The Vinegar Saint

by Hughes Mearns

BOOK THREE

The Call to be Free

It was all very well to say, “Drink Me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry: “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked poison or not.”... She had never forgotten that if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

XVI
RATS!

THE Levering spring-house had long ago gone to pieces to furnish part of the masonry of a new workshop, designed by Bardek and built by Mac, with everybody assisting. They picked a spot at the north of the orchard, where the light was right, and distant enough from habitation to allow for the most riotous hammering. A great chimney with both hand- and foot-bellows forge was the center about which the one-story, roomy structure spread.

The Leverings hardly knew what was going on. They had this satisfaction, however: Gorgas was on her own grounds, Mac was always within hail and Bardek, his wife, and the two shining-eyed youngsters had so won the affection of everyone that they were added as theoretic protectors. When young men called, they sauntered around to the cozy shop, looked on, smoked at their ease and drank continuous tea and ate toasted muffins. Kate often spent mornings there, pottering over punched brass, and thinking, to the pantomimic disgust of Bardek, that she was a workman, too. But no one seemed quite aware that a serious art was being studied in that busy quarter.

Mrs. Levering began to get inklings of the deep nature of the undertaking when a big order for a complete hand-wrought silver service was finished, dispatched, and the check forwarded. Bardek had been the business manager in securing that and other orders which followed, and he had overseen the designing and had plotted out the work; but the labor and the return were placed entirely to Gorgas’ account.

“My dear child,” the mother’s eyes focused agreeably upon the amount. “This is dreadful! You’re actually making money! Are you sure you are not taking advantage of someone? How could a little girl like you earn so much?”

But she soon accustomed herself to that sort of thing, and promptly let Gorgas take out a separate bank account, and thriftily watched the amount swell. It was quite proper, she assured herself, for a girl to make money, provided she stayed at home, and provided, too, it was something respectable, like—uh—art. Of course, this metal business was art; at least, the silver part was—she was somewhat dubious over the copper, really, the most artistic accomplishment of the shop; and the settings of copper and semi-precious stones, the hand-wrought gold rings—that was art and respectable. She wished, of course, that there were no necessity for the ugly forge and for the heavy malleting; but then, that was all done in the secluded shop away from the street. To think that all this silly pottering had turned out to be worth something! What a wonderful adviser was Allen Blynn! When she thought of the pleasant checks, she was grateful that she had been too busy at the time to oppose the building of the shop.

But in spite of the obvious fact that Gorgas was able to earn her own way, the mother continued to keep a controlling hand, as if the child were still a toddler needing protection, and not an independent young woman of seventeen: her letters had still to be O. K.’d, the hours of retiring were not to be changed, and the other claims of womanhood, the style of gown and hat and the mode of wearing the hair—these were still matters of maternal jurisdiction. And being the younger daughter she had more mothering—as is often the case—than Kate, who had long ago secured her rights to do as she pleased.

There were suggestions of rebellion and occasional flurries of attack and retreat. At seventeen, Gorgas had gained her right to give all her mornings to the “smitty,” as the shop was locally dubbed; she had won out in her right to play tennis and hockey, to bicycle and—an ability discovered by Bardek—to fence.

“Why can’t you just ride or drive and take walks?” the mother had complained. “These other games are so boyish and ‘tough,’ my dear. They give you a color like a hoyden—positively I was ashamed of you last Wednesday at dinner—and you have a stride like a young rowdy. Of course, I can’t tell you it’s not ladylike. I see that has no effect upon you; but you might consider how I feel when you walk through the streets in that tennis costume—I suppose one might call it a costume. In a boy it is all right; young Morris is quite attractive; but you, you look positively unsexed, Gorgas—I’m almost ashamed to use the word. And really, my dear, I must object to your putting off stays. You will never come around if you don’t begin early. Your figure is—well, is there no proper womanly argument that can reach you?”

“Health, first, mother,” Gorgas would say firmly. “I work hard all morning, I practice at music, to please you, and I must keep up my reading. Then, open air for me and a stiff fight and a shower. That makes me sing; makes me fit to do things. I wouldn’t have an original design in my head if I cooped up like most women. They are talking about voting! I’m with them there, but good Heavens! they could be enfranchised tomorrow if they could only break loose and live a decent, wholesome life.”

The severest quarrel was over clothes. Gorgas’ artistic sense was a deep-rooted thing. She protested, but without result, against the slave-like selection of “what everybody was wearing.” Women seemed to be uniformed like a squad of infantry, irrespective of individual build or personal taste. That repelled her. Not that she wanted to do anything eccentric; it was just her desire to be inconspicuous that led to a wish to study herself and, within the restrictions of the prevailing vogue, to clothe herself true to her own personal note.

Blynn had walked with her on one of his rare holidays home—lecturing usually kept him busy in vacation time—when she was driven out of herself and into stolidity by the mere fact of an outrageous puffed-sleeve affair, over which her mother had spent hours of selecting. To Gorgas, it was like wearing some other person’s clothing. She had gawked about, submerged in self-consciousness; and her chagrin she expressed in vindictive attacks on the unoffending Allen.

Gorgas resolved to end it then and there. One afternoon in February, 1893—Gorgas was seventeen and a half, but felt tremendously older—she interviewed the chief cutter of a smart Walnut street tailoring establishment and outlined to him her plans for a series of frocks and coats that made his eyes glisten. She produced a check for part-payment, and made it peremptorily clear that her own ideas were to prevail or no sale.

“Mother, I’ve ordered some spring clothes,” she let the news out bluntly. “I won’t stand being dressed and undressed and being put to bed any longer. You’d better get used to the idea, for it’s to be the thing. I’m paying my way now and I’ve got to go it on my own.”

And then she left immediately for the “smitty.”

Those were stormy days in the Levering family, but the disturbance was all from the elders. Gorgas was serene and calm. They were sure Gorgas would adopt some reckless fashion that would put them down before everybody, probably a bifurcated skirt or an out-and-out Dr. Mary Walker attire. There was much talk in the air at that period of boldly abolishing the dress distinction of sex. But when Gorgas appeared before them one afternoon in a neat, inconspicuous, tailor-made gown, right as to style, but with a mysterious wonder in it of something just beyond the style, the family capitulated. Capitulated? They broke ranks and rushed over one another to cheer the enemy.

Mount Airy, after all, had always been a country village. Its main charm, in spite of its nearness to a large city, was not its suburbanity, but its rurality. And it was well-known that the most careful copying by Mount Airyites of the designs in Godey’s “Lady Book,” would always be crude and home-made when compared with exactly the same pattern worn by the city ladies who could be seen any day moving in and out of certain exclusive in-town shops. The distinguishing difference is not so much one of material as of art.

In that apparel Gorgas could have argued the family out of its house and grounds. Oh, the subtle overpowering authority of the right gown! It will give strength to weakness, add courage to the natural craven, and overawe even Lizzie-in-the-kitchen. If I were a physician I would make most of my prescriptions on the blanks of proper tailors. Most women are not ill, they are simply inadequately gowned; their strength is oozing away through the terrible struggle to feel better than they look. And it is not primarily a question of money; it is a matter of taste and intelligence.

The young men responded instantly to the new touch. They didn’t know how it had happened, but the news passed quickly along that Gorgas Levering was “all right.” Callers, formal and informal, of all ages from sixteen to thirty-five, dropped in or begged permission, according to the type. The “smitty,” on Thursday afternoons, became a sort of rendezvous for all this fluttering group. Work and play were declared off, and the reception of guests was in order. Mrs. Levering occasionally dropped in, in her capacity as overseer, but Kate was always present, the mother’s viceroy; and Bea Wilcox and a few of Gorgas’ intimates; and, of course, Bardek.

Here they sang, chatted and danced as the mood seized. And on clear, summer afternoons there was always the tennis-court and the shadowy orchard; in winter there was hockey and skating on the Wissahickon at Valley Green, or, more often, roastings and toastings before the huge log fire in the “smitty.”

Gorgas’ permanent exhibition of unsold work brought other visitors. These came at all times. Usually, it was Bardek’s business to do the explaining and the selling, a duty he loved, and some of the customers became regular visitors and eventually slipped over into the Thursday afternoon group. Not that the Thursday afternoon group could be kept away at other times. Gorgas rather welcomed the opportunity to chat while she worked, but she always worked—except once.

One Thursday in April Morris took Gorgas aside and asked if he couldn’t come the next day in the morning and have a private talk with her.

She looked him over suspiciously.

“We’ve been partners for a long while, Neddie,” she summed up her look. “This sounds mighty strange and mysterious. Give me a hint beforehand. What’s up?”

“Can’t do it here,” he scowled at the crowd. “I’ll be in at about eleven. What d’y’ say?”

“How absurd you are,” she held him off to search his face. “You know anyone may see me at any time.”

“I know,” he hastened to explain awkwardly in the midst of the chatter and movement. “This is different. This is something—I can’t tell you here.”

“Well,” she patted him on the arm, “come along, sonny. You’ll have to talk loud. I’ve got a special fine lot of hammering to do that won’t wait.”

That night she tossed about and brought herself to book.

Morris had been behaving lately in a way they do before they begin to go to pieces and become temporary asses in the presence of their Titania. He had lost his fine spirit of camaraderie. He had been glaring at his fraternity pin, which Gorgas used, like a dozen other such articles, to adorn the dress it best suited. He had been moody and listless—the usual symptoms; and he had been hanging about like a stupid.

Try as she might she couldn’t get a thrill out of the thought. Ned Morris was a brother; that was all; a splendid chum, the sort at fellow you get terribly used to and wouldn’t give up without a fight. But anything else— Horrors! It was profanation of friendship to think it.

Nevertheless, she enjoyed the prospect of an adorer. It gave her the most unaccountable feeling of elation and self-pity and yearning and depression—all enjoyable sensations, every one. It attacked her so hard that she arose at sun-up, ate no breakfast, and let the metal work slide.

“You do not work today?” Bardek looked up from his bench, where he was inlaying a hair-like design of silver in the softest copper.

“Nope.”

“You are sick, may be?”

“Goodness, no!”

Hammer, hammer, hammer.

“Goin’ to jus’—loaf, eh?”

“Rather.”

Hammer, hammer.

“Ah! you fight the French revolution all over again with the mother?” he guessed. “Bome! bome! Down will go t’e Bastile. Huzza! Out come the prisoners—little ladies who t’eir mutters have boxed up! Vive la révolution des jeunes filles!”

Hammer, hammer, hammer.

“What?” he looked up.

“Wrong tack, Bardek. Take in a reef.”

“Eh? What?”

“And let down your jib.”

“Nom du nom! What language you talk?” Tap, tap, tap. “Somebody come, eh?”

“Yes; Morris.”

“Ho-ho-o-o!” softly, as much as to say, “So that’s the way the wind blows.” “Ho-ho-o-o!” louder, meaning, “I’ve been suspecting that boy.” “Ho-ho-o-o!” very wisely, with a glance that said, “I understand what’s in your little head, missy!”

“Oh, rats! Bardek.”

She arose and tried a few strokes, but soon gave it up.

“Perhaps Morris he would take share in partnership?” Bardek inquired with grotesque sympathy.

“Rats!” she called back.

“R-rats!” Bardek laughed as he tapped. “Rats—it is the meaning of what? When I say, ‘How beautiful is Miss Gorgas, this morning,’ Miss Gorgas say, ‘Rats!’—that is to say, ‘Thank you so much for compliment.’ When I say, ‘She work too hard, she must play more,’ Miss Gorgas say, ‘Rats!’—that is to say, ‘Do you think I small child, eh?’ If I say, ‘When you going marry, Miss Gorgas?’ Miss Gorgas say, ‘Rats!’—which is to say, ‘Shut up, you ol’ fool, and mind own business.’ It is vairy convenient; one nice, little word do for everything. It mean, ‘I don’t believe you’; it mean, ‘Go bag your head’; it mean, ‘Not on your tin-type.’ Jus’ now it mean, ‘Mr. Morris will talk to Miss Gorgas on vairy important matter. Ol’ Bardek better take holiday and fix more w’ite-wash in his house.’”

“Rats! Bardek,” she stopped him. “Stay where you are. I don’t want to seem to be clearing everybody out for Ned Morris. If we want to talk privately, we’ll go into the orchard. It’s warm enough outside.”

Bardek grinned so openly that she was forced into some sort of explanation. She talked earnestly and Bardek affected to be perfectly guileless.

“Morris is just a good friend, Bardek; not a thing more. Not a thing more.”

“Rats!” roared Bardek, suddenly slipping from earnest solicitude into loud irony. “Oh, I love that nice, easy, little word. It saves so much breath. I say, ‘Rats!’ and I mean, oh, a whole lot. With one word I say, ‘Don’t you be telling me all that foolishness about friend business and all that. The friend business is all played out. It had one grand failure, long ago, when Adam thought he try. Mr. Morris, he just like Adam. He hang ’round ’while and watch animals and sleep in the sun. Then, one day he wake up and he say he want nice, long talk, all alone; and Eve, she dress up in nice clothes, she can’t work, can’t hammer, can’t sit down, can’t walk, can’t do one thing but look and look and look at not’ing at all, and say, ‘Rats!’ All that for one little word!”

“Double fault, Bardek; you’re putting too many in the net.”

That was one way thoroughly to mystify the earnest student of English. Bardek studied hard, but never succeeded in getting the hang of American sporting terms. “Get a good lead! Go down with his arm! Two out; play for the batter! 68-22, through left-guard!” These phrases seemed to have meaning to Americans, but not one spark of intelligence was in them for the many-languaged Bohemian.

“I put too many into the net?” he repeated. “T’e English cannot be one of my native speeches, but when I see all these nice—” he drawled it into something like “nah-ees”—“young boys flying so like butterfly ’round Miss Gorgas I zink she do not put one into the net!”

Gorgas was busy sorting out some long branches of fresh willow for a corner decoration. She looked over sideways at Bardek, who tapped away with the air of a man who has made a hit. But she silenced him.

“Play in, boys; he’s going to bunt,” she remarked and watched with satisfaction the grin fade from Bardek’s face and in its place appear the rapt expression of a puzzled linguist.

“What is this—‘bunt’?” he asked at last, his mind completely off guard.

“It is an unexpected bingle, Bardek, that puts the infield in the soup,” she explained serenely as she left the “smitty” for more willow branches.

XVII
AN UNEXPECTED BINGLE

FOR awhile Bardek tapped away and struggled with the slang of the ’90’s. “‘Bingle,’” he murmured and shook his head. “‘Bunt,’ ‘Soup,’ I have lost the art of taking in languages. I grow old. My cerebellum turns to that same ‘soup.’”

Bardek sighed, a genuine old-fashioned sigh, full of undefined longing. Uncomfortable feelings swept over him, whose source he knew not.

“Nom de la manne céleste!” he ejaculated, putting down his hammer. Wide-eyed, he gazed out of the window toward the fast budding maples. It was a French day, sans doute. “Spring!” he exulted aloud in the appropriate language. “How it is ever beautiful, the spring. In France, best of all, but even here in Mount Airy it is good, the spring. In my old trunk the sap goes up, up, and spins my thoughts about. I am full of ideas in the spring, little shoots of thinking and buds and leaves of grand notions. How I can do things in the spring!” But he stood listlessly gazing. “Do? Bah! I can do nothing but dream of what I can never do; ... but it is good.”

Slowly his mind drifted to Gorgas and then back to the starting point of their conversation. His face lighted up, beamed with sympathy.

“So, that is what it is!” he chuckled. “He is a good fellow, Neddie. Nice, clean American fellow. But he is only boy wit’ face like girl. How young is all America! When I was twenty I was man. I had been in army. I had learned my work in life. I had seen the world. Now I am forty and old man. All the little American children of thirty, forty, fifty,—Professor Blynn, Miss Kate, Mrs. Levering, they all come to ask me what to do; me, Bardek! I have the wisdom of old gentleman about to sit down and die. Phoo-ee!” He puffed out a big breath and looked joyfully out of the window. “And I am ten t’ousand years younger than all of them put together.”

The flooding thoughts of spring were too much for Bardek. He doffed his apron, put his tools carefully in their racks and made ready to get out into the open. He hummed like a prowling bumble-bee as he tossed things about.

“Hello, Bardek. Where’s Gorgas?” Morris spoke from the doorway.

“Ah!” Bardek turned jubilantly, came forward in great strides and shook the young man warmly by both hands. “She is here! She is here!” he exulted, looking the astonished Morris over joyfully. “Jus’ you sit yourself. The big easy chair? No!” He dragged forward a cushioned settle. “V’là! It is the best for little tête-à-tête. Oh, you lucky young man! To have Miss Gorgas to talk to all alone. See! I will jus’ pull down this window thing, as— Where is she, that Eve who cannot work this morning—” He looked anxiously out of the door toward the orchard.

“Can’t work?” Morris inquired. “What’s the trouble, Bardek? Ill?”

“Ill?” Bardek exploded. “Oh, yes. She is—ho!—yes, it is a disease, vairy, vairy dangerous. It is good to get it early, like the chicken-poxes and measles. Hey!” looking at him curiously. “You, Neddie; don’t you ever feel like kicking out all the little life-businesses and rushing out into woods away from every one, to weep and laugh and sleep and swear and pray? Look inside. Close your eyes and look inside. Have you not got terrible voice in t’ere what say: Prenez la clef des champs! Faites l’école buissonnière! Take the key of the fields and play truant in the woods!... Day like dese! How can men stay in chicken-houses!”

He slipped out of a workman’s blouse and ruffled his hair excitedly.

“That’s spring fever, Bardek,” Morris explained. “Guess I’ve got a touch of it, too.” He yawned and began to make a cigarette. Then he turned the logs over in the grate.

“Miss Gorgas,” Bardek motioned eloquently toward the orchard, “is jus’ out in the trees, watching young leaves come.”

Bardek struck an expectant attitude.

Morris drew the settle up to the fire and picked up a book.

“The spring fever have made you dumb, perhaps? I say she is jus’ out! Two, t’ree steps,” he looked out of the window, “at the big cherry she is now ... eh?”

“Thanks, Bardek,” Morris yawned and stretched his legs. “I’ll just smoke and read a little.... She’ll be back presently, I suppose.”

The Bohemian stared. Then he seized a huge hammer and smote mightily, like Tubalcain himself.

“Holy mackerel, Bardek!” Morris turned, laughing. “This is only a stone hut, you know.... What y’ making, a battleship?”

“You have not put many in t’e net lately, eh?” Bardek stopped to inquire irrelevantly. He was experimenting with the new phrases.

“Oh, my full share, I fancy. What makes you ask?”

Bardek was bitterly indignant, but the emotion was lost on Morris’ back.

“I though’ you came here dis morning to, ah, bunt. What?”

“Bunt?”

“Yess.... Bingle.”

“Bingle?”

“Yess, bingle.”

“It’s lost on me, old man. I came here to talk to Gorgas.”

He resumed his reading, smoked at leisure and turned over pages carelessly. Bardek smote one vicious blow and exclaimed:

“Then you don’t want to—ah—get in the soup wit’ Miss Gorgas, eh?”

“What?”

Morris swung completely around.

“You have spring fever? You? Yah!” Bardek ejaculated his disgust in unspellable exclamations. “Ah, non! non! non! non! non! You are lazy? Yess. You like comfortable seat at small fire? Yess. But you still froze up like dead tree. The sap, it not yet run up. I tell you, ‘Miss Gorgas is in orchard.’ You say, ‘Oh, vairy well,’ and fix nice cushions to sit. I say, ‘She is one, two, t’ree step away.’ You roll cigarette and read book. Nom d’une pipe! How you sit and smoke when live woman wait for you, eh? One, two, t’ree step at the big cherry, eh? Name of a pipe! Your blood, it is water! Me, I go out!” He seized his hat. “I, I am yet young, alive, and sprout green things. I ’fraid I stay and catch your fever. Spring fever? Peste! Nom du nom! It is a disease of the winter, you have, my friend.”

In a trice Bardek was plunging down the lane, which led to Montgomery county. “Ah! que je suis un petit oiseau,” he was singing gloriously.

---

Gorgas sat in the sun on a bench under the bursting cherry tree, her hands clasping her knees and her eyes wide awake and staring. Somehow, that morning, her mind would not advance to conclusions; it remained dead-locked between the thought of Morris and all that he would probably say, and the answer that she knew she must make. But she would not let herself decide; she liked to play with the idea, to toss it about among the possibilities, view it from strange angles. Marriage was probably just this sort of thing—a little talk with a man, an agreement, dresses, the march up the aisle, and years together. Anything else was just romance, the stuff one makes fiction out of. Fiction! How well named!

But it was not the way she dreamed the event would happen. Her notion of felicity was much more strenuous and fearsome. At any time she wanted she could walk into the “smitty,” say “Hello, Neddie,” and end the whole business. There was nothing daring about that. But shouldn’t there be something to be afraid of?

Her man should surprise her—she thought out her best theory; she had several, depending on the mood!—come upon her at, say, twilight. She would like to see his staring, laughing face peer suddenly over her shoulder, and in a moment find herself in his mad grip. She should become weak with positive fright, and be a little afraid of him all her life. “I should probably scratch and bite,” she thought, “but he must laugh, and perhaps pinch my ear, till I yelped and let go.”

There was nothing frightening about Neddie Morris. Well; one had better go in and have it over. She would offer him tea.... If he drank it she would hate him. Pshaw! Life is just tea drinking, after all. It spoils one to dream of the impossible.... Oh, this spring weather! Ha-ho-hum!... Let him wait.... This thing has to be thought out. Let’s see; where were we?... But her mind hung motionless.

From her bench she could see Morris lighting a cigarette; but she remained and basked in her own dreams. Some things are better the longer they are postponed. Those cherry buds were just straining to get out. Look at that wise, silly robin tugging away at a tuft of string tangled on a stick! Everything was unfolding and getting ready for new life—even Gorgas.

Thundering mallet blows came from the “smitty.” It did not sound like Bardek. Certainly if he threw that sort of reckless force upon the frail lace-like silver upon which he should be working, there would be something annihilated. Perhaps Morris was growing impatient. Well—she hugged her knees—he would have to wait. She couldn’t go in to him until she had made up her mind about him.

Why should one ever decide? The joy of living is expecting. Who ever wants anything he gets? Possession is the beginning of dissatisfaction. Even if exactly the right man ... exactly the right man! ... should be waiting in the “smitty” it would be better to let him wait. The right man! Her eyes closed as she pictured that man, sitting expectant in the “smitty,” never dreaming she was so near; oh, the shivering ecstasy of holding him there forever with all his story yet to tell. Into her memory came lines from “The Grecian Urn,” which she and Allen Blynn had learned together; with eyes still closed she spoke them reverently aloud:

“... happy love!

Forever warm, and still to be enjoyed,

Forever panting and forever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”

“Hello, Gorgas,” Morris blundered upon her. “What are you mumbling? Poetry? Sounded like something with jiggles in it. Are you warm enough out here? I’ve got the shivers. C-come on b-back in the ‘smitty.’ We can t-talk better there. C-come on.”

“Wait. Please!” she begged. “Let’s don’t go back just yet. The—uh—everything’s so wonderful and springy out here. Don’t let’s talk just yet. Just listen to the sparrows.”

“Ug-g-g!” he shivered. “W-w-onderful l-l-ittl-le p-p-pests. How do you s-s-tand it? Without your c-coat, too. I’m g-going in.”

He danced a clog and flapped his arms, while he sang:

“In Ireland I was a blithering lad,

Yit I niver had said I had more than I had,

But when I set sail for America, Gad!

My tongue, it started to wag!

When I got on the brig I lost my brogue,

And then I began to brag.”

“Don’t do that!” she snapped suddenly. He stopped. “You look ridiculous.” Then penitently, “I was thinking lovely thoughts, and you jarred the picture.... Let’s go in.”

The settle, arranged beautifully before the fire, made her thoughtful. He started for it and beckoned her to follow, but she let him take the huge seat alone.

“That fire is too warm for me this morning,” she excused herself for sitting on a near-by hassock, where she could hug her knees and look up at him. In that position, while he talked and smoked innumerable cigarettes, she watched him dreamily.

There were few finer fellows than Ned Morris, she told herself. He was not only good to look at but he was a good “pard” and an unequaled sportsman. He had a reputation, too, a name—of course, that was not a thing to consider, yet a woman likes her man to be known for right qualities. It would be a comfort to have folks say, “Oh, Ned Morris, the tennis Morris?” Rather vain, that; but there are a hundred kinds of vanity, and some are virtues.

“What I wanted to see you about, Gorgas,” he began finally, looking suddenly at the grandfather clock in the corner—

“Not just yet, Ned,” Gorgas protested quietly. “Tell me about the Boys’ Club dinner first. I understand it went off like a Bellevue spread.”

Goodness! It was almost out, and then it would be all over, a pretty little dream spoiled by waking. Why are men so straightforward and possessing? Of course, she liked them best when they came selfishly demanding things. Meek ones—well, they might inherit the earth, but they could not share her goods and chattels.... Perhaps they would have to give up being friends.... No ... that would never do.... She began to see ... decision was slowly coming ... rather than break with him altogether she would just take him over, have one everlasting final row with the mater and decamp for—

“But I must get down to business, Gorgas,” he suddenly changed the topic. “What I’m going to say to you is darned hard to get out, so I’m just going to plump it at you like—”

She leaned forward and laid two nervous hands upon his nearest arm.

“Couldn’t you—couldn’t you just not say anything, Ned?... Couldn’t you wait until—tomorrow or next month?”

He stopped a smoke-ring in the act of being launched and looked at her searchingly. She was staring up at him with distress in her brown eyes.

“Why, what’s the matter, old girl?” he inquired solicitously. “I don’t believe you’re feeling fit, today. If you say so, I’ll cut out.” He arose, but she still sat watching him. “Awfully sorry if I’ve blundered around here when—I might have noticed you were not working today. Of course, I wanted to talk this thing out with you. It’s got to be done—and mighty soon, I can tell you. But, if you think the other way, why, I’ll just drop it for awhile.... But gee! I did so hope I could get this thing settled....”

“I think I know what you are going to say, Ned,” she arose, too. “And I’m going to let you say it. I couldn’t make up my mind until this minute. You are right; it must be settled now. It wouldn’t be fair to you to wait another day.... Go on.”

“Don’t see how you knew,” he wondered, “unless Bea told you.”

“Bea? Bea Wilcox?”

“Yes,” he went on hurriedly. “It’s the fraternity pin. I’ve got to let the cat out of the bag, I suppose. It’s a dead secret yet. Bea and I have about agreed to—uh—make it up. Uh—you know what I mean. Been keeping it rather dark, of course. She hasn’t quite come over yet.... She doesn’t seem to understand about the ‘frat’ pin.... Thinks it means a lot of nonsense. I offered her another, but she won’t take it. Says a girl who wears a man’s ‘frat’ pin is as good as engaged to him, and all that sort of stuff. What I want to know is—oh, this is a rotten thing to have to say—what I thought was that you wouldn’t mind giving it back and sort o’ explain things to Bea. She got real nasty over it, flared up and—what’s the matter? By George! You are ill; aren’t you? Shan’t I send for somebody or something?”

Gorgas was on the settle, her face buried in her hands, and laughing hysterically. Gasps and volleys of laughter followed in quick succession.

“Oh, Neddie!” she cried, “you’ve played a cracker-jack joke on me. Oh! oh!” she breathed hard in the endeavor to recover. “You’ve given me—a—pain on the inside.... I thought—good heavens, will I ever get over this!” She sat up with an effort and dried her laughing eyes. “I thought all the time it was me you wanted! You looked so silly ... and ... mooney ... and I was ready to give you the mitten.... I think I was. You got me so flabbergasted and sentimental, I don’t know what I’d have done. It made me so sorry for you I was almost ready to cry ... and now....” she went off again. “I’ll get a bad cold from this,” she sniffed at a ball of handkerchief. “Oh, boy, I haven’t been so upset and turned about for a dog’s age.... And how in the name of scandal have you kept this affair so dark? I see Bea every other day and she hasn’t blinked an eyelash. The she-fox! I’ll have her scalp for this.”

