Anthony the Absolute

by Samuel Merwin

April 8th. Noon.

WE have a perfect half scale, at last—c to g.

I shall now drive ahead after the rest of it. It has been a rather more exacting task than either of us foresaw. But she is persistent. If anything she throws too much nervous intensity into her work. She has asked me for copying to do, and even secretarial work. With her reasonably complete musical education she is quite competent to take down from the phonograph the notation of melodies and themes. She shuts herself in at night and works over my papers and music sheets until she is quite exhausted. I have tried to remonstrate; but she insists that she likes having the work to do. Poor child!

She has told me a good deal about her musical life. Not the least of her troubles is the fact that it would take at least two years of the very best coaching to fit her for opera. She has no repertoire to speak of. She has dreamed of the operatic stage from her earliest girlhood. But while she was young the opportunity was lacking. Her father was a high-school superintendent—a man of fineness and principle, I take it, but desperately poor. Her mother, who had been a singer, died when she was a child, the father two years ago. And then after her early marriage to Crocker, her life took a new and strange direction. She says nothing about Crocker. What little she does tell of this more recent part of her life she tells in a very quiet, reserved manner, implying an understanding that I will display no curiosity to learn more.

Yes, she accepts me as a friend. And she still thinks I know nothing of her beyond her bare name. I lie to her a dozen times a day, in my silences. But I don't see what else I can do. Certainly I can't offer her money. I can't buy her a ticket over the Trans-Siberian and send her off to Europe to study for opera. I am foolish enough to have moments of wishing to do just that; but it is, of course, an impossible thought. And to tell her the painful knowledge that is at present locked up in my mind would simply shock and hurt her to no purpose that I can perceive.

We have at least one meal a day together. Yesterday we shared all three meals—breakfast in her room, luncheon and dinner in mine. It seemed the natural thing to do. Excepting the breakfast—that was perhaps a trifle odd. But all during the night, at intervals, I heard her stirring about in her room, and saw that her light was on. Toward morning, feeling rather disturbed about her, I got up, and, at length, dressed. This was about six o'clock.

At six-thirty I stepped out on the narrow little French balcony outside my window. It is less than a foot wide, this balcony, and has a fancy wrought-iron railing.

She also has a balcony, and while I stood there she came out. She was dressed. And she seemed so frankly glad to see me, that I suggested the breakfast. She looked very tired about the eyes. Indeed, I am not sure that she does not grow a shade more tired, a shade slimmer, each day. She eats next to nothing at all.

Certainly, each day she works harder. I am going to think out some way in which I can offer to pay her for this work. It is most assuredly worth something. As it stands now, she even insists on paying for her share of the meals.

---

Night.

SIR ROBERT spoke to her to-day. As luck would have it, I was not at hand.

It has been cloudy, and when she went out for her walk this afternoon she forgot to take her umbrella. She is not timid about the weather, anyway. I have thought once or twice that she likes storms.

She was on her way back to the hotel when the storm broke—not far from the Arcade, where the moving pictures are shown. She took refuge in the entrance to the Arcade until the worst of the rain appeared to be over, then started out again through the wet.

Sir Robert appeared at her elbow, with an umbrella. She did not observe whether he had been following her or merely happened to meet her. He walked to the hotel with her. This was all she told me; but I am sure it was not quite all that occurred.

She asked if he was n't a judge.

“Yes,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh,” said she—“it was something he said.”

Which was all I learned about that episode.

It did not seem to disturb her materially. I was glad it did n't. I made a strong effort to conceal my own foolish anger over it, and trust that I succeeded. At any rate, we dropped the subject.

---

April 10th.

THIS afternoon, late, I came into the hotel from a walk in the rain and went directly upstairs. I had my rubbers on.

The upper corridor was nearly dark, particularly to my eyes that were fresh from the street and the bright lights of the office.

I saw a dark object by her door—a man, undoubtedly, crouching there.

I stopped short, and watched, he had a white paper in his hand. He fumbled with this for a moment, then slipped it under the door, pushing it clear through into the room with a pencil. Then he got awkwardly to his feet, and stood hesitating. By this time my eyes were partially accustomed to the dim light, and I knew it was Sir Robert. He did not see me. After a moment he tiptoed heavily across the hall to his own door, just opposite and entered, cautiously and silently closing the door behind him.

I walked straight along the hall, past my own door, and stood before his. I had a mind to go in there and strangle him.

But what was the use? He was an absurd old man, that was all. But none the less, as I stepped back and entered my own room, I found myself shivering oddly. There was an uncomfortable pressure at the back of my head, and my heart was skipping beats.

It is the first time in my life, I think, that I have been seized by the impulse to do physical harm to a fellow creature.

Before putting on my pajamas to-night I stood and looked at my bare chest and arms in my broken mirror. My chest is narrow, my skin white. My arms are thin. Possibly I could n't have strangled him, if I had tried. I wish I were strong.

A little earlier than that, before she closed our door, I asked her if Sir Robert was annoying her in any serious way.

The question made her very grave—graver even than usual. She looked at me, then dropped her eyes, and said nothing. But after a moment she looked up again, made one of those efforts to smile that are pain to me, and shrugged her shoulders. That was all.

---

April 11th.

SIR ROBERT is always hovering about the office and the lounge when I appear, and he always tries to engage me in talk. I can't understand it. He is insistent. He acts as if I fascinate him. Twice to-day I fairly ran away from him. I was afraid I would strike him. It makes me physically uncomfortable to have him so much as stand near me, even if he does not try to take my hand in greeting.

I fear I am not managing this matter very well. I am acting aimlessly, and in a sort of panic of the soul. This won't do.

---

April 12th.

THIS afternoon he caught me squarely at the clerk's desk. He extended a cigar and suggested that we stroll into the lounge and have a chin-chin. I observed that his hand was unsteady, as if the palsy had reached and touched him.

On the spot I made up my mind to face him out. I accepted the cigar, and down we sat.

He asked if I had attended any of the theaters in the Chinese city that lies to the south of the Tartar Wall. When I replied in the negative, he suggested that we do a little exploring together of an evening.

“The ancient Chinese character is nowhere better preserved,” said he, “than in these theatrical performances. And the music, of course, is the pure old strain, quite uncorrupted by Modernism or the West. I can boast of some familiarity with the Chinese drama and music, and even a little acquaintance with the language. It would give me pleasure to act as your guide.”

“Thank you,” said I, a bit too shortly. “Later on, perhaps. Just now I am very busy with my records.”

He smiled—all wrinkles. That left eyelid drooped and drooped.

I pulled savagely on my cigar, chewing it so hard that the end crumpled between my teeth and filled my mouth with unpleasant little particles of tobacco leaf.

Then he laughed—with an effort, I thought. It was not a successful laugh.

So we sat for a few moments, in silence and smoke. So men sit often in this queer tangle of life—smoking, smiling, speaking the commonplace phrases that are the current small change of human intercourse, yet hating each other in their hearts.

“I say, Eckhart”—it was a little later on that he came out with this—“you know who she is, of course.”

There was no good in pretending ignorance. God knows I am not quite the child I sometimes seem, even to myself. So I nodded.

He looked narrowly at me. I met his gaze. I was just a thin, nervous man, a little bald, sitting quietly there and smoking, yet all the time that drooping left eyelid irritated me so that I wanted to reach right over and tear it off his face. But I only nodded.

“Dangerous game, my boy,” said he.

That was his assumption, of course—that to me, too, she was merely a quarry in the endless, universal pursuit of woman by man. Out here on the Coast, of course, from the point of view of the hard world about us, any lone woman is quite legitimate prey.

He was still studying me.

“I 'm wondering how much you know,” he went on.

“About what?” said I, confused.

“About that woman and the fix she is in. You know who her husband is, surely.”

