McClure’s Magazine

August, 1908.

Vol. XXXI. No. 4

Copyright, 1908, by The S. S. McClure Co. All rights reserved

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Once in a generation the intimate and vital secrets of
a great nation may be made public through one
of the little circle of men to whom they are entrusted;
but rarely, if ever, till the men are dead,
and the times are entirely changed. Beginning next
month,
McClure’s Magazine
will present to the
reading world a striking exception to this rule. It will print for
the first time a frank and startling official revelation of the present
political plans and purposes of Russia—the great nation whose guarded
and secret movements have been the concern of modern European
civilization for two centuries.

General Kuropatkin—Minister of War and later Commander-in-Chief
of the Russian forces in the great and disastrous Manchurian
campaign—became a target for abuse at the close of the Russo-Japanese
War. He returned to St. Petersburg and constructed, from the official
material accessible to him, an elaborate history of the war, and a detailed
statement of the condition, purposes, and development of the
Russian Empire. Documents and dispatches endorsed “Strictly Confidential,”
matters involving the highest officials, information obviously
intended for no eyes but those of the innermost government circles,
are laid forth with the utmost abandon in this work. No sooner had
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it been completed, than it was confiscated by the government. Its
manuscript has never been allowed to pass out of the custody of the
Czar’s closest advisers.

An authentic copy of this came into the hands of
McClure’s Magazine
this spring; it is not essential and obviously would not be
wise to state just how. George Kennan, the well-known student of
Russian affairs, now has it in his possession and is engaged in translating
and arranging material taken from it for magazine publication.
A series of five or six articles, constructed from Kuropatkin’s 600,000
words, will be issued in
McClure’s,
beginning next month. These
will contain astonishing revelations concerning matters of great
international importance, and accusations that are audacious to
the point of recklessness.

LETTERS TO THE CZAR

Remarkable among these are the letters to the Czar. Kuropatkin’s
correspondence with him is given in detail, documents which naturally
would not appear within fifty or a hundred years from the time
when they were written. And upon the letters and reports of the
General appear the comments and marginal notes of the Emperor.
The war was forced against the will of the sovereign and the advice
of the War Department. It was ended, Kuropatkin shows, when
Russia was just beginning to discipline and dispose her great forces,
because of the lack of courage and firmness in the Czar.

Japan certainly would have been crushed, says Kuropatkin, if
war had continued. At the time of the Treaty at Portsmouth, the
military struggle, from Russia’s standpoint, had only begun. She
was then receiving ammunition and supplies properly for the first time;
her men were becoming disciplined soldiers; and the railroad, whose
service had increased from three to fourteen military trains a day, had
now, at last, brought the Russian forces into the distant field. For
the first time, just when treaty negotiations were begun, Russia had
more soldiers in her army than Japan. There were a million men,
well equipped and abundantly supplied, under General Linevitch, who
succeeded General Kuropatkin as Commander-in-Chief; and he was
about to take the offensive when peace was declared.

Beyond the individual conflict General Kuropatkin shows the
Russian nation, a huge, unformed giant, groping along its great
borders in every direction to find the sea.

“Can an Empire,” he asks, “with such a tremendous population,
be satisfied with its existing frontiers, cut off from free access to the
sea on all sides?”

RUSSIA’S SECRET NATIONAL PROGRAM

There are in existence in the secret archives of the government,
Kuropatkin’s work discloses, documents containing the definite program
of Russia, fixed by headquarters years ago, for its future growth
and aggrandizement. Results of campaigns and diplomacy are checked
up according to this great program, and decade after decade Russia
is working secretly and quietly to carry it out. The Japanese War
constituted a great mistake in the development of this national plan.

During the twentieth century, says Kuropatkin, Russia will lose
no fewer than two million men in war, and will place in the field not
fewer than five million. No matter how peaceful and purely defensive
her attitude may be, she will be forced into war along her
endless borders by the conflict with other national interests and the
age-long unsatisfied necessity of her population to reach the sea.

Russia will furnish in this century the advance guard of an inevitable
conflict between the white and yellow races. For within
a hundred years there must be a great struggle in Asia between the
Christian and non-Christian nations. To prepare for this, an understanding
between Russia and England is essential for humanity.
Kuropatkin deals with this necessity at length; and the future relations
of Russia with Japan and China are treated with an impressive
grasp.

His exposition of the sensitive and dangerous situation on the
Empire’s western border contains matters of consequence to the
whole world. The relations he discloses, between Russia, on the
one hand, and Austria and Germany on the other, are important in
the extreme. Within a fortnight these two latter countries could
throw two million men across the Russian frontier, and a war would
result much more colossal than that just finished with Japan.

KUROPATKIN’S FORTY YEARS OF SERVICE

General Kuropatkin has had an education and a career which
eminently qualify him as a judge and critic of the Russian nation.
For forty years, as an active member of its military establishment, he
has watched its development, from the viewpoint of important posts
in St. Petersburg, Turkey, Central Asia, and the far East.

Kuropatkin was born in 1848 and was educated in the Palovski
Military School and the Nikolaiefski Academy of the general staff in
St. Petersburg. From there he went at once into the army, and, at
the early age of twenty, took part in the march of the Russian expeditionary
force to the central Asian city of Samarkand. He won
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distinction in the long and difficult march of General Skobeleff’s
army to Khokand. In 1875 he acted as Russia’s diplomatic agent
in Chitral, and a year or two later he headed an embassy to Kashgar
and concluded a treaty with Yakub Bek.

When the Russo-Turkish War broke out in 1877, he became
General Skobeleff’s chief of staff and took part in the battle of Loftcha
and in many of the attacks on Plevna. While forcing the passage of
the Balkans with Skobeleff’s army, on the 25th of December, 1877
(O.S.), he was so severely wounded that he had to leave the theater
of war and return to St. Petersburg. There, as soon as he recovered,
he was put in charge of the Asiatic Department of the Russian General
Staff, and, at the same time, was made adjunct-professor of
military statistics in the Nikolaiefski Military Academy. In 1879 the
rank of General was conferred upon him and he was appointed to
command the Turkestan rifle brigade in Central Asia. In 1880 he led
a Russian expeditionary force to Kuldja, and when the trouble with
the Chinese there had been adjusted, he was ordered to organize and
equip a special force in the Amu Daria district and march to the assistance
of General Skobeleff in the Akhal-Tekhinski oasis. After
conducting this force across seven hundred versts of nearly waterless
desert, he joined General Skobeleff in front of the Turkoman
fortress of Geok Tepe, and in the assault upon that famous stronghold,
a few weeks later, he led the principal storming column. After the
Turkomen had been subdued, he returned to European Russia, and
during the next eight years served on the General Staff in St. Petersburg,
where he was entrusted with important strategic work. In
1890 he was made Lieutenant-General and was sent to govern the
trans-Caspian region and to command the troops there stationed.

He occupied this position six or eight years, and then, shortly
after his return to St. Petersburg, was appointed Minister of War. In
1902, while still holding the war portfolio, he was promoted to Adjutant-General;
in 1903 he visited Japan and made the acquaintance
of its political and military leaders; and in 1904, when hostilities began
in the Far East, he took command of the Russian armies in Manchuria
under the general direction of Viceroy Alexeieff. Besides, he has
written and published three important books.

No man perhaps, is better equipped, by education and experience,
to explain Russia’s plans and movements in Asia; to tell the
true story of the Japanese war. And probably never, at least in this
generation, has an international matter of this magnitude been treated
with such frankness by a person so thoroughly and eminently qualified
to discuss it.

In the autumn of 1867 my family went to
Wiesbaden, where my wife was to spend
some time on account of her health, and I
joined them there about Christmas time
for a few weeks. Great changes had taken
place in Germany since that dark December
night in 1861 when I rushed through the country
from the Belgian frontier to Hamburg on my
way from Spain to America. The period of
stupid reaction after the collapse of the revolutionary
movements of 1848 was over. King
Frederick William IV. of Prussia, who had been
so deeply convinced and arduous an upholder
of the divine right of kings, had died a helpless
lunatic. King William I., afterwards Emperor
William I., his brother and successor, also
a believer in that divine right, but not to the
extent of believing as well in the divine inspiration
of kings—in other words, a man of good
sense and capable of recognizing the superior
ability of others—had found in Bismarck a
minister of commanding genius. The sweeping
victory of Prussia over Austria in 1866 had resulted
in the establishment of the North German
Confederacy under Prussian hegemony,
which was considered a stepping-stone to the
unification of all Germany as a constitutional
empire. Several of the revolutionists of 1848
now sat in the Reichstag of the North German
Confederacy, and one of the ablest of them,
Lothar Bucher, was Bismarck’s confidential
counsellor. The nation was elated with hope,
and there was a liberal wind blowing even in the
sphere of the government.

I did not doubt that under these circumstances
I might venture into Germany without
danger of being seriously molested; yet, as my
personal case was technically not covered by
any of the several amnesties which had been
proclaimed in Prussia from time to time, I
thought that some subordinate officer, either construing
his duty with the strictness of a thorough
Prussian, or wishing to distinguish himself
by a conspicuous display of official watchfulness,
might give me annoyance. I did not, indeed,
entertain the slightest apprehension as to my
safety, but I might have become involved in
sensational proceedings, which would have been
extremely distasteful to me, as well as unwelcome
to the government. I therefore wrote to
Mr. George Bancroft, the American Minister at
Berlin, requesting him if possible to inform
himself privately whether the Prussian government
had any objection to my visiting Germany
for a few weeks, and to let me have his answer
at Bremerhaven upon the arrival there of the
steamer on which I had taken passage. My
intention was, in case the answer were unfavorable,
to sail at once from Bremen to England
and to meet my family there. Mr. Bancroft
very kindly complied with my request, and assured
me in his letter which I found at Bremerhaven
that the Prussian government not only
had no objection to my visiting Germany, but
that I should be welcome.

After having spent Christmas with my family
in Wiesbaden, I went to Berlin. I wrote a note
to Lothar Bucher, whom I had last seen sixteen
368
years before as a fellow refugee in London, and
whom I wished very much to meet again.
Bucher answered promptly that he would be
glad indeed to see me again, and asked if I
would not like to make the acquaintance of “the
Minister” (Bismarck), who had expressed a
wish to have a talk with me. I replied, of
course, that I should be happy, etc., whereupon
I received within an hour an invitation from
Count Bismarck himself (he was then only a
count) to visit him at eight o’clock that same
evening at the Chancellor’s palace on the Wilhelmstrasse.
Promptly at the appointed hour
I was announced to him, and he received me at
the door of a room of moderate size, the table
and some of the furniture of which were covered
with books and papers,—evidently his working
cabinet. There I beheld the great man whose
name was filling the world—tall, erect, and
broad-shouldered, and on those Atlas shoulders
that massive head which everybody knows from
pictures—the whole figure making the impression
of something colossal—then at the age of
fifty-three, in the fulness of physical and mental
vigor.

He was dressed in a General’s undress uniform,
unbuttoned. His features, which evidently
could look very stern when he wished,
were lighted up with a friendly smile. He
stretched out his hand and gave me a vigorous
grasp. “Glad you have come,” he said, in a
voice which appeared rather high-keyed, issuing
from so huge a form, but of pleasing
timbre.

“I think I must have seen you before,” was
his first remark, while we were still standing up
facing one another. “It was some time in the
early fifties on a railway train from Frankfort
to Berlin. There was a young man sitting opposite
me who, from some picture of you which
I had seen in a pictorial paper, I thought might
be you.”

I replied that this could not be, since at that
period I was not in Germany. “Besides,” I
added—a little impudently perhaps—“would
you not have had me arrested as a malefactor?”

“Oh,” he exclaimed, with a good, natural
laugh, “you mistake me. I would not have
done such a thing. You mean on account of
that Kinkel affair? Oh, no! I rather liked
that. And if it were not that it would be highly
improper for His Majesty’s minister and the
Chancellor of the North German Confederacy,
I should like to go with you to Spandau and
have you tell me the whole story on the spot.
Now let us sit down.”

He pointed out to me an easy-chair close to
his own and then uncorked a bottle which stood,
with two glasses, on a tray at his elbow. “You
are a Rhinelander,” he said, “and I know you
will relish this.” We touched glasses, and I
found the wine indeed very excellent.

“You smoke, of course,” he continued, “and
here are some good Havanas. I used to be very
fond of them, but I have a sort of superstitious
belief that every person is permitted to smoke
only a certain number of cigars in his life, and
no more. I am afraid I have exhausted my
allowance, and now I take to the pipe.” With
a lighted strip of paper, called in German “Fidibus,”
he put the tobacco in the porcelain bowl
of his long German student pipe in full blast,
and presently he blew forth huge clouds of
smoke.

This done, he comfortably leaned back in his
chair and said: “Now tell me, as an American
Republican and a Forty-eighter of the revolutionary
kind, how the present condition of Germany
strikes you. I would not ask you that
question,” he added, “if you were a privy
counsellor (a Geheimrath), for I know what he
would answer. But you will tell me what you
really think.”

Bismarck’s Sarcastic Humor

I replied that I had been in the country only
a few weeks and had received only superficial
impressions, but that I had become sensible of a
general atmosphere of newly inspired national
ambition and a confident hope for the development
of more liberal political institutions. I
had found only a few old fogies in Nassau and a
banker in Frankfort who seemed to be in a disappointed
and depressed state of mind. Bismarck
laughed heartily. The disgruntled Nassauers,
he said, had probably been some sort of
purveyors to the late ducal court, and he would
wager that the Frankfort banker was either a
member of one of the old patrician families,
who thought they were the highest nobility in
all the land, or a money-maker complaining
that Frankfort was no longer, as it had been,
the financial center of southern Germany.
Here Bismarck gave full reign to his sarcastic
humor. He had spent years in Frankfort as
the representative of the defunct “Bundestag,”
and had no end of funny anecdotes about the
aristocratic pretensions of the patrician burghers
of that ancient free city, and about their lofty
wrath at the incorporation of that commonwealth
in the Prussian monarchy.

Forcing the War with Austria

Then he began to tell me about the great difficulties
he had been obliged to overcome in bringing
about the decisive struggle with Austria.
One of the most serious of these difficulties, as
369
he said, consisted in the scrupulous hesitancy of
old King William to consent to anything that
seemed to be in any sense unconstitutional or
not in harmony with the strictest notion of
good faith. In our conversation Bismarck constantly
called the king “der alte Herr”—“the
old gentleman,” or, as it might also have been
translated, “the old master.” One moment he
would speak of the old gentleman with something
like sentimental tenderness, and then
again in a tone of familiar freedom which
smacked of anything but reverential respect.
He told me anecdotes about him which made
me stare, for at the moment I could not help
remembering that I was listening to the prime
minister of the crown, to whom I was an entire
stranger and who knew nothing of my discretion
or sense of responsibility.

As if we had been confidential chums all our
lives, he gave me, with apparently the completest
abandon and exuberant vivacity, inside
views of the famous “conflict” period between
the crown and the Prussian parliament, when,
seeing the war with Austria inevitably coming,
he had, without legislative authorization, spent
millions upon millions of the public funds upon
370
the army in preparation for the great crisis; how
the liberal majority of the chambers, and an indignant
public opinion which did not recognize
the great object of national unification in view,
had fiercely risen up against that arbitrary stretch
of power; how the king himself had recoiled from
such a breach of the constitution; how the king
had apprehended a new revolution which might
cost each of them his head—which would possibly
have come about if they had failed in the
Austrian war; how then he had “desperately used
his spurs to make the noble old horse clear the
ditch and take the risk”; and how, the victory
having been won, on their return from the war
they were received by the people with the most
jubilant acclamations instead of having their
heads cut off, which had pleased the old gentleman
immensely and taught him a lesson as to
his reckless prime minister.

It was not the cautious and conservative spirit
of the king alone that he had occasionally to
overcome. Still more was he clogged and not
seldom exasperated by what he called the
stupid old bureaucracy, which had to be got out
of its accustomed ruts whenever anything new
and bold was to be done. He fairly bubbled
over with humorous anecdotes, evidently relishing,
himself, his droll descriptions of the antiquated
“Geheimrath” (privy counsellor), as
he stared with his bleared eyes wide open,
whenever anything unusual was proposed, seeing
nothing but insuperable difficulties before
him and then exhausting his whole ingenuity in
finding the best sort of red tape with which to
strangle the project. His patience tried to the
utmost, he, the minister would then go to the
king and tell him that such and such a rusty
official could no longer be got along with and
must necessarily give place to a more efficient
person; whereupon the “old gentleman,” melting
with pity, would say, “Oh, he has so long
been a faithful servant of the State, would it not
be cruel to cast him aside like a squeezed-out
orange?—no, I cannot do it.” “And there,”
said Bismarck, “there we are.”

I ventured to suggest that an offer to resign
on his part, if he could not have his way, might
make the king less tender of his inefficient
friends in high places. “Oh,” said Bismarck
with a laugh, “I have tried that so often, too
often, perhaps, to make it impressive! What
do you think happens when I offer my resignation?
My old gentleman begins to sob and cry—he
actually sheds tears, and says, ‘Now you
want to leave me too?’ Now when I see him
shed tears, what in the world can I do then?”
So he went on for a while, from one funny anecdote
to another and from one satirical description
to another.

Bismarck’s Test of Von Moltke

Bismarck then came back to the Austrian war
and told me much about the diplomatic fencing
which led up to it. With evident gusto he related
story after story, showing how his diplomatic
adversaries at that critical period had
been like puppets in his hands, and how he had
managed the German princes as they grouped
themselves on one side or the other. Then he
came to speak of the battle of Königgrätz, and
especially of that “anxious moment” in it before
the arrival of the Crown Prince in the rear
of the Austrians, when some Prussian attacks
had failed and there were signs of disorder
among the repulsed troops.

“It was an anxious moment,” said Bismarck,
“a moment on the decision of which the fate of
empire depended. What would have become
of us if we had lost that battle? Squadrons of
cavalry, all mixed up, hussars, dragoons,
uhlans, were streaming by the spot where the
king, Moltke, and myself stood, and although
we had calculated that the Crown Prince might
long have appeared behind the Austrian rear,
no sign of the Crown Prince! Things began to
look ominous. I confess I felt not a little nervous.
I looked at Moltke, who sat quietly on his
horse and did not seem to be disturbed by what
was going on around us. I thought I would
test whether he was really as calm as he appeared.
I rode up to him and asked him
whether I might offer him a cigar, since I noticed
he was not smoking. He replied that he
would be glad if I had one to spare. I presented
to him my open case in which there were
only two cigars, one a very good Havana, and
the other of rather poor quality. Moltke looked
at them and even handled them with great attention,
in order to ascertain their relative value,
and then with slow deliberation chose the
Havana. ‘Very good,’ he said composedly.
This reassured me very much. I thought, If
Moltke can bestow so much time and attention
upon the choice between two cigars, things
cannot be very bad. Indeed, a few minutes
later we heard the Crown Prince’s guns, we
observed unsteady and confused movements
on the Austrian positions, and the battle was
won.”

I said that we in America who had followed
the course of events with intense interest were
rather surprised, at the time, that the conclusion
of peace followed the battle of Königgrätz
so quickly and that Prussia did not take greater
advantage of her victory. Bismarck replied
that the speedy conclusion of peace had been a
great surprise to many people, but that he
thought it was the best thing he had ever done,
371
and that he had accomplished it against the
desire of the king and of the military party, who
were greatly elated by that splendid triumph of
the Prussian arms and thought that so great
and so successful an effort should have a greater
reward. Sound statesmanship required that
the Austrian Empire, the existence of which
was necessary for Europe, should not be reduced
to a mere wreck; that it should be made a
friend and, as a friend, not too powerless; that
what Prussia had gone to war for was the leadership
of Germany, and that this leadership in
Germany would not have been fortified, but
rather weakened, by the acquisition from Austria
of populations which would not have fitted
into the Prussian scheme.

Besides, the Chancellor thought that, the success
of the Prussians having been so decisive, it
was wise to avoid further sacrifices and risks.
The cholera had made its appearance among the
troops, and so long as the war lasted there would
have been danger of French intervention. He
had successfully fought off that French intervention,
he said, by all sorts of diplomatic manœuvres,
some of which he narrated to me in
detail. But Louis Napoleon had become very
restless at the growth of Prussian power and
prestige, and he would, probably, not have
hesitated to put in his hand, had not the
French army been so weakened by his foolish
Mexican adventure. But now, when the main
Prussian army was marching farther and
farther away from the Rhine and had suffered
serious losses, and was threatened by malignant
disease, he might have felt encouraged by these
circumstances to do what he would have liked
to do all the time.

“That would have created a new situation,”
said Bismarck. “But to meet that situation, I
should have had a shot in my locker which, perhaps,
will surprise you when I mention it.”

I was indeed curious. “What would have
been the effect,” said Bismarck, “if under those
circumstances I had appealed to the national
feeling of the whole people by proclaiming the
constitution of the German Empire made at
Frankfort in 1848 and 1849?”

“I think it would have electrified the whole
country and created a German nation,” I replied.
“But would you really have adopted
that great orphan left by the revolution of
1848?”

“Why not?” said the Chancellor. “True,
that constitution contained some features very
objectionable to me. But, after all, it was not so
very far from what I am aiming at now. But
whether the old gentleman would have adopted
it is doubtful. Still, with Napoleon at the
gates, he might have taken that jump too.
But,” he added, “we shall have that war with
France anyhow.”

“War with France in Two Years”

I expressed my surprise at this prediction,—a
prediction all the more surprising to me when I
again recalled that the great statesman, carrying
on his shoulders such tremendous responsibilities,
was talking to an entire stranger,—and
his tone grew quite serious, grave, almost solemn,
as he said: “Do not believe that I love
war. I have seen enough of war to abhor it
profoundly. The terrible scenes I have witnessed
will never cease to haunt my mind. I
shall never consent to a war that is avoidable,
much less seek it. But this war with France
will surely come. It will be forced upon us by
the French Emperor. I see that clearly.”

Then he went on to explain how the situation
of an “adventurer on a throne,” such as Louis
Napoleon, was different from that of a legitimate
sovereign, like the King of Prussia. “I
know,” said he with a smile, “you do not believe
in such a thing as the divine right of kings.
But many people do, especially in Prussia—perhaps
not as many as did before 1848, but
even now more than you think. People are attracted
to the dynasty by traditional loyalty.
A King of Prussia may make mistakes or suffer
misfortunes, or even humiliations, but that traditional
loyalty will not give way. But the adventurer
on the throne has no such traditional
sentiment behind him. His security depends
upon personal prestige, and that prestige upon
sensational effects which must follow one another
in rather rapid succession to remain fresh
and satisfactory to the ambition, or the pride,
or, if you will, the vanity of the people—especially
to such a people as the French.

“Now, Louis Napoleon has lost much of his
prestige by two things—the Mexican adventure,
which was an astounding blunder, a fantastic
folly on his part; and then by permitting
Prussia to become so great without obtaining
some sort of ‘compensation’ in the way of an
acquisition of territory that might have been
made to appear to the French people as a brilliant
achievement of his diplomacy. It was
well known that he wanted such a compensation,
and tried for it, and was manœuvered out of it
by me without his knowledge of what was happening
to him. He is well aware that thus he
has lost much of his prestige, more than he can
afford, and that such a loss, unless soon repaired,
may become dangerous to his tenure as
emperor. He will, therefore, as soon as he
thinks that his army is in good fighting condition,
again make an effort to recover that prestige
which is so vital to him, by using some pretext
372
for picking a quarrel with us. I do not think
he is personally eager for that war, I think he
would rather avoid it, but the precariousness of
his situation will drive him to it. My calculation
is that the crisis will come in about two
years. We have to be ready, of course, and we
are. We shall win, and the result will be just
the contrary of what Napoleon aims at—the
total unification of Germany outside of Austria,
and probably Napoleon’s downfall.”

This was said in January, 1868. The war between
France and Prussia and her allies broke
out in July, 1870, and the foundation of the
German Empire and the downfall of Napoleon
373
were the results. No prediction was ever more
shrewdly made and more accurately and amply
fulfilled.

I have introduced here Bismarck as speaking
in the first person. I did this to present the
substance of what he said to me in a succinct
form. But this does not pretend to portray the
manner in which he said it—the bubbling
vivacity of his talk, now and then interspersed
with French or English phrases; the lightning
flashes of his wit scintillating around the subjects
of his remarks and sometimes illuminating,
as with a search-light, a public character,
or an event, or a situation; his laugh, now contageously
374
genial, and then grimly sarcastic; the
rapid transitions from jovial, sportive humor to
touching pathos; the evident pleasure taken by
the narrator in his tale; the dashing, rattling
rapidity with which that tale would at times
rush on; and behind all this that tremendous
personality—the picturesque embodiment
of a power greater than any king’s—a
veritable Atlas carrying upon his shoulders
the destinies of a great nation. There was
a strange fascination in the presence of the
giant who appeared so peculiarly grand and
yet so human.

While he was still speaking with unabated
animation I looked at the clock opposite me and
was astounded when I found that midnight
was long behind us. I rose in alarm and begged
the Chancellor’s pardon for having intruded so
long upon his time. “Oh,” said the Chancellor,
“I am used to late hours, and we have not
talked yet about America. However, you
have a right to be tired. But you must come
again. You must dine with me. Can you do
so to-morrow? I have invited a commission
on the Penal Code—mostly dull old jurists, I
suppose—but I may find some one among
them fit to be your neighbor at the table and to
entertain you.”

I gladly accepted the invitation and found myself
the next evening in a large company of serious
and learned-looking gentlemen, each one of
whom was adorned with one or more decorations.
I was the only person in the room who
had none, and several of the guests seemed to
eye me with some curiosity, when Bismarck in a
loud voice presented me to the Countess as
“General Carl Schurz from the United States of
America.” Some of the gentlemen looked
somewhat surprised, but I at once became a
person of interest, and many introductions followed.
At the table I had a judge from Cologne
for my neighbor, who had enough of the
Rhenish temperament to be cheerful company.
The dinner was a very rapid affair—lasting
hardly three quarters of an hour, certainly not
more.

Before the smokers could have got half
through with their cigars, the Minister of Justice,
who seemed to act as mentor and guide to
the gentlemen of the Penal Code Commission,
took leave of the host, which was accepted by
the whole company as a signal to depart. I followed
376
their example, but the Chancellor said:
“Wait a moment. Why should you stand in
that crowd struggling for your overcoat? Let
us sit down and have a glass of Apollinaris.”
We sat down by a small round table, a bottle of
Apollinaris water was brought, and he began at
once to ply me with questions about America.

He was greatly interested in the struggle going
on between President Johnson and the Republican
majority in Congress, which was then
approaching its final crisis. He said that he
looked upon that struggle as a test of the
strength of the conservative element in our
political fabric. Would the impeachment of
the President, and, if he were found guilty, his
deposition from office, lead to any further conflicts
dangerous to the public peace and order?
I replied that I was convinced it would not;
the executive power would simply pass from the
hands of one man to the hands of another,
according to the constitution and laws of the
country, without any resistance on the part of
anybody; and on the other hand, if President
Johnson were acquitted, there would be general
submission to the verdict as a matter of course,
although popular excitement stirred up by the
matter would run very high throughout the
country.

The Chancellor was too polite to tell me
point-blank that he had grave doubts as to all
this, but he would at least not let me believe
that he thought as I did. He smilingly asked
me whether I was still as firmly convinced a
republican as I had been before I went to America
and studied republicanism from the inside;
and when I assured him that I was, and that,
377
although I had in personal experience found the
republic not as lovely as my youthful enthusiasm
had pictured it to my imagination, but
much more practical in its general beneficence
to the great masses of the people, and much
more conservative in its tendencies than I had
imagined, he said that he supposed our impressions
or views with regard to such things were
largely owing to temperament, or education,
or traditional ways of thinking.

“I am not a democrat,” he went on, “and
cannot be. I was born an aristocrat and
brought up an aristocrat. To tell you the
truth, there was something in me that made me
instinctively sympathize with the slaveholders,
as the aristocratic party, in your Civil War.
But,” he added with earnest emphasis, “this
vague sympathy did not in the least affect my
views as to the policy to be followed by our government
with regard to the United States.
Prussia, notwithstanding her monarchical and
aristocratic sympathies, is, and will steadily be
by tradition, as well as by thoroughly understood
interest, the firm friend of your republic.
You may always count upon that.”

He asked me a great many questions concerning
the political and social conditions in the
United States. Again and again he wondered
how society could be kept in tolerable order
where the powers of the government were
so narrowly restricted and where there was
so little reverence for the constituted or “ordained”
authorities. With a hearty laugh, in
which there seemed to be a suggestion of assent,
he received my remark that the American
people would hardly have become the self-reliant,
energetic, progressive people they were, had
there been a privy-counsellor or a police captain
standing at every mud-puddle in America to
keep people from stepping into it. And he
seemed to be much struck when I brought out
the apparent paradox that in a democracy with
little government things might go badly in detail
but well on the whole, while in a monarchy
with much and omni-present government things
might go very pleasingly in detail but poorly on
the whole. He saw that with such views I was
an incurable democrat; but would not, he
asked, the real test of our democratic institutions
come when, after the disappearance of the
exceptional opportunities springing from our
wonderful natural resources which were in a
certain sense common property, our political
struggles became, as they surely would become,
struggles between the poor and the rich, between
the few who have, and the many who
want? Here we entered upon a wide field of
conjecture.

The conversation then turned to international
relations, and especially public opinion in America
concerning Germany. Did the Americans
sympathize with German endeavors towards
national unity?—I thought that so far as any
feeling with regard to German unity existed in
America, it was sympathetic; among the German-Americans
it was warmly so.—Did Louis
Napoleon, the emperor of the French, enjoy any
popularity in America?—He did not enjoy the
respect of the people at large and was rather unpopular
except with a comparatively small
number of snobs who would feel themselves
exalted by an introduction at his court.—There
would, then, in case of a war between Germany
and France, be no likelihood of American sympathy
running in favor of Louis Napoleon?—There
would not, unless Germany forced war on
France for decidedly unjust cause.

Throughout our conversation Bismarck repeatedly
expressed his pleasure at the friendly
relations existing between him and the German
Liberals, some of whom had been prominent in
the revolutionary troubles of 1848. He mentioned
several of my old friends, Bucher, Kapp,
and others, who, having returned to Germany,
felt themselves quite at home under the new
conditions and had found their way open to
public positions and activities of distinction and
influence, in harmony with their principles. As
he repeated this, or something like it, in a manner
apt to command my attention, I might have
taken it as a suggestion inviting me to do likewise.
But I thought it best not to say anything
in response.

Our conversation had throughout been so
animated that time had slipped by us unaware,
and it was again long past midnight when I left.
My old friends of 1848 whom I met in Berlin
were of course very curious to know what the
great man of the time might have had to say to
me, and I thought I could without being indiscreet
communicate to them how highly pleased
he had expressed himself with the harmonious
coöperation between him and them for common
ends. Some of them thought that Bismarck’s
conversion to liberal principles was really sincere.
Others were less sanguine, believing as
they did that he was indeed sincere and earnest
in his endeavor to create a united German
empire under Prussian leadership; that he
would carry on a gay flirtation with the Liberals
so long as he thought that he could thus best
further his object, but that his true autocratic
nature would assert itself again and he
would throw his temporarily assumed Liberalism
overboard as soon as he felt that he did
not need its support any longer, and especially
when he found it to stand in the way of his
will.

I

“Perhaps I’m too old to be wearing
such things, but I love bright colors,
and there’s not a bit of use denying
it.”

Mary Ann gathered one end of
the fancy tartan into a handful, and looked approvingly
at its soft, heavy folds.

“Particularly at this time of year. It’s
warming to the blood on a cold autumn day
just to see a dress like this on the street. I
always did like a good rich tartan. It becomes
me, too. Look, Selina’n’Jane.”

She held the dress material against one cheek,
and her sisters looked—but somehow failed to
see what a pleasing picture she made. She had
just come in from shopping and had not yet
removed her hat, and its trimming of foliage
repeated the colors of her face—autumnal
tints of red and bronze and healthy yellow.
She, the eldest of the family and the only unmarried
one, was forty-five, but she was rosy
and fat and matronly, while her sisters were
pinched and anemic. They were old maids by
nature, she by chance.

