up at — " His voice trailed disconsolately off as a man
with very fair hair cut in. Edith murmured a conventional "Thanks,
loads — cut in later," to the inconnu.

The very fair man insisted on shaking hands enthusiastically. She
placed him as one of the numerous Jims of her acquaintance — last

May Day

name a mystery. She remembered even that he had a peculiar rhythm
in dancing and found as they started that she was right.

"Going to be here long?" he breathed confidentially.

She leaned back and looked up at him.

"Couple of weeks."

"Where are you?"

"Biltmore. Call me up some day."

"I mean it," he assured her. "I will. We'll go to tea."

"So do I— Do."

A dark man cut in with intense formality.

"You don't remember me, do you?" he said gravely.

"I should say I do. Your name's Harlan."

"No-ope. Barlow."

"Well, I knew there were two syllables anyway. You're the boy
that played the ukulele so well up at Howard Marshall's house party."

"I played— but not "

A man with prominent teeth cut in. Edith inhaled a slight cloud of
whiskey. She liked men to have had something to drink ; they were
so much more cheerful, and appreciative and complimentary — much
easier to talk to.

"My name's Dean, Philip Dean," he said cheerfully. "You don't
remember me, I know, but you used to come up to New Haven with
a fellow I roomed with senior year, Gordon Sterrett."

Edith looked up quickly.

"Yes, I went up with him twice — to the Pump and Slipper and the
Junior prom."

"You've seen him, of course," said Dean carelessly. "He's here to-
night. I saw him just a minute ago."

Edith started. Yet she had felt quite sure he would be here.

"Why, no, I haven't "

A fat man with red hair cut in.

"Hello, Edith," he began.

"Why— hello there "

She slipped, stumbled lightly.

"I'm sorry, dear," she murmured mechanically.

She had seen Gordon — Gordon very white and listless, leaning
against the side of a doorway, smoking and looking into the ball-
room. Edith could see that his face was thin and wan — that the hand
he raised to his lips with a cigarette was trembling. They were danc-
ing quite close to him now.

" — They invite so darn many extra fellas that you — " the short
man was saying.

"Hello, Gordon," called Edith over her partner's shoulder. Her
heart was pounding wildly.

T02 May Day

His large dark eyes were fixed on her. He took a step in her direc-
tion. Her partner turned her away — she heard his voice bleating

" — but half the stags get lit and leave before long, so "

Then a low tone at her side.

"May I, please?"

She was dancing suddenly with Gordon; one of his arms was
around her ; she felt it tighten spasmodically ; felt his hand on her
back with the fingers spread. Her hand holding the little lace hand-
kerchief was crushed in his.

"Why Gordon," she began breathlessly.

"Hello, Edith."

She slipped again — was tossed forward by her recovery until her
face touched the black cloth of his dinner coat. She loved him — she
knew she loved him — then for a minute there was silence while a
strange feeling of uneasiness crept over her. Something was wrong.

Of a sudden her heart wrenched, and turned over as she realized
what it was. He was pitiful and wretched, a little drunk, and miser-
ably tired.

"Oh — " she cried involuntarily.

His eyes looked down at her. She saw suddenly that they were
blood-streaked and rolling uncontrollably.

"Gordon," she murmured, "we'll sit down, I want to sit down."

They were nearly in mid-floor, but she had seen two men start
toward her from opposite sides of the room, so she halted, seized
Gordon's limp hand and led him bumping through the crowd, her
mouth tight shut, her face a little pale under her rouge, her eyes
trembling with tears.

She found a place high up on the soft-carpeted stairs, and he sat
down heavily beside her.

"Well," he began, staring at her unsteadily, "I certainly am glad
to see you, Edith."

She looked at him without answering. The effect of this on her
was immeasurable. For years she had seen men in various stages of
intoxication, from uncles all the way down to chauffeurs, and her
feelings had varied from amusement to disgust, but here for the
first time she was seized with a new feeling — an unutterable
horror.

"Gordon," she said accusingly and almost crying, "you look like
the devil."

He nodded. "I've had trouble, Edith."

"Trouble?"

"All sorts of trouble. Don't you say anything to the family, but I'm
all gone to pieces. I'm a mess, Edith."

His lower lip was sagging. He seemed scarcely to see her.

May Day 103

"Can't you — can't you," she hesitated, "can't you tell me about it,
Gordon? You know I'm always interested in you."

She bit her lip — she had intended to say something stronger, but
found at the end that she couldn't bring it out.

Gordon shook his head dully. "I can't tell you. You're a good
woman. I can't tell a good woman the story."

"Rot," she said, defiantly. "I think it's a perfect insult to call any
one a good woman in that way. It's a slam. You've been drinking,
Gordon."

"Thanks." He inclined his head gravely. "Thanks for the informa-
tion."

"Why do you drink?"

"Because I'm so damn miserable."

"Do you think drinking's going to make it any better?"

"What you doing — trying to reform me?"

"No ; I'm trying to help you, Gordon. Can't you tell me about it?"

"I'm in an awful mess. Best thing you can do is to pretend not to
know me."

"Why, Gordon?"

"I'm sorry I cut in on you — it's unfair to you. You're pure woman —
and all that sort of thing. Here, I'll get some one else to dance with
you."

He rose clumsily to his feet, but she reached up and pulled him
down beside her on the stairs.

"Here, Gordon. You're ridiculous. You're hurting me. You're acting
like a — like a crazy man "

"I admit it. I'm a little crazy. Something's wrong with me, Edith.
There's something left me. It doesn't matter."

"It does, tell me."

"Just that. I was always queer — little bit different from other boys.
All right in college, but now it's all wrong. Things have been snapping
inside me for four months like little hooks on a dress, and it's about
to come off when a few more hooks go. I'm very gradually going
loony."

He turned his eyes full on her and began to laugh, and she shrank
away from him.

"What is the matter?"

"Just me," he repeated. "I'm going loony. This whole place is like
a dream to me — this Delmonico's "

As he talked she saw he had changed utterly. He wasn't at all light
and gay and careless — a great lethargy and discouragement had come
over him. Revulsion seized her, followed by a faint, surprising bore-
dom. His voice seemed to come out of a great void.

"Edith," he said, "I used to think I was clever, talented, an artist.

104 May Day

Now I know I'm nothing. Can't draw, Edith. Don't know why I'm
telling you this."

She nodded absently.

"I can't draw, I can't do anything. I'm poor as a church mouse."
He laughed, bitterly and rather too loud. "I've become a damn beg-
gar, a leech on my friends. I'm a failure. I'm poor as hell."

Her distaste was growing. She barely nodded this time, waiting
for her first possible cue to rise.

Suddenly Gordon's eyes filled with tears.

"Edith," he said, turning to her with what was evidently a strong
effort at self-control, "I can't tell you what it means to me to know
there's one person left who's interested in me."

He reached out and patted her hand, and involuntarily she drew
it away.

"It's mighty fine of you," he repeated.

"Well," she said slowly, looking him in the eye, "any one's always
glad to see an old friend — but I'm sorry to see you like this, Gordon."

There was a pause while they looked at each other, and the
momentary eagerness in his eyes wavered. She rose and stood look-
ing at him, her face quite expressionless.

"Shall we dance?" she suggested, coolly.

— Love is fragile — she was thinking — but perhaps the pieces are
saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said.
The new love words, the tendernesses learned, are treasured up for
the next lover.

Peter Himmel, escort to the lovely Edith, was unaccustomed to
being snubbed ; having been snubbed, he was hurt and embarrassed,
and ashamed of himself. For a matter of two months he had been on
special delivery terms with Edith Bradin and knowing that the one
excuse and explanation of the special delivery letter is its value in
sentimental correspondence, he had believed himself quite sure of his
ground. He searched in vain for any reason why she should have taken
this attitude in the matter of a simple kiss.

Therefore when he was cut in on by the man with the mustache he
went out into the hall and, making up a sentence, said it over to
himself several times. Considerably deleted, this was it :

"Well, if any girl ever led a man on and then jolted him, she did —
and she has no kick coming if I go out and get beautifully
boiled."

So he walked through the supper room into a small room adjoining
it, which he had located earlier in the evening. It was a room in which

May Day 105

there were several large bowls of punch flanked by many bottles. He
took a seat beside the table which held the bottles.

At the second highball, boredom, disgust, the monotony of time,
the turbidity of events, sank into a vague background before which
glittering cobwebs formed. Things became reconciled to themselves,
things lay quietly on their shelves ; the troubles of the day arranged
themselves in trim formation and at his curt wish of dismissal,
inarched off and disappeared. And with the departure of worry came
brilliant, permeating symbolism. Edith became a flighty, negligible
girl, not to be worried over ; rather to be laughed at. She fitted like
a figure of his own dream into the surface world forming about him.
He himself became in a measure symbolic, a type of the continent
bacchanal, the brilliant dreamer at play.

Then the symbolic mood faded and as he sipped his third highball
his imagination yielded to the warm glow and he lapsed into a state
similar to floating on his back in pleasant water. It was at this point
that he noticed that a green baize door near him was open about two
inches, and that through the aperture a pair of eyes were watching him
intently.

"Hm," murmured Peter calmly.

The green door closed — and then opened again — a bare half inch
this time.

" Peek-a-boo," murmured Peter.

The door remained stationary and then he became aware of a
series of tense intermittent whispers.

"One guy."

"What's he doin'?"

"He's sittin' lookin'."

"He better beat it off. We gotta get another li'P bottle."

Peter listened while the words filtered into his consciousness.

"Now this," he thought, "is most remarkable."

He was excited. He was jubilant. He felt that he had stumbled
upon a mystery. Affecting an elaborate carelessness he arose and
walked around the table — then, turning quickly, pulled open the
green door, precipitating Private Rose into the room.

Peter bowed.

"How do you do?" he said.

Private Rose set one foot slightly in front of the other, poised for
fight, flight, or compromise.

"How do you do?" repeated Peter politely.

"I'm o'right."

"Can I offer you a drink?"

Private Rose looked at him searchingly, suspecting possible sar-
casm.

io6 May Day

"O'right," he said finally.

Peter indicated a chair.

"Sit down."

"I got a friend," said Rose, "I got a friend in there." He pointed
to the green door.

"By all means let's have him in."

Peter crossed over, opened the door and welcomed in Private Key,
very suspicious and uncertain and guilty. Chairs were found and the
three took their seats around the punch bowl. Peter gave them each
a highball and offered them a cigarette from his case. They accepted
both with some diffidence.

"Now," continued Peter easily, "may I ask why you gentlemen
prefer to lounge away your leisure hours in a room which is chiefly
furnished, as far as I can see, with scrubbing brushes. And when the
human race has progressed to the stage where seventeen thousand
chairs are manufactured on every day except Sunday — " he paused.
Rose and Key regarded him vacantly. "Will you tell me," went on
Peter, "why you choose to rest yourselves on articles intended for the
transportation of water from one place to another?"

At this point Rose contributed a grunt to the conversation.

"And lastly," finished Peter, "will you tell me why, when you are
in a building beautifully hung with enormous candelabra, you prefer
to spend these evening hours under one anemic electric light?"

Rose looked at Key; Key looked at Rose. They laughed; they
laughed uproariously ; they found it was impossible to look at each
other without laughing. But they were not laughing with this man
— they were laughing at him. To them a man who talked after this
fashion was either raving drunk or raving crazy.

"You are Yale men, I presume," said Peter, finishing his highball
and preparing another.

They laughed again.

"Na-ah."

"So? I thought perhaps you might be members of that lowly sec-
tion of the university known as the Sheffield Scientific School."

"Na-ah."

"Hm. Well, that's too bad. No doubt you are Harvard men, anxious
to preserve your incognito in this — this paradise of violet blue, as
the newspapers say."

"Na-ah," said Key scornfully, "we was just waitin' for somebody."

"Ah," exclaimed Peter, rising and filling their glasses, "very inter-
estin'. Had a date with a scrublady, eh ?"

They both denied this indignantly.

"It's all right," Peter reassured them, "don't apologize. A scrub-
lady's as good as any lady in the world. Kipling says 'Any lady and

May Day 107

Judy O'Grady under the skin.' "

"Sure," said Key, winking broadly at Rose.

"My case, for instance," continued Peter, finishing his glass. "I
got a girl up there that's spoiled. Spoildest darn girl I ever saw. Re-
fused to kiss me ; no reason whatsoever. Led me on deliberately to
think sure I want to kiss you and then plunk! Threw me over!
What's the younger generation comin' to?"

"Say tha's hard luck," said Key— "that's awful hard luck."

"Oh boy! "said Rose.

"Have another?" said Peter.

"We got in a sort of fight for a while," said Key after a pause, "but
it was too far away."

"A fight? — tha's stuff!" said Peter, seating himself unsteadily.
"Fight 'em all ! I was in the army."

"This was with a Bolshevik fella."

"Tha's stuff ! " exclaimed Peter, enthusiastic. "That's what I say !
Kill the Bolshevik ! Exterminate 'em ! "

"We're Americuns," said Rose, implying a sturdy, defiant
patriotism.

"Sure," said Peter. "Greatest race in the world! We're all Ameri-
cuns ! Have another."

They had another.

At one o'clock a special orchestra, special even in a day of special
orchestras, arrived at Delmonico's, and its members, seating them-
selves arrogantly around the piano, took up the burden of providing
music for the Gamma Psi Fraternity. They were headed by a famous
flute-player, distinguished throughout New York for his feat of stand-
ing on his head and shimmying with his shoulders while he played
the latest jazz on his flute. During his performance the lights were
extinguished except for the spotlight on the flute-player and another
roving beam that threw flickering shadows and changing kaleido-
scopic colors over the massed dancers.

Edith had danced herself into that tired, dreamy state habitual
only with debutantes, a state equivalent to the glow of a noble soul
after several long highballs. Her mind floated vaguely on the bosom
of her music ; her partners changed with the unreality of phantoms
under the colorful shifting dusk, and to her present coma it seemed
as if days had passed since the dance began. She had talked on many
fragmentary subects with many men. She had been kissed once and
made love to six times. Earlier in the evening different undergradu-
ates had danced with her, but now, like all the more popular girls

io8 May Day

there, she had her own entourage — that is, half a dozen gallants had
singled her out or were alternating her charms with those of some
other chosen beauty; they cut in on her in regular, inevitable suc-
cession.

Several times she had seen Gordon — he had been sitting a long
time on the stairway with his palm to his head, his dull eyes fixed
at an infinite speck on the floor before him, very depressed, he looked,
and quite drunk — but Edith each time had averted her glance hur-
riedly. All that seemed long ago ; her mind was passive now, her senses
were lulled to trance-like sleep ; only her feet danced and her voice
talked on in hazy sentimental banter.

But Edith was not nearly so tired as to be incapable of moral in-
dignation when Peter Himmel cut in on her, sublimely and happily
drunk. She gasped and looked up at him.

"Why, Peter!"

"I'm a HT stewed, Edith."

"Why, Peter, you're a peach, you are! Don't you think it's a bum
way of doing — when you're with me?"

Then she smiled unwillingly, for he was looking at her with owlish
sentimentality varied with a silly spasmodic smile.

"Darlin' Edith," he began earnestly, "you know I love you, don't
you?"

"You tell it well."

"I love you — and I merely wanted you to kiss me," he added sadly.

His embarrassment, his shame, were both gone. She was a mos'
beautiful girl in whole worl'. Mos' beautiful eyes, like stars above.
He wanted to 'pologize — firs', for presuming try to kiss her ; second,
for drinking — but he'd been so discouraged 'cause he had thought
she was mad at him

The red-fat man cut in, and looking up at Edith smiled radiantly.

"Did you bring any one?" she asked.

No. The red-fat man was a stag.

"Well, would you mind — would it be an awful bother for you to —
to take me home to-night?" (this extreme diffidence was a charming
affectation on Edith's part — she knew that the red-fat man would
immediately dissolve into a paroxysm of delight).

"Bother? Why, good Lord, I'd be darn glad to! You know I'd be
darn glad to."

"Thanks loads \ You're awfully sweet."

She glanced at her wrist-watch. It was half-past one. And, as she
said "half-past one" to herself, it floated vaguely into her mind that
her brother had told her at luncheon that he worked in the office of
his newspaper until after one-thirty every evening.

Edith turned suddenly to her current partner.

May Day 109

"What street is Delmonico's on, anyway?"

"Street? Oh, why Fifth Avenue, of course."

"I mean, what cross street?"

"Why— let's see— it's on Forty-fourth Street."

This verified what she had thought. Henry's office must be across
the street and just around the corner, and it occurred to her imme-
diately that she might slip over for a moment and surprise him, float
in on him, a shimmering marvel in her new crimson opera cloak and
"cheer him up." It was exactly the sort of thing Edith revelled in
doing — an unconventional, jaunty thing. The idea reached out and
gripped at her imagination — after an instant's hesitation she had
decided.

"My hair is just about to tumble entirely down," she said pleas-
antly to her partner; "would you mind if I go and fix it?"

"Not at all."

"You're a peach."

A few minutes later, wrapped in her crimson opera cloak, she
flitted down a side-stairs, her cheeks glowing with excitement at her
little adventure. She ran by a couple who stood at the door — a weak-
chinned waiter and an over-rouged young lady, in hot dispute — and
opening the outer door stepped into the warm May night.

VII

The over-rouged young lady followed her with a brief, bitter glance
— then turned again to the weak-chinned waiter and took up her
argument.

"You better go up and tell him I'm here," she said defiantly, "or
I'll go up myself."

"No, you don't ! " said George sternly.

The girl smiled sardonically.

"Oh, I don't, don't I? Well, let me tell you I know more college
fellas and more of 'em know me, and are glad to take me out on a
party, than you ever saw in your whole life."

"Maybe so "

"Maybe so," she interrupted. "Oh, it's all right for any of 'em like
that one that just ran out — God knows where she went — it's all right
for them that are asked here to come or go as they like — but when
I want to see a friend they have some cheap, ham-slinging, bring-me-
a-doughnut waiter to stand here and keep me out."

"See here," said the elder Key indignantly, "I can't lose my job.
Maybe this fella you're talkin' about doesn't want to see you."

"Oh, he wants to see me all right."

"Anyway, how could I find him in all that crowd?"

no May Day

"Oh, hell be there," she asserted confidently. "You just ask any-
body for Gordon Sterrett and they'll point him out to you. They all
know each other, those fellas."

She produced a mesh bag, and taking out a dollar bill handed it
to George.

"Here," she said, "here's a bribe. You find him and give him my
message. You tell him if he isn't here in five minutes I'm coming up."

George shook his head pessimistically, considered the question for
a moment, wavered violently, and then withdrew.

In less than the allotted time Gordon came down-stairs. He was
drunker than he had been earlier in the evening and in a different
way. The liquor seemed to have hardened on him like a crust. He was
heavy and lurching — almost incoherent when he talked.

" 'Lo, Jewel," he said thickly. "Came right away. Jewel, I couldn't
get that money. Tried my best."

"Money nothing!" she snapped. "You haven't been near me for
ten days. What's the matter?"

He shook his head slowly.

"Been very low, Jewel. Been sick."

"Why didn't you tell me if you were sick. I don't care about the
money that bad. I didn't start bothering you about it at all until you
began neglecting me."

Again he shook his head.

"Haven't been neglecting you. Not at all."

"Haven't 1 You haven't been near me for three weeks, unless you
been so drunk you didn't know what you were doing."

"Been sick, Jewel," he repeated, turning his eyes upon her wearily.

"You're well enough to come and play with your society friends
here all right. You told me you'd meet me for dinner, and you said
you'd have some money for me. You didn't even bother to ring
me up."

"I couldn't get any money."

"Haven't I just been saying that doesn't matter? I wanted to see
you, Gordon, but you seem to prefer your somebody else."

He denied this bitterly.

"Then get your hat and come along," she suggested.

Gordon hesitated — and she came suddenly close to him and
slipped her arms around his neck.

"Come on with me, Gordon," she said in a half whisper. "We'll go
over to Devineries' and have a drink, and then we can go up to my
apartment."

"I can't, Jewel, "

"You can," she said intensely.

"I'm sick as a dog!"

May Day in

"Well, then, you oughtn't to stay here and dance."
With a glance around him in which relief and despair were min-
gled, Gordon hesitated; then she suddenly pulled him to her and
kissed him with soft, pulpy lips.
"All right," he said heavily. "I'll get my hat."

VIII

When Edith came out into the clear blue of the May night she
found the Avenue deserted. The windows of the big shops were
dark ; over their doors were drawn great iron masks until they were
only shadowy tombs of the late day's splendor. Glancing down
toward Forty-second Street she saw a commingled blur of lights
from the all-night restaurants. Over on Sixth Avenue the elevated,
a flare of fire, roared across the street between the glimmering
parallels of light at the station and streaked along into the crisp
dark. But at Forty-fourth Street it was very quiet.

Pulling her cloak close about her Edith darted across the Avenue.
She started nervously as a solitary man passed her and said in a
hoarse whisper — "Where bound, kiddo?" She was reminded of a
night in her childhood when she had walked around the block in
her pajamas and a dog had howled at her from a mystery-big back
yard.

In a minute she had reached her destination, a two-story, com-
paratively old building on Forty-fourth, in the upper windows of
which she thankfully detected a wisp of light. It was bright enough
outside for her to make out the sign beside the window — the New
York Trumpet. She stepped inside a dark hall and after a second
saw the stairs in the corner.

Then she was in a long, low room furnished with many desks and
hung on all sides with file copies of newspapers. There were only
two occupants. They were sitting at different ends of the room,
each wearing a green eye-shade and writing by a solitary desk
light.

For a moment she stood uncertainly in the doorway, and then
both men turned around simultaneously and she recognized her
brother.

"Why, Edith!" He rose quickly and approached her in surprise,
removing his eye-shade. He was tall, lean, and dark, with black,
piercing eyes under very thick glasses. They were far-away eyes
that seemed always fixed just over the head of the person to whom
he was talking.

He put his hands on her arms and kissed her cheek.

"What is it?" he repeated in some alarm.

ii2 May Day

"I was at a dance across at Delmonico's, Henry," she said ex-
citedly, "and I couldn't resist tearing over to see you."

"I'm glad you did." His alertness gave way quickly to a habitual
vagueness. "You oughtn't to be out alone at night though, ought
you?"

The man at the other end of the room had been looking at them
curiously, but at Henry's beckoning gesture he approached. He was
loosely fat with little twinkling eyes, and, having removed his collar
and tie, he gave the impression of a Middle- Western farmer on a
Sunday afternoon.

"This is my sister," said Henry. "She dropped in to see me."

"How do you do?" said the fat man, smiling. "My name's Bar-
tholomew, Miss Bradin. I know your brother has forgotten it long
ago."

Edith laughed politely.

"Well," he continued, "not exactly gorgeous quarters we have
here, are they?"

Edith looked around the room.

"They seem very nice," she replied. "Where do you keep the
bombs?"

"The bombs?" repeated Bartholomew, laughing. "That's pretty
good — the bombs. Did you hear her, Henry? She wants to know
where we keep the bombs. Say, that's pretty good."

Edith swung herself around onto a vacant desk and sat dangling
her feet over the edge. Her brother took a seat beside her.

"Well," he asked, absent-mindedly, "how do you like New York
this trip?"

"Not bad. I'll be over at the Biltmore with the Hoyts until Sun-
day. Can't you come to luncheon to-morrow?"

He thought a moment.

"I'm especially busy," he objected, "and I hate women in groups."

"All right," she agreed, unruffled. "Let's you and me have luncheon
together."

"Very well."

"I'll call for you at twelve."

Bartholomew was obviously anxious to return to his desk, but
apparently considered that it would be rude to leave without some
parting pleasantry.

"Well" — he began awkwardly.

They both turned to him.

"Well, we — we had an exciting time earlier in the evening."

The two men exchanged glances.

"You should have come earlier," continued Bartholomew, some-
what encouraged. "We had a regular vaudeville."

May Day 113

"Did you really?"

"A serenade," said Henry. "A lot of soldiers gathered down there
in the street and began to yell at the sign."

"Why?" she demanded.

"Just a crowd," said Henry, abstractedly. "All crowds have to
howl. They didn't have anybody with much initiative in the lead,
or they'd probably have forced their way in here and smashed
things up."

"Yes," said Bartholomew, turning again to Edith, "you should
have been here."

He seemed to consider this a sufficient cue for withdrawal, for he
turned abruptly and went back to his desk.

"Are the soldiers all set against the Socialists?" demanded Edith
of her brother. "I mean do they attack you violently and all
that?"

Henry replaced his eye-shade and yawned.

"The human race has come a long way," he said casually, "but
most of us are throw-backs ; the soldiers don't know what they want,
or what they hate, or what they like. They're used to acting in large
bodies, and they seem to have to make demonstrations. So it hap-
pens to be against us. There've been riots all over the city to-night.
It's May Day, you see."

"Was the disturbance here pretty serious?"

"Not a bit," he said scornfully. "About twenty-five of them
stopped in the street about nine o'clock, and began to bellow at the
moon."

"Oh"— She changed the subject. "You're glad to see me, Henry?"

"Why, sure."

"You don't seem to be."

"I am."

"I suppose you think I'm a — a waster. Sort of the World's Worst
Butterfly."

Henry laughed.

"Not at all. Have a good time while you're young. Why? Do I
seem like the priggish and earnest youth?"

"No — " She paused, " — but somehow I began thinking how abso-
lutely different the party I'm on is from — from all your purposes.
It seems sort of — of incongruous, doesn't it? — me being at a party
like that, and you over here working for a thing that'll make that
sort of party impossible ever any more, if your ideas work."

"I don't think of it that way. You're young, and you're acting
just as you were brought up to act. Go ahead — have a good time."

Her feet, which had been idly swinging, stopped and her voice
dropped a note.

H4 May Day

"I wish you'd — you'd come back to Harrisburg and have a good
time. Do you feel sure that you're on the right track "

"You're wearing beautiful stockings," he interrupted. "What on
earth are they?"

"They're embroidered," she replied, glancing down. "Aren't they
cunning?" She raised her skirts and uncovered slim, silk-sheathed
calves. "Or do you disapprove of silk stockings?"

He seemed slightly exasperated, bent his dark eyes on her pierc-
ingly.

"Are you trying to make me out as criticizing you in any way,
Edith?"

"Not at all "

She paused. Bartholomew had uttered a grunt. She turned and
saw that he had left his desk and was standing at the window.

"What is it?" demanded Henry.

"People," said Bartholomew, and then after an instant: "Whole
jam of them. They're coming from Sixth Avenue."

"People."

The fat man pressed his nose to the pane.

"Soldiers, by God 1 " he said emphatically. "I had an idea they'd
come back."

Edith jumped to her feet, and running over joined Bartholomew
at the window.

"There's a lot of them ! " she cried excitedly. "Come here, Henry ! "

Henry readjusted his shade, but kept his seat.

"Hadn't we better turn out the lights?" suggested Bartholomew.

"No. They'll go away in a minute."

"They're not," said Edith, peering from the window. "They're not
even thinking of going away. There's more of them coming. Look —
there's a whole crowd turning the corner of Sixth Avenue."

By the yellow glow and blue shadows of the street lamp she could
see that the sidewalk was crowded with men. They were mostly in
uniform, some sober, some enthusiastically drunk, and over the
whole swept an incoherent clamor and shouting.

Henry rose, and going to the window exposed himself as a long
silhouette against the office lights. Immediately the shouting became
a steady yell, and a rattling fusillade of small missiles, corners of
tobacco plugs, cigarette-boxes, and even pennies beat against the
window. The sounds of the racket now began floating up the stairs
as the folding doors revolved.

"They're coming up ! " cried Bartholomew.

Edith turned anxiously to Henry.

"They're coming up, Henry."

May Day 115

From down-stairs in the lower hall their cries were now quite
audible.

"—God damn Socialists ! "

"Pro-Germans! Boche-lovers ! "

"Second floor, front! Come on!"

"We'll get the sons "

The next five minutes passed in a dream. Edith was conscious
that the clamor burst suddenly upon the three of them like a cloud
of rain, that there was a thunder of many feet on the stairs, that
Henry had seized her arm and drawn her back toward the rear of
the office. Then the door opened and an overflow of men were forced
into the room — not the leaders, but simply those who happened to
be in front.

"Hello, Bo!"

"Up late, ain't you?"

"You an' your girl. Damn you!"

She noticed that two very drunken soldiers had been forced to
the front, where they wobbled fatuously — one of them was short
and dark, the other was tall and weak of chin.

Henry stepped forward and raised his hand.

"Friends!" he said.

The clamor faded into a momentary stillness, punctuated with
mutterings.

"Friends!" he repeated, his far-away eyes fixed over the heads of
the crowd, "you're injuring no one but yourselves by breaking in
here to-night. Do we look like rich men ? Do we look like Germans ?
I ask you in all fairness "

"Pipe down!"

"I'll say you do ! "

"Say, who's your lady friend, buddy?"

A man in civiliai clothes, who had been pawing over a table, sud-
denly held up a newspaper.

"Here it is!" he shouted. "They wanted the Germans to win
the war ! "

A new overflow from the stairs was shouldered in and of a sud-
den the room was full of men all closing around the pale little group
at the back. Edith saw that the tall soldier with the weak chin was
still in front. The short dark one had disappeared.

She edged slightly backward, stood close to the open window,
through which came a clear breath of cool night air.

Then the room was a riot. She realized that the soldiers were
surging forward, glimpsed the fat man swinging a chair over his
head — instantly the lights went out, and she felt the push of warm

n6 May Day

bodies under rough cloth, and her ears were full of shouting and
trampling and hard breathing.

A figure flashed by her out of nowhere, tottered, was edged side-
ways, and of a sudden disappeared helplessly out through the open
window with a frightened, fragmentary cry that died staccato on
the bosom of the clamor. By the faint light streaming from the
building backing on the area Edith had a quick impression that it
had been the tall soldier with the weak chin.

Anger rose astonishingly in her. She swung her arms wildly, edged
blindly toward the thickest of the scuffling. She heard grunts, curses,
the muffled impact of fists.

"Henry!" she called frantically, "Henry!"

Then, it was minutes later, she felt suddenly that there were
other figures in the room. She heard a voice, deep, bullying, authori-
tative ; she saw yellow rays of light sweeping here and there in the
fracas. The cries became more scattered. The scuffling increased and
then stopped.

Suddenly the lights were on and the room was full of policemen,
clubbing left and right. The deep voice boomed out :

"Here now ! Here now ! Here now ! "

And then :

"Quiet down and get out ! Here now ! "

The room seemed to empty like a wash-bowl. A policeman fast-
grappled in the corner released his hold on his soldier antagonist
and started him with a shove toward the door. The deep voice con-
tinued. Edith perceived now that it came from a bull-necked police
captain standing near the door.

"Here now ! This is no way ! One of your own sojers got shoved
out of the back window an' killed hisself ! "

"Henry!" called Edith, "Henry!"

She beat wildly with her fists on the back of the man in front of
her ; she brushed between two others ; fought, shrieked, and beat her
way to a very pale figure sitting on the floor close to a desk.

"Henry," she cried passionately, "what's the matter? What's the
matter? Did they hurt you?"

His eyes were shut. He groaned and then looking up said dis-
gustedly

"They broke my leg. My God, the fools ! "

"Here BOW!" called the police captain. "Here now! Here now!"

"Childs', Fifty-ninth Street," at eight o'clock of any morning
differs from its sisters by less than the width of their marble tables

May Day 117

or the degree of polish on the frying-pans. You will see there a
crowd of poor people with sleep in the corners of their eyes, trying
to look straight before them at their food so as not to see the other
poor people. But Childs', Fifty-ninth, four hours earlier is quite
unlike any Childs' restaurant from Portland, Oregon, to Portland,
Maine. Within its pale but sanitary walls one finds a noisy medley
of chorus girls, college boys, debutantes, rakes, filles de joie — a not
unrepresentative mixture of the gayest of Broadway, and even of
Fifth Avenue.

In the early morning of May the second it was unusually full.
Over the marble-topped tables were bent the excited faces of flappers
whose fathers owned individual villages. They were eating buck-
wheat cakes and scrambled eggs with relish and gusto, an accom-
plishment that it would have been utterly impossible for them to
repeat in the same place four hours later.

Almost the entire crowd were from the Gamma Psi dance at
Delmonico's except for several chorus girls from a midnight revue
who sat at a side table and wished they'd taken off a little more
make-up after the show. Here and there a drab, mouse-like figure,
desperately out of place, watched the butterflies with a weary,
puzzled curiosity. But the drab figure was the exception. This was
the morning after May Day, and celebration was still in the air.

Gus Rose, sober but a little dazed, must be classed as one of the
drab figures. How he had got himself from Forty-fourth Street to
Fifty-ninth Street after the riot was only a hazy half-memory. He
had seen the body of Carrol Key put in an ambulance and driven
off, and then he had started up town with two or three soldiers.
Somewhere between Forty-fourth Street and Fifty-ninth Street the
other soldiers had met some women and disappeared. Rose had wan-
dered to Columbus Circle and chosen the gleaming lights of Childs'
to minister to his craving for coffee and doughnuts. He walked in
and sat down.

All around him floated airy, inconsequential chatter and high-
pitched laughter. At first he failed to understand, but after a
puzzled five minutes he realized that this was the aftermath of some
gay party. Here and there a restless, hilarious young man wandered
fraternally and familiarly between the tables, shaking hands indis-
criminately and pausing occasionally for a facetious chat, while
excited waiters, bearing cakes and eggs aloft, swore at him silently,
and bumped him out of the way. To Rose, seated at the most incon-
spicuous and least crowded table, the whole scene was a colorful
circus of beauty and riotous pleasure.

He became gradually aware, after a few moments, that the couple
seated diagonally across from him, with their backs to the crowd,

n8 May Day

were not the least interesting pair in the room. The man was drunk.
He wore a dinner coat with a dishevelled tie and shirt swollen by
spillings of water and wine. His eyes, dim and bloodshot, roved
unnaturally from side to side. His breath came short between
his lips.

"He's been on a spree!" thought Rose.

The woman was almost if not quite sober. She was pretty, with
dark eyes and feverish high color, and she kept her active eyes fixed
on her companion with the alertness of a hawk. From time to time
she would lean and whisper intently to him, and he would answer
by inclining his head heavily or by a particularly ghoulish and
repellent wink.

Rose scrutinized them dumbly for some minutes, until the woman
gave him a quick, resentful look; then he shifted his gaze to two
of the most conspicuously hilarious of the promenaders who were
on a protracted circuit of the tables. To his surprise he recognized
in one of them the young man by whom he had been so ludicrously
entertained at Delmonico's. This started him thinking of Key with
a vague sentimentality, not unmixed with awe. Key was dead. He
had fallen thirty-five feet and split his skull like a cracked cocoa-
nut.

"He was a darn good guy," thought Rose mournfully. "He was a
darn good guy, o'right. That was awful hard luck about him."

The two promenaders approached and started down between
Rose's table and the next, addressing friends and strangers alike
with jovial familiarity. Suddenly Rose saw the fair-haired one with
the prominent teeth stop, look unsteadily at the man and girl oppo-
site, and then begin to move his head disapprovingly from side
to side.

The man with the blood-shot eyes looked up.

"Gordy," said the promenader with the prominent teeth, "Gordy."

"Hello," said the man with the stained shirt thickly.

Prominent Teeth shook his finger pessimistically at the pair, giv-
ing the woman a glance of aloof condemnation.

"What'd I tell you Gordy?"

Gordon stirred in his seat.

"Go to hell! "he said.

Dean continued to stand there shaking his finger. The woman
began to get angry.

"You go away!" she cried fiercely. "You're drunk, that's what
you are ! "

"So's he," suggested Dean, staying the motion of his finger and
pointing it at Gordon.

Peter Himmel ambled up, owlish now and oratorically inclined.

May Day 119

"Here now," he began as if called upon to deal with some petty
dispute between children. "Wha's all trouble?"

"You take your friend away," said Jewel tartly. "He's bother-
ing us."

"What's 'at?"

"You heard me!" she said shrilly. "I said to take your drunken
friend away."

Her rising voice rang out above the clatter of the restaurant and
a waiter came hurrying up.

"You gotta be more quiet ! "

"That fella's drunk," she cried. "He's insulting us."

"Ah-ha, Gordy," persisted the accused. "What'd I tell you." He
turned to the waiter. "Gordy an' I friends. Been tryin' help him,
haven't I, Gordy?"

Gordy looked up.

"Help me? Hell, no!"

Jewel rose suddenly, and seizing Gordon's arm assisted him to
his feet.

"Come on, Gordy ! " she said, leaning toward him and speaking in
a half whisper. "Let's us get out of here. This fella's got a mean
drunk on."

Gordon allowed himself to be urged to his feet and started toward
the door. Jewel turned for a second and addressed the provoker
of their flight.

"I know all about you ! " she said fiercely. "Nice friend, you are,
I'll say. He told me about you."

Then she seized Gordon's arm, and together they made their way
through the curious crowd, paid their check, and went out.

"You'll have to sit down," said the waiter to Peter after they
had gone.

"What's 'at? Sit down?"

"Yes— or get out."

Peter turned to Dean.

"Come on," he suggested. "Let's beat up this waiter."

"All right."

They advanced toward him, their faces grown stern. The waiter
retreated.

Peter suddenly reached over to a plate on the table beside him
and picking up a handful of hash tossed it into the air. It descended
as a languid parabola in snowflake effect on the heads of those
near by.

"Hey! Easeuoi"

"Put him out!'

"Sit down, Peter!"

120 May Day

"Cut out that stuff!"

Peter laughed and bowed.

"Thank you for your kind applause, ladies and gents. If some one
will lend me some more hash and a tall hat we will go on with the
act."

The bouncer hustled up.

"You've gotta get out ! " he said to Peter.

"Hell, no!"

"He's my friend!" put in Dean indignantly.

A crowd of waiters were gathering. "Put him out!"

"Better go, Peter."

There was a short struggle and the two were edged and pushed
toward the door.

"I got a hat and a coat here!" cried Peter.

"Well, go get 'em and be spry about it ! "

The bouncer released his hold on Peter, who, adopting a ludicrous
air of extreme cunning, rushed immediately around to the other
table, where he burst into derisive laughter and thumbed his nose
at the exasperated waiters.

"Think I just better wait a 1'iP longer," he announced.

The chase began. Four waiters were sent around one way and
four another. Dean caught hold of two of them by the coat, and
another struggle took place before the pursuit of Peter could be
resumed ; he was finally pinioned after overturning a sugar-bowl and
several cups of coffee. A fresh argument ensued at the cashier's desk,
where Peter attempted to buy another dish of hash to take with him
and throw at policemen.

But the commotion upon his exit proper was dwarfed by another
phenomenon which drew admiring glances and a prolonged involun-
tary "Oh-h-h ! " from every person in the restaurant.

The great plate-glass front had turned to a deep creamy blue, the
color of a Maxfield Parrish moonlight — a blue that seemed to press
close upon the pane as if to crowd its way into the restaurant. Dawn
had come up in Columbus Circle, magical, breathless dawn, silhou-
etting the great statue of the immortal Christopher, and mingling
in a curious and uncanny manner with the fading yellow electric
light inside.

Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will
search for them in vain through the social register or the births,
marriages, and deaths, or the grocer's credit list. Oblivion has swal-
lowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague

May Day 121

and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon
the best authority that for a brief space Mr. In and Mr. Out lived,
breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities
of their own.

During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native
garments down the great highway of a great nation ; were laughed
at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were
heard of no more.

They were already taking form dimly, when a taxicab with the
top open breezed down Broadway in the faintest glimmer of May
dawn. In this car sat the souls of Mr. In and Mr. Out discussing
with amazement the blue light that had so precipitately colored the
sky behind the statue of Christopher Columbus, discussing with
bewilderment the old, gray faces of the early risers which skimmed
palely along the street like blown bits of paper on a gray lake. They
were agreed on all things, from the absurdity of the bouncer in
Childs' to the absurdity of the business of life. They were dizzy with
the extreme maudlin happiness that the morning had awakened in
their glowing souls. Indeed, so fresh and vigorous was their pleasure
in living that they felt it should be expressed by loud cries.

"Ye-ow-ow ! " hooted Peter, making a megaphone with his hands —
and Dean joined in with a call that, though equally significant and
symbolic, derived its resonance from its very inarticulateness.

"Yo-ho! Yea! Yoho! Yo-buba!"

Fifty-third Street was a bus with a dark, bobbed-hair beauty
atop; Fifty-second was a street cleaner who dodged, escaped, and
sent up a yell of, "Look where you're aiminM" in a pained and
grieved voice. At Fiftieth Street a group of men on a very white
sidewalk in front of a very white building turned to stare after
them, and shouted :

"Some party, boys ! "

At Forty-ninth Street Peter turned to Dean. "Beautiful morning,"
he said gravely, squinting up his owlish eyes.

"Probably is."

"Go get some breakfast, hey?"

Dean agreed — with additions.

"Breakfast and liquor."

"Breakfast and liquor," repeated Peter, and they looked at each
other, nodding. "That's logical."

Then they both burst into loud laughter.

"Breakfast and liquor! Oh, gosh!"

"No such thing," announced Peter.

"Don't serve it? Ne'mind. We force 'em serve it. Bring pressure
bear."

122 May Day

"Bring logic bear."

The taxi cut suddenly off Broadway, sailed along a cross street,
and stopped in front of a heavy tomb-like building in Fifth Avenue.

"What's idea?"

The taxi-driver informed them that this was Delmonico's.

This was somewhat puzzling. They were forced to devote several
minutes to intense concentration, for if such an order had been given
there must have been a reason for it.

"Somep'm 'bouta coat," suggested the taxi-man.

That was it. Peter's overcoat and hat. He had left them at Del-
monico's. Having decided this, they disembarked from the taxi and
strolled toward the entrance arm in arm.

"Hey!" said the taxi-driver.

"Huh?"

"You better pay me."

They shook their heads in shocked negation.

"Later, not now — we give orders, you wait."

The taxi-driver objected; he wanted his money now. With the
scornful condescension of men exercising tremendous self-control
they paid him.

Inside Peter groped in vain through a dim, deserted check-room
in search of his coat and derby.

"Gone, I guess. Somebody stole it."

"Some Sheff student."

"All probability."

"Never mind," said Dean, nobly. "I'll leave mine here too — then
we'll both be dressed the same."

He removed his overcoat and hat and was hanging them up when
his roving glance was caught and held magnetically by two large
squares of cardboard tacked to the two coat-room doors. The one on
the left-hand door bore the word "In" in big black letters, and the
one on the right-hand door flaunted the equally emphatic word
"Out."

"Look ! " he exclaimed happily

Peter's eyes followed his pointing finger.

"What?"

"Look at the signs. Let's take 'em."

"Good idea."

"Probably pair very rare an' valuable signs. Probably come in
handy."

Peter removed the left-hand sign from the door and endeavored
to conceal it about his person. The sign being of considerable pro-
portions, this was a matter of some difficulty. An idea flung itself at
him, and with an air of dignified mystery he turned his back. After

May Day 123

an instant he wheeled dramatically around, and stretching out his
arms displayed himself to the admiring Dean. He had inserted the
sign in his vest, completely covering his shirt front. In effect, the
word "In" had been painted upon his shirt in large black letters.

"Yoho ! " cheered Dean. "Mister In."

He inserted his own sign in like manner.

"Mister Out!" he announced triumphantly. "Mr. In meet Mr.
Out."

They advanced and shook hands. Again laughter overcame them
and they rocked in a shaken spasm of mirth.

"Yoho!"

"We probably get a flock of breakfast."

"We'll go — go to the Commodore."

Arm in arm they sallied out the door, and turning east in Forty-
fourth Street set out for the Commodore.

As they came out a short dark soldier, very pale and tired, who
had been wandering listlessly along the sidewalk, turned to look
at them.

He started over as though to address them, but as they imme-
diately bent on him glances of withering unrecognition, he waited
until they had started unsteadily down the street, and then fol-
lowed at about forty paces, chuckling to himself and saying, "Oh,
boy!" over and over under his breath, in delighted, anticipatory
tones.

Mr. In and Mr. Out were meanwhile exchanging pleasantries con-
cerning their future plans.

"We want liquor ; we want breakfast. Neither without the other.
One and indivisible."

"We want both 'em ! "

"Both 'em!"

It was quite light now, and passers-by began to bend curious
eyes on the pair. Obviously they were engaged in a discussion, which
afforded each of them intense amusement, for occasionally a fit of
laughter would seize upon them so violently that, still with their
arms interlocked, they would bend nearly double.

Reaching the Commodore, they exchanged a few spicy epigrams
with the sleepy-eyed doorman, navigated the revolving door with
some difficulty, and then made their way through a thinly populated
but startled lobby to the dining-room, where a puzzled waiter
showed them an obscure table in a corner. They studied the bill of
fare helplessly, telling over the items to each other in puzzled
mumbles.

"Don't see any liquor here," said Peter reproachfully.

The waiter became audible but unintelligible.

124 May Day

"Repeat," continued Peter, with patient tolerance, "that there
seems to be unexplained and quite distasteful lack of liquor upon
bill of fare."

"Here ! " said Dean confidently, "let me handle him." He turned
to the waiter — "Bring us — bring us — " he scanned the bill of fare
anxiously. "Bring us a quart of champagne and a — a — probably
ham sandwich."

The waiter looked doubtful.

"Bring it!" roared Mr. In and Mr. Out in chorus.

The waiter coughed and disappeared. There was a short wait dur-
ing which they were subjected without their knowledge to a careful
scrutiny by the headwaiter. Then the champagne arrived, and at the
sight of it Mr. In and Mr. Out became jubilant.

"Imagine their objecting to us having champagne for breakfast —
jus' imagine."

They both concentrated upon the vision of such an awesome pos-
sibility, but the feat was too much for them. It was impossible for
their joint imaginations to conjure up a world where any one might
object to any one else having champagne for breakfast. The waiter
drew the cork with an enormous pop — and their glasses immediately
foamed with pale yellow froth.

"Here's health, Mr. In."

"Here's the same to you, Mr. Out."

The waiter withdrew; the minutes passed; the champagne be-
came low in the bottle.

"It's — it's mortifying," said Dean suddenly.

"Wha's mortifying?"

"The idea their objecting us having champagne breakfast."

"Mortifying?" Peter considered. "Yes, tha's word — mortifying."

Again they collapsed into laughter, howled, swayed, rocked back
and forth in their chairs, repeating the word "mortifying" over and
over to each other — each repetition seeming to make it only more
brilliantly absurd.

After a few more gorgeous minutes they decided on another quart.
Their anxious waiter consulted his immediate superior, and this
discreet person gave implicit instructions that no more champagne
should be served. Their check was brought.

Five minutes later, arm in arm, they left the Commodore and
made their way through a curious, staring crowd along Forty-second
Street, and up Vanderbilt Avenue to the Biltmore. There, with sud-
den cunning, they rose to the occasion and traversed the lobby, walk-
ing fast and standing unnaturally erect.

Once in the dining-room they repeated their performance. They
were torn between intermittent convulsive laughter and sudden spas-

May Day 125

modic discussions of politics, college, and the sunny state of their
dispositions. Their watches told them that it was now nine o'clock,
and a dim idea was born in them that they were on a memorable
party, something that they would remember always. They lingered
over the second bottle. Either of them had only to mention the word
"mortifying" to send them both into riotous gasps. The dining-room
was whirring and shifting now ; a curious lightness permeated and
rarefied the heavy air.

They paid their check and walked out into the lobby.

It was at this moment that the exterior doors revolved for the
thousandth time that morning, and admitted into the lobby a very
pale young beauty with dark circles under her eyes, attired in a
much-rumpled evening dress. She was accompanied by a plain stout
man, obviously not an appropriate escort.

At the top of the stairs this couple encountered Mr. In and
Mr. Out.

"Edith," began Mr. In, stepping toward her hilariously and mak-
ing a sweeping bow, "darling, good morning."

The stout man glanced questioningly at Edith, as if merely asking
her permission to throw this man summarily out of the way.

" 'Scuse familiarity," added Peter, as an afterthought. "Edith,
good-morning."

He seized Dean's elbow and impelled him into the foreground.

"Meet Mr. In, Edith, my bes' frien'. Inseparable. Mr. In and
Mr. Out."

Mr. Out advanced and bowed; in fact, he advanced so far and
bowed so low that he tipped slightly forward and only kept his bal-
ance by placing a hand lightly on Edith's shoulder.

"I'm Mr. Out, Edith," he mumbled pleasantly, "S'misterin Mister-
out."

" 'Smisterinanout," said Peter proudly.

But Edith stared straight by them, her eyes fixed on some infinite
speck in the gallery above her. She nodded slightly to the stout man,
who advanced bull-like and with a sturdy brisk gesture pushed
Mr. In and Mr. Out to either side. Through this alley he and Edith
walked.

But ten paces farther on Edith stopped again — stopped and
pointed to a short, dark soldier who was eyeing the crowd in gen-
eral, and the tableau of Mr. In and Mr. Out in particular, with a
sort of puzzled, spell-bound awe.

"There," cried Edith. "See there ! "

Her voice rose, became somewhat shrill. Her pointing finger shook
slightly.

"There's the soldier who broke my brother's leg."

126 May Day

There were a dozen exclamations ; a man in a cutaway coat left
his place near the desk and advanced alertly ; the stout person made
a sort of lightning-like spring toward the short, dark soldier, and
then the lobby closed around the little group and blotted them from
the sight of Mr. In and Mr. Out.

But to Mr. In and Mr. Out this event was merely a particolored
iridescent segment of a whirring, spinning world.

They heard loud voices ; they saw the stout man spring ; the pic-
ture suddenly blurred.

Then they were in an elevator bound skyward.

"What floor, please ?" said the elevator man.

"Any floor," said Mr. In.

"Top floor," said Mr. Out.

"This is the top floor," said the elevator man.

"Have another floor put on," said Mr. Out.

"Higher," said Mr. In.

"Heaven," said Mr. Out.

In a bedroom of a small hotel just off Sixth Avenue Gordon
Sterrett awoke with a pain in the back of his head and a sick
throbbing in all his veins. He looked at the dusky gray shadows in
the corners of the room and at a raw place on a large leather chair
in the corner where it had long been in use. He saw clothes, di-
shevelled, rumpled clothes on the floor and he smelt stale cigarette
smoke and stale liquor. The windows were tight shut. Outside the
bright sunlight had thrown a dust-filled beam across the sill — a
beam broken by the head of the wide wooden bed in which he had
slept. He lay very quiet — comatose, drugged, his eyes wide, his mind
clicking wildly like an unoiled machine.

It must have been thirty seconds after he perceived the sunbeam
with the dust on it and the rip on the large leather chair that he had
the sense of life close beside him, and it was another thirty seconds
after that before he realized he was irrevocably married to Jewel
Hudson.

He went out half an hour later and bought a revolver at a sport-
ing goods store. Then he took a taxi to the room where he had been
living on East Twenty-seventh Street, and, leaning across the table
that held his drawing materials, fired a cartridge into his head just
behind the temple.
1920 Tales of the Jazz Age

WINTER DREAMS

SOME of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one-room houses
with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green's father
owned the second best grocery-store in Black Bear — the best one was
"The Hub," patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island
— and Dexter caddied only for pocket-money.

In the fall when the days became crisp and gray, and the long
Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box, Dexter's skis
moved over the snow that hid the fairways of the golf course. At
these times the country gave him a feeling of profound melancholy
— it offended him that the links should lie in enforced fallowness,
haunted by ragged sparrows for the long season. It was dreary, too,
that on the tees where the gay colors fluttered in summer there were
now only the desolate sand-boxes knee-deep in crusted ice. When he
crossed the hills the wind blew cold as misery, and if the sun was out
he tramped with his eyes squinted up against the hard dimensionless
glare.

In April the winter ceased abruptly. The snow ran down into
Black Bear Lake scarcely tarrying for the early golfers to brave the
season with red and black balls. Without elation, without an interval
of moist glory, the cold was gone.

Dexter knew that there was something dismal about this Northern
spring, just as he knew there was something gorgeous -about the fall.
Fall made him clinch his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sen-
tences to himself, and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to
imaginary audiences and armies. October filled him with hope which
November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph, and in this mood the
fleeting brilliant impressions of the summer at Sherry feland were
ready grist to his mill. He became a golf champion and defeated
Mr. T. A. Hedrick in a marvellous match played a hundred times
over the fairways of his imagination, a match each detail of which
he changed about untiringly — sometimes he won with almost laugh-
able ease, sometimes he came up magnificently from behind. Again,
stepping from a Pierce- Arrow automobile, like Mr. Mortimer Jones,
he strolled frigidly into the lounge of the Sherry Island Golf Club —
or perhaps, surrounded by an admiring crowd, he gave an exhibition

127

128 Winter Dreams

of fancy diving from the spring-board of the club raft. . . . Among
those who watched him in open-mouthed wonder was Mr. Mortimer
Jones.

And one day it came to pass that Mr. Jones — himself and not his
ghost — came up to Dexter with tears in his eyes and said that Dexter

was the best caddy in the club, and wouldn't he decide not to

quit if Mr. Jones made it worth his while, because every other

caddy in the club lost one ball a hole for him — regularly

"No, sir," said Dexter decisively, "I don't want to caddy any
more." Then, after a pause: "I'm too old."

"You're not more than fourteen. Why the devil did you decide just
this morning that you wanted to quit ? You promised that next week
you'd go over to the state tournament with me."

"I decided I was too old."

Dexter handed in his "A Class" badge, collected what money was
due him from the caddy master, and walked home to Black Bear
Village.

"The best caddy I ever saw," shouted Mr. Mortimer Jones

over a drink that afternoon. "Never lost a ball ! Willing ! Intelligent !
Quiet! Honest! Grateful!"

The little girl who had done this was eleven — beautifully ugly as
little girls are apt to be who are destined after a few years to be in-
expressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of
men. The spark, however, was perceptible. There was a general un-
godliness in the way her lips twisted down at the corners when she
smiled, and in the — Heaven help us! — in the almost passionate qual-
ity of her eyes. Vitality is born early in such women. It was utterly
in evidence now, shining through her thin frame in a sort of glow.

She had come eagerly out on to the course at nine o'clock with a
white linen nurse and five small new golf-clubs in a white canvas
bag which the nurse was carrying. When Dexter first saw her she was
standing by the caddy house, rather ill at ease and trying to conceal
the fact by engaging her nurse in an obviously unnatural conversa-
tion graced by startling and irrelevant grimaces from herself.

"Well, it's certainly a nice day, Hilda," Dexter heard her say. She
drew down the corners of her mouth, smiled, and glanced furtively
around, her eyes in transit falling for an instant on Dexter.

Then to the nurse :

"Well, I guess there aren't very many people out here this morn-
ing, are there?"

The smile again — radiant, blatantly artificial — convincing.

"I don't know what we're supposed to do now," said the nurse,
looking nowhere in particular.

"Oh, that's all right. I'll fix it up."

Winter Dreams 129

Dexter stood perfectly still, his mouth slightly ajar. He knew that
if he moved forward a step his stare would be in her line of vision —
if he moved backward he would lose his full view of her face. For a
moment he had not realized how young she was. Now he remembered
having seen her several times the year before — in bloomers.

Suddenly, involuntarily, he laughed, a short abrupt laugh — then,
startled by himself, he turned and began to walk quickly away.

"Boy!"

Dexter stopped.

"Boy "

Beyond question he was addressed. Not only that, but he was
treated to that absurd smile, that preposterous smile — the memory
of which at least a dozen men were to carry into middle age.

"Boy, do you know where the golf teacher is?"

"He's giving a lesson."

"Well, do you know where the caddy-master is?"

"He isn't here yet this morning."

"Oh." For a moment this baffled her. She stood alternately on her
right and left foot.

"We'd like to get a caddy," said the nurse. "Mrs. Mortimer Jones
sent us out to play golf, and we don't know how without we get
a caddy."

Here she was stopped by an ominous glance from Miss Jones, fol-
lowed immediately by the smile.

"There aren't any caddies here except me," said Dexter to the
nurse, "and I got to stay here in charge until the caddy-master gets
here."

"Oh."

Miss Jones and her retinue now withdrew, and at a proper distance
from Dexter became involved in a heated conversation, which was
concluded by Miss Jones taking one of the clubs and hitting it on
the ground with violence. For further emphasis she raised it again
and was about to bring it down smartly upon the nurse's bosom,
when the nurse seized the club and twisted it from her hands.

"You damn little mean old thing I" cried Miss Jones wildly.

Another argument ensued. Realizing that the elements of the
comedy were implied in the scene, Dexter several times began to
laugh, but each time restrained the laugh before it reached audibility.
He could not resist the monstrous conviction that the little girl was
justified in beating the nurse.

The situation was resolved by the fortuitous appearance of the
caddy-master, who was appealed to immediately by the nurse.

"Miss Jones is to have a little caddy, and this one says he can't
go."

130 Winter Dreams

"Mr. McKenna said I was to wait here till you came," said
Dexter quickly.

"Well, he's here now." Miss Jones smiled cheerfully at the caddy-
master. Then she dropped her bag and set off at a haughty mince
toward the first tee.

"Well?" The caddy-master turned to Dexter. "What you standing
there like a dummy for? Go pick up the young lady's clubs."

"I don't think I'll go out to-day," said Dexter.

"You don't "

"I think I'll quit."

The enormity of his decision frightened him. He was a favorite
caddy, and the thirty dollars a month he earned through the summer
were not to be made elsewhere around the lake. But he had received
a strong emotional shock, and his perturbation required a violent and
immediate outlet.

It is not so simple as that, either. As so frequently would be the
case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated to by his
winter dreams.

Now, of course, the quality and the seasonability of these winter
dreams varied, but the stuff of them remained. They persuaded
Dexter several years later to pass up a business course at the State
university — his father, prospering now, would have paid his way —
for the precarious advantage of attending an older and more famous
university in the East, where he was bothered by his scanty funds.
But do not get the impression, because his winter dreams happened
to be concerned at first with musings on the rich, that there was any-
thing merely snobbish in the boy. He wanted not association with
glittering things and glittering people — he wanted the glittering
things themselves. Often he reached out for the best without know-
ing why he wanted it — and sometimes he ran up against the mysterious
denials and prohibitions in which life indulges. It is with one of those
denials and not with his career as a whole that this story deals.

He made money. It was rather amazing. After college he went to
the city from which Black Bear Lake draws its wealthy patrons.
When he was only twenty-three and had been there not quite two
years, there were already people who liked to say : "Now there's a
boy — " All about him rich men's sons were peddling bonds pre-
rariously, or investing patrimonies precariously, or plodding through
the two dozen volumes of the "George Washington Commercial
Course," but Dexter borrowed a thousand dollars on his college

Winter Dreams 131

degree and his confident mouth, and bought a partnership in a
laundry.

It was a small laundry when he went into it, but Dexter made
a specialty of learning how the English washed fine woolen golf-
stockings without shrinking them, and within a year he was catering
to the trade that wore knickerbockers. Men were insisting that their
Shetland hose and sweaters go to his laundry, just as they had in-
sisted on a caddy who could find golf-balls. A little later he was doing
their wives' lingerie as well — and running five branches in different
parts of the city. Before he was twenty-seven he owned the largest
string of laundries in his section of the country. It was then that he
sold out and went to New York. But the part of his story that con-
cerns us goes back to the days when he was making his first big
success.

When he was twenty-three Mr. Hart — one of the gray-haired men
who like to say "Now there's a boy" — gave him a guest card to the
Sherry Island Golf Club for a week-end. So he signed his name one
day on the register, and that afternoon played golf in a foursome
with Mr. Hart and Mr. Sandwood and Mr. T. A. Hedrick. He did
not consider it necessary to remark that he had once carried Mr.
Hart's bag over this same links, and that he knew every trap and
gully with his eyes shut — but he found himself glancing at the four
caddies who trailed them, trying to catch a gleam or gesture that
would remind him of himself, that would lessen the gap which lay
between his present and his past.

It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar im-
pressions. One minute he had the sense of being a trespasser — in the
next he was impressed by the tremendous superiority he felt toward
Mr. T. A. Hedrick, who was a bore and not even a good golfer any
more.

Then, because of a ball Mr. Hart lost near the fifteenth green, an
enormous thing happened. While they were searching the stiff grasses
of the rough there was a clear call of "Fore!" from behind a hill in
their rear. And as they all turned abruptly from their search a bright
new ball sliced abruptly over the hill and caught Mr. T. A. Hedrick
in the abdomen.

"By Gad!" cried Mr. T. A. Hedrick, "they" ought to put some of
these crazy women off the course. It's getting to be outrageous."

A head and a voice came up together over the hill :

"Do you mind if we go through?"

"You hit me in the stomach ! " declared Mr. Hedrick wildly.

"Did I?" The girl approached the group of men. "I'm sorry. I
yelled Tore!1"

132 Winter Dreams

Her glance fell casually on each of the men — then scanned the
fairway for her ball.

"Did I bounce into the rough?"

It was impossible to determine whether this question was ingenuous
or malicious. In a moment, however, she left no doubt, for as her
partner came up over the hill she called cheerfully :

"Here I am! I'd have gone on the green except that I hit some-
thing."

As she took her stance for a short mashie shot, Dexter looked at
her closely. She wore a blue gingham dress, rimmed at throat and
shoulders with a white edging that accentuated her tan. The quality
of exaggeration, of thinness, which had made her passionate eyes
and down-turning mouth absurd at eleven, was gone now. She was
arrestingly beautiful. The color in her cheeks was centred like the
color in a picture — it was not a "high" color, but a sort of fluctuating
and feverish warmth, so shaded that it seemed at any moment it
would recede and disappear. This color and the mobility of her mouth
gave a continual impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate
vitality — balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes.

She swung her mashie impatiently and without interest, pitching
the ball into a sand-pit on the other side of the green. With a quick,
insincere smile and a careless "Thank you ! " she went on after it.

"That Judy Jones ! " remarked Mr. Hedrick on the next tee, as they
waited — some moments — for her to play on ahead. "All she needs is
to be turned up and spanked for six months and then to be married
off to an old-fashioned cavalry captain."

"My God, she's good-looking ! " said Mr. Sandwood, who was just
over thirty.

"Good-looking!" cried Mr. Hedrick contemptuously, "she always
looks as if she wanted to be kissed ! Turning those big cow-eyes on
every calf in town ! "

It was doubtful if Mr. Hedrick intended a reference to the ma-
ternal instinct.

"She'd play pretty good golf if she'd try," said Mr. Sandwood.

"She has no form," said Mr. Hedrick solemnly.

"She has a nice figure," said Mr. Sandwood.

"Better thank the Lord she doesn't drive a swifter ball," said
Mr. Hart, winking at Dexter.

Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of
gold and varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry, rustling night of
Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club,
watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver mo-
lasses under the harvest-moon. Then the moon held a finger to her
lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet. Dexter put on

Winter Dreams 133

his bathing-suit and swam out to the farthest raft, where he stretched
dripping on the wet canvas of the springboard.

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around
the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was play-
ing the songs of last summer and of summers before that — songs
from "Chin-Chin" and "The Count of Luxemburg" and "The Choco-
late Soldier" — and because the sound of a piano over a stretch of
water had always seemed beautiful to Dexter he lay perfectly quiet
and listened.

The tune the piano was playing at that moment had been gay and
new five years before when Dexter was a sophomore at college. They
had played it at a prom once when he could not afford the luxury of
proms, and he had stood outside the gymnasium and listened. The
sound of the tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was
with that ecstasy he viewed what happened to him now. It was a
mood of intense appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was mag-
nificently attune to life and that everything about him was radiating
a brightness and a glamour he might never know again.

A low, pale oblong detached itself suddenly from the darkness of
the Island, spitting forth the reverberate sound of a racing motor-
boat. Two white streamers of cleft water rolled themselves out be-
hind it and almost immediately the boat was beside him, drowning
out the hot tinkle of the piano in the drone of its spray. Dexter rais-
ing himself on his arms was aware of a figure standing at the wheel,
of two dark eyes regarding him over the lengthening space of water —
then the boat had gone by and was sweeping in an immense and pur-
poseless circle of spray round and round in the middle of the lake.
With equal eccentricity one of the circles flattened out and headed
back toward the raft.

"Who's that?" she called, shutting off her motor. She was so near
now that Dexter could see her bathing-suit, which consisted appar-
ently of pink rompers.

The nose of the boat bumped the raft, and as the latter tilted
rakishly he was precipitated toward her. With different degrees of
interest they recognized each other.

"Aren't you one of those men we played through this afternoon?"
she demanded.

He was.

"Well, do you know how to drive a motor-boat? Because if you do
1 wish you'd drive this one so I can ride on the surf-board behind.
My name is Judy Jones" — she favored him with an absurd smirk —
rather, what tried to be a smirk, for, twist her mouth as she might, it
was not grotesque, it was merely beautiful — "and I live in a house
over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for

134 Winter Dreams

me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he
says I'm his ideal."

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around
the lake were gleaming. Dexter sat beside Judy Jones and she ex-
plained how her boat was driven. Then she was in the water, swim-
ming to the floating surf-board with a sinuous crawl. Watching her
was without effort to the eye, watching a branch waving or a sea-gull
flying. Her arms, burned to butternut, moved sinuously among the
dull platinum ripples, elbow appearing first, casting the forearm back
with a cadence of falling water, then reaching out and down, stabbing
a path ahead.

They moved out into the lake ; turning, Dexter saw that she was
kneeling on the low rear of the now uptilted surf-board.

"Go faster," she called, "fast as it'll go."

Obediently he jammed the lever forward and the white spray
mounted at the bow. When he looked around again the girl was
standing up on the rushing board, her arms spread wide, her eyes
lifted toward the moon.

"It's awful cold," she shouted. "What's your name?"

He told her.

"Well, why don't you come to dinner to-morrow night?"

His heart turned over like the fly-wheel of the boat, and, for the
second time, her casual whim gave a new direction to his life.

Ill

Next evening while he waited for her to come down-stairs, Dexter
peopled the soft deep summer room and the sun-porch that opened
from it with the men who had already loved Judy Jones. He knew
the sort of men they were — the men who when he first went to college
had entered from the great prep schools with graceful clothes and
the deep tan of healthy summers. He had seen that, in one sense, he
was better than these men. He was newer and stronger. Yet in ac-
knowledging to himself that he wished his children to be like them
he was admitting that he was but the rough, strong stuff from which
they eternally sprang.

When the time had come for him to wear good clothes, he had
known who were the best tailors in America, and the best tailors in
America had made him the suit he wore this evening. He had ac-
quired that particular reserve peculiar to his university, that set it
off from other universities. He recognized the value to him of such
a mannerism and he had adopted it ; he knew that to be careless in
dress and manner required more confidence than to be careful. But
carelessness was for his children. His mother's name had been

Winter Dreams 135

lich. She was a Bohemian of the peasant class and she had talked
broken English to the end of her days. Her son must keep to the set
patterns.

At a little after seven Judy Jones came down-stairs. She wore a
blue silk afternoon dress, and he was disappointed at first that she
had not put on something more elaborate. This feeling was accentu-
ated when, after a brief greeting, she went to the door of a butler's
pantry and pushing it open called : "You can serve dinner, Martha."
He had rather expected that a butler would announce dinner, that
there would be a cocktail. Therr he put these thoughts behind
him as they sat down side by side on a lounge and looked at each
other.

"Father and mother won't be here," she said thoughtfully.

He remembered the last time he had seen her father, and he was
glad the parents were not to be here to-night — they might wonder
who he was. He had been born in Keeble, a Minnesota village fifty
miles farther north, and he always gave Keeble as his home instead
of Black Bear Village. Country towns were well enough to come from
if they weren't inconveniently in sight and used as footstools by
fashionable lakes.

They talked of his university, which she had visited frequently
during the past two years, and of the near-by city which supplied
Sherry Island with its patrons, and whither Dexter would return next
day to his prospering laundries.

During dinner she slipped into a moody depression which gave
Dexter a feeling of uneasiness. Whatever petulance she uttered in
her throaty voice worried him. Whatever she smiled at — at him, at a
chicken liver, at nothing — it disturbed him that her smile could have
no root in mirth, or even in amusement. When the scarlet corners
of her lips curved down, it was less a smile than an invitation to a
kiss.

Then, after dinner, she led him out on the dark sun-porch and
deliberately changed the atmosphere.

"Do you mind if I weep a little?" she said.

"I'm afraid I'm boring you," he responded quickly.

"You're not. I like you. But I've just had a terrible afternoon.
There was a man I cared about, and this afternoon he told me out of
a clear sky that he was poor as a church-mouse. He'd never even
hinted it before. Does this sound horribly mundane?"

"Perhaps he was afraid to tell you."

"Suppose he was,1' she answered. "He didn't start right. You see,
if I'd thought of him as poor — well, I've been mad about loads of
poor men, and fully intended to marry them all. But in this case, I
hadn't thought of him that way, and my interest in him wasn't strong

136 Winter Dreams

enough to survive the shock. As if a girl calmly informed her fiance
that she was a widow. He might not object to widows, but

"Let's start right," she interrupted herself suddenly. "Who are
you, anyhow?"

For a moment Dexter hesitated. Then :

"I'm nobody," he announced. "My career is largely a matter of
futures."

"Are you poor?"

"No," he said frankly, "I'm probably making more money than
any man my age in the Northwest. I know that's an obnoxious re-
mark, but you advised me to start right."

There was a pause. Then she smiled and the corners of her mouth
drooped and an almost imperceptible sway brought her closer to him,
looking up into his eyes. A lump rose in Dexter's throat, and he
waited breathless for the experiment, facing the unpredictable com-
pound that would form mysteriously from the elements of their lips.
Then he saw — she communicated her excitement to him, lavishly,
deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfilment. They
aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would
demand more surfeit . . . kisses that were like charity, creating want
by holding back nothing at all.

It did not take him many hours to decide that he had wanted
Judy Jones ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy.

It began like that — and continued, with varying shades of intensity,
on such a note right up to the denouement. Dexter surrendered a part
of himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which
he had ever come in contact. Whatever Judy wanted, she went after
with the full pressure of her charm. There was no divergence of
method, no jockeying for position or premeditation of effects — there
was a very little mental side to any of her affairs. She simply made
men conscious to the highest degree of her physical loveliness. Dexter
had no desire to change her. Her deficiencies were knit up with a
passionate energy that transcended and justified them.

When, as Judy's head lay against his shoulder that first night,
she whispered, "I don't know what's the matter with me. Last night
I thought I was in love with a man and to-night I think I'm in love

with you " — it seemed to him a beautiful and romantic thing to

say. It was the exquisite excitability that for the moment he con-
trolled and owned. But a week later he was compelled to view this
same quality in a different light. She took him in her roadster to a
picnic supper, and after supper she disappeared, likewise in her road-

Winter Dreams 137

ster, with another man. Dexter became enormously upset and was
scarcely able to be decently civil to the other people present. When
she assured him that she had not kissed the other man, he knew she
was lying — yet he was glad that she had taken the trouble to lie to
him.

He was, as he found before the summer ended, one of a varying
dozen who circulated about her. Each of them had at one time been
favored above all others — about half of them still basked in the solace
of occasional sentimental revivals. Whenever one showed signs of
dropping out through long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed
hour, which encouraged him to tag along for a year or so longer.
Judy made these forays upon the helpless and defeated without
malice, indeed half unconscious that there was anything mischievous
in what she did.

When a new man came to town every one dropped out — dates
were automatically cancelled.

The helpless part of trying to do anything about it was that she
did it all herself. She was not a girl who could be "won" in the
kinetic sense — she was proof against cleverness, she was proof against
charm; if any of these assailed her too strongly she would imme-
diately resolve the affair to a physical basis, and under the magic of
her physical splendor the strong as well as the brilliant played her
game and not their own. She was entertained only by the gratifica-
tion of her desires and by the direct exercise of her own charm. Per-
haps from so much youthful love, so many youthful lovers, she had
come, in self-defense, to nourish herself wholly from within.

Succeeding Dexter's first exhilaration came restlessness and dis-
satisfaction. The helpless ecstasy of losing himself in her was opiate
rather than tonic. It was fortunate for his work during the winter
that those moments of ecstasy came infrequently. Early in their ac-
quaintance it had seemed for a while that there was a deep and spon-
taneous mutual attraction — that first August, for example — three
days of long evenings on her dusky veranda, of strange wan kisses
through the late afternoon, in shadowy alcoves or behind the protect-
ing trellises of the garden arbors, of mornings when she was fresh
as a dream and almost shy at meeting him in the clarity of the rising
day. There was all the ecstasy of an engagement about it, sharpened
by his realization that there was no engagement. It was during those
three days that, for the first time, he had asked her to marry him.
She said "maybe some day," she said "kiss me," she said "I'd like to
marry you," she said "I love you" — she said — nothing.

The three days were interrupted by the arrival of a New York
man who visited at her house for half September. To Dexter's agony,
rumor engaged them. The man was the son of the president of a

138 Winter Dreams

great trust company. But at the end of a month it was reported that
Judy was yawning. At a dance one night she sat all evening in a
motor-boat with a local beau, while the New Yorker searched the club
for her frantically. She told the local beau that she was bored with
her visitor, and two days later he left. She was seen with him at the
station, and it was reported that he looked very mournful indeed.

On this note the summer ended. Dexter was twenty-four, and he
found himself increasingly in a position to do as he wished. He joined
two clubs in the city and lived at one of them. Though he was by no
means an integral part of the stag-lines at these clubs, he managed to
be on hand at dances where Judy Jones was likely to appear. He
could have gone out socially as much as he liked — he was an eligible
young man, now, and popular with down-town fathers. His confessed
devotion to Judy Jones had rather solidified his position. But he had
no social aspirations and rather despised the dancing men who were
always on tap for the Thursday or Saturday parties and who filled in
at dinners with the younger married set. Already he was playing with
the idea of going East to New York. He wanted to take Judy Jones
with him. No disillusion as to the world in which she had grown up
could cure his illusion as to her desirability.

Remember that — for only in the light of it can what he did for her
be understood.

Eighteen months after he first met Judy Jones he became engaged
to another girl. Her name was Irene Scheerer, and her father was one
of the men who had always believed in Dexter. Irene was light-haired
and sweet and honorable, and a little stout, and she had two suitors
whom she pleasantly relinquished when Dexter formally asked her to
marry him.

Summer, fall, winter, spring, another summer, another fall — so
much he had given of his active life to the incorrigible lips of Judy
Jones. She had treated him with interest, with encouragement, with
malice, with indifference, with contempt. She had inflicted on him the
innumerable little slights and indignities possible in such a case —
as if in revenge for having ever cared for him at all. She had beck-
oned him and yawned at him and beckoned him again and he had
responded often with bitterness and narrowed eyes. She had brought
him ecstatic happiness and intolerable agony of spirit. She had caused
him untold inconvenience and not a little trouble. She had insulted
him, and she had ridden over him, and she had played his interest
in her against his interest in his work — for fun. She had done every-
thing to him except to criticise him — this she had not done — it
seemed to him only because it might have sullied the utter indiffer-
ence she manifested and sincerely felt toward him.

When autumn had come and gone again it occurred to him that he

Winter Dreams 139

could not have Judy Jones. He had to beat this into his mind but he
convinced himself at last. He lay awake at night for a while and
argued it over. He told himself the trouble and the pain she had
caused him, he enumerated her glaring deficiencies as a wife. Then
he said to himself .that he loved her, and after a while he fell asleep.
For a week, lest he imagined her husky voice over the telephone or
her eyes opposite him at lunch, he worked hard and late, and at night
he went to his office and plotted out his years.

At the end of a week he went to a dance and cut in on Her once.
For almost the first time since they had met he did not ask her to sit
out with him or tell her that she was lovely. It hurt him that she did
not miss these things — that was all. He was not jealous when he saw
that there was a new man to-night. He had been hardened against
jealousy long before.

He stayed late at the dance. He sat for an hour with Irene Scheerer
and talked about books and about music. He knew very little about
either. But he was beginning to be master of his own time now, and
he had a rather priggish notion that he — the young and already
fabulously successful Dexter Green — should know more about such
things.

That was in October, when he was twenty-five. In January, Dexter
and Irene became engaged. It was to be announced in June, and they
were to be married three months later.

The Minnesota winter prolonged itself interminably, and it was
almost May when the winds came soft and the snow ran down into
Black Bear Lake at last. For the first time in over a year Dexter was
enjoying a certain tranquillity of spirit. Judy Jones had been in
Florida, and afterward in Hot Springs, and somewhere she had been
engaged, and somewhere she had broken it off. At first, when Dexter
had definitely given her up, it had made him sad that people still
linked them together and asked for news of her, but when he began
to be placed at dinner next to Irene Scheerer people didn't ask him
about her any more — they told him about her. He ceased to be an
authority on her.

May at last. Dexter walked the streets at night when the darkness
was damp as rain, wondering that so soon, with so little done, so
much of ecstasy had gone from him. May one year back had been
marked by Judy's poignant, unforgivable, yet forgiven turbulence —
it had been one of those rare times when he fancied she had grown
to care for him. That old penny's worth of happiness he had spent
for this bushel of content. He knew that Irene would be no more than
a curtain spread behind him, a hand moving among gleaming tea-
cups, a voice calling to children . . . fire and loveliness were gone,
the magic of nights and the wonder of the varying hours and seasons

140 Winter Dreams

. . . slender lips, down-turning, dropping to his lips and bearing him
up into a heaven of eyes. . . .The thing was deep in him. He was too
strong and alive for it to die lightly.

In the middle of May when the weather balanced for a few days on
the thin bridge that led to deep summer he turned in one night at
Irene's house. Their engagement was to be announced in a week now
— no one would be surprised at it. And to-night they would sit to-
gether on the lounge at the University Club and look on for an hour
at the dancers. It gave him a sense of solidity to go with her — she was
so sturdily popular, so intensely "great."

He mounted the steps of the brownstone house and stepped inside.

"Irene," he called.

Mrs. Scheerer came out of the living-room to meet him.

"Dexter," she said, "Irene's gone up-stairs with a splitting head-
ache. She wanted to go with you but I made her go to bed."

"Nothing serious, I "

"Oh, no. She's going to play golf with you in the morning. You
can spare her for just one night, can't you, Dexter?"

Her smile was kind. She and Dexter liked each other. In the living-
room he talked for a moment before he said good-night.

Returning to the University Club, where he had rooms, he stood
in the doorway for a moment and watched the dancers. He leaned
against the door-post, nodded at a man or two — yawned.

"Hello, darling."

The familiar voice at his elbow startled him. Judy Jones had left
a man and crossed the room to him — Judy Jones, a slender enamelled
doll in cloth of gold : gold in a band at her head, gold in two slipper
points at her dress's hem. The fragile glow of her face seemed to
blossom as she smiled at him. A breeze of warmth and light blew
through the room. His hands in the pockets of his dinner-jacket tight-
ened spasmodically. He was filled with a sudden excitement.

"When did you get back?" he asked casually.

"Come here and I'll tell you about it."

She turned and he followed her. She had been away — he could have
wept at the wonder of her return. She had passed through enchanted
streets, doing things that were like provocative music. All mysterious
happenings, all fresh and quickening hopes, had gone away with
her, come back with her now.

She turned in the doorway.

"Have you a car here ? If you haven't, I have."

"I have a coup£."

In then, with a rustle of golden cloth. He slammed the door. Into
so many cars she had stepped — like this — like that — her back against
the leather, so — her elbow resting on the door — waiting. She would

Winter Dreams 141

have been soiled long since had there been anything to soil her — ex-
cept herself — but this was her own self outpouring.

With an effort he forced himself to start the car and back into the
street. This was nothing, he must remember. She had done this be-
fore, and he had put her behind him, as he would have crossed a bad
account from his books.

He drove slowly down-town and, affecting abstraction, traversed
the deserted streets of the business section, peopled here and there
where a movie was giving out its crowd or where QgBsumptive or pugi-
listic youth lounged in front of pool halls. The clink of glasses and
the slap of hands on the bars issued from saloons, cloisters of glazed
glass and dirty yellow light.

She was watching him closely and the silence was embarrassing, yet
in this crisis he could find no casual word with which to profane the
hour. At a convenient turning he began to zigzag back toward the
University Club.

"Have you missed me?" she asked suddenly.

"Everybody missed you."

He wondered if she knew of Irene Scheerer. She had been back
only a day — her absence had been almost contemporaneous with his
engagement.

"What a remark!" Judy laughed sadly — without sadness. She
looked at him searchingly. He became absorbed in the dashboard.

"You're handsomer than you used to be," she said thoughtfully.
"Dexter, you have the most rememberable eyes."

He could have laughed at this, but he did not laugh. It was the
sort of thing that was said to sophomores. Yet it stabbed at him.

"I'm awfully tired of everything, darling." She called every one
darling, endowing the endearment with careless, individual comrad-
erie. "I wish you'd marry me."

The directness of this confused him. He should have told her now
that he was going to marry another girl, but he could not tell her. He
could as easily have sworn that he had never loved her.

"I think we'd get along," she continued, on the same note, "unless
probably you've forgotten me and fallen in love with another girl."

Her confidence was obviously enormous. She had said, in effect, that
she found such a thing impossible to believe, that if it were true he
had merely committed a childish indiscretion — and probably to show
off. She would forgive him, because it was not a matter of any mo-
ment but rather something to be brushed aside lightly.

"Of course you could never love anybody but me," she continued,
"I like the way you love me. Oh, Dexter, have you forgotten last
year?"

"No, I haven't forgotten."

142 Winter Dreams

"Neither have 1 1"

Was she sincerely moved — or was she carried along by the wave of
her own acting ?

"I wish we could be like that again," she said, and he forced him-
self to answer :

"I don't think we can."

"I suppose not. ... I hear you're giving Irene Scheerer a violent
rush."

There was not the faintest emphasis on the name, yet Dexter was
suddenly ashamed.

"Oh, take me home," cried Judy suddenly; "I don't want to go
back to that idiotic dance — with those children."

Then, as he turned up the street that led to the residence district,
Judy began to cry quietly to herself. He had never seen her cry
before.

The dark street lightened, the dwellings of the rich loomed up
around them, he stopped his coupe in front of the great white bulk
of the Mortimer Joneses' house, somnolent, gorgeous, drenched with
the splendor of the damp moonlight. Its solidity startled him. The
strong walls, the steel of the girders, the breadth and beam and
pomp of it were there only to bring out the contrast with the young
beauty beside him. It was sturdy to accentuate her slightness — as if
to show what a breeze could be generated by a butterfly's wing.

He sat perfectly quiet, his nerves in wild clamor, afraid that if he
moved he would find her irresistibly in his arms. Two tears had rolled
down her wet face and trembled on her upper lip.

"I'm more beautiful than anybody else," she said brokenly, "why
can't I be happy?" Her moist eyes tore at his stability — her mouth
turned slowly downward with an exquisite sadness: "I'd like to
marry you if you'll have me, Dexter. I suppose you think I'm not
worth having, but I'll be so beautiful for you, Dexter."

A million phrases of anger, pride, passion, hatred, tenderness
fought on his lips. Then a perfect wave of emotion washed over him,
carrying off with it a sediment of wisdom, of convention, of doubt,
of honor. This was his girl who was speaking, his oWn, his beautiful,
his pride.

"Won't you come in ?" He heard her draw in her breath sharply.

Waiting.

"All right," his voice was trembling, "I'll come in."

It was strange that neither when it was over nor a long time after-
ward did he regret that night. Looking at it from the perspective of

Winter Dreams 143

ten years, the fact that Judy's flare for him endured just one month
seemed of little importance. Nor did it matter that by his yielding
he subjected himself to a deeper agony in the end and gave serious
hurt to Irene Scheerer and to Irene's parents, who had befriended
him. There was nothing sufficiently pictorial about Irene's grief to
stamp itself on his mind.

Dexter was at bottom hard-minded. The attitude of the city on his
action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to
leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation
seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion.
Nor, when he had seen that it was no use, that he did not possess in
himself the power to move fundamentally or to hold Judy Jones, did
he bear any malice toward her. He loved her, and he would love her
until the day he was too old for loving — but he could not have her.
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just
as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

Even the ultimate falsity of the grounds upon which Judy termi-
nated the engagement that she did not want to "take him away" from
Irene — Judy who had wanted nothing else — did not revolt him. He
was beyond any revulsion or any amusement.

He went East in February with the intention of selling out his
laundries and settling in New York — but the war came to America
in March and changed his plans. He returned to the West, handed
over the management of the business to his partner, and went into
the first officers' tftining-camp in late April. He was one of those
young thousands who greeted the war with a certain amount of relief,
welcoming the liberation from webs of tangled emotion.

This story is not his biography, remember, although things creep
into it which have nothing to do with those dreams he had when he
was young. We are almost done with them and with him now. There
is only one more incident to be related here, and it happens seven
years farther on.

It took place in New York, where he had done well — so well that
there were no barriers too high for him. He was thirty-two years
old, and, except for one flying trip immediately after the war, he had
not been West in seven years. A man named Devlin from Detroit
came into his office to see him in a business way, and then and there
this incident occurred, and closed out, so to speak, this particular side
of his life.

"So you're from the Middle West," said the man Devlin with care-
less curiosity. "That's funny — I thought men like you were probably

144 Winter Dreams

born and raised on Wall Street. You know — wife of one of my best
friends in Detroit came from your city. I was an usher at the wed-
ding."

Dexter waited with no apprehension of what was coming.

"Judy Simms," said Devlin with no particular interest; "Judy
Jones she was once."

"Yes, I knew her." A dull impatience spread over him. He had
heard, of course, that she was married — perhaps deliberately he had
heard no more.

"Awfully nice girl," brooded Devlin meaninglessly, "I'm sort of
sorry for her."

"Why?" Something in Dexter was alert, receptive, at once.

"Oh, Lud Simms has gone to pieces in a way. I don't mean he ill-
uses her, but he drinks and runs around "

"Doesn't she run around?"

"No. Stays at home with her kids."

"Oh."

"She's a little too old for him," said Devlin.

"Too old!" cried Dexter. "Why, man, she's only twenty-seven."

He was possessed with a wild notion of rushing out into the streets
and taking a train to Detroit. He rose to his feet spasmodically.

"I guess you're busy," Devlin apologized quickly. "I didn't
realize "

"No, Fm not busy," said Dexter, steadying his voice. "I'm not busy
at all. Not busy at all. Did you say she was — twenty-seven? No, I
said she was twenty-seven."

"Yes, you did," agreed Devlin dryly.

"Go on, then. Go on."

"What do you mean?"

"About Judy Jones."

Devlin looked at him helplessly.

"Well, that's— I told you all there is to it. He treats her like the
devil. Oh, they're not going to get divorced or anything. When he's
particularly outrageous she forgives him. In fact, I'm inclined to
think she loves him. She was a pretty girl when she first came to
Detroit."

A pretty girl 1 The phrase struck Dexter as ludicrous.

"Isn't she — a pretty girl, any more ?"

"Oh, she's all right."

"Look here," said Dexter, sitting down suddenly. "I don't under-
stand. You say she was a cpretty girl' and now you say she's 'all
right.' I don't understand what you mean — Judy Jones wasn't a
pretty girl, at all. She was a great beauty. Why, I knew her, I knew
her. She was "

Winter Dreams 145

Devlin laughed pleasantly.

"I'm not trying to start a row," he said. "I think Judy's a nice
girl and I like her. I can't understand how a man like Lud Simms
could fall madly in love with her, but he did.'' Then he added : "Most
of the women like her."

Dexter looked closely at Devlin, thinking wildly that there must
be a reason for this, some insensitivity in the man or some private
malice.

"Lots of women fade just like that" Devlin snapped his fingers.
"You must have seen it happen. Perhaps I've forgotten how pretty
she was at her wedding. I've seen her so much since then, you see.
She has nice eyes."

A sort of dullness settled down upon Dexter. For the first time in
his life he felt like getting very drunk. He knew that he was laughing
loudly at something Devlin had said, but he did not know what it
was or why it was funny. When, in a few minutes, Devlin went he
lay down on his lounge and looked out the window at the New York
sky-line into which the sun was sinking in dull lovely shades of pink
and gold.

He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulner-
able at last — but he knew that he had just lost something more, as
surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away
before his eyes.

The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a
sort of panic he flushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and
tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and
the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun
and the gold color of her neck's soft down. And her mouth damp to
his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness
like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer
in the world ! They had existed and they existed no longer.

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face.
But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and
eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care.
For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The
gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty
but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief
he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of
youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

"Long ago," he said, "long ago, there was something in me, but
now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I
cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more."
1922 All the Sad Young Men

THE SENSIBLE THING

AT THE Great American Lunch Hour young George O'Kelly
straightened his desk deliberately and with an assumed air of inter-
est. No one in the office must know that he was in a hurry, for suc-
cess is a matter of atmosphere, and it is not well to advertise the fact
that your mind is separated from your work by a distance of seven
hundred miles.

But once out of the building he set his teeth and began to run,
glancing now and then at the gay noon of early spring which filled
Times Square and loitered less than twenty feet over the heads of
the crowd. The crowd all looked slightly upward and took deep
March breaths, and the sun dazzled their eyes so that scarcely any
one saw any one else but only their own reflection on the sky.