I bowed. “He was on the ship.”

“Yes,” grunted Sir Robert sardonically, “he was on the ship. And you saw what he did in the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, didn't you? He nearly killed a waiter—a Chinaman, who was quite defenseless. But of course you saw it. I recall that you were dining with him at the time.”

“He was drunk,” I said huskily, as if in extenuation.

“Yes,” repeated Sir Robert dryly. “He was drunk. Rather dangerous at such times, is n't he?”

“Yes, but he quit drinking—after that. Cut it all out.” I could not keep my voice from rising a little. I felt my confusion increasing—my thoughts were all adrift, swept here and there by currents of feeling that I could not fathom.

“Oh, he did?” Why would n't that old man take his unpleasant eyes off me! “Oh, he did? You are in his confidence, then. And of course you know even more”—he paused, very deliberately—“regarding his state of mind, his reason for coming out here to the other side of the world, all that?”

I sat limp in my chair, still chewing that crumpling cigar.

Sir Robert leaned back. He was seated on the leather sofa. He let his head rest on the shabby upholstery and studied the ceiling. In one hand he held his cigar, in the other his monocle, tracing patterns in the air with them. His hands are not thin, but the skin on them is crisscrossed with fine wrinkles like the skin on his face and neck.

“My boy,” he began, after a rime, “I'm going to offer you a little counsel. You won't take it, but I am going to offer it. Probably, at your age, I should n't have taken it either.” He sighed. “I am an old man. For forty-five years I have been observing men—and women. I have seen—well, a good deal, one way and another. And the one fact I have come to be sure of.... You know, Eckhart, the great mass of human beings—in Europe and America, at least, labor under the curious delusion that the race has finally worked out something of a civilization. Curious, but they do. It is rot, of course. All rot. There is no civilization. Life is quite as primitive as ever. Only we have developed extraordinary ingenuity at covering life up. That's it. That's our greatest triumph—covering up! At best, it is pretty messy business. And all we can be sure of is that every man owes it to himself and his legitimate offspring to save his skin at all costs, and incidentally, to capture what little he can of the common booty.”

He made me nervous. I couldn't sit there indefinitely and listen to his sordid philosophy.

He was quick to catch my mood, and went on more to the point. This shiftiness is the seasoned lawyer in him, I suppose. He is pretty keen, after all.

“Look here, Eckhart—there's no sense in men like you and me beating about the bush. Crocker got blind drunk at Nagasaki, and missed the Shanghai boat. That night he told me the same story that he had doubtless told you. Or did n't he?”

I nodded. As he had said, there was no use beating about the bush.

“Then I've only this much to say, my boy. It's the one thing I've learned from life. Never—never—fall in love with a woman. Play with them, yes. Use them. But for God's sake don't let yourself fall in love with them!”

He was speaking with a curious emphasis. His gaze had drifted upward again toward the dirty ceiling. And now it was suddenly my turn to sit and watch him.

“Don't do it!” he went on. “Don't do it. They fasten their lives on you, they smother you. If you don't marry them, it's bad enough. If you do, it's worse. You are an extremely gifted young man. I do not know that I ever met a man with a keener mind or one that impressed me as having more driving, vital force with which to shape a career. You are out here now, right in your best years, full of enthusiasm for your work. Don't let any woman into your life. Good or bad, whatever the phrases mean, a woman is n't happy with a man until she has trimmed the scope of his life down to the compass of her own understanding. She has to get it right into her hands, and choke it. Then life begins to mean something to her. Personally I have come to the conclusion that I get on rather better with the bad women, so called. They don't expect so much. In a way they are squarer—better sports, as you Americans say. Remember, my boy, 'He travels the fastest who travels alone.'.

I was becoming tired of his wandering thoughts. Generalizations are a bore, anyway. They are always loose, and generally wrong. Then, too, I may as well admit that he was disturbing me deeply, this loose-minded but shrewd old man.

“Look here,” I said abruptly, “you know of this obsession of Crocker's?”

He bowed.

“Can't we do something to restrain him?” He slowly shook his head.

“You don't mean to say that we can't stop a man who is bent on murder?”

“Our motives might be regarded as—well, not exactly clear, yours and mine,” mused Sir Robert. “Besides, he hasn't done anything. You can hardly restrain a man from becoming indignant if an acquaintance breaks into his house and steals his wife.”

“But she is n't his property, like his watch!” I exclaimed.

He smiled tolerantly at me. “In a sense, she is,” said he. “In a sense. The weight of law and tradition is against you there, Eckhart.”

“Traditions are nothing to me!” said I, hotly.

“They still mean a good deal to the rest of the world,” said he dryly. “And even the law still has weight.” Then he went on, quite as if I had not interrupted him. “In England it might be possible, in case we could prove that he had openly threatened murder in the presence of competent witnesses, to put him under bonds to keep the peace. But this is n't England—it is the China Coast. At that, what would bonds mean to a strong, self-willed man in Crocker's state of mind! A jealous man!” He raised his monocle, held it a few inches before his face, and looked through it at a speck on the ceiling. He even moved it around a little, and squinted his right eye, as if sighting through a transit.

I wanted to strike it from his shaking fingers. Instead, I sat up very straight and clasped my hands tightly together in my lap.

“Do you know,” he continued, in that irritating, musing tone, “I believe the man is still in love with her, or thinks he is.”

“Love!” I sniffed. “You call that love!” He did n't look at me. He was still squinting at the ceiling. Pretty soon he sighed. “When you come right down to it,” he said, “if a man has no right to protect his home—and that implies some right of control over his wife—'love, honor and obey,' you know—what becomes of our institutions! You see, Eckhart, in the eyes of the world Crocker is entitled to a good deal of sympathy. He took care of this woman for years, supported her in some luxury, I take it, gave her a much richer sort of life than she had known before.”

“What do you mean by 'richer'.” I cried. “More money?”

He waved me back with his monocle, and went on with his argument. “She was unwilling to bear him children. Now, Eckhart, that is serious. She was his wife. She refused there to meet her absolute duty as a wife. English law, at least, is quite definite on that point.”

This was dreadful. I could hardly keep in my chair.

“And following all this”—he was growing emphatic now—“she deliberately leaves his home and attaches herself to another man. There is certainly no doubt there, my boy. That is adultery. She dishonored his home. She dishonored him—”

Here, I admit, I lost my temper. I sprang up, and for the second time in my acquaintance with this old man, shook my finger under his nose.

“Rot!” I cried, using his own phrase. “Rot! All rot! He had dishonored her home a hundred times.” My voice rang out on that word “dishonored.” I fairly jammed it down Sir Robert's throat—made h'm eat that word, letter by letter. “For God's sake, lower your voice!” said he. “Adultery!” I shouted this, too. “Good God—'adultery' is a commonplace to Crocker!”

“You don't know this,” said he. Then, “Lower your voice!”

“But I do know,” I answered him. “He told me himself. 'Adultery!' Why, millions of men commit adultery'—good men, bad men, every sort of men! That's what the millions of prostitutes are for! And, guilty or innocent, we all lie about it to the women and the children. Lie—lie—lie! I'm sick of it! I'm a scientist, I tell you, and I don't recognize lies in my business. There's something wrong somewhere. We're all playing at life—all pretending—all making believe—when we ought to be studying the facts, working through those facts toward the truth.”

“What did I tell you,” he broke in, talking around my finger—“covering up!”

“We're afraid of the truth,” I shouted. “So we cling desperately to our lies, and call them beautiful. And the truth—beaten down, perverted—undermines us, saps us, beats us at every turn. God, it's awful!” My hand fell by my side.

“The worst of it is, probably the truth would be beautiful, if we could only find it.”