“It becomes you well enough, but under the
circumstances,” Jane said, exchanging glances
with Selina, “it seems a pity to buy all these
things.”

Mary Ann opened her eyes wide.

“Circumstances? What circumstances? It’s
no more than I buy every fall,” protested the
puzzled Mary Ann. “The flowered piece is for
a morning wrapper, the tartan’s for a street
suit, and the blue-gray’s a company dress.”

Jane and Selina again exchanged glances, and
Selina nodded.

“You never did seem to look ahead, Mary
Ann,” said Jane, thus encouraged. “I don’t
believe you realize that an attack of bronchitis
is serious at Ma’s age. I wouldn’t have got all
my clothes colored. It’s never any harm to
have one black dress.”

Mary Ann gasped.

“Good gracious!” was all she said.

“Well, Mary Ann,” said Selina, coming to
Jane’s rescue, “there’s not a particle of use
shutting your eyes to plain facts. Ma’s in a
serious condition, and if anything happens to
her, what’ll you do with all that stuff? You
may dye the blue, but that tartan won’t take a
good black.”

“Why,” Mary Ann said, recovering speech,
“Ma has bronchitis at the beginning of cold
weather every year. She’ll be downstairs in a
week or two, the same as she always is.”

“I hope so, Mary Ann. I hope, when next
she comes down, it won’t be feet first. But
we’re told to prepare for the worst while we
hope for the best,” said Jane solemnly, imagining
that she was quoting scripture. “You and
Ma act as if there was nothing to prepare for.
To see you, sitting by her sick-bed, reading
trashy love-stories out of the magazines, and
both of you as much interested!—it gives me
a creepy feeling.”

“When my poor husband lay in his last illness,”
sighed Selina, “he was only too willing
to be flattered into the belief that he was going
to get well, but I wouldn’t let him deceive himself,
and it’s a comfort to me now I didn’t. I
had everything ready but my crape when he
died. I didn’t have to depend on the neighbors
for a dress for the funeral, as I’ve known some
do.”

“Many a time I’ve lent, but never borrowed,”
Jane boasted.

“And of course, never laying off widow’s
weeds, I’m ready for whatever comes.” Selina
stroked her tarletan cuffs complacently, yet
modestly withal, as if not wishing to make
others feel too keenly the difference in their
position.

Mary Ann gathered the dress goods together
and threw them in a heap on the sofa. “There,
I’m sorry I showed them to you,” she cried;
“you’ve got me almost turned against them.
380
I declare, I’d be melancholy in two minutes
more. Now you listen to me, Selina’n’Jane.
There’s no need to worry about Ma’s preparations
for the next world; she’s not thinking of
leaving this world yet, and there’s no reason
why she should. The day you two go away,
she’ll be standing at the gate to say good-by to
you, just the same as she always is. You see if
she’s not, Selina’n’Jane.”

She left the room with something as like a
flounce as her figure would permit. Stealing
softly into the half-darkened bedroom at the
head of the stairs, she stood looking down at
the sleeping woman in the bed. The indignant
moisture in her eyes turned to a mist of tenderness
that blotted out the sight until a few drops
formed and fell.

She was too unsuspicious to observe an unsleeplike
flickering of the eyelids. She turned
to tiptoe out of the room again. There was a
quick peep, a look of relief, a husky whisper,
“Is that you, Mary Ann?”

“Well now, I never did see anything like the
regular way you wake up at medicine time,”
Mary Ann said, opening the shutters and consulting
her watch. “Anybody’d think you had
an alarm inside of you to go off at the right
time.”

She administered the dose and then went on
with a cheerful monologue. She had got into
this habit in the sick-room, because her mother
hated silence and had to save her own voice.

“What kept me so long was that everybody
I met wanted to stop me and ask how you were.
Everybody seemed pleased to hear you were
getting along so nicely. Mrs. Dowling said Dr.
Corbett told her you were the most satisfactory
patient he had, because you always did everything
he told you and always got well.”

The sick woman smiled up at her. She had
a smile that came and went easily, and Mary
Ann had become skilful in the art of conducting
a conversation in such a way that it served as
well as words.

“And Caroline Sibbet said to tell you she
was counting on going with us to the reception
to the minister, and she didn’t believe she’d go
at all unless you were well by then.”

It was a wistful smile now.

“So I told her she needn’t be afraid, you’d
be there.”

A smile of appeal, as if to ask, “Do you really
think so?”

Mary Ann gave her a puzzled glance. Something
was wrong.

“Of course you’ll be well by then, dearie.
You heard what the doctor said to-day—that
you might go back to having your cup of tea
again to-morrow. That’s always the first sign
you’re getting well, then you get leave to sit up.
A week sitting up in your room, a week going
downstairs——” Mary Ann began to check off
the weeks on her fingers, but her mother interrupted.

“Was that Jane the doctor was talking to so
long in the hall to-day?”

“Let me see. No, that was Selina.”

“What was he saying to her?”

“He was saying every blessed thing that he’s
said to me since you took sick, and that I’ve
repeated over again to her. But you know
how it is with those two, Ma. I believe they
think there’s some kind of magic in the marriage
ceremony that gives a woman sense—they
don’t give me credit for a speck. When Selina
told me she was going to speak to the doctor
herself to-day, says she, ‘You know that it
stands to reason, Mary Ann, that you can’t be
as experienced as one that has been a wife five
years and a widow seven’; and then Jane
seemed to think it was being cast up to her that
she wasn’t a widow, so she speaks up real
snappy, ‘Nor one that’s brought up a family of
four boys,’ and then Selina she looked mad.”
Mary Ann went off into a peal of laughter at
the remembrance.

“Jane told me he said at my age the heart
was weak and there was always more or less
danger.”

“He always says that after he’s told what
good sound lungs you have, and what steady
progress you’re making, and how he’d rather
pass you for insurance than most women half
your age. It means we’re not to be too reckless,
all the same.”

“She says if I should recover from this
attack——”

“Sakes alive! Did she come over all that
with you too? ‘If you should recover from this
attack, you’d better sell the house and visit
round among your married children?’ Visit
round as much as you like, Ma, but have a
house of your own to come back to; that’s my
advice.”

“She said you wouldn’t want to keep up a
house after you were left alone——”

Mary Ann threw up her hands. “No wonder
Selina’n’Jane are thin—they wear the flesh
off their bones providing for the future. They’re
born Colquhouns. I’m glad I take after your
side of the family. Do you know what Selina
told me, Ma? The preserves she put up this
year won’t have to be touched till winter after
next. She has enough to last her over two
years. ‘Land sakes!’ I said, ‘what do you
want to eat stale jam for, when you might have
fresh?’ The two get competing which will be
furthest ahead in their work; from the way
381
they talk, I shouldn’t wonder if before long
their fall house-cleaning would be done in the
spring. It makes me think of what Pa used to
tell about his uncle Alick Colquhoun—how he
was earlier and earlier with the milking, till at
last the evening milking was done in the morning,
and the morning’s was done the night
before. Then there was Eva Meldrum; you
remember she had all her marriage outfit ready
before she was asked—sheets, tablecloths, and
everything. As soon as Fred Healey proposed,
she got right to work with the final preparations,
and when she found herself left with
nothing else to do—she just sat down and
wrote out notes of thanks for the wedding gifts,
leaving blanks for the names of the articles. I
laughed till I was sore when she told me.
‘You’re a Colquhoun,’ I said, ‘though you do
only get it from your grandma; you’re a
Colquhoun by nature if not by name.’ You
know I always say it comes from having such a
name. It’s enough to make an anxious streak
in the family, having to spell it, one generation
after another.”

Mary Ann laughed so heartily that the sound
reached her sisters, who wondered what “Ma’n’Mary
Ann” were at now. And still the
little cloud lingered, and the smile only flitted
waveringly.

“I called at the library, Ma, and brought
home the magazine. Now we’ll find out for
sure whether Lady Geraldine marries the earl—I
don’t believe but what she’s in love with the
private secretary.”

“Did you do the shopping?” her mother
whispered.

“Yes, and if you feel rested with your sleep,
I’ll show you what I got. Mr. Merrill opened
out such a heap of pretty things, I didn’t hardly
know what to take. I was thinking, Ma, it
wouldn’t be a bad idea to have Miss Adams in
to sew, the first week you’re downstairs, when
we’ve got to be in the house anyway.”

At this moment Jane and Selina came into
the room to see what the sounds of merriment
meant. They looked at patient and nurse with
disapproving gloom. Jane settled herself at once
to her knitting; Selina, who never worked in
the afternoon when she was wearing her widow’s
collar and cuffs, sat regarding her mother with
an expression of grieved wonder. Mrs. Colquhoun
was uncomfortably conscious of being judged by
something in her own child of other heritage
than hers—one of the strangest sensations a
parent can have.

“You’d ought to be kept quiet, Ma,” Selina
said, after a prolonged scrutiny. “If you had
any suitable book in the house, I’d read to you.
There was one my poor husband used to listen
to by the hour in his last illness—‘Preparations
for the Final Journey.’”

“I’m going to run down and fetch that stuff
I bought to-day to show it to Ma and get her
opinion,” Mary Ann interrupted, and a minute
later she was standing by the bed with the three
dress lengths piled in confusion upon her arms.
To the woman in the bed it was as if an angel
looked out from over a tumbled rainbow and
smiled a message of hope to her from the sky.

“Take an end of this tartan, will you, Jane,
and stand off a little with it. There, I knew
you’d like it, Ma. I said so to Mr. Merrill the
minute he showed it to me. That flowered
piece? That’s for a morning wrapper. I know
it’s gay, but somehow, after the flowers are all
over, I do hanker after gay colors. In summer
I don’t feel to want them so much on my back
when I can have them in the garden. The gray-blue’s
for a company dress. I’ll have it made
up in time for the reception to the new minister.
You’ll need a dress for that too, Ma. We’ll get
samples as soon as you’re well enough to choose.
It was between this and a shot silk, but I
thought this was more becoming at my age.
To tell the truth,” confessed Mary Ann with a
laugh, “I’d rather have had it than this, and
more than either I’d love to have bought a dress
off a piece of crimson velvet Mr. Merrill had just
got in.”

She rested an elbow on her knee and sank the
length of a forefinger in her plump cheek.

“When I was a little girl,” she ruminated, “I
was awfully fond of the rose-in-campin’ that
grew in our garden at home—you mind it,
mother; mullein pink, some call it. I used to
say to myself that if ever I could get what
clothes I liked, I’d have a dress as near like
that as I could find. Well, there I was to-day
looking at the very thing, the same color, the
same downy look, and all, and money enough
in my purse to buy it. Of course I know it
would be silly. But don’t it seem a pity that
the things we dream of having some day—when
the day comes, we don’t want ’em? I
feel somehow as if I’m cheating that little girl
that wished for the dress like a rose-in-campin’.”

She began to fold the dress pieces thoughtfully.
“Made up handsomely with a train,”
she said, half to herself, “and worn on suitable
occasions, it wouldn’t seem so silly, either. I
believe I’ll have that crimson velvet yet,” she
concluded, with a laughing toss of the head.
Her mother looked from the bright materials to
the bright face above them.

“She would never have gone and bought all
these colors just after the doctor said I wasn’t
going to get well,” she thought, and turned over
and fell into a real sleep. The last had been
382
feigned—to escape Jane’s disquieting remarks
and to ponder their significance.

II

Mary Ann’s prophecy was fulfilled. Her
mother stood beside her at the garden gate
when Jane and Selina drove away, her glances
up and down the sunny street evincing all a
convalescent’s freshened interest in the outside
world. The two faces were alike and yet unlike.
The joy of living was in both; but a little uncertainty,
a little appeal in the older woman’s
told that with her it depended to some degree
upon the steadier flow of animal spirits in the
younger.

Jane and Selina turned for a last look at the
portly figures and waving handkerchiefs.

“Who would think to look at them,” said
Jane, “that Ma had only just returned from the
jaws of death! It ought to be a warning to
them. Some day she’ll go off in one of those
attacks.”

“Ma’n’Mary Ann are as like as two peas,”
said Selina. “They’re Maberlys. There never
was a Maberly yet that knew how to look ahead.
I declare, it gave me the shivers to see these two
plunging right out of a sick-bed into colors and
fashions the way they did. Ma’d ought to listen
to us and sell her house and live round with her
married children; at her age she’d ought to be
some place where sickness and death are treated
in a serious way.”

Upon this point Mrs. Colquhoun was firm.
She could never go back to life on a farm again,
she said; “living in town was living.” But
she compromised by agreeing to devote the
whole of the next summer to visiting her
married children.

That was a long summer to Mary Ann.
There was something wanting in all the small
accustomed pleasures of her simple life, until
the middle of August came, and the time set
for her mother’s return was within counting
distance. Then her spirits rose higher with
every hour. As a toper would celebrate his
happiness at the saloon, she went to Mr. Merrill’s
dry-goods shop, and after a revel in that part
of it where color most ran riot, she bought new
chintz covering for the parlor furniture, a
chrysanthemum pattern in various shades of
fawn and glowing crimson.

The next step was to plan a reception to
welcome her mother home and exhibit the new
covering. Then a mighty idea struck her—this
was the opportunity for the crimson velvet
dress!

“I mayn’t never have as good an excuse for
it again,” she said to the sewing-girl, “and it’s
the one thing needed to make everything complete.
Me in that crimson and Ma in the fawn
silk she had made when the Reverend Mr. Ellis
came will be a perfect match for the furniture.”

She patted the sofa back with affectionate
pride.

“It does make you feel good to have anything
new,” she said, sighing contentedly. “Anything,
I don’t care if it’s only a kitchen stove-lifter.
But this!—There are an awful lot of
things in the world do make you feel good;
aren’t there, Miss Adams? I mean common
things, like putting on dry stockings when your
feet are wet, or reading in bed, or sitting in a
shady spot on a hot summer’s day, with a muslin
dress on—yes, or even eating your tea, if you
happen to be feeling hungry and have something
particularly nice,” added this cheerful materialist.

The crimson velvet dress was being fitted for
the last time when a letter was handed to Mary
Ann. Her spectacles were downstairs, so she
asked the sewing-girl to read it.

“‘My dear aunt,’” Miss Adams began,
“‘Grandma took cold in church a week ago last
Sunday and has been laid up——’”

There was a quick rustling of the velvet train.
Mary Ann was vanishing into the clothes-closet.
In a moment she reappeared with a small valise
in her hand, and Miss Adams saw in her face
what no one had ever seen there before—the
shadow of a fear that hovered always on the
outer edge of her happy existence and now
stood close by her side. Mary Ann might be
nine-tenths Maberly, but the other tenth was
Colquhoun, after all.

“Put a dress into it, please,” she said, handing
the valise to Miss Adams. “No, I won’t wait
to take this off—I’ve a waterproof that will
cover it all up. Pin the train up with safety
pins—never mind if it does make pin-holes—I’ve
just ten minutes to catch the train. A week
ago Sunday! Oh, why didn’t they let me know
before?”

When she alighted from the train at the flag
station, she was clutching the waterproof close
at the neck. She held it in the same unconscious
grasp when she entered Jane’s big farm-house,
by way of the kitchen. Selina was there,
making a linseed poultice, and the odor was
mingled with another which she knew afterwards
to be the odor of black dye.

In her mother’s bedroom the same acid odor
was in the air, and Jane was sitting at the window
with a piece of black sewing in her hands.
Jane’s husband and John Maberly were standing
at the foot of the bed, silent and melancholy,
looking as awkward as men always do in a sick-room;
Jane’s stern gloom was tinged with a
383
condescending pity for beings so out of place.
Mary Ann saw them all at the first glance.
Then she forgot everything; she was snuggling
down against the bed, making the little, tender,
glad, sorry sounds a mother makes when she
has been separated from her baby.

When she lifted her head the men were leaving
the room, John’s face working. Selina was
there with the poultice. She took it from her.
One look into her mother’s face had been
enough. From that moment she seemed to be
holding her back by sheer force of will from the
edge over which she was slipping.

There was no merry gossip and laughter now,
384
there were no love stories, no monologues with
pauses for smiles. Mary Ann felt that a careless
word or look would be enough to loosen that
frail hold on life. When the doctor came, he
found his patient in charge of a stout woman in
a fresh linen dress, whose self-command was so
perfect that he did not waste many words in
softening the opinion for which she followed
him to the door.

“Your mother’s age is against her,” he said.
“The bronchitis in itself is not alarming, but her
heart is weak, and I fear you must not expect
her recovery.”

He knew at once that she refused to accept his
verdict, though she only said, “I’d like to telegraph
for our doctor at home, if you don’t
mind.”

When Dr. Corbett came, he confirmed the
opinion.

“The bronchitis is no worse than usual,” he
added, “the treatment has been the same; but
she seems to have lost her grip.”

“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t catch
a hold of it again,” said poor Mary Ann, choking
down her agony with the thought that
she must return immediately to her mother’s
room.

“I don’t quite understand it,” the doctor
said, with a questioning look. “The nursing—that’s
been good? Dr. Black tells me so.”

“Yes, Jane and Selina are both good nurses,
better’n what I am, if it wasn’t that Ma’s used
to me.”

“And there’s no obstacle to her recovery that
you know of?” Mary Ann shook her head.
“Well, Miss Mary Ann, we must just conclude
that it’s the natural wearing out of a good
machine. And we’ll do what we can.”

When Mary Ann went back to her mother’s
room, she found her a little roused from the
stupor in which she had been lying. The visit
of her own doctor, the accustomed tendance,
had touched some spring that set old wheels
running. With the clairvoyance love so often
gives to the sick-nurse, Mary Ann knew that she
had something to say to her.

She sat by the bed and waited. A fluttering
whisper came at last.

“Did you see Jane’s hands?”

Mary Ann’s mind, seeking desperately for a
clue, flashed from the stains on her sister’s
hands, which she had vaguely set down to black
currant jelly, to the acid smell in the kitchen—to
the black sewing—to the forgotten shock of
a year ago.

“They asked me where I’d like to lie—beside
Pa or in the cemetery in town.”

“It’s their forehandedness, Ma. I never did
know such a forehanded pair. Talk about
meeting trouble half way—Selina’n’Jane don’t
wait for it to start out at all.”

“Selina read out of the paper that bronchitis
was nearly always fatal after seventy.”

“Well, now, what will those papers say next?
Do you know what I read out of our own
Advertiser the other day? That every woman
over thirty has had at least one offer of marriage.
Now, that’s a lie, for I never had an
offer in my life. I’m kind of glad I didn’t, Ma,
for I suppose I’d have took it; and you and me
do have an awfully good time together, don’t
we?”

But her mother was not listening now; it had
been a flash merely of the old self. Mary Ann
looked around the room until she found Jane’s
lap-board with a pile of black sewing on it.
She gathered up the carefully pressed pieces
and poked them roughly in between a large
clothes cupboard and the wall.

“There!” she said to herself, “it will be a
while before they find that, and when they do
they can call it Mary Ann’s flighty way of redding
up a room.”

She heard her sisters whispering in the hall
and went out to them. Selina was tying her
bonnet-strings.

“I’m going home to do a lot of cooking,” she
said in an important undertone. “John’s wrote
to Ma’s relatives in Iowa, and some of them’s
sure to come.”

Mary Ann looked into the wrinkled face; the
past weeks had added new lines of genuine grief
to it, yet she could not help seeing that Selina
found some strange pleasure in all these incidents
of a last illness. The words she had
meant to say seemed futile. She was turning
to go into her mother’s room again when an idea
came to her.

“Don’t go yet,” she said. “I want to show
you two something.”

She went into her bedroom and returned in a
few minutes with the crimson dress over her
arm.

“I was getting it fitted when the news of
Ma’s sickness came, and I just put a waterproof
over it. The seams have got a little ravelled.
I thought maybe you two would help me top-sew
them.”

“Mary Ann——!”

“You’re so much cleverer than me with the
needle. I was having it made for—for—”
Mary Ann could not trust her voice to tell what
she had been having it made for—“for an occasion.
It won’t be needed now as soon as I
expected, but you know, Selina’n’Jane, you
always say yourselves there’s nothing like taking
time by the forelock.”

“Mary Ann——”

“A few hours would finish it up if we all got
at it. Oh, there’s Ma coughing. I must run
and get the pail of water and hot brick to steam
up the room.”

She threw the dress into her sister’s hands
and was gone. They stood looking at each
other across it.

“Poor Mary Ann!”

“She talked about an occasion. I don’t know
more’n one kind of occasion people get dresses
like this for. Can she mean——?”

“At her age? Nonsense!”

“Dr. Corbett appears to think a pile of her.
He’s a widower——”

“Now you speak of it, Selina, he does look at
her in an admiring sort of way. If there was
anything of that kind in prospect—and of
course she’d lay off black sooner——”

The sun came out and streamed through the
high window upon the dress in their hands. It
was like a drink of wine to look at it.

“There’s no denying it’s a handsome thing,”
Jane said. “It does seem a pity to have the
edges ravel. We might finish it, anyway, and
sew it up in a bag with camphor.”

Through the gray languor that overlay Mrs.
Colquhoun’s consciousness, glints of crimson
began to find their way. Now the spot of color
was disappearing under Mary Ann’s white
apron; now it was in Jane’s stained hands;
now it was passing from Jane to Selina.

Then she heard Dr. Corbett say, as he handed
Mary Ann a small parcel, “It’s the first sewing-silk
I ever bought, Miss Mary Ann, and I don’t
know whether it’s a good match, but it’s crimson,
anyhow, Merrill gave me his word for that”;
and when Mary Ann made a warning gesture
towards the bed, the faint stirring of interest
almost amounted to curiosity.

“What did he mean?” she asked, after the
doctor had gone. Mary Ann bent down to
catch the husky whisper. “The silk—what
is it for?”

“You’re a little stronger to-day, aren’t you,
Ma? I’ve a secret I meant to keep till you were
well; but there! Wait till I get back and I’ll
tell you.”

Mrs. Colquhoun let her eyelids close and forgot
all about it. When she opened them again,
Mary Ann stood before her arrayed in the velvet
dress. The radiant vision seemed part of the
train of visions that had been passing before her
closed eyes; but this stayed, and the smiling
creases of the cheeks were substantial and
firm.

Then Mary Ann fell on her knees beside the
bed and made a crimson frame of her arms for
the nightcapped head on the pillow.

“I’m not a bit of good at keeping a secret,
Ma. Jane and Selina and me have just finished
it, but you weren’t to know anything about it
till you got home. It was to be a surprise.
And there’s new covering on the parlor furniture,
a handsome flower pattern, all fawn and crimson,
like our dresses, and we’re going to have a
home-coming party. I don’t want to be impatient,
but I wish you’d hurry up and get
well.”

Mrs. Colquhoun was gazing into her daughter’s
eyes.

“Do you really think I’m going to get well,
Mary Ann?” she asked, and the wistfulness of
old desire revived was in the feeble voice.

“Of course you’re going to get well, dearie.
Why shouldn’t you?”

“It seemed kind of settled I wasn’t—and
it’s so upsetting to stay when you’re expected
to go. I didn’t care much.”

She put up her hand weakly and stroked the
velvet.

“But now—if you think so—perhaps——”

At his next visit Dr. Corbett said, “Your
mother’s caught her grip again, Miss Mary
Ann,” and Dr. Black added heartily, “And if
you’ll only tell us how you did it, Miss Mary
Ann, you’ll be putting dollars in our pockets.”

But the cunning of love, with all its turnings
and twistings, is only half-conscious—the rest
is instinct.

“I don’t know that there’s anything to tell,
doctor,” Mary Ann said slowly, wiping away a
tear. “Only you might just keep a watch out
and see that none of your patients are being
hurried out of the world by the preparations
for their own mourning. That’s what was happening
to Ma.”

Perhaps Henry Irving and I might
have gone on with Shakespeare to the
end of the chapter if he had not been
in such a hurry to produce “Macbeth.”

We ought to have done “As You
Like It” in 1888, or “The Tempest.” Henry
thought of both these plays. He was much attracted
by the part of Caliban in “The Tempest,”
but, he said, “the young lovers are everything,
and where are we going to find them?”
He would have played Touchstone in “As You
Like It,” not Jacques, because Touchstone is in
the vital part of the play.

He might have delayed both “Macbeth” and
“Henry VIII.” He ought to have added to his
list of Shakespearian productions “Julius
Cæsar,” “King John,” “As You Like It,”
“Antony and Cleopatra,” “Richard II.,” and
“Timon of Athens.” There were reasons
“against,” of course. In “Julius Cæsar” he
wanted to play Brutus. “That’s the part for
the actor,” he said, “because it needs acting.
But the actor-manager’s part is Antony. Antony
scores all along the line. Now when the
actor and actor-manager fight in a play, and
when there is no part for you in it, I think it’s
wiser to leave it alone.”

Every one knows when luck first began to
turn against Henry Irving. It was in 1896,
when he revived “Richard III.” On the first
night he went home, slipped on the stairs in
Grafton Street, broke a bone in his knee, aggravated
the hurt by walking, and had to close the
theatre. It was that year, too, that his general
health began to fail. For the ten years preceding
his death he carried on an indomitable struggle
against ill-health. Lungs and heart alike
were weak. Only the spirit in that frail body
remained as strong as ever. Nothing could
bend it, much less break it.

But I have not come to that sad time yet.

“Macbeth”

“We all know when we do our best,” said Henry
once. “We are the only people who know.”
Yet he thought he did better in “Macbeth” than
in “Hamlet!”

Was he right, after all?

His view of Macbeth, though attacked and
derided and put to shame in many quarters, is
as clear to me as the sunlight itself. To me it
seems as stupid to quarrel with the conception
as to deny the nose on one’s face. But the carrying
out of the conception was unequal.
Henry’s imagination was sometimes his worst
enemy. When I think of his Macbeth, I remember
him most distinctly in the last act, after the
battle, when he looked like a great famished
wolf, weak with the weakness of a giant exhausted,
spent as one whose exertions have been
ten times as great as those of commoner men
of rougher fibre and coarser strength.

“Of all men else I have avoided thee.”

Once more he suggested, as he only could suggest,
388
the power of fate. Destiny
seemed to hang over him, and he
knew that there was no hope, no
mercy.

The “Macbeth” Rehearsals

The rehearsals for “Macbeth” were
very exhausting, but they were splendid
to watch. In this play Henry
brought his manipulation of crowds to
perfection. My acting edition of the
play is riddled with rough sketches by
him of different groups. Artists to
whom I have shown them have been
astonished by the spirited impressionism
of these sketches. For his
“purpose” Henry seems to have been
able to do anything, even to drawing
and composing music. Sir Arthur
Sullivan’s music at first did not quite
please him. He walked up and down
the stage humming and showing the
composer what he was going to do at
certain situations. Sullivan with wonderful
quickness and open-mindedness
caught his meaning at once.

“Much better than mine, Irving,—much
better—I’ll rough it out at
once!”

When the orchestra played the new
version based on that humming of
Henry’s, it was exactly what he
wanted!

Knowing what a task I had before
me, I began to get anxious and
worried about “Lady Mac.” Henry
wrote me such a nice letter about this:

“To-night, if possible, the last act.
I want to get these great multitudinous
scenes over and then we can
attack our scenes…. Your sensitiveness
is so acute that you must
suffer sometimes. You are not like
anybody else—you see things with
such lightning quickness and unerring
instinct that dull fools like myself
grow irritable and impatient
sometimes. I feel confused when I’m
thinking of one thing, and disturbed
by another. That’s all. But I do
feel very sorry afterwards when I
don’t seem to heed what I so much
value….

389

“I think things are going well, considering the
time we’ve been at it, but I see so much that is
wanting that it seems almost impossible to get
through properly. ‘To-night commence Matthias.
If you sleep, you are lost!’”[*]

At this time we were able to be of the right
use to each other. Henry could never have
worked with a very strong woman. I should
have deteriorated in partnership with a weaker
man whose ends were less fine, whose motives
were less pure. I had the taste and artistic
knowledge that his upbringing had not developed
in him. For years he did things to please
390
me. Later on I gave up asking him. In
“King Lear” Mrs. Nettleship made him a most
beautiful cloak, but he insisted on wearing a
brilliant purple velvet cloak with “glits” all
over it which spoiled his beautiful make-up and
his beautiful acting. Poor Mrs. Nettle was
almost in tears.

“I’ll never make you anything again,” she
said. “Never!”

Copyrighted by Window and Grove|From the collection of Miss

Sargent Paints Ellen Terry
as Lady Macbeth

One of Mrs. Nettle’s greatest triumphs was my
Lady Macbeth dress, which she carried out from
Mrs. Comyns Carr’s design. I am glad to think it
is immortalized in Sargent’s picture. From the
first I knew that picture was going to be splendid.
In my diary for 1888 I was always writing about
it:

“The picture of me is nearly finished and I
think it magnificent. The green and blue of the
dress is splendid, and the expression as Lady
Macbeth holds the crown over her head is quite
wonderful.”

“Sargent’s ‘Lady Macbeth’ in the New Gallery
is a great success. The picture is the sensation
of the year. Of course opinions differ about
it, but there are dense crowds round it day after
day. There is talk of putting it on an exhibition
by itself.”

Since then it has gone over nearly the whole of
Europe, and now is resting for life at the Tate
Gallery. Sargent suggested by this picture all
that I should have liked to be able to convey in
my acting as Lady Macbeth. Of Sargent’s portrait
of Henry Irving, I wrote in my dairy:

“Everybody hates Sargent’s head of Henry.
Henry also. I like it, but not altogether. I
think it perfectly wonderfully painted and like
him, only not at his best by any means. There
sat Henry and there by his side the picture, and
I could scarce tell one from t’other. Henry
looked white, with tired eyes, and holes in his
cheeks, and bored to death! And there was the
picture with white face, tired eyes, holes in the
cheeks, and boredom in every line. Sargent
tried to paint his smile and gave it up.”

Copyrighted by Window and Grove

Sargent said to me, I remember, upon Henry
391
Irving’s first visit to the studio to see the “Macbeth”
picture of me, “What a saint!” This to
my mind promised well—that Sargent should
see that side of Henry so swiftly. So then I
never left off asking Henry Irving to sit to Sargent,
who wanted to paint him into the bargain,
and said to me continually, “What a
head!”

Terry and Miss Frances Johnson
Copyrighted by Window and Grove and by W. & D. Downey

Again from my diary:

“Sargent’s picture is almost finished, and it is
really splendid. Burne-Jones yesterday suggested
two or three alterations about the colour,
which Sargent immediately adopted, but Burne-Jones
raves about the picture.

“It (Macbeth) is a most tremendous success,
and the last three days’ advanced booking has
been greater than ever was known, even at the
Lyceum. Yes, it is a success, and I am a success,
which amazes me, for never did I think I
should be let down so easily. Some people hate
me in it; some, Henry among them, think it my
best part, and the critics differ, and discuss it
hotly, which in itself is my best success of all!
Those who don’t like me in it are those who
don’t want and don’t like to read it fresh from
Shakespeare, and who hold by the ‘fiend’ reading
of the character…. One of the best
things ever written on the subject, I think, is
the essay of J. Comyns Carr. That is as hotly
discussed as the new Lady Mac—all the best
people agreeing with it. Oh dear! It is an exciting
time!”

Copyrighted by Window and Grove

From a letter I wrote to my daughter who
was in Germany at the time:

“I wish you could see my dresses. They are
superb, especially the first one: green beetles in
it, and such a cloak! The photographs give no
idea of it at all, for it is in colour that it is so
splendid. The dark red hair is fine. The whole
thing is Rossetti—rich stained-glass effects. I
play some of it well, but of course I don’t do
what I want to do yet. Meanwhile I shall not
budge an inch in the reading of it, for that I
know is right. Oh, it’s fun, but it’s precious
hard work, for I by no means make her a gentle
lovable woman’ as some of ’em say. That’s
all pickles. She was nothing of the sort,
although she was not a fiend, and did love her
392
husband. I have to what is vulgarly called
‘sweat at it,’ each night.”

Burne-Jones at “Macbeth”

The few people who liked my Lady Macbeth,
liked it very much. I hope I am not vain to
quote this letter from Lady Pollock:

“… Burne-Jones has been with me this
afternoon: he was at ‘Macbeth’ last night, and
you filled his whole soul with your beauty and
your poetry…. He says you were a great
Scandinavian queen, that your presence, your
voice, your movement, made a marvelously
poetic harmony, that your dress was grandly
imagined and grandly worn—and that he cannot
criticise—he can only remember.”