George O'Kelly, whose mind was over seven hundred miles away,
thought that all outdoors was horrible. He rushed into the subway,
and for ninety-five blocks bent a frenzied glance on a car-card which
showed vividly how he had only one chance in five of keeping his
teeth for ten years. At i37th Street he broke off his study of com-
mercial art, left the subway, and began to run again, a tireless,
anxious run that brought him this time to his home — one room in a
high, horrible apartment-house in the middle of nowhere.

There it was on the bureau, the letter — in sacred ink, on blessed
paper — all over the city, people, if they listened, could hear the
beating of George O'Kelly's heart. He read the commas, the blots,
and the thumb-smudge on the margin — then he threw himself hope-
lessly upon his bed.

He was in a mess, one of those terrific messes which are ordinary
incidents in the life of the poor, which follow poverty like birds of
prey. The poor go under or go up or go wrong or even go on, some-
how, in a way the poor have — but George O'Kelly was so new to
poverty that had any one denied the uniqueness of his case he would
have been astounded.

Less than two years ago he had been graduated with honors from
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had taken a position
with a firm of construction engineers in southern Tennessee. All his
life he had thought in terms of tunnels and skyscrapers and great

146

"The Sensible Thing" 147

squat dams and tall, three-towered bridges, that were like dancers
holding hands in a row, with heads as tall as cities and skirts of cable
strand. It had seemed romantic to George O'Kelly to change the
sweep of rivers and the shape of mountains so that life could flourish
in the old bad lands of the world where it had never taken root be-
fore. He loved steel, and there was always steel near him in his
dreams, liquid steel, steel in bars, and blocks and beams and form-
less plastic masses, waiting for him, as paint and canvas to his hand.
Steel inexhaustible, to be made lovely and austere in his imaginative
fire ...

At present he was an insurance clerk at forty dollars a week with
his dream slipping fast behind him. The dark little girl who had made
this mess, this terrible and intolerable mess, was waiting to be sent
for in a town in Tennessee.

In fifteen minutes the woman from whom he sublet his room
knocked and asked him with maddening kindness if, since he was
home, he would have some lunch. He shook his head, but the inter-
ruption aroused him, and getting up from the bed he wrote a tele-
gram.

"Letter depressed me have you lost your nerve you are foolish and
just upset to think of breaking off why not marry me immediately
sure we can make it all right "

He hesitated for a wild minute, and then added in a hand that
could scarcely be recognized as his own: "In any case I will arrive
to-morrow at six o'clock."

When he finished he ran out of the apartment and down to the
telegraph office near the subway stop. He possessed in this world not
quite one hundred dollars, but the letter showed that she was
"nervous" and this left him no choice. He knew what "nervous"
meant — that she was emotionally depressed, that the prospect of
marrying into a life of poverty and struggle was putting too much
strain upon her love.

George O'Kelly reached the insurance company at his usual run,
the run that had become almost second nature to him, that seemed
best to express the tension under which he lived. He went straight
to the manager's office.

"I want to see you, Mr. Chambers," he announced breathlessly.

"Well?" Two eyes, eyes like winter windows, glared at him with
ruthless impersonality.

"I want to get four days' vacation."

"Why, you had a vacation just two weeks ago ! " said Mr. Cham-
bers in surprise.

"That's true," admitted the distraught young man, "but now I've
got to have another."

i48 "The Sensible Thing"

"Where 'd you go last time? To your home?"

"No, I went to — a place in Tennessee."

"Well, where do you want to go this time?"

"Well, this time I want to go to — a place in Tennessee."

"You're consistent, anyhow," said the manager dryly. "But I
didn't realize you were employed here as a travelling salesman."

"I'm not," cried George desperately, "but I've got to go."

"All right," agreed Mr. Chambers, "but you don't have to come
back. So don't ! "

"I won't." And to his own astonishment as well as Mr. Chambers'
George's face grew pink with pleasure. He felt happy, exultant — for
the first time in six months he was absolutely free. Tears of gratitude
stood in his eyes, and he seized Mr. Chambers warmly by the hand.

"I want to thank you," he said with a rush of emotion, "I don't
want to come back. I think I'd have gone crazy if you'd said that I
could come back. Only I couldn't quit myself, you see, and I want
to thank you for — for quitting for me."

He waved his hand magnanimously, shouted aloud, "You owe me
three days' salary but you can keep it ! " and rushed from the office.
Mr. Chambers rang for his stenographer to ask if O'Kelly had
seemed queer lately. He had fired many men in the course of his
career, and they had taken it in many different ways, but none of
them had thanked him — ever before.

Jonquil Gary was her name, and to George O'Kelly nothing had
ever looked so fresh and pale as her face when she saw him and
fled to him eagerly along the station platform. Her arms were raised
to him, her mouth was half parted for his kiss, when she held him
off suddenly and lightly and, with a touch of embarrassment, looked
around. Two boys, somewhat younger than George, were standing
in the background.

"This is Mr. Craddock and Mr. Holt," she announced cheerfully.
"You met them when you were here before."

Disturbed by the transition of a kiss into an introduction and sus-
pecting some hidden significance, George was more confused when he
found that the automobile which was to carry them to Jonquil's house
belonged to one of the two young men. It seemed to put him at a dis-
advantage. On the way Jonquil chattered between the front and
back seats, and when he tried to slip his arm around her under cover
of the twilight she compelled him with a quick movement to take
her hand i

"The Sensible Thing" 149

"Is this street on the way to your house?17 he whispered. "I don't
recognize it."

"It's the new boulevard. Jerry just got this car to-day, and he
wants to show it to me before he takes us home."

When, after twenty minutes, they were deposited at Jonquil's
house, George felt that the first happiness of the meeting, the joy he
had recognized so surely in her eyes back in the station, had been
dissipated by the intrusion of the ride. Something that he had looked
forward to had been rather casually lost, and he was brooding on
this as he said good night stiffly to the two young men. Then his ill-
humor faded as Jonquil drew him into a familiar embrace under the
dim light of the front hall and told him in a dozen ways, of which
the best was without words, how she had missed him. Her emotion
reassured him, promised his anxious heart that everything would be
all right.

They sat together on the sofa, overcome by each other's presence,
beyond all except fragmentary endearments. At the supper hour
Jonquil's father and mother appeared and were glad to see George.
They liked him, and had been interested in his engineering career
when he had first come to Tennessee over a year before. They had
been sorry when he had given it up and gone to New York to look
for something more immediately profitable, but while they deplored
the curtailment of his career they sympathized with him and were
ready to recognize the engagement. During dinner they asked about
his progress in New York.

"Everything's going fine," he told them with enthusiasm. "I've
been promoted — better salary."

He was miserable as he said this — but they were all so glad.

"They must like you," said Mrs. Gary, "that's certain — or they
wouldn't let you off twice in three weeks to come down here."

"I told them they had to," explained George hastily; "I told them
if they didn't I wouldn't work for them any more."

"But you ought to save your money," Mrs. Gary reproached him
gently. "Not spend it all on this expensive trip."

Dinner was over — he and Jonquil were alone and she came back
into his arms.

"So glad you're here," she sighed. "Wish you never were going
away again, darling."

"Do you miss me?"

"Oh, so much, so much."

"Do you — do other men come to see you often? Like those two
kids?"

The question surprised her. The dark velvet eyes stared at him.

ISO "The Sensible Thing"

"Why, of course they do. All the time. Why — IVe told you in let-
ters that they did, dearest."

This was true — when he had first come to the city there had been
already a dozen boys around her, responding to her picturesque
fragility with adolescent worship, and a few of them perceiving that
her beautiful eyes were also sane and kind.

"Do you expect me never to go anywhere" — Jonquil demanded,
leaning back against the sofa-pillows until she seemed to look at him
from many miles away — "and just fold my hands and sit still — for-
ever?"

"What do you mean ?" he blurted out in a panic. "Do you mean
you think 111 never have enough money to marry you?"

"Oh, don't jump at conclusions so, George."

"I'm not jumping at conclusions. That's what you said."

George decided suddenly that he was on dangerous grounds. He
had not intended to let anything spoil this night. He tried to take
her again in his arms, but she resisted unexpectedly, saying :

"It's hot. I'm going to get the electric fan."

When the fan was adjusted they sat down again, but he was in a
supersensitive mood and involuntarily he plunged into the specific
world he had intended to avoid.

"When will you marry me?"

"Are you ready for me to marry you?"

All at once his nerves gave way, and he sprang to his feet.

"Let's shut off that damned fan," he cried, "it drives me wild.
It's like a clock ticking away all the time I'll be with you. I came
here to be happy and forget everything about New York and
time "

He sank down on the sofa as suddenly as he had risen. Jonquil
turned off the fan, and drawing his head down into her lap began
stroking his hair.

"Let's sit like this," she said softly, "just sit quiet like this, and
111 put you to sleep. You're all tired and nervous and your sweet-
heart'll take care of you."

"But I don't want to sit like this," he complained, jerking up sud-
denly, "I don't want to sit like this at all. I want you to kiss me.
That's the only thing that makes me rest. And anyways I'm not
nervous — it's you that's nervous. I'm not nervous at all."

To prove that he wasn't nervous he left the couch and plumped
himself into a rocking-chair across the room.

"Just when I'm ready to marry you you write me the most nervous
letters, as if you're going to back out, and I have to come rushing
down here "

"You don't have to come if you don't want to."

"The Sensible Thing" 151

"But I do want to!" insisted George.

It seemed to him that he was being very cool and logical and that
she was putting him deliberately in the wrong. With every word
they were drawing farther and farther apart — and he was unable to
stop himself or to keep worry and pain out of his voice.

But in a minute Jonquil began to cry sorrowfully and he came
back to the sofa and put his arm around her. He was the com-
forter now, drawing her head close to his shoulder, murmuring old
familiar things until she grew calmer and only trembled a little,
spasmodically, in his arms. For over an hour they sat there, while the
evening pianos thumped their last cadences into the street outside.
George did not move, or think, or hope, lulled into numbness by the
premonition of disaster. The clock would tick on, past eleven, past
twelve, and then Mrs. Gary would call down gently over the banister
— beyond that he saw only to-morrow and despair.

Ill

In the heat of the next day the breaking-point came. They had
each guessed the truth about the other, but of the two she was the
more ready to admit the situation.

"There's no use going on," she said miserably, "you know you
hate the insurance business, and you'll never do well in it."

"That's not it," he insisted stubbornly; "I hate going on alone.
If you'll marry me and come with me and take a chance with me, I
can make good at anything, but not while I'm worrying about you
down here."

She was silent a long time before she answered, not thinking —
for she had seen the end — but only waiting, because she knew that
every word would seem more cruel than the last. Finally she spoke :

"George, I love you with all my heart, and I don't see how I can
ever love any one else but you. If you'd been ready for me two
months ago I'd have married you — now I can't because it doesn't
seem to be the sensible thing."

He made wild accusations — there was some one else — she was
keeping something from him !

"No, there's no one else."

This was true. But reacting from the strain of this affair she had
found relief in the company of young boys like Jerry Holt, who had
the merit of meaning absolutely nothing in her life.

George didn't take the situation well, at all. He seized her in his
arms and tried literally to kiss her into marrying him at once. When
this failed, he broke into a long monologue of self-pity, and ceased
only when he saw that he was making himself despicable in her

152 "The Sensible Thing"

sight. He threatened to leave when he had no intention of leaving,
and refused to go when she told him that, after all, it was best that
he should.

For a while she was sorry, then for another while she was merely
kind.

"You'd better go now," she cried at last, so loud that Mrs. Gary
came down-stairs in alarm.

"Is something the matter?"

"I'm going away, Mrs. Gary," said George brokenly. Jonquil had
left the room.

"Don't feel so badly, George." Mrs. Gary blinked at him in helpless
sympathy — sorry and, in the same breath, glad that the little tragedy
was almost done. "If I were you I'd go home to your mother for a
week or so. Perhaps after all this is the sensible thing "

"Please don't talk," he cried. "Please don't say anything to me
now!"

Jonquil came into the room again, her sorrow and her nervousness
alike tucked under powder and rouge and hat.

"I've ordered a taxicab," she said impersonally. "We can drive
around until your train leaves."

She walked out on the front porch. George put on his coat and hat
and stood for a minute exhausted in the hall — he had eaten scarcely
a bite since he had left New York. Mrs. Gary came over, drew his
head down and kissed him on the cheek, and he felt very ridiculous
and weak in his knowledge that the scene had been ridiculous and
weak at the end. If he had only gone the night before — left her for
the last time with a decent pride.

The taxi had come, and for an hour these two that had been lovers
rode along the less-frequented streets. He held her hand and grew
calmer in the sunshine, seeing too late that there had been nothing
all along to do or say.

"I'll come back," he told her.

"I know you will," she answered, trying to put a cheery faith into
her voice. "And we'll write each other — sometimes."

"No," he said, "we won't write. I couldn't stand that. Some day I'll
come back."

"I'll never forget you, George."

They reached the station, and she went with him while he bought
his ticket. . . .

"Why, George O'Kelly and Jonquil Gary!"

It was a man and a girl whom George had known when he had
worked in town, and Jonquil seemed to greet their presence with
relief. For an interminable five minutes they all stood there talking ;

"The Sensible Thing" 153

then the train roared into the station, and with ill-concealed agony in
his face George held out his arms toward Jonquil. She took an un-
certain step toward him, faltered, and then pressed his hand quickly
as if she were taking leave of a chance friend.

"Good-by, George," she was saying, "I hope you have a pleasant
trip.

"Good-by, George. Come back and see us all again."

Dumb, almost blind with pain, he seized his suitcase, and in some
dazed way got himself aboard the train.

Past clanging street-crossings, gathering speed through wide sub-
urban spaces toward the sunset. Perhaps she too would see the sunset
and pause for a moment, turning, remembering, before he faded
with her sleep into the past. This night's dusk would cover up forever
the sun and the trees and the flowers and laughter of his young world.

On a damp afternoon in September of the following year a young
man with has face burned to a deep copper glow got off a train at a
city in Tennessee. He looked around anxiously, and seemed relieved
when he found that there was no one in the station to meet him. He
taxied to the best hotel in the city where he registered with some
satisfaction as George O'Kelly, Cuzco, Peru.

Up in his room he sat for a few minutes at the window looking
down into the familiar street below. Then with his hand trembling
faintly he took off the telephone receiver and called a number.

"Is Miss Jonquil in?"

"This is she."

"Oh — " His voice after overcoming a faint tendency to waver went
on with friendly formality.

"This is George O'Kelly. Did you get my letter?"

"Yes. I thought you'd be in to-day."

Her voice, cool and unmoved, disturbed him, but not as he had
expected. This was the voice of a stranger, unexcited, pleasantly glad
to see him — that was all. He wanted to put down the telephone and
catch his breath.

"I haven't seen you for — a long time." He succeeded in making
this sound offhand. "Over a year."

He knew how long it had been — to the day.

"It'll be awfully nice to talk to you again."

"I'll be there in about an hour."

He hung up. For four long seasons every minute of his leisure had
been crowded with anticipation of this hour, and now this hour was

iS4 "The Sensible Thing"

here. He had thought of finding her married, engaged, in love — he
had not thought she would be unstirred at his return.

There would never again in his life, he felt, be another ten months
like these he had just gone through. He had made an admittedly re-
markable showing for a young engineer — stumbled into two unusual
opportunities, one in Peru, whence he had just returned, and another,
consequent upon it, in New York, whither he was bound. In this short
time he had risen from poverty into a position of unlimited oppor-
tunity.

He looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror. He was almost
black with tan, but it was a romantic black, and in the last week,
since he had had time to think about it, it had given him consider-
able pleasure. The hardiness of his frame, too, he appraised with a
sort of fascination. He had lost part of an eyebrow somewhere, and
he still wore an elastic bandage on his knee, but he was too young
not to realize that on the steamer many women had looked at him
with unusual tributary interest.

His clothes, of course, were frightful. They had been made for
him by a Greek tailor in Lima — in two days. He was young enough,
too, to have explained this sartorial deficiency to Jonquil in his
otherwise laconic note. The only further detail it contained was a
request that he should not be met at the station.

George O'Kelly, of Cuzco, Peru, waited an hour and a half in the
hotel, until, to be exact, the sun had reached a midway position in
the sky. Then, freshly shaven and talcum-powdered toward a some-
what more Caucasian hue, for vanity at the last minute had over-
come romance, he engaged a taxicab and set out for the house he
knew so well.

He was breathing hard — he noticed this but he told himself that
it was excitement, not emotion. He was here ; she was not married —
that was enough. He was not even sure what he had to say to her.
But this was the moment of his life that he felt he could least easily
have dispensed with. There was no triumph, after all, without a girl
concerned, and if he did not lay his spoils at her feet he could at least
hold them for a passing moment before her eyes.

The house loomed up suddenly beside him, and his first thought
was that it had assumed a strange unreality. There was nothing
changed — only everything was changed. It was smaller and it seemed
shabbier than before — there was no cloud of magic hovering over its
roof and issuing from the windows of the upper floor. He rang the
door-bell and an unfamiliar colored maid appeared. Miss Jonquil
would be down in a moment. He wet his lips nervously and walked
into the sitting-room — and the feeling of unreality increased. After
all, he saw, this was only a room, and not the enchanted chamber

"The Sensible Thing" 155

where he had passed those poignant hours. He sat in a chair, amazed
to find it a chair, realizing that his imagination had distorted and
colored all these simple familiar things.

Then the door opened and Jonquil came into the room — and it was
as though everything in it suddenly blurred before his eyes. He had
not remembered how beautiful she was, and he felt his face grow
pale and his voice diminish to a poor sigh in his throat.

She was dressed in pale green, and a gold ribbon bound back her
dark, straight hair like a crown. The familiar velvet eyes caught his
as she came through the door, and a spasm of fright went through
him at her beauty's power of inflicting pain.

He said "Hello," and they each took a few steps forward and
shook hands. Then they sat in chairs quite far apart and gazed at
each other across the room.

"You've come back," she said, and he answered just as tritely : "I
wanted to stop in and see you as I came through."

He tried to neutralize the tremor in his voice by looking anywhere
but at her face. The obligation to speak was on him, but, unless he
immediately began to boast, it seemed that there was nothing to say.
There had never been anything casual in their previous relations —
it didn't seem possible that people in this position would talk about
the weather.

"This is ridiculous," he broke out in sudden embarrassment. "I
don't know exactly what to do. Does my being here bother you?"

"No." The answer was both reticent and impersonally sad. It
depressed him.

"Are you engaged?" he demanded.

"No."

"Are you in love with some one?"

She shook her head.

"Oh." He leaned back in his chair. Another subject seemed ex-
hausted— the interview was not taking the course he had intended.

"Jonquil," he began, this time on a softer key, "after all that's
happened between us, I wanted to come back and see you. Whatever
I do in the future I'll never love another girl as I've loved you."

This was one of the speeches he had rehearsed. On the steamer it
had seemed to have just the right note — a reference to the tenderness
he would always feel for her combined with a non-committal atti-
tude toward his present state of mind. Here with the past around
him, beside him, growing minute by minute more heavy on the air,
it seemed theatrical and stale.

She made no comment, sat without moving, her eyes fixed on him
with an expression that might have meant everything or noth-
ing.

IS6 "The Sensible Thing"

"You don't love me any more, do you?" he asked her in a level
voice.

"No."

When Mrs. Gary came in a minute later, and spoke to him about
his success — there had been a half-column about him in the local
paper — he was a mixture of emotions. He knew now that he still
wanted this girl, and he knew that the past sometimes comes back
— that was all. For the rest he must be strong and watchful and he
would see.

"And now," Mrs. Gary was saying, "I want you two to go and see
the lady who has the chrysanthemums. She particularly told me she
wanted to see you because she'd read about you in the paper."

They went to see the lady with the chrysanthemums. They walked
along the street, and he recognized with a sort of excitement just
how her shorter footsteps always fell in between his own. The lady
turned out to be nice, and the chrysanthemums were enormous and
extraordinarily beautiful. The lady's gardens were full of them, white
and pink and yellow, so that to be among them was a trip back into
the heart of summer. There were two gardens full, and a gate between
them; when they strolled toward the second garden the lady went
first through the gate.

And then a curious thing happened. George stepped aside to let
Jonquil pass, but instead of going through she stood still and stared
at him for a minute. It was not so much the look, which was not a
smile, as it was the moment of silence. They saw each other's eyes,
and both took a short, faintly accelerated breath, and then they
went on into the second garden. That was all.

The afternoon waned. They thanked the lady and walked home
slowly, thoughtfully, side by side. Through dinner, too, they were
silent. George told Mr. Gary something of what had happened in
South America, and managed to let it be known that everything
would be plain sailing for him in the future.

Then dinner was over, and he and Jonquil were alone in the
room which had seen the beginning of their love affair and the end.
It seemed to him long ago and inexpressibly sad. On that sofa he had
felt agony and grief such as he would never feel again. He would
never be so weak or so tired and miserable and poor. Yet he knew
that that boy of fifteen months before had had something, a trust, a
warmth that was gone forever. The sensible thing — they had done
the sensible thing. He had traded his first youth for strength and
carved success out of despair. But with his youth, life had carried
away the freshness of his love.

"You won't marry me, will you?" he said quietly.

Jonquil shook her dark head.

"The Sensible Thing" 157

"I'm never going to marry," she answered.

He nodded.

"I'm going on to Washington in the morning," he said.

"Oh "

"I have to go. I've got to be in New York by the first, and mean-
while I want to stop off in Washington."

"Business!"

"No-o," he said as if reluctantly. "There's some one there I must
see who was very kind to me when I was so — down and out."

This was invented. There was no one in Washington for him to see
— but he was watching Jonquil narrowly, and he was sure that she
winced a little, that her eyes closed and then opened wide again.

"But before I go I want to tell you the things that happened to
me since I saw you, and, as maybe we won't meet again, I wonder
if — if just this once you'd sit in my lap like you used to. I wouldn't
ask except since there's no one else — yet — perhaps it doesn't matter."

She nodded, and in a moment was sitting in his lap as she had sat
so often in that vanished spring. The feel of her head against his
shoulder, of her familiar body, sent a shock of emotion over him.
His arms holding her had a tendency to tighten around her, so he
leaned back and began to talk thoughtfully into the air.

He told her of a despairing two weeks in New York which had
terminated with an attractive if not very profitable job in a construc-
tion plant in Jersey City. When the Peru business had first presented
itself it had not seemed an extraordinary opportunity. He was to be
third assistant engineer on the expedition, but only ten of the Ameri-
can party, including eight rodmen and surveyors, had ever reached
Cuzco. Ten days later the chief of the expedition was dead of yellow
fever. That had been his chance, a chance for anybody but a fool, a
marvellous chance

"A chance for anybody but a fool?" she interrupted innocently.

"Even for a fool," he continued. "It was wonderful. Well, I wired
New York "

"And so," she interrupted again, "they wired that you ought to
take a chance?"

"Ought to ! " he exclaimed, still leaning back. "That I had to. There
was no time to lose "

"Not a minute?"

"Not a minute."

"Not even time for — " she paused.

"For what?"

"Look."

He bent his head forward suddenly, and she drew herself to him in
the same moment, her lips half open like a flower.

158 "The Sensible Thing"

"Yes," he whispered into her lips. "There's all the time in the
world. . . ."

All the time in the world — his life and hers. But for an instant as
he kissed her he knew that though he search through eternity he
could never recapture those lost April hours. He might press her
close now till the muscles knotted on his arms — she was something
desirable and rare that he had fought for and made his own — but
never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of
night. . . .

Well, let it pass, he thought ; April is over, April is over. There are
all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
1924 All the Sad Young Men

ABSOLUTION

THERE was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of
the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were
warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical
union with our Lord. Sometimes, near four o'clock, there was a rustle
of Swede girls along the path by his window, and in their shrill laugh-
ter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the
twilight to come. At twilight the laughter and the voices were
quieter, but several times he had walked past Romberg's Drug Store
when it was dusk and the yellow lights shone inside and the nickel
taps of the soda-fountain were gleaming, and he had found the scent
of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air. He passed that
way when he returned from hearing confessions on Saturday nights,
and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that
the smell of the soap would float upward before it reached his
nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the summer
moon.

But there was no escape from the hot madness of four o'clock.
From his window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged
the valley of the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and
the carpet pattern to which in agony he bent his eyes sent his thought
brooding through grotesque labyrinths, open always to the unavoid-
able sun.

One afternoon when he had reached the point where the mind
runs down like an old clock, his housekeeper brought into his study
a beautiful, intense little boy of eleven named Rudolph Miller. The
little boy sat down in a patch of sunshine, and the priest, at his wal-
nut desk, pretended to be very busy. This was to conceal his relief
that some one had come into his haunted room.

Presently he turned around and found himself staring into two
enormous, staccato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light. For
a moment their expression startled him — then he saw that his visitor
was in a state of abject fear.

"Your mouth is trembling," said Father Schwartz, in a haggard
voice.

The little boy covered his quivering mouth with his hand.

150

160 Absolution

"Are you in trouble?" asked Father Schwartz, sharply. "Take your
hand away from your mouth and tell me what's the matter."

The boy — Father Schwartz recognized him now as the son of a
parishioner, Mr. Miller, the freight-agent — moved his hand reluc-
tantly off his mouth and became articulate in a despairing whisper.

"Father Schwartz — I've committed a terrible sin."

"A sin against purity?"

"No, Father . . . worse."

Father Schwartz's body jerked sharply.

"Have you killed somebody?"

"No — but I'm afraid — " the voice rose to a shrill whimper.

"Do you want to go to confession?"

The little boy shook his head miserably. Father Schwartz cleared
his throat so that he could make his voice soft and say some quiet,
kind thing. In this moment he should forget his own agony, and try
to act like God. He repeated to himself a devotional phrase, hoping
that in return God would help him to act correctly.

"Tell me what you've done," said his new soft voice.

The little boy looked at him through his tears, and was reassured
by the impression of moral resiliency which the distraught priest had
created. Abandoning as much of himself as he was able to this man,
Rudolph Miller began to tell his story.

"On Saturday, three days ago, my father he said I had to go to
confession, because I hadn't been for a month, and the family they
go every week, and I hadn't been. So I just as leave go, I didn't care.
So I put it off till after supper because I was playing with a bunch
of kids and father asked me if I went, and I said 'no,' and he took
me by the neck and he said 'You go now,' so I said 'All right,' so I
went over to church. And he yelled after me : 'Don't come back till
you go.' . . ."

"On Saturday, Three Days Ago."

The plush curtain of the confessional rearranged its dismal creases,
leaving exposed only the bottom of an old man's old shoe. Behind the
curtain an immortal soul was alone with God and the Reverend
Adolphus Schwartz, priest of the parish. Sound began, a labored
whispering, sibilant and discreet, broken at intervals by the voice
of the priest in audible question.

Rudolph Miller knelt in the pew beside the confessional and
waited, straining nervously to hear, and yet not to hear what was

Absolution 161

being said within. The fact that the priest was audible alarmed him.
His own turn came next, and the three or four others who waited
might listen unscrupulously while he admitted his violations of the
Sixth and Ninth Commandments.

Rudolph had never committed adultery, nor even coveted his neigh-
bor's wife — but it was the confession of the associate sins that was
particularly hard to contemplate. In comparison he relished the less
shameful fallings away — they formed a grayish background which
relieved the ebony mark of sexual offenses upon his soul.

He had been covering his ears with his hands, hoping that his re-
fusal to hear would be noticed, and a like courtesy rendered to him
in turn, when a sharp movement of the penitent in the confessional
made him sink his face precipitately into the crook of his elbow. Fear
assumed solid form, and pressed out a lodging between his heart and
his lungs. He must try now with all his might to be sorry for his
sins — not because he was afraid, but because he had offended God.
He must convince God that he was sorry and to do so he must first
convince himself. After a tense emotional struggle he achieved a
tremulous self-pity, and decided that he was now ready. If, by
allowing no other thought to enter his head, he could preserve this
state of emotion unimpaired until he went into that large coffin set
on end, he would have survived another crisis in his religious life.

For some time, however, a demoniac notion had partially possessed
him. He could go home now, before his turn came, and tell his mother
that he had arrived too late, and found the priest gone. This, unfor-
tunately, involved the risk of being caught in a lie. As an alternative
he could say that he had gone to confession, but this meant that he
must avoid communion next day, for communion taken upon an un-
cleansed soul would turn to poison in his mouth, and he would
crumple limp and damned from the altar-rail.

Again Father Schwartz's voice became audible.

"And for your "

The words blurred to a husky mumble, and Rudolph got excitedly
to his feet. He felt that it was impossible for him to go to confession
this afternoon. He hesitated tensely. Then from the confessional came
a tap, a creak, and a sustained rustle. The slide had fallen and the
plush curtain trembled. Temptation had come to him too late. . . .

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. ... I confess to Almighty
God and to you, Father, that I have sinned. . . . Since my last con-
fession it has been one month and three days. ... I accuse myself
of — taking the Name of the Lord in vain. . . ."

This was an easy sin. His curses had been but bravado — telling of
them was little less than a brag.

". . . of being mean to an old lady."

1 62 Absolution

The wan shadow moved a little on the latticed slat.

"How, my child?"

"Old lady Swenson," Rudolph's murmur soared jubilantly. "She
got our baseball that we knocked in her window, and she wouldn't
give it back, so we yelled Twenty-three, Skidoo,' at her all afternoon.
Then about five o'clock she had a fit, and they had to have the
doctor."

"Go on, my child."

"Of — of not believing I was the son of my parents."

"What?" The interrogation was distinctly startled.

"Of not believing that I was the son of my parents."

"Why not?"

"Oh, just pride," answered the penitent airily.

"You mean you thought you were too good to be the son of
your parents ?"

"Yes, Father." On a less jubilant note.

"Go on."

"Of being disobedient and calling my mother names. Of slandering
people behind their back. Of smoking "

Rudolph had now exhausted the minor offenses, and was approach-
the sins it was agony to tell. He held his fingers against his face like
bars as if to press out between them the shame in his heart.

"Of dirty words and immodest thoughts and desires," he whispered
very low.

"How often?"

"I don't know."

"Once a week? Twice a week?"

"Twice a week."

"Did you yield to these desires?"

"No, Father."

"Were you alone when you had them?"

"No Father. I was with two boys and a girl."

"Don't you know, my child, that you should avoid the occasions
of sin as well as the sin itself? Evil companionship leads to evil
desires and evil desires to evil actions. Where were you when this
happened?"

"In a barn in back of "

"I don't want to hear any names," interrupted the priest sharply.

"Well, it was up in the loft of this barn and this girl and — a fella,
they were saying things — saying immodest things, and I stayed."

"You should have gone — you should have told the girl to go."

He should have gone ! He could not tell Father Schwartz how his
pulse had bumped in his wrist, how a strange, romantic excitement
had possessed him whea those curious things had been said. Perhaps

Absolution 163

in the houses of delinquency among the dull and hard-eyed incor-
rigible girls can be found those for whom has burned the whitest fire.

"Have you anything else to tell me?"

"I don't think so, Father."

Rudolph felt a great relief. Perspiration had broken out under his
tight-pressed fingers.

"Have you told any lies?"

The question startled him. Like all those who habitually and in-
stinctively lie, he had an enormous respect and awe for the truth.
Something almost exterior to himself dictated a quick, hurt answer.
"Oh, no, Father, I never tell lies."

For a moment, like the commoner in the king's chair, he tasted the
pride of the situation. Then as the priest began to murmur conven-
tional admonitions he realized that in heroically denying he had told
lies, he had committed a terrible sin — he had told a lie in confession.

In automatic response to Father Schwartz's "Make an act of con-
trition," he began to repeat aloud meaninglessly :

"Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee. . . ."

He must fix this now — it was a bad mistake — but as his teeth shut
on the last words of his prayer there was a sharp sound, and the slat
was closed.

A minute later when he emerged into the twilight the relief in com-
ing from the muggy church into an open world of wheat and sky post-
poned the full realization of what he had done. Instead of worrying
he took a deep breath of the crisp air and began to say over and over
to himself the words "Blatchford Sarnemington, Blatchford Sarnem-
ington ! "

Blatchford Sarnemington was himself, and these words were in
effect a lyric. When he became Blatchford Sarnemington a suave
nobility flowed from him. Blatchford Sarnemington lived in great
sweeping triumphs. When Rudolph half closed his eyes it meant that
Blatchford had established dominance over him and, as he went by,
there were envious mutters in the air: "Blatchford Sarnemington!
There goes Blatchford Sarnemington."

He was Blatchford now for a while as he strutted homeward along
the staggering road, but when the road braced itself in macadam in
order to become the main street of Ludwig, Rudolph's exhilaration
faded out and his mind cooled, and he felt the horror of his lie. God,
of course, already knew of it — but Rudolph reserved a corner of his
mind where he was safe from God, where he prepared the subter-
fuges with which he often tricked God. Hiding now in this corner
he considered how he could best avoid the consequences of his mis-
statement.

At all costs he must avoid communion next day. The risk of anger-

164 Absolution

ing God to such an extent was too great. He would have to drink
water "by accident" in the morning, and thus, in accordance with a
church law, render himself unfit to receive communion that day. In
spite of its flimsiness this subterfuge was the most feasible that oc-
curred to him. He accepted its risks and was concentrating on how
best to put it into effect, as he turned the corner by Romberg's Drug
Store and came in sight of his father's house.

Ill

Rudolph's father, the local freight-agent, had floated with the sec-
ond wave of German and Irish stock to the Minnesota-Dakota
country. Theoretically, great opportunities lay ahead of a young man
of energy in that day and place, but Carl Miller had been incapable
of establishing either with his superiors or his subordinates the repu-
tation for approximate immutability which is essential to success in
a hierarchic industry. Somewhat gross, he was, nevertheless, insuffi-
ciently hard-headed and unable to take fundamental relationships
for granted, and this inability made him suspicious, unrestful, and
continually dismayed.

His two bonds with the colorful life were his faith in the Roman
Catholic Church and his mystical worship of the Empire Builder,
James J. Hill. Hill was the apotheosis of that quality in which Miller
himself was deficient — the sense of things, the feel of things, the hint
of rain in the wind on the cheek. Miller's mind worked late, on the
old decisions of other men, and he had never in his life felt the bal-
ance of any single thing in his hands. His weary, sprightly, under-
sized body was growing old in Hill's gigantic shadow. For twenty
years he had lived alone with Hill's name and God.

On Sunday morning Carl Miller awoke in the dustless quiet of six
o'clock. Kneeling by the side of the bed he bent his yellow-gray hair
and the full dapple bangs of his mustache into the pillow, and prayed
for several minutes. Then he drew off his night-shirt — like the rest
of his generation he had never been able to endure pajamas — and
clothed his thin, white, hairless body in woollen underwear.

He shaved. Silence in the other bedroom where his wife lay ner-
vously asleep. Silence from the screened-off corner of the hall where
his son's cot stood, and his son slept among his Alger books, his col-
lection of cigar-bands, his mothy pennants — "Cornell," "Hamlin,"
and "Greetings from Pueblo, New Mexico" — and the other posses-
sions of his private life. From outside Miller could hear the shrill
birds and the whirring movement of the poultry, and, as an under-
tone, the low, swelling click-a-tick of the six-fifteen through-train
for Montana and the green coast beyond. Then as the cold water

Absolution 165

dripped from the wash-rag in his hand he raised his head suddenly —
he had heard a furtive sound from the kitchen below.

He dried his razor hastily, slipped his dangling suspenders to his
shoulder, and listened. Some one was walking in the kitchen, and he
knew by the light footfall that it was not his wife. With his mouth
faintly ajar he ran quickly down the stairs and opened the kitchen
door.

Standing by the sink, with one hand on the still dripping faucet
and the other clutching a full glass of water, stood his son. The boy's
eyes, still heavy with sleep, met his father's with a frightened, re-
proachful beauty. He was barefooted, and his pajamas were rolled
up at the knees and sleeves.

For a moment they both remained motionless — Carl Miller's brow
went down and his son's went up, as though they were striking a
balance between the extremes of emotion which filled them. Then the
bangs of the parent's mustache descended portentously until they
obscured his mouth, and he gave a short glance around to see if any-
thing had been disturbed.

The kitchen was garnished with sunlight which beat on the pans
and made the smooth boards of the floor and table yellow and clean
as wheat. It was the centre of the house where the fire burned and the
tins fitted into tins like toys, and the steam whistled all day on a
thin pastel note. Nothing was moved, nothing touched — except the
faucet where beads of water still formed and dripped with a white
flash into the sink below.

"What are you doing?"

"I got awful thirsty, so I thought I'd just come down and get "

"I thought you were going to communion."

A look of vehement astonishment spread over his son's face.

"I forgot all about it."

"Have you drunk any water?"

"No "

As the word left his mouth Rudolph knew it was the wrong answer,
but the faded indignant eyes facing him had signalled up the truth
before the boy's will could act. He realized, too, that he should never
have come down-stairs ; some vague necessity for verisimilitude had
made him want to leave a wet glass as evidence by the sink; the
honesty of his imagination had betrayed him.

"Pour it out," commanded his father, "that water!"

Rudolph despairingly inverted the tumbler.

"What's the matter with you, anyways?" demanded Miller angrily.

"Nothing."

"Did you go to confession yesterday?"

"Yes."

1 66 Absolution

"Then why were you going to drink water?"

"I don't know— I forgot."

"Maybe you care more about being a little bit thirsty than you
do about your religion."

"I forgot." Rudolph could feel the tears straining in his eyes.

"That's no answer."

"Well, I did."

"You better look out ! " His father held to a high, persistent, in-
quisitory note : "If you're so forgetful that you can't remember your
religion something better be done about it."

Rudolph filled a sharp pause with :

"I can remember it all right."

"First you begin to neglect your religion," cried his father, fan-
ning his own fierceness, "the next thing you'll begin to lie and steal,
and the next thing is the reform school ! "

Not even this familiar threat could deepen the abyss that Rudolph
saw before him. He must either tell all now, offering his body for
what he knew would be a ferocious beating, or else tempt the thunder-
bolts by receiving the Body and Blood of Christ with sacrilege upon
his soul. And of the two the former seemed more terrible — it was not
so much the beating he dreaded as the savage ferocity, outlet of the
ineffectual man, which would lie behind it.

"Put down that glass and go up-stairs and dress!" his father
ordered, "and when we get to church, before you go to communion,
you better kneel down and ask God to forgive you for your careless-
ness."

Some accidental emphasis in the phrasing of this command acted
like a catalytic agent on the confusion and terror of Rudolph's mind.
A wild, proud anger rose in him, and he dashed the tumbler passion-
ately into the sink.

His father uttered a strained, husky sound, and sprang for him.
Rudolph dodged to the side, tipped over a chair, and tried to get
beyond the kitchen table. He cried out sharply when a hand grasped
his pajama shoulder, then he felt the dull impact of a fist against the
side of his head, and glancing blows on the upper part of his body.
As he slipped here and there in his father's grasp, dragged or lifted
when he clung instinctively to an arm, aware of sharp smarts and
strains, he made no sound except that he laughed hysterically sev-
eral times. Then in less than a minute the blows abruptly ceased.
After a lull during which Rudolph was tightly held, and during which
they both trembled violently and uttered strange, truncated words,
Carl Miller half dragged, half threatened his son up-stairs.

"Put on your clothes ! "
* Rudolph was now both hysterical and cold. His head hurt him,

Absolution 167

and there was a long, shallow scratch on his neck from his father's
finger-nail, and he sobbed and trembled as he dressed. He was aware
of his mother standing at the doorway in a wrapper, her wrinkled
face compressing and squeezing and opening out into new series of
wrinkles which floated and eddied from neck to brow. Despising her
nervous ineffectuality and avoiding her rudely when she tried to touch
his neck with witch-hazel, he made a hasty, choking toilet. Then he
followed his father out of the house and along the road toward the
Catholic church.

They walked without speaking except when Carl Miller acknowl-
edged automatically the existence of passers-by. Rudolph's uneven
breathing alone ruffled the hot Sunday silence.

His father stopped decisively at the door of the church.

"I've decided you'd better go to confession again. Go in and tell
Father Schwartz what you did and ask God's pardon."

"You lost your temper, too ! " said Rudolph quickly.

Carl Miller took a step toward his son, who moved cautiously
backward.

"All right, I'll go."

"Are you going to do what I say?" cried his father in a hoarse
whisper.

"All right."

Rudolph walked into the church, and for the second time in two
days entered the confessional and knelt down. The slat went up
almost at once.

"I accuse myself of missing my morning prayers."

"Is that all?"

"That's all."

A maudlin exultation filled him. Not easily ever again would he
be able to put an abstraction before the necessities of his ease and
pride. An invisible line had been crossed, and he had become aware
of his isolation — aware that it applied not only to those moments
when he was Blatchford Sarnemington but that it applied to all his
inner life. Hitherto such phenomena as "crazy" ambitions and petty
shames and fears had been but private reservations, unacknowledged
before the throne of his official soul. Now he realized unconsciously
that his private reservations were himself — and all the rest a gar-
nished front and a conventional flag. The pressure of his environ-
ment had driven him into the lonely secret road of adolescence.

He knelt in the pew beside his father. Mass began. Rudolph knelt
up — when he was alone he slumped his posterior back against the

1 68 Absolution

seat — and tasted the consciousness of a sharp, subtle revenge. Beside
him his father prayed that God would forgive Rudolph, and asked
also that his own outbreak of temper would be pardoned. He glanced
sidewise at this son, and was relieved to see that the strained, wild
look had gone from his face and that he had ceased sobbing. The
Grace of God, inherent in the Sacrament, would do the rest, and per-
haps after Mass everything would be better. He was proud of
Rudolph in his heart, and beginning to be truly as well as formally
sorry for what he had done.

Usually, the passing of the collection box was a significant point
for Rudolph in the services. If, as was often the case, he had no
money to drop in he would be furiously ashamed and bow his head
and pretend not to see the box, lest Jeanne Brady in the pew behind
should take notice and suspect an acute family poverty. But to-day
he glanced coldly into it as it skimmed under his eyes, noting with
casual interest the large number of pennies it contained.

When the bell rang for communion, however, he quivered. There
was no reason why God should not stop his heart. During the past
twelve hours he had committed a series of mortal sins increasing in
gravity, and he was now to crown them all with a blasphemous
sacrilege.

"Domine, non sum dignus; ut intres sub tectum meum; sed
tantum die verbo, et sanabitur anima mea. . . ."

There was a rustle in the pews, and the communicants worked
their ways into the aisle with downcast eyes and joined hands. Those
of larger piety pressed together their finger-tips to form steeples.
Among these latter was Carl Miller. Rudolph followed him toward
the altar-rail and knelt down, automatically taking up the napkin
under his chin. The bell rang sharply, and the priest turned from
the altar with the white Host held above the chalice :

"Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in
vitam ceternam."

A cold sweat broke out on Rudolph's forehead as the communion
began. Along the line Father Schwartz moved, and with gathering
nausea Rudolph felt his heart-valves weakening at the will of God.
It seemed to him that the church was darker and that a great quiet
had fallen, broken only by the inarticulate mumble which announced
the approach of the Creator of Heaven and Earth. He dropped his
head down between his shoulders and waited for the blow.

Then he felt a sharp nudge in his side. His father was poking him
to sit up, not to slump against the rail; the priest was only two
places away.

"Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in
vitam ceternam"

Absolution 169

Rudolph opened his mouth. He felt the sticky wax taste of the
wafer on his tongue. He remained motionless for what seemed an in-
terminable period of time, his head still raised, the wafer undissolved
in his mouth. Then again he started at the pressure of his father's
elbow, and saw that the people were falling away from the altar like
leaves and turning with blind downcast eyes to their pews, alone
with God.

Rudolph was alone with himself, drenched with perspiration and
deep in mortal sin. As he walked back to his pew the sharp taps of
his cloven hoofs were loud upon the floor, and he knew that it was a
dark poison he carried in his heart.

"Sagitta Volante in Dei"

The beautiful little boy with eyes like blue stones, and lashes that
sprayed open from them like flower-petals had finished telling his
sin to Father Schwartz — and the square of sunshine in which he sat
had moved forward half an hour into the room. Rudolph had become
less frightened now ; once eased of the story a reaction had set in.
He knew that as long as he was in the room with this priest God
would not stop his heart, so he sighed and sat quietly, waiting for the
priest to speak.

Father Schwartz's cold watery eyes were fixed upon the carpet
pattern on which the sun had brought out the swastikas and the flat
bloomless vines and the pale echoes of flowers. The hall-clock ticked
insistently toward sunset, and from the ugly room and from the
afternoon outside the window arose a stiff monotony, shattered now
and then by the reverberate clapping of a far-away hammer on the
dry air. The priest's nerves were strung thin and the beads of his
rosary were crawling and squirming like snakes upon the green felt
of his table top. He could not remember now what it was he should
say.

Of all the things in this lost Swede town he was most aware of this
little boy's eyes — the beautiful eyes, with lashes that left them re-
luctantly and curved back as though to meet them once more.

For a moment longer the silence persisted while Rudolph waited,
and the priest struggled to remember something that was slipping
farther and farther away from him, and the clock ticked in the broken
house. Then Father Schwartz stared hard at the little boy and re-
marked in a peculiar voice :

"When a lot of people get together in the best places things go
glimmering."

170 Absolution

Rudolph started and looked quickly at Father Schwartz's face.
"I said—" began the priest, and paused, listening. "Do you hear
the hammer and the clock ticking and the bees? Well, that's no good.
The thing is to have a lot of people in the centre of the world, wher-
ever that happens to be. Then" — his watery eyes widened knowingly
— "things go glimmering."

"Yes, Father," agreed Rudolph, feeling a little frightened.

"What are you going to be when you grow up ?"

"Well, I was going to be a baseball-player for a while/' answered
Rudolph nervously, "but I don't think that's a very good ambition,
so I think I'll be an actor or a Navy officer."

Again the priest stared at him.

"I see exactly what you mean," he said, with a fierce air.

Rudolph had not meant anything in particular, and at the implica-
tion that he had, he became more uneasy.

"This man is crazy," he thought, "and I'm scared of him. He wants
me to help him out some way, and I don't want to."

"You look as if things went glimmering," cried Father Schwartz
wildly. "Did you ever go to a party?"

"Yes, Father."

"And did you notice that everybody was properly dressed? That's
what I mean. Just as you went into the party there was a moment
when everybody was properly dressed. Maybe two little girls were
standing by the door and some boys were leaning over the banisters,
and there were bowls around full of flowers."

"IVe been to a lot of parties," said Rudolph, rather relieved that
the conversation had taken this turn.

"Of course," continued Father Schwartz triumphantly, "I knew
you'd agree with me. But my theory is that when a whole lot of peo-
ple get together in the best places things go glimmering all the
time."

Rudolph found himself thinking of Blatchford Sarnemington.

"Please listen to me!" commanded the priest impatiently. "Stop
worrying about last Saturday. Apostasy implies an absolute damna-
tion only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that

fix it?"

Rudolph had not the faintest idea what Father Schwartz was
talking about, but he nodded and the priest nodded back at him
and returned to his mysterious preoccupation.

"Why," he cried, "they have lights now as big as stars — do you
realize that? I heard of one light they had in Paris or somewhere
that was as big as a star. A lot of people had it — a lot of gay people.
They have all sorts of things now that you never dreamed of."

"Look here—" He came nearer to Rudolph, but the boy drew

Absolution 171

away, so Father Schwartz went back and sat down in his chair, his
eyes dried out and hot. "Did you ever see an amusement park?"

"No, Father."

"Well, go and see an amusement park." The priest waved his hand
vaguely. "It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to
one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place —
under dark trees. You'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the
air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band
playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts — and everything will
twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything, you see. It will all just
hang out there in the night like a colored balloon— like a big yellow
lantern on a pole."

Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.

"But don't get up close," he warned Rudolph, "because if you do
you'll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life."

All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph,
because this man was a priest. He sat there, half terrified, his beauti-
ful eyes open wide and staring at Father Schwartz. But underneath
his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed.
There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing
to do with God. He no longer thought that God was angry at him
about the original lie, because He must have understood that Rudolph
had done it to make things finer in the confessional, brightening up
the dinginess of his admissions by saying a thing radiant and proud.
At the moment when he had affirmed immaculate honor a silver pen-
non had flapped out into the breeze somewhere and there had been
the crunch of leather and the shine of silver spurs and a troop of
horsemen waiting for dawn on a low green hill. The sun had made
stars of light on their breastplates like the picture at home of the
German cuirassiers at Sedan.

But now the priest was muttering inarticulate and heart-broken
words, and the boy became wildly afraid. Horror entered suddenly
in at the open window, and the atmosphere of the room changed.
Father Schwartz collapsed precipitously down on his knees, and let
his body settle back against a chair.

"Oh, my God ! " he cried out, in a strange voice, and wilted to the
floor.

Then a human oppression rose from the priest's worn clothes, and
mingled with the faint smell of old food in the corners. Rudolph gave
a sharp cry and ran in a panic from the house — while the collapsed
man lay there quite still, filling his room, filling it with voices and
faces until it was crowded with echolalia, and rang loud with a
steady, shrill note of laughter.

Outside the window the blue sirocco trembled over the wheat, and

172 Absolution

girls with yellow hair walked sensuously along roads that bounded
the fields, calling innocent, exciting things to the young men who
were working in the lines between the grain. Legs were shaped under
starchless gingham, and rims of the necks of dresses were warm and
damp. For five hours now hot fertile life had burned in the after-
noon. It would be night in three hours, and all along the land there
would be these blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from
the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.
1924 All the Sad Young Men

Glamor and Disillusionment

EDITOR'S NOTE

THIS second group consists of seven stories written between 1924,
the year when Fitzgerald finished The Great Gatsby, and the time of
Zelda's first breakdown in 1930. During those years he was devoting
most of his energy to magazine stories and the stories continued to
improve, after taking a leap forward at the time of Gatsby, but
already the author was suffering from a form of neglect. The situ-
ation was in some ways preposterous. Here was one of our leading
writers, doing some of his best work and having it featured in the
most popular American magazines, and at the same time the critics
were wondering what had become of him after his early success.
The critics didn't read the Saturday Evening Post or expect to find
serious fiction there, and Fitzgerald himself was so much affected
by their attitude that he never reprinted some of his most effective
stories.

There are three of the "junked and dismantled" stories in the
present group. "Magnetism" (1928) was almost the only fruit of his
first visit to Hollywood. He had gone there to write a script for
Constance Talmadge and had worked hard on it, besides being the
life of several wild parties, but the script was never produced.
"Magnetism" is a serious study of the movie colony, even if it deals
with the farcical dilemma of a good man and faithful husband who
can't keep other women from falling in love with him. . . . "The
Rough Crossing" (1929) was the souvenir of a stormy voyage to
Genoa, during which Scott and Zelda had flirted with strangers and
quarreled with each other. The first two paragraphs of the story
went into Fitzgerald's notebook and were afterwards rewritten into
Book II, Chapter XIX, of Tender Is the Night. . . . "The Bridal
Party" (1930) was suggested by the famous wedding of Powell
Fowler in the early summer of that same year. Better than anything
else I have read it gives us the atmosphere of that brief period when

176 Glamor and Disillusionment

the spirit of the Wall Street boom still flourished in the midst of
the crash.

Two other stories in the present group were reprinted in All the
Sad Young Men. "The Rich Boy" (1926) was the first serious work
that Fitzgerald undertook after finishing Gatsby. Like the novel it
reveals his complicated attitude toward the very rich, with its mix-
ture of distrust, admiration and above all curiosity about how their
minds work. Anson Hunter's central trait, in the story, is the sense
of superiority that he feeds by captivating others. It makes him will-
ing to help or destroy others, almost in the same gesture, but keeps
him from surrendering anything of himself. In revealing this trait
Fitzgerald shows how much he has learned about irony and under-
statement. . . . "The Baby Party" (1925) goes back to a somewhat
earlier period. After spending a year in Great Neck, Long Island,
and entertaining mobs of week-end guests, Fitzgerald was $5,000 in
debt and had to stop work on Gatsby. He wrote himself out of debt
by producing eleven stories, which he sold for more than $17,000.
"I really worked hard as hell last winter," he said in a letter to
Edmund Wilson — "but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart
as well as my iron constitution." Although it was written in a single
all-night session, "The Baby Party" is far from being trash, and it is
Fitzgerald's one expedition into the field of domestic comedy.

"The Last of the Belles" (1929) was reprinted in Taps at Reveille.
Its portrait of Ailie Calhoun, with her charm and professional vanity,
is filled out with incidents that Fitzgerald remembered from his court-
ship of Zelda. Like other stories written at the same period, "The
Last of the Belles" is filled with regret for a vanished emotion, but
the regret is seasoned with self-ridicule — as when the hero goes
stumbling through the knee-deep underbrush that had covered the
site of an army camp, "looking," as he said to himself, "for my
youth in a clapboard or a strip of roofing or a rusty tomato can." . . .
"Two Wrongs" (1930) was also reprinted in Taps. It dates from a
period when Fitzgerald was recovering from a mild attack of tuber-
culosis— his second or third — and Zelda was studying hard to be-
come a professional dancer. A great deal of his feeling about himself
went into the story, together with his premonitions of disaster.

THE RICH BOY

BEGIN WITH an individual, and before you know it you find that
you have created a type ; begin with a type, and you find that you
have created — nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer
behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than
we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an
"average, honest, open fellow," I feel pretty sure that he has some
definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to con-
ceal— and his protestation of being average and honest and open is
his way of reminding himself of his misprision.

There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his
and not his brothers' story. All my life I have lived among his
brothers but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about
his brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the
poor have told about the rich and the rich have told about them-
selves— such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick
up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality.
Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the
country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you
and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them,
makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trust-
ful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to
understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better
than we are because we had to discover the compensations and
refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our
world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different. The only way I can describe young Anson
Hunter is to approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stub-
bornly to my point of view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost —
I have nothing to show but a preposterous movie.

Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day divide
a fortune of fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of reason
— is it seven? — at the beginning of the century when daring young

178 The Rich Boy

women were already gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric "mobiles."
In those days he and his brother had an English governess who spoke
the language very clearly and crisply and well, so that the two boys
grew to speak as she did — their words and sentences were all crisp
and clear and not run together as ours are. They didn't talk exactl}
like English children but acquired an accent that is peculiar tc
fashionable people in the city of New York.

In the summer the six children were moved from the house on
7ist Street to a big estate in northern Connecticut. It was not 2
fashionable locality — Anson's father wanted to delay as long as pos-
sible his children's knowledge of that side of life. He was a man
somewhat superior to his class, which composed New York society,
and to his period, which was the snobbish and formalized vulgarity
of the Gilded Age, and he wanted his sons to learn habits of con-
centration and have sound constitutions and grow up into right-liv-
ing and successful men. He and his wife kept an eye on them as well
as they were able until the two older boys went away to school, but
in huge establishments this is difficult — it was much simpler in the
series of small and medium-sized houses in which my own youth was
spent — I was never far out of the reach of my mother's voice, of the
sense of her presence, her approval or disapproval.

Anson's first sense of his superiority came to him when he realized
the half-grudging American deference that was paid to him in the
Connecticut village. The parents of the boys he played with always
inquired after his father and mother, and were vaguely excited when
their own children were asked to the Hunters' house. He accepted
this as the natural state of things, and a sort of impatience with all
groups of which he was not the centre — in money, in position, in
authority — remained with him for the rest of his life. He disdained
to struggle with other boys for precedence — he expected it to be
given him freely, and when it wasn't he withdrew into his family.
His family was sufficient, for in the East money is still a somewhat
feudal thing, a clan-forming thing. In the snobbish West, money sepa
rates families to form "sets."

At eighteen, when he went to New Haven, Anson was tall and
thick-set, with a clear complexion and a healthy color from the
ordered life he had led in school. His hair was yellow and grew in a
funny way on his head, his nose was beaked — these two things kept
him from being handsome — but he had a confident charm and a cer-
tain brusque style, and the upper-class men who passed him on the
street knew without being told that he was a rich boy and had gone
to one of the best schools. Nevertheless, his very superiority kept
him from being a success in college — the independence was mistaken
for egotism, and the refusal to accept Yale standards with the proper

The Rich Boy 179

awe seemed to belittle all those who had. So, long before he gradu-
ated, he began to shift the centre of his life to New York.

He was at home in New York — there was his own house with "the
kind of servants you can't get any more" — and his own family, of
which, because of his good humor and a certain ability to make
things go, he was rapidly becoming the centre, and the debutante
parties, and the correct manly world of the men's clubs, and the occa-
sional wild spree with the gallant girls whom New Haven only knew
from the fifth row. His aspirations were conventional enough — they
included even the irreproachable shadow he would some day marry,
but they differed from the aspirations of the majority of young men
in that there was no mist over them, none of that quality which is
variously known as "idealism" or "illusion." Anson accepted with-
out reservation the world of high finance and high extravagance, of
divorce and dissipation, of snobbery and of privilege. Most of our
lives end as a compromise — it was as a compromise that his life
began.

He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was just out
of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the systematized
hysteria of the war. In the blue-green uniform of the naval aviation
he came down to Pensacola, where the hotel orchestras played "I'm
sorry, dear," and we young officers danced with the girls. Every one
liked him, and though he ran with the drinkers and wasn't an espe-
cially good pilot, even the instructors treated him with a certain
respect. He was always having long talks with them in his confident,
logical voice — talks which ended by his getting himself, or, more
frequently, another officer, out of some impending trouble. He was
convivial, bawdy, robustly avid for pleasure, and we were all sur-
prised when he fell in love with a conservative and rather proper
girl.

Her name was Paula Legendre, a dark, serious beauty from some-
where in California. Her family kept a winter residence just outside
of town, and in spite of her primness she was enormously popular ;
there is a large class of men whose egotism can't endure humor in a
woman. But Anson wasn't that sort, and I couldn't understand the
attraction of her "sincerity" — that was the thing to say about her —
for his keen and somewhat sardonic mind.

Nevertheless, they fell in love — and on her terms. He no longer
joined the twilight gathering at the De Soto bar, and whenever they
were seen together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue,
which must have gone on several weeks. Long afterward he told me
that it was not about anything in particular but was composed on
both sides of immature and even meaningless statements — the emo-
tional content that gradually came to fill it grew up not out of the

i8o The Rich Boy

words but out of its enormous seriousness. It was a sort of hypnosis.
Often it was interrupted, giving way to that emasculated humor we
call fun ; when they were alone it was resumed again, solemn, low-
keyed, and pitched so as to give each other a sense of unity in feeling
and thought. They came to resent any interruptions of it, to be un-
responsive to facetiousness about life, even to the mild cynicism of
their contemporaries. They were only happy when the dialogue was
going on, and its seriousness bathed them like the amber glow of an
open fire. Toward the end there came an interruption they did not
resent — it began to be interrupted by passion.

Oddly enough, Anson was as engrossed in the dialogue as she was
and as profoundly affected by it, yet at the same time aware that on
his side much was insincere, and on hers much was merely simple.
At first, too, he despised her emotional simplicity as well, but with
his love her nature deepened and blossomed, and he could despise it
no longer. He felt that if he could enter into Paula's warm safe life
he would be happy. The long preparation of the dialogue removed
any constraint — he taught her some of what he had learned from
more adventurous women, and she responded with a rapt holy inten-
sity. One evening after a dance they agreed to marry, and he wrote
a long letter about her to his mother. The next day Paula told him
that she was rich, that she had a personal fortune of nearly a million
dollars.

Ill

It was exactly as if they could say "Neither of us has anything : we
shall be poor together" — just as delightful that they should be rich
instead. It gave them the same communion of adventure. Yet when
Anson got leave in April, and Paula and her mother accompanied
him North, she was impressed with the standing of his family in
New York and with the scale on which they lived. Alone with Anson
for the first time in the rooms where he had played as a boy, she was
filled with a comfortable emotion, as though she were pre-eminently
safe and taken care of. The pictures of Anson in a skull cap at his
first school, of Anson on horseback with the sweetheart of a mysteri-
ous forgotten summer, of Anson in a gay group of ushers and brides-
maid at a wedding, made her jealous of his life apart from her in the
p£st? and so completely did his authoritative person seem to sum up
and typify these possessions of his that she was inspired with the
idea of being married immediately and returning to Pensacola as
his wife.

But an immediate marriage wasn't discussed — even the engage-
ment was to be secret until after the war. When she realized that

The Rich Boy 181

only two days of his leave remained, her dissatisfaction crystallized
in the intention of making him as unwilling to wait as she was. They
were driving to the country for dinner and she determined to force
the issue that night.

Now a cousin of Paula's was staying with them at the Ritz, a
severe, bitter girl who loved Paula but was somewhat jealous of her
impressive engagement, and as Paula was late in dressing, the cousin,
who wasn't going to the party, received Anson in the parlor of the
suite.

Anson had met friends at five o'clock and drunk freely and in-
discreetly with them for an hour. He left the Yale Club at a proper
time, and his mother's chauffeur drove him to the Ritz, but his usual
capacity was not in evidence, and the impact of the steam-heated
sitting-room made him suddenly dizzy. He knew it, and he was both
amused and sorry.

Paula's cousin was twenty-five, but she was exceptionally nai've,
and at first failed to realize what was up. She had never met Anson
before, and she was surprised when he mumbled strange information
and nearly fell off his chair, but until Paula appeared it didn't occur
to her that what she had taken for the odor of a dry-cleaned uni-*
form was really whiskey. But Paula understood as soon as she ap-
peared ; her only thought was to get Anson away before her mother
saw him, and at the look in her eyes the cousin understood too.

When Paula and Anson descended to the limousine they found two
men inside, both asleep ; they were the men with whom he had been
drinking at the Yale Club, and they were also going to the party. He
had entirely forgotten their presence in the car. On the way to Hemp-
stead they awoke and sang. Some of the songs were rough, and
though Paula tried to reconcile herself to the fact that Anson had
few verbal inhibitions, her lips tightened with shame and distaste.

Back at the hotel the cousin, confused and agitated, considered
the incident, and then walked into Mrs. Legendre's bedroom, saying :
"Isn't he funny?"

"Who is funny?"

"Why — Mr. Hunter. He seemed so funny."

Mrs. Legendre looked at her sharply.

"How is he funny?"

"Why, he said he was French. I didn't know he was French."

"That's absurd. You must have misunderstood." She smiled: "It
was a joke."

The cousin shook her head stubbornly.

"No. He said he was brought up in France. He said he couldn't
speak any English, and that's why he couldn't talk to me. And he
couldn't 1 "

1 82 The Rich Boy

Mrs. Legendre looked away with impatience just as the cousin
added thoughtfully, "Perhaps it was because he was so drunk/' and
walked out of the room.

This curious report was true. Anson, finding his voice thick and
uncontrollable, had taken the unusual refuge of announcing that he
spoke no English. Years afterwards he used to tell that part of the
story, and he invariably communicated the uproarious laughter which
the memory aroused in him.

Five times in the next hour Mrs. Legendre tried to get Hempstead
on the phone. When she succeeded, there was a ten-minute delay
before she heard Paula's voice on the wire.

"Cousin Jo told me Anson was intoxicated."

"Oh, no. . . ."

"Oh, yes. Cousin Jo says he was intoxicated. He told her he was
French, and fell off his chair and behaved as if he was very intoxi-
cated. I don't want you to come home with him."

"Mother, he's all right ! Please don't worry about "

"But I do worry. I think it's dreadful. I want you to promise me
not to come home with him."

"I'll take care of it, mother. . . ."

"I don't want you to come home with him."

"All right, mother. Good-by."

"Be sure now, Paula. Ask some one to bring you."

Deliberately Paula took the receiver from her ear and hung it up.
Her face was flushed with helpless annoyance. Anson was stretched
asleep out in a bedroom up-stairs, while the dinner-party below was
proceeding lamely toward conclusion.

The hour's drive had sobered him somewhat — his arrival was
merely hilarious — and Paula hoped that the evening was not spoiled,
after all, but two imprudent cocktails before dinner completed the
disaster. He talked boisterously and somewhat offensively to the
party at large for fifteen minutes, and then slid silently under the
table ; like a man in an old print — but, unlike an old print, it was
rather horrible without being at all quaint. None of the young girls
present remarked upon the incident — it seemed to merit only silence.
His uncle and two other men carried him up-stairs, and it was just
after this that Paula was called to the phone.

An hour later Anson awoke in a fog of nervous agony, through
which he perceived after a moment the figure of his uncle Robert
standing by the door.

". . . I said are you better?"

"What?"

"Do you feel better, old man?"

"Terrible," said Anson.

The Rich Boy 183

"I'm going to try you on another bromo-seltzer. If you can hold
it down, it'll do you good to sleep."

With an effort Anson slid his legs from the bed and stood up.

"I'm all right," he said dully.

"Take it easy."

"I thin' if you gave me a glassbrandy I could go down-stairs."

"Oh, no "

"Yes, that's the only thin'. I'm all right now. ... I suppose I'm
in Dutch dow' there."

"They know you're a little under the weather," said his uncle
deprecatingly. "But don't worry about it. Schuyler didn't even get
here. He passed away in the locker-room over at the Links."

Indifferent to any opinion, except Paula's, Anson was nevertheless
determined to save the d6bris of the evening, but when after a cold
bath he made his appearance most of the party had already left.
Paula got up immediately to go home.

In the limousine the old serious dialogue began. She had known
that he drank, she admitted, but she had never expected anything
like this — it seemed to her that perhaps they were not suited to each
other, after all. Their ideas about life were too different, and so forth.
When she finished speaking, Anson spoke in turn, very soberly. Then
Paula said she'd have to think it over ; she wouldn't decide to-night ;
she was not angry but she was terribly sorry. Nor would she let him
come into the hotel with her, but just before she got out of the car
she leaned and kissed him unhappily on the cheek.

The next afternoon Anson had a long talk with Mrs. Legendre
while Paula sat listening in silence. It was agreed that Paula was
to brood over the incident for a proper period and then, if mother
and daughter thought it best, they would follow Anson to Pensacola.
On his part he apologized with sincerity and dignity — that was all ;
with every card in her hand Mrs. Legendre was unable to establish
any advantage over him. He made no promises, showed no humility,
only delivered a few serious comments on life which brought him off
with rather a moral superiority at the end. When they came South
three weeks later, neither Anson in his satisfaction nor Paula in her
relief at the reunion realized that the psychological moment had
passed forever.

He dominated and attracted her, and at the same time filled her
with anxiety. Confused by his mixture of solidity and self-indulgence,
of sentiment and cynicism — incongruities which her gentle mind was
unable to resolve — Paula grew to think of him as two alternating

1 84 The Rich Boy

personalities. When she saw him alone, or at a formal party, or with
his casual inferiors, she felt a tremendous pride in his strong, attrac-
tive presence, the paternal, understanding stature of his mind. In
other company she became uneasy when what had been a fine im-
perviousness to mere gentility showed its other face. The other face
was gross, humorous, reckless of everything but pleasure. It startled
her mind temporarily away from him, even led her into a short covert
experiment with an old beau, but it was no use — after four months of
Anson's enveloping vitality there was an anaemic pallor in all other
men.

In July he was ordered abroad, and their tenderness and desire
reached a crescendo. Paula considered a last-minute marriage — de-
cided against it only because there were always cocktails on his
breath now, but the parting itself made her physically ill with grief.
After his departure she wrote him long letters of regret for the days
of love they had missed by waiting. In August Anson's plane slipped
down into the North Sea. He was pulled onto a destroyer after a
night in the water and sent to hospital with pneumonia ; the armistice
was signed before he was finally sent home.

Then, with every opportunity given back to them, with no material
obstacle to overcome, the secret weavings of their temperaments
came between them, drying up their kisses and their tears, making
their voices less loud to one another, muffling the intimate chatter of
their hearts until the old communication was only possible by letters,
from far away. One afternoon a society reporter waited for two
hours in the Hunters' house for a confirmation of their engagement.
Anson denied it ; nevertheless an early issue carried the report as a
leading paragraph — they were "constantly seen together at South-
hampton, Hot Springs, and Tuxedo Park." But the serious dialogue
had turned a corner into a long-sustained quarrel, and the affair was
almost played out. Anson got drunk flagrantly and missed an engage-
ment with her, whereupon Paula made certain behavioristic demands.
His despair was helpless before his pride and his knowledge of him-
self : the engagement was definitely broken.

"Dearest," said their letters now, "Dearest, Dearest, when I wake
up in the middle of the night and realize that after all it was not to
be, I feel that I want to die. I can't go on living any more. Perhaps
when we meet this summer we may talk things over and decide dif-
ferently— we were so excited and sad that day, and I don't feel that
I can live all my life without you. You speak of other people. Don't
you know there are no other people for me, but only you. . . ."

But as Paula drifted here and there around the East she would
sometimes mention her gaieties to make him wonder. Anson was too
acute to wonder. When he saw a man's name in her letters he felt

The Rich Boy 185

more sure of her and a little disdainful — he was always superior to
such things. But he still hoped that they would some day marry.

Meanwhile he plunged vigorously into all the movement and glitter
of post-bellum New York, entering a brokerage house, joining half
a dozen clubs, dancing late, and moving in three worlds — his own
world, the world of young Yale graduates, and that section of the
half-world which rests one end on Broadway. But there was always
a thorough and infractible eight hours devoted to his work in Wall
Street, where the combination of his influential family connection,
his sharp intelligence, and his abundance of sheer physical energy
brought him almost immediately forward. He had one of those in-
valuable minds with partitions in it ; sometimes he appeared at his
office refreshed by less than an hour's sleep, but such occurrences
were rare. So early as 1920 his income in salary and commissions ex-
ceeded twelve thousand dollars.

As the Yale tradition slipped into the past he became more and
more of a popular figure among his classmates in New York, more
popular than he had ever been in college. He lived in a great house,
and had the means of introducing young men into other great houses.
Moreover, his life already seemed secure, while theirs, for the most
part, had arrived again at precarious beginnings. They commenced
to turn to him for amusement and escape, and Anson responded
readily, taking pleasure in helping people and arranging their affairs.

There were no men in Paula 's letters now, but a note of tenderness
ran through them that had not been there before. From several
sources he heard that she had "a heavy beau," Lowell Thayer, a
Bostonian of wealth and position, and though he was sure she still
loved him, it made him uneasy to think that he might lose her, after
all. Save for one unsatisfactory day she had not been in New York
for almost five months, and as the rumors multiplied he became in-
creasingly anxious to see her. In February he took his vacation and
went down to Florida.

Palm Beach sprawled plump and opulent between the sparkling
sapphire of Lake Worth, flawed here and there by house-boats at
anchor, and the great turquoise bar of the Atlantic Ocean. The huge
bulks of the Breakers and the Royal Poinciana rose as twin paunches
from the bright level of the sand, and around them clustered the
Dancing Glade, Bradley's House of Chance, and a dozen modistes
and milliners with goods at triple prices from New York. Upon the
trellised veranda of the Breakers two hundred women stepped right,
stepped left, wheeled, and slid in that then celebrated calisthenic
known as the double-shuffle, while in half-time to the music two
thousand bracelets clicked up and down on two hundred arms.

At the Everglades Club after dark Paula and Lowell Thayer and

i86 The Rich Boy

Anson and a casual fourth played bridge with hot cards. It seemed to
Anson that her kind, serious face was wan and tired — she had been
around now for four, five, years. He had known her for three.

"Two spades."

"Cigarette? . . . Oh, I beg your pardon. By me."

"By."

"I'll double three spades."

There were a dozen tables of bridge in the room, which was filling
up with smoke. Anson's eyes met Paula's, held them persistently
even when Thayer's glance fell between them. . . .

"What was bid?" he asked abstractedly.

"Rose of Washington Square"
sang the young people in the corners :

"Vm withering there
In basement air "

The smoke banked like fog, and the opening of a door filled the
room with blown swirls of ectoplasm. Little Bright Eyes streaked
past the tables seeking Mr. Conan Doyle among the Englishmen
who were posing as Englishmen about the lobby.

"You could cut it with a knife."

". . . cut it with a knife."

"... a knife."

At the end of the rubber Paula suddenly got up and spoke to Anson
in a tense, low voice. With scarcely a glance at Lowell Thayer, they
walked out the door and descended a long flight of stone steps — in
a moment they were walking hand in hand along the moonlit beach.

"Darling, darling. . . ." They embraced recklessly, passionately,
in a shadow. . . . Then Paula drew back her face to let his lips say
what she wanted to hear — she could feel the words forming as they
kissed again. . . . Again she broke away, listening, but as he pulled
her close once more she realized that he had said nothing — only
"Darling! Darling!" in that deep, sad whisper that always made her
cry. Humbly, obediently, her emotions yielded to him and the tears
streamed down her face, but her heart kept on crying : "Ask me— oh,
Anson, dearest, ask me ! "

"Paula. . . . Paula!"

The words wrung her heart like hands, and Anson, feeling her
tremble, knew that emotion was enough. He need say no more, com-
mit their destinies to no practical enigma. Why should he, when he
might hold her so, biding his own time, for another year — forever?
He was considering them both, her more than himself. For a moment,
when she said suddenly that she must go back to her hotel, he hesi-

The Rich Boy 187

tated, thinking, first, "This is the moment, after all," and then : "No,
let it wait — she is mine. . . "

He had forgotten that Paula too was worn away inside with the
strain of three, years. Her mood passed forever in the night.

He went back to New York next morning filled with a certain
restless dissatisfaction. Late in April, without warning, he received
a telegram from Bar Harbor in which Paula told him that she was
engaged to Lowell Thayer, and that they would be married immedi-
ately in Boston. What he never really believed could happen had
happened at last.

Anson filled himself with whiskey that morning, and going to the
office, carried on his work without a break — rather with a fear of
what would happen if he stopped. In the evening he went out as
usual, saying nothing of what had occurred ; he was cordial, humor-
ous, unabstracted. But one thing he could not help — for three days,
in any place, in any company, he would suddenly bend his head into
his hands and cry like a child.

In 1922 when Anson went abroad with the junior partner to investi-
gate some London loans, the journey intimated that he was to be
taken into the firm. He was twenty-seven now, a little heavy without
being definitely stout, and with a manner older than his years. Old
people and young people liked him and trusted him, and mothers felt
safe when their daughters were in his charge, for he had a way, when
he came into a room, of putting himself on a footing with the oldest
and most conservative people there. "You and I," he seemed to say,
"we're solid. We understand."

He had an instinctive and rather charitable knowledge of the weak-
nesses of men and women, and, like a priest, it made him the more
concerned for the maintenance of outward forms. It was typical of
him that every Sunday morning he taught in a fashionable Episcopal
Sunday-school — even though a cold shower and a quick change into
a cutaway coat were all that separated him from the wild night be-
fore.

After his father's death he was the practical head of his family,
and, in effect, guided the destinies of the younger children. Through
a complication his authority did not extend to his father's estate,
which was administrated by his Uncle Robert, who was the horsey
member of the family, a good-natured, hard-drinking member of that
set which centres about Wheatley Hills.

Uncle Robert and his wife, Edna, had been great friends of Anson's
youth, and the former was disappointed when his nephew's superior-

1 88 The Rich Boy

ity failed to take a horsey form. He backed him for a city club
which was the mostMifficult in America to enter — one could only join
if one's family had "helped to build up New York" (or, in other
words, were rich before 1880) — and when Anson, after his election,
neglected it for the Yale Club, Uncle Robert gave him a little talk
on the subject. But when on top of that Anson declined to enter
Robert Hunter's own conservative and somewhat neglected broker-
age house, his manner grew cooler. Like a primary teacher who has
taught all he knew, he slipped out of Anson's life.

There were so many friends in Anson's life — scarcely one for
whom he had not done some unusual kindness and scarcely one whom
he did not occasionally embarrass by his bursts of rough conversation
or his habit of getting drunk whenever and however he liked. It
annoyed him when any one else blundered in that regard — about his
own lapses he was always humorous. Odd things happened to him
and he told them with infectious laughter.

I was working in New York that spring, and I used to lunch with
him at the Yale Club, which my university was sharing until the
completion of our own. I had read of Paula's marriage, and one after-
noon, when I asked him about her, something moved him to tell me
the story. After that he frequently invited me to family dinners at
his house and behaved as though there was a special relation between
us, as though with his confidence a little of that consuming memory
had passed into me.

I found that despite the trusting mothers, his attitude toward girls
was not indiscriminately protective. It was up to the girl — if she
showed an inclination toward looseness, she must take care of her-
self, even with him.

"Life," he would explain sometimes, "has made a cynic of me."

By life he meant Paula. Sometimes, especially when he was drink-
ing, it became a little twisted in his mind, and he thought that she
had callously thrown him over.

This "cynicism," or rather his realization that naturally fast girls
were not worth sparing, led to his affair with Dolly Karger, It wasn't
his only affair in those years, but it came nearest to touching him
deeply, and it had a profound effect upon his attitude toward life.

Dolly was the daughter of a notorious "publicist" who had married
into society. She herself grew up into the Junior League, came out
at the Plaza, and went to the Assembly ; and only a few old families
like the Hunters could question whether or not she "belonged," for
her picture was often in the papers, and she had more enviable atten-
tion than many girls who undoubtedly did. She was dark-haired, with
carmine lips and a high, lovely color, which she concealed under
pinkish-gray powder all through the first year out, because high color

The Rich Boy 189

was unfashionable — Victorian-pale was the thing to be. She wore
black, severe suits and stood with her hands in her pockets leaning
a little forward, with a humorous restraint on her face. She danced
exquisitely — better than anything she liked to dance — better than
anything except making love. Since she was ten she had always been
, and, usually, with some boy who didn't respond to her. Those
there were many — bored her after a brief encounter,
but for her failures she reserved the warmest spot in her heart.
When she met them she would always try once more — sometimes she
succeeded, more often she failed.

It never occurred to this gypsy of the unattainable that there was
a certain resemblance in those who refused to love her — they shared
a hard intuition that saw through to her weakness, not a weakness
of emotion but a weakness of rudder. Anson perceived this when he
first met her, less than a month after Paula's marriage. He was drink-
ing rather heavily, and he pretended for a week that he was falling
in love with her. Then he dropped her abruptly and forgot — imme-
diately he took up the commanding position in her heart.

Like so many girls of that day Dolly was slackly and indiscreetly
wild. The unconventionality of a slightly older generation had been
simply one facet of a post-war movement to discredit obsolete man-
ners— Dolly's was both older and shabbier, and she saw in Anson the
two extremes which the emotionally shiftless woman seeks, an
abandon to indulgence alternating with a protective strength. In
his character she felt both the sybarite and the solid rock, and these
two satisfied every need of her nature.

She felt that it was going to be difficult, but she mistook the reason
— she thought that Anson and his family expected a more spectacu-
lar marriage, but she guessed immediately that her advantage lay in
his tendency to drink.

They met at the large debutante dances, but as her infatuation
increased they managed to be more and more together. Like most
mothers, Mrs. Karger believed that Anson was exceptionally reliable,
so she allowed Dolly to go with him to distant country clubs and
suburban houses without inquiring closely into their activities or
questioning her explanations when they came in late. At first these
explanations might have been accurate, but Dolly's worldly ideas
of capturing Anson were soon engulfed in the rising sweep of her
emotion. Kisses in the back of taxis and motor-cars were no longer
enough ; they did a curious thing :

They dropped out of their world for a while and made another
world just beneath it where Anson's tippling and Dolly's irregular
hours would be less noticed and commented on. It was composed,
this world, of varying elements — several of Anson's Yale friends and

i QO The Rich Boy

their wives, two or three young brokers and bond salesmen and a
handful of unattached men, fresh from college, with money and a
propensity to dissipation. What this world lacked in spaciousness
and scale it made up for by allowing them a liberty that it scarcely
permitted itself. Moreover, it centred around them and permitted
Dolly the pleasure of a faint condescension — a pleasure which Anson,
whose whole life was a condescension from the certitudes of his
childhood, was unable to share.

He was not in love with her, and in the long feverish winter of
their affair he frequently told her so. In the spring he was weary —
he wanted to renew his life at some other source — moreover, he saw
that either he must break with her now or accept the responsibility
of a definite seduction. Her family's encouraging attitude precipitated
his decision — one evening when Mr. Karger knocked discreetly at
the library door to announce that he had left a bottle of old brandy
in the dining-room, Anson felt that life was hemming him in. That
night he wrote her a short letter in which he told her that he was
going on his vacation, and that in view of all the circumstances they
had better meet no more.

It was June. His family had closed up the house and gone to the
country, so he was living temporarily at the Yale Club. I had heard
about his affair with Dolly as it developed — accounts salted with
humor, for he despised unstable women, and granted them no place
in the social edifice in which he believed — and when he told me that
night that he was definitely breaking with her I was glad. I had seen
Dolly here and there, and each time with a feeling of pity at the
hopelessness of her struggle, and of shame at knowing so much about
her that I had no right to know. She was what is known as "a pretty
little thing," but there was a certain recklessness which rather fas-
cinated me. Her dedication to the goddess of waste would have been
less obvious had she been less spirited — she would most certainly
throw herself away, but I was glad when I heard that the sacrifice
would not be consummated in my sight.

Anson was going to leave the letter of farewell at her house next
morning. It was one of the few houses left open in the Fifth Avenue
district, and he knew that the Kargers, acting upon erroneous in-
formation from Dolly, had foregone a trip abroad to give their daugh-
ter her chance. As he stepped out the door of the Yale Club into
Madison Avenue the postman passed him, and he followed back
inside. The first letter that caught his eye was in Dolly's hand.

He knew what it would be — a lonely and tragic monologue, full
of the reproaches he knew, the invoked memories, the "I wonder
if's" — all the immemorial intimacies that he had communicated to
Paula Legendre in what seemed another age. Thumbing over some

The Rich Boy 191

bills, he brought it on top again and opened it. To his surprise it was
a short, somewhat formal note, which said that Dolly would be un-
able to go to the country with him for the week-end, because Perry
Hull from Chicago had unexpectedly come to town. It added that
Anson had brought this on himself : " — if I felt that you loved me
as I love you I would go with you at any time, any place, but Perry
is so nice, and he so much wants me to marry him "

Anson smiled contemptuously — he had had experience with such
decoy epistles. Moreover, he knew how Dolly had labored over this
plan, probably sent for the faithful Perry and calculated the time of
his arrival — even labored over the note so that it would make him
jealous without driving him away. Like most compromises, it had
neither force nor vitality but only a timorous despair.

Suddenly he was angry. He sat down in the lobby and read it
again. Then he went to the phone, called Dolly and told her in his
clear, compelling voice that he had received her note and would call
for her at five o'clock as they had previously planned. Scarcely wait-
ing for the pretended uncertainty of her "Perhaps I can see you for
an hour," he hung up the receiver and went down to his office. On
the way he tore his own letter into bits and dropped it in the street.

He was not jealous — she meant nothing to him — but at her pa-
thetic ruse everything stubborn and self-indulgent in him came to
the surface. It was a presumption from a mental inferior and it could
not be overlooked. If she wanted to know to whom she belonged she
would see.

He was on the door-step at quarter past five. Dolly was dressed
for the street, and he listened in silence to the paragraph of "I can
only see you for an hour/' which she had begun on the phone.

"Put on your hat, Dolly," he said, "we'll take a walk."

They strolled up Madison Avenue and over to Fifth while Anson's
shirt dampened upon his portly body in the deep heat. He talked
little, scolding her, making no love to her, but before they had walked
six blocks she was his again, apologizing for the note, offering not to
see Perry at all as an atonement, offering anything. She thought that
he had come because he was beginning to love her.

"I'm hot," he said when they reached yist Street. "This is a winter
suit. If I stop by the house and change, would you mind waiting for
me down-stairs? I'll only be a minute."

She was happy ; the intimacy of his being hot, of any physical fact
about him, thrilled her. When they came to the iron-grated door and
Anson took out his key she experienced a sort of delight.

Down-stairs it was dark, and after he ascended in the lift Dolly
raised a curtain and looked out through opaque lace at the houses
over the way. She heard the lift machinery stop, and with the notion

1 92 The Rich Boy

of teasing him pressed the button that brought it down. Then on
what was more than an impulse she got into it and sent it up to what
she guessed was his floor.

"Anson," she called, laughing a little.

"Just a minute," he answered from his bedroom . . . then after a
brief delay : "Now you can come in."

He had changed and was buttoning his vest.

"This is my room," he said lightly. "How do you like it?"

She caught sight of Paula's picture on the wall and stared at it in
fascination, just as Paula had stared at the pictures of Anson's child-
ish sweethearts five years before. She knew something about Paula
— sometimes she tortured herself with fragments of the story.

Suddenly she came close to Anson, raising her arms. They em-
braced. Outside the area window a soft artificial twilight already hov-
ered, though the sun was still bright on a back roof across the way.
In half an hour the room would be quite dark. The uncalculated op-
portunity overwhelmed them, made them both breathless, and they
,clung more closely. It was imminent, inevitable. Still holding one
another, they raised their heads — their eyes fell together upon
Paula's picture, staring down at them from the wall.

Suddenly Anson dropped his arms, and sitting down at his desk
tried the drawer with a bunch of keys.

"Like a drink?" he asked in a gruff voice.

"No, Anson."

He poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey, swallowed it, and
then opened the door into the hall.

"Come on," he said.

Dolly hesitated.

"Anson — I'm going to the country with you tonight, after all. You
understand that, don't you?"

"Of course," he answered brusquely.

In Dolly's car they rode on to Long Island, closer in their emo-
tions than they had ever been before. They knew what would hap-
pen— not with Paula's face to remind them that something was lack-
ing, but when they were alone in the still, hot Long Island night
they did not care.

The estate in Port Washington where they were to spend the week-
end belonged to a cousin of Anson's who had married a Montana
copper operator. An interminable drive began at the lodge and
twisted under imported poplar saplings toward a huge, pink Spanish
house. Anson had often visited there before.

After dinner they danced at the Linx Club. About midnight Anson
assured himself that his cousins would not leave before two — then
he explained that Dolly was tired ; he would take her home and re-

The Rich Boy 193

turn to the dance later. Trembling a little with excitement, they got
into a borrowed car together and drove to Port Washington. As they
reached the lodge he stopped and spoke to the night-watchman.

"When are you making a round, Carl ?"

"Right away."

"Then you'll be here till everybody's in?"

"Yes, sir."

"All right. Listen : if any automobile, no matter whose it is, turns
in at this gate, I want you to phone the house immediately." He put
a five-dollar bill into Carl's hand. "Is that clear?"

"Yes, Mr. Anson." Being of the Old World, he neither winked nor
smiled. Yet Dolly sat with her face turned slightly away.

Anson had a key. Once inside he poured a drink for both of them
— Dolly left hers untouched — then he ascertained definitely the loca-
tion of the phone, and found that it was within easy hearing distance
of their rooms, both of which were on the first floor.

Five minutes later he knocked at the door of Dolly's room.

"Anson?" He went in, closing the door behind him. She was in
bed, leaning up anxiously with elbows on the pillow ; sitting beside
her he took her in his arms.

"Anson, darling."

He didn't answer.

"Anson. . . . Anson! I love you. . . . Say you love me. Say it
now — can't you say it now? Even if you don't mean it?"

He did not listen. Over her head he perceived that the picture of
Paula was hanging here upon this wall.

He got up and went close to it. The frame gleamed faintly with
thrice-reflected moonlight — within was a blurred shadow of a face
that he saw he did not know. Almost sobbing, he turned around and
stared with abomination at the little figure on the bed.

"This is all foolishness," he said thickly. "I don't know what I was
thinking about. I don't love you and you'd better wait for somebody
that loves you. I don't love you a bit, can't you understand?"

His voice broke, and he went hurriedly out. Back in the salon he
was pouring himself a drink with uneasy fingers, when the front door
opened suddenly, and his cousin came in.

"Why, Anson, I hear Dolly's sick," she began solicitously. "I hear
she's sick. . . ."

"It was nothing," he interrupted, raising his voice so that it would
carry into Dolly's room. "She was a little tired. She went to bed."

For a long time afterward Anson believed that a protective God
sometimes interfered in human affairs. But Dolly Karger, lying
awake and staring at the ceiling, never again believed in anything
ataK.

194 The Rich Boy

When Dolly married during the following autumn, Anson was in
London on business. Like Paula's marriage, it was sudden, but it
affected him in a different way. At first he felt that it was funny,
and had an inclination to laugh when he thought of it. Later it de-
pressed him — it made him feel old.

There was something repetitive about it — why, Paula and Dolly
had belonged to different generations. He had a foretaste of the sen-
sation of a man of forty who hears that the daughter of an old
flame has married. He wired congratulations and, as was not the
case with Paula, they were sincere — he had never really hoped that
Paula would be happy.

When he returned to New York, he was made a partner in the
firm, and, as his responsibilities increased, he had less time on his
hands. The refusal of a life-insurance company to issue him a policy
made such an impression on him that he stopped drinking for a year,
and claimed that he felt better physically, though I think he missed
the convivial recounting of those Celliniesque adventures which, in
his early twenties, had played such a part in his life. But he never
abandoned the Yale Club. He was a figure there, a personality, and
the tendency of his class, who were now seven years out of college,,
to drift away to more sober haunts was checked by his presence.