Sir Robert again drew a long, long breath. “But what's the use, Eckhart?” said he. “What you say is of course true. But why make a Quixote of yourself? Why be a dam' fool! Society does cling to its little lie. Even at a sacrifice of half the women in the world. Admitting that some of our traditions are nothing more than outworn tribal notions, what's the use of beating your brains out against them. I tell you, my boy, if you talk too much of that sort of truth the world will kill you. And the women who call themselves good will lead the attack, for they are the sheltered, the privileged class. No, we must take it as we find it.”

But I was past all this now—past the influence of all his miserable sophistry. My head and hands were blazing hot.

“So!” I cried. “You tell me to play the coward! Do you not know that every one of the great explorers into the wonderful region of scientific truth has faced the terror and hatred of the world in precisely this way? Do you not know that if those great-hearted men, one after another, had not cut their way through the spiritual horrors of 'tradition' We should to-day be living in medieval darkness and filth? Why, Old Man, you yourself can remember when 'free-thinker' was a term of obloquy. To-day our right to think is the finest, greatest right we have.—Do you suppose I care if they kill me?” Again I waved my finger under his nose. “Tell me, Old Man, do you really imagine I care? Don't you know, the scientific mind better than that? Can't you see that I admit no tradition, no dogma, no authority. I am a scientist! I am of the most wonderful guild of explorers this wretched old world has yet seen—the guild that is exploring for the truth. Tradition has not stopped us yet. It will never stop us.”

I turned away. “Oh, I am disgusted with you,” I said—“with you and your beastly, cowardly mind! I'm sick of you!—Understand that? I'm sick of you!” And I walked straight for the door.

Sir Robert followed me. He had to step fast, too. He put his hand on my shoulder, and checked me. He loomed over me.

“Whatever you do, my boy,” he was saying, “keep your head. That woman has already wrecked two lives that we know of—possibly a third. Don't let her wreck yours.”

I wrenched away from him, and struck out alone into the narrow, muddy street between the Chinese houses.

I walked twice around the glacis that borders the Legation Quarter on the north, and through the Quarter from end to end on Legation Street. Scenes flitted past me that I only half saw—Peking carts with blue covers and little window's in the sides, innumerable street merchants uttering musical cries and offering trays of queer-smelling foods, and the usual indolent, good-humored crowds of blue-clad yellow men, with round yellow' children playing everywhere, underfoot and out in the mud of the street. In the Ha Ta Road a long wedding procession was passing, with an ornate red sedan chair for the poor little bride, and musical instruments that I did not so much as observe. I saw the stiff, cowed German soldiers on sentry duty at the eastern end of Legation Street, and, farther along, the solid masonry building of the Hongkong Bank; and, down a side street, the great, showy, extremely modern Wagon-lits Hotel. I vaguely noted the walls and trees of the British Compound, where centered the defense against the Boxer attack a dozen years ago. I strode by the American Compound, at the western end, and caught a glimpse through the open gate of lounging American boys in their olive drab. And, emerging on the plaza between the great Chien Gate in the Tartar Wall and the entrance to the Imperial City, I came upon a long train of laden camels, just in from Mongolia, each with a string in its ugly nose.

And all the way I knew that the confused forces that have been tearing at me during this disturbing week were merging into a new line of force. I knew, even then, that this meant a new direction for my life—my life that I once thought so simply and clearly outlined, so perfectly centered on a single interest. Now—God knows what is to become of me!

Did Sir Robert do this amazing thing to me? I can not think clearly. I am that way at times—I let another try to bring me to his own point of view, he is more likely than not merely to rouse my own inner voices. I never follow—I lead.

However it be, I only know now that I am a man with blazing fires in me—fires that both sear and illuminate my mind, my emotions, my soul. It is glorious. And terrible.

It was nearly six o'clock when I came into my room. I observed that the connecting door stood part way open. This meant, I had come to know, that she was in, and that I was welcome.

I tiptoed to the door, and tapped on it with the tips of my fingers.

She was sitting by her balcony, sewing.

“Did you have a good walk?” she asked softly.

She seemed less sad. When I had tossed my hat and stick aside and entered her room, it seemed to me even that a smile was hovering on her lovely face. I could not be certain of this, for she kept her head bowed over her work.

I dropped into a chair by her, and looked at her. Yes, she seemed distinctly softer, even more subtly feminine (as we say) than usual, bending over the needle that moved nimbly to and fro. It struck me that sewing brought out the beauty of her hands.

Finally she raised her head and looked at me. She was smiling.

“I've got it,” she said. “Listen.”

And with a quick breath and a slight stiffening of her shoulders she began singing the scale upward from middle c—sitting there with her sewing in her lap. I listened closely. Heretofore she had usually begun to miss the eighth-tone intervals when she reached a and b. Now she took them perfectly. I could not detect the slightest inaccuracy of pitch. I noticed that she kept to a marked rhythm, all the way up. The upper c she held, with a sudden triumphant glance at me, and trilled on it, very softly.

It brought me to my feet. “Come,” I said gruffly, “we'll take that down on the machine.” She followed into my room, explaining eagerly as she watched me putting on the cylinder—“You see, to-day, I realized all at once that I've been downright stupid about it. It occurred to me that singing with a rhythm might carry me right along through it. And then besides I just stopped fussing, and made up my mind that of course I could do it. I can do it again, too. You'll see.”

She promptly did it again. Again and again, as rapidly as I could put on new cylinders. I seized the occasion to make twelve records. Then we both listened attentively while I played them all over. There was not the slightest doubt that ten were perfect—or so nearly perfect that they satisfied us. And that is near enough. My hands trembled as I put each cylinder back in its box and carefully wrote the labels. Oh, it has been a tremendous day, this day!

She stood right over the machine throughout this performance—and we must have been an hour at it. I asked her to sit, but she laughed a little and said she was too excited.

When the labeled boxes were all carefully put away in a drawer of my bureau, where no accident short of fire could reach them, I came to her and took her two hands. Then suddenly I could not say anything at all.

But she looked right at me, and returned, very frankly, the pressure of my hands, and smiled, though there were tears in her own eyes.

“I'm so glad,” she said. “You just don't know—I've wanted so to be of use—”

She gently tried to withdraw her hands. I released one, but, still unable to speak, clung to the other; and hand in hand we walked to the French window and stepped out, side by side, on the narrow balcony. Then I let her hand go, and we leaned on the railing and breathed in the sweet April air.

It was evening now. Electric lights were twinkling. Gay paper lanterns hung out from nearby buildings. The confusion of street cries floated up faintly to our ears.

My time had come.

But it was hard to speak directly. First I told her how wonderfully she has helped me, and to what a practical end.

All she said to this was—very softly, gazing off at the lights—“I'm glad.”

I rambled on. Which would not do. My time had come, and I was letting it slip away. It was characteristic of me, I thought almost bitterly—always, except in the one narrow channel of my work, blundering ineffectually, missing the realities of life.

I gathered my forces, with a great effort. I felt sober, stem, all at once.

“Listen, please,” I began.

Instantly I knew that she had caught the change in me. I thought I felt her nerves tighten, though I was not touching her. I blundered on.

“You have come to know me,” I said.

“Yes,” she breathed, “I have come to know you.”

“And by this time you know just about the sort of man I am. I must assume that you know that, because I expect you to take all of me into account in what I am going to say. I know I shall say it badly. I doubt if I shall succeed at all in saying even what I mean. Yet, you've got to understand me.”

She kept silent; but it seemed to me, in the subtle understanding we had somehow reached, that she assented to this preliminary condition.

“I am going to put it bluntly,” I rushed on “It's the only way I can say it at all. I see two facts, as regards you and me. One is that you are a wonderful woman. You have great gifts. You have what we call temperament—a silly word, but there is no other for the precise meaning. It is an absurd waste to keep you here. You must go to Berlin or Paris—Paris, I think, for the French music is the most stimulating of any today. You must be prepared for opera just as rapidly as possible. There is no time to lose.”