Morris did not join in the merriment. He grinned occasionally, but it was a forced grimace. He was looking at Gorgas and making contrasts. Gorgas had always seemed just a good chum, but suddenly she seemed to have put on sex. To add to the humor, he tried clumsily to make excuses for not thinking of her in a more complimentary way. Bea was rather stormy and unreasonable. And Gorgas was growing more stunning every day. Doubts began to assail him.

“Don’t look at me that way, Ned,” she expostulated, still shaken by flurries of merriment. “That’s what fooled me lately. That moonstruck gaze! Oh! You should save them for Bea. No! On second thought you had better shoot them all at me.... Bea might change her mind.... Now! I feel better.”

She was touching her eyes quietly, and Morris was standing above her looking down thoughtfully, when Bardek poked a cautious head in the door. Seeing all quiet, he attempted to steal across the room to the corner where he kept a bludgeon of a stick, which he loved to carry with him on his walks.

Gorgas caught him in the act of skipping through the door.

“Come back here, you truant,” she called.

He looked in, smiling knowingly.

“All settled up?” he inquired mildly.

“Yes,” Gorgas smiled back. “Everything O. K.”

“O. K.,” he hummed. “So he bunt? Eh?”

Nobody answered.

“When you take you’ w’ite-wash house, eh?”

“But he didn’t bunt, Bardek,” she laughed mischievously.

“Not bunt? Then why everyt’ing—O. K.?” he demanded.

“No, Bardek,” she explained. “You see, it was this way. I played in for a bunt—”

“You played in for a bunt? You! I see that—”

“But instead of bunting, he biffed one on the nose—”

“Biffed? On the nose? Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?”

“Yes, on the nose for a homer.”

Bardek’s face was blank.

“In other words, Bardek—”

“I hope you have the other words,” he said helplessly.

“We can’t agree on that white-wash business, Neddie and I. So, it’s all off. Game postponed on account of previous engagement.”

“Phoo-ee! but how glad I am! Pos’pone!” Bardek stamped his stick on the floor. “How glad I am! First I thought I was happy, and then I found out when I walk through the woods that it was not happiness. I say, ‘It is not happiness, then what is it? Something like happiness; it make me laugh and jump and cry and feel hot and cold and glad and sick.’ Then I find out. It comes to me. It is not happiness I feel. It is misery. You—nice, clean you—to go off and give up to small boy like little Neddie here who don’t know nothing. I come back; I think, maybe if I see him first I can make him understand that he mus’ wait till he grow up and have mind. He smoke cigarette, vairy good. He sit down, nah-eese; he read book, oh, not bad—but he not real man wit’ arteries and muscles and hot forge-fires down inside. He jus’ littl’ puppy that play wit’ tail.... But I come back and all is lovely.... Now!” he seized his smudgy blouse, “I can work!”

He snatched his hammer and bent to his delicate task. Meanwhile, Gorgas was entering into the plot to satisfy the tyrannic Bea.

But Morris took a new tack. He wasn’t sure now that he wanted the old pin back. Girls shouldn’t be so domineering. They needed lessons, sometimes.

“You’ve upset me, Gorgas,” confessed Morris. “I’m just finding out what a lot I think of you.... Bea and I—well, we’re not so sure, either of us. I—perhaps—”

“Say!” called Bardek. “What you mean by zat ‘home-run’; eh?”

“Just you watch Ned Morris,” she replied, looking at Ned with the compelling face of a determined mother. “If he doesn’t make one without so much as another word I’ll call strikes on him.... One! Two—”

“I’m off,” laughed Ned, but he swung his hand and wafted a suspicious-looking salute at her.

---

“Now for work,” said Gorgas firmly, donning her apron.

But instead, she looked out of the window at the robins frantically building their nests. One set was at work just above in the eaves. Most interesting chaps; so energetic and serious. The silence in the shop caught her attention. She turned around. Bardek, too, was leaning over his bench and staring at the greening world outside.

He turned swiftly and met her gaze. One deprecatory glance he tossed toward the idle work-bench and then a meaningful sweep toward all of outdoors. They both stood silent, stirred by the invitation of the morning; and they laughed like guilty children about to slip away from school.

Suddenly he spread out his hands and broke into vehement Italian.

“The mother is calling all her little children,” he protested. “Wise old Demeter is leaning over the edge of the black pit of Hell-mouth, talking love talk to her daughter Proserpina, who comes forth with garlands and sprigs of little blossoming things and all the breezes of spring. Come, Proserpina mia! Let us do a bacchanal in the white sunlight, push through branch and briar, and loaf on the bare earth and sing the song of the hour!... Come!”

“Come?” she echoed. “Let someone try to stop me. Wait! Just wait till I change this clumsy skirt.” Into a capacious closet she shut herself and in half a minute sprang forth. “Comme ça!” she fell into the familiar French. “We’re off! I feel so healthy and strong that I could run a dozen miles without taking a long breath.”

“And I,” cried Bardek, back into French. “I? With one little jump—so!—I could hop over the stars! Come!”

He tucked her arm in his and marched out, singing of Le Roi D’ Yvetot, that jolly old king who lived in a mud hut, went to bed early, and got up late, who didn’t care a fippence for fame or reputation; his crown was a cotton cap and his sole bodyguard a lazy hound.

Through the orchard they trudged, both joining in the laughing chorus,

Oh! oh! oh! oh! ah! ah! ah! ah!

Quel bon petit roi c’était là là! là!

Oh! oh! oh! oh ah! ah! ah! ah!

Quel bon petit roi c’était là là! là!

XVIII
A PARABLE OF IGNORANCE

THAT night Gorgas wrote a long letter to Allen Blynn. It was so unlike the usual stilted newsletters that it made him wonder. The transition between childlike scraps of information and a flowing, spirited communication, was absolutely abrupt, as if she had been holding herself back all this while—as in reality she had done—assuming a naïveté not natural. This letter was a splendid personal outpouring; it did not contain a single reference to the doings of social Mount Airyites.

The theme was, Woman and her desire to be a free, untrammeled spirit, to express herself in work and play, to let develop whatever was within, not caring what happens. She wished she had the courage to give herself free rein, she told him, to be able not to care about the opinions of others, a crushing force, and so find out what were her possibilities. All personal development, all development of peoples, is a revolt and a demand for the right to grow. It is they who “give in” who eventually give up and become stamped with the mark of a caste. One must have room to expand, even if one smashes the receptacle which holds things together. In such broad generalization she summed up her view.

Her own character, she knew, had been made by her little rebellions. Bardek had taught her the meaning of freedom; but she lacked his courage to be really herself. “You don’t know what you have in there,” he would often say, tapping his heart and his head. “Only God knows, who gave you great forces to use.” She was seventeen and thoroughly matured, she admitted, yet custom hardly sanctioned even her apparel. What she had achieved in that department was won by fighting; and it was a fact, she bore witness in every daily movement, that until she had boldly adopted the costume of womanhood she had not been able to think the thoughts of woman. So small a thing as inches on a skirt influenced mightily one’s very thinking. How strange was that; but how much more powerful were other restrictions. Until one accepted freedom and moved forward, there was a stoppage of mental growth.

Many things she would like to do but dared not. At this moment, if she had the courage, she told him, she would slip into a travelling-gown, pack a bag, and take a sleeper for Holden. In the morning she would go straight to her capitaine, Allen Blynn, have breakfast with him and spend the day talking anything that chose to come into their heads, and read poetry, and let the world slip. The spring air had done this thing to her—she knew that; but why should one resist the call of spring. Cherry blossoms did not resist. Neither did the veriest worms. All night long Birchall’s dog had barked his delight. Why shouldn’t he? He didn’t consider, “Gorgas Levering is trying to sleep; I should not do this natural thing; I will resist the overpowering temptation to yowl.” If he did he would cease to be a dog. Next spring it would be easier for him to shut up; and in a few years he would move into a porch-house and be writing essays on the immorality of any barking whatever. By that time he would be wearing piccadilly collars and eye-glasses.

Some day she would break loose and express herself. She had done so in a number of small things. Phew! How the good mater would carry on if she knew!

For illustration, Gorgas gave a sketchy account of her holiday with Bardek. They had tramped across country to Chestnut Hill, and up the Whitemarsh Valley, where in a thick of young willows by the upper reaches of the Wissahickon they had struck camp. They built a fire and had luscious broiled chicken empaled on sticks—Bardek had negotiated for the chickens at a near-by farm house. For hours they lolled on the ground, Bardek’s thick coat serving as a protection from the damp earth, stirred the fire, and talked themselves out. They should have started for home, of course, but it was Gorgas who declined to go back, and Bardek had consoled himself with the sight of an occasional puffing train off beyond the trees; when they willed they could whisk back to Mount Airy in a half-hour or less.

Then, as the warm sun was slanting warningly toward the west, Gorgas, prowling among the willows, came upon an amateur spring-board disclosing a swimming-hole, shut in from all the world. The day was exceptionally warm, but when she shouted with delight and invited him to dare her to dive in, Bardek was wise enough to know the dangerous deception in the day and season, and ordered her most thunderously to do no such thing. And therein Bardek was not wise at all. She would not be ordered about by anyone, she had retorted angrily; she would do as she pleased; and when he strode forward, talking the while as if he were disciplining one of his youngsters, she plunged in. And just to show that she was master of herself, she had swum about deliberately in the tingling water until he changed his tone and pleaded with her to come out.

That, of course, put trains out of the question. The miles to Mount Airy must be walked, and at a good pace, too. The stimulating chill of that water she recorded as one of the most satisfying shocks of her young experience; and the swift tramp homeward on an exquisitely warm April night was altogether good.

Bardek, mindful of added trouble to Gorgas if the Leverings should glimpse him, discreetly dropped out at his white-washed cottage; so to Gorgas it was left to face the family alone. It was close to midnight. The Levering household was awake and watching, one might be sure, and full of silly speculation.

There was a row, of course; but not a word of explanation from Gorgas. She answered questions with tantalizing vagueness, foraged for food and ate hungrily, but only stared like Ophelia at their admonitory speeches.

Presently they noticed her closer resemblance to Ophelia, the damp hair, and presented the theory that she had fallen into the water. The thought of swimming in April did not occur to them. As that drew sympathy and a cessation of fault-finding she affected a clever shiver or two and was put to bed with much solicitude and a comforting drink of hot lemonade. At this hour she was presumed to be sleeping.

What good would explanations have done? She asked Blynn. The net result had been good, physically, mentally and spiritually good. She had let loose struggling feeling and had the fine bounding recompense that always comes when mother nature says, Give. To tell the bare facts would be to tell a sort of untruth; certain persons—the plaster-of-paris sort—are incapable of receiving; preconceived notions of conduct have “set” them forever.

Even this long letter, now coming to an abrupt close, was helpful and right. Nature had not said, Sleep—although she was saying it now, and mighty strong, too—but she had said, Give; write; tell Allen Blynn. And if Allen Blynn would mail his letters before ten o’clock at night Gorgas Levering would be the first to claim them in the morning. Spying over one’s letters would be the next thing to take up with the family!

Allen Blynn’s reply was dispatched immediately and strictly according to mailing directions. It was in long-hand, a tacit sign hereafter of the distinction between public and private readings.

The theme of his letter was freedom. To be free—that was the history of all human conflict and the goal of civilization. He was with her so thoroughly in her attempt to be herself that she glowed with the spirit of vindicated right. Here was an “authority” giving her that necessary courage so much needed by those who fight alone.

That was distinctly Blynn’s way with children, to start with agreement, gain loyalty, divert the terrific force of opposition—a pedagogic jiu-jitsu which turned all the energies his way.

“But here we come to a puzzle,” he went on, “which nobody yet has satisfactorily solved. Obey your instincts? All right. It is a great principle. But which instincts? The instinct to assert the best that is in us? Oh, yes, indeed. The instinct to be strong, to produce worthily, to live without mental or physical pain? Undoubtedly. But should we give play to other instincts, too, equally natural and equally struggling to express themselves; the instinct to kill, for instance; to grovel; to run away; to save one’s skin at the expense of one’s ideas; to be unclean; to be slothful; diseased; to sneak and lie and bear false witness? I am not mentioning the worst ones, but if you were a man I could. No doubt you are old enough to have heard of some. In other words, there is a war among our most natural desires, and the game is to him who exercises the high, and atrophies the base in us. That’s the old quarrel over good and evil, the archangel of the Lord against Lucifer and his demons.

“Whenever I feel most the desire to ‘break loose,’ as you say, and have my momentary will, I think of certain creatures about me who have tried that game to the full,—the blear-eyed wretches who sun themselves in the parks or nod and drowse in the reading-rooms of the public libraries; and of that hunted-looking crew of hideous women who prowl the streets in ones and twos after nightfall. All of these were young and fair once, and laughed, and felt the call to be themselves. Think of it!

“How can you judge where your desire will lead? The child would eat nothing but ice cream and cake. Some forlorn little kiddies, whom I meet in my journeys through the city, have been allowed to have their will. I see them satisfying their natural hunger craving while mothers look on complacently and permit the growth of a brood of malnutritioned youngsters. We wiser folks, passing by, we know the end. We are like prophets foreseeing calamity.

“Well, what is to guide us? Wisdom. And how shall we know wisdom? That is hard, I admit; but some of it is found in the curbs and restrictions of society. The very repressions that gall you may be the law that keeps you from eventual destruction. Society is not always right, not by a jugful, and revolutionists there must be to amend and abolish. But one must have care. For the ancient régime one might unwittingly substitute The Terror.

“Your letter has inspired me to write a parable. Half the morning I have been toiling over it, shaping and reshaping the phrases—is there any exercise more delightful! I have added to my joy by trying to put it into the stately English of Elizabeth, which even at its worst is touched with subtle beauty. It doesn’t satisfy just yet, so I shall wait.

“The title is clear to me. ‘Ignorance.’ No one should feel hurt by the accusation of ignorance; it is the common mortal possession.

“Before I close I must tell you more of my great mystery, ‘The Lady of the Interruption.’”

After one has been very serious with children, he knew, it is always prudent to shift the topic abruptly, as if all that has been said has no personal application whatever.

“She is present quite often at my extension lectures. Once or twice I have seen her distinctly, and have learned to look for my cues by her nods of approval or her smiling disdain. So far, she has not ‘interrupted’; but I am ready any moment. After the lecture we open the question-box and have a fifteen minute rapid answering of queries. Lately she has been asking questions, which, needless to say, I do not read aloud. Here is one.

“‘Don’t you think that a professor of English should take as much care in purchasing wearing apparel as he does in the selection of his phrases? Or do you believe that a hump at the back of the coat is essential to professional dignity; or that a white waistcoat for evening wear would be too undemocratic in a republic?’

“She has been hinting several times that my personal appearance could be improved without loss of vocal delivery! Isn’t it the most eccentric thing you ever heard of? And the strangest part of it all is that I enjoy it. I find she is quite right in a number of points. I am a shabby beggar. The total effect has been to send me to a good tailor. Oh, we’re quite spruce, nowadays, I tell you! Her latest question was:

“‘You follow my suggestions, but you do not read my questions aloud. Be careful, or I shall expose you again.’

“Is she simply odd-brained, or a great humorist? Pray, put your mind to it. I’m tremendously interested.”

It was not difficult for Gorgas to decide about the lady, but she did not write her full conclusions to Allen Blynn; if the lady were mad, there was method in it. What she did write was to inquire more about her appearance. Did she smile or look over-serious? Was she dark or light?

Men are the most artless creatures, she thought; women could take outrageous liberties with them and they never suspect anything. And of all artless men, Allen Blynn was the easiest. He was so chivalrous, so ready to serve. A woman had but to say, “Sit by me and talk,” or, “Spend Wednesday afternoon with me,” and Allen would drop his dearest interest to do the lady’s bidding; and with such flattering attention, too.

The “Lady of the Interruption” was going to needless lengths to capture the services of Allen Blynn, Gorgas thought. How easy to see through her ruse; although one had to admit that she was a daring creature, and intelligent, too. One could not help admiring her supreme nerve. Undoubtedly, she was “expressing herself,” and defying all that same code of society which forbids a young woman to debate in public.

A day or two later a typewritten letter, obviously for family reading, came to Gorgas, containing the simple statement that he thought the Leverings might be interested in the enclosed bit of writing.

A PARABLE OF IGNORANCE

His turban was a strange purple, and his gown was the orange of the dust of the road; and in his hand he bore no staff but a branch of wild grape. Although he had travelled far, yet was his face white; white like those hermits that dwell apart in caves; white was he as the live white of the growing lily, as the pallor of the moon in daylight; and the men and women of the city marvelled, for they were a dark people that worked in the furrows of the earth and lived daily in the sun.

Now the stranger would have passed on, but they came out from the gates of their city to gaze upon him. Some stood in the way and hindered, some touched reverently the hem of his robe, and many besought him to enter into their houses and stay with them.

But he said unto them, A wanderer have I been all the days of my manhood and must fare alone; although best of all things I love friends and companionship. And he would have turned back, even at the gate of the city, but they pressed him to come among them, if only for a little while. Friends, they cried, thou shalt have an abundance; for here everyone worketh with his hands in the fields, and each is neighbor to another. And he hearkened to them and said no word, but looked upon them as one with great longing. So he tarried with them.

And straightway some among them began to toil less in the heat of the day, and some wove coverings of straw to keep their faces from the light of the sun; and they said to one another in the market-place, How beautiful is the whiteness of the face and the hands of him that stooped to come among us. We are a rough people, dark of skin; from of old have we toiled with our hands and have lifted up our faces daily to the burning heavens, and see what it hath profited us. Would that we were as the holy man is.

Then went some to him in the night and told of their great desire to be as he. And one who was nearest him said unto him, Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy comeliness lieth and wherewith we might be as thou art. And when they one and all pressed upon him to say wherewith they might be as he, he smiled and regarded them with great tenderness.

Yet he passed his hands over the faces of those whom he loved, and blessed them, and, behold, they lost their roughness and became smooth and fair and of the whiteness of the clouds of heaven.

And one by one to each as he asked he laid his hands upon the brow and upon the cheek and upon the lips and upon the strong limbs, and blessed them, and they became as the Wanderer was, and went away rejoicing at the miracle wrought upon their bodies.

Much honor, they offered him, even silver and jewels; but none of these would he have save the daily bread and wine, claiming only their friendliness.

And when the day came that he had set for his departure, there was much sorrow, so that the Wanderer tarried longer. And again and again was the day put off until he had sojourned with them a full twelfth-month. The day of his coming they named for a holy day and the year of that day they celebrated with feasting and thanksgiving, for now few of them were not fair.

But on the evening of that day the Wanderer fell ill; and he called about him those who had been chiefly his companions, and said, I am to die. But they cried aloud that it could not be; that they whom he had comforted would comfort him also; that as he had ministered unto them so would they to him. Of a surety, they said, he would live to be strong again and, in the fullness of time, see age come with honor.

But he answered, I am to die. I am to die, he said, and turned his face quietly to the wall, quietly as of one who had finished a good task and was content.

Thereupon they besought him to tell them what they might do to save him, to which of his gods they might pray and offer sacrifice. And he turned and answered. Of all earthly things, best loved I friends and companionship. These ye have given me in abundance. Yet am I to die; for surely ye have known all this while, as ye turned me from my journey and led me through the gates of your city, as ye gave me of the bread and wine, as ye visited me and comforted me daily with friendliness; surely ye knew as ye begged the secret of my comeliness and bade me lay my hands upon thy brow, thy cheek, your lips and your strong limbs, surely ye knew: I am a leper.

XIX
TOBOGGANING

NED MORRIS’ behavior toward Gorgas underwent a decided change. His tone grew discreet and secretive and intimate; he seemed forever smirking, as if charged with unexpressed humor, the possessor of a private joke.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” he would whisper his greeting, although it might be evening.

And she would look up from her work with equal appreciation of the common jest and remark, “Merry Christmas, pretty boy,” but go on with her work.

When others were present he gave no sign, but so soon as the two were alone he hovered near, playing the open swain, but purely a dramatic rôle. It was very amusing. Gorgas liked the drama and the spirit in which it was played.

As she hammered he would sing an air from the new Robin Hood, “Churning, churning, churning, all the live-long day,” and act beautifully the tipsy sheriff of Nottingham. Or he would plead with mock mournfulness, “Oh, promise me that some day you and I will take our love together ’neath some sky,” and so forth.

Dangerous topics kept coming to the fore in their conversation, dangerous with stirring April in the pulse of things, and two healthy youngsters alone together. Ned seemed to have ample afternoons to give. He was third year medical school, which should have meant work, but he claimed to have everything “stowed away” for the May finals. At any rate, the spring recess was near at hand; he could “plug up” then.

They tried out the courts on fine days. The ground was still soft, but by dint of much rolling they managed to get some practice; most of the time, however, they sat on the bench in the sun, and, warmly wrapped in woolens, breathed the exquisite air and talked. He grew dexterous in putting sleeves into coats, playing gentleman-in-waiting, and while ordinarily she resented anyone touching her, she found herself enjoying these little signs of fond care of her.

He had been smoothing out a collar and tucking a “sweater” snugly back of her ears, carefully brushing away the hair, and tapping each little ear jokingly. Meanwhile he had drawn out a log for her feet and with the aid of a steamer-rug had tucked her in comfortably.

“I feel like a mummy,” she laughed, and bathed contentedly in the warm sun.

“You look like a seraph,” he eyed her critically.

“Seraphs don’t have feet,” she corrected.

“What!” he exclaimed. “Don’t tell me that! Nor little, fat, brown ears, either?”

“Nope.”

“Nor crinkly, brown hair what won’t stay fixed?” he deftly put back a fluttering strand.

“Nope.”

“Nor soft, mellow voices what sez ‘nope’?”

“Nope; they always toot through trumpets—or is it shawms?”

“Well, I’ll be dinged!” he swore.

“You’re quite likely to be.”

“All right,” cheerfully, “let’s be dinged together? Eh? What y’say?”

“Mebbe; how do you begin?”

“Facilis descensus Averni,” he suggested.

“Talk a language I understand,” but she quite understood that stale Latin quotation, “Easy is the road down.”

“That is to say,” Morris cast about for a translation. “‘Let her go, Gallagher, and boomp! you’re at the bottom!’ Let’s—uh—let’s toboggan?”

He slipped a hand under the steamer-rug and grasped her wrist.

She considered for a moment or two, but she gave no answering touch.

“You’re dead cold,” he withdrew and chirped gaily. “No blood in you. You couldn’t descensus for a cent. What you need is a series of stiff lessons.”

“Isn’t this just jim-dandy,” she murmured, ignoring his talk. “Golly! It’s good sometimes to be just alive.” He grew quiet. “I heard all you said, Neddie. I’m not inattentive. Go on and talk. I like to hear you prattle. But I’m so comforty. I don’t want to think.... And it’s so nice to be taken care of, tucked in, and all that.” She kicked out a foot. “There! It’s out again. Be a good boy and fix the mummy’s legs.”

“And he fixed them up so care-ful-ee,” he sang as he worked, “That now he’s the ruler of the Queen’s nav-ee.”

He smoked and they both lapsed into silence, while his eyes watched her with frank approval.

“Women like to be helpless,” she spoke out the summing up of her thinking. “I always thought I despised those frail beseeching-looking things that hang around like dolls and let men fetch and carry for them. I always did for myself—usually could do it better than any man; but lately, I’ve got a case of the ‘delicates.’ You’re responsible, Neddie; you’ve been taking such delicious care of me that I have succumbed. ‘Let her go, Gallagher and boomp! I’m at the bottom.’ Just tuck in that flapping hair, won’t you? I don’t want to move.”

A dutiful and faithful squire Morris became; and no one thought anything of it. Mrs. Levering frequently came to the “smitty” to watch the work or to chat with Gorgas about little teas and small receptions that kept an informal atmosphere moving in the neighborhood; Gorgas was clever in thinking up original things, decorations and so on. Ned’s presence was accepted as a matter of course. Had he not grown up in the neighborhood, and were not he and Gorgas perpetual tennis partners? But it is doubtful if she ever asked herself even so much as that; her serene assumption of the careful mother had annihilated all thinking on the subject.

“My daughters,” she confessed to a caller who was interested in seeing the “smitty,” “are pretty much about what I planned. It is almost wholly a question of management, I think. For instance, I decided that Keyser should like music. She rebelled, naturally; but I held her to it—my will was the stronger. Now she plays rather nicely, I think; and she’s very grateful, I can tell, for my insistence. Gorgas has been a trial, I must say; but look how she has come around! There was a time when we could hardly have a decent conversation together,” she laughed, “but now we’re quite chums.

“And then there’s that awful question of boys. I have never had the question. For us it just doesn’t exist. My scheme is very simple. I keep a lot of social things going on right at home; the girls have a good time, and I know everything that is happening.”

While Mrs. Levering talked, Ned Morris was saying pretty nothings in Gorgas’ ear.

“It seems to me, young man,” Gorgas told him in a secretive undertone, “that you are making the right speech to the wrong party. Bea Wilcox is the young lady who should have patent rights on that kind of talk. Or have you broken off?”

Ned made a wry face. “Friday nights,” he said, “I pay my addresses to the lady. Mother’s an awful stickler. You have to go home at ten o’clock, the time they unchain the mastiff. Broken off? Not exactly. Sort of mangled. Bea’s nasty lately. Can’t make her out. But this isn’t Bea’s party; I’m talking to your right ear.”

“The right ear is heartily ashamed of you,” she turned completely around. “Try the left ear; it’s not used to you yet.”

So they chatted nonsense and—drifted.

When the mother had gone she brushed him aside and took up a mallet.

“You are keeping me from my work,” she protested, but not with much force.

“Aw; you don’t want to work. You’re just bluffing. How can you pretend to work on days like these?”

Nevertheless, she began a gentle rhythmic tapping.

“‘Churning, churning, churning all the live-long day,’” Ned sang, keeping time to the beats. Leaning over he took hold of the handle, closed his hand over hers, and continued the singing. She joined in the second part, and laughingly enacted the rôle of the milk-maid where the sheriff aims to instruct Guy of Gisbond into the mysteries of courting. The scene ends with the sheriff drawing closer and closer until he turns to implant a kiss on the dairy-maid.

Gorgas ducked half-successfully, and gave the timidest imitation of a slap. In the wrestling that ensued she became somewhat flushed and disheveled, and Ned’s soft collar was wrenched quite buttonless; so that, although the warning of Mrs. Levering and her guest returning gave ample time for a quick recovery of the mallet, it allowed no opportunity for anything else.

“My dear,” the mother’s voice was solicitous, “I’m afraid you’re working too hard this morning. Don’t overdo it. You look positively done up. Don’t you think you had better lie down and rest, dear?”

Gorgas held herself in check and answered properly and dutifully, but volumes of pent-up laughter threatened to explode. The situation was made especially tense by the comic expression of sadness assumed by Morris—it seemed to convey a mountain of sympathy for the hard lot of the workwoman—and by the idiotic smile of sympathy from the stupid guest. Any person with half an eye could have seen that these two young persons had been tussling together.

Only the severest restraint held them in check until Mrs. Levering had piloted her visitor out of the “smitty” and into the front garden. Then the two culprits sprawled on the work-bench and laughed themselves into hiccoughs.

“What fools these elderly mortals be,” was Morris’ comment, on partial recovery. “They don’t know a hawk from a hand organ. ‘Oh, Gorgie, deah,’” he mimicked. “‘Are you suah you are not working too hahd?’”

When Bardek came in an hour later he found Gorgas and Ned sitting together on the big settle. Gorgas had her sleeve turned back and a handkerchief bound to her arm. He gave one careful look at them, walked quickly over to Gorgas’ bench, inspected the progress made, and softly whistled.

“We’re discussing important matters, Bardek,” Gorgas explained. The sly twinkle in his eye was not to be endured passively. “Ned’s telling me about his medical courses.”

Bardek whistled a strange, unfinished bar.

“Tell it to t’e marines,” he nodded significantly.