His day was never too full nor his mind too weary to give any sort
of aid to any one who asked it. What had been done at first through
pride and superiority had become a habit and a passion. And there
was always something — a younger brother in trouble at New Haven,
a quarrel to be patched up between a friend and his wife, a position
to be found for this man, an investment for that. But his specialty
was the solving of problems for young married people. Young mar-
ried people fascinated him and their apartments were almost sacred
to him — he knew the story of their love-affair, advised them where
to live and how, and remembered their babies' names. Toward young
wives his attitude was circumspect : he never abused the trust which
their husbands — strangely enough in view of his unconcealed irregu-
larities— invariably reposed in him.

He came to take a vicarious pleasure in happy marriages, and to
be inspired to an almost equally pleasant melancholy by those that
went astray. Not a season passed that he did not witness the collapse
of an affair that perhaps he himself had fathered. When Paula was
divorced and almost immediately remarried to another Bostonian,
he talked about her to me all one afternoon. He would never love any
one as he had loved Paula, but he insisted that he no longer cared.

The Rich Boy 195

"I'll never marry," he came to say; "I've seen too much of it,
and I know a happy marriage is a very rare thing. Besides, I'm too
old."

But he did believe in marriage. Like all men who spring from a
happy and successful marriage, he believed in it passionately — noth-
ing he had seen would change his belief, his cynicism dissolved upon
it like air. But he did really believe he was too old. At twenty-eight
he began to accept with equanimity the prospect of marrying with-
out romantic love ; he resolutely chose a New York girl of his own
class, pretty, intelligent, congenial, above reproach — and set about
falling in love with her. The things he had said to Paula with sin-
cerity, to other girls with grace, he could no longer say at all without
smiling, or with the force necessary to convince.

"When I'm forty," he told his friends, "I'll be ripe. I'll fall for
some chorus girl like the rest."

Nevertheless, he persisted in his attempt. His mother wanted to see
him married, and he could now well afford it — he had a seat on the
Stock Exchange, and his earned income came to twenty-five thousand
a year. The idea was agreeable : when his friends — he spent most of
his time with the set he and Dolly had evolved — closed themselves in
behind domestic doors at night, he no longer rejoiced in his freedom.
He even wondered if he should have married Dolly. Not even Paula
had loved him more, and he was learning the rarity, in a single life,
of encountering true emotion.

Just as this mood began to creep over him a disquieting story
reached his ear. His Aunt Edna, a woman just this side of forty, was
carrying on an open intrigue with a dissolute, hard-drinking young
man named Gary Sloane. Every one knew of it except Anson's Uncle
Robert, who for fifteen years had talked long in clubs and taken his
wife for granted.

Anson heard the story again and again with increasing annoyance.
Something of his old feeling for his uncle came back to him, a feel-
ing that was more than personal, a reversion toward that family soli-
darity on which he had based his pride. His intuition singled out the
essential point of the affair, which was that his uncle shouldn't be
hurt. It was his first experiment in unsolicited meddling, but with
his knowledge of Edna's character he felt that he could handle the
matter better than a district judge or his uncle.

His uncle was in Hot Springs. Anson traced down the sources of
the scandal so that there should be no possibility of mistake and
then he called Edna and asked her to lunch with him at the Plaza
next day. Something in his tone must have frightened her, for she
was reluctant, but he insisted, putting off the date until she had no
excuse for refusing.

196 The Rich Boy

She met him at the appointed time in the Plaza lobby, a lovely,
faded, gray-eyed blonde in a coat of Russian sable. Five great rings,
cold with diamonds and emeralds, sparkled on her slender hands. It
occurred to Anson that it was his father's intelligence and not his
uncle's that had earned the fur and the stones, the rich brilliance
that buoyed up her passing beauty.

Though Edna scented his hostility, she was unprepared for the
directness of his approach.

"Edna, I'm astonished at the way you've been acting," he said in
a strong, frank voice. "At first I couldn't believe it."

"Believe what?" she demanded sharply.

"You needn't pretend with me, Edna. I'm talking about Gary
Sloane. Aside from any other consideration, I didn't think you could
treat Uncle Robert "

"Now look here, Anson — " she began angrily, but his peremptory
voice broke through hers :

" — and your children in such a way. You've been married eighteen
years, and you're old enough to know better."

"You can't talk to me like that ! You "

"Yes, I can. Uncle Robert has always been my best friend." He
was tremendously moved. He felt a real distress about his uncle,
about his three young cousins.

Edna stood up, leaving her crab-flake cocktail untasted.

"This is the silliest thing "

"Very well, if you won't listen to me I'll go to Uncle Robert and
tell him the whole story — he's bound to hear it sooner or later. And
afterward I'll go to old Moses Sloane."

Edna faltered back into her chair.

"Don't talk so loud," she begged him. Her eyes blurred with
tears. "You have no idea how your voice carries. You might have
chosen a less public place to make all these crazy accusations."

He didn't answer.

"Oh, you never liked me, I know," she went on. "You're just tak-
ing advantage of some silly gossip to try and break up the only in-
teresting friendship I've ever had. What did I ever do to make you
hate me so?"

Still Anson waited. There would be the appeal to his chivalry, then
to his pity, finally to his superior sophistication — when he had
shouldered his way through all these there would be admissions, and
he could come to grips with her. By being silent, by being impervious,
by returning constantly to his main weapon, which was his own true
emotion, he bullied her into frantic despair as the luncheon hour
slipped away. At two o'clock she took out a mirror and a handker-
chief, shined away the marks of her tears and powdered the slight

The Rich Boy 197

hollows where they had lain. She had agreed to meet him at her own
house at five.

When he arrived she was stretched on a chaise-longue which was
covered with cretonne for the summer, and the tears he had called up
at luncheon seemed still to be standing in her eyes. Then he was
aware of Gary Sloane's dark anxious presence upon the cold hearth.

"What's this idea of yours?" broke out Sloane immediately. "I
understand you invited Edna to lunch and then threatened her on
the basis of some cheap scandal."

Anson sat down.

"I have no reason to think it's only scandal."

"I hear you're going to take it to Robert Hunter, and to my
father."

Anson nodded.

"Either you break it off — or I will," he said.

"What God damned business is it of yours, Hunter ?"

"Don't lose your temper, Gary," said Edna nervously. "It's only
a question of showing him how absurd "

"For one thing, it's my name that's being handed around," inter-
rupted Anson. "That's all that concerns you, Gary."

"Edna isn't a member of your family."

"She most certainly is ! " His anger mounted. "Why — she owes this
house and the rings on her fingers to my father's brains. When Uncle
Robert married her she didn't have a penny."

They all looked at the rings as if they had a significant bearing on
the situation. Edna made a gesture to take them from her hand.

"I guess they're not the only rings in the world," said Sloane.

"Oh, this is absurd," cried Edna. "Anson, will you listen to me?
I've found out how the silly story started. It was a maid I discharged
who went right to the Chilicheffs — all these Russians pump things
out of their servants and then put a false meaning on them." She
brought down her fist angrily on the table : "And after Robert lent
them the limousine for a whole month when we were South last
winter "

"Do you see ?" demanded Sloane eagerly. "This maid got hold of
the wrong end of the thing. She knew that Edna and I were friends,
and she carried it to the Chilicheffs. In Russia they assume that if a
man and a woman "

He enlarged the theme to a disquisition upon social relations in
the Caucasus.

"If that's the case it better be explained to Uncle Robert," said
Anson dryly, "so that when the rumors do reach him he'll know
they're not true."

Adopting the method he had followed with Edna at luncheon he

198 The Rich Boy

let them explain it all away. He knew that they were guilty and that
presently they would cross the line from explanation into justifica-
tion and convict themselves more definitely than he could ever do.
By seven they had taken the desperate step of telling him the truth
— Robert Hunter's neglect, Edna's empty life, the casual dalliance
that had flamed up into passion — but like so many true stories it
had the misfortune of being old, and its enfeebled body beat help-
lessly against the armor of Anson's will. The threat to go to Sloane's
father sealed their helplessness, for the latter, a retired cotton broker
out of Alabama, was a notorious fundamentalist who controlled his
son by a rigid allowance and the promise that at his next vagary the
allowance would stop forever.

They dined at a small French restaurant, and the discussion con-
tinued— at one time Sloane resorted to physical threats, a little later
they were both imploring him to give them time. But Anson was
obdurate. He saw that Edna was breaking up, and that her spirit
must not be refreshed by any renewal of their passion.

At two o'clock in a small night-club on 53d Street, Edna's nerves
suddenly collapsed, and she cried to go home. Sloane had been drink-
ing heavily all evening, and he was faintly maudlin, leaning on the
table and weeping a little with his face in his hands. Quickly
Anson gave them his terms. Sloane was to leave town for six months,
and he must be gone within forty-eight hours. When he returned
there was to be no resumption of the affair, but at the end of a year
Edna might, if she wished, tell Robert Hunter that she wanted a
divorce and go about it in the usual way.

He paused, gaining confidence from their faces for his final word.
"Or there's another thing you can do," he said slowly, "if Edna
wants to leave her children, there's nothing I can do to prevent your
running off together."

"I want to go home!" cried Edna again. "Oh, haven't you done
enough to us for one day?"

Outside it was dark, save for a blurred glow from Sixth Avenue
down the street. In that light those two who had been lovers looked
for the last time into each other's tragic faces, realizing that between
them there was not enough youth and strength to avert their eternal
parting. Sloane walked suddenly off down the street and Anson
tapped a dozing taxi-driver on the arm.

It was almost four; there was a patient flow of cleaning water
along the ghostly pavement of Fifth Avenue, and the shadows of
two night women flitted over the dark facade of St. Thomas's church.
Then the desolate shrubbery of Central Park where Anson had
often played as a child, and the mounting numbers, significant as
names, of the marching streets. This was his city, he thought, where

The Rich Boy 199

his name had flourished through five generations. No change could
alter the permanence of its place here, for change itself was the
essential substratum by wliich he and those of his name identified
themselves with the spirit of New York^ Resourcefulness and a
powerful will — for his threats in weaker hands would have been
less than nothing — had beaten the gathering dust from his uncle's
name, from the name of his family, from even this shivering figure
that sat beside him in the car.

Gary Sloane's body was found next morning on the lower shelf of
a pillar of Queensboro Bridge. In the darkness and in his excitement
he had thought that it was the water flowing black beneath him, but
in less than a second it made no possible difference — unless he had
planned to think one last thought of Edna, and call out her name
as he struggled feebly in the water.

VII

Anson never blamed himself for his part in this affair — the situa-
tion which brought it about had not been of his making. But the
just suffer with the unjust, and he found that his oldest and some-
how his most precious friendship was over. He never knew what
distorted story Edna told, but he was welcome in his uncle's house
no longer.

Just before Christmas Mrs. Hunter retired to a select Episcopal
heaven, and Anson became the responsible head of his family. An
unmarried aunt who had lived with them for years ran the house,
and attempted with helpless inefficiency to chaperone the younger
girls. All the children were less self-reliant than Anson, more con-
ventional both in their virtues and in their shortcomings. Mrs.
Hunter's death had postponed the debut of one daughter and the
wedding of another. Also it had taken something deeply material
from all of them, for with her passing the quiet, expensive superi-
ority of the Hunters came to an end.

For one thing, the estate, considerably diminished by two inherit-
ance taxes and soon to be divided among six children, was not a
notable fortune any more. Anson saw a tendency in his youngest
sisters to speak rather respectfully of families that hadn't "existed"
twenty years ago. His own feeling of precedence was not echoed in
them — sometimes they were conventionally snobbish, that was all.
For another thing, this was the last summer they would spend on
the Connecticut estate ; the clamor against it was too loud : "Who
wants to waste the best months of the year shut up in that dead old
town ?" Reluctantly he yielded — the house would go into the market
in the fall, and next summer they would rent a smaller place in

200 The Rich Boy

Westchester County. It was a step down from the expensive sim-
plicity of his father's idea, and, while he sympathized with the
revolt, it also annoyed him; during his mother's lifetime he had
gone up there at least every other week-end — even in the gayest
summers.

Yet he himself was part of this change, and his strong instinct
for life had turned him in his twenties from the hollow obsequies
of that abortive leisure class. He did not see this clearly — he still
felt that there was a norm, a standard of society. But there was no
norm, it was doubtful if there ever had been a true norm in New
York. The few who still paid and fought to enter a particular set
succeeded only to find that as a society it scarcely functioned — or,
what was more alarming, that the Bohemia from which they fled sat
above them at table.

At twenty-nine Anson's chief concern was his own growing loneli-
ness. He was sure now that he would never marry. The number of
weddings at which he had officiated as best man or usher was past
all counting — there was a drawer at home that bulged with the
official neckties of this or that wedding-party, neckties standing
for romances that had not endured a year, for couples who had passed
completely from his life. Scarf-pins, gold pencils, cuff-buttons, pres-
ents from a generation of grooms had passed through his jewel-box
and been lost — and with every ceremony he was less and less able
to imagine himself in the groom's place. Under his hearty good-will
toward all those marriages there was despair about his own.

And as he neared thirty he became not a little depressed at the
inroads that marriage, especially lately, had made upon his friend-
ships. Groups of people had a disconcerting tendency to dissolve
and disappear. The men from his own college — and it was upon
them he had expended the most time and affection — were the most
elusive of all. Most of them were drawn deep into domesticity, two
were dead, one lived abroad, one was in Hollywood writing con-
tinuities for pictures that Anson went faithfully to see.

Most of them, however, were permanent commuters with an
intricate family life centring around some suburban country
club, and it was from these that he felt his estrangement most
keenly.

In the early days of their married life they had all needed him ;
he gave them advice about their slim finances, he exorcised their
doubts about the advisability of bringing a baby into two rooms
and a bath, especially he stood for the great world outside. But now
their financial troubles were in the past and the fearfully expected
child had evolved into an absorbing family. They were always glad
to see old Anson, but they dressed up for him and tried to impress

The Rich Boy 201

him with their present importance, and kept their troubles to them-
selves. They needed him no longer.

A few weeks before his thirtieth birthday the last of his early
and intimate friends was married. Anson acted in his usual role of
best man, gave his usual silver tea-service, and went down to the
usual Homeric to say good-by. It was a hot Friday afternoon in
May, and as he walked from the pier he realized that Saturday
closing had begun and he was free until Monday morning.

"Go where?" he asked himself.

The Yale Club, of course; bridge until dinner, then four or five
raw cocktails in somebody's room and a pleasant confused evening.
He regretted that this afternoon's groom wouldn't be along — they
had always been able to cram so much into such nights : they knew
how to attach women and how to get rid of them, how much con-
sideration any girl deserved from their intelligent hedonism. A party
was an adjusted thing — you took certain girls to certain places and
spent just so much on their amusement; you drank a little, not
much, more than you ought to drink, and at a certain time in the
morning you stood up and said you were going home. You avoided
college boys, sponges, future engagements, fights, sentiment, and
indiscretions. That was the way it was done. All the rest was dissi-
pation.

In the morning you were never violently sorry — you made no
resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly
out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying
anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous
boredom projected you into another party.

The lobby of the Yale Club was unpopulated. In the bar three
very young alumni looked up at him, momentarily and without
curiosity.

"Hello, there, Oscar," he said to the bartender. "Mr. Cahill been
around this afternoon?"

"Mr. Cahiirs gone to New Haven."

"Oh . . . that so?"

"Gone to the ball game. Lot of men gone up."

Anson looked once again into the lobby, considered for a moment,
and then walked out and over to Fifth Avenue. From the broad win-
dow of one of his clubs — one that he had scarcely visited in five
years — a gray man with watery eyes stared down at him. Anson
looked quickly away — that figure sitting in vacant resignation, in
supercilious solitude, depressed him. He stopped and, retracing his
steps, started over 47th Street toward Teak Warden's apartment.
Teak and his wife had once been his most familiar friends — it was
a household where he and Dolly Karger had been used to go in

202 The Rich Boy

the days of their affair. But Teak had taken to drink, and his wife
had remarked publicly that Anson was a bad influence on him. The
remark reached Anson in an exaggerated form — when it was finally
cleared up, the delicate spell of intimacy was broken, never to be
renewed.

"Is Mr. Warden at home ?" he inquired.

"They Ve gone to the country."

The fact unexpectedly cut at him. They were gone to the country
and he hadn't known. Two years before he would have known the
date, the hour, come up at the last moment for a final drink,
and planned his first visit to them. Now they had gone without
a word.

Anson looked at his watch and considered a week-end with his
family, but the only train was a local that would jolt through the
aggressive heat for three hours. And to-morrow in the country, and
Sunday — he was in no mood for porch-bridge with polite under-
graduates, and dancing after dinner at a rural roadhouse, a diminu-
tive of gaiety which his father had estimated too well.

"Oh, no," he said to himself. . . . "No."

He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now, but
otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a
pillar of something — at times you were sure it was not society, at
others nothing else — for the law, for the church. He stood for a few
minutes motionless on the sidewalk in front of a 47th Street apart-
ment-house; for almost the first time in his life he had nothing
whatever to do.

Then he began to walk briskly up Fifth Avenue, as if he had just
been reminded of an important engagement there. The necessity of
dissimulation is one of the few characteristics that we share with
dogs, and I think of Anson on that day as some well-bred specimen
who had been disappointed at a familiar back door. He was going
to see Nick, once a fashionable bartender in demand at all private
dances, and now employed in cooling non-alcoholic champagne
among the labyrinthine cellars of the Plaza Hotel.

"Nick," he said, "what's happened to everything?"

"Dead," Nick said.

"Make me a whiskey sour." Anson handed a pint bottle over the
counter. "Nick, the girls are different ; I had a little girl in Brook-
lyn and she got married last week without letting me know."

"That a fact ? Ha-ha-ha," responded Nick diplomatically. "Slipped
it over on you."

"Absolutely," said Anson. "And I was out with her the night
before."

"Ha-ha-ha," said Nick, "ha-ha-ha!"

The Rich Boy 203

"Do you remember the wedding, Nick, in Hot Springs where I
had the waiters and the musicians singing 'God save the King'?"

"Now where was that, Mr. Hunter?" Nick concentrated doubt-
fully. "Seems to me that was "

"Next time they were back for more, and I began to wonder how
much I'd paid them," continued Anson.

" — seems to me that was at Mr. Trenholm's wedding."

"Don't know him," said Anson decisively. He was offended that
a strange name should intrude upon his reminiscences; Nick per-
ceived this.

"Na — aw — " he admitted, "I ought to know that. It was one of
your crowd — Brakins . . . Baker "

"Bicker Baker," said Anson responsively. "They put me in a
hearse after it was over and covered me up with flowers and drove
me away."

"Ha-ha-ha," said Nick. "Ha-ha-ha."

Nick's simulation of the old family servant paled presently and
Anson went up-stairs to the lobby. He looked around — his eyes met
the glance of an unfamiliar clerk at the desk, then fell upon a flower
from the morning's marriage hesitating in the mouth of a brass cus-
pidor. He went out and walked slowly toward the blood-red sun
over Columbus Circle. Suddenly he turned around and, retracing his
steps to the Plaza, immured himself in a telephone-booth.

Later he said that he tried to get me three times that afternoon,
that he tried every one who might be in New York — men and girls
he had not seen for years, an artist's model of his college days whose
faded number was still in his address book — Central told him that
even the exchange existed no longer. At length his quest roved into
the country, and he held brief disappointing conversations with
emphatic butlers and maids. So-and-so was out, riding, swimming,
playing golf, sailed to Europe last week. Who shall I say phoned?

It was intolerable that he should pass the evening alone — the
private reckonings which one plans for a moment of leisure lose
every charm when the solitude is enforced. There were always women
of a sort, but the ones he knew had temporarily vanished, and to pass
a New York evening in the hired company of a stranger never
occurred to him — he would have considered that that was something
shameful and secret, the diversion of a travelling salesman in a
strange town.

Anson paid the telephone bill — the girl tried unsuccessfully to joke
with him about its size — and for the second time that afternoon
started to leave the Plaza and go he knew not where. Near the revolv-
ing door the figure of a woman, obviously with child, stood side-
ways to the light — a sheer beige cape fluttered at her shoulders when

204 The Rich Boy

the door turned and, each time, she looked impatiently toward it as
if she were weary of waiting. At the first sight of her a strong
nervous thrill of familiarity went over him, but not until he was
within five feet of her did he realize that it was Paula.

"Why, Anson Hunter!"

His heart turned over.

"Why, Paula "

"Why, this is wonderful. I can't believe it, Anson ! "

She took both his hands, and he saw in the freedom of the gesture
that the memory of him had lost poignancy to her. But not to him —
he felt that old mood that she evoked in him stealing over his brain,
that gentleness with which he had always met her optimism as if
afraid to mar its surface.

"We're at Rye for the summer. Pete had to come East on business
— you know of course I'm Mrs. Peter Hagerty now — so we brought
the children and took a house. You've got to come out and see us."

"Can I?" he asked directly. "When?"

"When you like. Here's Pete." The revolving door functioned,
giving up a fine tall man of thirty with a tanned face and a trirn
mustache. His immaculate fitness made a sharp contrast with
Anson 's increasing bulk, which was obvious under the faintly tight
cut-away coat.

"You oughtn't to be standing," said Hagerty to his wife. "Let's
sit down here." He indicated lobby chairs, but Paula hesitated.

"I've got to go right home," she said. "Anson, why don't you —
why don't you come out and have dinner with us to-night? We're
just getting settled, but if you can stand that "

Hagerty confirmed the invitation cordially.

"Come out for the night."

Their car waited in front of the hotel, and Paula with a tired
gesture sank back against silk cushions in the corner.

"There's so much I want to talk to you about," she said, "it
seems hopeless."

"I want to hear about you."

"Well" — she smiled at Hagerty — "that would take a long time
too. I have three children — by my first marriage. The oldest is five,
then four, then three." She smiled again. "I didn't waste much time
having them, did I ?"

"Boys?"

"A boy and two girls. Then — oh, a lot of things happened, and I
got a divorce in Paris a year ago and married Pete. That's all —
except that I'm awfully happy."

In Rye they drove up to a large house near the Beach Club, from
which there issued presently three dark, slim children who broke

The Rich Boy 205

from an English governess and approached them with an esoteric
cry. Abstractedly and with difficulty Paula took each one into her
arms, a caress which they accepted stiffly, as they had evidently been
told not to bump into Mummy. Even against their fresh faces
Paula's skin showed scarcely any weariness — for all her physical
languor she seemed younger than when he had last seen her at Palm
Beach seven years ago.

At dinner she was preoccupied, and afterward, during the homage
to the radio, she lay with closed eyes on the sofa, until Anson won-
dered if his presence at this time were not an intrusion. But at nine
o'clock, when Hagerty rose and said pleasantly that he was going
to leave them by themselves for a while, she began to talk slowly
about herself and the past.

"My first baby," she said — "the one we call Darling, the biggest
little girl — I wanted to die when I knew I was going to have her,
because Lowell was like a stranger to me. It didn't seem as though
she could be my own. I wrote you a letter and tore it up. Oh, you
were so bad to me, Anson."

It was the dialogue again, rising and falling. Anson felt a sudden
quickening of memory.

"Weren't you engaged once?" she asked — "a girl named Dolly
something?"

"I wasn't ever engaged. I tried to be engaged, but I never loved
anybody but you, Paula."

"Oh," she said. Then after a moment : "This baby is the first one
I ever really wanted. You see, I'm in love now — at last."

He didn't answer, shocked at the treachery of her remembrance.
She must have seen that the "at last" bruised him, for she continued :

"I was infatuated with you, Anson — you could make me do any-
thing you liked. But we wouldn't have been happy. I'm not smart
enough for you. I don't like things to be complicated like you do."
She paused. "You'll never settle down," she said.

The phrase struck at him from behind — it was an accusation that
of all accusations he had never merited.

"I could settle down if women were different," he said. "If I
didn't understand so much about them, if women didn't spoil you for
other women, if they had only a little pride. If I could go to sleep
for a while and wake up into a home that was really mine — why,
that's what I'm made for, Paula, that's what women have seen in
me and liked in me. It's only that I can't get through the prelimi-
naries any more."

Hagerty came in a little before eleven; after a whiskey Paula
stood up and announced that she was going to bed. She went over
and stood by her husband.

2o6 The Rich Boy

"Where did you go, dearest?" she demanded.

"I had a drink with Ed Saunders."

"I was worried. I thought maybe you'd run away."

She rested her head against his coat.

"He's sweet, isn't he, Anson?" she demanded.

"Absolutely," said Anson, laughing.

She raised her face to her husband.

"Well, I'm ready," she said. She turned to Anson: "Do you want
to see our family gymnastic stunt?"

"Yes," he said in an interested voice.

"All right. Here we go!"

Hagerty picked her up easily in his arms.

"This is called the family acrobatic stunt," said Paula. "He can
ries me up-stiars. Isn't it sweet of him?"

"Yes," said Anson.

Hagerty bent his head slightly until his face touched Paula's.

"And I love him," she said. "I've just been telling you, haven't
I, Anson?"

"Yes," he said.

"He's the dearest thing that ever lived in this world ; aren't you,
darling? . . . Well, good night. Here we go. Isn't he strong?"

"Yes," Anson said.

"You'll find a pair of Pete's pajamas laid out for you. Sweet
dreams — see you at breakfast."

"Yes," Anson said.

VIII

The older members of the firm insisted that Anson should go
abroad for the summer. He had scarcely had a vacation in seven
years, they said. He was stale and needed a change. Anson resisted.

"If I go," he declared, "I won't come back any more."

"That's absurd, old man. You'll be back in three months with all
this depression gone. Fit as ever."

"No." He shook his head stubbornly. "If I stop, I won't go back
to work. If 1 stop, that means I've given up — I'm through."

"We'll take a chance on that. Stay six months if you like — we're
not afraid you'll leave us. Why, you'd be miserable if you didn't
work."

They arranged his passage for him. They liked Anson — every one
liked Anson — and the change that had been coming over him cast
a sort of pall over the office. The enthusiasm that had invariably
signalled up business, the consideration toward his equals and his
inferiors, the lift of his vital presence — within the past four months

The Rich Boy 207

his intense nervousness had melted down these qualities into the
fussy pessimism of a man of forty. On every transaction in which
he was involved he acted as a drag and a strain.

"If I go I'll never come back," he said.

Three days before he sailed Paula Legendre Hagerty died in
childbirth. I was with him a great deal then, for we were crossing
together, but for the first time in our friendship he told me not a
word of how he felt, nor did I see the slightest sign of emotion. His
chief preoccupation was with the fact that he was thirty years old —
he would turn the conversation to the point where he could remind
you of it and then fall silent, as if he assumed that the statement
would start a chain of thought sufficient to itself. Like his partners,
I was amazed at the change in him, and I was glad when the Paris
moved off into the wet space between the worlds, leaving his princi-
pality behind.

"How about a drink?" he suggested.

We walked into the bar with that defiant feeling that characterizes
the day of departure and ordered four Martinis. After one cocktail
a change came over him — he suddenly reached across and slapped
my knee with the first joviality I had seen him exhibit for months.

"Did you see that girl in the red tarn?" he demanded, "the one
with the high color who had the two police dogs down to bid
her good-by."

"She's pretty," I agreed.

"I looked her up in the purser's office and found out that she's
alone. I'm going down to see the steward in a few minutes. We'll
have dinner with her to-night."

After a while he left me, and within an hour he was walking up
and down the deck with her, talking to her in his strong, clear voice.
Her red tarn was a bright spot of color against the steel-green sea,
and from time to time she looked up with a flashing bob of her head,
and smiled with amusement and interest, and anticipation. At dinner
we had champagne, and were very joyous — afterward Anson ran the
pool with infectious gusto, and several people who had seen me
with him asked me his name. He and the girl were talking and
laughing together on a lounge in the bar when I went to bed.

I saw less of him on the trip than I had hoped. He wanted to
arrange a foursome, but there was no one available, so I saw him only
at meals. Sometimes, though, he would have a cocktail in the bar,
and he told me about the girl in the red tarn, and his adventures
with her, making them all bizarre and amusing, as he had a way of
doing, and I was glad that he was himself again, or at least the self
that I knew, and with which I felt at home. I don't think he was
ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to

208 The Rich Boy

him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promis-
ing him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they prom-
ised that there would always be women in the world who would
spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect
that superiority he cherished in his heart.
1926 An the Sad Young Men

THE BABY PARTY

WHEN JOHN ANDROS felt old he found solace in the thought of
life continuing through his child. The dark trumpets of oblivion were
less loud at the patter of his child's feet or at the sound of his child's
voice babbling mad non sequiturs to him over the telephone. The
latter incident occurred every afternoon at three when his wife called
the office from the country, and he came to look forward to it as
one of the vivid minutes of his day.

He was not physically old, but his life had been a series of struggles
up a series of rugged hills, and here at thirty-eight having won his
battles against ill-health and poverty he cherished less than the
usual number of illusions. Even his feeling about his little girl was
qualified. She had interrupted his rather intense love-affair with his
wife, and she was the reason for their living in a suburban town,
where they paid for country air with endless servant troubles and
the weary merry-go-round of the commuting train.

It was little Ede as a definite piece of youth that chiefly interested
him. He liked to take her on his lap and examine minutely her fra-
grant, downy scalp and her eyes with their irises of morning blue.
Having paid this homage John was content that the nurse
should take her away. After ten minutes the very vitality of the
child irritated him ; he was inclined to lose his temper when things
were broken, and one Sunday afternoon when she had disrupted a
bridge game by permanently hiding up the ace of spades, he had
made a scene that had reduced his wife to tears.

This was absurd and John was ashamed of himself. It was inevi-
table that such things would happen, and it was impossible that little
Ede should spend all her indoor hours in the nursery up-stairs when
she was becoming, as her mother said, more nearly a "real person"
every day.

She was two and a half, and this afternoon, for instance, she was
going to a baby party. Grown-up Edith, her mother, had telephoned
the information to the office, and little Ede had confirmed the busi-
ness by shouting "I yam going to a pantry \ " into John's unsuspect-
ing left ear.

"Drop in at the Markeys' when you get home, won't you, dear?"

209

210 The Baby Party

resumed her mother. "It'll be funny. Ede's going to be all dressed
up in her new pink dress "

The conversation terminated abruptly with a squawk which indi-
cated that the telephone had been pulled violently to the floor. John
laughed and decided to get an early train out; the prospect of a
baby party in some one else's house amused him.

"What a peach of a mess!" he thought humorously. "A dozen
mothers, and each one looking at nothing but her own child. All the
babies breaking things and grabbing at the cake, and each mama
going home thinking about the subtle superiority of her own child
to every other child there."

He was in a good humor to-day — all the things in his life were
going better than they had ever gone before. When he got off the train
at his station he shook his head at an importunate taxi man, and be-
gan to walk up the long hill toward his house through the crisp
December twilight. It was only six o'clock but the moon was out,
shining with proud brilliance on the thin sugary snow that lay over
the lawns.

As he walked along drawing his lungs full of cold air his happiness
increased, and the idea of a baby party appealed to him more and
more. He began to wonder how Ede compared to other children
of her own age, and if the pink dress she was to wear was something
radical and mature. Increasing his gait he came in sight of his own
house, where the lights of a defunct Christmas-tree still blossomed
in the window, but he continued on past the walk. The party was
at the Markeys' next door.

As he mounted the brick step and rang the bell he became aware
of voices inside, and he was glad he was not too late. Then he raised
his head and listened — the voices were not children's voices, but
they were loud and pitched high with anger ; there were at least three
of them and one, which rose as he listened to a hysterical sob, he
recognized immediately as his wife's.

"There's been some trouble," he thought quickly.

Trying the door, he found it unlocked and pushed it open.

The baby party began at half past four, but Edith Andros, cal-
culating shrewdly that the new dress would stand out more sensa-
tionally against vestments already rumpled, planned the arrival of
herself and little Ede for five. When they appeared it was already a
flourishing affair. Four baby girls and nine baby boys, each one
curled and washed and dressed with all the care of a proud and
jealous heart, were dancing to the music of a phonograph. Never
more than two or three were dancing at once, but as all were con-

The Baby Party 211

tinually in motion running to and from their mothers for encourage-
ment, the general effect was the same.

As Edith and her daughter entered, the music was temporarily
drowned out by a sustained chorus, consisting largely of the word
cute and directed toward little Ede, who stood looking timidly about
and fingering the edges of her pink dress. She was not kissed — this
is 'the sanitary age — but she was passed along a row of mamas each
one of whom said "cu-u-ute" to her and held her pink little hand
before passing her on to the next. After some encouragement and
a few mild pushes she was absorbed into the dance, and became an
active member of the party.

Edith stood near the door talking to Mrs. Markey, and keeping
one eye on the tiny figure in the pink dress. She did not care for
Mrs. Markey; she considered her both snippy and common, but
John and Joe Markey were congenial and went in together on the
commuting train every morning, so the two women kept up an
elaborate pretense of warm amity. They were always reproaching
each other for "not coming to see me," and they were always plan-
ning the kind of parties that began with "You'll have to come to
dinner with us soon, and we'll go in to the theatre," but never
matured further.

"Little Ede looks perfectly darling," said Mrs. Markey, smiling
and moistening her lips in a way that Edith found particularly
repulsive. "So grown-up — I can't believe it ! "

Edith wondered if "little Ede" referred to the fact that Billy
Markey, though several months younger, weighed almost five pounds
more. Accepting a cup of tea she took a seat with two other ladies on
a divan and launched into the real business of the afternoon, which
of course lay in relating the recent accomplishments and insouci-
ances of her child.

An hour passed. Dancing palled and the babies took to sterner
sport. They ran into the dining-room, rounded the big table, and
essayed the kitchen door, from which they were rescued by an
expeditionary force of mothers. Having been rounded up they
immediately broke loose, and rushing back to the dining-room tried
the familiar swinging door again. The word "overheated" began to
be used, and small white brows were dried with small white handker-
chiefs. A general attempt to make the babies sit down began, but
the babies squirmed off laps with peremptory cries of "Down!
Down ! " and the rush into the fascinating dining-room began anew.

This phase of the party came to an end with the arrival of refresh-
ments, a large cake with two candlesp and saucers of vanilla ice-
cream. Billy Marke>', & stout laugh'mg baby with red hair and legs

212 The Baby Party

somewhat bowed, blew out the candles, and placed an experimental
thumb on the white frosting. The refreshments were distributed, and
the children ate, greedily but without confusion — they had behaved
remarkably well all afternoon. They were modern babies who ate
and slept at regular hours, so their dispositions were good, and their
faces healthy and pink — such a peaceful party would not have been
possible thirty years ago.

After the refreshments a gradual exodus began. Edith glanced
anxiously at her watch — it was almost six, and John had not arrived.
She wanted him to see Ede with the other children — to see how
dignified and polite and intelligent she was, and how the only ice-
cream spot on her dress was some that had dropped from her chin
when she was joggled from behind.

"You're a darling," she whispered to her child, drawing her sud-
denly against her knee. "Do you know you're a darling? Do you
know you're a darling?"

Ede laughed. "Bow-wow," she said suddenly.

"Bow-wow?" Edith looked around. "There isn't any bow-wow."

"Bow-wow," repeated Ede. "I want a bow-wow."

Edith followed the small pointing finger.

"That isn't a bow-wow, dearest, that's a teddy-bear."

"Bear?"

"Yes, that's a teddy-bear, and it belongs to Billy Markey. You
don't want Billy Markey 's teddy-bear, do you?"

Ede did want it.

She broke away from her mother and approached Billy Markey,
who held the toy closely in his arms. Ede stood regarding him with
inscrutable eyes, and Billy laughed.

Grown-up Edith looked at her watch again, this time impatiently.

The party had dwindled until, besides Ede and Billy, there were
only two babies remaining — and one of the two remained only by
virtue of having hidden himself under the dining-room table. It was
selfish of John not to come. It showed so little pride in the child.
Other fathers had come, half a dozen of them, to call for their wives,
and they had stayed for a while and looked on.

There was a sudden wail. Ede had obtained Billy's teddy-bear by
pulling it forcibly from his arms, and on Billy's attempt to recover
it, she had pushed him casually to the floor.

"Why, Ede ! " cried her mother, repressing an inclination to laugh.

Joe Markey, a handsome, broad-shouldered man of thirty-five,
picked up his son and set him on his feet. "You're a fine fellow,"
he said jovially. "Let a girl knock you over ! You're a fine fellow."

"Did he bump his head?" Mrs. Markey returned anxiously from
bowing the next to last remaining mother out the door.

The Baby Party 213

"No-o-o-o," exclaimed Markey. "He bumped something else, didn't
you, Billy? He bumped something else."

Billy had so far forgotten the bump that he was already making an
attempt to recover his property. He seized a leg of the bear which
projected from Ede's enveloping arms and tugged at it but without
success.

"No," said Ede emphatically.

Suddenly, encouraged by the success of her former half-accidental
manoeuvre, Ede dropped the teddy-bear, placed her hands on Billy's
shoulders and pushed him backward off his feet.

This time he landed less harmlessly; his head hit the bare floor
just off the rug with a dull hollow sound, whereupon he drew in his
breath and delivered an agonized yell.

Immediately the room was in confusion. With an exclamation
Markey hurried to his son, but his wife was first to reach the injured
baby and catch him up into her arms.

"Oh, Billy" she cried, "what a terrible bump! She ought to be
spanked."

Edith, who had rushed immediately to her daughter, heard this
remark, and her lips came sharply together.

"Why, Ede," she whispered perfunctorily, "you bad girl 1 "

Ede put back her little head suddenly and laughed. It was a loud
laugh, a triumphant laugh with victory in it and challenge and
contempt. Unfortunately it was also an infectious laugh. Before her
mother realized the delicacy of the situation, she too had laughed, an
audible, distinct laugh not unlike the baby's, and partaking of the
same overtones.

Then, as suddenly, she stopped.

Mrs. Markey's face had grown red with anger, and Markey, who
had been feeling the back of the baby's head with one finger, looked
at her, frowning.

"It's swollen already," he said with a note of reproof in his voice.
"I'll get some witch-hazel."

But Mrs. Markey had lost her temper. "I don't see anything funny
about a child being hurt ! " she said in a trembling voice.

Little Ede meanwhile had been looking at her mother curiously.
She noted that her own laugh had produced her mother's and she
wondered if the same cause would always produce the same effect.
So she chose this moment to throw back her head and laugh again.

To her mother the additional mirth added the final touch of
hysteria to the situation. Pressing her handkerchief to her mouth she
giggled irrepressibly. It was more than nervousness — she felt that in
a peculiar way she was laughing with her child — they were laughing
together.

214 The Baby Party

It was in a way a defiance — those two against the world.

While Markey rushed up-stairs to the bathroom for ointment, his
wife was walking up and down rocking the yelling boy in her arms.

"Please go home!" she broke out suddenly. "The child's badly
hurt, and if you haven't the decency to be quiet, you'd better go
home."

"Very well," said Edith, her own temper rising. "I've never seen
any one make such a mountain out of "

"Get out ! " cried Mrs. Markey frantically. "There's the door, get
out — I never want to see you in our house again. You or your brat
either!"

Edith had taken her daughter's hand and was moving quickly
toward the door, but at this remark she stopped and turned around,
her face contracting with indignation.

"Don't you dare call her that ! "

Mrs. Markey did not answer but continued walking up and down,
muttering to herself and to Billy in an inaudible voice.

Edith began to cry.

"I will get out ! " she sobbed, "I've never heard anybody so rude
and c-common in my life. I'm glad your baby did get pushed down —
he's nothing but a f-fat little fool anyhow."

Joe Markey reached the foot of the stairs just in time to hear this
remark.

"Why, Mrs. Andros," he said sharply, "can't you see the child's
hurt? You really ought to control yourself."

"Control m-myself ! " exclaimed Edith brokenly. "You better ask
her to c-control herself. I've never heard anybody so c-common in
my life."

"She's insulting me ! " Mrs. Markey was now livid with rage. "Did
you hear what she said, Joe? I wish you'd put her out. If she won't
go, just take her by the shoulders and put her out ! "

"Don't you dare touch me ! " cried Edith. "I'm going just as quick
as I can find my c-coat ! "

Blind with tears she took a step toward the hall. It was just at
this moment that the door opened and John Andros walked anx-
iously in.

"John ! " cried Edith, and fled to him wildly.

"What's the matter? Why, what's the matter?"

"They're — they're putting me out ! " she wailed, collapsing against
him. "He'd just started to take me by the shoulders and put me out.
I want my coat ! "

"That's not true," objected Markey hurriedly. "Nobody's going to
put you out." He turned to John. "Nobody's going to put her out,"
he repeated. "She's "

The Baby Party 215

"What do you mean 'put her out'?" demanded John abruptly.
"What's all this talk, anyhow?"

"Oh, let's go ! " cried Edith. "I want to go. They're so common,
John!"

"Look here!" Markey's face darkened. "You've said that about
enough. You're acting sort of crazy."

"They called Ede a brat!"

For the second time that afternoon little Ede expressed emotion
at an inopportune moment. Confused and frightened at the shouting
voices, she began to cry, and her tears had the effect of conveying
that she felt the insult in her heart.

"What's the idea of this?" broke out John. "Do you insult your
guests in your own house?"

"It seems to me it's your wife that's done the insulting ! " answered
Markey crisply. "In fact, your baby there started all the trouble."

John gave a contemptuous snort. "Are you calling names at a little
baby?" he inquired. "That's a fine manly business!"

"Don't talk to him, John," insisted Edith. "Find my coat!"

"You must be in a bad way," went on John angrily, "if you have
to take out your temper on a helpless little baby."

"I never heard anything so damn twisted in my life," shouted
Markey. "If that wife of yours would shut her mouth for a
minute "

"Wait a minute! You're not talking to a woman and child

now "

There was an incidental interruption. Edith had been fumbling on
a chair for her coat, and Mrs. Markey had been watching her with
hot, angry eyes. Suddenly she laid Billy down on the sofa, where he
immediately stopped crying and pulled himself upright, and coming
into the hall she quickly found Edith's coat and handed it to her
without a word. Then she went back to the sofa, picked up Billy,
and rocking him in her arms looked again at Edith with hot, angry
eyes. The interruption had taken less than half a minute.

"Your wife comes in here and begins shouting around about how
common we are!" burst out Markey violently. "Well, if we're so
damn common, you'd better stay away! And, what's more, you'd
better get out now ! "

Again John gave a short, contemptuous laugh.

"You're not only common," he returned, "you're evidently an
awful bully — when there's any helpless women and children around."
He felt for the knob and swung the door open. "Come on, Edith."

Taking up her daughter in her arms, his wife stepped outside and
John, still looking contemptuously at Markey, started to follow.

"Wait a minute ! " Markey took a step .forward ; he was trembling

2i6 The Baby Party

slightly, and two large veins on his temple were suddenly full of
blood. "You don't think you can get away with that, do you? With
me?"

Without a word John walked out the door, leaving it open.

Edith, still weeping, had started for home. After following her with
his eyes until she reached her own walk, John turned back toward
the lighted doorway where Markey was slowly coming down the
slippery stej^He took off his overcoat and hat, tossed them off the
path onto the snow. Then, sliding a little on the iced walk, he took a
step forward.

At the first blow, they both slipped and fell heavily to the side-
walk, half rising then, and again pulling each other to the ground.
They found a better foothold in the thin snow to the side of the
walk and rushed attach other, both swinging wildly and pressing
out the snow into a pasty mud underfoot.

The street was deserted, and except for their short tired gasps and
the padded sound as one or the other slipped down into the slushy
mud, they fought in silence, clearly defined to each other by the full
moonlight as well as by the amber glow that shone out of the open
door. Several times they both slipped down together, and then for
a while the conflict threshed about wildly on the lawn.

For ten, fifteen, twenty minutes they fought there senselessly in
the moonlight. They had both taken off coats and vests at some
silently agreed upon interval and now their shirts dripped from their
backs in wet pulpy shreds. Both were torn and bleeding and so
exhausted that they could stand only when by their position they
mutually supported each other — the impact, the mere effort of a
blow, would send them both to their hands and knees.

But it was not weariness that ended the business, and the very
meaninglessness of the fight was a reason for not stopping. They
stopped because once when they were straining at each other on the
ground, they heard a man's footsteps coming along the sidewalk.
They had rolled somehow into the shadow, and when they heard these
footsteps they stopped fighting, stopped moving, stopped breathing,
lay huddled together like two boys playing Indian until the footsteps
had passed. Then, staggering to their feet, they looked at each other
like two drunken men.

"I'll be damned if I'm going on with this thing any more," cried
Markey thickly.

"I'm not going on any more either," said John Andros. "I've had
enough of this thing."

Again they looked at each other, sulkily this time, as if each sus-
pected the other of urging him to a renewal of the fight. Markey spat
out a mouthful of blood from a cut lip ; then he cursed softly, and

The Baby Party 217

picking up his coat and vest, shook off the snow from them in a sur-
prised way, as if their comparative dampness was his only worry in
the world.

"Want to come in and wash up?" he asked suddenly.

"No, thanks," said John. "I ought to be going home — my wife'll be
worried."

He too picked up his coat and vest and then his overcoat and hat.
Soaking wet and dripping with perspiration, it seemed absurd that
less than half an hour ago he had been wearing all these clothes.

"Well — good night," he said hesitantly.

Suddenly they both walked toward each other and shook hands.
It was no perfunctory hand-shake : John Andres's arm went around
Markey's shoulder, and he patted him softly on the back for a little
while.

"No harm done," he said brokenly.

"No— you?"

"No, no harm done."

"Well," said John Andros after a minute, "I guess I'll say good
night."

Limping slightly and with his clothes over his arm, John Andros
turned away. The moonlight was still bright as he left the dark
patch of trampled ground and walked over the intervening lawn.
Down at the station, half a mile away, he could hear the rumble of
the seven o'clock train.

"But you must have been crazy," cried Edith brokenly. "I thought
you were going to fix it all up there and shake hands. That's why I
went away."

"Did you want us to fix it up?"

"Of course not, I never want to see them again. But I thought of
course that was what you were going to do." She was touching the
bruises on his neck and back with iodine as he sat placidly in a hot
bath. "I'm going to get the doctor," she said insistently. "You may
be hurt internally."

He shook his head. "Not a chance," he answered. "I don't want
this to get all over town."

"I don't understand yet how it all happened."

"Neither do I." He smiled grimly. "I guess these baby parties are
pretty rough affairs."

"Well, one thing — " suggested Edith hopefully, "I'm certainly glad
we have beefsteak in the house for to-morrow's dinner."

"Why?"

"For your eye, of course. Do you know I came within an ace of
ordering veal? Wasn't that the luckiest thing?"

218 The Baby Party

Half.an hour later, dressed except that his neck would accommo-
date no collar, John moved his limbs experimentally before the glass.
"I believe 111 get myself in better shape," he said thoughtfully. "I
must be getting old."

"You mean so that next time you can beat him?"

"I did beat him," he announced. "At least, I beat him as much as
he beat me. And there isn't going to be any next time. Don't you go
calling people common any more. If you get in any trouble, you just
take your coat and go home. Understand ?"

"Yes, dear," she said meekly. "I was very foolish and now I under-
stand."

Out in the hall, he paused abruptly by the baby's door.

"Is she asleep?"

"Sound asleep. But you can go in and peek at her — just to say
good night."

They tiptoed in and bent together over the bed. Little Ede, her
cheeks flushed with health, her pink hands clasped tight together,
was sleeping soundly in the cool, dark room. John reached over the
railing of the bed and passed his hand lightly over the silken hair.

"She's asleep," he murmured in a puzzled way.

"Naturally, after such an afternoon."

"Miz Andros," the colored maid's stage whisper floated in from
the hall, "Mr. and Miz Markey downstairs an' want to see you.
Mr. Markey he's all cut up in pieces, mam'n. His face look like a
roast beef. An' Miz Markey she 'pear mighty mad."

"Why, what incomparable nerve ! " exclaimed Edith. "Just tell them
we're not home. I wouldn't go down for anything in the world."

"You most certainly will." John's voice was hard and set.

"What?"

"You'll go down right now, and, what's more, whatever that other
woman does, you'll apologize for what you said this afternoon. After
that you don't ever have to see her again."

"Why— John, I can't."

"You've got to. And just remember that she probably hated to
come over here just twice as much as you hate to go down-
stairs."

"Aren't you coming? Do I have to go alone?"

"I'll be down — in just a minute."

John Andros waited until she had closed the door behind her ; then
he reached over into the bed, and picking up his daughter, blankets
and all, sat down in the rocking-chair holding her tightly in his arms.
She moved a little, and he held his breath, but she was sleeping
soundly, and in a moment she was resting quietly in the hollow of
his elbow. Slowly he bent his head until his cheek was against her

The Baby Party 219

bright hair. "Dear little girl," he whispered. "Dear little girl, dear
little girl."

John Andros knew at length what it was he had fought for so sav-
agely that evening. He had it now, he possessed it forever, and for
some time he sat there rocking very slowly to and fro in the dark-
ness.
1925 All the Sad Young Men

MAGNETISM

THE PLEASANT, ostentatious boulevard was lined at prosperous
intervals with New England Colonial houses — without ship models
in the hall. When the inhabitants moved out here the ship models
had at last been given to the children. The next street was a complete
exhibit of the Spanish-bungalow phase of West Coast architecture ;
while two streets over, the cylindrical windows and round towers of
1897 — melancholy antiques which sheltered swamis, yogis, fortune
tellers, dressmakers, dancing teachers, art academies and chiro-
practors— looked down now upon brisk buses and trolley cars. A
little walk around the block could, if you were feeling old that day,
be a discouraging affair.

On the green flanks of the modern boulevard children, with their
knees marked by the red stains of the mercurochrome era, played
with toys with a purpose — beams that taught engineering, soldiers
that taught manliness, and dolls that taught motherhood. When the
dolls were so banged up that they stopped looking like real babies
and began to look like dolls, the children developed affection for
them. Everything in the vicinity — even the March sunlight — was
new, fresh, hopeful and thin, as you would expect in a city that had
tripled its population in fifteen years.

Among the very few domestics in sight that morning was a hand-
some young maid sweeping the steps of the biggest house on the
street. She was a large, simple Mexican girl with the large, simple
ambitions of the time and the locality, and she was already conscious
of being a luxury — she received one hundred dollars a month in re-
turn for her personal liberty. Sweeping, Dolores kept an eye on the
stairs inside, for Mr. Hannaford's car was waiting and he would soon
be coming down to breakfast. The problem came first this morning,
however — the problem as to whether it was a duty or a favor when
she helped the English nurse down the steps with the perambulator.
The English nurse always said "Please," and "Thanks very much,"
but Dolores hated her and would have liked, without any special
excitement, to beat her insensible. Like most Latins under the stimu-
lus of American life, she had irresistible impulses toward violence.

The nurse escaped, however. Her blue cape faded haughtily into

220

Magnetism 221

the distance just as Mr. Hannaford, who had come quietly down-
stairs, stepped into the space of the front door.

"Good morning." He smiled at Dolores ; he was young and extraor-
dinarily handsome. Dolores tripped on the broom and fell off the
stoop. George Hannaford hurried down the steps, reached her as she
was getting to her feet cursing volubly in Mexican, just touched her
arm with a helpful gesture and said, "I hope you didn't hurt your-
self."

"Oh, no."

"I'm afraid it was my fault; I'm afraid I startled you, coming
out like that."

His voice had real regret in it; his brow was knit with solici-
tude.

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"Aw, sure."

"Didn't turn your ankle?"

"Aw, no."

'Tm terribly sorry about it."

"Aw, it wasn't your fault."

He was still frowning as she went inside, and Dolores, who was
not hurt and thought quickly, suddenly contemplated having a love
affair with him. She looked at herself several times in the pantry
mirror and stood close to him as she poured his coffee, but he read
the paper and she saw that that was all for the morning.

Hannaford entered his car and drove to Jules Rennard's house.
Jules was a French Canadian by birth, and George Hannaford's best
friend ; they were fond of each other and spent much time together.
Both of them were simple and dignified in their tastes and in their
way of thinking, instinctively gentle, and in a world of the volatile
and the bizzare found in each other a certain quiet solidity.

He found Jules at breakfast.

"I want to fish for barracuda," said George abruptly. "When will
you be free? I want to take the boat and go down to Lower Cali-
fornia."

Jules had dark circles under his eyes. Yesterday he had closed out
the greatest problem of his life by settling with his ex-wife for two
hundred thousand dollars. He had married too young, and the former
slavey from the Quebec slums had taken to drugs upon her failure
to rise with him. Yesterday, in the presence of lawyers, her final
gesture had been to smash his finger with the base of a telephone. He
was tired of women for a while and welcomed the suggestion of a
fishing trip.

"How's the baby?" he asked.

"The baby's fine."

222 Magnetism

"And Kay?"

"Kay's not herself, but I don't pay any attention. What did you do
to your hand ?"

"I'll tell you another time. What's the matter with Kay, George?"

"Jealous."

"Of who?"

"Helen Avery. It's nothing. She's not herself, that's all." He got
up. "I'm late," he said. "Let me know as soon as you're free. Any
time after Monday will suit me."

George left and drove out an interminable boulevard which nar-
rowed into a long, winding concrete road and rose into the hilly coun-
try behind. Somewhere in the vast emptiness a group of buildings ap-
peared, a barnlike structure, a row of offices, a large but quick restau-
rant and half a dozen small bungalows. The chauffeur dropped
Hannaford at the main entrance. He went in and passed through
various enclosures, each marked off by swinging gates and inhabited
by a stenographer.

"Is anybody with Mr. Schroeder?" he asked, in front of a door
lettered with that name.

"No, Mr. Hannaford."

Simultaneously his eye fell on a young lady who was writing at a
desk aside, and he lingered a moment.

"Hello, Margaret," he said. "How are you, darling?"

A delicate, pale beauty looked up, frowning a little, still abstracted
in her work. It was Miss Donovan, the script girl, a friend of many
years.

"Hello. Oh, George, I didn't see you come in. Mr. Douglas wants
to work on the book sequence this afternoon."

"All right."

"These are the changes we decided on Thursday night." She smiled
up at him and George wondered for the thousandth time why she
had never gone into pictures.

"All right," he said. "Will initials do?"

"Your initials look like George Harris'."

"Very well, darling."

As he finished, Pete Schroeder opened his door and beckoned him.
"George, come here ! " he said with an air of excitement. "I want you
to listen to some one on the phone."

Hannaford went in.

"Pick up the phone and say 'Hello,' " directed Schroeder. "Don't
say who you are."

"Hello," said Hannaford obediently.

"Who is this?" asked a girl's voice.

Magnetism 223

Hannaford put his hand over the mouthpiece. "What am I sup-
posed to do?"

Schroeder snickered and Hannaford hesitated, smiling and sus-
picious.

"Who do you want to speak to ?" he temporized into the phone.

"To George Hannaford, I want to speak to. Is this him?"

"Yes."

"Oh, George ; it's me."

"Who?"

"Me — Gwen. I had an awful time finding you. They told me "

"Gwen who?"

"Gwen — can't you hear? From San Francisco — last Thursday
night."

"I'm sorry," objected George. "Must be some mistake."

"Is this George Hannaford?"

"Yes."

The voice grew slightly tart : "Well, this is Gwen Becker you spent
last Thursday evening with in San Francisco. There's no use pre-
tending you don't know who I am, because you do."

Schroeder took the apparatus from George and hung up the re-
ceiver.

"Somebody has been doubling for me up in Frisco," said Hanna-
ford.

"So that's where you were Thursday night ! "

"Those things aren't funny to me — not since that crazy Zeller girl.
You can never convince them they've been sold because the man
always looks something like you. What's new, Pete?"

"Let's go over to the stage and see."

Together they walked out a back entrance, along a muddy walk,
and opening a little door in the big blank wall of the studio building
entered into its half darkness.

Here and there figures spotted the dim twilight, figures that turned
up white faces to George Hannaford, like souls in purgatory watch-
ing the passage of a half-god through. Here and there were whispers
and soft voices and, apparently from afar, the gentle tremolo of a
small organ. Turning the corner made by some flats, they came upon
the white crackling glow of a stage with two people motionless
upon it.

An actor in evening clothes, his shirt front, collar and cuffs tinted
a brilliant pink, made as though to get chairs for them, but they
shook their heads and stood watching. For a long while nothing hap-
pened on the stage — no one moved. A row of lights went off with a
savage hiss, went on again. The plaintive tap of a hammer begged

224 Magnetism

admission to nowhere in the distance ; a blue face appeared among
the blinding lights above and called something unintelligible into the
upper blackness. Then the silence was broken by a low clear voice
from the stage :

"If you want to know why I haven't got stockings on, look in my
dressing room. I spoiled four pairs yesterday and two already this
morning. . . . This dress weighs six pounds."

A man stepped out of the group of observers and regarded the
girl's brown legs ; their lack of covering was scarcely distinguishable,
but, in any event, her expression implied that she would do nothing
about it. The lady was annoyed, and so intense was her personality
that it had taken only a fractional flexing of her eyes to indicate the
fact. She was a dark, pretty girl with a figure that would be full-
blown sooner than she wished. She was just eighteen.

Had this been the week before, George Hannaford's heart would
have stood still. Their relationship had been in just that stage. He
hadn't said a word to Helen Avery that Kay could have objected to,
but something had begun between them on the second day of this
picture that Kay had felt in the air. Perhaps it had begun even
earlier, for he had determined, when he saw Helen Avery's first re-
lease, that she should play opposite him. Helen Avery's voice and
the dropping of her eyes when she finished speaking, like a sort of
exercise in control, fascinated him. He had felt that they both toler-
ated something, that each knew half of some secret about people and
life, and that if they rushed toward each other there would be a
romantic communion of almost unbelievable intensity. It was this
element of promise and possibility that had haunted him for a fort-
night and was now dying away.

Hannaford was thirty, and he was a moving-picture actor only
through a series of accidents. After a year in a small technical college
he had taken a summer job with an electric company, and his first
appearance in a studio was in the role of repairing a bank of Klieg
lights. In an emergency he played a small part and made good, but
for fully a year after that he thought of it as a purely transitory
episode in his life. At first much of it had offended him — the almost
hysterical egotism and excitability hidden under an extremely thin
veil of elaborate good-fellowship. It was only recently, with the ad-
vent of such men as Jules Rennard into pictures, that he began to
see the possibilities of a decent and secure private life, much as his
would have been as a successful engineer. At last his success felt
solid beneath his feet.

He met Kay Tompkins at the old Griffith Studios at Mamaroneck
and their marriage was a fresh, personal affair, removed from most
stage marriages. Afterward they had possessed each other com-

Magnetism 225

pletely, had been pointed to: "Look, there's one couple in pictures
who manage to stay together." It would have taken something out
of many people's lives — people who enjoyed a vicarious security in
the contemplation of their marriage — if they hadn't stayed to-
gether, and their love was fortified by a certain effort to live up to
that.

He held women off by a polite simplicity that underneath was hard
and watchful ; when he felt a certain current being turned on he be-
came emotionally stupid. Kay expected and took much more from
men, but she, too, had a careful thermometer against her heart. Until
the other night, when she reproached him for being interested in
Helen Avery, there had been an absolute minimum of jealousy be-
tween them.

George Hannaford was still absorbed in the thought of Helen
Avery as he left the studio and walked toward his bungalow over the
way. There was in his mind, first, a horror that anyone should come
between him and Kay, and second, a regret that he no longer carried
that possibility in the forefront of his mind. It had given him a tre-
mendous pleasure, like the things that had happened to him during
his first big success, before he was so "made" that there was scarcely
anything better ahead ; it was something to take out and look at — a
new and still mysterious joy. It hadn't been love, for he was critical
of Helen Avery as he had never been critical of Kay. But his feeling
of last week had been sharply significant and memorable, and he was
restless, now that it had passed.

Working that afternoon, they were seldom together, but he was
conscious of her and he knew that she was conscious of him.

She stood a long time with her back to him at one point, and when
she turned at length, their eyes swept past each other's, brushing like
bird wings. Simultaneously he saw they had gone far, in their way ;
it was well that he had drawn back. He was glad that someone came
for her when the work was almost over.

Dressed, he returned to the office wing, stopping in for a moment
to see Schroeder. No one answered his knock, and, turning the knob,
he went in. Helen Avery was there alone.

Hannaford shut the door and they stared at each other. Her face
was young, frightened. In a moment in which neither of them spoke,
it was decided that they would have some of this out now. Almost
thankfully he felt the warm sap of emotion flow out of his heart and
course through his body.

"Helen!"

She murmured "What?" in an awed voice.

"I feel terribly about this." His voice was shaking.

226 Magnetism

Suddenly she began to cry; painful, audible sobs shook her. "Have
you got a handkerchief?" she said.

He gave her a handkerchief. At that moment there were steps out-
side. George opened the door halfway just in time to keep Schroeder
from entering on the spectacle of her tears.

"Nobody's in," he said facetiously. For a moment longer he kept
his shoulder against the door. Then he let it open slowly.

Outside in his limousine, he wondered how soon Jules would be
ready to go fishing.

From the age of twelve Kay Tompkins had worn men like rings
on every finger. Her face was round, young, pretty and strong; a
strength accentuated by the responsive play of brows and lashes
around her clear, glossy, hazel eyes. She was the daughter of a senator
from a Western state and she hunted unsuccessfully for glamour
through a small Western city until she was seventeen, when she ran
away from home and went on the stage. She was one of those people
who are famous far beyond their actual achievement.

There was that excitement about her that seemed to reflect the
excitement of the world. While she was playing small parts in Zieg-
feld shows she attended proms at Yale, and during a temporary
venture into pictures she met George Hannaford, already a star of
the new "natural" type then just coming into vogue. In him she
found what she had been seeking.

She was at present in what is known as a dangerous state. For six
months she had been helpless and dependent entirely upon George,
and now that her son was the property of a strict and possessive
English nurse, Kay, free again, suddenly felt the need of proving her-
self attractive. She wanted things to be as they had been before the
baby was thought of. Also she felt that lately George had taken her
too much for granted ; she had a strong instinct that he was interested
in Helen Avery.

When George Hannaford came home that night he had minimized
to himself their quarrel of the previous evening and was honestly sur-
prised at her perfunctory greeting.

"What's the matter, Kay?" he asked after a minute. "Is this going
to be another night like last night?"

"Do you know we're going out tonight?" she said, avoiding an
answer.

"Where?"

"To Katherine Davis'. I didn't know whether you'd want to
go "

Magnetism 227

"I'd like to go."

"I didn't know whether you'd want to go. Arthur Busch said he'd
stop for me."

They dined in silence. Without any secret thoughts to dip into like
a child into a jam jar, George felt restless, and at the same time was
aware that the atmosphere was full of jealousy, suspicion and anger.
Until recently they had preserved between them something precious
that made their house one of the pleasantest in Hollywood to enter.
Now suddenly it might be any house; he felt common and he felt
unstable. He had come near to making something bright and precious
into something cheap and unkind. With a sudden surge of emotion,
he crossed the room and was about to put his arm around her when
the doorbell rang. A moment later Dolores announced Mr. Arthur
Busch.

Busch was an ugly, popular little man, a continuity writer and
lately a director. A few years ago they had been hero and heroine to
him, and even now, when he was a person of some consequence in
the picture world, he accepted with equanimity Kay's use of him for
such purposes as tonight's. He had been in love with her for years,
but, because his love seemed hopeless, it had never caused him much
distress.

They went on to the party. It was a housewarming, with Hawaiian
musicians in attendance, and the guests were largely of the old
crowd. People who had been in the early Griffith pictures, even
though they were scarcely thirty, were considered to be of the old
crowd ; they were different from those coming along now, and they
were conscious of it. They had a dignity and straightforwardness
about them from the fact that they had worked in pictures before
pictures were bathed in a golden haze of success. They were still
rather humble before their amazing triumph, and thus, unlike the
new generation, who took it all for granted, they were constantly in
touch with reality. Half a dozen or so of the women were especially
aware of being unique. No one had come along to fill their places ;
here and there a pretty face had caught the public imagination for
a year, but those of the old crowd were already legends, ageless and
disembodied. With all this, they were still young enough to believe
that they would go on forever.

George and Kay were greeted affectionately; people moved over
and made place for them. The Hawaiians performed and the Duncan
sisters sang at the piano. From the moment George saw who was
here he guessed that Helen Avery would be here, too, and the fact
annoyed him. It was not appropriate that she should be part of this
gathering through which he and Kay had moved familiarly and tran-
quilly for years.

228 Magnetism

He saw her first when someone opened the swinging door to the
kitchen, and when, a little later, she came out and their eyes met, he
knew absolutely that he didn't love her. He went up to speak to her,
and at her first words he saw something had happened to her, too,
that had dissipated the mood of the afternoon. She had got a big part.

"And I'm in a daze ! " she cried happily. "I didn't think there was
a chance and I've thought of nothing else since I read the book a
year ago."

"It's wonderful. I'm awfully glad."

He had the feeling, though, that he should look at her with a cer-
tain regret ; one couldn't jump from such a scene as this afternoon
to a plane of casual friendly interest. Suddenly she began to laugh.

"Oh, we're such actors, George — you and I."

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean."

"I don't."

"Oh, yes, you do. You did this afternoon. It was a pity we didn't
have a camera."

Short of declaring then and there that he loved her, there was ab-
solutely nothing more to say. He grinned acquiescently. A group
formed around them and absorbed them, and George, feeling that the
evening had settled something, began to think about going home. An
excited and sentimental elderly lady — someone's mother — came up
and began telling him how much she believed in him, and he was
polite and charming to her, as only he could be, for half an hour.
Then he went to Kay, who had been sitting with Arthur Busch all
evening, and suggested that they go.

She looked up unwillingly. She had had several highballs and the
fact was mildly apparent. She did not want to go, but she got up
after a mild argument and George went upstairs for his coat. When
he came down Katherine Davis told him that Kay had already gone
out to the car.

The crowd had increased ; to avoid a general good night he went
out through the sun-parlor door to the lawn ; less than twenty feet
away from him he saw the figures of Kay and Arthur Busch against
a bright street lamp ; they were standing close together and staring
into each other's eyes. He saw that they were holding hands.

After the first start of surprise George instinctively turned about,
retraced his steps, hurried through the room he had just left, and
came noisily out the front door. But Kay and Arthur Busch were still
standing close together, and it was lingeringly and with abstracted
eyes that they turned around finally and saw him. Then both of
them seemed to make an effort ; they drew apart as if it was a physi-
cal ordeal. George said good-by to Arthur Busch with special cordial-

Magnetism 229

ity, and in a moment he and Kay were driving homeward through
the clear California night.

He said nothing, Kay said nothing. He was incredulous. He sus-
pected that Kay had kissed a man here and there, but he had never
seen it happen or given it any thought. This was different ; there hau
been an element of tenderness in it and there was something veiled
and remote in Kay's eyes that he had never seen there before.

Without having spoken, they entered the house ; Kay stopped by
the library door and looked in.

"There's someone there," she said, and she added without interest :
"I'm going upstairs. Good night."

As she ran up the stairs the person in the library stepped out into
the hall.

"Mr. Hannaford "

He was a pale and hard young man ; his face was vaguely familiar,
but George didn't remember where he had seen it before.

"Mr. Hannaford?" said the young man. "I recognize you from
your pictures." He looked at George, obviously a little awed.

"What can I do for you?"

"Well, will you come in here?"

"What is it? I don't know who you are."

"My name is Donovan. I'm Margaret Donovan's brother." His
face toughened a little.

"Is anything the matter?"

Donovan made a motion toward the door. "Come in here." His
voice was confident now, almost threatening.

George hesitated, then he walked into the library. Donovan fol-
lowed and stood across the table from him, his legs apart, his hands
in his pockets.

"Hannaford," he said, in the tone of a man trying to whip himself
up to anger, "Margaret wants fifty thousand dollars."

"What the devil are you talking about?" exclaimed George in-
credulously.

"Margaret wants fifty thousand dollars," repeated Donovan.

"You're Margaret Donovan's brother?"

"I am."

"I don't blieve it." But he saw the resemblance now. "Does Mar-
garet know you're here?"

"She sent me here. She'll hand over those two letters for fifty
thousand, and no questions asked."

"What letters?" George chuckled irresistibly. "This is some joke
of Schroeder's, isn't it?"

"This ain't a joke, Hannaford. I mean the letters you signed
your name to this afternoon."

230 Magnetism

III

An hour later George went upstairs in a daze. The clumsiness of
the affair was at once outrageous and astounding. That a friend of
seven years should suddenly request his signature on papers that
were not what they were purported to be made all his surroundings
seem diaphanous and insecure. Even now the design engrossed him
more than a defense against it, and he tried to re-create the steps by
which Margaret had arrived at this act of recklessness or despair.

She had served as script girl in various studios and for various
directors for ten years ; earning first twenty, now a hundred dollars
a week. She was lovely-looking and she was intelligent ; at any mo-
ment in those years she might have asked for a screen test, but some
quality of initiative or ambition had been lacking. Not a few times
had her opinion made or broken incipient careers. Still she waited
at directors' elbows, increasingly aware that the years were slipping
away.

That she had picked George as a victim amazed him most of all.
Once, during the year before his marriage, there had been a mo-
mentary warmth ; he had taken her to a Mayfair ball, and he remem-
bered that he had kissed her going home that night in the car. The
flirtation trailed along hesitatingly for a week. Before it could de-
velop into anything serious he had gone East and met Kay.

Young Donovan had shown him a carbon of the letters he had
signed. They were written on the typewriter that he kept in his
bungalow at the studio, and they were carefully and convincingly
worded. They purported to be love letters, asserting that he was
Margaret Donovan's lover, that he wanted to marry her, and that for
that reason he was about to arrange a divorce. It was incredible.
Someone must have seen him sign them that morning ; someone must
have heard her say: "Your initials are like Mr. Harris'."

George was tired. He was training for a screen football game to
be played next week, with the Southern California varsity as extras,
and he was used to regular hours. In the middle of a confused and
despairing sequence of thought about Margaret Donovan and Kay,
he suddenly yawned. Mechanically he went upstairs, undressed and
got into bed.

Just before dawn Kay came to him in the garden. There was a
river that flowed past it now, and boats faintly lit with green and
yellow lights moved slowly, remotely by. A gentle starlight fell like
rain upon the dark, sleeping face of the tforld, upon the black mys-
terious bosoms of the trees, the tranquil gleaming water and the
farther shore.

The grass was damp, and Kay came to him on hurried feet ; her

Magnetism 231

thin slippers were drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes, nes-
tling close to him, and held up her face as one shows a book open
at a page.

"Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don't ask you to love
me always like this, but I ask you to remember."

"You'll always be like this to me."

"Oh, no ; but promise me you'll remember." Her tears were falling.
"I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside of me there'll always be
the person I am tonight."

The scene dissolved slowly and George struggled into conscious-
ness. He sat up in bed ; it was morning. In the yard outside he heard
the nurse instructing his son in the niceties of behavior for two-
month-old babies. From the yard next door a small boy shouted mys-
teriously: "Who let that barrier through on me?"

Still in his pajamas, George went to the phone and called his
lawyers. Then he rang for his man, and while he was being shaved
a certain order evolved from the chaos of the night before. First, he
must deal with Margaret Donovan ; second, he must keep the matter
from Kay, who in her present state might believe anything; and,
third, he must fix things up with Kay. The last seemed the most im-
portant of all.

As he finished dressing he heard the phone ring downstairs and,
with an instinct of danger, picked up the receiver.

"Hello. . . . Oh, yes." Looking up, he saw that both his doors were
closed. "Good morning, Helen. . . . It's all right, Dolores. I'm tak-
ing it up here." He waited till he heard the receiver click downstairs.

"How are you this morning, Helen?"

"George, I called up about last night. I can't tell you how sorry
I am."

"Sorry? Why are you sorry?"

"For treating you like that. I don't know what was in me, George.
I didn't sleep all night thinking how terrible I'd been."

A new disorder established itself in George's already littered
mind.

"Don't be silly," he said. To his despair he heard his own voice
run on: "For a minute I didn't understand, Helen. Then I thought
it was better so."

"Oh, George," came her voice after a moment, very low.

Another silence. He began to put in a cuff button.

"I had to call up," she said after a moment. "I couldn't leave
things like that."

The cuff button dropped to the floor ; he stooped to pick it up, and
then said "Helen ! " urgently into the mouthpiece to cover the fact
that he had momentarily been away.

232 Magnetism

"What, George?"

At this moment the hall door opened and Kay, radiating a faint
distaste, came into the room. She hesitated.

"Are you busy?"

"It's all right." He stared into the mouthpiece for a moment.
"Well, good-by," he muttered abruptly and hung up the receiver. He
turned to Kay: "Good morning."

"I didn't mean to disturb you," she said distantly.

"You didn't disturb me." He hesitated. "That was Helen Avery."

"It doesn't concern me who it was. I came to ask you if we're
going to the Coconut Grove tonight."

"Sit down, Kay?"

"I don't want to talk."

"Sit down a minute," he said impatiently. She sat down. "How
long are you going to keep this up?" he demanded.

"I'm not keeping up anything. We're simply through, George, and
you know it as well as I do."

"That's absurd," he said. "Why, a week ago "

"It doesn't matter. We've been getting nearer to this for months,
and now it's over."

"You mean you don't love me?" He was not particularly alarmed.
They had been through scenes like this before.

"I don't know. I suppose I'll always love you in a way." Sud-
denly she began to sob. "Oh, it's all so sad. He's cared for me so
long."

George stared at her. Face to face with what was apparently a real
emotion, he had no words of any kind. She was not angry, not
threatening or pretending, not thinking about him at all, but con-
cerned entirely with her emotions toward another man.

"What is it?" he cried. "Are you trying to tell me you're in love
with this man?"

"I don't know," she said helplessly.

He took a step toward her, then went to the bed and lay down on
it, staring in misery at the ceiling. After a while a maid knocked to
say that Mr. Busch and Mr. Castle, George's lawyer, were below.
The fact carried no meaning to him. Kay went into her room and he
got up and followed her.

"Let's send word we're out," he said. "We can go away somewhere
and talk this over."

"I don't want to go away."

She was already away, growing more mysterious and remote with
every minute. The things on her dressing table were the property of
a stranger.

He began to speak in a dry, hurried voice. "If you're still thinking

Magnetism 233

about Helen Avery, it's nonsense. I've never given a damn for any-
body but you."

They went downstairs and into the living room. It was nearly
noon — another bright emotionless California day. George saw that
Arthur Busch 's ugly face in the sunshine was wan and white; he
took a step toward George and then stopped, as if he were waiting
for something — a challenge, a reproach, a blow.

In a flash the scene that would presently take place ran itself off
in George's mind. He saw himself moving through the scene, saw his
part, an infinite choice of parts, but in every one of them Kay would
be against him and with Arthur Busch. And suddenly he rejected
them all.

"I hope you'll excuse me," he said quickly to Mr. Castle. "I called
you up because a script girl named Margaret Donovan wants fifty
thousand dollars for some letters she claims I wrote her. Of course

the whole thing is " He broke off. It didn't matter. "I'll come to

see you tomorrow." He walked up to Kay and Arthur, so that only
they could hear.

"I don't know about you two — what you want to do. But leave me
out of it ; you haven't any right to inflict any of it on me, for after
all it's not my fault. I'm not going to be mixed up in your emotions."

He turned and went out. His car was before the door and he said
"Go to Santa Monica" because it was the first name that popped
into his head. The car drove off into the everlasting hazeless sun-
light.

He rode for three hours, past Santa Monica and then along toward
Long Beach by another road. As if it were something he saw out of
the corner of his eye and with but a fragment of his attention, he
imagined Kay and Arthur Busch progressing through the afternoon.
Kay would cry a great deal and the situation would seem harsh and
unexpected to them at first, but the tender closing of the day would
draw them together. They would turn inevitably toward each other
and he would slip more and more into the position of the enemy out-
side.

Kay had wanted him to get down in the dirt and dust of a scene
and scramble for her. Not he ; he hated scenes. Once he stooped to
compete with Arthur Busch in pulling at Kay's heart, he would never
be the same to himself. He would always be a little like Arthur
Busch; they would always have that in common, like a shameful
secret. There was little of the theater about George; the millions
before whose eyes the moods and changes of his face had flickered
during ten years had not been deceived about that. From the moment
when, as a boy of twenty, his handsome eyes had gazed off into
the imaginary distance of a Griffith Western, his audience had been

234 Magnetism

really watching the progress of a straightforward, slow-thinking,
romantic man through an accidentally glamorous life.

His fault was that he had felt safe too soon. He realized suddenly
that the two Fairbankses, in sitting side by side at table, were not
keeping up a pose. They were giving hostages to fate. This was per-
haps the most bizarre community in the rich, wild, bored empire,
and for a marriage to succeed here, you must expect nothing or you
must be always together. For a moment his glance had wavered from
Kay and he stumbled blindly into disaster.

As he was thinking this and wondering where he would go and
what he should do, he passed an apartment house that jolted his
memory. It was on the outskirts of town, a pink horror built to repre-
sent something, somewhere, so cheaply and sketchily that whatever
it copied the architect must have long since forgotten. And suddenly
George remembered that he had once called for Margaret Donovan
here the night of a Mayfair dance.

"Stop at this apartment ! " he called through the speaking tube.

He went in. The negro elevator boy stared open-mouthed at him
as they rose in the cage. Margaret Donovan herself opened the door.

When she saw him she shrank away with a little cry. As he entered
and closed the door she retreated before him into the front room.
George followed.

It was twilight outside and the apartment was dusky and sad. The
last light fell softly on the standardized furniture and the great
gallery of signed photographs of moving-picture people that covered
one wall. Her face was white, and as she stared at him she began
nervously wringing her hands.

"What's this nonsense, Margaret?" George said, trying to keep
any reproach out of his voice. "Do you need money that bad?"

She shook her head vaguely. Her eyes were still fixed on him with
a sort of terror ; George looked at the floor.

"I suppose this was your brother's idea. At least I can't believe
you'd be so stupid." He looked up, trying to preserve the brusque
masterly attitude of one talking to a naughty child, but at the sight
of her face every emotion except pity left him. "I'm a little tired. Do
you mind if I sit down?"

"No."

"I'm a little confused today," said George after a minute. "People
seem to have it in for me today."

"Why, I thought" — her voice became ironic in midsentence — "1
thought everybody loved you, George."

"They don't."

"Only me?"

"Yes," he said abstractedly.

Magnetism 235

"I wish it had been only me. But then, of course, you wouldn't
have been you."

Suddenly he realized that she meant what she was saying.

"That's just nonsense."

"At least you're here," Margaret went on. "I suppose I ought to be
glad of that. And I am. I most decidedly am. I've often thought of
you sitting in that chair, just at this time when it was almost dark.
I used to make up little one-act plays about what would happen
then. Would you like to hear one of them? I'll have to begin by com-
ing over and sitting on the floor at your feet."

Annoyed and yet spellbound, George kept trying desperately to
seize upon a word or mood that would turn the subject.

"I've seen you sitting there so often that you don't look a bit more
real than your ghost. Except that your hat has squashed your beau-
tiful hair down on one side and you've got dark circles or dirt under
your eyes. You look white, too, George. Probably you were on a
party last night."

"I was. And I found your brother waiting for me when I got home."

"He's a good waiter, George. He's just out of San Quentin prison,
where he's been waiting the last six years."

"Then it was his idea?"

"We cooked it up together. I was going to China on my share."

"Why was I the victim?"

"That seemed to make it realer. Once I thought you were going to
fall in love with me five years ago."

The bravado suddenly melted out of her voice and it was still light
enough to see that her mouth was quivering.

"I've loved you for years," she said — "since the first day you came
West and walked into the old Realart Studio. You were so brave
about people, George. Whoever it was, you walked right up to them
and tore something aside as if it was in your way and began to know
them. I tried to make love to you, just like the rest, but it was
difficult. You drew people right up close to you and held them there,
not able to move either way."

"This is all entirely imaginary," said George, frowning uncomfort-
ably, "and I can't control "

"No, I know. You can't control charm. It's simply got to be used.
You've got to keep your hand in if you have it, and go through life
attaching people to you that you don't want. I don't blame you. If
you only hadn't kissed me the night of the Mayfair dance. I sup-
pose it was the champagne."

George felt as if a band which had been playing for a long time in
the distance had suddenly moved up and taken a station beneath his
window. He had always been conscious that things like this were

236 Magnetism

going on around him. Now that he thought of it, he had always been
conscious that Margaret loved him, but the faint music of these emo-
tions in his ear had seemed to bear no relation to actual life. They
were phantoms that he had conjured up out of nothing ; he had never
imagined their actual incarnations. At his wish they should die in-
consequently away.

"You can't imagine what it's been like," Margaret continued after
a minute. "Things you've just said and forgotten, I've put myself
asleep night after night remembering — trying to squeeze something
more out of them. After that night you took me to the Mayfair
other men didn't exist for me any more. And there were others, you
know — lots of them. But I'd see you walking along somewhere about
the lot, looking at the ground and smiling a little, as if something
very amusing had just happened to you, the way you do. And I'd pass
you and you'd look up and really smile: 'Hello, darling I' 'Hello,
darling' and my heart would turn over. That would happen four
times a day."

George stood up and she, too, jumped up quickly.

"Oh, I've bored you," she cried softly. "I might have known I'd
bore you. You want to go home. Let's see — is there anything else?
Oh, yes ; you might as well have those letters."

Taking them out of a desk, she took them to a window and identi-
fied them by a rift of lamplight.

"They're really beautiful letters. They'd do you credit. I suppose
it was pretty stupid, as you say, but it ought to teach you a lesson
about — about signing things, or something." She tore the letters
small and threw them in the wastebasket: "Now go on," she said.

"Why must I go now?"

For the third time in twenty-four hours sad and uncontrollable
tears confronted him.

"Please go ! " she cried angrily — "or stay if you like. I'm yours for
the asking. You know it. You can have any woman you want in
the world by just raising your hand. Would I amuse you?"

"Margaret "

"Oh, go on then." She sat down and turned her face away. "After
all, you'll begin to look silly in a minute. You wouldn't like that,
would you? So get out."

George stood there helpless, trying to put himself in her place and
say something that wouldn't be priggish, but nothing came.

He tried to force down his personal distress, his discomfort, his
vague feeling of scorn, ignorant of the fact that she was watching
him and understanding it all and loving the struggle in his face. Sud-
denly his own nerves gave way under the strain of the past twenty-
four hours and he felt his eyes grow dim and his throat tighten. He

Magnetism 237

shook his head helplessly. Then he turned away — still not knowing
that she was watching him and loving him until she thought her
heart would burst with it — and went out to the door.

The car stopped before his house, dark save for small lights in the
nursery and the lower hall. He heard the telephone ringing, but when
he answered it, inside, there was no one on the line. For a few minutes
he wandered about in the darkness, moving from chair to chair and
going to the window to stare out into the opposite emptiness of the
night.

It was strange to be alone, to feel alone. In his overwrought condi-
tion the fact was not unpleasant. As the trouble of last night had
made Helen Avery infinitely remote, so his talk with Margaret had
acted as a katharsis to his own personal misery. It would swing
back upon him presently, he knew, but for a moment his mind was
too tired to remember, to imagine or to care.

Half an hour passed. He saw Dolores issue from the kitchen, take
the paper from the front steps and carry it back to the kitchen for
a preliminary inspection. With a vague idea of packing his grip, he
went upstairs. He opened the door of Kay's room and found her ly-
ing down.

For a moment he didn't speak, but moved around the bathroom
between. Then he went into her room and switched on the lights.

"What's the matter?" he asked casually. "Aren't you feeling
well?"

"I've been trying to get some sleep," she said. "George, do you
think that girl's gone crazy?"

"What girl?"

"Margaret Donovan. I've never heard of anything so terrible in my
life."

For a moment he thought that there had been some new develop-
ment.

"Fifty thousand dollars !" she cried indignantly. "Why, I wouldn't
give it to her even if it was true. She ought to be sent to jail."

"Oh, it's not so terrible as that," he said. "She has a brother who's
a pretty bad egg and it was his idea."

"She's capable of anything," Kay said solemnly. "And you're just
a fool if you don't see it. I've never liked her. She has dirty hair."

"Well, what of it ?" he demanded impatiently, and added : "Where's
Arthur Busch?"

"He went home right after lunch. Or rather I sent him home."

"You decided you were not in love with him?"

238 Magnetism

She looked up almost in surprise. "In love with him? Oh, you
mean this morning. I was just mad at you ; you ought to have known
that. I was a little sorry for him last night, but I guess it was the
highballs."

"Well, what did you mean when you " He broke off. Wherever

he turned he found a muddle, and he resolutely determined not to
think.

"My heavens!" exclaimed Kay. "Fifty thousand dollars!"

"Oh, drop it. She tore up the letters — she wrote them herself —
and everything's all right."

"George."

"Yes."

"Of course Douglas will fire her right away."

"Of course he won't. He won't know anything about it."

"You mean to say you're not going to let her go? After this?"

He jumped up. "Do you suppose she thought that?" he cried.

"Thought what?"

"That I'd have them let her go?"

"You certainly ought to."

He looked hastily through the phone book for her name.

"Oxford " he called.

After an unusually long time the switchboard operator answered :
"Bourbon Apartments."

"Miss Margaret Donovan, please."

"Why " The operator's voice broke off. "If you'll just wait a

minute, please." He held the line ; the minute passed, then another.
Then the operator's voice: "I couldn't talk to you then. Miss Dono-
van has had an accident. She's shot herself. When you called they
were taking her through the lobby to St. Catherine's Hospital."

"Is she — is it serious?" George demanded frantically.

"They thought so at first, but now they think she'll be all right.
They're going to probe for the bullet."

"Thank you."

He got up and turned to Kay.

"She's tried to kill herself," he said in a strained voice. "I'll have
to go around to the hospital. I was pretty clumsy this afternoon and
I think I'm partly responsible for this."

"George," said Kay suddenly.

"What?"

"Don't you think it's sort of unwise to get mixed up in this? Peo-
ple might say "

"I don't give a damn what they say," he answered roughly.

He went to his room and automatically began to prepare for going
out. Catching sight of his face in the mirror, he closed his eyes with

Magnetism 239

a sudden exclamation of distaste, and abandoned the intention of
brushing his hair.

"George," Kay called from the next room, "I love you."

"I love you too."

"Jules Rennard called up. Something about barracuda fishing.
Don't you think it would be fun to get up a party? Men and girls
both."

"Somehow the idea doesn't appeal to me. The whole idea of barra-
cuda fishing "

The phone rang below and he started. Dolores was answering it.

It was a lady who had already called twice today.

"Is Mr. Hannafordin?"

"No," said Dolores promptly. She stuck out her tongue and hung
up the phone just as George Hannaford came downstairs. She helped
him into his coat, standing as close as she could to him, opened the
door and followed a little way out on the porch.

"Meester Hannaford," she said suddenly, "that Miss Avery she
call up five-six times today. I tell her you out and say nothing to
missus."

"What?" He stared at her, wondering how much she knew about
his affairs.

"She call up just now and I say you out."

"All right," he said absently.

"Meester Hannaford."

"Yes, Dolores."

"I deedn't hurt myself thees morning when I fell off the porch."

"That's fine. Good night, Dolores."

"Good night, Meester Hannaford."

George smiled at her, faintly, fleetingly, tearing a veil from be-
tween them, unconsciously promising her a possible admission to
the thousand delights and wonders that only he knew and could com-
mand. Then he went to his waiting car and Dolores, sitting down on
the stoop, rubbed her hands together in a gesture that might have
expressed either ecstasy or strangulation, and watched the rising of
the thin, pale California moon.
1928 Previously Uncollected

THE LAST OF THE BELLES

AFTER ATLANTA'S elaborate and theatrical rendition of Southern
charm, we all underestimated Tarleton. It was a little hotter than
anywhere we'd been — a dozen rookies collapsed the first day in that
Georgia sun — and when you saw herds of cows drifting through the
business streets, hi-yaed by colored drovers, a trance stole down over
you out of the hot light : you wanted to move a hand or foot to be
sure you were alive.

So I stayed out at camp and let Lieutenant Warren tell me about
the girls. This was fifteen years ago, and IVe forgotten how I felt,
except that the days went along, one after another, better than they
do now, and I was empty-hearted, because up North she whose
legend I had loved for three years was getting married. I saw the
clippings and newspaper photographs. It was "a romantic wartime
wedding," all very rich and sad. I felt vividly the dark radiance of
the sky under which it took place and, as a young snob, was more
envious than sorry.

A day came when I went into Tarleton for a haircut and ran into
a nice fellow named Bill Knowles, who was in my time at Harvard.
He'd been in the National Guard division that preceded us in camp ;
at the last moment he had transferred to aviation and had been left
behind.

"I'm glad I met you, Andy," he said with undue seriousness. "I'll
hand you on all my information before I start for Texas. You see,
there're really only three girls here — "

I was interested ; there was something mystical about there being
three girls.

" — and here's one of them now."

We were in front of a drug store and he marched me in and intro-
duced me to a lady I promptly detested.

"The other two are Ailie Calhoun and Sally Carrol Happer."

I guessed from the way he pronounced her name that he was in-
terested in Ailie Calhoun. It was on his mind what she would be
doing while he was gone ; he wanted her to have a quiet, uninterest-
ing time.

At my age I don't even hesitate to confess that entirely unchival-

240

The Last of the Belles 241

rous images of Ailie Calhoun — that lovely name — rushed into my
mind. At twenty-three there is no such thing as a preempted beauty ;
though, had Bill asked me, I would doubtless have sworn in all
sincerity to care for her like a sister. He didn't ; he was just fretting
out loud at having to go. Three days later he telephoned me that he
was leaving next morning and he'd take me to her house that night.

