[Translator’s Note.] The suppressed memoirs
of General Kuropatkin are in four bulky
volumes and contain, in the aggregate, about
600,000 words. The first three volumes are
devoted, mainly, to a detailed review of the
three great battles of the Russo-Japanese war—Liao-yang,
the Sha-ho, and Mukden—from
the standpoint of modern military science. The
fourth volume, which is entitled “Summing up
of the War,” covers a very wide field, dealing
partly with Russia’s national problems, her military
history, and her policy in Asia, and partly
with the causes of the late war, the rise of Japan
as a military power, and the reasons for the
overwhelming defeat of Russia’s armies in the
Far East.

McCLURE’S MAGAZINE
VOL. XXXI       SEPTEMBER, 1908                   No. 5

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

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

STATE COUNCILLOR ALEXANDER MIKHAILOVICH BEZOBRAZOFF

WHO ACQUIRED HIS EXTRAORDINARY POWER IN THE FAR EAST BY MEANS OF HIS KOREAN
TIMBER COMPANY, AN ENTERPRISE IN WHICH HE INTERESTED THE TSAR OF RUSSIA TO THE
EXTENT OF 2,000,000 RUBLES. RATHER THAN SACRIFICE THE FAMILY INVESTMENT IN THIS
ENTERPRISE, THE TSAR ALLOWED RUSSIA TO BE DRAGGED INTO A WAR WITH JAPAN

I have chosen, as the subject for this article,
General Kuropatkin’s narrative of the events
which preceded the rupture with Japan, in
February, 1904, and which may be regarded,
historically, as the causes of the war that ensued.
It contains many new facts, and throws
a flood of light upon Russian governmental
methods, upon Russia’s Asiatic policy, and upon
the character of the monarch who now sits on
the Russian throne.

Kuropatkin begins this part of his work with
a review of Russia’s policy and territorial acquisitions
in the Far East, which may be briefly
summarized as follows: The question of obtaining
an outlet on the Pacific Ocean was
theoretically considered in Russia long ago;
and the conclusion reached was that, in view
of the sparseness of Russia’s population east of
Lake Baikal, and the insignificance of her commerce,
foreign and domestic, in that part of the
world, the task of getting access to the Pacific,
which might involve a serious struggle, ought
not to be imposed upon the existing generation.
An outlet was not needed at that time, and it is
not needed yet. The Russian War Department,
moreover, has always regarded with apprehension,
and as far as possible combatted, the
opinion that “Russia is the most western of
Asiatic states, not the most eastern of European,”
and that all her future lies beyond the
Urals.

Prior to the Japanese-Chinese war, nobody
questioned that the trans-Siberian railway
should follow a route inside of Russian territory;
but the weakness shown by China in 1894-5
suggested a new project, namely, to carry the
road through Manchuria and thus shorten it by
five hundred versts. General Dukhovski, governor-general
of the Pri-Amur and commander
of the forces in that territory, opposed this project,
and pointed out that a line crossing the
boundaries of China would not connect the Pri-Amur
with European Russia securely, and
would benefit the Chinese rather than the Russian
population. His opinion was not approved,
and this railroad, which had for Russia such
immense importance, was carried through a
foreign country. This change of route, which
proved to be so unfortunate, was the first striking
proof of the fact that Russia, in the Far
East, had begun a policy of energetic action.
The occupation of Port Arthur, the foundation
of Dalny, the construction of the southern
branch of the railway, the formation of a commercial
fleet on the Pacific, and the timber enterprise
of State Councillor Bezobrazoff on the
Yalu River in northern Korea, were all links of
one and the same chain, which was to unite
permanently the destinies of Russia and the
destinies of the Far East—and thus bring gain
to Russia.

ADMIRAL ALEXEIEFF

WHO SECRETLY SUPPORTED BEZOBRAZOFF IN HIS EFFORTS TO DELAY THE EVACUATION OF
SOUTHERN MANCHURIA AND TO BRING THE RUSSIAN ARMS INTO KOREA FOR THE EXPLOITATION
OF HIS TIMBER ENTERPRISE. IN RETURN FOR ALEXEIEFF’S SERVICES, BEZOBRAZOFF
USED HIS INFLUENCE WITH THE TSAR TO GET ALEXEIEFF APPOINTED VICEROY

“There is a prevalent opinion,” says Kuropatkin,
“that if we had confined ourselves to
the construction of the main trans-Siberian road,
even though we built a part of it through northern
Manchuria, there would have been no war;
that the war was caused by our occupation of
Port Arthur and Mukden, and, more particularly,
by the Bezobrazoff timber enterprise in
Korea. There is also an opinion, held by others,
that the building of the main line through
northern Manchuria should be regarded not
merely as the first of our active enterprises in
the Far East, but as the basis and foundation
of them all, because if we had carried the road
along the Amur, through our own territory, we
should never have thought of occupying the
southern part of Manchuria and the province
of Kwang-tung.”

After reviewing the Boxer uprising, the occupation
of Manchuria by Russian troops for the
protection of the railway, and the treaty agreement
with China to evacuate southern Manchuria by
April 8, 1903, and northern Manchuria
within six months thereafter, General Kuropatkin,
who was at that time Minister of
War, begins his narrative of later events as
follows:

THE SECRET CAUSES OF THE WAR WITH JAPAN
BY
GENERAL KUROPATKIN

Prior to the conclusion of the treaty with China, in April, 1902,
there was a difference of opinion between the commander of Kwang-tung
(Admiral Alexeieff) and myself, as to the expediency of evacuating
Manchuria, and the importance to us of the southern part of that
country. I believed that occupation of southern Manchuria would bring
us no profit, but, on the contrary, would involve us in trouble with
Japan on one side, through our nearness to Korea, and with China on
the other, through our possession of Mukden. I therefore regarded
the speedy evacuation of southern Manchuria and Mukden as a matter
of extreme necessity. Admiral Alexeieff, on the other hand, as the
commander of Kwang-tung, had reason to contend that occupation of
southern Manchuria was important because it insured the safety of
railroad communication between Kwang-tung and Russia.

This difference of opinion, however, ended with the ratification
of the Russo-Chinese treaty of March 26, 1902 (April 8, N. S.). By the terms of that convention,
our troops—with the exception of those guarding the
railway—were to be removed, within specified periods, from all
parts of Manchuria, southern as well as northern. This settlement of
the question, was a great relief to the War Department, because it held
out the hope of a “return to the West” in our military affairs. In the
first period of six months, we were to evacuate the western part of
southern Manchuria, from Shan-hai-kuan to the river Liao; and this we
punctually did. In the second period of six months, we were to remove
our troops from the rest of the province of Mukden, including the
cities of Mukden and Yinkow (New Chwang).

SERGIUS DE WITTE

FORMER RUSSIAN MINISTER OF FINANCE, WHO BUILT UP EXTENSIVE RUSSIAN INTERESTS
IN MANCHURIA, AND CREATED THE PORT OF DALNY, AN ACT WHICH KUROPATKIN
CLAIMS TO HAVE WEAKENED THE STRENGTH OF PORT ARTHUR

The War Department regarded the agreement to evacuate the province
of Mukden with approval, and made energetic preparations to carry it
into effect. Barracks for the soldiers to be withdrawn were hastily
erected between Blagovestchensk and Vladivostok, in the Pri-Amur
country; plans of transportation were drawn up and approved; the
movement of troops had begun; and Mukden had actually been evacuated;
when, suddenly, everything was stopped by order of Admiral Alexeieff,
the commander of Kwang-tung, whose reasons for taking such action have
not, to this day, been sufficiently cleared up.[1]
It is definitely known, however, that the change in policy which
stopped the withdrawal of troops from southern Manchuria corresponded
in time with the first visit to the Far East of State Councillor
Bezobrazoff, retired. Mukden, which we had already evacuated, was6
reoccupied, as was also the city of Yinkow (New Chwang). The Yalu
timber enterprise assumed more importance than ever, and in order

[487]

to give support to it, and to our other undertakings in northern
Korea, Admiral Alexeieff, commander of Kwang-tung, sent a force of
cavalry with field guns to Feng-wang-cheng.[2]
Thus, instead of completing the evacuation of southern Manchuria,
we moved into parts of it that we had never before occupied. At the
same time, we allowed operations in connection with the Korean timber
enterprise to go on, despite the fact that the promoters of this
enterprise, contrary to instructions from St. Petersburg, were striving
to give it a political and military character.

There is good reason to affirm that the unexpected change of policy
that put a stop to the evacuation of the province of Mukden was an
event of immense importance. So long as we held to our intention of
withdrawing all our troops from Manchuria (except the railway guard and
a small force at Kharbin), and so long as we refrained from invading
Korea with our enterprises, there was little danger of a break with
Japan; but we were brought alarmingly nearer to a rupture with that
Power when, contrary to our agreement with China, we left our troops
in southern Manchuria, and when, in the promotion of our timber
enterprise, we entered northern Korea. The uncertainty, moreover, with
regard to our intentions, alarmed not only China and Japan, but even
England, America, and other Powers.

COUNT LAMSDORFF

FORMER RUSSIAN MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS,
WHO COÖPERATED WITH WITTE AND KUROPATKIN
IN TRYING TO PREVENT WAR WITH JAPAN

Witte Creates the Port of Dalny

In the early part of 1903, our situation in the Far East became
very much involved. The interests of the Pri-Amur were thrown
completely into the background, and General Dukhovski, the military
commander and governor-general of that territory, was wholly ignored
in the consideration and decision of the most important questions
of Far Eastern policy. Meanwhile, in Manchuria—on Chinese
territory—enterprises involving many millions of rubles were
undertaken and carried on by virtue of authority that was wholly
special. The Minister of Finance (M. Witte) was building and managing
there a railroad about two thousand versts in length; he had the
direction of a whole army corps of railway guards; he was trying
to increase the economic importance of the railway by running in
connection with it a fleet of sea-going steamers; he had on the
Manchurian rivers a flotilla of smaller vessels, some of which carried
guns and gunners; and in military matters he was so independent of the
War Department that, without consulting the latter, he even selected
and purchased abroad the artillery for the railway guard. Vladivostok,
as a terminus, no longer seemed to satisfy the requirements of an
international transit line, so, regardless of the fact that the
province of Kwang-tung was subject to the authority of the provincial
commander, M. Witte, without consulting either the latter or the
Minister of War, located and created therein the spacious port of
Dalny. The enormous sums of money spent there only lessened the
importance and weakened the strength of Port Arthur, because it was
necessary either to fortify Dalny, or prepare to have it seized by
an enemy and used as a base of operations against us—a thing
that afterward happened. Finally, the Minister of Finance managed the
affairs of the Russo-Chinese Bank, and had at Peking, Seoul, and other
points, his own agents (in Peking, Pokotiloff).

It thus appears that in 1903 M. Witte controlled or directed in the
Far East not only railroads, but corps of troops, a fleet of commercial
steamers, armed river boats, the port of Dalny, and the Russo-Chinese
Bank. At the same time, Bezobrazoff and his company were developing
their enterprises in Manchuria and Korea, and promoting, by every
possible means, their

[488]

timber speculation on the Yalu. One
incredible scheme of Bezobrazoff followed another; and in the summer
of 1903 there was submitted to me for examination a project of his
which provided for the immediate concentration in southern Manchuria
of an army of 70,000 men. His aim was to utilize the timber company as
a means of creating a sort of “screen,” or barrier against a possible
attack upon us by the Japanese, and in 1902-1903 his activity, and that
of his adherents, assumed a very alarming form. Among the requests that
he made of Admiral Alexeieff were, to send into Korean territory six
hundred soldiers in civilian dress; to organize for service in the same
locality a force of three thousand Khunkhuzes[3];
to give the agents of the timber company the support of four companies
of chasseurs (six hundred mounted riflemen) to be stationed at
Shakhedze, on the Yalu; and to occupy Feng-wang-cheng with a body
of troops capable of acting independently. Admiral Alexeieff denied
some of these requests, but, unfortunately, he consented to station
one company of chasseurs (one hundred and fifty mounted riflemen)
at Shakhedze, and to send a regiment of Cossack cavalry, with field
guns, to Feng-wang-cheng. These measures were particularly serious
and injurious to us, for the reason that they were taken at the very
time when we were under obligations to evacuate the province of Mukden
altogether.

Copyright, 1905, by Underwood & Underwood

TWO VIEWS OF PORT ARTHUR

LOOKING ACROSS THE OLD TOWN OF PORT ARTHUR AND ACROSS THE NAVAL
BASIS, FROM A HIGH HILL TO THE NORTH OF THE CITY

The Ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs, and War (Witte, Lamsdorff
and Kuropatkin) all recognized the danger that would threaten us if we
continued to defer fulfilment of our promise to evacuate Manchuria,
and, more especially, if we failed to put an end to Bezobrazoff’s
activity in Korea. These three Ministers, therefore, procured the
appointment of a special council, which assembled in St. Petersburg on
the 5th of April, 1903 (April 18, N. S.),
and took into consideration certain propositions which Bezobrazoff
had made to its members separately in writing. These propositions
had for their object the strengthening of Russia’s strategic
position in the basin of the Yalu. All three of the Ministers above
designated expressed themselves firmly and definitely in opposition to
Bezobrazoff’s proposals, and all agreed that if his enterprise on the
Yalu were to be sustained, it must be upon a strictly commercial basis.
The Minister of Finance showed conclusively that, for the next five or
ten years, Russia’s task in the Far East must be to tranquilize the
country and bring to completion the work already undertaken there. He
said, furthermore, that although the views of the different departments
of the Government were not always precisely the same, there had never
been—so far as the Ministers of War, Foreign Affairs, and Finance
were concerned—any conflict of action. The Minister of Foreign
Affairs pointed out, particularly, the danger involved in Bezobrazoff’s
proposal to stop the withdrawal of troops from Manchuria.

Copyright, 1905, by Underwood & Underwood

TAKEN AT THE TIME OF THE WAR

ON THE TERRACE JUST ABOVE THE WHARVES. THE HIGH PROMONTORY AT THE LEFT IS PART OF THE GOLDEN
HILL, WHERE THERE ARE IMMENSELY STRONG FORTIFICATIONS, AND WHERE THE RUSSIANS MAINTAINED AN
IMPORTANT SIGNAL STATION UNTIL STOESSEL’s SURRENDER

The Tsar Takes Action

It pleased His Imperial Majesty to say, after
he had listened to these expressions of opinion,
that war with Japan was extremely undesirable,
and that we must endeavor to restore in Manchuria
a state of tranquillity. The company
formed for the purpose of exploiting the timber
on the river Yalu must be a strictly commercial
organization, must admit foreigners who desired
to participate, and must exclude all ranks of the
army. I was then ordered to proceed to the
Far East, for the purpose of acquainting myself,
on the ground, with our needs, and ascertaining
what the state of mind was in Japan. In the
latter country, where I met with the most cordial
and kind-hearted reception, I became convinced
that the Government desired to avoid a
rupture with Russia, but that it would be necessary

[490]

for us to act in a perfectly definite way in
Manchuria, and to refrain from interference in the
affairs of Korea. If we should go on with the
adventure of Bezobrazoff & Co., we should be
threatened with conflict. These conclusions
I telegraphed to St. Petersburg. After my departure
from that city, however, the danger of
a rupture with Japan, on account of Korea, had
increased considerably—especially when, on
the 7th of May, 1903 (May 20, N. S.), the Minister
of Finance announced that “after having had an
explanation from State Councillor Bezobrazoff,
he (the Minister) was not in disagreement with
him, so far as the essence of the matter was
concerned.”

In the council that was held at Port Arthur,
when I arrived there, Admiral Alexeieff, Lessar,[4]
Pavloff,[5]
and I cordially agreed that the
Yalu enterprise should have a purely commercial
character, and I said, furthermore, that, in
my opinion, it ought to be abandoned altogether.
I brought about the recall of several
army officers who were taking part in it, and
suggested to Lieutenant Colonel Madritoff, who
was managing the military and political side of
it, that he either resign his commission or give
up employment which, in my judgment, was not
suitable for an officer wearing the uniform of the
General Staff. He chose the former alternative.

In view of the repeated assurances given me
by Admiral Alexeieff that he was wholly opposed
to Bezobrazoff’s schemes; that he was holding
them back with all his strength; and that he
was a convinced advocate of a peaceful Russo-Japanese
agreement, I left Port Arthur for St.
Petersburg, in July, 1903 (O. S.), fully believing
that the avoidance of a rupture with Japan was
a matter entirely within our control. The results
of my visit to the Far East were embodied
in a special report to the Emperor, submitted
July 24th, 1903 (August 6, N. S.), in which, with
absolute frankness, I expressed the opinion
that if we did not put an end to the uncertain
state of affairs in Manchuria, and to the adventurous
activity of Bezobrazoff in Korea, we
must expect a rupture with Japan. Copies of
this report were sent to the Minister of Foreign
Affairs and the Minister of Finance, and met
with their approval.

By some means unknown to me, this report was given publicity;
and on the 11th of June, 1905 (June 24, N.
S.), the newspaper Razsvet printed an article, by one
Roslavleff, entitled “Which is the Greater?” the object of which
was to prove that I must be included among the persons responsible
for the rupture with Japan, because, through fear of Bezobrazoff,
I signed the minutes of the Port Arthur council which put the Yalu
enterprise under the protection of Russian troops and thus stopped the
evacuation of Manchuria.[6] This article has been
reprinted by many Russian and foreign journals, and there has never
been any refutation of the misstatements that it contains with
regard to my alleged action in signing certain fantastic minutes. M.
Roslavleff quotes from my report to the Emperor the following sentences
and paragraphs:

“Our actions in the basin of the Yalu and our behavior in Manchuria
have excited in Japan a feeling of hostility to us, which, upon our
taking any incautious step, may lead to war…. State Secretary
Bezobrazoff’s plan of operations, if carried out, will inevitably lead
to a violation of the agreement that we made with China on the 26th
of March, 1902 (April 8, N. S.), and will
also cause, inevitably, complications with Japan…. The activity of
State Secretary Bezobrazoff, toward the end of last year and at the
beginning of this, has practically brought about already a violation
of the treaty with China and a breach with Japan…. At the request of
Bezobrazoff, Admiral Alexeieff sent a force of chasseurs to Shakhedze
(on the Yalu) and kept a body of troops in Feng-wang-cheng. These
measures put a stop to the evacuation of the province of Mukden….
Among other participants in the Yalu enterprise who have given trouble
to Admiral Alexeieff is Actual State Councillor Balasheff, who has
a disposition quite as warlike as that of Bezobrazoff. If Admiral
Alexeieff had not succeeded in intercepting a dispatch from Balasheff
to Captain Bodisco, with regard to ‘catching all the Japanese,’
‘punishing them publicly,’ and ‘taking action with volleys,’ there
would have been a bloody episode on the Yalu before this time.[7] Unfortunately, it is liable to happen any day,
even now…. During my stay in Japan, I had an opportunity to see with
what nervous apprehension the people regarded our activity on the Yalu,
how they exaggerated our intentions, and how they were preparing to
defend, with arms, their Korean interests. Our active operations there

[491]

have convinced them that Russia is now about to
proceed to the second part of her Far Eastern
program—that, having swallowed Manchuria,
she is getting ready to gulp down Korea. The
excitement in Japan is such that if Admiral
Alexeieff had not shown wise caution—if he
had allowed all the proposals of Bezobrazoff to
go through—we should probably be at war
with Japan now. There is no reason whatever
to suppose that a few officers and soldiers, cutting
timber on the Yalu, will be of any use in a
war with Japan. Their value is trifling in comparison
with the danger that the timber enterprise
creates by keeping up the excitement
among the Japanese people…. Suffice it
to say that, in the opinion of Admiral Alexeieff,
and of our ministers in Peking, Seoul, and Tokio,
the timber enterprise may be the cause of war;
and in this opinion I fully concur.”

After quoting the above sentences and paragraphs
from my report, M. Roslavleff says:
“Thus warmly, eloquently, and shrewdly did
Kuropatkin condemn the Yalu adventure, and
thus clearly did he see, on the political horizon,
the ruinous consequences that it would have for
Russia. But why did not this bold and clear-sighted
accuser protest against the decision of
the Port Arthur council? Why, after making
a few caustic remarks about Bezobrazoff, did
he sign the minutes of the council which put the
Yalu adventure under the protection of Russian
troops, and thus stopped the evacuation of
Manchuria? Why? Simply because, at that
time, everybody was afraid of Bezobrazoff.”

Such accusations, which have had wide publicity,
require an explanation.

The council held at Port Arthur, in June,
1903, was called for the purpose of finding, if
possible, some means of settling the Manchurian
question without lowering the dignity of Russia.
There were present at this council, in addition
to Admiral Alexeieff and myself, Actual State
Councillor Lessar, Russian minister in China;
Chamberlain Pavloff, Russian minister in Seoul;
Major General Vogak; State Councillor Bezobrazoff;
and M. Plançon, an officer of the diplomatic
service. We were all acquainted with
the will of the Emperor that our enterprises in
the Far East should not lead to war, and we had
to devise means of carrying the Imperial will
into effect. With regard to such means there
were differences of opinion; but upon fundamental
questions there was complete agreement.
Among such fundamental questions were:

On the 20th of June (July 3, N. S.) the
council expressed its judgment with regard to
this question as follows: “In view of the extraordinary
difficulties and enormous administrative
expenses that the annexation of Manchuria
would involve, all the members of the council
agree that it is, in principle, undesirable; and
this conclusion applies not only to Manchuria as
a whole, but also to its northern part.”

On the 19th of June (July 2, N. S.) the council
decided that the occupation of the whole
of Korea, or even of the northern part, would
be unprofitable to Russia, and therefore undesirable.
Our activity in the basin of the Yalu,
moreover, might give Japan reason to fear a
seizure by us of the northern part of the peninsula.
On the 24th of June (July 7, N. S.) the
council invited Actual State Councillor Balasheff
and Lieutenant Colonel Madritoff, of the
General Staff, to appear before it, and explain
the status of the Yalu enterprise. From their
testimony it appeared that the business was
legally organized, the company holding permits
from the Chinese authorities to cut timber on
the northern side of the Yalu, and a concession
from the Korean Government covering the
southern side. Although the enterprise lost, to
some extent, its provocative character, after
the conclusions of the St. Petersburg council of
April 5, 1903 (April 18, N. S.) became known
in the province of Kwang-tung, its operations
could not yet be regarded as purely commercial.
Its affairs were managed by Lieutenant Colonel
Madritoff, of the General Staff, although that
officer was not officially in service.

After consideration of all the facts presented,
the members of the council came to the conclusion
that “although the Russian Timber Company
really appears to be a commercial organization,
its employment of officers of the active
military service to do work that has military
importance undoubtedly gives to it a politico-military
aspect.” The council, therefore, acknowledged
the necessity of “taking measures,
at once, to give the enterprise an exclusively
commercial character, to exclude from it officers
of the regular army, and to commit the management
of the timber business to persons not employed
in the service of the Empire.” On the
24th of June (July 7, N. S.) these conclusions
were signed by all the members of the
council, including State Councillor Bezobrazoff.

It is evident, from the facts above set forth,
that the statement in which M. Roslavleff
charges the members of the council with signing
minutes of proceedings that gave the Bezobrazoff
adventure a place among useful imperial enterprises
is fiction. Upon what it was based we
do not know. The duty of immediately carrying
into effect the conclusions of the council
rested upon Admiral Alexeieff, by virtue of the
authority given to him. The thing that he had

[492]

to do, first of all, and that he was fully empowered
to do, was to recall our force from Feng-wang-cheng
and the company of chasseurs from
the Yalu. Why this was not done I do not
know. Personally, I did not allow Lieutenant
Colonel Madritoff to continue his connection
with the timber company as an officer of the
General Staff, and I may add that he and other
officers who associated themselves with the enterprise
did so without consulting me.

But no matter how effective might be the
measures taken by Admiral Alexeieff to give the
Yalu enterprise a purely commercial character,
I still feared that this undertaking, which had
obtained world-wide notoriety, would continue
to have important political significance. In
my report of July 24, 1903 (August 6, N. S.),
which was presented to the Emperor upon my
return from Japan, I therefore expressed the
opinion that an end should be put to the operations
of the timber company, and that the whole
enterprise should be sold to foreigners.

The thought that our interests in Korea, which
were of trifling importance, might bring us into
conflict with Japan, caused me incessant anxiety
during my stay in the latter country. On the
13th of June, 1903 (June 26, N. S.), when I was
passing through the Inland Sea, on my way
to Nagasaki, I wrote in my diary:

“If I were asked to express an opinion, from
a military point of view, with regard to the comparative
importance of Russian interests in different
parts of the Empire, and upon different
frontiers, I should put my judgment into the
form of a pyramidal diagram, placing the least
important of our interests at the top and the
most important at the bottom, as follows:

“This diagram shows clearly where the principal
energies of the Ministry of War should hereafter
be concentrated, and what direction, in
future, should be given to Russia’s main powers
and resources. The interests that lie at the
foundation of our position as a nation are:
(1) the defence of the territorial integrity of the
Empire against the Powers of the Triple Alliance;
and (2) employment of the forces of all
our military districts for the preservation of internal
peace and order. These are our principal
tasks, and in comparison with them all the
others have secondary importance. The diagram
shows, furthermore, that our interests in
the Pri-Amur region must be regarded as more
important than our interests in Manchuria, and
that the latter must take precedence of our
interests in Korea. I am afraid, however, that,
for a time at least, our national activity will be
based on affairs in the Far East, and, if so, the
pyramid will have to be turned bottom side up
and made to stand on its narrow Korean top.
But such a structure on such a foundation will
fall. Columbus solved the problem of making
an egg stand on its end by breaking the egg.
Must we, in order to make our pyramid stand
on its narrow Korean end, break the Russian
Empire?”

Upon my return from Japan, I showed the
above diagram to M. Witte, who agreed that it
was correct.

The establishment of the Viceroyalty in the
Far East was for me a complete surprise. On
the 2nd of August, 1903 (August 15, N. S.) I
asked the Emperor to relieve me from duty as
Minister of War, and after the great manœuvers
I was granted an indefinite leave of absence, of
which I availed myself with the expectation
that my place would be filled by the appointment
of some other person.

In September, 1903 (O. S.) the state of affairs
in the Far East began to be alarming, and
Admiral Alexeieff was definitely ordered to take
all necessary measures to avoid war. The Emperor
expressed his will to this effect with firmness,
and did not limit or restrict in any way the
concessions that should be made in order to
avert a rupture with Japan. All that had to be
done was to find a method of making such concessions
that should be as little injurious as possible
to Russian interests. During my stay in
Japan, I became satisfied that the Japanese
Government was disposed to consider Japanese and Korean affairs calmly,
with a view to arriving at an agreement upon the basis of mutual
concessions.

MAP SHOWING FIELD OF THE OPERATIONS THAT LED
TO THE WAR BETWEEN RUSSIA AND JAPAN

In view of the alarming situation in the Far
East, I cut short
my leave of absence, and, in reporting to the Emperor for duty, I
gave this threatening state of affairs as my reason for returning.
The Emperor, on the 10th of October, 1903 (October 23, N. S.), made the following marginal note upon
my letter: “The alarm in the Far East is apparently beginning to
subside.” In October I recommended that the garrison of Vladivostok be
strengthened, but permission to reinforce it was not given. Meanwhile,
there was really no reëstablishment of tranquillity in the Far East,
and our relations with Japan and China were becoming more and more
involved.

On the 15th of October, 1903 (October 28, N.
S.) I presented to the Emperor a special report on the
Manchurian question, in which I showed that, in order to avoid
complications with China and a rupture with Japan, we must put an end
to our military occupation of southern Manchuria, and confine our
activity and our administrative supervision to the northern part of
that territory. My report was, in part, as follows:

“If we do not touch the boundary of Korea,
and do not place garrisons between that boundary
and the railway, we shall really convince
the Japanese that we have no intention of first
taking Manchuria and then seizing Korea. In
all probability, they will then confine themselves
to the peaceful promotion of their interests in the
peninsula, and will neither take possession of
it with troops, nor greatly increase the strength
of their army at home. This will relieve us of
the necessity of strengthening our forces in the
Far East, and of supporting the heavy burden
of an armed peace—even should there be no
war. If, on the other hand, we annex southern
Manchuria, all the questions that now trouble
two nations and threaten to bring about an
armed conflict will assume a still more critical
aspect. Our temporary occupation of certain
points between the railway and Korea will become
permanent; our attention will be more
and more attracted to the Korean frontier; and
our attitude will confirm the suspicion of the
Japanese that Russia intends to seize the peninsula.

“That our occupation of southern Manchuria
will lead to Japanese occupation of southern
Korea there can be no doubt. Beyond that, all
is dark. One thing, however, is certain, and
that is that if Japan takes this step, she will be
compelled to increase rapidly her military
strength, and we, in turn, shall respond by enlarging
our Far Eastern force. Thus two nations
whose interests are so different that they
would seem destined to live in peace will begin a
contest in which each will try to surpass the
other in military resources and power. And
we Russians shall do this at the expense of our
fighting readiness in the West; at the sacrifice
of the interest of our native population; and
for the sake of portions of Korea which, so far
as Russia is concerned, have no serious importance.
If, moreover, other Powers take part
in this rivalry, the struggle for military supremacy
is liable to change, at any moment, into a
deadly conflict, which may not only retard, for
a long time, the peaceful development of our
Far Eastern possessions, but check the growth
and progress of the whole Empire.

Japan a Dangerous and Warlike Enemy

“Even if we should defeat Japan on the mainland
(in Korea and Manchuria) we could not
destroy her, nor obtain decisive results, without
carrying the war into her territory. That, of
course, would not be impossible, but to invade
a country where there is a warlike population
of forty-seven millions, and where even the
women participate in wars of national defence,
would be a serious undertaking, even for a
Power as mighty as Russia. And if we do not
destroy Japan utterly—if we do not deprive
her of the right and the power to maintain a
navy—she will wait until we are engaged in
war in the West, and will then avail herself of
the opportunity to attack us, either alone, or
in coöperation with our Western enemies.

“It must not be forgotten that Japan can not
only put quickly into the field, in Korea or Manchuria,
a well organized and well trained army of
from 150,000 to 180,000 men, but can do this without
drawing at all heavily upon her population.
If we take the German ratio of regular troops
to population, namely, one per cent, we shall
see that Japan, with her forty-seven millions of
people, can maintain a force of 400,000 soldiers
in time of peace, and 1,000,000 in time of war.
And we must bear in mind the fact that, even
if we reduce this estimate by two thirds, Japan,
in a comparatively short time, will be able to
oppose us in Korea, and march into Manchuria,
with a regular army of from 300,000 to 350,000
men. If we make it our aim to annex Manchuria,
we shall be compelled to increase our
military strength to such an extent that, with
our Far Eastern force alone, we can withstand
the Japanese attack in the annexed territory.”

From the above lines it will be seen how seriously
the War Department regarded such an
antagonist as Japan, and how much anxiety it
felt concerning possible complications with that
Power on account of Korea. At the time when
this report was presented, and later, in November,

[495]

the negotiations that Admiral Alexeieff was
carrying on with Japan not only made no progress,
but became more critical, the Admiral
still believing that to show a yielding disposition
would only make matters worse.

Insignificance of Russia’s Eastern Interests

Bearing in mind the clearly expressed will of
the Emperor that all necessary measures should
be taken to avoid war, and not expecting favorable
results from Alexeieff’s negotiations, I
presented to His Majesty, on the 26th of November,
1903 (December 9, N. S.) a second
report on the Manchurian question, in which
I proposed that we return Port Arthur and the
province of Kwang-tung to China, securing, in
lieu thereof, certain special rights in the northern
part of Manchuria. In substance, this proposition
was that we admit the untimeliness of
our attempt to get an outlet on the Pacific and
abandon it altogether. The sacrifice might
seem a grievous one to make, but I showed the
necessity for it by presenting two important
considerations. In the first place, by surrendering
Port Arthur (which had been taken away
from the Japanese) and by giving up southern
Manchuria (with the Yalu enterprise), we should
escape the danger of a rupture with Japan and
China. In the second place, we should avoid
the possibility of internal disturbances in European
Russia. A war with Japan would be extremely
unpopular, and would increase the feeling
of dissatisfaction with the ruling authorities.
My report was, in part, as follows:

“The economic interests of Russia in the Far
East are extremely insignificant. We have as
yet, thank God, no over-production in manufactures,
because even our domestic markets are
not yet glutted. There may be some export of
articles from our factories and foundries, but it
is largely due to artificial encouragement and
will cease—or nearly cease—when such encouragement
is withheld. Russia, therefore,
has not yet grown up to the melancholy necessity
of waging war in order to get markets for
her products. As for our other interests in the
Far East, the success or failure of a few coal or
timber enterprises in Manchuria and Korea is
not a matter of sufficient importance to make
it worth while for Russia to run the risk of war
on their account.

“The railway lines that we have built through
Manchuria do not change the situation, and the
hope that these lines will have world-wide importance,
as avenues of international commerce,
is not likely, in the near future, to be realized.
Travelers, the mails, tea, and possibly some
other merchandise, will go over them, but the
great masses of heavy international freight
which, alone, can give world-wide importance to
a railway, will go by sea, simply because they
cannot bear railway charges. Such is not the
case, however, with local freight to supply local
needs. This the roads—and especially the
southern branch—will carry more and more,
deriving from it most of their revenue, and, at
the same time, stimulating the growth of the
country, and, in southern Manchuria particularly,
benefiting the Chinese population. But
if we do not take special measures to direct even
local freight to Dalny, that port is likely to suffer
from the competition of Yinkow (New Chwang).
Port Arthur has no value for Russia as the defence
and terminus of a railway, unless that railway
is part of an international transit route.
The southern branch of the Eastern Chinese
road has only—or chiefly—local importance,
and, from an economic point of view, Russia
does not need to protect it by means so costly
as the fortifications of Port Arthur, a fleet of
warships, and a garrison of 30,000 soldiers.

“It thus appears that the retention of a position
of an aggressive character in Kwang-tung is
no more supported by economic than it is by
political and military considerations. What,
then, are the aims that may involve us in war
with Japan and China? Are such aims important
enough to justify the great sacrifices
that war will demand? The Russian people are
powerful, and their faith in Divine Providence,
as well as their devotion to their Tsar and their
country, is unshaken. We may trust, therefore,
that if Russia is destined to undergo the
trial of war at the beginning of the twentieth
century, she will come out of it with victory and
glory. But she will have to make terrible sacrifices—sacrifices
that may long retard the natural
growth of the Empire.