“Honest, Bardek,” Ned assured him. “I was showing her how we bandage in emergencies without proper material at hand.”

“Rats!” Bardek exulted at his ability to use the prevailing lingo. A moment later, he added, “If Miss Gorgas ever finish zat order,” jerking his arm toward her bench, “Neddie must soon make ’not’er home-run, eh?”

“Hug the bag; pitcher’s got the ball!” Morris retorted.

“Look out for a steal!” put in Gorgas over her shoulder.

“There he goes!” shouted Ned. “Slide! slide!... Safe by a mile!”

“Somebody coach third,” called Gorgas.

“Vairy good,” agreed Bardek, who was quite aware that all this nonsense was aimed at him. “Vairy good. That talk I do not know; but I know some t’ings.” He marched toward the door. “I not so beeg a fool to stand around and stop nice little boy-girl love-making. Je n’aime pas à faire le fâcheux troisieme. I know when three is one too many! Au revoir, les enfants!” and he was gone.

The effect was sobering.

“The blithering fool!” ejaculated Gorgas.

Off in the distance they could hear Bardek singing lustily.

“Oh! oh! oh! oh! ah! ah! ah! ah!

“Quel bon petit roi c’était là! là! là!”

“Oh, he’s a wise boy, all right,” commented Ned. “He knows a hawk from a hand organ, O. K.”

“Hush!” Gorgas shook a finger under his nose. “That’s not the proper way to talk. We’re not—”

“Aren’t we?... Then let’s!”

She tried to gather her thoughts together. If this had been almost any other man, some chap she didn’t know like a brother, she would have sent him about his business instanter. But Ned was such a familiar figure, like a bit of accustomed furniture. One was so thoroughly used to him and his nonsense that much could be allowed without offence. Her mind would not face the real situation, however; it fought away from it for fear of stopping things.

Love-making? Nonsense.... What was it, then?... Oh, bother! Don’t think about it. Just let things go. “Let her go, Gallagher! and boomp! we’re at the bottom.”

There was nothing wrong in just drifting comfortably through new experiences. Ned didn’t mean anything. He was as good as engaged to Bea. But was this fair to Bea?... Oh, shucks! Why take up disagreeable topics?... Hang Bardek, anyway.... He spoilt all the fun.... It made them both self-conscious.

Ned was sitting on the arm of the settle, affecting to smooth out the bandage on her arm, but she knew he was not doing that at all. She was leaning against him. Perhaps she ought to get up and clear him out. But she did no such thing. It was very comforty, there.

It was more than comforty; of that she became aware when his head leaned over quietly and his face pressed against her temples. She could feel his hand tremble, and she knew that her face was burning with the touch of his.

She did not move away, but she said quietly, “Why do you do this, Ned? It isn’t right, and you know it.”

“Why?” his voice shook.

“There’s Bea.”

“Oh, Bea’s all right,” he parried.

“Are you going to marry Bea?”

“Oh, I guess so; forget it. Let’s—let’s just toboggan.”

She closed her eyes and let the thrill of the contact suffuse her.

“But you don’t care—” she struggled to see the thing straight.

“Don’t I?”

“And neither do I. We’re just good friends, like brother and sister. And we’re letting something get hold of us and make us wild.”

“All right. Let her go, Gallagher—” he chuckled.

“But how can we? It isn’t—love-making at all!... What is it?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. I didn’t invent this thing.... We’re just human, I suppose.”

Mrs. Levering’s voice could be heard calling for Mac. The two riotous young hearts beat violently at the sudden thought of detection; but they did not stir.

Fear shook her; if the mother had quietly opened the door before them and stared, in combined astonishment and indignation, Gorgas felt that she should be unable to get up. It was the sensation of dreams where we are about to be devoured by some hideous beast, yet can neither cry out nor move.

“Suppose mother should walk in that door!” she whispered. “That’s the way she always comes—from the house.”

“It’s locked,” he whispered back. There was no cause for the lower voice, save sheer excitement.

After a moment she asked, “How do you know?”

“I locked it myself.”

“When?”

“When she went out.... I slipped the bolt.... Let’s forget about it.”

From her silence he caught the need of making some defense.

“Maybe it isn’t love-making,” he argued. “I think it isn’t, myself. It’s a fair exchange, and therefore robs nobody.”

She did not move away, but she had not surrendered. Off in the depths of her mind something was striving to be heard. It seemed like long strings of sentences, too far off to be deciphered, marching, marching, in an undulating line over hill and valley, hurrying to her aid. She smiled as she recalled Mark Twain’s picture of the German language sprawling in that same fashion with a separable verb tacked on the end.

“I didn’t mean to do this,” he poured in her ear. “It was not in my thoughts until you put it there that day you and I talked about the ‘frat’ pin. Since then I have been aching to—do this. It’s nature. It’s just instinct, I suppose.”

Instinct! That was it. The marching line of words came clearly into view now. “There are good instincts and bad instincts,” it shouted at her. “Which will you have? Take your choice. The archangel of the Lord offers you one; Lucifer and his demons offer you another. Choose; and be exalted or forever damned.”

She twisted his arms from around her and got up.

“We’re both a little mad, I think.” She steadied herself and looked away from his eager eyes. “This won’t do. No!” She faced him and pushed him away. “Stop it, I tell you. I’m awake now. For a minute or two I was drunk.... What a storm you raised in me, Neddie Morris!... Oof! Let’s get out of here and breathe some air. I’m suffocated.”

For the remainder of that day she was obdurate. He was not permitted to touch her. Eventually he became bitter, tried unsuccessfully to quarrel with her, and finally left her in a huff.

And she was not ashamed. That was the oddest consequence, she thought. There was nothing, then, to tell her whether this instinct was a good or a bad one. It had seemed so right and natural, and—this she reluctantly confessed—it had been absolutely satisfactory.

She recalled the eager people who begged of the pale stranger to sojourn with them. How beautiful he must have appeared to them, just as this first experience was beautiful. Ignorance of the obvious had blinded their eyes as it now blinded hers. Leprosy! Hideous! But the “tobogganing,” what else did it lead to? She knew enough of her sisterhood to be aware of the wages eventually paid.

Almost the last touch of girlhood went from her that hour. Maturity lurked in her eyes as never before; in her step and carriage, even in the tones of her voice. The last trace of awkwardness in gait and speech disappeared, vanished suddenly. The ship had found herself and was surging through the tossing seas. Slight as the experience had been, it had not been slight in its effects. It gave her a kind of pride, as of one who had achieved something; and,—what strange thoughts go packed together!—it filled her with understanding sympathy for all wayward women. From that hour, another odd result, she became her mother’s intimate and friend. There were no more “rows”; and, so inconsistent a thing is memory, no one seemed to remember that Gorgas had ever been a difficult problem in the family.

And Ned? After a few days he adjusted himself to the changed situation; and, man-like, forgot that it had occurred. His medical studies began to pull him—when one interest is out, others always take its place—and the old jollity of manner came racing back.

Almost at their next encounter, over which Gorgas had been a little fearful, he met her eagerly with:

“Say, old girl, Bea treats me like a civilized compatriot now. Don’t see what she ever went on a strike for. I hadn’t done anything. Honest! Nothing that I know of. Well, she’s forgiven me for doing nothing and all’s hunky-dory.... She thinks you know. Say, be a good girl and make her tell you. She’s dying to talk it out with you; but she’s afraid. Sort of nervous and shy, you know.... Oh, she’s O. K. and A1, that little girl.”

What comic animals we are, she thought as she searched his eyes and saw there nothing but loyalty to the other woman. Do not the high gods sometimes hold their hands to their faces and smile?...

Let her go, Gallagher, and, boomp! we’re at the bottom....

Surely ye knew.... I am a leper!...

What a topic of conversation for Allen Blynn when he comes down for the Easter holidays. How much should she tell? It depended much on what sort of a debate they could manage to have together. Several apocryphal versions she thought out and discarded. The best of them was a hypothetical case of a girl who had confessed. Certainly she would not have the courage to talk the affair out boldly with Allen Blynn. Not that she felt the least guilt, but any telling would, somehow, be unfair to the facts. Who could transmute into puffed vocables the rich data of life? It would be like transposing a cumulus cloud-bank into a major chord. The life and the autobiography are never the same.

When Allen Blynn came she managed to secure a large share of his time; but even the third cousin of the topic was not broached. Her voice fled from all suggestion of anything so personal; possibly because he looked so much older and stronger: his forehead seemed to bulge more, his voice had grown heavier, and new little muscles began to show about his mouth, signs of much public speaking. Instead, she plied him with questions about Holden, with which she felt only a remote interest.

And they talked of the mysterious lady. Blynn grew gay at the thought of her.

“I’m hot on her trail,” he assured her. “When I go for her at the close of the lecture, she slips out. She is always at the end of the hall. And no one knows her. I have questioned dozens of persons who have been sitting near.”

“She watches you, I suppose, while you talk?” Gorgas asked.

“Tremendously! She leans forward and fixes me with her eyes. I think they must be black. Even across a big hall they burn at me.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Shouldn’t you expect it to? But it doesn’t. I get positive strength from her. She is the most attentive person I ever address. Every twist of her head is eloquent; I can catch the register of the value of everything I say. But I must get to know her better. She has ideas; no doubt of that; or I dream she has. And perhaps I am under some obligation to her. Someone has recently presented me with a mighty valuable book. It is a first edition, in good condition, too, of the second series of Bacon’s essays. Of course, I only guess that she sent it. It had my name on the cover, in a script that resembles hers. It was left in my room, too. Someone must have walked in and placed it on the table.... Which reminds me that I have a book for you.”

“Let’s see it.”

“Not until September 10th.”

“My birthday!”

“Yes. It is a first edition, and the only copy made.”

“It must be very valuable,” her eyes opened.

“It is to me. I hope it may be to you. I can tell you this much, I wrote it myself—”

“Oh, splendid! The MS. of a book! I shall be delighted. What a nice kind of present.”

“I hope you will think so,” he rumpled his hair comically. “I’ve put a lot into it—five years. But that’s all I’m going to tell you,” he foresaw her question. “Birthday gifts are secrets.... You won’t tell anybody about it, will you?”

She agreed. What girl does not hug a secret?

“But oh, Allen Blynn, why did you tell me in April? I shall wear myself out thinking— Is it fiction?” beaming.

“Bless my soul, no!”

“Oh, a book on literature!” mildly enthusiastic.

“No-o.”

“Pedagogy?” mournfully.

“Certainly not!”

“Essays?” brightening up.

“Here, stop this; I’ll be giving it away in a minute. I won’t say another word. Wait.”

May, June, July, August, September; five months of guessing. How delightful—and how wicked!

XX
A CONNOISSEUR OF JOY

BARDEK and his family had done astonishingly well with the “boards and plaster” of their white-washed cottage. It had been something more than a novel experience; genuine domestic roots had sprouted and held him. Assisted in emergencies by Mrs. Mac, the young wife fell into the ways of other women with remarkable instinctiveness, and the two babies flourished into rugged boyhood, went to bed like other lads, swam, quarreled and played miniature baseball with the neighbors’ children.

Perhaps the workshop held Bardek more than anything else; but he never ceased to marvel at his own surrender.

“I let myself, I, Bardek,” he would exclaim with comic seriousness, “be tied up like dog with chain.”

But he broke loose many times. Without notice he would be off; the little white cottage would give forth no sounds of singing or scrubbing; the children’s shrill voices would cease. One need not then bother further about Bardek for many days. Perhaps the doors would be closed, but the windows rarely; and often the wash was left flapping on the line. It was Mrs. Mac’s eye that saw that everything was put shipshape after one of these abrupt exoduses.

“It is good to be away,” on his return Bardek would say as he dropped his pack before the door and sniffed at the well-scrubbed pine floors and took in the general clean-up which Mrs. Mac could not refuse to an untidy dwelling. “The kennel gets in the nose; then one must gnaw the rope and be off and get new scents, and so to come back glad to the old. Ah! Nature is a great sweetener and cleaner. Ach! It is good to sit on hard chair! And how strong and fine smell the boards!”

And Mrs. Mac would lean in the doorway and listen to his sighs of satisfaction; and her eyes and her red cheeks would glow with pride.

Bardek would come back with something more than a nostalgia for boards and plaster; splendid orders he would bring for his own special work, and enough for Gorgas to keep her busy and prosperous. After one of these journeys there would be much excitement in the “smitty.” The lamp would burn at night. A clean spot would be cleared, the drawing boards would come down, and design would flourish.

---

And now once more had Bardek quietly decamped, silently stole away like the Arabs.

His pilgrimage was prolonged far beyond the usual hegira. April became May and May gave place to June, but no intimation came of the Bohemians. Mrs. Mac had time to give the cottage a complete house-cleaning, and Mac put new whitewash everywhere, on the broad boards that made the frame and on all the posts, and on the chicken-houses, and on the long, low fence which encircled the garden. Backed by a perfect mass of green shrubs and trees, and with a mighty Norway maple sheltering all, the little cottage cried out with welcome, but remained vacant.

Gorgas found herself almost helpless without the daily consultations with the master. At first she put things aside unfinished, hoping against an early return, but as the days lengthened into summer and the white cottage remained tenantless, she was forced to work out her problems alone. It was a dreary task, lacking the companionship of that bubbling cosmopolitan. How much he meant to her! Hardly had she realized that before. Just before he left, he had seemed moody and disappointed. She resolved to be kinder to him; to cease having jokes at his expense. Their baseball slang seemed to annoy him; or was he joking, too? One never could tell.

He was rarely angry, but once she had seen the inner ferocity of the man. A group of Italian railway laborers, sauntering by the “smitty” where they had no right to be, had stopped to peer in at the odd spectacle of a girl blowing a forge.

They talked in their own tongue. It was an unfamiliar patois to Gorgas; although she could comprehend their general meaning. Their guttural interrogation changed to amusement; references to the young woman became pointed and finally personal. They saw, far off in the corner, the thick-set man tapping gently at his bench, but they rested secure in what they were accustomed to find an incomprehensible speech. One quiet utterance from a beady-eyed youth, who led the others in the doorway, set the company in gusts of laughter, which was followed by a clatter of attempts to imitate their bold companion.

From the depths of the “smitty” the roaring voice of Bardek was suddenly heard calling upon them in their own tongue to run for their lives. A flying mallet crashed against the door-post and rebounded off to the leader’s shoulder. Almost before they could comprehend the curses hurled at them, the flaming form of Bardek appeared in the doorway, breathing carefully chosen Italian. Blows he rained upon them and kicks, delivered with precision. In terrified rout they scattered, straight through Mac’s perfect garden and over the fence, carrying part of it with them. Had anyone faltered he would probably have been killed.

It was a half-hour before Bardek subsided; and all the while he had bubbled Italian. Finally, little chuckles of deep laughter came in flurries to the surface. The voluble cries and prayers of the retreating Italians he repeated, first with irony, then with full comprehension of their comic possibilities.

“I must have care,” he warned himself. “Inside I am the big, sacred, mad bull of the old Greek, Dionusos. It is foolishness. To roar and kill, and for hot words, little harmless words, puffs of silly wind. For just that a man may give up a great fine life which the good Lord has made.... When I was jus’ a man I bellow like that, in Wien it was, and the man was big, a great Austrian.... We fight, and all for words. He speak against the France, and I have jus’ come from the France, and inside am I all French.” Bardek considered for a moment. “It was a bad day for that big Austrian when he speak against the France.... Eh bien, for that I am here!... Well, le bon Dieu,” he shrugged, “he it is, not Bardek, who manages.”

But Bardek was not back, even to tease with American slang, Bardek who hovered over her with eloquent eye, who hungered to touch her, to smooth her forehead and grip her to him, but who ever remained aloof, a picture of magnificent restraint. Somehow, she hardly dared touch him herself, she who was so free with the others that came about the “smitty.” The mad bull of the old Greek, Dionusos, seemed sometimes as if it needed only a resting of the hand on the arm to give signal for a wild devouring.

“I am just like his child,” she mused, “and—I must be honest—he is more my father than my father. It is wretched that we can’t show our affection in some human way.... Nom d’une pipe! Why does he not come back!... He must stop this gallivanting; I just can’t stand it.”

One splendid June morning, as she plodded listlessly over her bench, an answer came to her call. It was the familiar voice of two noisy children disputing in French over the possession of the drinking dipper. In the house they heard only German; outside, the speech was French; on the long pilgrimages and on daily prowlings with the father through Cresheim, the language was Italian. The back-yard being undisputed French territory the little Bohemians were “tutoyéing” most belligerently.

“Bardek!” shouted Gorgas. “Bardek!” she cried, and was out of the door and over the white fence.

“Là! là! là! là! mon enfant!” he shouted in reply. “I come; like the la grande vitesse, quick I come!”

Into each other’s arms they rushed. He swung her around and kissed her hair and cried over her like a veteran of the war returning safe to his children. Before she could recover, the boys had grabbed her knees, and the ordinarily stolid Lady Bardek had swooped upon her with much bubbling of Hungarian and weepings and wet kissings.

Bardek pulsated language. One would never, never go away again! Oh, it was so good to be home! Never, never, would one go away again; not until the next time—eh, what?—until the soul grew sick with sameness and ran away for the pleasure of coming back. How could one get such joy without the suffering of absence? How do you know what you love until you try for one little while to give it up? The white-faced bald heads who keep, keep, keep; ah! what do they have—nothing. Life is rhythm, not stillness; back and forth, give up and take back, so swing the tides of earth and the bountiful blessings of heaven.

“I,” cried Bardek, striking a pose, “I am the connoisseur of joy. It is not given to the rich to be happy, nor to the poor; both can be very miserable. I have studied and know the secret of living. Here is one of my secrets: When you love most, make it a grand sacrifice; go away; desert; fly for your life from that which gives life, and some day when you are far away, you hear the cry for you, oh! such a pitiful tenderness, it make you weep—inside. Have you loved? Oh, you thought yes. But now you know; never have you believed to love so much. Inside you have been cleaned out, burned dry, made ready to receive the blessing.... Then you come back. Rush fast? Right away? Oh, non! non! non! You wait. You suffer some little more. It is necessary. Soon you cannot rest where you are. But yet you do not rush; you hold fast and slip slow, slow, toward ‘home.’ Exquisite! The passion of going nearer, nearer! Each day the miles on the sign-post say littler and littler. Now it is sixty mile; now it is only forty-t’ree; now it is ten’s and five’s and two’s. You see all the home things, the skies and the grass and the cows and the—ach! Gott im Himmel, I cannot say it.... Ein tousand ein hundred ein und zwanzig! I am full of the joy. It is too much!”

Everybody wept gloriously. It was the feast of tears, a celebration of the joy that cometh in the morning. And they laughed and they talked and they ran through the little house and admired and patted and loved and kissed even the clean white crockery.

“You have miss me, eh?” Bardek eyed her with confidence.

Gorgas nodded.

“Ah, my child,” he patted her cheek, “now you know, too.... It was pain, was it not? Ah, yes. It must be. Qui sait aimer sait mourir. But ah! what would you give for your suffering? Eh? Nothings! The pain is part of the joy!”

Bardek came back with something more than accumulative joy; he brought cash for work done and orders for more. New York city had evidently been on the route of his travels, for a famous firm of jewelers was on his list. One knew better than to question Bardek either about his journeys or about his past. “Only the old and the foolish chew over again the past,” he would say. “I have been; it is part of me; you see it all in my face, in my talk, in my ‘me’ which is thus transformed: or I have it not. When I grow too feeble to live in the present, then, perhaps, will I live in the past; but more likely will I take then the quick jump into the great future.”

He was eager to go at his planning. The designs were talked over; sketches made, discarded and approved; the material tested and sorted, and the benches cleaned for action.

For several days the “smitty” was too busy for talk, except such business-like conversation as was needed to push the work forward; all copper does not anneal with the same result, nor does all charcoal burn with the same intensity; but after the plate, candlestick, candelabrum or vase had begun to reach a half-recognizable shape, there would be a lull.

“How is that Neddie fellow?” Bardek inquired. “I don’t see him hanging about and making the smile of idleness. More ‘home-run,’ eh?”

She explained that he was busy with his medical courses and, further, that Bea Wilcox had laid claims upon all his surplus time.

“Now, that is so much better,” honest Bardek nodded approval. “He is nice boy; nice, clean boy. I like—when the day’s work is done—to take him on my knee and sing sweet, sleepy songs, ‘Schlaf’, Kindschen, schlaf’,’ und so weiter.... But he smoke too many cigarette: so he will not grow.”

“He is twenty-two, Bardek,” Gorgas rejoined, but not disclosing in her tone any defense of Morris. “That is five years older than I.”

“You!” Bardek gazed at her. “Ha! You! Little Neddie will never be so old as Miss Gorgas. You take by years? Ah, that such wrong way to make measure. Today the whole world is one day older than yesterday, but is every man of the world just one day older? Ach, gar nichts! There are some who have lived—ah! how they have lived while the slow hours of last night moved away!—and there are some who have made one jump from child to man, and there are some baby-women who have in that little day turned to be mothers of babies, and there are some who have stood just where they are, and others who have gone back from jus’ fool to imbecile. The day, the month, the year, it is nothing. When I would know the age I do not look in the calendar—ach, nein!—I look in the eyes. Back of eyes, sprawling out nicely on soft, gray stuff, is you! Jus’ there!” he tapped his forehead. “In little children, I have seen, back there, wise old folks—you were jus’ such a little wise one when you first came to me. Your Neddie is jus’ boy—nice, clean, fresh boy. Oh, he will make nice man some day—if he grow up.”

It was difficult to know when Bardek spoke out of his serious opinions or through a desire to stir up his listeners. In English, especially, was he hard to fathom. Sometimes his auditors had laughed at the wrong spot, had taken his most earnest talk as if intended for droll humor. It was not prudent so to do; for then Bardek called on his heavy artillery of irony and satire, and woe betide the weakling who stood before him: the personal blemish of his opponent, moral or physical, which society had agreed to ignore, was trotted out for inspection, caparisoned with many unique beauties of language. To Gorgas, Ned Morris had seemed quite a man; but she deferred questioning Bardek too closely on that point.

Instead, she seemed to shift the subject.

“I envy you your freedom, Bardek,” she sighed. “When you want a thing, you just go and take it. If you want to cut loose you can say, ‘Let her go, Gallagher’ and boomp! you’re at the bottom. It takes courage, I tell you. One has to just stop caring for everybody and what everybody thinks. I can’t. I can’t be free. I’d like to break away and, if I wanted to, eat my breakfast in the middle of Main street—in my bare feet, too; but I couldn’t do it. Not that I care an awful lot about what folks say. It isn’t exactly that; but I’d be scared stiff. I might get as far as Main street with my oatmeal and roll, but my teeth would be chattering so much from fright that I couldn’t get the breakfast down.”

Bardek thought the matter over carefully. Then he eyed her seriously and asked:

“Something in your mind, it troubles you, eh?”

“Oh, no.”

He was not convinced.

“When you have great troubles, tell somebody. Confession is good. That what makes ol’ Mac such a fine man. He is always clean, is ol’ Mac. Every Saturday night he stand in line and think of the bad in him—it is not much, but no matter—then he soon be on his knees to tell the father and when he come out he is all w’ite-wash inside. Ol’ Mac, his mind is not always full of dead matters and ferments and things that go bad. His mind is like my house after Mrs. Mac have come to slop hot soap-water over everyt’ing. I know. Sometimes I, too, go to father and tell him everything.... No troubles, eh?”

“Oh, nothing’s the matter with me, Bardek; that is, nothing worth telling.”

“Very well,” he nodded. “When you make confession you must want to do it. Your inside will tell you it is time when.”

“That’s just what I want to know, Bardek,” she brought him back. “You listen to what the ‘inside’ bids you do, and you never question what the ‘outside’ would say. That’s freedom. I wish I had it.”

He worked for some time at his designing, as if he did not care to discuss the matter further. Occasionally, he looked over his shoulder at her, staring into her eyes as if to see what was within.

“So you would be free?” he asked quietly. “Well, it is easy. But first, you must know what freedom is—and that is hard. I have had many thoughts about freedom and have changed my mind many, many times; and just now I am not so sure as I was three, five, ten year ago. Once I t’ink freedom is ‘do as you please.’ In America you say that so much, ‘I do as I please.’ It is vairy nice. But ‘as I please’ is sometime not nice. For one, two, three minutes, yes. When you jump into nice, cold water and swim when it is yet April, ‘Oh!’ you say, ‘it is fine!’ but the next day you sneeze and for two weeks you have bad cold. That not vairy nice, eh? Now, I think you have not freedom then. You put great chains on you which keep you in house for two weeks when you would please go out. Sometimes it is freedom to be wise and not do ‘as I please.’

“You t’ink to sit in Main street and eat breakfast is freedom. You are right, quite right, if that is what you do want. But also, you want peoples to like you and not to laugh and touch the head and say, ‘What a crazy, silly child!’ You must choose. Well, you find you didn’t want to sit in Main street; not at all. It give you just what you don’t want.

“Life is full of jus’ that. ‘To do as you please,’ yes, that is to be free. But it is so hard to know what will please. You want swim in April spring water? You do not want cold in head? You cannot have both, my child. Freedom is to know what one to take. And who is to tell? It is hard, vairy hard.

“Then there are the other peoples—the great crowd, of them I do not think much—but of vairy few, my wife and those big boys, and you, Miss Gorgas, and of ol’ Mac—well, of them I do care. To keep them happy I must not have somet’ings. I please not to have them. I want them vairy much—oh, vairy much I want them—but so do I want to see the good friends with smiling face. I have freedom—yes—but I lose much. And it is good to lose.”

Gorgas was thinking how similar were the philosophies of Bardek and Allen Blynn, although each expressed his point of view in different ways. Here was an essential agreement on the mystic puzzle of human conduct, and by men who looked upon life from nearly opposite angles. It was as if Puritan and Cavalier, Stoic and Epicurean, Spartan and Athenian had for once settled their eternal quarrel.

“How did you learn all this?” Gorgas asked.

“By much troubles and much pains,” he shook his head. “You get one little cold in head. Ah! That is nothing. You learn so cheap! But I? I have walked in blood.... Nom d’une pipe! how I pay to know so little!”

Whatever were the experiences that Bardek conjured up, it prevented further speech. So they hammered away for the remainder of that morning without further discussion. Occasionally in the pauses she would hear Bardek muttering his nom d’une pipe!—a sign of great perturbation.

And she was glad. Clearness had come into her thinking. In her mind now she was certain of the track for a little way ahead. She had asked about freedom because she meant to liberate herself from a great thralldom, but she had feared the consequences; now that she had been taught to face all the choices, all the possible results, she had chosen and was content.

XXI
EVE’S CHOICE

MEANWHILE Allen Blynn, packing up his belongings at the end of the term, was far from either decision or content. The faculty of Holden College had divided bitterly on the question of the introduction of “electives.” Nowadays electives are accepted so serenely that one forgets how sinful they were some twenty or more years ago; but we shall not here touch the terrible battle which waged over the contention of the conservatives that a college senior could not hope to be a gentleman unless he had read the “Pseudolus” of Maccius Plautus. It is enough to know that, led by the example of Eliot of Harvard, Blynn had joined the sinful radicals and was openly preaching the “new education.”

This young man, who could be so eloquent with Gorgas Levering on the subject of Conservatism in Private Conduct, found himself an unwilling Public Reformer in Education. In his private thoughts he bound the law rigorously upon himself, but in public he was an impatient radical demanding that Holden College should cease weeping sentimentally over its eighteenth century past and begin to do its duty toward the children of the present year of grace. He did not know that that sort of inconsistency is alarmingly common. A man may be in favor of freedom as regards his country, but not as regards the goings and comings of his wife; a man may love his neighbor as himself on Sundays, yet unmercifully send promissory notes to protest on Mondays.