Her mouth twisted into a fleeting half-smile. “It is quite out of the question,” she murmured.

“No, it is not out of the question!” My voice was rising, and she had to give me a warning look. “I do not know quite how it is to be managed, but I can see a beginning, at least.”

She seemed surprised at this, so I talked more and more rapidly. “First, you must consider my second fact. Remember, I am speaking only as a practical scientist—quite impersonally.” God forgive me, this seemed true at the moment! “What you have done for me has a value that I dare not even estimate. Though my income is not great, even from my text books, I would gladly have traveled thousands of miles and devoted months of work to the securing of the phonographic close-interval scale that now is securely mine.”

She was beginning to stir restlessly. But I would not let her speak. “Take your copying and clerical work alone—perhaps, I should not say this—I could not possibly get such devoted and expert assistance anywhere in the world without paying a reasonable price by the week. Now hear me! You must not close your mind to what I am saying!” For I knew she was doing just that, as women will. I caught her arm—and her hand—in my two hands and clung to her. She did not resist. Nor did she respond—merely looked soberly off over the city, and seemed, all the time, to be drifting away from me. My head was burning hot. My forehead was dripping wet, and I had to shake the drops of sweat out of my eyes. Great, wild thoughts were gripping my mind, that had been so confused. I knew then that I must get her out of Peking, away from that ugly, persistent old man across the hall, away from the drink-crazed younger man who thought he could by a violent act restore what he called his honor. I knew that I must be equal to this task. I must find the way. And I must persuade her.

So I cried—

“You must listen! I will not place you in my debt. But you have placed me in yours. You must be fair to me. You must let me help you by paying my debt to you. I promise you I will do more than that. But oh, you must be fair to me!”

She would not look at me. I had her right forearm and hand in the grip of my hot, trembling hands. Her left elbow rested on the iron railing of the balcony, her chin on her hand. And her eyes roved off over the roofs of the Chinese houses, over the walls and trees of the Legation Quarter, off southward toward the temple of Heaven that stood somewhere there behind the trees and the starlit sky above it.

More and more my thoughts were slipping out of control. I struggled to hold them, but could not. I had never in my life felt like this.

“You must not let the fact that I love you confuse your sense of justice,” I went on, quite as if she and I had long known and admitted my love for her. “That is another matter altogether. Except in this—I know now that as long as I live I shall want to help you. This is quite beyond your control, or mine. It simply happens to be so. And it does seem to me that since it is so, you can at least let me help you to the extent that is practically and impersonally fair.”

It was curious how the mere utterance of those three words, “I love you,” cleared my mind. It explained everything. It relieved me by extricating me from all uncertainty of thought and feeling. It thrilled me, deeply and solemnly. I wanted to say it over and over and over. I wanted to take her into my arms and whisper it into one ear and then into the other. I wanted to whisper it to the stars up there, the stars that have heard so much. I wanted to go over to the big hotel in the Quarter, where there would be bright lights and tourists and gilded military folk and gay ladies, and say it so that all might hear and share the thrill of it.

My talk dwindled out. What part had more argument in this? My grip on her arm relaxed; I held only to her unresponsive hand, and leaned on the railing beside her.

For a long, long time we were still there. Then, finally she withdrew her hand.

I looked at her and saw that her eyes were shining, and there were tears on her cheek.

“Oh,” she murmured, “why—why—could n't we have gone on!”

“You don't mean that we can't go on!” said I.

She looked full at me, and inclined her head. To-day she has had more color, her face has not had so much of the worn, tired look. But now, by the half-light that fell on her from the window, I saw that it had all returned. She was very sad, very tired.

“You have spoken.” she said, “of money—and of love. Oh, I wish you had n't!”

Then she must have read my feelings on my face, for she put her hand on my arm and added—

“I did not mean to hurt you. It has been beautiful. You don't know—even you, you don't know. You almost made life mean something again. Nothing that I could ever do would pay you back for that. It made me almost happy—just to be useful. All my life I have wanted to be that. And they have made a toy of me. Or they have wanted me to do something I could n't do. You have helped me to do what I can do.”

“It has been beautiful,” I thought. Or perhaps I said it aloud, for she inclined her head again.

“It has been like a dream,” she said. “I know it could n't be so, but oh, how I have clung to it! I have blundered so with my life... but this seemed real.”

“It is real,” said I.

She looked away.

Again for a time we stood silently there, and looked out over the curving tile roofs.

And again I felt that she was slipping away from me. It was good that I had spoken my love.

That would stay in her thoughts. Perhaps it would grow there. Perhaps the magic that was stirring wonderfully in my heart would touch and stir her heart. I knew at that moment that I loved her more than all the world—more than my work, more than my life. I knew, with exultation, that I was plunging out into uncharted ways, where lives are as often wrecked as not. And I did not care. I was glad.

Her shoulder brushed mine, as we leaned side by side on the railing. There was sheer intoxication in that contact. I raised my arm, fairly holding my breath, and put it about her shoulders. I caught her two hands, there by her chin. I saw lights, trees, sky in a swirl of happy things. A voice was thrilling in my heart. I gripped her tightly, and tried to kiss her. But she struggled. She tried to push me away. She fought me.

And then, as I staggered back, the tears came from my own eyes, blinding me.

She ran back into my room, and stood there.

I followed. “It was in my heart to do it!” I was saying, like a fool. “It was in my heart to do it!”

She dropped on a chair, very limp and white. She motioned me to take another.

“You must not be like the others,” she was saying, in a desperate, choking voice—“you must not! I can't bear it!”

I could not think. “I am not,” I replied, low—“I am not. I love you. You shall see.”

This was getting us nowhere. Her eyes were dry now, and oh, so sad and tired. She was slowly shaking her head at me.

“You are killing—everything!” she said. But she said it gently.

I could not speak, I only looked at her—looked and looked. Then I went over to the phonograph and worked aimlessly over it. I think I wound it up.

She still sat there, her hands limp in her lap.

Finally she said, in a low voice that was y et steady—“I wish I could love you.”

“You can,” I muttered. “You shall!”

She slowly shook her head. “No,” she breathed.

“But you must,” I went on. “It is the only thing now. It is the one way out for you and me.”

This had some effect on her. She pursed her lips, and thought.

But after a little she shook her head again, and made that listless gesture of her left hand that she had made that first day, when I broke into her room.

“Something has died in me,” she said. “I don't believe I can ever love a man again.”

She rose, and moved toward her own room. On the sill she paused, and picked at the flaking paint of the door frame.

“I do not believe it is the only way out,” she said. “You will get over it, of course.” Then, at the shake of my head, she corrected—“At least, you will have your work, and the feeling that you are getting somewhere with your life. I should think that would be the one great thing, after all. And I shall at least know that I am not hurting another life. I hurt everybody, that cares for me. If I could—love you, I should undoubtedly hurt you.”

“Wait,” said I, “we will go on with our work, at least—in the morning.”

She pursed her lips again. “I don't know,” she replied, as if she were thinking aloud, “whether that is possible.”

“It must be possible!”

She shook her head. “You will have to let me think about that.”

Then she closed the door, and was gone.

I had meant to give her my life. I had only succeeded in taking away from her that part of it that had been helpful to her.

I find it difficult to reconstruct the hour that followed. I remember standing a long while by the window. Once I went to her door, just so that I might hear her moving about her room. But as I stood there it seemed like an intrusion, and I came away.

Many, many things that I might have said to her came rushing to my thoughts. I wanted to say them now. I wanted to go right into her room and say them.

All the time my heart was beating very rapidly, and my blood was hot. Love, it seems, is like a fever. I never knew this before. I have always thought it a weakness when I have seen what men call love apparently devastating a life. Now I see that I must correct this judgment. For love is a force that operates beyond the jurisdiction of reason or will. I begin to think that I must expect less assistance from my own reason than heretofore.