“In the wars that we waged in the early years
of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries, the enemy invaded our territory, and
we fought for the existence of Russia—marched
forth in defence of our country and died for
faith, Tsar, and Fatherland. If, in the early
years of the twentieth century, war breaks out
as the result of controverted questions arising
in the Far East, the Russian people and the
Russian army will execute the will of their
Monarch with as much devotion and self-sacrifice
as ever, and will give up their lives and their
property for the sake of attaining complete victory;
but they will have no intelligent comprehension
of the objects for which the war is
waged. For that reason there will be no such
exaltation of spirit—no such outburst of patriotism—as
that which accompanied the wars

[496]

that we fought either in self-defence or for objects
dear to the hearts of the people.

“We are now living through a critical period.
Internal enemies, aiming at the destruction of the
dearest and most sacred foundations of our life,
are invading even the ranks of our army. Large
groups of the population have become dissatisfied,
or mentally unsettled, and disorders of
various sorts—mostly created by a revolutionary
propaganda—are increasing in frequency.
Cases in which troops have to be called out to
deal with such disorders are much more common
than they were even a short time ago. We
must hope, however, that this evil has not yet
taken deep root in Russian soil, and that by
strict and wise measures it may be eradicated.

“If Russia were attacked from without, the
people, with patriotic fervor, would undoubtedly
repudiate the false teaching of the revolutionary
propaganda, and show themselves as ready to
answer the call of their revered Monarch, and to
defend their Tsar and country, as they were in
the early years of the eighteenth and particularly
in the nineteenth century. If, however, they are
asked to make great sacrifices in order to carry
on a war whose objects are not clearly understood
by them, the leaders of the anti-Government
party will take advantage of the opportunity
to spread sedition. Thus there will be
introduced a new factor which, if we decide on
war in the Far East, we must take into account.

“The sacrifices and dangers that we have
experienced, or that we anticipate, as results of
the position we have taken in the Far East,
ought to be a warning to us when we dream of
getting an outlet on the unfreezing waters of
the Indian Ocean at Chahbar. It is already
evident that the English are preparing to meet
us there. The building of a railroad across the
whole of Persia, and the establishment of a port
at Chahbar, with fortifications, a fleet, etc., will
simply be a repetition of our experience with the
Eastern Chinese Railway and Port Arthur. In
the place of Port Arthur, we shall have Chahbar,
and instead of war with Japan, we shall have a
still more unnecessary and still more terrible
war with Great Britain.

“In view of the considerations above set
forth, the questions arise: Ought we not to
avoid the present danger at Port Arthur, as well
as the future danger in Persia? Ought we not
to return Kwang-tung, Port Arthur, and Dalny to
China, give up the southern branch of the Eastern
Chinese Railway, and get from China, in
place of it, certain rights in northern Manchuria
and a sum of, say, 250,000,000 rubles as reimbursement
for expenses incurred by us in connection
with the railway and Port Arthur?”
Further on in my report I considered fully
the advantages and disadvantages of such a
decision, and set forth the principal advantages
as follows: “(1) We shall escape the necessity
of fighting Japan on account of Korea, and
China on account of Mukden. (2) We shall be
able to reëstablish friendly relations with both
Japan and China. (3) We shall give peace and
tranquillity, not only to Russia, but to the whole
world.”

Copies of this report were sent to the Minister
of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Finance, and
Admiral Alexeieff. Unfortunately, my views
were not approved, and meanwhile the negotiations
with Japan dragged along and became
more and more involved. The future historian,
who will have access to all the documents, may be
able, from study of them, to determine why the
will of the Russian Monarch to avoid war with
Japan was not carried into effect by his principal
co-workers. At present, it is only possible to
say, unconditionally, that although neither the
Emperor nor Russia desired war, we did not
succeed in escaping it. The reason for the failure
of the negotiations is evidently to be found
in our ignorance of Japan’s readiness for war,
and her determination to support her contentions
with armed force. We ourselves were
not ready to fight, and resolved that it should
not come to fighting. We made demands, but
we had no intention of using weapons to enforce
them—and, it may be added, they were not
worth going to war about. We always thought,
moreover, that the question whether there
should be war or peace depended upon us, and
we wholly overlooked Japan’s stubborn determination
to enforce demands that had for her
such vital importance, and also her reliance
upon our military unreadiness. Thus the negotiations
were carried on by the respective parties
under unequal conditions.

Then, too, our position was made worse by
the form that Admiral Alexeieff gave to the
negotiations intrusted to him. References were
made that offended Japanese pride, and the
whole correspondence became strained and difficult
as a result of the Admiral’s unfamiliarity
with diplomatic procedure and his lack of competent
staff assistance. He proceeded, moreover,
upon the mistaken assumption that, in
such a negotiation, it was necessary to display
inflexibility and tenacity. His idea was that
one concession, if made, would inevitably lead
to another, and that a yielding policy would be
more likely, in the end, to bring about a rupture
with Japan than a policy of firmness. On the
25th of January, 1904 (February 6, N. S.)

[497]

diplomatic relations were broken off by the
Japanese, and a few days later war began.

My opinions with regard to the relative importance
of the tasks set before the War Department
of Russia made me a convinced opponent
of an active Asiatic policy.

1. Recognizing our military unreadiness on
our western frontier, and taking into account
also the urgent need of devoting our resources
to the work of internal reorganization and reform,
I thought that a rupture with Japan would
be a national calamity, and I did everything in
my power to prevent it. Throughout my long
service in Asia, I was an advocate of an agreement
with Great Britain there, and I was satisfied
that there might also be a peaceable delimitation
of spheres of influence in the Far East between
Russia and Japan.

2. I regarded the building of the main line of
the trans-Siberian railway through Manchuria
as a mistake. The decision to adopt that route
was made without my participation (I was then
commander of the trans-Caspian territory); but
it was contrary to the judgment of the War
Department’s representative in the Far East—General
Dukhovski.

3. The occupation of Port Arthur took place
before I became Minister of War, and I had
nothing to do with it. I regard it as not only a
mistake, but a fatal mistake. By thus acquiring,
prematurely, an extremely inconvenient outlet
on the Pacific, we broke up our good understanding
with China and made an enemy of Japan.

4. I was always opposed to the timber enterprise
on the Yalu, because I foresaw that it
might bring about a rupture with Japan. I
therefore took all possible measures to have it
made an exclusively commercial affair, or to
have it suppressed altogether.

5. So far as the Manchurian question is concerned,
I made a sharp distinction between the
comparative importance to us of northern Manchuria
and southern Manchuria. At first, I was
in favor of removing our troops as quickly as
possible from both; but after the Boxer uprising,
in 1900, I recognized the necessity of
keeping on the railway at Kharbin three or four
battalions of infantry, a battery, and a hundred
Cossacks, as a reserve for the boundary
guard.

6. When our position in the Far East became
difficult, and there seemed to be danger of a
rupture with Japan, I was in favor of decisive
measures, and proposed that we avert war by
admitting the untimeliness of our attempt to
get an outlet on the Pacific; by restoring Port
Arthur and Kwang-tung to China; and by selling
the southern branch of the Chinese Eastern
Railway.

When Adjutant General Daniloff returned
from Japan, he told me that, at the farewell
dinner given him there, General Terauchi, the
Japanese Minister of War, said that General
Kuropatkin and he had done everything in their
power to avert war. And yet, even now, I
sometimes ask myself doubtfully, “Did I do
everything that was within the bounds of possibility
to prevent it?” The strong desire of
the Emperor to avoid war with Japan was well
known to me, as it was to his other co-workers,
and yet we, who stood nearest to him, were
unable to execute his will.

THE ROYAL TIMBER COMPANY

[Editor’s Note.]—Among the first
questions suggested by General Kuropatkin’s narrative
and the editorials, reports, and official proceedings
that he quotes, are: Who was State Councillor
Bezobrazoff? How did he acquire the extraordinary
power that he evidently exercised
in the Far East? Why was “everybody”—including
the Minister of War—”afraid of
him”? Why did even the Viceroy respond to
his calls for troops, and why was his Korean
timber company allowed to drag Russia into a
war with Japan, against the opposition and resistance,
apparently, of the Tsar, the Viceroy,
the Minister of War, the Minister of Finance,
the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Port Arthur
council, and the diplomatic representatives of
Russia in Peking, Tokio, and Seoul?

No replies to these questions can be found in
General Kuropatkin’s record of the events that
preceded the rupture with Japan, but convincing
answers are furnished by certain confidential
documents found in the archives of Port Arthur
and published, just after the close of the war,
in the liberal Russian review Osvobozhdenie
at Stuttgart.[8] Whether General Kuropatkin was aware of the existence of these documents
or not, I am unable to say; but as they throw
a strong side-light on his narrative, I shall append
them thereto, and tell briefly, in connection
with them, the story of the Yalu timber
enterprise, as it is related in St. Petersburg.

In the year 1898, a Vladivostok merchant
named Briner obtained from the Korean Government,
upon extremely favorable terms, a

[498]

concession for a timber company that should
have authority to exploit the great forest wealth
of the upper Yalu River.[9]
As Briner was a promoter and speculator, who had little means
and less influence, he was unable to organize his
company, and in 1902 he sold his concession to
Alexander Mikhailovich Bezobrazoff, another
Russian promoter and speculator, who had held
the rank of State Councillor in the Tsar’s civil
service, and who was high in the favor of some
of the Grand Dukes in St. Petersburg.

Bezobrazoff, who seems to have been a most
fluent and persuasive talker, as well as a man of
fine personal presence and bearing, soon interested
his Grand Ducal friends in the fabulous
wealth of the Far East generally, and in the extraordinary
value of the Korean timber concession
especially. They all took stock in his
enterprise, and one of them, with a view to
getting the strongest possible support for it,
presented him to the Tsar. Bezobrazoff made
upon Nicholas II. an extraordinarily favorable
impression and, in the course of a few months,
acquired an influence over him that nothing
afterward seemed able to shake. That the Tsar
became financially interested in Bezobrazoff’s
timber company is certain; and it is currently
reported in St. Petersburg that the Emperor and
the Empress Dowager, together, put into the
enterprise several million rubles. This report
may, or may not, be trustworthy; but the appended
telegram (No. 5) sent by Rear Admiral
Abaza, of the Tsar’s suite, to Bezobrazoff, in
November, 1903, indicates that the Emperor
was interested in the Yalu enterprise to the
extent, at least, of the two million rubles mentioned.
Bezobrazoff’s “Company,” in fact,
seems to have consisted of the Tsar, the Grand
Dukes, certain favored noblemen of the Court,
Viceroy Alexeieff, probably, and the Empress
Dowager possibly. Bezobrazoff had made
them all see golden visions of wealth to be
amassed, power to be attained, and glory to be
won, in the Far East, for themselves and the
Fatherland. It was this known influence of
Bezobrazoff with the Tsar that made “everybody”
in the Far East “afraid of him”; that
enabled him to enlist in the service of the timber
company even officers of the Russian General
Staff; that caused Alexeieff to respond to
his call for troops to garrison Feng-wang-cheng
and Shakhedze; and that finally changed Russia’s
policy in the Far East and stopped the
withdrawal of troops from southern Manchuria.

General Kuropatkin says that the Russian
evacuation of the province of Mukden “was
suddenly stopped by an order of Admiral Alexeieff,
whose reasons for taking such action have
not, to this day, been sufficiently cleared up.”
The following telegram from Lieutenant Colonel
Madritoff of the Russian General Staff to Rear
Admiral Abaza, the Tsar’s personal representative
in St. Petersburg, may throw some light on
the subject.

(No. 1.)

To Admiral Abaza,

House No. 50, Fifth Line,

Vassili Ostroff, St. Petersburg.

Our enterprises in East meet constantly with opposition
from Dzan-Dzun of Mukden and Taotai of Feng-wang-cheng.
Russian officer-merchants have been
sent East to make reconnoissance and examine places
on Yalu. They are accompanied by Khunkhuzes
whom I have hired. The Dzan-Dzun, feeling that he
is soon to be freed from guardianship of Russians, has
become awfully impudent, and has even gone so far
as to order Yuan to begin hostile operations against
Russian merchants and Chinese accompanying them,
and to put latter under arrest. Thanks to timely
measures taken by Admiral, this order has not been
carried out; but very fact shows that Chinese rulers
of Manchuria are giving themselves free rein, and, of
course, after we evacuate Manchuria, their impudence,
and their opposition to Russian interests, will have
no limit. Admiral (Alexeieff) took it upon himself to
order that Mukden and Yinkow (New Chwang) be not
evacuated.
[10]
To-day it has been decided to hold Yinkow,
but, unfortunately, to move the troops out of
Mukden. After evacuation of Mukden, state of affairs,
so far as our enterprises are concerned, will be very,
very much worse which, of course, is not desirable.
[10]
To-morrow I go to the Yalu myself.

Signed)

Madritoff.

Shortly before Lieutenant Colonel Madritoff
sent this telegram to Admiral Abaza, Bezobrazoff,
who had been several months in the Far
East, started for St. Petersburg, with the intention,
evidently, of seeing the Tsar and persuading
him to order, definitely, a suspension of the
evacuation of the province of Mukden, for the
reason that “it would inevitably result in the
liquidation of the affairs of the timber company.”
From a point on the road he sent back
to Madritoff the following telegram, which bears
date of March 26, 1903 (April 8, N. S.)—the
very day when the evacuation of the province
of Mukden should have been completed, in accordance
with the Russo-Chinese agreement of
March 26 (April 8, N. S.), 1902:

(No. 2.)

To Madritoff,

Port Arthur.

There will be an understanding attitude toward the
affair after I make my first report. I am only afraid
of being too late, as I shall not get there until the
3rd (April 16, N. S.) and the Master (Khozain) leaves
for Moscow on the 4th (April 17, N. S.). I will do all
that is possible and shall insist on manifestation of
energy in one form or another. Keep me advised and
don’t get discouraged. There will soon be an end of
the misunderstanding.

(Signed)

Bezobrazoff.

On April 11, 1903 (April 24, N. S.), Bezobrazoff
sent Madritoff from St. Petersburg a telegram
written, evidently, after he had made his first
“report” to “the Master.” It was as follows:

To Madritoff,,

Port Arthur.

Everything with me is all right. I hope to get my
views adopted in full as conditions imposed by existing
situation and force of circumstances. I hope that
if they ask the opinion of the Admiral (Alexeieff), he,
I am convinced (sic), will give me his support. That
will enable me to put many things into his hands.

(Signed)

Bezobrazoff.

General Kuropatkin says that Admiral Alexeieff
gave him “repeated assurances that he was
wholly opposed to Bezobrazoff’s schemes, and
that he was holding them back with all his
strength”; but the Admiral was evidently playing
a double part. While pretending to be in
full sympathy with Kuropatkin’s hostility to
the Yalu enterprise, he was supporting Bezobrazoff’s
efforts to promote that enterprise, Bezobrazoff
rewarded him, and fulfilled his promise
to “put many things into his hands” by getting
him appointed Viceroy. Kuropatkin says that
this appointment was a “complete surprise to
him,” and it naturally would be, because the
Tsar acted on the advice of Bezobrazoff, von
Plehve, Alexeieff, and Abaza, and not on the
advice of Kuropatkin, Witte, and Lamsdorff.
It will be noticed that von Plehve—the powerful
Minister of the Interior—is never once
mentioned by name in Kuropatkin’s narrative.
Everything seems to indicate that von Plehve
formed an alliance with Bezobrazoff, and that,
together, they brought about the dismissal of
Witte, who ceased to be Minister of Finance on
the 16th of August, 1903 (August 29, N. S.).
Anticipating this result of his efforts, and filled
with triumph at the prospect opening before
him, Bezobrazoff wrote Lieutenant Colonel
Madritoff, on the 12th of August, 1903 (August
25, N. S.), as follows:

(No. 4.)

The great saw-mill and the principal trade in timber
will be transferred to Dalny, and this in copartnership
with the Ministry of Finance. The Manchurian
Steamship Line will have all our ocean freight,
amounting to twenty-five million feet of timber, and
the business will become international (mirovava).
From this you will understand how I selected my base
and my operating lines.

In view of the complete defeat of such clear-sighted
statesmen and sane counsellors as Kuropatkin,

[499]

Witte, and Lamsdorff, there can be
no doubt that Bezobrazoff’s “base and operating
lines” were well “selected.”

The document that shows most clearly the
interest of the Tsar in the Yalu timber enterprise
is a telegram sent to Bezobrazoff at Port
Arthur, in November, 1903, by Rear Admiral
Abaza, who was then Director of the Special
Committee on Far Eastern Affairs, over which
the Tsar presided, and who acted as the latter’s
personal representative in all dealings with
Bezobrazoff and the timber company. In the
original of this telegram, significant words, such
as “Witte,” “Emperor,” “millions,” “garrison,”
“reinforcement,” etc., were in cipher;
but when Bezobrazoff read it, he (or possibly
his private secretary) interlined the equivalents
of the cipher words, and also, in one place, a
query as to the significance of “artels”—did
it mean chasseurs, or artillery? The following
copy was made from the interlined original:

(No. 5.)

From Petersburg, Nov. 14-27, 1903.

To Bezobrazoff,

Port Arthur.

Witte has told the Emperor that you have already
spent the whole of the two millions. Your telegram
with regard to expenditures has made it possible for me
to report on this disgusting slander and, at the same
time, contradict it. Remember that the Master
counts on your not touching a ruble more than the
three hundred without permission in every case.
Yesterday I reported again your ideas with regard to
the reinforcement of the garrison and also with regard
to the artels (chasseurs or artillery?) in the basin.
The Emperor directed me to reply that he takes all
that you say into consideration and that, in principle,
he approves. In connection with this, the Emperor
again confirmed his order that the Admiral telegraph
directly to him. He expects a telegram soon, and
immediately upon the receipt of the Admiral’s statement,
arrangements will be made with regard to the
reinforcement of the garrison, and, at the same time,
with regard to the chasseurs in the basin. In the
course of the conversation, the Emperor expressed the
fullest confidence in you.

Signed)

Abaza.

General Kuropatkin refers, again and again,
to the Tsar’s “clearly expressed desire that war
should be avoided,” and he regrets that His
Imperial Majesty’s “co-workers” “were unable
to execute his will.” It is more than likely that
Nicholas II. did wish to avoid war—if he could
do so without impairing the value of the family
investment in the Korean timber company—but
from the above telegram it appears that,
as late as November 27, 1903—only seventy
days before the rupture with Japan—he was
still disregarding the sane and judicious advice
of Kuropatkin, was still expressing “the fullest
confidence” in Bezobrazoff, and was still ordering
troops to the valley of the Yalu.

THE AMERICANIZING OF ANDRÉ FRANÇOIS
BY
STELLA WYNNE HERRON

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR G. DOVE

I wonder,” said Andrew F. Biron,
manager of the White Star Mine, to his
sister, as he watched, with drawn brows,
André François, immaculate in a white
flannel suit, bare-kneed and sailor-hatted,
go down the street attended by the ministering
Angélique, “what Providence had against me
when it picked me for the father of Andrew
François?”

“He is certainly the strangest child I have
ever known,” answered his sister irrelevantly,
“and I have had experience with a good many—an
old maid always does, you know.”

“What he needs is to mix up with the other
boys—to become Americanized. There is too
much European varnish on him. It needs to
be rubbed off so that the real boy underneath
will show through.”

“He needs something,” assented his sister
shortly, for she had looked with none too gracious
an eye upon the advent of André François
and his bonne, the volatile Angélique. “He
thinks of nothing except how he is dressed—a
miniature fop! He is now ten years old and
he is absolutely helpless. He seems never to
have learned to do anything for himself. There
is no manliness nor independence in him—nothing
but a head full of foolish, old-world
notions about what is due a gentleman of
his standing. As for Angélique, one moment
she runs his errands and the next
bullies him. Who ever heard of a big boy
of ten with a nurse, anyway?” Miss Biron
stopped a moment to catch her breath, then
continued:

“To be frank with you, Andrew, I think you
have been little less than criminal to take so
little interest in him as to leave him for eight
years in an environment of which you knew
nothing. You should have had him home immediately
after your wife’s death, and not have
waited until his grandmother died and the
responsibility of your son was literally forced
upon you.”

“The responsibility of his son.” All through
a busy morning at the office the phrase remained
subconsciously in Mr. Biron’s mind.
At noon hour, when the work slackened up,
he set himself to face and thresh it out, for it
was his policy to face and thresh out at the
first opportunity any difficulty which confronted
him.

For half an hour he paced his office, his hands
thrust hard down into his pockets, in his mouth
a black, unlighted cigar of the stogie species,
upon which he chewed with all the concentrated
violence which he would have liked to
expend upon the problem in hand. His son—how
well he remembered the little two-year-old
codger, with his serious blue eyes and his fleece
of yellow hair, whom he had taken tight in his
arms and told not to forget his daddy, as he
bid goodby on the steamer to his pretty, pale
French wife going back on a visit to her native
land.

After her death, little André François had at
once found snug quarters in the home of his
aristocratic Parisian grandmother, Madame
Fouchette, a grand dame of the old régime.
She wrote and begged to keep him. She said
he would be placed in a good school—the best,
indeed, in France—where, as a rule, none
except the sons of noblemen were admitted.
Year after year had drifted by, and the busy
mine-manager in Colorado, occupied with a
thousand and one matters of daily importance,
had sent a monthly check of generous figure,
together with a quarter-page of hurriedly type-written,
kindly words, accompanied at Christmas,
and at what he approximately made out to
be André François’ birthday, by a great miscellaneous
box of toys. He religiously selected
these as his wife had advised him to select them
on that first Christmas—for he instinctively

[501]

mistrusted his own judgment in such matters—and
varied them only in the matter of quantity,
which he increased each year in allowance for
the boy’s growth.

Perhaps it was because he always pictured
him as a tyro of two, unsteady on his legs,
principally experimental in his speech, that he
was so unprepared for the real André François,
the above, plus eight formative years of growth
in the French capital, an aristocratic grandmother’s
idolatry, and the training of a school
where, “as a rule, only the sons of noblemen
were received.”

Mr. Biron recalled with a rueful smile that
first meeting with his son and heir. André
François, self-possessed, slim, and aristocratic,
cultivating already the airs and graces of the
young boulevardier, greeted the manager of
the White Star with a careful—for he was none
too sure of where the accent fell in his mother-tongue——

“I am delighted, my father,” and kissed him
ceremoniously, first on one cheek, then on the
other. After which he devoted himself to
directing Angélique—who had been his bonne
ever since his mother’s death and in whose care
he had come across the ocean—in the disposal
of his four trunks. Madame Fouchette, during
her life, had spared neither time nor attention
in providing André François with as many new
suits and caps as his blue-blooded playmates.

The little raw town of fifteen hundred inhabitants,
still half mining-camp, was not prepared
for the youthful scion of the Old World, and
regarded him as a huge joke. As for Angélique,
in her high heels and infinitesimal aprons, with
her coquettish airs and her showers of exclamations,
nothing like her had ever been seen, except
in an overnight show, where the traditional
French maid, between a song and dance,
whisked imaginary dust off parlor chairs.

At school André François was under a double
disadvantage. In the class-room, he not only
knew more than any other boy, but frequently
and authoritatively corrected the teacher. In
the yard his white flannel sailor suit, with its
embroidered anchor and immense soft, red silk
bow in front, his jaunty round sailor hat and
dainty shoes—it had become the mode in
Paris at that time to follow the English style
in children’s dress—were regarded with derisive
and hostile looks by the sturdy blue-and-
brown-overalled town boys. Indeed, the little
transplanted Parisian, as he stood in line with
his fellows, looked very much like a lonely
orchid in a bunch of dusty field-flowers.

In the yard André François did not shine.
His attitude was marked in the eyes of the
indigenous youth by a supercilious stupidity.
He neither knew nor cared for baseball, football,
or any of the lesser sports which excite
young America at playtime. He had, indeed,
at first extended tentative invitations to a
chosen few of his class-mates to engage in a
fencing bout, but, finding that art entirely unknown,
he contented himself, during recess,
with sitting on the bench and reading from a
French book, over the top of which he sometimes
stared at his hot, excited school-mates
with insolent superiority.

They returned his contempt with full measure.
One and all looked upon André François
as a special brand of “Dago”—under which
general head they classified all things Latin—protected
from their scorn and patriotism by
an arbitrary higher power in the form of a
father who was a mine manager.

André François, in turn, confided to his father
that nobody but ignorant peasants, with whom
no gentleman could associate, attended the
school.

So matters stood without a change in either
direction two weeks after André François’
arrival in town. No change of environment
seemed strong enough to move him from his
accustomed ways of thought. Every morning
he started out for school at a quarter of nine
followed by the omnipresent Angélique. Every
afternoon he returned at three o’clock, still followed
by Angélique.

“Angélique! A nurse! A bonne!” As the
manager of the White Star thought of her, he
nearly bit the cigar, upon which he was chewing,
in half. All the militant Americanism in him rose
in revolt. He remembered his own bare-footed,
swaggering youth, independent as the wind,
insolent as a king. And now his son——. He
stopped short in his pacing and stared wrathfully
out into the street, which, like all the
streets of the town, ended abruptly, without
any preliminary slopes, in a sheer wall of rock
which went up and up and up into a rugged
mountain peak.

It chanced that school had just let out for
the noon hour, and down the middle of the
street, whistling to the full of his lungs, swinging
in a circle around his head a long leather
strap with a blue calico-covered book at the
end for a weight, swaggered a sturdy specimen
of young America. Mr. Biron gazed at him
with an envious eye and sighed. Then a
thought, sudden and sharp, popped into his
head. He hesitated for a moment. But why
not? Anything was worth trying.

The manager of the White Star was a man
of action, so, without wasting further time in
debate with himself, he beat a loud tattoo with
his knuckles on the window glass. The whistling stopped.

“‘I’D BE GLAD TO DO IT AS A FAVOR,’ HE SAID”

He crooked his finger and motioned,
and the deed was done. A moment
later the ground-glass door opened, and a
chunky, red-haired boy, with a belligerent eye,
stood expectantly before him. The newcomer
placed himself so that the big iron office safe
furnished a background for him, and as he
stood there with his feet wide apart, his hands
in his pockets, he seemed as solidly planted as
it. A shaft of noonday sunlight, coming
through a side window, struck his hair and made
a rubescent halo around his freckled face. The
manager of the White Star looked him up and
down, and the boy eyed him back look for look.
At length Mr. Biron cleared his throat.

“What is your name, my lad?” he asked.

“James Joseph McCarthy,” answered the boy,
in the same quick, phonographic monotone that
he had used on his first day at school, when the
teacher had asked him the same question.

“Ah, yes—do you know my son, Andrew
Francis Biron?”

“Sure. Most everybody knows Andray
Franswa.”

“And what do you think of—er—André
François?”

The boy looked at him searchingly. “You
oughter know—he’s your kid,” he said tersely.

“I know what I think,” said Mr. Biron, “but
I want to know what you think. That’s what
I brought you in for. I want to get some data
on the subject.”

The boy ran his hand through his hair, and
his brow puckered, as he struggled to find a
phrase by which to sum up his impression of
André François. Then he said:

“Ah, gee——” he made an abortive effort,
out of regard for parental feelings, to mitigate
the vast contempt in his voice, “he’s just a
darn sissy.”

“Um—I see. Are there any more sissies in
town?”

“Nope. Not now. There uster be one
onest, about a year ago, but he’s all right now.
We licked him till he got all right.”

“And do you intend to lick André François
until he gets all right?”

The scion of the McCarthys looked at him
suspiciously for a moment, but seeing in his face
rather a desire for honest information than the
guile of a parent, he answered:

“Nope. Nobody dast to touch him.”

“Why?” asked Mr. Biron with a gleam of
hope, “would he fight?”

“Who? Him? Him fight? I guess not.
It’s cause you’re his dad. My dad, he said
that if I dast to lay a finger on Andray Franswa,
he’d skin me alive—an’ the rest o’ the kids,
their dads told ’em the same thing.”

“I see,” said the manager of the White Star,
and he saw also that a certain disadvantage
went with being the employer of nearly every
man in the town.

He took a thoughtful turn around the office,
for his conscience gave him a twinge at the
critical moment, then stopped abruptly in front
of James Joseph and took from his pocket a
bright, new silver dollar.

“See this, Jimmie?” he asked, balancing it
seductively on the tip of his index finger, “I
will give you this, and further, I will see that
no complaint is made to your father—if you
lick André François.”

Each of Jimmie’s eyes grew as big and as
round as the dollar.

“Sure? D’ yer mean it? Gee, that’d be
fine. There’s goin’ to be a circus next week
in Briggs’ lot, and us fellows is savin’ up.
Say—is that what you just said on the dead
square?”

“On the dead square,” said André François’
father solemnly.

Jimmie held out his hand for the dollar.
“Sure,” he said, “I’ll lick Andray Franswa.
I’ll lay low till that crazy Angélique is out of
the way. Burbank, the assayer’s assistant, is
soft on her, and she stops to talk to him every
afternoon, an’ Andray Franswa walks as far as
from school to the assayer’s office alone. I’ll
get him then. I’m boss o’ the gang, an’ I kin
lick fine. Onest I licked a kid an’ he wasn’t
able to be out fer a week.”

“Wait,” said Mr. Biron, a little alarmed at
the enthusiasm he had invoked. “Remember—you
are acting under orders, and your orders
are not to hurt him. Just roll him around in
the mud good and plenty—and, Jimmie, spoil
that white sailor suit.”

Jimmie’s eyes filled with fellow feeling. For
the first time during the interview he and the
White Star manager were equals.

“I guess you was a pretty nice kid yourself
onest,” he said, “an’ I know how you must feel
’bout Andray Franswa.”

He hesitated a moment, his face twitched
with a fierce internal struggle, then he thrust
out his arm straight from the shoulder and
handed back to Mr. Biron the price of his
service.

“I—I’d be glad to do it as a favor,” he
said.

“Thank you,” said André François’ father
gravely, and he took and pocketed the dollar.

As Jimmie was about to leave the office he
put out a detaining hand.

“Oh, by the way,” he remarked, with elaborate
casuality, “you said something of a circus
in Briggs’ lot—I can’t get away myself, at
present, but if you’d take this and go, and let
me know if there is anything good, you’d oblige
me greatly.”

Jimmie McCarthy left the office of the White
Star with his ethics and his honor satisfied, and
with a dollar in the pocket of his blue overalls.

Thus was enacted the preliminary part of the
plot to Americanize André François, fils.

The following afternoon the manager of the
White Star sat at his office desk, a file of papers
before him. But his attention wavered, and
the nearer the clock hands drew to three, the
less grew his concentration upon the file. At
last the expected happened. The ground-glass
door burst open, and in rushed the immaculate
Angélique, her entire person in such dishevelment
as the Rue St. Honoré had never seen.
Her cap hung by one pin from her black hair,
her ruffled swiss apron was under one arm.
By the hand she dragged after her the panting
André François. His hat was gone, his hair
wet, his white sailor suit streaked terra cotta
from the clayey mud of the street. His red tie,
however, still made a brave flare of color under
one ear.

“Father,” he said in a high, excited voice,
“I have been attacked!”

Angélique motioned him to be quiet.

“Oh, Monsieur Bir-on, oh, sair,” she burst
out, her round eyes becoming perfect spheres
in her excitement, “Monsieur André François
have been attack’. I have jus’ stop to spik to
a gentleman for a so leetle moment—when I
look a-r-r-ound and zee thees so ter-r-ible boy
make the tackle at Monsieur André François’
legs. And nex’—O, ciel! I zee Monsieur
André François high in the air, and then—splash!
Quelle horreur! down in the depths
of the mud pud-dle, and thees boy r-r-ool heem
r-round an’ r-round an’ r-r-round. Barbare!
Sauvage!” Angélique’s voice broke, and she
buried her face in her abbreviated apron to shut
out the memory of a sight so uncivilized.

“Father,” said André François, trembling
with passion, “you will have him punished at
once—publicly, so that every one may know
that the indignity has been wiped out?”

“My boy,” said Mr. Biron quietly, placing
his hand on his son’s shoulder, “I am not lord
of a feudal principality. I cannot interfere.
You will have to fight your own fights.”

“But,” said André François, angry tears

[504]

rushing to his eyes, “I cannot fight this peasant—I
am a gentleman.” And he drew himself
up with a jerk, in his drabbled sailor suit, to his
full three feet eight. This assumption of dignity
was not without discomfort, for the muddy
water from his over-long hair dripped down his
neck in the back and into his eyes in the front.

“Of a certainty,” affirmed Angélique with
finality, “he is a gentleman. Madame Fouchette
so raised heem.”

“You will have to settle it your own way,
Andrew. If you are too good to fight him, and
he is not too good to fight you, I do not see
what you can do—except run.”

“I will not run,” cried André François, his
voice becoming shrill and childish with impotent
rage. “I want him punished.”

“I can do nothing for you,” said his father
shortly. “You had better go home now to your
aunt and have your suit changed.”

“Allons,” said Angélique indignantly, and,
catching André François by the hand, she
started out. At the door she paused long
enough to say devoutly, fixing the so unnatural
father with a basilisk glance.

“Dieu vous garde, mon pauvre enfant.“

The manager of the White Star even thought
he heard a “Bête!” as the door was closed so
decisively that one would almost say it was
slammed. All of which the so unnatural parent
endured with equanimity, and turned to his
delayed files with a patient if dubious smile, for
he had begun to do his parental duty as he saw
it, and anything he began, whether it was a
lockout, a new policy, or the training of his
son, he saw through to the bitter end.

The next morning, when the White Star manager
reached his office—and he got there early,
for he began his day’s work when his office boy
was still comfortably snoring—- he found a
small boy leaning against the door in the stiff
and resigned position of a guard waiting to be
relieved from duty. The only parts of him
which moved were the toes of his bare legs, and
these nimble members dibbled the clayey earth
in front of the door-step.

As soon as this apparition caught sight of Mr.
Biron, it straightened up into life.

“Kin I see you, Mr. Biron?” asked the boy
eagerly, “on a matter o’ business?”

“‘I CANNOT FIGHT THIS PEASANT—I AM A GENTLEMAN'”

“Certainly,” said the manager of the White
Star, “just step into the office.”

The boy followed him in through the ground-glass
door, shifted from one bare foot to the
other, cleared his throat, then without further
preliminary said:

“Say—d’ you want Andray Franswa licked
to-day?” Then, fixing him with a bargaining
eye, “I’ll do it dandy fer seventy-five cents. I
kin fight ‘most as good as Jimmie—I uster be
the biggest kid here before he come an’ licked
me,” he added, with reminiscent pride in a
past glory.