Naturally the students were solid for the electives and against Maccius Plautus and all his tribe, and with bonfires and shoutings they lauded their spokesman on the faculty. But it was the newspapers that shot the controversy out of its local setting and made it semi-national and glaringly notorious. And it was not all due to the managing of Diccon. Some men are naturally dramatic; all that they do is already good “news”; and once in the headlines it is almost impossible to keep out. Let a lawyer win a scandalous case or a clergyman defy his bishop; for the remainder of his days he cannot so much as visit the zoological garden without having the matter publicly heralded. The papers gave space to the Holden reforms because Blynn was back of them. Blynn could be counted on for spectacular things. “The Lady of the Interruption” had made him a perpetual headliner!

It was a heavy-hearted young man, therefore, who travelled toward Mount Airy the next morning, unable to escape some of the congratulations or to avoid seeing his picture flaring on the inside page of newspapers held by fellow passengers. He assumed the guilty skulk of an embezzling cashier, fearful lest he should find some casual eye comparing him with the photograph. He wondered what dreadful things they had said about him, but dared not read. The newspaper “boys” liked him—all boys did; they showed their affection by writing him up as if he were a pedagogic Luther, and it made him almost ill. “Rumors” of the resignation of President Galt and the election of President Blynn had been heard by the astute scribe. Dear old Rumor, patron saint of reporters!

Diccon did his share in the home town; he wrote beautiful imitation telegrams to his paper, briefly summing up the essential matter in dispute and making out a clear victory for their fellow-townsman, whose call to an important post in another city had been thus so thoroughly justified.

Blynn protested, but Diccon claimed to be powerless. “You’re ‘news’ now, old man,” he explained. “Nothing on earth could keep you from publicity. When newspapers begin to give you four or five thousand dollars’ worth of free advertising, it is because they think it pays. Once they have made you famous—”

“Infamous!” suggested Blynn.

“Same thing”; Diccon was undisturbed; “they’d do the same by you if you scuttled a hospital and got off with the job. When they go in to make you known to thousands of readers they have created customers for that sort of news. Every time you’re mentioned after that, they are assured of satisfied nods from their patrons. You are a continued story, a never-ending serial.... And you can’t expect me to howl, can you? You have made good, as I knew you would. Well, that cleans my slate. No one can say I pulled for a friend. You happened to be my friend, but also you happened to be the best man for the job.”

“Accident! accident!” cried Blynn; “accident and the absurdity of news values.”

In that frame of mind he dropped in on the Leverings. Mrs. Levering and Kate were sewing on the lawn at the rear in the shade of their huge chestnut trees. Gorgas was in town purchasing materials for the “smitty.”

The old familiarity was there in their greetings and something of warmth due to the natural joy in another’s success; but there was also a deferential treatment due to his newspaper fame, which made him uncomfortable.

“My dear Professor Blynn,” Mrs. Levering beamed toward him, “I do wish I could get courage to ask you to glance over the literary program of our little club. We’re not at all satisfied with the plans for next year; of course, we are all amateurs without taste or knowledge. But I’m afraid you are so busy with—”

“Not at all!” Blynn broke in. “Do let me work with you. I should be delighted. I have bushels of time and I’ll dig for you like a good gardener, provided—you don’t call me ‘professor.’”

“Oh, you’re too modest.”

“Not at all; I’m too proud!” he laughed. “In America ‘professor’ and ‘doctor’ are the inferior titles; ‘Mr.’ is really the mark of distinction. I like the way they say ‘Mr.’ Eliot in Cambridge. Fancy saying ‘Professor’ Eliot or even ‘Dr.’ Eliot! It would be like referring to Dr. George Washington! And he was an LL. D., too; both Harvard and U. of P.; but who remembers that? I have been ‘professored’ all my life. You don’t know how I yearn—like a small boy—to be called ‘Mr.’”

“Mr.” was agreed upon by Mrs. Levering, although Kate demurred.

“We always call you ‘Allen Blynn’ when we talk of you here at home,” she remarked thoughtfully. “I always say ‘Allen.’ You call me Kate; perhaps I had better dub you—”

“‘Pete’—for Petruchio,” he joked. “You can’t tell, you know. Fine weather like this, the germ is everywhere.” He was reminding her of his theory that love was a contagion.

“I fear you are immune,” she looked up from her embroidery frame and searched his face comically.

His eyes had the far-off stare of men who dream much. Your thinker is no great lover, she thought. He is too busy with the affections of his brain, the little loves of his own creation; even in their most animated conversations they seem only to half attend to what is going on about them.

“Please don’t say that,” Blynn protested. “Why, vaccination takes on me terribly. I am awfully susceptible. You don’t know how I want to be—uh—quarantined and posted as a dangerous case.”

Mrs. Levering arose. “Of all nasty talk!” she smiled. “Germs and disease! I fear I don’t quite follow you two young persons. And, besides, there is a garden in the back of the house that demands my inspection. Ugh! How can you laugh in the same breath with germs!” She moved off toward her garden.

“Where’s the child?” Blynn looked toward the “smitty.”

“What child?” Kate followed his gaze. “Oh, Gorgas? Child! You haven’t seen her since spring, have you? That child is sprouting, I tell you. She’s taller than I, by an inch or two. And her gowns! She’s been spreading herself lately! Gracious! You won’t dare to call her child—”

“Why, she’s only seventeen!”

“In years, yes; but in experience and general get-up she is twenty-five. Really, she’s quite stunning. It’s made me spruce up, I can tell you.... But, I’m not sorry, you know.... I say, I’m not sorry.”

“Why?” coming back abruptly to the lady before him.

“If Bianca has enough swains Katherina may have a chance with the left-overs.”

“Do you recall the advice I gave you the last time we were talking on this subject!” Blynn leaned forward and grew earnest.

She nodded and exhibited her embroidery.

“This is all I’m fit for.”

“Don’t say that. It isn’t fair to yourself, and it isn’t true. I wish you would let me take you in hand. I have had boys who have felt just as you do, until I enticed them really to get started at something.”

She agreed that it sounded exciting, but Petruchio might come along; one was never without hope; and then, smash! would go all the toil.

He pondered over that, and questioned why a woman’s occupation should go smash! just because she married.

“Women don’t want any other occupation,” she confessed. “I don’t.”

“I bet a dollar it’s pure use and wont!” he exclaimed. “Nobody can tell what is just custom and what is not, until after we’re dead a thousand years. Women don’t throw themselves into careers with the same daring energy as men, because they have to keep such a terrible look-out for marriage. At any moment, from around the corner, as you once said, their future may assail them. It’s almost as if a young man got up in the morning a barrel-maker and by night found himself a deep-sea diver! That’s disconcerting. I should think the excitement of guessing what might happen would play havoc with that cooperage business.”

They speculated on the uncertainty of a girl’s life; uncertain until some man decided for her.

“You see,” Kate explained. “A boy has his fortune to make and knows it depends upon a lot of acquired qualities; and unless he’s exceptional he can predict pretty well what that fortune is going to be. All that he has to do is to look at his father. Now a girl, no matter what her father or mother may be, has every chance in the world. A prince might choose her—haven’t royal dukes married chorus girls?—or the grocer’s apprentice, or the next governor of the State, or—the head of the division of English.”

He acknowledged the point, but his mind was concentrated on something else.

“And nobody may choose her at all,” he added significantly.

“But she won’t know that till she’s dead,” Kate responded gaily. “And not even then, perhaps—‘There is hope beyond the grave,’ you know!”

“There’s my point,” he stuck out an argumentative finger, his earnest eye quite showing that he had missed her light pleasantry. “She ought to know it long before. She ought to face the fact of the million or so of unmarried women—good, fine women, too. She ought to presume from the very beginning—her mother should put it into her head—that in all probability she will not marry. The dreams should be deliberately shaken out of her; the years of pretty primping and ogling I would abolish without a qualm. The women on parade! Ugh! I fly from them and find shelter with the aged married ones.

“Now you,” he turned to her with such frankness as quite to disarm the direct speech. “You live in a village, revolving in an eddy; it would be a sheer accident if your mate found you.”

“I might take Eve’s choice,” she reflected. How amused she seemed!

“What was that?” he interrupted his argument. The phrase was new to him.

“The only man available.”

“Ah! Eve’s choice! The only man available and the man God created for her. That’s a wonderful choice and a rare combination in history, you must admit.”

No; she must face the facts. She was a member of the most unmarriageable class of women, those who are neither rich nor poor, yet who sit at home unknown.

Mrs. Levering could be seen occasionally hovering over her garden. Once or twice she stood erect, her ample figure surrounded by all the flowers of June, and surveyed with satisfaction the two earnest young persons. A few more such tête-à-têtes, that was all. Let them be together. Somehow, she felt that she had managed things excellently. Some persons would take credit for the laws of nature. If the sun should shine brightly on her lawn party she would accept congratulations as if it were a right tribute to her cleverness.

“You’ll do, Allen Blynn,” Mrs. Levering remarked to a drooping rose-bud. Allen was talking earnestly with head and hands. Kate seemed to be looking absently away. “But Keyser Levering will have to be spoken to,” she added. “I’m afraid she is too cold.”

Then she ordered Louisa to prepare a platter of sweet cakes and an iced lemon drink, carefully concocted to suit the warm weather.

She might have recalled the order if she had known at that moment Allen Blynn was proving to Keyser Levering that as marrying for her was probably out of the question it behooved her instantly to find a sensible life-job!

And she found it. By accident the work that she was destined to do unfolded to her. And by the same accident Allen Blynn found his own work.

XXII
TOP-O’-THE-HILL

Through the deep

Hood of the woods a murmur seemed to creep,

The Schuylkill whispering in a voice of sleep.

All else was still. The oxen from their plows

Rested at last, and from their long day’s browse

Came the dun files of Krisheim’s home-bound cows.

—From The Pennsylvania Pilgrim.

AS Mrs. Levering, flanked by Louisa and the refreshments, moved toward them, Kate shifted the subject.

“Did you know I have been coaching the Croft boy?”

“No!” he was surprised. “He hasn’t said anything to me about it. Since when?”

“Practically all winter.”

“Well! well!” he ejaculated. “I thought that chap was coming up strong. You quite take the wind out of my sails. I had been giving myself all sorts of kudos over that case. And here it’s you, all the time. How did it happen?”

“He brought me over one of your letters,” she explained as she helped with sugar. “Your stenographer by-the-hour had mixed up an important direction. He disliked to ask you about it—you know how shy he is—so he put it to me. I puzzled it out; we became very well acquainted and began to hold regular irregular sessions together.... I enjoyed your letters immensely. Once, you took him to task about a stupid error which was really mine. He had a good laugh at me, I can tell you. Isn’t he a pathetic little fellow?”

“He’ll be a great thinker some day,” Blynn avowed. “You’ll be proud of your share in the making of him.”

Mrs. Levering was pleased to hear them discussing methods of pedagogy so intimately.

“You’ll have Keyser turning school-mistress, yet,” she suggested. But her smile showed that she had no such fear.

“And why not!” Blynn seized the idea. “Oh, I don’t mean the regular kind; normal training, public school and all that sort of thing. That’s fine, too; but it’s overcrowded with women, and the whole business is set like a plaster cast. I almost despair of seeing any development there; routine and habit have fastened themselves upon the institution. I have dreams of another kind of teacher, something like Pestalozzi, gathering his little ones about him and teaching them without ever their being aware.”

He told them about Pestalozzi. When the scourge of war swept over Switzerland in 1798 neither men nor women were spared. It was a massacre. Pestalozzi’s heart went out to the children. In a ruined convent on the shores of Lake Lucerne, he gathered the deserted little ones about him and shared their sufferings. They had neither home nor parents, and they were hungry. “I cannot fight,” he said; “I cannot raise my hand against my brother; but the children of my brother, the fatherless children, these I can serve, their piteous little bodies I can save, and their starving desolate souls.” Blynn darted into the library and brought out a book and read them Pestalozzi’s own story. “‘My hand lay in their hand, my eye was their eye, my tears flowed with their tears, and my laughter mingled with their laughter. They were out of the raging world; they were with me, and I was with them. Their meat was mine, their drink was mine. I had nothing, no friends, no servants; I had them alone. When they were well I stood in their midst; when they were ill I was at their side. I was the last who went to bed at night, the first who rose in the morning. Even in bed I prayed and talked with them until they were asleep,—they wished it to be so.’”

Blynn closed the book reverently. “They say he was an unhandsome man, but that he had a wonderful transforming smile. He saw into the heart of children. I should be happy if I were that sort.

“My dream is to have just such a school,” Blynn continued. “I have even gone as far as to pick out the site—off in Cresheim Valley. We should have to select our teachers with the utmost care. They must be gifted to communicate freely with children. Communication is everything. I don’t care much about what they know, although we must have skill there, too, especially in art work and languages; but the main thing in teaching is not knowledge, but wisdom.”

Mrs. Levering voiced the discontent of parents with schools as they are and expressed the belief that there would be no difficulty in securing paying pupils.

“It would be a great joy to spend one’s life at that task,” he mused.

“Why don’t you?” Kate inquired quietly.

Well, he was a professor of English; that was the first reason. His studies had all been to prepare him for scholarship. One could not go against one’s life preparation. The main reason seemed to be the matter of expense. Elisha might begin such an undertaking, but not without the ravens. It costs money even to do good. To open such a school and keep it going would require a never-ending store of health and good cheer. The vitality of the staff would be absolutely essential to its life. Worry over money or, worse, the necessity of putting good energy into outside work—that would wear down the most courageous spirit and would mean slow failure.

But his mind was on the theme. He sketched the ideal environment for children as he saw it clear before him. There should be much out-of-doors, and glorious muscle-stretching play; health should come first, and then the searching discovery of individual aptitude. The world’s store of necessary information would be transferred as naturally and as imperceptibly as growth. The children would never once object; the enormous turbines of curiosity would actually drive them along; give a child half a chance and he will question himself into intelligence.

And what a pace these youngsters would travel! He had one boy—one of his “cases” whom he taught personally and by correspondence—who had done four years of grammar school work in eight months.

“He was not forced,” Blynn explained; “he was enticed to discover his speed. We dawdle mightily in our long years of preparation. Think of deciding before you were born that you must not study fractions until you are eleven years of age! You should see some of my six-year-old lads eat up fractions! They love ’em! Especially the vulgar and the improper ones!”

“Allen Blynn,” Kate remarked, “with all your gift for discovering the genius of others, you haven’t found out your own ability.”

“And what is that, pray?”

“At heart you’re not really a college professor—”

“I believe you,” earnestly. “I’m afraid I ‘profess’ for a livelihood and for the excitement that’s in it. The racket I’ve stirred up in Holden; phew! But what can I do?” he spread out his hands pathetically. “I am ‘professing’ because scholarship is not endowed. Scholarship and teaching! They are the antipodes! Scratch a fine scholar and you’ll probably find a wretched teacher.”

“I doubt if you are even a scholar,” she persisted.

“Please be more careful, Keyser,” Mrs. Levering looked up from her sewing. “You mustn’t be flippant, you know. That’s one of the things the Leverings do not do, whatever else they may be guilty of.”

“I’m very much in earnest, mother,” Kate continued. “Allen Blynn is a genius with little children. He should be a primary teacher, that’s—”

“Gracious!” Mrs. Levering stared. “Why not hire him as a coachman or gardener! Primary teacher! That’s a sort of public nursery governess, isn’t it?”

Blynn was regarding Kate in deep perplexity.

“Remember Pestalozzi,” she ignored her mother. “You have just his spirit and just his gift. You have something of his face, too. Oh, I know they say he was a plain man, but they called Lincoln that. Few people understand the beauty of ruggedness—”

“Thanks,” he bowed.

“Children always understand. And they thoroughly comprehend you, Allen Blynn. I have watched you at your work. It’s—it’s just great! That’s your job, sir!”

“Oh, I hope you’re right,” he glowed innocently. “Wouldn’t it be fine! You could help— There! That’s your job, madam!”

“And Gorgas could do the shop end—” Kate put in enthusiastically.

“And Bardek!” remembered Allen. “Wouldn’t he be a cracker-jack at the languages!—”

“And Mac,” remarked Mrs. Levering satirically. “He could teach horsemanship and stabling.”

“Why not!” exclaimed both Kate and Allen. “Mac cares for horses the way everybody should care for children,” said one. “He’s the sort of teacher I should want for myself,” said the other.

And so they chattered until Allen remembered that the lack of funds stood forever in the way.

“But I couldn’t finance it,” he concluded gloomily. “I’m no good at the money business. If a man owed me fifty dollars—there are several who do!—I’d never get it unless he volunteered to pay. That’s the reason I enjoy my ‘cases’ so much. If anyone forced me to accept money I would decamp. I have no financial ability.”

“Neither had Pestalozzi,” Kate reminded him.

“To be sure he hadn’t,” he mused. “But that’s why he failed.”

“But he didn’t have a manager.”

“Neither have I.”

“Let me take the post?”

For the first time Mrs. Levering saw some sense in their talk. A secret admiration for the daughter’s astuteness almost showed in her face.

“Just you let Keyser manage for you, Mr. Blynn,” the mother nodded her head significantly. “She runs this house—and everybody in it. When it comes to money Keyser can do wonders on nothing.”

“I can believe it,” laughed Blynn. “Pennsylvania-German thrift is notorious. But how could you ‘manage’? We haven’t a red cent.”

“Let us see,” Kate searched among her sewing things for paper and pencil. “What is your income outside of your salary at Holden?”

“How can you be so impertinent?” the mother interfered.

“Oh, no,” Blynn urged. “This is not impertinent, it’s important. She should ask that first. It will bring the school of cards down at the first shot. Outside of salary and lectures and writings, my sure income is exactly $96 per annum, the rental of Bardek’s house. I have a half-dozen other small properties. Sometimes I have had as much as $600 a year. It practically put me through college. Of course, mother has her own. Just at present I am pulling about $300. The reason I know is that I have just had an annual report from the agent. But Bardek is the only sure tenant. The dream’s up, my lady; oats is too high.”

“Do you think so?” she was calmly figuring. “Please let me do the managering, if I am to be manager.” After a moment or two of consideration she looked up satisfied. But first she asked questions. They included a complete list of his “cases.” Alongside of each one she checked those who could pay and those who could not.

“Here’s my scheme,” she showed him her paper. “I’ll rent you five acres of woodland for the grounds. There’s a good stone house there. It needs fixing up. I’ll attend to that. It’s just off the old mill above Cresheim Creek, where the road forks and goes up, you know, at the top of the hill.”

“‘Top-o’-the-Hill!’” he exclaimed. “We’ll call it ‘Top-o’-the-Hill.’ But,” ruefully, “where are we going to get the rent?”

“On the premises,” she continued. “I shall retain 51% of the stock and demand one wild rose paid to me every year with proper literary ceremonies.”

“A Pageant of the Wild Rose,” said he. “We shall crown you queen and I will recite. Listen! Wouldn’t this be nice and lugubrious. It’s old Dick Fanshawe’s fancy of complimenting his lady-love three hundred years ago.”

He began with, “Blown in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon”—but she interrupted at the first line.

“I should particularly fancy that when I am growing aged and the petals begin to drop off. But to come down to business,” the manager referred to her paper; “would keeping up your outside lectures be too much for you?”

“Not at all,” he rejoined. “That is mere play. I figured out once that I could just about make a living by giving one or two series each year.”

“Well, then, that’s disposed of,” she resumed. “We could charge $100 a year to each pupil I have checked on this list, and let the others come in free. Bardek and Gorgas and I would serve without pay. I don’t need it and the other two are making lots of money. They really ought to contribute something. We can guarantee you, with your lectures and your rentals,” she verified carefully the totals in her memoranda, “two thousand a year at the least, which ought to be enough. When we can afford it we’ll take all your time. And we’ll see about those houses of yours, too; just put them in my hands and I’ll boost your cash account, I have some of that same sort of property myself and you bet your buttons I don’t let any agent monkey with them.”

Gorgas bounded in with a roseate greeting, and after her gown had been admired the project was gone over again.

“I’d love it,” she chirped. “Let me pay all the bills. I’ve got loads of money.”

They talked of the business and of the proposal for awhile and then drifted into an animated discussion of methods. The children must spend the whole day with them. There would be a fine midday dinner, a powerful educational instrument. They would teach the three r’s and all the informational necessities, but they would also cultivate the graces of cheerfulness, unselfishness, fair play, courage, restraint and table manners. There should be no scoldings and no punishments; and while they might talk and sing and even dance in languages, there should be no conjugations! And there would be tree climbing, and sledding, baseball and tennis and swimming and skating and riding, and dancing, all a part of the course of study. They even got so far as outlining a prospectus and selecting a name. Of a host of suggestions, “Top-o’-the-Hill” remained first choice.

“It is from the top of that hill,” said Blynn, “that I always see Whittier’s ‘dun files of Krisheim’s home-bound cows’ and hear them clanking their bells up the rough road. Do you know, milady,” he turned to Kate, “that John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a considerable poem on our little Valley?”

“Did he?” she asked, with a smiling lack of interest. “I am not very poetic, you know—just a practical person who owns some earth, the very spot for your school.”

A messenger-boy bicycled slowly along the road, peering here and there at houses on either side. He stopped to inquire at the Williams’ and came back to the Levering gate. Mrs. Levering walked forward. Gorgas, Kate, and Allen were lost in their discussion.

“It’s a telegram for you, Mr. Blynn,” Mrs. Levering handed him the envelope. “Your mother sent him over here. It is prepaid. I have signed for you.”

His face, after he had read the paper carefully, gave the three women a fright, but he hastened to reassure them.

“Perhaps it is good news,” he said; “I don’t know. It really frightens me.” He searched their faces hesitantly, then decided. “I am told to keep this information strictly to myself, but I’m sure it will not do harm to tell you, especially Gorgas and Kate, after all your beautiful plans. I’m afraid they’re knocked sky-high. It is from Diccon. He is at Holden now attending a special meeting of the trustees. Oh, it’s really dreadful.”

He read:

“Strictly private information not yet made public. President Galt will resign to take effect next term. He goes on retirement at full salary. Trustees to engineer a monster farewell dinner of alumni. He goes out covered with laurels. Says he recognizes time to make a climax of his life-work and will leave the working out of the new plans to younger hands. He is not unfavorable to you as his successor. Straw vote of board shows you to be the candidate of majority for presidency. Come to Holden immediately. Don’t see anybody; don’t decide anything. Above all, don’t talk. Remember you know nothing. Wire.

“Diccon.”

“How perfectly splendid!” exclaimed Mrs. Levering.

The other members of the group looked like a trio of sentenced convicts.

“How can you say that, mother!” Kate spoke sharply. “Everything was so lovely—and now there’ll be no Top-o’-the-Hill.”

“It’s beastly,” snapped Gorgas. “I hate Holden; always did. Squabbling, little, petty kid-factory.”

“It’s awful!” murmured the candidate of a majority of the trustees.

But eventually they talked off their disappointment and began to see things from a less personal point of view. Blynn showed them the absurdity of his own qualifications; there were other men in the faculty to whom the elevation would be not only welcome but deserving.

“I am an accident,” he went on. “I got into the limelight. I took other men’s ideas and had the spokesman rôle. Everybody understood; I made no secret of it. Some folks can talk and others can’t. That’s all there is to it.... I suppose I’m a dramatic sort of chap. Diccon says I am. I get heated up with enthusiasm, the preacher in me comes to the front, and I splutter figures of speech.... In my lectures it comes out, and when I get the most applause,” he bowed his head, “I am the most ashamed. I like to thrill ’em, work the stops, soft pedal, vox humana and all that. I don’t mean to play on their feelings. I am honest with my own feelings but—there’s the trouble!—I do have feelings; and I show ’em.

“It’s my running tongue that got me in this fix. Why does everybody put such foolish value on the talker! Talkers ought to be suppressed!”

Gorgas came to her senses first.

“I’m over my mad now,” she said. “Of course, you’ve got to go, whether you want to or not. They call it duty, I believe. That means something disagreeable that your insides won’t let you shirk. You can’t back out, Allen Blynn. I advised you to go to Holden. In fact, I had just this thing in mind. I wanted you to be big and famous and talked about. Well, you are. I’m not happy about it. This splendid idea of a school in Cresheim Valley where we could all work together and be somebodies ourselves—it’s an awful come-down to have to chuck it—”

“Gorgas!” mildly from Mrs. Levering. “That talk doesn’t go at all with your lady-like clothes. I wish you wouldn’t say ‘chuck it.’”

“Mother, I’m almost tempted to say ‘Rats!’”

“Horrors!” the mother flung up her hands. “Say ‘chuck it’ if you must. That other word is positively vulgar. I can’t see why so many nice young boys and girls use such slang. Slang of the right sort, Mr. Blynn, I don’t mind; but the latest corruptions of the language are just low. Don’t toss those gloves on the ground, Gorgas, even if you do pay for them yourself. You have no proper reverence for fine clothes.”

“I’m ready to swear, mother, at any moment. Look out!” Gorgas smiled grimly.

“Ein tousand ein hundred ein und zwanzig!” helped Blynn. He was beginning to recover from the shock.

“Name of the name of a pipe!” she added, and suggested, “Let’s talk it over with Bardek.”

“Good!” everyone agreed, and they were off to the white cottage.

Bardek was riding both children on his back, a French lancer charging flying Germans. The air was full of rippling French, fierce manifestations of ancient hatred. The children were echoing every annihilating threat.

“You see at once a lesson in patriotism and savagery and the French language,” he explained after he had dismissed the cavalry. “The professor has come back. Good!” He shook hands effusively. “Do not be afraid. I will not kiss you. See! I hold myself back. It is for me a lesson in courage; I subdue the flesh.” He beat his breast like St. Jerome. “Sit, children,” he pointed to the collection of large flat-topped rocks which flanked his door.

They talked all together and told him of “Top-o’-the-Hill” and the imminent presidency of Holden. The latter topic did not reach Bardek at all.

“That Top-o’-the-Hill,”—he called it “Tope-o-t’-Heel”—“it is grand! I would like that—oh, so much. The ‘smithy’ it is good—it keep me alive and it make me forget—but to teach the little children, zat, my friends,” tears came to his eyes and his English went to pieces, “is what I—it is what—in English I cannot,” he blurted in torrential French. “That is what I am, teacher of children. In École Nouvelle at Grenoble I taught the little ones the languages! I can do that; ah, how well I can do that!—I have the certificate of the University of Naples!” he roared, and struck an attitude. “And I am bachelier ès lettres de l’Université de Bordeaux!”

The group was tremendously impressed. They told him so noisily, and soothed his pride.

“But in my silliness,” he slipped into his normal self, “I fight the big Austrian and then I must go away. This I should not tell you, but—it is told.”

It was hard to break his enthusiasm. Little by little it came to him that Top-o’-the-Hill was a dream. He held himself in with great restraint while Holden and its presidency was put before him.

“You should go, my friend,” he advised quietly. “It is a great honor—to be president of a big university and you so young. These other little schools for little fellows, they can be made by anybody; but the university, it is vairy important. When the time comes to succeed, one must not go back of the gods who send things. I have always had my will; I have laughed at fortune and I have been happy. But I know what it is to have the great thought in the brain to go up, up, up and be a man famous. They tell me you have that already. They talk about you out in the great world there,” he seemed deeply thoughtful over such honors. “And it is right. You are good. And you should not turn away from the big world and be like ol’ Bardek, who has nothings but for you kind friends. It is not always happy to be exile and live like pig.... So we must not have the little school at the top o’ the hill? It is a great pity—for me, and for the little fellows. Nom d’une pipe!” he grew more and more agitated. “What a thing to choose between, honors and presidents—and the little fellows. Oh, it is nice to have your name in beeg preent and to have all the little men bow and look up at you—but nom du nom d’une pipe!” His agitation increased. “It would not do to make Bardek to choose. I would put in one hand all the great nothings of the universities and poof!” he blew savagely. “It is wort’ one good laugh—jus’ that.... But,” he recovered himself, “men are not the same. And it is good. A world full of Bardeks! Hoi, yoi! It would be the ol’ devil who would have to laugh.... I do not want to discourage you, my friend. Go to your little place. The world will call it with big name. Maybe you, after while, will believe it, too. That is the way wit’ man. Go on! Be busy all day at typewriter. Run! Hurry!... Smile and laugh when you would better cry! Go up! Be success! But I am so sorry that we not have zat Tope-o’-t’-Heel. Nom d’une pipe!”