But Burne-Jones by this time had become
one of our most ardent admirers, and was prejudiced
in my favour because my acting appealed
to his eye. Still the drama is for the eye
as well as for the ear and the mind.

“The Dead Heart”

Very early I learned that one had best be ambitious
merely to please oneself in one’s work a
little—quietly I coupled with this the reflection
that one “gets nothing for nothing, and damned
little for sixpence!”

Here I was in the very noonday of my life,
fresh from Lady Macbeth and still young
enough to play Rosalind, suddenly called upon
to play a rather uninteresting mother in “The
Dead Heart.” However, my son Teddy made
his first appearance in it, and had such a big success
that I soon forgot that for me the play was
rather “small beer.”

It had been done before, of course, by Benjamin
Webster and George Vining. Henry engaged
Bancroft for the Abbé, a part of quite as
much importance as his own. It was only a
melodrama, but Henry could always invest a
melodrama with life, beauty, interest, mystery,
by his methods of production.

“I’m full of French Revolution,” he wrote to
me when he was preparing the play for rehearsal,
“and could pass an examination. In
our play at the taking of the Bastille, we must
have a starving crowd—hungry, eager, cadaverous
394
faces. If that can be well carried out, the
effect will be very terrible, and the contrast to
the other crowd (the red and fat crowd—the
blood-gorged ones who look as if they’d been all
drinking wine—red wine, as Dickens says)
would be striking…. It’s tiresome stuff to
read, because it depends so much on situations.
I have been touching the book up, though, and
improved it here and there, I think.

“A letter this morning from the illustrious
—— offering me his prompt book to look at….
I think I shall borrow the treasure, why not?
Of course he will say that he has produced the
play and all that sort of thing, but what does
395
that matter, if one can only get one hint out of
it?

“The longer we live, the more we see that if
we only do our own work thoroughly well, we
can be independent of everything else or anything
that may be said….

“I see in Landry a great deal of Manette—that
same vacant gaze into years gone by
when he crouched in his dungeon nursing
his wrongs….

“I shall send you another book soon to put
any of your alterations and additions in—I’ve
added a lot of little things with a few lines for
you—very good, I think, though I say it as
shouldn’t—I know you’ll laugh! They are
perhaps not startlingly original, but better than
the original, anyhow! Here they are—last act!

“‘Ah, Robert, pity me. By the recollections
of our youth, I implore you to save my boy! (Now for ’em!)

“‘If my voice recalls a tone that ever fell
sweetly upon your ear, have pity on me! If
the past is not a blank, if you once loved, have
pity on me!’ (Bravo!)

“Now I call that very good, and if the ‘If’
and the ‘pity’s’ don’t bring down the house,
well it’s a pity! I pity the pittites.

“… I’ve just been copying out my part in
an account book—a little more handy to put
into one’s pocket. It’s really very short, but
difficult to act, though, and so is yours. I like
this ‘piling up’ sort of acting, and I am sure you
will, when you play the part. It’s restful.
‘The Bells’ is that sort of thing.”

The crafty old Henry! All this was to put
me in conceit with my part!

A Letter From Burne-Jones

Many people put me in conceit with my son,
including dear Burne-Jones, with his splendid
gift of impulsive enthusiasm:

“The Grange, West Kensington, W.
“Sunday.

“Most dear Lady:

“I thought all went wonderfully last night—and
no sign could I see of hitch or difficulty—and
as for your boy, he looked a lovely little
gentleman—and in his cups was perfect, not
overdoing by the least touch a part always perilously
easy to overdo. I too had the impertinence
to be a bit nervous for you about him—but
not when he appeared—so altogether I
was quite happy.

“… Irving was very noble—I thought I
had never seen his face so beatified before—no,
that isn’t the word, and to hunt for the right one
would be so like judicious criticism that I won’t—exalted
and splendid it was—and you were
you—YOU—and so all was well. I rather
wanted more shouting and distant roar in the
Bastille scene—since the walls fell, like Jericho,
by noise, a good, dreadful growl always going
on would have helped, I thought—and that
was the only point where I missed anything.

“And I was very glad you got your boy back
again and that Mr. Irving was ready to have his
head cut off for you, so it had what I call a good
ending, and I am in bright spirits to-day, and
ever,

“Your real friend,

“E. B. J.

“I would come and growl gladly.”

There were terrible strikes all over England
when we were playing “The Dead Heart.” I
could not help sympathising with the strikers;
yet reading all about the French Revolution
as I did then, I can’t understand how the
French nation can be proud of it when one remembers
how they butchered their own great
men, the leaders of the movement—Camille
Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, and the
others. My man is Camille Desmoulins. I
just love him.

“Ravenswood”

Plays adapted from novels are always unsatisfactory.
A whole story cannot be conveyed in
three hours, and every reader of the story looks
for something not in the play. Wills took from
“The Vicar of Wakefield” an episode and did it
right well, but there was no episode in “The
Bride of Lammermoor” for Merivale to take.
He tried to traverse the whole ground and
failed. But he gave me some lovely things to
do in Lucy Ashton. I had to lose my poor wits,
as in Ophelia, in the last act, and with hardly a
word to say I was able to make an effect. The
love scene at the well I did nicely, too.

Seymour Lucas designed splendid dresses for
this play. My “Ravenswood” riding dress set a
fashion in ladies’ coats for quite a long time.
Mine was copied by Mr. Lucas from a leather
coat of Lord Mohun. He is said to have had it
on when he was killed. At any rate there was a
large stab in the back of the coat, and a blood-stain.

“Nance Oldfield”

This was my first speculation in play-buying!
I saw it acted and thought I could do something
with it. Henry would not buy it, so I did. He
let me do it first in front of a revival of “The
Corsican Brothers,” in 1891. It was a great
success, although my son and I did not know a
word on the first night and had our parts written
out and pinned all over the furniture! Dear
396
old Mr. Howe wrote to me that Teddy’s performance
was “more than creditable; it was
exceedingly good and full of character, and
with your own charming performance, the piece
was a great success.” Since 1891 I must have
played “Nance Oldfield” hundreds of times,
but I never had an Alexander Oldworthy so
good as my own son, although such talented
young actors as Martin Harvey, Laurence Irving,
and, more recently, Harcourt Williams, have all
played it with me.

“Henry VIII.”

Henry’s pride as Cardinal Wolsey seemed to eat
him. How wonderful he looked (though not
fat and self-indulgent like the pictures of the
real Wolsey) in his flame-coloured robes! He
had the silk dyed specially by the dyers to the
Cardinals’ College in Rome. Seymour Lucas
designed the clothes. It was a magnificent production,
but not very interesting to me. I
played Katherine much better ten years later at
Stratford-on-Avon at the Shakespeare Memorial
Festival. I was stronger then, and more
mature. This letter from Burne-Jones about
“Henry VIII.” and Henry Irving is delightful.
I will not keep it to myself any longer:

“My dear Lady,

“We went last night to the play (at my
Theatre) to see ‘Henry VIII.’ Margaret and
Mackail and I. It was delicious to go out again
and see mankind, after such evil days. How
kind they were to me no words can say—I
went in at a private door and then into a cosy
box and back the same way, swiftly, and am
marvellously the better for the adventure. No
you, alas!

“I have written to Mr. Irving just to thank
him for his great kindness in making the path
of pleasure so easy, for I go tremblingly at
present. But I could not say to him what I
thought of the Cardinal—a sort of shame keeps
one from saying to an artist what one thinks of
his work—but to you I can say how nobly he
warmed up the story of the old religion to my
exacting mind in that impersonation. I shall
think always of dying monarchy in his Charles—and
always of dying hierarchy in his Wolsey.
How Protestant and dull all grew when that
noble type had gone!

“I can’t go to Church till red cardinals come
back (and may they be of exactly that red), nor
to Court till trumpets and banners come back—nor
to evening parties till the dances are like that
dance. What a lovely young Queen has been
found. But there was no you…. Perhaps
it was as well. I couldn’t have you slighted
even in a play, and put aside. When I go back
to see you as I soon will, it will be easier. Mr.
Irving let me know you would not act; and
proposed that I should go later on—wasn’t
that like him? So I sat with my children and
was right happy, and as usual the streets looked
dirty and all the people muddy and black as we
came away. Please not to answer this stuff.

“Ever yours aff’ly,

“E. B. J.

“I wish that Cardinal could have been made
Pope, and sat with his foot on the Earl of Surrey’s
neck. Also I wish to be a Cardinal, but
then I sometimes want to be a pirate. We
can’t have all we want.

“Your boy was very kind—I thought the
race of young men who are polite and attentive
to old fading ones had passed away with antique
pageants—but it isn’t so.”

When the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire
gave the famous fancy-dress ball at Devonshire
House, they attended it in the robes which had
appealed so strongly to Burne-Jones’s imaginative
eye. I was told by one who was present at
this ball that, as the Cardinal swept up the staircase,
his long train held magnificently over his
arm, a sudden wave of reality seemed to sweep
upstairs with him, and reduce to the pettiest
make-believe all the aristocratic masquerade
that surrounded him.

I renewed my acquaintance with “Henry
VIII” in 1902, when I played Queen Katherine
for Mr. Benson during the Shakespeare Memorial
performances in April. I was pretty miserable
at the time—the Lyceum reign was dying,
and taking an unconscionably long time about
it, which made the position all the more difficult.
Henry Irving was reviving “Faust”—a wise
step, as it had been his biggest “money-maker”—and
it was a question whether I could play
Margaret. There are some young parts that
the actress can still play when she is no longer
young: Beatrice, Portia, and many others come
to mind. But I think that when the character
is that of a young girl, the betrayal of whose innocence
is the main theme of the play, no
amount of skill on the part of the actress can
make up for the loss of youth.

Suggestions were thrown out to me (not by
Henry Irving, but by others concerned) that,
although I was too old for Margaret, I might
play Martha! Well! well! I didn’t quite see
that. So I redeemed a promise given in jest at
the Lyceum to Frank Benson twenty years
earlier, and went off to Stratford-upon-Avon to
play in “Henry VIII.”

I played Katherine on Shakespeare’s Birthday—such
a lovely day, bright and sunny and
warm. The performance went finely—and I
397
made a little speech afterwards which was quite
a success.

During these pleasant days at Stratford, I
went about in between the performances of
“Henry VIII,” which was, I think, given three
times a week for three weeks, seeing the lovely
country and lovely friends who live there. A
visit to Broadway and to beautiful Madame de
Navarro (Mary Anderson), was particularly delightful.
To see her looking so handsome, robust,
fresh, so happy in her beautiful home, gave
me the keenest pleasure. I also went to Stanways,
the Elchos’ home—a fascinating place.
Lady Elcho showed me all over it, and she was
not the least lovely thing in it.

In Stratford I was rebuked by the permanent
inhabitants for being kind to a little boy in professionally
ragged clothing who made me, as he
has made hundreds of others, listen to a long
made-up history of Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare,
“The Merchant of Venice,” “Julius
Cæsar,” and other things—the most hopeless
mix! The inhabitants assured me that the boy
was a little rascal, who begged and extorted
money from visitors by worrying them with his
recitation until they paid him to leave them
alone.

Long before I knew that the child was such a
reprobate, I had given him a pass to the gallery
and a Temple Shakespeare! I derived such
pleasure from his version of the “Mercy” speech
from the “Merchant of Venice” that I still think
he was ill-paid!

I asked the boy what he meant to be when he
was a man. He answered with decision: “A
reciterer.”

I also asked him what he liked best in the
play.

“When the blind went up and down and you
smiled,” he replied—surely a naïve compliment
to my way of “taking a call!” Further
pressed, he volunteered: “When you lay on the
bed and died to please the angels.”

Other Plays

I had exactly ten years more with Henry Irving
after “Henry VIII.” During that time we did
“King Lear,” “Becket,” “King Arthur,”
“Cymbeline,” “Madame Sans-Gêne,” “Peter
the Great,” and “The Medicine Man,” I feel too
near to these productions to write about them.
But a time will come. The first night of “Cymbeline”
I felt almost dead. Nothing seemed
right. “Everything is so slow, so slow,” I wrote
in my diary. “I don’t feel a bit inspired, only
dull and hide-bound.” Yet Imogen was, I think,
the only inspired performance of these later
years. On the first night of “Sans-Gêne” I
acted courageously and fairly well. Everyone
seemed to be delighted. The old Duke of Cambridge
patted, or rather, thumped me on the
shoulder and said kindly: “Ah, my dear, you
can act!” Henry quite effaced me in his wonderful
sketch of Napoleon. “It seems to me
some nights,” I wrote in my diary at the time,
“as if I were watching Napoleon trying to imitate
H. I., and I find myself immensely interested
and amused in the watching.”

“The Medicine Man” was, in my opinion, our
only quite unworthy production and I wrote in
my diary: “If ‘Manfred’ and a few such plays
are to succeed this, I simply must do something
else.”

But I did not! I stayed on, as everyone
knows, when the Lyceum as a personal enterprise
of Henry’s was no more, when the farcical Lyceum
Syndicate took over the theatre. I played
a wretched part in “Robespierre,” and refused
£12,000 to go to America with Henry in
“Dante.”

In these days Henry Irving was a changed
man. He gave the whole thing up—as a producer,
I mean. As an actor he worked as faithfully
as ever. Henley’s stoical lines might have
been written of him as he was in those last
days:

Henry Irving did not treat me badly. I did
not treat him badly. He revived “Faust” and
produced “Dante.” I would have liked to stay
with him to the end of the chapter, but I could
not act in either of these plays. But we never
quarrelled. Our long partnership dissolved
naturally. It was all very sad, but it could not
be helped.

… among the rocks one of the sea women combing her long hair, and if he can
creep up to her unbeknownst, and steal away from her her “cubuleen driuth,” which is a
kind of small cap the merrows do be wearing, she can never go back under the sea any more
at all, but must follow his bidding while ever he has it in his keeping.

“Adventure, is it?” said Patsy,
pushing his empty glass away from
him. “What happened me last night
would be makin’ a adventure seem
like grass growin’ in a cimitery!”

From the other side of the table, in their own
particular corner of the back room at Devinsky’s
Place on the Upper East Side, Tim regarded his
friend with characteristic stolidity and replied
with a grunt of interrogatory interest. Patsy
seldom needed urging in the matter of talking
about himself.

“It all come of Mike O’Hara’s owin’ me three
dollars,” he continued. “Sure, the good heart
of me keeps me brains busy rescuin’ me from
trouble. Mike is after keepin’ a boat-house
over on the North River near Spuytendivil, and
seein’ no other way I wint up to see him early
last evenin’ and took wan of his boats out for
five hours, though it’s me hates floatin’ about
in a bunch of boards and workin’ to do it.

“Twas me intention to work up the river
with the tide and thin cheat O’Hara by gittin’
out and settin’ on the shore. Which I done,
tyin’ me boat to wan of thim skinny little private
docks over on the Jersey shore beyant
Fort Lee. And thin, Tim, it come on me to
climb clear up thim Palisades, which was
amazin’ unnatural and the first of the queer
things that happened me the night.

“It was hard climbin’ by a path what was
mostly growed up with vines, and whin I come
to the top they wasn’t anny too much daylight
left to me, and the place was lonely as a Dimmycrat.
They was lights over across the river in
New York—och, but thim lights was far off!—but
Jersey was just wan hunk of nuthin’, with
some ghosty trees in the front of it. Excipt for
a tug or a ferry whistlin’ now and thin, they
was niver a sound but the hummin’ of ivry wan
of all the mosquities that iver was, barrin’ thim
as was tryin’ was they a chanct to kiss each
other by borin’ through me from both sides at
wanct.

“It was no place for usin’ up boat-rint, but
me shoes was full of gravel and, seein’ the ruins
of a house a bit off, I wint over to it to set down
and take thim off comfortable. It’s the fine
large house it must ’a’ been wanct, but they’d
been a fire in it, and ’twas only the walls of it
was standin’, with wan big second-story room
stickin’ up big and darkish in a corner of it.
Raymimber that wan second-story room in
your mind. It was all a bit creepy-like, and I
wint at me shoes in a hurry.

“I had the both of thim off and shakin’ thim,
rubbin’ me sock-feet together to keep some of
thim mosquities away, whin all to wanct I heard
something walkin’. Just as I was, I turned mesilf
to stone, with me feet up off the ground and
a empty shoe held out in the air afore me in
each hand, balancin’ mesilf wonderful.

“The steps come nearer. ‘They ain’t anny
ghost makes that much noise,’ I says, niver
losin’ me nerve or movin’ a inch annywheres.
‘Though ye can’t niver tell about ghosts.’ And
just thin a little man come strollin’ round the
corner of a wall and stood lookin’ at me. It
wasn’t so dark yet but what I could be makin’
out what little they was of him, and if iver wan
of thim dudes in the newspaper funny-pictures
come to life, here he was, only thim funny-pictures
must ’a’ been drawed by ammyteurs.
I misdoubted was he real, but if he was, they
was money on him, and if they was money on
him, it would come off of him easy-like, and I
could be namin’ the man would spend it. Thin
I raymimbered I was still holdin’ up me shoes
and me feet, like I was settin’ on the point of a
church-steeple, for his mouth was hangin’ open
like I was the first wan he iver seen, and belike
I was.

“‘Pardon me,’ he says, ‘but why do ye do
that?’ says he, singin’ it off like a Englishman.

“‘Whisht!’ I says, not thinkin’ of anny
answer yet and cursin’ the stone for bein’ so
hard.

“‘But, me good man,’ says he, payin’ no attention,
‘why are ye holdin’ thim shoes up in
the air?’

“‘Whisht!’ says I. ‘Why not?’

“‘Why not?’ says he, gaspin’.

“‘Ye said “why” the other time,’ I says.
‘Which do ye mean?’

“‘Which what?’ says he, weak-like.

“‘Either wan of thim,’ says I; ‘sure, all
what’s is the same to me. But run along with
ye now and don’t be disturbin’ me; it’s workin’
a charm I am. Unless ye would be helpin’ me
hold these shoes steady,’ I adds enticin’, bein’
wishful of gittin’ him close enough to grab him.

“‘Hold thim shoes steady?’ says he.

“‘Hold thim shoes steady,’ says I.

“‘A charm?’ says he.

“‘Yis,’ says I, ‘a charm. And would ye
mind not usin’ me own conversation over ag’in
so soon, sor? I’ve heard tell ’twas bad luck,
and annyways, it’s nervous it’s makin’ me.’

“‘Do you have to set that way?’ says he,
comin’ closer.

“‘Indeed and I do,’ I says, ‘though it’s mortal
wearin’. But whin ye are makin’—’ and just
there I makes a grab at him. But, och, blathers,
if his brains was slow, his feet was quick,
and away he wint, me after him, divil-racketty.

“Thim ruins was right on the edge of the Palisades,
and ’twas me endeavor to keep him atween
me and the cliff so he couldn’t make for the
open. Up and down we wint, scramblin’, running
and crawlin’, first to wan ind of thim
crumblin’ walls and thin back ag’in to the other,
me always hemmin’ him in and headin’ him off,
but niver quite catchin’ him, and thim piles of
loose brick hurtin’ me sock-feet cruel, me havin’
dropped me shoes whin I tried to grab him.
They wasn’t much light left, but all to wanct
I saw him goin’ right up in the air, and whin I
come up he was just climbin’ over the edge of
that wan second-story room. Faith, for a minute
I was thinkin’ he was a ghost, but he hadn’t
no more than landed whin he begun draggin’ up
after him a long board with slats nailed to it
what some boys must ’a’ left there for a ladder.
Me hand just missed the ind of it, me foot slippin’
on top a pile of bricks and rollin’ me down
over the sharp corners of thim.

“I wint all round that second-story room,
mostly crawlin’—och, me poor feet, it was perishin’
with the pain of thim I was!—but niver
a way of gittin’ up to him, and him likely to
drop down on the off side and run like a rabbit
if I took me attention off him. So I wint
scramblin’ back where I’d be atween him and
the road and set down on a pile of bricks. He’d
been layin’ flat on his stommick, gittin’ his wind
back in him, but prisintly he clumb up on his
knees and throwed a brick at me.

“‘Ye young gomeral,’ I says, ‘if ye do that
ag’in, I’ll shoot a hole in ye!’

“He wint behind a bit of brick wall and
throwed another. If iver I go annywheres
ag’in without a gun, may the divil fly away with
me! So I wint behind a bit of wall mesilf. And
there he was.

“Of course, I was ragin’, and I begun tossin’
bricks back at him. Hiven knows they was
enough of thim! Whin he’d throwed about
twinty, doin’ no harm with thim, thim little
arms of his wore out, and I kept just enough of
thim goin’ to make him nervous-like without
hurtin’ him, wonderin’ in between would it be
safe to go after me poor shoes and could I git
404
thim on if I did, me feet bein’ swelled surprisin’.
Sure, the little spalpeen owed me ivrything he
had about him!

“All to wanct a grand idea come to me. I
would kidnap me little gintleman and hold him
for wan of thim ransoms! ‘Sure,’ I says to mesilf,
‘they’re kidnappin’ boys all the time, and
it’s the tidy sum a grown man would be bringin’
me, though it’s the little wan he is and part
wore out.’

“‘I say, sor,’ I calls up to him, polite, from
behind me wall, and droppin’ a whole brick
closer to him than common, ‘wouldn’t it be
after bein’ more pleasant for ye to come down
willin’,’ I says, ‘than to have wan of thim bricks
search the head of ye for brains and turn the
corpse over to me? To say nothin’ of the mosquities,’
I says.

“‘They niver bite me,’ he says, trembly-like,
from behind his bit of a wall.

“‘Holy Saints,’ I says, ‘that’s queer! Are ye
as bad as that?’

“‘What do ye want of me annyways?’ says
he, still trembly.

“‘Well,’ I says, ‘’twas me intention to rob
ye, but now—’ And thin I stopped to listen to
him keepin’ quiet and worryin’. ‘But now,’
says I prisintly, ‘I’m goin’ to kidnap ye and
inform your friends ye’ll be killed entirely if
they don’t sind me five thousand dollars immediate.’

“‘Oh!’ says he, like I’d said I was goin’ to
give him something he wanted. ‘Oh,’ says he,
‘I’ll be right down. Just wait till I find me hat.’

“Och, it took me breath away to have him so
willin’, but I could hear him scramblin’ round
up there, and prisintly I seen him at a hole in
the wall, and he begun lettin’ down his ladder
and losin’ no time over it.

“‘I’ll just be takin’ anny sticks of things ye
have,’ I says, frindly, whin he come down to me,
and, findin’ the flat side of two bricks for me
poor feet, I wint through him careful and religious.
So help me, they was only elivin dollars
and twinty cents and niver the sign of a watch!
He might as well been some wan that earned his
own livin’.

“‘Look here,’ says he, maybe feelin’ sort of
hurt himsilf, ‘ye said five thousand. Why not
make it ten?’

“‘What?’ says I, gaspin’.

“‘Why not make it ten?’ says he.

“‘Arrah,’ says I, ‘are ye wantin’ me to feed
ye till me grandchilder can be collectin’ of it?
Ten thousand, indeed! Ye ought to be thankful
ye ain’t marked down to forty-nine-fifty.’

“‘Oh, well,’ he says, careless, ‘it’s none of my
business. But where do ye take me?’

“Now I’d been thinkin’ of a old warehouse
near Mike O’Hara’s dock with a fine cellar in it
and no wan nosin’ round, but it’s mesilf is too
knowledgeable to be tellin’ ivrything that’s in
me head, even if they was time for it. ‘We’ll be
gittin’ me shoes first,’ I says, ‘and thin we’ll be
climbin’ down to me boat and cross the river,’
I says, ‘where they ain’t room for so manny
mosquities.’

“All right,’ says he, cheerful, ‘though I
don’t mind thim anny, as I told ye a bit gone.
Come along afore it gits too dark.’

“Was they iver the like of that, and him bein’
kidnapped! ‘Faith, maybe it’s a bluff he’s
workin’,’ thinks I, ‘though divil the wan of me
knows why he’d be workin’ it.’ And whin I’d
took him to where I’d dropped me shoes—oh,
wirra, how bad the walkin’ was!—I let go of
him entirely whilst I was crammin’ thim two
feet of mine into thim, to see would he run
ag’in, but keepin’ me arm handy to a brick to
throw through him whin he tried it. Och, he
niver made a move, and the more chanct I give
him, the peaceabler he stood there waitin’ for
me. It was most unsettlin’.

‘We’ll be goin’ down the cliff now,’ says I,
takin’ off me suspinders and tyin’ wan ind of
thim in a hard knot around the scrawny little
neck of him to hold him by.

“‘Do ye always tie thim up that way?’ says
he.

“‘Yis, sor,’ I says; ‘thim suspinders has kidnapped
nine men, divil a wan less,’ I says.

“‘I hope they was nice people,’ says he.

“‘And why do ye hope that?’ I says.

“‘Why not?’ says he, gintle-like.

“‘Don’t ye git gay, sor,’ says I, ‘and don’t be
goin’ so fast whin it’s so steep-like. Faith, it’s
you is bein’ kidnapped, not mesilf.’

“‘Yis,’ says he, ‘I raymimber that.’

“‘Oh, ye do?’ says I. ‘Ye’d better be usin’
your brains to walk with instid of strainin’ thim
like that. Here! That ain’t the way!’ I yells at
him as we come to where a side path turned off.
And with that me poor feet slipped on some
loose stones, and I would ’a’ jerked the head off
him but for the suspinders stretchin’.

“‘Guh!’ says he, which was about what ye’d
expect from him whin he talked without stoppin’
to think it up aforehand. And thin says he:
‘Here, me good man, ye’d better be fixin’ this.
The rope’s comin’ loose.’

“‘I near dropped the suspinders entirely.
‘Holy hiven,’ I says to mesilf, ‘he must think
we’re playin’ he was Queen of the May, and me
wantin’ to quit and go home! Bedad, they’s
something behind all this!’ But I tied him up
ag’in and we wint on down, with me thinkin’
till the roots of me hair was twisted, tryin’ to
find was they anny explanation of him, and him
405
stumblin’ along in the dark and askin’ me quistions,
happy and continted.

“Whin we come to the bottom I says ‘whoa’
to him, till I could see they was no wan hangin’
round, and thin we wint down where I’d left me
boat. Divil the lie I’m tellin’ ye, some wan
had took it!

“‘Is it gone?’ says he.

“‘Mother of hiven, is it here?’ says I, irritated
at the empty head of him.

“‘No,’ says he.

“‘Thin where is it?’ I says.

“‘Gone,’ says he.

“‘Right,’ says I, ‘and ye guessed it without
puttin’ yoursilf greatly about. It shows what
thinkin’ would do for ye if ye was to try it.’

“‘What are we goin’ to do now?’ says he,
bleatin’ sorrowful like a sheep.

“‘Look here, sor,’ I says, drawin’ with me
finger in the sand, the moon havin’ come up so
we could see a bit; ‘here is wan side of the river,
and we’re on it,’ I says, ‘and here is the other
side, and we ain’t, but we wish we was. What’s
the answer, and how manny sides is they to the
river? Come along with me and figure it out
to yoursilf,’ I says. ‘I’m goin’ to see is they a
chanct to steal somewan ilse’s boat,’ I says,
pullin’ him after me by the suspinders.

“But sure, wan half thim jersey omadhawns
must spind all their time arrangin’ to keep the
other half from stealin’ boats off thim, for what
boats they was was chained up with enough iron
to sink thim, and me with only me knife for the
patent locks. Kidnappin’ is easy whin ye have a
place to kidnap thim to, but they ain’t no money
in settin’ down with a man annywheres ye find
him and tellin’ him ye’ve got his tab and will his
frinds give ye all their money.

“‘Let’s climb up the Palisades ag’in and take
the trolley to the ferry,’ says he.

“‘The saints in glory be among us! Is it a
lunytic ye think I am to take ye where ye can
git help and have me arrested by openin’ your
mouth but wanct?’

“‘Well,’ says he, excusin’ himsilf, ‘thin
what?’

“‘Twinty years,’ says I, ‘and lucky at that.’

“‘I mean,’ says he, ‘what are we goin’ to do,
thin?’

“‘“We”?’ says I, fair losin’ me timper,
‘“we”? Arrah, and whose doin’ this kidnappin’,
annyways? Ye’ll be collectin’ money off
me next for takin’ me home! Ain’t ye niver
been kidnapped afore?’

“‘No,’ says he, ‘this is the first time.’

“‘Yis,’ I says, ‘and it was gittin’ dark whin I
took ye.’

“‘Well,’ says he, peaceable and irritatin’,
‘what are we goin’ to do?’

“‘We’re goin’ to drown ye, if ye ask me that
ag’in!’ I says, bein’ beyont mesilf entirely. And
thin all to wanct it come to me I might be tryin’
the trolley after all, and tellin’ the people he was
a crazy man I was takin’ home, if he begun
talkin’. Sure, wan look at him would convince
thim he’d been a lunytic afore he was took so
bad. And this way I could be takin’ him to me
own place on the East Side instid of to the warehouse
near O’Hara. It was a fool plan, but
most plans is fool wans, and what ilse could I be
doin’ with him?

“‘I’d been considerin’ the trolley mesilf,’ I
says, ‘and I’m thinkin’ we’ll take it and go over
on the 130th Street ferry, but if ye make wan
peep to annywan, it’s me will kill ye on the
spot. Do ye mind that!’ I says to him, ferocious.

“‘Oh,’ says he, ‘ye don’t need to talk to me
like that,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t goin’ to say annything
or make ye anny trouble.’

“‘Oh, ye wasn’t?’ I says to him. ‘Ye’re a
liar,’ I says to mesilf, ‘ye was, and they’s something
queerer about ye than ye look, which is
sayin’ a good deal.’ But I give the suspinders
a jerk, and we wint on down the shore to a easier
path up thim Palisades, it bein’ no long walk
from the top to the trolley. What worried me
worst was him bein’ so cheerful. It might ’a’
been from him not havin’ sinse enough to be
anny other way, only whin it was plain robbin’
he’d thought I was after he’d been scared
healthy and satisfyin’ entirely. It was the kidnappin’
soothed him, bad scran to him, and it
was fair uneasy I was in the heart of me, almost
suspectin’ they were brains in him somewheres.

“Well, maybe they was and maybe they
wasn’t, I dunno, and maybe ’twas something
worse than that. ‘And the mosquities won’t
bite him,’ I says to mesilf. ‘If mosquities was
humans, ’twould be easy of understandin’, but a
mosquity ain’t got annything in his head exciptin’
teeth, and thim Jersey wans will bite
whativer it is if it don’t bite thim first. Sure,
they’s times whin dumb beasts can be teachin’
anny of us, and thim mosquities is after havin’
their own reasons. And do ye mind,’ I wint on
to mesilf, ‘how he wint up that ladder like he
was floatin’ on air?’ Faith, I think I was half
believin’ him a ghost, excipt for his neck feelin’
a bit solid whin I pulled on the suspinders.

“Whin we come to the top, and the wind was
back in him ag’in, I says: ‘And what might
your name be, sor?’

“‘Courtney Delevan Schwartz,’ says he,
lively as a grig.

“‘Is your father livin’?’ I says.

“‘Why, yis,’ he says, ‘he’s Charles B.
Schwartz.’

“‘I’ve niver met him,’ I says. ‘Will he want
ye back?’

“‘Why, of course,’ says he, ‘I’m the only
wan he’s got.’

“‘Well,’ I says, ‘even Teddy would be givin’
him a special license for not havin’ anny more.
Can he be raisin’ the five thousand?’

“‘Don’t ye know who Charles B. Schwartz
is?’ says he, surprised-like. ‘The Pittsburg
multi-millionaire and railroad man?’

“‘Git along with ye!’ I says. ‘Don’t ye think
I know ye wouldn’t be breathin’ it if they was
that much money in the family?’

“‘I told ye to make it ten instid of five,’ he
says.