Mr. Biron looked at him
thoughtfully a moment, then
said:

“I engaged Jimmie for the first
job, and he did it satisfactorily.
I think there may be a tacit
contract existing between us that
I give him, at least, the refusal
of the rest.”

“Nope,” said the boy.
“Jimmie, he ain’t no pig. He
told the bunch, ‘You fellers go
’round an’ see if yer kin git nuf
for the circus what’s comin’.’ I
bin waitin’ a long time so’s to be
early nuf.”

“I see,” said Mr. Biron,
“Jimmie does not believe in
monopolies. He is a despot, but
an enlightened one.”

“Kin I have the job, then?”

“Very well,” said Mr. Biron,
“I engage you to lick André
François—but with this reservation—mind
you do not hurt
him, and I will pay you the
standard rate of one dollar for a
first-class job.”

This was the first but not the last of the
manager’s visitors. It was Saturday, and that
whole morning the office of the White Star was
besieged by applicants for a “job.” Mr. Biron
had his pick of the entire bellicose population
of the town between the ages of nine and thirteen,
and several more nefarious bargains were
secretively struck in the shadow of the big iron
safe, behind the discreet ground-glass door of
the White Star office.

“‘IT WAS OF A SUDDENNESS,’
SAID ANGÉLIQUE
BLUSHING”

That afternoon Mr. Biron found it difficult to
concentrate on the work before him, for, reasoning
from cause to effect, and having produced
the cause, he was subconsciously expectant of
another visit from André and Angélique. Nothing,
however, occurred to disturb him and,
as he closed up his desk and safe, preparatory
to leaving, he smiled grimly to himself.

“I never was stumped by a proposition yet,”
he muttered half aloud, as he walked home in
the sunset, “and André François isn’t going to
be the first. He must have some red blood in
his veins—his grandfather fought at Gettysburg,
and I could fight my weight in wildcats
at his age.”

As he ate his dinner, half an hour later, his
sister recounted to him the events of the day.

“Andrew Francis was attacked again,” she
said, casually nodding toward André François,
who ate in silence—for she was a woman of
sense. “He came home again
covered with mud from head to
foot. Angélique says he refused
to run and she could do nothing——”

“But no,” interrupted the
bonne eagerly, and her words
came like a string of firecrackers
exploded by a small boy on the
Fourth of July, “he came with a
quickness—like zat!” and she
clapped her hands. “Before I
know, he have come behin’ and
trip Monsieur André François up
from his legs. Zen I try to grab
thees boy, but he is of a so great
slipperiness as an eel! He have
hit Monsieur André François—whack!
He have poke heem an’
make heem to fall into the mud.
Zen he is away with a quickness—zipp!
No person is of a
similar quickness to catch heem.”

During this display of wordy
pyrotechnics, the son and heir
of the house sat in sullen silence
and broke his bread into small
pieces. When it ended, he suddenly
looked up.

“Father,” he said, “I do not want Angélique
to take me to school any longer. She is a
fool.”

“Sank you, sair,” said the lady referred to
sarcastically, “you have a great gratitude when
I protec’ your life.” Then she turned to the
manager of the White Star:

“Sair, I have the pleasure to inform you of
somesing. In one month I am about to marry
myself to the Mr. Bur-bank—he who makes
known what is in the rocks.”

“Kind of sudden, wasn’t it, Angélique?”
asked Mr. Biron.

“It was of a suddenness,” said Angélique
blushing. “I was greatly of a desire to go back
to France, but I could not, an’ the nex’ bes’
zing—zat is to marry myself. I mus’ have a
protector in thees so savage land where even
the children are bloodthirsty. I am not of a
nervousness to stan’ everysing. Voilà!“

“THAT FIGHT WILL LONG BE REMEMBERED IN THE ANNALS OF THE GANG”

The next morning André François went to
school minus his familiar. During the week
and a half that followed he was “attacked”
with startling frequency and regularity. Almost
every afternoon he came home with his
clothes muddy and torn.

He was grimly silent about the details of
these mishaps.

Angélique was in despair.

“Ah, Madame,” she said to Miss Biron, “in
one short month he will not have a stitch to
wear—out of the largesse of four trunks full.
And the las’ command of Madame Fouchette,
it was ‘Angélique, always make Monsieur André
François to look like the little prince.’ Ciel!
how can one make heem to look like the little
prince when thees so savage boys tear off his
clothes? But I do my ver’ bes’—I darn and
darn and darn heem.”

André François made no one his confidant,
but day by day he grew more somber and silent.
His early garrulity was quite gone. Instead of
the air of hauteur which characterized him on
his entrance to the town, he now had a pathetic
droop. He even became careless about his
clothes.

“He used to be so proud, so debonair,” said
Angélique sadly, “when he have the clean,
white suit on, he is like the peacock, he know
he is beautiful—but now—he does not care
what he have on. No!”

“What can be the matter?” asked Miss
Biron anxiously, for she was really worried
by André François’ looks; “he has never
been seriously hurt in these little school-boy
fights.”

“Eh, bien! Madame! Is it not of a seriousness
to be wound’ in the pride? To be insult’?
Monsieur André François has been made the
gross insult many times. Those insult, they
knaw heem in his heart. He zink. He zink all
the time now. He zink of those many insult’!
Some day he will have his revengement—you
see.”

About this time the manager of the White
Star noticed a falling off in the number of applicants
for his peculiar variety of “job.” There
was a slump in the André François market.
One morning he called in a youngster whom he
saw going early to school, stated his terms, and

[507]

made his usual proposal. The boy hesitated a
few moments, then said:

“It’ll cost yer a dollar an’ a quarter now,
Mr. Biron. Yer see, ‘taint so easy as ’twas at
first. ‘Course Andray Franswa never runs,
an’ it’s easy t’ git him, but he’s growin’ awful
savage. He kicks an’ bites somethin’ fierce,
sir. He nearly chewed Harry Peters’ finger
offer him day ‘fore yesterday.”

The manager paid the extra quarter without
any demur.

It was about this time also that Mr. Biron
made a discovery which gratified him. He
found, secreted under a pillow in the window-seat
where André François usually sat, a dusty,
copiously diagrammed book entitled, “The
Manly Art of Self-Defense.” It was an edition
of twenty years ago, and had been used by
Mr. Biron himself during his college days.

He put it back carefully and held his silence.

The following evening he proceeded in an
experimental, roundabout way to get into a
conversation with his son.

“Andrew,” he said, with sociable casualness,
to his heir, who now always ensconced himself
in the window-seat directly after dinner, and
kept a moody silence until Angélique took him
off to bed, “you have never told me about your
school days in France.”

Accepting this remark as the statement of
an irrefutable fact, André François merely remained
politely silent.

“What do you do for recreation? What
sport do you have now, for instance?”

“We fence, father,” said André François,
listlessly.

“Ah, yes,” said the White Star manager,
introducing his subject in as elaborately casual
a way as a politician about to ask for a favor,
“just so. Well, you see we don’t do much
fencing in America, not very much. Boxing,
now, is more in our line.”

A gleam of interest, which was not lost upon
his father, shot into André François’ weary
eyes.

“Father,” he asked timidly, “are you familiar
with the manly art of self-defense?”

“I am, my son,” answered the manager of the
White Star gravely.

André François gazed at him questioningly a
moment, then drew the manual from under the
sofa cushion.

“I have been practising some of the things
described in this book,” he said, slowly opening
it and disclosing diagrams of a heavy-muscled
individual executing a wonderful curve along a
dotted line marked “a—— a—— a,” “but I
am unable to make out the explanations attached
to most of these figures. If you could
show me the rudiments——” he finished tentatively.

It was at this point that the manager of the
White Star joyously threw diplomacy to the
winds.

“You bet I will,” he cried enthusiastically,
“we will have our first lesson to-night in the
attic,” and grasping his son’s arm he started
off.

Miss Biron and Angélique, sedately sewing
by the fire in the next room, were electrified
to see, a moment later, the manager of the
White Star and André François rush madly
through, banging a door at either end in their
flight, and laughing at the top of their voices.
They also stayed awake that night beyond
their usual retiring time, for strange noises
emanated from the attic long after the hour
when a well-conducted father and son should
have been in bed.

The next morning the manager of the White
Star let the applicant in waiting know that no
further business would be transacted, and the
word went forth among the members of the
gang that he would pay for no more André
François lickings, and would tolerate no unpaid-for
ones.

So, by the ultimatum of his father, André
François went whither he would, unmolested
except by word of mouth. But he underwent
such martyrdom as only a small boy can receive
at the hands of others of his kind.

Not only did the gang remember and resent
his former attitude of superiority, but they
looked on him as a source of revenue taken
from them. His presence irritated them as the
presence of a government-owned railroad might
irritate a company of magnates shorn of their
profits. His first position had been marked at
least by a certain uniqueness and dignity. He
had never been licked, even if he could have
been.

Now, however, he was the lowest of the low.
In the democracy of the gang, where might was
right, he was a pariah, a proven coward, licked
by each and every member, and ought, by the
law of the survival of the fittest, to be kicked
out. He was only allowed to intrude his presence
on suffrance, because a higher power
artificially protected him.

At recess, in school, he sat on the well-worn
bench that ran around the yard and watched
the others play or fight. No one ever spoke
to him, except now and then to throw a taunt
his way.

“Where’s nursie, Annie?”

“Hello, sissy—are yer lost?”

“Where’d yer git that suit?” and similar personalities
greeted him when one of the boys

[508]

chanced to notice his presence. Sometimes, as
he walked home, pebbles and bits of hardened
mud were sent richochetting after him, but this
was the extent of any assault, for the manager
of the White Star, sitting behind his ground-glass
door, had it within his power to speak a
potent word to the father of any boy who disobeyed
him.

André François seldom spoke back, but his
silence had something grim in it, and there was
a portentous light in his eye.

At home he never complained, and Angélique,
rejoiced that the régime of physical violence
was over, snatched the time between stitches
on a wonderful, beruffled trousseau, to make
him “look like the little prince.” Only his
father knew how he spent his time every evening
in the attic, and what passionate energy he
put into his work. Neither alluded to it, but
both knew that the lessons had an ultimate
object.

And, one day, three weeks from the time he
took his first boxing lesson, this object was
unexpectedly accomplished.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and the gang,
freed from the tyranny of school and the irritation
of Saturday morning chores, were joyously
disporting themselves in a vacant lot at the
corner of the street. The first inning of a baseball
game was just over, and the overalled
players were lying on the ground disputing
certain fine points of the play with the audience.

André François stopped, leaned on the top
rail of the fence, and gazed at them a trifle
wistfully. Jimmie McCarthy’s roving eye discovered
him, and he yelled out:

“You’d better run along, Annie—nursie will
be out lookin’ fer yer in a minnut.”

The gang laughed flatteringly at the subtle
wit of their leader. André François’ face
flushed a vivid crimson and his eyes darkened.
Then he electrified the gang by leaping over the
fence and rushing straight up to the redoubtable
Jimmie.

He thrust out his chin and yelled up into the
face of the surprised leader:

“I’ll show you if I’m an Annie or not. D’you
want to fight?”

Jimmie stood dumb with amazement a moment,
then he laughed long and loud, for his
sense of humor was Irish; and the whole gang
joined in.

“S-a-a-y,” he said, “yer wanter git licked
again, d’yer? You must’er got inter the habit.
I tell yer what—I got a baby brother two years
old ter home. I’ll go fetch him, and the two o’
yez kin have it out.”

“AN ADMIRING CONCOURSE OF SMALL BOYS FOLLOWED AT A RESPECTFUL DISTANCE”

It was here that André François’ early training
enabled him to make an impression. He
stood up on his toes, as he had once seen the
Marquis de Boissé stand up on his toes, and
slapped Jimmie McCarthy across the mouth
with his open palm, as he had seen that noble
marquis slap a count of France.

But what followed was not an exchange of
ultra courteous priorities to a duel. It was a
good American fight in the middle of a ring of
small boys, and what happened is what always
happens when natural and scientific force stand
up before each other. That fight will be long
remembered in the annals of the gang, which,
like the records of the great Homeric fights or
the sagas of the primitive Northmen, are first
handed down by word of mouth.

“I wished yer’d seen it, kid,” said Charlie
Brown, to his wide-eyed, freckled-faced junior,
whom he was trying to bring up in the right
way. “It’d bin an eddycation fer yer. Andray
Franswa jumped round jest like he was made o’
rubber. Every time that Jim grabbed fer him,
he was on the other side an’ had landed him one
on the nose. Gee, yer oughter seen it bleed—it
was worse’n the time Jim beat Buck Paxell.
Now, Teddy, yer want ter keep yer eye on
Andray Franswa, an’ do same as yer see him
doin’—’cause he’s goin’ ter be a great man
some day like Jim Jeffries—see?”

That afternoon the manager of the White
Star chanced to look out of his window, and he
saw André François, with his white sailor hat,
fashioned after that of Prince Edward, set
rakishly over one ear, his hands in his pockets,
whistling at the top of his lungs, come down
the street. His face was muddy and bleeding,
a great scratch cut across it from ear to ear,
his hair was wild and tangled, but his swagger
was that of a conqueror, and he took the middle
of the road. An admiring concourse of small
boys followed along at a respectful distance.

Mr. Biron smiled to himself. Then he took
down his ledger, for he was a careful man of
business, and read over a certain page. On it
was written fourteen times:

“To Andrew Francis, licking … $1.00”

“Um,” said the manager of the White Star
softly at the end of the addition, “fourteen
dollars.” Then he took another look out of the
window:

“I never made a better bargain in my
life.”

AIN’T YOU GWINE TO COME?
BY
EDMUND VANCE COOKE

JUNGLE BLOOD
BY
ELMORE ELLIOTT PEAKE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN

He was a coal-black, box-headed
negro, of a bulk and stature never
before admitted to the dining-room
of the Bluegrass Hotel. The blacks
preferred by the management of
that fastidious hostelry were agile, under-sized
fellows with round heads and small hands; and
Moss Harper would assuredly never have effected
an entrance to the dining-room, had it
not been for a waiters’ strike, which made
almost any kind of help welcome.

The lynx-eyed head waiter, prejudiced from
the start against his gigantic underling, quickly
discovered that salt-cellars and other small
objects eluded Moss’ clumsy fingers like drops
of quicksilver; also, that the channels between
the tables were wholly inadequate for the safe
navigation of a vessel of this draft. Hence
Moss’ term of service would doubtless have
been a very brief one, had it not been for an unforeseen
event. On his way home the very first
night, he broke the heads of half a dozen union
pickets who had waylaid him in a dark alley,
and this feat gave the strike a shock from which
it died the next day.

Out of gratitude, and possibly also a desire to
give the recalcitrant negroes an object-lesson,
the management decided to tolerate Moss for
a month. It was clearly a case of toleration.
He broke more dishes than any four of the other
waiters; he forgot orders; he trod on toes; and,
although he was of a singularly peaceful disposition,
never taking part in the multitudinous
squabbles of the dining-room, the incessant
gibes, sneers, and threats of his unionized
associates would occasionally prove too much
for even his equanimity. Then, like an infuriated
gorilla, he would spring upon his
tormentors, regardless of their number, and
dearly indeed would they pay for their sport.

He was, moreover, a silent fellow; and his
silence was not that of the well-bred waiter,
but a solemn, profound, brooding, depressing
thing, acquired, one could almost believe, in
the African jungles where his forefathers had
crept like wild beasts or squatted in superstitious
terror. People, consequently, were a
little afraid of him. It was told that he had
once carried a piano up three flights of stairs on
his back; and when he would pass down the
dining-room with a seventy-pound tray balanced
on the tips of three fingers as lightly as if it were
a pie-pan, a certain bald-headed, white-waist-coated,
pink-faced old bachelor, who made his
home at the hotel, never tired of observing to
strangers, with his dry little chuckle: “How’d
you like to meet that boy on a lonely road, suh,
afteh dark, with your gun at home?” And, in
truth, Moss’ huge black paw, suddenly appearing
over their shoulders from behind, as he served a
meal, was a trifle disconcerting to ladies with
delicate nerves.

There was, however, a force of some kind, a
sort of dumb nobility about the fellow, which
made itself felt; and, in spite of his manifold
shortcomings, he had, when his month was up,
made a fairly favorable impression. Still, his
fate was hanging in the balance when Fortune
once more intervened in his behalf. An imaginative
reporter on one of the Louisville
papers, being hard pressed for a Sunday story,
concocted an article entitled “A Congo King,”
in which he solemnly averred that the herculean
waiter at the Bluegrass was the grandson of an
African prince who had been captured by
slavers on the upper Congo, after a desperate
fight, and landed in Charleston in 1832.

From that hour Moss became a show-piece
which the proprietors of the Bluegrass would
not willingly have parted with. Guests almost
daily asked to be shown the “Congo King.” A
German ethnologist who was touring the country
ran down from Chicago to get some exact
measurements of the royal descendant’s head.
An artist of State reputation painted him in
what was alleged to be his grandfather’s court
costume—a strip of leopard-skin around his
loins; and a photograph from this painting

[511]

made the most popular souvenir post-card
which the hotel’s news-stand had ever handled.

Curiously enough, his fame did not spoil
him. Indeed, for any change in him, he
might have been unaware of his fame, and
possibly was unaware of it. At all events,
he continued to pursue the simple routine of
his life. He worked seven days in the week,
from six in the morning until nine at night,
with a respite from two till six. Most of the
hotel negroes spent this recess in shooting
craps and guzzling beer in an adjacent dive,
but Moss devoted it to the prosecution of an
enterprise very near to his heart. He was
learning to read! He could already read a
bill-of-fare, of course, to any near-sighted
guest who had chanced to forget his glasses;
but this was merely a mnemonic trick, assisted
by the position of the words on the
card. He yearned to be able to read “really
and truly,” out of a newspaper or a book.

One afternoon, after laying off his dining-room
livery and getting into his own shabby
clothes,—in which few of the Bluegrass
guests would have recognized their Congo
King!—he set off with unusual alacrity.
At the street door he paused to turn up his
collar and draw down his hat-brim, and
then indifferently stepped out into a pelting
shower. A block away he entered a second-hand
book-store and bought a greasy, dog-eared
Second Reader which he had priced the
day before. Stowing his purchase in an
inside pocket to keep it dry, he longingly
eyed a passing street-car, for he was tired;
but he put the temptation aside—five cents
would buy a loaf of bread or two quarts of
buttermilk—and stepped out into the rain
again.

A walk of ten blocks brought him to the
head of an ill-smelling, narrow alley, dotted
with foul pools of water and bordered with
tumble-down shanties. The rain had now
ceased, and the sun, beating down more
fiercely than ever, was raising a pestilential
reek which had brought the black denizens
of the alley to their tiny stoops for a breath
of comparatively fresh air. Children, the
smaller ones quite naked, pattered about
like ducks in the black mud.

The number of men present, considering it
was midday, would have surprised any one
not familiar with the fact that the residents of
Goosefoot Lane plied their varied trades
mostly by night. Oily-skinned and blear-eyed
from heat, drink, and loss of sleep, these
gentlemen of color somewhat resembled the
animals of an over-traveled menagerie, blinking
stupidly, staring morosely into vacancy,
slapping viciously at flies, and occasionally
exposing their red mouths and gleaming teeth
in a wide, fierce, carnivorous yawn. Some few,
in a better humor, were drinking pailed beer
and shooting craps. The women held their
babies and chatted with their neighbors, while
now and then some fat old mammy would
waddle out into the lane to settle a row among
the youngsters.

It was into this atmosphere that the student
took his way, nodding at an acquaintance here
and there, until he reached the shanty which
the payment of four dollars a month in advance
entitled him to call home. An old darky sat
drowsing on the stoop. There was something
ape-like about his long arms, his flat, wide-nostriled
nose, and the mat of gray wool which
crept down his forehead to within two inches
of his eyebrows. Yet, on a closer inspection,
his face was human, kindly, and benevolent,
and even lit with a shrewd humor.

“This you’ Secum Reader, sonny?” asked
old Benjy, starting from his doze as Moss
thrust the book into his hand. He fumbled
in his pocket for his silver-rimmed spectacles,—cherished
memento of better days,—pinched
the book between his thick, knotted fingers,
and opened it about as gracefully as a bear
would open an oyster. Then he squinted at
the page with an owl-like expression, moving
the book now nearer, now farther, and turning
it this way and that for a better light. For he
was Moss’ teacher, and it would be highly injurious
to his prestige for him to show any
flustration over this new volume. Nevertheless,
he was not quite at ease.

“Yass—book-store man di’n’ cheat you.
He Secum Reader,” he observed astutely,
after moving his lips inaudibly for a moment.
“Says so—right theh—top o’ the page—in
plain print. An’ print don’ lie! ‘Member
that, sonny,—print don’ lie. Men lies,
women lies, clouds lies—say it’s gwine rain
when it don’ do nothin’ but blow up a li’l’
dust—but print neveh lies. ‘Cause why?
‘Cause the Good Book is print. But, sonny,
if you gwine git an educashum, you gotter
strike out for it—strike out—strike out.”

“Ain’t I strikin’ out?” asked Moss in an
aggrieved tone.

“Shuh, sonny, shuh. But this yere vollum
make you scratch you’ haid. Yass, indeed,
sonny,—make you scratch you’ haid. Purt’
near makes me scratch mine!” The last,
however, was accompanied by a low chuckle
to indicate that it was only a joke; after which
he adjusted his glasses afresh and again fixed
his gaze on the book. “Wuds in heah, sonny,
you neveh seen befo’. I done seen ’em, of co’se,

[512]

’cause ole Mis’ tuk me mos’ through the Thud
Reader befo’ the Wah broke out. But, of co’se,
my eyesight ain’t what it was—no, sonny,
’tain’t what it was.” He stared harder than
ever, shutting first one eye, as though squinting
along his old coon-gun, then the other, blinking,
and moving his lips. Finally his black face
lighted.

“Heah’s an ole devil I used to wrastle
with!” he exclaimed shrilly. “Lawd, Lawd,
how I used to wrastle with that ole devil!
Succumstance! Succumstance! That’s the ole
devil!”

“Lemme see ‘im,” said Moss curiously, bending
nearer.

“Right theh,” answered Benjy proudly, pointing with
his stub forefinger. “That long, crinkly, twis’ed feller.
Looks a good ‘eal like a dried fish-wum. Sonny, when
you kin read a wud like him, easy-like, same as
I do—succumstance—see!—suc-cum-stance—you’
educashum mighty neah complete.”

Satisfied with this feat, however, the old
man turned from the text to the pictures,
which were less trying, he declared, to his
eyesight. His attention was at once caught
by a little girl, in an old-fashioned pinafore,
driving a hoop amid a fairly Edenic profusion
of butterflies, flowers, and birds, with a squirrel
eating a nut overhead. For a moment he
stared fixedly through his grimy lenses, and
then his hands trembled with excitement.

“Sonny,” he almost shouted, “dis the
same Secum Reader ole Mis’ done learn me
out of! Dar’s li’l’ gull with her hoop, and
squ’ull up above. An’ dar”—turning a
page—”is li’l’ boy with pony—spotted pony
with a collah ‘stid of breas’-strap. An’ dar
anudder li’l’ boy with white rabbits. I ‘members
’em all. I ‘members what ole Mis’ said
about ’em all,” he ran on eagerly, while Moss’
own eyes grew large with wonder at the strange
coincidence. “I ‘members de day ole Mis’
guve me de book. I done driv’ her back that
day fum the Law’ences’, where she spend the
day with ole Mis’ Lutie. She spend lots of
days with ole Mis’ Lutie, ’cause ole Mis’
Lutie’s husband killed in Mexican Wah, same
as ole Mistis’. An’ as we driv’ up the ca’igeway,
Miss Pen and Marse Willie Hahpeh, her
cousin, come kitin’ by us on theh hosses, makin’
sich a clatter, my hosses shied in the blackberry-bushes.
But Miss Pen juss larf, like she
always do when Marse Willie with her, and
neveh slowed up a bit. Ole Mis’ kind of sighed
and sayed: ‘Benjy, that gull gwine breck her
neck some day on that hoss.’ An’ I say, ‘Mis’
Judie, neveh while Marse Willie aroun’. He
got better use for her neck than breckin’ it.’
An’ she say, ‘Shut up, Benjy; you fohget they
fust cousins.’ So we kim on up to the po’ch.
Then she han’ me a book an’ say, ‘Benjy, that’s
Secum Reader. You done learn all they is in
the Fust.’ An’, sonny, it’s the same book, the
same book.”

For a moment he was lost in reverie. His
faded, age-filmed eyes, lifted to an archipelago
of fleecy cloudlets, grew dreamy as his mind
wandered back to the shady driveways of the
old Harper mansion; the spacious, rose-curtained
veranda; the cool, high-ceiled rooms
within; Old Marse and Old Mis’, Miss Pen
and Miss Patty, and the troops of guests who
kept the great house ringing with merriment,
with few intermissions, from January till December.

“Times is change, sonny,” he murmured
plaintively. “Ole Mistis been grave-dust fo’
thutty yeahs, eenamost, I reckon. Miss Pen
done mah’d Marse Willie, spite of bein’ fust
cousins; de Wah kem on, an’ Benjy—fool
Benjy—run away with the Linkum sojers.
Yass, ole fool Benjy run away with the Linkum
sojers, an’ been livin’ on ‘taters and sow-belly
eveh since.”

The new Second Reader was forgotten, and
he rambled on with the tale of the old days—a
tale which had neither beginning nor end,
whose characters and events grew sharper with
each repetition, and of which the old man never
grew weary.

It was a tale of which Moss never grew
weary, either. In his childhood it had served
him in lieu of the fairy-tales which a white
child hears at its mother’s knees, and throughout
his later years it had served him in lieu of
books, pictures, music—in short, had been
the sole food of his esthetic nature. At Harper
Hall, before the War, according to Benjy, it
was never too hot or too cold; birds and flowers
were present throughout the year; the grass
was always green, the streams were always full
of water; nobody ever worked very hard; there
was always time to fish and hunt, to dance and
play the banjo; there was always plenty to eat.
Best of all, there was always love. In that
Garden of Eden, a broken head or a broken
heart was equally sure of healing balm. Old
Mis’, Miss Pen, and Miss Patty were little lower
than the angels.

“MOST OF THE HOTEL NEGROES SPENT THIS RECESS IN AN ADJACENT DIVE”

Moss had heard of slavery, of course. He
even knew that his father had been a slave.
But the word conveyed little meaning to him.
The war of which his father so often spoke was
equally vague. The only clear thing about it
was that it had ended the old times and begun
the new. How vastly superior those old times
had been to the new! What possible comparison

[513]

could there be, for instance, between
Harper Hall and Goosefoot Lane? What a
fallen creature was the landlord at the Bluegrass,
compared with Benjy’s old master!
How miserable a thing was Moss’ daily fare
beside the feasts to which his father habitually
used to sit down!

The old man was still muttering reminiscently,
and Moss was still sitting with his chin
buried in his hands, when an apparition appeared
at the head of the Lane. It was a lady,
with a white parasol and broad-brimmed white
hat, daintily lifting a fluffy, many-ruffled white
skirt, and exposing a pair of white shoes and
stockings. She nodded amiably at the blacks
on either side as she picked her way along, and
halted once for a bit of chat; but at last she
bore airily down on Moss Harper’s stoop, where
she folded her parasol as a dove might fold its
wings on reaching its ledge.

It was then, and not till then, that a stranger,
unless a Southerner, would have discovered
that black blood flowed in her veins—that she
was, in the vernacular of the South, a “nigger”—no
more so and no less so than her thick-lipped,
ebon-hued husband, Moss Harper.

She paused for a last covetous glimpse of the
stream of life flowing past the head of the Lane,
out there in the white man’s world, and then,
with a careless nod at her husband, she passed
through the squat doorway of the musty den—a
butterfly entering a rat-hole.

Moss had not spoken,—with elemental
human nature mere words count for little,—but
his mind glided from Benjy’s broken recital
to his wife. He never thought of her as half
white, for she had been suckled at a black
breast; she had played with black pickaninnies;
her present associates were black, like
her husband; and she spoke the jargon of the
blacks. He preferred, in fact, to think of her
as of his own race. Yet her undeniable beauty,
her fair skin and her wavy hair, were facts to
be reckoned with. And beneath that fair
skin and wavy hair were other things to
be reckoned with—yearnings and ambitions
unknown to an Ethiopian, a taste for fine
clothes, a discontent with her present state and

[514]

a blind groping for something better in the way
of life, all handed down in her white father’s
blood.

It is true that the ladies for whom Estelle
formerly acted as maid had pronounced her
worthless—vain, frivolous, and dishonest.
And they were right. She was a thief. The
beautiful skirt which she had this day flaunted
in the envious eyes of the wenches of Goosefoot
Lane had been stolen from the laundry at which
she worked three days in a week, and many a
neat job of shoplifting had she done. Yet,
after all, these were only mistaken means to a
great End—means which, if history speaks
true, were not unknown to a far-distant generation
of our own race when they were groping
their way out of the darkness of barbarism.

Of these means Moss, fortunately, knew
nothing; for old Benjy, rigidly drilled in honesty
by his mistress, had done the same for his son.
But the End he saw, mistily and uncertainly,
for Estelle had handed over to him a great deal
of that which her father had handed down to
her; and it was toward this end that he himself
was now making his slow and painful way, with
a Second Reader in his hand.

Estelle laid off her scented finery lingeringly
and lovingly, put on a calico wrapper, and
passed into the diminutive lean-to which they
called a kitchen. Five minutes later she appeared
at the front door, shot a searching glance
up the Lane for anything of interest, and coolly
announced supper. Then the man who, for
eleven hours of seven days in the week, served
other men with every luxury which the four
quarters of the globe could supply, sat down to
a meal of buttermilk, cold potatoes, and dry
bread.

When Moss got home again that night,
Estelle was sitting on the stoop alone, old Benjy
having gone to bed with the chickens, as usual.
His eyes brightened, for very often she was
summoned to the laundry at night to take care
of “immediate” work from the hotels, she being
an expert at ironing women’s fine fabrics. He
sat down beside her on one of the benches
which flanked the stoop, and she rested her
head on his arm, as if weary.

“You done paid Fitzpatrick the rent to-day?”
he finally asked.

“Yass.”

“You show him that hole in the flo’?”

“Yass.” She dropped her long dark lashes
for an instant, and then added: “I tole him
about it. He di’n’ come here. I took the
money to his saloom. You know, he sayed if
he haved to come here again fo’ that money, he
th’ow us out in the alley.”

“He ain’ neveh tried to th’ow me yet,”
observed Moss quietly. “We’ll th’ow ourseffs
out befo’ long. We ain’ gwine to live in this
hawg-pen all the time.” He paused, and
added more gently: “I don’ want you to go to
his saloom no mo’, ‘Stelle.”

“I went in the side do’,” she explained.
“Nobody di’n’ see me. An’ I di’n’ go no
furder than the do’. But I won’ go no mo’ ef
you don’ want me to.”

“I don’ want you to,” he repeated definitely.
“I don’ want him to insult you like he did me
when I axed him to fix that hole what you
could th’ow a bull thoo.”

“Why, Mossie, you neveh tole me about
that! What he say?” There was an indescribable
undertone—possibly of amusement—in
her velvety voice.

“He sayed he’d hoss-whip me ef I eveh
come to his saloom again beggin’ for repai’s.”

Estelle’s lashes again quivered slightly, and
her lips parted in the shadow of a smile—just
enough to reveal the straight, faultless joint
between her two rows of glistening teeth. She
reached for the great black hand which rested
on his knee and laid it in her lap, covering it
with her own. It was as if she recognized in
that member of sledge-hammer size and hardness
a sure defense from all harm. Yet the light
which played in her eyes, as she lazily turned
her face toward his, was still half-ironical.
Was it Caucasian fleering at Ethiopian—white
blood mocking black?

“Moss, I’d lak to see him try to hoss-whip
you.” She laughed at the thought.

“You mus’n’ want me to fight,” he rebuked
her quietly. “I don’ lak to fight. I want to
git where I won’ never have to fight. When I
gits awdained as preacher, we gwine live in the
country, an’ have a li’l’ house with a gyahden,
where dad kin potter roun’ and raise us veg’tables.
You won’ have to wuk in no laundry
then, or live in a hawg-pen lak this.”

Estelle was quiet for several minutes, with
her large eyes fixed reflectively on the stars.

“When you think you gwine be awdained?”
she finally asked.

“Pretty soon, now; soon’s I learns to read
a li’l’ better.”

But in his heart he was not so sure. Old
Benjy was of the opinion that he would at
least have to go through the Third Reader
to qualify for ordination, and he was only
beginning the Second.

“You think you lak the country better as
you do the city?” asked Estelle hesitatingly.

“Don’ you?” he demanded in astonishment.

“Oh, I do,” she hastened to assure him.
“But I was juss wunnerin’ ef you wou’n’

[515]

make mo money in a big chu’ch in the city
as you would in a li’l’ chu’ch in the country.”

“Got to take li’l’ chu’ch fust,” he observed
astutely.

That he was still dissatisfied with her question,
Estelle seemed to detect by some sixth
sense, for she ran on suavely: “You know, I
neveh lived in the country, lak you. Tha’s
why I axed you what I did. I reckon I don’
know how sweet the country is. Moss, I wish
we gwine the country to-mo’ow to live!” She
flung her arms about his neck and let herself
settle down upon his broad chest.

Tears filled the giant’s eyes. “I wish you
was, honey. But I cyarn take you—juss
yit. Got to wait a li’l’ while—juss a li’l’
while.”

In that moment Estelle probably meant
what she said. In that moment her love for
the man whose name she bore was probably
uppermost in her foolish heart. In that moment
her impulse toward a higher life may
have carried her beyond her love of finery, and
she may have been willing to give up the city
and the very questionable means which it
afforded for securing that finery.

“IT WAS INTO THIS ATMOSPHERE THAT THE STUDENT TOOK HIS WAY”

We drift along the placid stream of Time,
complaining of the monotony of the voyage,
when already the murmur of rapids which are
to try every muscle and thrill every nerve
might be heard if we but stilled our peevish
notes long enough to listen. A week after the
above events a party of four ladies from central
Kentucky arrived one evening at the Bluegrass.
The register showed them to be mother and
daughters; and their gentle manners and soft
voices, added to the beauty of the girls, had

[516]

put the clerk on his mettle, spurring him to an
exhibition of his choicest Kentucky gallantry.
He had just promised them a large, cool room
on the second floor, containing two beds, and,
in answer to their laughing, half-ironical request
that they might be shown the Congo
King, he had assured them that they should
be seated at that royal scion’s table.