Bardek turned abruptly and marched like a corporal of the guard straight into his white cottage. Kate stepped on ahead down the path and disappeared within the house. Gorgas pumped Allen’s hand at parting as if to assure him that although convicted and sentenced she would stand by him no matter what public opinion said.

“This spoils something else for me,” she said. “I can’t talk about it now. Don’t ask. When do you go up to Holden?”

“Tonight, I fear,” he confessed guiltily.

“You will write to me?”

“Oh, I shall be gone for only a day or two, a week at the most. But I’ll write anyway,” he read her face, “though you may have to be satisfied with a dictated family letter.”

“That’s better than silence.”

He could think of nothing to say, he the much heralded talker! Her rather heavy voice had given an intonation to the sentence which seemed to hold it in the air. “That’s better than silence.”

“It sounds like the ending of Hamlet,” he managed to be gay. “‘The rest is silence,’ you know. Goodby, child.”

“Aufwiederhören, mein guter Kamarade.”

“Aufwiederhören?” he repeated. “You shall hear from me if I have to send couriers!”

BOOK FOUR
Canaan

“Speak when you’re spoken to!” the Queen sharply interrupted her.

“But if everybody obeyed that rule,” said Alice ... “and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for you to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything....”

XXIII
MY LORD AND EKE MY MASTER

BUT Gorgas did not hear from Allen Blynn, nor did he send couriers. For nearly a week he permitted himself to be led about by Diccon in the rôle of a “candidate,” growing each day more rebellious, and finally he had decamped. There was one important luncheon “to meet Professor Allen Blynn” which had to get along without its chief guest. The professor had seized his grip and fled. Rumor had it that he had buried himself in the University library, but Gorgas soon discovered that he had been seen under his own shade trees with his young pupils; and there she found him.

He looked older, she noted as she peered cautiously at him through a hedge. And what was that on the end of his chin which waggled as he talked? Mercy! It was the beginnings of a beard! That tuft was certainly the sign of a man absorbed in his affairs or worried beyond peradventure.

For some time she watched him through the hedge—“Getting used to the chin-thing,” she told him later. Howard Croft, the cripple boy, was reading aloud from a portentous history of philosophy; the two seemed to be stopping at every sentence to talk it out. She had rarely seen Allen Blynn so terribly in earnest.

When she finally stepped through the hedge and came up to the studious pair, Allen gave her a nod, as much as to say, “Sit down and pretend to be busy or you’ll frighten this shy bird off.”

For an hour she sketched beards of all nations, from Belshazzarian curls to the latest French twist, adroitly arranging it so that the boy could not see her.

“You like to make folks suffer, Allen Blynn,” Gorgas scolded gently after the boy had gone. “How do you suppose the Leverings have stood all this waiting for you to come over and tell us the latest? I just couldn’t stand it any longer. If I don’t hear all about Holden and other things I’ll blow up. I’m to take you back with me for dinner. The old crowd—some of them—are to drop in. Oh, the papers have told everything, so you needn’t fear.”

And all the time her mirthful eyes were fastened on his chin.

“I cannot talk about it,” his lips closed firmly. “It makes me ill even to think of it. That’s why I have been working on the youngsters so solidly. It’s the only antidote.”

She broke into sudden laughter. “It waggles when you talk.” She imitated by thrusting her own chin up and down grotesquely. “Why—oh, why did you do it?”

“Oh!” he came out of his perplexity. “My Van Dyke? A barber persuaded me. My chin is all bristles, and it was too sensitive for shaving. He fixed it this way, and I have forgotten to remove it.”

“I thought maybe it was penance for sins,” she choked back her laughter.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Yes,” she steadied herself. “I like—anything that’s funny!... Wait.... I thought I was used to it, but I see it’ll take some time.... There! I’ll be good and won’t laugh at the big man. Come!” she tapped him cheerfully on the arm. “Come along with me. We’ve wasted loads of time already.... And trust that crowd for making you forget. When they see that—whisker! oh!” she held her handkerchief to her mouth. “You are too funny, Allen Blynn! They’ll want you to talk all night—to see—it go up and down!”

As they walked along the shaded streets, she ceased joking him, except for an occasional mischievous peer around at the tufted chin. His good humor was equal to hers; but they soon settled into a more serious chat.

The dinner had some of its old-time gaiety and irresponsibility. Morris and Bea Wilcox were at the announcement stage and therefore open to persistent raillery. Diccon was there to keep the topic away from Holden, and Betty and Mary had brought their young husbands. Far in the background, seated like an accustomed idol, Leopold smiled wisely over the whole.

One may be sure that Blynn’s beard was greeted with excess of emotion. Beards were a rarity then; they were restricted by tacit law to dentists, young physicians, returning European tourists, and war veterans.

Almost the only difference between these dinner-parties and the others of five years ago was that they broke up earlier. There were trains to catch; there was the next day’s work; and in some cases there had begun to be babies to go back to. By ten o’clock Allen Blynn was alone with the Leverings.

Everyone had avoided the topic of Holden with obvious premeditation. Diccon had passed the word along to “drop it,” but in the more intimate situation with the Leverings questions were bound to arise.

“Diccon will have to do without me,” Allen spoke up with sudden firmness. “I am a candidate, I suppose; but I refuse to campaign.”

Diccon had managed things with distressing brilliancy. Doubting members of the trustees had to be dined and talked into reason. And they had to be paid.

“Paid?” Kate and Gorgas asked together. Mrs. Levering had elected to keep out of the conversation; her instinctive interest was to pilot the boat, not to take part in the ship’s concert.

“Yes, paid,” nodded Blynn grimly. “Paid in blood.”

“Oh,” the girls gasped in relief. Blood was permitted; money, never.

“Yes,” he explained; “I had to entertain, tell sprightly stories, plunge into theories of education, and act all the while with sweeping smile and glittering eye—and voluble! as Tutivillus himself. And not just to one person or to one group of persons, mind you; but to every Tom, Dick and Harry whom Diccon sicked on me. If they had come in battalions I could have done it, but they came in single file. When Diccon finally started to use me, we had dinners every night and luncheons every day, except one day, when we had two luncheons. Diccon said there was no other way out of it.”

“I wouldn’t have done that for a peck of presidents,” said Gorgas firmly. “I’d have been myself.”

“Myself!” echoed Allen. “Bless my soul! Myself during that whole trip was a silent, sullen, nasty-tongued person. If I had ever let myself out of the box he would have first lambasted the whole crew and then sunk back into a silent scowl. You know how it is. Haven’t you done the same thing when you were the charming hostess?” Blynn appealed to them.

“Oh, yes, indeed,” everyone chorused, including Mrs. Levering.

“There are times,” Kate remembered, “when I am strongly tempted to have fake hysterics in the middle of the dinner, just to drive them home.”

“Exactly!” he nodded firmly. “So I avoided a scene and drove myself home.” And therefore, one day he did not “meet” one fussy little member.

“I just couldn’t stand that fellow,” Blynn grew rigid. “He is a puffy-looking, self-assertive sort of nobody. Everybody knows that he was appointed on the board because he is a relative of a man who has a friend who was able to influence somebody who knew somebody who could get him the appointment—one of those absurd selections that happen every now and then in America, due to the hysteric ambition of some small person, helped out by the easy-going American character. Well, this Nobody presumes to busy himself with the affairs of Holden, talks about it, bothers everybody as if he really had judgment. I couldn’t trust myself near him. If he had got off any of those loud-mouthed advices of his, before others, too, I’d have shut him up with his own history. So I concluded that the best thing I could do for Diccon was to vanish. I came home and locked myself up in the University library and hit on a fine trail—I analyzed pretty much all the ways in which the Elizabethan courtier complimented his lady. There’s little in it for subtle minds, but it will make a splendid popular lecture.”

Then, to avoid what was obviously to him a distressing remembrance, he dropped Holden and its affairs and told them about the gallant Elizabethan gentlemen.

“I wonder what the Elizabethan women thought about all that stuff,” the practical Gorgas summed up.

“It isn’t all stuff,” protested the professor.

“Didn’t the ladies ever reply?” questioned Kate.

“Not a word,” said Allen. “Their silence is profound. Every mother’s son was busy writing sonnets to his mistress’ eyebrow, but the ladies stood pat. The secret of high diplomacy is, Never divulge; keep ’em guessing. And they did!”

“I wish they had written,” Gorgas was thoughtful.

“No doubt they felt things as keenly as the men.... All the men wore beards, I suppose?” she continued irrelevantly.

“Undoubtedly,” Blynn’s mind was rarely personal. The merry face of Gorgas, he did not note at all; nor her attempts, with hand at mouth, to hold back a volume of laughter; nor Kate’s furtive, elderly signal of rebuke to the grinning sister. With eye mostly upon Kate, who was presenting a polite face of assumed interest, the young professor poured forth a dissertation on Elizabethan tonsorial fashions. He was summing up his conclusions when his attention was attracted by a badly suppressed squeak of laughter from Gorgas. “The beard,” he was saying, “was the sign of the gentleman, and the sign of the man. Of course they—what are you grinning at, you Cheshire kitten? Oh! see here, I’ll pluck this thing off tomorrow. I didn’t mean to wear it, anyway. It was forced on me by a villainous barber.”

Everyone protested except Gorgas.

“I think you had better take it off,” she shook her head. “I’ve been bubbling with shut-in laughter all evening. I like fun, but this—is—carrying things a little—too far.” She pushed her laughter back with her handkerchief. “I don’t wonder the Elizabethan ladies didn’t reply. Poems praising men’s eyes and noses and beards! Là! là! là! là! That would be too funny!”

It was a relief to get away from Holden and its small politics. Elizabethan lyrics were such a remove. So he left them in a cheerful mood and promised to come back soon, with his notes, and let them have his amorous studies, that substitute for fussy little trustees.

The next morning his mail brought him an unsigned communication in the sprawling hand of Gorgas Levering. Evidently she had penned it after he had gone the night before. It read:

To My Lord and Eke My Master

Thy beard is waggling in my thoughts, I find,

Oh, lord and master, chosen of my heart;

Thy loving prattle have I heard but part,

The waggling beard distracted all my mind.

And those gray eyes—or are they slightly green?—

I did not see, nor either freckled cheek,

Nor teeth, nor ear, nor bald spot on the peak:

The waggle, waggle, waggle held the scene.

I like thee, master, for thy forehead seared

By crash of pewters foaming to the brink;

I like thee, master, for thy fingers pink

That never once hath honest labor smeared;

I like thee for thy nose’s Roman kink,

But Zooks! I love that waggle, waggle beard.

To which was added,

P.S. But I don’t. I hate it.

XXIV
THE HOLD-UP

ALLEN BLYNN’S smile at breakfast that morning was quite Pestalozzian. The mother looked across at him with much the same seraphic glow, simply reflected.

“Just listen to this from Gorgas, mother. It’s a perfect little bit of satire. Oh, this is rich!” He read with outright joy.

“I like thee, master, for thy fingers pink

That never once hath honest labor smeared;

I like thee for thy nose’s Roman kink,

But Zooks! I love that waggle, waggle beard!”

The mother was keen enough to see the cleverness and as well the poet’s criticism of her son’s tuft of beard.

“It is rather rough, my dear,” she looked over mildly.

“Do you think so?” he was surprised. “That’s remarkably smooth verse, mother. It just flows straight to the point. And the sonnet structure! It’s perfect. I don’t think it a bit rough, mother.”

“I was not considering the verse, my dear,” she managed to say. “Motherlike, I was thinking only of my son’s ornamented chin. It is rather rough and bristly—the chin, not the sonnet. And it does—uh—waggle when you talk, my dear.”

“It goes today, mother,” he eyed the postscript carefully. “I’ve pledged my word.” But his mind went out to the little girl who was ever tossing odd rhymes at him. “I didn’t suspect she could put anything into such shape as this. We’ve been reading a lot of verse together; it has counted; no doubt, it has counted.” The Pestalozzian smile of triumph was still on his face.

“What wonders you have done with Gorgas,” the mother shared his pride.

That brought him down like a shot.

“Nonsense!” he exploded. “She’s the only one of all my children who has baffled me. Everything she has is her own. I try to teach her one thing, she comes forth with something different and unexpected—like this,” flourishing the sonnet. “She picks her own way about. Some children will bloom in spite of teachers; but we teachers have a habit of taking credit for all our smart ones. Did you ever try to stop a dandelion from thriving?”

Another letter of his small packet was not so consoling.

“Schmuhl is in town!” he ejaculated. “Diccon says I must have luncheon with him at the Union League.”

“And pray, who is Schmuhl?”

“A trustee and a big wig,” he explained, but without enthusiasm. “He’s a corporation lawyer; never seems to work; but he does work, like a rat, in the dark. He’s the ‘legislative man’ at Holden. He can do anything with law-makers. He seems thoroughly gentle and harmless. But ... I will not meet him.”

“Why, my dear?” the mother asked.

“I shall resign from Holden College and demand that my name shall not be considered for the presidency,” he went on sternly.

“If it worries you, my dear,” the mother spoke complacently; she had enormous confidence that anything her boy should decide to do would be therefore exactly right.

“Without an atom of proof I sense this Schmuhl. He makes laws—how, I do not know, but I strongly suspect the method. Laws are essential to colleges that depend partly on state appropriations. Therefore I would need Schmuhl. And I decline to need him! It would be a continuous ‘hold-up’ and I decline to be ‘held up’ by the Schmuhls of this world. They call him respectable; I call him infamous, and I refuse to link my life with his!”

Almost abruptly he left for his writing desk. In a short while he was trudging down the street with letters in his hand. He strode forward indignantly, and he dropped the letters in the corner mail box with something of the thrust of a righteous man spurning evil. “Top-o’-the Hill” began to loom up as a blessed certainty.

He strode into a barbershop and had the offending beard removed; and still striding, he went on to the Leverings. On the lawn he met Bardek, Kate, and Gorgas; they had not ceased discussing the fortunes of Allen. “I have resigned from Holden; I will not be a candidate,” he announced bluntly. Briefly he sketched his reasons.

Gorgas and Kate received the news with amazement. Already they had begun to feel some of the pride of their friend’s success. As Bardek had hinted, the “little place” was being called a big name by the world; some of the world’s valuation was slowly changing their own. It would seem almost like a defeat to back out now. They even forgot to notice the absence of the beard.

“It would mean machination and continual intrigue,” Blynn shook his head firmly. “And I’m not the man for that. Good old Galt. Somehow I begin to see his side of the thing. A fine, old sport he was, too; he never ‘peached.’ No matter how hard they ran him he never whimpered. I wonder what he thought of me—a tricky politician, I guess, shouting for ‘the youth of America’ and secretly pulling wires for the presidency. Ugh! What a job!”

“My dear good friend,” Bardek interposed. “This President Galt, I know him; he is good sport, yes; and he twist about and turn and you cannot catch him—yes; I know him. But also! He know you. That is the business of wise old Galts to know peoples. Oh, he know you. From the day he first see you he know you. Your face, it is all on the outside—”

“Gracious! I hope so,” he stroked his face thoughtfully.

“Yes,” Bardek continued. “You will always be that way. You let your thinkings grow right up, so they show in your eyes and around the corners of your mouth. You would never make little diplomat—great statesman? Yes? Perhaps; for you would fool all the little liars and gamblers—they would look on your face and see what is to them an unknown t’ing, the truth. It is vairy confusing to little statesmen—the truth, m’sieu’. When the big Bismarck was in corner he quick tell the truth so’s nobody would believe and all go the wrong way. Sometime, I, too, have tol’ t’ truth.”

“Well, I hope so!” laughed Blynn. “But we’re all forgetting the main business in hand. Top-o’-the-Hill is emerging out of dreamland into reality. Come, Miss Manager, let’s discuss plans. Holden will find my resignation in tomorrow’s mail.”

The plans were even better matured than Blynn had hoped for. Kate had kept at work—“To keep my mind off Petruchio”—she had told him. Mac had already cleaned paths and had made a rough estimate of the building needs. There was much to be done there; but with some outside hired help, and everybody joining in, September should see a school-house prepared for those parents who had courage to trust their children to the experimenters. Blynn’s work was already mapped out on a card. First was the writing of the “prospectus.” He could do that “trick” with the proper sense and style. It wasn’t to be a pedagogical document, but a thriller to win parents over.

Blynn agreed, but insisted upon one further condition. The property must be assessed at a marketable figure and a proper rental paid.

“Trust your manager,” advised Kate. “I don’t intend to give anything away. A stock-company is to be formed, which will buy the land and house. I will take 51 per cent. of the shares as security and to control you reckless ones. The stock-company pays taxes and improvements; but I insist upon the wild rose and all the literary ceremonies.”

“Right!” agreed Allen. “The first wild rose of spring shall be yours; but this is something more than poetry; it is almost my only means of livelihood. I should be needlessly worried if I felt for a single minute that the thing did not pay for itself entirely. I cannot live on your property, Kate.”

“Now, that is vairy strange,” Bardek commented when the matter had been made clear to him. “You cannot take the ol’ house and little earth.”—He said something like “leetle airt,” but it was perfectly clear as he spoke it.—“Oh, no! You would have such shame! But you would take it quick if I be fool and sell it cheap! You cannot take money! But you take rent from poor peoples who cannot pay! And you not take my ol’, good coat which is now too little for me! Ach! you would be beggar! But you take present from me of my best workmanship which give me much labor and a big pain in t’ back! And you take my dinner at my table wit’ no shame at all; and my laughter and all my good talk and my friendliness, which take all my life to make and cost me—everyt’ing! It is strange! As for me—poof!—I have not the shame. When you give and I want, I jus’ take and forget, like wind and rain.”

For the next few days they toiled like slaves on the “property.” They dug, planted, cut weeds, sawed and even plastered. Bardek secured the help of one or two Italians to do the heavy hauling. “Work is good,” he argued, “it is the only medicine; but a broken back, it is not good. The little men of Italy? Ah! They are built so. See how they laugh! I talk to them of Garibaldi and zoop! they carry like demons.”

As they trudged home one weary afternoon, full of exultant hopes, a newspaper fell into their hands. Blynn’s picture had caught Kate’s quick eye. “Blynn, Holden’s Chief,” ran the headlines. It told of a special meeting of the board of trustees, and reviewed Blynn’s history with the accuracy of a fond parent. The vote was 7 to 2.

“Never you mind,” Blynn grew rigid as he turned to his friends. “That won’t go! I told Diccon to withdraw my name; I see he didn’t. It’s all right, Kate. I’ll get out of this somehow. I’ve been to the top of Pisgah; there’ll be no turning back until we reach the Promised Land.”

“Not when I have worked like a coal miner,” implored Bardek. “Who would give me my ol’ back back?—Oof! wass für eine Sprache! What a language!—give a back back! Ho!”

“That’s good business,” Kate nodded her head, satisfied. “I’m glad they elected you. It will boom Top-o’-the-Hill immensely. I’ll have it easy financing this job. The trouble will be to keep the money from swamping us.”

“‘The President of Holden College resigns to become a kindergartner,’” exclaimed Gorgas. “Allen Blynn, that’s too funny. It’s almost as funny as the waggle-waggle beard!”

“You minx!” he shook a finger at her. “Are you cogitating another sonnet?”

“I may get on my poet-bonnet!” she smiled at him.

XXV
DAGO

For-ty year on when a-far and a-sunder.

[[audio/mpeg]] [[MusicXML]]

AT the suggestion of Gorgas, Leopold became a member of the staff of “Top-o’-the-Hill.” Of all the old group that used to make rendezvous of the Levering house, Leopold and Blynn were the only two who kept up the relationship; but both men were rather intermittent visitors. Leopold—everyone said “Leopold,” possibly because of the impossible surname, Hayim—called punctiliously upon Mrs. Levering, although Mrs. Levering saw little of him. Gorgas and he spent the time exercising their French. He was a silent, grave man, with a far-off friendly smile; and, once enticed, he could talk out of a rare life. On festival occasions he could always be counted upon for a plaintive song.

“Leopold will do the science, you know,” Gorgas explained. “I have talked it over with him. You should have seen his fine eyes sparkle! He’s got heaps of money, you know; we’ll make him treasurer. Besides, he’s English. That will give such a tone!”

What a varied group it was! At night they drew up the staff as it would be printed in the “prospectus.” The list of names and qualifications was almost formidable when one considered how informal and unregulated all their teaching hoped to be; and in that list they stumbled over the name of Bardek. He would never admit any other names. “Jus’ Bardek,” he would say. “Why have more than one name? Even one is hard to remember.” Here is the first faculty of “Top-o’-the-Hill,” that prototype of the “new schools” which were soon to spring up all over America:

In Charge:
Mr. Allen Blynn
Holden and Jena
Miss Keyser Levering
The Warren School
Associates:
Mr. Hayim Leopold
Harrow and Cambridge
Mr. Bardek
Naples and Bordeaux
Miss Gorgas Levering
School of Applied Arts

“It sounds so learned,” Allen looked on ruefully. “We oughtn’t to print it.”

“It ought to sound learned,” said Kate.

“But we are to deal with young life, not learning,” he reminded her.

“We’ll do all of that,” she assured him. “This list of names is just advertising. No one will question us after they see all our vast qualifications; they won’t even inquire if we have them. This,” tapping the sheet, “will bring us more paying pupils than any other page in the pamphlet. I know these people. ‘Jena,’ ‘Bordeaux,’ ‘Harrow,’ ‘Cambridge’—why, that’s as good as paying dividends already. You watch.”

“When you go fishing, my friend,” Bardek’s eyes twinkled, “it would be big fool if you not put on the dying worm or the already dead insect. Of course,” spreading his hands, “you might say to the fish, ‘Come, jump on my hook; it won’t hurt you any worse jus’ because the dead insect is not there. Come; quick; get it over.’ Ah! no! The fish are too wise.

“Titles and degrees and all that,” Bardek went on, “they are vairy great power. We see little men wit’ big decorations, and we come to them and ask questions, and prod them with the stick of our minds, and we turn them round and round and open their mouths and look down their throats. How we tremble! At any minute dese great man may say some wise thing! And you stay and stay for hundert t’ousand years and he say, nothing—nothing that you don’t know when you were small boy. ‘It look like rain,’ maybe he say after two, t’ree thousand years. But the world! Ah! It walks in a great wide circle and will not come near the great man. Mystery! Mystery! They are afraid of his wisdom. It will strike them dead, like lightning. So they send their children to him.

“And the children! First they are afraid—they believe then all the papa and mamma has tol’ dem. Then they find he don’t know what happened in the world day before it was yesterday. And soon they laugh. Then he grow red in face and scold; and then because they have pains of laughter they stop. And all their days they meet ol’ school friend and they sit and drink and eat and laugh at that ol’ fool who did not know what happens the day before it was yesterday.

“And t’en t’ey send dere children to him and make beeg stories how great is that man!

“Oh, put the dead insect on the hook, my friend: or there will be no little pupils and we will be so hungry to teach t’at we fall on each other and teach.”

It was precisely as Kate had predicted. She seemed to know exactly where to drop her printed bait. By August she had closed the doors and had engineered a waiting list, for they were resolved the first year to begin with small numbers.

“We’ll pay you your wages and have something besides for improvements,” she announced to Blynn.

Of all that enthusiastic lot of teachers he was the only one who could not afford to give his time without salary. It hurt him to take that money, but his good sense showed him that there was no other way out. It was shame of the sort that Bardek thought so strange, and it must be downed. He reflected with some grimness that while the others were giving energy, joy, and enthusiasm to the work, he was offering all that and something much harder to give, his pride as an independent man.

“Top-o’-the-Hill”

To no one he spoke of this. In spite of his innocence and in spite of the face which, as Bardek claimed, he wore for the most part “on the outside,” Blynn could mask a hundred worries back of his Pestalozzian smile. Yet Gorgas knew. She had pieced together his jests and his half-uttered opinions.

They had worked all day together on a baseball diamond and were celebrating the conclusion by a picnic supper on the grounds of “Top-o’-the-Hill.”

“Mein guter Kamarade,” she whispered, “you mustn’t feel bad about that fool salary.”

“Oh, I don’t,” he smiled.

“Yes, you do,” she nodded wisely. “I’m onto your curves, old chap. I’ll just have to talk to you like a Dutch uncle. I’ve a scheme, too; better than anything Kate gets off. Now—mustn’t it be grand?”

“Phew!” he affected seriousness. “It must be a corker. Let’s hear it.”

“Here? Wouldn’t that be funny,” she asked herself aloud. “Wouldn’t that be too funny!” The idea amused her. “Oh, no, mon capitaine, not here before all these folks. It’s—it’s private. Yes,” she mused, “it’s quite private.... You must let me have an interview. I’ve been trying to have one with you ever since June.”

“Why, my dear child!” he was surprised. “We’ve been together nearly every blessed day, taken walks together and all that!”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve tried to say it—and couldn’t. But I’m going to dive in soon. That’s what I came to your house for, in June; you remember when you were teaching the Croft boy? If he hadn’t been there I’d have done it then. Hush!” she raised a finger. “They’re coming back. Not a word.... It’s partly about him.” She nudged toward Leopold.

That was an exasperating way to end a conversation, characteristic of Gorgas—just like an exciting continuous story. “It’s partly about him.” About Leopold?

Leopold had never ceased his subtle interest in Gorgas since the night of their first conversation in French. He was both French and English, and, back of that, the Oriental. He seemed ever ready to do two contradictory things; to leap into the breach and seize the enemy by the throat, or to stand, courageous as the day, and undisturbed take every shock. One of these—the French or the English—might have won out and given him a positive emotional character, but the persistent Hebrew, trained to keep emotions in check, to pass them in review before hard, good sense, held the two contrary horses together and dominated from the driver’s seat. One needs a mixed metaphor to describe Leopold.

There was much more to Leopold than that—what forked, straddling biped can be summed up in a phrase?—he had the smile of compassion and the hovering sadness of those who have looked upon the world from afar off, who have travelled sympathetically among peoples and have seen the splendid futility of the life effort.

It was generally believed that Leopold was rich. He admitted a competence, but his life was simple. Ah! Blynn had a swift thought of comprehension. Leopold was to furnish the salary! That was it. Wise little Gorgas had thought to dissipate a man’s pride in being self-supporting by shifting the source of income from a stock-company to a person! Women will never understand that side of man, he mused; the fierce hatred of leaning upon another. In illness women are meek and saintly; when men become sick and incapacitated they grow unbearable, their maimed spirits cry out against the very charity that would make them whole. Women live in dependence without shame. They take furs and carriages and spending money from their fathers. Even a boy of sixteen begins to rebel. He cannot take things, even from fathers; he must earn.

Over the sprightly little fire Blynn told them of Diccon.

“You know how mean I felt because I had to leave him in the lurch,” he said. “Well! Diccon was just fine about it. He said he suspected that turn of affairs all along and had prepared for it.

“What a loyal chap that Diccon is! He said his only interest was in having the post officially tendered me; he really didn’t care what I did with it. He said just what you remarked the other day, that the election would make my name valuable anywhere else I went. I told him about ‘Top-o’-the-Hill.’ He said, ‘Bully! It’ll be a great go. Put me on the trustees, will you?’”

“Let’s!” suggested Gorgas. “I like Diccon. He’s got sense. We haven’t.”

“What!” they shouted.

“We’re dreaming,” she nodded wisely. “We need his kind to prevent us soaring right up in the air like a balloon and—”

“And go bust, eh?” continued Bardek.

“Just that,” said Gorgas. “We need ballast badly.”

They could hardly eat, these dreamers, until the new idea had been incorporated. A board of advisers was drawn up to give ballast: it included Diccon, and the rector of Grace Church, the butter-and-egg man, others of the tennis-court group, and three influential “mothers.”

“We’ll get out a second edition of the prospectus,” Kate smiled her satisfaction. “That front page will look slick! We’ll charge ’em two hundred next year.”