“‘Tare and ages!’ I says. ‘Don’t ye know
that ain’t no way to act whin ye’re bein’ kidnapped?
Ye’ve got all mixed up about it, sor.
Ye ought to be runnin’ the price down instid of
tryin’ to make me charge your poor father twict
as much as ye ain’t worth, ye blamed handless
gossoon. And don’t be walkin’ so fast like ye
couldn’t wait to be locked up. It ain’t you gits
the five thousand, annyways.’

“‘Excuse me,’ says he. ‘But me father won’t
be mindin’ the other five, and the price will be
lookin’ a bit cheap whin it gits in the papers.’

“‘Bedad, if ye’re valuin’ yoursilf like that,
it’s a blessin’ it ain’t you sets the price on a
bushel of good potaties, what is worth something.’

“‘Hold on,’ says he, sudden, ‘I hear somewan
on the road we’re comin’ to. We’d better
wait till they git past.’

“Och, did ye iver hear the like of that?
Think of him warnin’ me from his chanct to yell
for help! It left me feelin’ fair uneasy, even
whin the wagon had gone on down the road.
‘Sure,’ I thinks, ‘if they is anny humans as
foolish as that, they wouldn’t be let run loose.
And annyways, he ain’t got enough brains to be
a real lunytic, God help him. Yit maybe he is—they
ain’t nothin’ as different as lunytics.’

“‘“The night has a thousand eyes,”’ says he
just thin, goin’ right along with the suspinders
tight on his neck, ‘“the day but wan”—do ye
know that?’ he says. ‘I just happened to
think of it.’

“‘Faith, no wan would think of it anny other
way,’ I says, catchin’ up with him and smellin’
his breath, but it was Prohibition. ‘Where do
ye see thim eyes?’ I asks him, bein’ sure he was
crazy now.

“‘Why, up there,’ says he, pointin’ straight
up in the air.

“‘Niver mind, niver mind,’ I says, soothin’,
and fearin’ he would be took worse. ‘They
won’t hurt ye anny.’

“‘Hurt me?’ says he.

“‘Not a bit,’ says I. ‘We’ll be turnin’ to the
right here,’ I says.

“‘But what I meant by thim eyes—’ says
he.

“‘Don’t think about thim anny more,’ I says.
‘It ain’t good for ye.’

“He stopped and turned round, laughin’, the
silly fool, though it was no time for it. ‘Ye
think I’m crazy, don’t ye, me frind?’ he says.

“‘Me?’ says I.

“‘No, me,’ says he, cheerful. ‘I was just
playin’ a joke on ye,’ he says. ‘The Irish likes
thim, don’t they?’

“‘Divil a bit,’ I says. ‘Thin what are ye if
ye ain’t?’ I asks him.

“‘I might ask ye, after your own manner of
sayin’ things, Which am I if I ain’t what?’ says
he, all to wanct talkin’ like a man who knew his
ways about. ‘But I’ll be tellin’ ye wan thing I
ain’t, and that’s crazy.’

“It was like hearin’ a baby all to wanct begin
talkin’ like a old man. Nothin’ could ’a’ surprised
me like him showin’ they was brains in
him. I knowed immediate it was no lunytic
he was after bein’. ‘Thin what are ye?’ I says,
weak-like.

“‘Ah, me frind,’ says he, ‘who’s doin’ this
kidnappin’—you or me? Come on, now; thim
cars runs half a hour apart.’

“Arrah, the anger rose in me at the owdaciousness
of him, and I took me oath to git him
to the East Side even if he become twins. But,
bein’ a thinkin’ man, the unsettlement of me
mind was ten times worse over him showin’
signs of brains in him. If he could grow thim
manny brains in half a hour, they was no tellin’
how much sinse he might have by mornin’.
‘But sure,’ thinks I, ‘thin he’s worth more than
what I priced him, for they may be some wan
can be usin’ him for something.’

“‘I’ll make it eight thousand, sor,’ I says to
him.

“‘Thank ye, me good man,’ says he, resumin’
his old way of talkin’. ‘Hurry up! I hear a car
comin’.’

“Thin we run for it, and the suspinders jerkin’
out of me hands, the little spalpeen showed me
the heels of him, me cursin’ after him amazin’.
All to wanct me foot caught in a root, and down
I wint, fair knockin’ me daffy. By the time I’d
begun seein’ straight ag’in, he was wavin’ his
arms in the middle of the track, with the head-light
shinin’ on him and the car comin’ to a stop.

“I seen at wanct that, even could I hold the
car by yellin’, he would have time to tell thim
all his troubles, and like as not they’d beat me
life out afore I could tell thim about him bein’
crazy, and they wouldn’t believe it annyways.
It was gone he was and good riddance.

“‘Come on!’ he hollers. ‘They’re waitin’
for ye!’

“And hiven help me, they was, and him
standin’ there lookin’ worried over me delay
and sayin’ nothin’ to annybody! For wanct in
me life I didn’t stop to think—faith, I was
within wan of payin’ dear for it later—and the
next I knew I was climbin’ in the car, with him
helpin’ me up, me bein’ still a bit dizzy.

“‘I’m sorry,’ says he, blowin’ for wind, whin
we was in a seat togither, ‘but I lost thim suspinders.’

“‘Niver mind thim, niver mind thim,’ I says,
watchin’ ivry minute to see would he be callin’
on the other passengers. ‘Wait till I git me
breath!’

“But he niver paid thim others anny attention
whativer, and pretty soon I begun wishin’
he would. Sure, if he was thinkin’ of worse
than bein’ rescued and havin’ me handed over
to the polayce, thin thim cold chills runnin’ up
and down me back wasn’t doin’ it for nothin’.
‘Nonsinse,’ I says to mesilf, summonin’ back
me manhood, ‘I misdoubt if he knows what he
is doin’. And annyways, he seems to be comin’
along with me all right, bad cess to him, and it’s
me will be showin’ him what it is to be dealin’
with a strong man and a brainy wan.

“‘A few quistions, if ye please,’ I says to
him, commandin’. ‘And be prompt with
thim!’

“‘Yis,’ says he, turnin’ to me from lookin’
408
out the windy and tryin’ to look like he’d been
intelligent whin he was a lad.

“‘Where does your father, Charles B.
Schwartz, live at?’ says I.

“‘Ye can address him at the Aldorf, but he
lives in Pittsburg,’ says he.

“‘We’ll pass over that last, Courtney,’ says I;
‘I’m not askin’ ye for the fam’ly skeletons. Ye
say he likes ye?’

“‘Oh, yis,’ he says, ‘we’re chums, the two of
us. It’s this way,’ says he; ‘the old man says
that while I can’t help him anny in his business,
I’m interistin’ to him, bein’ different from ivry
wan ilse he iver met.’

“‘God bless the old gintleman!’ I says.

“‘Yis,’ says he, ‘he says it’s excitin’ to see
what I’m going to spend his money on next.’

“‘Now they ain’t anny use in pretendin’ to
be so rich,’ I interrupts him, irritated, ‘and you
with but eliven dollars and twinty cints on the
whole of ye!’

“‘I don’t carry it all with me,’ says he.

“‘No,’ says I, ‘ye don’t carry all of annything
with ye,’ I says.

“‘Would ye believe me if I said I was poor?’
says he.

“‘Divil a bit,’ says I.

“‘But then what do ye——’

“‘Go on with your story,’ I says to him
severe, ‘and don’t be wastin’ time on foolishness.’

“‘Well,’ says he, ‘me father’s been a bit sore
on me lately, sayin’ I’m not livin’ up to me repytation
with him, but just spendin’ money on
stars and bars, like annywan ilse, and managin’
to dodge the stripes. Do ye see the joke?’ he
says, stoppin’.

“‘No,’ says I, ‘but it wouldn’t be anny the
better for me seein’ it. What’s the ind of the
fairy-tale?’ I says.

“‘The joke’s about flags,’ says he. ‘Well,’ he
says, ‘me old man bet me I’d used up all the
new ways of spendin’ what he earned, and I
took the bet. If I sind him in the bill for something
I niver tried before, thin he doubles me
allowance for six months. If I don’t do it inside
of wan week, thin he cuts me allowance in
half,’ he says. ‘And I ain’t allowed just to find
something new in the shops and buy it.’

“‘I ain’t niver heard a better,’ says I. ‘Who
wrote it?’

“‘But don’t ye see?’ he says. ‘That’s why
I want to be kidnapped—to win me bet!
They’s money in it for both of us, me good man.’

“‘Och,’ says I, ‘tell me but this wan thing,’ I
says, disgusted, layin’ me finger right on wan of
the manny weak places in what he’d been
handin’ me, ‘why did ye want to make it ten
thousand instid of five, whin five would ’a’ won
your bet just as easy-like? Answer me that!’ I
says.

“‘Well,’ says he, fidgittin’ in his seat, ‘well,
you see—oh, I was just wantin’ to rub it in on
the old man,’ he says, stammerin’.

“‘I’m glad I met ye,’ I says; ‘ye’re the most
bedivel’d and all-amazin’ liar I iver seen. If ye
iver meet Mr. Roosevelt, he’ll choke to death
tryin’ to describe ye.’

“‘Yis,’ he says, ‘I guess ye caught me. It
does sound a bit queer whin I come to think
about it. But I’ll tell ye what I’ll do,’ says he,
brightenin’ up sudden-like, ‘I’ll take it all back!’

“So help me, it was too much for anny man!
Whativer he was, I give him up. And him settin’
there lookin’ at me like he was twelve years
old! Me brains was in a prespiration from tryin’
to put a label on him, but no sooner was they
findin’ a explanation of him than he goes to
work and proves thim wrong entirely. They
might as well been a omelette in me head. It
was queer doin’s, but what it was behind thim
no wan could be tellin’. ‘This is me last kidnappin’,’
says I to mesilf. ‘I want something
easy on me nerves like burglin’, and I wish I was
safe on the East Side with me little human
conundrum, bad scran to him, and what is he
smilin’ to himsilf about now?’ thinks I.

“‘Do ye want to know what I’m smilin’
about?’ says he right thin.

“‘Yis, sor,’ says I, feeble, ‘if ye don’t mind
sayin’’—me heart nearly pantin’ itsilf to death.
‘Holy saints!’ thinks I, ‘is the little divil wan
of thim mind-readers, or is he the divil himsilf?’

“‘Well,’ says he, pleasant, the car startin’ on
thim bed-spring curves down to the ferry, ‘I’ve
been thinkin’ that whin you and me has got
through with each other,’ he says, lookin’ at me
with thim fish-eyes in a way that raised the
goose-flesh on me, ‘I’ll be tryin’ this kidnappin’
business mesilf. You like it pretty well, don’t
ye?’

“‘They ain’t nothin’ like it,’ I says, thankin’
God it was the truth. And just thin the car
stopped in front of the ferry.

“‘See here, me man,’ says he, as we was gittin’
off, ‘if me frinds can’t be raisin’ the eight
thousand, we can be makin’ it five ag’in, and if
they can’t be findin’ that much, would ye be
willin’ to let me loose long enough to kidnap
some wan ilse and pay ye?’

“‘Oh,’ thinks I, ‘so that’s what ye’ve been
drivin’ at! But thin,’ says me second thoughts,
‘why has he been tellin’ me—’ We was walkin’
in the door of the ferry, and I grabs hold of his
arm, fair burstin’ with rage, bein’ nervous from
what I’d been through: ‘Ye scut,’ I says,
‘didn’t ye say your father was rollin’ in money?’

“‘Yis,’ says he, calm and pleasant, ‘but I
409
took all that back. I ain’t got anny father now.
Ye’ll have to be payin’ for the ferry-tickets,’ he
says.

“It was the ind of me last hope, and me knees
wint weak under me. I’d been thinkin’ I’d
found out wan thing about him annyways, and
now I couldn’t even raymimber what it was, excipt
that it was wrong. Whin I begun thinkin’
ag’in, we was on the ferry-boat, the two of us,
and him so cheerful it brung the tears to me eyes
and made me nervouser than I’d been yit. Thin
me wits come to me assistance, and I seen what
was the sinsible thing to be doin’ with the nasty
little divil. ‘Rich or poor,’ I says to mesilf, ‘rich
or poor, drunk or sober, intilligent or what he
looks like, lunytic or no lunytic, divil, ghost,
sleep-walker, or plain human, whativer he is or
ain’t, or all of thim togither, I want no more of
him!’

“Divil the lie I’m tellin’ ye, no sooner was
thim words in me mind than he ups and walks
off from me like he’d heard me thinkin’ and
begins talkin’ to a stranger man lookin’ over the
edge of the boat! Faith, the hair was crawlin’
round on top me head.

“I was startin’ for the other ind of the boat,
but it come over me strong to slip up behind
thim and listen was he plannin’ anny divilment
against me with the other man. Och, it was a
hard thing to bring mesilf to, but whativer ilse
I am, I’m not after bein’ anny coward.

“Bedad, they was but talkin’ of thim new
tunnels under the river, and him not even mentionin’
he was bein’ kidnapped! Wirra, wirra,
and afore I was half way down the boat, he come
runnin’ after me excusin’ himsilf for leavin’ me,
and the rist of the way over he talked tunnels to
me, sociable and entertainin’, till I could feel
thim runnin’ all through me.

“They was no chanct to slip away from him
in the crowd gittin’ off, but whin we come to
thim freight tracks just outside the ferry-house,
the gates begun droppin’ for a train, and, waitin’
till the last minute, I sprung from him to git
across and let the train come atween us, with
him held back by it while I was disappearin’
into the whole of New York. So help me, the
little omadhawn, like as not readin’ ivry
thought in me head, grabbed me back and
spoiled it all, neat plan as it was.

“‘Ye might ’a’ been killed and ruined the kidnappin’!’
he says, anxious like he was me own
mother.

“‘Don’t let me catch ye hangin’ back that
way a’gin!’ I says, pretendin’ I was uncommon
mad, which I was. ‘Whin that big gomach of a
train is gone,’ I says, ‘see that ye stick close by
me and try no foolishness. We’re goin’ to take
the subway to where we git off,’ says I, meanin’
to dodge him at the subway and grab a surface
car to whereiver it wint. ‘Come along now, and
be quick with ye.’

“But they wasn’t no chanct to dodge him,
and inside of ten minutes the two of us was settin’
side by side in a subway car like both of us
wanted to. He was gittin’ cheerfuller ivry
minute, and the cheerfuller he got, the more I
fell to wishin’ I’d niver seen the likes of him.
He didn’t look like anny human annyhow, and I
begun prayin’ the saints he wasn’t, for if he was,
thin they wasn’t anny answer to him. ‘Tare and
ages!’ the thought come to me sudden, ‘he’s a
detective, he is, and may the divil dance on the
skinny back of him till they’s snow a foot deep
where the both of thim belongs! Sure, it’s all
plain now, ivrything he’s been doin’, and why
wasn’t I thinkin’ of it whin I begun this kidnappin’—may
I niver hear the word ag’in and
bad scran to it!’

“And thin, at the next station, in come a
polayceman siven foot long and set down across
the aisle within reachin’ distance of his arm, and
he niver made a sign beyond glancin’ at him
whin he come in! ‘Thin he ain’t,’ I says to mesilf,
sinkin’ back in me seat. ‘Ivrything they
is he ain’t, and anny wan of thim would be
makin’ me feel better. If he follows me clear
home, I will kidnap him, whether I want him or
not, but if they’s wan breath left in me body I’ll
escape from him afore that,’ I goes on to mesilf,
tryin’ to think what I ate for supper and hopin’
maybe it was all wan of thim nightmares.

“It was but the beginnin’ of me troubles.
At the next station I tried to slip from him by
pretindin’ to ask the guard something and jump
out just afore the doors was closed, but nothin’
would do but he must be askin’ the guard something
himsilf. Wan of us asked if it was a express
we was on and the other asked if it wasn’t,
and thin we set down ag’in togither. Whin we
come to our station, I endivored to lose him
wanct more, whin we was walkin’ crosstown I
tried it ag’in, and in Central Park I tried it twict.
I might as well tried to dodge a ghost what was
hauntin’ me. And him cheerfuller than iver
and not seemin’ to notice annything!

“‘Look here, sor,’ I says, whin he was pretty
well into the East Side, feelin’ I could stand no
more of it, ‘I’ve been thinkin’ it over, and me
conscience is hurtin’ me. Ye niver did me no
wrong, and here I am kidnappin’ ye. It ain’t
right, sor, and I’m goin’ to give ye your liberty
and let ye go without chargin’ ye annything.’

“‘Why,’ says he, ‘I don’t want to git away!’
he says, his voice growin’ sorrowful.

“‘That ain’t got annything to do with it, sor,
askin’ your pardon,’ I says; ‘it’s me conscience,
and they ain’t anny use arguin’ with a man’s
410
conscience whin its dander is up. I’ve got to
let ye go, sor,’ I says, ‘and ye can do it now.
I’ll turn me back.’

“‘No, no,’ says he, ‘I know what ye’re
thinkin’, but——’

“‘Yis, I know ye do, sor,’ I says, thim queer
mind-readin’ ways of his comin’ over me ag’in,
‘but for God’s sake don’t tell me!’ I says.
‘Don’t tell me, sor. I’ll believe ye without that,
sor, and I know what it was already mesilf annyways,
and I wasn’t thinkin’ annything, besides,
and not meanin’ a word of it,’ I goes on, beyond
mesilf entirely, all the queer ways of him risin’
up before me, and the mosquities not bitin’ him,
me nerves givin’ out at last from all they’d been
through.

“Just thin he turned thim fish-eyes of his on
to me, niver sayin’ a word, and put out wan
hand, soft-like, to lay it on me, and I give wan
jump and was off down the street, runnin’ as I
niver run afore. And him after me and gainin’,
the divil snatch him, if he ain’t the divil himsilf.

“What people they was on the street—praise
be, they was but few at that hour—comminced
chasin’ me, too, but ’twas but wan long
block to Devinsky’s, here, and I come in that
side door like I was a autymobile, near drownin’
Peter Casey in the beer he was carryin’. By
good luck Micky Doyle and Big McCarthy was
drinkin’ at the bar, and I yells at thim: ‘Stop
thim, for the love of hiven! They’re tryin’ to
kidnap me!’ and I wint out the front door like
they was a thousand divils clutchin’ at me.

“And the boys did it, may the blessin’ of
hiven shine on thim, but wan of thim fools what
was helpin’ chase me give that little spalpeen
me name, and this day has been a curse to me
from worryin’ over what may happen me yit,
though it’s proud I should be over frustratin’
the nefarious plans of him.”

Tim merely grunted. A tough-looking waiter
entered through the swinging door, approached
the table where the two were sitting, and tossed a
dainty envelope in front of Patsy, with the announcement
that a messenger had brought it.
It was addressed to “Patsy Moran, Esq., Care of
Devinsky’s Place.” Patsy opened it with nervous
fingers, and a newspaper clipping fell out
upon the table, displaying the unprepossessing
features of a young man over the words: “Courtney
Schwartz, son of multi-Millionaire Chas. B.
Schwartz, of Pittsburg.”

A gasp from Patsy, another grunt from Tim,
and the two of them seized the letter with a
common impulse, Tim’s stolidity shaken for
once. There was dead silence while the two
pairs of eyes followed the straggling words of
what was written there:

“My dear Mr. Moran:

“The enclosed clipping will convince you that
I gave you my real name, and that my father is
abundantly able to pay ransoms. All I told
you about that bet may also be true, but as I
took that story back, I really can’t say now
whether it is or not. It doesn’t sound so, does
it?

“It may be, on the other hand, that I merely
figured out in the beginning that you were the
kind I could get so rattled you would let me go
before I got through with you. If that is true,
it worked, didn’t it? But maybe it isn’t true.

“If neither one of these things is true, what
is?

“In any case, you lost $8,000 of the easiest
money that ever happened. Why not have
tied me up somewhere till you got a boat, or,
after getting me as far as you did, why not have
taken me the rest of the way?

“But I bear you no grudge. I am sure no
one but you could make being kidnapped so
amusing. It was great. I am exceedingly
sorry, however, that I lost your suspenders.
Please accept, in their place, the eleven dollars
you have already taken from me. Would enclose
more, but feel that the experience alone
was worth a fortune to you. You needed the
practice. You were right, though, in refusing to
set my ransom at $10,000, for in that case you
would now be out $2,000 more of easy money.

“Life would be far easier, wouldn’t it, if we
could judge a book by its covers?

“Very truly yours,

“Courtney Delevan Schwartz.

“P.S.—It may interest you to know that before
I came down from my roost in those ruins,
I concealed my watch and $840 under some of
the bricks you threw at me. I found them there
this morning.

“C. D. S.”

About twenty-five years ago, the
Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia,
making a journey into the northern
part of the Empire, chanced to visit
the lonely Solovetski Monastery on
the shores of the White Sea. Among the sacred
painters of this monastery he found a young
peasant who had been sent there by his parents
as a boy of fifteen. Duke Vladimir, struck with
his talent, shipped him off to St. Petersburg to
study in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.
The young Russian peasant was Alexander
Borissoff, the adventurous painter whose work
in the last few years has made the wonderful
color scheme of the Arctic Circle for the first
time accessible to the eyes of the world.

His early years on the edge of the Arctic fired
the imagination of the youth, and directed the
course of his whole future life. While he was
still a student he made a trip to England.
“There,” he says, “an idea that had long been
shaping itself in my brain took hold of me. The
polar regions fascinated me. My forefathers,
I knew, hunted bears at Spitzbergen; and as a
boy I had heard all about the Arctic. I wanted
to see and paint that wonderful country.
Travelers would write that the Arctic nights
were magnificent; but I wanted to give the
colors and lights themselves.”

Borissoff Becomes a Samoyed

Borissoff shipped on a Russian boat from Newcastle
for the Murman Coast—Russian territory
adjoining Norway—and from there sailed to
Nova Zembla. On the frozen island of the
Arctic Sea, living among the wandering Samoyed
tribes, he began to paint under such
conditions as certainly no artist has ever
painted before. It was the make-shift expedition
of a buoyantly adventurous and rough-bred
young artist, better furnished with canvases
and brushes than with clothing, instruments,
and stores. He practically became a Samoyed;
he adapted himself to the tribal laws with good-natured
tact, helping out the native commissariat
by shooting white partridges, wild geese,
and Arctic bear. He studied reindeer breeding;
he took native baths in steam-tents and ice-water;
412
he attended weddings, funerals, and
pagan rites. Wherever the tribe traveled, he
followed; and everywhere he painted.

The movements of the Samoyed depend
largely on the habits of the reindeer. “In autumn
the reindeer seeks the wooded zone,”
says Borissoff. “He cannot stand the tremendous
snowstorms that whirl in the tundra;
and he must live on lichen from the trunks and
boughs of fir-trees, or feed on the shoots of birch
and willows, when the frozen soil prevents him
from browsing moss under the snow. But no
sooner does he sniff the polar spring, than he
longs irresistibly to gallop to the north to the
open air of the Arctic, where there are no tiresome
gnats, no intolerable wasps to lay their
larvæ in his skin and cause him torment.”

The Samoyed keeps in this migrating animal’s
wake; and it was in one of these migrations
north that Borissoff first saw what he
calls the Realms of Death.

Painting in a Temperature of 30°
Below Zero

“The curious thing was that I found all as I
had imagined it,” he says. “The knowledge of
the icebergs and the snow seemed to have been
born in me. Vast stretches of glaciers with
their yawning chasms of death, icebergs mountain-high—I
greeted them as old friends. Living
on native rations and enduring the most
bitter cold, I made landscapes—or rather, icescapes—in
the open, with a temperature of
30 degrees below zero.

“Sometimes it was impossible to paint. Even
the turpentine froze. The paint congealed in
lumps, whilst the hairs of the brushes snapped
off like brittle glass. I had to put on fur
gloves to hold a brush, and work with swift, energetic
strokes—as the rough appearance of
some of my paintings bears evidence.”

All of Borissoff’s paintings were done in the
ice zone beyond the 70th parallel of north latitude,
in the district between Archangel and the
Yalmal Peninsula. He never tires of telling
of the peculiar color-tones of this region, and the
curious psychological effects of its distance, silence,
and isolation. Living amid its singular
light phenomena, where the spring-time snow
turns pink against blue icebergs, and the boggy
midsummer tundra swims in a sea of orange-red
against a sky of aquamarine, even the Samoyed
becomes a color worshiper.

“Why does that man sit in a scarlet cloak on
rose-colored snow against a solid background of
dark blue?” I asked, examining one of Borissoff’s
paintings.

“The deep blue is an iceberg,” he laughed.
“Yes, and the snow is really that color—by reflection.
The man is a Samoyed who bartered
everything he owned—reindeer, walrus, ivory,
dogs, and sledges—to an adventurous dealer
from the nearest settlements for a robe of scarlet
woolen stuff. Then, in his scarlet cloak, he
wandered about in the sunlight for ten days, in
an ecstatic trance, silent, good-for-nothing, living
on his family, drunk with the glory of that
scarlet garment!”

Traveling With a Woman Scout

The man was Danillo, the brother-in-law of
Ireena, a woman scout of whom Borissoff
speaks frequently in his reminiscences, and
whose wonderful gift of “seeing” by atmospheric
signs the country beyond the horizon and
divining where the trails lay gave her a position
of peculiar dignity among her tribesfolk. This
woman was their sole and undisputed guide
through the monotonous flat wastes of snow.
Among the last of the pagans of Europe
woman’s place is certainly higher than it is supposed
to have been before the dawn of Christianity.
A woman like Ireena may hold the
tribal-family together; revive courage in dire
surroundings; decide momentous debates as to
reindeer-speculation; practise medicine and
surgery; withstand the redoubtable devils of
blizzard and thaw; serve the bad Siadey in his
bloody sanctuary; and even dare the unmentionable
good god’s isolating stretches of white
cold, to serve an inquisitive painter from the
South.

It was Ireena and Danillo who took Borissoff
to the last pagan shrines of Europe, never visited
before by a European.

“In the background,” says Borissoff, “one
sees mountains of floating icebergs of tremendous
dimensions, prevented from approaching
the coast by submarine reefs. Here, on the
edge of the Arctic, are the cliffs containing the
Holy Place, reached only after a terrible journey
over icy rocks and fearful ravines, through riverbeds
stuffed with snow, up snowy slopes in intricate
zig-zags, where the reindeer floundered
and protested.”

Borissoff’s Pilgrimage to the Last
Pagan Shrines of Europe

Three versts’ distance from the shrine, they
stopped on the threshold of the Samoyed Mecca.
Borissoff stumbled over huge mounds of idols
heaped between cliffs, one of them so great that
forty sledges could not have removed the idols.
He passed mountains of deer-skulls, antlers, and
skulls of polar bears; and heaps of rusty axes,
knives, chains, fragments of anchors, harpoons,
and parts of rifles brought as offerings over
weary leagues. The Samoyeds often drive
414
here from a thousand miles away, stop at the
threshold of this dwelling-place of the supreme
Idol-God of the polar regions, and, killing a
domestic deer as the least sacrifice, besprinkle
the shrine with its blood.

“People who naïvely believe that the Samoyeds
are no longer heathen are greatly mistaken,”
says Borissoff. “Notwithstanding their
being nominally Christians, they still worship
their Hyes and Siadeys no less fervently than in
old times. Recent bloodstains on the idols testified
to recent visits; but it was only when we
were about to take our departure that I learned
that this was not the chief shrine at all!”

Borissoff insisting, Ireena reluctantly guided
him to it, three or four versts down the coast,
to the east.

“Now we passed far greater mounds of axes,
knives, and other valuable offerings,” he says.
“The idols stood like an army around two
enormous elevated, round clay altars at the very
top of the mountain, cut off by a deep chasm
bridged by a stone archway; but the number of
bones was less than I had expected to find.”

Ireena explained.

“This is the dwelling-place of Hye, the god,
not that of Siadey, the devil,” she said. “Hye
wants for sacrifice the head of a human being or
of a white bear, or at least of a wild deer. Now
that white bears are harder to kill and wild deer
are scarcer, it’s no good for people to come here—unless
in great stress. But Siadey takes anything,
even domestic deer!”

“In great stress” had a grim significance.
One of the skulls was obviously that of a man
of Aryan race.

Further on they came on one of the sledges
habitually used by the Samoyeds for the conveyance
of their gods. Opening its box, Borissoff
found two human-shaped idols, one of wood
and the other of stone, and the images of a bear
and a wolf in wood. These must have been
brought out of the tundra by some sorceress, to
keep real bears and wolves from some locality.
As long as these objects remained at Hye’s
shrine, there would be no danger to the pious
offerer’s herds. Near by lay another curiosity.
It was a piece of boulder wrapped up in red
cloth. It was “sickness,” removed from the
tundra, beyond the sea, so as never to return to
the dwellers of the Tchoom!

Borissoff lived with the Samoyeds until he
had painted up all his canvases. Returning to
civilization, he was immediately welcomed by
enthusiastic amateurs. The sale of seventy-five
pictures en bloc to M. Tretiakoff, of Moscow,
put him on his feet financially. Count Witte
took an interest in his work. The Grand Duke
Vladimir remembered that he had been the first
to appreciate the painter’s possibilities; and the
Tsar told him to go ahead with another expedition,
offering to defray most of the expenses.

An Ill-Fated Expedition

So, with the zoölogist Timofeieff, and the
chemist Filipoff, he soon started on a veritable
white man’s expedition, with a smart cutter, the
“Metchka,” a portable dwelling-house, kerosene
stoves, scientific instruments, photographic apparatus,
guns, ammunition, books, clothing,
trading-stores, and food delicacies in abundance.
Yet, by a strange irony of fate, the well-stocked
415
little expedition was destined to suffer perils and
privations such as Borissoff had never dreamed
of among his Samoyeds.

They set up their portable dwelling-house on
the edge of the Nova Zembla tundra off the
Strait of Matochkin Shar, transporting its parts
and furnishings by dog-sledge. By the time
this was accomplished, the “Metchka” had arrived
in the Strait; and they started on a voyage
into the Kara Sea. Their object was to distribute
materials and provisions along the
extreme northeastern coast of Nova Zembla
during the fall, and to return to their house to
spend the winter. In the spring they hoped
to make an early start in sledges along the
route of their supplies.

The Abandonment of the Ship

“It was in navigating the Sea of Kara that we
encountered our first acute peril,” says Borissoff.
“The further north we got, the more
numerous were icebergs. Often our small ship
was wedged in tight between walls of ice that
threatened to crush us.

“We decided to turn back; but it was too
late. Winter was closing in earlier than we had
anticipated; and the broken ice about us was
becoming a solid field. After two weeks’ battle,
we had to surrender. Nature had captured us.
We were being carried off into regions of certain
death. Our only escape lay in abandoning our
ship, and attempting to regain the coast by
journeying across the dreadful sea of ice on
foot. Gathering what provisions we could
carry, our party of nine, including the five sailors,
set out with but little expectation of ever
reaching land.”

Everything was put into three canoes, to be
pulled along the edges of ice-banks by nine men
and some twenty dogs. Soon the free water
froze tight; and they had to drag the boats over
the ice. The wind made this too difficult. The
canoes were abandoned; and the most necessary
supplies were placed on sledges made of skis.
With the snow up to their waists, they plodded
on—until they discovered that they were on a
drifting island of ice!

Drifting Out to Sea on Floes of Ice

“We noticed that the ice a little way in front of
us was flying at a terrible speed toward the
north, while we seemed to be standing still; but
this was merely an optical illusion—the ice in
front of us was standing still, for it was shore-ice,
while we were being carried at a giddy pace out
to sea!

“Our only salvation was to reach the stationary
shore-ice. The edge of the moving floe was
grinding it into a devilish porridge. Immense
blocks, weighing tens of thousands of tons, were
whirled round, leaped out of the sea, climbed on
each other, rearing on high, groaning and roaring,
and plunging and vanishing!”

They made the crossing and dragged on inland
for three days. A gentle breeze was blowing.
Borissoff heard a suspicious plash of water.

“It was horrible to believe our ears. We
climbed a hummock; and there our eyes assured
us that another channel of water really
separated us from firm land! The floe began
breaking up. The solid ground failed beneath
us. Our feet were sucked into yielding quicksands
of snow and splintered ice. We threw
ourselves flat to distribute our weight and
clutched the larger lumps. We lost our kerosene
stove, the tray for lighting fires on, some of
our cartridges, and most of our instruments.
The sleeping-bags, fur coats, and other remnants
of our supplies we managed to save.”