That long, wild hour of my solitude somehow passed. It occurred to me to go outdoors. I picked up my hat and stick. Then, irresolute, I moved to the window and looked out over the city.

While I stood there Sir Robert came up the stairs. I heard his ponderous step, more hurried than usual, come along the corridor. There was a silence while, I knew, he was fumbling for his key. Then a jingling, and the sound of his door opening.

I think that an old man is the structure his younger self has built. How badly this man has built. Myself, often when tempted to do this or that, I have thought—“Will it make toward a sweet old age?”

He had talked to me cynically of love, had Sir Robert, only a few hours ago. What would he say now if he knew the immensity of the forces he had stirred and brought to the surface of my consciousness. I smiled as I thought that perhaps I owe much to that old man. I almost wanted to thank him.

So I stood there by the window, thinking many things. And the April air was sweet.

After a little time I started for my walk, my second walk this day under stress of great emotion. But in the course of the few hours intervening I had crossed a line. The man who was now about to step lightly down the stairs and stroll out through the shabby office of the hotel was a new man, one who had never before gone down those stairs or out through that office.

I lingered a moment by her door. I could hear her light step. And she was humming—oh, so softly! Humming another song by her favorite, Franz. It was the dainty, exquisite—

“Madchen mit dem roten Mündchen.”

It seemed to me that there was a new brightness in her voice.

I slipped out into the corridor.

Sir Robert's door stood open. I stepped across and looked in. I had pushed my hat to the back of my head, to let the air cool my forehead. And I think I was swinging my stick.

From behind the closed door across the hall came, very faintly, that floating, silvery voice.

Sir Robert's room was in confusion. He had drawn his leather steamer trunk to the center of the room, opened it, and placed the tray across an arm-chair that stood by the head of the bed. The bed was covered with shirts, underwear, collars, books and papers in disorderly heaps. Shoes littered the floor. His evening clothes were laid out on the table, other suits across a chair.

On the edge of the bed, amid the disorder, sat Sir Robert. He was in his shirt sleeves. His waistcoat was unbuttoned, his white hair rumpled so that it stuck up grotesquely over his ears.

“Well, well,” said I. “Is n't this unexpected?” He looked up.

His face never had any color to speak of, but now it was a pasty gray. His eyes were sunken, but with a curious sparkle in them. He said nothing, just stared at me.

“Well,” I repeated, “are you leaving?”

Still he merely stared at me. It was unpleasant. I felt my assurance fading out, and stood stupidly there, unable to think of anything further to say. “He's here!” whispered Sir Robert then.

“Who—who—” My nerves were tightening. The left side of his face twitched.

I heard myself saying—“But that's impossible. He would n't be here yet.”

Sir Robert dropped his eyes now. I was glad of this. They made me extremely uncomfortable. He began packing his shirts in the tray of his trunk.

“How did he come here?” It was still myself speaking.

“Good God—how should I know!” he muttered. “What has that to do with it?”

“Where are you going?”

“I don't know,” he was answering me. “There are trains in the morning. And I won't stay here to-night. I won't stay here to-night!”

“Are you sure of this?” I asked. Why was it that my mind seemed to be refusing utterly to react from this news! Why could n't I realize it! Why could n't I think!

“He's at the Wagon-lits. I saw him. He is drinking. This is no place for you, either. I advise you to move quick.”

“No,” said I, “I shall see him. He and I got on very well. I shall talk with him. It is time some one forced him to listen to reason.”

Sir Robert, I recall, had a shoe in his hand at this moment. It fell to the floor. At the noise, we both started. His face twitched again—on the left side. He looked at me, with eyes like little glass beads.

“Why not?” I added.

Sir Robert drew in a long breath.

“Crocker told me he was going to kill that woman and the man she is living with,” he said, slowly and huskily.

“Yes,” I put in, with a sort of eagerness, “but don't you see—”

“It would be exceedingly difficult to convince a jury,” he went on, deliberately silencing me, “that she is not at present living with—”

“Well?” said I, thinking queer, rapid thoughts.

“You,” he finished.

---

April 12th—very late.

I WALKED slowly Lack into my own room, trying to think; but my mind was inert.

In the next room Heloise was still singing, softly and brightly.

I stepped out on the little balcony.

What was it Sir Robert had said? Oh, yes, that Crocker had come to Peking. This was dreadful. It meant trouble. One way or the other, I myself was involved in this trouble. A wife is, in a sense, the property of her husband—in a sense. If she dishonors his home by leaving him for another, he has some right to be indignant. If his outraged sense of possession lashes him into a murderous passion he can not be stopped from killing her. In England now—something about competent witnesses. And the difficulty of convincing a jury that she was not living with me....

In the confusion of mind that lay over my faculties like a paralysis, one curious fact sticks out in my memory. I deliberately shook myself, standing there on my balcony. I tried to shake myself awake.

I seemed to be recalling a story that the fat vaudeville manager from Cincinnati told on the ship, one night. It had to do with a celebrated prize fight in New York some years back. He reveled in memories of fights, that vaudeville man. An odd mental habit!

On the occasion he mentioned, one fighter was knocked down and very nearly, as the phrase runs, “out.” Lying there upon the floor of the ring, dazed, all but unconscious, the man actually beat his own head against the door in a desperate effort to rouse himself.

Over and over again that picture rose in my mind. I have never witnessed such a spectacle. Primitive brutality has played, needless to say, no part in my life. But at this time, caught up and whirled about, as I was, in a bewildering conflict of primitive emotions, it was a second-hand recollection of the prize ring that came to my aid.

The fact is not uninteresting.

I chanced to glance down. A tiny, lacy ball lay there at my feet. I picked it up. It was Heloise's handkerchief.

I held the absurdly small square of linen and lace in my two hands and looked at it. I folded and unfolded it. I pressed it to my lips, again and again.

Am I to become the helpless victim of these crude emotional uprushes—like any common clerk with his shopgirl? I, who have for so long observed the human herd from afar with a sort of casual interest?... I wonder.

Suddenly the thought of the man Crocker came to me. He was in this city. He was over there in the Legation Quarter, behind the walls that I could see—over in the big hotel. He was drinking again. And there was murder in his heart.

It seems to me that this thought—I am trying to face my strange, new self, and set everything down; God know's I need the discipline!—that this thought was followed by a little blaze of heroics. I am somewhat confused about this, of course—one can not analyze one's own emotions with any degree of accuracy while they are still active—but I recall going out into the hall and standing there like a sentry. I was determined to protect my lady with my life. I saw myself fighting gloriously for her; and I saw her, close at hand, witnessing my ever valiant act, and exulting in my prowess.

A child has such notions. And, I note, a lover.

I stood for a time at the top of the stairs. Crocker should never mount those stairs alive. Behind me, through the transom of number eighteen, there occasionally came floating clear little threads of tone. Heloise was singing as she moved about her room. She did not know. And she should not know—not yet. Perhaps I could find a way to spare her. At any rate, Crocker would never pass those stairs without fighting his way over my body.

Once I tiptoed back and tapped at Sir Robert's door; even tried the knob, but it was locked. He had gone, evidently.

I don't seem to know quite why I sought that old man again. It was an impulse. Perhaps I wanted him to see that his warning had had no effect on me, none whatever.

It was getting on into the early evening now, say between seven and eight. I half-saw one of the Chinese waiters come up the stairs with a tray for Heloise. I leaned against the wall when he passed. But for some reason it did not occur to me to order food for myself. I could not have eaten out there in the hall, anyway; and were I to sit in my room, even with the door open, there was a possibility that Crocker might rush by before I could stop him. So I ate nothing, all the evening. I could n't eat now, if food were brought to me. The reactions of what we call love are curiously related, it appears, to the various bodily appetites. I am almost ready to define love as a general disturbance of all the nerve centers, accompanied by strong, positive, emotional excitement and a partial paralysis of the reasoning faculty.