Bardek brought the Italian laborers to the picnic supper. They demurred mightily at first, but Gorgas won them by a neat speech of invitation in Italian. How their eyes glistened, not for the good things to eat, although that must have touched them, but for the sound of that rich Italian speech.

“They are so hungry for words,” laughed Bardek; “the sound of your own language in a strange land—ah! that is sweet. One day I pass an ol’ woman wit’ bundle of sticks and she say, ‘Dam t’ose t’ings; t’ey won’t stay on my ol’ head’; but she say it in Czech, the clicking-clacking Czech which my mother spoke to me.” He burst into a strange rattle of exclamations. “That is the sweet Czech, my friends. It sounds not so sweet to you, eh? No? Your ear it is not right. Suppose you was in the middle of China and could never go to your home and, quick, you hear little children wit’ high American voice sing in the evening,

‘Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,

Mulberry bush, mulberry bush,

Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,

So early in the morning.’

“Ach! Gott, would you not cry?

“I did cry and hug that ol’ woman and tell her in her own Czech that I be long-gone son. And she believe me! I make her say, ‘Dam t’ose sticks,’ five, ten times and give her silver dollar for each time she speak. Ach! if she do not go mad after that! Somewhere in America is a crazy woman, all her life-time singing and shouting, ‘Dam t’ose sticks!’”

“We’ve caught you at last, Bardek,” Gorgas cried. “You are Czech! That’s what you are!”

“Oh, no!” he protested. “I am cosmopolitan. My mother, she was Czech when I was boy; but before t’at she was many t’ings; and after, many t’ings. I am cosmopolitan,” he claimed again. To Leopold and to Gorgas he spoke in French, to Blynn he made his remarks in German, and to the Italians he talked in their own tongue. The very timbre and rhythm of his voice changed with each language; he had the music of each in his head.

“Ask Caproni, here,” he boasted, “if I am not Italian.”

Gorgas inquired in their language.

“Him?” their eyes opened in surprise at the question. “Oh, but, yes, milady. He is grand signor, Italian gentleman. He has lived in Milan, Napoli, everywhere, even in our own Sicily. Italian? Oh, but yes. French? You would make fun, milady? He speak French as we in Sicily speak French; ah! he talk Italian from the heart.”

While Gorgas translated, Bardek sat transfigured.

“You see!” he shook his great, round head in pride.

“And I would take oath you are French,” Leopold remarked quietly. “You have tones and nuances of the Loire—”

“Oh, yes, I have lived on the Loire,” he admitted, “and also in Brittany.” For example, he shifted back and forth between the patois of the north and south of France.

“I say again that I am cosmopolitan,” he averred. “The Bohemian belongs to all countries. In New York city is a Bohemia which New York city does not know. There we talk all languages and listen to the pulses of the world. New York is a little place, full of the small thinkings of little places. It has great pride and wonderful industry—just like little places—but of the doings of the great world, it knows everything too late. Long before the big wars the Bohemia of New York city knows what is to be, and prepares; one day New York city wake up and scream the stale news. So wit’ everyt’ing.

“But I should not so talk,” he shook his head sadly. “I am no longer cosmopolitan.”

They tried for some time to get him to tell them why. At first he would not speak. Sadness enveloped him. After a while he laughed.

“I am not sorry; it is good,” he said, with characteristic optimism. “In America one cannot be cosmopolitan, I see. America is too strong, it sucks t’ blood out. In Europe I could change my skin and still be—deep—myself, Bardek, Citizen of No Place. Always I could be French and still look on like foreign; or German or Dutch or Spanish or Polish or Italian or anyt’ing. Jus’ so I be in America for long time. Zen somet’ing happen to me. I eat poison grass, or somet’ing. My skin, it does not change; it gets tough.

“Sometimes when I talk French or Italian to my boys or to Miss Gorgas, I must stop and t’ink for the word. Me, Bardek, stop to think! It is terrible, my friend, to have big things bubbling inside and no word at the mout’! And always the English word, it come. And such English! Ach! My boys, dey laugh and make fun—when they t’ink I do not look—and they say, ‘Dago.’ Oof! Sometimes I beat t’em in six languages; but, sometimes, too, I laugh.... ‘Dago!’ It is so.”

A chorus of protests told him how well he spoke English.

Leopold scolded him for his desponding. “It is thinking that counts, my dear Bardek,” he said, “not words. Greek is a wonderful language, but without Plato or Homer and Aesculus or Sophocles and Aristophanes, it would be a dead instrument. You think, my dear Bardek. If you spoke in Pennsylvania-Dutch you would be worth listening to.”

“And your English is better than English,” spoke up the loyal Gorgas. “It is softer and lovelier and beautifully strange.”

“Thank you,” he smiled. “I like you to say zat. A good lie, you owe it to a friend, to make him happy. What! You laugh? But it is not sin to lie. You do not read your Bible, my friend. To kill? steal? yes. To bear false witness? yes. But the good Moses was too wise to say, ‘Thou shalt not lie.’... Yet I am ‘Dago,’ jus’ like dese Italian ol’ men.

“Oh, I know; it is right,” he continued. “The Italian, oh, he will come to America and he say, ‘I will live like pig and make much money and go back to my country and live like prince. Yah! He stay wit’ his own people and talk, talk, talk his own speech. He laugh at funny Americans. Yah! Soon he must hide his fine clothes of colors and put on grease-pants and ol’ hat. It is not good to make money when peoples laugh. Yah! And zen he must learn little English, and he speak ‘Dago,’ jus’ like me. Or how can he make the much money, eh? Yah! To his little boys and girls he talk ze good language of his own land; but zey? Ach! Zey will not. In ze house, yes; so not to get ze beatings. But in ze street, là! là! là! là! Gabble, gabble, gabble. Some day zey make fun of daddy and wink and say, ‘Dago!’

“And he is ‘Dago.’ Soon he find himself talking ‘Dago’ in house, even wit’ his wife. Once he fight and beat her and all cry curses—in his own speech? Ah, no; in ‘Dago.’ He call her ‘Dam dog’ and she say to him ‘Go t’ ’ell!’ and zen he is done. His skin cannot change. All his life he is not’ing—he is American.”

It was the strong America seizing on the immigrant and twisting him into a new mold. The children would be Americans, but the old ones, they were wrecked in the process. The Germans became “Dutchmen”; the Irish became “Micks”; the Poles became “Hunkies,” and the Italians “Dagos.”

“But sometimes they go back,” ventured Blynn.

Bardek laughed at the picture his mind conjured.

“Oh, yes, they go back. Là! là! là! là! What a comic! The people of their own land rush out of t’ house to see t’ funny t’ing. Là! là! là! là! The dead clot’es of ragman! The gol’ watch-chain for t’ tie big dog! Zen they talk! It is no language. Perhaps they stay to be comic all their lives? Ah, no. For they get sick for America, where the little boys and girls go to school. They do not rest till zey go back and be once more ‘Dago.’”

The twilight came slowly about them while they lingered over the camp-fire. Some of Bardek’s brooding spirit had infected them; but it did not drive them home. Night began to make its claims for a habitation, and the stars of a fine August evening shone clear, yet they stayed to hear Leopold talk of his boyhood days at Harrow. Finally they joined hands with him and formed the circle about the ebbing fire—as Harrow “old boys” have done for generations—while they sang the Harrow parting song:

Forty year on, when afar and asunder

Parted are those who are singing today,

When you look back, and forgetfully wonder

What you were like in your work and your play;

Then it may be, there will often come o’er you

Glimpses of notes, like the catch of a song—

Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,

Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along.

Follow up! Follow up! Follow up!

Till the field ring again and again

With the tramp of the twenty-two men.

Follow up! Follow up!

XXVI
THE BIOLOGIST AND THE PURITAN

THE solemnity of the parting song had driven Bardek off alone. Allen and Kate walked along ahead, but at the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, a dark, forbidding place, Allen insisted upon stopping to wait for Gorgas and Leopold, who were straggling far in the rear. Fumbling accidentally in his pockets, Blynn produced his morning mail, two letters, still unopened. They moved up to the lights of the station to see what it would disclose. One was from Gorgas—she had a habit of jotting notes to persons she met every day. He glanced at it hurriedly, but in the bad light did not catch the full meaning. The other letter set him dancing.

“Can you spare me for the remainder of the month, Madam Manager, and part of September?” he asked. His eyes showed good news.

“Is it money?” the practical manager asked first.

“Bushels!” he cried. “Diccon has booked a series of lectures in a string of cities,” he read, “Rochester, Ithaca, Albany, Providence and Boston. I cover the route three times, fifteen lectures in five weeks, at—what do you think? One hundred dollars each and expenses!”

“How much is that altogether?” Kate was figuring.

“I don’t know. I’m so excited, I can’t count. One hundred apiece—child’s play! I’ve got ’em all done. Isn’t it great! and isn’t it robbery! ‘Each local center pays three hundred dollars,’ he read, ‘and expenses, which makes it one hundred dollars per lecture. I hope this is not too slight an honorarium.’ Golly! Too slight? Let me confess something, Kate. I don’t take any pennies out of the cash-drawer of Top-o’-the-Hill. By George! you don’t know how splendid I feel to be able to face those children like a man. That ‘salary’—oh, you were managing it beautifully, I know—but that ‘salary’ was choking me, even before I got any. I’m glad that’s all over and settled.”

---

They were strolling toward home through the wooded Seminary grounds, on which site once stood the old “Classical and Military Lyceum,” where Beauregarde, Meade and many another Northern and Southern officer received preliminary training. Over these same grounds, in 1777, came Sullivan’s men, driving the British advance post before them; and a little later, on that October morning, General Washington rode down the “Great Road” with his eager staff.

“I dug a cannon-ball out of my garden the other day,” Allen remarked abruptly. The thrill of the evening was upon them and they had had no need for speech; but if the man would talk, Kate would tuck her hand in his arm and be content. “A little round, rusty thing, about as big as your fist—it made me a little more reverent toward this old battleground.... The Continentals came up out of the fog over there,” he pointed earnestly, although it was almost too dark to see him, “surprised the pickets in the Allen House and bayoneted every one—poor devils!... They swept on over this ground, firing from behind trees, for the Fifty-second British Light Infantry, who were tenting over there in the fields beyond the New Street, were stirring out like hornets—and such a bugling and banging there must have been!... The Fifty-second put up a running fight and weren’t able to make a stand for nearly a mile.... Think of it! Washington himself followed right after Sullivan’s men—perhaps he rode over this very spot!... Doesn’t it excite you?”

“Not a bit, Sentimental Sir,” she laughed coolly.

“You are standing, mebbe, on historic spots, madam!” he mocked her laughter with assumed sternness. “That battle came near to deciding everything—think of the historic persons who struggled here—Washington and Wayne, and Lafayette, and—and—”

“And me,” she helped.

“Since when have you become an historic person, madam?”

“‘On this spot,’” she quoted an imaginary stone, “‘one wonderful evening late in August in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-two, stood Keyser Levering, familiarly known as Kate, with her arm linked comfortably in that of a poetic but pleasant person otherwise unknown.’... Washington and Lafayette were nice boys,” said she, “and that battle was their fun, but standing here very much alive and living my little life is all the history I’ll ever have; so I’ve got to make the most of it.... Sentimental Sir, aren’t you going to get all worked up over historic me, standing here?—or do I have to be dead before it is proper to become really stirred?”

She waited expectantly. Kate had told her story to this man in as many veiled ways as is permitted to a lady; but each time he had looked at her earnestly, as if she had propounded a serious riddle. And always it amused her—at least she smiled gamely—to see how really obtuse this clever man could be. This time, in the darkening night, she could not see his eyes as he bent forward; but she felt his arm tighten and the brotherly pat of his hand upon her own.

“You’re all right, Kate,” he said; and then, “Good old Kate!” which he repeated with great satisfaction. A second later, he asked irrelevantly, “Where are those children?” meaning Gorgas and Leopold.

They peered fruitlessly into the darkness, and even retraced their steps a part of the way down the Valley, but there was no sign of them.

“They have felt the spell of the evening and have tracked off,” Kate suggested. “Didn’t Leopold do that song well? ‘Forty year on when afar and asunder,’” she sang. “It gave me a thrill, I tell you.”

“Me, too,” Blynn pressed his lips together. “And how he felt it! Did you see him straining to keep the tears back? Think what it meant to him, that old parting song of Harrow!”

The floating melody and the words of the song lingered. By association, the thought of Gorgas came into their minds.

“They’ll be home before us,” Kate spoke out. “While we’ve been dawdling along they have probably taken some short cut. It may be Gorgas has dragged Leopold on one of her ‘bee-lines.’”

“Well, well!” Blynn laughed. “At night, too. Gorgas claims that’s to be one of the studies in Top-o’-the-Hill. ‘Cut a straight path,’ she says, ‘like a bee, only bee-ier:

‘Through bush, through briar,

Ice, rain, water, fire;

Over river, up tree,

Bee-ier than a flying bee,

Through hedge and over gate,

Straight! straight! straight! straight!’

“She goes up one side of a tree and down the other like a squirrel! I was on one last Wednesday. Phew! She chose a southeast ‘bee-line’ and insisted upon fording the Schuylkill river, clothes and all! She said her conscience wouldn’t let her back out. I just had to follow to keep her from mischief.”

They were not at home, however, when Kate and Allen arrived, nor did they come in for hours after. Then Gorgas walked in alone. She was rather disheveled. With only a slight word of greeting, she went up the stairs as if she were tired out.

“Another ‘bee-line,’ Gorgas?” Blynn asked cheerfully.

She stopped on the landing and looked back at him.

“You bet!” she nodded almost angrily and moved swiftly up the stairs.

“What is a ‘bee-line’?” Leopold, at the doorway, asked quietly. He was spick and orderly as ever, save that his tie was completely off its moorings and hanging over his left shoulder.

Blynn explained, quoting the verses of the game, and joked about the tell-tale tie.

“Ah!” Leopold adjusted the cravat thoughtfully. “She did not give a name to it.”

---

That night Blynn and Leopold walked home together. They talked of Gorgas as if the theme had been set in advance. She came abruptly into their conversation, but so intent was each upon his own thought that neither considered the need of apology or explanation. Without introduction, Leopold began:

“She is beautifully unschooled. It is a rare thing nowadays to meet a natural woman—and with the beginnings of a mind.”

“Sometimes,” Blynn pondered as he talked, “I have taken pride in having shaped that mind of hers. But—she is herself, and would have been herself without any help or hindrance from me.”

“You have done much for her,” Leopold protested.

“Nonsense!”

“Much! I recognize it. Some of your Puritan conscience is in her.”

“How do you make that out?”

Leopold pondered in turn. “Tonight she—and on other nights, too—she—but I can’t give illustrations.”

Blynn looked at him. “I think I understand,” he brightened up. “She is just naturally moral.”

Leopold laughed quietly. “Moral! What a wretched word!”

“Oh, I don’t mean—”

“Don’t explain, friend Allen. I know you don’t mean the little prudential codes of playing safe and getting on in life. You mean that she has principles of conduct which she has thought out—”

“No,” explained Blynn. “I don’t mean that at all. She has principles of conduct, all right, but they are not thought out; they are instinctive. She plays fair by instinct; she couldn’t want to take advantage: not because she has reasoned the thing out, but because—because she just knows it isn’t the square thing to do. And then she has a powerful lot of self-respect without a trace of vanity. She—”

The two men interrupted each other continually. That was their method—tossing the idea back and forth.

“Yes,” Leopold took it up, “she fights reason without any reason at all, and won’t let herself go. She admits things with delicious candor; she has wants and owns up to them, but she won’t let herself satisfy them. She knows her instincts, but she holds them down.”

“Good!” Blynn commented. “She has character. Control—that’s the whole of character. But we’re talking very vaguely. Wants! Instincts! What sort? They may be friends or enemies.”

“Ha!” Leopold interjected gleefully. “That’s her very phrase! I can see your coaching there, old boy! And you’ve done a good job—so far.”

“I’m glad,” said Blynn simply. The thoughts of the two men were on totally different levels. For over an hour that night off in Cresheim Valley, Leopold had been matching his instincts against that very control which meant in Gorgas, character. All the rushing events of that tremulous night were in his mind as he talked; but Blynn, characteristically, considered only the general application of his theory. “I’m glad,” he went on. “I wasn’t sure. Her mother is practically useless to her—so is her sister, for that matter. I have planted a few seed-ideas, that is all. If they’ve rooted, I’m glad. But, gracious me! She’s had no chance to test herself. That may come; but it will be later, when she’s older and better able to be her own master. She’s quite sheltered here. No one will bother her here. What—”

Blynn stopped speaking. A self-satisfied exclamation from Leopold arrested his thinking. Some of his own dormant instincts began to tug at his mind—suspicion, among others and a swift, unreasoned touch of jealousy; but he checked himself and went on. “Of course, I have been able to do very little. A man must generalize, he must—”

“She understood all your generalizations,” Leopold interrupted.

“Did she say—but—how could you know?”

“She told me.”

“Told you what?”

“Well, among other things, she told me your story of the pale wanderer who turned a whole city full of people into lepers. Ugh! That was an ugly dose! It got into her, somehow, and sickened her. It has made her afraid to let go. Leper! Ugh! How could you?”

“Because it is life,” Blynn spoke warmly. “Ignorance is the only sin. You remember your Socrates. If we really knew all, he said, we would never embrace evil. Ignorance makes our criminals, it makes our slums, it brings into the world cripple-minded children, it separates mothers and fathers, breeds disease, and corrupts the best of us. We don’t take evil into our lives because we believe it to be evil, but because we ignorantly think it good.”

“Phew!” Leopold affected concern. “You are a Puritan! Scratch a Puritan and find a preacher!... Well; you’ve made her half a Puritan—you and your ghastly leper—and it is a good thing.” Leopold nodded sagely. “At first, I did not like it. It seemed inconsistent with her strong sense of individual freedom. I am not much of a Puritan myself. I obey my will. I do not let it be balked by creed or dictum made by others. And I have always believed in giving the same freedom to everyone. That is my idea of tolerance. But she is not that way—and, strange, I am glad!”

They talked for a desultory moment on freedom and restrictions, but Leopold came back to Gorgas.

“She is not wholly Puritan,” he explained. “At times—no; at other times—tonight, for instance—she takes fright, calls on her little gods, and fights. You it is, I gather, who have planted that in her—”

“Oh, no!” Blynn protested grimly. The generalities of Leopold began to assume horrid, specific meanings. His slow mind was racing to catch up with the events. The “bee-line,” the angry, disheveled Gorgas mounting the stairs, the cravat so accusingly awry—what did they mean? Suddenly his memory began to piece data together, material that had been observed by his eyes, that had been recorded on the phonographic-disk of a brain, but which never before had been summoned into consciousness. The pictures that he conjured made him ill, and as he walked he drew in deep breaths to steady himself. “Oh, no!” he repeated, while his mind throbbed, “I taught her nothing. She has her own character, predestined to grow into its own as an oak from an acorn. You can’t spread morals on children like stucco on a wall. Character is the self revealed. You can only bring it out. But with Gorgas I didn’t even bring it out. It was always there.”

“I believe you,” Leopold answered. “You are quite right. And I am glad. Strange that I should want in a woman the qualities that I do not respect myself.”

“You want—Gorgas?”

“Yes.”

Leopold went on calmly, but Allen only half heeded him; through the dark they strode, the biologist pursuing serenely his theory, the other hearing only the turmoil of his own wild thoughts. Finally the pleasant voice at his side caught Allen’s attention. Leopold was saying:

“There is something, after all, in that old worship of chastity in women—the ‘double-standard,’ as we call it today—something more than merely the echo of the age of chivalry or the offshoot of the worship of the Virgin. It is an ingrained necessity, I am finding. A man must be sure of his woman. Faithfulness, constancy, unconquerability—those are the qualities that hold us. If the woman surrenders easily, we men suspect that the next comer will have the same victory. Then the Othello-Desdemona business! The ideal method, I fancy, is savage seizure, like the Sabines. The longer they struggle, the longer they’ll stay contented in captivity. I’m a biologist. In biology all mating is war of sex. Gorgas—well—let me give you an added confidence—tonight I took her in my arms forcibly—”

“Leopold!” Blynn clutched him by the arm.

“Don’t be alarmed, my Puritan friend,” Leopold laughed pleasantly. “I am simply courting that young lady—”

“She is only a child!” Blynn gasped.

“She is seventeen—will be eighteen shortly. Biology calls that quite old enough.”

Blynn dropped his grasp. “She is only a child,” he repeated firmly.

“My mother was married and had children at seventeen,” Leopold considered for a moment. The agitation of his companion was hid by the darkness. “Child? Oh, no, my dear Allen—she is a full-grown woman—charged with womanhood. Well, she broke away tonight.... At first, I was angry—then I was glad. Her resistance is the measure of her constancy.... You don’t mind my talking out this way, old fellow.”

“No! no! Go on!”

But he did not go on. Leopold’s sensitiveness was slowly taking account of the long stride of the man by his side. As they passed a street-lamp he saw the white face staring ahead into the night, and caught the firm lips and the long, deep breathing.

“You are fond of her?” Leopold asked mildly.

No answer; but in that vibrating moment words were not essential.

Unconscious of direction, the two men had been marching on across the city-line, and were now pacing through a deeply wooded lane in Montgomery county.

“I always fancied it was a purely pedagogic interest,” Leopold remarked, as if to the trees lined thick along the road.

Again there was no answer.

“So!” Leopold spoke with sympathy. “I did not know. Forgive me.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

They tramped along sturdily.

“Have you told her that you—”

“Merciful heavens!” Blynn broke forth; but restrained further speech.

“Why not?” Leopold asked kindly.

“She is a child. Oh, yes! yes! yes!” he struck down the attempted interruption. “I have taken her by the hand and led her as an older brother might take his little sister. I have watched over her ... talked to her of books, of life, of God.... I have been the confidant of her little troubles and have—have—tried to give her courage and—understanding. She has opened the door of her life to me. I have stepped within and have broken bread with her. Now ... how could I desecrate ... how could I sully ... I don’t mean that. It is hard for me to say, Leopold. I can’t explain it to you. To me she is still a serious-eyed, fearless child, who has come to me in the perfect faith of innocence.... My reason doesn’t tell me that. My reason tells me to go and seize her, fight you for her, and carry her off. But there’s something else.... You call it Puritan.... Maybe it is racial, or an inheritance. Maybe it is only superstition. Whatever it is, it holds me fast. I am chained, bound absolutely. I cannot speak. I cannot go to that child and—and—unmask.... Let’s go back.”

They turned and trudged along the uneven road without speaking until a stray light or two along the Chestnut Hill Pike told them they were coming back into the village.

“I have been wondering,” Leopold spoke thoughtfully, “what it is that draws us to our mates. Nobody knows. It is the greatest mystery in creation. Let us face the facts: Gorgas is a remarkable girl; she thinks; she has unusual abilities. Good! But that is not what draws us. I know dozens of women who are her superior—women whose conversation is—well!—shall I say more congenial? The truth is, Gorgas is not ready to enter on an intellectual level with either of us. In fact—well!—her education must be kept up—uh—afterwards. You are right; in many respects she is yet a child. I see things as a biologist: I fancy that her charm, after all, is her youth and her astonishing health. That is the mating cry—health.”

“If you don’t mind, Leopold,” Blynn stopped, “I’ll leave you here and cut off across this field alone.”

Leopold laughed pleasantly.

“I shock your good old Puritan soul, I see. Nothing shocks me. God made all, and there is no high nor low—that’s my simple creed. And don’t forget that in biology man is not different from the rest of creation; we are only vertebrata, my good friend, subject all to the same law of life; biology knows no Chosen Species. Good night, old Allen.... I am sorry we did not have this talk earlier. I am not strong for self-sacrifice, but, really, I believe, if I had known, I—well, I would not have let things go so far.”

Blynn looked hard at him, in his eyes the fire of a zealot.

“Things have—have—gone far; have they?”

“Quite,” said Leopold. “Quite far.”

After that night Blynn withdrew abruptly from the daily councils at “Top-o’-the-Hill.” The preparation of the lectures seemed to be taking all his time. He dropped in on the group once or twice for a moment’s chat, and to see the progress, but his mind seemed ever hard at work, selecting and rejecting material. That series must be a great go, he explained; he would put his best into it, and give them the worth of their money. In two weeks he was off to Rochester.

XXVII
TZOO-OOM!

WHEN Allen left for his lecture tour, Gorgas immediately knocked off work and gave herself up to gloomy thoughts. She began to discover what a lonely child she had always been; she who had had parents, but no real mother and father; and now mon capitaine (mon duc, mon prince!) was busy with his own affairs. Bardek, too, had been in the depths—it was Leopold’s doleful song that had set him off. “One should not sing of ‘For-r-ty year-r on,’” he growled, “not when one is for-r-ty year-r on!” The “smitty” was therefore deserted. And Leopold had been absolutely debarred from the Leverings; Gorgas would send for him when she wanted him.

There comes a night when lights go up in Bardek’s “white-wash house.” Gorgas is gloomily swinging in a hammock in the orchard. She listens to the clatter and to the singing, and knows that Bardek has recovered his spirits. Are they dancing? She can hear the thump of the children’s heavy shoes, and she can see forms flash back and forth between the light and the window. Bardek’s voice is roaring; and an occasional squeal from the inexpressive little wife is a certain sign of good times.

Hey ho! She, too, could be happy if she chose. Off there in the dark, Leopold was waiting; waiting with fearful, confident patience, she thought and shuddered. If she chose—but she could not will to choose. Not yet, at any rate; she would wait a while.

After a time the noise subsided in Bardek’s cottage. The lamp moved into the kitchen, and finally it travelled up the stairs and into the children’s room. It was the putting-to-bed hour, a happy sky-larking time in the Bardek household.

So much happiness near at hand was almost too much for Gorgas. The shrill voices of the children especially were painful as they came clear on the night air; it made her feel more motherless and deserted than is quite bearable. She turned her back to the joyous windows and strove fiercely to keep down the desire to give way to tears. But they would come; little trickling ones first; then huge, coursing ones; and, finally, a very deluge.

The man who had been her “lord and master” all her life—all the life that counted—had gone gravely away without so much as a smiling goodby. For days she had been watching him hungrily as he talked with seriousness—to everybody but to her—of his dates, cities, halls, subjects; and she could glean nothing from his sober face but an alarming interest in lectures. All her life she had given him the first place in her heart and was content; with an absurd faith, as the days of her childhood flitted by, that all would surely be right in the end; and now she was telling herself that she had been deceived by a dream. He was not for her; to him she was a child, an interesting child, to be sure, capable in many ways above other children, but only one of a hundred or more of his “cases,” one which he had probably card-catalogued under the “L’s,” with penciled notes—a pedagogic specimen!

It was hateful, and she cried aloud her protest; it was unfair; and it was not to be endured. But even as she protested wildly in the dark of the orchard, she felt the pitiless certainty of the facts; for once more she had written him a letter—to be sure, it was only a funny little request for an “interview with the great man,” written under his very nose, and put in his own hand to mail; with characteristic disregard of her he had posted the letter without once looking at it—and he had neglected to answer it.

On the day before he left Mount Airy, she had seen the small gray note among a bundle that he had sorted out in public; and the sight of it had sent her face flaming, as if it would shout its contents to all the world; but he had given it one frowning stare and passed it over without a touch of recognition, so intent was he on his own affairs.

No better proof, she thought, of the gulf that separated them. Morris had taught her to be a “sport,” and all her instinct bade her bear without flinching. She would face the facts, be they or be they not to her hurt—but, oh, the bitterness of the reality. Her childhood’s dream was far better, picturing something always off in the future, always a possible event.... If—

No. His face was “on the outside” as Bardek had said; and during those last few days could there be any mistaking of the calm, self-absorbed Allen? If it had been hers to choose, would she have elected a public lecture tour as against the partner of her soul?

Oh, no! Though Boston and New York and all the cities of Christendom called in dulcet tones! Oh, no!