The despairing howls of their lost dogs cut
them to the heart. The men lost courage.
Borissoff and the two scientific men had to
threaten the others with revolvers; and a
tragedy on the ice was imminent, when they
found themselves being carried into an extensive
bay surrounded by lofty cliffs. On an iceberg
they discovered brackish water. Later it
gave them unbearable thirst, until the men
cried: “Oh, God, for one small cup of warm
water, to die in peace!”

Making a Fire with Seal Fat

Borissoff killed a seal and implored them to be
patient while he made a fire with its oily fat to
melt snow for drinking—a trick he had learned
among the Samoyeds. Ravenously eating the
liver, lights, kidneys, and brains raw, they began
cutting the necessary pieces of fat. Borissoff
would take a tiny log of firewood, cut it small,
pour kerosene over it, rub it with fat, and light
it. This had to be done in a tea-tin. They put
fat on the fire. It burned splendidly. One
small stick warmed the kettle; and the famished
men were soon drinking lukewarm cocoa. During
their further wanderings from floe to floe,
they carried with them the embers of wood and
treasured every little piece of rag and paper “to
keep the lamp of our life burning as long as we
should have seal fat. The wood embers seemed
capable of burning for ever, provided there was
enough fat!”

They grew attached to particular floes on
which they had built shelters. But the sleeping-bags
were becoming unendurable, the fur rubbed
off, the leather wet and clammy, like the skin of
a putrefying carcass. They had almost got to
lying in the sleeping-bags by day, when a Samoyed
declared he smelt the smoke of a native
encampment. A sailor thought he heard the
barking of dogs; but they paid no attention, for
the howls of their own poor beasts, wandering
aimlessly on the floes, often came to them.
After drinking tea, they rose up and prepared to
make some effort.

The Party Rescued by Samoyeds

It grew lighter. There was something moving
on the shore. It could not be merely birds!
They let off a gun. Two shots answered. Lines
of tiny black dots advanced toward them.
They were Samoyed dog-sledges. “And fancy
what a stroke of luck!” says Borissoff; “they
were old friends of mine, with whom I had lived
on my first sojourn in the tundra!”

Brought finally to shore by the natives, they
rejoiced childishly at its contact. Here was
solid land! Here were real stones! “Strange
phenomenon,” says Borissoff, “an hour before,
we had scarcely been able to lift our weary feet.
Now we wanted to leap, dance, laugh, cry, pray,
and run about aimlessly! Timofeieff and I
took two rifles and went along the shore northward.
We ploughed through the snow, why
and whither we did not know. We could not
sit still. Then, when we returned to the snug
tents, we ate boiled reindeer meat, drank hot
tea, and lay down to sleep twenty-seven hours
without once waking!” The land journey back
to their portable house was accomplished in dog-sledges.

The three months’ night was passed amid
comfortable surroundings. They shot the
white bear. They read, dreamed, told stories,
and played cards interminably. They received
continual visits from delighted natives, come
on perilous pilgrimages to the magic European
house, with its lavish food novelties,
its devil-boxes that talked, sang, and played
music.

When the three months’ day came again, they
made a great sledge expedition north to the
Straits of Tchekin, called The Unknown and the
Bear Straits. Borissoff, as usual, made quantities
of paintings. He named one enormous
glacier after Count Witte.

“One morning I went out to paint it, shining
like silver in the sunlight. I had scarcely finished
making the rough sketch,” he tells, “when
a noise of shuffling and deep breathing attracted
my attention. Glancing round, I saw to my
horror the shaggy white body of a great polar
bear within ten feet of my back. He had been
watching me paint. Now, taking my fright for
hostility, he lost interest in art and advanced
toward me, with a paw uplifted. Springing
back, I snatched my rifle, crying: ‘Oshkai!
Oshkai!’ hoping that my companions might
hear. Dropping on one knee, I fired; but the
bullet only caused the great bear to roar and
dash toward me. I fired again. The shot was
more effective. It slowed his progress. Then
three shots rang from behind an icy boulder;
for my companions had heard and come to my
rescue, and I was saved.”

Good luck, however, could not stay with the
expedition. First, their best dogs went mad,
not from hydrophobia, but from the strange
craze of the ice, which affects men and dogs
alike. Then food failed. The remaining dogs
starved, though they killed their few reindeer to
feed both themselves and the dogs. When
nothing remained to kill, they were glad to eat
the refuse of their previous camps. Amid hair-breadth
escapes, suffering from starvation and
exhaustion, they wandered back on foot to their
portable house, where the arrival of the Russian
military transport-ship, the “Pakhtoosoff,”
ended their courageous preparations for a second
wintering. Leaving the house and its stores to
their faithful Samoyeds and carefully packing
418
Borissoff’s three hundred paintings, they
steamed back to civilization.

Borissoff’s Revelation of Arctic Color

When Borissoff arrived at St. Petersburg, the
Tsar sent for him. His impression of the Emperor
was of “a quiet gentleman who takes a
keen delight in art.” The Empress, herself a
painter of portraits, was immensely interested;
and the first exhibition of the paintings took
place in the White Salon of the Winter Palace.
Other exhibitions followed in other capitals of
Europe. In Berlin, the exhibit was patronized
by the German Empress; in Munich, by the
Prince Regent. In Paris the French Government
bought “In the Kara Sea”; while in London
the court set pointed the way to all good
Englishmen to their exhibition at the Grafton
Galleries.

The extraordinary thing about the paintings
is, of course, their revelation of the colors
of the frozen world of the polar circle.
In a region which our ignorant imagination
shrouds in dull sepia tones, Borissoff reveals
lights that we never dreamed to be on land or
sea. There is an effect of strange, mysterious
brilliancy in one of his largest canvases, entitled
“In the Kingdom of Death.” Dark icebergs
tower above the open sea; while through
heavy purple-black clouds, melting to blue and
mauve, break lines of lurid red light from the
August sunrise, that throw an orange-red glow
along steely, blue-black waters.

“Midnight in the Kara Sea”—selected by
the French Government’s experts as Borissoff’s
most extraordinary production—shows a sky
of glowing orange, and floes of ice drifting on
black waters. An unearthly yellow-green light
illumines the deep blue shadows of “A Polar
Winter Night.” Two polar bears stand in a
great expanse of snow; the moon’s rays fall
across rocks and project their outline in black
shade. The snow is wonderfully rendered—thick,
soft, and glistening, after a recent fall.

“Looking for the Reindeer—Evening” shows
a snowy landscape with a firmament of yellow.
In “The Cold Became More Severe” gray plains
are seen beneath a sky of clear apricot. “A
Halting Place” has a dark blue-gray sky, brown-gray
ice, a belt of snow, and a range of hills with
patches of brown rock showing beneath the
snow. Two polar bears lying dead on the ice in
front are admirably done; and the whole picture
is full of stern romance. The romantic
quality of Borissoff’s best pictures comes, in
part, from the fact that he makes us understand
that people live in these awful places—or
have lived!

Such is the suggestion of “The Last Survivor.”
It shows a desolate shore where,
after an exceptionally severe winter, a band
of poor hunters had perished. Reverently the
survivors had interred their dying comrades—until
the last man died! A solitary white
fox surrounded by a few bleaching bones is the
central feature of the haunting picture.

For the most part, the pictures are small canvases,
depicting glaciers, icebergs, snowdrifts,
coast scenes, and the tundra in its ever-varying
color-aspects, winter and midsummer, spring
and autumn, with its Samoyeds, their tents,
boats, sledges, reindeer, dogs, and foxes.
Every imaginable atmospheric effect is given,
from the wonderful glow of the midnight sun, to
raw, hanging fog that can be well-nigh felt. Of
the splendid richness of these effects and, quite
as much, their baffling gradations, the painter
never tires of telling. “One beauty of this
strange nature,” he says, “is the extraordinarily
soft variety of tones, that can only be
compared to the reflections of precious stones.
And God preserve the artist from trying to
follow conventional ideas as to tones and effects
that may have happened to strike him as
universal in the past! Offended nature will
elude him. It is only by divesting oneself of
prejudice that one can render these wonderful
harmonies.”

BY
WILLA SIBERT CATHER

BY
GERTRUDE HALL

I

At one end of the village stood a century-old
house, infinitely seemly in
line and proportion, in color unblemished
white. A hint of the
manorial, if not the temple-like, it
owed to a front of broad stairs and fluted columns,
upholding a pediment which over-hung
the ground-floor window-doors and shadowed
the windows of the upper story. An equal dignity
and rather serious beauty belonged to the
arrangement of the surrounding garden. Year
after year, the same plants bloomed there, the
sort, mostly, we call old-fashioned. A reverence
for ancestral predilections determined the
colors and fragrances to be enjoyed to-day; but
as these fairly accorded with the present owners’,
the garden remained a true expression of
the house’s inhabitants.

At the other end of the village, overlooking
the main street, stood a new house, fruit of what
seemed now and then to some one the most
singularly successful research in vulgar ugliness.
But to a large proportion of the villagers it embodied
the last word of splendor: it had, on the
face of it, cost enormously, and necessarily met
the tastes of many, from the fact that it offered
some specimen of every style the one who
planned it had admired in any dwelling ever
seen by her: turrets, balconies, projecting windows,
a Renaissance roof, acres of verandah,
and, ornamenting all, as lace might a lady’s garment,
numberless yards of intricate wooden
openwork. It had originally been painted in
three colors, but one day, no one divined at
what prompting, a gang of workmen was seen
overlaying the rich buff, russet, and green, with
white, and the house stood forth among its
trees no longer utterly condemnable to the more
fastidious, but clothed in such redeeming grace
as we might find in a person who with every
fault had yet some quality of candor. Pyramidal
masses of hydrangea flanked the entrance-door
and spread in opaline patches upon
the lawn; a round of ornamental water, with a
central statue and a border of sea-conchs, supported
the green pads of lilies,—the pink variety.
The estate was bounded on the street by
a fence of wrought iron,—more ponderous lace,
in this case black.

In these two houses lived two women who
frankly could not bear each other. We had
nearly said two beautiful women, but the one
impressed rather by charm than any unusual
felicity of form, and the other, strikingly effective,
“stunning,” as she was frequently described,
displeased almost as many as she
pleased. Yet each of them had heard herself
called beautiful often enough to have assumed
the bearing and outlook upon life of a beautiful
woman: there was something positive in the
claim of each that her will should be given
weight. We have said they hated each other:
but each fair bosom harbored a very different
sentiment from the other. Celia Compton, the
charming, who lived in the peaceful ancient
house, hated Judith Bray, the red-blooded
beauty for whom had been built the architectural
monstrosity on the main street, merely as
one hates smoke in the eyes, a grating sound, or
shudders at the thought of flannel against the
teeth. But Judith lay awake in the night, unable
to sleep for hating Celia Compton so, and
would hardly have suffered more from stabs
with a knife than she did from the recapitulation
of what she called the slights put upon her
by Celia. She turned hot and cold at the recollection,
and clenched her hands while she devised
sanguinary methods of getting even with
her. When the sane light of day returned,
these must be dropped: for Celia’s offences
were, after all, such as can hardly be visited
with vengeance; they could not even be defined.
But Judith had a companion, a poor
relative whom she had taken to live with her,
an insignificant, homely, middle-aged-looking
young woman called Jess, who understood without
definition, and with whom she could enlarge
upon the subject of Miss Compton without concern
for being precise as to facts or just as to
421
assumptions,—true only to her dislike, and
correct in her sense of the dislike felt for her by
Celia. It was with this Jess she planned some
of the crude impertinences by which she endeavored
to retaliate upon her enemy.

When Celia, at the death of her father, the
Egyptologist, whose obituary notice thrust
aside the daily news by an ample column, had
decided to come back and spend her summers
in the grandparents’ house where much of her
childhood had been spent, she had looked forward
with infinite affection to this return to
the tenderly remembered old village which she
had not seen for half a dozen years. The vision
of it, always in apple-blossom time, had used
often to interpose between her and yellow
reaches of the Nile. She had been informed,
no doubt, in letters, of innovations at home, but
had read, as became evident afterwards, without
bringing home to herself the meaning of these
communications, for it was with a shock she at
last beheld them. There had been in the village,
as the image of it lived in her brain, one
modest store to which you went for everything.
It was kept by a good, simple man whose wife
and children as often as he waited upon the
customers: all people with whom you in good
country fashion talked over the affairs of the
country-side, crops, church-festival, change of
minister. In place of this now stood a large,
showy building called the Emporium. One Matthew
Bray, from outside, had bought out the
widow of the old store-keeper, and enlarged the
business as you might see. From all over the
county people came to trade there. There was
no longer the necessity to go by rail to the city
to shop: here were dress-stuffs, trimmings,
fashion-books, a millinery department. In
reality the thing was not ill done, since it perfectly
met a need, but Celia stared at it in helpless
grief, hurt as by hearing a familiar melody
bawled out of tune. Then she was driven past
the new house—it was still tri-colored—and
her mind was made up about the Brays.

She loved many of the village people, with
whom she had stood from infancy in the simplest
cordial relations. It hurt a little to discover
their pleasure in these changes, the mean
ambitions, as it seemed to Celia, which they
were developing. She found it difficult to be
just, and pardon as natural their satisfaction in
the growing material prosperity brought about
by the influx of people drawn by the Emporium.
The widow of the old store-keeper, upon the
strength of it, had opened an Ice-Cream Room.
They loved the increased liveliness, too. Celia
could not blame them: her winters were lively,
while theirs were dull enough. But she came
here for rest, the village of her love had been
ideally sleepy. Now it was spoiled for her. It
hurt her, too, like a needle-point of neuralgia, to
observe, as she fancied, a new tone among the
younger people. Were those really attempts at
style and dash and smartness she witnessed in
the children of good old Asah and Jerusha
Brown? Heart-sick, if she allowed herself to
consider the spreading of a leaven which would
in time unfit the place for her habitation, she
lived more secluded than had been her habit
while there in former days. The old house was
easily sufficient to itself in the matter of society.
The family made but a small group, but friends
of Celia’s from the outside world succeeded each
other in the enjoyment of the Comptons’ hospitality,
of an elegance as simple as it was graceful.

She had half suspected what pernicious admiration
must be at the root of the degeneracy
she perceived among the village girls, when one
day—this was soon after her return—she
saw Judith Bray. It was in the Emporium,
for, no matter how much you hate an Emporium,
if there is not the least thread-and-needle
store beside, you may be forced to patronize it.
The attendant, matching embroidery-silks for
her, bent to say: “That across the aisle is Miss
Bray.” Celia looked.

For some time she had been aware of a strong
feminine voice exchanging witticisms with the
clerk, but had paid no attention. She saw a
handsome brunette, of what she called to herself,
as she thought Judith over on the way
home, a crude sort of primitive beauty, as if
that superb body and face had been kneaded
with profusion of coarse materials and not carefully
finished off: large yet quick dark eyes, a
black abundance of hair, features of an indescribably
triumphant cast. The physical exuberance
clearly expressed in the young woman’s
color and molding seemed condensed in a voice
and laugh whose chime cut ringingly through
all contending sounds. She was dressed with
conspicuous elegance, according to her own
idea, which the community accepted from her.
If one discarded all standards, this solid prize-fruit
was certainly good to look at. Celia
granted so much, but did not for the fraction of
an instant relinquish her standards. Personally,
she could no more relish that presence than
a perfume or a flavor too pronounced; it may
be doubted whether that particular perfume
and flavor would have been to her taste in the
weakest dilution.

While she was thus in the act of stealing
glances, Judith abruptly swung round. The
clerk, showing off the last importation of dress-fabrics,
had whispered to her, “That just behind
you is Miss Compton,” and Judith, breathless
422
with interest, turned her full bright eye upon
the one who, in Judith’s own words, had been
“the most important person socially” until she
came.

“She looks just as I thought she would,” she
said low to the clerk; and she contrived to find
herself near the door when Celia was leaving,
and, smiling an assured smile, she said, “I am
so glad to see you back, Miss Compton. I have
heard so much about you, I feel as if you were
already an old acquaintance. I wish you would
come and see me. I suppose we are still new-comers
to you, so according to the ways here it
would be your place to call first, wouldn’t it,
though I shouldn’t mind a bit coming first, if
you say so….”

Celia, flushing at the intolerable offensiveness
to her of this, replied in a low soft voice
that she was at present not going out at all, and
with a bow of the most finished perfection
passed forth. It had been so well done that
Judith, who felt snubbed at the moment, rejected,
upon consideration, the idea of a repulse,
and the year after, when Miss Compton was out
of mourning, sent her an invitation. Celia declined
it in a note which contained not one discoverable
prickle, but yet had about it an atmosphere
that seemed to numb Judith’s hand
which held it. To the most critical examination,
however, it showed nothing that was not
completely civil, and the unwary Judith permitted
herself to act upon the verdict of her
brain, and again, and at intervals again, made
overtures to Celia, of whom she had from the
first glance fallen into the most extravagant admiration.
It was her native conceit which prevented
her for such a long time from reaching
the certainty that a closer acquaintance with
her was not desired. For what reason?…
How could such a thing be?… She was in her
proper esteem so beyond question as desirable
an acquaintance as any person could have.
And she was attracted by Celia as she had never
been by woman or man before. Though she
was far from being so humble as to wish herself
in any wise altered to resemble her, it was the
difference between them, no doubt, which gave
such fascination for her to Celia’s every way of
being, her coolness, restraint, that personal
pride so quiet it had the face almost of modesty,
and her manner! her air!… Covering the
house with white paint was, however, the only
tribute of imitation Judith ever paid her, and
it was not conscious: she had merely looked at
the white house so much that she judged the
paint on her own house to have become, with
wear, more glaring.

It was during the third summer that Judith
compassed her desire of standing within the
portals of the Compton house. Celia, sitting
with her mother and brother and their visitors
in the shadow of the Dorian pillars, in the idleness
of a warm afternoon, saw Judith’s carriage
approach, and—instead of passing, stop.
Judith, in splendid array, descended and came
forward. Celia, wondering, arose. When the
ordinary formalities had been dispatched, Celia
ushered Miss Bray into the long museum-like
sitting-room, with the odor of strange old far-away
things. Judith, while she spoke, could
not keep her eyes from roving. She said, and a
simple-minded, rich delight in what she had to
say, and felt herself able to do, pierced through
her expressions: “I understand, Miss Compton,
that you don’t like the idea of a line of
electric cars running through our village and
down to the lake. Some one said so. You
think it would spoil the looks of the old street
and bring a lot of rough Sunday people. I
wanted to hear it directly from you, to be quite
sure, for it really, when all is said, you know,
depends upon my father, and my father—”
she laughed with roguish audacity—“does exactly
what I want him to. It’s true he’s set his
heart on the line—it’s progress, in his way of
looking. But if you don’t want it, there shan’t
be any car-line. Isn’t it fun? There’s a town-hall
and select-men, and all that, but it really
depends upon us two. My Dad will do anything
I say, and I’ll do anything you say.
There!… You’ve only got to speak….”

Celia had felt herself growing pale with the
sheer force of antipathy. Her nervous hands
were so near trembling, she reached to a jade
cup and took from it a string of curious blue
beads with which to keep them occupied. She
replied in precisely modulated tones; “You
are mistaken in believing I care—beyond a
certain point. I had rather there were electric
cars than—than certain other things. Personally,
it can affect me very little—since I
believe we shall soon cease altogether coming
here for the summer.”

Judith, the dense, went away charmed with
her call. She had loitered a little while on the
porch, in chatter with the company, and been
escorted to her carriage by the brother. She
was amply discussed after her departure, she
and her errand; the brother and the other man,
as far as circumstances permitted, wedging in
good words for her, with half-ironical good-humor.

The small, withered gentlewoman in the rocking-chair
said, “I fear you will be obliged to call
upon her, Celia, after all.”

Celia somberly raged. “Is one to be forced
to know people whom it gives one goose-flesh
to hear mentioned? The Brays have made me
423
feel as if boiled cabbage were reeking from every
house in the village, and I am to associate with
them quite as with people I like? Voluntary
intercourse should signify, after all, some degree
of regard, and I am to pretend—No! I
will not admit the legitimacy of any tyranny
which could so coerce me! I will be civil to her
every time my bad luck throws us together, but
seek her out I will not.”

At the last of the season, nevertheless, Mrs.
Compton’s card and Celia’s were left at the
Brays’, their call falling upon a day when Judith
was far from home, to the knowledge of every
soul in the place, Judith truly believed. Celia
left on the day after, with the comfortable sense
of having done her duty and deserved the crumb
of favor vouchsafed her by fate.

She supposed, when she came back the following
year, that her relation with the Brays
was now definitely established: one formal call
from each party during the season. But the
first time she met Judith, she perceived instantly
that all was changed. She knew she
had made an enemy. How the revulsion had
come about was never clear: whether owing to
the mere ripening of age—Judith was now
twenty-four or -five, Celia five or six years older—or
the souring of a despised prepossession,
or the intimacy with Jess, which began at about
this time. Celia’s punctilious bow met the response
of as much petty rudeness as could be
concentrated into a lifting of the chin and a
stare. “Very well,” she said to herself stonily,
“if you prefer it so, it is by far the most agreeable
to me.”

It was not, altogether; that is, not all the
time. We are seldom of a piece, and a part of
Celia was chafed, and now and then saddened,
by the sense of having brought about anything
so unbeautiful as this hate. She could not at
all moments clear her conscience of blame, and
had pangs of regret—too honest with herself,
however, not to know that if all were still to do,
she should do the same. For another part of
Celia, child of a worldly clan, felt itself eminently
justified. One must keep the two
worlds distinct in practice: Brethren before our
Maker, we yet play the social game according to
its rules. After the first, she relegated the matter
to a high shelf. She had not made much
case of Judith’s friendship, she made scarcely
more of her enmity. Her life was full of other
interests, and, as she mingled less and less with
the village, the reminder of Judith’s sentiments
toward her hardly recurred often enough to
constitute an element in her consciousness.
The truth is that as Judith dropped out of her
existence in the character of one who could interfere
with it, she disliked her less. Sometimes
the flushed face with its assumed haughtiness,
“cutting her dead,” (Celia, with some idea,
perhaps, of doing for her part a Christian’s duty,
continued to bow as if unaware of the insult intended
her) smote her with a sense of pity at
the evil passions hardening that really beautiful
face. The Comptons’ idea that they might
have to give up the village as a summering place
was forgotten. When a little chafed by some
noisy exhibition of the Brays’ vulgarity, Celia
used to say to herself hopefully that no doubt
Judith would in time marry and go to live elsewhere.
She would have been amazed to discover
that she was herself directly concerned
with Judith’s singleness. Judith, the very type
of whose charms proclaimed her passionate
temperament, had never among her adorers
seen one she was sure would have been felt good
enough for Celia. There was a story passed
along in confidence—how things which the
persons concerned in them never breathe come
to be generally known is a mystery—that
Celia would never marry, because the one she
should have married, renounced on account of
some deadly habit of a drug, was off somewhere
at the other end of the world, fighting his weakness,
or, there were those who said, having given
up the fight. Judith, hearing this long before,
had considered the circumstances with an aching
sympathy, mingled with awe. She knew
she could never have done it. If she had cared
for the man,—the most brilliant man before,
and now the most unhappy,—she pictured him
handsome as a hero of Byron’s,—she would
have had to cling to him and go down into the
depths together. But spinsterhood had acquired
an effect of fineness for her from the
study of Celia, with the destruction of her happiness
so perfectly concealed that one could detect
it by no sign, unless that air of detachment,
sometimes, and distance and fatigue, were an
expression of it. In her latter mood Judith
chose savagely to despise Celia for her defection
from her lover; at the same time she lent
small ear to love-proffers, absorbed in a different
passion. For the hatred of Celia, who did not
think of her once a week, was grown to a passion.

It was at this time hardly a matter of resolve
that Celia did not think of Judith, unless some
vision obtruded itself of her, driving past with
Jess, whose little sallow face—owing its effect
of malignity perhaps to a defect of the eyes, of
which one never could quite ascertain the nature—was
so well fitted to set off the proud
bloom of hers. A strain of magnificence had
developed in her: she was perpetually organizing
festivities, picnics, water-parties, lawn-parties:
her garden could be seen a mile away
424
at night, festooned with Chinese lanterns, while
the village band played among the trees, and
the contingent of the village people which she
had formed into “her set” ate ices on her verandah.
Effluvia of these doings drifted necessarily
to the Comptons.

But in time Celia began finding herself subjected
to small occasional pin-pricks of annoyance
at things reported to her as having been
said by Judith. They were repeated without
malicious intention, mostly as being funny.
The village dressmaker, who sometimes sewed
for Celia, was employed as well by Judith. It
might almost have been supposed part of this
woman’s business to tell the village news while,
as was the custom, one sat and sewed with her.
Celia expected it as much as that she should
bring her thimble and wax. Miss Greene was
one of her oldest village associations, a “character”
she was called, and was a privileged and
much-quoted person. She felt a whole-souled
allegiance to the Comptons, but no less to the
new-comer, Judith Bray, who had been lavish
to her as to everybody. She “did not know as
the one interfered with the other.” When she
liked a person, the bent of her disposition was to
tell her everything, but particularly whatever in
the most distant way had reference to her.

She said to Celia one day, without ceasing to
push her gathering needle, “You know who
Judy Bray thinks you like?… in looks?…
Well, you never would guess it! Not
’cause there ain’t nothin’ in it, though …
for after you’ve been told, you’ll see it at
once. She says she can never see Beech—Beechnut,
your dog, you know—without it
makes her think of you.”

Celia felt an inward start. The dog had been
given her by some one very dear, and she saw
at once by what perhaps unconscious association
of ideas it was probable the animal had
been selected for her. Some vague resemblance
unmistakably existed between herself and the
red-haired setter, with his delicate long face and
air at once noble and mournful. She felt no inclination
to resent the comparison in itself,
though she knew it had been meant ill-naturedly;
but she chafed under the sense of the
power possessed by the first-comer to belittle
one at pleasure, if it be only in words.

The remark might have passed from her
mind, as originating in Judith’s, but for an
event forming a complement to it. Walking
down the main street with Beech, she came, as
she approached the Emporium, in sight of a bull-dog,
hideous enough surely to take a first prize—bow-legged,
goggle-eyed, crooked-toothed,
a stranger in the village, where no dog had ever
happened before who constituted a real danger
to Beech. He was decorated with a spiked
collar and a splashing cherry ribbon bow. Hurriedly
Celia got her hand upon her dog’s collar
and drew him to the other side of the road. The
bull-dog sat upon the top step of the Emporium
stoop, sleepily blinking in the sun, a goodly
beast of his sort, in his loose soft coat of brindled
plush, but to Celia more hateful than Cerberus.
“Whose is that brute?” she asked a boy lounging
near the village horse-trough, and heard
what she had expected, for she had not failed to
notice Judith’s cart in waiting near the Emporium
door. A flame of real hatred shot up
within her and burned earnestly for a moment.
Those who have not a dog cannot conceive the
sensitiveness of the spot in their master’s heart
reserved for them. The contemplation of this
constant menace henceforth to Beech, with the
alternative of a confinement he had never
known, generated in Celia desires almost murderous
toward the heavy-jawed antagonist,
over there. She seized the full reach of Judith’s
clumsy attempt at esprit: Having pointed out
the likeness between Beech and his mistress,
she had procured a pet resembling herself, as it
was her humour to suppose she appeared in the
eyes of Celia. She had succeeded this time to
the extent of her intention in embittering existence
to Celia. A nervous fear lest there
should be an encounter between the proud, gentle
Beech and that ruffian—the report reached
her that his facetious name was Punch—destroyed
all possible enjoyment of walks even in
the remotest by-paths and woods, for, supposing
Judith to maintain this dog for her annoyance,
what sense of bounds or fairness would
constrain her?

A long time passed, however, without sign of
the enemy in her remoter walks; and she had
come to feel secure once more and let her dog
range along unleashed, when one day, nothing
being further from her thoughts, Beech’s voice
came to her ear, tangled in quarrel with another,
and her heart told her that the event so dreaded
was upon them. She ran, with shaking knees,
and saw at a glance the worst she had feared.
Celia was not a coward, but a certain permanent
sense of the physical means at her command
compelled her to stand helpless, crying out and
beating the air with her hands. Judith, appearing
upon the scene a moment later, white
with fright, too, plunged at the fighters, and
having by force of rage and fury of muscle got
mastery over her dog, was with one hand belaboring
his big head, while with the other
twisted in his collar she shook and choked him.
She stopped, suddenly without strength, and
looked over at Celia, who, trembling from head
to foot, was clinging to Beech. As their
425
glances met, concentrated indignation shot from
Celia’s eyes. “I hope you are satisfied!” she
said.

Judith, after a moment’s pause, which appeared
owing to amazement, flourished in the
air, for Celia to see, a bitten and bleeding hand,
and said in her harsh, impudent laugh, “I hope
you are!” while yet Celia could not fail to remark
that pain or some other emotion was forcing
tears into her eyes. Too angry to be in the
least moved by them, she turned away.

It was only in recollection that she did grudging
justice to Judith’s conduct; but the initial
wrong and the whole blame of the occurrence
being so signally hers, she felt under no obligation
of acknowledgement. What became of
Punch she never inquired. He was not seen
again in those latitudes. The injury received,
however, was of a kind which the tender mistress
of Beech was not likely to remit, and the
remembrance of it went to intensify the effect
of scorn with which upon another occasion she
met an impulsive tender of Judith’s, prompted
by penitence…. And after that there was no
more question between the women of anything
but hate to the extent of their respective capacities.

The reinforcement of ill-will in this case arose
from a question of so innocent and fragile a
thing as wild orchids. Celia alone in all the
country-side knew where any were to be found.
Her grandmother had taken her as a child to the
solitary place in the woods, and it had been her
fancy to preserve the secret, but for one exception
or two. The donor of Beech had visited
the fairy recess with her, and the odor of it now
had power to evoke past words and scenes almost
more than anything left of that poor romance.
The thoughts she had there thought
first seemed year after year to be still lying in
wait for her there. It was her habit to gather
the flowers with discretion and reverence, distributing
them as if they had been so much gold.
Any wild orchid seen in a village sitting-room
was sure to be noticed with the remark, “I see
you’ve had a call from Miss Compton,” and it
seemed agreed that one should expect them
only from her hand. Celia, seeking the hushed
green haunt one summer morning, her head as
always on those pilgrimages lost in its old dream,
upon reaching the dell where her eyes looked
for sparks of pink against the lace of ferns, was
startled by the sight of Judith, solid and ample.
One hand grasped a bunch of orchids, the other
was still busily harvesting. What she saw in
Celia’s face as Celia recognized her, Judith alone
could tell. But instead of anything their immediately
preceding intercourse could have led
Celia to look for, Judith went to her quickly,
and, holding out the flowers for her to take,
blurted forth, “It’s a burning shame!…
Of course they belong to you, and I’d no business….”
But Celia looked at her with eyes
of judgment, and, with a gesture of utter rejection,
turned. Judith scattered her nosegay
angrily upon the earth, and the two women, as
fast as ever they could, widened the distance
between them.

After that, each according to her nature entertained
her aversion. In Celia the act consisted
in as perfect an exclusion from her
thoughts of the other, now altogether outside
the pale of consideration, as her will could compass.
She refused to be concerned with such
ugliness, or have her life vulgarized by the sentiments
which befitted it. In Judith it formed
an undercurrent of excitement, never quite
below consciousness, and at the root of many
an action of hers which from the surface would
have seemed to have no relation with it. Other
factors in Judith’s life there were combining
with her sense of Celia’s disesteem and her revolt
against it and requital of hatred, to give
her character a touch of lawlessness in its audacity;
her wealth, her power over her father,
her ascendency over the imaginations of the
plain villagers. It was finally felt that she believed
everything permitted to her, and an occasional
exaggeration in hard, hare-brained
boldness made a beginning of division in opinion
about her among those whom her generosity
and good-humor had first made all alike her adherents.
From time to time inevitably the rivals
crossed each other’s path, when Celia’s superiority
was confirmed to her by the cold freedom
of mind she could maintain under the test, while
Judith’s tortures were manifest in the loud fool
she made of herself, with the cheap drama of
her flashing eye and imperial attitudes.