“You certainly are entitled to the privilege,”
he added blandly, “for his real name is
the same as yours.”

“Harper?” queried the mother of the pretty
trio, with some surprise.

“Yes; Moss Harper.”

The four ladies exchanged quick glances.

“Why, our carriage-driver, long before the
War, was an old negro named Moss. He had
a son named Benjy, who ran away during the
War. I don’t want to impeach the genealogy
of your King, but I wonder—” She stopped,
as if recalling that her auditor was a stranger,
then added, with a smile: “Anyhow, we must
be waited on by him, now.”

Moss was aware that the ladies at his table
were scanning him with more interest than
even his size and legendary history usually
evoked, and he was not much surprised, therefore,
when the eldest of them said: “Excuse
me, please, but is your real name Moss Harper?”

“Yassum,” he answered, halting instantly
in his employment, as old Benjy had taught
him to do, and dumbly waiting the lady’s
further pleasure.

“Do you know your father’s name?”

“Yassum. Ole Benjy.”

“Is he still living?”

“Yassum; livin’ with me.”

The lady’s small white hand closed rather
quickly on the table-cloth.

“Do you know what county he came from?”

“Yassum. Ole Bubbon; he done live at
Hahpeh Hall.” Then the lady’s lighting eyes
encouraged him to volunteer a word or two,
contrary to his habit. “The Hahpehs all daid
and gone now, though. All killed in the Wah.”

One of the girls shot her sisters an amused
glance, but Penelope Harper’s lips quivered.
In a voice which struck Moss as the sweetest
he had ever heard, she continued: “I think I
shall ask you to come to our room—No. 120—as
soon as you are through with your duties
here. I have something of interest to tell you.”

To Moss, with the childish impatience of his
race, it seemed as if he would never escape from
the dining-room that night; for when he was on
the point of leaving, at a little after nine, he
was detailed to help take care of a party of a
dozen or more that had just come in. It was,
therefore, after ten when he gently tapped on
the door of No. 120.

He had been too well bred by his father to
sit down; and Mrs. Harper, not wishing to
disturb his conception of propriety, though
some laxity on the present occasion would
have been permissible, let him stand just inside
the door, with his greasy old hat clutched
awkwardly between his hands and the shrunken
sleeves of his butternut suit exposing four or
five inches of muscular black wrist.

“In the first place, Moss,” she began, after
ascertaining a little more of his history, “I
want to tell you that the Harpers are not all
dead. I am a Harper myself. I am the Miss
Pen that old Benjy must have often told you
about.”

“Not Miss Pen!” exclaimed Moss, with
starting eyes, as if beholding an apparition.
“Not the one that mah’d Marse Willie Hahpeh?”

“The very same,” she assured him, smiling.
“And these are my daughters. But Marse
Willie is dead; he died a long time ago, during
the War.”

Verily, it was as if some magician had rung
up the curtain on the past—that beautiful
past of which his father had told him so much.
He listened to Mrs. Harper’s story in something
like a trance, with his blue-black eyes half lost
in reverie. And, thus forgetting himself, his
awkwardness passed; his hands fell naturally
by his side, his chest came out, his head rose,
and he stood before the ladies in all the splendor
of physique which Nature had invested him
with.

“Now, Moss,” Mrs. Harper concluded, “no
Harper could ever neglect a descendant of our
faithful old Moss, even though his son did run
away during the War. We want to take care
of you and Benjy. We’ll give him a cabin by
himself, and we’ll give you and your wife another
cabin. As fast as you learn the plantation
work, you shall be advanced. With your
strength and intelligence, I am sure that you
can soon be earning good wages, and you will
be much happier and better off than you are
here. To-morrow afternoon, when you are at
home, we’ll drive out to see old Benjy, as he is
probably too feeble to come here, and you can
then tell us what you have decided to do.
Meanwhile, to relieve any immediate needs,
accept this.” And she handed him a ten-dollar
bill.

Just how he expressed his thanks, or how
he got out of the room, Moss never clearly recalled,
for his brain was whirling. But when
he found himself in the street, with the cool

“HEAH’S AN OLE DEVIL I USED TO WRASTLE WITH,’ HE EXCLAIMED SHRILLY”

evening air on his heated brow, he started for
home on a run. It was a rather dangerous
thing for a black man to do, too, at that hour of
the night, in a Southern city, since a policeman
was likely to stop him with a tap on the head
from a “billy.”

But the first thing that stopped Moss was
the glowing front of a pawnshop, near the head
of Goosefoot Lane. In the window was a
brooch which Estelle had paused to gaze at,
with covetous eyes, every day for weeks.
Moss had looked at it himself a good many times,
dreaming rather than hoping to carry it home
some day as a surprise for Estelle. Now he had
the money, and, without a thought of the
prodigality of his course, he entered the shop.

His heavy breathing did not escape the
sharp eyes of the Hebrew proprietor, who
would not have been at all surprised to see a
pursuing policeman heave in sight. But when
Moss showed his bill and asked for the brooch,
the pawnbroker quickly went forward for the
article, and, after taking into consideration his
customer’s evident hurry, he set a price of five
dollars on it. Estelle would have got it for
half that sum, but Moss paid the price without
a murmur, and then sped on down the Lane,
leaving the Hebrew well pleased with the transaction
and fully convinced that his customer
was a thief.

Estelle was not at home, to Moss’ keen disappointment,
and, though he took it that she
was at the laundry, he woke his father to make
sure. Old Benjy, as torpid as a woodchuck
in January, was not easily roused; but Moss’
repeated shouts and by no means gentle
thumps finally brought him to his elbow,
blinking dazedly.

“Daddy, Miss Pen’s alive! She’s at the
hotel, and she’s foun’ us out, and gwine to
teck us all back to Hahpeh Hall!”

Old Benjy continued to blink silently, and
was evidently of the opinion that he had been
dreaming. But when Moss had repeated the
news twice or thrice, and the facts had finally
filtered through Benjy’s thick skull, he let out
a yelp that would have shamed a coyote.

“Halleluyer! Halleluyer! Glory to Gawd!
Bress de Lam’! Bress de Lam’!”

Moss, after confirming his supposition as
to Estelle’s whereabouts, did not wait for the
broadside of questions which his father was
sure to fire at him, but ran out to the stoop.
Should he wait for her? Should he pin the
brooch on her night-dress, and then, when she
discovered it, overwhelm her with the good
news? That would be fine, but it was far too
severe a tax upon his patience. The next
moment he was on the wing again.

No negroes were allowed to enter the laundry
by the front door, or, indeed, by any door, unless
employed about the place. But Moss
stole in through the engine-room at the rear,
and managed to make his way as far as the
ironing-machines without challenge. Estelle
was nowhere in sight, however; and, raising
his voice above the clatter, he inquired as to
where she was of a mulatto girl whom he had
often seen with his wife.

“She done gone to git some medicine fur a
haidache,” answered the girl.

“How long ‘go?”

“Juss li’l’ while—not ten minutes.”

At this, a wrinkled old negress, who had
bent her head forward to catch the colloquy,
showed her half-dozen yellow teeth in an evil
grin.

“Sonny,” she volunteered maliciously, “she
been gone two hou’s by the clock. The medicine
that gull gwine arfter don’ come fum no
drug-sto’.”

Moss had no time for further parley, for the
threatening voice of the foreman warned him
to depart without loss of time, and he glided
swiftly out again; but in the starlight outside
he paused, with the mist from the exhaust-pipe
drifting into his upturned face.

Some of the joy had gone out of his eyes.
Did the old woman mean that Estelle drank?
Once or twice, recently, he thought he had
detected liquor on her breath, but he had immediately
dismissed the suspicion. Drinking,
of course, was no heinous offense in his eyes;
he daily saw too many white women drinking
to hold such an opinion as that. Nevertheless,
he himself had forgone liquor for years—old
Benjy had preached him many a temperance
sermon; and Estelle had allowed him to believe
that she, too, never drank.

But now that the accursed maggot of doubt
was in his brain, he could not cast it out, and
its foul progeny multiplied thick and fast.
With feverish haste he made the round of all
the drug-stores in the vicinity; but Estelle
was not to be seen. Twice he returned to the
cabin; but the measured snoring of old Benjy,
who had swallowed the good news as a child
would a sugar-plum, and then calmly fallen
asleep again, was the only sound that greeted
his ears.

How quiet the cabin was! A chill solitude
already seemed brooding over it, and the
familiar objects of the room had taken on a
strange appearance. With an unnamed, unnamable
fear compressing his heart and making
breathing difficult, he took his way back to the
head of the Lane. After standing there a moment,
straining his eyes in either direction, he
began to wander slowly and a little wearily up
and down the avenue, scrutinizing every woman
who came within his range of vision.

“OLD BENJY CONTINUED TO BLINK SILENTLY”

He finally found himself, by mere chance,
in front of his landlord’s saloon. A passing
thought brought his leaden feet to a stand-still.
If Estelle should have gone out for a
drink, and had had no money,—as he believed
to be the case,—would she not have come to
Fitzpatrick’s? It would have been the last
place to which he would have gone to ask
credit for a drink, for, in the first place, no
negroes were allowed to drink at Fitzpatrick’s
bar; in the second place, Fitzpatrick was no
friend of his. Yet Estelle had gone there once
with the rent! Maybe she had gone more than
once; maybe——

A sound in the gloomy hallway along one
side of the saloon suddenly made his steady-going
heart give one great bound. It was
Estelle’s voice in silly, tipsy laughter, followed
by a profane admonition, in a masculine voice,
to keep still. Next came the cautious closing
of a door and guarded footsteps. As rigid as
iron, with his great fists clenched and his nostrils
spread like an angry bull’s, Moss waited
for the pair to appear. But, instead of coming
nearer, their footsteps receded until he heard
them ascending the stairs at the other end of
the hall; then they ceased.

One—two—three—four—five minutes
Moss stood there, seeing nothing, hearing
nothing, a film over his eyes, a noise like rushing
waters in his ears. His sensations were
very similar to those he had felt when a careless
carpenter had once dropped an oak two-by-four
on his head from the second story of a
building; and now, as then, he automatically
raised his hand to his scalp.

But at last he came out of the curious obsession;

[520]

he saw the twinkling arc-lights, heard
the humming of the trolley-cars, and was conscious
of people passing to and fro. With a
strange smile, he took the packet containing
the brooch from his pocket, slowly unwrapped
it, and dropped the trinket to the sidewalk,
after which he ground it under his heel. Then
he crossed the street to a negro saloon—that
is, a saloon for negroes, run by a white man.
He poured himself a big drink. The villainous
liquor trickled pleasantly through his interior,
and he immediately ordered a second drink—then
a third—then a fourth. This time the
bartender, after an uneasy glance at the herculean
shoulders and muddy eyes of his patron,
substituted a weaker mixture for the fiery stuff
he had been setting out. He also shifted a
revolver beneath the bar into a slightly handier
position.

But Moss walked quietly out and recrossed
the street, with no hint of unsteadiness in his
gait, in spite of his unusual potations. He
softly entered Fitzpatrick’s hallway, and in the
dark recess behind the stairs he took his stand—a
silent, grim, fearsome statue of obsidian
hue and almost heroic size.

He waited for what seemed hours; but,
queerly enough, he was not impatient, nor
was he in the least excited. Occasionally a
policeman sauntered past the entrance; at
intervals a trolley-car thundered by; the bartender
of the saloon slammed and locked the
back door. Finally, a tower clock began to
boom out the hour, and Moss, in the absence
of anything else to do, counted the strokes.

Only twelve! He would have guessed that
it was at least two o’clock. Then, having
counted to twelve without much effort, he began
to count his fingers over and over, to see
how far he could go. At thirty-nine, being a
little uncertain of the next number, he paused.
During the pause he heard the swish of a skirt
in the hall above. They were coming!

A woman’s agonized shriek, a man’s curse,
a chance shot into the dark from his ever-ready
revolver, a scuffle,—a very brief scuffle,—and
then all was as still as before. Estelle
had told her last lie; Fitzpatrick had dispensed
his last drink.

Moss walked forward to the doorway, waited
quietly until an officer who had heard the report
of the revolver came running up, and then surrendered
himself.

“I done kill ’em,” he explained laconically.

Ten minutes later, in heavy manacles, he
stepped down from the police ambulance at
the entrance to the jail—a huge brick building,
covering an entire block, with its barred
windows rising story on story, a somber architectural
jest at Civilization.

Some two months later, the governor of
Kentucky was standing with his hands in his
pockets at the window of his office, in the
quaint capitol building at Frankfort, and gazing
idly at the tablet in the sidewalk which marks
the spot where William Goebel fell, the victim
of an assassin’s ball. He turned, at the rustle
of a lady’s skirts.

“Why, Pen! What angel sent you?” he
exclaimed, pushing forward his easiest chair.
“Pen, do you know you’re just in time to save
the gov’neh of Kentucky from a spell of the
blues? It’s a fact. I read a book last night,
by a man named Buckle, about civilization
and that sawt of thing, and the pesky thoughts
stick to me like a nightmare. I was standin’
by that window theh, just reviewin’ the events
which have taken place in our deah old State
in the past quarter of a century, and I was askin’
myself which way we were headed—up or
down.”

“Up, surely,” answered Mrs. Harper. She
looked at him with that candor and seriousness
which is permitted only between old friends,
and then continued: “Wilbur, I have a problem,
too, and I want you to help me solve it.
I want you to pardon a negro who was convicted
last June in Louisville of a double
murder, and who is now here in the penitentiary.
He is the son of that Benjy of ours that ran off
during the War, and the grandson of our old
Moss. You remember them both. I never
knew either of them to be guilty of a vicious
act, and this boy—he’s only twenty-five—killed
his wife and the white man who had
debauched her.”

The governor sat playing with his pen-knife
for some time after she had finished
her story.

“I wish this Moss of yours had killed only
the man, Pen,” he observed. “That’s what
a white man would have done, and everybody
would have applauded. But, then, a
niggeh ain’t a white man—never will be a
white man. Pen, being gov’neh is a terribly
responsible job. Now, you, for instance, ask
me, one man, to set aside the findings of twelve
men appointed by the people to determine
this niggeh’s guilt. Yet the pahdoning power
was certainly given me for a purpose, and
I intend to use it when I see fit. I’ll take
your word for it, Pen, that Moss is a good
niggeh; I’ll look into his case, and if you are
not mistaken as to the facts, and will take him
out to the Hall and keep him theh, I’ll pahdon
him. But I can’t do it right away. In the

[521]

fust place, a little punishment will do him good.
In the second place, theh’s politics. Politics,
Pen! To pahdon that niggeh now, my dear
Pen, while the events are still so fresh, would
make an awful row. The press would froth at
the mouth. But in a year, mind you, or eighteen
months at the most, I’ll turn him loose.”

“Oh, Wilbur, a year is such a long time!”
exclaimed Mrs. Harper plaintively.

“Is it, Pen,—to you—at fifty-five?” he
asked whimsically.

“Alas, no, not to me! I’m not in a cell.
But I understand your position, Wilbur, and
I’ll submit to the inevitable. It is so much
better than it might have been, and I am very,
very grateful. But can I not intimate the
good news to him, just to keep up his courage?”

“If you do it very diplomatically, Pen, and
do not mention me.”

Then, after she had left, he sat chuckling
in his chair at the idea of asking a woman to
be diplomatic under such circumstances.

The warden, after reading the Governor’s
note, turned to a guard. “Put a coat on
1610 and bring him to the reception-room.”

“If you please,” interposed Mrs. Harper,
“I should like to see him just as he is, at his
work.”

She followed her conductor through the
stifling prison-yard, cut off by the encircling
hills from every current of air. On the hill-side,
where the convicts were breaking stone,
it seemed even hotter, the oven-like breath
of the dog-day sun rebounding into one’s
face in almost palpable pulsations. Moss
was one of a gang of fifty. He was naked to the
waist, and his broad, sweaty back glistened in
the sunlight like the skin of a porpoise; yet, in
spite of the heat, his sledge rose and fell with
the regularity of machinery.

“Has he given you any trouble?” asked
Mrs. Harper of the guard.

“No’m. He ain’t that kind. He’s the kind
that gits gloomy and either dies or goes nutty.
But after a year or two we’ll probably make a
trusty of him, and then he’ll be happier. Murderers
generally make the best trusties.”

When Mrs. Harper, after going forward a
few steps alone, with a quickened pulse, spoke
his name, Moss’ sledge hung in mid-air, and he
hearkened without looking up, as if doubting
his ears. It was not until she repeated his
name that he turned toward her. His face
was neither bitter nor vindictive, but dull, oh,
unutterably dull, as if he had said farewell forever
to hope. He did not speak—to speak
was against the rules. He did not even smile,
but simply touched the brim of his wool hat.

Mrs. Harper, with a catch in her breath,
stepped still nearer.

“Moss, I remain your friend,” she began
tremulously. “Benjy is with us, and we are
taking the best care of him. And, listen, Moss!
This is what I came to tell you. I am authorized
to say, positively, by a power that is supreme,
that, if your behavior is good, your detention
here will not be more than eighteen months, and
I hope only twelve. You can stand the work
that long, can’t you, knowing that we are waiting
for you, ready to give you a home?”

Still his expression did not change, and still
he did not speak.

“Don’t you—don’t you understand, Moss?”
she asked, with quivering lips, fearful that his
mind had already been shocked.

His slow words then came:

“Yassum, I kin stan’ it. I could stan’ it
foreveh. But she’s daid,” he cried hoarsely.
“I kill her—I choke her—with that han’!”
thrusting out the member. “The same han’
she used to put her li’l’ han’s roun’ and hole
so tight—same han’ I used to pat her cheek
with—same han’—” A shudder passed over
his huge form until his teeth chattered.

“Oh, I know it’s hard!” exclaimed the
tender woman, suffering only less than he.
“You have sinned, and you must do penance.
But we’ve all sinned, and all done penance,
and yet happiness comes again. Believe me,
Moss, some day you’ll be happy again. Be
brave, and one month from to-day I’ll be here
to see you again. Meanwhile, can I do anything
for you—take any word to Benjy?”

His lusterless eyes seemed to brighten a little.

“Mis’ Pen, will you sot up a li’l’ tombstone
on her grave? Juss a li’l’ one, so I kin fine it
some day, when I gits out?”

And Penelope, with blinding eyes, promised.

AN AMERICAN MASTER OF LANDSCAPE
BY
T. M. CLELAND

A striking reversal of attitude may be noticed to-day toward
innovations in the field of art. Time was, we are told by the
biographers of the Old Masters, when the painter who dared to step
beyond the pale of conventions current in his day, suffered the
neglect and bitter scorn of his contemporaries. From the earliest
period of artistic endeavor, the innovator has been on the defensive;
whereas the cardinal sin in the modern artist is rather the failure
to innovate or to startle us by some new form of disregard for the
principles established by tradition. In the place of knowledge and
patient scholarship, we find sophistication and a restless, conscious
craving to produce an effect sufficiently startling to command the
instant attention of a busy world. In the art of landscape painting
particularly this desire to be effective at any cost has led many of
the younger generation of artists to adopt for themselves hastily
formed theories regarding the phenomena of light and air and to devote
their lives to these, forgetting all else.

The result of all this is a modern school of landscape, the aims of
which seem strangely more allied to scientific investigation than to
artistic study, and a class of pictures which expound, frequently with
great skill, the theories upon which they are accomplished; but which
are rarely intelligible to any one not directly concerned with the
study of art.

So it is with some sense of relief that we may turn our attention
upon the achievements of an artist like Thomas R. Manley, whose
drawings are reproduced here, not that they may be the subject of a
written discourse, but that of themselves they may give pleasure to a
wider public than it has hitherto been their fortune to command. They
are the product of a quiet and orderly development carried on outside
the clamor of the modern movement, simple masterpieces of landscape
drawing as it has been practised since the days of Claude Lorrain. They
present no “theory” upon which we may base a philosophical discussion,
and there is nothing “new” about them at all beyond a simple technical
invention of the artist’s, whereby his line is rendered more soft and
pliable than by the ordinary mediums of crayon or pencil.

What they do possess, however, and to a high degree, is the evidence
of a mastery of the technique of design plus a finely trained
intelligence and feeling. This technical mastery of design is perhaps
the rarest of accomplishments at the present day, because it is the
most difficult to acquire and makes too great a demand upon patience.
And yet it is this which should and does satisfy most directly the
unconscious esthetic sense in us all; for who cannot experience some
inward pleasure in the form and movement of the hills and trees as
they are expressed to us in these drawings? It is not essential to
our enjoyment of these things that we should ourselves have knowledge
of the technical means whereby they are conveyed; but it is these
studied accomplishments which we are enjoying nevertheless; because
through them our own sense of harmony is aroused. Let us note, for
instance, the character of the lines used to represent the foliage in
the first drawing reproduced, and see with what beautiful, rhythmic
precision they produce at one and the same time the required tone and
the movement of the thing represented. And again, in the trunks of
the trees how fully the firm lines record the upward growth and the
vicissitudes of weather suffered in their struggles to attain the
majestic heights to which they rise. This method of drawing, in which
light and shade is produced by lines which at the same time follow the
form and movement of the objects represented, is perhaps the oldest and
most conventional; but in the hands of a master like Mr. Manley it is
more fully expressive and beautiful in its results than any other.

If to dwell upon points as technical as this seems a contradiction
to the statement already made, to the effect that these reproductions
are presented for what pleasure they may give the layman, it should
be said that it is for the reason that such technicalities as are
pointed out may well be within the understanding of all intelligent
persons and that their elucidation may assist greatly toward a fuller
appreciation of the more intellectual merits. And if we fail to
consider sufficiently here those more poetic qualities and to attempt
some description of the meanings and sensations conveyed to us by the
pictures themselves, it will be because it seems that these are matters
best left to the individual observer.

This is what might be called the “literary” side of pictures,
and one upon which art criticism has come too largely to dwell. If,
on the other hand, the discussion of pictures were content to confine
itself to the pointing out of what constitutes the “art” of the work,
might we not derive each for himself a more intimate pleasure in
undisturbed enjoyment of those intellectual conceptions, which, though
produced by the same picture, are, in no two of us, precisely alike?

There are represented in the four drawings
here selected (from a collection so interesting
that any selection at all was difficult) several
phases of the artist’s ability, each so well demonstrated
that it is scarcely possible to choose
between them. This versatility of mood is a
noteworthy evidence in itself of the well
grounded mastery of the artist and of his ability
to deal with nature at all points. It is, in other
words, no mere trick or specialty which he has
learned as one might pick out note for note and
learn by heart a tune upon the piano; but the
work of a hand and eye and mind turned in
perfect accord, like a single instrument capable
of an infinite range of expression.

In the first of the drawings, that of the piece
of woodland through which a path winds off to
where it is lost to view among the trees, carrying
our imagination with it to the contemplation
of scenes still farther on, we find virtues of a
more uncommon type than in the others. The
large nobility—the monumental quality—is an
aspect of nature wholly out of fashion in our day.
The firm bed of earth we can feel under our feet
with a sense that it is good to stand upon, and the
fine pattern of trees and clouds swayed in common
movement stirs one with that martial sense
of activity, that vitality of impulse which recalls
the memory of some high-winded, keen-aired
autumn day. We have considered already the
spirited and skilful drawing of the trees in this
picture; but it is difficult to turn from it without
again noting some of those qualities of line
which are particularly well displayed in these
parts of the composition. To render those long,
bare, sinuous stems, growing upward with their
roots unmistakably planted in the ground and
not so that they have the appearance of hanging
down from the clouds, is a feat of no small
difficulty, to judge from the frequent instances
one meets with of failure in this regard. This
well established feeling of the growth from the
ground upward of the trunks of the trees and
the springing from the branches outward of the
foliage, this complete and harmonious development
of the whole structure from the seed, as
it were, is the product of an exhaustive study,
in all of its stages, of the life and characteristics
of the tree itself.

We are confronted in the second drawing with
a striking contrast to the first, in that the merits
of vigorous and harmoniously balanced line and
form are supplanted by the more tender effects
of atmosphere, and the vigorous stroke becomes
gentle in its handling of the delicate trees worn
by the winds and but half seen through the uncertain
twilight. Here, perhaps, the man is
more in evidence than the draftsman, and the
sensitive and sympathetic spirit of the artist
seems abstracted for a time from the more tangible
qualities which are the chief glory of the
former work. But like the first drawing it possesses
a carefully built up unity of sentiment
and notes no point in the scene not concerned
with the impression of loneliness and neglect it
seems intended to convey.

The third and fourth drawings are more remarkable
for skilled and accomplished draftsmanship
than for the expression of any distinctive
feature in the varying moods of nature.
Our delight in them comes more from the beautiful
precision of aim whereby a single stroke is
made to record a number of interesting facts at
the same time. In the drawing of the barn and
shed over-topped by a rugged tree and with a
middle ground filled by lively detail, we are reminded
of the great masters of etching in the
clever abbreviation of each of those details and
the manner in which they are grouped or merged
one into the other. And then, in the last one,
note the contour of the earth, how well it is
rendered by that cleverly foreshortened winding
line of half obliterated roadway leading up the
hill and into the fresh mass of foliage which
crowns it. This ability to draw the solid ground
so that it appears solid is a rare gift in any
draftsman, and it may well be taken as an
evidence of the fullness of his talent and training.

Like Constable, Mr. Manley has been content
to draw his inspiration from the small section
of the world in which circumstances have placed
him, the quiet New Jersey country where Inness
worked out for himself the distinguished place his
name holds among American landscape painters.
These drawings by no means represent the full
range of Mr. Manley’s activities, for he has won
high esteem as a painter and an etcher and
holds a position of importance as a miniaturist;
but they are, perhaps, the things in which his
rarest talents are displayed, as they are also the
closest to his own pleasure in his art. They are
the pastimes of an uncommonly sincere and
scholarly master who shows integrity in play
as well as in work, and who has carried on his
career with an earnestness and a humility and
modesty of character which all but deprived us
of any sight of his achievements at all.

THE HOUSE OF MUSIC
BY
GERTRUDE HALL

One elating, blue and white April
morning saw a cheerful company of
six assembling in a railroad-station
waiting-room. There were the
manager of the tour, Duprez—gray-haired
in comparative youth, at once care-worn
and accommodating looking—the foreign
stamp on him not entirely obliterated by
the stamp of the country; and his wife, the
popular Pearl Wharton-Duprez, whose habit of
facing the world as an audience must have found
its way into her features; she was recognizable
at sight for a singer. Her brilliant face, while
not precluding the possibility of a heart, suggested
less remotely a temper.

There was one Milen Odiesky, gripping a black
violin-box; who listened to a hilarious conversation
he but half understood, with a fixed
smile, revealing a marked division between his
two broad, white front teeth,—disagreeable, for
some reason, though he might pass for handsome
in a dark, hairy, Oriental way.

Then there was one who at first glance looked
in the group as if he must be an aquaintance
come to see them off. He was tall and proportionately
broad, with stalwart shoulders, a deep
chest, and a big neck; superlatively well groomed
and dressed. The gloss of his silk hat was not
broken by the wilfulness of one hair. He carried
himself a trifle more than erect, and swept
his limited horizon with a calm, kingly eye.
His face was close-shaven, a smooth coppery
rose, shading easily into the color of his close-cropped
hair. His features were of the rather
thick, round, good-natured type, and time was
beginning to divide up his face into heavier
masses than occur in the forties; but these facts
did not prevent his presence on the whole from
impressing an observer with the sense that he
looked at something really very fine. This was
Bronson, whose name on the program would
occupy the most room: the great Bronson, Anthony,
the tenor of long sustained fame—sustained,
indeed, so long that these appearances
in parts that knew him only by that fame had
now been projected.

Then there was a little plump woman, the one
who kept the others laughing; and she carried,
besides what one is accustomed to see on the arms
of travelers, all the things she had forgotten to
put into her trunk; among which were an
alarm-clock, a sponge-bag, a pink flannel dressing-sacque,
and a little image of the Virgin. She
bubbled on, in a voice as impossible to forget or
mistake for another’s as her face; which face,
however, was not pretty, but so faithfully reflected
a nature as to be memorable for its want
of all malice, concealment, or suspicion. It was
not that her features were child-like which accounted
for her face bringing to mind a child’s,
but that it shared some quality inclining one on
shortest acquaintance, without fear of rebuff, to
treat its winsome, unsevere, uncritical owner
familiarly and affectionately. She was not
pretty, but certainly her dark-edged, misty,
pale blue eyes, with their capacity in the same
measure for humor and sentiment, under eyebrows
sympathetically working with her
thoughts, and lids stained a tender bistre, had
an attaching sweetness; and the clear spaces of
her face, the forehead and temples, something
cool and rare, like the stamp of talent; while
just beside her ear, where a faint lock of silken
black hung an inch or so down a soft, sallow
cheek, was a spot creating an instant desire to
kiss it. This was Miss Nevers, the pianiste;
Nevers, they briefly called her in speaking of
her, pronouncing the name like an English one;
Marie-Aimée they called her in speaking to her,
all excepting Odiesky, who did not yet know
her well enough; except, too, the sixth member
of the party, who could never take it into his
head to do so. The latter was a homely, thin
man, neither young nor old, of the name of Snell,
who was engaged to play common accompaniments,
and tune the pianos. He stood near the
others, but only ventured a smile where they
laughed.

Yet he with the rest, as they trooped to the
train, was conscious of a lift to his spirits. The
tour was a turning the back upon the old and
known. It had the charm of beginnings; it

[529]

opened to life, with this new combination, new
possibilities. Hard work and wearing travel
were a certainty in the prospect, but it showed
nevertheless like a holiday, enlivened by daily
change of scene, faces, food.

Beside these general justifications of a reasonable
elation on starting, there was excuse
for the festive jollity which made people turn to
look after our friends as they progressed down
the platform—the stately Bronson now carrying
a bulging rubber sponge-bag, impossible to
conceal—in the brilliant artistic auspices under
which these musical peregrinations were undertaken,
and the discovery, now that the artists
were come together en troupe, that they severally
brought elements promising uncommon
liveliness and fun.

About five years had passed since the laurel-laden
return of the Duprez Concert Company,
when Marie-Aimée one morning, rather earlier
than it is customary to make a call, rang
the door-bell of a certain large impressive
house.

Whether the explanations were hurry in
dressing or absence of mind, she looked, on this
occasion, somewhat as if her clothes, as the
saying is, had been thrown at her. The velvet
of her little bonnet needed brushing; and her
little gloves, alas, mending. She wore no veil,
and wisps of her hair had been blown on end.
But this effect of disorder culminated in her face
itself, where the colors were out of their places;
her cheeks being pale, her poor small nose and
her eyelids red. She had grown stouter since
our last sight of her, and on this day was carrying
herself so without pride or heed as to look
fairly round-shouldered.

As she stood waiting, she must have forgotten
that she was in a public street, or else felt bad
beyond caring; two or three times she openly
mopped her eyes. When, however, she faced
the tall butler who opened the door, she appeared
to have nothing worse the matter with
her than a bad head-cold. She asked if Miss
Cheriton were in, gave her card, and was shown
into a vast hushed drawing-room. There, as
soon as she had been left alone, she looked at
herself in the mirror; after which she chose a
seat with its back to the windows. She had
occupied this but a moment, when, lest the
thoughts stealing back upon her should drive
her again to tears, she crossed over to the grand-piano
glimmering in the half-light with liquid
reflections of gilt moldings, brocade, and palms.
She lifted the lid to peer at the name of the
maker, and tried its tone with a scarce audible
chord. Then she took up piece after piece of
the music in the rack, questioning it as to Miss
Cheriton’s title to her high reputation as an
amateur pianist.

On hearing a rustle, she hurriedly laid down
the music, and got up, her heart rushing. Miss
Cheriton had shaken hands, with expressions of
pleasure in making her aquaintance, had offered
her a seat, and taken one, before Marie-Aimée
had been able to do more than clear her throat.

Miss Cheriton had allotted her a seat well in
the lights; her curiosity about this caller could
do no less; wherefore Marie-Aimée’s reddened
eyes at first refused a square encounter. But
shortly, while Miss Cheriton was forcing a dullish
conversation, Marie-Aimée forgot herself, and
looked Miss Cheriton in the face; full as interested
as she in the looks of the other at close
range.

Marie-Aimée saw a well-grown young woman
of eight or nine and twenty; faultlessly dressed
in a fawn colored cloth matching her perfectly
arranged abundant hair. Her face was entirely
fine, if a little cold. She gave an impression of
great self-poise; she could be imagined to have
always thought and decided for herself, and had
the fortune to see everything go as she wished,
which no doubt she laid to the firm and just
management she looked so capable of exercising.
She had a beautiful calm complexion and calm
dark-blue eyes, which weighed you thoughtfully,
and would with difficulty, you fancied,
alter their conclusions about you. But at least,
Marie-Aimée felt with relief and hope, they were
windows into a mind where there was room to
breathe.

She began abruptly, in a suggestive pause occurring
in Miss Cheriton’s small talk, “You must
be wondering what brought me.”

The expression of Miss Cheriton’s face, her
only answer to this, signified that though she
hoped she had not seemed to be wondering
rudely, she would in effect be pleased to know.

Marie-Aimée picked at her glove. “It is
this. I was told that I had been making mischief.
And I came, wishing if possible to remedy
it.”

Miss Cheriton’s eyebrows moved upward just
enough to start a ripple in the beautiful smoothness
of her forehead, and she waited, her eyes inquiring
of Miss Nevers’ troubled face; in their
depths had flashed a prevision of what might be
coming.

“I know I talk a dreadful lot,” Marie-Aimée
burst forth in disgust, “I tell everything I
know. I can’t keep to myself even stories that
are against myself. Whatever is on my heart,
I say it. I have been making a dreadful fool of
myself—which is bad enough, but I feel worse
about having given annoyance to others….
Mr. Bronson came to see me yesterday evening.”

She paused, as after a piece of news. Miss
Cheriton waited in silence, her face expressing
nothing beyond polite attention.

“And he said that my doing as I have been
doing made a lot of gossip, which inevitably
reached you, and was calculated to give you a
mistaken impression of our relations in the
past——” Marie-Aimée’s voice stuck.

After a moment, “Please, please, don’t be distressed,”
murmured Miss Cheriton; and as if
her uneasiness at the sight of tears had made her
restless, left her seat, and went to stand beside
the mantle-piece, leaning on it with one elbow,
ornaments at choice within reach, to pick up
and play with.