The lamp had come down in the Bardek house. In the Levering home a low light burned in the library. Her mother and father were there, she knew; but the thought of meeting them and talking of everyday matters was too repellent. How far away they were from her now, and always had been! And how much, just now, she needed the comfort of communion. She gazed wistfully at Bardek’s gay light. His great laugh came through the trees and cheered her wonderfully. Dear old Bardek, mother and sister and father-confessor, all rolled into one! She would go to Bardek and lay her little troubles in his huge palm.

The Bardek house was without corridors. One opened the front door and stood within. And who would dream of knocking at that democratic portal! So she slipped noiselessly along the grass, which grew to the very edge of the house, turned the knob quietly and entered.

Bardek was facing her, standing like a statue in the middle of the low room. The light was behind him, so that Gorgas, coming in out of the darkness, was not able instantly to comprehend that the little wife, clad in the gayest of garments, deep reds and greens, with a glorious scarf of gold about her head, was folded snugly in the Bohemian’s sturdy arms.

“Oh!” cried Gorgas, and started back.

“Come in!” welcomed Bardek, without moving the fraction of an inch, save the necessary tightening of his hold on the shy wife.

“Oh, no! No!” cried Gorgas, shocked at her intrusion.

“Come in, I say!” roared Bardek. “We jus’ celebr-r-rate our marriage—zat is all. Come in, and see how it is done.... Be still, Bit-of-my-heart,” he called to the struggling wife, but in some staccato dialect of Hungary. “We must be the teacher of the beautiful Gorgas in all things, and this is what she should learn to do; and it must be done well, or life itself is spilled to the wind.” This he translated gayly to Gorgas. “Come in, Liebschen! This is our marriage day. It is the day I take the wonderful woman when she is but wonderful girl, take her right out of the street where she squat beside the orange cart wit’ her peddling mother; and I do not know her name; and I will not know it, so I can call her love names all her life—I take her from her oranges, and quick into the biggest cathedral in all Hungary, and kneel before the altar, and call upon the priest to come marry us before I cut him open to see what make him so fat and slow.”

The invitation in their eyes was so real that Gorgas slipped weakly to a chair near the door.

“He say to wait five, six, seven week or it not a marriage,” Bardek went on. “‘Five, six, seven week!’ I cry; ‘in that time she be grow up and ol’ woman! And I? Every day of zose week I die of waiting. Five, six, seven week? Not five, six, seven minute!’; and I scare zat priest by the things I say. And when I show him gold, he not so scared, but raise up the hands and make the language which I give him to make.

“And when all is done, ‘Tzoom!’ I cry, and explain: ‘Zat is the big bell up in Heaven which bring all the angels to the Gates of Earth, through which they now look down; and Tzoo-oom!’—he nearly drop dead for think I be madman!—‘zat is the bell which break open the Gates of Earth and fling the glad angels toward this good world of love; and Tzoo-oo-oom!’ I roar like the roar of Saint Peters in Rome when they make the new Pope, ‘zat is the bell which make this woman of my blood and of my flesh, and carry us together, up straight up, up, up with the singing angels to the Heaven itself.’ And zen I take her in my arms, and lift her to her little toes, and hug her till she forget for little while to live!... Ah! But she nevair forget zat marriage! Nevair!”

As he talked he interrupted himself often to utter weird sayings to the happy wife, so that she half turned in his arms, and seemed to understand that he was telling Gorgas of the wonderful wedding day. And Gorgas contemplated their happiness with the greatest sympathy and with a longing that was akin to pain.

“So!” Bardek went on jubilantly. “On zat wonderful day in May, which we now celebr-r-ate—ah. May is in Hungary of all months the—”

“But Bardek,” Gorgas interrupted, for a moment forgetting her personal grief. “This is not May, it is September.” She could not be mistaken about this, for in three days it would be the tenth, her birthday, and Allen had promised her a mysterious gift on that day.

“Of course!” smiled Bardek. “So we celebr-r-ate our marriage.”

“But if it was May when you—”

“You would wait until it come May again?” he inquired mildly.

By this time he had sat himself in a big chair, and the wife had dropped to the floor, draping herself about his knee. The scarf of gold spread out in a brilliant streamer; the greens and reds of her Hungarian costume tumbled over one another in a riot of unpremeditated folds. The blood was afire in her gypsy face, and her eyes were two dark lights. By the magic of adoration this peasant woman was transformed into a thing of rare delight.

“But if you were married in May,” Gorgas was saying, “you could not have an anniversary until—”

“Ho!” cried Bardek in great glee, and then communicated exultant things to the gay wife, patting her on the head the while, and tweaking her brown ears. “Ho!” he turned to Gorgas. “You would wait until it come May again! You are like the priest who I scare all the Latin out of! You would wait five, six, seven week! You would wait until the earth go about the sun just so!—until the constellations of the heavens be just so! You cannot praise God until it be Sunday; you cannot be married when Nature cries out it is time, and you would let the calendar make you slave when you would have anniversary! Ho! It is superstitious you are! Sometimes I have celebr-r-ated zat marriage three times in one month! Here is my calendar of days!” he slapped his heart right lustily.

“Many things might make me celebr-r-ate,” he went on. “This time it was your Leopold and his ugly song. ‘For-r-ty year-r on, when afar-r and asunder-r,’” he rolled his r’s vigorously. “It is a song that give me the blue devils of regret. ‘For-r-ty year-r on!’ it is no song to sing, when it is I, Bardek, who is ‘for-r-ty year-r on,’ and do not want to remember zat it is so! ‘For-r-ty year-r on!’ Heugh! It is a ol’ man’s song; and I must sing it over and over in my brain, till I cannot work, and grow sick wit’ thoughts of gray head and teeth falling out, and feel my bones go stiff, and—heugh! So I be ol’ man for two, three day, and zen I make celebr-r-ation and chase the bad thoughts out. To this little Bit-of-my-heart I say, ‘Quick, get into the beautiful clothes of Hungary, put on the scarf of gold, and the earrings and the spangles of gold, and we will have again our marriage day! Tzoo-oom!’” he boomed suddenly, and caressed the lady’s head with huge confidence. “And now I am young again!”

Even though he had seemed so absorbed in his own contemplations, Bardek’s quick eye had noted the droop in Gorgas’ shoulders, and the discouraging sadness in her mien.

“Zat song?” he asked her; “it make ugly thoughts for you, too; eh, my Gorgas?”

She tried to speak, but found it easier to shake her head. No; it was not the song that had taken the spring out of her life.

“U-m!” hummed Bardek sympathetically. And then, with characteristic abruptness, he asked, “When is it zat you go to the priest and make the bells of Heaven go, tzoom!—eh?”

This was too much for Gorgas. It brought with benumbing clearness the vision of her own forlorn place in the world. There would be for her no exulting Bardek to seize her out of the street beside her cart of oranges, carry her to the nearest altar, and start the very heavens a-tzooming for joy. But she was too brave a lass to weep in the presence of Bardek and his lady, although it was a glistening eye and a trembling lip which smiled gamely at them.

“Leopold—” she began, but words were too difficult; so she stopped pathetically, and seemed to beg Bardek to understand.

“H-m,” said he. “Leopold, eh?... He is very wonderful man.... Very smart.... He know—everything.” Bardek spread out his palms humbly. “You would celebr-r-ate wit’ Leopold, eh?” He watched her narrowly, but she did not answer. “Of course, you would know. You would not have to look in a book for to find out zat—or to ask the mother if it be so!... You would know.... And it is very important to know; for if you do not know whether you will want to smash the calendar and have two, three celebr-r-ation in one month, and all the times after which you do live together,” he spread his palms a trifle higher, “well, zen you should not begin—much better to die.... So it is Leopold, eh?”

“No!” she struggled to her feet. “No, Bardek, it is not Leopold. He wants me, but I won’t have him. I won’t! He frightens me, and always did, from the time he began to watch me, like a big, big—” She could not find the word. “It is not Leopold!”

Bardek’s sudden laugh drew her out of her tragic plane, and in some inexplicable way gave her a touch of gladness.

“I know zat it is not Leopold!” he cried. “I could see it in your two eyes zat it is not! And I could see it in your two eyes who zat it is! Ah! Your eyes zey tell me whenever you do look at him!... And zat is so right now! So right!...”

His own two eyes beamed and sparkled upon her, and seemed to shout congratulations, and many happy returns of the day. To his wife he confided uproariously; so clearly, indeed, that Gorgas understood every word and gesture; and as he mounted to Hungarian eloquence, she began to catch some of the contagion of his confidence: the despairing thoughts born of reality began to clear out, vanish like a cloud rack before the west wind; and she revived her spirits with the vitality of Bardek’s optimism.

At his call she came over and sat down on the floor beside the wife, Bardek presiding above them like a patriarch of old. And the wife, so often smilingly mute in that household, broke forth in a musical chirping of congratulations, and stroked Gorgas’ hair, and patted her cheek, and welcomed her to the inner shrine of spouses! To Gorgas it was a very blessed ordination. For a little while she would pretend, she defended herself, and then—

But Bardek was in full flow: “With him, with the good Allen, you would celebr-r-ate; eh, mein Liebschen, ma fleur du bois? Marriage? Ho! Zat is easy to do—it take five, six week; or it take five, six minute—but to celebr-r-ate, it must last all the life! There are many peoples who have had just marriage, with confetti, and bands and dancing and much wine, but zey will never, never celebr-r-ate! Ho! It would be comic to see zem even to try! Comic? It would be pain!... For to celebr-r-ate, it is to be two peoples wit’ body and bone and blood of one—See!—ze blood it go up my arm, and through my aor-r-ta, and presto! it is humming along zis little woman’s pink ear and making the eyes to dance! And ze daughter of ze peddling mother must in dose times rise to be ze queen of all ze wor-r-ld—regina dei gratia et potentissima et pulchrissima!... Look at her, mein Liebschen. To you she is, I know not what strange child of Europa—”

“She is beautiful!” murmured Gorgas.

“Ah! I make you see a little wit’ my eyes,” his voice grew tender; “but you do not know. Even you, my Gorgas, are as nothing to her. You are good—mais oui!—but I would not walk wit’ you one, two, t’ree step when she crook the finger and smile, ‘Come!’”

All this was very wonderful to Gorgas, this most intimate revelation of the deep privacy of domestic happiness; and because she believed that it was the true state of all right marriages, she reveled in its beauty; and then she shivered at the stark reality that was hers. For her there would be no “celebrations.”

But she would not give way again. “That’s all very pretty and poetic, Bardek,” she sat up straight, and seemed to fling off the romantic spell which the Bohemian had set vibrating. “I’m better now. Had a good cry out there,” she jabbed a hand toward the orchard. “Lonesome, I guess. Came in here to get cheered up—and you did it! Sure did!” She searched the room with wondering eyes, as if trying to comprehend how a hut like this could be so charged with happiness. “But I’m different, Bardek.” That was her own answer to the survey she had just made. “I wanted something ... and wanted it ... more—well! why talk about it—” With a great effort she controlled a quavering voice. “I am not to have it—that’s all.”

Bardek watched her with deep sympathy. All the time, he stroked the head of the gypsy girl at his knee, and seemed to agree with Gorgas. But to himself he said, as he admitted later, “She must suffer first, because it is the demand of love that we suffer; in no other way can we give it its true value; and then she will believe better when she has plumbed the depths of doubt.”

She got a grip on herself and went on: “I must not fool myself any longer.... It is madness.... I’d soon be fit for nothing.... Leopold is all right. I’ve known him all my life. He likes me, and, in a way, I like him. We have had great times together. I’ll get over the shock of his liking me in the way—in the way he does.... Got sort of used to it already. I told him I’d let him know. He’s waiting. He said I didn’t know myself ... that I’d come to him ... ‘like the tides rise and follow the irresistible moon,’ he said.... I guess he was right.... He knows a lot about me! It seems a little bit unfair, but I suppose— Suppose, nothing!” She got herself up suddenly from the comfortable floor, and, at the motion, seemed to bring her resolutions together. “I can’t stand this any longer,” she turned to Bardek. “Leopold it is and must be—I’d better get used to it—and all I’ve got to do is to walk down that road twenty steps and whistle.”

She moved resolutely toward the door. “There is one way to settle it once and for all,” she said, “a sure way to end all the suffering which comes of uncertainty—and it is better,” she insisted, “to stop forever the doubt and the pain.”

“Twenty paces down the road,” thought Bardek. “Why, then it would be all over for the little Gorgas, and settled for life—like two puffs of a cigarette!”

Her hand was on the knob before Bardek called softly to her.

“Yes, Bardek?” she asked, for he had not spoken more than her name. She looked magnificently strong and able as she stood blocked out in dark tints against his white door; and the weariness and the despondency had gone from her; wavering uncertainty had made place for the mind made up. She could not have her first wish; very well; she would accept the next best, and it would not be done half-heartedly; and once accepted, she would be loyal to the death. All this Bardek noted as he looked at her.

“But it is another story zat I happen to know,” he began softly. “Allen Blynn has not told me in words, for then I could not speak wit’out being tattle-tale, but I have listened wit’ my eyes and wit’ my heart—oh, a very good ear my heart has!—and so I know zat it is the good Allen who prays on his knees every night zat some day he will have courage to ask my Gorgas to try to like him—jus’ a leetle bit, mebbe!”

Slowly he drew her from the door. She protested. He argued subtly—it was the fight, he said, against the Evil One for the life of a woman, so it needs must be subtle. Slowly he drew her again to her place beside him on the floor. And then he poured forth the eloquence that only Bardek could summon. He made her cry and he made her laugh; and he filled her with hope. Who could doubt Bardek when he rose to his best? And when the theme is Love—ah! Bardek could have made great strides toward converting the Evil One himself!

“But how do you know, Bardek?” Gorgas demanded.

Ah, he knew! He, Bardek, had been born with both of his two eyes open! The ways of Allen Blynn were not hidden from him. And the little Gorgas must not let despair and fear in at the heart, for they are the father and mother of failure. Much he told her of Allen, evidence that piled up against the absent swain, until some of the despair and fear fled at his strong touch. The protestings of Gorgas grew weaker as Bardek plied his argument.

Among other matters he related one of the many debates which he and Allen had had together. Blynn had been standing for a reaction against the type of freedom—free will, free love, free anything—which had been pulsing from the “lunacy fringe” of the radicals for a generation or more. “They do not seem to understand,” Blynn had argued, “that there is something higher than individual will—or even the individual nation’s will, as Alexander and Napoleon have long ago found out—something which demands surrender, acquiescence.” Bardek had been defending life as the expression of the individual right to live; Blynn had taken the side of individual renunciation. “But there is a divine, far-off event to which the whole creation moves,” said Blynn; “and while our irresistible part is that of free spirits, yet we are most free when we bind the law upon ourselves.” That was the philosophy of Allen Blynn.

“He is not one to seize the daughter of the orange woman,” laughed Bardek, “and zen make a new service of marriage for himself! Ho! He would beat his breast wit’ ze big stone and wait four, five, six week! Now you! You are like me—it make you sick to wait. So! I say, do not wait. Go to him. Tell him to hurry. Tell him you cannot wait for God’s big universe to come to end, but it must come now! Go to him, Liebschen! Go to him!”

“I have always wanted to,” agreed Gorgas. “Many times I started to—but I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” asked the fearless man.

“Women do not do that, Bardek.”

He raged at her. “How often have I taught you not to be afraid of what women do or do not! It is woman who will be the last slave on the free earth; and it is because she want to be slave. I will not have you, my Gorgas, be like all ze others! Go, and be!”

“But he is in Boston,” she faltered. She knew his itinerary by heart.

“Go to him, ma fleurie. Lives have been lost through pride, through not saying the word when it is time. Boston is not yet Babylon, but for you, mein Liebschen, there it is zat ze tower to Heaven is. Go to him.”

“I know just what I shall say,” she laughed. The natural tint of health was back in her face. “I have said it so often to myself.”

“Of course you have!” he agreed heartily. “And you will say it over again for many years. And the speeches he will say to you! Himmel! What a dam will burst and drown all the little valleys when one of zese Puritans go loose! Zey try hard all the life to live like Saint Acetum, the Vinegar Saint who is always repairing ze roof of ze Heaven; and when zey topple over and fall, it is a great distance!... You will be eaten alive, my Gorgas; and it is a very pleasant experience, vairy pleasant and good!”

And that night a happy, exulting young woman, charged with uncalculable joy, strode across the lawn and through the orchard, with never a fear nor a despair, those sad parents of failure.

XXVIII
THE MIDNIGHT EXPRESS

AT Boston Allen Blynn was preparing to loaf about the old town at his ease until the door should open for his second lecture in that city. At eleven o’clock he was on his knees at the bed; he could not quite make up his mind which was the easiest pair of shoes for walking.

A knock at his door, the deferential tap of a well-feed “bell-hop” brought his cheery, “Come!” but he did not look around.

“Good morning, Professor,” greeted Gorgas, fresh and radiant.

“Gracious!” ejaculated the astonished Blynn.

“Don’t let me interrupt your rosary,” she laughed.

He jumped to his feet—still unadorned with shoes—and grasped both her extended hands.

“Well! Well!” he looked at her from several angles. “If this doesn’t beat the Pennsylvania-Dutch! How did you get here? Another ‘bee-line,’ eh? By the Great Horn Spoon, I’m glad to see you! Did the whole family come up? Where is Kate?” he made a motion as if to look into the hall, but quickly gave up because of the more overpowering desire to gaze at his entrancing visitor. “And how did you know I was here?”

“Hold on!” she stopped him. “This is no blooming quiz. I’m alone, mon capitaine. I just—came.”

His mind would not quite focus on the fact.

“I see!” he managed to say, but he did not see.

She produced a cardboard. “Thought I’d boost your little lecture by buying a ticket,” she explained.

“Alone!” he exclaimed. “When did you come?”

“On the Federal express, night before last. I mixed up your dates. Thought you were due in Boston yesterday. So I just naturally waited over.” She walked toward the window. “Great view you have here; simply great!” He seized the nearest pair of shoes and struggled into them. Then he followed her to the window.

“Does Mrs. Levering know you have come?” he asked, full of the proprieties.

She sang a bar of a popular hit.

“Do you know what you’re about?

Does your mother know you’re out?

“I didn’t say exactly where I was going; I don’t think I did,” she turned reflectively. “Why should I?”

He tried to explain. She was still a child, seventeen years old, he told her.

“I’m eighteen the tenth of this month, and that’s tomorrow,” she corrected.

He knew that. Still—he argued further.

“Why will you persist in looking down on me?” she stamped her foot, just like a child. “I’ve been on my own since I was knee high to a grasshopper. I’m making my own living; I do a man’s work and, by your own Horn Spoon, I can take care of myself. Look here: yesterday afternoon I sunned myself in the Common on a bench—”

“Heavens!” he muttered.

“You should use just the opposite word,” she commented complacently. “I just sat there and counted the men who ogled me and the ones who sat down and tried to talk.”

“Goodness!” said he.

“Opposite again,” she corrected. “They were just imps. Well, they didn’t waste much time on me, I tell you! Superior disdain, that’s the trick.”

The professor was flabbergasted. He told her so, and tried to make clear the risks she was running.

She laughed at him. “Now don’t be preachy, Allen Blynn; I’m in Boston to get ideas from the Jewelers’ Exposition—that, among other things. I’m a business woman, you know. It’s a new species; get used to it.”

The Jewelers’ Exposition was a discovery of the day before. It would not do to be too abrupt with Allen Blynn.

By the time he had gone with her to the Exposition and had heard her wise talk to the exhibitors, he was almost used to it; and by the time he had watched her taking notes and making sketches, he was quite reconciled. Then they just prowled.

“Let’s go window-cracking?” she suggested.

“Not for a minute!” he pretended alarm.

“Don’t you know ‘window-cracking’?” she looked incredulously. “Where is your knowledge of English? That’s my private word for looking in every window along one street and picking out the things you would buy, and not buying a thing. It’s great fun, and awfully cheap.”

So they went “window-cracking,” like penniless children.

They lunched in style at the best hotel and lived many weeks together in one afternoon. She gave him time to get his notes together for the lecture, drove with him to the hall and sat in the middle of the audience, an enraptured vision to stir him to his best.

At the close of the lecture he hurried to her.

“I have a surprise for you,” he whispered; “you are not the only lady that takes long journeys to help out struggling lecturers. I want you to meet ‘The Lady of the Interruption.’”

Her glance fell. “I hate her,” she said.

“S-sh!” he smiled and turned to a gracious matronly woman of about fifty-five.

“Mrs. Fellows, here’s my little girl, Gorgas,” he said.

“No longer a little girl,” Mrs. Fellows extended a hand.

“You are the ‘Lady’?” Gorgas gasped.

“Yes,” the “Lady” responded pleasantly. “You thought I was young and attractive, and you are happy to find I am not.”

“But you are attractive—you are lovely!” Gorgas shot out impulsively.

“Ah! thank you,” the Lady bowed herself away; “that is a nice speech. And I know you think you mean it.”

She was gone and others crowded around.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was old?” Gorgas inquired.

“It was a stupid joke of mine not to,” he replied as they struggled through the crowd. “I found her out long ago. She has had great troubles—death in a very frightful form. She has considerable wealth but gives her whole life to charity. Eccentric, a little; but her mind is mighty keen, I can tell you. I am very fond of her; that is why I did not like to discuss her with anyone after I found out.”

At half-past ten they were having supper in a gaudy grill-room, thrilling with the strumming of an Hungarian “orchestra” and the stirring air of city-bohemias.

Then Allen Blynn came partly to his senses. “You’re going home tonight,” he said firmly.

“On the ‘Midnight,’” she agreed, and displayed her Pullman ticket.

“Good!” he exclaimed, relieved. “I’m half responsible, you know,” he added. “It’s a great lark. I’m just chuck full of joy; but we must ship you off tonight.”

“Let’s quarrel a little bit, first,” she smiled. “We have had some dandy quarrels, haven’t we?”

He couldn’t remember any; then she would start one.

“First,” she began, “I want to know why you didn’t walk home with me the night of the picnic at Top-o’-the-Hill—when Leopold sang ‘Forty year on.’ I wrote you a little note asking you to go with me. You trotted off with Kate and left me with Leopold. We had the deuce of a time, I can tell you.”

Conscience-stricken, he remembered that half-read letter. The offer of the lectures had swamped his mind.

The explanation satisfied.

“Leopold wants to marry me,” she blurted out next.

“I know,” he replied gravely. “He told me as much,—but at seventeen! Think of it!”

“I wish you would not always be telling me that I am—” she began indignantly.

“But you are, you know,” he told her quietly. “Leopold is as old as I, but a man couldn’t possib—”

“Oh,” she laughed. “He couldn’t? Couldn’t he! He’s been dogging me for ever so long. You make a big mistake about years. Everybody does. At thirteen, when I first talked with you, I was as much a woman as I am now or ever will be. And I’ve been sitting back trying to behave myself like a doll. At fifteen I had my height and—everything; and now I’m eighteen. I can’t stay in the refrigerator any longer, I tell you.... Leopold? Child? Let me tell you something, Allen Blynn. Leopold and I had a fight that night. Not words, remember; but an ugly real fight, with fists and hands.... He knows I’m no child.... Now wait!” she held up her hand. “Leopold’s all right. He wants to marry me. He did just what he ought to have done. It was all right, absolutely right. It was my fault again. You went off and deserted me—and I just didn’t care what happened to me. Then I had to fight my way out. Nom d’une pipe! Nom du nom d’une pipe!... And that isn’t all. I must shock your old professorial head a little. There was another.... But I woke up and got out. Your letter did it—the one on morals and instincts, and that terrible story of the leper; don’t you remember?”

Yes, he remembered. The little woman before him was opening up astonishing vistas into her stirring life. But she was a child, he insisted. The general appearance was that of a woman; but that was a trick of hat and gown and hair, a disguise easily seen through. Her face was womanly, and her voice; but in both were cries of very young life. Her very wonderful health, the thing that gave her beauty—that was youth; and her frankness was the innocence of youth.

“Do you know what Bardek means by Saint Acetum?” she asked him suddenly. She had been studying his rather solemn-smiling face, delighting in its fine seriousness—made fine, she thought, by the light of a smile that hovered ever in the eyes and in and out the firm lips.

“What does Bardek mean by anything!” Allen chuckled contentedly, the solemnity quite fading from his face at the thought of the unfathomable Bardek. “Saint Acetum? I never heard of the person.”

“Oh!” Gorgas laughed in her impulsive way. “Saint Acetum is you!—The Vinegar Saint! Oh, Allen Blynn, that is too funny!...” Allen frowned at her inquiringly. “That’s just the way he would look, too—stern, and wise, and worried—”

“Worried?”

“For fear the roof would fall in, you know.”

“Roof?” he glanced apprehensively at the ceiling.

“Saint Acetum, you know—” she tried to explain. His serious face was delightfully comic; in a flash she saw how it would be immensely jolly, and assuring, to have him gazing at her forever as if she needed the firmest and sternest looking after.

“Saint Acetum?” he cogitated. “There ain’t no such animal.”

“Oh, yes,” she continued, “Bardek says—”

“Bardek invented him, then.”

“Of course, silly! That’s the fun of it. Saint Acetum is forever repairing ‘ze roof of ze Heaven’; and there he is up there all alone, patching and patching, and always looking for trouble; and he won’t ever come down and have a good time with the angels—not even once! It might rain, you see. And Bardek says, that’s just like you, Allen Blynn—”

“Isn’t Bardek a wonder!” His eyes glowed with delight in the Bohemian’s comic fantasy. “And isn’t that just like him!... The Vinegar Saint!... Well!...” A strong flash of determination came into his face suddenly. “And he is quite right!... Someone must keep watch lest the Heavens fall! And they might fall, you know,” he added whimsically. “You believe that God is good, and all-wise, and all-powerful, don’t you?”

She nodded. “One must,” she said. “It would be terrible not to.”

“He is good, and wise; but perhaps not all-wise. And sometimes I think He is not all-powerful. The Old One has won some of the battles—in Eden, for instance. Sometimes I fancy—it is an ancient belief—that the long battle between Good and Evil, begun aeons ago in chaos, is still at its height, and that the outcome might even be in doubt; and then I fancy that He needs us—some of us—on the firing line; or, like your Vinegar Saint, guarding the outposts. Perhaps we are sometimes a brake on progress, but often we are the ones who save liberty from liberty’s self. You know, we Allens were Tories in the Revolution; we were for the existing order then, and against the revolutionists. There must be a drop or two of reactionary blood still in me!... Vinegar Saint! Good! But don’t think that the poor old chap loves the endless patching, or that the songs of the angels don’t tempt him mightily to shirk his job.... And if he gets to looking too fierce and vinegary, it’s because—”

“It’s because he is a dear old honest capitaine,” she cried; “and I’d rather have him vinegary any day than—”

“Peppery?” he joked, determined not to be solemn.

“Yes, or even sugary. Ugh!” she affected a delightful shudder. “How I hate the sweety ones!”

This was a pleasing savor to the Vinegar Saint, and for a moment or two he forgot his patchings, and reveled in the unsaintly joy of flattery; then he remembered abruptly.

“What are you going to do about Leopold?” he asked.

“It depends upon you, mon capitaine,” she replied calmly. “If you don’t want me, Allen Blynn—anybody can have me. There! It’s out! I’ve made up my mind to say this to you for almost a year. Let me—”

A preposterous waiter had to be dealt with. He was recommending some custard concoction with a dash of white wine, and inquiring about such irrelevant matters as demi-tasses or full cups. Gorgas had to be appealed to. She made selections deliberately, but her fingers were nervously restless.

“So you will take the wine-sauce?” the waiter was most interested.

“Yes,” said Blynn.

“Or would you prefer it with cream?”

“Yes,” said Blynn.

“Perhaps M’sieu’ would rather have the sliced oranges?”

“Yes, yes,” said Blynn in great distress, “Anything, old man. You fix it up. Anything. Just cut along like a good fellow, will you?”