Thus, while weeks grew to months and
months to years, under the genial light of day
and the beauty of the nights, amid innocent
occupations and simple pleasures and natural
relations satisfying to the heart, the two carried
about, with as little fear as if it had
been some such thing as Judith’s diminutive
pet alligator brought home from the South, or
the diamond snake with which Celia fastened
her lace, the sentiment destined to find its termination
in such tragic horror.

II

Celia, after a round of visits, had come late
this year to their country-house. Miss Greene,
called in to make shorter a walking-skirt for
country rambles, as she stitched, told the news,
according to her wont. She had discovered
426
that she was more acceptable to Celia when she
left the Brays out of her conversation, just as
she was more acceptable to Judith when she
turned it upon the Comptons. As this diminished
her immediate store of topics while at the
Comptons—village doings were so inwoven
with the Brays’ affairs—Miss Greene felt obliged
to extend the radius which her reports
took in.

“You ever drive over Quarryville way these
days?” After an interval of silence, long for
her, she thus started a new subject.

“I haven’t driven there for a long time. Do
you think it a pretty road? I have never cared
for it.”

“No, no more do I. It ain’t tree-sy, nor yet
there ain’t nothin’ much to see of any sort. But
Miss Goodrich she drove over there this summer
early, she’s got a relative livin’ over there,
and—Did you ever notice between this and
there a little tumble-down farm-house jest a
little mite off the road? I don’t believe there’s
more’n half a dozen houses between here and
Quarryville, so you must have seen it, though
perhaps you never took no particular notice.
Tell you what you might remember it by. It’s
got an oleander-tree in a box near the door in
the front yard. The man and woman who live
there come from some furrin place and are most
as black as colored people. They’ve been there
a long time, five or six years, I guess, and have
got a vegetable-garden and a corn-patch. I
guess you never took no notice. Well, Miss
Goodrich, drivin’ past on her way home from
visitin’ her relative, stopped there jest by
chance—I forgit now whether a rain-storm
come up or she wanted a drink o’ water—but
there in that ’most black woman’s house she see
the fairest boy-baby she says she ever set eyes
on. Then she began askin’ questions, and the
woman owned ’twarn’t hers, and it come out,
not all at once, but gradually, for Miss Goodrich
she was interested, that when that baby was
nothin’ but a few weeks old, a well-dressed lady,
she might have been fifty or so, brought him to
her in the carry-all from the depot, and said
would she keep him and bring him up as her
own, and here was a sum o’ money and there to
be the end o’ the whole thing. You can’t
rightly tell how much she give her, the woman
don’t let on, and as she don’t talk much English,
it’s sort o’ hard gettin’ things out o’ her.
But I shouldn’t wonder if it had been somethin’
like a thousand dollars. I guess it was as much
as that, for she was a fashionable-lookin’ lady.
And from that day to this not a word nor a sign
further, and the woman ain’t no more idea than
you or me who the lady was or whose child she’s
got. But she ain’t any children of her own, nor
ever has had, and he’s a purty little fellow, and
she don’t seem to mind the care of him any
more ’n if he was her own. The lady never left
any name to call him by,—she jest wanted to
wash her hands of him, that’s clear enough,—and
the woman calls him Larry, ’cause she
thinks that’s one of our names. But it’s queer,
ain’t it, the whole thing? If it wasn’t so far I’d
drive over myself, jest out o’ curiosity. I sh’ld
think you’d like to, Miss Ceely. Things like
that, that sounds as if they come out of a story-book,
is in your line, I sh’ld jedge.”

Celia remembered afterwards, marvelling,
how small hand she had had in the incidents
which brought her to the place where a treacherous
fate lay in wait for her. It seemed to her
that her will had been at every step counter to
the direction she finally must take.

It was a friend on a visit to her, who, when in
the afternoon they hesitated in the choice of a
drive, proposed Quarryville. Celia, though in
the least degree repelled, could find no reason
for setting aside the suggestion. But she regretted—yet
again without good reason, as
she argued with herself—having permitted
just the sort of person this gifted and charming
Mary Havens could not help being, to be present
at her trying-on with Miss Greene. They had
no difficulty in recognizing the house. The
oleander stood beside the door-step in the rough
front yard, where common flowers and flourishing
weeds made about an even mixture. Among
them toddled a child in a faded pink slip. As
Celia reined in the horse that they might pass
slowly, Mary Havens, before Celia knew what
she intended, jumped out, and Celia saw her in a
moment more, down in the tall grass, scrutinizing
the child’s face, and heard her foolish, eager
chatter at him. Celia waited, with a misleading
effect of patience, looking off at the meadows
on the other side, in an unaccountable distaste,
till she became aware of Mary trying
to find footing for the child in front of her
knees.

“Look at him!” Mary said to her in an impressed
tone, “Isn’t he different?”

Celia, in the supposition that any baby lifted
off his feet by a stranger would scream, had
braced her nerves for the shock. But as she
looked at the child, she ceased to think of that,
her displeasure with Mary dispersed.

He was a being after her own heart, that was
all,—exactly after her own heart. She had not
the general love of children common in women,
which seemed proof that this one who so captured
her fancy must have about him something
extraordinary. He was so fair that the
sun to which he was indiscriminately exposed
could not prevail against his firm, uniform,
427
healthy whiteness. He was large for his small
age,—for though he could walk, it was plain he
could not yet talk, or else he did not regard language
as necessary, for not by one sound did he
depart from his self-possessed dumbness. The
soilure of the earth upon it could not make his
splendid little face funny. A straight-limbed,
strong, calm, fearless, and somewhat solemn
baby, noble in size, noble in the whole effect of
him, with just a touch of something which
melted the heart in his wide, sweet, steady,
unsmiling eyes and the drooping arch of his lip.
We have described him as he appeared to Celia.

“He looks like a king,” she breathed, “or like
a prophet!”

“That’s just it—I couldn’t define it. Think—think
of rejecting a creature like that! Why—if
he had been mine——”

Celia was not listening. She had taken in
hers one of his little strong, firm, white hands,
beautiful in shape, in texture surpassing, and,
quite absorbed in him, pressing it as earnestly
as if she entered into a compact with him, was
saying over to him just “Larry … Larry
…” in her voice itself a communication and
a caress.

After a little he wearied of these women, and
turned his back upon them to look at their
horse. They became aware of a woman not far
from the carriage-step, clothed in the nondescript
dark cotton dress of a poor farmer’s wife, a
once bright kerchief around her neck. She
was swart in color, with straight, good features,
severer in expression than were her brown eyes,
which suggested possibilities of kindness when
need should arise. She smiled deferentially
and said nothing. It might easily be supposed
that English was not her tongue. Miss Havens
fell upon her with questions, which Celia cut
short by hurrying their departure.

But the thought of Larry would not leave
her, and it brought disturbance almost, making
her feel, as she had never felt, a loneliness in her
life, an emptiness. The appeal he had made to
her was beyond anything she had imagined of
her nature; the sense of him haunted her, his
image passed before her ten times an hour, a
heroic yet divinely innocent little figure, possessing
indescribable affinities with her deepest
soul, or, if this were infatuated imagination, fulfilling
at the very least her every taste.

When Miss Havens had left, not before, she
returned to see him, alone. And after that, at
intervals growing more frequent, she went,
sinking deeper, as she found, in attachment to
this child, instead of recovering from her unaccountable
fancy, as it had seemed not quite impossible
one might.

A drop of bitter it was to her, as when in
blowing bubbles one gets a taste of soapwater,
to realize after a time that her interest in Larry
had become a subject of discussion in the village.
Even some perversion of her remark that he
looked like a small predestined Knight of the
Grail came back to her ears, with the effect of a
humorous sally. It was almost enough to
make one resolve not to see him any more. Such
a thought, however, could be but momentary:
her new love had too strong a hold on her, and
she was grown philosophical, she believed,
where village gossip was concerned.

Dimly there formed in the background of her
mind the thought that sometime, if certain
matters could be arranged, she might make herself
responsible for Larry’s future. She had no
idea of forsaking him, ever; but he was happy,
for the present, and well cared for where he
was. The woman was kind to him, and she was
a person of natural good sense. Celia could see
him as often as she pleased; in a manner already
she directed his small affairs. The subsidized
Cape Verde Islander bathed and kept him clean
and observed hygienic practices, to her full of
mystery. Closely as her heart was involved, a
perfect prudence restrained Celia: there certainly
was no occasion for haste in coming to
any determination, and the thought lurked
within vague undergrowths of her mind that
perhaps time would bring forth some effect of
taint in this fruit of strange parentage, which
the present superbly triumphed over.

It was after an absence from him of perhaps a
week, that, coming upon Larry as he played
among the weeds, she spied upon the ground
near him a toy of the richest and gaudiest. The
sight of it gave her heart a sharp pang before
her brain had framed the smallest theory of it.
She had taken Larry upon her arm—his weight
did but charm her; holding him, she went about
the house calling for Julia, the foster-mother.
She was not to be found, though the doors were
open. Celia sat down with Larry upon the
door-step and took up the dazzling puppet, a
male doll with a squeak. She turned it about,
sniffing it with faint, jealous dislike, as if by
some emanation from it to divine whence it
came, what it meant. Unenlightened, she at
last, though without hope, asked the baby,
“Who gave it to you, Larry?” He only put
out his hand for it masterfully, fumbled its
satins, waved it up and down in the air, and cast
it far.

Celia derived from the woman, returning by
and by from the field, that the doll was the gift
of Judith Bray. The woman did not know the
young lady’s name, but her broken and laborious
description was perfectly illuminating to Celia.
According to the woman’s story, Judith had
428
been there three times within the week, bringing
extravagant gifts for Larry, over whom she
screamed with admiration and whom she fondled
as if she would eat him. Celia felt ice
hardening about her heart. That day she spoke
decisively to Julia of her intention to take Larry
off her hands. When she had understood, Julia
unexpectedly gave evidence of satisfaction; explaining
that this would be for them a desired
thing: her husband had been wishing for some
time to move away from there and go to a factory-town,
where the child would be a hindrance.
Celia remembered the money the
couple were supposed to have received, for the
care of Larry; the man had no doubt some plan
of outlay for his little capital; her scheme and
theirs fell into accord. Celia impressed it upon
Julia before leaving that Larry was from that
moment forth to be regarded as hers, her property.
She proposed to fetch him as soon as
suitable preparations could be made, after
which Julia and her husband, delivered for good
and all from the burden and expense of him,
would be free to go where they were more likely
to make their fortunes than here.

With grave, peculiar tenderness, Celia, before
leaving, took up the baby and searched his little
face, looked deep into his eyes, which told her of
his mysterious little soul no more than before.
She knew it was like trying to force open a shut
flower. “Whatever happens now, dear,” she said
to him, though without audible words, “we two
go together. All that happens to you, happens
to me. If you are in the future to be bad or
afflicted, I am to be unhappy. But I will never
repent, remembering the glory of you now.”
She wondered, seriously, at so beautiful a thing
being permitted to live. She kissed him many
more times than she usually did, upon his eyes,
his cheeks, his forehead,—he was royally passive
under kissing—and having left him, almost
as if something had warned her, she went
back and pressed him to her a last time. As
she started the horse, she held up a finger to
Julia at the gate, in reminder of their agreement;
Julia smiled back her good trustworthy
smile.

Celia had expected to meet with objections at
home; they were more obstinate than she had
looked for. But Celia was sure of her way
where only her relatives’ prejudices were opposed
as a barrier. She had the whip-hand of
an exceptional devotion from them, fairly
earned, no doubt. In this case she was able to
allay some anxieties, some difficulties she over-rode;
all were surprised at the willingness she
displayed to make a genuine sacrifice of interests.
There was conducted a quiet, polite domestic
campaign, at the closing of which she
was granted unconditionally, with whatever
grim forewarnings, an open field in which to
make her life’s mistake.

A little out of conceit with the whole matter,
from the weariness of this contending—impressed,
too, in spite of herself, with the pertinence
of some of the objections which had been
made, but staunch in her main purpose, she at
last set forth to fetch Larry. As she passed the
Brays’ house, a sickly surge of resentment rose
from her momentary general disaccord with the
world, and beat against the windows that were
Judith’s, for it had been she who indirectly precipitated
this adoption: without her and the indefinable
pollution of her caresses, all being
allowed to come to its ripeness naturally, there
would not have been this effect of strain and
muffled discord in bringing home the son-elect.
Judith’s windows were shuttered; her gay, long-fringed
hammocks taken in. Celia had heard
that she was gone unexpectedly early this year.

But why—why were the windows of the
grey farm-house closed and shuttered too?
What could be the meaning of that? Celia
could hardly believe her eyes. Never once had
she seen them closed. And the door was closed,
and the garden empty, and the clothes-line
gone, the oleander gone. She remained for a
time without getting out of the carriage, staring
in puzzlement over at the house. It was like
something in a dream. When she got out, she
found that her knees were unsteady, and wondered
at it, because she as yet felt little but a
futile effort of the brain to find some common explanation
of these circumstances, which only superficially,
of course, seemed so unnatural. Why
should not Julia for once in her life have gone
on a visit, or a jaunt, or an errand? It was a
long knowledge of all the conditions which
made this surmise insufficient. Celia fumbled
with a shutter and got it open. She made
blinders with her hands and peered in. Then
her heart sank away, as if one should suddenly
find by the touch that a person one supposed
alive was dead. It was a house from which the
inmates plainly had moved away. She made
the circuit of the house, examining things. All
told the same story, no possibility of deceiving
oneself. They had gone. Celia went to the
gate and seated herself upon a stone facing the
house, and stared at it. She felt no pain. Indeed,
something said within her, in the tone she
took discussing things sometimes, when she was
drawing from a worldly philosophy: “Well, it
simplifies matters.” The solution first to present
itself satisfied her. The same who had
placed Larry there had come for him. Perhaps
they had got wind of the proposed adoption,—Julia
was deeper than had been suspected,—and
429
in order that the darkness they evidently
sought should be ensured past all doubt, they
had prevailed upon the foster-parent to leave,
like the Arabs. No house was so near that she
might to any purpose have made inquiry, if she
had cared to do that. But, as has been said,
she was satisfied. What had happened seemed
to her obvious and what, had she been a little
wiser, she would have been prepared for. As
she rose, she laughed, or did something more or
less like it, and said aloud for the crows to hear:
“What a fool I was to suppose that anything I
cared so much about could go right!” She got
into her phaeton and drove back. She said to
them at home, and the hard sadness setting her
features was in its effect vindictive, “You see,
you are to have your wish, after all.” To make
investigation did not even later enter her mind.
She would not grant to her persecuting fate the
joy of beholding her tortured with suspenses or
uncertainties. She was persuaded of the worst.
Her heart told her it was finished with that
dream.

After that she tried to make the best of her
position, to keep her mind fixed upon the advantages
of her defeat. But the persistent
image of Larry, the memory of his thousand
ways of being dear and The Only, with the
thought of never seeing him again or knowing
anything further about him, made her struggle
for an ordinary exterior at moments more than
difficult. She came to learn the measure of the
cheated feminine tenderness which, denied any
natural channel, had fastened so hungrily upon
that child of strangers, when it was thrown back
useless upon her heart. She selected finally, to
dwell upon, the best of all the possibilities: that
among the people who had claimed him back—of
fine race, if he resembled them—he would
find all for the absence of which he had been
pitied: the tender love of parents, the opportunities
of a privileged life. She agreed that
his case would be better than if he had been
left to her. But after she had by arguments
persuaded herself, when by her own logic she had
reason for rejoicing, there closed down upon her
a melancholy such as she had at intervals in her
life suffered from before. The experience was
like going into a tunnel, of which nothing could
avail to lighten the darkness until by the grace
of God one came out at the other side of the
hill. There was no fighting it off by reason, no
discovering an adequate cause for it, no foreseeing
the moment of its end. One endured it like
a prolonged bad dream, wherein the magnified
affections shake one in one’s helplessness at
their will. At such times all that had ever been
pain, disappointment, defeat, however long recovered
from, came again to perfect life in memory,
while all that had been happy, diminished
to insignificant proportions, retreated out of
sight. “Why do I feel like this?” Celia could
still ask herself by daylight, and repeat, “Everything
is all right.” But in the night time the
power of the thing was complete.

She had at last, after some three days of such
nerve-sickness, taken something to assist sleep.
But the small hours found her, in spite of all,
awake and staring into the dark, with her
troubled mind harping upon the same chords.
She sat up in bed, old sorrows bleeding afresh
with the new; she took her confused head between
her hands, and was voicing the unreconcilement
of millions before her and to follow:
“Why is everything I love made into an instrument
to punish me? What have I done? Why
all this senseless pain and calamity to me?
Why to me one after the other two losses such
as, coming singly in a life, would be enough to
darken the sun? Are you, stupid blind Fate,
weaving a pattern in which the same design
must repeat itself? For is it justice that twice
I should have the thing my heart had grown
around taken from me, and not in the terrible
legitimate way of death, but just placed out of
reach and sight, while I torture myself with
wondering what may be happening to make the
beloved suffer?… Oh, Larry, why … why
this dismay inseparable from the thought of
you?” The torture of the visions of Larry
which, spite of her shuddering repudiation,
would obtrude themselves, was such now that
even in her morbid mood she recognized something
disproportionate in it, and had clear-sightedness
to attribute it to a reaction from
the narcotic. She tried to get herself more
normally awake. She strained her eyes to see
the figures upon her watch, and a sort of patience
fell upon her, ascertaining that in an hour
or so it would begin to be day, by the light of
which the worst never appears quite so unendurable.
She felt cold now, and drawing up
her quilt went through the forlorn mockery of
composing herself to sleep.

Perhaps for a moment without knowing it
she dozed, for when the barking of Beech, who
slept in the laundry, roused her with a start, it
was certainly lighter, she could distinguish the
vine-branches against her window. The muffled
bark of lugubrious timbre came again and
again, deadened by distance and doors. The
shock of the first outburst—her heart had
seemed to roll over—had plunged Celia into
what we call, when children suffer it, a fit of the
horrors. Twitching, she sat up again, and receiving
from Beech’s voice, as his angry barks
multiplied, a message of warning, she kept her
eyes instinctively fixed upon the square of light.

She slept on the ground-floor, and a garden-walk
passed under her window. A figure now
darkened it. It could hardly be said that she
was frightened, she seemed to have turned to
stone. Some one tapped, then stood peering in
and making signs. As she did not stir, the
tapping was repeated, urgent and more urgent.
She arose and with less astonishment than
seemed explicable, recognized Judith Bray,
who whispered gaspingly, “Let me in, let me
in—you must!” At this point was entered
by Celia a quite different phase of sensation.
Now that there seemed to be something to do,
a call upon her for she as yet did not know what,
her nerve got back its tensest steadiness, her
mind its calm,—she was the effective daughter
of a long line of effective people.

She had signed the auroral intruder to a side-entrance,
the furthest from the sleepers in the
house, and when they had tiptoed back to her
own chamber and noiselessly closed its door,
she re-entered her bed, being conscious in an
undercurrent fashion of cold. As her eyes consulted
Judith, the livid atmosphere in which
her bad dreams had been enacting themselves
through the night was shot with sanguine. Judith’s
face prepared the mind for revelations
which should smother. That touch of excess
which, however expressed, had always been an
element in the repugnance with which she inspired
Celia, showed itself now in a haggardness
beyond all one could conceive a person achieving
in the brief space since the girl had been
seen at the gate of her garden jesting with the
passers. She was bareheaded; the wide hood
of a travelling-cape, which had perhaps replaced
her hat, lay back, and her blown hair
made a great wreath to her bloodless face. Her
breathing spoke of a merciless excitement driving
her heart.

Celia sat up and clasped her knees with
cramped fingers, pale with the gray pallor of
the dawn, in which her long coppery hair was
just beginning to glimmer a little—with the
gilt picture-frames, and the griffins of the candlesticks,
and the like. “Well?” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know how to tell you!” broke
forth Judith, and the manner of this first utterance
exposed shockingly the fact that here
stood that sickening anomaly, a Judith clean
emptied of spirit, pride, or courage: “How
shall I tell you?”

“Hush!… Speak lower!”

“Oh, who cares?… I have brought him
back to you——”

“You have brought back whom?” Celia inquired
in blank wonder, “You have brought
back—No, no, you don’t mean—What?
You never can mean Larry?”

“I do…. For pity’s sake wait till I’ve told
you….”

“Then it was you who took him away?…”

“Yes, it was…. And now I’ve got him dead
on my hands!”

Celia’s understanding could not at once fully
grasp this which was offered, and she remained
open-mouthed and mute.

“Of course it was I took him. Do you mean
you didn’t even suspect me?… When I found
you meant to have him, I couldn’t let you, that’s
all. You had been so mortally mean….
But that wasn’t the whole. I could see all
you saw in him, too. I was just as crazy about
him as you. And when I heard you were going
to adopt him, the thought came in a flash,
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ as long as I meant never
to marry. And it seemed a great lark, a good
one on you, just lifting him away like that. I
paid a good price, I can tell you. But what
does all that matter now?… We were going
to drive him to Jess’s home in the country—Jess
said she knew all about babies—and then,
after a time, he was to reappear here as an
orphan I’d adopted. You would recognize
him, of course, but what could you do?…
When I think of the light-hearted way I went
into this thing, I could kill myself…. But
it’s going to kill me, anyhow. Oh, you
shouldn’t have treated me so…. I have a
heart, too! But what do you care?… I did
care about him, though. I did. I did. You
can’t hate me as much as if I hadn’t truly cared.
That little fellow had got a sort of hold on me
nothing has ever had. You should have seen
him when we left, all in laces and embroideries,
like a little fairy prince. And he seemed all
right. We stopped the first night at a country
hotel, and Jess and I gave him his bath and fed
him, just as nice…. We drove all the next
day. He seemed interested in the things we
passed. The night after that we were at a
hotel again. I thought something wasn’t quite
usual with him, but Jess said it was all right,
and wouldn’t hear of my calling in a doctor.
And suddenly, in the middle of the night, when
we were both asleep, I was wakened by a sound,
and I don’t know what was wrong—he was
struggling, he seemed to be choking, and after
just the shortest time he was still, and anyone
could see how it was. We were so frightened
we didn’t know what to do. We didn’t dare
call anybody, and Jess got so scared thinking
all sorts of things which might happen, how we
might be called to account before the law, that,
will you believe it, she wouldn’t stay with me a
second longer. She put on her things and the
instant it was light off she started for her home.
Then—I can never tell you how I did it. I
431
dressed him and wrapped him up and wound
my veil around his head, and I asked for my
carriage, and I haven’t stopped since, except to
feed and water the horse——”

“Do you mean …” gasped Celia.

“Yes…. Outside….”

Celia pressed her drained face to her knees
and beat the bedclothes with her hands.

“That’s the way I feel, too,” said Judith, with
a dizzy movement of her hand across her forehead,
“I want to scream aloud till I go mad.”

Celia was moaning into the covers.

“Stop, stop, you poor thing!” Judith’s
breath caught in her throat, and her hand travelled
tremblingly toward Celia’s shoulder, “Oh,
I know—I know how you feel! Don’t….
Don’t!… you poor thing. I’ve been and
done it, haven’t I…. There was no one—no
one like him, nor ever will be again. A human
flower, wasn’t he?… And why I should
come here to the one I’ve hurt most and who
must hate me worst, I don’t know…. I suppose
it’s the way criminals give themselves up.
Unless it’s because, as I’ve hated you so, and
had good reason to, and you’ve known it, I felt
you would understand better than the others.
Then, you’ve got brains, you can tell me what
to do. After driving those millions of miles
with that poor angel like lead upon my arm, I
haven’t an idea in my head beside … I’m
afraid to go to my father—” She shivered.
“He’s been sick of my pranks for some time.
You will stand by me, Celia Compton, just for
the first?… I could have been devoted to
you, if you had let me…. You know I was
never anything but a soft-hearted fool—and
now to have upon my soul the responsibility of
this ghastliness….”

Celia had got up, and with the dainty carefulness
forming part in her of that second nature
which stands us in stead when the directing
faculties are dazed, was fastening up her hair.

“First,” she said, “we shall have to call my
brother. Then go to your father.”

At these words, which could be interpreted
as a promise of assistance, Judith laid down
her head, and let tears at last have their way
with her. In floods, more and more uncontrolled
they came. Celia stood over her, but
even a racking compassion could not make her
touch the heaving figure. “The fault was more
mine than yours,” she said, with dry lips and
inexpressive voice, like that of an oracle, or a
sleeper speaking. “In the bottom of my heart
I must have always known that the blame of
our silly feud was with me. With a word I
could have set everything right. What are
you?… A leaf in your own passions. But
I know what I am about, and do what I do deliberately.

“And with a heart just a little larger …
but now, as you say, between us, we’ve done
it. But you need not blame yourself as much
as me…. Come. You must go outside and
remain with … with him, while I explain to
my brother. In a moment it will be sunrise.”

As Judith’s strength and command over her
will seemed now to have forsaken her, Celia
helped her to her feet and guided her out of the
house. It was a shock, turning the corner, to
find the carriage directly at hand, high upon the
lawn. The pearl-grey carriage-rug lay massed
upon the seat.

The sweet daylight brightening over all the
familiar things had its moment of trying to
convince that the strange and terrible must be
unreal. Only, there upon the carriage-seat lay
the proof that the past belief was true. Celia
stood, her eyes held by it, a chill from it stealing
congealingly upon her. And as at the sight, with
the horror, the sorrowfulness of it all smote her
directly upon the heart,—and the sense, at last
fully brought home, of the ruin of the most
adorable thing the earth had given her to know
wrung from her a scalding quintessence of tears,—her
eyes closed against the image that would
form of what the grey folds concealed, and her
figure swayed. Judith, beside her, had been
struggling to screw her nerve to the point where
it might be subjected once more to the strain
that had broken it down; but at the sight in accusing
daylight of the burden which must be
taken up again, her whole being recoiled with
such violence that her head jerked convulsively
back and her hand reached out for something
steadying—and the two women, in a common
anguish before their work, clung to each other
for support.

“Jes look, Miss No’th! Looker w’at’s
comin’ down de road!”

Miss North turned her head inquiringly,
and Ezekiel continued to comment
enthusiastically.

“It’s ole Arch’bal’ Smiff,” he declared, with
lively appreciation, though in the near distance
Archibald failed to look as aged as Ezekiel
might have led one to expect. “Yas’m, ’tis;
dat’s ole Arch’bal’ Smiff. Now, w’at dey-all
doin’ ’im dat-a-way fer? Look, Miss No’th!
Dey’s jes
a-chasin’
’im down de road!”

Miss North stopped a moment and glanced
back at the rapidly approaching Archibald.

“They are probably just chasing him for fun,
aren’t they?” she began reassuringly.

“’Tain’ no fun ter git w’ite men chasin’ after
yer dat-a-way,” objected Ezekiel.

There were excited shouts from the passing,
jostling runners, and Archibald turned and cast
a momentary exalted, half-dramatic smile on
Miss North.

“They are just in fun, you see. Come, Ezekiel,
I want you to go on with me, and bring
back some books that I order; will you?”

“Yas’m—yas’m, I’ll go on wid yer, Miss
No’th; but look like ole w’ite men’s gwine ketch
’im, too, doan’t it?”

“Catch him? No. Why should they want
to catch him?”

“Cert’nly make me think ’bout de time dey-all
come a-chasin’ af’ Jonah w’en I’se ter Mis’
Simons’. An’ I reckon, ef ’tain’ been fer
Mis’ Simons, dey’d ’a’ ketch ’im, too. But Mis’
Simons she jes ’ntirely dis’range dey plans.”

“How did she do that?” questioned Miss
North, suddenly interested.

“W’y, she jes done it,” explained Ezekiel,
explicitly.

“I see; but—how? Did Jonah get into
some—some trouble?”

“Ya’as, ma’am! An’ he jes did!” assured
Ezekiel dramatically; “but Mis’ Simons she jes
completely dis’range de whul plan. W’y, yer
see, it wuz dat ve’y day de Cap’n went off ter
de ho’se fair, an’ lef’ ’er all ’lone wid jes me an’
Sarah an’ Marg’ret an’—an’—well, he would
’a’ lef’ ’er wid Jonah, too, but, yer see, Mis’ Simons
she foun’ she’s ’blige sen’ Jonah on a r’al ’mportant
erran’. ’Twuz ’long ’bout free o’clock in
433
de evenin’, an’ I wuz in de gyarden a-waterin’
de yaller lily-baid, an’ Jonah he wuz a-hoein’
on de li’l’ paff where cut ’roun’ siden de baid,
w’en Mis’ Simons step up an’ say, ‘Jonah,’ she
say, ‘I want yer ter stop a-hoein’ an’ do a
erran’ fer me,’ she say.

“‘Yas’m,’ Jonah answer ’er. Yer see, Jonah
think a awful heap o’ Mis’ Simons, an’ allays
seem ter wanter do jes like she ax ’im ter.
Co’se, ef he ain’t wanter, w’y, I s’pose he’d ’a’
did it jes same anyway, but he jes natchelly is
wanter. So, ‘Yas’m,’ he say, an’ Mis’ Simons
’mence tellin’ ’im all ’bout it. She look up in
de sky ez she’s talkin’, too, at de sun, where’s
shinin’ righ’ down stret inter de yaller lilies,
an’ she say: ‘Co’se yer’ll be back ’fo’ dark,
Jonah; doan’ be no longer’n yer’s ’blige ter,
’cuz we wants yer back ’fo’ dark.’

“An’ Jonah smile at ’er an’ say he’ll go ’long
right smart, an’ Mis’ Simons smile back at ’im
an’ say, well, not ter kill ’isself ’bout it; an’ den
Jonah he lef’ us dere
siden de lily-baid,
an’ de sun a-shinin’
down jes same.

“‘’Zekiel,’ Mis’
Simons ’mence after
w’ile, an’ ’er voice
soun’ kine o’ slow
an’ dreamin’ like.
‘’Zekiel, does yer
s’pose yer’ll ever git
ter be ’s good a man
’s Jonah?’

“‘Wha’m?’ I say,
kine o’ s’prise w’en
she ax me right out
ez plain’s dat.
‘Yas’m, I s’pose I
is, Mis’ Simons,’ I
say.

“She look at me
r’al quick an’ laf,
same way I seen ’er
do ser many times
befo’.

“‘I doubt it,’ she
say, still a-smilin’; ‘I
doubt it, ’Zekiel.’

“Well, co’se I ain’
know jes ’zackly
w’at she mean
talkin’ dat-a-way,
but look ’mos’ like
she think I ain’t ser
good’s Jonah is, an’,
anyway, I ain’t
r’ally like way she
spoke, so, ‘Yas’m,’ I
say, ‘I reckon I kin be jes ez good’s Jonah!’ I
say, an’—an’ I didn’ ’mence ter cry, nudder,
but—but I ’mence hoein’ on de li’l’ paff, an’
waterin’ de yaller lilies, twell Mis’ Simons pat
me light ’n’ sof’ on de haid—kine o’ laffin’,
too.

“‘W’y, yes, co’se, ’Zekiel,’ she say, ‘co’se
yer’s gwine be ez good’s Jonah! An’ I jes
reckon yer’ll be ’blige tek ’is place now twell
he gits back, too! W’y—w’y, I couldn’ git
’long ’thout yer noways, could I, ’Zekiel?’
She ben’ down while she’s talkin’ an’ pick a
yaller lily f’um de baid. ‘Jes see it ketch de
sun!’ she say. ‘Doan’t it look like gole a-shinin’!
Doan’t yer reckon I better tek a whul
bunch ter Mis’ Myers, ’Zekiel?’ she say. ‘She’s
sick, yer know—po’ Mis’ Myers!’

“‘Yas’m,’ I answer ’er, an’ ’mence pickin’ de
bunch fer ’er.

“‘An’ you’ll tek cyare o’ de place w’ile I’se
gone, won’t yer, ’Zekiel? I kin trus’ yer jes
434
same’s I kin Jonah, cyan’t I?
Ya’as, co’se. I ain’ gwine be
gone ve’y long, nudder,’ she
say; ‘jes long ’nough ter give
Mis’ Myers de flowers, an’ talk
a li’l’, or p’r’aps read a li’l’—’
an’ same time she’s tellin’ me
’bout it she ’mence walkin’ off
down de paff.