Some little time passed while I stood there at the head of the stairs. A fit of impatience, that may have had in it an element of morbid eagerness to hasten the event, took possession of me. After all, it was not essential that I should stand guard at that particular spot. I walked slowly down the stairs and, making a strong effort to appear unconcerned, through the office and out the door. He would have to come in this way.

I walked slowly along the narrow street toward the Italian glacis. It would be better, much better, to meet him out here.

There has been a chill in the air this evening. And the wind has risen, stirring up clouds of the powdery loess dust that is the curse of this wonderful old city.

For a long time I paced that street, breathing at times through my handkerchief in order to avoid the choking dust.

As the evening wore away, my resolution weakened. I began to see myself for the absurdity I unquestionably was—I the thin, nervous man of science, pitifully inexperienced in the ways of this sadly violent world, yet endeavoring to swell myself up (like the frog in the fable) into a creature fit to cope with that world. It is absurd. I am not a violent man. I don't understand violence. There is no place for it in my philosophy, for my philosophy is based on fact and reason. There is no room for violence in an orderly world. Yet, under the pretense of civilization which is spread so plausibly over the surface of modern human life, I am confronted at every turn by the spirit of violence. And my own reason and sense of fact, in which I have so often sought sanctuary, have now failed me utterly.

Little by little my walks to and fro carried me farther into the broad open park that is called the glacis. That odd, morbid eagerness was drawing me steadily nearer and nearer the little foreign city within the Legation walls.

Finally I entered the Quarter. The great masonry walls fairly breathed of violence.

There is a sharp angle in this narrow road where it enters the Quarter, so constructed that the street can not be raked, from without, by shot and shell.

I passed under a sentry box on the wall, from which an armed soldier peered out at me—placed there because he might be needed to prevent or commit murder. For he and his like are but the trained agents of violence, masquerading behind a thin film of patriotism and what men still call glory.

Once within the walls I walked very rapidly. I was conscious that my whole body had tightened nervously, but I was powerless to relax. The blood was racing through my arteries and veins. I could feel that old throbbing at the back of my head. And my forehead was sweating so that I had to push my hat back. I carried my heavy walking stick—it had seemed that I might need it—and I was swinging it as I walked, gripping it so tightly by the middle that it all but hurt my hand.

There was no stopping me now. I went straight through to Legation Street, hurried along it, past the bank and the big German store, and turned off south toward the great hotel with its hundreds of bright lights and its noisy little swarm of rickshaw men on the curb.

I entered the wide hall that leads to the office and stood there, while my eyes searched about among the moving, chatting groups of people. There was a circle of tourists about the old Chinese conjuror who sat on his heels in a corner among his cloths and bowls and what not; I walked slowly around this circle, seeking the erect figure, the solid shoulders, and the drink-flushed face of Crocker.

I walked deliberately through the lounge, studying every solitary figure there among the easy chairs and the little tables and the potted shrubbery.

I went down the long corridor to the bar, and stood squarely on the threshold surveying the large room. There was a considerable number of men there—fifty or more, easily. The dress uniforms of half the armies of Europe flashed their gilt at me. All the tables were occupied, and there was a solid rank at the bar, behind which slab of mahogany the sober, silent Chinese waiters worked deftly at catering to the vics of these dignified gentlemen from the Christian West, now and then pausing to take in the scene with inscrutable, slanting eyes. There was much loud talk, some laughter, and, at one of the tables, a little quarreling.

Here, sure enough, was Crocker.

He sat in the corner across from the door and a little to the left. He was alone. A whisky bottle stood before him on the table, and a number of glasses. His face was very red. His big, usually vigorous body leaned limply against the wall. His head rolled slowly back and forth. There could be no doubt that he was very drunk. It seemed to me that he would have rolled to the floor had not his body been wedged in between the wall and the back of his chair.

I will admit that I was profoundly relieved. Nothing could be done to-night. Crocker could not act, or talk, or even listen.

Even now I feel that relief. Though I have observed Crocker closely enough to know that when he recovers from this debauch he will be dangerously unbalanced, I am glad of even a day's delay. He was in what he himself referred to as the “hangover” stage when he knocked down the waiter at Yokohama.

I may as well admit further—since this journal must be honest or else cease to exist—that this first sight of the man since Heloise entered my life and so vitally changed it was unexpectedly unsettling to me. Despite his condition at the moment, I felt again, looking at his shoulders and chest and arms and the outlines of his head, the primitive force of the man. And the expression of his face, now maudlin with drink, oddly recalled my memory of him as I had last seen him at the Yokohama station when there were tears on it. I had never before seen a man cry. I do not know that the possibility of such extreme emotion in a strong man had ever occurred to me.

He holds ideas regarding men, women and morality that are profoundly repellent to me, this crude yet not wholly unattractive man. He is permitting his life to be wrecked for these ideas—which at least indicates some sincerity. Heaven knows a man can't “own” a woman, or a woman “own” a man. Neither can possibly possess more of the other than that other is compelled by the power of love to give. There are no “rights” in love.

Yet—and this is the puzzling thing—when I was with Crocker, I liked him. And he liked me.

Savagely as he is mistreating his splendidly vigorous body, desperately as he is permitting his mind to become confused and brutalized, he is, even now, by no means a besotted man. I am not certain that he could properly be termed a drunkard. There is yet stuff in him. There is energy in him, that could be used. But in his stubborn purpose of destruction he is incidentally destroying himself.

What is this mystery of sex that it should enter a man's heart in the guise of love only to tear that heart to pieces?

Pale wanderings, these! And sad. For they tell me that in all the so-called practical affairs of life I am a weak person of confused mentality. There is bitterness in the thought.

I rather like that man. I think I feel a deep pity for him. And I am his mortal enemy. I can not understand it. But it is so.

I think I will give you up, you Journal that have so long been my companion in the rich solitude of my working life. For this life of mine is a working life no longer. It has turned off into the dark byways of passion. My purpose, hitherto compelling, falters now. My once clear mind is clouded and confused. I do not know when I shall work again. I do not know what I shall do. I only know that all is dark and still in the room next to this dingy room of mine, and that a sad, beautiful woman sleeps softly there. I only know that I love her beyond my strength, and yet that I seem unable to hate the man who would hate me if he knew.

It is only a little later—in the very early morning. I have reconsidered. I shall not yield to this weakness. After all, it may steady me to continue my old-time habit of writing everything down. Besides, it is clear that I shall have no sleep this night. It will be better to keep occupied at something.

It was my weakness for introspection, I think, that brought me to that state of bewilderment. I seem to get along better when I confine my narrative closely to the facts. I must resolve again, as I have resolved before, simply to tell what took place. Just tell it.

I turned away from the bar-room door. A number of men from one of the legations approached along the corridor. They were talking and laughing rather freely, and were all tall men, so that I neither heard nor saw the man behind them until after I had stepped aside and across the corridor to let them pass in to the bar. And the man behind followed them in without seeing me.

It was Sir Robert. He was in evening dress, of course, true to his British breeding. His monocle dangled against his shirt front. He was bowed a little. His hands shook perceptibly as he walked. And I observed that same new nervous twitching on the left side, of his face.

He stepped a little way into the room and looked about, as I had done. I waited. I did not seem to care whether he saw me or not, but felt no desire to invite conversation with him.

His eyes finally rested on the drunken man in the corner. His left eyelid drooped and drooped, as it always does when he is thinking intently. It seemed to me that he stood there for a long time, and that there was irresolution on his face. Myself, I could not take my eyes off him; it fascinated me to watch his drooping eyelid and the twitching corner of his mouth.