Marie-Aimée laughed through a sob. “You
see? Was there ever such a fool? And this is
the way I have been ever since I heard of his
engagement. But I want you to understand,
Miss Cheriton, that that’s just me. How can he
help it, unhappy man, if I am made this way?
I have cried like a pump. I have cried upon
the shoulder of every one who would stand it.
But I had no right, no possible right, to lament
in the highways like that. It was only—when
my heart was full, I let it run over. But I never
in the least meant it as a reproach to anyone,—any
more, put it this way, than a sunflower
going draggled and crazy at sunset. But he
told me last night I made him ridiculous. Oh,
he was gentle. For all that, the things he said
troubled me horribly; and I made up my mind,
after he had left, to come directly to you and
explain, so that if reports have vexed you, you
should not mind them after this.”

Miss Cheriton said quietly, not looking at
Marie-Aimée, but at an ivory Chinaman she
held: “It is not necessary, Miss Nevers. I did
indeed hear something, but I did not give it
much thought.”

Upon which Marie-Aimée, as if these words
had contained all the encouragement necessary,
proceeded eagerly, “We never, never were engaged.
You will believe me, whatever you may
hear. We merely have been friends for years.
I had known him slightly a long time already,
when we went on a tour together, with Madame
Wharton-Duprez. It was then we became such
chums…. Mercy on me, that tour! Shall
I ever forget it? Will any of us?” She
smiled, with a sudden drenched reflection of
sunshine on her tear-bedabbled face.

“I know!” Miss Cheriton smiled too. “Mr.
Bronson has spoken of it to me.”

“Has he?” asked Marie-Aimée, brightening
still further, rainbow-like, and immediately at
greater ease with Miss Cheriton, from a responsiveness
she felt in her smile when the ever fertile
subject of the tour was broached, dear in its
time to Anthony Bronson’s heart. “That’s good.
For it will in part explain…. Don’t you
agree with me that laughing together makes
a stronger bond than even weeping? Well, on
that tour, what we did best and chiefly, was to
laugh. Did he ever tell you——” She dropped
her voice like a person having something good
to relate, and fun played over her face in ripples,
“the adventure of the water-melon? Yes, of
course! I suppose he has told you everything.
And the adventure of the face-wash and the
curling-irons? And the night of the great thunderstorm?
Oh, make him tell you that one. It
is incredible, the number of things, and the description
of things, that happened to us in those
six months. It was as if we had been a sort of
lightening-rod attracting all the incongruous,
ludicrous, delicious happenings that should have
been distributed over the country. Or else, it
is that we were in a disposition of mind to find
everything funny. Of course, it may have been
that. But still—imagine our arriving once at
a little place where we had never been heard of.
There is a mistake. And no one expects us.
And there is no hotel. And it ends in our being
obliged to sleep in the empty jail, we women, a
dovecote of a jail, with just two wee cells; oh,
slumbers of sweetness and safety, after our many
nights in strange hostelries. No need for once
to look under the bed for burglars; and the men
in a barn. Odiesky didn’t get the hayseed out
of his hair that season. And imagine—imagine
having along with you a man who has a nightmare
every time he drops off to sleep. A poor
Mr. Snell who went with us was like that, and
we used to run into one another in the lobbies,
in curl-papers, at dead of night, flying to knock
him up, he made such awful, such blood-curdling
sounds, which could be heard all over the hotel.
It is unkind to laugh at an infirmity, but the
sounds he made, could you have heard them,
would excuse me to you. And imagine—but
try to—imagine the six of us, six people who
feel themselves not a little famous, going fourteen
miles in a single-seated wagon, that, or
miss our connection, and complications without
end. I don’t believe I stopped laughing the
whole way. You see it? We two, the grace
and beauty of the party, enthroned upon the
laps of ces messieurs—no other way, no other
way possible, none. Wharton-Duprez in the
arms of her own husband; and Odiesky astride
the horse, postilion, having to drive; and
poor little Snell on the floor with his knees over
the dash-board; and the danger at any moment
of the wagon breaking down——” She pieced
out that fourteen-mile long ecstasy of merriment
with more of a singularly rich, unaffected laugh,
in the midst of which her face fell blankly serious,

[531]

and she held up, as if she had never seen
it before, the hand which in the heat of her description
she had been waving.

“Will you look at my glove?” she said;
promptly closing which parenthesis she continued,
“As I was saying, it may have been
that circumstances really justified us, or our
mood, which was exceptional. For myself, I
never enjoyed myself so much. Oh, I was impressionable
then, and ready to be pleased.
Every day a new place, every night a new
triumph. It was Mr. Bronson’s triumph, but his
glory fell upon us all. We lived in an atmosphere
of success; and people were so nice to us,
we were entertained everywhere like king and
court. It was then, you see, when we were together
from morning until night, we grew to
know each other so well. And, you know him,
you know how kind he would be to a little person
traveling as I was doing; kind does not
express it, and thoughtful and considerate. And
you know the charming companion that he is,
even-tempered, easy-going, good fellow. And
in traveling like that you know the thousand
little services a man can render you, and, among
artists, the good turns. He, you will have discovered,
has not a touch of that queer jealousy
so common among artists.

“But there was even more than all that. Before
the end of our engagement, Wharton-Duprez
had taken the most cattish dislike to me;
I have never known why. And everything that
woman could do to make things uncomfortable
for me she took pains to do, even, will you believe
it, contriving that my luggage should be left
behind, and I forced to appear on the stage in
the filthiest little coal-begrimed traveling-suit—at
the fag end of the season, you understand.
Ferdinand, her husband, did not dare to say a
word. It would have been past endurance for
me then, had it not been for Mr. Bronson’s invariably
showing himself my friend, and keeping
her within limits. I had reason to be grateful
to him, you see. I should have had to be a
monster not to become devoted to him. You
can put yourself in my place, can’t you? And
then, add to everything else his singing. Never,
never, never, to me, has there been anything
like it.”

Miss Cheriton bowed her head, slowly, in
agreement.

“If with all your heart ye truly seek me,” murmured
Marie-Aimée, looking as if she listened
to a voice singing in her memory.

“In manly worth and honor clad,” murmured
the other, likewise.

“It opens a door, doesn’t it,” Marie-Aimée
spoke low, as if they had entered a church, “into
a world where it is all beautiful, calm, eternal—
the only world—where whoever breathes its
air must worship and must love; just his mere
voice, when it is what I call his ballad-voice,
doesn’t it contain all romance? Moonlight,
boats on lonely seas, lattices with roses; and
when it is his anthem-voice, it contains, doesn’t
it, all aspiration, cathedrals, matin-bells, archangel’s
choirs——”

Again Miss Cheriton nodded dreamily; then,
raising her eyes, which in listening she had
dropped, forgot the one of whom they were
speaking for interest in the face of the speaker,
who looked ahead with eyes which clearly did
not see what was before them, but the cloudy
white pillars, one might have surmised, and dim
glimmering splendors of some temple of Music
and Love.

Marie-Aimée swept her hand across her forehead.
“And I,” she continued, raising her
voice in a tone of plaintive exculpation, “I was
born mad for music! A voice has power over
me like a spell. And I am flesh and blood!
And so——” she ended feebly, “do you
wonder?”

Silence, while Marie-Aimée turned her face
wholly from the light. But even while she
made application of her little damp pocket-handkerchief,
a stealing sense warmed her in all
her woe that she had somehow made a friend of
Miss Cheriton. The exemplary piece of tranquility
there felt drawn to her; something communicated
this unimaginable fact directly to her
heart; and it melted her, as the hint of kindness
always did, and inclined her now verily to
make no more circumstances about it, but show
her whole heart in abandoned frankness, repeating
just once more the fault she was here to
confess. But simultaneously with gratitude for
that liking, rose in Marie-Aimée the need to repay
it greatly; whence a caution to herself to
proceed more than ever guardedly with the
truth.

“And after we were come back,” she took up
again, “we naturally continued seeing a great
deal of each other. I won’t say we would not
have done so from choice, but it was inevitable,
too. Our profession threw us together, concerts,
rehearsals; he used, besides, to bring every
bit of new music to learn at my house, with me
to play it over for him. And so on, for years;
and to me, I tell it frankly, that light-hearted,
unconventional comradeship of ours gave its
principal charm to life. In the last year I have
seen less of him, and latterly very much less.
He was not singing much, he was under treatment
for his throat, and often out of town
by his doctor’s directions. I missed him, but
I am busy from morning until night, the week
round, work and a thousand things. I thought

[532]

nothing of it. Do old friends need to see
each other constantly to be assured nothing is
changed? Then I hear of his engagement to
you. I am thunderstruck! For never, never,
never, had I dreamed of such a possibility.
You see my folly? He was not bound to me
by any promise, or by what you would call
a moral obligation. There never had been any
question of our marrying, not even at the beginning
when we first got home, not even in my
own mind—” Native honesty and poor human
nature would not permit but that she should
add, though in a tone that made little of it—”
any definite, immediate, formulated idea of it.
My poor sweet mother was living then, a sufficient
reason against it. And when she was no
longer there, all had got into a groove, and remained
as it had been. And it seemed natural.
I have nothing but what I earn. He was having
bothers about money. He put all his in a
mine, you know. We called ourselves poor
working-people. But still! There it is! That’s
where you discover my bird’s brain. That’s
me! The way I am! I flatly refused to believe
it, and when I saw him again, I did not
even ask. But I daresay I looked as he had
never seen me look. Then he himself told me
of it, as one tells such a thing to an old friend.
And the past stood suddenly in a new light;
and I saw clearly, in a flash, that just this and
nothing else was to have been expected. And
I knew that it was altogether the most fortunate
thing that could happen to him; and,
after the first, I acquiesced.

“Only, I followed my nature in making the
outcry of one who has received a wound and is
bleeding dreadfully. I have no dignity, Miss
Cheriton. Discretion and I have never so much
as been acquainted. I go around with my heart
in my face, I forget my face, you see, in thinking
of what has befallen me. And I run into
some sympathetic woman who is fond of me,
and she cries out ‘Marie-Aimée, my poor child,
what is the matter with you?’ and I bend feebly
upon her shoulder, and tell. And then I suppose
she goes off and tells too. Hence, you see,
the ground of Mr. Bronson’s remonstrances with
me yesterday evening. And in consequence of
them I am here. I didn’t know what else to do,
Miss Cheriton. I hope it was best. And you
do see, don’t you? I have made the whole
thing plain? I have made it all right? You
know how he is, and now you have seen how I
am, the inference will be simple! And I beg
both your pardons. Oh, he is right, he is quite
right, to feel put out with me, but not—” she
forced a little watery smile, as she rose to take
her leave—”not because it has ever seemed so
terribly to a great singer’s discredit that, when
the whole world goes after him, among them
should be a silly woman who does not manage
to conceal her grande passion. It only makes
him like Mario and others; you must not let it
trouble you, Miss Cheriton. You must think
of me in a thought of the same strain you bestow
upon the thousands of photographs of him that
have been sold in the course of his career, and
are cherished and given places of honor in young
ladies’ rooms; and the sentimental follies
school girls have committed in the way of sending
him flowers and notes. Let these tributes
to him merely increase your pride of possession.
He is free from all blame, all, that is what I
have wished you to feel assured of, or all—” she
put out her hand in farewell—”except just a
little, little bit. You don’t mind? A little bit
he certainly was to blame, though I suppose it
can be laid to the account of his modesty, in
not taking it home to himself that he could not
be so nice, so consistently, persistently dear and
nice to a person, without her falling to stupidly
adoring him.”

She stopped, and stood, vaguely shaking her
head, prolonging her faint, watery, bitter-sweet
smile; and would have withdrawn her hand, but
Miss Cheriton retained it, by a firmer pressure,
in the warm, kind clasp of hers. Marie-Aimée
lifted her eyes, touched and full of thanks, to
the fine calm eyes above her; and in their unclouded
light read Anthony Bronson’s unqualified
exoneration, and that she herself had been
impartially examined, and now stood classed,
past appeal, among those soft, sweet, idiotic
women who will fall into unwarranted love with
any man of whom they see much, and are by
their own passion made incapable of discerning
the fact that he is not in love with them. The
glance was full of honest sympathy for a sorrow
so real; but it was not untinged with as much
contempt as would be implied in the prayer, “I
thank thee, my God, I am not as these women
are!” Under which Marie-Aimée humbly
bowed her head and waited but for the release
of her hand to go. But Miss Cheriton, whom
stiffness or delicacy kept from saying a word in
reference to what she had heard, yet found herself
utterly unwilling that her visitor should
leave so uncheered. Still holding her hand, she
told her, in a voice full of the suggestion of
sincerity, the deep pleasure she had always had
in hearing her; she amplified, tactfully, understandingly,
upon all she had discovered of exquisite
in her playing.

Marie-Aimée’s face lightened a little; she had
never become callous to praise. Miss Cheriton
spoke of friends they had in common, from
whom she had heard so much of her, of a sort
that had long made it one of her most eager

[533]

wishes to know her. Whereupon Marie-Aimée,
as ever responsive, gave herself into Miss Cheriton’s
hands, to be known. And the two were
shortly making acquaintance as they might have
done had they been presented to each other at
the house of those mutual friends. One could
not have dreamed, to hear them, what had gone
before. They talked of music mostly, and musicians,
wholly forgetful of time. To illustrate
some point, Marie-Aimée went to the piano and
played a bar or two; after which, as she would
have risen, Miss Cheriton entreated against it;
and when Marie-Aimée, who never resisted,
asked what she should play, suggested a composition
of Miss Nevers’ own, which the latter
had imagined so obscure, she said, as to be almost
her only secret. And she found, to her
astonishment, that Miss Cheriton, whether
moved by genuine musical congeniality, or a
vulgarer curiosity, had procured everything
ever published of Marie-Aimée’s. Afterwards,
Miss Cheriton took the place at the piano of
Marie-Aimée urgent. Then Marie-Aimée begged
leave, and supplanted her, to show how a different
sequence of chords would be better; and
the woman of talent and the woman of cultivation
spent a long hour, delightful to both; in
the course of which Miss Cheriton found the
quaint enthusiasm for Marie-Aimée felt by her
innumerable friends accounted for; and Marie-Aimée
came to disdain, as paltry praise, the
definition “very fine girl” which one was accustomed
to hear joined to the name of Kate
Cheriton.

Smiting her brow, aghast, at the recollection
of an appointment missed, Marie-Aimée jumped
to her feet. By running she might still be in
time to apologize. They shook hands again,
warmly; and Marie-Aimée said, all her heart in
her voice, “I hope you will be very happy.”

In the street, Marie-Aimée, as she hurried
along, could think of nothing but Miss Cheriton.
She would send her as a wedding-gift the French
great-grandmother’s rococo cross, the choicest
bit of jewelry she owned.

Her heart might have been so much dusty,
worm-eaten wood; remarking its astonishing
lightness and insensibility, she reverted in
thought, almost flippantly, to the horrors besetting
her when she left home that morning.
Surely, if it were possible that with Tony’s marriage
brought as close as a visit to his intended
brought it, she should feel as she felt, she might
still hope to put on a good face about it to the
world.

In this mood she went about a good part of
that day; and talked to some with so much of a
return to her old spirit that they disguised their
surprise by a greater cheerfulness than really
their mystification allowed them to feel. Meeting
an old aquaintance who put on the face of
a sympathizer to say, “My dear, I did feel for
you when I heard of his engagement, you know
whose I mean,” she looked as if not sure she
understood; and the old aquaintance, after a
searching look at her, dropped her mournfulness,
to proceed, “It seems to be a fine thing for
Bronson, this marriage. I hear that Miss
Cheriton will be a millionaire. People exaggerate,
you think? But she has bought a superb
place out of town?”

By the late afternoon, that curious, unseasonable,
baseless good cheer was wearing off, like
the effects of wine, and the world, through its
fading fumes, was returning to look like the
world of yesterday. Weariness was overtaking
her; but her heart had not recommenced its
clamorous aching; it was only a little sick, when
she went into a music-store for a score she
needed. She was looking this over, with her
eyes rather than her mind, when her attention
became fixed in memory upon that expression
of Miss Cheriton’s face from which she had
judged her mission successful—Tony cleared.
Suddenly, as in the middle of the night she had
sometimes known that in a letter sent off there
was a word misspelled, she felt that triumph of
confidence in Miss Cheriton’s eyes not to have
been the work of her own explanations. She
herself had been fully explained to Miss Cheriton
before ever she set foot in her house. How
could it have been otherwise?

Marie-Aimée’s ghost-seeing eyes became fixed
upon nothingness. She sat so a long time, her
chin dropped in dolorous absorption; a figure
which struck discomfort in the beholder. Another
woman buying music bent over the counter
and whispered to the clerk, who whispered
back, and both stole glances at the unconscious,
rigid, dumpy profile, stamped with tragedy, of
the well-known pianiste, whose most intimate
sorrow had become town-talk.

She went out at last into the hubbub of the
streets, which seemed a cruelty of men, under
the gorgeous sunset sky, which seemed a cruelty
of Heaven’s, and, as much as a great heaviness
would allow, hurried home and to bed and the
dark. It was no use! no use! Though Tony’s
conduct to her admitted of the face she had put
on it to Miss Cheriton, and though the world’s
jury, upon full evidence, might have acquitted
him, he not being the last shade of black, she
herself knew, and something of incorruptible
justice in the bottom of her heart would not let
her blink it, that she had been badly, badly
treated. But that was not the most woeful,
that she should have been badly treated, or that
she must live her days hereafter without him;

[534

but that he, Tony, should have been capable of
doing this thing to her, to her, who would have
shed her blood for him, and he knew it.

In the days following, as she went about her
crowded occupations, she did not, as she had
allowed herself to do before, seek relief in speaking
of what weighed upon her heart. But human
strength did not suffice to keep the matter
out of her face; her cheek was leaden, her eyes
were in a fog.

But it was useless now, her avoiding Anthony
Bronson’s name. She had spoken too much before.
Besides, too many remembered the soft,
radiant, enamored face with which she had been
used to beam up at him in those earliest days
after their return from touring, and down upon
which he had benignantly beamed, like a big,
gratified idol. Furthermore, this gossip concerning
persons so well known had too many
of the elements which ensure a thing being
repeated till everyone knows. Reports of
“scenes” made by Marie-Aimée were still
spreading after she had placed the seal upon
her lips; and those who got them last did not
know that they were old news; and as it was the
least interested in her personally who last became
au fait of her affairs, some among them
took the view that little Nevers was disgracing
herself; which sentiment once in the air, certain
of Marie-Aimée’s closer friends saw the matter
more nearly in that light, experienced a reaction
from too complete sympathy with her.
One heard it said with a touch of impatience,
“Some one ought to talk to Marie-Aimée!”
Even those who loved her most, this, as it
seemed, insistent and protracted harping upon
an unfortunate attachment at last came near
disgusting. And she did receive scoldings and
lectures, of which she abjectly owned the justice;
and she tried to keep herself more out of
sight. Only so far as the necessity to earn a
living made it imperative did she go about.
Wherefore some whose invitations she refused
said, “Nevers is moping. It is a pity she can’t
behave like the rest who have to suffer from
the fickleness of man!”

A critical, less friendly attitude of the world
toward her was beginning at last, through her
dismal preoccupation, to penetrate her heart
with its novel chill, and make the city where
she had always lived seem not like home any
more. She looked about, bewildered, for escape.
The day of the Bronson-Cheriton wedding,
too, was close at hand; but before it had
arrived, there descended upon her from a distance
a stern older married sister, whom rumors
at last had aroused.

No one saw Marie-Aimée after the coming of
this sister. To everyone’s astonishment, in the
busiest time of the season, Marie-Aimée’s rooms
were empty of her. It was thought that the
sister had carried her off to keep her under surveillance:
till it became known from Marie-Aimée
herself, writing to her old friends, that
she was in a convent of the Sacred Heart, hundreds
of miles removed, and there proposed to
remain until she had become free from the
faintest taint of the folly that had made her a
scandal and a laughing-stock,—yes, if she remained
there until she died. Her time was profitably
spent in study, and the giving of piano-lessons
to the young girls receiving their education
in the holy house. And she enjoyed the
inestimable privilege, accorded to her by the
Mother Superior, of weeping as much as she
pleased.

To that little portion of the busy world-in-general
which concerned itself with her, one
may be sure it seemed very soon after her disappearance
that it began to be said Nevers
might be looked for again. Already? Yet,
when one had grumbled that love, after all,
does not last very long, he made calculations,
and these told him that three years and more
had slipped past since the tragico-comic retreat
of the poor crossed-in-love. Certainly, something
may be expected of three years.

She was really coming back? There was excitement.
She was coming, no longer any doubt
of it; there was glee, there was expanding of
the heart. She was come; there was a rush
to see her. Affection accounted for much of
this; for the rest, curiosity to see the result of
her three years. But when she had been seen,
delight knew no reserve; each felt as if he had
won a bet.

A movement arose, as a breeze comes up, and
gradually gained force, till it resulted in a concert
given for Marie-Aimée, a testimony of the
regard felt for her, and the joy at her return.
The occasion was made a magnificent one; the
house was crowded, and contained such a proportion
of personal friends of Marie-Aimée that
the affair took the character of a huge family
festivity. But the applause resounding when
Marie-Aimée herself appeared to perform her
little task at the piano was in excess of all the
rest. In the sound, in the faces, in the air, one
felt “How she is beloved!”

She came forward in the childlike manner one
remembered of her, with that adorable absence
of self-consciousness which touches more than
grace, bowing from side to side with the moved
air which infallibly moves, half in tears, yet
smiling. To gratify her faithful, she had gone

[535]

into hearty extravagance, and appeared wonderfully
encased in a warm delicious pink, worthy
of the event, much of it rustling off far from her
heels, not much of it at all troubling her dimpled
arms and shoulders. She held her sweet little
black head on one side, like a tender bird; it
looked as if dragged over by the weight of a big
rose in her hair. And the people could not be
satisfied with clapping their hands. The public
was for the occasion become romantic, and, as
much as the artist, was applauding the woman
who had loved and, by this token, triumphed
over a villainous deserter. They kept it up ad
absurdum, intoxicated by the noise they made,
more and more touched by their own loyalty to
the old favorite, wishing to proclaim it still more
loudly; and so expressing at last, it is sad to
say, far more than any one felt. But it had
been a goodly demonstration, and all thought
better of themselves when finally those who
were eager to hear the playing began hushing,
and silence gradually came about.

Then she played, and it was to many what
they were pleased to call a revelation. It was
at all events a fresh, delicate, inspirating, moving
music. There were those who listened with
eyes upturned, and thought of sunrise upon
Eden; there were those who nodded surprise
and commendation, and spoke of technique.

Marie-Aimée was one of those persons about
whom all who know them talk. She offered
opportunity for it, certainly, by herself talking;
her manner of being and her ways were fertile
in food for comment; but her modest ray of
fame was also accountable, being felt to brighten
all who could claim sufficient nearness to her to
know her affairs.

Had she changed? was the capital question
in the discussions of her following upon her return.
Most said not in the least, except, the
presumption was, toward Bronson. She was
open-hearted as ever, merry once more as she
had used to be when her star first rose among
them. She was still the one that so lent herself
to be loved and gently, almost enviously,
laughed at. But if she were changed, as some
maintained, it was for the better. She looked
younger, rested; her face was clear and untroubled
now. If, after the first, one missed
something in her, she explained that it was her
old faults.

“When I began to see glimmering ahead of
me in the distance a triumphal re-entrance
among you,” she held forth to a little group, “I
began to prepare for it. I tried to fit myself
better to please you. For the bon Dieu’s sake,
I had tried to obtain a clean soul; but for the
world’s sake—your sake, my dears—I tried
to become thin! I did gymnastics, I walked, I
dosed myself, I gave up eating everything I
liked, and you see the result? Honor my beautiful
shape, will you? and do not press upon
me sponge-cake and plum-cake, as you used to
do. Then I became orderly. Haven’t you noticed?
All my buttons there, all my hooks and
eyes. And every little spot at once rubbed out
with cologne. When did you know such things
of me before? But look at my head! I tell
you I hunt up mirrors expressly to see myself
in them; and I set my bonnet straight, and
tuck in my loose ends. Then I became prudent.
I always think before I act, now, and before I
speak, and before I spend my money. And
punctual! I catch trains, and I keep appointments.
I look at my watch, like the rest of
you, and see that it is time to go, and I go. I
no longer, like some one I remember, sit down
and play and play and play, or talk and talk
and talk, till it is dinner time, and I have to be
invited. And then I am not a chatter-box now,
no, not what you could call a chatter-box.”

Her joy at being again among her old friends
softened and won them; and no less did the
humility of her attitude toward the past. In
regard to that she was shame-faced, apologetic,
reformed.

So much of the story of her exile filtered
through those who received it at first hand, that
a legend of it was before long public property;
and such a character was given the event,
Marie-Aimée’s own view perhaps initially tinging
it for all, that, without fear of being thereby
unacceptable, the multitude of those who stood
with Marie-Aimée on a footing of good-humored
comradeship neglected, even in speaking to her,
to disguise their familiarity with what concerned
her. It was common, on the ground of a perfect
understanding with her, and a supposition
of at least some small degree of that enmity
which often succeeds love and takes satisfaction
in hearing of Fortune’s disparaging turns
on the ex-beloved, to entertain her with late accounts
of Bronson. And though she merely
listened, as she would have done to anything
well-intentioned, her unoffended air left a feeling
that encouragement had not been wanting. One
irresponsible, feather-brained youth, of the baritone
variety, reached such recklessness, while regaling
her with good stories as they stood waiting
for her cab, as to inquire, “Have you heard
the latest joke about old Bronson?” He
brought his lips near her ear, and breathed
through a chuckle: “They say it takes two
years and seven months to get over being in
love with Bronson, but if you marry him it
doesn’t take so long!” And as he laughed
heartily, she let her bright laugh ring out companionably
alongside of his. Having got into

[536]

her cab, she repeated the joke carefully over to
herself, to apprehend the point of it.

It was not to have been expected that the
peculiar extreme enthusiasm for Marie-Aimée,
with the exaggerated form of tribute to her,
should continue long unabated. Still, with discretion
on her part, it might have had the ordinary
length of such things. As it was, alas, there
soon seemed occasion to believe that the public
mind is ruled by the law of reaction: By so
much as the public had gone beyond rational
appreciation, it seemed now threatening to fall
below it.

Those who watched Marie-Aimée’s fortunes
with most interest, with a sinking of the spirit
began to note a decrease in her social popularity.
As they witnessed this trifling evidence of it and
that, these lifted their eyebrows and pushed out
their chins, with the expression which one interprets,
“But what can be done about it?”
Whenever there was reference to her now, it
seemed to bring about in the atmosphere a
vague fall of temperature. A just appreciable
effect of disappointment, disapproval, regret,
followed the long-loved name.

Those fondest of her could scarcely be brought
to speak of it; when they did speak, it was not
frankly and openly, as everyone had used to
discuss her affairs once, shaking the head
amusedly. They talked in dreary undertones,
and ended asking each other “Now, can you
understand it?”

Presently, she was by certain ones avoided,
because of an awkwardness they felt in meeting
her, with a consciousness of what were best not
mentioned—disagreeable to those accustomed
to dealings with her of a perfect candor. When
met, she was at best in these days indifferent
fun, preoccupied, unlike herself, with little to
say.

At last, as an increasing coldness takes a definite
pattern of frost, certain persons refrained
from calling upon her, explaining privately that
they had heard it said that it was possible to
come upon Anthony Bronson in her little drawing-room.
This refraining did not signify by
any means in all a wish to express condemnation;
on the part of most it really expressed a
good-humored wish not to be in the way.

It was as winter was waning, that, reversing
somewhat the order of the day, one who had
never called on her resolved to do so. With her
clothes and her hair and her eyes full of March,
she ascended to Miss Nevers’ little flat. The
door was opened by Marie-Aimée herself, who
stood looking up, uncertain, inquiring.

“I fear you do not remember me,” the visitor
said. “May I come in?”

“Your voice,” Marie-Aimée faltered, “is familiar
—but the light—the light is behind
you. Do, I pray, come in.”

She hurried ahead into the drawing-room,
which was unexpectedly light, from the reflection
upon its ceiling of the snow on lower
neighboring roofs. She turned and looked at
the visitor who was entering; she uttered an
exclamation, unfollowed by any word.

“I see you have recalled me,” said the visitor.
“Mrs. Bronson? Kate Cheriton that was?”

“Take a seat, I pray!” said Marie-Aimée
faintly.

Mrs. Bronson looked around her for once.
Though her eye confessed no more scrutiny than
accords with good breeding, it missed little in
the tiny room, warm-colored, crowded, a bit
untidy, but genially so, as where a pair of evening
gloves and a crumpled play-bill lay on a
chair, and a lace bonnet saddled a green bronze
lion. The walls were covered with gimcracks
and pictures, among which in profusion photographs
of the celebrated, overscrawled with
their various calligraphies. The piano stood
open, littered with music; a tea-table, ready
for service, the kettle steaming, was drawn close
to the fire; a faint smell of macaroons mingled
in the air with the smell of violets, whereof a big
double handful was fading in a bowl. A well-worn
leather chair, deep and wide, patriarchal,
was on one side of the fire-place; and, suggestively
at its elbow, matches and an ash-tray.

In this seat, after her casual circular glance,
Mrs. Bronson quietly arranged herself; and
Marie-Aimée took the rocker on the opposite
side of the fire. She dropped back in it, leaning,
and loosely folded her hands; which no sooner
had she done, than she sat upright, and moved
forward to the edge of her chair.

There was a longer silence than is often suffered
by persons of the world. To attempt
“carrying off” anything whatsoever was not in
Marie-Aimée’s moyens.

“Do you know why I have come, Miss Nevers?”
Mrs. Bronson asked.

Marie-Aimée regarded her with eyes as steady
as they were inwardly frightened. Her whole
face expressed what one had never expected to
see in it, something very near hostility; its like
could be imagined in the look of a tame animal
uncertain whether harm is meant to its young.

“I judge you have come here to find Mr.
Bronson,” she answered, “I expect him at any
moment.”

It was plain there would be no delicate fencing
this afternoon.

Mrs. Bronson shook her head, and laughed in
spite of herself at this unheard-of directness.
“Oh, no! I scarcely think he will come to-day,
I mentioned at lunch that I should call on you.”

This was spoken without the hint of a sneer,
yet Marie-Aimée flushed.

“You are quite mistaken if you think he
makes love to me,” she blurted out, her breath
coming quick.

Mrs. Bronson lifted her hand in deprecation.
“And you are mistaken, my dear Miss Nevers,
if you think I have come to make a vulgar scene
about him. I am here, and solely, because I
like you!”

Marie-Aimée stared, doubt in her eyes; then,
expressing wonder by the faintest possible effect
of a shrug, looked down in her lap, all her face
slowly relaxing to a plaintive look of trouble.
Her lips composed themselves to lines of such
stiff stillness, it might be guessed that if she
tried to speak they would tremble; she picked
at the folds of her tea-gown, readjusting them,
smoothing the fabric across her knees.

“I don’t believe you have any idea how much
I felt myself attracted to you that single time
we met, Miss Nevers. You made my conquest
completely, and I am not one who takes fancies.
Though you are so contrary to all I am, it
seemed to me I understood you better than all
the others did, just as I had always felt that I
appreciated your work more truly at its worth.
I don’t know what I would not have given to
have you for a friend.”

Marie-Aimée put out her hands, to stop her,
her kindness at that moment hurt so much.
But Mrs. Bronson went on eagerly. “You are
not made right for this low world. Your very
virtues have the effect of faults, and bring calamity
upon you. There you are, one piece of
honesty, lovingness, unselfishness; and the consequence,—you
have no chance among us who
are nothing of the sort. Being as you are would
be all right in a world peopled with angels, but
here——!”

Marie-Aimée, with a deepening look of dejection
and a vast returning softness, slowly shook
her head; rather as if she were trying to make
these notions of herself fit into place, than in
denial of what she heard.

“And now I find you doing something dreadfully
foolish,” Mrs. Bronson continued, with a
remonstrative mother’s persuasive inflections,
“something, I am afraid, which will prove the
deadliest mistake. I cannot resist the impulse
to come and warn you of it, to try to drag you
back into the safe path—all, I do assure you,
because I so sincerely like and respect and admire
you. Of those in question, believe me, it
is you, you, who are the one I care about.”

There was a pause. Marie-Aimée sat as if
considering a proposition; but in reality she
was only groping after thoughts among emotions.
She made a gesture of resignation, casting
up her hands and letting them drop again.
“Well? I am listening, but is it not likely that
I know already all you are intending to say?”

“No, no, it is not possible!” Mrs. Bronson
said emphatically. “You cannot see clearly for
yourself, else you would have turned back long
ago. Mind you, I know how easy it will be for
you to misunderstand me in this. Almost necessarily,
you will imagine that it is myself I have
principally in view, that I am jealous, perhaps,
or anxious about appearances, concerned in the
figure I myself cut in all this. But you would
be wrong. To all that I am highly indifferent.
Jealous! For jealousy there must be some remnant
of the folly of fondness. And, for the rest,
I refuse to grant that anything Mr. Bronson
does can either lift or lower me. No, what he
chooses to do affects me not at all. But for you,
I tell you, I am sorry.”

“If it is as you say,” said Marie-Aimée, regaining
a little life, “you need be troubled about
nothing. It is all so much simpler than one
thinks, than, I find, one is willing to think. Because
once or twice a caller has found him here,
a caller likewise, it has been taken for granted
that he spends I don’t know how much of his
time with me, which is particularly false and
unfair. He comes from time to time; I will be
quite honest, perhaps once or twice in the week,
when he happens to be in town. Then we try
over music, and I tell him the gossip of the
world which used to be his as well as mine, and
we laugh together as we used to do. You know
that I always had a knack of cheering him. And
I give him tea, and let him smoke, and that is
all. And is it not truly innocent enough?”

“I believe you perfectly, Miss Nevers. And
for that you are willing to give up all that I
know you are losing?”

Marie-Aimée repeated her little French gesture
of resignation. “When it comes to contending
with the evil mind of the world, how can one
hope to do it? I used to believe in the world,
I loved it. I have lately discovered it to be
such that I care very little what I lose with it.
Its good opinion? I don’t want it any more!”

“Quite right, Miss Nevers. You are as right
as possible in valuing the opinion of the world
lightly. Still, the loss of all that comes to make
life pleasant, from being on good terms with it,
is serious. There should be something to counterbalance
it, in that for the sake of which one
renounces it. And you, will you tell me what
you are getting? You are ruining your life,
Miss Nevers, no other word serves, for a man
who is perfectly willing to let you do it, for the
satisfaction he derives from his occasional afternoons
here of gossip and tea, music and smoke.”