“Don’t look so frowning, mon capitaine,” Gorgas smiled across the table, but her eyes belied that smile. “Don’t speak yet. Let me show you how I look at this thing. If I stop now, I’ll never begin again. And I just can’t stand keeping it inside.... When you came to me at the tennis-court five years ago and took me for a grown woman, the thing was done; right there. I’ve never got over it. I’ve tried; but it was no use; it got worse. I sent you to Holden to get rid of you.... You scared me.... You saw it, I guess. My eyes must have shown, for you got out of the way.... That’s why you suddenly fled to Holden; wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” dumbly.

“I knew.... It was beastly the way you cut me.... Don’t speak yet.... I don’t blame you.... Sometimes I’d catch you looking at me like a hungry dog, afraid to come near for fear I’d beat you or something. I know what was the matter. You were afraid of encouraging a child. Mercy! Encourage? That was just the way to make me rabid! Well, I resolved to grow up. I fought the family until I could dress the part, and I fooled everybody but you.... And now I am grown up.... It’s no fooling now.... And there you are, as far away as ever. So I said to myself, that man will have to be approached and stormed. He’ll never marry anybody, unless somebody asks him. No, you wouldn’t, Allen Blynn. You’re not a bit aggressive; you’re too courteous, too afraid of hurting folks’ feelings. Well, I want to be hurt.... So I’m coming right at you. Here’s your chance, Allen Blynn.... Wait!... I figured it this way. It’s all mere custom, this woman-sitting-back-and-waiting business. I’ve got the same desire for my man as any man has for his woman. I want him. Shall I let him slip by? Not I. I’m going right for him. He’ll be startled at first, just the way women are—oh! I’ve talked with a lot of ’em!—but keeping right at it brings everything. Half the women don’t want the men that come at them; but the thought gets into their brains and grows until it bubbles over and swamps ’em. Oh, I know. Neddie Morris nearly had me, and so did Leopold; if you hadn’t been in my head one of ’em would have got me; it was just a matter of sliding.... Now, Allen Blynn, you’re my man.” They were very close together at their diminutive little table. She could have touched his arms, almost without leaning forward. Her voice grew very soft and tender as she added, “Aren’t I the brazen one!”

“Little woman,” he spoke with the greatest kindness. “Will you let me think this out?”

She nodded. For a half-hour they watched the silly crowd and nibbled at sweetish frothy desserts and sipped at cold coffees. Overbibulous folks laughed in high keys, and the Hungarian orchestra, taking its cue from the diners, grew noisier and noisier. At this moment the bandsmen were working vigorously on the quietest of love themes; castanets and cymbals clashed and tanged and told all the world about “long years ago in old Madrid, where softly sighs of love the light guitar.” The song had taken the country only a few years before, and had now reached the stage of orchestral “variations.” The Hungarian leader was consumed with passion and beer; he gesticulated and shouted to his workers, and they bent to their task. Every child in America knew the absurd words. Even Allen Blynn knew them!

Come, my love, the stars are shining,

Time is flying,

Love is sighing,

Come, my love, my heart is pining

Here alone I wait for thee.

Mischievously Gorgas accompanied with the words of the refrain, she pianissimo, the orchestra thundering double forte to its climax. They smiled guiltily as they thought of the smashing, gesticulating music and the personal significance of the libretto.

“Well,” he turned to her.

“Well?” she rested her arms on the little table so that her two hands almost touched him.

“This is the greatest experience of my life,” he said soberly, “absolutely the greatest and the finest.” His face shone with exultation. “It is the last thing I dreamed of. I thought it was Leopold. The fact is—well, I was mortally sure. We talked together just before I left. He didn’t tell me outright, but I knew, of course. Naturally I couldn’t guess the details.... That is a revelation!...”

Already she thought she had read his answer and withdrew her hands ever so slightly. Except for a deeply flushed face and sparkling eyes she gave no other sign; she was prepared for it to take time!

“Here alone I wait for thee!” the orchestra shouted.

“It’s hard to talk here. Come,” he looked earnestly at his watch as if he had never seen one before. “We’ll cab it for my hotel, where I must get your birthday gift—the manuscript book, you know.... Then I’ll see you to your train.... We have barely a half-hour.”

St. Acetum had not tumbled from the roof of the Heaven as Bardek had predicted; he seemed, rather, to be all too intent on his eternal patching and repairing. It was very assuring; one felt safe and protected; now, whatever else happened, the Heavens would not fall! For in spite of Bardek’s jests at the expense of the Saint, Gorgas knew that the good man would not so easily desert his high duties for anything merely personal. Still, she wished that he might at least just look down!

At her side of the cab she sat rigid; without a word she let him get out at the hotel and return with the gift; but as they drew near the railway terminal, she put a trembling hand on his shoulder.

“Won’t you even touch me?” she asked plaintively.

“Please! please!” he begged; and she withdrew to her place. Nom d’une pipe! Nom du nom d’une pipe!

“I’m not a bit sorry I came,” she said finally.

“Nor am I! Nor am I!” he replied fervently. “I feel—glorified!”

They walked slowly, like two tired persons, to her car. He saw about her tickets and bade her goodby at the steps.

“Is there—somebody else?” she asked quietly.

“Gracious, no!” he cried; but immediately he said, “Wait!” and looked worried. “Yes,” he corrected, “there is—and there isn’t at all!” His lips closed firmly, but his eyes seemed to be telling her not to believe a word of it.

“This little book,” he put the package into her hand hastily, as if he were eager to change the topic, “is five years of my life. It will explain what I have not been able to say to you tonight. But you are not to open it until your eighteenth birthday.”

“That is tomorrow—and tomorrow is almost here,” she told him. “In a few moments I’ll be eighteen.”

“Yes, I know!” he agreed. “So you will be! Well! well! On your ride home, then, you may read it. There is just one condition: you must begin at the beginning, and go straight through—‘Through hedge and over gate. Straight! straight! straight! straight!’” he quoted. “Promise!”

She promised.

The porters began to take on the appearance of getting under way; the Midnight Express was a punctual institution.

“All aboard!” someone called afar off. “Express for Philadelphia and Washington! All aboard!”

She leaned up to him with flaming invitation in her face.

“No one will know,” she said. “Quick! They’ll think we’re brother and sister!”

A big clock tolled the first stroke of twelve. He took her face in his hands so tempestuously as to startle and hurt, but she laughed.

“All aboard!”

“Go quick!” he cried.

The conductor was impatient. Boom! boom! the big clock finished out its twelve slow strokes.

“Many happy returns of the day,” he called after the moving train. She said nothing, but she waved until the darkness enveloped her.

XXIX
“STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT!”

“I ’M not a bit sorry I came,” she said aloud as she fumbled around the zigzag corners of two Pullmans until she reached her own drawing-room. And she was not; she was most unreasonably elated; she had, she knew not why, all the humming sensations of victory. It was unaccountable. She sat on her couch and tried to fathom the meaning of her snug contentedness. She retold the full day together, the “window-cracking,” the luncheon in state, the jogs about strange streets, the applauding crowd at the lecture, the garish Hungarian café, the confession and its almost painful reception, and the tumultuous parting. She ought to have been depressed, but she was throbbing with joy. “It was good, every minute of it,” she said.

Mechanically she undid the wrappings from Allen’s birthday gift, arranged the pillows and the light, and prepared to read. The outside of the book was the simple adjustable cover of a college note-book, but a gold-leafed title had been printed across the front:

Unclaimed Letters

She turned to the first page carefully, remembering,

Through hedge, over gate
Straight! straight! straight! straight!

There she found a subtitle: Letters to Gorgas Levering; to be delivered into her hands on the twentieth anniversary of her birth; dictated from time to time by the heart of an old comrade and withheld from the post by his conscience. (Later note: “twentieth” amended to “eighteenth” but under stern protest of said conscience.)

The first letter was dated June 17, 1888. It was a date she knew by heart. Every year she had celebrated secretly the anniversary of the meeting at the tennis-court. She read:

“Dear Gorgas Levering: You have given me a psychological shock: you have unhinged my reason, let loose my emotions, and upset my moral apple cart! You did all that, and you know nothing about it. When you grow up—say, at twenty or twenty-one—I shall present you with this document of evidence, and if you have any sense of decency at that age you will be shocked too. No little girl of thirteen with a face like a madonna should be allowed to tuck her legs under her pinafore and impose upon a grown up man what shaves every day. (The seeming irrelevancy of these remarks is not due to lunacy—although it is yet disputed if the moon does not have something to do with it—but to a fine scientific ardor. All the facts must be recorded and in this case concealed legs is facts.)

“All my life I have stopped in the middle of experience and recorded my feelings. I say, ‘Allen Blynn, you feel this way or that way.’ This helps me to remember later; for all our lives we are stuffing and changing and forgetting our former selves. Hence I hereby solemnly affirm that if I had the courage to smash all the conventions of my civilization and put a good-sized gash into the moral code of my contemporaries, I, Allen Blynn, male, white, and a voter, would have picked you up in my arms today at the tennis-courts, hugged the daylight out of you, tossed you across my shoulders, made straight for the nearest clergyman and married you—with one hand across your mouth to prevent your squealing and the other firmly grasping your struggling legs.

“That would be kidnapping—punishable by life imprisonment. I know it. And also grand larceny. Of course it is. And something like piracy. Right! Yet, I did none of these things; sheer cowardice held my hands; but if to have murder in the heart is to be murderer, as I believe, then I stand here convicted of the desire to own you, bag and baggage, legs, and all.

“And you are thirteen years old, and I am twenty-three!

“It is shameful, isn’t it? But I am brazenly unashamed. That is the Lord’s own psychological truth!

“Your kidnapper at heart,
“Allen Blynn.”

“And I wouldn’t have squealed a bit,” Gorgas crooned. “I’d have trotted right along—in the lead, too. I bet he doesn’t know the shortest cut to the parsonage.”

“June 21,” the next letter began.

“That was the Wednesday afternoon he first came to the house,” she commented.

“Dear Gorgas Levering: Psychological facts are accumulating.

“Fact No. 1: I am still a criminal-at-large and more dangerous than ever.

“Fact No. 2: I slipped back five years this afternoon and became eighteen. The proof is we both had a gallumptious time mimicking the neighborhood and acted like a pair of school children. Further proof is that you continually did make eyes at me, and, in spite of all the roaring protestations of something that’s left of my conscience, my own did slip several times. They really did slip: they slid nearer and nearer; from your chin they drew up to the tip of your nose; clambered up, up, slowly, overran the mark, and perched perilously on the right eyebrow; leaned over for a dizzy second and—slipped into untold brown fathoms. Once I was nearly drowned. It was the most terrifying sensation of my young manhood.

“Fact No. 3: I was mortally ashamed—put that down to my credit (you were not, you rogue!) and resolved never to do it again. The Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law.

“Fact No. 4: That gypsy scamp scares me into trembles. When you told me of him I had murder in my heart, then and there; all the fierce primitive desire to meet that beast and beat him into pulp. My voice shook so when I asked you about him that I was certain you noticed it. My nesting instincts are coming with a rush—and they are most terrifying.

“Fact No. 5: In daylight I admit none of these things. I am very moral and civilized in daylight. Only at night when I sit before this white paper does my inward, honest self come to the fore and disport his naked savagery.

“Fact No. 6: The two ‘me’s’ are fighting each other; daylight against darkness. Daylight is going to win, or it’s all over with Allen Blynn (see the state your rhyming’s put me in!)

“Still criminal,
“Allen Blynn.”

The next letters were full of vindictive hatred of Bardek. Allen had gone to the old mill and found it deserted. He told how all his talk on Elizabethan love with Kate as they drove along the Wissahickon was only the outward voice speaking; within were throbbing anxious cries for a little child off in the woods with—what sort of a man? The Lord only knew. Elizabethan love—contagion, infection, plague and what not—he had them all, a virulent case. With wide eyes Gorgas read of his tramp back into the dark of Cresheim Valley and how he had seen her forlorn little figure pacing thoughtfully beside “Gyp.” Only vigorous conscience withheld his hands from touching her as she passed by.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—terrible! a life-time of exile. Perhaps one might make it nineteen—No! said Conscience, roaring outrageously. Well, twenty, then.

The “German days,” “French days,” and “Italian days” followed in review, while Gorgas passed from thirteen to fourteen. His joy at the discovery of the simple sincerity of Bardek flowed through the pages, with just a hint of watchfulness. “He is a man, a free-thinker, a free-lover, too, I suspect,” he warned her. “Look out for him, child; but you need not do that. I am on eternal guard, now. He has no conscience, that is certain; but in some matters neither have I. If he makes a step toward you ‘I would eat his heart out in the market-place!’ But I have faith in Bardek, an unreasoned thing, but clear enough. Time will tell.

“And I’m watching you, too, Golden Child. Your brown eyes do not behave themselves. They explore, explore, explore, until I am ready to reach out my hand and close them against myself. And you continually do pluck at my sleeve and touch my wrist nervously with the tips of your hot fingers and send my blood slamming and jamming and ramming and cramming like the waters go down at Lodore. You have no conscience, either; that’s plain. Well, here’s where I begin my long vigil. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—it is life imprisonment. I’ll be an old man! Shall we say nineteen then? Golly! What a racket Conscience sets up!”

At another time he wrote briefly. “You stood in the narrow path today, when we found that Bardek had gone, and reached out your arms to me. By the Great Horn Spoon! By the Dipper and the Little Bear! And the Pole Star! And the Pleiades! Don’t ever do that again! Zounds! Flesh and blood, that’s all I’m made of! Fra Lippo Lippi said that. Fortunately for you and me I’m flesh and blood plus a Conscience.”

“And I never guessed it!” Gorgas communed with herself. “If I had—” The first touch of remorse seized her for the lost chances of life, and a little anger at the laws of polite society, and a pang of jealousy for that “other” whom he had so dubiously confessed.

“Why does he torture me with this book of letters?” she marvelled. A few leaves slipped through her fingers; she turned impatiently toward the concluding pages, but stopped. “I’ll play fair,” she said. “Straight! straight! straight! straight!”

Morris came into the letters. Allen had noticed greedily their intimacy and lamented the early bookishness that had prevented his ever being more than a spectator at athletics. Some of the fierce passions of envy seized him. He was gloriously frank. “I’m a half-man,” he exclaimed. “They let me sit and spell out books and praised me until my vanity led me further and further away from real life. Why couldn’t they have driven me off to baseball and football and all that! The world praises the pedant, but the young woman goes straight to a man. I have had the education of a woman—and even women are repudiating it, nowadays.”

He was very unfair to himself in these despondent pages. Gorgas quarreled with every line. She scolded him; told him what his real qualities were and advised him to have more sense or she would skip. It was the “Sorrows of Allen Blynn,” the aching of strong youth before he has found his place, when he cries out upon his own unfitness for any place at all. “These are just my growing pains, child,” he was wise enough to write. “Don’t bother your little head about them; it’ll come out all right eventually.” But it made her uncomfortable and weepy.

At the top of the next page a street address gave her a sudden pleasurable thrill:

18/a Fürstenstrasse,
München, Deutschland.

“Oh!” Gorgas gasped in delight. “He really did write from Germany, after all.”

“Mein Kindschen,” it began. “Frau Schloss talked of your letter even before she would arrange the price of breakfasts and bed. There has been a great to do over your letter. It came several days before I arrived. And it was a bulky document—thick, extravagant American letter-paper is to the German mind like feeding lamb chops to stray dogs. And it lacked stamps mightily.

“The question that confronted the Frau Schloss, the Herr Schloss, the Gemüse Frau, who keeps a green-grocery below stairs, and the Herr Postman—the question that has stirred them for the past fortnight is whether it is a safe investment to pay the overdue postage, trusting that the Herr Professor would later make restitution plus trinkgeld; or deny all knowledge of the Herr Professor and throw the responsibility upon the efficient German postal service. Well! They decided that the Herr Professor would be an easy American mark, as he had been on former visits; so they paid out real money, received the letter, and took the big risk that I might not have recovered from the American madness of paying large sums with a smile.

“As I arrived in the Fürstenstrasse, Frau Schloss saw me from the window above the green-grocery and hastened down the dark stair and through the darker alley of a vestibule (where the Gemüse Frau keeps her push-cart) to meet me breathless in front of the Vegetable Lady’s display.

“‘I suppose I may have my old rooms?’ I asked, after the first formal greetings.

“‘Oh, the letter, my honored Herr Professor!’ she began tragically.

“‘Ah!’ I caught her up. ‘I cannot have the rooms then? I’m sorry.’

“‘Yes! yes!’ she assured me, ‘Yes, honored Herr Professor. The rooms are ready. And the letter is ready, too! It came a week ago. We have kept it for you—’

“‘We have kept it,’ said Herr Schloss, emerging from the dark hall.

“‘—and have paid,’ beamed Frau Schloss anxiously.

“‘We have indeed paid,’ helped Herr Schloss.

“‘I have seen them pay,’ corroborated the Gemüse Frau, looming from the dark doorway.

“Oh, they held me with a glittering eye, Frau Schloss, Herr Schloss, and the Gemüse Frau, as I listened to their tale, awaited the bringing forth of the letter and stood silent and noncommittal throughout the profuse explanation of each glaring governmental mark that announced money due.

“‘Bless my soul!’ I cried in English; ‘it’s from Gorgas.’ And I ripped it open right before them, ejaculated my joy in their very faces—we were still on the sidewalk in front of the house—thanked them in flowery German and passed rapidly by to my old rooms without so much as a hint of payment.

“They followed me.

“‘Is it then an important letter?’ anxiously inquired the Frau Schloss.

“‘Important?’ I echoed. ‘It is worth a million Dutch thalers.’

“Then I saw their faces. ‘Oh’ I sensed their trouble. ‘My best thanks for your thoughtfulness; pray, accept this little token,’ and I passed the lady the sum of twelve cents—a silver fifty-pfennig piece—a Bavarian ransom. As the postage amounted to only twenty-five pfennig, this gave the family a clear rake-off of six American cents. Ah! there was joy in the Schloss family that night, and for days the Gemüse Frau shone by reflected glory. Thrift! What would we Americans in Germany do without thrift in the Germans!

“I am purposely keeping away from your letter. All this introductory setting is to tantalize myself, to force myself to be calm and see things straight. At the slightest excuse I could gush forth on these pages a quantity and quality of sentiment that would make your six-page outcry seem quite sensible and respectable. (And it is neither, you know, mein Kindschen.) You tell me things here that I know only too well. Maybe that’s why I am in Germany. You hint that I could marry you by crooking my little finger. Down here in Bavaria they often do that sort of thing at exactly your age—fifteen and one-half. But if I should do it, or encourage you to think that I might even want to do it—well! I have read enough Italian literature to know that there is a particularly private pit in Hell reserved for those chaps. So I am going to perform a bit of moral cruelty which makes me ill to think of—and is bound to make me iller as the days and nights go by—I am going to ignore your truthful little confession; act brutally as if you had never penned it; pretend that I never could guess how you would count the days it takes for a letter to cross the ocean, arrive at Hamburg, drift down to Munich; how you would count again the days it takes a reply to come up to Hamburg and sail to New York; how for days and days and months and months you would watch for the postman, trying all the while to look unconcerned, and find each day—silence. You are not the kind of child to grow busy with your playthings and forget. I know how you will suffer—worse now, perhaps, than if you were older. And I make you suffer because there is no other way.

“There is no other way; I may make no explanation. If I told you the truth you would probably take the next steamer for Europe; and if I acted the way I feel, I’d probably meet you half way over. And I can’t write you a lame acknowledgment that I have received your letter, have it on file and will attend to your order in due course. The coldest thing I wrote would burn with the lie that it carried and you would guess and be tempted by me. No. I am like a man in love with his friend’s wife. There is nothing to do. I must keep the faith—which means, in this case, silence.

“It is so horrible, the thing I must do, that I almost forget how you have paid in advance for my necessary brutality. This fragile, badly-spelled, pink-rose-leaf confession of yours, so delicately real, like a half-opened cherry-bud, warm, fragrant, potent with all that is to be! I could send it back to you, mein Kindschen, and say, ‘All that you own here, I confess again to you. Speak; and whatever you say, that will be but the echo of myself.’

“And I shall say nothing. But my heart is full of pity, mein Kindschen.”

They were crossing the river above New York city before she had been able to finish three-quarters of the book; the cars were shifted carefully and tenderly to a flat-bottomed ferry; in a few moments they were being towed down the river to Jersey City. She could look out of her window and see the lights of the river and hear the water lapping the sides of the boat. Much meditation had gone with each page; and she was reluctant to come to the impending end.

Leopold appeared in the letters. “I am playing a losing game, I know,” he wrote. “While I wait and look fatherly (and get called mon père—ugh!) someone else, less scrupulous—and a blamed sight more natural!—will reach out and take you.... Nom d’une pipe!... My word is given, however, and I will not break it. Hier stehe ich, Gott mir helfen, ich kann nicht anders; so said Luther, or something like that, on a matter that seems to me less important!”

Almost immediately after this he was rowing most gloriously with Conscience and bringing the years down to eighteen. “Something ought to be knocked off for good behavior,” he argued; “every decent prison allows that. But there’s the final stand. One step this side—one minute even, and I’d never forgive myself. Seventeen, eighteen! Two years of acting-grandfather, playing the wise old professor, so interested in education! Rats!”

Now he was leaving abruptly for Holden, decamping in the night, fleeing before the attack of the tempter. The devil had got into him; the Old One needed vigorous exorcising.

The Old One came in for a long essay. The devil was God’s ally, he found out; Lucifer tried men out, tested them, showed up the flaws, taught them exactly what to amend, reject or add. Spiritual perfection was not possible without a healthy, vigorous tussle with the Old One.

“I know when he is coming,” he claimed; “first, I hear the cries of the old mystery-play devils, ‘Out haro! Out haro! Out! out! out!’ just like a pack of yelping dogs on a hot scent. Then I find my heart, blood, lungs, vertebræ, stomach, legs, and sympathetic nervous system all going back on me. The flesh and the devils are old cronies, you know. ‘Out! out! Out haro! Out! out!’ he howls, nearer and nearer; my whole physical ‘me’ tugs and yowls and bites at the leash.

“Then the real ‘me’ takes a fresh grip and holds fast. I slip and slide a little, but dig my feet in the stones, and pray—”

“I know. I know,” nodded Gorgas.

“—Then I throw the thong over my shoulders,” Allen went on, “turn my back on the fiend and drag that other part of ‘me,’ heart, stomach, and all, straight up on firm ground. Every step’s a better one.”

“My legs get away from me,” Gorgas commented ruefully. “They just took me off to Boston. And I’m not a bit sorry—and that’s funny, too.”

Seventeen was the hardest year. The grown-up gowns were not lost on him. “Attire of the devil’s making,” he wrote. “A snare of the Old One,—Retro, Sathanas! Get thee behind me. Not a minute before the hour set, or all my life I shall feel depraved.”

The Old One argued with him. He gave a part of the debate:

“Old One: Why grow solemn-faced over so simple a matter! She’s a woman and you’re a man.

“Allen B.: She’s a child and I am a man, thank the Lord, full-grown and in control of himself.

“Old One: (sneering) Are you a man? Oh, no, you’re not. You’re neither male nor female. You’re a pedagogue.

“A. B.: (wincing) Touchez bien! A hit! Whatever I am, I am going to be decent.

“Old One: (artfully) All the unnatural things and all the disagreeable ones are decent. In Constantinople it isn’t decent for a woman to show her lips. Man invented that word, ‘decent.’ With God there is no decent or indecent. He made ’em all, the good and the bad. Don’t you know your Browning? He made you, Allen Blynn, what you are.

“A. B.: And he made you, you canker! And he made me strong to fight you. Retro! Imp of Darkness! ’Raus!

“Old One: Are you so strong?

“A. B.: No!... Get out!

“Old One: Neither is Leopold—Leopold, your bosom-friend—

“A. B.: (smiting him) Back to hell, you miserable liar! Back! Back!

“Old One: (retreating) Ho! ho! ho! ho! Out haro! out haro! ho! ho! Neither is Leopold!... Leopold!... Leopold!”

On other pages he was full of hope. The dream had come true. He was planning out his life with her. “We must make this go right,” he said. “The world is writing its books against us. Every little novelist and every little playwright is hinting dark things against marriage. They sneer at all the habits of the race and cry, ‘Liberty for the emotions.’ ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they tempt, ‘and also thy neighbor’s wife. Marriage is servitude and a restriction; let’s wallow and be natural.’ Liars and servants of the Old One, every mother’s son. But we must watch carefully. Marriage is like any other attempt at living; it must be tended and watched and fed, not squandered or tossed about. We’ll spend our store of affection like other gifts, not lavishly all at once in one mad spree, but with rare economy; and we’ll keep adding new funds to the old by sharing associations together. We must not begin to have separate interests or even different friends. Marriage is a wonderful art; the ideal is ever beyond achievement, but it is worth striving for.... Did you say, ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’?

“I have two complete and separate lives,” he wrote further; “the one I live in the day-time, serious, mature, full of windy arguments of state, books, religion, literature, education; the one I live at night when the hurlyburly of the day is done and I travel these pages with you. My very style is different in these two personalities. In the broad light of day I am somewhat stilted and over-oldish for one so young; here with you sitting sleepy-eyed in the chair before me, I am lithe and bold and gay and boyish. There are no sweethearts in the day-time for Allen Blynn. And that’s a good thing, too; or he couldn’t do a proper day’s work. Sometimes you do bob in, but I rise politely, put on my spectacles, usher you firmly to the door and bid you a pleasant but peremptory ‘good morning.’ Sometimes you slip in by the window, and then I am done for.”

The “Lady of the Interruption” came in for a comment or two. “You have a wrong notion of that Lady; and I have encouraged it; you ask such persistent questions about her eyes and her hair and her dresses—about all of which I know nothing. She is at least fifty, but I have carefully concealed that from you. Your wide-open eyes see a life-partner there and I affect to wonder if it might not be. That’s playing the game square—a little too square, perhaps. At any rate it is right penance for all my sins of desire; and it pleases Conscience mightily and makes the Old One howl.”

Those dictated letters to the family! Great Scott! How self-conscious and bookish they were. Daylight wrote every line of them, affirmed Allen Blynn.

---

Dawn was slowly touching the edge of a New Jersey pine wood; but Gorgas was not at all aware of that. Never had sleep seemed so foreign to her needs.

Breathlessly she read on until within a page or two of the end.

“What does he mean? What does he mean?” she fingered the scant leaves that remained. “He said there was another—‘There is—and there isn’t at all,’ he said.”

The end came abruptly. It was dated only a few weeks ago. Before he had left for his lecture trip he had had a casual talk with Leopold, he wrote. What Leopold really said is not recorded—Leopold was too honest a man to have lied—but, nevertheless, Allen Blynn came away with the certain impression that the long vigil had come to naught. Poets, lovers and madmen have such seething brains!

“I have climbed to my ‘Top-o’-the-hill,’” wrote Allen; “beyond is Canaan, but it is not for me.”

“How could he? How could he?” Gorgas whispered. “This is terrible, Allen Blynn.” Solicitude for her man quite outweighed her own loss.

She read on: “Within sight of the promised land I must die and be buried in the Valley of Moab,” he wrote on the final page. “What sin I have committed I know not.... And now you will never find me out, my child. Your birthday gift—this book of absurd confessions—must be buried with me.

“‘And Jehovah showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the South, and the Plain of the Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.... And He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab; but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’”

“Finis” was written in deliberate ink; but a white space below had left room for a scrawl in pencil: “You are out there in the cab, little woman, and Canaan is around and about me; yet I must not speak. When you read these pages you will know and understand. The Old One is fighting hard with me to break the faith; but I cannot, now. Our life together must not begin this way. You must go home, and I must not have it on my soul that I even so much as touched you. There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. In my stupid, iron-set, prejudiced, superstitious brain you are a child until tomorrow. Tomorrow you will be something other, my right woman. That other I will claim, but—tomorrow. Tomorrow!

“Your ecstatic, maybe-foolish, and altogether glorified,

“Vinegar Saint.”

“Oh, Allen Blynn! Allen Blynn!” the tearful little woman laughed in her joy. “You are too funny! You are too, too funny!”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

No attempt was made to standardize dialect.

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