After a time he slowly turned and came out. He did not so much as know that I was there. He was studying the carpeted floor—thinking, thinking. I followed him.

He moved slowly out through the lounge to the street door, bowing coldly to certain of the individuals he passed. He went out, and down the steps.

The ragged rickshaw coolies pressed about him. He brushed them aside with his hand. For a moment he stood there, on the stone sidewalk. Once he turned, as if to reenter the hotel; but wavered, and stood still again.

I thought he saw me, waiting in the doorway, but believe now that he did not.

Finally he stepped up into a rickshaw, and waved his hand. His coolie picked up the shafts and set off on a run.

I hurried down the steps, leaped into the next rickshaw, and followed.

He went as directly as the streets permitted to our little Hôtel de Chine.

So he was coming back!

I dismissed my rickshaw at the corner of the street and walked to the hotel.

He was not to be seen in office or lounge, so I went on up the stairs.

As I mounted, I heard voices. I stopped short when my eyes cleared the top step, and looked down the corridor.

Heloise's door was a little ajar. I could tell this by the rectangular shaft of light thrown from her room across the dim passage. Sir Robert had unlocked his own door, just across from it, and was standing with his hand on the knob, crouching a little, evidently listening to the conversation in her room.

I stood motionless.

One of the voices—that of a man—grew a little louder; but I was too far off, there on the stairs, to catch what he was saying. Then rather abruptly, the door swung open and the man backed out. He was the manager of the hotel.

At the same instant Sir Robert, with agility surprising in one of his age, darted into his own room and swiftly, but softly, swung the door nearly to behind him. The manager was too intent on his own words and thoughts to know of this.

I could not think what to do. The one thing I was sure of was that I did not want to speak to the manager, coming, as he was, directly from her room. So I ran down the stairs, and was in the lounge looking at a magazine when he appeared on the ground floor.

I waited a few moments longer, then went up again. I simply had to know what Sir Robert was about. And again I stopped when my head rose just above the top step.

Sure enough, there he was—that old man!—crouching by her door and tapping softly at it with his shaking fingers. I felt a slow, cold sort of dread creep across my mind and my nerves. I did not move.

He tapped and tapped—oh, so softly! He stooped to the keyhole and whispered. I could not hear him, but I could see it all in pantomime.

He gave this up; and stood thinking. He slipped into his own room and switched on the light, but did not close the door. In a very short time he reappeared with a white paper in his hand—an envelope, doubtless.

And for the second time I had to watch this monstrous old man get down on his shaking knees and with a pencil thrust his evil communication in under her door.

This done, he got to his feet (I could hear his heavy breathing), lingered only a moment, then returned to his room, leaving his door ajar.

I came on up the stairs then, walking as heavily as possible, and let myself into my own room here.

I kept silent for quite a time until I heard Sir Robert's door shut. Then I tapped on Heloise's door. Again and again I tapped there, but she would not reply. She is avoiding me, and that is disturbing. Her light went out soon after that.

On looking back, I see that I have spoken of her as sleeping. Since then I have thought, on two occasions, that I have heard her tiptoeing about her room; but for the most part it has been unusually still there. I have wondered if she is out on her balcony; but I dare not look. I shrink from it. For she is avoiding me. She would not answer my tapping on her door—the light, nervous tapping that she knows so well. And one thought stands out in all the dreadful, turbulent confusion of this hour. It is that I must not try to see her if she does not wish to see me.

It is just two o'clock.

I shall not sleep. I shall not even undress. This is not wise of me, I suppose. But it is the way I feel. And I am a creature of feeling now. It would help to pass these dreadful hours if I could go on writing—or if I could read. But she will know it if I do not put out my light. Perhaps she would worry.

So I shall sit here in the dark. Or walk to the window and look out at the sleeping city—at this rich old capital of a peaceful people, who smile languidly at the turbulent West from which I spring (like Crocker and his sorry kind)—who turn from the miseries of actual life to the philosophy of their ancient seers.

Though, come to think of it, I am wrong here. Even gentle, contemplative old China has been drawn from her slumber of the ages into the whirlpool of modern life. I was thinking of the past. I had forgotten. They are carving out a republic here now. Their hands are stained with blood. And the sometimes violent bankers of the Western world sit coldly over them while they struggle.

There is no peace. There is no clear thought. There is only life. Only life.

---

April 14th.

ALL the rest of that night of the 12th-13th I sat in my dark room, or softly walked the floor, or gazed out at the sleeping city fit un my one window. And all night I was conscious of unusual and increasingly violent nervous reactions. Turning the pages back, I note that I attempted the other day to write a definition of love. This was absurd. I do not know what love is. Nobody knows. It is a capricious and wild thing. It flashes like the lightning, and rushes like the wind. It grows by feeding on itself. It exalts. It devastates. It contains within itself all the latent possibilities of nobility and service, of lust and jealousy, of tenderness, of sacrifice, of murder. It is a blind, insistent force; yet it shines before the mind's eye like dewdrops on the gossamer wings of fairies.

When morning finally came, I stood there at my window and watched the sun climb slowly over the Legation walls. It was a flat red sun, hung behind a film of dusty air.

I wondered how long it would be before I should tap on Heloise's door. Not long. I feared. All night I had been waiting; all night I had been withholding my hand.

I heard her get up, and stir about her room. I wondered if she had slept. Perhaps, for she still did not know what I knew.

For a long, long time I waited.

Finally, at seven o'clock. I tiptoed across the creaking floor. I stood there by the door. I raised my hand, then dropped it. My throat became suddenly dry.

At length I tapped.

She had been stirring there, on the other side of the door. Now, at the sound, she was still.

I tapped again. And again.

She did not answer me.

I whispered her name. I spoke it louder.

This would not do. Sir Robert had tapped at her door. He too had whispered. She had not answered him. She would not now answer me. I turned away—hurt, bewildered.

I do not know how long I stood there, motionless, a little way from the door. I could not think clearly. And all the time it seemed to me that I must force myself to think.

After a time I deliberately went downstairs and ordered a light breakfast. But when it came I could not eat it. I could only nibble at a crust of toast and sip a little of the café au lait.

I went out into the air and walked about. It was absolutely necessary that I should steady myself. The day was big with evil possibilities. Crocker, if I could judge from my one previous experience with him, might be up and about by mid-afternoon. I must control myself. I must be calm. Crocker had a set purpose and a strong body. I, presumably, though weak in body, had a mind. I was the only obstacle between Crocker and his purpose.

It was just a quarter past nine when I turned back into the street that led to the Hôtel de Chine. The shops, with their highly colored displays and their quaint smells, were all buzzing with the rush of the morning trade. Coolies, merchants, purchasers and idlers of all ages jostled to and fro. Underfoot the children swarmed.

I was picking my way through this busy little thoroughfare, when, looking up, I saw Heloise step out of the hotel. She wore a veil that hid her face, from me. And then she was a hundred feet or so away. She turned in my direction. The street crowd closed in between us, and for a moment I lost sight of her.

I remember plunging crazily forward to meet her. Then I saw her again, and my heart stood still. For Sir Robert had followed her out of the hotel and caught up with her. She had stopped, and was listening to him.

He took her arm.

She withdrew her arm from his touch. But she made no effort to leave him. She was standing irresolute, I thought, listening to him. I plunged toward them again.

Then suddenly I stopped. For they were walking together now—right toward me. He was bending down over her. I could see that he was talking to her, very earnestly. And she was listening!

He reached out with his stick, as I watched, and brushed a group of coolies aside. He was protecting her.

I just stood there. I could not think out what I ought to do. I had meant to rescue her from him. But I could not do this against her wish. A moment more and they would be upon me.