We met at the hotel and walked uptown through the flowery, hot
twilight. The four white pillars of the Calhoun house faced the
street, and behind them the veranda was dark as a cave with hang-
ing, weaving, climbing vines.

When we came up the walk a girl in a white dress tumbled out of
the front door, crying, "I'm so sorry I'm late ! " and seeing us, added :
"Why, I thought I heard you come ten minutes "

She broke off as a chair creaked and another man, an aviator from
Camp Harry Lee, emerged from the obscurity of the veranda.

"Why, Canby!" she cried. "How are you?"

He and Bill Knowles waited with the tenseness of open litigants.

"Canby, I want to whisper to you, honey," she said, after just a
second. "You'll excuse us, Bill."

They went aside. Presently Lieutenant Canby, immensely dis-
pleased, said in a grim voice, "Then we'll make it Thursday, but
that means sure." Scarcely nodding to us, he went down the walk,
the spurs with which he presumably urged on his aeroplane gleam-
ing in the lamplight.

"Come in — I don't just know your name "

There she was — the Southern type in all its purity. I would have
recognized Ailie Calhoun if I'd never heard Ruth Draper or read
Marse Chan. She had the adroitness sugar-coated with sweet, voluble
simplicity, the suggested background of devoted fathers, brothers
and admirers stretching back into the South's heroic age, the unfail-
ing coolness acquired in the endless struggle with the heat. There
Were notes in her voice that ordered slaves around, that withered
up Yankee captains, and then soft, wheedling notes that mingled in
unfamiliar loveliness with the night.

I could scarcely see her in the darkness, but when I rose to go — it
was plain that I was not to linger — she stood in the orange light from
the doorway. She was small and very blond; there was too much
fever-colored rouge on her face, accentuated by a nose dabbed clown-
ish white, but she shone through that like a star.

"After Bill goes I'll be sitting here all alone night after night.
Maybe you'll take me to the country-club dances." The pathetic
prophecy brought a laugh from Bill. "Wait a minute," Ailie mur-
mured. "Your guns are all crooked."

She straightened my collar pin, looking up at me for a second with

242 The Last of the Belles

something more than curiosity. It was a seeking look, as if she asked,
"Could it be you?" Like Lieutenant Canby, I marched off unwillingly
into the suddenly insufficient night.

Two weeks later I sat with her on the same veranda, or rather she
half lay in my arms and yet scarcely touched me — how she managed
that I don't remember. I was trying unsuccessfully to kiss her, and
had been trying for the best part of an hour. We had a sort of joke
about my not being sincere. My theory was that if she'd let me kiss
her I'd fall in love with her. Her argument was that I was obviously
insincere.

In a lull between two of these struggles she told me about her
brother who had died in his senior year at Yale. She showed me his
picture — it was a handsome, earnest face with a Leyendecker fore-
lock— and told me that when she met someone who measured up to
him she'd marry. I found this family idealism discouraging; even
my brash confidence couldn't compete with the dead.

The evening and other evenings passed like that, and ended with
my going back to camp with the remembered smell of magnolia
flowers and a mood of vague dissatisfaction. I never kissed her. We
went to the vaudeville and to the country club on Saturday nights,
where she seldom took ten consecutive steps with one man, and she
took me to barbecues and rowdy watermelon parties, and never
thought it was worth while to change what I felt for her into love. I
see now that it wouldn't have been hard, but she was a wise nineteen
and she must have seen that we were emotionally incompatible. So
I became her confidant instead.

We talked about Bill Knowles. She was considering Bill; for,
though she wouldn't admit it, a winter at school in New York and
a prom at Yale had turned her eyes North. She said she didn't think
she'd marry a Southern man. And by degrees I saw that she was
consciously and voluntarily different from these other girls who sang
nigger songs and shot craps in the country-club bar. That's why Bill
and I and others were drawn to her. We recognized her.

June and July, while the rumors reached us faintly, ineffectually,
of battle and terror overseas, Ailie's eyes roved here and there about
the country-club floor, seeking for something among the tall young
officers. She attached several, choosing them with unfailing perspi-
cacity— save in the case of Lieutenant Canby, whom she claimed to
despise, but, nevertheless, gave dates to "because he was so sincere"
— and we apportioned her evenings among us all summer.

One day she broke all her dates — Bill Knowles had leave and was
coming. We talked of the event with scientific impersonality —
would he move her to a decision ? Lieutenant Canby, on the contrary,
wasn't impersonal at all ; made a nuisance of himself. He told her

The Last of the Belles 243

that if she married Knowles he was going to climb up six thousand
feet in his aeroplane, shut off the motor and let go. He frightened
her — I had to yield him my last date before Bill came.

On Saturday night she and Bill Knowles came to the country club.
They were very handsome together and once more I felt envious and
sad. As they danced out on the floor the three-piece orchestra was
playing After You've Gone, in a poignant incomplete way that I
can hear yet, as if each bar were trickling off a precious minute of
that time. I knew then that I had grown to love Tarleton, and I
glanced about half in panic to see if some face wouldn't come in for
me out of that warm, singing, outer darkness that yielded up couple
after couple in organdie and olive drab. It was a time of youth and
war, and there was never so much love around.

When I danced with Ailie she suddenly suggested that we go out-
side to a car. She wanted to know why didn't people cut in on her
tonight ? Did they think she was already married ?

"Are you going to be?"

"I don't know, Andy. Sometimes, when he treats me ^s if I were
sacred, it thrills me." Her voice was hushed and far away. "And
then "

She laughed. Her body, so frail and tender, was touching mine,
her face was turned up to me, and there, suddenly, with Bill Knowles
ten yards off, I could have kissed her at last. Our lips just touched
experimentally; then an aviation officer turned a corner of the
veranda near us, peered into our darkness and hesitated.

"Ailie."

"Yes."

"You heard about this afternoon ?"

"What?" She leaned forward, tenseness already in her voice.

"Horace Canby crashed. He was instantly killed."

She got up slowly and stepped out of the car.

"You mean he was killed?" she said.

"Yes. They don't know what the trouble was. His motor "

"Oh-h-h ! " Her rasping whisper came through the hands suddenly
covering her face. We watched her helplessly as she put her head on
the side of the car, gagging dry tears. After a minute I went for
Bill, who was standing in the stag line, searching anxiously about
for her, and told him she wanted to go home.

I sat on the steps outside. I had disliked Canby, but his terrible,
pointless death was more real to me then than the day's toll of
thousands in France. In a few minutes Ailie and Bill came out. Ailie
was whimpering a little, but when she saw me her eyes flexed and
she came over swiftly.

"Andy" — she spoke in a quick, low voice — "of course you must

244 The Last of the Belles

never tell anybody what I told you about Canby yesterday. What
he said, I mean."

"Of course not."

She looked at me a second longer as if to be quite sure. Finally
she was sure. Then she sighed in such a quaint little way that I
could hardly believe my ears, and her brow went up in what can only
be described as mock despair.

"An-dy!"

I looked uncomfortably at the ground, aware that she was calling
my attention to her involuntarily disastrous effect on men.

"Good night, Andy I" called Bill as they got into a taxi.

"Good night," I said, and almost added: "You poor fool."

Of course I should have made one of those fine moral decisions
that people make in books, and despised her. On the contrary, I
don't doubt that she could still have had me by raising her hand.

A few days later she made it all right by saying wistfully, "I
know you think it was terrible of me to think of myself at a time
like that, but it was such a shocking coincidence."

At twenty-three I was entirely unconvinced about anything, ex-
cept that some people were strong and attractive and could do what
they wanted, and others were caught and disgraced. I hoped I was
of the former. I was sure Ailie was.

I had to revise other ideas about her. In the course of a long dis-
cussion with some girl about kissing — in those days people still
talked about kissing more than they kissed — I mentioned the fact
that Ailie had only kissed two or three men, and only when she
thought she was in love. To my considerable disconcertion the girl
figuratively just lay on the floor and howled.

"But it's true," I assured her, suddenly knowing it wasn't. "She
told me herself."

"Ailie Calhoun! Oh, my heavens! Why, last year at the Tech
spring house party "

This was in September. We were going overseas any week now, and
to bring us up to full strength a last batch of officers from the fourth
training camp arrived. The fourth camp wasn't like the first three —
the candidates were from the ranks ; even from the drafted divisions.
They had queer names without vowels in them, and save for a few
young militiamen, you couldn't take it for granted that they came
out of any background at all. The addition to our company was
Lieutenant Earl Schoen from New Bedford, Massachusetts ; as fine
a physical specimen as I have ever seen. He was six-foot-three, with

The Last of the Belles 245

black hair, high color and glossy dark-brown eyes. He wasn't very
smart and he was definitely illiterate, yet he was a good officer, high-
tempered and commanding, and with that becoming touch of vanity
that sits well on the military. I had an idea that New Bedford was a
country town, and set down his bumptious qualities to that.

We were doubled up in living quarters and he came into my hut.
Inside of a week there was a cabinet photograph of some Tarleton
girl nailed brutally to the shack wall.

"She's no jane or anything like that. She's a society girl; goes
with all the best people here."

The following Sunday afternoon I met the lady at a semi-private
swimming pool in the country. When Ailie and I arrived, there was
Schoen's muscular body rippling out of a bathing suit at the far end
of the pool.

"Hey, lieutenant ! "

When I waved back at him he grinned and winked, jerking his head
toward the girl at his side. Then, digging her in the ribs, he jerked
his head at me. It was a form of introduction.

"Who's that with Kitty Preston ?" Ailie asked, and when I told her
she said he looked like a street-car conductor, and pretended to look
for her transfer.

A moment later he crawled powerfully and gracefully down
the pool and pulled himself up at our side. I introduced him to
Ailie.

"How do you like my girl, lieutenant?" he demanded. "I told you
she was all right, didn't I?" He jerked his head toward Ailie; this
time to indicate that his girl and Ailie moved in the same circles.
"How about us all having dinner together down at the hotel some
night?"

I left them in a moment, amused as I saw Ailie visibly making up
her mind that here, anyhow, was not the ideal. But Lieutenant Earl
Schoen was not to be dismissed so lightly. He ran his eyes cheerfully
and inoffensively over her cute, slight figure, and decided that she
would do even better than the other. Then minutes later I saw them
in the water together, Ailie swimming away with a grim little stroke
she had, and Schoen wallowing riotously around her and ahead of
her, sometimes pausing and staring at her, fascinated, as a boy might
look at a nautical doll.

While the afternoon passed he remained at her side. Finally Ailie
came over to me and whispered, with a laugh: "He's a following me
around. He thinks I haven't paid my carfare."

She turned quickly. Miss Kitty Preston, her face curiously flus-
tered, stood facing us.

"Ailie Calhoun, I didn't think it of you to go out and delib'ately try

246 The Last of the Belles

to take a man away from another girl." — An expression of distress at
the impending scene flitted over Ailie's face — "I thought you con-
sidered yourself above anything like that."

Miss Preston's voice was low, but it held that tensity that can be
felt farther than it can be heard, and I saw Ailie's clear lovely eyes
glance about in panic. Luckily, Earl himself was ambling cheerfully
and innocently toward us.

"If you care for him you certainly oughtn't to belittle yourself
in front of him," said Ailie in a flash, her head high.

It was her acquaintance with the traditional way of behaving
against Kitty Preston's naive and fierce possessiveness, or if you
prefer it, Ailie's "breeding" against the other's "commonness." She
turned away.

"Wait a minute, kid!" cried Earl Schoen. "How about your ad-
dress? Maybe I'd like to give you a ring on the phone."

She looked at him in a way that should have indicated to Kitty
her entire lack of interest.

"I'm very busy at the Red Cross this month," she said, her voice
as cool as her slicked-back blond hair. "Good-by."

On the way home she laughed. Her air of having been unwittingly
involved in a contemptible business vanished.

"She'll never hold that young man," she said. "He wants somebody
new."

"Apparently he wants Ailie Calhoun."

The idea amused her.

"He could give me his ticket punch to wear, like a fraternity pin.
What fun I If mother ever saw anybody like that come in the house,,
she'd just lie down and die."

And to give Ailie credit, it was fully a fortnight before he did
come to her house, although he rushed her until she pretended to
be annoyed at the next country-club dance.

"He's the biggest tough, Andy," she whispered to me. "But he's
so sincere."

She used the word "tough" without the conviction it would have
carried had he been a Southern boy. She only knew it with her mind ;
her ear couldn't distinguish between one Yankee voice and another.
And somehow Mrs. Calhoun didn't expire at his appearance on the
threshold. The supposedly ineradicable prejudices of Ailie's parents
were a convenient phenomenon that disappeared at her wish. It was
her friends who were astonished. Ailie, always a little above Tarleton,
whose beaus had been very carefully the "nicest" men of the camp
— Ailie and Lieutenant Schoen ! I grew tired of assuring people that
she was merely distracting herself — and indeed every week or so
there was someone new — an ensign from Pensacola, an old friend

The Last of the Belles 247

from New Orleans — but always, in between times, there was Earl
Schoen.

Orders arrived for an advance party of officers and sergeants to
proceed to the port of embarkation and take ship to France. My
name was on the list. I had been on the range for a week and when
I got back to camp, Earl Schoen buttonholed me immediately.

"We're giving a little farewell party in the mess. Just you and I
and Captain Craker and three girls."

Earl and I were to call for the girls. We picked up Sally Carrol
Happer and Nancy Lamar, and went on to Ailie's house ; to be met
at the door by the butler with the announcement that she wasn't
home. ;

"Isn't home?" Earl repeated blankly. "Where is she?"

"Didn't leave no information about that; just said she wasn't
home."

"But this is a darn funny thing ! " he exclaimed. He walked around
the familiar dusky veranda while the butler waited at the door.
Something occurred to him. "Say," he informed me — "say, I think
she's sore."

I waited. He said sternly to the butler, "You tell her I've got to
speak to her a minute."

"How'm I goin' tell her that when she ain't home?"

Again Earl walked musingly around the porch. Then he nodded
several times and said :

"She's sore at something that happened downtown."

In a few words he sketched out the matter to me.

"Look here ; you wait in the car," I said. "Maybe I can fix this."
And when he reluctantly retreated: "Oliver, you tell Miss Ailie I
want to see her alone."

After some argument he bore this message and in a moment re-
turned with a reply :

"Miss Ailie say she don't want to see that other gentleman abou'
nothing never. She say come in if you like."

She was in the library. I had expected to see a picture of cool,
outraged dignity, but her face was distraught, tumultuous, despair-
ing. Her eyes were red-rimmed, as though she had been crying slowly
and painfully, for hours.

"Oh, hello, Andy," she said brokenly. "I haven't seen you for so
long. Has he gone?"

"Now, Ailie—"

"Now, Ailie ! " she cried. "Now, Ailie I He spoke to me, you see.
He lifted his hat. He stood there ten feet from me with that horrible
— that horrible woman — holding her arm and talking to her, and then
when he saw me he raised his hat. Andy, I didn't know what to do.

248 The Last of the Belles

I had to go in the drug store and ask for a glass of water, and I was
so afraid he'd follow in after me that I asked Mr. Rich to let me go
out the back way. I never want to see him or hear of him again."

I talked. I said what one says in such cases. I said it for half an
hour. I could not move her. Several times she answered by murmur-
ing something about his not being "sincere," and for the fourth
time I wondered what the word meant to her. Certainly not con-
stancy ; it was, I half suspected, some special way she wanted to be
regarded.

I got up to go. And then, unbelievably, the automobile horn
sounded three times impatiently outside. It was stupefying. It said
as plainly as if Earl were in the room, "All right ; go to the devil
then ! I'm not going to wait here all night."

Ailie looked at me aghast. And suddenly a peculiar look came into
her face, spread, flickered, broke into a teary, hysterical smile.

"Isn't he awful?" she cried in helpless despair. "Isn't he terrible?"

"Hurry up," I said quickly. "Get your cape. This is our last night."

And I can still feel that last night vividly, the candlelight that
flickered over the rough boards of the mess shack, over the frayed
paper decorations left from the supply company's party, the sad
mandolin down a company street that kept picking My Indiana
Home out of the universal nostalgia of the departing summer. The
three girls lost in this mysterious men's city felt something, too — a
bewitched impermanence as though they were on a magic carpet that
had lighted on the Southern countryside, and any moment the wind
would lift it and waft it away. We toasted ourselves and the South.
Then we left our napkins and empty glasses and a little of the past
on the table, and hand in hand went out into the moonlight itself.
Taps had been played ; there was no sound but the far-away whinny
of a horse, and a loud persistent snore at which we laughed, and the
leathery snap of a sentry coming to port over by the guardhouse.
Craker was on duty ; we others got into a waiting car, motored into
Tarleton and left Craker's girl.

Then Ailie and Earl, Sally and I, two and two in the wide back
seat, each couple turned from the other, absorbed and whispering,
drove away into the wide, flat darkness.

We drove through pine woods heavy with lichen and Spanish moss,
and between the fallow cotton fields along a road white as the rim
of the world. We parked under the broken shadow of a mill where
there was the sound of running water and restive squawky birds and
over everything a brightness that tried to filter in anywhere — into
the lost nigger cabins, the automobile, the fastnesses of the heart.
The South sang to us — I wonder if they remember. I remember — the
cool pale faces, the somnolent amorous eyes and the voices :

The Last of the Belles 249

"Are you comfortable ?"

"Yes; are you?"

"Are you sure you are?"

"Yes."

Suddenly we knew it was late and there was nothing more. We
turned home.

Our detachment started for Camp Mills next day, but I didn't go
to France after all. We passed a cold month on Long Island, marched
aboard a transport with steel helmets slung at our sides and then
marched off again. There wasn't any more war. I had missed the
war. When I came back to Tarleton I tried to get out of the Army,
but I had a regular commission and it took most of the winter. But
Earl Schoen was one of the first to be demobilized. He wanted to
find a good job "while the picking was good." Ailie was noncom-
mittal, but there was an understanding between them that he'd be
back.

By January the camps, which for two years had dominated the
little city, were already fading. There was only the persistent in-
cinerator smell to remind one of all that activity and bustle. What
life remained centred bitterly about divisional headquarters building
with the disgruntled regular officers who had also missed the war.

And now the young men of Tarleton began drifting back from the
ends of the earth — some with Canadian uniforms, some with crutches
or empty sleeves. A returned battalion of the National Guard pa-
raded through the streets with open ranks for their dead, and then
stepped down out of romance forever and sold you things over the
counters of local stores. Only a few uniforms mingled with the dinner
coats at the country-club dance.

Just before Christmas, Bill Knowles arrived unexpectedly one day
and left the next — either he gave Ailie an ultimatum or she had made
up her mind at last. I saw her sometimes when she wasn't busy with
returned heroes from Savannah and Augusta, but I felt like an out-
moded survival — and I was. She was waiting for Earl Schoen with
such a vast uncertainty that she didn't like to talk about it. Three
days before I got my final discharge he came.

I first happened upon them walking down Market Street together,
and I don't think I've ever been so sorry for a couple in my life ;
though I suppose the same situation was repeating itself in every
city where there had been camps. Exteriorly Earl had about every-
thing wrong with him that could be imagined. His hat was green,
with a radical feather ; his suit was slashed and braided in a grotesque
fashion that national advertising and the movies have put an end to.
Evidently he had been to his old barber, for his hair bloused neatly on
his pink, shaved neck. It wasn't as though he had been shiny and

2 so The Last of the Belles

poor, but the background of mill-town dance halls and outing clubs
flamed out at you — or rather flamed out at Ailie. For she had never
quite imagined the reality ; in these clothes even the natural grace of
that magnificent body had departed. At first he boasted of his fine
job ; it would get them along all right until he could "see some easy
money." But from the moment he came back into her world on its
own terms he must have known it was hopeless. I don't know what
Ailie said or how much her grief weighed against her stupefaction.
She acted quickly — three days after his arrival, Earl and I went
North together on the train.

"Well, that's the end of that," he said moodily. "She's a wonder-
ful girl, but too much of a highbrow for me. I guess she's got to
marry some rich guy that'll give her a great social position. I can't
see that stuck-up sort of thing." And then, later : "She said to come
back and see her in a year, but I'll never go back. This aristocrat
stuff is all right if you got the money for it, but "

"But it wasn't real," he meant to finish. The provincial society in
which he had moved with so much satisfaction for six months already
appeared to him as affected, "dudish" and artificial.

"Say, did you see what I saw getting on the train?" he asked me
after a while. "Two wonderful janes, all alone. What do you say we
mosey into the next car and ask them to lunch? I'll take the one in
blue." Halfway down the car he turned around suddenly. "Say,
Andy," he demanded, frowning; "one thing — how do you sup-
pose she knew I used to command a street car? I never told her
that."

"Search me."

Ill

This narrative arrives now at one of the big gaps that stared me
in the face when I began. For six years, while I finished at Harvard
Law and built commercial aeroplanes and backed a pavement block
that went gritty under trucks, Ailie Calhoun was scarcely more than
a name on a Christmas card ; something that blew a little in my mind
on warm nights when I remembered the magnolia flowers. Occasion-
ally an acquaintance of Army days would ask me, "What became
of that blond girl who was so popular?" but I didn't know. I ran into
Nancy Lamar at the Montmartre in New York one evening and
learned that Ailie had become engaged to a man in Cincinnati, had
gone North to visit his family and then broken it off. She was lovely
as ever and there was always a heavy beau or two. But neither Bill
Knowles nor Earl Schoen had ever come back.

And somewhere about that time I heard that Bill Knowles had

The Last of the Belles 251

married a girl he met on a boat. There you are— not much of a
patch to mend six years with.

Oddly enough, a girl seen at twilight in a small Indiana station
started me thinking about going South. The girl, in stiff pink organdie,
threw her arms about a man who got off our train and hurried him to
a waiting car, and I felt a sort of pang. It seemed to me that she was
bearing him off into the lost midsummer world of my early twenties,
where time had stood still and charming girls, dimly seen like the
past itself, still loitered along the dusky streets. I suppose that
poetry is a Northern man's dream of the South. But it was months
later that I sent off a wire to Ailie, and immediately followed it to
Tarleton.

It was July. The Jefferson Hotel seemed strangely shabby and
stuffy — a boosters> club burst into intermittent song in the dining
room that my memory had long dedicated to officers and girls. I
recognized the taxi driver who took me up to Ailie's house, but his
"Sure, I do, lieutenant," was unconvincing. I was only one of twenty
thousand.

It was a curious three days. I suppose some of Ailie's first young
lustre must have gone the way of such mortal shining, but I can't
bear witness to it. She was still so physically appealing that you
wanted to touch the personality that trembled on her lips. No — the
change was more profound than that.

At once I saw she had a different line. The modulations of pride,
the vocal hints that she knew the secrets of a brighter, finer ante-
bellum day, were gone from her voice ; there was no time for them
now as it rambled on in the half-laughing, half-desperate banter of
the newer South. And everything was swept into this banter in order
to make it go on and leave no time for thinking — the present, the
future, herself, me. We went to a rowdy party at the house of some
young married people, and she was the nervous, glowing centre of it.
After all, she wasn't eighteen, and she was as attractive in her role of
reckless clown as she had ever been in her life.

"Have you heard anything from Earl Schoen?" I asked her the
second night, on our way to the country-club dance.

"No." She was serious for a moment. "I often think of him. He was
the " She hesitated.

"Go on."

"I was going to say the man I loved most, but that wouldn't be
true. I never exactly loved him, or I'd have married him any old how,
wouldn't I?" She looked at me questioningly. "At least I wouldn't
have treated him like that."

"It was impossible."

"Of course," she agreed uncertainly. Her mood changed ; she be-

The Last of the Belles

came flippant : "How the Yankees did deceive us poor little South-
ern girls. Ah, me I "

When we reached the country club she melted like a chameleon
into the — to me — unfamiliar crowd. There was a new generation
upon the floor, with less dignity than the ones I had known, but
none of them were more a part of its lazy, feverish essence than
Ailie. Possibly she had perceived that in her initial longing to escape
from Tarleton's provincialism she had been walking alone, following
a generation which was doomed to have no successors. Just where
she lost the battle, waged behind the white pillars of her veranda, I
don't know. But she had guessed wrong, missed out somewhere. Her
wild animation, which even now called enough men around her to
rival the entourage of the youngest and freshest, was an admission
of defeat.

I left her house, as I had so often left it that vanished June, in a
mood of vague dissatisfaction. It was hours later, tossing about my
bed in the hotel, that I realized what was the matter, what had
always been the matter — I was deeply and incurably in love with
her. In spite of every incompatibility, she was still, she would always
be to me, the most attractive girl I had ever known. I told her so
next afternoon. It was one of those hot days I knew so well, and
Ailie sat beside me on a couch in the darkened library.

"Oh, no, I couldn't marry you," she said, almost frightened ; "I
don't love you that way at all. ... I never did. And you don't
love me. I didn't mean to tell you now, but next month I'm going
to marry another man. We're not even announcing it, because I've
done that twice before." Suddenly it occurred to her that I might
be hurt: "Andy, you just had a silly idea, didn't you? You know I
couldn't ever marry a Northern man."

"Who is he?" I demanded.

"A man from Savannah."

"Are you in love with him?"

"Of course I am." We both smiled. "Of course I am ! What are
you trying to make me say?"

There were no doubts, as there had been with other men. She
couldn't afford to let herself have doubts. I knew this because she
had long ago stopped making any pretensions with me. This very
naturalness, I realized, was because she didn't consider me as a
suitor. Beneath her mask of an instinctive thoroughbred she had
always been on to herself, and she couldn't believe that anyone not
taken in to the point of uncritical worship could really love her. That
was what she called being "sincere"; she felt most security with
men like Canby and Earl Schoen, who were incapable of passing
judgments on the ostensibly aristocratic heart.

The Last of the Belles 253

"All right," I said, as if she had asked my permission to marry.
"Now, would you do something for me ?"

"Anything."

"Ride out to camp."

"But there's nothing left there, honey."

"I don't care."

We walked downtown. The taxi driver in front of the hotel re-
peated her objection : "Nothing there now, cap."

"Never mind. Go there anyhow."

Twenty minutes later he stopped on a wide unfamiliar plain pow-
dered with new cotton fields and marked with isolated clumps of
pine.

"Like to drive over yonder where you see the smoke?" asked the
driver. "That's the new state prison."

"No. Just drive along this road. I want to find where I used to
live."

An old race course, inconspicuous in the camp's day of glory, had
reared its dilapidated grandstand in the desolation. I tried in vain to
orient myself.

"Go along this road past that clump of trees, and then turn right —
no, turn left."

He obeyed, with professional disgust.

"You won't find a single thing, darling," said Ailie. "The contrac-
tors took it all down."

We rode slowly along the margin of the fields. It might have been
here

"All right. I want to get out," I said suddenly.

I left Ailie sitting in the car, looking very beautiful with the warm
breeze stirring her long, curly bob.

It might have been here. That would make the company streets
down there and the mess shack, where we dined that night, just over
the way.

The taxi driver regarded me indulgently while I stumbled here
and there in the knee-deep underbrush, looking for my youth in a
clapboard or a strip of roofing or a rusty tomato can. I tried to sight
on a vaguely familiar clump of trees, but it was growing darker now
and I couldn't be quite sure they were the right trees.

"They're going to fix up the old race course," Ailie called from the
car. "Tarleton's getting quite doggy in its old age."

No. Upon consideration they didn't look like the right trees. All
I could be sure of was this place that had once been so full of life
and effort was gone, as if it had never existed, and that in another
month Ailie would be gone, and the South would be empty for me
forever.
1929 Taps at Reveille

THE ROUGH CROSSING

ONCE ON the long, covered piers, you have come into a ghostly
country that is no longer Here and not yet There. Especially at
night. There is a hazy yellow vault full of shouting, echoing voices.
There is the rumble of trucks and the clump of trunks, the strident
chatter of a crane and the first salt smell of the sea. You hurry
through, even though there's time. The past, the continent, is behind
you ; the future is that glowing mouth in the side of the ship ; this dim
turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.

Up the gangplank, and the vision of the world adjusts itself, nar-
rows. One is a citizen of a commonwealth smaller than Andorra. One
is no longer so sure of anything. Curiously unmoved the men at the
purser's desk, cell-like the cabin, disdainful the eyes of voyagers and
their friends, solemn the officer who stands on the deserted prome-
nade deck thinking something of his own as he stares at the crowd
below. A last odd idea that one didn't really have to come, then the
loud, mournful whistles, and the thing — certainly not a boat, but
rather a human idea, a frame of mind — pushes forth into the big
dark night.

Adrian Smith, one of the celebrities on board — not a very great
celebrity, but important enough to be bathed in flash light by a
photographer who had been given his name, but wasn't sure what his
subject "did" — Adrian Smith and his blond wife, Eva, went up to the
promenade deck, passed the melancholy ship's officer, and, finding a
quiet aerie, put their elbows on the rail.

"We're going!" he cried presently, and they both laughed in
ecstasy. "We've escaped. They can't get us now."

"Who?"

He waved his hand vaguely at the civic tiara.

"All those people out there. They'll come with their posses and
their warrants and list of crimes we've committed, and ring the bell
at our door on Park Avenue and ask for the Adrian Smiths, but
what ho ! the Adrian Smiths and their children and nurse are off for
France."

"You make me think we really have committed crimes."

"They can't have you," he said, frowning. "That's one thing they're

254

The Rough Crossing 255

after me about — they know I haven't got any right to a person like
you, and they're furious. That's one reason I'm glad to get away."

"Darling," said Eva.

She was twenty-six — five years younger than he. She was something
precious to everyone who knew her.

"I like this boat better than the Majestic or the Aquitania" she
remarked, unfaithful to the ships that had served their honeymoon.

"It's much smaller."

"But it's very slick and it has all those little shops along the
corridors. And I think the staterooms are bigger."

"The people are very formal — did you notice ? — as if they thought
everyone else was a card sharp. And in about four days half of them
will be calling the other half by their first names."

Four of the people came by now — a quartet of young girls abreast,
making a circuit of the deck. Their eight eyes swept momentarily
toward Adrian and Eva, and then swept automatically back, save for
one pair which lingered for an instant with a little start. They be-
longed to one of the girls in the middle, who was, indeed, the only
passenger of the four. She was not more than eighteen — a dark little
beauty with the fine crystal gloss over her that, in brunettes, takes
the place of a blonde's bright glow.

"Now, who's that?" wondered Adrian. "I've seen her before."

"She's pretty," said Eva.

"Yes." He kept wondering, and Eva deferred momentarily to his
distraction ; then, smiling up at him, she drew him back into their
privacy.

"Tell me more," she said.

"About what?"

"About us — what a good time we'll have, and how we'll be much
better and happier, and very close always."

"How could we be any closer?" His arm pulled her to him.

"But I mean never even quarrel any more about silly things. You
know, I made up my mind when you gave me my birthday present
last week" — her fingers caressed the fine seed pearls at her throat —
"that I'd try never to say a mean thing to you again."

"You never have, my precious."

Yet even as he strained her against his side she knew that the mo-
ment of utter isolation had passed almost before it had begun. His
antennae were already out, feeling over this new world.

"Most of the people look rather awful," he said — "little and
swarthy and ugly. Americans didn't use to look like that."

"They look dreary," she agreed. "Let's not get to know anybody,
but just say together."

A gong was beating now, and stewards were shouting down the

256 The Rough Crossing

decks, "Visitors ashore, please!" and voices rose to a strident
chorus. For a while the gangplanks were thronged ; then they were
empty, and the jostling crowd behind the barrier waved and called
unintelligible things, and kept up a grin of good will. As the steve-
dores began to work at the ropes a flat-faced, somewhat befuddled
young man arrived in a great hurry and was assisted up the gang-
plank by a porter and a taxi driver. The ship having swallowed him
as impassively as though he were a missionary for Beirut, a low,
portentous vibration began. The pier with its faces commenced to
slide by, and for a moment the boat was just a piece accidentally
split off from it; then the faces became remote, voiceless, and the
pier was one among many yellow blurs along the water front. Now
the harbor flowed swiftly toward the sea.

On a northern parallel of latitude a hurricane was forming and
moving south by southeast preceded by a strong west wind. On its
course it was destined to swamp the Peter I. Eudim of Amsterdam,
with a crew of sixty-six, to break a boom on the largest boat in the
world, and to bring grief and want to the wives of several hundred
seamen. This liner, leaving New York Sunday evening, would enter
the zone of the storm Tuesday, and of the hurricane late Wednes-
day night.

Tuesday afternoon Adrian and Eva paid their first visit to the
smoking room. This was not in accord with their intentions — they
had "never wanted to see a cocktail again" after leaving America —
but they had forgotten the staccato loneliness of ships, and all ac-
tivity centered about the bar. So they went in for just a minute.

It was full. There were those who had been there since luncheon,
and those who would be there until dinner, not to mention a faithful
few who had been there since nine this morning. It was a prosperous
assembly, taking its recreation at bridge, solitaire, detective stories,
alcohol, argument and love. Up to this point you could have matched
it in the club or casino life of any country, but over it all played a
repressed nervous energy, a barely disguised impatience that ex-
tended to old and young alike. The cruise had begun, and they had
enjoyed the beginning, but the show was not varied enough to last
six days, and already they wanted it to be over.

At a table near them Adrian saw the pretty girl who had stared at
him on the deck the first night. Again he was fascinated by her love-
liness; there was no mist upon the brilliant gloss that gleamed
through the smoky confusion of the room. He and Eva had decided
from the passenger list that she was probably "Miss Elizabeth

The Rough Crossing 257

D'Amido and maid," and he had heard her called Betsy as he walked
past a deck-tennis game. Among the young people with her was the
flat-nosed youth who had been "poured on board" the night of their
departure ; yesterday he had walked the deck morosely, but he was
apparently reviving. Miss D'Amido whispered something to him, and
he looked over at the Smiths with curious eyes. Adrian was new
enough at being a celebrity to turn self-consciously away.

"There's a little roll. Do you feel it?" Eva demanded.

"Perhaps we'd better split a pint of champagne."

While he gave the order a short colloquy was taking place at the
other table ; presently a young man rose and came over to them.

"Isn't this Mr. Adrian Smith?"

"Yes."

"We wondered if we couldn't put you down for the deck-tennis
tournament. We're going to have a deck-tennis tournament."

"Why " Adrian hesitated.

"My name's Stacomb," burst out the young man. "We all know
your — your plays or whatever it is, and all that — and we wondered
if you wouldn't like to come over to our table."

Somewhat overwhelmed, Adrian laughed: Mr. Stacomb, glib, soft,
slouching, waited ; evidently under the impression that he had de-
livered himself of a graceful compliment.

Adrian, understanding that, too, replied: "Thanks, but perhaps
you'd better come over here."

"We've got a bigger table."

"But we're older and more — more settled."

The young man laughed kindly, as if to say, "That's all right."

"Put me down," said Adrian. "How much do I owe you?"

"One buck. Call me Stac."

"Why?" asked Adrian, startled.

"It's shorter."

When he had gone they smiled broadly.

"Heavens," Eva gasped, "I believe they are coming over."

They were. With a great draining of glasses, calling of waiters,
shuffling of chairs, three boys and two girls moved to the Smiths'
table. If there was any diffidence, it was confined to the hosts ; for
the new additions gathered around them eagerly, eying Adrian with
respect — too much respect — as if to say: "This was probably a mis-
take and won't be amusing, but maybe we'll get something out of it
to help us in our after life, like at school."

In a moment Miss D'Amido changed seats with one of the men
and placed her radiant self at Adrian's side, looking at him with
manifest admiration.

"I fell in love with you the minute I saw you," she said, audibly

258 The Rough Crossing

and without self-consciousness ; "so 111 take all the blame for butting
in. IVe seen your play four times."

Adrian called a waiter to take their orders.

"You see," continued Miss D'Amido, "we're going into a storm,
and you might be prostrated the rest of the trip, so I couldn't take
any chances."

He saw that there was no undertone or innuendo in what she said,
nor the need of any. The words themselves were enough, and the
deference with which she neglected the young men and bent her
politeness on him was somehow very touching. A little glow went
over him ; he was having rather more than a pleasant time.

Eva was less entertained; but the flat-nosed young man, whose
name was Butterworth, knew people that she did, and that seemed
to make the affair less careless and casual. She did not like meeting
new people unless they had "something to contribute," and she was
often bored by the great streams of them, of all types and conditions
and classes, that passed through Adrian's life. She herself "had
everything" — which is to say that she was well endowed with
talents and with charm — and the mere novelty of people did not
seem a sufficient reason for eternally offering everything up to
them.

Half an hour later when she rose to go and see the children, she
was content that the episode was over. It was colder on deck, with a
damp that was almost rain, and there was a perceptible motion.
Opening the door of her stateroom she was surprised to find the
cabin steward sitting languidly on her bed, his head slumped upon
the upright pillow. He looked at her listlessly as she came in, but
made no move to get up.

"When you've finished your nap you can fetch me a new pillow-
case," she said briskly.

Still the man didn't move. She perceived then that his face was
green.

"You can't be seasick in here," she announced firmly. "You go and
lie down in your own quarters."

"It's me side," he said faintly. He tried to rise, gave out a little
rasping sound of pain and sank back again. Eva rang for the stew-
ardess.

A steady pitch, toss, roll had begun in earnest and she felt no sym-
pathy for the steward, but only wanted to get him out as quick as
possible. It was outrageous for a member of the crew to be seasick.
When the stewardess came in Eva tried to explain this, but now her
own head was whirring, and throwing herself on the bed, she covered
her eyes.

"It's his fault," she groaned when the man was assisted from the

The Rough Crossing 259

room. "I was all right and it made me sick to look at him. I wish he'd
die."

In a few minutes Adrian came in.

"Oh, but I'm sick ! " she cried.

"Why, you poor baby." He leaned over and took her in his arms.
"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was all right upstairs, but there was a steward Oh, I'm too

sick to talk."

"You'd better have dinner in bed."

"Dinner ! Oh, my heavens I "

He waited solicitously, but she wanted to hear his voice, to have
it drown out the complaining sound of the beams.

"Where've you been?"

"Helping to sign up people for the tournament."

"Will they have it if it's like this? Because if they do I'll just lose
for you."

He didn't answer ; opening her eyes, she saw that he was frown-
ing.

"I didn't know you were going in the doubles," he said.

"Why, that's the only fun."

"I told the D'Amido girl I'd play with her."

"Oh."

"I didn't think. You know I'd much rather play with you."

"Why didn't you, then?" she asked coolly. '

"It never occurred to me."

She remembered that on their honeymoon they had been in the
finals and won a prize. Years passed. But Adrian never frowned in
this regretful way unless he felt a little guilty. He stumbled about,
getting his dinner clothes out of the trunk, and she shut her eyes.

When a particular violent lurch startled her awake again he was
dressed and tying his tie. He looked healthy and fresh, and his eyes
were bright.

"Well, how about it?" he inquired. "Can you make it, or no?"

"No."

"Can I do anything for you before I go?"

"Where are you going?"

"Meeting those kids in the bar. Can I do anything for you?"

"No."

"Darling, I hate to leave you like this."

"Don't be silly. I just want to sleep."

That solicitous frown — when she knew he was crazy to be out and
away from the close cabin. She was glad when the door closed. The
thing to do was to sleep, sleep.

Up — down — sideways. Hey there, not so far I Pull her round the

260 The Rough Crossing

corner there! Now roll her, right— left Crea-eak! Wrench!

Swoop I

Some hours later Eva was dimly conscious of Adrian bending over
her. She wanted him to put his arms around her and draw her up
out of this dizzy lethargy, but by the time she was fully awake the
cabin was empty. He had looked in and gone. When she awoke next
the cabin was dark and he was in bed.

The morning was fresh and cool, and the sea was just enough
calmer to make Eva think she could get up. They breakfasted in the
cabin and with Adrian's help she accomplished an unsatisfactory
makeshift toilet and they went up on the boat deck. The tennis
tournament had already begun and was furnishing action for a
dozen amateur movie cameras, but the majority of passengers were
represented by lifeless bundles in deck chairs beside untasted trays.

Adrian and Miss D'Amido played their first match. She was deft
and graceful ; blatantly well. There was even more warmth behind
her ivory skin than there had been the day before. The strolling
first officer stopped and talked to her ; half a dozen men whom she
couldn't have known three days ago called her Betsy. She was al-
ready the pretty girl of the voyage, the cynosure of starved ship's
eyes.

But after a while Eva preferred to watch the gulls in the wireless
masts and the slow slide of the roll-top sky. Most of the passengers
looked silly with their movie cameras that they had all rushed to get
and now didn't know what to use for, but the sailors painting the
lifeboat stanchions were quiet and beaten and sympathetic, and
probably wished, as she did, that the voyage was over.

Butterworth sat down on the deck beside her chair.

"They're operating on one of the stewards this morning. Must be
terrible in this sea."

"Operating? What for?" she asked listlessly.

"Appendicitis. They have to operate now because we're going into
worse weather. That's why they're having the ship's party tonight."

"Oh, the poor man ! " she cried, realizing it must be her steward.

Adrian was showing off now by being very courteous and thought-
ful in the game.

"Sorry. Did you hurt yourself? . . . No, it was my fault. . . .
You better put on your coat right away, pardner, or you'll catch
cold."

The match was over and they had won. Flushed and hearty, he
came up to Eva's chair.

"How do you feel?"

"Terrible."

"Winners are buying a drink in the bar," he said apologetically.

The Rough Crossing 261

"I'm coming, too," Eva said, but an immediate dizziness made her
sink back in her chair.

"You'd better stay here. I'll send you up something."

She felt that his public manner had hardened toward her slightly.

"You'll come back?"

"Oh, right away."

She was alone on the boat deck, save for a solitary ship's officer
who slanted obliquely as he paced the bridge. When the cocktail
arrived she forced herself to drink it, and felt better. Trying to dis-
tract her mind with pleasant things, she reached back to the sanguine
talks that she and Adrian had had before sailing : There was the little
villa in Brittany, the children learning French — that was all she
could think of now — the little villa in Brittany, the children learn-
ing French — so she repeated the words over and over to herself until
they became as meaningless as the wide white sky. The why of their
being here had suddenly eluded her; she felt unmotivated, acci-
dental, and she wanted Adrian to come back quick, all responsive and
tender, to reassure her. It was in the hope that there was some se-
cret of graceful living, some real compensation for the lost, careless
confidence of twenty-one, that they were going to spend a year in
France.

The day passed darkly, with fewer people around and a wet sky
falling. Suddenly it was five o'clock, and they were all in the bar
again, and Mr. Butterworth was telling her about his past. She took
a good deal of champagne, but she was seasick dimly through it, as
if the illness was her soul trying to struggle up through some thick-
ening incrustation of abnormal life.

"You're my idea of a Greek goddess, physically," Butterworth was
saying.

It was pleasant to be Mr. Butterworth's idea of a Greek goddess
physically, but where was Adrian? He and Miss D'Amido had gone
out on a forward deck to feel the spray. Eva heard herself promising
to get out her colors and paint the Eiffel Tower on Butterworth's
shirt front for the party tonight.

When Adrian and Betsy D'Amido, soaked with spray, opened the
door with difficulty against the driving wind and came into the now-
covered security of the promenade deck, they stopped and turned
toward each other.

"Well?" she said. But he only stood with his back to the rail,
looking at her, afraid to speak. She was silent, too, because she
wanted him to be first; so for a moment nothing happened. Then
she made a step toward him, and he took her in his arms and kissed
her forehead.

The Rough Crossing

"You're just sorry for me, that's all." She began to cry a little.
"You're just being kind."

"I feel terribly about it." His voice was taut and trembling.

"Then kiss me."

The deck was empty. He bent over her swiftly.

"No, really kiss me."

He could not remember when anything had felt so young and fresh
as her lips. The rain lay, like tears shed for him, upon the softly
shining porcelain cheeks. She was all new and immaculate, and her
eyes were wild.

"I love you," she whispered. "I can't help loving you, can I? When
I first saw you — oh, not on the boat, but over a year ago — Grace
Heally took me to a rehearsal and suddenly you jumped up in the
second row and began telling them what to do. I wrote you a letter
and tore it up."

"We've got to go."

She was weeping as they walked along the deck. Once more, im-
prudently, she held up her face to him at the door of her cabin. His
blood was beating through him in wild tumult as he walked on to the
bar.

He was thankful that Eva scarcely seemed to notice him or to
know that he had been gone. After a moment he pretended an inter-
est in what she was doing.

"What's that?"

"She's painting the Eiffel Tower on my shirt front for tonight,"
explained Butterworth.

"There," Eva laid away her brush and wiped her hands. "How's
that?"

"A chef-d'oeuvre:'

Her eyes swept around the watching group, lingered casually upon
Adrian.

"You're wet. Go and change."

"You come too."

"I want another champagne cocktail."

"You've had enough. It's time to dress for the party."

Unwilling she closed her paints and preceded him.

"Stacomb's got a table for nine," he remarked as they walked
along the corridor.

"The younger set," she said with unnecessary bitterness. "Oh,
the younger set. And you just having the time of your life — with
a child."

They had a long discussion in the cabin, unpleasant on her part
and evasive on his, which ended when the ship gave a sudden gigan-
tic heave, and Eva, the edge worn off her champagne, felt ill again.

The Rough Crossing 263

There was nothing to do but to have a cocktail in the cabin, and
after that they decided to go to the party — she believed him now, or
she didn't care.

Adrian was ready first — he never wore fancy dress.

"I'll go on up. Don't be long."

"Wait for me, please ; it's rocking so."

He sat down on a bed, concealing his impatience.

"You don't mind waiting, do you? I don't want to parade up there
all alone." /

She was taking a tuck in an oriental costume rented from the
barber.

"Ships make people feel crazy," she said. "I think they're awful."

"Yes," he muttered absently.

"When it gets very bad I pretend I'm in the top of a tree, rocking
to and fro. But finally I get pretending everything, and finally I have
to pretend I'm sane when I know I'm not."

"If you get thinking that way you will go crazy."

"Look, Adrian." She held up the string of pearls before clasping
them on. "Aren't they lovely?"

In Adrian's impatience she seemed to move around the cabin
like a figure in a slow-motion picture. After a moment he de-
manded :

"Are you going to be long? It's stifling in here."

"You go on ! " she fired up.

"I don't want "

"Go on, please ! You just make me nervous trying to hurry me."

With a show of reluctance he left her. After a moment's hesitation
he went down a flight to a deck below and knocked at a door.

"Betsy."

"Just a minute."

She came out in the corridor attired in a red pea-jacket and
trousers borrowed from the elevator boy.

"Do elevator boys have fleas ?" she demanded. "I've got everything
in the world on under this as a precaution."

"I had to see you," he said quickly.

"Careful," she whispered. "Mrs. Worden, who's supposed to be
chaperoning me, is across the way. She's sick."

"I'm sick for you."

They kissed suddenly, clung close together in the narrow corridor,
swaying to and fro with the motion of the ship.

"Don't go away," she murmured.

"I've got to. I've "

Her youth seemed to flow into him, bearing him up into a delicate,
romantic ecstasy that transcended passion. He couldn't relinquish it ;

264 The Rough Crossing

he had discovered something that he had thought was lost with his
own youth forever. As he walked along the passage he knew that he
had stopped thinking, no longer dared to think.

He met Eva going into the bar.

"WhereVe you been?" she asked with a strained smile.

"To see about the table."

She was lovely ; her cool distinction conquered the trite costume
and filled him with a resurgence of approval and pride. They sat
down at a table.

The gale was rising hour by hour and the mere traversing of a
passage had become a rough matter. In every stateroom trunks were
lashed to the washstands, and the Vestris disaster was being re-
viewed in detail by nervous ladies, tossing, ill and wretched, upon
their beds. In the smoking room a stout gentleman had been hurled
backward and suffered a badly cut head ; and now the lighter chairs
and tables were stacked and roped against the wall.

The crowd who had donned fancy dress and were dining together
had swollen to about sixteen. The only remaining qualification for
membership was the ability to reach the smoking room. They ranged
from a Groton-Harvard lawyer to an ungrammatical broker they had
nicknamed Gyp the Blood, but distinctions had disappeared ; for the
moment they were samurai, chosen from several hundred for their
triumphant resistance to the storm.

The gala dinner, overhung sardonically with lanterns and stream-
ers, was interrupted by great communal slides across the room, pre-
cipitate retirements and spilled wine, while the ship roared and com-
plained that under the panoply of a palace it was a ship after all.
Upstairs afterward a dozen couples tried to dance, shuffling and
galloping here and there in a crazy fandango, thrust around fan-
tastically by a will alien to their own. In view of the condition of
tortured hundreds below, there grew to be something indecent about
it, like a revel in a house of mourning, and presently there was an
egress of the ever-dwindling survivors toward the bar.

As the evening passed, Eva's feeling of unreality increased. Adrian
had disappeared — presumably with Miss D'Amido — and her mind,
distorted by illness and champagne, began to enlarge upon the fact ;
annoyance changed slowly to dark and brooding anger, grief to des-
peration. She had never tried to bind Adrian, never needed to — for
they were serious people, with all sorts of mutual interests, and satis-
fied with each other — but this was a breach of the contract, this
was cruel. How could he think that she didn't know ?

It seemed several hours later that he leaned over her chair in the
bar where she was giving some woman an impassioned lecture upon
babies, and said:

The Rough Crossing 265

"Eva, we'd better turn in."

Her lip curled. "So that you can leave me there and then come
back to your eighteen-year "

"Be quiet."

"I won't come to bed."

"Very well. Good night."

More time passed and the people at the table changed. The stew-
ards wanted to close up the room, and thinking of Adrian — her
Adrian — off somewhere saying tender things to someone fresh and
lovely, Eva began to cry.

"But he's gone to bed," her last attendants assured her. "We saw
him go."

She shook her head. She knew better. Adrian was lost. The long
seven-year dream was broken. Probably she was punished for some-
thing she had done ; as this thought occurred to her the shrieking
timbers overhead began to mutter that she had guessed at last. This
was for the selfishness to her mother, who hadn't wanted her to marry
Adrian ; for all the sins and omissions of her life. She stood up, say-
ing she must go out and get some air.

The deck was dark and drenched with wind and rain. The ship
pounded through valleys, fleeing from black mountains of water
that roared toward it. Looking out at the night, Eva saw that there
was no chance for them unless she could make atonement, propitiate
the storm. It was Adrian's love that was demanded of her. Deliber-
ately she unclasped her pearl necklace, lifted it to her lips — for she
knew that with it went the freshest, fairest part of her life — and
flung it out into the gale.

Ill

When Adrian awoke it was lunchtime, but he knew that some
heavier sound than the bugle had called him up from his deep sleep.
Then he realized that the trunk had broken loose from its lashings
and was being thrown back and forth between a wardrobe and Eva's
bed. With an exclamation he jumped up, but she was unharmed —
still in costume and stretched out in deep sleep. When the steward
had helped him secure the trunk, Eva opened a single eye.

"How are you?" he demanded, sitting on the side of her bed.

She closed the eye, opened it again.

"We're in a hurricane now," he told her. "The steward says it's
the worst he's seen in twenty years."

"My head," she muttered. "Hold my head."

"How?"

"In front. My eyes are going out. I think I'm dying."

266 The Rough Crossing

"Nonsense. Do you want the doctor?"

She gave a funny little gasp that frightened him ; he rang and sent
the steward for the doctor.

The young doctor was pale and tired. There was a stubble of beard
upon his face. He bowed curtly as he came in and, turning to Adrian,
said with scant ceremony :

"What's the matter?"

"My wife doesn't feel well."

"Well, what is it you want — a bromide?"

A little annoyed by his shortness, Adrian said: "You'd better
examine her and see what she needs."

"She needs a bromide," said the doctor. "I've given orders that
she is not to have any more to drink on this ship."

"Why not?" demanded Adrian in astonishment.

"Don't you know what happened last night?"

"Why, no, I was asleep."

"Mrs. Smith wandered around the boat for an hour, not knowing
what she was doing. A sailor was set to follow her, and then the
medical stewardess tried to get her to bed, and your wife insulted
her."

"Oh, my heavens!" cried Eva faintly.

"The nurse and I had both been up all night with Steward Carton,
who died this morning." He picked up his case. "I'll send down a
bromide for Mrs. Smith. Good-by."

For a few minutes there was silence in the cabin. Then Adrian
put his arm around her quickly.

"Never mind," he said. "We'll straighten it out."

"I remember now." Her voice was an awed whisper. "My pearls. 1
threw them overboard."

"Threw them overboard ! "

"Then I began looking for you."

"But I was here in bed."

"I didn't believe it ; I thought you were with that girl."

"She collapsed during dinner. I was taking a nap down here."

Frowning, he rang the bell and asked the steward for luncheon
and a bottle of beer.

"Sorry, but we can't serve any beer to your cabin, sir."

When he went out Adrian exploded: "This is an outrage. You
were simply crazy from that storm and they can't be so high-handed.
I'll see the captain."

"Isn't that awful?" Eva murmured. "The poor man died."

She turned over and began to sob into her pillow. There was a
knock at the door.

"Can I come in?"

The Rough Crossing 267

The assiduous Mr. Butterworth, surprisingly healthy and immacu-
late, came into the crazily tipping cabin.

"Well, how's the mystic?" he demanded of Eva. "Do you remem-
ber praying to the elements in the bar last night?"

"I don't want to remember anything about last night."

They told him about the stewardess, and with the telling the situa-
tion lightened ; they all laughed together.

"I'm going to get you some beer to have with your luncheon,"
Butterworth said. "You ought to get up on deck."

"Don't go," Eva said. "You look so cheerful and nice."

"Just for ten minutes."

When he had gone, Adrian rang for two baths.

"The thing is to put on our best clothes and walk proudly three
times around the deck," he said.

"Yes." After a moment she added abstractedly: "I like that
young man. He was awfully nice to me last night when you'd dis-
appeared."

The bath steward appeared with the information that bathing
was too dangerous today. They were in the midst of the wildest
hurricane on the North Atlantic in ten years ; there were two broken
arms this morning from attempts to take baths. An elderly lady had
been thrown down a staircase and was not expected to live. Further-
more, they had received the SOS signal from several boats this
morning.

"Will we go to help them?"

"They're all behind us, sir, so we have to leave them to the
Mauretania. If we tried to turn in this sea the portholes would be
smashed."

This array of calamities minimized their own troubles. Having
eaten a sort of luncheon and drunk the beer provided by Butter-
worth, they dressed and went on deck.

Despite the fact that it was only possible to progress step by step,
holding on to rope or rail, more people were abroad than on the day
before. Fear had driven them from their cabins, where the trunks
bumped and the waves pounded the portholes and they awaited
momentarily the call to the boats. Indeed, as Adrian and Eva stood
on the transverse deck above the second class, there was a bugle call,
followed by a gathering of stewards and stewardesses on the deck
below. But the boat was sound ; it had outlasted one of its cargo —
Steward James Carton was being buried at sea.

It was very British and sad. There were the rows of stiff, dis-
ciplined men and women standing in the driving rain, and there was
a shape covered by the flag of the Empire that lived by the sea. The
chief purser read the service, a hymn was sung, the body slid off into

268 The Rough Crossing

the hurricane. With Eva's burst of wild weeping for this humble end,
some last string snapped within her. Now she really didn't care. She
responded eagerly when Butterworth suggested that he get some
champagne to their cabin. Her mood worried Adrian ; she wasn't used
to so much drinking and he wondered what he ought to do. At his
suggestion that they sleep instead, she merely laughed, and the
bromide the doctor had sent stood untouched on the washstand. Pre-
tending to listen to the insipidities of several Mr. Stacombs, he
watched her ; to his surprise and discomfort she seemed on intimate
and even sentimental terms with Butterworth, and he wondered if
this was a form of revenge for his attention to Betsy D'Amido.

The cabin was full of smoke, the voices went on incessantly, the
suspension of activity, the waiting for the storm's end, was getting
on his nerves. They had been at sea only four days ; it was like a
year.

The two Mr. Stacombs left finally, but Butterworth remained. Eva
was urging him to go for another bottle of champagne.

"We've had enough," objected Adrian. "We ought to go to bed."

"I won't go to bed!" she burst out. "You must be crazy! You
play around all you want, and then, when I find somebody I — I like,
you want to put me to bed."

"You're hysterical."

"On the contrary, I've never been so sane."

"I think you'd better leave us, Butterworth," Adrian said. "Eva
doesn't know what she's saying."

"He won't go. I won't let him go." She clasped Butterworth's
hand passionately. "He's the only person that's been half decent to
me."

"You'd better go, Butterworth," repeated Adrian.

The young man looked at him uncertainly.

"It seems to me you're being unjust to your wife," he ventured.

"My wife isn't herself."

"That's no reason for bullying her."

Adrian lost his temper. "You get out of here ! " he cried.

The two men looked at each other for a moment in silence. Then
Butterworth turned to Eva, said, "I'll be back later," and left the
cabin.

"Eva, youVe got to pull yourself together," said Adrian when the
door closed.

She didn't answer, looked at him from sullen, half-closed eyes.

"I'll order dinner here for us both and then we'll try to get some
sleep."

"I want to go up and send a wireless."

The Rough Crossing 269

"Who to?"

"Some Paris lawyer. I want a divorce."

In spite of his annoyance, he laughed. "Don't be silly."

"Then I want to see the children."

"Well, go and see them. I'll order dinner."

He waited for her in the cabin twenty minutes. Then impatiently
he opened the door across the corridor ; the nurse told him that Mrs.
Smith had not been there.

With a sudden prescience of disaster he ran upstairs, glanced in
the bar, the salons, even knocked at Butterworth's door. Then a
quick round of the decks, feeling his way through the black spray
and rain. A sailor stopped him at a network of ropes.

"Orders are no one goes by, sir. A wave has gone over the wireless
room."

"Have you seen a lady?"

"There was a young lady here " He stopped and glanced

tround. "Hello, she's gone."

"She went up the stairs ! " Adrian said anxiously. "Up to the wire-
less room ! "

The sailor ran up to the boat deck ; stumbling and slipping, Adrian
followed. As he cleared the protected sides of the companionway, a
tremendous body struck the boat a staggering blow and, as she keeled
over to an angle of forty-five degrees, he was thrown in a helpless
roll down the drenched deck, to bring up dizzy and bruised against a
stanchion.

"Eva!" he called. His voice was soundless in the black storm.
Against the faint light of the wireless-room window he saw the sailor
making his way forward.

"Eva!"

The wind blew him like a sail up against a lifeboat. Then there
was another shuddering crash, and high over his head, over the very
boat, he saw a gigantic, glittering white wave, and in the split second
that it balanced there he became conscious of Eva, standing beside
a ventilator twenty feet away. Pushing out from the stanchion, he
lunged desperately toward her, just as the wave broke with a
smashing roar. For a moment the rushing water was five feet deep,
sweeping with enormous force toward the side, and then a human
body was washed against him, and frantically he clutched it and was
swept with it back toward the rail. He felt his body bump against it,
but desperately he held on to his burden ; then, as the ship rocked
slowly back, the two of them, still joined by his fierce grip, were
rolled out exhausted on the wet planks. For a moment he knew no
more.

270 The Rough Crossing

Two days later, as the boat train moved tranquilly south toward
Paris, Adrian tried to persuade his children to look out the window
at the Norman countryside.

"It's beautiful," he assured them. "All the little farms like toys.
Why, in heaven's name, won't you look?"

"I like the boat better," said Estelle.

Her parents exchanged an infanticidal glance.

"The boat is still rocking for me," Eva said with a shiver. "Is it
for you ?"

"No. Somehow, it all seems a long way off. Even the passengers
looked unfamiliar going through the customs."

"Most of them hadn't appeared above ground before."

He hesitated. "By the way, I cashed Butterworth's check for him."

"You're a fool. You'll never see the money again."

"He must have needed it pretty badly or he would not have come
to me."

A pale and wan girl, passing along the corridor, recognized them
and put her head through the doorway.

"How do you feel?"

"Awful."

"Me, too," agreed Miss D'Amido. "I'm vainly hoping my fiance
will recognize me at the Gare du Nord. Do you know two waves went
over the wireless room?"

"So we heard," Adrian answered dryly.

She passed gracefully along the corridor and out of their life.

"The real truth is that none of it happened," said Adrian after a
moment. "It was a nightmare — an incredibly awful nightmare."

"Then, where are my pearls?"

"Darling, there are better pearls in Paris. I'll take the respon-
sibility for those pearls. My real belief is that you saved the boat."

"Adrian, let's never get to know anyone else, but just stay together
always — just we two."

He tucked her arm under his and they sat close. "Who do you
suppose those Adrian Smiths on the boat were?" he demanded. "It
certainly wasn't me."

"Nor me."

"It was two other people," he said, nodding to himself. "There are
so many Smiths in this world."
1929 Previously Uncollected

THE BRIDAL PARTY

THERE WAS the usual insincere little note saying : "I wanted you
to be the first to know/7 It was a double shock to Michael, announc-
ing, as it did, both the engagement and the imminent marriage;
which, moreover, was to be held, not in New York, decently and far
away, but here in Paris under his very nose, if that could be said to
extend over the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity,
Avenue George-Cinq. The date was two weeks off, early in June.

At first Michael was afraid and his stomach felt hollow. When he
left the hotel that morning, the jemme de chambre, who was in love
with his fine, sharp profile and his pleasant buoyancy, scented the
hard abstraction that had settled over him. He walked in a daze to
his bank, he bought a detective story at Smith's on the Rue de Rivoli,
he sympathetically stared for a while at a faded panorama of the
battlefields in a tourist-office window and cursed a Greek tout who
followed him with a half -displayed packet of innocuous post cards
warranted to be very dirty indeed.

But the fear stayed with him, and after a while he recognized it
as the fear that now he would never be happy. He had met Caroline
Dandy when she was seventeen, possessed her young heart all
through her first season in New York, and then lost her, slowly,
tragically, uselessly, because he had no money and could make no
money ; because, with all the energy and good will in the world, he
could not find himself ; because, loving him still, Caroline had lost
faith and begun to see him as something pathetic, futile and shabby,
outside the great, shining stream of life toward which she was in-
evitably drawn.

Since his only support was that she loved him, he leaned weakly
on that ; the support broke, but still he held on to it and was carried
out to sea and washed up on the French coast with its broken pieces
still in his hands. He carried them around with him in the form of
photographs and packets of correspondence and a liking for a maud-
lin popular song called Among My Souvenirs. He kept clear of other
girls, as if Caroline would somehow know it and reciprocate with a
faithful heart. Her note informed him that he had lost her forever.

It was a fine morning. In front of the shops in the Rue de Cas-

271

272 The Bridal Party

tiglione, proprietors and patrons were on the sidewalk gazing upward,
for the Graf Zeppelin, shining and glorious, symbol of escape and
destruction — of escape, if necessary, through destruction — glided in
the Paris sky. He heard a woman say in French that it would not
her astonish if that commenced to let fall the bombs. Then he heard
another voice, full of husky laughter, and the void in his stomach
froze. Jerking about, he was face to face with Caroline Dandy and
her fianc6.

"Why, Michael ! Why, we were wondering where you were. I asked
at the Guaranty Trust, and Morgan and Company, and finally sent
a note to the National City "

Why didn't they back away? Why didn't they back right up,
walking backward down the Rue de Castiglione, across the Rue de
Rivoli, through the Tuileries Gardens, still walking backward as fast
as they could till they grew vague and faded out across the river ?

"This is Hamilton Rutherford, my fiance."

"We've met before."

"At Pat's, wasn't it?"

"And last spring in the Ritz Bar."

"Michael, where have you been keeping yourself?"

"Around here." This agony. Previews of Hamilton Rutherford
flashed before his eyes — a quick series of pictures, sentences. He re-
membered hearing that he had bought a seat in 1920 for a hundred
and twenty-five thousand of borrowed money, and just before the
break sold it for more than half a million. Not handsome like
Michael, but vitally attractive, confident, authoritative, just the
right height over Caroline there — Michael had always been too short
for Caroline when they danced.

Rutherford was saying : "No, I'd like it very much if you'd come
to the bachelor dinner. I'm taking the Ritz Bar from nine o'clock on.
Then right after the wedding there'll be a reception and breakfast
at the Hotel George-Cinq."

"And, Michael, George Packman is giving a party day after
tomorrow at Chez Victor, and I want you to be sure and come. And
also to tea Friday at Jebby West's ; she'd want to have you if she
knew where you were. What's your hotel, so we can send you an in-
vitation ? You see, the reason we decided to have it over here is be-
cause mother has been sick in a nursing home here and the whole
clan is in Paris. Then Hamilton's mother's being here too "

The entire clan ; they had always hated him, except her mother ;
always discouraged his courtship. What a little counter he was in
this game of families and money ! Under his hat his brow sweated
with the humiliation of the fact that for all his misery he was worth

The Bridal Party 273

just exactly so many invitations. Frantically he began to mumble
something about going away.

Then it happened — Caroline saw deep into him, and Michael knew
that she saw. She saw through to his profound woundedness, and
something quivered inside her, died out along the curve of her mouth
and in her eyes. He had moved her. All the unforgettable impulses
of first love had surged up once more ; their hearts had in some way
touched across two feet of Paris sunlight. She took her fiance's arm
suddenly, as if to steady herself with the feel of it.

They parted. Michael walked quickly for a minute; then he
stopped, pretending to look in a window, and saw them farther up
the street, walking fast into the Place Vendome, people with much
to do.

He had things to do also — he had to get his laundry.

"Nothing will ever be the same again," he said to himself. "She
will never be happy in her marriage and I will never be happy at all
any more."

The two vivid years of his love for Caroline moved back around
him like years in Einstein's physics. Intolerable memories arose —
of rides in the Long Island moonlight ; of a happy time at Lake
Placid with her cheeks so cold there, but warm just underneath the
surface; of a despairing afternoon in a little cafe on Forty-eighth
Street in the last sad months when their marriage had come to seem
impossible.

"Come in," he said aloud.

The concierge with a telegram ; brusque because Mr. Curly's
clothes were a little shabby. Mr. Curly gave few tips; Mr. Curly was
obviously a petit client.

Michael read the telegram.

uAn answer?" the concierge asked.

"No," said Michael, and then, on an impulse: "Look."

uToo bad — too bad," said the concierge. "Your grandfather is
dead."

"Not too bad," said Michael. "It means that I come into a quarter
of a million dollars."

Too late by a single month ; after the first flush of the news his
misery was deeper than ever. Lying awake in bed that night, he lis-
tened endlessly to the long caravan of a circus moving through the
street from one Paris fair to another.

When the last van had rumbled out of hearing and the corners of
the furniture were pastel blue with the dawn, he was still thinking
of the look in Caroline's eyes that morning — the look that seemed
to say: "Oh, why couldn't you have done something about it? Why

274 The Bridal Party

couldn't you have been stronger, made me marry you? Don't you
see how sad I am ?"

Michael's fists clenched.

"Well, I won't give up till the last moment," he whispered. "I've
had all the bad luck so far, and maybe it's turned at last. One takes
what one can get, up to the limit of one's strength, and if I can't have
her, at least she'll go into this marriage with some of me in her
heart."

Accordingly he went to the party at Chez Victor two days later,
upstairs and into the little salon off the bar where the party was to
assemble for cocktails. He was early ; the only other occupant was a
tall lean man of fifty. They spoke.

"You waiting for George Packman's party?"

"Yes. My name's Michael Curly."

"My name's "

Michael failed to catch the name. They ordered a drink, and
Michael supposed that the bride and groom were having a gay time.

"Too much so," the other agreed, frowning. "I don't see how they
stand it. We all crossed on the boat together ; five days of that crazy
life and then two .weeks of Paris. You" — he hesitated, smiling faintly
— "you'll excuse me for saying that your generation drinks too
much."

"Not Caroline."

"No, not Caroline. She seems to take only a cocktail and a glass
of champagne, and then she's had enough, thank God. But Hamilton
drinks too much and all this crowd of young people drink too much.
Do you live in Paris ?"

"For the moment," said Michael.

"I don't like Paris. My wife — that is to say, my ex-wife, Hamilton's
mother — lives in Paris."

"You're Hamilton Rutherford's father?"

"I have that honor. And I'm not denying that I'm proud of what
he's done ; it was just a general comment."

"Of course."

Michael glanced up nervously as four people came in. He felt sud-
denly that his dinner coat was old and shiny ; he had ordered a new
one that morning. The people who had come in were rich and at home
in their richness with one another — a dark, lovely girl with a hysteri-
cal little laugh whom he had met before ; two confident men whose
jokes referred invariably to last night's scandal and tonight's po-
tentialities, as if they had important roles in a play that extended

The Bridal Party 275

indefinitely into the past and the future. When Caroline arrived,
Michael had scarcely a moment of her, but it was enough to note
that, like all the others, she was strained and tired. She was pale
beneath her rouge ; there were shadows under her eyes. With a mix-
ture of relief and wounded vanity, he found himself placed far from
her and at another table ; he needed a moment to adjust himself to
his surroundings. This was not like the immature set in which he
and Caroline had moved ; the men were more than thirty and had an
air of sharing the best of this world's good. Next to him was Jebby
West, whom he knew ; and, on the other side, a jovial man who im-
mediately began to talk to Michael about a stunt for the bachelor
dinner: They were going to hire a French girl to appear with an
actual baby in her arms, crying: "Hamilton, you can't desert me
now!" The idea seemed stale and unamusing to Michael, but its
originator shook with anticipatory laughter.

Farther up the table there was talk of the market — another drop
today, the most appreciable since the crash; people were kidding
Rutherford about it: "Too bad, old man. You better not get married,
after all."

Michael asked the man on his left, "Has he lost a lot?"

"Nobody knows. He's heavily involved, but he's one of the
smartest young men in Wall Street. Anyhow, nobody ever tells you
the truth."

It was a champagne dinner from the start, and toward the end it
reached a pleasant level of conviviality, but Michael saw that all
these people were too weary to be exhilarated by any ordinary stimu-
lant ; for weeks they had drunk cocktails before meals like Ameri-
cans, wines and brandies like Frenchmen, beer like Germans, whisky-
and-soda like the English, and as they were no longer in the twen-
ties, this preposterous melange, that was like some gigantic cocktail
in a nightmare, served only to make them temporarily less conscious
of the mistakes of the night before. Which is to say that it was not
really a gay party ; what gayety existed was displayed in the few who
drank nothing at all.

But Michael was not tired, and the champagne stimulated him and
made his misery less acute. He had been away from New York for
more than eight months and most of the dance music was unfamiliar
to him, but at the first bars of the "Painted Doll", to which he and
Caroline had moved through so much happiness and despair the pre-
vious summer, he crossed to Caroline's table and asked her to dance.

She was lovely in a dress of thin ethereal blue, and the proximity
of her crackly yellow hair, of her cool and tender gray eyes, turned
his body clumsy and rigid ; he stumbled with their first step on the
floor. For a moment it seemed that there was nothing to say; he

276 The Bridal Party

wanted to tell her about his inheritance, but the idea seemed abrupt
unprepared for.

"Michael, it's so nice to be dancing with you again."
He smiled grimly.

"I'm so happy you came," she continued. "I was afraid maybe
you'd be silly and stay away. Now we can be just good friends and
natural together. Michael, I want you and Hamilton to like each
other."

The engagement was making her stupid ; he had never heard her
make such a series of obvious remarks before.

"I could kill him without a qualm," he said pleasantly, "but he
looks like a good man. He's fine. What I want to know is, what
happens to people like me who aren't able to forget?"

As he said this he could not prevent his mouth from drooping
suddenly, and glancing up, Caroline saw, and her heart quivered
violently, as it had the other morning.

"Do you mind so much, Michael?"

"Yes."

For a second as he said this, in a voice that seemed to have come
up from his shoes, they were not dancing ; they were simply clinging
together. Then she leaned away from him and twisted her mouth
into a lovely smile.

"I didn't know what to do at first, Michael. I told Hamilton about
you — that I'd cared for you an awful lot — but it didn't worry him,
and he was right. Because I'm over you now — yes, I am. And you'll
wake up some sunny morning and be over me just like that."

He shook his head stubbornly.

"Oh, yes. We weren't for each other. I'm pretty flighty, and I need
somebody like Hamilton to decide things. It was that more than
the question of — of "

"Of money." Again he was on the point of telling her what had
happened, but again something told him it was not the time.

"Then how do you account for what happened when we met the
other day," he demanded helplessly — "what happened just now?
When we just pour toward each other like we used to — as if we were
one person, as if the same blood was flowing through both of us?"

"Oh, don't," she begged him. "You mustn't talk like that ; every-
thing's decided now. I love Hamilton with all my heart. It's just that
I remember certain things in the past and I feel sorry for you — for
us — for the way we were."

Over her shoulder, Michael saw a man come toward them to cut
in. In a panic he danced her away, but inevitably the man came on.

"I've got to see you alone, if only for a minute," Michael said
quickly. "When can I ?"

The Bridal Party 277

"I'll be at Jebby West's tea tomorrow," she whispered as a hand
fell politely upon Michael's shoulder.

But he did not talk to her at Jebby West's tea. Rutherford stood
next to her, and each brought the other into all conversations. They
left early. The next morning the wedding cards arrived in the first
mail.

Then Michael, grown desperate with pacing up and down his
room, determined on a bold stroke; he wrote to Hamilton Ruther-
ford, asking him for a rendezvous the following afternoon. In a
short telephone communication Rutherford agreed, but for a day
later than Michael had asked. And the wedding was only six days
away.

They were to meet in the bar of the Hotel Jena. Michael knew
what he would say: "See here, Rutherford, do you realize the re-
sponsibility you're taking in going through with this marriage? Do
you realize the harvest of trouble and regret you're sowing in per-
suading a girl into something contrary to the instincts of her heart?"
He would explain that the barrier between Caroline and himself had
been an artificial one and was now removed, and demand that the
matter be put up to Caroline frankly before it was too late.

Rutherford would be angry, conceivably there would be a scene,
but Michael felt that he was fighting for his life now.

He found Rutherford in conversation with an older man, whom
Michael had met at several of the wedding parties.

"I saw what happened to most of my friends," Rutherford was
saying, "and I decided it wasn't going to happen to me. It isn't so
difficult ; if you take a girl with common sense, and tell her what's
what, and do your stuff damn well, and play decently square with
her, it's a marriage. If you stand for any nonsense at the beginning,
it's one of these arrangements — within five years the man gets out,
or else the girl gobbles him up and you have the usual mess."

"Right!" agreed his companion enthusiastically. "Hamilton, boy,
you're right."

Michael's blood boiled slowly.

"Doesn't it strike you," he inquired coldly, "that your attitude
went out of fashion about a hundred years ago?"

"No, it didn't," said Rutherford pleasantly, but impatiently. "I'm
as modern as anybody. I'd get married in an aeroplane next Satur-
day if it'd please my girl."

"I don't mean that way of being modern. You can't take a sensitive
woman "

"Sensitive? Women aren't so darn sensitive. It's fellows like you
who are sensitive ; it's fellows like you they exploit — all your devo-
tion and kindness and all that. They read a couple of books and see

278 The Bridal Party

a few pictures because they haven't got anything else to do, and then
they say they're finer in grain than you are, and to prove it they take
the bit in their teeth and tear off for a fare-you-well — just about as
sensitive as a fire horse."

"Caroline happens to be sensitive," said Michael in a clipped
voice.

At this point the other man got up to go ; when the dispute about
the check had been settled and they were alone, Rutherford leaned
back to Michael as if a question had been asked him.

"Caroline's more than sensitive," he said. "She's got sense."

His combative eyes, meeting Michael's, flickered with a gray light.
"This all sounds pretty crude to you, Mr. Curly, but it seems to me
that the average man nowadays just asks to be made a monkey of by
some woman who doesn't even get any fun out of reducing him to
that level. There are darn few men who possess their wives any more,
but I am going to be one of them."

To Michael it seemed time to bring the talk back to the actual
situation: "Do you realize the responsibility you're taking?"

"I certainly do," interrupted Rutherford. "I'm not afraid of re-
sponsibility. I'll make the decisions — fairly, I hope, but anyhow
they'll be final."

"What if you didn't start right?" said Michael impetuously. "What
if your marriage isn't founded on mutual love?"

"I think I see what you mean," Rutherford said, still pleasant.
"And since you've brought it up, let me say that if you and Caroline
had married, it wouldn't have lasted three years. Do you know what
your affair was founded on? On sorrow. You got sorry for each other.
Sorrow's a lot of fun for most women and for some men, but it seems
to me that a marriage ought to be based on hope." He looked at his
watch and stood up.

"I've got to meet Caroline. Remember, you're coming to the
bachelor dinner day after tomorrow."

Michael felt the moment slipping away. "Then Caroline's personal
feelings don't count with you?" he demanded fiercely.

"Caroline's tired and upset. But she has what she wants, and that's
the main thing."

"Are you referring to yourself ?" demanded Michael incredulously.

"Yes."

"May I ask how long she's wanted you?"

"About two years." Before Michael could answer, he was gone.

During the next two days Michael floated in an abyss of helpless-
ness. The idea haunted him that he had left something undone that
would sever this knot drawn tighter under his eyes. He phoned
Caroline, but she insisted that it was physically impossible for her

The Bridal Party 279

to see him until the day before the wedding, for which day she
granted him a tentative rendezvous. Then he went to the bachelor
dinner, partly in fear of an evening alone at his hotel, partly from a
feeling that by his presence at that function he was somehow nearer
to Caroline, keeping her in sight.

The Ritz Bar had been prepared for the occasion by French and
American banners and by a great canvas covering one wall, against
which the guests were invited to concentrate their proclivities in
breaking glasses.

At the first cocktail, taken at the bar, there were many slight spill-
ings from many trembling hands, but later, with the champagne,
there was a rising tide of laughter and occasional bursts of song.

Michael was surprised to find what a difference his new dinner
coat, his new silk hat, his new, proud linen made in his estimate of
himself ; he felt less resentment toward all these people for being so
rich and assured. For the first time since he had left college he felt
rich and assured himself; he felt that he was part of all this, and
even entered into the scheme of Johnson, the practical joker, for the
appearance of the woman betrayed, now waiting tranquilly in the
room across the hall.

"We don't want to go too heavy," Johnson said, "because I imagine
Ham's had a pretty anxious day already. Did you see Fullman Oil's
sixteen points off this morning?"

"Will that matter to him?" Michael asked, trying to keep the
interest out of his voice.

"Naturally. He's in heavily ; he's always in everything heavily. So
far he's had luck ; anyhow, up to a month ago."

The glasses were filled and emptied faster now, and men were
shouting at one another across the narrow table. Against the bar a
group of ushers was being photographed, and the flash light surged
through the room in a stifling cloud.

"Now's the time," Johnson said. "You're to stand by the door, re-
member, and we're both to try and keep her from coming in — just
till we get everybody's attention."

He went on out into the corridor, and Michael waited obediently
by the door. Several minutes passed. Then Johnson reappeared with
a curious expression on his face.

"There's something funny about this."

"Isn't the girl there?"

"She's there all right, but there's another woman there, too ; and
it's nobody we engaged either. She wants to see Hamilton Ruther-
ford, and she looks as if she had something on her mind."

They went out into the hall. Planted firmly in a chair near the
door sat an American girl a little the worse for liquor, but with a

280 The Bridal Party

determined expression on her face. She looked up at them with a
jerk of her head.

"Well, j'tell him?" she demanded. "The name is Marjorie Collins,
and he'll know it. I've come a long way, and I want to see him now
and quick, or there's going to be more trouble than you ever saw."
She rose unsteadily to her feet.

"You go in and tell Ham," whispered Johnson to Michael. "Maybe
he'd better get out. I'll keep her here."

Back at the table, Michael leaned close to Rutherford's ear and,
with a certain grimness, whispered :

"A girl outside named Marjorie Collins says she wants to see you.
She looks as if she wanted to make trouble."

Hamilton Rutherford blinked and his mouth fell ajar ; then slowly
the lips came together in a straight line and he said in a crisp
voice :

"Please keep her there. And send the head barman to me right
away."

Michael spoke to the barman, and then, without returning to the
table, asked quietly for his coat and hat. Out in the hall again, he
passed Johnson and the girl without speaking and went out into the
Rue Cambon. Calling a cab, he gave the address of Caroline's hotel.

His place was beside her now. Not to bring bad news, but simply
to be with her when her house of cards came falling around her head.

Rutherford had implied that he was soft — well, he was hard enough
not to give up the girl he loved without taking advantage of every
chance within the pale of honor. Should she turn away from Ruth-
erford, she would find him there.

She was in ; she was surprised when he called, but she was still
dressed and would be down immediately. Presently she appeared in
a dinner gown, holding two blue telegrams in her hand. They sat
down in armchairs in the deserted lobby.

"But, Michael, is the dinner over?"

"I wanted to see you, so I came away."

"I'm glad." Her voice was friendly, but matter-of-fact. "Because
I'd just phoned your hotel that I had fittings and rehearsals all day
tomorrow. Now we can have our talk after all."

"You're tired," he guessed. "Perhaps I shouldn't have come."

"No. I was waiting up for Hamilton. Telegrams that may be im-
portant. He said he might go on somewhere, and that may mean
any hour, so I'm glad I have someone to talk to."

Michael winced at the impersonality in the last phrase.

"Don't you care when he gets home?"

"Naturally," she said, laughing, "but I haven't got much say
about it, have I?"

The Bridal Party 281

"Why not?"

"I couldn't start by telling him what he could and couldn't
do."

"Why not?"

"He wouldn't stand for it."

"He seems to want merely a housekeeper," said Michael ironi-
cally.

"Tell me about your plans, Michael," she asked quickly.

"My plans? I can't see any future after the day after tomorrow.
The only real plan I ever had was to love you."

Their eyes brushed past each other's, and the look he knew so
well was staring out at him from hers. Words flowed quickly from
his heart :

"Let me tell you just once more how well I've loved you, never
wavering for a moment, never thinking of another girl. And now
when I think of all the years ahead without you, without any hope,
I don't want to live, Caroline darling. I used to dream about our
home, our children, about holding you in my arms and touching your
face and hands and hair that used to belong to me, and now I just
can't wake up."

Caroline was crying softly. "Poor Michael — poor Michael." Her
hand reached out and her fingers brushed the lapel of his dinner
coat. "I was so sorry for you the other night. You looked so thin,
and as if you needed a new suit and somebody to take care of you."
She sniffled and looked more closely at his coat. "Why, you've got
a new suit ! And a new silk hat ! Why, Michael, how swell ! " She
laughed, suddenly cheerful through her tears. "You must have come
into money, Michael ; I never saw you so well turned out."

For a moment, at her reaction, he hated his new clothes.

"I have come into money," he said. "My grandfather left me about
a quarter of a million dollars."

"Why, Michael," she cried, "how perfectly swell I I can't tell you
how glad I am. I've always thought you were the sort of person who
ought to have money."

"Yes, just too late to make a difference."

The revolving door from the street groaned around and Hamilton
Rutherford came into the lobby. His face was flushed, his eyes were
restless and impatient.

"Hello, darling; hello, Mr. Curly." He bent and kissed Caroline.
"I broke away for a minute to find out if I had any telegrams. I see
you've got them there." Taking them from her, he remarked to
Curly, "That was an odd business there in the bar, wasn't it ? Espe-
cially as I understand some of you had a joke fixed up in the same
line." He opened one of the telegrams, closed it and turned to Caro-

282 The Bridal Party

line with the divided expression of a man carrying two things in his
head at once.

"A girl I haven't seen for two years turned up," he said. "It seemed
to be some clumsy form of blackmail, for I haven't and never have
had any sort of obligation toward her whatever."

"What happened?"

"The head barman had a Surete Generate man there in ten minutes
and it was settled in the hall. The French blackmail laws make ours
look like a sweet wish, and I gather they threw a scare into her that
shell remember. But it seems wiser to tell you."

"Are you implying that I mentioned the matter?" said Michael
stiffly.

"No," Rutherford said slowly. "No, you were just going to be on
hand. And since you're here, I'll tell you some news that will interest
you even more."

He handed Michael one telegram and opened the other.

"This is in code," Michael said.

"So is this. But I've got to know all the words pretty well this last
week. The two of them together mean that I'm due to start life all
over."

Michael saw Caroline's face grow a shade paler, but she sat quiet
as a mouse.

"It was a mistake and I stuck to it too long," continued Ruth-
erford. "So you see I don't have all the luck, Mr. Curly. By the way,
they tell me you've come into money."

"Yes," said Michael.

"There we are, then." Rutherford turned to Caroline. "You under-
stand, darling, that I'm not joking or exaggerating. I've lost almost
every cent I had and I'm starting life over."

Two pairs of eyes were regarding her — Rutherford's noncommittal
and unrequiring, Michael's hungry, tragic, pleading. In a minute she
had raised herself from the chair and with a little cry thrown herself
into Hamilton Rutherford's arms.

"Oh, darling," she cried, "what does it matter! It's better; I like
it better, honestly I do ! I want to start that way ; I want to ! Oh,
please don't worry or be sad even for a minute ! "

"All right, baby," said Rutherford. His hand stroked her hair
gently for a moment ; then he took his arm from around her.

"I promised to join the party for an hour," he said. "So I'll say
good night, and I want you to go to bed soon and get a good sleep.
Good night, Mr. Curly. I'm sorry to have let you in for all these
financial matters."

But Michael had already picked up his hat and cane. "I'll go
along with you," he said.

The Bridal Party 283

III

It was such a fine morning. Michael's cutaway hadn't been de-
livered, so he felt rather uncomfortable passing before the cameras
and moving-picture machines in front of the little church on the
Avenue George-Cinq.

It was such a clean, new church that it seemed unforgivable not
to be dressed properly, and Michael, white and shaky after a sleep-
less night, decided to stand in the rear. From there he looked at the
back of Hamilton Rutherford, and the lacy, filmy back of Caroline,
and the fat back of George Packman, which looked unsteady, as if
it wanted to lean against the bride and groom.

The ceremony went on for a long time under the gay flags and
pennons overhead, under the thick beams of June sunlight slanting
down through the tall windows upon the well-dressed people.

As the procession, headed by the bride and groom, started down
the aisle, Michael realized with alarm he was just where everyone
would dispense with their parade stiffness, become informal and
speak to him.

So it turned out. Rutherford and Caroline spoke first to him;
Rutherford grim with the strain of being married, and Caroline love-
lier than he had ever seen her, floating all softly down through the
friends and relatives of her youth, down through the past and for-
ward to the future by the sunlit door.

Michael managed to murmur, "Beautiful, simply beautiful," and
then other people passed and spoke to him — old Mrs. Dandy,
straight from her sickbed and looking remarkably well, or carrying
it off like the very fine old lady she was; and Rutherford's father
and mother, ten years divorced, but walking side by side and look-
ing made for each other and proud. Then all Caroline's sisters and
their husbands and her little nephews in Eton suits, and then a long
parade, all speaking to Michael because he was still standing par-
alyzed just at that point where the procession broke.

He wondered what would happen now. Cards had been issued for
a reception at the George-Cinq ; an expensive enough place, heaven
knew. Would Rutherford try to go through with that on top of those
disastrous telegrams? Evidently, for the procession outside was
streaming up there through the June morning, three by three and
four by four. On the corner the long dresses of girls, five abreast,
fluttered many-colored in the wind. Girls had become gossamer
again, perambulatory flora; such lovely fluttering dresses in the
bright noon wind.

Michael needed a drink ; he couldn't face that reception line with-

284 The Bridal Party

out a drink. Diving into a side doorway of the hotel, he asked for the
bar, whither a chasseur led him through half a kilometer of new
American-looking passages.

But — how did it happen? — the bar was full. There were ten —
fifteen men and two — four girls, all from the wedding, all needing
a drink. There were cocktails and champagne in the bar; Ruther-
ford's cocktails and champagne, as it turned out, for he had engaged
the whole bar and the ballroom and the two great reception rooms
and all the stairways leading up and down, and windows looking out
over the whole square block of Paris. By and by Michael went and
joined the long, slow drift of the receiving line. Through a flowery
mist of "Such a lovely wedding," "My dear, you were simply lovely,"
"You're a lucky man, Rutherford" he passed down the line. When
Michael came to Caroline, she took a single step forward and kissed
him on the lips, but he felt no contact in the kiss ; it was unreal and
he floated on away from it. Old Mrs. Dandy, who had always liked
him, held his hand for a minute and thanked him for the flowers he
had sent when he heard she was ill.

"I'm so sorry not to have written ; you know, we old ladies are

grateful for " The flowers, the fact that she had not written, the

wedding — Michael saw that they all had the same relative impor-
tance to her now ; she had married off five other children and seen
two of the marriages go to pieces, and this scene, so poignant, so con-
fusing to Michael, appeared to her simply a familiar charade in which
she had played her part before.

A buffet luncheon with champagne was already being served at
small tables and there was an orchestra playing in the empty ball-
room. Michael sat down with Jebby West ; he was still a little em-
barrassed at not wearing a morning coat, but he perceived now that
he was not alone in the omission and felt better. "Wasn't Caroline
divine?" Jebby West said. "So entirely self-possessed. I asked her
this morning if she wasn't a little nervous at stepping off like this.
And she said, Why should I be? I've been after him for two years,
and now I'm just happy, that's all.' "

"It must be true," said Michael gloomily.