Marie-Aimée kept her eyes unflinchingly upon

[538]

Mrs. Bronson’s, eyes full of resentment and denial,
but she was too moved now to speak.

“He spoiled the best years of your life,” Mrs.
Bronson went on, her nostrils sharpening till
their edges were white, a cold fire in her eyes.
“Oh, how well I see now, now that I know him
better, what his conduct would be with you.
But when the moment came in which it was convenient,
he set you aside without one second’s
hesitation. You patiently take the broken
pieces of your life out of sight, you manage to
put them together again, you reappear bravely
patched up, poor child; oh, I saw you. To me,
you were pathetic—and again, because it is
convenient, just a little bit convenient, he takes
you up, calmly, to break you into pieces a second
time.”

“You don’t understand him!” burst forth
Marie-Aimée, in her tone the deepest hopelessness
that the other ever could understand.

“I don’t understand him? I don’t?”

“No, no, no!”

“Then you think three years of marriage
not instructive?” Mrs. Bronson asked rapidly.
“Or do you think him complicated? The
truth is, he is as simple as simplicity. Suppose
a man with one instinct, one motive, heretofore
and forever: to do that which is at the moment
easiest and pleasantest and most profitable for
himself, and you have him. But you must,
to have him exact, accommodate this tendency
with a brain the most elementary; and
must suppose his objects always of the lowest
and most ordinary: little common satisfactions,
material or mental, good wine and
cigars, or the flattery of some woman’s silly
admiration. And, for I will do him justice,
you must accommodate it with a constitution
completely healthy, like a prize animal’s, without
any more viciousness than he has imagination.
For the rest, ideas?” continued the
coldly indignant woman, reaching a fearful
fluency, “he has none. All the fine things which
his singing brings to our minds have no existence
in himself. Talent? I do you the credit,
Miss Nevers, to suppose you with me in the
secret of his musical talent. Talent he has
none, nor ever had any, nor the least real love
or appreciation of music. But a God-given
voice he had, and an instinct for using it to perfection
which he shares with nightingales and
mocking-birds; and, besides these, what you
call a presence, combined with an enormous
vanity and an equal hatred of hard work!”

“Why do you say all this to me?” gasped
Marie-Aimée, choking.

“Because I cannot conceive but that you
misrepresent him to yourself, but that you still
have illusions about him. If I were removed
to-morrow, do you imagine he would by any
chance marry you? If my removal left him
wealthy, he would not marry at all; if it left
him poor, you can be sure he would not marry
you.”

After another gesture of warding off, Marie-Aimée,
shuddering, buried her face in her hands,
as if blinding herself might deaden hearing too.

Mrs. Bronson at once accorded the respite for
which this action seemed to entreat. She sat
in silence, critically regarding the top of Marie-Aimée’s
bent head, as if one could hope to see
through it into her brain.

“Can you tell me that all this is not so?” she
asked at last, heat and anger conspicuously absent
from her voice, speaking in that reasonable
tone of debate which seems to lay a compulsion
of reasonableness upon others. The question
sounded genuine, as if, for plain human curiosity’s
sake, she would like to know if there could
be two points of view about Anthony.

Marie-Aimée raised her face, all sickened protest
and repudiation. “Everything you have
said, and have made to sound so heinous, might,
differently worded, fit perfectly into one’s description
of a nice normal boy. And is a boy
unworthy of one’s love? Say that Anthony
Bronson remained all his life a boy, and who
will contradict you? It is the same nature,
that reaches out so simply toward what pleases
him, that wants what it wants without thought
of afterwards. But you must add to this, in
his case, that sort of native kingliness of the
great, who have never a doubt but theirs is the
first right, and that others will be glad to yield
for them. He has never meant to hurt anyone,
one could not be further from cruel. He
merely, in order to go where he would be, must
drive steadily onward. He would be sorry if
his wheels crushed anything, but that it should
stop him could never enter his brain. Call it
an incapacity, it is that of most strong, healthy
big boys.”

“It must have likewise characterized arboreal
man.”

“Don’t, Mrs. Bronson!” Marie-Aimée cried,
and rose whole-heartedly at last to the encounter,
bringing to bear the most piercing of her
arguments, “He is not happy now! He wants
things as much as ever, but he no longer can
get what he wants. He can’t sing any more.
His voice is gone. You think he doesn’t care,
but he does, indeed, he does! He feels so dreadfully
out of it. The public is ungrateful. His
friends are not yours, they scarcely any longer
seem his own; your friends are not his; Everything
has turned out wrong. Don’t sneer at
him. Nothing can brighten his life to what it
was before. And he feels helpless against it,

[539]

just as the boy we were speaking of would feel.
Oh, he is blue—blue! You have not made him
happy!”

“Has he made me happy?”

“He has meant to!” Marie-Aimée said earnestly.
“Your quarrel is with his whole manner
of being. One must take him as he is.”

“Yes! And whatever he is is to be enough,
so he thinks in his calm Jovian babyhood. How
could he but satisfy any woman? How should
any but feel honored to be his servant and worshipper?
the great, heavy, self-pleased, all-sufficient
Male!”

“You married him!”

“You are right. My stupidity deserves exactly
what I have got. But I didn’t come here
to speak of myself, or to complain of him. It
has been vulgar enough, as it is. I beg your
pardon and I beg you to believe, Miss Nevers,
that I speak to no one—no one, I assure you—as
I have spoken to you. I go my way, with
my chin high, my eyes well above the heads of
the scandal-mongering crowd. It was by accident
I discovered his renewed visits to you; and
the brazenness, the heartlessness of it, revolted
even me, prepared for anything, God knows, in
the way of calm, colossal selfishness. My first
thought was the most common one—that he
acted from pique, that his vanity could not quite
stand having it blazed abroad that you had recovered.
But I know him better than that,
after all. I am just. It was simpler. It was
nothing more than a big dog wanting to be
petted. He felt in need of consolation, sympathy,
condolence, some one to talk to about
me—oh, I know it—and never stopping a
moment to think of you, poor woman, he turned
to the quarter where he felt surest of getting it.
But what puzzles me beyond everything is that
he should have guessed right. Pardon me,
Marie-Aimée, but in those three years at the
convent, what were you doing? You seem to
have wasted your time. What was that far-spread
anecdote that you had come out because
it was all over, lived down, you were cured, immune?
Did others make up this fable, or did
you?”

“Ah, don’t speak of it! I was in good
faith.”

“You really thought it was all done with?
You honestly felt sure of yourself?”

“But certainly! More than sure! How
otherwise would I have come back?”

“And then?”

“Then at the rehearsal for Mrs. MacDougal’s
charity concert I met him again. He had consented
to sing, you remember, but afterwards
withdrew. And I had scarcely more than seen
him, when the three years might as well not
have been. But to whom—dear me, to whom
am I saying this?”

Mrs. Bronson leaned forward till she could
touch Marie-Aimée’s knee. “It’s all right,” she
said gently. “Don’t mind because it’s I. I can
understand,” and as she saw tears springing into
Marie-Aimée’s eyes, she patted the knee, and
murmured in her most soothing note, “You
poor darling!”

“Oh, you needn’t pity me at all!” Marie-Aimée
laughed harshly through her tears.
“When I think that I might—that there could
have been the possibility—that those three
years should so have changed me, that I should
have grown so cold and dry-hearted, and proud
of my dry-hearted coldness, and supposed it a
virtue, and called it morality, that when he
turned to his old comrade for a little cheer
against the thickening shadows, the fast-coming
gray hairs, the lost voice, the domestic misères,
I might have refused, I am glad and grateful
for the ill-name and the snubs that may follow
me the rest of my life because I didn’t.” Whereupon
her voice came utterly to wreck; she subsided
into soft unrestrained weeping.

Mrs. Bronson with a distressed frown left her
seat for the corner of a divan which was nearer
Marie-Aimée. After listening helplessly a moment,
fidgeting, embarrassed by her life-habit
of undemonstrativeness, she put out her hands,
quick as darting swallows, and enclosed one of
Marie-Aimée’s, pressing it, stroking it, murmuring,
“Don’t! Don’t! You are a dear!”

Without a word Marie-Aimée turned her wet
face to kiss the cheek of the consoler. Mrs.
Bronson pressed closer to her; and the two sat
crushed against each other with interlocked,
hands—and so, silently drifted into a different
relation. It was as if the thoughts of their
blood had communed through their hands, and
there were no need more to conceal anything.

“Imagine,” Marie-Aimée said, in a voice
cracked with rueful laughter, “that when I was
in the convent I had reached the point of believing
that it was one of the laws of nature
which was being accomplished in me! I said
that love was like a plant, and if it got
neither sunshine nor rain, it perished. I was
not in the least happy over it, you know. But
I became philosophical about it, and was glad,
as one might be over something one owned
which was not beautiful, but had a practical
use. When I went into that place, you know,
I honestly believed I should never come out of
it again; and I used to read his old letters, and
pore upon photographs of him, and play over
and over all the music associated with him.

“But one day I found them flatly wearying
me. I shall never understand it! I could picture

[540]

seeing him again, meeting him in company
with you at his side, and not minding. I could
picture meeting him again, free, and anxious
that all should be as before, and I could be calm
over it, inclined, if anything, to refuse. I was
worn out, I suppose. I imagined it was my
illusion about him which had worn out. I
judged him! But in the same breath I judged
myself, as likewise incapable of any but shallow
feelings; and I despised us both equally, and
forgave him, as one forgives offences one no
longer suffers from. And so, foolhardily, I
come forth again. And when I see him, all I
know is that it is he, the same one, who was all
the romance of life to me once; that the same
door is still open between our eyes through
which we come and go familiarly into each other.
All that I had thought dead and buried comes
to life again. And I know that I may go into a
convent for twenty years, that I might be buried
and dust as many more, but when Anthony
Bronson comes by, and we are face to face again,
it will be all as nothing. And the marvel is that
though it can only mean a return to suffering, I
can only be glad. Isn’t it strange?”

“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Bronson pressed one of her
hands across her tearless eyes; her cheek was
pale. “Strange, and beautiful. But terrible
too!”

She got up abruptly, as if to escape an oppression
from the atmosphere down on Marie-Aimée’s
level; she made a motion with her
head as if to disengage it; and walking to the
window, stood looking out across the snowy
roofs and the steeples, to the dull distance, the
bank of purplish dun hanging at the horizon
over the enormous city, her eyes full of gloomy
distances too.

In the long silence ensuing there developed
small homely noises of tea-making, over yonder,
near the fire.

“But it’s all really wasted!” Mrs. Bronson
exclaimed unexpectedly, as if in expostulation
with herself as much as with Marie-Aimée, “I
know it! You saw him again, he had grown
older, it shocked you. His hair had turned—it
is his time of life—it saddened you. You
say he has lost his voice. That is a manner of
speaking; nothing is wrong with his throat.
But he has never cared to sing since he was
married. A little careful practice, and he could
sing very acceptably still—I won’t say in public,
but for his own pleasure—if he cared anything
for music, and for that of others who have
had a cult for his singing. You have thought
him blue, and it has moved you. I understand
it. But do believe me that he is a little bit of
a humbug. Why should he be so blue? Everything
is his own fault. Do you really believe
that I have never tried? He is blue when he
is with you, just because it will move you. He
is not so very blue when among others. I can
imagine circumstances, with which you would
have nothing to do, you, nor music, nor the
past, but simple, sordid, material circumstances,
in which he would be perfectly happy, perfectly
content—”

She had said this staring out of the window.
She turned, feeling Marie-Aimée at her elbow.
Marie-Aimée held toward her a cup of tea and
a piece of thin bread-and-butter. Mrs. Bronson
let her stand there, apparently not seeing these
things, while she searched her little shut over-clouded
face, which showed plainly enough a resolve
to say no more about it. “But to you, I
do believe, all this makes no difference!” Mrs.
Bronson pursued. “Let him be, let him do, what
he pleases, you will care just the same, just as
much. Are you completely a fool, my dear,
and blind as a mole, or—do you see more than
we do? That’s what I can’t make out. I beg
your pardon!”

She accepted the cup from her, and helped
herself to the bread, and took a seat on the
music-stool. She drew the gloves off her beautiful
milk-white hands liberally begemmed with
diamonds and sapphires, and mechanically
folded her bread. She tasted the tea, and continued
looking off out of the window. Marie-Aimée
brought a cup of tea for herself, and
stood in the window-place too, looking off,
drinking.

What Mrs. Bronson thought in her long stare
at the grave distance from which the light was
beginning to depart, she may, as her eye caught
the silhouette against it of the other woman’s
meek, set profile, have perceived the futility of
saying. “You have a beautiful view,” was her
next remark.

Marie-Aimée deplored its not being to-day at
its best; she described it by touches, when
finest. And they talked a while like parties to
the most ordinary call, of views, flats, and so
forth, but in intonations so curiously detached
and melancholy that they might have been
ghosts talking over a tragedy that had its end
three centuries ago.

Suddenly, over the roofs, flashed an arc of
light, splendid; strings of lamp-like jewels, red
and green and golden, publishing to earth and
sky the name of an actor and of a melodrama.
Mrs. Bronson looked at her watch, set down her
cup, and rose.

“So I shall go as I came,” she said; “I had
thought I had such things to say to you, Miss
Nevers, so to the point, so irrefutable, that you
could not but listen to me. I thought that the
fact that it was I who came to you and said

[541]

them would have its weight. I meant, at a
pinch, Miss Nevers, to demand of you to leave,
at all events to break off relations with Anthony.
But now, see, I am going, and I have demanded
nothing. I am all adrift. You have taken me
out beyond my depth. You shall do as you
feel right. As for me, I don’t know. I have
not a heart to lead me, as you have. I have only
my common share of hard worldly sense, and
you have made me feel that it might be unsafe
sometimes to trust it. Do as you please.
I don’t know! I don’t know! Perhaps it is
you who are right, you who love him, and all
we who are fools.”

In Marie-Aimée’s face, which her eyes were
intently interrogating as she spoke this, Mrs.
Bronson could not fail to read a perplexity equal
to her own, but coupled with a forlornness such
as her own nature could never match, no, not
if Fate should place her alone on a storm-beaten
rock in mid-ocean—as Marie-Aimée might have
been imagined standing, with that face. Marie-Aimée
drew in the air through her lips, till her
shoulders were lifted, and let it out in a great
sigh.

“Ah, we are poor things all!” Mrs. Bronson
agreed, with an echo of the sigh; and repeated
that gesture of pressing her hand to her eyes,
not to hide tears, but as part of an attempt to
concentrate the mental vision upon those mysteries
in life which offer the effect of blank impenetrable
walls. She tore away her hand almost
at once, her brief pantomime declaring the
uselessness of trying to understand anything,
verily, of all that happens in this sorrowful
world; and whether in mockery of it, or of herself,
or in the wish merely to effect a change in
the current of their thoughts, struck a startling,
brilliant chord on the piano under her hand;
and while it still vibrated, another, and another,
and executed a cadenza that seemed to laugh
aloud and shake fool’s-bells.

“Do you remember,” she sat fairly down before
the keyboard, and preluded while she talked,
“the last time? After that scene of blood and
tears, you poor sweet thing, how you played for
me, so dearly obliging as you were? And polonaises
and waltzes you played; as well as elegies
and nocturnes. And then I played and then
you played. You played and played, my dear,
till you had missed an engagement. I shall miss
one now if I don’t hurry off instantly, but let
it be missed. I shall count it well done, if
you will sit down here a moment and play
for me.”

“Oh,” moaned Marie-Aimée, putting up the
ever-willing hands, like a martyr in prayer,
“don’t ask me. And don’t take it ill if I can’t.
It’s not the same thing any longer.” She let
her head hang; “I haven’t the heart for it to-night.”

“I am a beast!” said Mrs. Bronson heartily,
and without adding a note further to the musical
phrase she was in the middle of, jumped
up, sick at herself. And feeling of so little
importance before depths of woe such as she
suspected near her that it mattered nothing
whether she apologized, she pressed Marie-Aimée’s
hand with all her strength, and murmuring,
“I will take myself away,” made haste
to be gone.

Mrs. Bronson was conscious of a vast relief,
by which she first learned in what suspense she
had been living, when a few days later she recognized
Marie-Aimée’s hand-writing on a letter
to her. She read:

“I went, you see, after all. I am at my sister’s,
to remain with her and the dear children
until I have thought further what I had better
do. You were right in wishing me to go, though
not perhaps for the reasons you gave. My
thoughts are not at all clear upon the subject of
the rightness or wrongness of what I was doing
then, or what I have done since. I felt sure I
was justified against the whole world, and even
now I find no good argument against it. Only,
it came home to me that I who used to love
everyone and have only feelings of kindness towards
others, was fast coming to hate everybody,
myself most, and it seemed a sufficient
sign. But you won’t think that was quite all.
I did also think of you, who perhaps—which
of us knows her own heart?—care more than
you believe. Very likely not. But on the
barest possibility of the sort, how could I continue
obstinately fixed in my position?

“And now, lest the sympathy you showed me
be troubled on my account, I want you to be
sure that I shall not be unhappy. For one
thing, because there is something strangely compensating
in the assurance a person may gain
that the one she loves is never, to the edge of
doom, to lack the whole love of at least one
heart; and then, because I believe you will
grant a request I am about to make, oh, more
humbly and supplicatingly than pen and ink
can show: which is that you will try to see him
more truly, to discern what is good and lovable
in him; and that—I find it difficult. Yet
why? Let me seem brazen and indelicate, I
will finish. I have thought I divined that he is
a pensioner of yours, and sometimes a straightened
one. It cannot be but that you are by
nature as generous as you are kind, nothing else
would accord with your forehead and eyes. I
can only think that you have imagined things
about him, that his marriage perhaps was mercenary,
and this has been your revenge. Do

[542]

differently hereafter. Show him and yourself
this respect. Grudge him not the independence
and the honors that beseem the state of the lion
growing old. For, do not deceive yourself, he
has been great. Those upon whom God bestows
such a gift are marked for the reverence of
others.

“You will forgive my meddling and will do
what I ask? You asked me to go, and I went.
You could not demand it, nor can I demand
this. Yet let it be as a bargain between us,
will you?

“For your infinite kindness and gentleness
and generosity to myself, receive the assurance
of my utmost gratitude; and for the affection
you were so good as to say you feel
for me, a return of affection which is of sufficient
strength, I believe, to outlast all that
divides us.

Marie-Aimée.”

Mrs. Bronson kissed the name, like a school-girl;
but glancing back over the letter could
not repress a laugh tinged with disdain as the
thought presented itself: “She wishes to provide
against his missing her. Oh, the poor
child, how well she knows him, after all!”
Rising to the noblest height of her nature, she
determined to set the figure of Anthony Bronson’s
income, as near as her fortune permitted,
at what should represent her own estimate of
his loss in Marie-Aimée; at the same time reflecting
that very much less—but very much
less, indeed—would quite as effectually have
kept him from missing her overmuch.

VERSES
BY
A. E. HOUSMAN

There pass the careless people

That call their souls their own:

Here by the road I loiter,

How idle and alone.

Ah, past the plunge of plummet,

In seas I cannot sound,

My heart and soul and senses,

World without end, are drowned.

His folly has not fellow

Beneath the blue of day

That gives to man or woman

His heart and soul away.

There flowers no balm to sain him

From east of earth to west

That’s lost for everlasting

The heart out of his breast.

Here by the laboring highway

With empty hands I stroll:

Sea-deep, till doomsday morning

Lie lost my heart and soul.

From “A Shropshire Lad.”

---

[543]

When I arrived in the United
States again, the impeachment
trial was over and
President Johnson had been
acquitted. There had indeed
not been any revolutionary disturbance,
but the public mind was much agitated by what
had happened.

I had, since I left Washington, been quietly
engaged in editing the Detroit Post, when one
day in the spring of 1867 I received, quite unexpectedly,
a proposition from the proprietors of
the Westliche Post, a daily journal published in
the German language in St. Louis, Missouri,
inviting me to join them, and offering me, on
reasonable terms, a property interest in their
prosperous concern. On further inquiry I
found the proposition advantageous, and accepted
it. My connection with the Detroit
Post, which, owing to the excellent character
of the persons with whom it brought me into
contact, had been most pleasant, was amicably
dissolved, and I went to St. Louis to take charge
of the new duties.

A particular attraction to me in this new
arrangement was the association with Dr. Emil
Preetorius, one of the proprietors of the Westliche
Post. He was a native of the Bavarian
Palatinate, the same province in which in 1849
the great popular uprising in favor of the
National Constitution of Germany had taken
place, and of the town of Alzei, which, according
to ancient legend, had been the home of the
great fiddler among the heroes of the Nibelungenlied—”Volker
von Alzeien,” grim Hagen’s
valiant brother in arms. The town of Alzei still
carries a fiddle in its coat of arms. Mr. Preetorius
was a few years older than I. He had
already won the diploma of Doctor of Laws
when the revolution of 1848 broke out. With
all the ardor of his soul he threw himself into
the movement for free government and had to
leave the Fatherland in consequence. But all
the idealism of 1848 he brought with him to his
new home in America. As a matter of course,
he at once embraced the anti-slavery cause with
the warmest devotion and became one of the
leaders of the German-born citizens of St. Louis,
who, in the spring of 1861, by their courageous
patriotism, saved their city and their State to
the Union. He then remained in public life as
a journalist and as a speaker of sonorous eloquence.

The Convention of 1868

In the winter of 1867-8, as I have said, I
made a visit to Germany. Not long after my
return to St. Louis, the Republican State Convention
was held for the purpose of selecting
delegates for the Republican National Convention
which was to meet at Chicago on the 20th
of May. I was appointed one of the delegates
at large, and at its first meeting the Missouri
delegation elected me its chairman. At Chicago

[544]

a surprise awaited me which is usually
reckoned by men engaged in politics as an
agreeable one. The chairman of the Republican
National Committee, Mr. Marcus L. Ward,
informed me that his committee had chosen me
to serve as the temporary chairman of the
Republican National Convention. It was an
entirely unexpected honor, which I accepted
with due appreciation. I made as short a
speech as is permissible on such occasions, and,
after the customary routine proceedings, surrendered
the gavel to the permanent president,
General Joseph R. Hawley of Connecticut.

DR. EMIL PREETORIUS

ONE OF THE PROPRIETORS OF THE WESTLICHE POST,
THE NEWSPAPER WITH WHICH CARL SCHURZ BECAME
ASSOCIATED IN 1867

That General Grant would be nominated as
the Republican candidate for the presidency
was a foregone conclusion. As to the nomination
for the vice-presidency, there was a rather
tame contest, which resulted in the choice of
Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the National
House of Representatives, who at that time
enjoyed much popularity and seemed to have a
brilliant future before him, but was fated to be
wrecked on the rocks of finance.

From the collection of F. H. Meserve

SCHUYLER COLFAX

WHO WAS ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
STATES ON THE REPUBLICAN TICKET OF 1868

When the Committee on Resolutions made
its report, I observed with surprise that the
proposed platform contained nothing on the
subject of an amnesty to be granted to any of
the participants in the late rebellion. This
omission struck me as a grave blunder. Should
the great Republican party go into the next
contest for the presidency without, in its profession
of faith and its program of policy, holding
out a friendly hand to the erring brethren
who were to return to their old allegiance, and
without marking out for itself a policy of generosity
and conciliation? I resolved at once upon
an effort to prevent so grievous a mistake by
offering an amendment to the platform. Not
knowing whether the subject had not been
thought of in the committee, or whether a resolution
touching it had been debated and voted
down there, and deeming it important that my
amendment should be adopted by the Convention
without a discussion that might have let
loose the lingering war passions of some hot-heads,
I drew up a resolution which did not go
as far as I should have liked it to go, but which
would substantially accomplish the double object
I had in view—the encouragement of well-disposed
Southerners and the commitment of
the Republican party—without arousing any
opposition. It was as follows:

“That we highly commend the spirit of magnanimity
and forbearance with which men who
have served in the rebellion, but who now
frankly and honestly coöperate with us in

[545]

restoring the peace of the country and reconstructing
the Southern State governments upon
the basis of impartial justice and equal rights,
are received back into the communion of the
loyal people; and we favor the removal of the
disqualifications and restrictions imposed upon
the late rebels in the same measure as the spirit
of disloyalty will die out, and as may be consistent
with the safety of the loyal people.”

ULYSSES S. GRANT

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1869, THE YEAR OF HIS FIRST INAUGURATION

The resolution received general applause when it was read to the
Convention, and, as I had hoped, it was adopted and made a part of the
platform without a word of adverse debate.

[546]

FRANCIS PRESTON BLAIR

THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR VICE-PRESIDENT IN THE CAMPAIGN OF 1868

Grant, the Candidate of the Whole Republic

The presidential campaign of 1868 was not one of uncommon excitement
or enthusiasm. The Republican candidate, General Grant, was then
at the height of his prestige. He had never been active in politics
and never identified himself with any political party. Whether he held
any settled opinions on political questions, and, if so, what they
were, nobody could tell with any assurance. But people were willing
to take him for the presidency, just as he was. It is quite probable,
and it has frequently been said, that, had the Democrats succeeded
in “capturing” him as their candidate, he would have been accepted
with equal readiness on that side. He was one of the most striking
examples in history of the military hero who is endowed by the popular
imagination with every conceivable capacity and virtue. People believed
in perfectly good faith that the man who had commanded such mighty
armies, and conducted such brilliant campaigns, and won such great
battles, must necessarily be able and wise and energetic enough to
lead in the solution of any problem of civil government; that he who
had performed great tasks of strategy in the field must be fitted to
accomplish great tasks of statesmanship in the forum or in the closet.
General Grant had the advantage of such presumptions in the highest
degree, especially as he had, in addition to his luster as a warrior,
won a reputation for wise generosity and a fine tact in fixing the
terms of Lee’s surrender and in quietly composing the disagreements
which had sprung from the precipitate action of General Sherman in
treating with the Confederate General Johnston. On the whole, the
country received the candidacy of General Grant as that of a deserving
and a safe man.

HORATIO SEYMOUR

THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN THE CAMPAIGN OF 1868

On the other hand, the Democratic party had not only to bear the
traditional odium of the sympathy of some of its prominent members
with the rebellion, which at that time still counted for much, but it
managed to produce an especially unfavorable impression by the action
of its convention. Its platform stopped but little short of advocating
violence to accomplish the annulment of the reconstruction laws adopted
by Congress, and it demanded the payment of a large part of the
national debt in depreciated greenbacks. The floundering search for a
candidate and the final forcing of the nomination upon the unwilling,
weak, and amiable Horatio Seymour presented an almost ludicrous
spectacle of helplessness, while the furious utterances of the fiery
Frank Blair, the candidate for

[547]

the vice-presidency, sounded like
the wild cries of a madman bent upon stirring up another revolution
when the people wanted peace. The Democrats were evidently riding
for a fall.

JOHN B. HENDERSON

ONE OF THE SEVEN REPUBLICAN SENATORS
WHOSE VOTES DEFEATED THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT
JOHNSON. HE WAS SUCCEEDED IN THE SENATE BY CARL SCHURZ

I was called upon for a good many speeches in the campaign, and
had large and enthusiastic audiences. One of the experiences I had in
this campaign I remember with especial pleasure. The movement in favor
of paying off national bonds, not in coin, but in depreciated paper
money, which found advocacy in the Democratic platform, was in fact not
confined to the ranks of the Democratic party. Although the Republican
Convention had in its platform sternly declared against any form of
repudiation, yet that movement found supporters among the Republicans,
too, especially among people of confused moral notions, small
politicians eager to win a cheap popularity by catering to questionable
impulses, and politicians of higher rank nervously anxious to catch
every popular breeze and inclined to bend to it whenever it seemed to
blow with some force.

An Appeal to the Plain People

In the early part of the campaign I was asked

[548]

to make a series of speeches in Indiana, and to begin with an outdoor
mass-meeting at a little place—if I remember rightly its name
was Corydon—near the Illinois line, at which a large number of
farmers were expected. While a great crowd was gathering, I dined
at the village hotel with the members of the local committee. They
seemed to have something on their minds, which finally came forth,
apparently with some hesitation. One of them, after a few minutes of
general silence, turned to me with a very serious mien, as if he had
to deliver an important message, saying that they thought it their
duty to inform me of a peculiar condition of the public mind in that
region: that the people around there were all, Republicans as well as
Democrats, of the opinion that all the United States bonds should be
paid off in greenbacks and that an additional quantity of greenbacks
should be issued for that purpose; that there was much feeling on that
question, and that they, the committee, would earnestly ask me, if I
could not conscientiously advocate the same policy, at least not to
mention the subject in my speech.

SENATOR CHARLES D. DRAKE

WHOM CARL SCHURZ MET IN JOINT DEBATE, WHILE RUNNING
AGAINST DRAKE’S CANDIDATE FOR THE MISSOURI SENATORSHIP

Having been informed that there had been a good deal of greenback
talk in that neighborhood, I was not surprised. But I thought it a
good opportunity to administer a drastic lesson to my chicken-hearted
party friends. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I have been invited here to preach
Republican doctrines to your people. The Democratic platform advocates
the very policy which you say is favored by your people. The Republican
platform emphatically condemns that policy. I think it is barefaced,
dishonest, rascally repudiation. If your people favor this, they
stand in eminent need of a good, vigorous talking to. But if you, the
committee managing this meeting, do not want me to speak my mind on
this subject, I shall not speak at all. I shall leave instantly, and
you may do with the meeting as you like.”

It was as if a bombshell had dropped among my committee-men. They
were in great consternation and cried out accordingly. I had

[549]

been announced as the principal speaker. A large number of people had come
to hear me. If I left, there would be a great disappointment which
would hurt the party. But I did not mean it—did I?

I assured them that I was in dead earnest. I would stay and speak
only on condition that I should feel at perfect liberty to express my
convictions straightforwardly and impressively. They looked at one
another as if in great doubt what to do, and then, after a whispered
consultation, told me that, of course, if I insisted, they must let
me have my way; but they begged me to “draw it mild.” I replied that
I could not promise to “draw it mild,” but that I believed they were
mistaken in thinking that their people, if properly told the truth,
would favor the rascally policy of repudiation. They shook their heads
and sighed, and “hoped there would be no row.”

The meeting was very large, mostly plain country people, men and
women. The committee-men sat on the platform on both sides of me, with
anxious faces, evidently doubtful of what would happen. I had put the
audience in sympathetic temper when in the due order of my speech I
reached the bond question. Then I did not “draw it mild.” I described
the circumstances under which the bonds were sold by our government and
bought by our creditors: the rebellion at the height of its strength;
our armies in the field suffering defeat after defeat; our regular
revenues sadly insufficient to cover the expenses of the war; our
credit at a low ebb; a gloomy cloud of uncertainty hanging over our
future. These were the circumstances under which our government called
upon our own citizens and upon the world abroad for loans of money.
The people whom we then called bond-holders lent their money upon our
promise that the money should be paid back in coin. They did so at a
great risk, for if we had failed in the war, they might have lost all
or much of what they had lent us. Largely owing to the help they gave
us in our extremity, we succeeded. And now are we to turn round and
denounce them as speculators and bloodsuckers, and say that we will not
give them in the day of success and prosperity what we promised them in
the day of our need and distress? Would not that be downright knavery
and a crime before God and men?

When I had advanced thus far, cries of “shame! shame!” came from
the audience. Then I began to denounce the vile politicians who
advocated such a disgraceful course, first the Democrats who had made
such an ignominious proposition a part of their platform, and then
the Republicans who, believing that such a movement might develop
some popular strength, had cowardly bent their knees to it. By this
time my hearers were thoroughly warmed up, and when I opened my whole
vocabulary of strong language, in all parts of the crowd arose such
cries as “You are right!” “Bully for you!” “Give it to them!” “Hit them
again!” and other ebullitions of the unsophisticated mind; and when I
added that I had been told the whole population of this region were in
favor of that crime of repudiating the honest debts of the republic,
and that I had in their name repelled the charge as a dastardly
slander, my hearers broke out in a storm of applause and cheers lasting
long enough to give me time to look round at my committee-men, who
returned my gaze with a smile of pitiable embarrassment on their
faces.

The Moral Cowardice of Politicians a National
Danger

When my speech was over, I asked them what they now thought of the
repudiation sentiment in their neighborhood. Ah, they had “never been
so astonished in their lives.” One of them attempted to compliment me
upon my “success in so quickly turning the minds of those people.”
But I would not let them have that consoling conception of the facts,
and answered that I had not turned the minds of those people at all;
that their feelings and impulses were originally honest; that I had
only called forth a manifestation of that original honesty; and that
if the local political leaders had believed in the original honesty
of the people and courageously stood up for truth and right instead
of permitting themselves to be frightened by a rascally agitation
and of pusillanimously pandering to it, they would have had the same
experience.

In fact, the same experience has repeated itself in the course of my
political activity again and again until a late period. I have had an
active part in a great many political campaigns and probably addressed
as many popular meetings as any man now living; and I have always found
that whenever any public question under public discussion had in it
any moral element, an appeal to the moral sense of the people proved
uniformly the most powerful argument. I do not, of course, mean to say
that there were not at all times many persons accessible to selfish
motives and liable to yield to the seduction of the opportunity for
unrighteous gain, and that such evil influences were not at times hard
to overcome. But with the majority of the people, notably the “plain
people”—using the term in the sense in which Abraham Lincoln was
wont to use it—I found the question “is this morally right?” to have
ultimately more weight than the question “will this be profitable?”

[550]

ALEXANDER T. STEWART

IN WHOSE BEHALF
PRESIDENT GRANT ASKED CONGRESS TO SUSPEND THE ACT ESTABLISHING THE
TREASURY DEPARTMENT

We have, indeed, sometimes witnessed so-called “crazes” in favor
of financial policies that were essentially immoral, such as the
“inflation craze” and the “silver craze,” gaining an apparently almost
irresistible momentum among the people. But that was not owing to a
real and wide-spread demoralization of the popular conscience, but
rather to an artful presentation of the question which covered up and
disguised the moral element in it, and so deceived the unsophisticated
understanding, and also to the cowardice of politicians of high as
well as low rank, who, instead of courageously calling things by their
right names, would, against their better convictions, yield to what
they considered a strong current of opinion, for fear of jeopardizing
their personal popularity. I have seen men of great ability and high
standing in the official world do the most astonishing things in this
respect when they might, as far as their voices could be heard, have
easily arrested the vicious heresies by a bold utterance of their true
opinions. The moral cowardice of the politicians is one of the most
dangerous ailments of democracies.