“Praesen’ly she turn ’roun’
ag’in, an’ I kin see ’er tekkin’
one o’ de lilies f’um de bunch
an’ puttin’ it in ’er dress.
Den she put ’er hand up to
’er haid quick, like she’s
thought o’ sump’n’ she
oughter ’membered ’fo’.

“‘’Zekiel!’ she say. An’ I
run up to ’er fas’ ’s I could.

“‘’Zekiel, tell Jonah I—I
forgot!’ she whisper to me,
an’ she look r’al w’ite an’
strange. ‘Tell ’im—no—’
an’ she seem ter change ’er
mine, ‘no, I ain’ gwine, after
all. I’ll wait yere twell he
comes.’

“Co’se I ain’ know w’at ’tis
Mis’ Simons ’membered ’bout
ser quick, an’ I ain’t r’ally
wanter ax ’er, nudder; so I
jes stood dere a-lookin’ after
’er w’ile she walk off ter de li’l’ arbor in de
gyarden an’ se’ down on de seat. She look
kine o’ lonesome, too, a-settin’ dere all ’lone,
an’ I start gwine after ’er ter ax ’er w’at’s de
matter. But time I gotten dere I didn’ r’ally
like ter trouble ’er, so I jes stood dere quiet by
de do’, a-lookin’ in.

“‘Well, ’Zekiel,’ she ’mence praesen’ly, ‘did
yer want sump’n’?’

“‘No’m,’ I say, kine o’ wishin’ I ain’t come,
‘no’m, but I’se studyin’ a li’l’ ’bout yer, Mis’
Simons—an’ wonderin’ did sump’n’—frighten
yer?’

“She smile den, an’ hel’ out ’er han’.

“‘No, no, my chile,’ she say, lookin’ mo’
like she useter ’gin, ‘’tain’ nuthin’ frighten
me; I’se jes thinkin’ ’bout sump’n’—I oughter
’membered ’fo’. ’Twuz ve’y thoughtless o’ me—ter
fergit!’ she say low like to ’erself. Den,
‘’Zekiel,’ she ’mence ag’in, ‘’ow long does yer
reckon it’s gwine tek Jonah ter git back?’

“‘I dunno’m, Mis’ Simons,’ I say, ‘but I
reckon he’ll be back right soon now, too.’

“‘Couldn’ tek ’im mo’n a hour, could it?’
she ask, jes ez ef I knowed all ’bout it.

“‘No’m,’ I say, ‘couldn’ tek ’im mo’n a
hour.’

“She look up r’al bright at me den, an’ praesen’ly
look down at de flowers in ’er han’.

“‘I reckon
you’ll
be ’blige tek ’em ter Mis’
Myers, won’t yer, ’Zekiel?’ she ’mence. But
she stop quick ’gin, lookin’ same way she did
’fo’, w’en she put ’er han’ up to ’er haid.

“‘No!’ she say, ‘doan’t yer go outen de yard
ter-day, ’Zekiel! Yer won’t go ’way ter-day,
will yer, ’Zekiel?’

“‘W’y, no’m,’ I say, wonderin’ w’at she
mean; ‘no’m, I ain’ gwine ’way ’n’ leave yer,
Mis’ Simons.’

“She smile ag’in, an’ lay down de flowers, an’
den she tuk up a book where’s layin’ on de
seat.

“‘Dat’s a good li’l’ boy,’ she say; ‘now go ’n’
hoe de weeds outen de gyarden paff, same way
Jonah’s doin’ ’fo’ he went.’

“So I went back ter de paff by de lilies, an’
start in ter wuk right smart. But, co’se, eve’y
li’l’ w’ile I ’range ter git jes enough time ter
look at Mis’ Simons, too, a-settin’ in de arbor
wid ’er book; an’ praesen’ly ’mence ter look
like she’s ’mos’ forgotten where she’s at, she’s
a-readin’ ser hard. Mus’ ’a’ been mo’n a hour
sence Jonah went ’way, too, but she keep on
a-readin’, an’ I keep on a-wukkin’ on de paff, jes
435
wukkin’ ’long same’s befo’, twell bime-by I’se
jes ’blige se’ down an’ res’ a li’l’ myself. But
Mis’ Simons she ain’t look up ’tall. An’ after I
’mence ter feel kine o’ rested an’ mo’ like wuk,
w’y, co’se I got up an’ start in hoein’ ag’in, an’
dere’s Mis’ Simons still a-settin’ dere readin’
jes same’s befo’! De sun’s gittin’ kine o’ low,
too, an’ look like she gwine git cotch in de dark
ef she ain’ cyarful, so I drap my hoe in de
grass an’ step ’long up ter de li’l arbor an’
se’ down on de step. Mis’ Simons kine o’
start-like w’en she seen me, an’ put down ’er
book an’ raise ’er han’s up slow ’n’ sleepy-like
to ’er eyes.

“‘Wat time is it, ’Zekiel?’ she say.

“De clock wuz strikin’ six, time I drap my
hoe down in de grass, so I tole ’er ’bout it.

“‘Six!’ she say, a-jumpin’ off ’er seat. ‘Six
er-clock! An’ ain’ Jonah come? Ain’t he
come yit, ’Zekiel?’

“‘No’m, he ain’t,’ I say, ‘cuz he ain’t, so
w’at else is it I kin say? ‘No’m, he ain’t,’
I say.

“‘An’ he’s been gone long ’nough to’ve gone
free times at leas’!’ she whisper un’er ’er bref.
‘Oh, w’at is I done! Jonah, Jonah, w’y doan’t
yer come back!’

“‘I reckon he’ll be back right soon now,’ I
say, ’cuz cert’nly make me feel bad ter see
Mis’ Simons look dat-a-way. ‘Doan’t yer
reckon he will?’ I say.

“But she jes shuk ’er haid awful sad ’n’
slow-like.

“‘I’se ’fraid—I’se ’fraid sump’n’s ’appen
to ’im, ’Zekiel,’ she answer. ‘I—I sent ’im
de ve’y place—where it’s awful trouble—gwine
on ter-day! I sent ’im, ’Zekiel, ’thout—’thout
’memberin’ w’at I knowed!’

“Well, I ain’t r’ally know ’ow ter answer ’er
dat time, so I jes didn’ make no ’sponse ’tall.

“‘Come,’ she say, ‘we mus’ go in de house,
’Zekiel; it’s gittin’ dark.’

“It seem awful long after we’s in de house,
an’ praesen’ly, it’s sech a warm evenin’, Mis’
Simons went out on de po’ch. But she mus’
’a’ feel kine o’ strange ’n’ lonesome, too, ’cuz
praesen’ly she ax Sarah ’n’ Marg’ret won’t dey
come out ’n’ set dere fer a li’l’ w’ile.

“‘It’s time fer you ter go ter baid, ain’t it,
’Zekiel?’ she say; an’ I jes start ter tell ’er,
‘No’m, I doan’ reckon ’tis,’ w’en it come de
stranges’ noise out dere in de yard. Look like
somebody’s runnin’ ser fas’ he cyan’t sca’cely
breve, an’ all time comin’ right ’long fru de
grass todes de steps.

“‘Mis’ Simons, Mis’ Simons!’ somebody
whisper, awful hoarse an’ strange-like. An’
w’at yer s’pose? W’y, it’s jes Jo-nah, a-tearin’
right ’long up de steps!

“‘Lemme go in, Mis’ Simons! Please lemme
go in!’ he keep on whisperin’, like he cyan’t
sea’cely breve. ‘Dey’s after me, Mis’ Simons!
Dey’s gwine git me! An’ yer knows I ain’t
done a thing to ’em, Mis’ Simons! Oh, w’at’s
dey a-chasin’ me fer? I—I ain’ done a
thing!’

“Yas’m, dat’s jes de way he talk, an’ ’mos’
look like he’s gwine fall right down, too, twell
Mis’ Simons tuk hole uv ’is arm, kine o’ shekkin’
’im, like, an’ turn ’roun’ ter de do’.

“‘Go in, Jonah! Quick!’ she say. ‘Cuz
dey’s voices an’ folks a-runnin’ an’ holl’in’
right dere in de yard. She seem ter jes push
’im in an’ shet de do’; an’ den she stan’ up,
lookin’ ser stret ’n’ w’ite-like, didn’ look r’ally
like Mis’ Simons.

“‘’Tain’ gwine nobody else git—fru—dat-do’,’
she say, ser low couldn’ nobody sca’cely
hyeah it; an’ den, oh, ’twuz jes awful! Dey
all come a-knockin’ up ’ginst de steps, an’ a-holl’in’
an’ a-pushin’, an’ some uv ’em laffin’ an’
some uv ’em cursin’, an’ all uv ’em holl’in’ ’bout
de nigger, an’ tellin’ Mis’ Simons ter bring
out de nigger!

“An’ w’at yer s’pose? Mis’ Simons she jes
stan’ dere same’s ever, a-lookin’ down on ’em
wid ’er back ter de do’.

“‘Bring ’im out!’ dey keep on a-holl’in’.
‘Bring ’im out!’

“An’ ’er face look all w’ite an’ dazzlin’ in
de light, an’ ’er voice come low an’ kine o’
shekkin’ like. ‘No,’ she say, ‘I cert’nly is not
gwine—bring ’im out,’ she say. Yas’m, dat’s
jes de ’sponse she make. An’ den dey all
’mence holl’in’ ag’in ’bout crim’nal ’n’—’n’
murd’rer, an’ sayin’ does she want ’em ter go in
af-ter ’im, an’ buntin’ up ’ginst de steps ag’in,
an’ jostlin’ an’ pushin’, twell Mis’ Simons kine
o’ step forrad a li’l’, still
a-lookin’ down at ’em.

“‘Ain’t yer ’shame!’ she
say. ‘Oh—ain’t—yer—’shame!’
An’ I ’clare, ez she
stood dere, seem like I ain’
nuver seed ’er eyes look ser
clare ’n’ burnin’-like, ner ’er
face ser dazzlin’ w’ite.

“‘He’s jes ez innercent uv
any crime—ez I is,’ she say.
‘I knows it, ’cuz I knows
’im,’ she say; ‘an’—you
knows it! Ef yer doan’t—it’s
’cuz yer doan’t cyare
’nough ’bout it—ter—fine—out.’

“It’s one r’al big man
where seem ter be kine o’
mekkin’ all de res’ uv ’em do
jes like he done, an’ fum de
ve’y time Mis’ Simons ’mence
ter speak he jes stood dere
a-lookin’ at ’er like he cyan’t
move ner holler.

“‘Yer—doan’t cyare
’nough ’bout it—ter—fine
out!’ she say; ’an’ den dis
yere’s de kine o’ thing yer
do! Oh, it’s de kine o’ thing
we’s ’blige answer fer—eve’y
day!’ An’ she stop, kine o’
gaspin’ like, ter ketch ’er
bref.

“Well, de ve’y same time she stop, de big
man turn ’roun’ awful quick ’n’ look off r’al
sudden at de road an’ den he look at de res’
where’s cursin’ ’n’ laffin’——”

“Ezekiel!” interrupted Miss North in a
sharp whisper, catching at his arm. Then her
hand dropped, and she looked around her.

“Don’t you see, Ezekiel?” she went on
naturally. “We are almost there. And—wait,
Ezekiel; stay right here; don’t hurry so.
Wait, stay close to me! There seems to be—some
trouble.”

“It’s Arch’bal’, Miss No’th!” he began, his
voice rising excitedly. “Dey’s cotch ’im! I
tole yer dey’s gwine cotch ’im, Miss No’th!
Look, Miss No’th!”

Just then a big negro broke in on the scene,
and suddenly Archibald was at large again,
dashing through the noisy crowd in one direction,
while the big negro ran in another. In
the confusion that followed, Miss North put
her hand out for Ezekiel, to find that he was
not there, while Ezekiel, looking distractedly
for Miss North, found himself pushed on in the
crowd of jostling, swearing men.

“Oh, look out!” he gasped;
“yer’s pushin’ me! Yer—yer’s
steppin’ on me! Oh,
turn me loose!”

“Get out o’ yere!” a coarse
voice called in his ear,
“You’ll get killed, an’ good
riddance if you do!”

He felt them closing in over
him, while he slipped to the
ground—tramping on over
him, pushing, tramping on,
while, a limp, wounded little
heap, he tried to raise his
head, and felt it knock back
again in the dust.

“Mis’—Mis’ Simons—wouldn’
nuver ’a’ let yer—done
me—dat-a-way!” he
whispered vaguely. He
raised his head again, feeling
confusedly for it as he sat
up, gazing stupidly around.
Then he pulled himself to his
feet and limped aimlessly
around in a circle.

“Where’s I gwine?” he
mumbled. “Mis’ Simons! …
Mis’ Simons—wouldn’
nuver ’a’ let yer—done
me—dat-a-way!” He
stumbled off across the side-walk
into the grass, unheeded
by a still confused, noisy
crowd. In the grass he still stumbled on.

“Mis’ Simons—wouldn’ nuver ’a’ let yer—’a’
let yer—done me—” As he slipped down
again into the grass, his eyes closed.

A crowd of angry, excited men seemed to be
still before him—but Mrs. Simons stood with
her back to the door, looking down at them
with a white face. From a step beside her he
seemed to be still looking up at her, while her
low, vibrating voice seemed to be still echoing—echoing:

“Oh, aren’t you ashamed of yourselves!
Aren’t—you—ashamed!”

With their reckless, brutish faces flickering
437
before him again, he thought he was watching
only her—watching—while her low voice went
vibrating on—till they turned from her, swearing
and laughing! And then she was stretching
out her white hand, catching at one of the
pillars, while she slipped down—down beside
him on the step—and her arms fell around
him helplessly.

“You’ll—take—care of me!” she cried
faintly, “won’t you—Ezekiel!”

“Yas’m,” came a broken whisper from the
grass, “I’ll tek cyare o’ yer, Mis’ Simons!”

But there was another low voice which he
did not understand, and his eyes opened wide,
looking up vacantly at Miss North.

“Ezekiel! Have you—have you—been
hurt? Oh, Ezekiel——”

“Yas’m, I reckon I is, Mis’ Simons, jes a
li’l’,” he mumbled, struggling painfully to his
feet; “but I’ll—tek cyare o’ yer—I’ll tek
cyare o’ yer, Mis’ Simons!”

The next morning he sat in his seat at
school, watching Miss North with large, absent
eyes.

“You ought not to have come this morning,
Ezekiel,” she began gently, as her eyes rested
on his thin, wistful little face; “I don’t think
you ought to stay.”

“Yas’m, I oughter stay, Miss No’th,” he
assured her, with a faint smile. His eyes
wandered to the window.

“Did dey ketch ’im?” he questioned suddenly.
“Did dey ketch Arch’bal’, Miss No’th?”

“No,” she answered, a sudden hot color
rising up in her cheeks. “Archibald’s gone away;
they can’t find him. But he—he needn’t
have. They found out it was a mistake; he
wasn’t the one they wanted.”

“Mis’ Simons oughter ’a’ been yere—ain’t
she?” he went on dreamily. “She wouldn’
nuver ’a’ let ’em—done ’im—dat-a-way!
Would she, Miss No’th?”

“No!” she answered, her voice startling
him out of his dream, while the color deepened
painfully in her cheeks. “Remember always,
Ezekiel, she wouldn’t have let them! And remember”—her
voice softened—“she’s your
friend, because—she’s of the best!” Miss
North’s eyes wandered dreamily now, and she
seemed to have forgotten her audience. “Remember,
there are always the others, too—the
coarse and the brutal, who are only glad of
an excuse—and they can stamp their whole
people—very coarsely. But remember, Ezekiel,”
her eyes gazed fixedly ahead, “it isn’t
the fault of the best ones; it’s the fault of the
worst—who always snatch at an excuse—and
who will—just as long as they’re allowed.”

Her eyes fell on Ezekiel again, who was
looking at her in wide perplexity.

“What is it, Ezekiel?” she smiled. “Oh,
yes, I was just saying—about Mrs. Simons—she
was always very good to you, wasn’t she,
Ezekiel?”

“Yas’m, Mis’ Simons cert’nly wuz good ter
me.” Again it was Ezekiel’s eyes that dreamed
with languid, velvety moistness.

“Remember—that she’s—one of the best,
Ezekiel!”

“Yas’m,” came the gentle response; “couldn’
be nobuddy no better’n—Mis’ Simons!”

BY
HUGO MÜNSTERBERG

If a German stands up to talk about prohibition,
he might just as well sit down at
once, for every one in America, of course,
knows beforehand what he is going to say.
Worse, every one knows also exactly why
he is so anxious to say it: how can he help being
on the wrong side of this question? And especially
if he has been a student in Germany, he
will have brought the drinking habit along with
him from the Fatherland, together with his
cigar smoking and card playing and duelling.
If a poor man relies on his five quarts of heavy
Munich beer a day, how can he ever feel happy
if he is threatened with no license in his town
and with no beer in his stein? Yet my case
seems slightly different. I never in my life
played cards, I never fought a duel, and when
the other day in a large women’s college, after
an address and a reception, the lady president
wanted to comfort me and suggested that I go
into the next room and smoke a cigar, I told her
frankly that I could do it if it were the rule in
her college, but that it would be my first cigar.
With beer it is different: Last winter in traveling
I was for some days the guest of an Episcopal
clergyman, who, anticipating the visit of a
German, had set up a bottle of excellent beer as
a welcome, and we drank together the larger
part of the bottle—but I think that is my only
case in late years. When I had to attend a
Students’ “Commers,” I was always protected
by the thick mug through which no one could
discover that the contents never became less
during the evening. I live most comfortably
in a pleasant temperance town which will, I
hope, vote no-license year by year as long as
freshmen stroll over the old Harvard Yard.
And although I have become pretty much
Americanized, I have never drunk a cocktail.

The problem of prohibition, thus, does not
affect my thirst, but it greatly interests my
scientific conscience; not as a German, but as a
psychologist I feel impelled to add a word to
the discussion which is suddenly reverberating
over the whole country. But is it really a discussion
which we hear? Is it not rather a one-sided
denunciation of alcohol, repeated a million
times with louder and louder voice, an outcry
ever swelling in its vehemence? On the
other side there may be the protests of the distillers
and brewers and wine-growers and bottle-makers
and saloon-keepers, and perhaps some
timid declarations of thirsty societies—but
such protests do not count, since they have all
the earmarks of selfishness; they are ruled out,
and no one listens, just as no one would consult
the thieves if a new statute against pickpockets
were planned. So far as the really disinterested
public is concerned, the discussion is essentially
one-sided. If serious men like Cardinal
Gibbons raise their voices in a warning
against prohibition, they are denounced and
overborne, and no one cares to imitate them.

The Fundamental Evil of American
Public Opinion

It has been seldom indeed that the fundamental
evil of American public opinion has come out so
clearly; namely, that no one dares to be on the
unpopular side; just as in fashion and social life,
every one wants to be “in it.” No problem has
in America a fair hearing as soon as one side has
become the fashion of mind. Only the cranks
come out with an unbalanced, exaggerated opposition
and thus really help the cause they
want to fight against. The well-balanced
thinkers keep quiet and simply look on while
the movement rushes forward, waiting quietly
for the reaction which sets in from the inner
absurdity of every social extreme. The result
is too often an hysterical zig-zag movement,
where fearlessness might have found a middle
way of steady progress. There must be indeed
a possible middle way between the evil of the
present saloon and the not lesser evil of a future
national prohibition; yet if this one-sidedness of
discussion goes on, it is not difficult to foresee,
after the legislative experiences of the last year,
439
that the hysterical movement will not stop until
prohibition is proclaimed from every state-house
between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Exaggerated denunciation of the prohibition
movement is, of course, ineffective. Whoever
simply takes sides with the saloon-keeper
and his clientèle—yes, whoever is blind to the
colossal harm which alcohol has brought and is
now bringing to the whole country—is unfit to
be heard by those who have the healthy and
sound development of the nation at heart. The
evils which are connected with the drinking
habit are gigantic; thousands of lives and many
more thousands of households are the victims
every year; disease and poverty and crime
grow up where alcohol drenches the soil. To
deny it means to ignore the teachings of medicine
and economics and criminology.

But is this undeniable fact really a proof of
the wisdom of prohibition? The railroads of
the United States injured last year more than
one hundred thousand persons and put out
seven thousand hopeful lives; does any sane
man argue that we ought to abolish railroads?
The stock exchange has brought in the last year
economic misery to uncounted homes, but even
at the height of the panic no one wanted to destroy
the market for industrial stocks. How
much crime and disaster and disease and ruin
have come into the lives of American youth
through women, and yet who doubts that
women are the blessing of the whole national
life? To say that certain evils come from a
certain source suggests only to fools the hasty
annihilation of the source before studying
whether greater evils might not result from its
destruction, and without asking whether the
evils might not be reduced, and the good from
the same source remain untouched and untampered
with. Even if a hollow tooth aches, the
modern dentist does not think of pulling it; that
would be the remedy of the clumsy village barber.
The evils of drink exist, and to neglect
their cure would be criminal, but to rush on to
the conclusion that every vineyard ought therefore
to be devastated is unworthy of the logic
of a self-governing nation. The other side has
first to show its case.

“Better England Free Than England
Sober?”

This does not mean that every argument of the
other side is valid. In most of the public protestations,
especially from the Middle West, far
too much is made of the claim that all the Puritanic
laws and the whole prohibitionist movement
are an interference with personal liberty.
It is an old argument, indeed, “Better England
free than England sober.” For public meetings
it is just the kind of protest which resounds well
and rolls on nobly. We are at once in the midst
of the “most sacred” rights. Who desires that
America, the idol of those who seek freedom
from the tyranny of the Old World, shall trample
on the right of personal liberty? And yet
those hundreds of singing-societies which have
joined in this outburst of moral indignation have
forgotten that every law is a limitation of personal
liberty. The demand of the nation must
limit the demands of the individual, even if it
is not the neighbor, but the actor himself who
is directly hurt. No one wants to see the lottery
or gambling-houses or the free sale of morphine
and cocaine permitted, or slavery, even
though a man were to offer himself for sale, or
polygamy, even though all wives should consent.
To prevent temptation toward ruinous
activities is truly the State’s best right, and no
injury to personal liberty. The German reflects
gladly how much more the German State
apparently intrudes upon personal freedom:
for instance, in its splendid State insurance for
old age and accidents.

To be sure, from this German viewpoint it is
hard to understand why the right of the State
to subordinate personal wishes to national ones
should not carry with it a duty to make compensation.
To him the actions of some Southern
States appear simply as the confiscation of
property. When, as has happened, a captain
of industry erects, for instance, a most costly
brewery, and the State in the following year
prohibits the sale of beer, turning the large, new
establishment into a huge, useless ruin, without
giving the slightest compensation, the foreigner
stands aghast, wondering if to-morrow a party
which believes in the State ownership of railroads
may not prohibit railroading by private
companies without any payment to the present
owners.

Yet the political aspect does not concern the
social psychologist. I abstract from it as from
many others. There is, indeed, no limit to the
problems which ought to be studied most seriously
before such a gigantic revolution is organized.
The physician may ask whether and
when alcohol is real medicine, and the physiologist
may study whether it is a food and
whether it is rightly taken as helpful to nutrition;
but this is not our problem. The theologians
may quarrel as to whether the Bible
praises the wine or condemns the drinker,
whether Christ really turned water into that
which we call wine, and whether Christianity
as such stands for abstinence. It is matter
for the economist to ask what will become of
the hundred thousands of men who are working
to-day in the breweries and related industries.
440
A labor union claims that “over half a
million men would be thrown out of employment
by general prohibition, who, with their
families, would make an army of a million
human beings robbed of their means of existence.”
And the economist, again, may consider
what it might mean to take out the
license taxes from the city budgets and the hundreds
of millions of internal revenue from the
budget of the whole country. It is claimed
that the brewers, maltsters, and distillers pay
out for natural and manufactured products,
for labor, transportation, etc., seven hundred
million dollars annually; that their aggregate
investments foot up to more than three thousand
millions; and that their taxes contribute
three hundred and fifty millions every year to
the public treasuries. Can the country afford
to ruin an industry of such magnitude? Such
weighty problems cannot be solved in the Carrie
Nation style: yet they are not ours here.

The Lonely Drinker of the Temperance
Town

Nearer to our psychological interest comes the
well-known war-cry, “Prohibition does not
prohibit.” It is too late in the day to need to
prove it by statistics: every one knows it. No
one has traveled in prohibition States who has
not seen the sickening sight of drunkards of the
worst order. The drug-stores are turned into
very remunerative bars, and through hidden
channels whiskey and gin flood the community.
The figures of the United States Commissioner
of Internal Revenue tell the story publicly. In
a license State like Massachusetts, there exists
one retail liquor dealer for every 525 of population;
in a prohibition State like Kansas, one for
every 366. But the secret story is much more
alarming. What is the effect? As far as the
health of the nation and its mental training in
self-control and in regulation of desires are concerned,
the result must be dangerous, because,
on the whole, it eliminates the mild beverages
in favor of the strong drinks and substitutes
lonely drinking for drinking in social company.
Both are psychologically and physiologically a
turn to the worse. It is not the mild beer and
light wine which are secretly imported; it is
much easier to transport and hide whiskey and
rum, with their strong alcoholic power and
stronger effect on the nerve-cells of the brain.
And of all forms of drinking none is more ruinous
than the solitary drink, as soon as the feeling
of repugnance has been overcome; there is
no limit and no inhibition. If I look back over
the last years, in which I often studied the
effects of suggestion and hypnotism on habitual
drinkers, I do not hesitate to say that it was in
most cases an easy thing to cure the social
drinker of the large cities, but very hard to
break the lonely drinker of the temperance
town. Of course, prohibition reduces somewhat
the whole quantity of consumption, but it
withdraws the stimulant, in most cases, where
it would do the least harm and intensifies the
harm to the organism where it is most
dangerous.

Our Greatest Danger—Disregard for
Law

But man is not only a nervous system. Prohibition
forced by a majority on an unwilling
minority will always remain a living source of
the spirit of disregard for law. Yet, “unwilling”
minority is too weak an epithet; the question
is of a minority which considers the arbitrary
rule undemocratic, absurd, immoral, and
which really believes that it is justified in finding
a way around a contemptible law.

Judges know how rapidly the value of the
oath sinks in courts where violation of the prohibition
laws is a frequent charge, and how
habitual perjury becomes tolerated by respected
people. The city politicians know still better
how closely blackmail and corruption hang together,
in the social psychology, with the enforcement
of laws that strike against the beliefs
and traditions of wider circles. The public service
becomes degraded, the public conscience
becomes dulled. And can there be any doubt
that disregard of law is the most dangerous
psychological factor in our present-day American
civilization? It is not lynch law which is
the worst; the crimes against life are twenty
times more frequent than in Europe, and as for
the evils of commercial life which have raised
the wrath of the whole well-meaning nation in
late years, has not disregard of law been their
real source? In a popular melodrama the sheriff
says solemnly: “I stand here for the law”;
and when the other shouts in reply, “I stand
for common sense!” night after night the public
breaks out into jubilant applause. To foster
this immoral negligence of law by fabricating
hasty, ill-considered laws in a hysterical mood,
laws which almost tempt toward a training in
violation of them, is surely a dangerous experiment
in social psychology.

Are We About to Prohibit Meat and Tea?

Hasty and hysterical that kind of law-making
is indeed. Within a few years, during which
the situation itself has not been changed, during
which no new discoveries have proved the
right or necessity, during which no experts have
reached common results, the wave has swollen
to a devastating flood. Who let it loose? Were
441
the psychologists asked to decide, or the physicians,
or the physiologists, or the sociologists,
or any one who has studied the problem as a
whole with professional knowledge? Certainly
not: their commissions have hardly ever proposed
total abstinence. Of course, those who
rush on mean the best as they see it; they want
to make better men; but can a nation ever hope
to reach private morality by law and thus to
exclude all private lying and greediness and
envy and ingratitude and temper and unfairness
just as well as intemperance? Such unclear
and vague mixing of purposes always characterizes
hysterical legislation. A sober contemplator
must ask himself: What is it to lead
to if well-meaning, short-sighted dilettantes can
force legislation on questions which demand the
most serious expert study?

There is growing throughout the land to-day a
conviction—which has its core of truth—that
many people eat too much meat; and not a few
see a remedy in vegetarianism and Fletcherism.
If this prejudice swells in a similar way, the
time may come when one State after the other
will declare slaughtering illegal, confiscate the
meat-packing houses, and prohibit the poisonous
consumption of beef and the killing of any creature
that can look on us with eyes. Other groups
are fighting coffee and tea, and we may finally
land in nuts and salads. Yes, according to this
line of legislative wisdom, there is no reason for
prohibiting only alcohol. Do I go far beyond
the facts in asserting that in certain States the
same women and men who are publicly against
every use of alcohol are also opposed to the
“drugs” of the physicians and speak of them
privately as poisons? Not the Christian Scientists
only—in intellectual Boston thousands of
educated women speak of drugs and nervine as
belonging to a medieval civilization which they
have outgrown. The same national logic may
thus lead us to laws which will prohibit every
physician from using the resources of the drug-store—if
they have not all simply to go over
to osteopathy.

A Spring Flood of Emotional Legislation

The question of the liquor trade and temperance—which
is so widely different from a hasty
prohibition—has engaged the minds of all
times and of all nations, and is studied everywhere
to-day with the means of modern science.
But this spring flood of prohibition legislation
which has overrun the States shows few signs of
deeper connection with serious study and fewer
signs of profit from the experiments of the past.
When the Chinese government made laws
against intemperance about eleven hundred
years before Christ, it can hardly have gone
more hastily to work than the members of this
movement of the twentieth century after Christ.
It is unworthy of women and men who want to
stand for sobriety to allow themselves to become
intoxicated with hysterical outcries, when a gigantic
national question is to be solved, a question
which can never be solved until it is solved
rightly. A wrong decision must necessarily lead
to a social reaction which can easily wipe out
every previous gain.

Progress is to be hoped for only from the most
careful analysis of all the factors of this problem;
yet, instead, the nation leaves it to the unthinking,
emotional part of the population. In
the years of the silver agitation it was a matter
of admiration to any foreigner, the wonderful
seriousness with which large crowds listened in
a hundred towns, evening after evening, to long
hours of difficult technical discussion on currency;
sixteen to one was really discussed by
the whole nation, and arguments were arrayed
against arguments before a decision was reached.
Is it necessary that the opposite method be
taken as soon as this problem is touched—a
question far more complex and difficult than the
silver question, and of far more import to the
moral habits and the development of the nation?
When leading scholars bring real arguments
on both sides of the problem, their work is
buried in archives, and no one is moved to action.
But when a Chicago minister hangs the
American flag over his pulpit, fastens a large
patch of black color on it, declares that the
patch stands for the liquor evil which smirches
the country, denounces wildly the men who
spend for whiskey the money which ought to
buy medicine for sick children, and then madly
tears the black cloth from the stars and stripes
and grinds it under his heel—then thousands
rush out as excited as if they had heard a convincing
argument. And this superficiality is
the more repellent because every glimpse below
the surface shows an abundance of cant and
hypocrisy and search for cheap fame and sensationalism
and still more selfish motives mingled
with the whole movement; even the agitation
itself, with its threats of ruin, borders too often
on graft and blackmail and thus helps to debauch
the public life.

Alcohol and the Brain

Those who seriously study, not merely the one
or the other symptom, but the whole situation,
can hardly doubt that the demand of true civilization
is for temperance and not for abstinence,
and that complete prohibition must in the long
run work against real temperance. But nothing
is more characteristic of the hysterical caprice
of the masses than the constant neglect of
442
this distinction. Even the smallest dose of
alcohol is for them nothing but evil, and triumphantly
they seize on isolated statements of
physiologists who acknowledge that every dose
of alcohol has a certain influence on the brain.
This is at once given the turn that every glass of
beer or wine “muddles” the brain and is therefore
a sin against the freedom of man.