"What?"

"What you just said."

He had been stabbed, but, rather to his distress, he did not feel
the wound.

He asked Jebby to dance. Out on the floor, Rutherford's father
and mother were dancing together.

"It makes me a little sad, that," she said. "Those two hadn't met
for years ; both of them were married again and she divorced again.
She went to the station to meet him when he came over for Caroline'*

The Bridal Party 285

wedding, and invited him to stay at her house in the Avenue du Bois
with a whole lot of other people, perfectly proper, but he was afraid
his wife would hear about it and not like it, so he went to a hotel
Don't you think that's sort of sad?"

An hour or so later Michael realized suddenly that it was after-
noon. In one corner of the ballroom an arrangement of screens like
a moving-picture stage had been set up and photographers were tak-
ing official pictures of the bridal party. The bridal party, still as
death and pale as wax under the bright lights, appeared, to' the
dancers circling the modulated semidarkness of the ballroom, like
those jovial or sinister groups that one comes upon in The Old Mill
at an amusement park.

After the bridal party had been photographed, there was a group
of the ushers ; then the bridesmaids, the families, the children. Later,
Caroline, active and excited, having long since abandoned the repose
implicit in her flowing dress and great bouquet, came and plucked
Michael off the floor.

"Now we'll have them take one of just old friends." Her voice im-
plied that this was best, most intimate of all. "Come here, Jebby,
George — not you, Hamilton; this is just my friends — Sally "

A little after that, what remained of formality disappeared and
the hours flowed easily down the profuse stream of champagne. In
the modern fashion, Hamilton Rutherford sat at the table with his
arm about an old girl of his and assured his guests, which included
not a few bewildered but enthusiastic Europeans, that the party was
not nearly at an end ; it was to reassemble at Zelli's after midnight.
Michael saw Mrs. Dandy, not quite over her illness, rise to go and
become caught in polite group after group, and he spoke of it to one
of her daughters, who thereupon forcibly abducted her mother and
called her car. Michael felt very considerate and proud of himself
after having done this, and drank much more champagne.

"It's amazing," George Packman was telling him enthusiastically.
"This show will cost Ham about five thousand dollars, and I under-
stand they'll be just about his last. But did he countermand a bottle
of champagne or a flower? Not he! He happens to have it — that
young man. Do you know that T. G. Vance offered him a salary of
fifty thousand dollars a year ten minutes before the wedding
this morning? In another year he'll be back with the million-
aires."

The conversation was interrupted by a plan to carry Rutherford
out on communal shoulders — a plan which six of them put into
effect, and then stood in the four-o'clock sunshine waving good-by
to the bride and groom. But there must have been a mistake some-
where, for five minutes later Michael saw both bride and groom

286 The Bridal Party

descending the stairway to the reception, each with a glass of cham-
pagne held defiantly on high.

"This is our way of doing things," he thought. "Generous and fresh
and free ; a sort of Virgina-plantation hospitality, but at a different
pace now, nervous as a ticker tape."

Standing unself-consciously in the middle of the room to see which
was the American ambassador, he realized with a start that he hadn't
really thought of Caroline for hours. He looked about him with a
sort of alarm, and then he saw her across the room, very bright and
young, and radiantly happy. He saw Rutherford near her, looking at
her as if he could never look long enough, and as Michael watched
them they seemed to recede as he had wished them to do that day in
the Rue de Castiglione — recede and fade off into joys and griefs of
their own, into the years that would take the toll of Rutherford's fine
pride and Caroline's young, moving beauty; fade far away, so that
now he could scarcely see them, as if they were shrouded in some-
thing as misty as her white, billowing dress.

Michael was cured. The ceremonial function, with its pomp and
its revelry, had stood for a sort of initiation into a life where even
his regret could not follow them. All the bitterness melted out of
him suddenly and the world reconstituted itself out of the youth and
happiness that was all around him, profligate as the spring sunshine.
He was trying to remember which one of the bridesmaids he had
made a date to dine with tonight as he walked forward to bid Ham-
ilton and Caroline Rutherford good-by.
1930 Previously Uncollected

TWO WRONGS

"LOOK AT those shoes," said Bill— "twenty-eight dollars."

Mr. Brancusi looked. "Purty."

"Made to order."

"I knew you were a great swell. You didn't get me up here to
show me those shoes, did you?"

"I am not a great swell. Who said I was a great swell?" demanded
Bill. "Just because I've got more education than most people in
show business."

"And then, you know, you're a handsome young fellow," said
Brancusi dryly.

"Sure I am — compared to you anyhow. The girls think I must be
an actor, till they find out. . . . Got a cigarette? What's more, I
look like a man — which is more than most of these pretty boys round
Times Square do."

"Good-looking. Gentleman. Good shoes. Shot with luck."

"You're wrong there," objected Bill. "Brains. Three years — nine
shows — four big hits — only one flop. Where do you see any luck in
that?"

A little bored, Brancusi just gazed. What he would have seen —
had he not made his eyes opaque and taken to thinking about some-
thing else — was a fresh-faced young Irishman exuding aggressive-
ness and self-confidence until the air of his office was thick with it.
Presently, Brancusi knew, Bill would hear the sound of his own
voice and be ashamed and retire into his other humor — the quietly
superior, sensitive one, the patron of the arts, modelled on the in-
tellectuals of the Theatre Guild. Bill McChesney had not quite de-
cided between the two, such blends are seldom complete before
thirty.

"Take Ames, take Hopkins, take Harris — take any of them," Bill
insisted. "What have they got on me? What's the matter? Do you
want a drink?" — seeing Brancusi's glance wander toward the cabinet
on the opposite wall.

"I never drink in the morning. I just wondered who was it keeps

287

288 Two Wrongs

on knocking. You ought to make it stop it. I get a nervous fidgets,
kind of half crazy, with that kind of thing."

Bill went quickly to the door and threw it open.

"Nobody," he said. . . . "Hello! What do you want?"

"Oh, I'm so sorry," a voice answered; "I'm terribly sorry. I got
so excited and I didn't realize I had this pencil in my hand."

"What is it you want?"

"I want to see you, and the clerk said you were busy. I have a
letter for you from Alan Rogers, the playwright — and I wanted to
give it to you personally."

"I'm busy," said Bill. "See Mr. Cadorna."

"I did, but he wasn't very encouraging, and Mr. Rogers said — "

Brancusi, edging over restlessly, took a quick look at her. She
was very young, with beautiful red hair, and more character in her
face than her chatter would indicate ; it did not occur to Mr. Bran-
cusi that this was due to her origin in Delaney, South Carolina.

"What shall I do?" she inquired, quietly laying her future in
Bill's hands. "I had a letter to Mr. Rogers, and he just gave me this
one to you."

"Well, what do you want me to do — marry you?" exploded Bill.

"I'd like to get a part in one of your plays."

"Then sit down and wait. I'm busy. . . . Where's Miss Cohalan?"
He rang a bell, looked once more, crossly, at the girl and closed the
door of his office. But during the interruption his other mood had
come over him, and he resumed his conversation with Brancusi in
the key of one who was hand in glove with Reinhardt for the artistic
future of the theatre.

By 12:30 he had forgotten everything except that he was going
to be the greatest producer in the world and that he had an engage-
ment to tell Sol Lincoln about it at lunch. Emerging from his office,
he looked expectantly at Miss Cohalan.

"Mr. Lincoln won't be able to meet you," she said. "He jus' 'is
minute called."

"Just this minute," repeated Bill, shocked. "All right. Just cross
him off that list for Thursday night."

Miss Cohalan drew a line on a sheet of paper before her.

"Mr. McChesney, now you haven't forgotten me, have you?

He turned to the red-headed girl.

"No," he said vaguely, and then to Miss Cohalan: "That's all
right : ask him for Thursday anyhow. To hell with him."

He did not want to lunch alone. He did not like to do anything
alone now, because contacts were too much fun when one had
prominence and power.

"If you would just let me talk to you two minutes — " she began.

Two Wrongs 289

"Afraid I can't now." Suddenly he realized that she was the most
beautiful person he had ever seen in his life.

He stared at her.

"Mr. Rogers told me—"

"Come and have a spot of lunch with me," he said, and then, with
an air of great hurry, he gave Miss Cohalan some quick and con-
tradictory instructions and held open the door.

They stood on Forty-second Street and he breathed his pre-
empted air — there is only enough air there for a few people at a
time. It was November and the first exhilarating rush of the season
was over, but he could look east and see the electric sign of one of
his plays, and west and see another. Around the corner was the one
he had put on with Brancusi — the last time he would produce any-
thing except alone.

They went to the Bedford, where there was a to-do of waiters and
captains as he came in.

"This is ver' tractive restaurant," she said, impressed and on com-
pany behavior.

"This is hams' paradise." He nodded to several people. "Hello,
Jimmy— Bill. . . . Hello there, Jack. . . . That's Jack Dempsey.
... I don't eat here much. I usually eat up at the Harvard Club."

"Oh, did you go to Harvard? I used to know — "

"Yes." He hesitated ; there were two versions about Harvard, and
he decided suddenly on the true one. "Yes, and they had me down
for a hick there, but not any more. About a week ago I was out on
Long Island at the Gouverneer Haights — very fashionable people —
and a couple of Gold Coast boys that never knew I was alive up in
Cambridge began pulling this 'Hello, Bill, old boy' on me."

He hesitated and suddenly decided to leave the story there.

"What do you want — a job ?" he demanded. He remembered sud-
denly that she had holes in her stockings. Holes in stockings always
moved him, softened him.

"Yes, or else I've got to go home," she said. "I want to be a
dancer — you know, Russian Ballet. But the lessons cost so much,
so I've got to get a job. I thought it'd give me stage presence any-
how."

"Hoofer, eh?"

"Oh, no, serious."

"Well, Pavlova's a hoofer, isn't she?"

"Oh, no." She was shocked at this profanity, but after a moment
she continued: "I took with Miss Campbell — Georgia Berriman
Campbell — back home — maybe you know her. She took from Ned
Wayburn, and she's really wonderful. She — "

"Yeah?" he said abstractedly. "Well, it's a tough business — cast-

290 Two Wrongs

ing agencies bursting with people that can all do anything, till I
give them a try. How old are you?"

"Eighteen."

"I'm twenty-six. Came here four years ago without a cent."

"My!"

"I could quit now and be comfortable the rest of my life."

"My!"

"Going to take a year off next year — get married. . . . Ever
hear of Irene Rikker?"

"I should say ! She's about my favorite of all."

"We're engaged."

"My!"

When they went out into Times Square after a while he said care-
lessly, "What are you doing now?"

"Why, I'm trying to get a job.

"I mean right this minute."

"Why, nothing."

"Do you want to come up to my apartment on Forty-sixth Street
and have some coffee?"

Their eyes met, and Emmy Pinkard made up her mind she could
take care of herself.

It was a great bright studio apartment with a ten-foot divan, and
after she had coffee and he a highball, his arm dropped round her
shoulder.

"Why should I kiss you?" she demanded. "I hardly know you,
and besides, you're engaged to somebody else."

"Oh, that ! She doesn't care."

"No, really ! "

"You're a good girl."

"Well, I'm certainly not an idiot."

"All right, go on being a good girl."

She stood up, but lingered a minute, very fresh and cool, and not
upset at all.

"I suppose this means you won't give me a job?" she asked pleas-
antly.

He was already thinking about something else — about an inter-
view and a rehearsal — but now he looked at her again and saw that
she still had holes in her stockings. He telephoned:

"Joe, this is the Fresh Boy. . . . You didn't think I knew you
called me that, did you ? . . . It's all right. . . . Say, have you got
those three girls for the party scene ? Well, listen ; save one for a
Southern kid I'm sending around today."

He looked at her jauntily, conscious of being such a good
fellow.

Two Wrongs 291

"Well, I don't know how to thank you. And Mr. Rogers," she
added audaciously. "Good-by, Mr. McChesney."
He disdained to answer.

During rehearsal he used to come around a great deal and stand
watching with a wise expression, as if he knew everything in people's
minds ; but actually he was in a haze about his own good fortune
and didn't see much and didn't for the moment care. He spent most
of his week-ends on Long Island with the fashionable people who
had "taken him up." When Brancusi referred to him as the "big
social butterfly," he would answer, "Well, what about it? Didn't I
go to Harvard? You think they found me in a Grand Street apple
cart, like you?" He was well liked among his new friends for his
good looks and good nature, as well as his success.

His engagement to Irene Rikker was the most unsatisfactory
thing in his life ; they were tired of each other but unwilling to put
an end to it. Just as, often, the two richest young people in a town
are drawn together by the fact, so Bill McChesney and Irene Rikker,
borne side by side on waves of triumph, could not spare each other's
nice appreciation of what was due such success. Nevertheless, they
indulged in fiercer and more frequent quarrels, and the end was
approaching. It was embodied in one Frank Llewellen, a big, fine-
looking actor playing opposite Irene. Seeing the situation at once,
Bill became bitterly humorous about it; from the second week of
rehearsals there was tension in the air.

Meanwhile Emmy Pinkard, with enough money for crackers and
milk, and a friend who took her out to dinner, was being happy.
Her friend, Easton Hughes from Delaney, was studying at Colum-
bia to be a dentist. He sometimes brought along other lonesome
young men studying to be dentists, and at the price, if it can be
called that, of a few casual kisses in taxicabs, Emmy dined when
hungry. One afternoon she introduced Easton to Bill McChesney
at the stage door, and afterward Bill made his facetious jealousy
the basis of their relationship,

"I see that dental number has been slipping it over on me again.
Well, don't let him give you any laughing gas is my advice."

Though their encounters were few, they always looked at each
other. When Bill looked at her he stared for an instant as if he
had not seen her before, and then remembered suddenly that she
was to be teased. When she looked at him she saw many things — a
bright day outside, with great crowds of people hurrying through
the streets ; a very good new limousine that waited at the curb for

292 Two Wrongs

two people with very good new clothes, who got in and went some-
where that was just like New York, only away, and more fun there.
Many times she had wished she had kissed him, but just as many
times she was glad she hadn't ; since, as the weeks passed he grew
less romantic, tied up, like the rest of them, to the play's laborious
evolution.

They were opening in Atlantic City. A sudden moodiness, appar-
ent to everyone, came over Bill. He was short with the director and
sarcastic with the actors. This, it was rumored, was because Irene
Rikker had come down with Frank Llewellen on a different train.
Sitting beside the author on the night of the dress rehearsal, he was
an almost sinister figure in the twilight of the auditorium ; but he
said nothing until the end of the second act, when, with Llewellen
and Irene Rikker on the stage alone, he suddenly called :

"We'll go over that again — and cut out the mush ! "

Llewellen came down to the footlights.

"What do you mean — cut out the mush?" he inquired. "Those
are the lines, aren't they?"

"You know what I mean — stick to business."

"I don't know what you mean."

Bill stood up. "I mean all that damn whispering."

"There wasn't any whispering. I simply asked — "

"That'll do— take it over."

Llewellen turned away furiously and was about to proceed, when
Bill added audibly: "Even a ham has got to do his stuff."

Llewellen whipped about. "I don't have to stand that kind of talk,
Mr. McChesney."

"Why not? You're a ham, aren't you? When did you get ashamed
of being a ham? I'm putting on this play and I want you to stick
to your stuff." Bill got up and walked down the aisle. "And when
you don't do it, I'm going to call you just like anybody else."

"Well, you watch out for your tone of voice — "

"What'll you do about it?"

Llewellen jumped down into the orchestra pit.

"I'm not taking anything from you 1 " he shouted.

Irene Rikker called to them from the stage, "For heaven's sake,
are you two crazy?" And then Llewellen swung at him, one short,
mighty blow. Bill pitched back across a row of seats, fell through
one, splintering it, and lay wedged there. There was a moment's
wild confusion, then people holding Llewellen, then the author, with
a white face, pulling Bill up, and the stage manager crying: "Shall
I kill him, chief? Shall I break his fat face?" and Llewellen panting
and Irene Rikker frightened.

"Get back there!" Bill cried, holding a handkerchief to his face

Two Wrongs 293

and teetering in the author's supporting arms. "Everybody get back !
Take that scene again, and no talk ! Get back, Llewellen ! "

Before they realized it they were all back on the stage, Irene
pulling Llewellen's arm and talking to him fast. Someone put on
the auditorium lights full and then dimmed them again hurriedly.
When Emmy came out presently for her scene, she saw in a quick
glance that Bill was sitting with a whole mask of handkerchiefs
over his bleeding face. She hated Llewellen and was afraid that
presently they would break up and go back to New York. But Bill
had saved the show from his own folly, since for Llewellen to take
the further initiative of quitting would hurt his professional stand-
ing. The act ended and the next one began without an interval.
When it was over, Bill was gone.

Next night, during the performance, he sat on a chair in the wings
in view of everyone coming on or off. His face was swollen and
bruised, but he neglected to seem conscious of the fact and there
were no comments. Once he went around in front, and when he re-
turned, word leaked out that two of the New York agencies were
making big buys. He had a hit — they all had a hit.

At the sight of him to whom Emmy felt they all owed so much,
a great wave of gratitude swept over her. She went up and thanked
him.

"I'm a good picker, red-head," he agreed grimly.

"Thank you for picking me."

And suddenly Emmy was moved to a rash remark.

"You've hurt your face so badly ! " she exclaimed. "Oh, I think
it was so brave of you not to let everything go to pieces last night."

He looked at her hard for a moment and then an ironic smile
tried unsuccessfully to settle on his swollen face.

"Do you admire me, baby?"

"Yes."

"Even when I fell in the seats, did you admire me?"

"You got control of everything so quick."

"That's loyalty for you. You found something to admire in that
fool mess."

And her happiness bubbled up into, "Anyhow, you behaved just
wonderfully." She looked so fresh and young that Bill, who had had
a wretched day, wanted to rest his swollen cheek against her cheek.

He took both the bruise and the desire with him to New York
next morning ; the bruise faded, but the desire remained. And when
they opened in the city, no sooner did he see other men begin to
crowd around her beauty than she became this play for him, this
success, the thing that he came to see when he came to the theatre.
After a good run it closed just as he was drinking too much and

294 Two Wrongs

needed someone on the gray days of reaction. They were married
suddenly in Connecticut, early in June.

Ill

Two men sat in the Savoy Grill in London, waiting for the Fourth
of July. It was already late in May.

"Is he a nice guy?" asked Hubbel.

"Very nice," answered Brancusi ; "very nice, very handsome, very
popular." After a moment, he added: "I want to get him to come
home."

"That's what I don't get about him," said Hubbel. "Show business
over here is nothing compared to home. What does he want to stay
here for?"

"He goes around with a lot of dukes and ladies."

"Oh?"

"Last week when I met him he was with three ladies — Lady this,
Lady that, Lady the other thing."

"I thought he was married."

"Married three years," said Brancusi, "got a fine child, going
to have another."

He broke off as McChesney came in, his very American face star-
ing about boldly over the collar of a box-shouldered topcoat.

"Hello, Mac ; meet my friend Mr. Hubbel."

"J'doo," said Bill. He sat down, continuing to stare around the
bar to see who was present. After a few minutes Hubbel left, and
Bill asked :

"Who's that bird?"

"He's only been here a month. He ain't got a title yet. You been
here six months, remember."

Bill grinned.

"You think I'm high-hat, don't you? Well, I'm not kidding myself
anyhow. I like it ; it gets me. I'd like to be the Marquis of McChes-
ney."

"Maybe you can drink yourself into it," suggested Brancusi.

"Shut your trap. Who said I was drinking? Is that what they
say now ? Look here ; if you can tell me any American manager in
the history of the theatre who's had the success that I've had in
London in less than eight months, I'll go back to America with you
tomorrow. If you'll just tell me — "

"It was with your old shows. You had two flops in New York."

Bill stood up, his face hardening.

"Who do you think you are?" he demanded. "Did you come over
here to talk to me like that?"

Two Wrongs 295

"Don't get sore now, Bill. I just want you to come back. I'd say
anything for that. Put over three seasons like you had in '22 and
'23, and you're fixed for life."

"New York makes me sick," said Bill moodily. ccOne minute
you're a king; then you have two flops, they go around saying
you're on the toboggan."

Brancusi shook his head.

"That wasn't why they said it. It was because you had that
quarrel with Aronstael, your best friend."

"Friend hell!"

"Your best friend in business anyhow. Then — "

"I don't want to talk about it." He looked at his watch. "Look
here; Emmy's feeling bad so I'm afraid I can't have dinner with
you tonight. Come around to the office before you sail."

Five minutes later, standing by the cigar counter, Brancusi saw
Bill enter the Savoy again and descend the steps that led to the tea
room.

"Grown to be a great diplomat," thought Brancusi ; "he used to
just say when he had a date. Going with these dukes and ladies is
polishing him up even more."

Perhaps he was a little hurt, though it was not typical of him to
be hurt. At any rate he made a decision, then and there, that
McChesney was on the down grade; it was quite typical of him
that at that point he erased him from his mind forever.

There was no outward indication that Bill was on the down
grade ; a hit at the New Strand, a hit at the Prince of Wales, and
the weekly grosses pouring in almost as well as they had two or
three years before in New York. Certainly a man of action was
justified in changing his base. And the man who, an hour later,
turned into his Hyde Park house for dinner had all the vitality of
the late twenties. Emmy, very tired and clumsy, lay on a couch
in the upstairs sitting room. He held her for a moment in his
arms.

"Almost over now," he said. "You're beautiful."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"It's true. You're always beautiful. I don't know why. Perhaps
because you've got character, and that's always in your face, even
when you're like this."

She was pleased ; she ran her hand through his hair.

"Character is the greatest thing in the world," he declared, "and
you've got more than anybody I know."

"Did you see Brancusi?"

"I did, the little louse I I decided not to bring him home to
dinner,"

296 Two Wrongs

"What was the matter?''

"Oh, just snooty — talking about my row with Aronstael, as if it
was my fault. "

She hesitated, closed her mouth tight and then said quietly, "You
got into that fight with Aronstael because you were drinking. "

He rose impatiently.

"Are you going to start — "

"No, Bill, but you're drinking too much now. You know you are."

Aware that she was right, he evaded the matter and they went
in to dinner. On the glow of a bottle of claret he decided he would
go on the wagon tomorrow till after the baby was born.

"I always stop when I want, don't I? I always do what I say.
You never saw me quit yet."

"Never yet."

They had coffee together, and afterward he got up.

"Come back early," said Emmy.

"Oh, sure. . . . What's the matter, baby?"

"I'm just crying. Don't mind me. Oh, go on ;^ don't just stand
there like a big idiot."

"But I'm worried, naturally. I don't like to see you cry."

"Oh, I don't know where you go in the evenings; I don't know
who you're with. And that Lady Sybil Combrinck who kept phon-
ing. It's all right, I suppose, but I wake up in the night and I feel
so alone, Bill. Because we've always been together, haven't we, until
recently?"

"But we're together still . . . What's happened to you, Emmy?"

"I know — I'm just crazy. We'd never let each other down, would
we? We never have — "

"Of course not."

"Come back early, or when you can."

He looked in for a minute at the Prince of Wales Theatre ; then
he went into the hotel next door and called a number.

"I'd like to speak to her Ladyship. Mr. McChesney calling."

It was some time before Lady Sybil answered :

"This is rather a surprise. It's been several weeks since I've been
lucky enough to hear from you."

Her voice was flip as a whip and cold as automatic refrigeration,
in the mode grown familiar since British ladies took to piecing
themselves together out of literature. It had fascinated Bill for a
while, but just for a while. He had kept his head.

"I haven't had a minute," he explained easily. "You're not sore,
are you?"

"I should scarcely say 'sore'."

"I was afraid you might be ; you didn't send me an invitation to

Two Wrongs 297

you party tonight. My idea was that after we talked it all over we
agreed — "

"You talked a great deal/' she said; "possibly a little too much."

Suddenly, to Bill's astonishment, she hung up.

" Going British on me," he thought. "A little skit entitled The
Daughter of a Thousand Earls."

The snub roused him, the indifference revived his waning interest.
Usually women forgave his changes of heart because of his obvious
devotion to Emmy, and he was remembered by various ladies with
a not unpleasant sigh. But he had detected no such sigh upon the
phone.

"I'd like to clear up this mess," he thought. Had he been wearing
evening clothes, he might have dropped in at the dance and talked it
over with her, still he didn't want to go home. Upon considera-
tion it seemed important that the misunderstanding should be fixed
up at once, and presently he began to entertain the idea of going as
he was ; Americans were excused unconventionalities of dress. In any
case, it was not nearly time, and, in the company of several high-
balls, he considered the matter for an hour.

At midnight he walked up the steps of her Mayfair house. The
coat-room attendants scrutinized his tweeds disapprovingly and a
footman peered in vain for his name on the list of guests. Fortu-
nately his friend Sir Humphrey Dunn arrived at the same time and
convinced the footman it must be a mistake.

Inside, Bill immediately looked about for his hostess.

She was a very tall young woman, half American and all the more
intensely English. In a sense, she had discovered Bill McChesney,
vouched for his savage charms ; his retirement was one of her most
humiliating experiences since she had begun being bad.

She stood with her husband at the head of the receiving line — Bill
had never seen them together before. He decided to choose a less
formal moment for presenting himself.

As the receiving went on interminably, he became increasingly
uncomfortable. He saw a few people he knew, but not many, and
he was conscious that his clothes were attracting a certain atten-
tion ; he was aware also that Lady Sybil saw him and could have
relieved his embarrassment with a wave of her hand, but she made
no sign. He was sorry he had come, but to withdraw now would be
absurd, and going to a buffet table, he took a glass of champagne.

When he turned around she was alone at last, and he was about
to approach her when the butler spoke to him :

"Pardon me, sir. Have you a card?"

"I'm a friend of Lady Sybil's," said Bill impatiently. He turned
away, but the butler followed.

298 Two Wrongs

"I'm sorry, sir, but I'll have to ask you to step aside with me and
straighten this up."

"There's no need. I'm just about to speak to Lady Sybil now."

"My orders are different, sir," said the butler firmly.

Then, before Bill realized what was happening, his arms were
pressed quietly to his sides and he was propelled into a little ante-
room back of the buffet.

There he faced a man in a pince-nez in whom he recognized the
Combrincks' private secretary.

The secretary nodded to the butler, saying, "This is the man";
whereupon Bill was released.

"Mr. McChesney," said the secretary, "you have seen fit to force
your way here without a card, and His Lordship requests that you
leave his house at once. Will you kindly give me the check for your
coat?"

Then Bill understood, and the single word that he found appli-
cable to Lady Sybil sprang to his lips ; whereupon the secretary gave
a sign to two footmen, and in a furious struggle Bill was carried
through a pantry where busy bus boys stared at the scene, down
a long hall, and pushed out a door into the night. The door closed ;
a moment later it was opened again to let his coat billow forth and
his cane clatter down the steps.

As he stood there, overwhelmed, stricken aghast, a taxicab stopped
beside him and the driver called:

"Feeling ill, gov'nor?"

"What?"

"I know where you can get a good pick-me-up, gov'nor. Never
too late." The door of the taxi opened on a nightmare. There
was a cabaret that broke the closing hours; there was being with
strangers he had picked up somewhere ; then there were arguments,
and trying to cash a check, and suddenly proclaiming over and over
that he was William McChesney, the producer, and convincing no
one of the fact, not even himself. It seemed important to see Lady
Sybil right away and call her to account ; but presently nothing was
important at all. He was in a taxicab whose driver had just shaken
him awake in front of his own home.

The telephone was ringing as he went in, but he walked stonily
past the maid and only heard her voice when his foot was on the
stair.

"Mr. McChesney, it's the hospital calling again. Mrs. McChes-
ney's there and they've been phoning every hour."

Still in a daze, he held the receiver up to his ear.

"We're calling from the Midland Hospital, for your wife. She was
delivered of a still-born child at nine this morning."

Two Wrongs 299

"Wait a minute." His voice was dry and cracking. "I don't under-
stand."

After a while he understood that Emmy's child was dead and
she wanted him. His knees sagged groggily as he walked down the
street, looking for a taxi.

The room was dark ; Emmy looked up and saw him from a rum-
pled bed.

"It's you!" she cried. "I thought you were dead! Where did
you go?"

He threw himself down on his knees beside the bed, but she
turned away.

"Oh, you smell awful," she said. "It makes me sick."

But she kept her hand in his hair, and he knelt there motionless
for a long time.

"I'm done with you," she muttered, "but it was awful when I
thought you were dead. Everybody's dead. I wish I was dead."

A curtain parted with the wind, and as he rose to arrange it, she
saw him in the full morning light, pale and terrible, with rumpled
clothes and bruises on his face. This time she hated him instead of
those who had hurt him. She could feel him slipping out of her
heart, feel the space he left, and all at once he was gone, and she
could even forgive him and be sorry for him. All this in a minute.

She had fallen down at the door of the hospital, trying to get out
of the taxicab alone.

When Emmy was well, physically and mentally, her incessant idea
was to learn to dance ; the old .dream inculcated by Miss Georgia
Berriman Campbell of South Carolina persisted as a bright avenue
leading back to first youth and days of hope in New York. To her,
dancing meant that elaborate blend of tortuous attitudes and formal
pirouettes that evolved out of Italy several hundred years ago and
reached its apogee in Russia at the beginning of this century. She
wanted to use herself on something she could believe in, and it
seemed to her that the dance was woman's interpretation of music ;
instead of strong fingers, one had limbs with which to render.
Tschaikowsky and Stravinski; and feet could be as eloquent in
Chopiniana as voices in "The Ring." At the bottom, it was some-
thing sandwiched in between the acrobats and the trained seals ; at
the top it was Pavlova and art.

Once they were settled in an apartment back in New York, she
plunged into her work like a girl of sixteen — four hours a day at
bar exercises, attitudes, sauts, arabesques and pirouettes. It became

300 Two Wrongs

the realest part of her life, and her only worry was whether or not
she was too old. At twenty-six she had ten years to make up, but
she was a natural dancer with a fine body — and that lovely face.

Bill encouraged it ; when she was ready he was going to build the
first real American ballet around her. There were even times when
he envied her her absorption ; for affairs in his own line were more
difficult since they had come home. For one thing, he had made
enemies in those early days of self-confidence; there were exag-
gerated stones of his drinking and of his being hard on actors and
difficult to work with.

It was against him that he had always been unable to save money
and must beg a backing for each play. Then, too, in a curious way,
he was intelligent, as he was brave enough to prove in several un-
commercial ventures, but he had no Theatre Guild behind him, and
what money he lost was charged against him.

There were successes, too, but he worked harder for them, or it
seemed so, for he had begun to pay a price for his irregular life. He
always intended to take a rest or give up his incessant cigarettes, but
there was so much competition now — new men coming up, with new
reputations for infallibility — and besides, he wasn't used to regu-
larity. He liked to do his work in those great spurts, inspired by
black coffee, that seem so inevitable in show business, but which
took so much out of a man after thirty. He had come to lean, in a
way, on Emmy's fine health and vitality. They were always together,
and if he felt a vague dissatisfaction that he had grown to need her
more than she needed him, there was always the hope that things
would break better for him next month, next season.

Coming home from ballet school one November evening, Emmy
swung her little gray bag, pulled her hat far down over her still
damp hair, and gave herself up to pleasant speculation. For a month
she had been aware of people who had come to the studio especially
to watch her — she was ready to dance. Once she had worked just
as hard and for as long a time on something else — her relations with
Bill — only to reach a climax and misery and despair, but here there
was nothing to fail her except herself. Yet even now she felt a little
rash in thinking : "Now it's come. I'm going to be happy."

She hurried, for something had come up today that she must talk
over with Bill.

Finding him in the living room, she called him to come back while
she dressed. She began to talk without looking around :

"Listen what happened!" Her voice was loud, to compete with
the water running in the tub. "Paul Makova wants me to dance
with him at the Metropolitan this season ; only it's not sure, so it's
a secret — even I'm not supposed to know."

Two Wrongs 301

"That's great."

"The only thing is whether it wouldn't be better for me to make
a debut abroad? Anyhow Donilof says I'm ready to appear. What
do you think?"

"I don't know."

"You don't sound very enthusiastic."

"I've got something on my mind. I'll tell you about it later.
Go on."

"That's all, dear. If you still feel like going to Germany for a
month, like you said, Donilof would arrange a debut for me in Ber-
lin, but I'd rather open here and dance with Paul Makova. Just
imagine — " She broke off, feeling suddenly through the thick skin
of her elation how abstracted he was. "Tell me what you've got on
your mind."

"I went to Doctor Kearns this afternoon."

"What did he say?" Her mind was still singing with her own hap-
piness. Bill's intermittent attacks of hypochondria had long ceased
to worry her.

"I told him about that blood this morning, and he said what he
said last year — it was probably a little broken vein in my throat.
But since I'd been coughing and was worried, perhaps it was safer
to take an X-ray and clear the matter up. Well, we cleared it up all
right. My left lung is practically gone."

"Bill!"

"Luckily there are no spots on the other."

She waited, horribly afraid.

"It's come at a bad time for me," he went on steadily, "but it's
got to be faced. He thinks I ought to go to the Adirondacks or to
Denver for the winter, and his idea is Denver. That way it'll prob-
ably clear up in five or six months."

"Of course we'll have to — " she stopped suddenly.

"I wouldn't expect you to go — especially if you have this oppor-
tunity."

"Of course I'll go," she said quickly. "Your health comes first.
We've always gone everywhere together."

"Oh, no."

"Why, of course." She made her voice strong and decisive. "We've
always been together. I couldn't stay here without you. When do
you have to go?"

"As soon as possible. I went in to see Brancusi to find out if he
wanted to take over the Richmond piece, but he didn't seem enthusi-
astic." His face hardened. "Of course there won't be anything else
for the present, but I'll have enough, with what's owing — "

"Oh, if I was only making some money ! " Emmy cried. "You work

3O2 Two Wrongs

so hard and here I've been spending two hundred dollars a week for
just my dancing lessons alone — more than 111 be able to earn for
years."

"Of course in six months I'll be as well as ever — he says."

"Sure, dearest; we'll get you well. We'll start as soon as we
can."

She put an arm around him and kissed his cheek.

"I'm just an old parasite," she said. "I should have known my
darling wasn't well,"

He reached automatically for a cigarette, and then stopped.

"I forgot — I've got to start cutting down smoking." He rose to the
occasion suddenly: "No, baby, I've decided to go alone. You'd go
crazy with boredom out there, and I'd just be thinking I was keeping
you away from your dancing."

"Don't think about that. The thing is to get you well."

They discussed the matter hour after hour for the next week, each
of them saying everything except the truth — that he wanted her to
go with him and that she wanted passionately to stay in New York.
She talked it over guardedly with Donilof, her ballet master, and
found that he thought any postponement would be a terrible mistake.
Seeing other girls in the ballet school making plans for the winter,
she wanted to die rather than go, and Bill saw all the involuntary
indications of her misery. For a while they talked of compromising
on the Adirondacks, whither she would commute by aeroplane for
the week-ends, but he was running a little fever now and he was
definitely ordered West.

Bill settled it all one gloomy Sunday night, with that rough,
generous justice that had first made her admire him, that made him
rather tragic in his adversity, as he had always been bearable in his
overweening success :

"It's just up to me, baby. I got into this mess because I didn't have
any self-control — you seem to have all of that in this family — and
now it's only me that can get me out. You've worked hard at your
stuff for three years and you deserve your chance — and if you came
out there now you'd have it on me the rest of my life." He grinned.
"And I couldn't stand that. Besides, it wouldn't be good for the
kid."

Eventually she gave in, ashamed of herself, miserable — and glad.
For the world of her work, where she existed without Bill, was big-
ger to her now than the world in which they existed together. There
was more room to be glad in one than to be sorry in the other.

Two days later, with his ticket bought for that afternoon at five,
they passed the last hours together, talking of everything hopeful.
She protested still, and sincerely; had he weakened for a moment

Two Wrongs 303

she would have gone. But the shock had done something to him,
and he showed more character under it than he had for years. Per-
haps it would be good for him to work it out alone.

"In the spring!" they said.

Then in the station with little Billy, and Bill saying: "I hate these
grave-side partings. You leave me here. I've got to make a phone
call from the train before it goes."

They had never spent more than a night apart in six years, save
when Emmy was in the hospital ; save for the time in England they
had a good record of faithfulness and of tenderness toward each
other, even though she had been alarmed and often unhappy at this
insecure bravado from the first. After he went through the gate alone,
Emmy was glad he had a phone call to make and tried to picture
him making it.

She was a good woman; she had loved him with all her heart.
When she went out into Thirty-third Street, it was just as dead as
dead for a while, and the apartment he paid for would be empty of
him, and she was here, about to do something that would make her
happy.

She stopped after a few blocks, thinking : "Why, this is terrible —
what I'm doing! I'm letting him down like the worst person I ever
heard of. I'm leaving him flat and going off to dinner with Donilof
and Paul Makova, whom I like for being beautiful and for having
the same color eyes and hair. Bill's on the train alone."

She swung little Billy around suddenly as if to go back to the
station. She could see him sitting in the train, with his face so pale
and tired, and no Emmy.

"I can't let him down," she cried to herself as wave after wave of
sentiment washed over her. But only sentiment — hadn't he let her
down — hadn't he done what he wanted in London?

"Oh, poor Bill!"

She stood irresolute, realizing for one last honest moment how
quickly she would forget this and find excuses for what she was
doing. She had to think hard of London, and her conscience cleared.
But with Bill all alone in the train it seemed terrible to think that
way. Even now she could turn and go back to the station and tell
him that she was coming, but still she waited, with life very strong
in her, fighting for her. The sidewalk was narrow where she stood ;
presently a great wave of people, pouring out of the theatre, came
flooding along it, and she and little Billy were swept along with the
crowd.

In the train, Bill telephoned up to the last minute, postponed
going back to his stateroom, because he knew it was almost certain
that he would not find her there. After the train started he went back

304 Two Wrongs

and, of course, there was nothing but his bags in the rack and some
magazines on the seat.

He knew then that he had lost her. He saw the set-up without
any illusions — this Paul Makova, and months of proximity, and lone-
liness— afterward nothing would ever be the same. When he had
thought about it all a long time, reading Variety and Zit's in be-
tween, it began to seem, each time he came back to it, as if Emmy
somehow were dead.

"She was a fine girl — one of the best. She had character." He
realized perfectly that he had brought all this on himself and that
there was some law of compensation involved. He saw, too, that by
going away he had again become as good as she was; it was all
evened up at last.

He felt beyond everything, even beyond his grief, an almost com-
fortable sensation of being in the hands of something bigger than
himself; and grown a little tired and unconfident — two qualities he
could never for a moment tolerate — it did not seem so terrible if he
were going West for a definite finish. He was sure that Emmy would
come at the end, no matter what she was doing or how good an en-
gagement she had.
1930 Taps at Reveillf

Ill

Retrospective: Basil and Josephine

EDITOR'S NOTE

WHEN I said in the Introduction that Fitzgerald's stories, taken
together, formed a sort of autobiography, I did not mean to suggest
that they could be followed as a guide to the events of his life. They
changed or disguised the events, as stories always do, but the best of
them served as a faithful record of his emotions. In the end it was his
life, as lived, that became the most impressive of his fictional cre-
ations. If we have some knowledge of the life it gives a new dimen-
sion to the stories, and these in turn help us to understand the life
by telling us how Fitzgerald felt in each new situation.

That is the rule, but the Basil stories are an exception. Written in
1928, they tell us nothing about Fitzgerald's emotions at the time,
except that he was unhappy about himself and in a mood for retro-
spection. He relived his boyhood in the stories and made little effort
to disguise the fact that he was writing autobiography. Almost every
incident happened in life and almost every character can be identified.
Basil Duke Lee was of course Fitzgerald himself ; his friends Riply
Buckner, Bill Kempf and Hubert Blair were, in life and respectively,
Cecil Reid, Paul Ballion and Reuben Warner. The Scandal Detec-
tives of the story really existed and their Book of Scandal has been
preserved, in the shape of a "Thoughtbook" that Fitzgerald kept
when he was fourteen ; most of his thoughts were about girls. St. Regis
School, where Basil was "The Freshest Boy," was of course the New-
man School; during his first year at Newman, Fitzgerald was just
as miserable as his hero. "The Captured Shadow" was the name of
a play that he wrote and directed for the Elizabethan Club in St. Paul
before his sixteenth birthday. It was a success, as in the story.

There were nine Basil stories in all; one has never been pub-
lished and the other eight appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.
Maxwell Perkins wanted to publish them as a book, but Fitzgerald
hesitated — partly because he feared they were too much like the

307

308 Retrospective: Basil and Josephine

Penrod stories that Booth Tarkington had written as he emerged
from a period of heavy drinking. Actually the Penrod stories were
of another generation and they were observed, not felt from within,
but that didn't comfort Fitzgerald. He said in his notebook: "Tark-
ington. I have a horror of going into a personal debauch and coming
out of it devitalized with no interest except an acute observation of
the behavior of colored people, children and dogs." At last Perkins
persuaded him to revise five of the stories (not including Perkins'
favorite, "A Night at the Fair") for republication in Taps at Reveille.
I have included three of the revised stories in the present group. "The
Captured Shadow" is by far the best, for its self-portrait of a writer
at the begining of his career, but "The Freshest Boy" is a minor
classic of prep-school life and "The Scandal Detectives" contains a
fine picture of the children gathering in the Whartons7 yard "for that
soft and romantic time before supper."

The Josephine stories — five of them, published in 1930 and 1931 —
were also retrospective, but in a different fashion, since Fitzgerald
was trying to think his way back into the mind of a girl with whom
he was desperately in love during his years at Princeton. She was also
Isabelle, in This Side of Paradise, and suggested the heroine of
"Winter Dreams." Long afterwards she said of the stories, in a letter
to Arthur Mizener, "I was too thoughtless in those days and too much
in love with love to think of consequences. These things he has em-
phasized— and overemphasized in the Josephine stories, but it is
only fair to say that I asked for some of them." When she paid a
short visit to Hollywood in 1937 Fitzgerald had lunch with her and
was almost ready to fall in love all over again.

At one time he considered making a book out of the stories, called
My Girl Josephine, but most of them were too loosely constructed to
be his best work. Three were reprinted in Taps at Reveille. "A
Woman with a Past," included here, is better than the others for its
insights into the dreams of a boarding-school girl and its picture of
her first big dance at New Haven.

THE SCANDAL DETECTIVES

IT WAS a hot afternoon in May and Mrs. Buckner thought that a
pitcher of fruit lemonade might prevent the boys from filling up on
ice cream at the drug store. She belonged to that generation, since
retired, upon whom the great revolution in American family life
was to be visited ; but at that time she believed that her children's
relation to her was much as hers had been to her parents, for this
was more than twenty years ago.

Some generations are close to those that succeed them ; between
others the gap is infinite and unbridgeable. Mrs. Buckner — a woman
of character, a member of Society in a large Middle- Western city —
carrying a pitcher of fruit lemonade through her own spacious back
yard, was progressing across a hundred years. Her own thoughts
would have been comprehensible to her great-grandmother; what
was happening in a room above the stable would have been entirely
unintelligible to them both. In what had once served as the coach-
man's sleeping apartment, her son and a friend were not behaving
in a normal manner, but were, so to speak, experimenting in a void.
They were making the first tentative combinations of the ideas and
materials they found ready at their hand — ideas destined to become,
in future years, first articulate, then startling and finally common-
place. At the moment when she called up to them they were sitting
with disarming quiet upon the still unhatched eggs of the mid-
twentieth century.

Riply Buckner descended the ladder and took the lemonade. Basil
Duke Lee looked abstractedly down at the transaction and said,
"Thank you very much, Mrs. Buckner."

"Are you sure it isn't too hot up there?"

"No, Mrs. Buckner. It's fine."

It was stifling ; but they were scarcely conscious of the heat, and
they drank two tall glasses each of the lemonade without knowing
that they were thirsty. Concealed beneath a sawed-out trapdoor
from which they presently took it was a composition book bound in
imitation red leather which currently absorbed much of their atten-

309

310 The Scandal Detectives

tion. On its first page was inscribed, if you penetrated the secret of
the lemon-juice ink: "THE BOOK OF SCANDAL, written by Riply
Buckner, Jr., and Basil D. Lee, Scandal Detectives."

In this book they had set down such deviations from rectitude on
the part of their fellow citizens as had reached their ears. Some of
these false steps were those of grizzled men, stories that had become
traditions in the city and were embalmed in the composition book by
virtue of indiscreet exhumations at family dinner tables. Others were
the more exciting sins, confirmed or merely rumored, of boys and
girls their own age. Some of the entries would have been read by
adults with bewilderment, others might have inspired wrath, and
there were three or four contemporary reports that would have pros-
trated the parents of the involved children with horror and despair.

One of the mildest items, a matter they had hesitated about setting
down, though it had shocked them only last year, was: "Elwood
Learning has been to the Burlesque Show three or four times at the
Star."

Another, and perhaps their favorite, because of its uniqueness, set
forth that "H. P. Cramner committed some theft in the East he
could be imprisoned for and had to come here" — H. P. Cramner
being now one of the oldest and "most substantial" citizens of the
city.

The single defect in the book was that it could only be enjoyed
with the aid of the imagination, for the invisible ink must keep its
secrets until that day when, the pages being held close to the fire,
the items would appear. Close inspection was necessary to determine
which pages had been used — already a rather grave charge against a
certain couple had been superimposed upon the dismal facts that
Mrs. R. B. Gary had consumption and that her son, Walter Gary,
had been expelled from Pawling School. The purpose of the work as
a whole was not blackmail. It was treasured against the time when its
protagonists should ado something" to Basil and Riply. Its possession
gave them a sense of power. Basil, for instance, had never seen
Mr. H. P. Cramner make a single threatening gesture in Basil's direc-
tion, but let him even hint that he was going to do something to
Basil and there preserved against him was the record of his past.

It is only fair to say that at this point the book passes entirely out
of this story. Years later a janitor discovered it beneath the trap-
door, and finding it apparently blank, gave it to his little girl ; so the
misdeeds of Elwood Learning and H. P. Cramner were definitely
entombed at last beneath a fair copy of Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address.

The book was Basil's idea. He was more the imaginative and in
most ways the stronger of the two. He was a shining-eyed, brown-

The Scandal Detectives 311

haired boy of fourteen, rather small as yet, and bright and lazy at
school. His favorite character in fiction was Ars£ne Lupin, the gentle-
man burglar, a romantic phenomenon lately imported from Europe
and much admired in the first bored decades of the century.

Riply Buckner, also in short pants, contributed to the partnership
a breathless practicality. His mind waited upon Basil's imagination
like a hair trigger and no scheme was too fantastic for his immediate
"Let's do it ! " Since the school's third baseball team, on which they
had been pitcher and catcher, decomposed after an unfortunate April
season, they had spent their afternoons struggling to evolve a way
of life which should measure up to the mysterious energies ferment-
ing inside them. In the cache beneath the trapdoor were some
"slouch" hats and bandanna handkerchiefs, some loaded dice, half of
a pair of handcuffs, a rope ladder of a tenuous crochet persuasion for
rear-window escapes into the alley, and a make-up box containing
two old theatrical wigs and crepe hair of various colors — all to be
used when they decided what illegal enterprises to undertake.

Their lemonades finished, they lit Home Runs and held a desultory
conversation which touched on crime, professional baseball, sex and
the local stock company. This broke off at the sound of footsteps and
familiar voices in the adjoining alley.

From the window, they investigated. The voices belonged to Mar-
garet Torrence, Imogene Bissel and Connie Davies, who were cutting
through the alley from Imogene's back yard to Connie's at the end
of the block. The young ladies were thirteen, twelve and thirteen
years old respectively, and they considered themselves alone, for in
time to their march they were rendering a mildly daring parody in
a sort of whispering giggle and coming out strongly on the finale:
"Oh, my dar-ling Clemen-tine."

Basil and Riply leaned together from the window, then remember-
ing their undershirts sank down behind the sill.

"We heard you ! " they cried together.

The girls stopped and laughed. Margaret Torrence chewed exag-
geratedly to indicate gum, and gum with a purpose. Basil imme-
diately understood.

"Whereabouts?" he demanded.

"Over at Imogene's house."

They had been at Mrs. Bissel 's cigarettes. The implied recklessness
of their mood interested and excited the two boys and they pro-
longed the conversation. Connie Davies had been Riply's girl during
dancing-school term ; Margaret Torrence had played a part in Basil's
recent past; Imogene Bissel was just back from a year in Europe.
During the last month neither Basil nor Riply had thought about
girls, and, thus refreshed, they became conscious that the centre of

312 The Scandal Detectives

the world had shifted suddenly from the secret room to the little
group outside.

"Come on up," they suggested.

"Come on out. Come on down to the Whartons' yard."

"All right."

Barely remembering to put away the Scandal Book and the box of
disguises, the two boys hurried out, mounted their bicycles and rode
up the alley.

The Whar tons' own children had long grown up, but their yard
was still one of those predestined places where young people gather
in the afternoon. It had many advantages. It was large, open to other
yards on both sides, and it could be entered upon skates or bicycles
from the street. It contained an old seesaw, a swing and a pair of
flying rings; but it had been a rendezvous before these were put
up, for it had a child's quality — the thing that makes young people
huddle inextricably on uncomfortable steps and desert the houses of
their friends to herd on the obscure premises of "people nobody
knows." The Whartons' yard had long been a happy compromise;
there were deep shadows there all day long and ever something vague
in bloom, and patient dogs around, and brown spots worn bare by
countless circling wheels and dragging feet. In sordid poverty, below
the bluff two hundred feet away, lived the "micks" — they had merely
inherited the name, for they were now largely of Scandinavian
descent — and when other amusements palled, a few cries were
enough to bring a gang of them swarming up the hill, to be faced if
numbers promised well, to be fled from into convenient houses if
things went the other way.

It was five o'clock and there was a small crowd gathered there for
that soft and romantic time before supper — a time surpassed only by
the interim of summer dusk thereafter. Basil and Riply rode their
bicycles around abstractedly, in and out of trees, resting now and
then with a hand on someone's shoulder, shading their eyes from the
glow of the late sun that, like youth itself, is too strong to face
directly, but must be kept down to an undertone until it dies away.

Basil rode over to Imogene Bissel and balanced idly on his wheel
before her. Something in his face then must have attracted her, for
she looked up at him, looked at him really, and slowly smiled. She
was to be a beauty and belle of many proms in a few years. Now her
large brown eyes and large beautifully shaped mouth and the high
flush over her thin cheek bones made her face gnome-like and
offended those who wanted a child to look like a child. For a mo-
ment Basil was granted an insight into the future ; the spell of her
vitality crept over him suddenly. For the first time in his life he
realized a girl completely as something opposite and complementary

The Scandal Detectives 313

to him, and he was subject to a warm chill of mingled pleasure and
pain. It was a definite experience and he was immediately conscious
of it. The summer afternoon became lost in her suddenly — the soft
air, the shadowy hedges and banks of flowers, the orange sunlight,
the laughter and voices, the tinkle of a piano over the way — the odor
left all these things and went into Imogene's face as she sat there
looking up at him with a smile.

For a moment it was too much for him. He let it go, incapable of
exploiting it until he had digested it alone. He rode around fast in
a circle on his bicycle, passing near Imogene without looking at her.
When he came back after a while and asked if he could walk home
with her, she had forgotten the moment, if it had ever existed for
her, and was almost surprised. With Basil wheeling his bicycle
beside her, they started down the street.

"Can you come out tonight?" he asked eagerly. "There'll prob-
ably be a bunch in the Whartons' yard."

"I'll ask mother."

"I'll telephone you. I don't want to go unless you'll be there."

"Why?" She smiled at him again, encouraging him.

"Because I don't want to."

"But why don't you want to?"

"Listen," he said quickly. "What boys do you like better than
me?"

"Nobody. I like you and Hubert Blair best."

Basil felt no jealousy at the coupling of this name with his. There
was nothing to do about Hubert Blair but accept him philosophically,
as other boys did when dissecting the hearts of other girls.

"I like you better than anybody," he said deliriously.

The weight of the pink dappled sky above him was not endurable.
He was plunging along through air of ineffable loveliness while warm
freshets sprang up in his blood and he turned them, and with them
his whole life, like a stream toward this girl.

They reached the carriage door at the side of her house.

"Can't you come in, Basil?"

"No." He saw immediately that that was a mistake, but it was
said now. The intangible present had eluded him. Still he lingered,
"Do you want my school ring?"

"Yes, if you want to give it to me."

"I'll give it to you tonight." His voice shook slightly as he added,

"That is, I'll trade."

"What for?"

"Something."

"What ?" Her color spread ; she knew.

"You know. Will you trade?"

314 The Scandal Detectives

Imogene looked around uneasily. In the honey-sweet silence that
had gathered around the porch, Basil held his breath.
"You're awful," she whispered. "Maybe. . „ . Good-by."

It was the best hour of the day now and Basil was terribly happy.
This summer he and his mother and sister were going to the lakes
and next fall he was starting away to school. Then he would go to
Yale and be a great athlete, and after that— if his two dreams had
fitted onto each other chronologically instead of existing independ-
ently side by side — he was due to become a gentleman burglar.
Everything was fine. He had so many alluring things to think about
that it was hard to fall asleep at night.

That he was now crazy about Imogene Bissel was not a distrac-
tion, but another good thing. It had as yet no poignancy, only a bril-
liant and dynamic excitement that was bearing him along toward
the Wharton yard through the May twilight.

He wore his favorite clothes — white duck knickerbockers, pepper-
and-salt Norfolk jacket, a Belmont collar and a gray knitted tie.
With his brown hair wet and shining, he made a handsome little
figure as he turned in upon the familiar but not reenchanted lawn
and joined the voices in the gathering darkness. Three or four girls
who lived in neighboring houses were present, and almost twice as
many boys; and a slightly older group adorning the side veranda
made a warm, remote nucleus against the lamps of the house and
contributed occasional mysterious ripples of laughter to the already
overburdened night.

Moving from shadowy group to group, Basil ascertained that
Imogene was not yet here. Finding Margaret Torrence, he spoke to
her aside, lightly.

"Have you still got that old ring of mine?"

Margaret had been his girl all year at dancing school, signified by
the fact that he had taken her to the cotillion which closed the sea-
son. The affair had languished toward the end; none the less, his
question was undiplomatic.

"IVe got it somewhere," Margaret replied carelessly. "Why? Do
you want it back?"

"Sort of."

"All right. I never did want it. It was you that made me take it,
Basil. Ill give it back to you tomorrow."

"You couldn't give it to me tonight, could you?" His heart leaped
as he saw a small figure come in at the rear gate. "I sort of want to
get it tonight."

The Scandal Detectives 315

"Oh, all right, Basil."

She ran across the street to her house and Basil followed. Mr. and
Mrs. Torrence were on the porch, and while Margaret went upstairs
for the ring he overcame his excitement and impatience and an-
swered those questions as to the health of his parents which are so
meaningless to the young. Then a sudden stiffening came over him,
his voice faded off and his glazed eyes fixed upon a scene that was
materializing over the way.

From the shadows far up the street, a swift, almost flying figure
emerged and floated into the patch of lamplight in front of the
Whartons' house. The figure wove here and there in a series of
geometric patterns, now off with a flash of sparks at the impact of
skates and pavement, now gliding miraculously backward, describing
a fantastic curve, with one foot lifted gracefully in the air, until the
young people moved forward in groups out of the darkness and
crowded to the pavement to watch. Basil gave a quiet little groan
as he realized that of all possible nights, Hubert Blair had chosen
this one to arrive.

"You say you're going to the lakes this summer, Basil. Have you
taken a cottage?"

Basil became aware after a moment that Mr. Torrence was mak-
ing this remark for the third time.

"Oh, yes, sir," he answered — "I mean, no. We're staying at the
club."

"Won't that be lovely?" said Mrs. Torrence.

Across the street, he saw Imogene standing under the lamp-post
and in front of her Hubert Blair, his jaunty cap on the side of his
head, maneuvering in a small circle. Basil winced as he heard his
chuckling laugh. He did not perceive Margaret until she was beside
him, pressing his ring into his hand like a bad penny. He muttered
a strained hollow good-by to her parents, and, weak with apprehen-
sion, followed her back across the street.

Hanging back in a shadow, he fixed his eyes not on Imogene but
on Hubert Blair. There was undoubtedly something rare about
Hubert. In the eyes of children less than fifteen, the shape of the
nose is the distinguishing mark of beauty. Parents may call attention
to lovely eyes, shining hair or gorgeous coloring, but the nose and its
juxtaposition on the face is what the adolescent sees. Upon the lithe,
stylish, athletic torso of Hubert Blair was set a conventional chubby
face, and upon this face was chiseled the piquant, retrouss6 nose of
a Harrison Fisher girl.

He was confident ; he had personality, uninhibited by doubts or
moods. He did not go to dancing school — his parents had moved to
the city only a year ago — but already he was a legend. Though most

316 The Scandal Detectives

of the boys disliked him, they did homage to his virtuosic athletic
ability, and for the girls his every movement, his pleasantries, his
very indifference, had a simply immeasurable fascination. Upon sev-
eral previous occasions Basil had discovered this ; now the discourag-
ing comedy began to unfold once more.

Hubert took off his skates, rolled one down his arm and caught it
by the strap before it reached the pavement ; he snatched the ribbon
from Imogene's hair and made off with it, dodging from under her
arms as she pursued him, laughing and fascinated, around the yard.
He cocked one foot behind the other and pretended to lean an elbow
against a tree, missed the tree on purpose and gracefully saved him-
self from falling. The boys watched him noncommittally at first.
Then they, too, broke out into activity, doing stunts and tricks as
fast as they could think of them until those on the porch craned their
recks at the sudden surge of activity in the garden. But Hubert
coolly turned his back on his own success. He took Imogene's hat and
began setting it in various quaint ways upon his head. Imogene and
the other girls were filled with delight.

Unable any longer to endure the nauseous spectacle, Basil went up
to the group and said, "Why, hello, Hube," in as negligent a tone as
he could command.

Hubert answered: "Why, hello, old — old Basil the Boozle," and
set the hat a different way on his head, until Basil himself couldn't
resist an unwilling chortle of laughter.

"Basil the Boozle! Hello, Basil the Boozle !" The cry circled the
garden. Reproachfully he distinguished Riply's voice among the
others.

"Hube the Boob ! " Basil countered quickly ; but his ill humor de-
tracted from the effect though several boys repeated it appreciatively.

Gloom settled upon Basil, and through the heavy dusk the figure
of Imogene began to take on a new, unattainable charm. He was a
romantic boy and already he had endowed her heavily from his
fancy. Now he hated her for her indifference, but he must perversely
linger near in the vain hope of recovering the penny of ecstasy so
wantonly expended this afternoon.

He tried to talk to Margaret with decoy animataion, but Margaret
was not responsive. Already a voice had gone up in the darkness
calling in a child. Panic seized upon him ; the blessed hour of summer
evening was almost over. At a spreading of the group to let pedes-
trians through, he maneuvered Imogene unwillingly aside.

"I've got it," he whispered. "Here it is. Can I take you home?"

She looked at him distractedly. Her hand closed automatically on
the ring.

"What? Oh, I promised Hubert he could take me home." At the

The Scandal Detectives 317

sight of his face she pulled herself from her trance and forced a note
of indignation. "I saw you going off with Margaret Torrence just
as soon as I came into the yard."

"I didn't. I just went to get the ring."

"Yes, you did ! I saw you ! "

Her eyes moved back to Hubert Blair. He had replaced his roller
skates and was making little rhythmic jumps and twirls on his toes,
like a witch doctor throwing a slow hypnosis over an African tribe.
Basil's voice, explaining and arguing, went on, but Imogene moved
away. Helplessly he followed. There were other voices calling in the
darkness now and unwilling responses on all sides.

"All right, mother!"

"I'll be there in a second, mother."

"Mother, can't I please stay out five minutes more ?"

"I've got to go," Imogene cried. "It's almost nine."

Waving her hand and smiling absently at Basil, she started off
down the street. Hubert pranced and stunted at her side, circled
around her and made entrancing little figures ahead.

Only after a minute did Basil realize that another young lady was
addressing him.

"What?" he demanded absently.

"Hubert Blair is the nicest boy in town and you're the most con-
ceited," repeated Margaret Torrence with deep conviction.

He stared at her in pained surprise. Margaret wrinkled her nose
at him and yielded up her person to the now-insistent demands com-
ing from across the street. As Basil gazed stupidly after her and then
watched the forms of Imogene and Hubert disappear around the
corner, there was a low mutter of thunder along the sultry sky and
a moment later a solitary drop plunged through the lamplit leaves
overhead and splattered on the sidewalk at his feet. The day was to
close in rain.

Ill

It came quickly and he was drenched and running before he
reached his house eight blocks away. But the change of weather had
swept over his heart and he leaped up every few steps, swallowing
the rain and crying " Yo-o-o ! " aloud, as if he himself were a part of
the fresh, violent disturbance of the night. Imogene was gone, washed
out like the day's dust on the sidewalk. Her beauty would come back
into his mind in brighter weather, but here in the storm he was alone
with himself. A sense of extraordinary power welled up in him, until
to leave the ground permanently with one of his wild leaps would
not have surprised him. He was a lone wolf, secret and untamed ; a

3i8 The Scandal Detectives

night prowler, demoniac and free. Only when he reached his own
house did his emotion begin to turn, speculatively and almost with-
out passion, against Hubert Blair.

He changed his clothes, and putting on pajamas and dressing-gown
descended to the kitchen, where he happened upon a new chocolate
cake. He ate a fourth of it and drank most of a bottle of milk. His
elation somewhat diminished, he called up Riply Buckner on the
phone.

"I've got a scheme," he said.

"What about?"

"How to do something to H. B. with the S. D."

Riply understood immediately what he meant. Hubert had been
so indiscreet as to fascinate other girls besides Miss Bissell that
evening.

"Well have to take in Bill Kampf," Basil said.

"All right."

"See you at recess tomorrow. . . . Good night!"

Four days later, when Mr. and Mrs. George P. Blair were finish-
ing dinner, Hubert was called to the telephone. Mrs. Blair took ad-
vantage of his absence to speak to her husband of what had been on
her mind all day.

"George, those boys, or whatever they are, came again last
night."

He frowned.

"Did you see them?"

"Hilda did. She almost caught one of them. You see, I told her
about the note they left last Tuesday, the one that said, 'First warn-
ing, S.D.,' so she was ready for them. They rang the back-door bell
this time and she answered it straight from the dishes. If her hands
hadn't been soapy she could have caught one, because she grabbed
him when he handed her a note, but her hands were soapy so he
slipped away."

"What did he look like?"

"She said he might have been a very little man, but she thought he
was a boy in a false face. He dodged like a boy, she said, and she
thought he had short pants on. The note was like the other. It said
'Second warning, S.D.' "

"If youVe got it, I'd like to see it after dinner."

Hubert came back from the phone. "It was Imogene Bissel," he
said. "She wants me to come over to her house. A bunch are going
over there tonight."

The Scandal Detectives 319

"Hubert," asked his father, "do you know any boy with the
initials S.D.?"

"No, sir."

"Have you thought?"

"Yeah, I thought. I knew a boy named Sam Davis, but I haven't
seen him for a year."

"Who was he?"

"Oh, a sort of tough. He was at Number 44 School when I went
there."

"Did he have it in for you ?"

"I don't think so."

"Who do you think could be doing this ? Has anybody got it in for
you that you know about ?

"I don't know, papa ; I don't think so."

"I don't like the looks of this thing," said Mr. Blair thoughtfully.
"Of course it may be only some boys, but it may be — "

He was silent. Later, he studied the note. It was in red ink and
there was a skull and crossbones in the corner, but being printed, it
told him nothing at all.

Meanwhile Hubert kissed his mother, set his cap jauntily on the
side of his head, and passing through the kitchen stepped out on the
back stoop, intending to take the usual short cut along the alley. It
was a bright moonlit night and he paused for a moment on the stoop
to tie his shoe. If he had but known that the telephone call just re-
ceived had been a decoy, that it had not come from Imogene Bissel's
house, had not indeed been a girl's voice at all, and that shadowy
and grotesque forms were skulking in the alley just outside the gate,
he would not have sprung so gracefully and lithely down the steps
with his hands in his pockets or whistled the first bar of the Grizzly
Bear into the apparently friendly night.

His whistle aroused varying emotions in the alley. Basil had given
his daring and successful falsetto imitation over the telephone a little
too soon, and though the Scandal Detectives had hurried, their prepa-
rations were not quite in order. They had become separated. Basil,
got up like a Southern planter of the old persuasion, just outside the
Blairs' gate; Bill Kampf, with a long Balkan mustache attached by
a wire to the lower cartilage of his nose, was approaching in the
shadow of the fence ; but Riply Buckner, in a full rabbinical beard,
was impeded by a length of rope he was trying to coil and was still a
hundred feet away. The rope was an essential part of their plan ; for,
after much cogitation, they had decided what they were going to do
to Hubert Blair. They were going to tie him up, gag him and put
him in his own garbage can.

The idea at first horrified them — it would ruin his suit, it was

320 The Scandal Detectives

awfully dirty and he might smother. In fact the garbage can, symbol
of all that was repulsive, won the day only because it made every
other idea seem tame. They disposed of the objections — his suit
could be cleaned, it was where he ought to be anyhow, and if they
left the lid off he couldn't smother. To be sure of this they had paid
a visit of inspection to the Buckners' garbage can and stared into it,
fascinated, envisaging Hubert among the rinds and eggshells. Then
two of them, at least, resolutely put that part out of their minds and
concentrated upon the luring of him into the alley and the over-
whelming of him there.

Hubert's cheerful whistle caught them off guard and each of the
three stood stock-still, unable to communicate with the others. It
flashed through Basil's mind that if he grabbed Hubert without Riply
at hand to apply the gag as had been arranged, Hubert's cries might
alarm that gigantic cook in the kitchen who had almost taken him
the night before. The thought threw him into a state of indecision.
At that precise moment Hubert opened the gate and came out into
the alley.

The two stood five feet apart, staring at each other, and all at once
Basil made a startling discovery. He discovered he liked Hubert
Blair — liked him as well as any boy he knew. He had absolutely no
wish to lay hands on Hubert Blair and stuff him into a garbage can,
jaunty cap and all. He would have fought to prevent that con-
tingency. As his mind, unstrung by his situation, gave pasture to this
inconvenient thought, he turned and dashed out of the alley and up
the street.

For a moment the apparition had startled Hubert, but when it
turned and made off he was heartened and gave chase. Out-distanced,
he decided after fifty yards to let well enough alone ; and returning
to the alley, started rather precipitously down toward the other end
— and came face to face with another small and hairy stranger.

Bill Kampf, being more simply organized than Basil, had no
scruples of any kind. It had been decided to put Hubert into a
garbage can, and though he had nothing at all against Hubert, the
idea had made a pattern on his brain which he intended to follow.
He was a natural man — that is to say, a hunter — and once a creature
took on the aspect of a quarry, he would pursue it without qualms
until it stopped struggling.

But he had been witness to Basil's inexplicable flight, and suppos-
ing that Hubert's father had appeared and was now directly behind
him, he, too, faced about and made off down the alley. Presently he
met Riply Buckner, who, without waiting to inquire the cause of his
flight, enthusiastically joined him. Again Hubert was surprised into

The Scandal Detectives 321

pursuing a little way. Then, deciding once and for all to let well
enough alone, he returned on a dead run to his house.

Meanwhile Basil had discovered that he was not pursued, and
keeping in the shadows, made his way back to the alley. He was not
frightened — he had simply been incapable of action. The alley was
empty ; neither Bill nor Riply was in sight. He saw Mr. Blair come
to the back gate, open it, look up and down and go back into the
house. He came closer. There was a great chatter in the kitchen —
Hubert's voice, loud and boastful, and Mrs. Blair's frightened, and
the two Swedish domestics contributing bursts of hilarious laughter.
Then through an open window he heard Mr. Blair's voice at the tele-
phone :

"I want to speak to the chief of police. . . . Chief, this is George
P. Blair. . . . Chief, there's a gang of toughs around here who — "

Basil was off like a flash, tearing at his Confederate whiskers as he
ran.

Imogene Bissel, having just turned thirteen, was not accustomed
to having callers at night. She was spending a bored and solitary
evening inspecting the months' bills which were scattered over her
mother's desk, when she heard Hubert Blair and his father admitted
into the front hall.

"I just thought I'd bring him over myself," Mr. Blair was saying
to her mother. "There seems to be a gang of toughs hanging around
our alley tonight."

Mrs. Bissel had not called upon Mrs. Blair and she was consider-
ably taken aback by this unexpected visit. She even entertained the
uncharitable thought that this was a crude overture, undertaken by
Mr. Blair on behalf of his wife.

"Really I" she exclaimed. "Imogene will be delighted to see
Hubert, I'm sure. . . . Imogene!"

"These toughs were evidently lying in wait for Hubert," continued
Mr. Blair. "But he's a pretty spunky boy and he managed to drive
them away. However, I didn't want him to come down here alone."

"Of course not," she agreed. But she was unable to imagine why
Hubert should have come at all. He was a nice enough boy, but
surely Imogene had seen enough of him the last three afternoons. In
fact, Mrs. Bissel was annoyed, and there was a minimum of warmth
in her voice when she asked Mr. Blair to come in.

They were still in the hall, and Mr. Blair was just beginning to
perceive that all was not as it should be, when there was another ring

322 The Scandal Detectives

at the bell. Upon the door being opened, Basil Lee, red-faced and
breathless, stood on the threshold.

"How do you do, Mrs. Bissel? Hello, Imogene!" he cried in an
unnecessarily hearty voice. "Where's the party?"

The salutation might have sounded to a dispassionate observer
somewhat harsh and unnatural, but it fell upon the ears of an al-
ready disconcerted group.

"There isn't any party," said Imogene wonderingly.

"What?" Basil's mouth dropped open in exaggerated horror, his
voice trembled slightly. "You mean to say you didn't call me up and
tell me to come over here to a party?"

"Why, of course not, Basil ! "

Imogene was excited by Hubert's unexpected arrival and it oc-
curred to her that Basil had invented this excuse to spoil it. Alone of
those present, she was close to the truth ; but she underestimated the
urgency of Basil's motive, which was not jealousy but mortal fear.

"You called me up, didn't you, Imogene?" demanded Hubert con-
fidently.

"Why, no, Hubert ! I didn't call up anybody."

Amid a chorus of bewildered protestations, there was another ring
at the doorbell and the pregnant night yielded up Riply Buckner,
Jr., and William S. Kampf. Like Basil, they were somewhat rumpled
and breathless, and they no less rudely and peremptorily demanded
the whereabouts of the party, insisting with curious vehemence that
Imogene had just now invited them over the phone.

Hubert laughed, the others began to laugh and the tensity re-
laxed. Imogene, because she believed Hubert, now began to believe
them all. Unable to restrain himself any longer in the presence of
this unhoped-for audience, Hubert burst out with his amazing ad-
venture.

"I guess there's a gang laying for us all!" he exclaimed. "There
were some guys laying for me in our alley when I went out. There
was a big fellow with gray whiskers, but when he saw me he ran
away. Then I went along the alley and there was a bunch more, sort
of foreigners or something, and I started after'm and they ran. I
tried to catchem, but I guess they were good and scared, because
they ran too fast for me"

So interested were Hubert and his father in the story that they
failed to perceive that three of his listeners were growing purple in
the face or to mark the uproarious laughter that greeted Mrs. Bissel's
polite proposal that they have a party, after all.

"Tell about the warnings, Hubert," prompted Mr. Blair. "You see,
Hubert had received these warnings. Did you boys get any warn-
ings?"

The Scandal Detectives 323

"I did," said Basil suddenly. "I got a sort of warning on a piece of
paper about a week ago."

For a moment, as Mr. Blair's worried eye fell upon Basil, a strong
sense not precisely of suspicion but rather of obscure misgiving
passed over him. Possibly that odd aspect of Basil's eyebrows, where
wisps of crepe hair still lingered, connected itself in his subconscious
mind with what was bizarre in the events of the evening. He shook
his head somewhat puzzled. Then his thoughts glided back restfully
to Hubert's courage and presence of mind.

Hubert, meanwhile, having exhausted his facts, was making tenta-
tive leaps into the realms of imagination.

"I said, 'So, you're the guy that's been sending these warnings/ and
he swung his left at me, and I dodged and swung my right back at
him. I guess I must have landed, because he gave a yell and ran.
Gosh, he could run ! You'd ought to of seen him, Bill — he could run
as fast as you."

"Was he big?" asked Basil, blowing his nose noisily.

"Sure ! About as big as father."

"Were the other ones big too?"

"Sure! They were pretty big. I didn't wait to see. I just yelled,
'You get out of here, you bunch of toughs, or I'll show you!' They
started to sort of fight, but I swung my right at one of them and they
didn't wait for any more."

"Hubert says he thinks they were Italians," interrupted Mr. Blair.
"Didn't you, Hubert?"

"They were sort of funny-looking," Hubert said. "One fellow
looked like an Italian."

Mrs. Bissel led the way to the dining room, where she had caused
a cake and grape juice supper to be spread. Imogene took a chair by
Hubert's side.

"Now tell me all about it, Hubert," she said, attentively folding
her hands.

Hubert ran over the adventure once more. A knife now made its
appearance in the belt of one conspirator; Hubert's parleys with
them lengthened and grew in volume and virulence. He had told
them just what they might expect if they fooled with him. They had
started to draw knives, but had thought better of it and taken to
flight.

In the middle of this recital there was a curious snorting sound
from across the table, but when Imogene looked ovef, Basil was
spreading jelly on a piece of coffee cake and his eyes were brightly
innocent. A minute later, however, the sound was repeated, and this
time she intercepted a specifically malicious expression upon his
face.

324 The Scandal Detectives

"I wonder what you'd have done, Basil," she said cuttingly. "Ill
bet you'd be running yet I "

Basil put the piece of coffee cake in his mouth and immediately
choked on it — an accident which Bill Kampf and Riply Buckner
found hilariously amusing. Their amusement at various casual inci-
dents at table seemed to increase as Hubert's story continued. The
alley now swarmed with malefactors, and as Hubert struggled on
against overwhelming odds, Imogene found herself growing restless
— without in the least realizing that the tale was boring her. On the
contrary, each time Hubert recollected new incidents and began
again, she looked spitefully over at Basil, and her dislike for him
grew.

When they moved into the library, Imogene went to the piano,
where she sat alone while the boys gathered around Hubert on the
couch. To her chagrin, they seemed quite content to listen indefi-
nitely. Odd little noises squeaked out of them from time to time, but
whenever the narrative slackened they would beg for more.

"Go on, Hubert. Which one did you say could run as fast as Bill
Kampf?"

She was glad when, after half an hour, they all got up to go.

"It's a strange affair from beginning to end," Mr. Blair was say-
ing. "I don't like it. I'm going to have a detective look into the
matter tomorrow. What did they want of Hubert? What were they
going to do to him?"

No one offered a suggestion. Even Hubert was silent, contem-
plating his possible fate with certain respectful awe. During breaks
in his narration the talk had turned to such collateral matters as
murders and ghosts, and all the boys had talked themselves into a
state of considerable panic. In fact each had come to believe, in
varying degrees, that a band of kidnappers infested the vicinity.

"I don't like it," repeated Mr. Blair. aln fact I'm going to see all
of you boys to your own homes."

Basil greeted this offer with relief. The evening had been a mad
success, but furies once aroused sometimes get out of hand. He did
not feel like walking the streets alone tonight.

In the hall, Imogene, taking advantage of her mother's somewhat
fatigued farewell to Mr. Blair, beckoned Hubert back into the
library. Instantly attuned to adversity, Basil listened. There was a
whisper and a short scuffle, followed by an indiscreet but unmistak-
able sound. With the corners of his mouth falling, Basil went out the
door. He had stacked the cards dexterously, but Life had played
a trump from its sleeve at the last.

A moment later they all started off, clinging together in a group,
turning corners with cautious glances behind and ahead. What Basil

The Scandal Detectives 325

and Riply and Bill expected to see as they peered warily into the
sinister mouths of alleys and around great dark trees and behind
concealing fences they did not know — in all probability the same
hairy and grotesque desperadoes who had lain in wait for Hubert
Blair that night.

A week later Basil and Riply heard that Hubert and his mother
had gone to the seashore for the summer. Basil was sorry. He had
wanted to learn from Hubert some of the graceful mannerisms that
his contemporaries found so dazzling and that might come in so
handy next fall when he went away to school. In tribute to Hubert's
passing, he practised leaning against a tree and missing it and rolling
a skate down his arm, and he wore his cap in Hubert's manner, set
jauntily on the side of his head.

This was only for a while. He perceived eventually that though
boys and girls would always listen to him while he talked, their
mouths literally moving in response to his, they would never look at
him as they had looked at Hubert. So he abandoned the loud
chuckle that so annoyed his mother and set his cap straight upon his
head once more.

But the change in him went deeper than that. He was no longer
sure that he wanted to be a gentleman burglar, though he still read
of their exploits with breathless admiration. Outside of Hubert's
gate, he had for a moment felt morally alone ; and he realized that
whatever combinations he might make of the materials of life would
have to be safely within the law. And after another week he found
that he no longer grieved over losing Imogene. Meeting her, he saw
only the familiar little girl he had always known. The ecstatic
moment of that afternoon had been a premature birth, an emotion
left over from an already fleeting spring.

He did not know that he had frightened Mrs. Blair out of town
and that because of him a special policeman walked a placid beat
for many a night. All he knew was the vague and restless yearn-
ings of three long spring months were somehow satisfied. They
reached combustion in that last week — flared up, exploded and
burned out. His face was turned without regret toward the bound-
less possibilities of summer.
1928 Taps at Reveille

THE FRESHEST BOY

IT WAS a hidden Broadway restaurant in the dead of the night,
and a brilliant and mysterious group of society people, diplomats
and members of the underworld were there. A few minutes ago the
sparkling wine had been flowing and a girl had been dancing gaily
upon a table, but now the whole crowd were hushed and breathless.
All eyes were fixed upon the masked but well-groomed man in
the dress suit and opera hat who stood nonchalantly in the
door.

"Don't move, please," he said, in a well-bred, cultivated voice that
had, nevertheless, a ring of steel in it. "This thing in my hand might
—go off."

His glance roved from table to table — fell upon the malignant
man higher up with his pale saturnine face, upon Heatherly, the
suave secret agent from a foreign power, then rested a little longer,
a little more softly perhaps, upon the table where the girl with dark
hair and dark tragic eyes sat alone.

"Now that my purpose is accomplished, it might interest you
to know who I am." There was a gleam of expectation in every eye.
The breast of the dark-eyed girl heaved faintly and a tiny burst of
subtle French perfume rose into the air. "I am none other than that
elusive gentleman, Basil Lee, better known as the Shadow."

Taking off his well-fitting opera hat, he bowed ironically from
the waist. Then, like a flash, he turned and was gone into the
night.

"You get up to New York only once a month," Lewis Crum was
saying, "and then you have to take a master along."

Slowly, Basil Lee's glazed eyes returned from the barns and bill-
boards of the Indiana countryside to the interior of the Broadway
Limited. The hypnosis of the swift telegraph poles faded and Lewis
Crum's stolid face took shape against the white slip-cover of the
opposite bench.

"I'd just duck the master when I got to New York," said Basil.

"Yes, you would!"

326

The Freshest Boy 327

"I bet I would."

"You try it and you'll see."

"What do you mean saying 111 see, all the time, Lewis? What'll
I see?"

His very bright dark-blue eyes were at this moment fixed upon
his companion with boredom and impatience. The two had nothing
in common except their age, which was fifteen, and the lifelong
friendship of their fathers — which is less than nothing. Also they
were bound from the same Middle- Western city for Basil's first and
Lewis' second year at the same Eastern school.

But, contrary to all the best traditions, Lewis the veteran was mis-
erable and Basil the neophyte was happy. Lewis hated school. He
had grown entirely dependent on the stimulus of a hearty vital
mother, and as he felt her slipping farther and farther away from
him, he plunged deeper into misery and homesickness. Basil, on the
other hand, had lived with such intensity on so many stories of
boarding-school life that, far from being homesick, he had a glad
feeling of recognition and familiarity. Indeed, it was with some sense
of doing the appropriate thing, having the traditional rough-house,
that he had thrown Lewis7 comb off the train at Milwaukee last night
for no reason at all.

To Lewis, Basil's ignorant enthusiasm was distasteful — his in-
stinctive attempt to dampen it had contributed to the mutual
irritation.

'Til tell you what you'll see," he said ominously. "They'll catch
you smoking and put you on bounds."

"No, they won't, because I won't be smoking. I'll be in training
for football."

"Football! Yeah! Football!"

"Honestly, Lewis, you don't like anything, do you?"

"I don't like football. I don't like to go out and get a crack in the
eye." Lewis spoke aggressively, for his mother had canonized all his
timidities as common sense. Basil's answer, made with what he
considered kindly intent, was the sort of remark that creates life-
long enmities.

"You'd probably be a lot more popular in school if you played
football," he suggested patronizingly.

Lewis did not consider himself unpopular. He did not think of
it in that way at all. He was astounded.

"You wait ! " he cried furiously. "They'll take all that freshness
out of you."

"Clam yourself," said Basil, coolly plucking at the creases of his
first long trousers. "Just clam yourself."

328 The Freshest Boy

"I guess everybody knows you were the freshest boy at the
Country Day!"

"Clam yourself," repeated Basil, but with less assurance. "Kindly
clam yourself."

"I guess I know what they had in the school paper about you — "

Basil's own coolness was no longer perceptible.

"If you don't clam yourself," he said darkly, "I'm going to throw
your brushes off the train too."

The enormity of this threat was effective. Lewis sank back in his
seat, snorting and muttering, but undoubtedly calmer. His reference
had been to one of the most shameful passages in his companion's
life. In a periodical issued by the boys of Basil's late school there
had appeared, under the heading Personals :

"If someone will please poison young Basil, or find some other
means to stop his mouth, the school at large and myself will be
much obliged."

The two boys sat there fuming wordlessly at each other. Then,
resolutely, Basil tried to re-inter this unfortunate souvenir of the
past. All that was behind him now. Perhaps he had been a little
fresh, but he was making a new start. After a moment, the memory
passed and with it the train and Lewis' dismal presence — the breath
of the East came sweeping over him again with a vast nostalgia. A
voice called him out of the fabled world ; a man stood beside him
with a hand on his sweater-clad shoulder.

"Lee!"

"Yes, sir."

"It all depends on you now. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"All right," the coach said, "go in and win."

Basil tore the sweater from his stripling form and dashed out on
the field. There were two minutes to play and the score was 3 to o
for the enemy, but at the sight of young Lee, kept out of the game
all year by a malicious plan of Dan Haskins, the school bully, and
Weasel Weems, his toady, a thrill of hope went over the St. Regis
stand.

"33-12-16-22!" barked Midget Brown, the diminutive little
quarterback.

It was his signal

"Oh, gosh ! " Basil spoke aloud, forgetting the late unpleasantness.
"I wish we'd get there before tomorrow."

The Freshest Boy 329

ST. REGIS SCHOOL, EASTCHESTER,

November 18, 19

"DEAR MOTHER : There is not much to say today, but I thought I
would write you about my allowance. All the boys have a bigger
allowance than me, because there are a lot of little things I have to
get, such as shoe laces, etc. School is still very nice and am having a
fine time, but football is over and there is not much to do. I am going
to New York this week to see a show. I do not know yet what it will
be, but probably the Quacker Girl or little boy Blue as they are
both very good. Dr. Bacon is very nice and there's a good phycission
in the village. No more now as I have to study Algebra.

"Your Affectionate Son,

"BASIL D. LEE."

As he put the letter in its envelope, a wizened little boy came into
the deserted study hall where he sat and stood staring at him.

"Hello," said Basil, frowning.

"I been looking for you," said the little boy, slowly and judicially.
"I looked all over — up in your room and out in the gym, and they
said you probably might of sneaked off in here."

"What do you want?" Basil demanded.

"Hold your horses, Bossy."

Basil jumped to his feet. The little boy retreated a step.

"Go on, hit me!" he chirped nervously. "Go on, hit me, cause I'm
just half your size — Bossy."

Basil winced. "You call me that again and I'll spank you."

"No, you won't spank me. Brick Wales said if you ever touched
any of us — "

"But I never did touch any of you."

"Didn't you chase a lot of us one day and didn't Brick Wales — "

"Oh, what do you want?" Basil cried in desperation.

"Doctor Bacon wants you. They sent me after you and somebody
said maybe you sneaked in here."

Basil dropped his letter in his pocket and walked out — the little
boy and his invective following him through the door. He traversed
a long corridor, muggy with that odor best described as the smell of
stale caramels that is so peculiar to boys' schools, ascended a stairs
and knocked at an unexceptional but formidable door.

Doctor Bacon was at his desk. He was a handsome, redheaded
Episcopal clergyman of fifty whose original real interest in boys
was now tempered by the flustered cynicism which is the fate of all

330 The Freshest Boy

headmasters and settles on them like green mould. There were cer-
tain preliminaries before Basil was asked to sit down — gold-rimmed
glasses had to be hoisted up from nowhere by a black cord and fixed
on Basil to be sure that he was not an impostor; great masses of
paper on the desk had to be shuffled through, not in search of any-
thing but as a man nervously shuffles a pack of cards.

"I had a letter from your mother this morning — ah — Basil." The
use of his first name had come to startle Basil. No one else in school
had yet called him anything but Bossy or Lee. "She feels that your
marks have been poor. I believe you have been sent here at a cer-
tain amount of — ah — sacrifice and she expects — "

Basil's spirit writhed with shame, not at his poor marks but that
his financial inadequacy should be so bluntly stated. He knew that
he was one of the poorest boys in a rich boys' school.

Perhaps some dormant sensibility in Doctor Bacon became aware
of his discomfort; he shuffled through the papers once more and
began on a new note.

"However, that was not what I sent for you about this afternoon.
You applied last week for permission to go to New York on Satur-
day, to a matinee. Mr. Davis tells me that for almost the first time
since school opened you will be off bounds tomorrow."

"Yes, sir."

"That is not a good record. However, I would allow you to go to
New York if it could be arranged. Unfortunately, no masters are
available this Saturday."

Basil's mouth dropped ajar. "Why, I — why, Doctor Bacon, I know
two parties that are going. Couldn't I go with one of them?"

Doctor Bacon ran through all his papers very quickly. "Unfor-
tunately, one is composed of slightly older boys and the other group
made arrangements some weeks ago."

"How about the party that's going to the Quaker Girl with Mr.
Dunn?"

"It's that party I speak of. They feel that their arrangements
are complete and they have purchased seats together."

Suddenly Basil understood. At the look in his eye Doctor Bacon
went on hurriedly :

"There's perhaps one thing I can do. Of course there must be
several boys in the party so that the expenses of the master can be
divided up among all. If you can find two other boys who would like
to make up a party, and let me have their names by five o'clock,
I'll send Mr. Rooney with you."

"Thank you," Basil said.

Doctor Bacon hesitated. Beneath the cynical incrustations of
many years an instinct stirred to look into the unusual case of this

The Freshest Boy 331

boy and find out what made him the most detested boy in school.
Among boys and masters there seemed to exist an extraordinary hos-
tility toward him, and though Doctor Bacon had dealt with many
sorts of schoolboy crimes, he had neither by himself nor with the aid
of trusted sixth-formers been able to lay his hands on its underlying
cause. It was probably no single thing, but a combination of things ;
it was most probably one of those intangible questions of person-
ality. Yet he remembered that when he first saw Basil he had con-
sidered him unusually prepossessing.

He sighed. Sometimes these things worked themselves out. He
wasn't one to rush in clumsily. "Let us have a better report to send
home next month, Basil."

"Yes, sir."

Basil ran quickly downstairs to the recreation room. It was
Wednesday and most of the boys had already gone into the village of
Eastchester, whither Basil, who was still on bounds, was forbidden
to follow. When he looked at those still scattered about the pool
tables and piano, he saw that it was going to be difficult to get any-
one to go with him at all. For Basil was quite conscious that he was
the most unpopular boy at school.

It had begun almost immediately. One day, less than a fortnight
after he came, a crowd of the smaller boys, perhaps urged on to it,
gathered suddenly around him and began calling him Bossy. Within
the next week he had two fights, and both times the crowd was
vehemently and eloquently with the other boy. Soon after, when he
was merely shoving indiscriminately, like every one else, to get into
the dining room, Carver, the captain of the football team, turned
about and, seizing him by the back of the neck, held him and dressed
him down savagely. He joined a group innocently at the piano and
was told, "Go on away. We don't want you around."

After a month he began to realize the full extent of his unpop-
ularity. It shocked him. One day after a particularly bitter humilia-
tion he went up to his room and cried. He tried to keep out of the
way for a while, but it didn't help. He was accused of sneaking off
here and there, as if bent on a series of nefarious errands. Puzzled
and wretched, he looked at his face in the glass, trying to discover
there the secret of their dislike — in the expression of his eyes, his
smile.

He saw now that in certain ways he had erred at the outset — he
had boasted, he had been considered yellow at football, he had
pointed out people's mistakes to them, he had shown off his rather
extraordinary fund of general information in class. But he had tried
to do better and couldn't understand his failure to atone. It must be
too late. He was queered fprever.