Missouri Retires Senator Henderson

To me the Republican victory brought a promotion which I had not
anticipated while I was active in the campaign. One of the United
States Senators from Missouri, Mr. John B. Henderson, had voted in
the impeachment trial for the acquittal of President Johnson. He was
a gentleman of superior ability and of high character, but he had
voted for the acquittal of

[551]

Andrew Johnson. He had done so for
reasons entirely honorable and entirely consistent with his principles
and convictions of right, but in disregard of the feelings prevalent
among his constituents and in spite of a strong pressure brought upon
him by hosts of Republicans in his own State; and as his term as a
Senator was just then expiring, this clash was fatal to his prospects
of a reëlection. The warmest of his friends frankly recognized the
absolute impossibility of keeping him in his place.

Indeed, all the Republican Senators who had voted for Johnson’s
acquittal found themselves more or less at variance with their party
in their respective States; but Republicanism in Missouri was in one
respect somewhat different from Republicanism elsewhere. In Missouri a
large part of the population had joined the rebellion. The two parties
in the Civil War had not been geographically divided. The Civil War had
therefore had the character of a neighborhood war—in Missouri
it was not only State against State, or district against district,
but house against house. The bitter animosities of the civil conflict
survived in Missouri much longer than in the northern States, and any
favor shown to “the traitor” Andrew Johnson appeared to the great mass
of Missouri Republicans simply unpardonable.

The immediate consequence of Mr. Henderson’s course was that his
colleague in the Senate, Mr. Charles D. Drake, obtained a directing
influence in the party which for the moment seemed to be undisputed.
Senator Drake was an able lawyer and an unquestionably honest man, but
narrow-minded, dogmatic, and intolerant to a degree. He aspired to be
the Republican “boss” of the State—not, indeed, as if he had
intended to organize a machine for the purpose of enriching himself or
his henchmen. Corrupt schemes were absolutely foreign to his mind. He
merely wished to be the recognized authority dictating the policies
of his party and controlling the federal offices in Missouri. This
ambition overruled with him all others.

Senator Drake was of small stature, but he planted his feet upon
the ground with demonstrative firmness. His face, framed with grey
hair and a short, stubby white beard and marked with heavy eyebrows,
usually wore a stern and often even a surly expression. His voice had
a rasping sound, and his speech, slow and peremptory, was constantly
accompanied with a vigorous shake of the forefinger which meant
laying down the law. I do not know to what religious denomination
he belonged; but he gave the impression that no religion would be
satisfactory to him that did not provide for a well-kept hell-fire to
roast sinners and heretics. Still, he was said to be very kind and
genial in his family and in the circle of his intimate friends. But
in politics he was inexorable. I doubt whether, as a leader, he was
ever really popular with the Republican rank and file in Missouri. But
certain it is that most of the members of his party, especially in the
country districts, stood much in awe of him.

How Schurz Became a Candidate

Mr. Drake, very naturally, wished to have at his side, in the place
of Mr. Henderson, a colleague sympathizing with him and likely to shape
his conduct according to Senator Drake’s wishes. He chose General
Ben Loan of the western part of the State, a gentleman of excellent
character, and respectable but not uncommon abilities. Senator Drake
permitted it to go forth as a sort of decree of his that Mr. Loan
should be elected to the Senate, and, although the proposition did not
seem to meet with any hearty response in the State, he would have been
so elected, had not another candidacy intervened.

It happened in this wise: I was a member of a little club consisting
of a few gentlemen of the same way of thinking in politics, who
dined together and discussed current events once or twice a month.
At one of those dinners, soon after the presidential election of
1868, the conversation turned upon the impending election of Senator
Henderson’s successor and the candidacy of Mr. Drake’s favorite,
General Loan. We were all agreed in heartily disliking Mr. Drake’s
kind of statesmanship. We likewise agreed in disliking the prospect
of seeing Mr. Drake duplicated in the Senate—indeed fully
duplicated—by the election of Mr. Loan. But how prevent it? We
all recognized, regretfully, the absolute impossibility of getting the
Legislature to reëlect Mr. Henderson. But what other candidate was
there to oppose to Mr. Loan? One of our table turned round to me and
said: “You!” The others instantly and warmly applauded.

The thought that I, a comparative newcomer in Missouri, should
be elected senator in preference to others, who had been among the
leaders in the great crisis of the State only a few years ago,
seemed to me extravagant, and I was by no means eager to expose
myself to what I considered almost certain defeat. But my companions
insisted, and I finally agreed that a “feeler” might be put out in
the Globe-Democrat, the leading Republican journal in St. Louis,
of which Colonel William M. Grosvenor, a member of our little
table-company, was the editor in chief. The number of Republican papers
in the State which responded

[522]

approvingly was surprisingly large, and
I soon found myself in the situation of an acknowledged candidate for
the senatorship “in the hands of his friends.” It seemed that when
“stumping” the State in the last campaign, I had won more favor with
the country people than I myself was aware of. Still, my chances of
success would have been slim, had not my principal adversary, Senator
Drake, appeared in person upon the scene.

When he learned that my candidacy was developing strength, he
hurried from Washington to Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri,
to throw the weight of his personal influence with the Legislature
into the scale against me. By his side appeared General Loan. There
was then perfect justification for me to be on the ground with some
of my friends. My manager was Colonel Grosvenor, the editor of the
Globe-Democrat, an uncommonly bright, genial, active, and energetic
young man. I could not have had a more efficient and more faithful
champion, or a more skilful tactician. In their talks with members
of the Legislature my opponents were reckless in the extreme. They
denounced me as a foreign intruder, as a professional revolutionist, as
a “German infidel,” as a habitual drunkard, and what not.

Our plan of campaign was very simple: Not a word against my
competitor, General Loan; no champagne or whisky, nor even cigars; no
noisy demonstrations; no promises of offices or other pledges in case
of my election; but a challenge to General Loan and also to Senator
Drake, if he would accept it, to meet me in public debate before the
day when the caucus of the Republican majority for the nomination
of a senatorial candidate was to be held. The campaign attracted
much attention throughout the North and was commented upon in the
newspapers, mostly in my favor. There were some symptoms of friendly
zeal in my behalf. My friend Sigismund Kaufmann in New York telegraphed
to me that if I needed any money for my campaign he would put $10,000
at my disposal. I telegraphed back my thanks, but declined the money,
since I had no use for it. My reliance was upon the public debate.

A Joint Debate for a Senatorship

Senator Drake accepted the challenge for himself and General Loan.
Arrangements were made for two meetings on two consecutive evenings.
On the first evening I was to open with a speech of a certain
length, and on the second evening Loan and Drake were to answer me,
and I was to close. The announcement, as it went over the State,
attracted from the country districts—as well as the
cities—so many of the friends of the two candidates who wished
to witness what they considered a great event, that the hotels of the
State capital were crowded to the utmost.

Remembering the debate between Lincoln and Douglas at Quincy,
Illinois, to which I had listened ten years before, I kept my opening
speech in a calm, somewhat tame defensive tone, reserving my best
ammunition for my closing argument and putting forth in a somewhat
challenging manner only a few sharp points which I wished Drake to
take up the next evening. The effect of my speech was satisfactory
in a double sense. My supporters were well pleased with the courtesy
and moderation with which I had stated my position and repelled
certain attacks, and Mr. Drake was jubilant. He could not conceal his
anticipation of triumph. Before a large crowd he said in a loud voice:
“That man was described to me as a remarkable orator, something like
Cicero and Demosthenes combined. But what did we hear? A very ordinary
talk. Gentlemen, to-morrow night about this hour General Carl Schurz
will be as dead as Julius Cæsar!” When I heard this, I was sure that
his speech would be as bitter, overbearing, and dictatorial as I could
wish, and that thus he would deliver himself into my hands.

The next evening the great hall of the assembly was crowded to
suffocation. General Loan spoke first. His speech was entirely decent
in tone but quite insignificant in matter. Its only virtue was its
brevity. It received only that sort of applause which any audience will
grant to any respectable man’s utterance which is not too long and not
offensive, even if uttered in a voice too low to be heard.

Senator Drake then mounted the rostrum with a defiant air, as
of one who would make short work of his antagonists. After a few
remarks concerning his attitude on the negro question, he took me
in hand. Who was I, to presume to be a candidate for the Senate? He
would, indeed, like to inquire a little into my past career, were
it not that he would have to travel too far—to Germany, and
to various places in this country, to find out whether there was
not much to my discredit. But he had no time for so long a journey,
however instructive such a search might be. This insinuation was
received by the audience with strong signs of displeasure, which,
however, stirred up Mr. Drake to greater energy. Then he launched
into a violent attack on the Germans of Missouri, for whose political
character and conduct he made me responsible. He denounced them as
an ignorant crowd, who did not understand

[553]

English, read only their German newspapers, and were led by corrupt and designing rings; as
marplots and mischief-makers who could never be counted upon, and whose
presence in the Republican party hurt that party more than it helped
it. Finally, after having expressed his contempt for the newspapers
and the politicians who supported my candidacy, he closed with an
elaborate eulogy of General Loan and of himself, the length of which
seemed to tire the audience, for it was interrupted by vociferous
calls for me coming from all parts of the house. The immediate effect
of Mr. Drake’s speech was perceptibly unfavorable to him and his
candidate—especially his bitter denunciation of the Germans and
of a large part of the Republican party which advocated my election,
for many members of the Legislature remembered how important an element
of their constituency those same Germans formed, and how much their
political standing depended on those same newspapers.

When I rose, the audience received me with a round of uproarious
cheers. I succeeded in putting myself into relations of good humor
even with my opponents by introducing myself as “a young David who,
single-handed and without any weapon except his sling and a few pebbles
in his pouch, had to meet in combat two heavily armed Goliaths at
once.” The audience laughed and cheered again. I next brushed away Mr.
Loan’s “harmless” speech with a few polite phrases and “passed from the
second to the principal.”

I then proceeded to take the offensive against Mr. Drake in good
earnest. To the great amusement of my hearers I punctured with irony
and ridicule the pompous pretence that he was the father of the new
constitution with which Missouri was blessed. I took up his assault
upon the Germans. I asked the question, “Who was it that at the
beginning of the war took prisoners the rebel force assembled in camp
Jackson and thus saved St. Louis and the State to the Union, and who
was foremost on all the bloody fields in Missouri?” The whole audience
shouted “The Germans! The Germans!” I asked where Mr. Drake was in
those critical days, and answered that having been a Democrat before
the war, pleading the cause of slavery, he sat quietly in his law
office, coolly calculating when it would be safe for him to pronounce
himself openly for the Union, while the Germans were shedding their
blood for that Union. This was a terrible thrust.

My unfortunate victim nervously jumped to his feet and called my
friend, General McNeil, who was present, to witness that the General
himself advised him to stay quietly at home, because he could do
better service there than twenty men in the field. Whereupon General
McNeil promptly answered: “Yes, but that was long after the beginning
of the war”—an answer which made Mr. Drake sink back into his
chair, while the meeting burst out in a peal of laughter. Soon he rose
again to say that I was wrong in imputing to him any hostility to the
Germans, for he was their friend. My reply instantly followed that
then we had to take what he had said of them to-night as a specimen of
Mr. Drake’s characteristic friendship. The audience again roared with
laughter.

But the sharpest arrow was still to be shot. I reviewed the
Senator’s career as a party leader—how he had hurled his anathema
against every Republican who would not take his word as law, thus
disgusting and alienating one man after another, and was now seeking
to read out of the party every man and every newspaper, among them
the strongest journal in the State, that supported me. Almost every
sentence drew applause. But when I reached my climax, picturing Mr.
Drake as a party leader so thinning out his following that he would
finally stand “lonesome and forlorn, surrounded by an immensity of
solitude, in desolate self-appreciation,” the general hilarity became
so boisterous and the cheering so persistent, that I had to wait
minutes for a chance to proceed. I closed my speech in a pacific
strain. There had been talk that, if I were elected, the unseemly
spectacle would be presented of two Senators from the same State
constantly quarrelling with one another. I did not apprehend anything
of the kind. I was sure that if we ever differed, Senator Drake would
respect my freedom of opinion, and I certainly would respectfully
recognize his. Our watchword would be: “Let us have peace.”

When I had finished there was another outbreak of tumultuous
applause and a rush for a handshake, the severest I have ever had to
go through. With great difficulty I had to work my way to my tavern
and to bed, where I lay long awake hearing the jubilant shouts of my
friends on the streets. The first report I received in the morning was
that Mr. Drake had quickly withdrawn from last night’s meeting before
its adjournment, had hurried to his hotel, had asked for his bill and
the washing he had given out, and when told that his shirts and collars
were not yet dry, had insisted upon having them instantly whether wet
or dry, and then had hurried to the railroad station for the night
train East. The party-dictatorship was over, and its annihilation was
proclaimed by the flight of the dictator.

[554]

The Republic’s Crowning Honor to an Adopted Son

That same day the caucus of the Republican members of the
Legislature took place. I was nominated for the senatorship on the
first ballot, and on motion the nomination was made unanimous. My
election by the Legislature followed in due course. No political
victory was ever more cleanly won. My whole election expenses amounted
only to my board bill at the hotel, and absolutely unencumbered by any
promise of patronage or other favor I took my seat in the Senate of
the United States on the 4th of March, 1869. My colleague, Mr. Drake,
courteously escorted me to the chair of the president of the Senate
where I took the oath of office.

I remember vividly the feelings which almost oppressed me as I
first sat down in my chair in the Senate chamber. Now I had actually
reached the exalted public position to which my boldest dreams of
ambition had hardly dared to aspire. I was still a young man, just
forty. Little more than sixteen years had elapsed since I had landed on
these shores, a homeless waif saved from the wreck of a revolutionary
movement in Europe. Then I was enfolded in the generous hospitality of
the American people, opening to me, as freely as to its own children,
the great opportunities of the new world. And here I was now, a member
of the highest law-making body of the greatest of republics. Should I
ever be able fully to pay my debt of gratitude to this country, and to
justify the honors that had been heaped upon me? To accomplish this,
my conception of duty could not be pitched too high. I recorded a vow
in my own heart that I would at least honestly endeavor to fulfil that
duty; that I would conscientiously adhere to the principle “Salus
populi, suprema lex“; that I would never be a sycophant of power
nor a flatterer of the multitude; that, if need be, I would stand up
alone for my conviction of truth and right; and that there would be no
personal sacrifice too great for my devotion to the republic.

My first official duty was to witness, with the Senate, the
inauguration of General Grant as President of the United States.
I stood near the same spot from which, eight years before, I had
witnessed the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. It was a remarkable
contrast—then the anxious patriot, in the hour of stress, with
pathetic tenderness appealing to the wayward children of the nation;
now the victorious soldier speaking in the name of the restored
national authority. General Grant’s inaugural address, evidently his
own work, was somewhat crude in style, but breathed a rugged honesty
of purpose. With particular rigor it emphasized our obligations to the
national creditor—in striking contrast to Mr. Johnson’s last
annual message, which had stopped little short of advising downright
repudiation.

On the whole, General Grant’s accession to the presidency was
welcomed by almost everybody with a sense of relief. It put an end
to the unseemly, not to say scandalous brawl between the executive
and the legislative branches of the national government, which at
times came near threatening the peace of the country. It was justly
expected to restore the government to its proper dignity and to
furnish, if not a brilliant, at least a highly decent and efficient
business administration. As General Grant had really not owed his
nomination to any set of politicians, nor even, strictly speaking, to
his identification with a political party, he enjoyed an independence
of position which offered him peculiarly favorable possibilities
for emancipating the public service from the grasp of the spoils
politician, and the friends of civil service reform looked up to him
with great hope.

It was not unnatural that in the absolute absence of political
experience he should not only have had much to learn concerning the
nature and conduct of civil government, but that he should also have
had much to unlearn of the mental habits and the ways of thinking he
had acquired in the exercise of almost unlimited military command. This
was strikingly illustrated by some remarkable incidents.

A. T. Stewart and the Law of the Treasury

As usual, the nominations made by the President for Cabinet offices
were promptly ratified by the Senate without being referred to any
committee. But after this had been done, it was remembered and reported
to President Grant that one of the nominees so confirmed, Mr. A.
T. Stewart of New York, whom President Grant had selected for the
secretaryship of the treasury, as a person engaged in commerce, was
disqualified by one of the oldest laws on the statute-book—in
fact, the act of September 2, 1789, establishing the Treasury
Department. That this law, which provided that the Treasury Department,
having the administration of the custom houses under its control,
should not have at its head a merchant or importer in active business,
was an entirely proper, indeed, a necessary one, had never been
questioned. The next morning, March 6th, I had occasion to call upon
President Grant for the purpose of presenting to him a congratulatory
message from certain citizens of St. Louis. I found him alone, engaged
in writing something on a half-sheet of

[555]

note-paper. “Mr. President,” I said, “I see you are busy,
and I do not wish to interrupt you. My business can wait.”
“Never mind,” he answered, “I am only writing a message to the Senate.”
My business was quickly disposed of, and I withdrew.

In the course of that day’s session of the Senate a message from
the President was brought in, in which, after quoting the statute of
September 2, 1789, the President asked that Mr. Stewart be exempted
by joint resolution of the two Houses of Congress from the operation
of the law which stood in Mr. Stewart’s way. There were some signs of
surprise among Senators when the message was read, but Mr. Sherman
at once asked unanimous consent to introduce a bill in accordance
with the President’s wish. But Mr. Sumner objected to the immediate
consideration thereof because of its great importance. This stopped
further proceedings, and the bill was laid on the table never to be
heard of again. However, the President’s message had evidently made
an impression, and there was forthwith a little council held in the
cloakroom, which agreed that some Senator should without delay go
to see Mr. Elihu B. Washburn, the new Secretary of State, who was
General Grant’s intimate friend, and urgently ask him to suggest to the
President that, while there was now perfect good feeling all round,
it would be prudent for him to drop Mr. Stewart and to abstain from
demanding the suspension or the repeal of good laws which he found in
his way. Whether Mr. Washburn did carry this admonition to President
Grant, I do not know. Probably he did, for Mr. Stewart was promptly
dropped. Mr. Boutwell of Massachusetts was made Secretary of the
Treasury in Mr. Stewart’s place, and the repeal or suspension of the
old law was never again heard of.

A Governor’s Right to His Staff

So this incident passed, harmless. But the cloakroom of the Senate,
where Senators amused one another with the gossip of the day, continued
to buzz with anecdotes about President Grant’s curious notions of the
nature and functions of civil government. One of these anecdotes,
told by a Senator who was considered one of the best lawyers in that
body and one of the most jealous of the character of his profession,
was particularly significant. He heard a rumor that President Grant
was about to remove a Federal judge in one of the territories of the
United States. The Senator happened to know that judge as a lawyer
of excellent ability and uncommon fitness for the bench, and he
went to the President to remonstrate against so extreme a measure
as the removal of a judge unless there were cogent reasons for
it connected with the administration of the office. President Grant
admitted that, as far as he knew, there was no allegation of the
unfitness of the judge, as a judge, “but,” he added, “the governor of
the territory writes me that he cannot get along with that judge at
all, and is very anxious to be rid of him; and I think the governor is
entitled to have control of his staff.” The Senator closed his story
by saying that he found it to be a delicate as well as a difficult job
to make the great general in the chair of the President of the United
States understand how different the relations between a territorial
governor and a Federal judge were from those between a military
commander and his staff officers. The anecdote was received by the
listeners with a laugh, but the mirth was not far from apprehension.
However, there being sincere and perfect goodwill on both sides, things
went on pleasantly in the expectation that the military hero at the
head of the government would learn what he needed to know and that the
men in places of political power would treat him with due consideration
and fairness.

Grant Presses for San Domingo Annexation

It was a few days later when I met President Grant at an evening
reception given by Colonel Forney, the Secretary of the Senate. I was
somewhat surprised when I saw the President coming toward me from the
opposite side of the room, saying: “Senator, you have not called to
see me at the White House for some time, and I have been wanting to
speak to you.” All I could say in response was that I was very sorry
to have missed a conversation I might have had with him, but that I
knew him to be a busy man who should not be robbed of his time by
merely conventional visits. He repeated that he wished very much to
see me. Would I not call upon him at my earliest convenience some
evening? I put myself at once at his service, and went to the White
House the next night. He received me in the library room and invited
me to sit with him on a sofa. He plunged forthwith into the subject
he had at heart. “I hear you are a member of the Senate committee
that has the San Domingo treaty under consideration,” he said, “and
I wish you would support the treaty. Won’t you do that?” I thought
it would be best not to resort to any circumlocution in answering so
pointblank a summons, but to be entirely frank. I said I should be
sincerely happy to act with his administration whenever and wherever I
conscientiously could, but in this case, I was sorry to confess, I was
not able to do as he wished,

[556]

because I was profoundly convinced it
would be against the best interests of the republic. Then I gave him
some of my dominant reasons; in short, acquisition and possession of
such tropical countries with indigestible, unassimilable populations
would be highly obnoxious to the nature of our republican system of
government; it would greatly aggravate the racial problems we had
already to contend with; those tropical islands would, owing to their
climatic conditions, never be predominantly settled by people of
Germanic blood; this federative republic could not, without dangerously
vitiating its vital principles, undertake to govern them by force,
while the populations inhabitating them could not be trusted with
a share in governing our country; to the difficulties we had under
existing circumstances to struggle with in our Southern States, much
greater and more enduring difficulties would be added; and for all
this the plan offered absolutely no compensating advantages. Moreover,
the conversations I had had with Senators convinced me that the
treaty had no chance of receiving the two-thirds vote necessary for
its confirmation, and I sincerely regretted to see his administration
expose itself to a defeat which, as I thought, was inevitable.

The Liveryman and the Foreign Mission

I spoke with the verve of sincere conviction, and at first the
President listened to me with evident interest, looking at me as if
the objections to the treaty which I expressed were quite new to him
and made an impression on his mind. But after a little while I noticed
that his eyes wandered about the room, and I became doubtful whether he
listened to me at all. When I had stopped, he sat silent for a minute
or two. I, of course, sat silent too, waiting for him to speak. At last
he said in a perfectly calm tone, as if nothing had happened: “Well, I
hope you will at least vote for the confirmation of Mr. Jones, whom I
have selected for a foreign mission.”

I was very much taken aback by this turn of the conversation. Who
was Mr. Jones? If the President had sent his nomination to the Senate,
it had escaped me. I had not heard of a Mr. Jones as a nominee for
a foreign mission. What could I say? The President’s request that I
should vote for Mr. Jones sounded so child-like and guileless, at
the same time implying an apprehension that I might not vote for the
confirmation of Mr. Jones, which he had evidently much at heart, that
I was sincerely sorry that I could not promptly answer “Yes.” I should
have been happy to please the President. But I had to tell him the
truth. So I gathered myself together and replied that I knew nothing
of Mr. Jones, either by personal acquaintance or by report; that it
was the duty of the Committee on Foreign Relations to inquire into
the qualifications for diplomatic service of the persons nominated
for foreign missions and to report accordingly to the Senate, and
that if Mr. Jones was found to possess those qualifications, it would
give me the most genuine pleasure to vote for him. This closed the
conference.

A few days later there was a meeting of the Committee on Foreign
Relations. After having disposed of some other business, Charles
Sumner, its chairman, said in his usual grave tone: “Here is the
President’s nomination of Mr. Jones for the mission to Brussels. Can
any member of the committee give us any information concerning Mr.
Jones?” There was a moment’s silence. Then Senator Morton of Indiana,
a sarcastic smile flickering over his face—I see him now before
me—replied: “Well, Mr. Jones is about the most elegant gentleman
that ever presided over a livery stable.” The whole committee, except
Mr. Sumner, broke out in a laugh. Sumner, with unbroken gravity, asked
whether any other member of the committee could give any further
information. There was none. Whereupon Mr. Sumner suggested that the
nomination be laid over for further inquiry, which was done.

At a subsequent meeting the committee took up the case of Mr. Jones
again. It was a matter of real embarrassment to every one of us. We
all wished to avoid hurting the feelings of President Grant. There had
been no malice in Senator Morton’s remark about the elegant gentleman
presiding over a livery stable. Morton was one of the staunchest
administration men, but he simply could not resist the humor of the
occasion. I do not recollect what the result of the “further inquiry”
was. I have a vague impression that Mr. Jones turned out to be in some
way connected with the street-car lines in Chicago, and to have had
much to do with horses, which was supposed to be the link of sympathy
between him and President Grant. However reluctant the committee was
to wound the President’s feelings in so personal a matter, yet it did
not think it consistent with its sense of duty and dignity positively
to recommend to the Senate to confirm the nomination of Mr. Jones.
It therefore, if I remember rightly, reported it back to the Senate
without any recommendation, whereupon the Senate indulgently ratified
it.

The foregoing article will be the last of the
Carl Schurz Reminiscences to appear in McClure’s Magazine. The writing
of the Memoirs was broken off at this point by Mr. Schurz’ death,
which occurred in 1906. A conclusion to the series, compiled by Mr.
Frederic Bancroft from Carl Schurz’ notes and letters, will appear
in Volume III of the book, which will be issued in the fall.

---

[557]

A CAVALRY PEGASUS
BY
WILL ADAMS

The orderly-room was quiet; only the clicking of the Troop Clerk’s
type-writer broke the stillness in sharp taps. Captain Campbell and
Sergeant Stone were at their desks, absorbed in papers. Presently Stone
pushed his work aside, and, hunting in a pigeonhole, brought forth a
grimy bundle.

“Are you interested in poetry, sir?” he said. Captain Campbell,
alias Shorty, sat up, with a snort, and peered over the piled-up
findings of a court-martial case. “Am I a love-sick puppy? Do I
look as if I were interested in poetry?” Shorty’s hair was mussed
and matted, his flannel shirt (he never wore a coat, if he could help
it) was open at the throat, and the dust of the early-morning drill
still adhered to his countenance, giving it a curiously gray-veiled
appearance—he said he hadn’t had time to wash. Stone was forced
to admit that his appearance was not poetic.

“Well,” he said, “I guess this isn’t really poetry—just a stab
at it. Shall I read——”

“Sergeant Stone,” interrupted his captain vehemently, “if you’ve
been such an ass as to try to write poetry, I’ll be condemned if I keep
you as Top of my troop. No, don’t attempt to explain; I know it all!
There’s a girl at the bottom of it: there always is. Poetry leads to
everything and anything. Soon you’ll be neglecting your duties, and
then, I warn you,—I warn you,—you’re busted! ‘Member
Sergeant Johnson? Good soldier, but very foolish man. Went and got
married—what a fool! No good any more. Poetry will do the same
for you.”

Stone had been trying to stem the torrent. “For the Lord’s
sake, Captain, what do you take me for? I haven’t been writin’ any
poetry.”

“What do you mean, then, insinuating that you have? There’s only one
man living now who can write poetry, but be hanged if I’d want him in
my troop.”

“Still,” said Stone, with his boyish, dimpling grin, “you’ve a poet
in the troop, in spite of you. It’s Teddy Ryan.”

“Ryan! That freckled kid? Why, he’s a pretty fair soldier. Reckon
his poetry must be right rotten. Don’t believe he knows enough to spell
‘cat,’ even. What you got there? Hand ’em over, only hurry up. I got to
go to headquarters soon. Oh, this is goin’ to be a picnic!” Shorty was
chuckling over the soiled scraps.

The first one was ominously entitled “Destinny, by Prvt. T. Ryan
5th Mont. Inf. U. S. V. 1898,” and set forth:

I do not like my tacks and bacon,

They allus sets my belly aken.

I do not like to tote a gun,

It seems like I was son of one.

And lots of other things they done

to me I do not like at all.

I wish I never had inlisted

My feet is allus gettin’ blistered

It’s allus drillin drillin drillin

And eating grub that isent fillin.

And that is why I do not wanter stay.

And O By jimminy dont i wish my time

was up and i could get away.

“You bet he did,”
laughed Shorty. “You read these?” turning to Stone.

“Sure. Aren’t they rich? Read ‘Soljer and Moskeeter’ an’ ‘To My
Hoss.’ There’s a horse on you in that last.”

“Soldier and Mosquito” proved to be a dialogue.

SOLJER AND MOSKEETER

Soljer says:

“When we do go to bed

We do try to sleep instead

Of lyeing awake.

But we cannot for you kno

The pesky moskeeto

Our blood does take.”

Moskeeter says:

“When that feller goes to bed

he covers up his head

In the dark,

i cannot cannot eat her

so I starve says poor moskeeter,

Grim and stark.”

“‘ARE YOU INTERESTED IN POETRY, SIR?’ HE SAID”

“Soldier seems to be a he an’ a she too. An’ he is sure impartial,”
remarked Captain Campbell. “Even a mosquito must have a point of
view—darn little nuisances!”

“‘Life is one long gorgeous sunset if your head-net works as
planned,'” agreed Stone, quoting from the American Mandalay. “Go on an’
read ‘To My Hoss,’ You’ll appreciate that.”

TO MY HOSS

My hoss is gentle has no fears,

And is slow if you dont ticcle his years.

He has fore long legs and a drawn out hed,

And so is cald a quadruped.

Saturday morning enspection time

i groom my hoss up clene and fine,

But if his saddel aint packed wel,

You bet Shorty gives me hel.

My hoss must be fed before the men,

Wen i dont do it I get hel agen,

My hosses tale is very long

the end of him and the end of my song.

“I know,” chuckled
Shorty, “what was the inspiration for that second verse. I jumped all
over him one Saturday for havin’ his canteen on the near side an’ his
picket-pin upside-down where it would blame well spit him if he should
fall on it. He’s right he got all that was coming to him. I only got
time for one more now—a short one. What shall it be?”

“Try ‘Fiting Joe And Dewey’; that’s a bit different—might be
classed under ‘Poems of Ambition’.”

Shorty shuffled the papers and read:

FITTING JOE AND DEWEY

Theres heaps of places in the world men wud lik to been and see

But i tell you

And I tell you true,

That theres only 2 for me.

Ide like to have worn my Countrys blu

In the calvery riding or holding the tiller

With Fiting joe at San Wan Hill or with Dewey at Manilla.

And the old man says:

“Ive been in slews of battels and ime toting in my shin

A bullit from a johnny-rebils killer,

With Fiting joe at San Wan Hill or Dewey a t manilla.”

“How in Tophet did you come by this stuff,
Sergeant?” asked the Captain, as he got up to

[559]

put on his small coat, and, on tiptoe before a little hanging mirror, tried, ineffectually, to calm his upstanding hair with the ten-toothed comb of nature.

“Why, sir, Ryan gave ’em to me to read. He came into my room two
or three nights ago an’ asked me if I wouldn’t like to see them. Said
he’d written that ‘Destinny’ quite a time ago, but that all the others
were just recently finished; that he’d been writing a lot lately,
an’ felt as if he just had to show ’em to somebody, an’ he thought
the other fellows would laugh at him. He said I might keep an’ read
them to anybody I thought would appreciate them. He thinks they’re
Shaksperean.”

“Well,” said Shorty, grabbing his hat and preparing to bolt, “I have
sure appreciated ’em. But, you mark my words, there’s a girl behind
this. A fellow like Ryan doesn’t go squanderin’ rhymes for nothin’,
hombre. Adios.” And off shot Shorty, with hands jammed deep in his
pockets.

“He’s smart, all right,” said Stone to himself; “the girl’s there.
Where the deuce is that bloomin’ ode, ‘To my Lady-Frend’?” Finding
it, he read:

Heaven meant things to go in 2s Cora,

Thats why i am alone unhappy single.

There won’t be a bird or animal refuse Cora

Each with other folks to mingle.

So why do you give me the cold sholder Cora

Is it becaws youre shi or love another?

If youd only speak to your deer soljer Cora,

Ide fite a feller if he was my brother.

The moone is shining britely in the ski my Cora deer

The nite is late the village clock strikes 2.

Yes everything says 2 my years can hear Cora,

And that is why i think of you.

“Poor kid, he seems to be up against it! Wonder where he
got that about the village clock? Must have been doin’ some promiscious
readin’. He said that was the best ‘piece’ he’d written. I wonder
if he—I wonder if she——” Still wondering, Stone
carefully put the precious manuscript away and turned back to work,
resolving to corral Private T. Ryan at the first opportunity.

Private T. Ryan proved obliging, however, and came into Stone’s room
after supper to get his verses and the first sergeant’s opinion of
them.

“‘he used language to me, sir, and i am hiss sergeant'”

[560]

“What do I think about ’em, kid? Why, I think they’re mighty
interestin’. Take a chair. I didn’t know you had it in you. But that
one about your lady-friend, now; is that straight goods or is it a
poet’s pipe-dream?”

“It’s true, all right. You know who she is, too. Cora
Sheean—father’s that retired chief trumpeter; lives over back o’
the ridin’-hall.”

“Cora Sheean! Why, yes, I know who she is.” Mrs. Sheean did
Stone’s washing, and he had often seen red-haired Cora, and heard of
her, too; for she was the belle of the post in “enlisted” circles.
“She’s a mighty pretty girl, Ted,—here’s luck to you,—but
she’s so bloomin’ popular it’s liable to be heavy goin’. You tell
me all about it, an’ maybe I can help you some”; and Stone began a
rapid-fire broadside of questions, in the midst of which arrived John
Whitney.

“Howdy,” he remarked. “Say, yo’ runnin’ a pumpin’-station,
Jerry?”

“No, I’m not. Now, either you clear out or come in an’ help. I
showed you Ryan’s poetry—an’ you remember that one about his
lady-friend? Well, it’s true, an’ he’s tellin’ me about it. Do you mind
his comin’ in, kid? He can probably help you better than I can, as he’s
had so much more experience with Eliz——”

“Shut up! Yo’-all are mighty fond of refe’in’ to that lady. I notice
yo’ get a letter every day yo’self!”

“Set down,” said Ryan. “No, I don’t mind, but don’t you ever let
on. There’s Hansen, now. He’d devil me all over the place if he caught
on.”