Certainly every glass of beer has an influence
on the cells of the brain and on the mind; so has
every cup of tea or coffee, every bit of work and
every amusement, every printed page and every
spoken word. Is it certain that the influence is
harmful because an overdose of the same stimulants
is surely poisonous? Boiling water is
most dangerous for the body on account of its
strong heat: is a bath in lukewarm water therefore
also harmful? To climb Mount Blanc
would overtax my heart: is it therefore inadvisable
for me to climb the two flights to my
laboratory? Of course, under certain conditions
it might be wise to take account of the
slightest influences. Without being harmful,
they might be unsuited to a certain mental purpose.
If I were to take a glass of beer now in
the morning, I should certainly be unable to
write the next page of this essay with the same
ease; the ideas would flow more slowly. But
does that indicate that I did wrong in taking
last night, after a hard day’s fatiguing work, a
glass of sherry and a glass of champagne at a
merry dinner-party, after which nothing but
light conversation and music were planned for
the rest of the evening? Of course, alcohol before
serious intellectual work disturbs me; but
hearing a hurdy-gurdy in the street or thinking
of the happy news which a letter has just
brought to me, or feeling angry over any incident,
disturbs me just as much. It is all the
same kind of interference; the brain centers
which I used for my intellectual effort are for a
while inhibited and thus unfit for the work
which I have in hand. When the slight anger
has evaporated, when the pleasurable excitement
has subsided, when the music is over, I
can gather my thoughts again, and it is arbitrary
to claim that the short blockade of ideas
was dangerous, and that I ought to have avoided
the music or the pleasure or the wine.

Of course, if we consider, for instance, the prevention
of crime, we ought not to forget that
some even of these slight inhibitions may facilitate
a rash, vehement deed and check cool deliberation.
In times of social excitement, therefore,
alcohol ought to be reduced. But again this
same effect, as far as the temperate use of alcohol
is in question, may result from many other
sources of social unrest. The real danger begins
everywhere with intemperance: that is, with a
lack of that self-discipline which is not learned
but lost under the outer force of prohibition.

The Case Psychologically

Psychologically the case stands thus: alcohol
has indeed an inhibitory influence on mind and
body. The feeling of excitement, the greater
ease of motor impulse, the feeling of strength
and joy, the forgetting of sorrow and pain—all
are at bottom the result of inhibition; impulses
are let free because the checking centers are inhibited.
But it is absurd to claim from the
start that all this is bad and harmful, as if the
word inhibition meant destruction and lasting
damage. Harmful it is, bodily and socially,
when these changes become exaggerated, when
they are projected into such dimensions that
vital interests, the care for family and honor
and duty are paralyzed; but in the inhibition
itself lies no danger. There is not the slightest
act of attention which does not involve such inhibition.
If I read in my study, the mere attention
to my book will inhibit the ticking of
the clock in my room and the noise from the
street, and no one will call it harmful. As soon
as my attention increases, and I read with such
passion that I forget my engagements with
friends and my duties in my office, I become
ridiculous and contemptible. But the fact
that the unbalanced attention makes me by its
exaggerated inhibition quite unfit for my duties,
is no proof that the slight inhibition produced
by attentive reading ought to be avoided.

The inhibition by alcohol, too, may have in
the right place its very desirable purpose, and
no one ought to be terrified by such physiological
statements, even if inhibition is called a partial
paralysis. Yes, it is partial paralysis, but
no education, no art, no politics, no religion, is
possible without such partial paralysis. What
else are hope and belief and enjoyment and enthusiasm
but a re-enforcement of certain mental
states, with corresponding inhibition—that
is, paralysis—of the opposite ideas? If a moderate
use of alcohol can help in this most useful
blockade, it is an ally and not an enemy. If
wine can overcome and suppress the consciousness
of the little miseries and of the drudgery of
life, and thus set free and re-enforce the unchecked
enthusiasm for the dominant ideas, if
wine can make one forget the frictions and pains
and give again the feeling of unity and frictionless
power—by all means let us use this helper
to civilization. It was a well-known philosopher
who coupled Christianity and alcohol as
the two great means of mankind to set us free
from pain. But nature provided mankind with
other means of inhibition; sleep is still more
radical, and every fatigue works in the same direction;
443
to inhibit means to help and to prepare
for action.

And are those who fancy that every brain
alteration is an evil really aware how other influences
of our civilization hammer on the neurones
and injure our mental powers far beyond
the effects of a moderate use of alcohol? The
vulgar rag-time music, the gambling of the
speculators, the sensationalism of the yellow
press, the poker playing of the men and the
bridge playing of the women, the mysticism and
superstition of the new fancy churches, the hysterics
of the baseball games, the fascination of
murder cases, the noise on the Fourth of July
and on the three hundred and sixty-four other
days of the year, the wild chase for success; all
are poison for the brain and mind. They make
the nervous system and the will endlessly more
unfit for the duties of the day than a glass of
lager beer on a hot summer’s evening.

Drying up a Nation Emotionally

What would result if prohibition should really
prohibit, and all the inhibitions which a mild
use of beer and wine promise to the brain really
be lost? The psychological outcome would be
twofold: certain effects of alcohol which serve
civilization would be lost; and, on the other
hand, much more harmful substitutions would
set in. To begin with: the nation would lose
its chief means of recreation after work. We
know to-day too well that physical exercise and
sport is not real rest for the exhausted brain-cells.
The American masses work hard
throughout the day. The sharp physical and
mental labor, the constant hurry and drudgery
produce a state of tension and irritation
which demands before the night’s sleep some
dulling inhibition if a dangerous unrest is not
to set in. Alcohol relieves that daily tension
most directly.

Not less important would be the loss on the
emotional side. Emotional desire for a life in
beauty would yield to the triviality of usefulness.
Puritanism has held back the real
American spirit of artistic creation in fine arts
and music and drama: prohibition without
substitutes would crush still more the esthetic
spirit in the brain of man and would make
beauty still more the domain of women. Her
more responsive physiological constitution does
not need the artificial paralysis of the inhibiting
centers. The mind of the average woman
shows that lower degree of checking power
which small alcoholic doses produce in the average
man. But just therefore she and men of
the female type cannot carry on alone the work
of the nation. A national life without the artificial
inhibitions of the restraining centers
becomes for the large masses a matter of mere
practical calculation and righteous dulness.
Truly the German, the Frenchman, the Italian
who enjoys his glass of light wine and then
wanders joyful and elated to the masterpieces
of the opera, serves humanity better than the
New Englander who drinks his ice-water and
sits satisfied at the vaudeville show, world-far
from real art. Better America inspired than
America sober. Can we forget that in almost
all parts of the globe even religious life began
with intoxication cults? God Indra was in the
wine for the Hindus and Dionysius for the
Greeks. It is the optimistic exuberance of life,
the emotional inspiration, which alcohol brought
into the dulness of human days, and the history
of culture shows it on every page.

But with the emotion dries up the will. Mere
righteousness needs no stimulation. But the
American nation would never have achieved its
world work if the attitude of resignation had
been its national trait. Those pioneers who
opened the land and awoke to life its resources
were men who longed for excitement, for the
intensity of life, for vividness of experience.
The nation would not be loyal to its tradition
if it were not to foster this desire of intense experience:
the moderate use of alcohol is both
training in such intensified conscious experience
and training in the control and discipline
of such states. The nation needs both, and as
the child learns to prepare for the work of life
by plays and games, so man is schooling himself
for the active and effective life by the temperate
use of exciting beverages which playingly
awake those vivid feelings of success. The
scholar and the minister and a thousand other
individuals may not need this training, but the
millions, the masses, cannot prepare themselves
for a national career of effectiveness if this opportunity
is taken from their lives. History
shows it abundantly.

To be sure, all this is but half true, because,
as we said, the individual, and finally the nation,
may seek substitutes, may satisfy the
craving for emotional excitement, for will
elation, for intense experience, by other
means than the oldest and most widely
scattered. Zealotism in religious belief, tyranny
and cruelty, sexual over-indulgence and perversion,
gambling and betting, mysticism and
superstition, recklessness and adventurousness,
and, above all, senseless crimes have always
been the psychological means of overcoming the
emptiness and monotony of an unstimulated life.
They produce, just like alcohol, that partial
paralysis and create intense experiences. They
thus take hold of the masses, so long as the social
mind is not entirely dried up, with the necessity
444
of a psychological law. There is no more dangerous
state for a healthy, strong nation than
mental monotony in the life of the masses.
Catholic countries play to the imagination at
least through the religion, monarchic countries
have their own picturesqueness and color,
America under prohibition pushes the masses
into gambling and reckless excitements and
sexual disorder and money-crazes and criminal
explosions of the mind.

The Temperance Experiment in
Mohammedanism

Has not history experimented sufficiently?
Prohibitionist stump speakers may tell us that
their cause means the hitherto unheard-of
progress of civilization; the United States, after
abolishing slavery for mankind, is called on to
end also the tyranny of alcohol under which
humanity has suffered for ages. But are there
not two hundred millions of Moslems who are
obedient to Mohammed’s law, that wine drinking
is sinful? What is the outcome? Of course,
it is not inspiring to hear the boast of the Moslems
that the Christians bring whiskey to Africa
and bestialize the natives, while the Mohammedans
fight alcohol. But aside from this,
their life goes on in slavery and polygamy and
semi-civilization. All the strong nations, all
those whose contributions were of lasting value
to the progress of mankind, have profited from
the help of artificial stimulation and intoxicants.

But every strong nation remained also conscious
of the dangers and evils which result from
intemperance. On the whole, history shows
that intemperance and abstinence alike work
against the highest interests of civilization;
temperance alone offers the most favorable
psychological conditions for the highest cultural
achievement. Intemperance mostly precedes
the strongest periods in the life of a nation and
follows them again as soon as decay has set in.
Temperance, that is, sufficient use of intoxicants
to secure emotional inspiration and volitional intensity,
together with sufficient training in self-discipline
to avoid their evils, always introduced
the fullest blossoming of national greatness. Instinctively
the American nation as a whole is
evidently striving for such temperance, but a
hysterical minority has at present succeeded in
exaggerating the movement and in transforming
it into its caricature, prohibition. The final
result, of course, will be temperance, since the
American nation will not ultimately allow itself
to become an emasculated nation of dyspeptic
ice-water drinkers without inspiration and energy,
or permit vulgar amusements, reckless
stock-gambling, sensationalism, adultery, burglary,
and murder to furnish the excitement
which the nerves of a healthy nation need.

The Securing of Temperance

How temperance can be secured, the experiences
of the older nations with a similar psychological
type of national mind ought to be decisive.
First of all, the beverages of strongly
alcoholic nature ought to be fought by those of
light alcoholic effect. The whiskey of the laborers
must be fought by light healthy beer and
perhaps by light American wines. Further, a
systematic education in self-control must set in;
the drunkard must not be tolerated under any
circumstances. Above all, the social habits in
the sphere of drinking must be entirely reshaped.
They belong to a period where the
Puritan spirit considered beer and wine as sinful
and relegated them to regions hidden from decent
eyes. The American saloon is the most
disgusting product of such narrowness; its dangers
for politics and law, health and economics,
are alarming. The saloon must disappear and
can be made to disappear perhaps by higher
license taxation and many other means. And
with it must disappear the bar and the habit of
drinking standing and of mutual treating. The
restaurant alone, with the hotel and the club,
is the fit public place where guests sitting at
tables may have beer and wine with their meals
or after meals,—and all controlled by laws
which absolutely forbid the sale of intoxicants
to certain groups of persons, to children, to inebriates,
and so on. As long as drinking means
to the imagination of a considerable well-meaning
minority of the nation the present-day repulsive
life of saloons and bars, the minority will
find it easy to terrorize and to whip into line the
whole country. But if those relics of a narrow
time disappear and customs grow which spread
the spirit of geniality and friendly social intercourse
over the foaming cup, the spell will be
broken. Instead of being tyrannized over by
short-sighted fanatics on the one side and corrupt
saloon-keepers on the other, the nation will
proceed with the unanimous sympathy of the
best citizens to firm temperance laws which the
sound instinct of the masses will really respect.
Training in self-control as against recklessness,
training in harmless hilarity and social enjoyment
as against mere vulgar excitement and
rag-time pleasures, training in respect for law
as against living under hysterical rules which
cannot be executed and which invite blackmail,
corruption, and habitual disregard of laws—these
are indeed the most needed influences on
the social mind of the country.

BY
MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES

I

“About that letter of your uncle’s? I
take it you have no one to suggest?”

Thomas Carden glanced anxiously
at the son in whom he had
so great a confidence, and who was the secret
pride of his eyes, the only love of his austere,
hard-working life.

The two were a great contrast to one another.
The older man was short and slight, with the
delicate, refined, spiritual face so often seen
in the provincial man of business belonging to
that disappearing generation of Englishmen who
found time to cultivate the things of the mind
as well as the material interests of life; a contrast,
indeed, to the tall, singularly handsome,
alert-looking man whom he had just addressed,
and whose perfect physical condition made him
appear somewhat younger than his thirty-two
years.

And yet, in spite or perhaps because of this
contrast between them, the two were bound in
the closest, if not exactly in the most confidential,
ties of affection. And, as a matter of course,
they were partners in the great metal-broking
business of Josh. Carden, Thomas Carden and
Son, which had been built up by three generations
of astute, self-respecting citizens of Birmingham.

It was Easter Monday, and the two men were
lingering over breakfast, in a way they seldom
allowed themselves time to do on ordinary
week-days, in the finely proportioned, book-lined
dining-room of one of those spacious old
houses which remain to prove that the suburb of
Edgbaston was still country a hundred years
ago.

Theodore Carden looked across the table
meditatively. He had almost forgotten his
uncle’s letter, for, since that letter had been read
and cursorily discussed, he and his father had
been talking of a matter infinitely more important
to them both. The matter in question
was the son’s recent engagement and coming
marriage, a marriage which was a source of true
satisfaction to the older man. His father’s unselfish
joy in the good thing which had befallen
him touched Theodore Carden keenly, for the
niche occupied in most men’s minds by their
intimate feminine circle was filled in that of the
young man by the diminutive figure of the
senior partner of Carden and Son.

As is perhaps more often the case than those
who despise human nature believe, men sometimes
have the grace to reverence and admire
those qualities in which they know themselves
to be deficient. Such a man was the younger
Carden. To-day the depths had been stirred,
and he let his mind dwell with a certain sense
of shame and self-rebuke on his own and his
father’s ideals of human conduct. Even as a
schoolboy, Theodore had come to realize how
much more he knew of the ugly side of life
than did his father. But then, old Mr. Carden
was quite exceptional; he knew nothing—or
so, at least, his son believed, and loved him
for it—of the temptations, conflicts, victories,
and falls of the average sensual man. Theodore’s
father had been engaged, at twenty, to
a girl of his own age whom he had not been
able to marry till twelve years later; she had
left him a widower with this one child after
five years of married life; and Thomas Carden,
as he had himself once told his son in a moment
of unwonted confidence, had been absolutely
faithful to her before the marriage
and since her death.

The woman—many people would have said
the very fortunate young woman—who was so
soon to become Mrs. Theodore Carden would not
possess such a husband as Thomas Carden had
been to his wife. And yet, in his heart, Theodore
was well aware that the gentle girl he loved
would probably be a happier woman than his
own mother had been, for he, unlike his father,
446
in his dealings with the other sex could call up
at will that facile and yet rather rare gift of tenderness
which women, so life had taught him,
value far more than the deeper, inarticulate
love….

Carden came back to the prosaic question of
his uncle’s letter with a distinct effort. “Have
I any one to suggest?” he echoed. “I have no
one to suggest, father. I know, of course, exactly
the sort of man Uncle Barrett is looking
for; he’s asking us to find him the perfect clerk
every man of business has sought for at some
time or other. If I were you, I should write and
tell him that the man he wants us to find never
has to look outside England for a job, and, what
is more, would rather be a clerk here—if he’s
any sense—than a partner in New Zealand!”

A smile quivered for a moment over the young
man’s shrewd face; his uncle was evidently
seeking such a man as he was himself, but such
men, so Theodore Carden was able to tell himself
without undue conceit, were not likely to
go into voluntary exile, even for the bribe of
eventual partnership in a flourishing business.

There was a pause, and then again the older
man broke the silence with something entirely
irrelevant to the subject which was filling the
minds of his son and himself.

“You haven’t looked at the Post this morning?
There’s nothing in it. Dearth of real
news is, I suppose, responsible for this?” and he
pointed, frowning as he spoke, to a column on
the middle page headed, “The Garvice Mystery.
New Developments.”

Again a shrewd, good-humoured smile quivered
on his son’s firm mouth. “In these days
newspapers have to follow, not lead, the public
taste. Very few people are honestly as indifferent
as you are, father, to that sort of story.
Now, even I, who never met poor old Garvice,
cannot help wondering how he came by his
death; and yet you, who knew the man——”

“I knew him,” said the other with a touch of
impatience, “as I know, and as you know,
dozens of our fellow-townsmen.”

“Never mind; you, at any rate, can put a face
to the man’s name; and yet the question as to
whether he was or was not poisoned by his wife
is one of indifference to you! Now I submit
that in this indifference you are really a little—”
he hesitated for a word, but found that none so
well expressed his thought as that which had
first risen to his lips—“peculiar, father.”

“Am I?” said Thomas Carden slowly; “am
I so, Theodore? Nay, nay, I deny that I am
indifferent! Lane”—Major Lane was at that
time Head Constable of Birmingham, and a life-long
friend of the speaker—“Lane was quite
full of it last night. He insisted on telling me
all the details of the affair, and what shocked
me, my boy, was not so much the question
which, of course, occupied Lane—that is, as to
whether that unhappy young woman poisoned
her husband or not—but the whole state of
things which he disclosed about them. Lane
told me certain facts concerning Garvice, who,
as you truly say, I have known, in a sense, for
years, which I should not have thought possible
of any man—vile things, which should
have prevented his thinking of marriage, especially
of marriage with a young wife.”

Theodore Carden remained silent; he never
discussed unsavory subjects with his father.
Moreover, he had no liking for Major Lane,
though he regarded him with considerable respect,
and even with a feeling of gratitude.
Some years before, the Head Constable had
helped the young man out of a serious scrape,
the one real scrape—so Carden was complaisantly
able to assure himself—engendered by
his systematic pursuit of women. Even now he
could not recall, without wincing, the interview
he had had on that occasion with his father’s
friend. During that interview Carden had felt
himself thoroughly condemned, and even despised,
by the older man, and he had been made
to feel that it was only for the sake of his father—his
high-minded, unsuspicious father—that
he was being saved from the public exposure of
a peculiarly sordid divorce suit.

But it was in all sincerity that the young man
now felt indignant with Major Lane for having
distressed such a delicately spiritual soul as was
Thomas Carden with the hidden details of the
Garvice story. After all, what interested the
public was not the question of Garvice’s moral
character, but whether a gently nurtured and
attractive woman had carried through a sinister
and ingenious crime, which, but for a mere accident,
would have utterly defied detection.

Theodore Carden got up from the breakfast
table and walked over to a circular bay-window
which commanded charming views of the wide,
sloping garden, interspersed with the streams
and tiny ponds which gave the house its name
of Watermead, and which enabled old Mr. Carden
to indulge himself with especial ease in his
hobby of water gardening.

Standing there, the young man began wondering
what he should do with himself this early
spring day. His fiancée had just left the quiet
lodgings which she and her mother, a clergyman’s
widow, had occupied in Birmingham during
the last few weeks, to pay visits to relatives
in the South. The thought of going to any of
the neighbouring houses, where he knew himself
to be sure of a warm welcome, and where the
news of his engagement would be received with
447
boisterous congratulations, tempered in some
cases with an underlying touch of regret and
astonishment, filled him with repugnance. The
girl he had chosen to be his wife was absolutely
different from the women who had hitherto attracted
him; he reverenced as well as loved her,
and hitherto Theodore Carden had never found
reverence to be in any sense a corollary of passion.

The last few days had brought a great change
in his life, and one which he meant should be
permanent; and yet, in spite or perhaps because
of this, as he stood staring with absent eyes into
his father’s charming garden, he found his mind
dwelling persistently on the only one of his
many amorous adventures which had left a
deep, an enduring, and, it must be admitted, a
most delightful mark on the tablets of his memory.

The whole thing was still so vivid to him that
half-involuntarily he turned round and looked
down the long room to where his old father was
sitting. How amazed, above all, how shocked
and indignant the man for whom he had so
great an affection and respect would feel, if he
knew the picture which was now floating before
his son’s retrospective vision!

What had happened had been briefly this:
One day in the previous October, Carden had
taken his seat in the afternoon express which
stops at Birmingham on its way from the north
to Euston, or rather, having taken a leisurely
survey of the train, which was, as he quickly
noted, agreeably empty, he had indicated to the
porter carrying his bag a carriage in which sat,
alone, a singularly pretty woman.

As he afterwards had the delight of telling
her, and, as he now reminded himself with a
retrospective thrill of feeling, he had experienced,
when his eyes first met those of the fair
traveller, that incommunicable sensation, part
physical, part mental, which your genuine
Lothario, if an intelligent man, always welcomes
with quickening pulse as the foretaste of
special zest to be attached to a coming pursuit.

Carden’s instinct as to such delicate questions
had seldom played him false; never less so
than on this occasion, for, within an hour, he
and the lovely stranger had reached that delightful
stage of intimacy in which each feels
that he and she, while still having much to
learn about the other, are on the verge of a complete
understanding.

During the journey of between two and three
hours, his travelling companion had told him a
great deal more about herself than he had
chosen to reveal concerning his own life and
affairs; he learned, for instance, that she was the
young wife of an old man, and that the old
man was exceedingly jealous. Further, that she
found the life she was compelled to lead “horribly
boring,” and that a widowed cousin, who
lived near London, and from whom she had
“expectations,” formed a convenient excuse
for occasional absences from home.

Concerning three matters of fact, however,
she completely withheld her confidence, both
then, in those first delicious hours of their acquaintance,
and even later, when their friendship—well,
why not say friendship? for Carden
had felt a very strong liking as well as an over-mastering
attraction toward this Undine-like
creature—had become much closer. The first
and second facts which she kept closely hidden,
for reasons which should perhaps have
been obvious, were her surname—she confided
to him that her Christian name was Pansy—and
her husband’s profession. The third,
about which she might surely have been less
reticent, was the name of the town where she
lived and from which she appeared to be travelling
that day.

The actual incidents of that eventful October
journey had become, to a certain extent, blurred
in Theodore Carden’s memory, but what had
followed was still extraordinarily vivid, and
to-day, on this holiday morning, standing idly
looking out of the window, he allowed his mind
a certain retrospective licence.

From whom, so he now asked himself, had
first come the suggestion that there should be no
parting at Euston between himself and the
strange, elemental woman he had found so full
of unforced fascination and disarming charm?
The answer soon came echoing down the corridors
of memory: from himself, of course—but
then, and even now the memory brought with it
shamefaced triumph, he remembered her quick
acquiescence, as free, as unashamed, as joyous
as that of a spoilt child acclaiming an unlooked-for
treat.

And, after all, what harm had there been in
the whole halcyon adventure—what injury
had it caused to any human being? Carden
put the husband, the fatuous old man who had
had the incredible folly to marry a girl thirty-five
years younger than himself, out of court.
Pansy, light-hearted, conscienceless Pansy—he
always thought of her with a touch of easy
tenderness—had run no risk of detection, for,
as he had early discovered, she knew no one in
London, with the solitary exception of the old
cousin who lived in Upper Norwood. As for his
own business acquaintances, he might, of course,
have been seen by any of them taking about this
singularly attractive woman, for the two went
constantly to the theatre, and daily to one or
448
other of the great restaurants. But what then?
Excepting that she was quieter in manner, far
better dressed, and incomparably prettier, Pansy
might have been the wife or sister of any one of
his own large circle of relations, that great Carden
clan who held their heads so high in the
business world of the Midlands.

Nay, nay, no risk had been run, and no one had
been a penny the worse! Indeed, on looking
back, Theodore Carden could tell himself that it
had been a perfect, a flawless episode, and perhaps
after all it was well that there had been no
attempt at a repetition. And yet? And yet
the young man, especially during the first few
weeks which had followed that sequence of enchanting
days, had often felt piqued, even a
little surprised, that the heroine of this amazing
experience had not taken advantage of his earnest
entreaty that she would give him the chance
of meeting her again. He had left it to her to
be mysterious; as for himself, he had seen no
reason why he should conceal from her either his
name or his business address.

Many men, doubtless, would not have been so
frank, but Theodore Carden, too wise in feminine
lore to claim an infallible knowledge of
women, never remembered having made a mistake
as to the moral social standing of a new
feminine acquaintance. During the few days
they had been together, everything had gone to
prove that Pansy was no masquerader from that
under-world whose denizens always filled him
with a sensation of mingled aversion and pity.
He could not doubt—he never had doubted—that
what she had chosen to tell him about herself
and her private affairs was substantially
true. No man, having heard her speak of it,
could fail to understand her instinctive repulsion
from the old husband to whom she had sold
herself into bondage; and as human, if not perhaps
quite as worthy of sympathy, was her restless
longing for freedom to lead the pleasant life
led by those of her more fortunate contemporaries
whose doings were weekly chronicled in the
society papers which seemed to form her only
reading.

Once only had Carden felt for his entrancing
companion the slightest touch of repugnance.
He had taken her to a play in which a child
played an important part, and she had suddenly
so spoken as to make him realise with a shock of
surprise that she was the mother of children!
Yet the little remark made by her, “I wonder
how my little girls are getting on,” had been
very natural and even womanly. Then, in
answer to a muttered word or two on his part,
she had explained that she preferred not to have
news of her children when she was absent from
home, since it only worried her; even when staying
with the old cousin at Upper Norwood, she
made a point of being completely free of all
possible home troubles. Hearing this gentle,
placid explanation of her lack of maternal anxiety,
Carden had put up his hand to his face to
hide a smile; he had not been mistaken; Pansy
was indeed the thorough-going little hedonist he
had taken her to be. Still, it was difficult, even
rather disturbing, to think of her as a mother,
and as the mother of daughters.

Yet how deep an impression this unmoral,
apparently soulless woman had made on his
mind and on his emotional memory! Even
now, when he had no desire, and, above all,
must not allow himself to have any desire, ever
to see her again, Theodore Carden felt almost as
keenly as he had done during the period of their
brief intimacy a morbid curiosity to know where
she lived and had her being.

It was late in the afternoon of the same day.
Theodore Carden had just come in from a long
walk, and, as he passed through the circular hall
round which Watermead was built, he heard the
low sound of voices, those of his father and some
other man, issuing from the square drawing-room
always occupied by the father and son on
such idle days as these. He stayed his steps,
realized that the visitor was Major Lane, and
then made up his mind to go up and change, instead
of going straight in to his father, as he
would have done had the latter been alone.

As he came down again, and crossed the now
lighted hall, he met the parlourmaid, an elderly
woman who had been in Thomas Carden’s service
ever since his wife’s death.

“I wonder if I can take in the lamps now,
Mr. Theodore? It’s getting so dark, sir.”

There was a troubled sound in her voice, and
the young man stopped and looked at her with
some surprise. “Of course you can, Jane,” he
said quickly, “why not? Why haven’t you
taken them in before?”

“I did go in with them half an hour ago, sir,
but the master told me to take them out again.
There’s firelight, to be sure, and it’s only Major
Lane in there, but he’s been here since three
o’clock, and master’s not had his tea yet. I
suppose they thought they’d wait till you came
in.”

“Oh! well, if my father prefers to sit in the
dark, and to put off tea till he can have my company,
you had better wait till I ring, and then
bring in the lamps and the tea together.” He
spoke with his usual light good-nature, and then
passed on, and so into the room which was the
only apartment in the large old house clearly
associated in his mind with the graceful, visionary
figure of his young mother.

Thomas Carden and the Head Constable were
sitting in the twilight, one on each side of the
fireplace, and when the young man came in they
both stirred perceptibly and abruptly stopped
speaking.

Theodore came forward and stood on the
hearth-rug.

“May Jane bring in the lamps, father?”

“Yes, yes, I suppose so.”

And the lamps were brought in. Then came
the tea-tray, placed by Jane on a large table
several paces from the fire. Very deliberately,
and asking no questions as to milk or sugar, for
well he knew the tastes of his father and of his
father’s friend, he poured out two cups of tea,
and, turning, advanced, a cup balanced in each
steady hand.

But halfway across the room he stopped for a
moment, arrested by the sound of his father’s
voice:

“Theo, my boy, I want to ask you something.”
This mode of address had become of late years
a little unusual, and there was something in
Thomas Carden’s accents which struck his son
as significant, even as rather solemn.

“Yes, father?”

“Did you not tell me this morning that you
had never met Garvice?”

The one onlooker, hatchet-faced Major Lane,
suddenly leaned a little forward. He was astonished
at his old friend’s extraordinary and
uncalled-for courage, and it was with an effort,
with the feeling that he was bracing himself to
see something terrible take place, that he looked
straight at the tall, fine-looking man who had
now advanced into the circle of light thrown by
the tall Argand lamps.

But Theodore Carden appeared quite unmoved,
nay, more, quite unconcerned by his
father’s question.

“Yes,” he said, “of course I told you so. I
suppose I knew the old fellow by sight, but I
certainly was never introduced to him. Are
there any new developments?” He turned to
Major Lane with a certain curiosity, and then
quite composedly handed him the cup of tea he
held in his right hand.

“Well, yes,” answered the other coldly,
“there are. We arrested Mrs. Garvice this
morning.”

“That seems rather a strong step to have
taken, unless new evidence has turned up since
Saturday,” said Theodore thoughtfully.

“Such new evidence has come to hand since
Saturday,” observed Major Lane significantly.

There was a pause, and again Thomas Carden
addressed his son with that strange touch of
solemnity, and again Major Lane, with some inward
wincing, stared fixedly at the young man
now standing, a stalwart, debonair figure, between
himself and his old friend.

“Can you assure me—can you assure us
both—that you never met Mrs. Garvice?”

Carden looked down at his father with a puzzled
expression. “Of course, I can’t assure you
of anything of the kind,” he said, still speaking
quite placidly. “I may have met her somewhere
or other, but I can’t remember having
done so; and I think I should have remembered
it, both because the name is an uncommon one,
and because”—he turned to Major Lane—“isn’t
she said to be an extraordinarily pretty
woman?”

As the last words were being uttered, an odd
thing happened. Thomas Carden suddenly
dropped the cup he was holding in his hand; it
rang against the brass fender and broke in several
pieces, while the spoon went clattering into
the fireplace.

“Father!” exclaimed Theodore, and then
quickly he added, “Don’t trouble to do that,”
for the old man was stooping over the rug and
fumbling with the broken pieces. But Thomas
Carden shook his head; it was evident that he
was, for the moment, physically incapable of
speech.

A great fear came into the son’s mind; he
turned to Major Lane and muttered in an urgent,
agonised whisper, “Is it—can it be a
seizure? Hadn’t I better go and try to find Dr.
Curle?” But the other, with a dubious expression
on his face, shook his head. “No,” he
said; “it’s nothing of the kind. Your father’s
getting older, Carden, as we all are, and I’ve had
to speak to him to-day about a very disagreeable
matter.” He looked fixedly, probingly, at the
young man, but again Theodore showed no sign
of having understood. “I think it’s thoroughly
upset him.” The speaker hesitated, and then
added: “I daresay he’ll tell you about it; in
any case, I’d better go now and come back later.
If you can spare me half an hour this evening, I
should like to have a talk with you.”

During the last few moments Major Lane had
made up his mind to take a certain course, even
to run a certain risk, and that not for the first
time that day, for he had already set his own
intimate knowledge of the life-long friend whose
condition now wrung him with pity against
what was, perhaps, his official duty.

Some two hours before, the Head Constable
had entered the house, where he had been so
constantly and so hospitably entertained, with
the firm conviction that Theodore Carden had
been the catspaw of a clever, unscrupulous
woman; in fact, that there had come a repetition,
but a hundred times more serious, of that
now half-forgotten entanglement which had so
450
nearly brought Carden to grief some seven or
eight years before. Once more he had come
prepared to do his best to save his friend’s son,
so far as might be possible, from the consequences
of his folly.

But now? Ah, now, the experienced, alert
official had to admit to himself that the incidents
of the last ten minutes had completely altered
his view of the matter. He realised that in any
case Theodore Carden was no fool; for the first
time that day the terrible suspicion came into
Major Lane’s mind that the man before him
might, after all, be more closely connected with
the Garvice mystery than had seemed possible.