332 The Freshest Boy

He had, indeed, become the scapegoat, the immediate villain, the
sponge which absorbed all malice and irritability abroad — just as
the most frightened person in a party seems to absorb all the others'
fear, seems to be afraid for them all. His situation was not helped
by the fact, obvious to all, that the supreme self-confidence with
which he had come to St. Regis in September was thoroughly broken.
Boys taunted him with impunity who would not have dared raise
their voices to him several months before.

This trip to New York had come to mean everything to him — sur-
cease from the misery of his daily life as well as a glimpse into the
long-awaited heaven of romance. Its postponement for week after
week due to his sins — he was constantly caught reading after lights,
for example, driven by his wretchedness into such vicarious escapes
from reality — had deepened his longing until it was a burning
hunger. It was unbearable that he should not go, and he told over
the short list of those whom he might get to accompany him. The
possibilities were Fat Caspar, Treadway, and Bugs Brown. A quick
journey to their rooms showed that they had all availed themselves
of the Wednesday permission to go into Eastchester for the
afternoon.

Basil did not hesitate. He had until five o'clock and his only
chance was to go after them. It was not the first time he had broken
bounds, though the last attempt had ended in disaster and an ex-
tension of his confinement. In his room, he put on a heavy sweater —
an overcoat was a betrayal of intent — replaced his jacket over it
and hid a cap in his back pocket. Then he went downstairs and with
an elaborately careless whistle struck out across the lawn for the
gymnasium. Once there, he stood for a while as if looking in the win-
dows, first the one close to the walk, then one near the corner of the
building. From here he moved quickly, but not too quickly, into a
grove of lilacs. Then he dashed around the corner, down a long
stretch of lawn that was blind from all windows and, parting the
strands of a wire fence, crawled through and stood upon the grounds
of a neighboring estate. For the moment he was free. He put on his
cap against the chilly November wind, and set out along the half-
mile road to town.

Eastchester was a suburban farming community, with a small shoe
factory. The institutions which pandered to the factory workers were
the ones patronized by the boys — a movie house, a quick-lunch
wagon on wheels known as the Dog and the Bostonian Candy
Kitchen. Basil tried the Dog first and happened immediately upon
a prospect.

This was Bugs Brown, a hysterical boy, subject to fits and stren-
uously avoided. Years later he became a brilliant lawyer, but at that

The Freshest Boy 333

time he was considered by the boys of St. Regis to be a typical
lunatic because of his peculiar series of sounds with which he
assuaged his nervousness all day long.

He consorted with boys younger than himself, who were without
the prejudices of their elders, and was in the company of several
when Basil came in.

"Who-ee ! " he cried. "Ee-ee-ee ! " He put his hand over his mouth
and bounced it quickly, making a wah-wah-wah sound. "It's Bossy
Lee! It's Bossy Lee I It's Boss-Boss-Boss-Boss-Bossy Lee!"

"Wait a minute, Bugs," said Basil anxiously, half afraid that
Bugs would go finally crazy before he could persuade him to come to
town. "Say, Bugs, listen. Don't, Bugs — wait a minute. Can you come
up to New York Saturday afternoon?"

"Whe-ee-ee!" cried Bugs to Basil's distress. " Whee-ee-ee I "

"Honestly, Bugs, tell me, can you? We could go up together if
you could go."

"I've got to see a doctor," said Bugs, suddenly calm. "He wants
to see how crazy I am."

"Can't you have him see about it some other day?" said Basil
without humor.

"Whee-ee-ee ! " cried Bugs.

"All right then," said Basil hastily. "Have you seen Fat Caspar
in town?"

Bugs was lost in shrill noise, but someone had seen Fat; Basil
was directed to the Bostonian Candy Kitchen.

This was a gaudy paradise of cheap sugar. Its odor, heavy and
sickly and calculated to bring out a sticky sweat upon an adult's
palms, hung suffocatingly over the whole vicinity and met one like a
strong moral dissuasion at the door. Inside, beneath a pattern of
flies, material as black point lace, a line of boys sat eating heavy
dinners of banana splits, maple nut, and chocolate marshmallow nut
sundaes. Basil found Fat Caspar at a table on the side.

Fat Caspar was at once Basil's most unlikely and most ambitious
quest. He was considered a nice fellow — in fact he was so pleasant
that he had been courteous to Basil and had spoken to him politely
all fall. Basil realized that he was like that to everyone, yet it was
just possible that Fat liked him, as people used to in the past, and
he was driven desperately to take a chance. But it was undoubtedly
a presumption, and as he approached the table and saw the stiffened
faces which the other two boys turned toward him, Basil's hope
diminished.

"Say, Fat — " he said, and hesitated. Then he burst forth suddenly.
"I'm on bounds, but I ran off because I had to see you. Doctor
Bacon told me I could go to New York Saturday if I could get two

334 The Freshest Boy

other boys to go. I asked Bugs Brown and he couldn't go, and I
thought I'd ask you."

He broke off, furiously embarrassed, and waited. Suddenly the
two boys with Fat burst into a shout of laughter.

"Bugs wasn't crazy enough!"

Fat Caspar hesitated. He couldn't go to New York Saturday and
ordinarily he would have refused without offending. He had nothing
against Basil; nor, indeed, against anybody; but boys have only a
certain resistance to public opinion and he was influenced by the
contemptuous laughter of the others.

"I don't want to go," he said indifferently. "Why do you want
to ask me?"

Then, half in shame, he gave a deprecatory little laugh and bent
over his ice cream.

"I just thought I'd ask you," said Basil.

Turning quickly away, he went to the counter and in a hollow
and unfamiliar voice ordered a strawberry sundae. He ate it me-
chanically, hearing occasional whispers and snickers from the table
behind. Still in a daze, he started to walk out without paying his
check, but the clerk called him back and he was conscious of more
derisive laughter.

For a moment he hesitated whether to go back to the table and
hit one of those boys in the face, but he saw nothing to be gained.
They would say the truth — that he had done it because he couldn't
get anybody to go to New York. Clenching his fists with impotent
rage, he walked from the store.

He came immediately upon his third prospect, Treadway. Tread-
way had entered St. Regis late in the year and had been put in to
room with Basil the week before. The fact that Treadway hadn't
witnessed his humiliations of the autumn encouraged Basil to be-
have naturally toward him, and their relations had been, if not
intimate, at least tranquil.

"Hey, Treadway," he cried, still excited from the affair in the
Bostonian, "can you come up to New York to a show Saturday
afternoon ?"

He stopped, realizing that Treadway was in the company of Brick
Wales, a boy he had had a fight with and one of his bitterest
enemies. Looking from one to the other, Basil saw a look of impa-
tience in Treadway's face and a faraway expression in Brick Wales',
and he realized what must have been happening. Treadway, making
his way into the life of the school, had just been enlightened as to
the status of his roommate. Like Fat Caspar, rather than acknowl-
edge himself eligible to such an intimate request, he preferred to cut
their friendly relations short.

The Freshest Boy 335

"Not on your life," he said briefly. "So long." The two walked past
him into the candy kitchen.

Had these slights, so much the bitterer for their lack of passion,
been visited upon Basil in September, they would have been un-
bearable. But since then he had developed a shell of hardness which,
while it did not add to his attractiveness, spared him certain del-
icacies of torture. In misery enough, and despair and self-pity, he
went the other way along the street for a little distance until he
could control the violent contortions of his face. Then, taking a
roundabout route, he started back to school.

He reached the adjoining estate, intending to go back the way
he had come. Half-way through a hedge, he heard footsteps ap-
proaching along the sidewalk and stood motionless, fearing the prox-
imity of masters. Their voices grew nearer and louder; before he
knew it he was listening with horrified fascination :

" — so, after he tried Bugs Brown, the poor nut asked Fat Gas-
par to go with him and Fat said, 'What do you ask me for?' It
serves him right if he couldn't get anybody at all."

It was the dismal but triumphant voice of Lewis Crum.

Ill

Up in his room, Basil found a package lying on his bed. He knew
its contents and for a long time he had been eagerly expecting it, but
such was his depression that he opened it listlessly. It was a series
of eight color reproductions of Harrison Fisher girls "on glossy
paper, without printing or advertising matter and suitable for
framing."

The pictures were named Dora, Marguerite, Babette, Lucille,
Gretchen, Rose, Katherine and Mina. Two of them — Marguerite and
Rose — Basil looked at, slowly tore up and dropped in the waste-
basket, as one who disposes of the inferior pups from a litter. The
other six he pinned at intervals around the room. Then he lay down
on his bed and regarded them.

Dora, Lucille and Katherine were blonde ; Gretchen was medium ;
Babette and Mina were dark. After a few minutes, he found that he
was looking oftenest at Dora and Babette and, to a lesser extent, at
Gretchen, though the latter's Dutch cap seemed unromantic and pre-
cluded the element of mystery. Babette, a dark little violet-eyed
beauty in a tight-fitting hat, attracted him most; his eyes came
to rest on her at last.

"Babette," he whispered to himself— "beautiful Babette."

The sound of the word, so melancholy and suggestive, like "Vilia*
or "I'm happy at Maxim's" on the phonograph, softened him and

336 The Freshest Boy

turning over on his face, he sobbed into the pillow. He took hold of
the bed rails over his head and, sobbing and straining, began to talk
to himself brokenly — how he hated them and whom he hated — he
listed a dozen — and what he would do to them when he was great
and powerful. In previous moments like these he had always re-
warded Fat Caspar for his kindness, but now he was like the rest.
Basil set upon him, pummeling him unmercifully, or laughed sneer-
ingly when he passed him blind and begging on the street.

He controlled himself as he heard Treadway come in, but did not
move or speak. He listened as the other moved about the room, and
after a while became conscious that there was an unusual opening
of closets and bureau drawers. Basil turned over, his arm concealing
his tear-stained face. Treadway had an armful of shirts in his hand.

"What are you doing?" Basil demanded.

His roommate looked at him stonily. "I'm moving in with Wales,"
he said.

"Oh ! "

Treadway went on with his packing. He carried out a suitcase full,
then another, took down some pennants and dragged his trunk into
the hall. Basil watched him bundle his toilet things into a towel
and take one last survey about the room's new barrenness to see if
there was anything forgotten.

"Good-by," he said to Basil, without a ripple of expression on
his face.

"Good-by."

Treadway went out. Basil turned over once more and choked into
the pillow.

"Oh, poor Babette!" he cried huskily. "Poor little Babette! Poor
little Babette!"

Babette, svelte and piquant, looked down at him coquettishly
from the wall.

Doctor Bacon, sensing Basil's predicament and perhaps the ex-
tremity of his misery, arranged it that he should go into New York,
after all. He went in the company of Mr. Rooney, the football coach
and history teacher. At twenty Mr. Rooney had hesitated for some
time between joining the police force and having his way paid
through a small New England college ; in fact he was a hard spec-
imen and Doctor Bacon was planning to get rid of him at Christmas.
Mr. Rooney's contempt for Basil was founded on the latter's am-
biguous and unreliable conduct on the football field during the past

The Freshest Boy 337

season — he had consented to take him to New York for reasons of
his own.

Basil sat meekly beside him on the train, glancing past Mr.
Rooney's bulky body at the Sound and the fallow fields of West-
Chester County. Mr. Rooney finished his newspaper, folded it up and
sank into a moody silence. He had eaten a large breakfast and the
exigencies of time had not allowed him to work it off with exercise.
He remembered that Basil was a fresh boy, and it was time he did
something fresh and could be called to account. This reproachless
silence annoyed him.

"Lee," he said suddenly, with a thinly assumed air of friendly
interest, "why don't you get wise to yourself?"

"What sir?" Basil was startled from his excited trance of this
morning.

"I said why don't you get wise to yourself?" said Mr. Rooney in a
somewhat violent tone. "Do you want to be the butt of the school
all your time here?"

"No, I don't," Basil was chilled. Couldn't all this be left behind
for just one day?

"You oughtn't to get so fresh all the time. A couple of times in
history class I could just about have broken your neck." Basil could
think of no appropriate answer. "Then out playing football," con-
tinued Mr. Rooney " — you didn't have any nerve. You could play
better than a lot of 'em when you wanted, like that day against the
Pomfret seconds, but you lost your nerve."

"I shouldn't have tried for the second team," said Basil. "I was
too light. I should have stayed on the third."

"You were yellow, that was all the trouble. You ought to get wise
to yourself. In class, you're always thinking of something else. If
you don't study, you'll never get to college."

"I'm the youngest boy in the fifth form," Basil said rashly.

"You think you're pretty bright, don't you?" He eyed Basil fero-
ciously. Then something seemed to occur to him that changed his
attitude and they rode for a while in silence. When the train began
to run through the thickly clustered communities near New York, he
spoke again in a milder voice and with an air of having considered
the matter for a long time :

"Lee, I'm going to trust you."

"Yes, sir."

"You go and get some lunch and then go on to your show. I've got
some business of my own I got to attend to, and when I've finished
I'll try to get to the show. If I can't, I'll anyhow meet you outside."
Basil's heart leaped up. "Yes, sir."

338 The Freshest Boy

"I don't want you to open your mouth about this at school — I
mean, about me doing some business of my own."

"No, sir."

"We'll see if you can keep your mouth shut for once," he said,
making it fun. Then he added, on a note of moral sternness, "And
no drinks, you understand that?"

"Oh, no, sir!" The idea shocked Basil. He had never tasted a
drink, nor even contemplated the possibility, save the intangible
and nonalcoholic champagne of his cafe dreams.

On the advice of Mr. Rooney he went for luncheon to the Man-
hattan Hotel, near the station, where he ordered a club sandwich,
French fried potatoes and a chocolate parfait. Out of the corner of
his eye he watched the nonchalant, debonair, blase New Yorkers at
neighboring tables, investing them with a romance by which these
possible fellow citizens of his from the Middle West lost nothing.
School had fallen from him like a burden ; it was no more than an
unheeded clamor, faint and far away. He even delayed opening the
letter from the morning's mail which he found in his pocket, because
it was addressed to him at school.

He wanted another chocolate parfait, but being reluctant to bother
the busy waiter any more, he opened the letter and spread it before
him instead. It was from his mother :

"Dear Basil : This is written in great haste, as I didn't want to
frighten you by telegraphing. Grandfather is going abroad to take
the waters and he wants you and me to come too. The idea is that
you'll go to school at Grenoble or Montreux for the rest of the year
and learn the languages and we'll be close by. That is, if you want
to. I know how you like St. Regis and playing football and base-
ball, and of course there would be none of that ; but on the other
hand, it would be a nice change, even if it postponed your entering
Yale by an extra year. So, as usual, I want you to do just as you
like. We will be leaving home almost as soon as you get this and
will come to the Waldorf in New York, where you can come in and
see us for a few days, even if you decide to stay. Think it over,
dear.

"With love to my dearest boy,

"Mother."

Basil got up from his chair with a dim idea of walking over to
the Waldorf and having himself locked up safely until his mother
came. Then, impelled to some gesture, he raised his voice and in one
of his first basso notes called boomingly and without reticence for
the waiter. No more St. Regis ! No more St. Regis I He was almost
strangling with happiness.

The Freshest Boy 339

"Oh, gosh ! " he cried to himself. "Oh, golly ! Oh, gosh ! Oh, gosh ! "
No more Doctor Bacon and Mr. Rooney and Brick Wales and Fat
Caspar. No more Bugs Brown and on bounds and being called
Bossy. He need no longer hate them, for they were impotent shadows
in the stationary world that he was sliding away from, sliding past,
waving his hand. "Good-by!" he pitied them. "Good-by!"

It required the din of Forty-second Street to sober his maudlin
joy. With his hand on his purse to guard against the omnipresent
pickpocket, he moved cautiously toward Broadway. What a day I He
would tell Mr. Rooney — Why, he needn't ever go back! Or perhaps
it would be better to go back and let them know what he was
going to do, while they went on and on in the dismal, dreary round
of school.

He found the theater and entered the lobby with its powdery
feminine atmosphere of a matinee. As he took out his ticket, his gaze
was caught and held by a sculptured profile a few feet away. It was
that of a well-built blond young man of about twenty with a strong
chin and direct gray eyes. Basil's brain spun wildly for a moment
and then came to rest upon a name — more than a name — upon a
legend, a sign in the sky. What a day ! He had never seen the young
man before, but from a thousand pictures he knew beyond the pos-
sibility of a doubt that it was Ted Fay, the Yale football captain,
who had almost single-handed beaten Harvard and Princeton last
fall. Basil felt a sort of exquisite pain. The profile turned away ; the
crowd revolved; the hero disappeared. But Basil would know all
through the next hours that Ted Fay was here too.

In the rustling, whispering, sweet-smelling darkness of the theater
he read the program. It was the show of all shows that he wanted
to see, and until the curtain actually rose the program itself had a
curious sacredness — a prototype of the thing itself. But when the
curtain rose it became waste paper to be dropped carelessly to
the floor.

ACT. I. The Village Green of a Small Town near New York.

It was too bright and blinding to comprehend all at once, and it
went so fast that from the very first Basil felt he had missed things ;
he would make his mother take him again when she came — next
week — tomorrow.

An hour passed. It was very sad at this point — a sort of gay sad-
ness, but sad. The girl — the man. What kept them apart even now?
Oh, those tragic errors and misconceptions. So sad. Couldn't they
look into each other's eyes and see ?

In a blaze of light and sound, of resolution, anticipation and
imminent trouble, the act was over.

340 The Freshest Boy

He went out. He looked for Ted Fay and thought he saw him
leaning rather moodily on the plush wall at the rear of the theater,
but he could not be sure. He bought cigarettes and lit one, but fancy-
ing at the first puff that he heard a blare of music he rushed back
inside.

ACT II. The Foyer of the Hotel Astor.

Yes, she was, indeed, like that song — a Beautiful Rose of the
Night. The waltz buoyed her up, brought her with it to a point of
aching beauty and then let her slide back to life across its last bars
as a leaf slants to earth across the air. The high life of New York!
Who could blame her if she was carried away by the glitter of it
all, vanishing into the bright morning of the amber window borders
or into distant and entrancing music as the door opened and closed
that led to the ballroom ? The toast of the shining town.

Half an hour passed. Her true love brought her roses like herself
and she threw them scornfully at his feet. She laughed and turned to
the other, and danced — danced madly, wildly. Wait 1 That delicate
treble among the thin horns, the low curving note from the great
strings. There it was again, poignant and aching, sweeping like a
great gust of emotion across the stage, catching her again like a leaf
helpless in the wind:

"Rose — Rose — Rose of the night,

When the spring moon is bright you'll be fair — "

A few minutes later, feeling oddly shaken and exalted, Basil
drifted outside with the crowd. The first thing upon which his eyes
fell was the almost forgotten and now curiously metamorphosed
specter of Mr. Rooney.

Mr. Rooney had, in fact, gone a little to pieces. He was, to begin
with, wearing a different and much smaller hat than when he left
Basil at noon. Secondly, his face had lost its somewhat gross aspect
and turned a pure and even delicate white, and he was wearing his
necktie and even portions of his shirt on the outside of his unaccount-
ably wringing-wet overcoat. How, in the short space of four hours,
Mr. Rooney had got himself in such shape is explicable only by the
pressure of confinement in a boys' school upon a fiery outdoor spirit.
Mr. Rooney was born to toil under the clear light of heaven and,
perhaps half consciously, he was headed toward his inevitable
destiny.

"Lee," he said dimly, "you ought to get wise to y'self. I'm going
to put you wise y'self."

To avoid the ominous possibility of being put wise to himself in
the lobby, Basil uneasily changed the subject.

The Freshest Boy 341

"Aren't you coming to the show?" he asked, flattering Mr. Rooney
by implying that he was in any condition to come to the show. "It's
a wonderful show."

Mr. Rooney took off his hat, displaying wringing-wet matted hair.
A picture of reality momentarily struggled for development in the
back of his brain.

"We got to get back to school," he said in a somber and uncon-
vinced voice.

"But there's another act," protested Basil in horror. "I've got to
stay for the last act."

Swaying, Mr. Rooney looked at Basil, dimly realizing that he had
put himself in the hollow of this boy's hand.

"All righY' he admitted. "I'm going to get somethin' to eat. I'll
wait for you next door."

He turned abruptly, reeled a dozen steps and curved dizzily into
a bar adjoining the theater. Considerably shaken, Basil went back
inside.

ACT III. The Roof Garden of Mr. Van Astor's House. Night.

Half an hour passed. Everything was going to be all right, after
all. The comedian was at his best now, with the glad appropriateness
of laughter after tears, and there was a promise of felicity in the
bright tropical sky. One lovely plaintive duet, and then abruptly the
long moment of incomparable beauty was over.

Basil went into the lobby and stood in thought while the crowd
passed out. His mother's letter and the show had cleared his mind
of bitterness and vindictiveness — he was his old self and he wanted
to do the right thing. He wondered if it was the right thing to get
Mr. Rooney back to school. He walked toward the saloon, slowed up
as he came to it and, gingerly opening the swinging door, took a
quick peer inside. He saw only that Mr. Rooney was not one of
those drinking at the bar. He walked down the street a little way,
came back and tried again. It was as if he thought the doors were
teeth to bite him, for he had the old-fashioned Middle- Western boy's
horror of the saloon. The third time he was successful. Mr. Rooney
was sound asleep at a table in the back of the room.

Outside again Basil walked up and down, considering. He would
give Mr. Rooney half an hour. If, at the end of that time, he had
not come out, he would go back to school. After all, Mr. Rooney had
laid for him ever since football season — Basil was simply washing his
hands of the whole affair, as in a day or so he would wash his
hands of school.

He had made several turns up and down, when, glancing up an

342 The Freshest Boy

alley that ran beside the theater his eye was caught by the sign, Stage
Entrance. He could watch the actors come forth.

He waited. Women streamed by him, but those were the days
before Glorification and he took these drab people for wardrobe
women or something. Then suddenly a girl came out and with her
a man, and Basil turned and ran a few steps up the street as if
afraid they would recognize him — and ran back, breathing as if with
a heart attack — for the girl, a radiant little beauty of nineteen, was
Her and the young man by her side was Ted Fay.

Arm in arm, they walked past him, and irresistibly Basil followed.
As they walked, she leaned toward Ted Fay in a way that gave them
a fascinating air of intimacy. They crossed Broadway and turned
into the Knickerbocker Hotel, and twenty feet behind them Basil
followed, in time to see them go into a long room set for afternoon
tea. They sat at a table for two, spoke vaguely to a waiter, and then,
alone at last, bent eagerly toward each other. Basil saw that Ted
Fay was holding her gloved hand.

The tea room was separated only by a hedge of potted firs from
the main corridor. Basil went along this to a lounge which was almost
up against their table and sat down.

Her voice was low and faltering, less certain than it had been in
the play, and very sad: "Of course I do, Ted." For a long time, as
their conversation continued, she repeated "Of course I do" or "But
I do, Ted." Ted Fay's remarks were too low for Basil to hear.

" sayS next month, and he won't be put off any more. . . .

I do in a way, Ted. It's hard to explain, but he's done everything for
mother and me. . . . There's no use kidding myself. It was a fool-
proof part and any girl he gave it to was made right then and
there. . . . He's been awfully thoughtful. He's done everything for
me."

Basil's ears were sharpened by the intensity of his emotion ; now
he could hear Ted Fay's voice too :

"And you say you love me."

"But don't you see I promised to marry him more than a year ago."

"Tell him the truth — that you love me. Ask him to let you off."

"This isn't musical comedy, Ted,"

"That was a mean one," he said bitterly.

"I'm sorry, dear, Ted darling, but you're driving me crazy going
on this way. You're making it so hard for me."

"I'm going to leave New Haven, anyhow."

"No, you're not. You're going to stay and play baseball this spring.
Why, you're an ideal to all those boys ! Why, if you "

He laughed shortly. "You're a fine one to talk about ideals."

The Freshest Boy 343

"Why not? I'm living up to my responsibility to Beltzman ; you've
got to make up your mind just like I have — that we can't have each
other."

"Jerry! Think what you're doing! All my life, whenever I hear
that waltz "

Basil got to his feet and hurried down the corridor, through the
lobby and out of the hotel. He was in a state of wild emotional con-
fusion. He did not understand all he had heard, but from his
clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world
that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had
gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnifi-
cent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple
and a little sad.

They would go on. Ted Fay would go back to Yale, put her picture
in his bureau drawer and knock out home runs with the bases full
this spring — at 8:30 the curtain would go up and She would miss
something warm and young out of her life, something she had had
this afternoon.

It was dark outside and Broadway was a blazing forest fire as
Basil walked slowly along toward the point of brightest light. He
looked up at the great intersecting planes of radiance with a vague
sense of approval and possession. He would see it a lot now, lay his
restless heart upon this greater restlessness of a nation — he would
come whenever he could get off from school.

But that was all changed — he was going to Europe. Suddenly Basil
realized that he wasn't going to Europe. He could not forego the
molding of his own destiny just to alleviate a few months of pain.
The conquest of the successive worlds of school, college and New
York — why, that was his true dream that he had carried from boy-
hood into adolescence, and because of the jeers of a few boys he had
been about to abandon it and run ignominiously up a back alley ! He
shivered violently, like a dog coming out of the water, and simul-
taneously he was reminded of Mr. Rooney.

A few minutes later he walked into the bar, past the quizzical eyes
of the bartender and up to the table where Mr. Rooney still sat
asleep. Basil shook him gently, then firmly. Mr. Rooney stirred and
perceived Basil.

"G'wise to yourself," he muttered drowsily. "G'wise to yourself
an' let me alone."

"I am wise to myself," said Basil. "Honest, I am wise to myself,
Mr. Rooney. You got to come with me into the washroom and get
cleaned up, and then you can sleep on the train again, Mr. Rooney.
Come on, Mr. Rooney, please "

344 The Freshest Boy

It was a long hard time. Basil got on bounds again in December
and wasn't free again until March. An indulgent mother had given
him no habits of work and this was almost beyond the power of any-
thing but life itself to remedy, but he made numberless new starts
and failed and tried again.

He made friends with a new boy named Maplewood after Christ-
mas, but they had a silly quarrel ; and through the winter term, when
a boys' school is shut in with itself and only partly assuaged from
its natural savagery by indoor sports, Basil was snubbed and slighted
a good deal for his real and imaginary sins, and he was much alone.
But on the other hand, there was Ted Fay, and Rose of the Night
on the phonograph — "All my life whenever I hear that waltz" — and
the remembered lights of New York, and the thought of what he was
going to do in football next autumn and the glamorous mirage of
Yale and the hope of spring in the air.

Fat Caspar and a few others were nice to him now. Once when he
and Fat walked home together by accident from downtown they had
a long talk about actresses — a talk that Basil was wise enough not
to presume upon afterward. The smaller boys suddenly decided that
they approved of him, and a master who had hitherto disliked him
put his hand on his shoulder walking to a class one day. They would
all forget eventually — maybe during the summer. There would be
new fresh boys in September; he would have a clean start next
year.

One afternoon in February, playing basketball, a great thing hap-
pened. He and Brick Wales were at forward on the second team and
in the fury of the scrimmage the gymnasium echoed with sharp
slapping contacts and shrill cries.

"Hereyar!"

"Bill! Bill!"

Basil had dribbled the ball down the court and Brick Wales, free,
was crying for it.

"Hereyar! Lee! Hey! Lee-y!"

Lee-y !

Basil flushed and made a poor pass. He had been called by a nick-
name. It was a poor makeshift, but it was something more than the
stark bareness of his surname or a term of derision. Brick Wales
went on playing, unconscious that he had done anything in par-
ticular or that he had contributed to the events by which another
boy was saved from the army of the bitter, the selfish, the neu-
rasthenic and the unhappy. It isn't given to us to know those rare
moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can

The Freshest Boy 345

wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any
more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious
drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.

Lee-y! It could scarcely be pronounced. But Basil took it to bed
with him that night, and thinking of it, holding it to him happily to
the last, fell easily to sleep.
1928 Taps at Reveille

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

BASIL DUKE LEE shut the front door behind him and turned on
the dining-room light. His mother's voice drifted sleepily downstairs :

"Basil, is that you?"

"No, mother, it's a burglar/'

"It seems to me twelve o'clock is pretty late for a fifteen-year-old
boy."

"We went to Smith's and had a soda."

Whenever a new responsibility devolved upon Basil he was "a
boy almost sixteen," but when a privilege was in. question, he was
"a fifteen-year-old boy."

There were footsteps above, and Mrs. Lee, in kimono, descended
to the first landing.

"Did you and Riply enjoy the play?"

"Yes, very much."

"What was it about?"

"Oh, it was just about this man. Just an ordinary play."

"Didn't it have a name?"

"< Are You a Mason?'"

"Oh." She hesitated, covetously watching his alert and eager face,
holding him there. "Aren't you coming to bed?"

"I'm going to get something to eat."

"Something more?"

For a moment he didn't answer. He stood in front of a glassed-in
bookcase in the living room, examining its contents with an equally
glazed eye.

"We're going to get up a play," he said suddenly. "I'm going to
write it."

"Well — that'll be very nice. Please come to bed soon. You were
up late last night, too, and you've got dark circles under your
eyes."

From the bookcase Basil presently extracted "Van Bibber and
Others," from which he read while he ate a large plate of straw
softened with a half pint of cream. Back in the living room he sat
for a few minutes at the piano, digesting, and meanwhile staring at
the colored cover of a song from "The Midnight Sons." It showed

346

The Captured Shadow 347

three men in evening clothes and opera hats sauntering jovially
along Broadway against the blazing background of Times Square.

Basil would have denied incredulously the suggestion that that was
currently his favorite work of art. But it was.

He went upstairs. From a drawer of his desk he took out a com-
position book and opened it.

BASIL DUKE LEE

ST. REGIS SCHOOL
EASTCHESTER, CONN.
FIFTH FORM FRENCH

and on the next page, under Irregular Verbs :

PRESENT

je connais nous con
tu connais
il connait

He turned over another page.

MR. WASHINGTON SQUARE
A Musical Comedy by

BASIL DUKE LEE
Music by Victor Herbert

ACT I

[The porch of the Millionaires' Club, near New York.
Opening Chorus, LEILIA and DEBUTANTES :

We sing not soft, we sing not loud

For no one ever heard an opening chorus.
We are a very merry crowd

But no one ever heard an opening chorus.
Wefre just a crowd of debutantes

As merry as can be
And nothing that there is could ever bore us

We're the wittiest ones, the prettiest ones.

In all society
But no one ever heard an opening chorus.

LEILIA (stepping forward) : Well, girls, has Mr. Washington
Square been around here today?

348 The Captured Shadow

Basil turned over a page. There was no answer to Leilia's question.
Instead in capitals was a brand-new heading :

HIC! HIC! HIC!

A Hilarious Farce in One Act
by

BASIL DUKE LEE

SCENE

[A fashionable apartment near Broadway, New York City. It is
almost midnight. As the curtain goes up there is a knocking at the
door and a jew minutes later it opens to admit a handsome man in
a full evening dress and a companion. He has evidently been imbib-
ing, for his words are thick, his nose is red, and he can hardly stand
up. He turns up the light and comes down centre.

STUYVESANT: Hicl Hie! Hie!

O'HARA (his companion) : Begorra, you been sayin' nothing else
all this evening.

Basil turned over a page and then another, reading hurriedly, but
not without interest.

PROFESSOR PUMPKIN : Now, if you are an educated man, as you
claim, perhaps you can tell me the Latin word for "this."
STUYVESANT: Hie! Hie! Hie!
PROFESSOR PUMPKIN : Correct. Very good indeed. I

At this point Hie ! Hie ! Hie ! came to an end in midsentence. On
the following page, in just as determined a hand as if the last two
works had not faltered by the way, was the heavily underlined be-
ginning of another :

THE CAPTURED SHADOW
A Melodramatic Farce in Three Acts
by BASIL DUKE LEE

SCENE

[All three acts take place in the library of the VAN BAKERS* house in
New York. It is well furnished with a red lamp on one side and
some crossed spears and helmets and so on and a divan and a general
air of an oriental den.

When the curtain rises Miss SAUNDERS, LEILIA VAN BAKER

The Captured Shadow 349

ESTELLA GARBAGE are sitting at a table. Miss SAUNDERS is an old
maid about forty very kittenish. LEILIA is pretty with dark hair.
ESTELLA has light hair. They are a striking combination.

"The Captured Shadow" filled the rest of the book and ran over
into several loose sheets at the end. When it broke off Basil sat for
a while in thought. This had been a season of "crook comedies" in
New York, and the feel, the swing, the exact and vivid image of the
two he had seen, were in the foreground of his mind. At the time
they had been enormously suggestive, opening out into a world much
larger and more brilliant than themselves that existed outside their
windows and beyond their doors, and it was this suggested world
rather than any conscious desire to imitate "Officer 666" that had in-
spired the effort before him. Presently he printed ACT II at the head
of a new tablet and began to write.

An hour passed. Several times he had recourse to a collection of
joke books and to an old Treasury of Wit and Humor which em-
balmed the faded Victorian cracks of Bishop Wilberforce and Sydney
Smith. At the moment when, in his story, a door moved slowly open,
he heard a heavy creak upon the stairs. He jumped to his feet,
aghast and trembling, but nothing stirred; only a white moth
bounced against the screen, a clock struck the half-hour far across
the city, a bird whacked its wings in a tree outside.

Voyaging to the bathroom at half-past four, he saw with a shock
that morning was already blue at the window. He had stayed up all
night. He remembered that people who stayed up all night went
crazy and, transfixed in the hall, he tried agonizingly to listen to him-
self, to feel whether or not he was going crazy. The things around
him seemed prenaturally unreal, and rushing frantically back into
his bedroom, he began tearing off his clothes, racing after the vanish-
ing night. Undressed, he threw a final regretful glance at his pile of
manuscript — he had the whole next scene in his head. As a com-
promise with incipient madness he got into bed and wrote for an
hour more.

Late next morning he was startled awake by one of the ruthless
Scandinavian sisters who, in theory, were the Lees' servants. "Eleven
o'clock!" she shouted. "Five after!"

"Let me alone," Basil mumbled. "What do you come and wake me
up for?"

"Somebody downstairs." He opened his eyes. "You ate all the
cream last night," Hilda continued. "Your mother didn't have any
for her coffee."

"All the cream ! " he cried. "Why, I saw some more."

"Tt

3 so The Captured Shadow

"That's terrible," he exclaimed, sitting up. "Terrible ! "

For a moment she enjoyed his dismay. Then she said, "Riply
Buckner's downstairs," and went out, closing the door.

"Send him up!" he called after her. "Hilda, why don't you ever
listen for a minute? Did I get any mail?"

There was no answer. A moment later Riply came in.

"My gosh, are you still in bed?"

"I wrote on the play all night. I almost finished Act Two." He
pointed to his desk.

"That's what I want to talk to you about," said Riply. "Mother
thinks we ought to get Miss Halliburton."

"What for?"

"Just to sort of be there."

Though Miss Halliburton was a pleasant person who combined the
occupations of French teacher and bridge teacher, unofficial chaperon
and children's friend, Basil felt that her superintendence would give
the project an unprofessional ring.

"She wouldn't interfere," went on Riply, obviously quoting his
mother. "I'll be the business manager and you'll direct the play, just
like we said, but it would be good to have her there for prompter
and to keep order at rehearsals. The girls' mothers'll like it."

"All right," Basil agreed reluctantly. "Now look, let's see who
we'll have in the cast. First, there's the leading man — this gentleman
burglar that's called The Shadow. Only it turns out at the end that
he's really a young man about town doing it on a bet, and not really
a burglar at all."

"That's you."

"No, that's you."

"Come on ! You're the best actor," protested Riply.

"No, I'm going to take a smaller part, so I can coach."

"Well, haven't I got to be business manager?"

Selecting the actresses, presumably all eager, proved to be a diffi-
cult matter. They settled finally on Imogene Bissel for leading lady ;
Margaret Torrence for her friend, and Connie Davies for "Miss
Saunders, an old maid very kittenish."

On Riply's suggestion that several other girls wouldn't be pleased
at being left out, Basil introduced a maid and a cook, "who could
just sort of look in from the kitchen." He rejected firmly Riply's
further proposal that there should be two or three maids, "a sort of
sewing woman," and a trained nurse. In a house so clogged with
femininity even the most umbrageous of gentleman burglars would
have difficulty in moving about.

"Ill tell you two people we won't have," Basil said meditatively —
"that's Joe Gorman and Hubert Blair."

The Captured Shadow 351

"I wouldn't be in it if we had Hubert Blair," asserted Riply.

"Neither would I."

Hubert Blair's almost miraculous successes with girls had caused
Basil and Riply much jealous pain.

They began calling up the prospective cast and immediately the
enterprise received its first blow. Imogene Bissel was going to
Rochester, Minnesota, to have her appendix removed, and wouldn't
be back for three weeks.

They considered.

"How about Margaret Torrence ?"

Basil shook his head. He had vision of Leilia Van Baker as some-
one rarer and more spirited than Margaret Torrence. Not that Leilia
had much being, even to Basil — less than the Harrison Fisher girls
pinned around his wall at school. But she was not Margaret Tor-
rence. She was no one you could inevitably see by calling up half an
hour before on the phone.

He discarded candidate after candidate. Finally a face began to
flash before his eyes, as if in another connection, but so insistently
that at length he spoke the name.

"Evelyn Beebe."

"Who?"

Though Evelyn Beebe was only sixteen, her precocious charms had
elevated her to an older crowd and to Basil she seemed of the very
generation of his heroine, Leilia Van Baker. It was a little like asking
Sarah Bernhardt for her services, but once her name had occurred
to him, other possibilities seemed pale.

At noon they rang the Beebe 's door-bell, stricken by a paralysis of
embarrassment when Evelyn opened the door herself and, with polite-
ness that concealed a certain surprise, asked them in.

Suddenly, through the portiere of the living room, Basil saw and
recognized a young man in golf knickerbockers.

"I guess we better not come in," he said quickly. *

"We'll come some other time," Riply added.

Together they started precipitately for the door, but she barred
their way.

"Don't be silly," she insisted. "It's just Andy Lockheart."

Just Andy Lockheart — winner of the Western Golf Championship
at eighteen, captain of his freshman baseball team, handsome, suc-
cessful at everything he tried, a living symbol of the splendid,
glamorous world of Yale. For a year Basil had walked like him and
tried unsuccessfully to play the piano by ear as Andy Lockheart was
able to do.

Through sheer ineptitude at escaping, they were edged into the
room. Their plan suddenly seemed presumptuous and absurd.

352 The Captured Shadow

Perceiving their condition Evelyn tried to soothe them with pleas-
ant banter.

"Well, it's about time you came to see me," she told Basil. "Here
I've been sitting home every night waiting for you — ever since the
Davies dance. Why haven't you been here before?"

He stared at her blankly, unable even to smile, and muttered:
"Yes, you have."

"I have though. Sit down and tell me why you've been neglecting
me! I suppose you've both been rushing the beautiful Imogene
Bissel."

"Why, I understand — " said Basil. "Why, I heard from somewhere
that she's gone up to have some kind of an appendicitis — that is — "
He ran down to a pitch of inaudibility as Andy Lockheart at the
piano began playing a succession of thoughtful chords, which resolved
itself into the maxixe, an eccentric stepchild of the tango. Kicking
back a rug and lifting her skirts a little, Evelyn fluently tapped out
a circle with her heels around the floor.

They sat inanimate as cushions on the sofa watching her. She was
almost beautiful, with rather large features and bright fresh color,
behind which her heart seemed to be trembling a little with laughter.
Her voice and her lithe body were always mimicking, ceaselessly
caricaturing every sound and movement near by, until even those
who disliked her admitted that "Evelyn could always make you
laugh." She finished her dance now with a false stumble and an awed
expression as she clutched at the piano, and Basil and Riply
chuckled. Seeing their embarrassment lighten, she came and sat down
beside them, and they laughed again when she said: "Excuse my
lack of self-control."

"Do you want to be the leading lady in a play we're going to give ?"
demanded Basil with sudden desperation. "We're going to have it at
the Martindale School, for the benefit of the Baby Welfare."

"Basil, this is so sudden."

Andy Lockheart turned around from the piano.

" What're you going to give — a minstrel show ?"

"No, it's a crook play named "The Captured Shadow." Miss Halli-
burton is going to coach it." He suddenly realized the convenience of
that name to shelter himself behind.

"Why don't you give something like "The Private Secretary"?"
interrupted Andy. "There's a good play for you. We gave it my last
year at school."

"Oh, no, it's all settled," said Basil quickly. "We're going to put
on this play that I wrote."

"You wrote it yourself?" exclaimed Evelyn.

"Yes."

The Captured Shadow 353

"My-y gosh ! " said Andy. He began to play again.

"Look, Evelyn," said Basil. "It's only for three weeks, and you'd
be the leading lady."

She laughed. "Oh, no. I couldn't. Why don't you get Imogene?"

"She's sick, I tell you. Listen "

"Or Margaret Torrence?"

"I don't want anybody but you."

The directness of this appeal touched her and momentarily she
hesitated. But the hero of the Western Golf Championship turned
around from the piano with a teasing smile and she shook her head.

"I can't do it, Basil. I may have to go East with the family."

Reluctantly Basil and Riply got up.

"Gosh, I wish you'd be in it, Evelyn."

"I wish I could."

Basil lingered, thinking fast, wanting her more than ever ; indeed,
without her, it scarcely seemed worth while to go on with the play.
Suddenly a desperate expedient took shape on his lips :

"You certainly would be wonderful. You see, the leading man is
going to be Hubert Blair."

Breathlessly he watched her, saw her hesitate.

"Good-by," he said.

She came with them to the door and then out on the veranda,
frowning a little.

"How long did you say the rehearsals would take?" she asked
thoughtfully.

On an August evening three days later Basil read the play to the
cast on Miss Halliburton's porch. He was nervous and at first there
were interruptions of "Louder" and "Not so fast." Just as his audi-
ence was beginning to be amused by the repartee of the two comic
crooks — repartee that had seen service with Weber and Fields — he
was interrupted by the late arrival of Hubert Blair.

Hubert was fifteen, a somewhat shallow boy save for two or three
felicities which he possessed to an extraordinary degree. But one
excellence suggests the presence of others, and young ladies never
failed to respond to his most casual fancy, enduring his fickleness of
heart and never convinced that his fundamental indifference might
not be overcome. They were dazzled by his flashing self-confidence,
by his cherubic ingenuousness, which concealed a shrewd talent for
getting around people, and by his extraordinary physical grace.
Long-legged, beautifully proportioned, he had that tumbler's balance
usually characteristic only of men "built near the ground." He was

354 The Captured Shadow

in constant motion that was a delight to watch, and Evelyn Beebe
was not the only older girl who had found in him a mysterious prom-
ise and watched him, for a long time with something more than
curiosity.

He stood in the doorway now with an expression of bogus rever
ence on his round pert face.

"Excuse me," he said. "Is this the First Methodist Episcopal
Church ?" Everybody laughed — even Basil. "I didn't know. I thought
maybe I was in the right church, but in the wrong pew."

They laughed again, somewhat discouraged. Basil waited until
Hubert had seated himself beside Evelyn Beebe. Then he began to
read once more, while the others, fascinated, watched Hubert's efforts
to balance a chair on its hind legs. This squeaky experiment con-
tinued as an undertone to the reading. Not until Basil's desperate
"Now, here's where you come in, Hube," did attention swing back
to the play.

Basil read for more than an hour. When, at the end, he closed the
composition book and looked up shyly, there was a burst of spon-
taneous applause. He had followed his models closely, and for all its
grotesqueries, the result was actually interesting — it was a play.
Afterward he lingered, talking to Miss Halliburton, and he walked
home glowing with excitement and rehearsing a little by himself
into the August night.

The first week of rehearsal was a matter of Basil climbing back
and forth from auditorium to stage, crying, "No ! Look here, Connie ;
you come in more like this." Then things began to happen. Mrs. Van
Schellinger came to rehearsal one day and, lingering afterward, an-
nounced that she couldn't let Gladys be in "a play about crimi-
nals." Her theory was that this element could be removed; for
instance, the two comic crooks could be changed to "two funny
farmers."

Basil listened with horror. When she had gone he assured Miss
Halliburton that he would change nothing. Luckily Gladys played
the cook, an interpolated part that could be summarily struck out,
but her absence was felt in another way. She was tranquil and tract-
able, "the most carefully brought-up girl in town," and at her with-
drawal rowdiness appeared during rehearsals. Those who had only
such lines as "I'll ask Mrs. Van Baker, sir," in Act I and "No,
ma'am," in Act III showed a certain tendency to grow restless in be-
tween. So now it was :

"Please keep that dog quiet or else send him home ! " or :

"Where's that maid ? Wake up, Margaret, for heaven's sake ! " or :

"What is there to laugh at that's so darn funny?"

More and more the chief problem was the tactful management of

The Captured Shadow 355

Hubert Blair. Apart from his unwillingness to learn his lines, he was
a satisfactory hero, but off the stage he became a nuisance. He gave
an endless private performance for Evelyn Beebe, which took such
forms as chasing her amorously around the hall or flipping peanuts
over his shoulder to land mysteriously on the stage. Called to order,
he would mutter, "Aw, shut up yourself," just loud enough for Basil
to guess, but not to hear.

But Evelyn Beebe was all that Basil had expected. Once on the
stage she compelled a breathless attention, and Basil recognized this
by adding to her part. He envied the half -sentimental fun that she
and Hubert derived from their scenes together and he felt a vague,
impersonal jealousy that almost every night after rehearsal they
drove around together in Hubert's car.

One afternoon when matters had progressed a fortnight, Hubert
came in an hour late, loafed through the first act and then informed
Miss Halliburton that he was going home.

"What for?" Basil demanded.

"I've got some things I got to do."

"Are they important?"

"What business is that of yours?"

"Of course it's my business," said Basil heatedly, whereupon Miss
Halliburton interfered.

"There's no use of anybody getting angry. What Basil means,
Hubert, is that if it's just some small thing — why, we're all giving'
up our pleasure to make this play a success."

Hubert listened with obvious boredom.

"I've got to drive downtown and get father."

He looked coolly at Basil, as if challenging him to deny the ade-
quacy of this explanation.

"They why did you come an hour late ?" demanded Basil.

"Because I had to do something for mother."

A group had gathered and he glanced around triumphantly. It was
one of those sacred excuses, and only Basil saw that it was dis-
ingenuous.

"Oh, tripe! "he said.

"Maybe you think so — Bossy."

Basil took a step toward him, his eyes blazing.

"What'dyousay?"

"I said 'Bossy.' Isn't that what they call you at school?"

It was true. It had followed him home. Even as he went white
with rage a vast impotence surged over him at the realization that the
past was always lurking near. The faces of school were around him,
sneering and watching. Hubert laughed.

"Get out ! " said Basil in a strained voice. "Go on ! Get right out ! "

356 The Captured Shadow

Hubert laughed again, but as Basil took a step toward him he re-
treated.

"I don't want to be in your play anyhow. I never did."

"Then go on out of this hall."

"Now, Basil ! " Miss Halliburton hovered breathlessly beside them.
Hubert laughed again and looked about for his cap.

"I wouldn't be in your crazy old show," he said. He turned slowly
and jauntily, and sauntered out the dooj.

Riply Buckner read Hubert's part that afternoon, but there was a
cloud upon the rehearsal. Miss Beebe's performance lacked its cus-
tomary verve and the others clustered and whispered, falling silent
when Basil came near. After the rehearsal, Miss Halliburton, Riply
and Basil held a conference. Upon Basil flatly refusing to take the
leading part, it was decided to enlist a certain Mayall De Bee, known
slightly to Riply, who had made a name for himself in theatricals
at the Central High School.

But next day a blow fell that was irreparable. Evelyn, flushed and
uncomfortable, told Basil and Miss Halliburton that her family's
plans had changed — they were going East next week and she couldn't
be in the play after all. Basil understood. Only Hubert had held her
this long.

"Good-by," he said gloomily.

His manifest despair shamed her and she tried to justify herself.

"Really, I can't help it. Oh, Basil, I'm so sorry!"

"Coudn't you stay over a week with me after your family goes?"
Miss Halliburton asked innocently.

"Not possibly. Father wants us all to go together. That's the only
reason. If it wasn't for that I'd stay."

"All right," Basil said. "Good-by."

"Basil, you're not mad, are you?" A gust of repentance swept over
her. "I'll do anything to help. I'll come to rehearsals this week until
you get someone else, and then I'll try to help her all I can. But
father says we've got to go."

In vain Riply tried to raise Basil's morale after the rehearsal that
afternoon, making suggestions which he waved contemptuously
away. Margaret Torrence? Connie Davies? They could hardly play
the parts they had. It seemed to Basil as if the undertaking was
falling to pieces before his eyes.

It was still early when he got home. He sat dispiritedly by his
bedroom window, watching the little Barnfield boy playing a lone-
some game by himself in the yard next door.

His mother came in at five, and immediately sensed his depression.

"Teddy Barnfield has the mumps," she said, in an effort to dis-
tract him. "That's why he's playing there all alone."

The Captured Shadow 357

"Has he?" he responded listlessly.

"It isn't at all dangerous, but it's very contagious. You had it when
you were seven."

"H'm."

She hesitated.

"Are you worrying about your play? Has anything gone wrong?"

"No, mother. I just want to be alone."

After a while he got up and started after a malted milk at the soda
fountain around the corner. It was half in his mind to see Mr. Beebe
and ask him if he couldn't postpone his trip East. If he could only
be sure that that was Evelyn's real reason.

The sight of Evelyn's nine-year-old brother coming along the
street broke in on his thoughts.

"Hello, Ham. I hear you're going away."

Ham nodded.

"Going next week. To the seashore."

Basil looked at him speculatively, as if, through his proximity to
Evelyn, he held the key to the power of moving her.

"Where are you going now?" he asked.

"I'm going to play with Teddy Barnfield."

"What ! " Basil exclaimed. "Why, didn't you know—" He stopped.
A wild, criminal idea broke over him; his mother's words floated
through his mind : "It isn't at all dangerous, but it's very contagious."
If little Ham Beebe got the mumps, and Evelyn couldn't go away —

He came to a decision quickly and coolly.

"Teddy's playing in his back yard," he said. "If you want to see
him without going through his house, why don't you go down this
street and turn up the alley?"

"All right. Thanks," said Ham trustingly.

Basil stood for a minute looking after him until he turned the
corner into the alley, fully aware that it was the worst thing he had
ever done in his life.

Ill

A week later Mrs. Lee had an early supper — all Basil's favorite
things: chipped beef, French-fried potatoes, sliced peaches and
cream, and devil's food.

Every few minutes Basil said, "Gosh! I wonder what time it is,"
and went out in the hall to look at the clock. "Does that clock work
right?" he demanded with sudden suspicion. It was the first time the
matter had ever interested him.

"Perfectly all right. If you eat so fast you'll have indigestion and
then you won't be able to act well."

358 The Captured Shadow

"What do you think of the program ?" he asked for the third time.
"Riply Buckner, Jr., presents Basil Duke Lee's comedy, 'The Cap-
tured Shadow/ "

"I think it's very nice."

"He doesn't really present it."

"It sounds very well though."

"I wonder what time it is?" he inquired.

"You just said it was ten minutes after six."

"Well, I guess I better be starting."

"Eat your peaches, Basil. If you don't eat you won't be able to
act."

"I don't have to act," he said patiently. "All I am is a small part,
and it wouldn't matter — " It was too much trouble to explain.

"Please don't smile at me when I come on, mother," he requested.
"Just act as if I was anybody else."

"Can't I even say how-do-you-do?"

"What?" Humor was lost on him. He said good-by. Trying very
hard to digest not his food but his heart, which had somehow slipped
down into his stomach, he started off for the Martindale School.

As its yellow windows loomed out of the night his excitement be-
came insupportable ; it bore no resemblance to the building he had
been entering so casually for three weeks. His footsteps echoed
symbolically and portentously in its deserted hall; upstairs there
was only the janitor setting out the chairs in rows, and Basil won-
dered about the vacant stage until someone came in.

It was Mayall De Bee, the tall, clever, not very likeable youth they
had imported from Lower Crest Avenue to be the leading man.
Mayall, far from being nervous, tried to engage Basil in casual con-
versation. He wanted to know if Basil thought Evelyn Beebe would
mind if he went to see her sometime when the show was over. Basil
supposed not. Mayall said he had a friend whose father owned a
brewery who owned a twelve-cylinder car.

Basil said, "Gee!"

At quarter to seven the participants arrived in groups — Riply
Buckner with the six boys he had gathered to serve as ticket takers
and ushers ; Miss Halliburton, trying to seem very calm and reliable ;
Evelyn Beebe, who came in as if she were yielding herself up to
something and whose glance at Basil seemed to say : "Well, it looks
as if I'm really going through with it after all."

Mayall De Bee was to make up the boys and Miss Halliburton the
girls, Basil soon came to the conclusion that Miss Halliburton knew
nothing about make-up, but he judged it diplomatic, in that lady's
overwrought condition, to say nothing, but to take each girl to Mayall
for corrections when Miss Halliburton had done.

The Captured Shadow 359

An exclamation from Bill Kampf, standing at a crack in the cur-
tain, brought Basil to his side. A tall bald-headed man in spectacles
had come in and was shown to a seat in the middle of the house,
where he examined the program. He was the public. Behind those
waiting eyes, suddenly so mysterious and incalculable, was the secret
of the play's failure or success. He finished the program, took off his
glasses and looked around. Two old ladies and two little boys came
in, followed immediately by a dozen more.

"Hey, Riply," Basil called softly. "Tell them to put the children
down in front."

Riply, struggling into his policeman's uniform, looked up, and the
long black mustache on his upper lip quivered indignantly.

"I thought of that long ago."

That hall, filling rapidly, was now alive with the buzz of conversa-
tion. The children in front were jumping up and down in their seats,
and everyone was talking and calling back and forth save the several
dozen cooks and housemaids who sat in stiff and quiet pairs about
the room.

Then, suddenly, everything was ready. It was incredible. "Stop!
Stop ! " Basil wanted to say. "It can't be ready. There must be some-
thing— there always has been something," but the darkened audi-
torium and the piano and violin from Geyer's Orchestra playing
Meet Me in the Shadows belied his words. Miss Saunders, Leilia Van
Baker and Leilia's friend, Estella Carrage, were already seated on
the stage, and Miss Halliburton stood in the wings with the prompt
book. Suddenly the music ended and the chatter in front died away.

"Oh, gosh ! " Basil thought. "Oh, my gosh ! "

The curtain rose. A clear voice floated up from somewhere. Could
it be from that unfamiliar group on the stage ?

I will, Miss Saunders. I tell you I will!

But, Miss Leilia, I don't consider the newspapers proper for young ladies
nowadays.

I don't care. I want to read about this wonderful gentleman burglar they
call The Shadow.

It was actually going on. Almost before he realized it, a ripple of
laughter passed over the audience as Evelyn gave her imitation of
Miss Saunders behind her back.

"Get ready, Basil," breathed Miss Halliburton.

Basil and Bill Kampf, the crooks, each took an elbow of Victor
Van Baker, the dissolute son of the house, and made ready to aid
him through the front door.

It was strangely natural to be out on the stage with all those eyes

360 The Captured Shadow

looking up encouragingly. His mother's face floated past him, other
faces that he recognized and remembered.

Bill Kampf stumbled on a line and Basil picked him up quickly
and went on.

Miss SAUNDERS: So you are alderman from the Sixth Ward?
RABBIT SIMMONS: Yes, ma'am.

Miss SAUNDERS (shaking her head kittenishly) : Just what is an alderman?
CHINAMAN RUDD: An alderman is halfway between a politician and a
pirate.

This was one of Basil's lines that he was particularly proud of —
but there was not a sound from the audience, not a smile. A moment
later Bill Kampf absent-mindedly wiped his forehead with his
handkerchief and then stared at it, startled by the red stains of
make-up on it — and the audience roared. The theatre was like that.

Miss SAUNDERS : Then you believe in spirits, Mr. Rudd.
CHINAMAN RUDD: Yes, ma'am, I certainly do believe in spirits. Have you
got any?

The first big scene came. On the darkened stage a window rose
slowly and Mayall De Bee, "in a full evening dress," climbed over
the sill. He was tiptoeing cautiously from one side of the stage to
the other, when Leilia Van Baker came in. For a moment she was
frightened, but he assured her that he was a friend of her brother
Victor. They talked. She told him naively yet feelingly of her admira-
tion for The Shadow, of whose exploits she had read. She hoped,
though, that The Shadow would not come here tonight, as the family
jewels were all in that safe at the right.

The stranger was hungry. He had been late for his dinner and so
had not been able to get any that night. Would he have some crackers
and milk ? That would be fine. Scarcely had she left the room when
he was on his knees by the safe, fumbling at the catch, undeterred
by the unpromising word "Cake" stencilled on the safe's front. It
swung open, but he heard footsteps outside and closed it just as
Leilia came back with the crackers and milk.

They lingered, obviously attracted to each other. Miss Saunders
came in, very kittenish, and was introduced. Again Evelyn mimicked
her behind her back and the audience roared. Other members of the
household appeared and were introduced to the stranger.

What's this? A banging at the door, and Mulligan, a policeman,
rushes in.

The Captured Shadow 361

We have just received word from the Central Office that the notorious
Shadow has been seen climbing in the window! No one can leave this house
tonight !

The curtain fell. The first rows of the audience — the younger
brothers and sisters of the cast — were extravagant in their enthusi-
asm. The actors took a bow.

A moment later Basil found himself alone with Evelyn Beebe on
the stage. A weary doll in her make-up she was leaning against a
table.

"Heigh-ho, Basil," she said.

She had not quite forgiven him for holding her to her promise after
her little brother's mumps had postponed their trip East, and Basil
had tactfully avoided her, but now they met in the genial glow of
excitement and success.

"You were wonderful," he said— "Wonderful ! "

He lingered a moment. He could never please her, for she wanted
someone like herself, someone who could reach her through her
senses, like Hubert Blair. Her intuition told her that Basil was of a
certain vague consequence; beyond that his incessant attempts to
make people think and feel, bothered and wearied her. But suddenly,
in the glow of the evening, they leaned forward and kissed peace-
fully, and from that moment, because they had no common ground
even to quarrel on, they were friends for life.

When the curtain rose upon the second act Basil slipped down a
flight of stairs and up another to the back of the hall, where he stood
watching in the darkness. He laughed silently when the audience
laughed, enjoying it as if it were a play he had never seen
before.

There was a second and a third act scene that were very similar.
In each of them The Shadow, alone on the stage, was interrupted by
Miss Saunders. Mayall De Bee, having had but ten days of rehearsal,
was inclined to confuse the two, but Basil was totally unprepared for
what happened. Upon Connie's entrance Mayall spoke his third-act
line and involuntarily Connie answered in kind.

Others coming on the stage were swept up in the nervousness and
confusion, and suddenly they were playing the third act in the mid-
dle of the second. It happened so quickly that for a moment Basil
had only a vague sense that something was wrong. Then he dashed
down one stairs and up another and into the wings, crying :

"Let down the curtain ! Let down the curtain ! "

The boys who stood there aghast sprang to the rope. In a minute
Basil, breathless, was facing the audience.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "there's been changes in the cast

3 62 The Captured Shadow

and what just happened was a mistake. If you'll excuse us we'd like
to do that scene over."

He stepped back in the wings to a flutter of laughter and applause.

"All right, Mayall ! " he called excitedly. "On the stage alone. Your
line is: 'I just want to see that the jewels are all right/ and Connie's
is: 'Go ahead, don't mind me.' All right! Curtain up!"

In a moment things righted themselves. Someone brought water
for Miss Halliburton, who was in a state of collapse, and as the act
ended they all took a curtain call once more. Twenty minutes later
it was over. The hero clasped Leilia Van Baker to his breast, confess-
ing that he was The Shadow, "and a captured Shadow at that" ; the
curtain went up and down, up and down; Miss Halliburton was
dragged unwillingly on the stage and the ushers came up the aisles
laden with flowers. Then everything became informal and the actors
mingled happily with the audience, laughing and important, con-
gratulated from all sides. An old man whom Basil didn't know came
up to him and shook his hand, saying, "You're a young man that's
going to be heard from some day," and a reporter from the paper
asked him if he was really only fifteen. It might all have been very
bad and demoralizing for Basil, but it was already behind him. Even
as the crowd melted away and the last few people spoke to him and
went out, he felt a great vacancy come into his heart. It was over, it
was done and gone — all that work, and interest and absorption. It
was a fyollowness like fear.

"Good night, Miss Halliburton. Good night, Evelyn."

"Good night, Basil. Congratulations, Basil. Good night."

"Where's my coat? Good night, Basil."

"Leave your costumes on the stage, please. They've got to go
back tomorrow."

He was almost the last to leave, mounting to the stage for a mo-
ment and looking around the deserted hall. His mother was waiting
and they strolled home together through the first cool night of the
year.

"Well, I thought it went very well indeed. Were you satisfied ?" He
didn't answer for a moment. "Weren't you satisfied with the way it
went?"

"Yes." He turned his head away.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," and then, "Nobody really cares, do they?"

"About what?"

"About anything."

"Everybody cares about different things. I care about you, fo;
instance."

The Captured Shadow 363

Instinctively he ducked away from a hand extended caressingly
toward him: "Oh, don't. I don't mean like that."

"You're just overwrought, dear."

"I am not overwrought. I just feel sort of sad."

"You shouldn't feel sad. Why, people told me after the play — "

"Oh, that's all over. Don't talk about that — don't ever talk to me
about that any more."

"Then what are you sad about?"

"Oh, about a little boy."

"What little boy?"

"Oh, little Ham — you wouldn't understand."

"When we get home I want you to take a real hot bath and quiet
your nerves."

"All right."

But when he got home he fell immediately into deep sleep on the
sofa. She hesitated. Then covering him with a blanket and a com-
forter, she pushed a pillow under his protesting head and went
upstairs.

She knelt for a long time beside her bed.

"God, help him! help him," she prayed, "because he needs help
that I can't give him any more."
1928 Taps at Reveille

A WOMAN WITH A PAST

DRIVING SLOWLY through New Haven, two of the young girls
became alert. Josephine and Lillian darted soft frank glances into
strolling groups of three or four undergraduates, into larger groups
on corners, which swung about as one man to stare at their receding
heads. Believing that they recognized an acquaintance in a solitary
loiterer, they waved wildly, whereupon the youth's mouth fell open,
and as they turned the next corner he made a dazed dilatory gesture
with his hand. They laughed. "We'll send him a post card when we
get back to school tonight, to see if it really was him."

Adele Craw, sitting on one of the little seats, kept on talking to
Miss Chambers, the chaperone. Glancing sideways at her, Lillian
winked at Josephine without batting an eye, but Josephine had
gone into a reverie.

This was New Haven — city of her adolescent dreams, of glittering
proms where she would move on air among men as intangible as the
tunes they danced to. City sacred as Mecca, shining as Paris, hidden
as Timbuktu. Twice a year the life-blood of Chicago, her home,
flowed into it, and twice a year flowed back, bringing Christmas or
bringing summer. Bingo, bingo, bingo, that's the lingo ; love of mine,
I pine for one of your glances; the darling boy on the left there;
underneath the stars I wait.

Seeing it for the first time, she found herself surprisingly un-
moved— the men they passed seemed young and rather bored with
the possibilities of the day, glad of anything to stare at ; seemed un-
dynamic and purposeless against the background of bare elms, lakes
of dirty snow and buildings crowded together under the February
sky. A wisp of hope, a well-turned-out derby-crowned man, hurrying
with stick and suitcase toward the station, caught her attention, but
his reciprocal glance was too startled, too ingenuous. Josephine won-
dered at the extent of her own disillusionment.

She was exactly seventeen and she was blas6. Already she had been
a sensation and a scandal ; she had driven mature men to a state of
disequilibrium ; she had, it was said, killed her grandfather, but as

364

A Woman with a Past 365

he was over eighty at the time perhaps he just died. Here and there
in the Middle West were discouraged little spots which upon inspec-
tion turned out to be the youths who had once looked full into her
green and wistful eyes. But her love affair of last summer had
ruined her faith in the all-sufficiency of men. She had grown bored
with the waning September days — and it seemed as though it had
happened once too often. Christmas with its provocative shortness,
its travelling glee clubs, had brought no one new. There remained
to her only a persistent, a physical hope; hope in her stomach
that there was someone whom she would love more than he loved
her.

They stopped at a sporting-goods store and Adele Craw, a pretty
girl with clear honorable eyes and piano legs, purchased the sport-
ing equipment which was the reason for their trip — they were the
spring hockey committee for the school. Adele was in addition the
president of the senior class and the school's ideal girl. She had
lately seen a change for the better in Josephine Perry — rather as an
honest citizen might guilelessly approve a peculator retired on his
profits. On the other hand, Adele was simply incomprehensible to
Josephine — admirable, without doubt, but a member of another
species. Yet with the charming adaptability that she had hitherto
reserved for men, Josephine was trying hard not to disillusion her,
trying to be honestly interested in the small, neat, organized
politics of the school.

Two men who had stood with their backs to them at another
counter turned to leave the store, when they caught sight of Miss
Chambers and Adele. Immediately they came forward. The one who
spoke to Miss Chambers was thin and rigid of face. Josephine recog-
nized him as Miss Brereton's nephew, a student at New Haven, who
had spent several week-ends with his aunt at the school. The other
man Josephine had never seen before. He was tall and broad, with
blond curly hair and an open expression in which strength of purpose
and a nice consideration were pleasantly mingled. It was not the
sort of face that generally appealed to Josephine. The eyes were
obviously without a secret, without a sidewise gambol, without a
desperate flicker to show that they had a life of their own apart
from the mouth's speech. The mouth itself was large and masculine ;
its smile was an act of kindness and control. It was rather with
curiosity as to the sort of man who would be attentive to Adele Craw
that Josephine continued to look at him, for his voice that obviously
couldn't lie greeted Adele as if this meeting was the pleasant surprise
of his day.

In a moment Josephine and Lillian were called over and intro-
duced.

366 A Woman with a Past

"This is Mr. Waterbury" — that was Miss Brereton's nephew —
"and Mr. Dudley Knowleton."

Glancing at Adele, Josephine saw on her face an expression of
tranquil pride, even of possession. Mr. Knowleton spoke politely,
but it was obvious that though he looked at the younger girls he did
not quite see them. But since they were friends of Adele's he made
suitable remarks, eliciting the fact that they were both coming down
to New Haven to their first prom the following week. Who were their
hosts? Sophomores; he knew them slightly. Josephine thought that
was unnecessarily superior. Why, they were the charter members of
the Loving Brothers' Association — Ridgeway Saunders and George
Davey — and on the glee-club trip the girls they picked out to rush
in each city considered themselves a sort of elite, second only to the
girls they asked to New Haven.

"And oh, I've got some bad news for you," Knowleton said to
Adele. "You may be leading the prom. Jack Coe went to the infirmary
with appendicitis, and against my better judgment I'm the provi-
sional chairman." He looked apologetic. "Being one of these stone-
age dancers, the two-step king, I don't see how I ever got on the
committee at all."

When the car was on its way back to Miss Brereton's school,
Josephine and Lillian bombarded Adele with questions.

"He's an old friend from Cincinnati," she explained demurely.
"He's captain of the baseball team and he was last man for Skull
and Bones."

"You're going to the prom with him?"

"Yes. You see, I've known him all my life."

Was there a faint implication in this remark that only those who
had known Adele all her life knew her at her true worth ?

"Are you engaged ?" Lillian demanded.

Adele laughed. "Mercy, I don't think of such matters. It doesn't
seem to be time for that sort of thing yet, does it?" ("Yes," inter-
polated Josephine silently.) "We're just good friends. I think there
can be a perfectly healthy friendship between a man and a girl with-
out a lot of—"

"Mush," supplied Lillian helpfully.

"Well, yes, but I don't like that word. I was going to say without
a lot of sentimental romantic things that ought to come later."

"Bravo, Adele!" said Miss Chambers somewhat perfunctorily.

But Josephine's curiosity was unappeased.

"Doesn't he say he's in love with you, and all that sort of thing?"

"Mercy, no! Dud doesn't believe in such stuff any more than I
do. He's got enough to do at New Haven, serving on the committees
and the team."

A Woman with a Past 367

"Oh! "said Josephine.

She was oddly interested. That two people who were attracted to
each other should never even say anything about it but be content to
"not believe in such stuff," was something new in her experience. She
had known girls who had no beaus, others who seemed to have no
emotions, and still others who lied about what they thought and did ;
but here was a girl who spoke of the attentions of the last man
tapped for Skull and Bones as if they were two of the limestone
gargoyles that Miss Chambers had pointed out on the just completed
Harkness Hall. Yet Adele seemed happy — happier than Josephine,
who had always believed that boys and girls were made for nothing
but each other, and as soon as possible.

In the light of his popularity and achievements, Knowleton seemed
more attractive. Josephine wondered if he would remember her and
dance with her at the prom, or if that depended on how well he
knew her escort, Ridgeway Saunders. She tried to remember whether
she had smiled at him when he was looking at her. If she had really
smiled he would remember her and dance with her. She was still
trying to be sure of that over her two French irregular verbs and her
ten stanzas of the Ancient Mariner that night; but she was still
uncertain when she fell asleep.

Three gay young sophomores, the founders of the Loving Brothers7
Associaton, took a house together for Josephine, Lillian and a girl
from Farmington and their three mothers. For the girls it was a first
prom, and they arrived at New Haven with all the nervousness of
the condemned ; but a Sheffield fraternity tea in the afternoon yielded
up such a plethora of boys from home, and boys who had visited
there and friends of those boys, and new boys with unknown pos-
sibilities but obvious eagerness, that they were glowing with self-
confidence as they poured into the glittering crowd that thronged
the armory at ten.

It was impressive ; for the first time Josephine was at a function
run by men upon men's standards — an outward projection of the
New Haven world from which women were excluded and which went
on mysteriously behind the scenes. She perceived that their three
escorts, who had once seemed the very embodiments of worldliness,
were modest fry in this relentless microcosm of accomplishment and
success. A man's world 1 Looking around her at the glee-club con-
cert, Josephine had felt a grudging admiration for the good fellow-
ship, the good feeling. She envied Adele Craw, barely glimpsed in
the dressing-room, for the position she automatically occupied by

3 68 A Woman with a Past

being Dudley Knowleton's girl tonight. She envied her more stepping
off under the draped bunting through a gateway of hydrangeas at the
head of the grand march, very demure and faintly unpowdered in
a plain white dress. She was temporarily the centre of all attention,
and at the sight something that had long lain dormant in Josephine
awakened — her sense of a problem, a scarcely defined possibility.

"Josephine," Ridgeway Saunders began, "you can't realize how
happy I am now that it's come true. IVe looked forward to this so
long, and dreamed about it — "

She smiled up at him automatically, but her mind was elsewhere,
and as the dance progressed the idea continued to obsess her. She
was rushed from the beginning ; to the men from the tea were added
a dozen new faces, a dozen confident or timid voices, until, like all
the more popular girls, she had her own queue trailing her about the
room. Yet all this had happened to her before, and there was some-
thing missing. One might have ten men to Adele's two, but Josephine
was abruptly aware that here a girl took on the importance of the
man who had brought her.

She was discomforted by the unfairness of it. A girl earned her
popularity by being beautiful and charming. The more beautiful and
charming she was, the more she could afford to disregard public
opinion. It seemed absurd that simply because Adele had managed
to attach a baseball captain, who mightn't know anything about
girls at all, or be able to judge their attractions, she should be thus
elevated in spite of her thick ankles, her rather too pinkish face.

Josephine was dancing with Ed Bement from Chicago. He was
her earliest beau, a flame of pigtail days in dancing school when
one wore white cotton stockings, lace drawers with a waist attached
and ruffled dresses with the inevitable sash.

"What's the matter with me?" she asked Ed, thinking aloud. "For
months I've felt as if I were a hundred years old, and I'm just seven-
teen and that party was only seven years ago."

"You've been in love a lot since then," Ed said.

"I haven't," she protested indignantly. "I've had a lot of silly
stories started about me, without any foundation, usually by girls
who were jealous."

"Jealous of what?"

"Don't get fresh," she said tartly. "Dance me near Lillian."

Dudley Knowleton had just cut in on Lillian. Josephine spoke to
her friend ; then waiting until their turns would bring them face to
face over a space of seconds, she smiled at Knowleton. This time she
made sure that smile intersected as well as met glance, that he passed
beside the circumference of her fragrant charm. If this had been
named like French perfume of a later day it might have been called

A Woman with a Past 369

"Please." He bowed and smiled back ; a minute later he cut in on her.

It was in an eddy in a corner of the room and she danced slower
so that he adapted himself, and for a moment they went around in
a slow circle.

"You looked so sweet leading the march with Adele," she told
him. "You seemed so serious and kind, as if the others were a lot of
children. Adele looked sweet, too." And she added on an inspiration,
"At school IVe taken her for a model."

"You have ! " She saw him conceal his sharp surprise as he said,
"111 have to tell her that."

He was handsomer than she had thought, and behind his cordial
good manners there was a sort of authority. Though he was correctly
attentive to her, she saw his eyes search the room quickly to see if
all went well ; he spoke quietly, in passing, to the orchestra leader,
who came down deferentially to the edge of his dais. Last man for
Bones. Josephine knew what that meant — her father had been
Bones. Ridgeway Saunders and the rest of the Loving Brothers'
Association would certainly not be Bones. She wondered, if there
had been a Bones for girls, whether she would be tapped — or Adele
Craw with her ankles, symbol of solidity.

Come on o-ver here,
Want to have you near ;
Come on join the part-y,
Get a wel-come heart-y.

"I wonder how many boys here have taken you for a model," she
said. "If I were a boy you'd be exactly what I'd like to be. Except
I'd be terribly bothered having girls falling in love with me all the
time."

"They don't," he said simply. "They never have."

"Oh, yes — but they hide it because they're so impressed with you,
and they're afraid of Adele."

"Adele wouldn't object." And he added hastily, "—if it ever
happened. Adele doesn't believe in being serious about such things."

"Are you engaged to her?"

He stiffened a little. "I don't believe in being engaged till the
right time comes."

"Neither do I," agreed Josephine readily. "I'd rather have one
good friend than a hundred people hanging around being mushy all
the time."

"Is that what that crowd does that keeps following you around
tonight?"

"What crowd ?" she asked innocently

370 A Woman with a Past

"The fifty per cent of the sophomore class that's rushing you."

"A lot of parlor snakes," she said ungratefully.

Josephine was radiantly happy now as she turned beautifully
through the newly enchanted hall in the arms of the chairman of the
prom committee. Even this extra time with him she owed to the awe
which he inspired in her entourage ; but a man cut in eventually and
there was a sharp fall in her elation. The man was impressed that
Dudley Knowleton had danced with her; he was more respectful,
and his modulated admiration bored her. In a little while, she hoped,
Dudley Knowleton would cut back, but as midnight passed, dragging
on another hour with it, she wondered if after all it had only been
a courtesy to a girl from Adele's school. Since then Adele had prob-
ably painted him a neat little landscape of Josephine's past. When
finally he approached her she grew tense and watchful, a state which
made her exteriorly pliant and tender and quiet. But instead of
dancing he drew her into the edge of a row of boxes.

"Adele had an accident on the cloakroom steps. She turned her
ankle a little and tore her stocking on a nail. She'd like to borrow
a pair from you because you're staying near here and we're way out
at the Lawn Club."

"Of course."

"I'll run over with you — I have a car outside."

"But you're busy, you mustn't bother."

"Of course I'll go with you."

There was thaw in the air ; a hint of thin and lucid spring hovered
delicately around the elms and cornices of buildings whose bareness
and coldness had so depressed her the week before. The night had
a quality of asceticism, as if the essence of masculine struggle were
seeping everywhere through the little city where men of three cen-
turies had brought their energies and aspirations for winnowing.
And Dudley Knowleton sitting beside her, dynamic and capable,
was symbolic of it all. It seemed that she had never met a man
before.

"Come in, please," she said as he went up the steps of the house
with her. "TheyVe made it very comfortable."

There was an open fire burning in the dark parlor. When she came
downstairs with the stockings she went in and stood beside him, very
still for a moment, watching it with him. Then she looked up, still
silent, looked down, looked at him again.

"Did you get the stockings?" he asked, moving a little.

"Yes," she said breathlessly. "Kiss me for being so quick."

He laughed as if she said something witty and moved toward the
door. She was smiling and her disappointment was deeply hidden as
they got into the car.

A Woman with a Past 371

"It's been wonderful meeting you," she told him. "I can't tell you
how many ideas I've gotten from what you said."

"But I haven't any ideas."

"You have. All that about not getting engaged till the proper time
comes. I haven't had much opportunity to talk to a man like you.
Otherwise my ideas would be different, I guess. I've just realized
that I've been wrong about a lot of things. I used to want to be excit-
ing. Now I want to help people."

"Yes," he agreed, "that's very nice."

He seemed about to say more when they arrived at the armory.
In their absence supper had begun ; and crossing the great floor by
his side, conscious of many eyes regarding them, Josephine wondered
if people thought that they had been up to something.

"We're late," said Knowleton when Adele went off to put on the
stockings. "The man you're with has probably given you up long
ago. You'd better let me get you something here."

"That would be too divine."

Afterward, back on the floor again, she moved in a sweet aura of
abstraction. The followers of several departed belles merged with
hers until now no girl on the floor was cut in on with such fre-
quency. Even Miss Brereton's nephew, Ernest Waterbury, danced
with her in stiff approval. Danced? With a tentative change of pace
she simply swung from man to man in a sort of hands-right-and-left
around the floor. She felt a sudden need to relax, and as if in answer
to her mood a new man was presented, a tall, sleek Southerner with
a persuasive note :

"You lovely creacha. I been strainin my eyes watchin your cameo
face floatin round. You stand out above all these othuz like an
Amehken Beauty Rose over a lot of field daisies."

Dancing with him a second time, Josephine hearkened to his
pleadings.

"All right. Let's go outside."

"It wasn't outdaws I was considerin," he explained as they left the
floor. "I happen to have a mortgage on a nook right hee in the
building."

"All right."

Book Chaffee, of Alabama, led the way through the cloakroom,
through a passage to an inconspicuous door.

"This is the private apartment of my friend Sergeant Boone,
instructa of the battery. He wanted to be particularly sure it'd be
used as a nook tonight and not a readin room or anything like
that."

Opening the door he turned on a dim light ; she came in and he
shut it behind her, aad they faced each oti&f .

372 A Woman with a Past

"Mighty sweet," he murmured. His tall face came down, his long
arms wrapped around her tenderly, and very slowly so that their
eyes met for quite a long time, he drew her up to him. Josephine
kept thinking that she had never kissed a Southern boy
before.

They started apart at the sudden sound of a key turning in the lock
outside. Then there was a muffled snicker followed by retreating foot-
steps, and Book sprang for the door and wrenched at the handle,
just as Josephine noticed that this was not only Sergeant Boone's
parlor ; it was his bedroom as well.

"Who was it?" she demanded. "Why did they lock us in?"

"Some funny boy. I'd like to get my hands on him."

"Will he come back?"

Book sat down on the bed to think. "I couldn't say. Don't even
know who it was. But if somebody on the committee came along it
wouldn't look too good, would it?"

Seeing her expression change, he came over and put his arm
around her. "Don't you worry, honey. We'll fix it."

She returned his kiss, briefly but without distraction. Then she
broke away and went into the next apartment, which was hung with
boots, uniform coats and various military equipment.

"There's a window up here," she said. It was high in the wall and
had not been opened for a long time. Book mounted on a chair and
forced it ajar.

"About ten feet down," he reported, after a moment, "but there's
a big pile of snow just underneath. You might get a nasty fall and
you'll sure soak your shoes and stockin's."

"We've got to get out," Josephine said sharply.

"We'd better wait and give this funny man a chance — "

"I won't wait. I want to get out. Look — throw out all the blankets
from the bed and I'll jump on that: or you jump first and spread
them over the pile of snow."

After that it was merely exciting. Carefully Book Chaffee wiped
the dust from the window to protect her dress ; then they were struck
silent by a footstep that approached — and passed the outer door.
Book jumped, and she heard him kicking profanely as he waded out
of the soft drift below. He spread the blankets. At the moment when
Josephine swung her legs out the window, there was the sound of
voices outside the door and the key turned again in the lock. She
landed softly, reaching for his hand, and convulsed with laughter
they ran and skidded down the half block toward the corner, and
reaching the entrance to the armory, they stood panting for a mo-
ment, breathing in the fresh night. Book was reluctant to go
inside.

A Woman with a Past 373

"Why don't you let me conduct you where you're stayin? We can
sit around and sort of recuperate."

She hesitated, drawn toward him by the community of their late
predicament ; but something was calling her inside, as if the fulfill-
ment of her elation awaited her there.

"No," she decided.

As they went in she collided with a man in a great hurry, and
looked up to recognize Dudley Knowleton.

"So sorry," he said. "Oh hello—"

"Won't you dance me over to my box?" she begged him impul-
sively. "I've torn my dress."

As they started off he said abstractedly: "The fact is, a little mis-
chief has come up and the buck has been passed to me. I was going
along to see about it."

Her heart raced wildly and she felt the need of being another sort
of person immediately.

"I can't tell you how much it's meant meeting you. It would be
wonderful to have one friend I could be serious with without being
all mushy and sentimental. Would you mind if I wrote you a letter -
I mean, would Adele mind?"

"Lord, no." His smile had become utterly unfathomable to her.
As they reached the box she thought of one more thing :

"Is it true that the baseball team is training at Hot Springs dur-
ing Easter?"

"Yes. You going there?"

"Yes. Good night, Mr. Knowleton."

But she was destined to see him once more. It was outside the
men's coat room, where she waited among a crowd of other pale
survivors and their paler mothers, whose wrinkles had doubled and
tripled with the passing night. He was explaining something to Adele,
and Josephine heard the phrase, "The door was locked, and the
window open — "

Suddenly it occurred to Josephine that, meeting her coming in
damp and breathless, he must have guessed at the truth — and Adele
would doubtless confirm his suspicion. Once again the spectre of her
old enemy, the plain and jealous girl, arose before her. Shutting her
mouth tight together she turned away.

But they had seen her, and Adele called to her in her cheerful
ringing voice :

"Come say good night. You were so sweet about the stockings.
Here's a girl you won't find doing shoddy, silly things, Dudley." Im-
pulsively she leaned and kissed Josephine on the cheek. "You'll see
I'm right, Dudley — next year she'll be the most respected girl in
school."

374 A Woman with a Past

III

As things go in the interminable days of early March, what
happened next happened quickly. The annual senior dance at Miss
Brereton's school came on a night soaked through with spring, and
all the junior girls lay awake listening to the sighing tunes from the
gymnasium. Between the numbers, when boys up from New Haven
and Princeton wandered about the grounds, cloistered glances looked
down from dark open windows upon the vague figures.

Not Josephine, though she lay awake like the others. Such vicarious
diversions had no place in the sober patterns she was spinning now
from day to day ; yet she might as well have been in the forefront of
those who called down to the men and threw notes and entered
into conversations, for destiny had suddenly turned against her and
was spinning a dark web of its own.

Lit-tle lady, don't be depressed and blue,
After all, we're both in the same can-noo —

Dudley Knowleton was over in the gymnasium fifty yards away,
but proxmity to a man did not thrill her as it would have done a
year ago — not, at least, in the same way. Life, she saw now, was a
serious matter, and in the modest darkness a line of a novel cease-
lessly recurred to her: "He is a man fit to be the father of my chil-
dren." What were the seductive graces, the fast lines of a hundred
parlor snakes compared to such realities. One couldn't go on forever
kissing comparative strangers behind half-closed doors.

Under her pillow now were two letters, answers to her letters.
They spoke in a bold round hand of the beginning of baseball prac-
tice ; they were glad Josephine felt as she did about things ; and the
writer certainly looked forward to seeing her at Easter. Of all the
letters she had ever received they were the most difficult from which
to squeeze a single drop of heart's blood — one couldn't even read the
"Yours" of the subscription as "Your" — but Josephine knew them
by tteart. They were precious because he had taken the time to write
thezk ; they were eloquent in the very postage stamp because he used

She was restless in her bed — the music had begun again in the
gymnasium :

Oh, my love, I've waited so long for you,
Oh, my love, Fm singing this song for you —
Oh-h-h-

A Woman with a Past 375

From the next room there was light laughter, and then from below
a male voice, and a long interchange of comic whispers. Josephine
recognized Lillian's laugh and the voices of two other girls. She
could imagine them as they lay across the window in their night-
gowns, their heads just showing from the open window. "Come right
down," one boy kept saying. "Don't be formal — come just as you
are."

There was a sudden silence, then a quick crunching of footsteps on
gravel, a suppressed snicker and a scurry, and the sharp, protesting
groan of several beds in the next room and the banging of a door
down the hall. Trouble for somebody, maybe. A few minutes later
Josephine's door half opened, she caught a glimpse of Miss Kwain
against the dim corridor light, and then the door closed.

The next afternoon Josephine and four other girls, all of whom
denied having breathed so much as a word into the night, were placed
on probation. There was absolutely nothing to do about it. Miss
Kwain had recognized their faces in the window and they were all
from two rooms. It was an injustice, but it was nothing compared to
what happened next. One week before Easter vacation the school
motored off on a one-day trip to inspect a milk farm — all save the
ones on probation. Miss Chambers, who sympathized with Josephine's
misfortune, enlisted her services in entertaining Mr. Ernest Water-
bury, who was spending a week-end with his aunt. This was only
vaguely better than nothing, for Mr. Waterbury was a very dull,
very priggish young man. He was so dull and so priggish that the
following morning Josephine was expelled from school.

It had happened like this : They had strolled in the grounds, they
had sat down at a garden table and had tea. Ernest Waterbury had
expressed a desire to see something in the chapel, just a few minutes
before his aunt's car rolled up the drive. The chapel was reached
by descending winding mock-medieval stairs; and, her shoes still
wet from the garden, Josephine had slipped on the top step and
fallen five feet directly into Mr. Waterbury's unwilling arms, where
she lay helpless, convulsed with irrestible laughter. It was in this
position that Miss Brereton and the visiting trustee had found
them.

"But I had nothing to do with it!" declared the ungallant Mr.
Waterbury. Flustered and outraged, he was packed back to New
Haven, and Miss Brereton, connecting this with last week's sin, pro-
ceeded to lose her head. Josephine, humiliated and furious, lost hers,
and Mr. Perry, who happened to be in New York, arrived at the
school the same night. At his passionate indignation, Miss Brereton
collapsed and retracted, but the damage was done, and Josephine

37<> A Woman with a Past

packed her trunk. Unexpectedly, monstrously, just as it had begun
to mean something, her school life was over.

For the moment all her feelings were directed against Miss Brere-
ton, and the only tears she shed at leaving were of anger and resent-
ment. Riding with her father up to New York, she saw that while at
first he had instinctively and whole-heartedly taken her part, he felt
also a certain annoyance with her misfortune.

"We'll all survive," he said. "Unfortunately, even that old idiot
Miss Brereton will survive. She ought to be running a reform school."
He brooded for a moment. "Anyhow, your mother arrives tomorrow
and you and she can go down to Hot Springs as you planned."

"Hot Springs!" Josephine cried, in a choked voice. "Oh, no!''

"Why not?" he demanded in surprise. "It seems the best thing to
do. Give it a chance to blow over before you go back to Chicago."

"I'd rather go to Chicago," said Josephine breathlessly. "Daddy,
I'd much rather go to Chicago."

"That's absurd. Your mother's started East and the arrangements
are all made. At Hot Springs you can get out and ride and play golf
and forget that old she-devil — "

"Isn't there another place in the East we could go? There's people
I know going to Hot Springs who'll know all about this, people that
I don't want to meet — girls from school."

"Now, Jo, you keep your chin up — this is one of those times.
Sorry I said that about letting it blow over in Chicago ; if we hadn't
made other plans we'd go back and face every old shrew and gossip
in town right away. When anybody slinks off in a corner they think
you've been up to something bad. If anybody says anything to you,
you tell them the truth — what I said to Miss Brereton. You tell
them she said you could come back and I damn well wouldn't let
you go back."

"They won't believe it."

There would be, at all events, four days of respite at Hot Springs
before the vacations of the schools. Josephine passed this time tak-
ing golf lessons from a professional so newly arrived from Scotland
that he surely knew nothing of her misadventure; she even went
riding with a young man one afternoon, feeling almost at home with
him after his admission that he had flunked out of Princeton in
February — a confidence, however, which she did not reciprocate in
kind. But in the evenings, despite the young man's importunity, she
stayed with her mother, feeling nearer to her than she ever had
before.

But one afternoon in the lobby Josephine saw by the desk two
dozen good-looking young men waiting by a stack of bat cases and
bags, and knew that what she dreaded was at hand. She ran upstairs

A Woman with a Past 377

and with an invented headache dined there that night, but after
dinner she walked restlessly around their apartment. She was ashamed
not only of her situation but of her reaction to it. She had never felt
any pity for the unpopular girls who skulked in dressing-rooms be-
cause they could attract no partners on the floor, or for girls who
were outsiders at Lake Forest, and now she was like them — hiding
miserably out of life. Alarmed lest already the change was written
in her face, she paused in front of the mirror, fascinated as ever by
what she found there.