And so he continued his recital. Yes, Cora had flirted outrageously
with him. “But she says she ain’t ever goin’ ter marry no private; I
got ter be a sergeant anyway, or she won’t look at me.” He was going
to hold her to that; he was going to work hard, and there was a good
chance, for there would be two non-coms to get their discharge next
week. No, he hadn’t always been fond of poetry; only this last winter.
Will Carleton was a fine poet. “‘Member ’bout that feller who fell
through the ceilin’ into the butter-tub?—or was it a churn he
fell in?” But Ella Wheeler Wilcox was the finest poet who ever wrote a
line. “So all-fired hot,” she was. He had two books full of her things.
He always wrote verses when he felt sort of lonely or Cora had been
making him mad. “I write ’em about everything. To-day, at Retreat, now,
I thought they’d keep us standin’ there till kingdom come; an’ when
them bugles was blowin’ the last part, that goes down an’ up an’ down
again twice, an’ then has a little wiggle to it, yer know, why, the
words to it just popped into my head. Like this”: And he sang:

Rhymes came easy when he felt like it. Sometimes he could write
’em when he felt extra good, too. It had to be one way or the
other; he couldn’t write a bit when things were just common. And he
was awfully fond of Cora. He’d give up ‘most anything he had if

[561]

she’d only say she’d marry him. But Hansen was a Q. M. sergeant an’ put on
dog, an’ had reenlisted pay an’ all, an’ it cut a big figger with her.
He wasn’t worried about any of the other fellers; he could beat them
out easy; but Hansen had him buffaloed. “An’ I say, Sergeant, don’t you
tell Shorty I want ter get married or he won’t do a blame thing for
me.”

“Sure thing,” said Stone, “I won’t tell him. But look here, kid; if
I can work a pull for you,—an’ I’ll do the best I can,—will
the lady have you, after all?”

“I think I can work it. I believe she’s got a fondness for me, but
she’s that proud she wouldn’t never marry nothin’ but a sergeant;
her father was chief trumpeter, yer know. Say, do please give me a
recommend ter Shorty, an’ I’ll try mer very best ter do the work well
an’ be a good soldier.”

“Glad to hear you say that; ’cause, I warn you, if you don’t make
a good non-com, you get busted. We can’t run this troop on sentiment.
Yes, I’ll tell the captain I think you’ll do for a corporal, if that’ll
ease your mind any; as for your getting a sergeancy, that’s your own
lookout later. It all depends on what sort you prove yourself to be. If
it isn’t the right sort, back you go.”

“‘I was a corporal wanst; I was rejuiced aftherwards,'” murmured
Whitney. “Yes, Ted, I’ll tell Shorty, too, that you’d make a good
non-com. Will yo’ leave yo’ vuhses? I want to read ’em again.
Goodnight. Next time I see Miss Cora, I’ll make yo’ ears bu’n.” And, as
Ryan departed with abject thanks, visibly cheered, Whitney stretched
out his hand. “Speakin’ of Kiplin’, hand over that Lady-Friend
yonder—want to learn her; she’s a gem. Say, do yo’ think Hansen’s
in earnest over that?”

“Ask me an’ I say no. I know that Knudt down to the ground. He isn’t
the marryin’ kind.”

“Soldier of fortune, pyo’ an’ simple, he is,” said Whitney; “always
on the go; an’ do yo’ think he’s goin’ to pin himself down anywhere?
Not he. He’s only in this for the fun of the thing, an’ it’s a heap
better fo’ the little Cora girl if he stays out.”

“I’m with you. He couldn’t tie up to one girl, never in his bloomin’
life. Between you an’ me an’ the lamp-post, he’s goin’ to the bad in
more ways than one. ‘Wine, women, an’ song,’ an’ consequent mix-ups in
his accounts. He’s gettin’ too crooked to stay quartermaster. Shorty’s
about decided to put him back in the line. Why, only yesterday he came
over to me an’ said, ‘Say, make me out a afferdavid, will you? I lost
my carbine.’ I knew blame well he hadn’t lost it, so I said right
quick, ‘That so? How much you get for it?’

“‘Why,’ he says, ‘the man only gave me three-fif—. Say, Stone,
you’re darn smart! But help a feller out a bit, won’t you? I had to
have the money.’

“‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t. You get out of here. I’m not goin’ to
perjure my soul so’s you can have any three-fifteen, or three-fifty, or
whatever it was.’ The big yap! An’, you can bet your life, if it had
come down to his carbine, he’s been doin’ some tall monkeyin’ with the
accounts an’ the troop fund. An’ yet, with it all, I can’t help liking
him; there’s so many good things about him. If he’s your friend once,
he’s your friend for always—never knew such a man to stick. He’s
been awfully good to me when there’s no call to be, an’ helped me in
lots of little ways.”

“Yes,” said Whitney; “an’ the things he’s seen, an’ the places
he’s been, an’ the messes

[562]

he’s been mixed up in—an’ he knows
how to tell it, too. That takes with the little Cora girl, of co’se.
Better fo’ her, though, if he’d keep away. I like him all right fo’
myself, but he’s liable to be crooked anywheres. Little Teddy Ryan’s
clean strain, but he wouldn’t show up to much advantage beside Knudt.
Dixon goes out to-mo’w; I s’pose that’s what yo’re thinkin’ of fo’ the
kid. Who gets the sergeancy? Decided?”

“Yep. Melody’s jumped, an’ Sullivan gets it, but I don’t think
Shorty’s thought of who’d be corporal. I’ll try an’ fix it in the
mornin’.”

Accordingly, next morning Stone nominated the poet to be Corporal
Ryan.

“What the——!” said Shorty. “I’ve no use for a poet, I
was thinkin’ of Terry—what?”

“Well, only that Terry drinks an’ Ryan never does. I don’t think his
verse-makin’ will interfere with his duties; it hasn’t hitherto, an’ if
he doesn’t make good, we can try some one else.”

“Have it your own way, then. The way you run this troop is
scandalous. There’s not another T. C. in the army who gets bossed by
his Top the way I do.” And off went Shorty chuckling, having decided
two days before that Ryan was to be corporal, and well knowing that
Stone would defy even the colonel before he would run counter to an
order given by his adored captain.

---

Two nights later Stone and Whitney were again together.

“Well,” said Whitney, “I’ve just seen the new co’poral goin’, in
all his glory, to the little Cora girl’s. He didn’t take long to get
his stripes an’ chevrons.”

“To get! What you talkin’ about? He had ’em all ready. Stevens saw
him take ’em out of his locker already fixed on a new suit.”

“That’s what I call befo’handed. But the little cuss is so blame
happy over it all.”

“Yes,” said Stone; “happy, an’ wooin’ the Muse again, too. Hope he
don’t mix her up with his Cora. Will you look at this? And the length
of it? It’s an ode to the troop, an’ he hasn’t left out anybody. Wonder
where he got the time to do it all! Read the first three verses an’
then the last; they’re all you need to waste your time on.”

So Whitney read:

“Lariat! Gee! Wonder he didn’t put ‘an’ picket-pin.’ The second line
of that last verse is mighty ambiguous. Do you s’pose he means a hawse
or a dishono’able discharge?”

“Don’t know,” said Stone. “An’ look at the last two lines:

Its prayses sound from East to West
For all agree J troop is best.

Sounds like a soap advertisement to me. An’ up there about the
lieutenants. Wonder if an’ ‘unwiling pennence’ meant a reluctant pen
’cause he didn’t care to mention Spurs an’ had to have a rhyme?”

“It’s likely. But look yere, Jerry. Yo’ an’ I don’t breathe. Our
breath draws us.”

“Pretty strong breath it must be, then.”

“Hush, man! Yo’ goin’ to show these to Shorty?”

“I was thinkin’ maybe he wouldn’t like to think Ryan was still
writin’, now that he’s a corporal.”

“Ah, go on; show it. Shorty won’t care.”

And Shorty didn’t. Only, after a delighted snort over the ode, he
sent forth the order: “You tell him I say this has got to be the last.
If I catch him writin’ any more monkey-doodle verses, I’ll bust him
quick as a minute. If he wants to be a non-com in my troop, he’s got to
put his whole mind to it.”

Ryan obeyed, and, unsaddling his Pegasus, set himself to work
with such a will that as time went on he came to be one of the best
non-coms in the troop, particularly where the instruction of recruits
was concerned; for he seemed to have a special sympathy with them,
and a knack of imparting the correct way to do things; His suit with
Cora prospered, too, for she paid more attention to the corporal than
she had to the private; but, being past grand mistress of the art of
flirtation, she always contrived some little act or remark to chasten
her lover’s spirit and keep him sufficiently humble, as an offset

[563]

to any particular favoritism that might have uplifted his spirits; which
manoeuver always successfully puzzled Teddy. “First she’s all sweet as
candy; next minute I get the throw-down.” But he never despaired, and
came back strongly on the rebound, inquiring periodically, “Say, Cora,
you’re goin’ ter marry me when I get mer sergeancy, ain’t yer?” And she
would reply, laughing: “Yes, when you get to be a sergeant I’ll marry
yer; an’ that’ll be when the river catches fire.”

Time wore on, and the summer drew to a close. Hansen was no longer
the quartermaster-sergeant, so he was not such an impressive figure
as he had been. One payday Captain Campbell instructed Stone to read
the men a lecture on the sin of drunkenness. “Not that I mind a man’s
gettin’ drunk so much, but when the whole troop goes on a booze, it’s a
blame sight too much of a good thing. We’re not to have any such time
in J barracks as we did last month. You tell ’em that, an’ make it
red-hot.”

So Stone, translating liberally, read them a severe lecture, ending
up with: “An’ if any of you big yaps comes home drunk, don’t care who
he is, he gets put under arrest. Savvy? That’s straight.”

The troop paid honors to an ultimatum when it was paraded before
them, and it was a straight-walking, sober crowd that rounded up at
J barracks that night. But, shortly before reveille, sounds of song
and hilarity disturbed the sleepers, and Stone was obliged to rise
and place Sergeant Knudt Hansen under arrest. He had returned from
town in an exceedingly talkative frame of mind, and was now tipsily
enlightening his squad-room on the disgracefully small quantity of
drinks that could be bought on a sergeant’s pay.

“I hate to do it, old man,” said Stone, “but I’ll have to put you
under arrest. You know what I said, and now you’ve gone an’ done this
deliberately.”

“Aw right. ‘Sh mer own fault—only ‘sh bad exshample to ‘resht
shergeant before shquad-room o’ privatshes; mosht demoralizin’.”

“I’m sorry, Hansen, but I must do it. You are confined to quarters
for two days.” And Stone retired, grieved that Hansen, of all men,
should have been the one to suffer for the sake of an example.

“Gee!” said Brown, “I never thought Stone’d do that!”

“Wouldn’t he, though?” rejoined Ryan. “You bet your boots, a
sergeant looks all same buck to the Top.”

“Hansen’ll lay it up to him, you see,” said Hickey, looking at the
big man now sprawled out on his bunk in noisy slumber.

“Not on yer life, Dope,” said Brown. “Hansen’s too much sense fer
that. He’ll see the Top’s side of it.” And so it proved, for, after a
few half-laughs, half-apologetic words from his first sergeant, Hansen
agreed that there had been no other course to pursue.

“And, anyway,” he said, with a grin, “I’ll get a goot rest, yess. It
iss about time I loafed some. I shall sleep.”

Now, sleep was all very well for that day and part of the next, but
by the afternoon of the second day Sergeant Knudt Hansen’s active mind
and body became saturated with rest and extremely bored. He had read
everything he could lay his hands on, even including a vagrant copy of
“Edgeworth’s Moral Tales” that had wandered, Heaven knows how, into
the troop library. While affording him food for sarcastically profane
comment in the slimy sediment of at least six different languages, this
estimable work had, if anything, increased his ennui. His body began
actually to ache for action of some sort; almost anything would do at a
pinch.

Strolling disconsolately through the hall, whom should he chance
to see but Corporal Ryan, who was in charge of quarters for that day,
busily cleaning his saber (for the next day was Saturday), and singing
cheerfully, “‘You’re in the army now.'”

“Let up on that musical, you gamin; it iss not to the ear pleasant,”
growled Hansen. Besides his other grievance that Ryan’s cheerfulness
flicked on the raw, the little corporal had cut out the big sergeant
several times lately with Cora.

“Ah, g’wan an’ soak yer swelled head!” retorted Ryan respectfully,
and, bending to his work, began to carol forth the delectable ballad
of the “Rubber Dolly.” Hansen advanced into the room.

“See here, Meester Freshie, that iss no way to speak to your
sergeant! Oh, yess; I am knowing what you mean. You t’ank, because Cora
go with you a leetle, you can come it ofer me here, too—not?”

“You leave her name out o’ that,” said Teddy, straightening up and
reddening. “She’s got nothin’ ter do with it, an’ you leave her be.”

“Oho! The leetle man tank she iss so sweet and innocent a leetle
girl, I am not fit to speak of her—yess? Why, she—” And
Hansen started in to enumerate in no very choice language certain
fabricated insinuations against the character of the popular Miss Cora
Sheean. But they were barely out of his mouth before Teddy Ryan’s fist
was in it. Blindly the big

[564]

Swede struck back, catching Ryan on the
nose and drawing the blood; and then they started in in earnest.

“Hello, hello! What’s all this?” demanded Captain Campbell, popping
in on the scene like a vibrant little jack-in-the-box. Hansen drew off.
“He used language to me, sir, and I am hiss sergeant; it iss him that I
am teaching hiss place,” he explained sullenly.

“But, Cap’en,” cried Ryan, “he said—he said—I can’t tell
yer what he said,” he finished slowly.

“Well, I can tell what I’ll say, an’ pretty blame quick! Hansen,
you’re a bully, that’s what. Next time tackle some one nearer your
size; an’ you get three days’ confinement. Ryan (for heaven’s sake
get a handkerchief an’ wipe your nose), I’ll give you a day, too; for
fightin’ your sergeant an’ for gettin’ into a fight when you’re left
in charge of quarters.” Thus it was that the Captain ended the fight,
but the consequences stretched far beyond him and were in the hands of
Cora.

“You oughter been ter J Troop yesterday,” quoth Corporal Brown the
next evening, while sitting on Miss Cora Sheean’s front step. “Hansen
an’ Ryan had a fight. Hansen said somepin’, an’ Ryan went fer him, an’
they had it hot. Nobody was by, an’ Ryan won’t tell, so we don’t know
what Hansen said.”

Cora was staring at him with eyes wide with concern. “My Lord!” she
gasped, “is he hurt?”

“Naw, Hansen ain’t hurt none. He’s a fighter, an’ Ryan ain’t big
enough ter——”

“Stupid! I mean Teddy Ryan. Is he hurt?”

“Naw; only a black eye an’ a nose-bleed. Cap’en stopped ’em before
Hansen had a chance ter do much.”

“Thank Gawd!” sighed Cora, sinking back in relief. “Look here, Mr.
Brown, will you do me a favor? Will you tell Mr. Ryan that if he can
run over here early to-morrow mornin’, I got somethin’ I want ter give
him?”

When the bearer of tidings had departed, Cora sat up very straight,
with tightly clasped hands, repeating vacantly, with an ambiguous
mixture of pronouns, “He might er killed him—he might er killed
him!” For to her the fight between these men had only one meaning;
intuitively she knew herself to be the cause. “He fought for me,” she
said, “I know he did. An’ I want Teddy Ryan. I want him!“

Next morning she peeped out of the window and watched the approach
of the sturdy, honest-faced little corporal before she went to open the
door for him herself.

“You wanted ter see me?” he said, fingering his hat shyly.

“Yes; I—I heard you’d been in a fight. I—I wanted to
read you a lecture. That’s an awful eye you got, Mr. Ryan!”

“I’m sorry you don’t like it, Miss Cora, but I had to; you’d have
wanted me to if you’d known.”

“Oh!” cried Cora, and her heart whispered: “Then it was about me,
just as I thought, and the dear won’t tell me.” But aloud she said, “It
ain’t ever right to fight, an’ I didn’t think it of you, Mr. Ryan.”

“I had to,” he repeated awkwardly, and turned away. “Is that all you
had ter say ter me? I must go back; but I thought Brown said that you
had somethin’ ter give me.”

“Yes,” said Cora in a very scared, small voice. “I
have—me!”

“Cora! Do you mean it, girlie? Do you really mean it?” And two short
but strong arms went round her. “But I ain’t a sergeant yet, nor won’t
be for ever so long.”

“Oh, Teddy!” said Cora, and hid her face right over his second
button, “I ain’t lovin’ yer chevrons; I’m lovin’ you.”

Shorty received the joyous news in ominous silence. “When’s the
weddin’?” he demanded abruptly.

“Oh, sometime next month, I guess,” said the proud husband-to-be.

“Nothin’ of the sort. You get married next week; do you hear? No
mañana about this business; get it over as quick as possible. You’ll
be worthless to me for long enough, as it is. A great poet you are!
The whole thing was nothin’ but the girl, just as I told Sergeant
Stone.”

So J Troop had a wedding, and the whole troop turned out in
force, brave in full dress, from Shorty down to the latest junior
rook—the only member not present being Sergeant Hansen, who had
no interest in the proceedings. And the punch flowed so freely and so
strongly that every man who tried to enlighten the absent one told a
totally different story.

Spring had come again at Fort Hotchkiss, and one soft evening, as
Stone and Whitney were sitting on the porch, Sergeant Theodore Ryan,
now proudly sporting his three chevrons, came up to them, smiling a
wide-mouthed, foolish smile.

“Well, what’s up, hombre?”

“Recruits fer J Troop—over to my quarters.”

“Recruits! You don’t mean to say there’s two of ’em?”

Ryan nodded. “Twins,” he assented beamingly.

“‘Heaven meant things to go in twos, Cora,'” quoted Whitney.

Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Terry (Mrs. Carew)

One of the best “audiences” that actor or actress could wish for was Mr. Gladstone. He
used often to come and see the play at the Lyceum from a little seat in
the O. P. entrance, and he nearly always arrived five minutes before
the curtain went up. One night I thought he would catch cold—it
was a bitter night—and I lent him my white scarf.

He could always give his whole great mind to the matter in hand.
This made him one of the most comfortable people to talk to that I have
ever met.

I contrasted his punctuality, when he came to see “King Lear,” with
the unpunctuality of Lord Randolph Churchill, who came to see the play
the very next night with a party of men friends and arrived when the
first act was over. Lord Randolph was, all the same, a great admirer of
Henry Irving. He confessed to him once that he had never read a play of
Shakespeare’s in his life, but that after seeing Henry act he thought
it was time to begin. A very few days later he astonished us with his
complete and masterly knowledge of at least half a dozen of the plays.
He was a perfect person to meet at a dinner or supper—brilliantly
entertaining, and queerly simple. He struck one as being able to master
any subject that interested him, and, once a Shakespeare performance at
the Lyceum had fired his interest, there was nothing about that play,
or about past performances of it, which he did not know. His beautiful
wife, now Mrs. George Cornwallis West, wore a dress at supper one
evening which gave me the idea for the Lady Macbeth dress, afterwards
painted by Sargent. The bodice of Lady Randolph’s gown was trimmed all
over with green beetles’ wings. I told Mrs. Comyns Carr about it, and
she remembered it when she designed my Lady Macbeth dress.

The present Princess of Wales, when she was Princess May of Teck,
used often to come to the Lyceum with her mother, Princess Mary, and to
supper in the Beefsteak Room. In 1891 she chose to come as her birthday
treat, which was very flattering to us.

A record of those Beefsteak Room suppers would be a pleasant
thing to possess. I have such a bad memory. I see faces round the
table—the face of Liszt among them—but when I try to think
when it was, or how it was, the faces vanish. Singers were often among
Henry Irving’s guests in the Beefsteak Room—Patti, Melba, Calvé,
Albani, and many others.

I once watched Patti sing from behind the scenes at the Metropolitan
Opera House, New York. My impression from that point of view was that
she was actually a bird. She could not help singing. Her head,
flattened on top, her nose, tilted downwards like a lovely little beak,
her throat, swelling and swelling as it poured out that extraordinary
volume of sound, all made me think that she must have been a
nightingale before she was transmigrated into a human being. I imagine
that Tetrazzini, whom I have not yet heard, must have this bird-like
quality.

The dear, kind-hearted Melba has always been a good friend of mine.
The first time I met her was in New York at a supper party, and she had
a bad cold, and therefore a frightful speaking voice for the moment. I
shall never forget the shock it gave me. Thank goodness, I very soon
[566]
afterwards heard her again when she hadn’t a cold, and she spoke as
exquisitely as she sang. She was one of the first to offer her services
for my Jubilee performance at Drury Lane, but unfortunately she was ill
when the day came and could not sing. She had her dresses in “Faust”
copied from mine by Mrs. Nettleship, and I came across a note from her
the other day, thanking me for having introduced her to “an angel.”
Another note sent round to me during a performance of “King Arthur” in
Boston I shall always prize:

“You are sublime, adorable, ce soir…. I wish I were a
millionaire—I would throw all my millions at your feet. If
there is another procession, tell the stage-manager to see those imps
of Satan don’t chew gum. It looks awful.

Love. Melba.”

I think at that time it was the solemn procession of mourners
following the dead body of Elaine who were chewing gum, but we always
had to be prepared for it among our American “supers,” whether they
were angels or devils or courtiers.

In “Faust” we “carried” about six leading devils for the Brocken
scene and recruited the forty others from local talent in the different
towns that we visited. Their general instructions were to throw up
their arms and look fierce at certain music cues. One night I noticed
a girl going through the most terrible contortions with her jaw, and
thought I must say something. “That’s right, dear. Very good, but don’t
exaggerate.”

“How?” was all the answer that I got; and the girl continued to make
faces as before. I was contemplating a second attempt, when Templeton,
the lime-light man, who had heard me speak to her, touched me gently on
the shoulder. “Beg pardon, miss, she don’t mean it. She’s only chewing
gum.”

One of my earliest friends among literary folk was Mr. Charles
Dodgson—or Lewis Carroll—or “Alice in Wonderland.” Ah, now
you know what I am talking about. I can’t remember when I didn’t know
him. I think he must have seen Kate act as a child, and having given
her “Alice”—he always gave his young friends “Alice” at once by
way of establishing pleasant relations—he made progress as the
years went on through the whole family. Finally he gave “Alice” to my
children.

He was a splendid theatre-goer, and took the keenest interest in all
the Lyceum productions, frequently writing to me to point out slips in
the dramatist’s logic which only he would ever have noticed. He did not
even spare Shakespeare. I think he wrote these letters for fun, as some
people make puzzles, anagrams, or limericks.

Mr. Dodgson’s kindness to children was wonderful. He really loved
them and put himself out for them. The children he knew who wanted
to go on the stage were those who came under my observation, and
nothing could have been more touching than his ceaseless industry on
their behalf. This letter to my sister Floss is characteristic of his
“Wonderland” style when writing to children:

“My dear Florence:

“Ever since that heartless piece of conduct of yours (I allude
to the affair of the Moon and the blue silk gown), I have regarded
you with a gloomy interest, rather than with any of the affection of
former years—so that the above epithet ‘dear’ must be taken as
conventional only, or perhaps may be more fitly taken in the sense
in which we talk of a ‘dear’ bargain, meaning to imply how much it
has cost us; and who shall say how many sleepless nights it has cost
me to endeavour to unravel (a most appropriate verb) that ‘blue silk
gown’?

“Will you please explain to Tom about that photograph of the
family group which I promised him? Its history is an instructive
one, as illustrating my habits of care and deliberation. In 1867 the
picture was promised him, and an entry made in my book. In 1869, or
thereabouts, I mounted the picture on a large card, and packed it in
brown paper. In 1870, or 1871, or thereabouts, I took it with me to
Guildford, that it might be handy to take with me when I went up to
town. Since then I have taken it two or three times to London, and on
each occasion (having forgotten to deliver it to him) I brought it back
again.

“This was because I had no convenient place in London to leave it
in. But now I have found such a place. Mr. Dubourg has kindly taken
charge of it—so that it is now much nearer to its future owner
than it has been for seven years. I quite hope, in the course of
another year or two, to be able to remember to bring it to your house;
or perhaps Mr. Dubourg may be calling even sooner than that and take it
with him. You will wonder why I ask you to tell him instead of writing
myself. The obvious reason is that you will be able, from sympathy, to
put my delay in the most favourable light; to make him see that, as
hasty puddings are not the best of puddings, so hasty judgments are
not the best of judgments, and that he ought to be content to wait
even another seven years for his picture, and to sit ‘like patience on
a monument, smiling at grief.’

[567]

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

FROM THE PAINTING BY J. MCCLURE HAMILTON, DONE AT
HAWARDEN CASTLE IN 1890

“This quotation, by the way, is altogether a misprint. Let me
explain it to you. The passage originally stood, ‘They sit, like
patients on the Monument, smiling at Greenwich.’ In the next edition
‘Greenwich’ was printed short, ‘Greenh,’ and so got gradually altered
into ‘Grief.’ The allusion, of course, is to the celebrated Dr. Jenner,
who used to send all his patients to sit on the top of the Monument
(near London Bridge) to inhale fresh air, promising them that, when
they were well enough, they should go to ‘Greenwich Fair.’ So, of
course, they always looked out towards Greenwich, and sat smiling to
think of the treat in store for them. A play was written on the subject
of their inhaling the fresh air, and was for some time attributed to
him (Shakespeare), but it is certainly not in his style. It was called
‘The Wandering Air,’ and was lately revived at the Queen’s Theatre. The
custom of sitting on the Monument was given up when Dr. Jenner went mad,

Copyrighted by the London Stereoscopic Co.

LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL

[568]

and insisted on it that the air was worse up
there, and that the lower you went the more
airy it became. Hence he always called those
little yards, below the pavement, outside the
kitchen windows, ‘the kitchen airier,’ a name
that is still in use.

Copyrighted by W. & D. Downey

THE PRINCESS OF WALES

TO WHOM HENRY IRVING GAVE A BIRTHDAY SUPPER IN THE BEEFSTEAK ROOM OF THE LYCEUM IN 1891

“All this information you are most welcome to
use, the next time you are in want of something
to talk about. You may say you learned it from
‘a distinguished etymologist,’ which is perfectly
true, since anyone who knows me by sight can
easily distinguish me from all other etymologists.

“What parts are you and Polly now playing?

“Believe me to be (conventionally)

“Yours affectionately,
C. Dodgson..”

No two men could be more unlike than Mr.
Dodgson and Mr. J. M. Barrie, yet there are
more points of resemblance than “because
there’s a ‘b’ in both!” If “Alice in Wonderland”
is the children’s classic of the library,
and one perhaps even more loved by the grown-up
children than by the others, “Peter Pan” is
the children’s stage classic, and here again
elderly children are the most devoted admirers.
I am a very old child, nearly old enough to be
a “beautiful great-grandmother” (a part that I
am sure Mr. Barrie could write for me), and I
go and see “Peter” year after year and love him
more each time.

MELBA AS MARGUERITE IN “FAUST”

There is one advantage in being a grown-up child—you are not afraid of
the pirates or the crocodile.

I first became an ardent lover of Mr. Barrie
through “Sentimental Tommy” and I simply
had to write and tell him how hugely I had
enjoyed it. In reply I received this letter from
Tommy himself:

“Dear Miss Ellen Terry:

“I just wonder at you. I noticed that Mr.
Barrie, the author (so-called), and his masterful
wife had a letter they wanted to conceal from
me, so I got hold of it, and it turned out to be
from you, and not a line to me in it! If you
like the book, it is me you like, not him, and
it is to me you should send your love, not to
him. Corp thinks, however, that you did not
like to make the first overtures, and if that is
the explanation, I beg herewith to send you
my warm love (don’t mention this to Elspeth),
and to say that I wish you would come and
have a game with us in the Den (Don’t let on
to Grizel that I invited you). The first moment
I saw you, I said to myself ‘This is the kind I
like,’ and while the people round about me were
only thinking of your acting, I was wondering
which would be the best way of making you my
willing slave, and I beg to say that I believe I
have ‘found a way,’ for most happily the very
ones I want most to lord it over are the ones
who are least able to resist me.

“We should have ripping fun. You would
be Jean MacGregor, captive in the Queen’s
Bower, but I would climb up at the peril of
my neck to rescue you, and you would faint in
my strong arms; and wouldn’t Grizel get a
turn when she came upon you and me whispering
sweet nothings in the Lovers’ Walk. I think
it advisable to say in writing that I would only
mean them as nothings (because Grizel is really
my one), but so long as they were sweet, what
does that matter (at the time)? And, besides,
you could love me genuinely, and I would carelessly
kiss your burning tears away.

“Corp is a bit fidgetty about it, because he
says I have two to love me already, but I feel
confident that I can manage more than two.

“Trusting to see you at the Cuttle Well on
Saturday when the eight o’clock bell is ringing,

I am, Your Indulgent Commander,

“T. Sandys.“

“P. S.—Can you bring some of the Lyceum
armour with you, and two hard-boiled eggs?”

Henry Irving once thought of producing Mr.
Barrie’s play “The Professor’s Love Story.”
He was delighted with the first act, but when
he read the rest he did not think the play would
do for the Lyceum. It was the same with many
plays which were proposed for us. The ideas
sounded all right, but as a rule the treatment
was too thin, and the play, even if good, on too
small a scale for the theatre.

Mrs. Craigie’s Great Promise

One of our playwrights from whom I always expected a great play
was Mrs. Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes). A little one-act play of hers,
“Journeys End in Lovers’ Meeting,” in which I first acted with
Johnston Forbes Robertson and Terriss at a special matinée in 1894,
brought about a friendship between us that lasted until her death.
Of her it could indeed be said with poignant truth, “She should have
died hereafter.” Her powers had not nearly reached their limit.

MRS. CRAIGIE (JOHN OLIVER HOBBES)

From the painting by Miss Maud Porter

Lent by the Press Picture Agency.

C. L. DODGSON (LEWIS CARROLL)

WHO GAVE “ALICE IN WONDERLAND” TO ALL OF ELLEN TERRY’S
FAMILY

Pearl Craigie had a man’s intellect, a woman’s
wit and apprehension. “Bright,” as the Americans
say, she always managed to be even in the
dullest company, and she knew how to be
silent at times, to give the “other fellow” a
chance. Her executive ability was extraordinary.
Wonderfully tolerant, she could at
the same time not easily forgive any meanness
or injustice that seemed to her deliberate. Hers
was a splendid spirit.

I shall always bless that little play of hers
which first brought me near to so fine a creature.
I rather think that I never met any
one who gave out so much as she did. To
me, at least, she gave, gave all the time. I
hope she was not exhausted after our long
“confabs.” I was most certainly refreshed and
replenished.

Photograph by the London Autotype Co.

J. M. BARRIE

FROM THE PAINTING BY LESLIE BROOKE. BARRIE’S PLAY, “ALICE-SIT-BY-THE-FIRE,”
WHICH HE WROTE FOR MISS TERRY, WAS PRODUCED BY HER IN 1905

The first performance of “Journeys End in
Lovers’ Meeting” she watched from a private
box with the Princess of Wales (our present
Queen) and Henry Irving. She came round
afterwards just burning with enthusiasm and
praising me for work which was really not good.
She spoiled me for other women.

Her best play was, I think, “The Ambassador,”
in which Violet Vanbrugh, who is now
Mrs. Bouchier, played a pathetic part very
beautifully, and made a great advance in her
profession. There was some idea of Pearl
Craigie writing a play for Henry Irving and me,
but it never came to anything. There was a
play on the same subject as “The School for
Saints,” and another about Guizot.

Feb. 11, 1898.

“My very dear Nell:

“I have an idea for a real four-act comedy
(in these matters nothing daunts me!), founded
on a charming little episode in the private lives
of Princess Lieven (the famous Russian ambassadress),
and the celebrated Guizot, the French
Prime Minister and historian. I should have to
veil the identity slightly, and also make the
story a husband-and-wife story; it would be
more amusing this way. It is comedy from

[572]

beginning to end. Sir Henry would make a
splendid Guizot, and you the ideal Madame de
Lieven. Do let me talk it over with you. ‘The
School for Saints’ was, as it were, a born biography.
But the Lieven-Guizot idea is a play.

“Yours ever affectionately,

“Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie.”

In another letter she writes:

“I am changing all my views about so-called
‘literary’ dialogue. It means pedantry. The
great thing is to be lively.”

“Captain Brassbound’s Conversion”

It has always been a reproach against Henry
Irving in some mouths that he neglected the
modern English playwright; and of course the
reproach included me to a certain extent. I
was glad, then, to show that I could act in the
new plays when Mr. Barrie wrote “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire”
for me, and after some years’ delay I
was able to play in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s “Captain
Brassbound’s Conversion.” Of course I
could not have played in “little” plays of this
school at the Lyceum with Henry Irving, even
if I had wanted to; they are essentially plays
for small theatres and a single “star.”

572-1

Copyrighted by Window & Grove

ELLEN TERRY AND HER SON, GORDON CRAIG, IN “THE DEAD HEART”

In Mr. Shaw’s “A Man of Destiny” there were
two good parts, and Henry, at my request, considered
it, although it was always difficult to fit
a one-act play into the Lyceum bill. For reasons
of his own Henry never produced Mr.
Shaw’s play, and there was a good deal of fuss
made about it at the time, 1897. But ten years
ago Mr. Shaw was not so well known as he is
now, and the so-called “rejection” was probably
of use to him as an advertisement. “A Man of
Destiny” has been produced since, but without
any great success. I wonder if Henry and I
could have done more with it?

Copyrighted by Window & Grove

ELLEN TERRY AS MISTRESS PAGE IN “MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR”

At this time Mr. Shaw and I frequently corresponded.
It began by my writing to ask him
as musical critic of the Saturday Review, to tell
me frankly what he thought of the chances of a
composer-singer friend of mine. He answered
“characteristically,” and we developed a perfect
fury for writing to each other. Sometimes the
letters were on business, sometimes they were
not, but always his were entertaining, and mine
were, I suppose, “good copy,” as he drew the
character of Lady Cecily Waynflete in “Brassbound”
entirely from my letters. He never met
me until after the play was written. In 1902
he sent me this ultimatum:—

“3rd April, 1902.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw’s compliments to Miss
Ellen Terry.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw has been approached by
Mrs. Langtry with a view to the immediate and
splendid production of ‘Captain Brassbound’s
Conversion.’

[573]

“Mr. Bernard Shaw, with the last flash of a trampled-out love, has repulsed Mrs. Langtry
with a petulance bordering on brutality.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw has been actuated in this
ungentlemanly and unbusinesslike course by an
angry desire to seize Miss Ellen Terry by the
hair and make her play Lady Cecily.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw would be glad to know
whether Miss Ellen Terry wishes to play Martha
at the Lyceum instead.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw will go to the length of
keeping a minor part open for Sir Henry Irving
when ‘Faust’ fails, if Miss Ellen Terry desires it.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw lives in daily fear of Mrs.
Langtry recovering sufficiently from her natural
resentment of his ill manners to re-open the
subject.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw begs Miss Ellen Terry to
answer this letter.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw is looking for a new cottage
or house in the country and wants advice
on the subject.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw craves for the sight of
Miss Ellen Terry’s once familiar handwriting.”