"The darn fools/' she said aloud. And as she said it her chin went
up and the faint cloud about her eyes lifted. The phrases of the
myriad love letters she had received passed before her eyes ; behind
her, after all, was the reassurance of a hundred lost and pleading
faces, of innumerable tender and pleading voices. Her pride flooded
back into her till she could see the warm blood rushing up into her
cheeks.

There was a knock at the door — it was the Princeton boy.

"How about slipping downstairs?" he proposed. "There's a dance.
It's full of E-lies, the whole Yale baseball team. I'll pick up one of
them and introduce you and you'll have a big time. How about it?"

"All right, but I don't want to meet anybody. You'll just have to
dance with me all evening."

"You know that suits me."

She hurried into a new spring evening dress of the frailest fairy
blue. In the excitement of seeing herself in it, it seemed as if she had
shed the old skin of winter and emerged a shining chrysalis with no
stain ; and going downstairs her feet fell softly just off the beat of
the music from below. It was a tune from a play she had seen a
week ago in New York, a tune with a future — ready for gayeties as
yet unthought of, lovers not yet met. Dancing off, she was certain
that life had innumerable beginnings. She had hardly gone ten steps
when she was cut in upon by Dudley Knowleton.

"Why, Josephine ! " He had never used her first name before — he
stood holding her hand. "Why, I'm so glad to see you. I've been hop-
ing and hoping you'd be here"."

She soared skyward on a rocket of surprise and delight. He was
actually glad to see her — the expression on his face was obviously
sincere. Could it be possible that he hadn't heard ?

"Adele wrote me you might be here. She wasn't sure."

— Then he knew and didn't care ; he liked her anyhow.

"I'm in sackcloth and ashes," she said.

"Well, they're very becoming to you."

"You know what happened — " she ventured.

"I do. I wasn't going to say anything, but it's generally agreed that

378 A Woman with a Past

Waterbury behaved like a fool — and it's not going to be much help
to him in the elections next month. Look — I want you to dance with
some men who are just starving for a touch of beauty."

Presently she was dancing with, it seemed to her, the entire team
at once. Intermittently Dudley Knowleton cut back in, as well as the
Princeton man, who was somewhat indignant at this unexpected
competition. There were many girls from many schools in the room,
but with an admirable team spirit the Yale men displayed a sharp
prejudice in Josephine 's favor ; already she was pointed out from the
chairs along the wall.

But interiorly she was waiting for what was coming, for the mo-
ment when she would walk with Dudley Knowleton into the warm,
Southern night. It came naturally, just at the end of a number, and
they strolled along an avenue of early-blooming lilacs and turned a
corner and another corner. . . .

"You were glad to see me, weren't you?" Josephine said.

"Of course."

"I was afraid at first. I was sorriest about what happened at
school because of you. I'd been trying so hard to be different — be-
cause of you."

"You mustn't think of that school business any more. Everybody
that matters knows you got a bad deal. Forget it and start over."

"Yes," she agreed tranquilly. She was happy. The breeze and the
scent of lilacs — that was she, lovely and intangible ; the rustic bench
where they sat and the trees — that was he, rugged and strong beside
her, protecting her.

"I'd thought so much of meeting you here," she said after a min-
ute. "You'd been so good for me, that I thought maybe in a different
way I could be good for you — I mean I know ways of having a good
time that you don't know. For instance, we've certainly got to go
horseback riding by moonlight some night. That'll be fun."

He didn't answer.

"I can really be very nice when I like somebody — that's really
not often," she interpolated hastily, "not seriously. But I mean when
I do feel seriously that a boy and I are really friends I don't believe
in having a whole mob of other boys hanging around taking up
time. I like to be with him all the time, all day and all evening, don't
you?"

He stirred a little on the bench ; he leaned forward with his elbows
on his knees, looking at his strong hands. Her gently modulated
voice sank a note lower.

"When I like anyone I don't even like dancing. It's sweeter to be
alone."

Silence for a moment.

A Woman with a Past 379

"Well, you know" — he hesitated, frowning — "as a matter of fact,
I'm mixed up in a lot of engagements made some time ago with some
people." He floundered about unhappily. "In fact, I won't even be
at the hotel after tomorrow. I'll be at the house of some people down
the valley — a sort of house party. As a matter of fact, Adele's getting
here tomorrow."

Absorbed in her own thoughts, she hardly heard him at first, but
at the name she caught her breath sharply.

"We're both to be at this house party while we're here, and I
imagine it's more or less arranged what we're going to do. Of course,
in the daytime I'll be here for baseball practice."

"I see." Her lips were quivering. "You won't be— you'll be with
Adele."

"I think that — more or less — I will. She'll — want to see you, of
course."

Another silence while he twisted his big fingers and she helplessly
imitated the gesture.

"You were just sorry for me," she said. "You like Adele — much
better."

"Adele and I understand each other. She's been more or less my
ideal since we were children together."

"And I'm not your kind of girl." Josephine's voice trembled with
a sort of fright. "I suppose because I've kissed a lot of boys and got
a reputation for a speed and raised the deuce."

"It isn't that."

"Yes, it is," she declared passionately. "I'm just paying for
things." She stood up. "You'd better take me back inside so I can
dance with the kind of boys that like me."

She walked quickly down tfee path, tears of misery streaming
from her eyes. He overtook her by the steps, but she only shook her
head and said, "Excuse me for being so fresh. I'll grow up — I got
what was coming to me — it's all right."

A little later when she looked around the floor for him he had gone
— and Josephine realized with a shock that for the first time in her
life, she had tried for a man and failed. But, save in the very young,
only love begets love, and from the moment Josephine had perceived
that his interest in her was merely kindness she realized the wound
was not in her heart but in her pride. She would forget him quickly,
but she would never forget what she had learned from him. There
were two kinds of men, those you played with and those you might
marry. And as this passed through her mind, her restless eyes wan-
dered casually over the group of stags, resting very lightly on Mr.
Gordon Tinsley, the current catch of Chicago, reputedly the richest
young man in the Middle West. He had never paid any attention to

380 A Woman with a Past

young Josephine until tonight. Ten minutes ago he had asked her to
go driving with him tomorrow.

But he did not attract her — and she decided to refuse. One mustn't
run through people, and, for the sake of a romantic half-hour, trade
a possibility that might develop — quite seriously — later, at the
proper time. She did not know that this was the first mature thought
that she had ever had in her life, but it was.

The orchestra were packing their instruments and the Princeton
man was still at her ear, still imploring her to walk out with him
into the night. Josephine knew without cogitation which sort of man
he was — and the moon was bright even on the windows. So with a
certain sense of relaxation she took his arm and they strolled out to
the pleasant bower she had so lately quitted, and their faces turned
toward each other, like little moons under the great white one which
hovered high over the Blue Ridge ; his arm dropped softly about her
yielding shoulder.

"Well?" he whispered.

"Well?"
1930 Taps at Reveille

Last Act and Epilogue

EDITOR'S NOTE

THERE had been intimations of disaster — "faintly signaled, like a
nervous beating of the feet" — in some of the stories Fitzgerald wrote
from 1928 to 1930. By the end of 1930 the disaster was upon him ;
Zelda was a patient in a Swiss sanitarium, where the doctors were
unable to promise that she would recover, and Fitzgerald was begin-
ning to think of himself as an alcoholic. One result of the new situ-
ation was a new type of story, more complicated emotionally, with
less regret for the past and more dignity in the face of real sorrow.

"Babylon Revisited" (1931) is the first of the later stories and one
of the best he ever wrote. It shows that an age has ended in the year
since "The Bridal Party." Charles Wales, who might have figured in
the crowded background of the earlier story, is now a lonely survivor
wandering through Paris like a bewildered mastodon. "I lost every-
thing I wanted in the boom," he says to the head barman at the Ritz ;
and then he adds to himself, "The snow of twenty-nine wasn't real
snow. If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money."
. . . "Crazy Sunday" was the fruit of a second trip to Hollywood,
in the winter of 1931-32. It reveals the author's admiration for
Irving Thalberg, who served as model not only for the director in
the story but also for the hero of The Last Tycoon. More than that,
Fitzgerald had learned how to deal with the illogic of extremely com-
plicated emotions. . . . "Family in the Wind" (1932) is the study of
an alcoholic doctor, but in some ways it is also a defense of the
author's career.

In 1933 Fitzgerald was too busy with the manuscript of Tender Is
the Night to do much writing for the magazines, and after the novel
was published he was distracted with worries about Zelda's third
breakdown and what he called his "lesion of vitality" ; he began to
fear that he was losing his talent. "I can never write anything com-
pletely bad," he said belligerently; and the boast was true to the

383

384 Last Act and Epilogue

extent that even the trivial stories he sold to Liberty and Collier's
after the Post stopped printing his work had something good in each
of them, if only a scene or an incidental remark that gave dignity to
his characters; but the plots were beginning to be carelessly put
together and the subjects were far from his own experience.

In Hollywood the type of energy that he had formerly devoted to
writing long magazine stories went into moving-picture scripts, but
he was also writing shorter pieces for Esquire and some of these — not
all, but ten or twelve of the best — proved to be another development
for Fitzgerald. "At last I am mature," he said in his ruin, and these
are really mature stories — without the glitter and high spirits of his
early work, without boasting or self-pity or nostalgia, and even with-
out the strong rhythms and incantatory words he had once used to
intensify the emotions of his characters. The emotions in these stories
have no need of being intensified. The best of them are so close to
his personal tragedy that the emotion is in the events themselves,
which have merely to be stated in the barest language.

In the present group there are seven short stories from Fitzgerald's
last years. "An Alcoholic Case" suggests his own dilemma, unfor-
gettably, and "The Long Way Out" suggests Zelda's. "Financing
Finnegan" is a comedy, if a painful one, about the debts he owed to
his agent Harold Ober and his editor Maxwell Perkins. It is a relief
to learn that the debts were paid almost in full before Finnegan died.
The two Pat Hobby sketches are selected from a group of seventeen
that were written for Esquire in 1939-40. Pat wasn't the author him-
self, but in his comic degradation he was what the author sometimes
feared that he might become. "Three Hours between Planes" is
simply a good and honestly told story, but "The Lost Decade" is
more than that. Written in the summer of 1939, when Fitzgerald was
recovering from the long after-effects of his worst spree, it is his
memorial to the years when he "was taken drunk . . . every-which-
way drunk." It is also his promise that the rest of his life, however
short, would be different — as indeed it was.

BABYLON REVISITED

"AND WHERE'S Mr. Campbell?" Charlie asked.

"Gone to Switzerland. Mr. Campbell's a pretty sick man, Mr.
Wales."

"I'm sorry to hear that. And George Hardt?" Charlie inquired.

"Back in America, gone to work."

"And where is the Snow Bird?"

"He was in here last week. Anyway, his friend, Mr. Schaeffer, is
in Paris."

Two familiar names from the long list of a year and a half ago.
Charlie scribbled an address in his notebook and tore out the page.

"If you see Mr. Schaeffer, give him this," he said. "It's my brother-
in-law's address. I haven't settled on a hotel yet."

He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the
stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an
American bar any more — he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned
it. It had gone back into France. He felt the stillness from the mo-
ment he got out of the taxi and saw the doorman, usually in a frenzy
of activity at this hour, gossiping with a chasseur by the servants'
entrance.

Passing through the corridor, he heard only a single, bored voice in
the once-clamorous women's room. When he turned into the bar he
traveled the twenty feet of green carpet with his eyes fixed straight
ahead by old habit; and then, with his foot firmly on the rail, he
turned and surveyed the room, encountering only a single pair of
eyes that fluttered up from a newspaper in the corner. Charlie asked
for the head barman, Paul, who in the latter days of the bull market
had come to work in his own custom-built car — disembarking, how-
ever, with due nicety at the nearest corner. But Paul was at his coun-
try house today and Alix giving him information.

"No, no more," Charlie said, "I'm going slow these days."

Alix congratulated him : "You were going pretty strong a couple
of years ago."

"Ill stick to it all right," Charlie assured him. "I've stuck to it for
over a year and a half now."

"How do you find conditions in America?"

385

386 Babylon Revisited

"I haven't been to America for months. I'm in business in Prague,
representing a couple of concerns there. They don't know about me
down there."

Alix smiled.

"Remember the night of George Hardt's bachelor dinner here?"
said Charlie. "By the way, what's become of Claude Fessenden?"

Alix lowered his voice confidentially: "He's in Paris, but he doesn't
come here any more. Paul doesn't allow it. He ran up a bill of thirty
thousand francs, charging all his drinks and his lunches, and usually
his dinner, for more than a year. And when Paul finally told him he
had to pay, he gave him a bad check."

Alix shook his head sadly.

"I don't understand it, such a dandy fellow. Now he's all bloated
up — " He made a plump apple of his hands.

Charlie watched a group of strident queens installing themselves
in a corner.

"Nothing affects them," he thought. "Stocks rise and fall, people
loaf or work, but they go on forever." The place oppressed him. He
called for the dice and shook with Alix for the drink.

"Here for long, Mr. Wales?"

"I'm here for four or five days to see my little girl."

"Oh-hl You have a little girl?"

Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily
through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were
in movement ; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard
des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in
pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the
sudden provincial quality of the left bank.

Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de 1'Opera, which was out
of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the mag-
nificent fagade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly
the first few bars of Le Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Sec-
ond Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano's
Book-store, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little
bourgeois hedge of Duval's. He had never eaten at a really cheap
restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen
cents, wine included. For some odd reason he wished that he had.

As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden pro-
vincialism, he thought, "I spoiled this city for myself. I didn't realize
it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years
were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone."

He was thirty-five, and good to look at. The Irish mobility of his
face was sobered by a deep wrinkle between his eyes. As he rang his
brother-in-law's bell in the Rue Palatine, the wrinkle deepened till it

Babylon Revisited 387

pulled down his brows; he felt a cramping sensation in his belly.
From behind the maid who opened the door darted a lovely little
girl of nine who shrieked "Daddy ! " and flew up, struggling like a
fish, into his arms. She pulled his head around by one ear and set her
cheek against his.
"My old pie," he said.

"Oh, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, dads, dads, dads!"
She drew him into the salon, where the family waited, a boy and a
girl his daughter's age, his sister-in-law and her husband. He greeted
Marion with his voice pitched carefully to avoid either feigned en-
thusiasm or dislike, but her response was more frankly tepid, though
she minimized her expression of unalterable distrust by directing her
regard toward his child. The two men clasped hands in a friendly
way and Lincoln Peters rested his for a moment on Charlie's
shoulder.

The room was warm and comfortably American. The three chil-
dren moved intimately about, playing through the yellow oblongs
that led to other rooms; the cheer of six o'clock spoke in the eager
smacks of the fire and the sounds of French activity in the kitchen.
But Charlie did not relax ; his heart sat up rigidly in his body and
he drew confidence from his daughter, who from time to time came
close to him, holding in her arms the doll he had brought.

"Really extremely well," he declared in answer to Lincoln's ques-
tion. "There's a lot of business there that isn't moving at all, but
we're doing even better than ever. In fact, damn well. I'm bringing
my sister over from America next month to keep house for me. My
income last year was bigger than it was when I had money. You see,
the Czechs "

His boasting was for a specific purpose ; but after a moment, see-
ing a faint restiveness in Lincoln's eye, he changed the subject:

"Those are fine children of yours, well brought up, good manners."

"We think Honoria's a great little girl too."

Marion Peters came back from the kitchen. She was a tall woman
with worried eyes, who had once possessed a fresh American loveli-
ness. Charlie had never been sensitive to it and was always surprised
when people spoke of how pretty she had been. From the first there
had been an instinctive antipathy between them.

"Well, how do you find Honoria?" she asked.

"Wonderful. I was astonished how much she's grown in ten
months. All the children are looking well."

"We haven't had a doctor for a year. How do you like being back
in Paris ?"

"It seems very funny to see so few Americans around."

"I'm delighted," Marion said vehemently. "Now at least you can

388 Babylon Revisited

go into a store without their assuming you're a millionaire. We've
suffered like everybody, but on the whole it's a good deal pleasanter."

"But it was nice while it lasted," Charlie said. "We were a sort of
royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. In the bar
this afternoon" — he stumbled, seeing his mistake — "there wasn't a
man I knew."

She looked at him keenly. "I should think you'd have had enough,
of bars."

"I only stayed a minute. I take one drink every afternoon, and
no more."

"Don't you want a cocktail before dinner?" Lincoln asked.

"I take only one drink every afternoon, and I've had that."

"I hope you keep to it," said Marion.

Her dislike was evident in the coldness with which she spoke, but
Charlie only smiled; he had larger plans. Her very aggressiveness
gave him an advantage, and he knew enough to wait. He wanted
them to initiate the discussion of what they knew had brought him
to Paris.

At dinner he couldn't decide whether Honoria was most like him
or her mother. Fortunate if she didn't combine the traits of both that
had brought them to disaster. A great wave of protectiveness went
over him. He thought he knew what to do for her. He believed in
character ; he wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in
character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything else
wore out.

He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to
see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those
of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched
Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.

After an hour he left and strolled toward Montmartre, up the Rue
Pigalle into the Place Blanche. The rain had stopped and there were
a few people in evening clothes disembarking from taxis in front of
cabarets, and cocottes prowling singly or in pairs, and many Negroes.
He passed a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with
the sense of familiarity ; it was Bricktop's, where he had parted with
so many hours and so much money. A few doors farther on he found
another ancient rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside.
Immediately an eager orchestra burst into sound, a pair of profes-
sional dancers leaped to their feet and a maitre d 'hotel swooped
toward him, crying, "Crowd just arriving, sir!" But he withdrew
quickly.

"You have to be damn drunk," he thought.

Zelli's was closed, the bleak and sinister cheap hotels surrounding
it were dark; up in the Rue Blanche there was more light and a

Babylon Revisited 389

local, colloquial French crowd. The Poet's Cave had disappeared,
but the two great mouths of the Caf6 of Heaven and the Caf6 of Hell
still yawned — even devoured, as he watched, the meager contents of
a tourist bus — a German, a Japanese, and an American couple who
glanced at him with frightened eyes.

So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre. All the cater-
ing to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he sud-
denly realized the meaning of the word "dissipate" — to dissipate into
thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of
the night every move from place to place was an enormous human
jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower
motion.

He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for
playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman
for calling a cab.

But it hadn't been given for nothing.

It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an
offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth
remembering, the things that now he would always remember — his
child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.

In the glare of a brasserie a woman spoke to him. He bought her
some eggs and coffee, and then, eluding her encouraging stare, gave
her a twenty-franc note and took a taxi to his hotel.

He woke upon a fine fall day — football weather. The depression of
yesterday was gone and he liked the people on the streets. At noon
he sat opposite Honoria at Le Grand Vatel, the only restaurant he
could think of not reminiscent of champagne dinners and long
luncheons that began at two and ended in a blurred and vague
twilight.

"Now, how about vegetables? Oughtn't you to have some vege-
tables?"

"Well, yes."

"Here's ipinards and chou-fleur and carrots and haricots"

"I'd like chou-fleur."

"Wouldn't you like to have two vegetables?"

"I usually only have one at lunch."

The waiter was pretending to be inordinately fond of children.
"Qu'elle est mignonne la petite I Elle parle exactement comme une
Fran$aise."

"How about dessert? Shall we wait and see?"

The waiter disappeared. Honoria looked at her father expectantly.

390 Babylon Revisited

"What are we going to do ?"

"First, we're going to that toy store in the Rue Saint-Honor6 and
buy you anything you like. And then we're going to the vaudeville
at the Empire."

She hesitated. "I like it about the vaudeville, but not the toy
store."

"Why not?"

"Well, you brought me this doll." She had it with her. "And I've
got lots of things. And we're not rich any more, are we?"

"We never were. But today you are to have anything you want."

"All right," she agreed resignedly.

When there had been her mother and a French nurse he had been
inclined to be strict ; now he extended himself, reached out for a new
tolerance ; he must be both parents to her and not shut any of her
out of communication.

"I want to get to know you," he said gravely. "First let me intro-
duce myself. My name is Charles J. Wales, of Prague."

"Oh, daddy ! " her voice cracked with laughter.

"And who are you, please?" he persisted, and she accepted a role
immediately: "Honoria Wales, Rue Palatine, Paris."

"Married or single?"

"No, not married. Single."

He indicated the doll. "But I see you have a child, madame."

Unwilling to disinherit it, she took it to her heart and thought
quickly: "Yes, I've been married, but I'm not married now. My
husband is dead."

He went on quickly, "And the child's name?"

"Simone. That's after my best friend at school."

"I'm very pleased that you're doing so well at school."

"I'm third this month," she boasted. "Elsie" — that was her cousin
— "is only about eighteenth, and Richard is about at the bottom."

"You like Richard and Elsie, don't you?"

"Oh, yes. I like Richard quite well and I like her all right."

Cautiously and casually he asked : "And Aunt Marion and Uncle
Lincoln — which do you like best?"

"Oh, Uncle Lincoln, I guess."

He was increasingly aware of her presence. As they came in, a
murmur of ". . . adorable" followed them, and now the people at
the next table bent all their silences upon her, staring as if she were
something no more conscious than a flower.

"Why don't I live with you?" she asked suddenly. "Because
mamma's dead?"

"You must stay here and learn more French. It would have been
hard for daddy to take care of you so well."

Babylon Revisited 391

"I don't really need much taking care of any more. I do everything
for myself."

Going out of the restaurant, a man and a woman unexpectedly
hailed him.

"Well, the old Wales!"

"Hello there, Lorraine. . . . Dune."

Sudden ghosts out of the past: Duncan Schaeffer, a friend from
college. Lorraine Quarries, a lovely, pale blonde of thirty ; one of a
crowd who had helped them make months into days in the lavish
times of three years ago.

"My husband couldn't come this year," she said, in answer to his
question. "We're poor as hell. So he gave me two hundred a month
and told me I could do my worst on that. . . . This your little
girl?"

"What about coming back and sitting down ?" Duncan asked.

"Can't do it." He was glad for an excuse. As always, he felt Lor-
raine's passionate, provocative attraction, but his own rhythm was
different now.

"Well, how about dinner?" she asked.

"I'm not free. Give me your address and let me call you."

"Charlie, I believe you're sober," she said judicially. "I honestly
believe he's sober, Dune. Pinch him and see if he's sober."

Charlie indicated Honoria with his head. They both laughed.

"What's your address?" said Duncan skeptically.

He hesitated, unwilling to give the name of his hotel.

"I'm not settled yet. I'd better call you. We're going to see the
vaudeville at the Empire."

"There ! That's what I want to do," Lorraine said. "I want to see
some clowns and acrobats and jugglers. That's just what we'll do,
Dune."

"We've got to do an errand first," said Charlie. "Perhaps we'll see
you there."

"All right, you snob. . . . Good-by, beautiful little girl."

"Good-by."

Honoria bobbed politely.

Somehow, an unwelcome encounter. They liked him because he
was functioning, because he was serious; they wanted to see him,
because he was stronger than they were now, because they wanted
to draw a certain sustenance from his strength.

At the Empire, Honoria proudly refused to sit upon her father's
folded coat. She was already an individual with a code of her own,
and Charlie was more and more absorbed by the desire of putting a
little of himself into her before she crystallized utterly. It was hope-
less to try to know her in so short a time.

392 Babylon Revisited

Between the acts they came upon Duncan and Lorraine in the
lobby where the band was playing.

"Have a drink?"

"All right, but not up at the bar. Well take a table."

"The perfect father."

Listening abstractedly to Lorraine, Charlie watched Honoria's
eyes leave their table, and he followed them wistfully about the
room, wondering what they saw. He met her glance and she smiled.

"I liked that lemonade," she said.

What had she said ? What had he expected ? Going home in a taxi
afterward, he pulled her over until her head rested against his chest.

"Darling, do you ever think about your mother?"

"Yes, sometimes," she answered vaguely.

"I don't want you to forget her. Have you got a picture of her?"

"Yes, I think so. Anyhow, Aunt Marion has.Why don't you want
me to forget her?"

"She loved you very much."

"I loved her too."

They were silent for a moment.

"Daddy, I want to come and live with you," she said suddenly.

His heart leaped ; he had wanted it to come like this.

"Aren't you perfectly happy?"

"Yes, but I love you better than anybody. And you love me better
than anybody, don't you, now that mummy's dead?"

"Of course I do. But you won't always like me best, honey. You'll
grow up and meet somebody your own age and go marry him and
forget you ever had a daddy."

"Yes, that's true," she agreed trancpilly.

He didn't go in. He was coming l&ack at nine o'clock and he
wanted to keep himself fresh and new for the thing he must say then.

"When you're safe inside, just show yourself in that window."

"All right. Good-by, dads, dads, dads, dads."

He waited in the dark street until she appeared, all warm and
glowing, in the window above and kissed her fingers out into the
night.

Ill

They were waiting. Marion sat behind the coffee service in a dig-
nified black dinner dress that just faintly suggested mourning. Lin-
coln was walking up and down with the animation of one who had
already been talking. They were as anxious as he was to get into the
question. He opened it almost immediately :

Babylon Revisited 393

"I suppose you know what I want to see you about — why I really
came to Paris."

Marion played with the black stars on her necklace and frowned.

"I'm awfully anxious to have a home," he continued. "And Fm
awfully anxious to have Honoria in it. I appreciate your taking in
Honoria for her mother's sake, but things have changed now" — he
hesitated and then continued more forcibly — "changed radically with
me, and I want to ask you to reconsider the matter. It would be silly
for me to deny that about three years ago I was acting badly "

Marion looked up at him with hard eyes.

" — but all that's over. As I told you, I haven't had more than a
drink a day for over a year, and I take that drink deliberately, so
that the idea of alcohol won't get too big in my imagination. You
see the idea?"

"No," said Marion succinctly.

"It's a sort of stunt I set myself. It keeps the matter in propor-
tion."

"I get you," said Lincoln. "You don't want to admit it's got any
attraction for you."

"Something like that. Sometimes I forget and don't take it. But
I try to take it. Anyhow, I couldn't afford to drink in my position.
The people I represent are more than satisfied with what I've done,
and I'm bringing my sister over from Burlington to keep house for
me, and I want awfully to have Honoria too. You know that even
when her mother and I weren't getting along well we never let any-
thing that happened touch Honoria. I know she's fond of me and I
know I'm able to take care of her and — well, there you are. How do
you feel about it?" f

He knew that now he would have to take a beating. It would last
an hour or two hours, and it would be difficult, but if he modulated
his inevitable resentment to the chastened attitude of the reformed
sinner, he might win his point in the end.

Keep your temper, he told himself. You don't want to be justified.
You want Honoria.

Lincoln spoke first : "We've been talking it over ever since we got
your letter last month. We're happy to have Honoria here. She's a
dear little thing, and we're glad to be able to help her, but of course
that isn't the question "

Marion interrupted suddenly. "How long are you going to stay
sober, Charlie?" she asked.

"Permanently, I hope."

"How can anybody count on that?"

"You know I never did drink heavily until I gave up business and

394 Babylon Revisited

came over here with nothing to do. Then Helen and I began to run
around with "

"Please leave Helen out of it. I can't bear to hear you talk about
her like that."

He stared at her grimly ; he had never been certain how fond of
each other the sisters were in life.

"My drinking only lasted about a year and a half — from the time
we came over until I — collapsed."

"It was time enough."

"It was time enough," he agreed.

"My duty is entirely to Helen," she said. "I try to think what
she would have wanted me to do. Frankly, from the night you did
that terrible thing you haven't really existed for me. I can't help
that. She was my sister."

"Yes."

"When she was dying she asked me to look out for Honoria. If
you hadn't been in a sanitarium then, it might have helped
matters."

He had no answer.

"I'll never in my life be able to forget the morning when Helen
knocked at my door, soaked to the skin and shivering and said you'd
locked her out."

Charlie gripped the sides of the chair. This was more difficult than
he expected ; he wanted to launch out into a long expostulation and
explanation, but he only said : "The night I locked her out — " and
she interrupted, "I don't feel up to going over that again."

After a moment's silence Lincoln said : "We're getting off the sub-
ject. You want Marion to set aside her legal guardianship and give
you Honoria. I think the main point for her is whether she has con-
fidence in you or not."

"I don't blame Marion," Charlie said slowly, "but I think she
can have entire confidence in me. I had a good record up to three
years ago. Of course, it's within human possibilities I might go
wrong any time. But if we wait much longer I'll lose Honoria's child-
hood and my chance for a home." He shook his head, "I'll simply
lose her, don't you see?"

"Yes, I see," said Lincoln.

"Why didn't you think of all this before?" Marion asked.

"I suppose I did, from time to time, but Helen and I were getting
along badly. When I consented to the guardianship, I was flat on
my back in a sanitarium and the market had cleaned me out. I
knew I'd acted badly, and I thought if it would bring any peace to
Helen, I'd agree to anything. But now it's different. I'm functioning,
I'm behaving damn well, so far as "

Babylon Revisited 395

"Please don't swear at me/' Marion said.

He looked at her, startled. With each remark the force of her dis-
like became more and more apparent. She had built up all her fear
of life into one wall and faced it toward him. This trivial reproof
was possibly the result of some trouble with the cook several hours
before. Charlie became increasingly alarmed at leaving Honoria in
this atmosphere of hostility against himself; sooner or later it
would come out, in a word here, a shake of the head there, and
some of that distrust would be irrevocably implanted in Honoria.
But he pulled his temper down out of his face and shut it up inside
him; he had won a point, for Lincoln realized the absurdity of
Marion's remark and asked her lightly since when she had objected
to the word "damn."

"Another thing," Charlie said: "Fm able to give her certain ad-
vantages now. I'm going to take a French governess to Prague with
me. Fve got a lease on a new apartment "

He stopped, realizing that he was blundering. They couldn't be
expected to accept with equanimity the fact that his income was
again twice as large as their own.

"I suppose you can give her more luxuries than we can," said
Marion. "When you were throwing away money we were living
along watching every ten francs. ... I suppose you'll start doing
it again."

"Oh, no," he said. "Fve learned. I worked hard for ten years, you
know — until I got lucky in the market, like so many people. Terribly
lucky. It won't happen again."

There was a long silence. All of them felt their nerves straining,
and for the first time in a year Charlie wanted a drink. He was sure
now that Lincoln Peters wanted him to have his child.

Marion shuddered suddenly; part of her saw that Charlie's feet
were planted on the earth now, and her own maternal feeling recog-
nized the naturalness of his desire ; but she had lived for a long time
with a prejudice — a prejudice founded on a curious disbelief in her
sister's happiness, and which, in the shock of one terrible night, had
turned to hatred for him. It had all happened at a point in her life
where the discouragement of ill health and adverse circumstances
made it necessary for her to believe in tangible villainy and a
tangible villain.

"I can't help what I think!" she cried out suddenly. "How much
you were responsible for Helen's death, I don't know. It's something
you'll have to square with your own conscience."

An electric current of agony surged through him ; for a moment
he was almost on his feet, an unuttered sound echoing in his throat.
He hung on to himself for a moment, another moment.

396 Babylon Revisited

"Hold on there," said Lincoln uncomfortably. "I never thought
you were responsible for that."

"Helen died of heart trouble," Charlie said dully.

"Yes, heart trouble." Marion spoke as if the phrase had another
meaning for her.

Then, in the flatness that followed her outburst, she saw him
plainly and she knew he had somehow arrived at control over the
situation. Glancing at her husband, she found no help from him, and
as abruptly as if it were a matter of no importance, she threw up the
sponge.

"Do what you like ! " she cried, springing up from her chair. "She's
your child. I'm not the person to stand in your way. I think if it
were my child I'd rather see her — " She managed to check herself.
"You two decide it. I can't stand this. I'm sick. I'm going to bed."

She hurried from the room ; after a moment Lincoln said :

"This has been a hard day for her. You know how strongly she
feels — " His voice was almost apologetic : "When a woman gets an
idea in her head."

"Of course."

"It's going to be all right. I think she sees now that you — can
provide for the child, and so we can't very well stand in your way or
Honoria's way."

"Thank you, Lincoln."

"I'd better go along and see how she is."

"I'm going."

He was still trembling when he reached the street, but a walk
down the Rue Bonaparte to the quais set him up, and as he crossed
the Seine, fresh and new by the quai lamps, he felt exultant. But
back in his room he couldn't sleep. The image of Helen haunted
him. Helen whom he had loved so until they had senselessly begun
to abuse each other's love, tear it into shreds. On that terrible Feb-
ruary night that Marion remembered so vividly, a slow quarrel had
gone on for hours. There was a scene at the Florida, and then he
attempted to take her home, and then she kissed young Webb at a
table; after that there was what she had hysterically said. When
he arrived home alone he turned the key in the lock in wild anger.
How could he know she would arrive an hour later alone, that there
would be a snowstorm in which she wandered about in slippers, too
confused to find a taxi? Then the aftermath, her escaping pneu-
monia by a miracle, and all the attendant horror. They were "recon-
ciled," but that was the beginning of the end, and Marion, who had
seen with her own eyes and who imagined it to be one of many
scenes from her sister's martyrdom, never forgot.

Going over it again brought Helen nearer, and in the white, soft

Babylon Revisited 397

light that steals upon half sleep near morning he found himself talk-
ing to her again. She said that he was perfectly right about Honoria
and that she wanted Honoria to be with him. She said she was glad
he was being good and doing better. She said a lot of other things —
very friendly things — but she was in a swing in a white dress, and
swinging faster and faster all the time, so that at the end he could
not hear clearly all that she said.

He woke up feeling happy. The door of the world was open again.
He made plans, vistas, futures for Honoria and himself, but suddenly
he grew sad, remembering all the plans he and Helen had made.
She had not planned to die. The present was the thing — work to do
and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury
that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching
them too closely : afterward, out in the world, the child would seek
in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing
probably to find it, turn against love and life.

It was another bright, crisp day. He called Lincoln Peters at the
bank where he worked and asked if he could count on taking Honoria
when he left for Prague. Lincoln agreed that there was no reason for
delay. One thing — the legal guardianship. Marion wanted to retain
that a while longer. She was upset by the whole matter, and it would
oil things if she felt that the situation was still in her control for
another year. Charlie agreed, wanting only the tangible, visible child.

Then the question of a governess. Charles sat in a gloomy agency
and talked to a cross Bearnaise and to a buxom Breton peasant,
neither of whom he could have endured. There were others whom he
would see tomorrow.

He lunched with Lincoln Peters at Griffons, trying to keep down
his exultation.

"There's nothing quite like your own child," Lincoln said. "But
you understand how Marion feels too."

"She's forgotten how hard I worked for seven years there," Charlie
said. "She just remembers one night."

"There's another thing." Lincoln hesitated. "While you and Helen
were tearing around Europe throwing money away, we were just
getting along. I didn't touch any of the prosperity because I never
got ahead enough to carry anything but my insurance. I think
Marion felt there was some kind of injustice in it — you not even
working toward the end, and getting richer and richer."

"It went just as quick as it came," said Charlie.

"Yes, a lot of it stayed in the hands of chasseurs and saxophone

398 Babylon Revisited

players and maitres dTiotel — well, the big party's over now. I just
said that to explain Marion's feeling about those crazy years. If you
drop in about six o'clock tonight before Marion's too tired, we'll
settle the details on the spot."

Back at his hotel, Charlie found a pneumatique that had been re-
directed from the Ritz bar where Charlie had left his address for
the purpose of finding a certain man.

"DEAR CHARLIE : You were so strange when we saw you the other
day that I wondered if I did something to offend you. If so, I'm not
conscious of it. In fact, I have thought about you too much for the
last year, and it's always been in the back of my mind that I might
see you if I came over here. We did have such good times that crazy
spring, like the night you and I stole the butcher's tricycle, and the
time we tried to call on the president and you had the old derby rim
and the wire cane. Everybody seems so old lately, but I don't feel
old a bit. Couldn't we get together some time today for old time's
sake? I've got a vile hang-over for the moment, but will be feeling
better this afternoon and will look for you about five in the sweat-
shop at the Ritz.

"Always devotedly,

"LORRAINE."

His first feeling was one of awe that he had actually, in his
mature years, stolen a tricycle and pedaled Lorraine all over the
£toile between the small hours and dawn. In retrospect it was a
nightmare. Locking out Helen didn't fit in with any other act of his
life, but the tricycle incident did — it was one of many. How many
weeks or months of dissipation to arrive at that condition of utter
irresponsibility ?

He tried to picture how Lorraine had appeared to him then — very
attractive; Helen was unhappy about it, though she said nothing.
Yesterday, in the restaurant, Lorraine had seemed trite, blurred,
worn away. He emphatically did not want to see her, and he was
glad Alix had not given away his hotel address. It was a relief to
think, instead, of Honoria, to think of Sundays spent with her and of
saying good morning to her and of knowing she was there in his
house at night, drawing her breath in the darkness.

At five he took a taxi and bought presents for all the Peters — a
piquant cloth doll, a box of Roman soldiers, flowers for Marion, big
linen handkerchiefs for Lincoln.

He saw, when he arrived in the apartment, that Marion had
accepted the inevitable. She greeted him now as though he were a
recalcitrant member of the family, rather than a menacing outsider.
Honoria had been told she was going ; Charlie was glad to see that

Babylon Revisited 399

her tact made her conceal her excessive happiness. Only on his lap
did she whisper her delight and the question "When?" before she
slipped away with the other children.

He and Marion were alone for a minute in the room, and on an
impulse he spoke out boldly :

"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any
rules. They 're not like aches or wounds ; they're more like splits in
the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material. I wish
you and I could be on better terms."

"Some things are hard to forget," she answered. "It's a question
of confidence." There was no answer to this and presently she asked,
"When do you propose to take her?"

"As soon as I can get a governess. I hoped the day after to-
morrow."

"That's impossible. I've got to get her things in shape. Not before
Saturday."

He yielded. Coming back into the room, Lincoln offered him a
drink.

"I'll take my daily whisky," he said.

It was warm here, it was a home, people together by a fire. The
children felt very safe and important ; the mother and father were
serious, watchful. They had things to do for the children more im-
portant than his visit here. A spoonful of medicine was, after all,
more important than the strained relations between Marion and
himself. They were not dull people, but they were very much in the
grip of life and circumstances. He wondered if he couldn't do some-
thing to get Lincoln out of his rut at the bank.

A long peal at the door-bell ; the bonne d tout faire passed through
and went down the corridor. The door opened upon another long
ring, and then voices, and the three in the salon looked up expect-
antly; Richard moved to bring the corridor within his range of
vision, and Marion rose. Then the maid came back along the corridor,
closely followed by the voices, which developed under the light into
Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarries.

They were gay, they were hilarious, they were roaring with laugh-
ter. For a moment Charlie was astounded ; unable to understand how
they ferreted out the Peters' address.

"Ah-h-h!" Duncan wagged his finger roguishly at Charlie.
"Ah-h-h!"

They both slid down another cascade of laughter. Anxious and at
a loss, Charlie shook hands with them quickly and presented them
to Lincoln and Marion. Marion nodded, scarcely speaking. She had
drawn back a step toward the fire ; her little girl stood beside her,
and Marion put an arm about her shoulder.

4OO Babylon Revisited

With growing annoyance at the intrusion, Charlie waited for
them to explain themselves. After some concentration Duncan said :

"We came to invite you out to dinner. Lorraine and I insist that
all this shishi, cagy business 'bout your address got to stop."

Charlie came closer to them, as if to force them backward down
the corridor.

"Sorry, but I can't. Tell me where you'll be and 111 phone you in
half an hour."

This made no impression. Lorraine sat down suddenly on the side
of a chair, and focusing her eyes on Richard, cried, "Oh, what a nice
little boy I Come here, little boy." Richard glanced at his mother,
but did not move. With a perceptible shrug of her shoulders, Lor-
raine turned back to Charlie :

"Come and dine. Sure your cousins won' mine. See you so sel'om.
Or solemn."

"I can't," said Charlie sharply. "You two have dinner and I'll
phone you."

Her voice became suddenly unpleasant. "All right, we'll go. But I
remember once when you hammered on my door at four A.M. I was
enough of a good sport to give you a drink. Come on, Dune."

Still in slow motion, with blurred, angry faces, with uncertain feet,
they retired along the corridor.

"Good night," Charlie said.

"Good night 1" responded Lorraine emphatically.

When he went back into the salon Marion had not moved, only
now her son was standing in the circle of her other arm. Lincoln
was still swinging Honoria back and forth like a pendulum from side
to side.

"What an outrage!" Charlie broke out. "What an absolute out-
rage!"

Neither of them answered. Charlie dropped into an armchair,
picked up his drink, set it down again and said :

"People I haven't seen for two years having the colossal nerve "

He broke off. Marion had made the sound "Oh!" in one swift,
furious breath, turned her body from him with a jerk and left the
room.

Lincoln set down Honoria carefully.

"You children go in and start your soup," he said, and when they
obeyed, he said to Charlie:

"Marion's not well and she can't stand shocks. That kind of peo-
ple make her really physically sick."

"I didn't tell them to come here. They wormed your name out of
somebody. They deliberately "

"Well, it's teo bad. It doesn't help matters. Excuse me a minute."

Babylon Revisited 401

Left alone, Charlie sat tense in his chair. In the next room he
could hear the children eating, talking in monosyllables, already ob-
livious to the scene between their elders. He heard a murmur of con-
versation from a farther room and then the ticking bell of a tele-
phone receiver picked up, and in a panic he moved to the other side
of the room and out of earshot.

In a minute Lincoln came back. "Look here, Charlie. I think we'd
better call off dinner for tonight. Marion's in bad shape."

"Is she angry with me?"

"Sort of," he said, almost roughly. "She's not strong and "

"You mean she's changed her mind about Honoria?"

"She's pretty bitter right now. I don't know. You phone me at the
bank tomorrow."

"I wish you'd explain to her I never dreamed these people would
come here. I'm just as sore as you are."

"I couldn't explain anything to her now."

Charlie got up. He took his coat and hat and started down the
corridor. Then he opened the door of the dining room and said in
a strange voice, "Good night, children."

Honoria rose and ran around the table to hug him.

"Good night, sweetheart," he said vaguely, and then trying to
make his voice more tender, trying to conciliate something, "Good
night, dear children."

Charlie went directly to the Ritz bar with the furious idea of find-
ing Lorraine and Duncan, but they were not there, and he realized
that in any case there was nothing he could do. He had not touched
his drink at the Peters, and now he ordered a whisky-and-soda. Paul
came over to say hello.

"It's a great change," he said sadly. "We do about half the busi-
ness we did. So many fellows I hear about back in the States lost
everything, maybe not in the first crash, but then in the second. Your
friend George Hardt lost every cent, I hear. Are you back in the
States?"

"No, I'm in business in Prague."

"I heard that you lost a lot in the crash."

"I did," and he added grimly, "but I lost everything I wanted in
the boom."

"Selling short."

"Something like that."

Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare
— the people they had met travelling ; then people who couldn't add a

4O2 Babylon Revisited

row of figures or speak a coherent sentence. The little man Helen
had consented to dance with at the ship's party, who had insulted
her ten feet from the table ; the women and girls carried screaming
with drink or drugs out of public places

— The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the
snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow. If you didn't want it to be
snow, you just paid some money.

He went to the phone and called the Peters' apartment ; Lincoln
answered.

"I called up because this thing is on my mind. Has Marion said
anything definite?"

"Marion's sick," Lincoln answered shortly. "I know this thing
isn't altogether your fault, but I can't have her go to pieces about
it. I'm afraid we'll have to let it slide for six months ; I can't take
the chance of working her up to this state again."

"I see."

"I'm sorry, Charlie."

He went back to his table. His whisky glass was empty, but he
shook his head when Alix looked at it questioningly. There wasn't
much he could do now except send Honoria some things ; he would
send her a lot of things tomorrow. He thought rather angrily that
this was just money — he had given so many people money. . . .

"No, no more," he said to another waiter. "What do I owe you?"

He would come back some day ; they couldn't make him pay for-
ever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now,
beside that fact. He wasn't young any more, with a lot of nice
thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure
Helen wouldn't have wanted him to be so alone.
1931 Taps at Reveille

CRAZY SUNDAY

IT WAS Sunday — not a day, but rather a gap between two other
days. Behind, for all of them, lay sets and sequences, the long waits
under the crane that swung the microphone, the hundred miles a day
by automobiles to and fro across a county, the struggles of rival in-
genuities in the conference rooms, the ceaseless compromise, the
clash and strain of many personalities fighting for their lives. And
now Sunday, with individual life starting up again, with a glow
kindling in eyes that had been glazed with monotony the afternoon
before. Slowly as the hours waned they came awake like "Puppen-
feen" in a toy shop: an intense colloquy in a corner, lovers disap-
pearing to neck in a hall. And the feeling of "Hurry, it's not too late,
but for God's sake hurry before the blessed forty hours of leisure
are over."

Joel Coles was writing continuity. He was twenty-eight and not
yet broken by Hollywood. He had had what were considered nice
assignments since his arrival six months before and he submitted
his scenes and sequences with enthusiasm. He referred to himself
modestly as a hack but really did not think of it that way. His
mother had been a successful actress ; Joel had spent his childhood
between London and New York trying to separate the real from the
unreal, or at least to keep one guess ahead. He was a handsome man
with the pleasant cow-brown eyes that in 1913 had gazed out at
Broadway audiences from his mother's face.

When the invitation came it made him sure that he was getting
somewhere. Ordinarily he did not go out on Sundays but stayed
sober and took work home with him. Recently they had given him a
Eugene O'Neill play destined for a very important lady indeed.
Everything he had done so far had pleased Miles Caiman, and Miles
Caiman was the only director on the lot who did not work under a
supervisor and was responsible to the money men alone. Everything
was clicking into place in Joel's career. ("This is Mr. Caiman's
secretary. Will you come to tea from four to six Sunday — he lives in
Beverly Hills, number .")

403

404 Crazy Sunday

Joel was flattered. It would be a party out of the top-drawer. It
was a tribute to himself as a young man of promise. The Marion
Davies crowd, the high-hats, the big currency numbers, perhaps
even Dietrich and Garbo and the Marquise, people who were not
seen everywhere, would probably be at Caiman's.

"I won't take anything to drink," he assured himself. Caiman was
audibly tired of rummies, and thought it was a pity the industry
could not get along without them.

Joel agreed that writers drank too much — he did himself, but he
wouldn't this afternoon. He wished Miles would be within hearing
when the cocktails were passed to hear his succinct, unobtrusive,
"No, thank you."

Miles Caiman's house was built for great emotional moments —
there was an air of listening, as if the far silences of its vistas hid
an audience, but this afternoon it was thronged, as though people
had been bidden rather than asked. Joel noted with pride that only
two other writers from the studio were in the crowd, an ennobled
limey and, somewhat to his surprise, Nat Keogh, who had evoked
Caiman's impatient comment on drunks.

Stella Caiman (Stella Walker, of course) did not move on to her
other guests after she spoke to Joel. She lingered — she looked at
him with the sort of beautiful look that demands some sort of ac-
knowledgment and Joel drew quickly on the dramatic adequacy in-
herited from his mother :

"Well, you look about sixteen! Where's your kiddy car?"

She was visibly pleased ; she lingered. He felt that he should say
something more, something confident and easy — he had first met her
when she was struggling for bits in New York. At the moment a
tray slid up and Stella put a cocktail glass into his hand.

"Everybody's afraid, aren't they?" he said, looking at it absently.
"Everybody watches for everybody else's blunders, or tries to make
sure they're with people that'll do them credit. Of course that's not
true in your house," he covered himself hastily. "I just meant gen-
erally in Hollywood."

Stella agreed. She presented several people to Joel as if he were
very important. Reassuring himself that Miles was at the other side
of the room, Joel drank the cocktail.

"So you have a baby?" he said. "That's the time to look out.
After a pretty woman has had her first child, she's very vulnerable,
because she wants to be reassured about her own charm. She's got
to have some new man's unqualified devotion to prove to herself
she hasn't lost anything."

"I never get anybody's unqualified devotion," Stella said rather
resentfully.

Crazy Sunday 405

"They're afraid of your husband."

"You think that's it?" She wrinkled her brow over the idea; then
the conversation was interrupted at the exact moment Joel would
have chosen.

Her attentions had given him confidence. Not for him to join safe •
groups, to slink to refuge under the wings of such acquaintances as
he saw about the room. He walked to the window and looked out
toward the Pacific, colorless under its sluggish sunset. It was good
here — the American Riviera and all that, if there were ever time to
enjoy it. The handsome, well-dressed people in the room, the lovely
girls, and the — well, the lovely girls. You couldn't have every-
thing.

He saw Stella's fresh boyish face, with the tired eyelid that always
drooped a little over one eye, moving about among her guests and
he wanted to sit with her and talk a long time as if she were a girl
instead of a name ; he followed her to see if she paid anyone as much
attention as she had paid him. He took another cocktail — not be-
cause he needed confidence but because she had given him so much
of it. Then he sat down beside the director's mother.

"Your son's gotten to be a legend, Mrs. Caiman — Oracle and a
Man of Destiny and all that. Personally, I'm against him but I'm in
a minority. What do you think of him? Are you impressed? Are
you surprised how far he's gone?"

"No, I'm not surprised," she said calmly. "We always expected a
lot from Miles."

"Well now, that's unusual," remarked Joel. "I always think all
mothers are like Napoleon's mother. My mother didn't want me to
have anything to do with the entertainment business. She wanted
me to go to West Point and be safe."

"We always had every confidence in Miles." . . .

He stood by the built-in bar of the dining room with the good-
humored, heavy-drinking, highly paid Nat Keogh.

" — I made a hundred grand during the year and lost forty grand
gambling, so now I've hired a manager."

"You mean an agent," suggested Joel.

"No, I've got that too. I mean a manager. I make over everything
to my wife and then he and my wife get together and hand me out
the money. I pay him five thousand a year to hand me out my
money."

"You mean your agent."

"No, I mean my manager, and I'm not the only one — a lot of
other irresponsible people have him."

"Well, if you're irresponsible why are you responsible enough to
hire a manager?"

406 Crazy Sunday

"I'm just irresponsible about gambling. Look here "

A singer performed ; Joel and Nat went forward with the others to
listen.

The singing reached Joel vaguely; he felt happy and friendly
toward all the people gathered there, people of bravery and industry,
superior to a bourgeoisie that outdid them in ignorance and loose
living, risen to a position of the highest prominence in a nation that
for a decade had wanted only to be entertained. He liked them — he
loved them. Great waves of good feeling flowed through him.

As the singer finished his number and there was a drift toward
the hostess to say good-by, Joel had an idea. He would give them
" Building It Up," his own composition. It was his only parlor trick,
it had amused several parties and it might please Stella Walker. Pos-
sessed by the hunch, his blood throbbing with the scarlet corpuscles
of exhibitionism, he sought her.

"Of course," she cried. "Please! Do you need anything?"

"Someone has to be the secretary that I'm supposed to be dictating
to."

"I'll be her."

As the word spread, the guests in the hall, already putting on their
coats to leave, drifted back and Joel faced the eyes of many
strangers. He had a dim foreboding, realizing that the man who had
just performed was a famous radio entertainer. Then someone said
"Sh I " and he was alone with Stella, the center of a sinister Indian-
like half-circle. Stella smiled up at him expectantly — he began.

His burlesque was based upon the cultural limitations of Mr. Dave
Silverstein, an independent producer ; Silverstein was presumed to be
dictating a letter outlining a treatment of a story he had bought.

" — a story of divorce, the younger generators and the Foreign
Legion," he heard his voice saying, with the intonations of Mr. Silver-
stein. "But we got to build it up, see?"

A sharp pang of doubt struck through him. The faces surrounding
him in the gently molded light were intent and curious, but there
was no ghost of a smile anywhere ; directly in front the Great Lover
of the screen glared at him with an eye as keen as the eye of a
potato. Only Stella Walker looked up at him with a radiant, never
faltering smile.

"If we make him a Menjou type, then we get a sort of Michael
Arlen only with a Honolulu atmosphere."

Still not a ripple in front, but in the rear a rustling, a perceptible
shift toward the left, toward the front door.

Crazy Sunday 407

" — then she says she feels this sex appil for him and he burns out
and says 'Oh, go on destroy yourself ' "

At some point he heard Nat Keogh snicker and here and there were
a few encouraging faces, but as he finished he had the sickening real-
ization that he had made a fool of himself in view of an important
section of the picture world, upon whose favor depended his career.

For a moment he existed in the midst of a confused silence, broken
by a general trek for the door. He felt the undercqrrent of derision
that rolled through the gossip ; then — all this was in the space of ten
seconds — the Great Lover, his eye hard and empty as the eye of a
needle, shouted "Boo ! Boo ! " voicing in an overtone what he felt was
the mood of the crowd. It was the resentment of the professional
toward the amateur, of the community toward the stranger, the
thumbs-down of the clan.

Only Stella Walker was still standing near and thanking him as
if he had been an unparalleled success, as if it hadn't occurred to
her that anyone hadn't liked it. As Nat Keogh helped him into his
overcoat, a great wave of self-disgust swept over him and he clung
desperately to his rule of never betraying an inferior emotion until
he no longer felt it.

"I was a flop," he said lightly, to Stella. "Never mind, it's a good
number when appreciated. Thanks for your cooperation.''

The smile did not leave her face — he bowed rather drunkenly and
Nat drew him toward the door. . . .

The arrival of his breakfast awakened him into a broken and
ruined world. Yesterday he was himself, a point of fire against an
industry, today he felt that he was pitted under an enormous dis-
advantage, against those faces, against individual contempt and col-
lective sneer. Worse than that, to Miles Caiman he was become one
of those rummies, stripped of dignity, whom Caiman regretted he
was compelled to use. To Stella Walker on whom he had forced a
martyrdom to preserve the courtesy of her house — her opinion he
did not dare to guess. His gastric juices ceased to flow and he set his
poached eggs back on the telephone table. He wrote :

"DEAR MILES: You can imagine my profound self-disgust. I con-
fess to a taint of exhibitionism, but at six o'clock in the afternoon,
in broad daylight ! Good God I My apologies to your wife.

"Yours ever,

"JOEL COLES."

Joel emerged from his office on the lot only to slink like a male-
factor to the tobacco store. So suspicious was his manner that one
of the studio police asked to see his admission card. He had decided

408 Crazy Sunday

to eat lunch outside when Nat Keogh, confident and cheerful, over*
took him.

"What do you mean you're in permanent retirement? What if
that Three-Piece Suit did boo you?

"Why, listen," he continued, drawing Joel into the studio restau-
rant. "The night of one of his premieres at Grauman's, Joe Squires
kicked his tail while he was bowing to the crowd. The ham said
Joe'd hear from him later but when Joe called him up at eight o'clock
next day and said, 'I thought I was going to hear from you/ he hung
up the phone."

The preposterous story cheered Joel, and he found a gloomy con-
solation in staring at the group at the next table, the sad, lovely
Siamese twins, the mean dwarfs, the proud giant from the circus pic-
ture. But looking beyond at the yellow-stained faces of pretty
women, their eyes all melancholy and startling with mascara, their
ball gowns garish in full day, he saw a group who had been at Cai-
man's and winced.

"Never again," he exclaimed aloud, "absolutely my last social
appearance in Hollywood 1 "

The following morning a telegram was waiting for him at his
office:

"You were one of the most agreeable people at our party. Expect
you at my sister June's buffet supper next Sunday. v

"STELLA WALKER CALMAN."

The blood rushed fast through his veins for a feverish minute.
Incredulously he read the telegram over.
"Well, that's the sweetest thing I ever heard of in my life ! "

III

Crazy Sunday again. Joel slept until eleven, then he read a news-
paper to catch up with the past week. He lunched in his room on
trout, avocado salad and a pint of California wine. Dressing for the
tea, he selected a pin-check suit, a blue shirt, a burnt orange tie.
There were dark circles of fatigue under his eyes. In his second-hand
car he drove to the Riviera apartments. As he was introducing him-
self to Stella's sister, Miles and Stella arrived in riding clothes —
they had been quarreling fiercely most of the afternoon on all the
dirt roads back of Beverly Hills.

Miles Caiman, tall, nervous, with a desperate humor and the un-
happiest eyes Joel ever saw, was an artist from the top of his curi-

Crazy Sunday 409

ously shaped head to his niggerish feet. Upon these last he stood
firmly — he had never made a cheap picture though he had sometimes
paid heavily for the luxury of making experimental flops. In spite
of his excellent company, one could not be with him long without
realizing that he was not a well man.

From the moment of their entrance Joel's day bound itself up in-
extricably with theirs. As he joined the group around them Stella
turned away from it with an impatient little tongue click — and
Miles Caiman said to the man who happened to be next to him :

"Go easy on Eva Goebel. There's hell to pay about her at home."
Miles turned to Joel, "I'm sorry I missed you at the office yesterday.
I spent the afternoon at the analyst's."

"You being psychoanalyzed?"

"I have been for months. First I went for claustrophobia, now
I'm trying to get my whole life cleared up. They say it'll take over
a year."

"There's nothing the matter with your life," Joel assured him.

"Oh, no? Well, Stella seems to think so. Ask anybody — they can
all tell you about it," he said bitterly.

A girl perched herself on the arm of Miles' chair ; Joel crossed to
Stella, who stood disconsolately by the fire.

"Thank you for your telegram," he said. "It was darn sweet. I
can't imagine anybody as good-looking as you are being so good-
humored."

She was a little lovelier than he had ever seen her and perhaps the
unstinted admiration in his eyes prompted her to unload on him — it
did not take long, for she was obviously at the emotional bursting*
point.

" — and Miles has been carrying on this thing for two years, and
I never knew. Why, she was one of my best friends, always in the
house. Finally when people began to come to me, Miles had to admit
it."

She sat down vehemently on the arm of Joel's chair. Her riding
breeches were the color of the chair and Joel saw that the mass of
her hair was made up of some strands of red gold and some of pale
gold, so that it could not be dyed, and that she had on no make-up.
She was that good-looking

Still quivering with the shock of her discovery, Stella found un-
bearable the spectacle of a new girl hovering over Miles; she led
Joel into a bedroom, and seated at either end of a big bed they went
on talking. People on their way to the washroom glanced in and
made wisecracks, but Stella, emptying out her story, paid no atten-
tion. After a while Miles stuck his head in the door and said, "There's

4io Crazy Sunday

no use trying to explain something to Joel in half an hour that I
don't understand myself and the psychoanalyst says will take a
whole year to understand."

She talked on as if Miles were not there. She loved Miles, she
said — under considerable difficulties she had always been faithful
to him.

"The psychoanalyst told Miles that he had a mother complex. In
his first marriage he transferred his mother complex to his wife, you
see — and then his sex turned to me. But when we married the thing
repeated itself — he transferred his mother complex to me and all his
libido turned toward this other woman."

Joel knew that this probably wasn't gibberish — yet it sounded like
gibberish. He knew Eva Goebel ; she was a motherly person, older
and probably wiser than Stella, who was a golden child.

Miles now suggested impatiently that Joel come back with them
since Stella had so much to say, so they drove out to the mansion in
Beverly Hills. Under the high ceilings the situation seemed more
dignified and tragic. It was an eerie bright night with the dark very
clear outside of all the windows and Stella all rose-gold raging and
crying around the room. Joel did not quite believe in picture
actresses' grief. They have other preoccupations — they are beautiful
rose-gold figures blown full of life by writers and directors, and after
hours they sit around and talk in whispers and giggle innuendoes,
and the ends of many adventures flow through them.

Sometimes he pretended to listen and instead thought how well
she was got up — sleek breeches with a matched set of legs in them,
an Italian-colored sweater with a little high neck, and a short brown
chamois coat. He couldn't decide whether she was an imitation of an
English lady or an English lady was an imitation of her. She hovered
somewhere between the realest of realities and the most blatant of
impersonations.

"Miles is so jealous of me that he questions everything I do," she
cried scornfully. "When I was in New York I wrote him that I'd
been to the theater with Eddie Baker. Miles was so jealous he
phoned me ten times in one day."

"I was wild," Miles snuffled sharply, a habit he had in times of
stress. "The analyst couldn't get any results for a week."

Stella shook her head despairingly. "Did you expect me just to sit
in the hotel for three weeks ?"

"I don't expect anything. I admit that I'm jealous. I try not to be.
I worked on that with Dr. Bridgebane, but it didn't do any good. I
was jealous of Joel this afternoon when you sat on the arm of his
chair."

"You were?" She started up. "You were! Wasn't there somebody

Crazy Sunday 411

on the arm of your chair? And did you speak to me for two
hours?"

"You were telling your troubles to Joel in the bedroom."

"When I think that that woman" — she seemed to believe that to
omit Eva Goebel's name would be to lessen her reality — "used to
come here "

"All right — all right," said Miles wearily. "I've admitted every-
thing and I feel as bad about it as you do." Turning to Joel he began
talking about pictures, while Stella moved restlessly along the far
walls, her hands in her breeches pockets.

"They Ve treated Miles terribly," she said, coming suddenly back
into the conversation as if they'd never discussed her personal
affairs. "Dear, tell him about old Beltzer trying to change your
picture."

As she stood hovering protectively over Miles, her eyes flashing
with indignation in his behalf, Joel realized that he was in love with
her. Stifled with excitement he got up to say good night.

With Monday the week resumed its workaday rhythm, in sharp
contrast to the theoretical discussions, the gossip and scandal of
Sunday; there was the endless detail of script revision — "Instead of
a lousy dissolve, we can leave her voice on the sound track and cut
to a medium shot of the taxi from Bell's angle or we can simply pull
the camera back to include the station, hold it a minute and then
pam to the row of taxis" — by Monday afternoon Joel had again for-
gotten that people whose business was to provide entertainment were
ever privileged to be entertained. In the evening he phoned Miles'
house.- He asked for Miles but Stella came to the phone.

"Do things seem better?"

"Not particularly. What are you doing next Saturday evening?"

"Nothing."

"The Perrys are giving a dinner and theater party and Miles
won't be here — he's flying to South Bend to see the Notre Dame-
California game. I thought you might go with me in his place."

After a long moment Joel said, "Why — surely. If there's a con-
ference I can't make dinner but I can get to the theater."

"Then I'll say we can come."

Joel walked his office. In view of the strained relations of the Cai-
mans, would Miles be pleased, or did she intend that Miles shouldn't
know of it? That would be out of the question — if Miles didn't
mention it Joel would. But it was an hour or more before he could
get down to work again.

Wednesday there was a four-hour wrangle in a conference room
crowded with planets and nebulae of cigarette smoke. Three men and
a woman paced the carpet in turn, suggesting or condemning, speak-

412 Crazy Sunday

ing sharply or persuasively, confidently or despairingly. At the end
Joel lingered to talk to Miles.

The man was tired — not with the exaltation of fatigue but life-
tired, with his lids sagging and his beard prominent over the blue
shadows near his mouth.

"I hear you're flying to the Notre Dame game."

Miles looked beyond him and shook his head.

"I've given up the idea."

"Why?"

"On account of you." Still he did not look at Joel.

"What the hell, Miles?"

"That's why I've given it up." He broke into a perfunctory laugh
at himself. "I can't tell what Stella might do just out of spite —
she's invited you to take her to the Perrys', hasn't she? I wouldn't
enjoy the game."

The fine instinct that moved swiftly and confidently on the set,
muddled so weakly and helplessly through his personal life.

"Look, Miles," Joel said frowning. "I've never made any passes
whatsoever at Stella. If you're really seriously canceling your trip
on account of me, I won't go to the Perrys' with her. I won't see her.
You can trust me absolutely."

Miles looked at him, carefully now.

"Maybe." He shrugged his shoulders. "Anyhow there'd just be
somebody else. I wouldn't have any fun."

"You don't seem to have much confidence in Stella. She told me
she'd always been true to you."

"Maybe she has." In the last few minutes several more muscles
had sagged around Miles' mouth. "But how can I ask anything of
her after what's happened? How can I expect her — " He broke off
and his face grew harder as he said, "I'll tell you one thing, right or
wrong and no matter what I've done, if I ever had anything on her
I'd divorce her. I can't have my pride hurt — that would be the last
straw."

His tone annoyed Joel, but he said:

"Hasn't she calmed down about the Eva Goebel thing?"

"No." Miles snuffled pessimistically. "I can't get over it either."

"I thought it was finished."

"I'm trying not to see Eva again, but you know it isn't easy just
to drop something like that — it isn't some girl I kissed last night in
a taxi. The psychoanalyst says "

"I know," Joel interrupted. "Stella told me." This was depressing.
"Well, as far as I'm concerned if you go to the game I won't see
Stella. And I'm sure Stella has nothing on her conscience about any
body."

Crazy Sunday 413

"Maybe not," Miles repeated listlessly. "Anyhow I'll stay and take
her to the party. Say," he said suddenly, "I wish you'd come too.
I've got to have somebody sympathetic to talk to. That's the trouble
— I've influenced Stella in everything. Especially I've influenced her
so that she likes all the men I like — it's very difficult."

"It must be," Joel agreed.

Joel could not get to the dinner. Self-conscious in his silk hat
against the unemployment, he waited for the others in front of the
Hollywood Theater and watched the evening parade : obscure replicas
of bright, particular picture stars, spavined men in polo coats, a
stomping dervish with the beard and staff of an apostle, a pair of
chic Filipinos in collegiate clothes, reminder that this corner of the
Republic opened to the seven s£as, a long fantastic carnival of young
shouts which proved to be a fraternity initiation. The line split to
pass two smart limousines that stopped at the curb.

There she was, in a dress like ice-water, made in a thousand pale-
blue pieces, with icicles trickling at the throat. He started forward.

"So you like my dress ?"

"Where's Miles?"

"He flew to the game after all. He left yesterday morning — at least
I think — " She broke off. "I just got a telegram from South Bend
saying that he's starting back. I forgot — you know all these people?"

The party of eight moved into the theater.

Miles had gone after all and Joel wondered if he should have
come. But during the performance, with Stella a profile under the
pure grain of light hair, he thought no more about Miles. Once he
turned and looked at her and she looked back at him, smiling and
meeting his eyes for as long as he wanted. Between the acts they
smoked in the lobby and she whispered :

"They're all going to the opening of Jack Johnson's night club —
I don't want to go, do you?"

"Do we have to?"

"I suppose not." She hesitated. "I'd like to talk to you. I suppose
we could go to our house — if I were only sure "

Again she hesitated and Joel asked :

"Sure of what?"

"Sure that — oh, I'm haywire I know, but how can I be sure Miles
went to the game?"

"You mean you think he's with Eva Goebel ?"

"No, not so much that — but supposing he was here watching every-
thing I do. You know Miles does odd things sometimes. Once he

414 Crazy Sunday

wanted a man with a long beard to drink tea with him and he sent
down to the casting agency for one, and drank tea with him all
afternoon."

"That's different. He sent you a wire from South Bend — that
proves he's at the game."

After the play they said good night to the others at the curb and
were answered by looks of amusement. They slid off along the
golden garish thoroughfare through the crowd that had gathered
around Stella.

"You see he could arrange the telegrams," Stella said, "very
easily."

That was true. And with the idea that perhaps her uneasiness was
justified, Joel grew angry: if Miles had trained a camera on them he
felt no obligations toward Miles. Aloud he said :

"That's nonsense."

There were Christmas trees already in the shop windows and the
full moon over the boulevard was only a prop, as scenic as the
giant boudoir lamps of the corners. On into the dark foliage of
Beverly Hills that flamed as eucalyptus by day, Joel saw only the
flash of a white face under his own, the arc of her shoulder. She
pulled away suddenly and looked up at him.

"Your eyes are like your mother's," she said. "I used to have a
scrap book full of pictures of her."

"Your eyes are like your own and not a bit like any other eyes," he
answered.

Something made Joel look out into the grounds as they went into
the house, as if Miles were lurking in the shrubbery. A telegram
Waited on the hall table. She read aloud :

"CHICAGO.
"Home tomorrow night. Thinking of you. Love.

"MILES."

"You see," she said, throwing the slip back on the table, "he
could easily have faked that." She asked the butler for drinks and
sandwiches and ran upstairs, while Joel walked into the empty re-
ception rooms. Strolling about he wandered to the piano where he
had stood in disgrace two Sundays before.

"Then we could put over," he said aloud, "a story of divorce, the
younger generation and the Foreign Legion."

His thoughts jumped to another telegram.

"You were one of the most agreeable people at our party "

An idea occurred to him. If Stella's telegram had been purely a
gesture of courtesy then it was likely that Miles had inspired it, for
it was Miles who had invited him. Probably Miles had said :

Crazy Sunday 415

"Send him a wire — he's miserable — he thinks he's queered him-
self."

It fitted in with "I've influenced Stella in everything. Especially
I've influenced her so that she likes all the men I like." A woman
would do a thing like that because she felt sympathetic — only a man
would do it because he felt responsible.

When Stella came back into the room he took both her hands.

"I have a strange feeling that I'm a sort of pawn in a spite game
you're playing against Miles," he said.

"Help yourself to a drink."

"And the odd thing is that I'm in love with you anyhow."

The telephone rang and she freed herself to answer it.

"Another wire from Miles," she announced. "He dropped it, or it
says he dropped it, from the airplane at Kansas City."

"I suppose he asked to be remembered to me."

"No, he just said he loved me. I believe he does. He's so very
weak."

"Come sit beside me," Joel urged her.

It was early. And it was still a few minutes short of midnight a
half-hour later, when Joel walked to the cold hearth, and said tersely :

"Meaning that you haven't any curiosity about me?"

"Not at all. You attract me a lot and you know it. The point is
that I suppose I really do love Miles."

"Obviously."

"And tonight I feel uneasy about everything."

He wasn't angry — he was even faintly relieved that a possible en-
tanglement was avoided. Still as he looked at her, the warmth and
softness of her body thawing her cold blue costume, he knew she
was one of the things he would always regret.

"I've got to go," he said. "I'll phone a taxi."

"Nonsense — there's a chauffeur on duty."

He winced at her readiness to have him go, and seeing this she
kissed him lightly and said, "You're sweet, Joel." Then suddenly
three things happened : he took down his drink at a gulp, the phone
rang loud through the house and a clock in the hall struck in trumpet
notes.

Nine — ten — eleven — twelve

It was Sunday again. Joel realized that he had come to the theater
this evening with the work of the week still hanging about him like
cerements. He had made love to Stella as he might attack some mat-
ter to be cleaned up hurriedly before the day's end. But this was

416 Crazy Sunday

Sunday — the lovely, lazy perspective of the next twenty-four hours
unrolled before him — every minute was something to be approached
with lulling indirection, every moment held the germ of innumerable
possibilities. Nothing was impossible — everything was just begin-
ning. He poured himself another drink.

With a sharp moan, Stella slipped forward inertly by the tele-
phone. Joel picked her up and laid her on the sofa. He squirted soda-
water on a handkerchief and slapped it over her face. The telephone
mouthpiece was still grinding and he put it to his ear.

" — the plane fell just this side of Kansas City. The body of Miles
Caiman has been identified and "

He hung up the receiver.

"Lie still," he said, stalling, as Stella opened her eyes.

"Oh, what's happened?" she whispered. "Call them back. Oh,
what's happened?"

"Ill call them right away. What's your doctor's name?"

"Did they say Miles was dead?"

"Lie quiet — is there a servant still up?"

"Hold me— I'm frightened."

He put his arm around her.

"I want the name of your doctor," he said sternly. "It may be a
mistake but I want someone here."

"It's Doctor— Oh, God, is Miles dead?"

Joel ran upstairs and searched through strange medicine cabinets
for spirits of ammonia. When he came down Stella cried :

"He isn't dead — I know he isn't. This is part of his scheme. He's
torturing me. I know he's alive. I can feel he's alive."

"I want to get hold of some close friend of yours, Stella. You
can't stay here alone tonight."

"Oh, no," she cried. "I can't see anybody. You stay. I haven't got
any friend." She got up, tears streaming down her face. "Oh, Miles
is my only friend. He's not dead — he can't be dead. I'm going there
right away and see. Get a train. You'll have to come with me."

"You can't. There's nothing to do tonight. I want you to tell me
the name of some woman I can call: Lois? Joan? Carmel? Isn't
there somebody ?"

Stella stared at him blindly.

"Eva Goebel was my best friend," she said.

Joel thought of Miles, his sad and desperate face in the office two
days before. In the awful silence of his death all was clear about
him. He was the only American-born director with both an interest-
ing temperament and an artistic conscience. Meshed in an industry,
he had paid with his ruined nerves for having no resilience, no
healthy cynicism, no refuge — only a pitiful and precarious escape.

Crazy Sunday 417

There was a sound at the outer door — it opened suddenly, and
there were footsteps in the hall.

"Miles!" Stella screamed. "Is it you, Miles? Oh, it's Miles."

A telegraph boy appeared in the doorway.

"I couldn't find the bell. I heard you talking inside."

The telegram was a duplicate of the one that had been phoned.
While Stella read it over and over, as though it were a black lie,
Joel telephoned. It was still early and he had difficulty getting any-
one ; when finally he succeeded in finding some friends he made Stella
take a stiff drink.

"You'll stay here, Joel," she whispered, as though she were half-
asleep. "You won't go away. Miles liked you — he said you — " She
shivered violently, "Oh, my God, you don't know how alone I feel."
Her eyes closed, "Put your arms around me. Miles had a suit like
that." She started bolt upright. "Think of what he must have felt.
He was afraid of almost everything, anyhow."

She shook her head dazedly. Suddenly she seized Joel's face and
held it close to hers.

"You won't go. You like me — you love me, don't you? Don't call
up anybody. Tomorrow's time enough. You stay here with me
tonight."

He stared at her, at first incredulously, and then with shocked
understanding. In her dark groping Stella was trying to keep Miles
alive by sustaining a situation in which he had figured — as if Miles'
mind could not die so long as the possibilities that had worried him
still existed. It was a distraught and tortured effort to stave off the
realization that he was dead.

Resolutely Joel went to the phone and called a doctor.

"Don't, oh, don't call anybody 1 " Stella cried. "Come back here and
put your arms around me."

"Is Doctor Bales in?"

"Joel," Stella cried. "I thought I could count on you. Miles liked
you. He was jealous of you — Joel, come here."

Ah then — if he betrayed Miles she would be keeping him alive —
for if he were really dead how could he be betrayed?

" — has just had a very severe shock. Can you come at once, and
get hold of a nurse?"

"Joel!"

Now the door-bell and the telephone began to ring intermittently,
and automobiles were stopping in front of the door.

"But you're not going," Stella begged him. "You're going to stay,
aren't you?"

"No," he answered. "But I'll be back, if you need me."

Standing on the steps of the house which now hummed and pal-

4i 8 Crazy Sunday

pitated with the life that flutters around death like protective leaves,
he began to sob a little in his throat.

"Everything he touched he did something magical to," he thought.
"He even brought that little gamin alive and made her a sort of
masterpiece."

And then :

"What a hell of a hole he leaves in this damn wilderness —
already!"

And then with a certain bitterness, "Oh, yes, 111 be back — I'll be
back!"
1932 Taps at Reveille

FAMILY IN THE WIND

THE TWO men drove up the hill toward the blood-red sun. The
cotton fields bordering the road were thin and withered, and no
breeze stirred in the pines.

"When I am totally sober," the doctor was saying — "I mean when
I am totally sober — I don't see the same world that you do. I'm like
a friend of mine who had one good eye and got glasses made to cor-
rect his bad eye ; the result was that he kept seeing flliptical suns
and falling off tilted curbs, until he had to throw the glasses away.
Granted that I am thoroughly anaesthetized the greater part of the
day — well, I only undertake work that I know I can do when I am
in that condition."

"Yeah," agreed his brother Gene uncomfortably. The doctor was
a little tight at the moment and Gene could find no opening for what
he had to say. Like so many Southerners of the humbler classes, he
had a deep-seated courtesy, characteristic of all violent and passion-
ate lands — he could not change the subject until there was a mo-
ment's silence, and Forrest would not shut up.

"I'm very happy," he continued, "or very miserable. I chuckle or
I weep alcoholically and, as I continue to slow up, life accommodat-
ingly goes faster, so that the less there is of myself inside, the more
diverting becomes the moving picture without. I have cut myself
off from the respect of my fellow man, but I am aware of a com-
pensatory cirrhosis of the emotions. And because my sensitivity, my
pity, no longer has direction, but fixes itself on whatever is at hand,
I have become an exceptionally good fellow — much more so than
when I was a good doctor."

As the road straightened after the next bend and Gene saw his
house in the distance, he remembered his wife's face as she had
made him promise, and he could wait no longer: "Forrest, I got a
thing "

But at that moment the doctor brought his car to a sudden stop
in front of a small house just beyond a grove of pines. On the front
steps a girl of eight was playing with a gray cat.

"This is the sweetest little kid I ever saw," the doctor said to

42O Family in the Wind

Gene, and then to the child, in a grave voice : "Helen, do you need
any pills for kitty?

The little girl laughed.

"Well, I don't know," she said doubtfully. She was playing another
game with the cat now and this came as rather an interruption.

"Because kitty telephoned me this morning," the doctor con-
tinued, "and said her mother was neglecting her and couldn't I get
her a trained nurse from Montgomery."

"She did not." The little girl grabbed the cat close indignantly;
the doctor took a nickel from his pocket and tossed it to the steps.

"I recommend a good dose of milk," he said as he put the car into
gear. "Good night, Helen."

"Good night, doctor."

As they drove off, Gene tried again : "Listen ; stop," he said. "Stop
here a little way down . . . Here."

The doctor stopped the car and the brothers faced each other.
They were alike as to robustness of figure and a certain asceticism of
feature and they were both in their middle forties ; they were unlike
in that the doctor's glasses failed to conceal the veined, weeping eyes
of a soak, and that he wore corrugated city wrinkles ; Gene's wrinkles
bounded fields, followed the lines of rooftrees, of poles propping up
sheds. His eyes were a fine, furry blue. But the sharpest contrast lay
in the fact that Gene Janney was a country man while Dr. Forrest
Janney was obviously a man of education.

"Well?" the doctor asked.

"You know Pinky's at home," Gene said, looking down the road.

"So I hear," the doctor answered noncommittally.

"He got in a row in Birmingham and somebody shot him in the
head." Gene hesitated. "We got Doc Behrer because we thought
maybe you wouldn't — maybe you wouldn't "

"I wouldn't," agreed Doctor Janney blandly.

"But look, Forrest; here's the thing," Gene insisted. "You know
how it is — you often say Doc Behrer doesn't know nothing. Shucks,
I never thought he was much either. He says the bullet's pressing on
the — pressing on the brain, and he can't take it out without causin'
a hemmering, and he says he doesn't know whether we could get
him to Birmingham or Montgomery, or not, he's so low. Doc wasn't
no help. What we want "

"No," said his brother, shaking his head. "No."

"I just want you to look at him and tell us what to do," Gene
begged. "He's unconscious, Forrest. He wouldn't know you; you'd
hardly know him. Thing is his mother's about crazy."

"She's in the grip of a purely animal instinct*" The doctor took
from his hip a flask containing half water and half Alabama corn,

Family in the Wind 421

and drank. "You and I know that boy ought to been drowned the
day he was born."

Gene flinched. "He's bad," he admitted, "but I don't know— You
see him lying there "

As the liquor spread over the doctor's insides he felt an instinct to
do something, not to violate his prejudices but simply to make some
gesture, to assert his own moribund but still struggling will to
power.

"All right, I'll see him," he said. "I'll do nothing myself to help
him, because he ought to be dead. And even his death wouldn't make
up for what he did to Mary Decker."

Gene Janney pursed his lips. "Forrest, you sure about that?"

"Sure about it I" exclaimed the doctor. "Of course I'm sure. She
died of starvation ; she hadn't had more than a couple cups of coffee
in a week. And if you looked at her shoes, you could see she'd
walked for miles."

"Doc Behrer says "

"What does he know ? I performed the autopsy the day they found
her on the Birmingham Highway. There was nothing the matter with
her but starvation. That — that" — his voice shook with feeling —
"that Pinky got tired of her and turned her out, and she was trying
to get home. It suits me fine that he was invalided home himself a
couple of weeks later."

As he talked, the doctor had plunged the car savagely into gear
and let the clutch out with a jump ; in a moment they drew up be-
fore Gene Janney's home.

It was a square frame house with a brick foundation and a well-
kept lawn blocked off from the farm, a house rather superior to the
buildings that composed the town of Bending and the surrounding
agricultural area, yet not essentially different in type or in its interior
economy. The last of the plantation houses in this section of Ala-
bama had long disappeared, the proud pillars yielding to poverty, rot
and rain.

Gene's wife, Rose, got up from her rocking-chair on the porch.

"Hello, doc." She greeted him a little nervously and without meet-
ing his eyes. "You been a stranger here lately."

The doctor met her eyes for several seconds. "How do you do,
Rose," he said. "Hi, Edith ... Hi, Eugene"— this to the little boy
and girl who stood beside their mother; and then: "Hi, Butch!" to
the stocky youth of nineteen who came around the corner of the
house hugging a round stone.

"Coin to have a sort of low wall along the front here — kind of
neater," Gene explained.

All of them had a lingering respect for the doctor. They felt re-

422 Family in the Wind

proachful toward him because they could no longer refer to him as
the celebrated relative — "one of the bess surgeons up in Mont-
gomery, yes suh" — but there was his learning and the position he had
once occupied in the larger world, before he had committed pro-
fessional suicide by taking to cynicism and drink. He had come
home to Bending and bought a half interest in the local drug store
two years ago, keeping up his license, but practising only when
sorely needed.

"Rose/' said Gene, "doc says he'll take a look at Pinky."

Pinky Janney, his lips curved mean and white under a new beard,
lay in bed in a darkened room. When the doctor removed the band-
age from his head, his breath blew into a low groan, but his paunchy
body did not move. After a few minutes, the doctor replaced the
bandage and, with Gene and Rose, returned to the porch.

"Behrer wouldn't operate?" he asked.

"No."

"Why didn't they operate in Birmingham?"

"I don't know."

"H'm." The doctor put on his hat. "That bullet ought to come out,
and soon. It's pressing against the carotid sheath. That's the — any-
how, you can't get him to Montgomery with that pulse."

"What'll we do?" Gene's question carried a little tail of silence as
he sucked his breath back.

"Get Behrer to think it over. Or else get somebody in Mont-
gomery. There's about a 25 per cent chance that the operation would
save him ; without the operation he hasn't any chance at all."

"Who'll we get in Montgomery?" asked Gene.

"Any good surgeon would do it. Even Behrer could do it if he had
any nerve."

Suddenly Rose Janoey came close to him, her eyes straining and
burning with an animal maternalism. She seized his coat where it
hung open.

"Doc, you do it! You can do it. You know you were as good a
surgeon as any of em once. Please, doc, you go on do it."

He stepped back a little so that her hands fell from his coat, and
held out his own hands in front of him.

"See how they tremble?" he said with elaborate irony. "Look
close and you'll see. I wouldn't dare operate."

"You could do it all right," said Gene hastily, "with a drink to
stiffen you up."

The doctor shook his head and said, looking at Rose : "No. You
see, my decisions are not reliable, and if anything went wrong, it
would seem to be my fault." He was acting a little now — he chose

Family in the Wind 423

his words carefully. "I hear that when I found that Mary Decker
died of starvation, my opinion was questioned on the ground that
I was a drunkard."

"I didn't say that," lied Rose breathlessly.

"Certainly not. I just mention it to show how careful IVe got to
be." He moved down the steps. "Well, my advice is to see Behrer
again, or, failing that, get somebody from the city. Good night."

But before he had reached the gate, Rose came tearing after him,
her eyes white with fury.

"I did say you were a drunkard I" she cried. "When you said
Mary Decker died of starvation, you made it out as if it was Pinky's
fault — you, swilling yourself full of corn all day I How can anybody
tell whether you know what you're doing or not? Why did you
think so much about Mary Decker, anyhow — a girl half your age?
Everybody saw how she used to come in your drug store and talk
to you "

Gene, who had followed, seized her arms. "Shut up now, Rose . . .
Drive along, Forrest."

Forrest drove along, stopping at the next bend to drink from his
flask. Across the fallow cotton fields he could see the house where
Mary Decker had lived, and had it been six months before, he might
have detoured to ask her why she hadn't come into the store that day
for her free soda, or to delight her with a sample cosmetic left by a
salesman that morning. He had not told Mary Decker how he felt
about her ; never intended to — she was seventeen, he was forty-five,
and he no longer dealt in futures — but only after she ran away to
Birmingham with Pinky Janney, did he realize how much his love
for her had counted in his lonely life.

His thoughts went back to his brother's house.

"Now, if I were a gentleman," he thought, "I wouldn't have done
like that. And another person might have been sacrificed to that
dirty dog, because if he died afterward Rose would say I killed
him."

Yet he felt pretty bad as he put his car away ; not that he could
have acted differently, but just that it was all so ugly.

He had been home scarcely ten minutes when a car creaked to
rest outside and Butch Janney came in. His mouth was set tight
and his eyes were narrowed as though to permit of no escape to the
temper that possessed him until it should be unleashed upon its
proper objective.

"Hi, Butch."

"I want to tell you, Uncle Forrest, you can't talk to my mother
thataway. Ill kill you, you talk to my mother like that!"

424 Family in the Wind

"Now shut up, Butch, and sit down," said the doctor sharply.

"She's already bout sick on account of Pinky, and you come over
and talk to her like that."

"Your mother did all the insulting that was done, Butch. I just
took it."

"She doesn't know what she's saying and you ought to understand
that."

The doctor thought a minute. "Butch, what do you think of
Pinky?"

Butch hesitated uncomfortably. "Well, I can't say I ever thought
so much of him" — his tone changed defiantly — "but after all, he's
my own brother "

"Wait a minute, Butch. What do you think of the way he treated
Mary Decker?"

But Butch had shaken himself free, and now he let go the artillery
of his rage :

"That ain't the point ; the point is anybody that doesn't do right
to my mother has me to answer to. It's only fair when you got all
the education "

"I got my education myself, Butch."

"I don't care. We're going to try again to get Doc Behrer to oper-
ate or get us some fellow from the city. But if we can't I'm coming
and get you, and you're going to take that bullet out if I have to
hold a gun to you while you do it," He nodded, panting a little ; then
he turned and went out and drove away.

"Something tells me," said the doctor to himself, "that there's no
more peace for me in Chilton County." He called to his colored
boy to put supper on the table. Then he rolled himself a cigarette
and went out on the back stoop.

The weather had changed. The sky was now overcast and the grass
stirred restlessly and there was a sudden flurry of drops without a
sequel. A minute ago it had been warm, but now the moisture on
his forehead was suddenly cool, and he wiped it away with his hand-
kerchief. There was a buzzing in his ears and he swallowed and shook
his head. For a moment he thought he must be sick ; then suddenly
the buzzing detached itself from him, grew into a swelling sound,
louder and ever nearer, that might have been the roar of an approach-
ing train.

Butch Janney was halfway home when he saw it — a huge, black,
approaching cloud whose lower edge bumped the ground. Even as he
stared at it vaguely, it seemed to spread until it included the whole

Family in the Wind 425

southern sky, and he saw pale electric fire in it and heard an in-
creasing roar. He was in a strong wind now ; blown debris, bits of
broken branches, splinters, larger objects unidentifiable in the grow-
ing darkness, flew by him. Instinctively he got out of his car and, by
now hardly able to stand against the wind, ran for a bank, or rather
found himself thrown and pinned against a bank. Then for a minute,
two minutes, he was in the black centre of pandemonium.

First there was the sound, and he was part of the sound, so en-
gulfed in it and possessed by it that he had no existence apart from
it. It was not a collection of sounds, it was just Sound itself ; a great
screeching bow drawn across the chords of the universe. The sound
and force were inseparable. The sound as well as the force held him
to what he felt was the bank like a man crucified. Somewhere in this
first moment his face, pinned sideways, saw his automobile make a
little jump, spin halfway around and then go bobbing off over a field
in a series of great helpless leaps. Then began the bombardment,
the sound dividing its sustained cannon note into the cracks of a
gigantic machine gun. He was only half -conscious as he felt himself
become part of one of those cracks, felt himself lifted away from the
bank to tear through space, through a blinding, lacerating mass of
twigs and branches, and then, for an incalculable time, he knew
nothing at all.

His body hurt him. He was lying between two branches in the top
of a tree ; the air was full of dust and rain, and he could hear noth-
ing ; it was a long time before he realized that the tree he was in had
been blown down and that his involuntary perch among the pine
needles was only five feet from the ground.

"Say, man!" he cried, aloud, outraged. "Say, man! Say, what a
wind ! Say, man ! "

Made acute by pain and fear, he guessed that he had been stand-
ing on the tree's root and had been catapulted by the terrific wrench
as the big pine was torn from the earth. Feeling over himself, he
found that his left ear was caked full of dirt, as if someone had
wanted to take an impression of the inside. His clothes were in rags,
his coat had torn on the back seam, and he could feel where, as some
stray gust tried to undress him, it had cut into him under the arms.

Reaching the ground, he set off in the direction of his father's
house, but it was a new and unfamiliar landscape he traversed. The
Thing — he did not know it was a tornado — had cut a path a quarter
of a mile wide, and he was confused, as the dust slowly settled, by
vistas he had never seen before. It was unreal that Bending church
tower should be visible from here; there had been groves of trees
between.

But where was here? For he should be close to the Baldwin house ;

426 Family in the Wind

only as he tripped over great piles of boards, like a carelessly kept
lumberyard, did Butch realize that there was no more Baldwin house,
and then, looking around wildly, that there was no Necrawney house
on the hill, no Peltzer house below it. There was not a light, not a
sound, save the rain falling on the fallen trees.

He broke into a run. When he saw the bulk of his father's house
in the distance, he gave a "Hey I" of relief, but coming closer, he
realized that something was missing. There were no outhouses and
the built-on wing that held Pinky's room had been sheared com-
pletely away.

"Mother ! " he called. "Dad I " There was no answer ; a dog bounded
out of the yard and licked his hand. . . .

... It was full dark twenty minutes later when Doc Janney
stopped his car in front of his own drug store in Bending. The elec-
tric lights had gone out, but there were men with lanterns in the
street, and in a minute a small crowd had collected around him. He
unlocked the door hurriedly.

"Somebody break open the old Wiggins Hospital." He pointed
across the street. "I've got six badly injured in my car. I want some
fellows to carry em in. Is Doc Behrer here?"

"Here he is," offered eager voices out of the darkness as the
doctor, case in hand, came through the crowd. The two men stood
face to face by lantern light, forgetting that they disliked each
other.

"God knows how many more there's going to be," said Doc Janney.
"I'm getting dressing and disinfectant. There'll be a lot of frac-
tures— " He raised his voice, "Somebody bring me a barrel ! "

"I'll get started over there," said Doc Behrer. "There's about half
a dozen more crawled in."

"What's been done?" demanded Doc Janney of the men who fol-
lowed him into the drug store. "Have they called Birmingham and
Montgomery?"

"The telephone wires are down, but the telegraph got through."

"Well, somebody get Doctor Cohen from Wettela, and tell any
people who have automobiles to go up the Willard Pike and cut
across toward Corsica and all through those roads there. There's not
a house left at the crossroads by the nigger store. I passed a lot of
folks walking in, all of them hurt, but I didn't have room for any-
body else." As he talked he was throwing bandages, disinfectant and
drugs into a blanket. "I thought I had a lot more stuff than this in
stock. And wait ! " he called. "Somebody drive out and look down in
that hollow where the Wooleys live. Drive right across the fields —
the road's blocked . . . Now, you with the cap — Ed Jenks, aint
it?"

Family in the Wind 427

"Yes, doc."

"You see what I got here? You collect everything in the store
that looks like this and bring it across the way, understand?"

"Yes, doc."

As the doctor went out into the street, the victims were streaming
into town — a woman on foot with a badly injured child, a buckboard
full of groaning Negroes, frantic men gasping terrible stories. Every-
where confusion and hysteria mounted in the dimly illumined dark-
ness. A mud-covered reporter from Birmingham drove up in a side-
car, the wheels crossing the fallen wires and brushwood that clogged
the street, and there was the siren of a police car from Cooper, thirty
miles away.

Already a crowd pressed around the doors of the hospital, closed
these three months for lack of patients. The doctor squeezed past
the melee of white faces and established himself in the nearest ward,
grateful for the waiting row of old iron beds. Doctor Behrer was
already at work across the hall.

"Get me half a dozen lanterns," he ordered.

"Doctor Behrer wants iodine and adhesive."

"All right, there it is. ... Here, you Shinkey, stand by the door
and keep everybody out except cases that can't walk. Somebody run
over and see if there ain't some candles in the grocery store."

The street outside was full of sound now — the cries of women, the
contrary directions of volunteer gangs trying to clear the highway,
the tense staccato of people rising to an emergency. A little before
midnight arrived the first unit of the Red Cross. But the three doc-
tors, presently joined by two others from near-by villages, had lost
track of time long before that. The dead began to be brought in by
ten o'clock; there were twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty — the list
grew. Having no more needs, these waited, as became simple hus-
bandmen, in a garage behind, while the stream of injured — hundreds
of them — flowed through the old hospital built to house only a score
The storm had dealt out fractures of the leg, collar bone, ribs and
hip, lacerations of the back, elbows, ears, eyelids, nose ; there were
wounds from flying planks, and odd splinters in odd places, and a
scalped man, who would recover to grow a new head of hair. Living
or dead, Doc Janney knew every face, almost every name.

"Don't you fret now. Billy's all right. Hold still and let me tie
this. People are drifting in every minute, but it's so consarned dark
they can't find 'em — All right, Mrs. Oakey. That's nothing. Ev
here'll touch it with iodine . . . Now let's see this man."

Two o'clock. The old doctor from Wettala gave out, but now there
were fresh men from Montgomery to take his place. Upon the air
of the room, heavy with disinfectant, floated the ceaseless babble of

428 Family in the Wind

human speech reaching the doctor dimly through the layer after
layer of increasing fatigue :

". . . Over and over — just rolled me over and over. Got hold of
a bush and the bush came along too."

" Jeff I Where's Jeff?"

". . . I bet that pig sailed a hundred yards "

" — just stopped the train in time. All the passengers got out and
helped pull the poles "

" Where's Jeff?"

"He says, 'Let's get down cellar/ and I says, 'We ain't got no
cellar' "

" — If there's no more stretchers, find some light doors."

"... Five seconds? Say, it was more like five minutes!"

At some time he heard that Gene and Rose had been seen with
their two youngest children. He had passed their house on the way
in and, seeing it standing, hurried on. The Janney family had been
lucky ; the doctor's own house was outside the sweep of the storm.

Only as he saw the electric lights go on suddenly in the streets
and glimpsed the crowd waiting for hot coffee in front of the Red
Cross did the doctor realize how tired he was.

"You better go rest," a young man was saying. "I'll take this side
of the room. I've got two nurses with me."

"All right— all right. I'll finish this row."

The injured were being evacuated to the cities by train as fast as
their wounds were dressed, and their places taken by others. He
had only two beds to go — in the first one he found Pinky Janney.

He put his stethoscope to the heart. It was beating feebly. That
he, so weak, so nearly gone, had survived this storm at all was re-
markable. How he had got there, who had found him and carried
him, was a mystery in itself. The doctor went over the body ; there
were small contusions and lacerations, two broken fingers, the dirt-
filled ears that marked every case — nothing else. For a moment the
doctor hesitated, but even when he closed his eyes, the image of Mary
Decker seemed to have receded, eluding him. Something purely pro-
fessional that had nothing to do with human sensibilities had been
set in motion inside him, and he was powerless to head it off. He
held out his hands before him ; they were trembling slightly.

"Hell's bells! "he muttered.

He went out of the room and around the corner of the hall, where
he drew from his pocket the flask containing the last of the corn
and water he had had in the afternoon. He emptied it. Returning to
the ward, he disinfected two instruments and applied a local
anaesthetic to a square section at the base of Pinky's skull where
the wound had healed over the bullet. He called a nurse to his side

Family in the Wind 429

and then, scalpel in hand, knelt on one knee beside his nephew's
bed.

Ill

Two days later the doctor drove slowly around the mournful
countryside. He had withdrawn from the emergency work after the
first desperate night, feeling that his status as a pharmacist might
embarrass his collaborators. But there was much to be done in
bringing the damage to outlying sections under the aegis of the Red
Cross, and he devoted himself to that.

The path of the demon was easy to follow. It had pursued an ir-
regular course on its seven-league boots, cutting cross country,
through woods, or even urbanely keeping to roads until they curved,
when it went off on its own again. Sometimes the trail could be
traced by cotton fields, apparently in full bloom, but this cotton
came from the insides of hundreds of quilts and mattresses redis-
tributed in the fields by the storm.

At a lumber pile that had lately been a Negro cabin, he stopped
a moment to listen to a dialogue between two reporters and two shy
pickaninnies. The old grandmother, her head bandaged, sat among
the ruins, gnawing some vague meat and moving her rocker cease-
lessly.

"But where is the river you were blown across?" one of the re-
porters demanded.

"There."

"Where?"

The pickaninnies looked to their grandmother for aid.

"Right there behind you-all," spoke up the old woman.

The newspapermen looked disgustedly at a muddy stream four
yards wide.

"That's no river."

"That's a Menada River, we always calls it ever since I was a gull.
Yes, suh, that's a Menada River. An' them two boys was blowed
right across it an set down on the othah side just as pretty, 'thout
any hurt at all. Chimney fell on me," she concluded, feeling her
head.

"Do you mean to say that's all it was?" demanded the younger
reporter indignantly. "That's the river they were blown across 1
And one hundred and twenty million people have been led to
believe "

"That's all right, boys," interrupted Doc Janney. "That's a right
good river for these parts. And it'll get bigger as those little fellahs
get older."

43O Family in the Wind

He tossed a quarter to the old woman and drove on.

Passing a country church, he stopped and counted the new brown
mounds that marred the graveyard. He was nearing the centre of
the holocaust now. There was the Howden house where three had
been killed ; there remained a gaunt chimney, a rubbish heap and a
scarecrow surviving ironically in the kitchen garden. In the ruins of
the house across the way a rooster strutted on top of a piano, reign-
ing vociferously over an estate of trunks, boots, cans, books, calen-
dars, rugs, chairs and window frames, a twisted radio and a legless
sewing machine. Everywhere there was bedding — blankets, mat-
tresses, bent springs, shredded padding — he had not realized how
much of people's lives was spent in bed. Here and there, cows and
horses, often stained with disinfectant, were grazing again in the
fields. At intervals there were Red Cross tents, and sitting by one of
these, with the gray cat in her arms, the doctor came upon little
Helen Kilrain. The usual lumber pile, like a child's building game
knocked down in a fit of temper, told the story.

"Hello, dear," he greeted her, his heart sinking. "How did kitty
like the tornado?"

"She didn't."

"What did she do?"

"She meowed."

"Oh."

"She wanted to get away, but I hanged on to her and she scratched
me — see?"

He glanced at the Red Cross tent.

"Who's taking care of you?"

"The lady from the Red Cross and Mrs. Wells," she answered.
"My father got hurt. He stood over me so it wouldn't fall on me,
and I stood over kitty. He's in the hospital in Birmingham. When
he comes back, I guess he'll build our house again."

The doctor winced. He knew that her father would build no more
houses ; he had died that morning. She was alone, and she did not
know she was alone. Around her stretched the dark universe, im-
personal, inconscient. Her lovely little face looked up at him con-
fidently as he asked: "You got any kin anywhere, Helen?"

"I don't know."

"You've got kitty, anyhow, haven't you?"

"It's just a cat," she admitted calmly, but anguished by her own
betrayal of her love, she hugged it closer.

"Taking care of a cat must be pretty hard."

"Oh, no," she said hurriedly. "It isn't any trouble at all. It doesn't
eat hardly anything."

Family in the Wind 431

He put his hand in his pocket, and then changed his mind sud-
denly.

"Dear, I'm coming back and see you later — later today. You take
take good care of kitty now, won't you?"

"Oh, yes," she answered lightly.

The doctor drove on. He stopped next at a house that had escaped
damage. Walt Cupps, the owner, was cleaning a shotgun on his
front porch.

"What's that, Walt? Going to shoot up the next tornado?"

"Ain't going to be a next tornado."

"You can't tell. Just take a look at that sky now. It's getting
mighty dark."

Walt laughed and slapped his gun. "Not for a hundred years,
anyhow. This here is for looters. There's a lot of 'em around, and
not all black either. Wish when you go to town that you'd tell 'em to
scatter some militia out here."

"I'll tell em now. You come out all right?"

"I did, thank God. With six of us in the house. It took off one hen,
and probably it's still carrying it around somewhere."

The doctor drove on toward town, overcome by a feeling of un-
easiness he could not define.

"It's the weather," he thought. "It's the same kind of feel in the
air there was last Saturday."

For a month the doctor had felt an urge to go away permanently.
Once this countryside had seemed to promise peace. When the im-
petus that had lifted him temporarily out of tired old stock was ex-
hausted, he had come back here to rest, to watch the earth put forth,
and live on simple, pleasant terms with his neighbors. Peace! He
knew that the present family quarrel would never heal, nothing
would ever be the same, it would all be bitter forever. And he had
seen the placid countryside turned into a land of mourning. There
was no peace here. Move on !

On the road he overtook Butch Janney walking to town.

"I was coming to see you," said Butch, frowning. "You operated
on Pinky after all, didn't you?"

"Jump in. ... Yes, I did. How did you know?"

"Doc Behrer told us." He shot a quick look at the doctor, who
did not miss the quality of suspicion in it. "They don't think he'll
last out the day."

"I'm sorry for your mother."

Butch laughed unpleasantly. "Yes, you are."

"I said I'm sorry for your mother," said the doctor sharply.

"I heard you."

43 2 Family in the Wind

They drove for a moment in silence.

"Did you find your automobile?"

"Did I?" Butch laughed ruefully. "I found something— I don't
know whether you'd call it a car any more. And, you know, I could
of had tornado insurance for twenty- five cents." His voice trembled
indignantly : "Twenty-five cents — but who would ever of thought of
getting tornado insurance?"

It was growing darker ; there was a thin crackle of thunder far
to the southward.

"Well, all I hope," said Butch with narrowed glance, "is that you
hadn't been drinking anything when you operated on Pinky."

"You know, Butch," the doctor said slowly, "that was a pretty
dirty trick of mine to bring that tornado here."

He had not expected the sarcasm to hit home, but he expected
a retort — when suddenly he caught sight of Butch's face. It was
fish-white, the mouth was open, the eyes fixed and staring, and from
the throat came a mewling sound. Limply he raised one hand be-
fore him, and then the doctor saw.

Less than a mile away, an enormous, top-shaped black cloud
filled the sky and bore toward them, dipping and swirling, and in
front of it sailed already a heavy, singing wind.

"It's come back ! " the doctor yelled.

Fifty yards ahead of them was the old iron bridge spanning Bilby
Creek. He stepped hard on the accelerator and drove for it. The
fields were full of running figures headed in the same direc-
tion. Reaching the bridge, he jumped out and yanked Butch's
arm.

"Get out, you fool ! Get out ! "

A nerveless mass stumbled from the car ; in a moment they were
in a group of half a dozen, huddled in the triangular space that the
bridge made with the shore.

"Is it coming here?"

"No, it's turning ! "

"We had to leave grampa ! "

"Oh, save me, save me ! Jesus save me ! Help me ! "

"Jesus save my soul 1 "

There was a quick rush of wind outside, sending little tentacles
under the bridge with a curious tension in them that made the
doctor's skin crawl. Then immediately there was a vacuum, with
no more wind, but a sudden thresh of rain. The doctor crawled to
the edge of the bridge and put his head up cautiously.

"It's passed," he said. "We only felt the edge; the centre went
way to the right of us."

He could see it plainly; for a second he could even distinguish

Family in the Wind 433

objects in it — shrubbery and small trees, planks and loose earth.
Crawling farther out, he produced his watch and tried to time it,
but the thick curtain of rain blotted it from sight.

Soaked to the skin, he crawled back underneath. Butch lay
shivering in the farthest corner, and the doctor shook him.

"It went in the direction of your house!" the doctor cried. "Pull
yourself together! Who's there?"

"No one," Butch groaned. "They're all down with Pinky."

The rain had changed to hail now ; first small pellets, then larger
ones, and larger, until the sound of the fall upon the iron bridge
was an ear-splitting tattoo.

The spared wretches under the bridge were slowly recovering, and
in the relief there were titters of hysterical laughter. After a certain
point of strain, the nervous system makes its transitions without
dignity or reason. Even the doctor felt the contagion.

"This is worse than a calamity," he said dryly. "It's getting to
be a nuisance."

There were to be no more tornadoes in Alabama that spring. The
second one — it was popularly thought to be the first one come back ;
for to the people of Chilton County it had become a personified
force, definite as a pagan god — took a dozen houses, Gene Janney's
among them, and injured about thirty people. But this time — per-
haps because everyone had developed some scheme of self-protection
— there were no fatalities. It made its last dramatic bow by sailing
down the main street of Bending, prostrating the telephone poles
and crushing in the fronts of three shops, including Doc Janney's
drug store.

At the end of a week, houses were going up again, made of the
old boards ; and before the end of the long, lush Alabama summer
the grass would be green again on all the graves. But it would be
years before the people of the country ceased to reckon events as
happening "before the tornado" or "after the tornado," — and for
many families thing would never be the same.

Doctor Janney decided that this was as good a time to leave as
any. He sold the remains of his drug store, gutted alike by charity
and catastrophe, and turned over his house to his brother until Gene
could rebuild his own. He was going up to the city by train, for his
car had been rammed against a tree and couldn't be counted on for
much more than the trip to the station.

Several times on the way in he stopped by the roadside to say
good-by — once it was to Walter Cupps.

432 Family in the Wind

They drove for a moment in silence.

"Did you find your automobile?"

"Did I?" Butch laughed ruefully. "I found something— I don't
know whether you'd call it a car any more. And, you know, I could
of had tornado insurance for twenty-five cents." His voice trembled
indignantly : "Twenty-five cents — but who would ever of thought of
getting tornado insurance?"

It was growing darker ; there was a thin crackle of thunder far
to the southward.

"Well, all I hope," said Butch with narrowed glance, "is that you
hadn't been drinking anything when you operated on Pinky."

"You know, Butch," the doctor said slowly, "that was a pretty
dirty trick of mine to bring that tornado here."

Less than a mile away, an enormous, top-shaped black cloud
filled the sky and bore toward them, dipping and swirling, and in
front of it sailed already a heavy, singing wind.

"It's come back ! " the doctor yelled.

"Get out, you fool 1 Get out ! "

A nerveless mass stumbled from the car ; in a moment they were
in a group of half a dozen, huddled in the triangular space that the
bridge made with the shore.

"Is it coming here?"

"No, it's turning ! "

"We had to leave grampa ! "

"Oh, save me, save me! Jesus save me! Help me!"

"Jesus save my soul ! "

"It's passed," he said. "We only felt the edge ; the centre went
way to the right of us."

He could see it plainly; for a second he could even distinguish

Family in the Wind 433

objects in it — shrubbery and small trees, planks and loose earth.
Crawling farther out, he produced his watch and tried to time it,
but the thick curtain of rain blotted it from sight.

Soaked to the skin, he crawled back underneath. Butch lay
shivering in the farthest corner, and the doctor shook him.

"It went in the direction of your house!" the doctor cried. "Pull
yourself together! Who's there ?"

"No one," Butch groaned. "They're all down with Pinky."

The rain had changed to hail now ; first small pellets, then larger
ones, and larger, until the sound of the fall upon the iron bridge
was an ear-splitting tattoo.

"This is worse than a calamity," he said dryly. "It's getting to
be a nuisance."

At the end of a week, houses weie going up again, made of the
old boards; and before the end of the long, lush Alabama summer
the grass would be green again on all the graves. But it would be
years before the people of the country ceased to reckon events as
happening "before the tornado" or "after the tornado," — and for
many families thing would never be the same.

Several times on the way in he stopped by the roadside to say
good-by — once it was to Walter Cupps.

434 Family in the Wind

"So it hit you, after all," he said, looking at the melancholy back
house which alone marked the site.

"It's pretty bad," Walter answered. "But just think; they was six
of us in or about the house and not one was injured. I'm content
to give thanks to God for that."

"You were lucky there, Walt," the doctor agreed. "Do you happen
to have heard whether the Red Cross took little Helen Kilrain to
Montgomery or to Birmingham?"

"To Montgomery. Say, I was there when she came into town with
that cat, tryin' to get somebody to bandage up its paw. She must of
walked miles through that rain and hail but all that mattered to her
was her kitty. Bad as I felt, I couldn't help laughin' at how spunky
she was."

The doctor was silent for a moment. "Do you happen to recollect
if she has any people left?"

"I don't, suh," Walter replied, "but I think as not."

At his brother's place, the doctor made his last stop. They were
all there, even the youngest, working among the ruins; already
Butch had a shed erected to house the salvage of their goods. Save
for this the most orderly thing surviving was the pattern of round
white stone which was to have inclosed the garden.

The doctor took a hundred dollars in bills from his pocket and
handed it to Gene.

"You can pay it back sometime, but don't strain yourself," he
said. "It's money I got from the store." He cut off Gene's thanks :
"Pack up my books carefully when I send for 'em."

"You reckon to practice medicine up there, Forrest?"

"I'll maybe try it."

The brothers held on to each other's hands for a moment, the two
youngest children came up to say good-by. Rose stood in the back-
ground in an old blue dress — she had no money to wear black for
her eldest son.

"Good-by, Rose," said the doctor.

"Good-by," she responded, and then added in a dead voice, "Good
luck to you, Forrest."

For a moment he was tempted to say something conciliatory, but
he saw it was no use. He was up against the maternal instinct, the
same force that had sent little Helen through the storm with her
injured cat.

At the station he bought a one-way ticket to Montgomery. The
village was drab under the sky of a retarded spring, and as the train
pulled out, it was odd to think that six months ago it had seemed
to him as good a place as any other.

He was alone in the white section of the day coach ; presently he

Family in the Wind 433

felt for a bottle on his hip and drew it forth. "After all, a man of
forty-five is entitled to more artificial courage when he starts over
again." He began thinking of Helen. "She hasn't got any kin. I
guess she's my little girl now."

He patted the bottle, then looked down at it as if in surprise.

"Well, we'll have to put you aside for a while, old friend. Any
cat that's worth all that trouble and care is going to need a lot of
grade-B milk."

He settled down in his seat, looking out the window. In his mem-
ory of the terrible week the winds still sailed about him, came in as
draughts through the corridor of the car — winds of the world —
cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes — gray and black, expected or unfore-
seen, some from the sky, some from the caves of hell.

But he would not let them touch Helen again — if he could help it.

He dozed momentarily, but a haunting dream woke him : "Daddy
stood over me and I stood over kitty"

"All right, Helen," he said aloud, for he often talked to himself,
"I guess the old brig can keep afloat a little longer — in any wind."
1932 Taps at Reveille

AN ALCOHOLIC CASE

"LET— GO— that— oh-h-h ! Please, now, will you? Don't start drink-
ing again I Come on — give me the bottle. I told you I'd stay awake
givin it to you. Come on. If you do like that a-way — then what are
you going to be like when you go home. Come on — leave it with me
— I'll leave half in the bottle. Pul-lease. You know what Dr. Carter
says — I'll stay awake and give it to you, or else fix some of it in
the bottle — come on — like I told you, I'm too tired to be fightin you
all night. ... All right, drink your fool self to death."

"Would you like some beer?" he asked.

"No, I don't want any beer. Oh, to think that I have to look at
you drunk again. My God ! "

"Then I'll drink the Coca-Cola."

The girl sat down panting on the bed.

"Don't you believe in anything?" she demanded.

"Nothing you believe in — please — it'll spill."

She had no business there, she thought, no business trying to help
him. Again they struggled, but after this time he sat with his head
in his hands awhile, before he turned around once more.

"Once more you try to get it I'll throw it down," she said quickly.
"I will — on the tiles in the bathroom."

"Then I'll step on the broken glass — or you'll step on it."

"Then let go — oh you promised "

Suddenly she dropped it like a torpedo, sliding underneath her
hand and slithering with a flash of red and black and the words:
SIR GALAHAD, DISTILLED LOUISVILLE GIN. He took it by the neck and
tossed it through the open door to the bathroom.

It was on the floor in pieces and everything was silent for awhile
and she read Gone With the Wind about things so lovely that had
happened long ago. She began to worry that he would have to go
into the bathroom and might cut his feet, and looked up from time
to time to see if he would go in. She was very sleepy — the last time
she looked up he was crying and he looked like an old Jewish man
she had nursed once in California; he had had to go to the bath-
room many times. On this case she was unhappy all the time but
she thought :

436

An Alcoholic Case 437

"I guess if I hadn't liked him I wouldn't have stayed on the case."

With a sudden resurgence of conscience she got up and put a chair
in front of the bathroom door. She had wanted to sleep because he
had got her up early that morning to get a paper with the story of
the Yale-Dartmouth game in it and she hadn't been home all day.
That afternoon a relative of his had come to see him and she had
waited outside in the hall where there was a draft with no sweater to
put over her uniform.

As well as she could she arranged him for sleeping, put a robe
over his shoulders as he sat slumped over his writing table, and one
on his knees. She sat down in the rocker but she was no longer sleepy ;
there was plenty to enter on the chart and treading lightly about
she found a pencil and put it down :

Pulse 120

Respiration 25

Temp. 98 — 98.4 — 98.2

Remarks —

— She could make so many:

Tried to get bottle of gin. Threw it away and broke it.

She corrected it to read :

In the struggle it dropped and was broken. Patient was generally
difficult.

She started to add as part of her report : / never want to go on an
alcoholic case again, but that wasn't in the picture. She knew she
could wake herself at seven and clean up everything before his niece
awakened. It was all part of the game. But when she sat down in
the chair she looked at- his face, white and exhausted, and counted
his breathing again, wondering why it had all happened. He had
been so nice today, drawn her a whole strip of his cartoon just for
fun and given it to her. She was going to have it framed and hang
it in her room. She felt again his thin wrists wrestling against her
wrist and remembered the awful things he had said, and she thought
too of what the doctor had said to him yesterday :

"You're too good a man to do this to yourself."

She was tired and didn't want to clean up the glass on the bath-
room floor, because as soon as he breathed evenly she wanted to
get him over to the bed. But she decided finally to clean up the
glass first ; on her knees, searching a last piece of it, she thought :

— This isn't what I ought to be doing. And this isn't what he ought
to be doing.

Resentfully she stood up and regarded him. Through the thin
delicate profile of his nose came a light snore, sighing, remote, in-
consolable. The doctor had shaken his head in a certain way, and
she knew that really it was a case that was beyond her. Besides, on

438 An Alcoholic Case

her card at the agency was written, on the advice of her elders, "No
Alcoholics."

She had done her whole duty, but all she could think of was that
when she was struggling about the room with him with that gin
bottle there had been a pause when he asked her if she had hurt her
elbow against a door and that she had answered : "You don't know
how people talk about you, no matter how you think of yourself — "
when she knew he had a long time ceased to care about such things.

The glass was all collected — as she got out a broom to make sure,
she realized that the glass, in its fragments, was less than a window
through which they had seen each other for a moment. He did not
know about her sisters, and Bill Markoe whom she had almost
married, and she did not know what had brought him to this pitch,
when there was a picture on his bureau of his young wife and his
two sons and him, all trim and handsome as he must have been
five years ago. It was so utterly senseless — as she put a bandage on
her finger where she had cut it while picking up the glass she made
up her mind she would never take an alcoholic case again.

It was early the next evening. Some Halloween jokester had split
the side windows of the bus and she shifted back to the Negro section
in the rear for fear the glass might fall out. She had her patient's
check but no way to cash it at this hour ; there was a quarter and a
penny in her purse.

Two nurses she knew were waiting in the hall of Mrs. Hixson's
Agency.

"What kind of case have you been on?"

"Alcoholic," she said.

"Oh yes — Gretta Hawks told me about it — you were on with that
cartoonist who lives at the Forest Park Inn."

"Yes, I was."

"I hear he's pretty fresh."

"He's never done anything to bother me," she lied. "You can't
treat them as if they were committed "

"Oh, don't get bothered — I just heard that around town — oh, you
know — they want you to play around with them "

"Oh, be quiet," she said, surprised at her own rising resentment.

In a moment Mrs. Hixson came out and, asking the other two to
wait, signaled her into the office.

"I don't like to put young girls on such cases," she began. "I got
your call from the hotel."

"Oh, it wasn't bad, Mrs. Hixson. He didn't know what he was

An Alcoholic Case 439

doing and he didn't hurt me in any way. I was thinking much more
of my reputation with you. He was really nice all day yesterday.
He drew me "

"I didn't want to send you on that case." Mrs. Hixson thumbed
through the registration cards. "You take T.B. cases, don't you?
Yes, I see you do. Now here's one "

The phone rang in a continuous chime. The nurse listened as Mrs.
Hixson 's voice said precisely :

"I will do what I can — that is simply up to the doctor. . . . That
is beyond my jurisdiction. . . . Oh, hello, Hattie, no, I can't now.
Look, have you got any nurse that's good with alcoholics? There's
somebody up at the Forest Park Inn who needs somebody. Call
back will you?"

She put down the receiver. "Suppose you wait outside. What sort
of man is this, anyhow? Did he act indecently?"

"He held my hand away," she said, "so I couldn't give him an
injection."

"Oh, an invalid he-man," Mrs. Hixson grumbled. "They belong in
sanitaria. I've got a case coming along in two minutes that you can
get a little rest on. It's an old woman "

The phone rang again. "Oh, hello, Hattie. . . . Well, how about
that big Svensen girl? She ought to be able to take care of any
alcoholic. . . . How about Josephine Markham? Doesn't she live
in your apartment house? . . . Get her to the phone." Then after
a moment, "Joe, would you care to take the case of a well-known
cartoonist, or artist, whatever they call themselves, at Forest Park
Inn? . . . No, I don't know, but Dr. Carter is in charge and
will be around about ten o'clock."

There was a long pause ; from time to time Mrs. Hixson spoke :

"I see. ... Of course, I understand your point of view. Yes, but
this isn't supposed to be dangerous — just a little difficult. I never
like to send girls to a hotel because I know what riff-raff you're
liable to run into. . . . No, I'll find somebody. Even at this hour.
Never mind and thanks. Tell Hattie I hope the hat matches the
negligee. . . ."

Mrs. Hixson hung up the receiver and made notations on the pad
before her. She was a very efficient woman. She had been a nurse
and had gone through the worst of it, had been a proud, idealistic,
overworked probationer, suffered the abuse of smart internes and
the insolence of her first patients, who thought that she was some-
thing to be taken into camp immediately for premature commitment
to the service of old age. She swung around suddenly from the desk.

"What kind of cases do you want? I told you I have a nice old
woman "

An Alcoholic Case

The nurse's brown eyes were alight with a mixture of thoughts
— the movie she had just seen about Pasteur and the book they had
all read about Florence Nightingale when they were student nurses.
And their pride, swinging across the streets in the cold weather at
Philadelphia General, as proud of their new capes as debutantes in
their furs going in to balls at the hotels.

"I — I think I would like to try the case again," she said amid a
cacophony of telephone bells. "I'd just as soon go back if you can't
find anybody else."

"But one minute you say you'll never go on an alcoholic case
again and the next minute you say you want to go back to one."

"I think I overestimated how difficult it was. Really, I think I
could help him."

"That's up to you. But if he tried to grab your wrists."

"But he couldn't," the nurse said. "Look at my wrists: I played
basketball at Waynesboro High for two years. I'm quite able to
take care of him."

Mrs. Hixson looked at her for a long minute. "Well, all right,"
she said. "But just remember that nothing they say when they're
drunk is what they mean when they're sober — I've been all through
that ; arrange with one of the servants that you can call on him, be-
cause you never can tell — some alcoholics are pleasant and some of
them are not, but all of them can be rotten."

"I'll remember," the nurse said.

It was an oddly clear night when she went out, with slanting par-
ticles of thin sleet making white of a blue-black sky. The bus was
the same that had taken her into town, but there seemed to be more
windows broken now and the bus driver was irritated and talked
about what terrible things he would do if he caught any kids. She
knew he was just talking about the annoyance in general, just as
she had been thinking about the annoyance of an alcoholic. When
she came up to the suite and found him all helpless and distraught
she would despise him and be sorry for him.

Getting off the bus, she went down the long steps to the hotel,
feeling a little exalted by the chill in the air. She was going to take
care of him because nobody else would, and because the best people
of her profession had been interested in taking care of the cases that
nobody else wanted.

She knocked at his study door, knowing just what she was going
to say.

He answered it himself. He was in dinner clothes even to a derby
hat — but minus his studs and tie.

"Oh, hello," he said casually. "Glad you're back. I woke up a
while ago and decided I'd go out. Did you get a night nurse?"

An Alcoholic Case 441

"I'm the night nurse too," she said. "I decided to stay on twenty-
four hour duty."

He broke into a genial, indifferent smile.

"I saw you were gone, but something told me you'd come back.
Please find my studs. They ought to be either in a little tortoise
shell box or "

He shook himself a little more into his clothes, and hoisted the
cuffs up inside his coat sleeves.

"I thought you had quit me," he said casually.

"I thought I had, too."

"If you look on that table," he said, ''you'll find a whole strip of
cartoons that I drew you."

"Who are you going to see?" she asked.

"It's the President's secretary," he said. "I had an awful time try-
ing to get ready. I was about to give up when you came in. Will
you order me some sherry?"

"One glass," she agreed wearily.

From the bathroom he called presently:

"Oh, nurse, nurse, Light of my Life, where is another stud?"

"I'll put it in."

In the bathroom she saw the pallor and the fever on his face and
smelled the mixed peppermint and gin on his breath.

"You'll come up soon?" she asked. "Dr. Carter's coming at ten."

"What nonsense! You're coming down with me."

"Me?" she exclaimed. "In a sweater and skirt? Imagine I"

"Then I won't go."

"All right then, go to bed. That's where you belong anyhow. Can't
you see these people tomorrow?"

"No, of course not."

"Of course not!"

She went behind him and reaching over his shoulder tied his tie —
his shirt was already thumbed out of press where he had put in the
studs, and she suggested:

"Won't you put on another one, if you've got to meet some people
you like?"

"All right, but I want to do it myself."

"Why can't you let me help you ?" she demanded in exasperation.
"Why can't you let me help you with your clothes? What's a nurse
for — what good am I doing?"

He sat down suddenly on the toilet seat.

"All right— go on.'1

"Now don't grab my wrist," she said, and then, "Excuse me."

"Don't worry. It didn't hurt. You'll see in a minute."

She had the coat, vest and stiff shirt off him but before she could

442 An Alcoholic Case

pull his undershirt over his head he dragged at his cigarette, de-
laying her.

"Now watch this," he said. "One— two— -three."

She pulled up the undershirt ; simultaneously he thrust the crim-
son-gray point of the cigarette like a dagger against his heart. It
crushed out against a copper plate on his left rib about the size of
a silver dollar, and he said "ouch ! " as a stray spark fluttered down
against his stomach.

Now was the time to be hardboiled, she thought. She knew there
were three medals from the war in his jewel box, but she had risked
many things herself: tuberculosis among them and one time some-
thing worse, though she had not known it and had never quite for-
given the doctor for not telling her.

"You've had a hard time with that, I guess," she said lightly as
she sponged him. "Won't it ever heal?"

"Never. That's a copper plate."

"Well, it's no excuse for what you're doing to yourself."

He bent his great brown eyes on her, shrewd — aloof, confused. He
signaled to her, in one second, his Will to Die, and for all her train-
ing and experience she knew she could never do anything construc-
tive with him. He stood up, steadying himself on the washbasin and
fixing his eye on some place just ahead.

"Now, if I'm going to stay here you're not going to get at that
liquor," she said.

Suddenly she knew he wasn't looking for that. He was looking at
the corner where he had thrown the bottle the night before. She stared
at his handsome face, weak and defiant — afraid to turn even half-
way because she knew that death was in that corner where he was
looking. She knew death — she had heard it, smelt its unmistakable
odor, but she had never seen it before it entered into anyone, and
she knew this man saw it in the corner of his bathroom ; that it was
standing there looking at him while he spit from a feeble cough and
rubbed the result into the braid of his trousers. It shone there . . .
crackling for a moment as evidence of the last gesture he ever made.

She tried to express it next day to Mrs. Hixson:

"It's not like anything you can beat — no matter how hard you
try. This one could have twisted my wrists until he strained them
and that wouldn't matter so much to me. It's just that you can't
really help them and it's so discouraging — it's all for nothing."
1937 Previously uncollected

THE LONG WAY OUT

WE WERE talking about some of the older castles in Touraine and
we touched upon the iron cage in which Louis XI imprisoned Car-
dinal Balue for six years, then upon oubliettes and such horrors.
I had seen several of the latter, simply dry wells thirty or forty
feet deep where a man was thrown to wait for nothing ; since I have
such a tendency to claustrophobia that a Pullman berth is a certain
nightmare, they had made a lasting impression. So it was rather a
relief when a doctor told this story — that is, it was a relief when he
began it, for it seemed to have nothing to do with the tortures
long ago.

There was a young woman named Mrs. King who was very happy
with her husband. They were well-to-do and deeply in love, but at
the birth of her second child she went into a long coma and emerged
with a clear case of schizophrenia or "split personality." Her delu-
sion, which had something to do with the Declaration of Independence,
had little bearing on the case and as she regained her health it began
to disappear. At the end of ten months she was a convalescent pa-
tient scarcely marked by what had happened to her and very eager
to go back into the world.

She was only twenty-one, rather girlish in an appealing way and
a favorite with the staff of the sanitarium. When she became well
enough so that she could take an experimental trip with her hus-
band there was a general interest in the venture. One nurse had
gone into Philadelphia with her to get a dress, another knew the
story of her rather romantic courtship in Mexico and everyone had
seen her two babies on visits to the hospital. The trip was to Virginia
Beach for five days.

It was a joy to watch her make ready, dressing and packing metic-
ulously and living in the gay trivialities of hair waves and such
things. She was ready half an hour before the time of departure and
she paid some visits on the floor in her powder-blue gown and her
hat that looked like one minute after an April shower. Her frail
lovely face, with just that touch of startled sadness that often lingers
after an illness, was alight with anticipation.

"Well just do nothing," she said. "That's my ambition. To get

443

444 The Long Way Out

up when I want to for three straight mornings and stay up late for
three straight nights. To buy a bathing suit by myself and order a
meal"

When the time approached Mrs. King decided to wait downstairs
instead of in her room and as she passed along the corridors, with an
orderly carrying her suitcase, she waved to the other patients, sorry
that they too were not going on a gorgeous holiday. The superin-
tendent wished her well, two nurses found excuses to linger and share
her infectious joy.

"What a beautiful tan you'll get, Mrs. King."

"Be sure and send a postcard. "

About the time she left her room her husband's car was hit by a
truck on his way from the city — he was hurt internally and was not
expected to live more than a few hours. The information was received
;it the hospital in a glassed-in office adjoining the hall where Mrs.
King waited. The operator, seeing Mrs. King and knowing that the
tflass was not sound proof, asked the head nurse to come imme-
diately. The head nurse hurried aghast to a doctor and he decided
what to do. So long as the husband was still alive it was best to tell
her nothing, but of course she must know that he was not coming
today.

Mrs. King was greatly disappointed.

"I suppose it's silly to feel that way," she said, "After all these
months what's one more day? He said he'd come tomorrow,
didn't he?"

The nurse was having a difficult time but she managed to pass it
off until the patient was back in her room. Then they assigned a
very experienced and phlegmatic nurse to keep Mrs. King away
from other patients and from newspapers. By the next day the
matter would be decided one way or another.

But her husband lingered on and they continued to prevaricate.
A little before noon next day one of the nurses was passing along
the corridor when she met Mrs. Kingr dressed as she had been the
day before but this time carrying her own suitcase.

"I'm going to meet my husband," she explained. "He couldn't
come yesterday but he's coming today at the same time."

The nurse walked along with her. Mrs. King had the freedom of
the building and it was difficult to simply steer her back to her
room, and the nurse did not want to tell a story that would con-
tradict what the authorities were telling her. When they reached
the front hall she signaled to the operator, who fortunately under-
stood. Mrs. King gave herself a last inspection in the mirror and
said:

The Long Way Out 445

"I'd like to have a dozen hats just like this to remind me to be
this happy always."

When the head nurse came in frowning a minute later she de-
manded :

"Don't tell me George is delayed?"

"I'm afraid he is. There is nothing much to do but be patient."

Mrs. King laughed ruefully. "I wanted him to see my costume
when it was absolutely new."

"Why, there isn't a wrinkle in it."

"I guess it'll last till tomorrow. I oughtn't to be blue about wait'
ing one more day when I'm so utterly happy."

"Certainly not."

That night her husband died and at a conference of doctors next
morning there was some discussion about what to do — it was a risk
to tell her and a risk to keep it from her. It was decided finally to
say that Mr. King had been called away and thus destroy her hope
of an immediate meeting; when she was reconciled to this they
could tell her the truth.

As the doctors came out of the conference one of them stopped
and pointed. Down the corridor toward the outer hall walked Mrs.
King carrying her suitcase.

Dr. Pirie, who had been in special charge of Mrs. King, caught
his breath.

"This is awful," he said. "I think perhaps I'd better tell her now.
There's no use saying he's away when she usually hears from him
twice a week, and if we say he's sick she'll want to go to him. Any-
body else like the job?"

One of the doctors in the conference went on a fortnight's vaca-
tion that afternoon. On the day of his return in the same corridor at
the same hour, he stopped at the sight of a little procession coming
toward him — an orderly carrying a suitcase, a nurse and Mrs. King
dressed in the powder-blue suit and wearing the spring hat.

"Good morning, Doctor," she said. "I'm going to meet my husband
and we're going to Virginia Beach. I'm going to the hall because I
don't want to keep him waiting."

He looked into her face, clear and happy as a child's. The nurse
signaled to him that it was as ordered, so he merely bowed and spoke
of the pleasant weather.

"It's a beautiful day," said Mrs. King, "but of course even if it
was raining it would be a beautiful day for me."

446 The Long Way Out

The doctor looked after her, puzzled and annoyed — why are they
letting this go on, he thought. What possible good can it do?

Meeting Dr. Pirie, he put the question to him.

"We tried to tell her," Dr. Pirie said. "She laughed and said we
were trying to see whether she's still sick. You could use the word
unthinkable in an exact sense here — his death is unthinkable to
her/'

"But you can't just go on like this."

"Theoretically no," said Dr. Pirie. "A few days ago when she
packed up as usual the nurse tried to keep her from going. From out
in the hall I could see her face, see her begin to go to pieces — for
the first time, mind you. Her muscles were tense and her eyes glazed
and her voice was thick and shrill when she very politely called the
nurse a liar. It was touch and go there for a minute whether we
had a tractable patient or a restraint case — and I stepped in and told
the nurse to take her down to the reception room."

He broke off as the procession that had just passed appeared
again, headed back to the ward. Mrs. King stopped and spoke to
Dr. Pirie.

"My husband's been delayed," she said. "Of course I'm disap-
pointed but they tell me he's coming tomorrow and after waiting so
long one more day doesn't seem to matter. Don't you agree with
me, Doctor?"

"I certainly do, Mrs. King."

She took off her hat.

"I've got to put aside these clothes — I want them to be as fresh
tomorrow as they are today." She looked closely at the hat. "There's
a speck of dust on it, but I think I can get it off. Perhaps he won't
notice."

"I'm sure he won't."

"Really I don't mind waiting another day. It'll be this time to-
morrow before I know it, won't it?"

When she had gone along the younger doctor said :

"There are still the two children."

"I don't think the children are going to matter. When she 'went
under,1 she tied up this trip with the idea of getting well. If we took
it away she'd have to go to the bottom and start over."

"Could she?"

"There's no prognosis," said Dr. Pirie. "I was simply explaining
why she was allowed to go to the hall this morning."

"But there's tomorrow morning and the next morning."

"There's always the chance," said Dr. Pirie, "that some day he
will be there."

The Long Way Out 447

The doctor ended his story here, rather abruptly. When we pressed
him to tell what happened he protested that the rest was anticlimax
— that all sympathy eventually wears out and that finally the staff
of the sanitarium had simply accepted the fact.

"But does she still go to meet her husband?'*

"Oh yes, it's always the same — but the other patients, except new
ones, hardly look up when she passes along the hall. The nurses
manage to substitute a new hat every year or so but she still wears
the same suit. She's always a little disappointed but she makes the
best of it, very sweetly too. It's not an unhappy life as far as we
know, and in some funny way it seems to set an example of tran-
quillity to the other patients. For God's sake let's talk about some-
thing else — let's go back to oubliettes."
1937 Previously uncollected

FINANCING FINNEGAN

FINNEGAN and I have the same literary agent to sell our writings
for us, but though I'd often been in Mr. Cannon's office just before
and just after Finnegan's visits, I had never met him. Likewise we
had the same publisher and often when I arrived there Finnegan
had just departed. I gathered from a thoughtful sighing way in
which they spoke of him —

"Ah— Finnegan— "

"Oh yes, Finnegan was here."

— that the distinguished author's visit had been not uneventful.
Certain remarks implied that he had taken something with him
when he went — manuscripts, I supposed, one of those great success-
ful novels of his. He had taken "it" off for a final revision, a last
draft, of which he was rumored to make ten in order to achieve that
facile flow, that ready wit, which distinguished his work. I discov-
ered only gradually that most of Finnegan's visits had to do with
money.

"I'm sorry you're leaving," Mr. Cannon would tell me, "Finne-
gan will be here tomorrow." Then after a thoughtful pause "I'll
probably have to spend some time with him."

I don't know what note in his voice reminded me of a talk with a
nervous bank president when Dillinger was reported in the vicinity.
His eyes looked out into the distance and he spoke as to him-
self.

"Of course he may be bringing a manuscript. He has a novel he's
working on, you know. And a play too." He spoke as though he were
talking about some interesting but remote events of the cinquecento ;
but his eyes became more hopeful as he added : "Or maybe a short
story."

"He's very versatile, isn't he?" I said.

"Oh yes," Mr. Cannon perked up. "He can do anything — any-
thing when he puts his mind to it. There's never been such a talent."

"I haven't seen much of his work lately."

"Oh, but he's working hard. Some of the magazines have stories
of his that they're holding."

"Holding for what?"

448

Financing Finnegan 449

"Oh, for a more appropriate time — an upswing. They like to think
they have something of Finnegan's."

His was indeed a name with ingots in it. His career had started
brilliantly and if it had not kept up to its first exalted level, at
least it started brilliantly all over again every few years. He was
the perennial man of promise in American letters — what he could
actually do with words was astounding, they glowed and coruscated
— he wrote sentences, paragraphs, chapters that were masterpieces
of fine weaving and spinning. It was only when I met some poor
devil of a screen writer who had been trying to make a logical story
out of one of his books that I realized he had his enemies.

"It's all beautiful when you read it," this man said disgustedly,
"but when you write it down plain it's like a week in the nut-house."

From Mr. Cannon's office I went over to my publishers on Fifth
Avenue and there too I learned in no time that Finnegan was ex-
pected tomorrow. Indeed he had thrown such a long shadow before
him that the luncheon where I expected to discuss my own work was
largely devoted to Finnegan. Again I had the feeling that my host,
Mr. George Jaggers, was talking not to me but to himself.

"Finnegan's a great writer," he said.

"Undoubtedly."

"And he's really quite all right, you know."

As I hadn't questioned the fact I inquired whether there was any
doubt about it.

"Oh no," he said hurriedly. "It's just that he's had such a run of
hard luck lately "

I shook my head sympathetically. "I know. That diving into a
half-empty pool was a tough break."

"Oh, it wasn't half-empty. It was full of water. Full to the brim.
You ought to hear Finnegan on the subject — he makes a side-
splitting story of it. It seems he was in a run-down condition and
just diving from the side of the pool, you know — " Mr. Jaggers
pointed his knife and fork at the table, "and he saw some young
girls diving from the fifteen-foot board. He says he thought of his
lost youth and went up to do the same and made a beautiful swan
dive — but his shoulder broke while he was still in the air." He looked
at me rather anxiously. "Haven't you heard of cases like that — a
ball player throwing his arm out of joint?"

I couldn't think of any orthopedic parallels at the moment.

"And then," he continued dreamily, "Finnegan had to write on
the ceiling."

"On the ceiling?"

"Practically. He didn't give up writing — he has plenty of guts,
that fellow, though you may not believe it. He had some sort of

45O Financing Finnegan

arrangement built that was suspended from the ceiling and he lay
on his back and wrote in the air."

I had to grant that it was a courageous arrangement.

"Did it affect his work?" I inquired. "Did you have to read his
stories backward — like Chinese?'1

"They were rather confused for a while," he admitted, "but he's
all right now. I got several letters from him that sounded more like
the old Finnegan — full of life and hope and plans for the future "

The faraway look came into his face and I turned the discussion
to affairs closer to my heart. Only when we were back in his office
did the subject recur — and I blush as I write this because it in-
cludes confessing something I seldom do — reading another man's
telegram. It happened because Mr. Jaggers was intercepted in the
hall and when I went into his office and sat down it was stretched
out open before me :

With fifty / could at least pay typist and get haircut and pencils
life has become impossible and I exist on dream of good news des-
perately Finnegan

I couldn't believe my eyes — fifty dollars, and I happened to know
that Finnegan 's price for short stories was somewhere around three
thousand. George Jaggers found me still staring dazedly at the tele-
gram. After he read it he stared at me with stricken eyes.

"I don't see how I can conscientiously do it," he said.

I started and glanced around to make sure I was in the prosperous
publishing office in New York. Then I understood — I had misread
the telegram. Finnegan was asking for fifty thousand as an advance
— a demand that would have staggered any publisher no matter
who the writer was.

"Only last week," said Mr. Jaggers disconsolately, "I sent him a
hundred dollars. It puts my department in the red every season, so
I don't dare tell my partners any more. I take it out of my own
pocket — give up a suit and a pair of shoes."

"You mean Finnegan's broke?"

"Broke!" He looked at me and laughed soundlessly — in fact I
didn't exactly like the way that he laughed. My brother had a
nervous — but that is afield from this story. After a minute he pulled
himself together. "You won't say anything about this, will you?
The truth is Finnegan's been in a slump, he's had blow after blow
in the past few years, but now he's snapping out of it and I know
well get back every cent we've — " He tried to think of a word but
"given him" slipped out. This time it was he who was eager to
change the subject.

Financing Finnegan 451

Don't let me give the impression that Finnegan's affairs absorbed
me during a whole week in New York — it was inevitable, though,
that being much in the offices of my agent and my publisher, I hap-
pened in on a lot. For instance, two days later, using the telephone
in Mr. Cannon's office, I was accidentally switched in on a conver-
sation he was having with George Jaggers. It was only partly eaves-
dropping, you see, because I could only hear one end of the con-
versation and that isn't as bad as hearing it all.

"But I got the impression he was in good health ... he did say
something about his heart a few months ago but I understood it
got well . . . yes, and he talked about some operation he wanted
to have — I think he said it was cancer. . . . Well, I felt like telling
him I had a little operation up my sleeve, too, that I'd have had by
now if I could afford it. ... No, I didn't say it. He seemed in such
good spirits that it seemed a shame to bring him down. He's start-
ing a story today, he read me some of it on the phone . . .

". . . I did give him twenty-five because he didn't have a cent
in his pocket ... oh, yes — I'm sure he'll be all right now. He
sounds as if he means business."

I understood it all now. The two men had entered into a silent
conspiracy to cheer each other up about Finnegan. Their investment
in him, in his future, had reached a sum so considerable that Finne-
gan belonged to them. They could not bear to hear a word against
him — even from themselves.

I spoke my mind to Mr. Cannon.

"If this Finnegan is a four-flusher you can't go on indefinitely
giving him money. If he's through he's through and there's nothing
to be done about it. It's absurd that you should put off an operation
when Finnegan's out somewhere diving into half-empty swimming
pools."

"It was full," said Mr. Cannon patiently— "full to the brim."
"Well, full or empty the man sounds like a nuisance to me."
"Look here," said Cannon, "I've got a call from Hollywood due
on the wire. Meanwhile you might glance over that." He threw a
manuscript into my lap. "Maybe itll help you understand. He
brought it in yesterday."

It was a short story. I began it in a mood of disgust but before
I'd read five minutes I was completely immersed in it, utterly
charmed, utterly convinced and wishing to God I could write like
that. When Cannon finished his phone call I kept him waiting while
I finished it and when I did there were tears in these hard old pro-

452 Financing Finnegan

fessional eyes. Any magazine in the country would have run it first
in any issue.

But then nobody had ever denied that Finnegan could write.

Ill

Months passed before I went again to New York, and then, so far
as the offices of my agent and my publisher were concerned, I
descended upon a quieter, more stable world. There was at last time
to talk about my own conscientious if uninspired literary pursuits,
to visit Mr. Cannon in the country and to kill summer evenings with
George Jaggers where the vertical New York starlight falls like
lingering lightning into restaurant gardens. Finnegan might have
been at the North Pole — and as a matter of fact he was. He had
quite a group with him, including three Bryn Mawr anthropologists,
and it sounded as if he might collect a lot of material there. They
were going to stay several months, and if the thing had somehow the
ring of a promising little houseparty about it, that was probably
due to my jealous, cynical disposition.

"We're all just delighted," said Cannon. "It's a God-send for him.
He was fed up and he needed just this — this — "

"Ice and snow," I supplied.

"Yes, ice and snow. The last thing he said was characteristic of
him. Whatever he writes is going to be pure white — it's going to have
a blinding glare about it."

"I can imagine it will. But tell me — who's financing it? Last time
I was here I gathered the man was insolvent."

"Oh, he was really very decent about that. He owed me some
money and I believe he owed George Jaggers a little too." He "be-
lieved," the old hypocrite. He knew damn well. "So before he left
he made most of his life insurance over to us. That's in case he
doesn't come back — those trips are dangerous of course."

"I should think so," I said, "especially with three anthropologists."

"So Jaggers and I are absolutely covered in case anything happens
— it's as simple as that."

"Did the life-insurance company finance the trip?"

He fidgeted perceptibly.

"Oh, no. In fact when they learned the reason for the assign-
ments they were a little upset. George Jaggers and I felt that when
he had a specific plan like this with a specific book at the end of
it, we were justified in backing him a little further."

"I don't see it," I said flatly.

"You don't?" The old harassed look came back into his eyes
"Well, I'll admit we hesitated. In principle I know it's wrong. I

Financing Finnegan 453

used to advance authors small sums from time to time, but lately
I've made a rule against it — and kept it. It's only been waived once
in the last two years and that was for a woman who was having a
bad struggle — Margaret Trahill, do you know her? She was an old
girl of Finnegan's, by the way."

"Remember I don't even know Finnegan."

"That's right. You must meet him when he comes back — if he does
come back. You'd like him — he's utterly charming."

Again I departed from New York, to imaginative North Poles of
my own, while the year rolled through summer and fall. When the
first snap of November was in the air, I thought of the Finnegan
expedition with a sort of shiver and any envy of the man departed.
He was probably earning any loot, literary or anthropological, he
might bring back. Then, when I hadn't been back in New York
three days, I read in the paper that he and some other members of
his party had walked off into a snowstorm when the food supply
gave out, and the Arctic had claimed another sacrifice of intrepid
man.

I was sorry for him, but practical enough to be glad that Cannon
and Jaggers were well protected. Of course, with Finnegan scarcely
cold — if such a simile is not too harrowing — they did not talk about
it but I gathered that the insurance companies had waived habeas
corpus or whatever it is in their lingo, just as if he had fallen
overboard into the Atlantic, and it seemed quite sure that they
would collect.

His son, a fine looking young fellow, came into George Jaggers'
office while I was there and from him I could guess at Finnegan's
charm — a shy frankness together with an impression of a very quiet,
brave battle going on inside of him that he couldn't quite bring
himself to talk about — but that showed as heat lightning in his
work.

"The boy writes well too/' said George after he had gone. "He's
brought in some remarkable poems. He's not ready to step into hi*
father's shoes, but there's a definite promise."

"Can I see one of his things?"

"Certainly — here's one he left just as he went out."

George took a paper from his desk, opened it and cleared his
throat. Then he squinted and bent over a little in his chair.

"Dear Mr. Jaggers" he began, '7 didn't like to ask you this i*
person — " Jaggers stopped, his eyes reading ahead rapidly.

"How much does he want?" I inquired.

He sighed.

"He gave me the impression that this was some of his work," he
said in a pained voice.

454 Financing Finnegan

"But it is," I consoled him. "Of course he isn't quite ready to
step into his father's shoes."

I was sorry afterwards to have said this, for after all Finnegan
had paid his debts, and it was nice to be alive now that better times
were back and books were no longer rated as unnecessary luxuries.
Many authors I knew who had skimped along during the depres-
sion were now making long-deferred trips or paying off mortgages
or turning out the more finished kind of work that can only be done
with a certain leisure and security. I had just got a thousand dollars
advance for a venture in Hollywood and was going to fly out with
all the verve of the old days when there was chicken feed in every
pot. Going in to say good-by to Cannon and collect the money, it
was nice to find he too was profiting — wanted me to go along and
see a motor boat he was buying.

But some last-minute stuff came up to delay him and I grew im-
patient and decided to skip it. Getting no response to a knock on
the door of his sanctum, I opened it anyhow.

The inner office seemed in some confusion. Mr. Cannon was on
several telephones at once and dictating something about an insur-
ance company to a stenographer. One secretary was getting hur-
riedly into her hat and coat as upon an errand and another was
counting bills from her purse upon a table.

"It'll be only a minute," said Cannon, "it's just a little office riot
— you never saw us like this."

"Is it Finnegan's insurance?" I couldn't help asking. "Isn't it
any good?"

"His insurance — oh, perfectly all right, perfectly. This is just a
matter of trying to raise a few hundred in a hurry. The banks are
closed and we're all contributing."

"I've got that money you just gave me," I said. "I don't need all
of it to get to the coast." I peeled off a couple of hundred. "Will
this be enough?"

"That'll be fine — it just saves us. Never mind, Miss Carlsen. Mrs.
Mapes, you needn't go now."

"I think I'll be running along," I said.

"Just wait two minutes," he urged. "I've only got to take care of
this wire. It's really splendid news. Bucks you up."

It was a cablegram from Oslo, Norway — before I began to read
I was full of a premonition.

Am miraculously safe here but detained by authorities please wire
passage money for four people and two hundred extra I am bring-
ing back plenty greetings from the dead.

Finnegan

Financing Finnegan 455

"Yes, that's splendid," I agreed. "He'll have a story to tell now.'1

"Won't he though," said Cannon. "Miss Carlsen, will you wire
the parents of those girls — and you'd better inform Mr. Jaggers."

As we walked along the street a few minutes later, I saw that Mr.
Cannon, as if stunned by the wonder of this news, had fallen into a
brown study, and I did not disturb him, for after all I did not know
Finnegan and could not whole-heartedly share his joy. His mood of
silence continued until we arrived at the door of the motor boat
show. Just under the sign he stopped and stared upward, as if
aware for the first time where we were going.

"Oh, my," he said, stepping back. "There's no use going in here
now. I thought we were going to get a drink."

We did. Mr. Cannon was still a little vague, a little under the
spell of the vast surprise — he fumbled so long for the money to pay
his round that I insisted it was on me.

I think he was in a daze during that whole time because, though
he is a man of the most punctilious accuracy, the two hundred
I handed him in his office has never shown to my credit in the
statements he has sent me. I imagine, though, that some day I will
surely get it because some day Finnegan will click again and I know
that people will clamor to read what he writes. Recently I've taken
it upon myself to investigate some of the stories about him and IVe
found that they're mostly as false as the half-empty pool. That
pool was full to the brim.

So far there's only been a short story about the polar expedition,
a love story. Perhaps it wasn't as big a subject as he expected. But
the movies are interested in him — if they can get a good long look
at him first and I have every reason to think that he will come
through. He'd better.
1938 Previously uncollected

PAT HOBBY HIMSELF
A PATRIOTIC SHORT

PAT HOBBY, the writer and the Man, had his great success in
Hollywood during what Irvin Cobb refers to as "the mosaic swim-
ming-pool age — just before the era when they had to have a shin-
bone of St. Sebastian for a clutch lever."

Mr. Cobb no doubt exaggerates, for when Pat had his pool in
those fat days of silent pictures, it was entirely cement, unless you
should count the cracks where the water stubbornly sought its own
level through the mud.

"But it was a pool/' he assured himself one afternoon more than
a decade later. Though he was now more than grateful for this small
chore he had assigned him by producer Berners — one week at two-
fifty — all the insolence of office could not take that memory away.

He had been called in to the studio to work upon a humble short.
It was based on the career of General Fitzhugh Lee, who fought for
the Confederacy and later for the U.S.A. against Spain — so it would
offend neither North nor South. And in the recent conference Pat
had tried to co-operate.

"I was thinking — " he suggested to Jack Berners, " — that it
might be a good thing if we could give it a Jewish touch."

"What do you mean?" demanded Jack Berners quickly.

"Well I thought — the way things are and all, it would be a sort
of good thing to show that there were a number of Jews in it too."

"In what?"

"In the Civil War." Quickly he reviewed his meager history.
"They were, weren't they?"

"Naturally," said Berners, with some impatience. "I suppose
everybody was except the Quakers."

"Well, my idea was that we could have this Fitzhugh Lee in love
with a Jewish girl. He's going to be shot at curfew so she grabs
a church bell "

Jack Berners leaned forward earnestly.

"Say, Pat, you want this job, don't you? Well, I told you the
story. You got the first script. If you thought up this tripe to please
me you're losing your grip."

456

Pat Hobby Himself 457

Was that a way to treat a man who had once owned a pool which
had been talked about by —

That was how he happened to be thinking about his long-lost
swimming pool as he entered the shorts department. He was remem-
bering a certain day over a decade ago in all its details, how he had
arrived at the studio in his car driven by a Filipino in uniform ; the
deferential bow of the guard at the gate which had admitted car and
all to the lot, his ascent to that long-lost office which had a room
for the secretary and was really a director's office . . .

His reverie was broken off by the voice of Ben Brown, head of
the shorts department, who walked him into his own chambers.

"Jack Berners just phoned me," he said. "We don't want any new
angles, Pat. We've got a good story. Fitzhugh Lee was a dashing
cavalry commander. He was a nephew of Robert E. Lee and we
want to show him at Appomattox, pretty bitter and all that. And
then show how he became reconciled— we'll have to be careful be-
cause Virginia is swarming with Lees — and how he finally accepts
a U.S. commission from President McKinley "

Pat's mind darted back again into the past. The President — that
was the magic word that had gone around that morning many years
ago. The President of the United States was going to make a visit
to the lot. Everyone had been agog about it — it seemed to mark a
new era in pictures, because a President of the United States had
never visited a studio before. The executives of the company were
all dressed up — from a window of his long-lost Beverly Hills house
Pat had seen Mr. Maranda, whose mansion was next door to him,
bustle down his walk in a cutaway coat at nine o'clock, and had
known that something was up. He thought maybe it was clergy, but
when he reached the lot he had found it was the President of the
United States himself who was coming . . .

"Clean up the stuff about Spain," Ben Brown was saying. "The
guy that wrote it was a red and he's got all the Spanish officers with
ants in their pants. Fix up that."

In the office assigned him Pat looked at the script of True to Two
Flags. The first scene showed General Fitzhugh Lee at the head of
his cavalry receiving word that Petersburg had been evacuated. In
the script Lee took the blow in pantomime, but Pat was getting
two-fifty a week — so, casually and without effort, he wrote in one of
his favorite lines:

LEE: (to his officers)

Well, what are you standing here gawking for? DO something/

6. Medium Shot. Officers pepping up, slapping each other on
back, etc.

Dissolve to:

458 Pat Hobby Himself

To what? Pat's mind dissolved once more into the glamorous past.
On that happy day in the twenties his phone had rung at about
noon. It had been Mr. Maranda.

"Pat, the President is lunching in the private dining room. Doug
Fairbanks can't come so there's a place empty and anyhow we
think there ought to be one writer there."

His memory of the luncheon was palpitant with glamor. The
Great Man had asked some questions about pictures and had told
a joke and Pat had laughed and laughed with the others — all of
them solid men together — rich, happy and successful.

Afterwards the President was to go on some sets and see some
scenes taken and still later he was going to Mr. Maranda's house to
meet some of the women stars at tea. Pat was not invited to that
party but he went home early anyhow and from his veranda saw the
cortege drive up, with Mr, Maranda beside the President in the back
seat. Ah he was proud of pictures then — of his position in them —
of the President of the happy country where he was born . . .

Returning to reality Pat looked down at the script of True to Two
Flags and wrote slowly and thoughtfully : Insert : A calendar — with
the years plainly marked and the sheets blowing off in a cold wind,
to show Fitzhugh Lee growing older and older.

His labors had made him thirsty — not for water, but he knew
better than to take anything else his first day on the job. He got
up and went out into the hall and along the corridor to the water-
cooler.

As he walked he slipped back into his reverie.

That had been a lovely California afternoon, so Mr. Maranda
had taken his exalted guest and the coterie of stars into his garden,
which adjoined Pat's garden. Pat had gone out his back door and
followed a low privet hedge keeping out of sight — and then acci-
dentally had come face to face with the Presidential party.

The President had smiled and nodded. Mr. Maranda smiled and
nodded.

"You met Mr. Hobby at lunch," Mr. Maranda said to the Pres-
ident. "He's one of our writers."

"Oh, yes," said the President. "You write the pictures."
"Yes, I do," said Pat.

The President glanced over into Pat's property.

"I suppose," he said, "that you get lots of inspiration sitting
by the side of that fine pool."

"Yes," said Pat. "Yes, I do."

... Pat filled his cup at the cooler. Down the hall there was a
group approaching — Jack Berners, Ben Brown and several other
executives and with them a girl to whom they were very attentive

Pat Hobby Himself 459

and deferential. He recognized her face — she was the girl of the
year, the It Girl, the Oomph Girl, the Glamor Girl, the girl for
whose services every studio was in violent competition.

Pat lingered over his drink. He had seen many phonies break in
and break out again, but this girl was the real thing, someone to
stir every pulse in the nation. He felt his own heart beat faster.
Finally, as the procession drew near, he put down the cup, dabbed
at his hair with his hand and took a step out into the corridor.

The girl looked at him — he looked at the girl. Then she took one
arm of Jack Berners' and one of Ben Brown's and suddenly the
party seemed to walk right through him — so that he had to take a
step back against the wall.

An instant later Jack Berners turned around and said back to
him, "Hello, Pat." And then some of the others threw half glances
around but no one else spoke, so interested were they in the girl.

In his office, Pat looked at the scene, where President McKinley
offers a United States commission to Fitzhugh Lee. Suddenly he
gritted his teeth and bore down on his pencil as he wrote :

LEE

Mr. President, you can take your commission and go straight to
hell.

Then he bent down over his desk, his shoulders shaking as he
thought of that happy day when he had had a swimming pool.

TWO OLD-TIMERS

PHIL MACEDON, once the Star of Stars, and Pat Hobby, script
writer, had collided out on Sunset near the Beverly Hills Hotel. It
was five in the morning and there was liquor in the air as they
argued and Sergeant Caspar took them around to the station house.
Pat Hobby, a man of forty-nine, showed fight, apparently because
Phil Macedon failed to acknowledge that they were old acquain-
tances.
He accidentally bumped Sergeant Caspar, who was so provoked

460 Pat Hobby Himself

that he put him in a little barred room while they waited for the
captain to arrive.

Chronologically Phil Macedon belonged between Eugene O'Brien
and Robert Taylor. He was still a handsome man in his early fifties
and he had saved enough from his great days for a hacienda in the
San Fernando Valley; there he rested as full of honors, as rollick-
some and with the same purposes in life as Man o* War.

With Pat Hobby life had dealt otherwise. After twenty-one years
in the industry, script and publicity, the accident found him driving
a 1935 car which had lately become the property of the Acme Loan
Co. And once, back in 1928, he had reached the point of having a
private swimming pool.

He glowered from his confinement, still resenting Macedon 's
failure to acknowledge that they had ever met before.

"I suppose you don't remember Colman," he said sarcastically.
"Or Connie Talmadge or Bill Corker or Allan Dwan."

Macedon lit a cigarette with the sort of timing in which the
silent screen has never been surpassed, and offered one to Sergeant
Caspar.

"Couldn't I come in tomorrow?" he asked. "I have a horse to
exercise "

"I'm sorry, Mr. Macedon," said the cop — sincerely, for the actor
was an old favorite of his. "The captain is due here any minute.
After that we won't be holding you."

"It's just a formality," said Pat, from his cell.

"Yeah, it's just a — " Sergeant Caspar glared at Pat. "It may not
be any formality for you. Did you ever hear of the sobriety test?"

Macedon flicked his cigarette out the door and lit another.

"Suppose I come back in a couple of hours," he suggested.

"No," regretted Sergeant Caspar. "And since I have to detain
you, Mr. Macedon, I want to take the opportunity to tell you what
you meant to me once. It was that picture you made, The Final
Push, it meant a lot to every man who was in the war."

"Oh, yes," said Macedon, smiling.

"I used to try to tell my wife about the war — how it was, with
the shells and the machine guns — I was in there seven months with
the 26th New England — but she never understood. She'd point her
finger at me and say 'Boom ! you're dead,' and so I'd laugh and stop
trying to make her understand."

"Hey, can I get out of here?" demanded Pat.

"You shut up!" said Caspar fiercely. "You probably wasn't in the
war."

"I was in the Motion Picture Home Guard," said Pat. "I had bad
eyes."

Pat Hobby Himself 461

"Listen to him," said Caspar disgustedly. "That's what all them
slackers say. Well, the war was something. And after my wife saw
that picture of yours I never had to explain to her. She knew. She
always spoke different about it after that — never just pointed her
finger at me and said 'Boom!' I'll never forget the part where you
was in that shell hole. That was so real it made my hands sweat."

"Thanks," said Macedon graciously. He lit another cigarette. "You
see, I was in the war myself and I knew how it was. I knew how it
felt."

"Yes, sir," said Caspar appreciatively. "Well, I'm glad of the
opportunity to tell you what you did for me. You — you explained
the war to my wife."

"What are you talking about?" demanded Pat Hobby suddenly.
"That war picture Bill Corker did in 1925?"

"There he goes again," said Caspar. "Sure — The Birth of a Nation.
Now you pipe down till the captain comes.

"Phil Macedon knew me then all right," said Pat resentfully. "I
even watched him work on it one day."

"I just don't happen to remember you, old man," said Macedon
politely. "I can't help that."

"You remember the day Bill Corker shot that shell-hole sequence,
don't you? Your first day on the picture?"

There was a moment's silence.

"When will the captain be here?" Macedon asked.

"Any minute now, Mr. Macedon."

"Well, I remember," said Pat, "because I was there when he
had that shell hole dug. He was out there on the back lot at nine
o'clock in the morning with a gang of hunkies to dig the hole and
four cameras. He called you up from a field telephone and told you
to go to the costumer and get into a soldier suit. Now you re-
member?"

"I don't load my mind with details, old man."

"You called up that they didn't have one to fit you and Corker
told you to shut up and get into one anyhow. When you got out to
the back lot you were sore as hell because your suit didn't fit."

Macedon smiled charmingly.

"You have a most remarkable memory. Are you sure you have the
right picture — and the right actor?" he asked.

"Am I!" said Pat grimly. "I can see you right now. Only you
didn't have much time to complain about the uniform because that
wasn't Corker's plan. He always thought you were the toughest ham
in Hollywood to get anything natural out of — and he had a scheme.
He was going to get the heart of the picture shot by noon — before
you even knew you were acting. He turned you around and shoved

462 Pat Hobby Himself

you down into that shell hole on your fanny, and yelled 'Camera/ "

"That's a lie," said Phil Macedon. "I got down."

"Then why did you start yelling?" demanded Pat. "I can still hear
you : 'Hey, what's the idea ! Is this some God damn gag? You get me
out of here or 111 walk out on you!*

"And all the time you were trying to claw your way up the side
of that pit, so damn mad you couldn't see. You'd almost get up
and then you'd slide back and lie there with your face working — till
finally you began to bawl and all this time Bill had four cameras on
you. After about twenty minutes you gave up and just lay there,
heaving. Bill took a hundred feet of that and then he had a couple of
prop men pull you out."

The police captain had arrived in the squad car. He stood in the
doorway against the first gray of dawn.

"What you got here, Sergeant? A drunk?"

Sergeant Caspar walked over to the cell, unlocked it and beckoned
Pat to come out. Pat blinked a moment— then his eyes fell on Phil
Macedon and he shook his finger at him.

"So you see I do know you," he said. "Bill Corker cut that piece
of film and titled it so you were supposed to be a doughboy whose
pal had just been killed. You wanted to climb out and get at the
Germans in revenge, but the shells bursting all around and the con-
cussions kept knocking you back in."

"What's it about?" demanded the captain.

"I want to prove I know this guy," said Pat. "Bill said the best
moment in the picture was when Phil was yelling, Tve already
broken my first finger nail!' Bill titled it, Ten Huns will go to hell
to shine your shoes ! ' "

"You've got here 'collision with alcohol/ " said the captain look-
ing at the blotter. "Let's take these guys down to the hospital and
give them the test."

"Look here now," said the actor, with his flashing smile, "my
name's Phil Macedon."

The captain was a political appointee and very young. He remem-
bered the name and the face, but he was not especially impressed
because Hollywood was full of has-beens.

They all got into the squad car at the door.

After the test Macedon was held at the station house until friends
could arrange bail. Pat Hobby was discharged, but his car would not
run, so Sergeant Caspar offered to drive him home.

"Where do you live?" he asked as they started off.

"I don't live anywhere tonight," said Pat. "That's why I was driv-
ing around. When a friend of mine wakes up I'll touch him for a

Pat Hobby Himself 463

couple of bucks and go to a hotel."

"Well now," said Sergeant Caspar, "I got a couple of bucks that
ain't working."

The great mansions of Beverly Hills slid by and Pat waved his
hand at them in salute.

"In the good old days," he said, "I used to be able to drop into
some of those houses day or night. And Sunday mornings "

"Is that all true you said in the station," Caspar asked, " — about
how they put him in the hole?"

"Sure, it is," said Pat. "That guy needn't have been so upstage.
He's just an old-timer like me."
1940 Previously uncollected

THREE HOURS BETWEEN PLANES

IT WAS a wild chance but Donald was in the mood, healthy and
bored, with a sense of tiresome duty done. He was now rewarding
himself. Maybe.

When the plane landed he stepped out into a midwestern summer
night and headed for the isolated pueblo airport, conventionalized
as an old red "railway depot." He did not know whether she was
alive, or living in this town, or what was her present name. With
mounting excitement he looked through the phone book for her
father who might be dead too, somewhere in these twenty years.

No. Judge Harmon Holmes — Hillside 3194.

A woman's amused voice answered his inquiry for Miss Nancy
Holmes.

"Nancy is Mrs. Walter Gifford now. Who is this?"

But Donald hung up without answering. He had found out what
he wanted to know and had only three hours. He did not remember
any Walter Gifford and there was another suspended moment while
he scanned the phone book. She might have married out of town.

No. Walter Gifford — Hillside 1191. Blood flowed back into his
fingertips.

"Hello?"

"Hello. Is Mrs. Gifford there—this is an old friend of hers."

"This is Mrs. Gifford."

He remembered, or thought he remembered, the funny magic in
the voice.

"This is Donald Plant. I haven't seen you since I was twelve years
old."

"Oh-h-h!" The note was utterly surprised, very polite, but he
could distinguish in it neither joy nor certain recognition.

" — Donald I " added the voice. This time there was something more
in it than struggling memory.

". . . when did you come back to town?" Then cordially, "Where
are you?"

"I'm out at the airport — for just a few hours."

"Well, come up and see me."

"Sure you're not just going to bed."

464

Three Hours Between Planes 463

"Heavens, no !" she exclaimed. "I was sitting here — having a high-
ball by myself. Just tell your taxi man . . ."

On his way Donald analyzed the conversation. His words "at the
airport" established that he had retained his position in the upper
bourgeoisie. Nancy's aloneness might indicate that she had matured
into an unattractive woman without friends. Her husband might be
either away or in bed. And — because she was always ten years old
in his dreams — the highball shocked him. But he adjusted himself
with a smile — she was very close to thirty.

At the end of a curved drive he saw a dark-haired little beauty
standing against the lighted door, a glass in her hand. Startled by her
final materialization, Donald got out of the cab, saying:

"Mrs. Gifford?"

She turned on the porch light and stared at him, wide-eyed and
tentative. A smile broke through the puzzled expression.

"Donald — it is you — we all change so. Oh, this is rewar /table ! "

As they walked inside, their voices jingled the words "all these
years,'' and Donald felt a sinking in his stomach. This derived in
part from a vision of their last meeting — when she rode past him
on a bicycle, cutting him dead — and in part from fear lest they have
nothing to say. It was like a college reunion — but there the failure
to find the past was disguised by the hurried boisterous occasion.
Aghast, he realized that this might be a long and empty hour. He
plunged in desperately.

"You always were a lovely person. But I'm a little shocked to find
you as beautiful as you are."

It worked. The immediate recognition of their changed state, the
bold compliment, made them interesting strangers instead of fum-
bling childhood friends.

"Have a highball?" she asked. "No? Please don't think I've be-
come a secret drinker, but this was a blue night. I expected my hus-
band but he wired he'd be two days longer. He's very nice, Donald,
and very attractive. Rather your type and coloring." She hesitated,
" — and I think he's interested in someone in New York — and I don't
know."

"After seeing you it sounds impossible," he assured her. "I was
married for six years, and there was a time I tortured myself that
way. Then one day I just put jealousy out of my life forever. After
my wife died I was very glad of that. It left a very rich memory —
nothing marred or spoiled or hard to think over."

She looked at him attentively, then sympathetically as he spoke.

"I'm very sorry," she said. And after a proper moment, "You've
changed a lot. Turn your head. I remember father saying, 'That boy
has a brain/ "

466 Three Hours Between Planes

"You probably argued against it."

"I was impressed. Up to then I thought everybody had a brain.
That's why it sticks in my mind."

"What else sticks in your mind?" he asked smiling.

Suddenly Nancy got up and walked quickly a little away.

"Ah, now," she reproached him. "That isn't fair! I suppose I was
a naughty girl."

"You were not," he said stoutly. "And I will have a drink now."

As she poured it, her face still turned from him, he continued:

"Do you think you were the only little girl who was ever
kissed?"

"Do you like the subject?" she demanded. Her momentary irrita-
tion melted and she said: "What the hell ! We did have fun. Like in
the song."

"On the sleigh ride."

"Yes — and somebody's picnic — Trudy James'. And at Frontenac
that — those summers."

It was the sleigh ride he remembered most and kissing her cool
cheeks in the straw in one corner while she laughed up at the cold
white stars. The couple next to them had their backs turned and he
kissed her little neck and her ears and never her lips.

"And the Macks' party where they played post office and I couldn't
go because I had the mumps," he said.

"I don't remember that."

"Oh, you were there. And you were kissed and I was crazy with
jealousy like I never have been since."

"Funny I don't remember. Maybe I wanted to forget."

"But why?" he asked in amusement. "We were two perfectly in-
nocent kids. Nancy, whenever I talked to my wife about the past, I
told her you were the girl I loved a/most as much as I loved her. But
I think I really loved you just as much. When we moved out of
town I carried you like a cannon ball in my insides."

"Were you that much — stirred up?"

"My God, yes ! I — " He suddenly realized that they were standing
just two feet from each other, that he was talking as if he loved her
in the present, that she was looking up at him with her lips half-
parted and a clouded look in her eyes.

"Go on," she said, "I'm ashamed to say — I like it. I didn't know
you were so upset then. I thought it was me who was upset."

"You I" he exclaimed. "Don't you remember throwing me over
at the drugstore." He laughed. "You stuck out your tongue at
me,"

"I don't remember at all. It seemed to me you did the throwing
over." Her hand fell lightly, almost consolingly on his arm. "I've

Three Hours Between Planes 467

got a photograph book upstairs I haven't looked at for years. I'll dig
it out."

Donald sat for five minutes with two thoughts — first the hopeless
impossibility of reconciling what different people remembered about
the same event — and secondly that in a frightening way Nancy
moved him as a woman as she had moved him as a child. Half an
hour had developed an emotion that he had not known since the
death of his wife — that he had never hoped to know again.

Side by side on a couch they opened the book between them.
Nancy looked at him, smiling and very happy.

"Oh, this is such fun," she said. "Such fun that you're so nice, that
you remember me so — beautifully. Let me tell you — I wish I'd
known it then ! After you'd gone I hated you."

"What a pity," he said gently.

"But not now," she reassured him, and then impulsively, "Kiss
and make up —

". . . that isn't being a good wife," she said after a minute. "I
really don't think I've kissed two men since I was married."

He was excited — but most of all confused. Had he kissed Nancy?
or a memory? or this lovely trembly stranger who looked away from
him quickly and turned a page of the book ?

"Wait!" he said. "I don't think I could see a picture for a few
seconds."

"We won't do it again. I don't feel so very calm myself."

Donald said one of those trival things that cover so much ground.

"Wouldn't it be awful if we fell in love again."

"Stop it!" She laughed, but very breathlessly. "Its all over. It
was a moment. A moment I'll have to forget."

"Don't tell your husband."

"Why not? Usually I tell him everything."

"It'll hurt him. Don't ever tell a man such things."

"All right I won't."

"Kiss me once more," he said inconsistently, but Nancy had
turned a page and was pointing eagerly at a picture.

"Here's you," she cried. "Right away I"

He looked. It was a little boy in shorts standing on a pier with a
sailboat in the background.

"I remember — " she laughed triumphantly, " — the very day it was
taken. Kitty took it and I stole it from her."

For a moment Donald failed to recognize himself in the photo—-
then, bending closer — he failed utterly to recognize himself.

"That's not me," he said.

"Oh yfc£. & re* & Frontenac — the summer we — we used to go to
the cave."

468 Three Hours Between Planes

"What cave? I was only three days in Frontenac." Again he
strained his eyes at the slightly yellowed picture. "And that isn't me.
That's Donald Bowers. We did look rather alike."

Now she was staring at him — leaning back, seeming to lift away
from him.

"But you're Donald Bowers!" she exclaimed; her voice rose a
little. "No, you're not. You're Donald Plant"

"I told you on the phone."

She was on her feet — her face faintly horrified.

" Plant 1 Bowers! I must be crazy. Or it was that drink? I was
mixed up a little when I first saw you. Look here! What have I told
you?"

He tried for a monkish calm as he turned a page of the book.

"Nothing at all," he said. Pictures that did not include him formed
and re-formed before his eyes — Frontenac — a cave — Donald Bowers
— "You threw me over!"

Nancy spoke from the other side of the room.

"You'll never tell this story," she said. "Stories have a way of get-
ting around."

"There isn't any story," he hesitated. But he thought: So she was
a bad little girl.

And now suddenly he was filled with wild raging jealousy of little
Donald Bowers — he who had banished jealousy from his life for-
ever. In the five steps he took across the room he crushed out twenty
years and the existence of Walter Gifford with his stride.

"Kiss me again, Nancy," he said, sinking to one knee beside her
chair, putting his hand upon her shoulder. But Nancy strained
away.

"You said you had to catch a plane."

"It's nothing. I can miss it. It's of no importance."

"Please go," she said in a cool voice. "And please try to imagine
how I feel."

"But you act as if you don't remember me," he cried, " — as if you
don't remember Donald Plant/'9

"I do. I remember you too . . . But it was all so long ago." Her
voice grew hard again. "The taxi number is Crestwood 8484."

On his way to the airport Donald shook his head from side
to side. He was completely himself now but he could not digest the
experience. Only as the plane roared up into the dark sky and its
passengers became a different entity from the corporate world below
did he draw a parallel from the fact of its flight. For five blinding
minutes he had lived like a madman in two worlds at once. He had

Three Hours Between Planes 469

been a boy of twelve and a man of thirty-two, indissolubly and help-
lessly commingled.

Donald had lost a good deal, too, in those hours between the planes
— but since the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of
things, that part of the experience probably didn't matter.
1941 Previously uncollected

THE LOST DECADE

ALL SORTS of people came into the offices of the news-weekly and
Orrison Brown had all sorts of relations with them. Outside of office
hours he was "one of the editors" — during work time he was simply
a curly-haired man who a year before had edited the Dartmouth
Jack-O-Lantern and was now only too glad to take the undesirable
assignments around the office, from straightening out illegible copy
to playing call boy without the title.

He had seen this visitor go into the editor's office — a pale, tall man
of forty with blond statuesque hair and a manner that was neither
shy nor timid, nor otherworldly like a monk, but something of all
three. The name on his card, Louis Trimble, evoked some vague
memory, but having nothing to start on, Orrison did not puzzle over
it — until a buzzer sounded on his desk, and previous experience
warned him that Mr. Trimble was to be his first course at lunch.

"Mr. Trimble — Mr. Brown," said the Source of all luncheon
money. "Orrison — Mr. Trimble's been away a long time. Or he feels
it's a long time — almost twelve years. Some people would consider
themselves lucky to've missed the last decade."

"That's so," said Orrison.

"I can't lunch today," continued his chief. "Take him to Voisin
or a i or anywhere he'd like. Mr. Trimble feels there 're lots of things
he hasn't seen."

Trimble demurred politely.

"Oh, I can get around."

"I know it, old boy. Nobody knew this place like you did once —
and if Brown tries to explain the horseless carriage just send him
back here to me. And you'll be back yourself by four, won't you?"

Orrison got his hat.

"You've been away ten years?" he asked while they went down in
the elevator.

"They'd begun the Empire State Building," said Trimble. "What
does that add up to?"

"About 1928. But as the chief said, you've been lucky to miss a

470

The Lost Decade 471

lot." As a feeler he added, "Probably had more interesting things to
look at."

"Can't say I have."

They reached the street and the way Trimble's face tightened at
the roar of traffic made Orrison take one more guess.

"YouVe been out of civilization?"

"In a sense." The words were spoken in such a measured way that
Orrison concluded this man wouldn't talk unless he wanted to — and
simultaneously wondered if he could have possibly spent the thirties
in a prison or an insane asylum.

"This is the famous 21," he said. "Do you think you'd rather eat
somewhere else?"

Trimble paused, looking carefully at the brownstone house.

"I can remember when the name 21 got to be famous," he said,
"about the same year as Moriarity's." Then he continued almost
apologetically, "I thought we might walk up Fifth Avenue about
five minutes and eat wherever we happened to be. Some place with
young people to look at."

Orrison gave him a quick glance and once again thought of bars
and gray walls and bars ; he wondered if his duties included introduc-
ing Mr. Trimble to complaisant girls. But Mr. Trimble didn't look
as if that was in his mind — the dominant expression was of absolute
and deep-seated curiosity and Orrison attempted to connect the name
with Admiral Byrd's hideout at the South Pole or flyers lost in
Brazilian jungles. He was, or he had been, quite a fellow — that wasi
obvious. But the only definite clue to his environment — and tcv
Orrison the clue that led nowhere — was his countryman's obedience
to the traffic lights and his predilection for walking on the side nexi
to the shops and not the street. Once he stopped and gazed into t
haberdasher's window.

"Crepe ties," he said. "I haven't seen one since I left college,"

"Where'dyougo?"

"Massachusetts Tech."

"Great place."

"I'm going to take a look at it next week. Let's eat somewhere
along here — " They were in the upper Fifties " — you choose."

There was a good restaurant with a little awning just around the
corner.

"What do you want to see most?" Orrison asked, as they sat
down.

Trimble considered.

"Well— the back of people's heads," he suggested. "Their necks-
how their heads are joined to their bodies. I'd like to hear what those
two little girls are saying to their father. Not exactly what they're

472 The Lost Decade

saying but whether the words float or submerge, how their mouths
shut when they Ve finished speaking. Just a matter of rhythm — Cole
Porter came back to the States in 1928 because he felt that there
were new rhythms around."

Orrison was sure he had his clue now, and with nice delicacy did
not pursue it by a millimeter — even suppressing a sudden desire to
say there was a fine concert in Carnegie Hall tonight.

"The weight of spoons," said Trimble, "so light. A little bowl with
a stick attached. The cast in that waiter's eye. I knew him once but
he wouldn't remember me."

But as they left the restaurant the same waiter looked at Trimble
rather puzzled as if he almost knew him. When they were outside
Orrison laughed :

"After ten years people will forget."

"Oh, I had dinner there last May — " He broke off in an abrupt
manner.

It was all kind of nutsy, Orrison decided — and changed himself
suddenly into a guide.

"From here you get a good candid focus on Rockefeller Center,"
he pointed out with spirit " — and the Chrysler Building and the
Armistead Building, the daddy of all the new ones."

"The Armistead Building," Trimble rubber-necked obediently.
"Yes— I designed it."

x Orrison shook his head cheerfully — he was used to going out with
all kinds of people. But that stuff about having been in the restau-
rant last May . . .

He paused by the brass entablature in the cornerstone of the build-
ing. "Erected 1928," it said.

Trimble nodded.

"But I was taken drunk that year — every-which-way drunk. So I
never saw it before now."

"Oh." Orrison hesitated. "Like to go in now?"

"I've been in it — lots of times. But I've never seen it. And now it
isn't what I want to see. I wouldn't ever be able to see it now. I
simply want to see how people walk and what their clothes and
shoes and hats are made of. And their eyes and hands. Would you
mind shaking hands with me?"

"Not at all, sir."

"Thanks. Thanks. That's very kind. I suppose it looks strange —
but people will think we're saying good-bye. I'm going to walk up
the avenue for awhile, so we will say good-bye. Tell your office I'll
be in at four."

Orrison looked after him when he started out, half expecting him

The Lost Decade 473

to turn into a bar. But there was nothing about him that suggested

or ever had suggested drink.

"Jesus/1 he said to himself. uDrunk for ten years/'
He felt suddenly of the texture of his own coat and then he reached

out and pressed his thumb against the granite of the building by

his side.

1939 Previously imcollected

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