Still I hesitated. Finally, really without any plan of action, I stepped up and into a Chinese shop and watched them as they walked slowly by.

He was talking—still talking—in a low, insistent voice. I could not hear what he was saying. And I could not quite make out her expression behind her veil.

When they were well past, I stepped out. I followed. For I had come to this.

At the glacis, they turned to the right, walking, oh, so slowly. And I, a miserable thing with nothing but ungovernable turbulence in my heart, dodged in and out among the street traffic, and shadowed them. I shadowed the woman I love.

They went—without thought or aim, apparently—around outside the wall of the Imperial City and toward the Chien Gate. At the western end of Legation Street they paused, and for a few minutes stood on the corner. He was talking, talking, talking. I saw him making eager, nervous gestures with his monocle between his fingers.

Then, slowly, they moved on toward the old stone ramp that leads up to the top of the Tartar Wall, just outside the compound of the American Legation.

I could not follow them here, for I should certainly be seen.

Heloise hesitated once, and it seemed to me that she meant to draw back. But after a moment she went on, and together they slowly mounted the incline.

I turned away. I tried to tell myself that there was no significance in this walk of theirs. Whatever it was he wished to say—up there on the broad summit of the Wall where they could walk and talk in quiet, removed from the turmoil of the city—certainly she had a right to listen if she chose. He had been annoying her persistently. She was not the sort to run away from anything. She was unafraid. Perhaps by facing him and hearing him out she would dispose of him once and for all.

But I did not succeed in imposing this attitude of mind on myself. And I am going to tell what followed. It marks the lowest point to which this strange new self of mine has sunk—as yet. It must be told.

I walked like mad the whole length of Legation Street—a mile. Perhaps I ran. I don't know. I rushed by the Wagon-lits Hotel with no more than a glance. I did not seem to care that Crocker was in there and might soon emerge. I did not seem to care about anything. I was all empty—life was laughing at me for all the years I had taken it so seriously and so hard. Yet, empty and purposeless as I felt, the forces that keep at me so, these days, were overwhelming me.

I went out through the German Gate saying—aloud—“What do I know about this woman? What is she to me? Who is she, that I should permit her to devastate my life!”

Some German soldiers heard me, and laughed.

There I stood, a thin little man, doubtless flushed and wild of eye, laying bare my poor tom heart to the world; and the soldiers were laughing at me.

I hurried away. An empty rickshaw was passing. I hailed it and leaped in. I rode straight to my little hotel. I ran up the stairs. I let myself into my room, and slammed the door shut behind me. I tore open the drawer of the bureau where I had carefully put away the ten cylinders on which Heloise and I had painstakingly recorded the close-interval scales.

I got them out, the ten boxes that I had labeled so carefully. I threw them on the bed in a heap. I stood over them. As nearly as I can recall it now, I laughed at them. For they were hers. She had made them. She had made them for me; and I had held her within my arms. The picture of her there on my balcony, came to me with poignant vividness. And another picture—Heloise, in her chair with her sewing in her lap, singing that difficult scale successfully for the first time, and trilling softly and triumphantly on the last note, while her eyes sought mine. It was all utterly bewildering. Suddenly, from laughing, I had to tight back the sobs that came.

It was then that I tore open the boxes, one by one, and threw the cylinders to the floor and stamped on them. They were merely a waxy composition, not hard to destroy. I did not stop until my floor was strewn with the pieces. And now no longer in there, anywhere in the world, a finely perfect close-interval scale as a standard basis of comparison for the tone-intervals of so-called primitive music. Von Stumbostel will never know of my triumph now. Nor Boag, nor Ramel, nor Fourmont, nor de Musseau, nor Sir Frederick Rhodes. That beastly little von Westfall, of Bonn, can snarl to his heart's content, unrefuted. And the British Museum will never see this great result that might well have crowned my work and my life.

All about the room were scattered the bits of broken cylinders. I stood among them, trying to think ahead. But I could n't think ahead. All I seemed to know was that I could stay no longer in this shabby little hostelry where my life had soared so high and sunk so low.

I cleared a space in the middle of the room with my foot, kicking the pieces of my once precious cylinders aside as if they were pebbles. I drew out my steamer trunk, and opened it; got my clothes from the wardrobe and threw them in heaps on the bed; jerked out bureau drawers and set them on chairs and on the floor where I could reach them.

I was still working furiously at my packing when she came in, alone. I heard her light, quick step in the hall, I heard her unlock her door, and enter her room. Then she locked it again, on the inside.

I stood there, coatless and collarless. I wanted to tap once more at her door. I hesitated over this thought. I resisted it. I fought with it.

Finally I put on my collar and coat, picked up my hat, and rushed out. I could finish the packing later. Certainly, I could n't finish it now, with every nerve tip quiveringly conscious of her nearness, there behind the thin partition and the shrunken door.

If I should find it too hard to come back later, I decided then, I would send a Chinese valet from the other hotel to finish the job for me.

Among the qualities that go to make up the unrest that we call love, it appears that self-absorption plays no small part. Perhaps this selfishness, lying at the root of desire, is the element of positive force in love. I wonder! Certainly, without it, love would be much more nearly a negative thing than it actually is.

It was very primitive, very confused, very petty, this outbreak of mine.

But then, life is that.

And I have destroyed my scales!

It was after eleven—in the morning—when I went away from the Hôtel de Chine.

I was angry, bitter. Nothing in the world seemed important except my own feelings.

I knew well enough what I was going to do. There were two or three other shabby little hotels outside the Quarter. But I was going straight to the Wagon-lits. It was twelve o'clock now. I decided to have my tiffin there. Then perhaps I would send a man around to finish my packing and fetch my luggage.

As I walked deliberately into the great, gay hotel, I was in spirit not unlike a man who has awakened from a turbulent dream. For here were the familiar folk of the West. On the preceding evening, when I had first entered this building, the same groups of tourists, business and military men, and diplomats, with their ladies, had been here; but then I had seen them with different eyes. Now they looked natural, as we say. And their voices fell on my ears with a pleasant reminder of home.

I found a chair in the lounge, and sat hack to watch the bright, chattering, shifting crowd. I glanced about for Crocker, of course, but saw no sign of him. A little later, just before tiffin, I looked up his box, at the desk. I wanted to ask about him, but feared that the clerk would think I wished to see him. God knows I did n't wish that! It was at this time, I think, that I began to realize the shadowy nature of the curious revulsion of feeling that I had been passing through, on this day. I did not feel so great relief as I had just been telling myself I was feeling. Those vivid mental pictures of Heloise, as I had seen her so often in her room or mine, kept flashing before me.... No, I didn't want to see Crocker. I did want to know where he was, and what he was doing. His box told me nothing. There were no letters in it; and his key was not there. But I had no doubt he was still in bed.

I ate my tiffin alone in the big dining-room, seated where I could watch the door. I fortified myself with the latest papers, and tried to believe that it would be pleasant to pass a leisurely hour or two there.

But I was restless. I did n't seem to want to read, now that I had my comfortable chair, and unusually good food. When the coffee came, I drank it at a gulp, and went out.

I stepped over to the desk to pay for my tiffin. I reached into my pocket for my purse. My fingers touched something filmy—Heloise's handkerchief! I could not resist bringing it out, there with the Belgian clerk looking coldly at me, and staring at it—that rumpled little ball o f linen and lace. This for a moment: then I paid my bill and walked away.

I went right out to the street. I had to stare again at the little handkerchief. I had to press it to my lips. The rickshaw coolies could see me; but I cared nothing for them, though the tears were crowding into my eyes.

I did not come to my senses all at once. I must have walked about until three o'clock or thereabouts. At least, it was twenty minutes past three when I found myself again in the street that leads from the Italian glacis to our little Hôtel de Chine. I was humble now, and very sad.

For I had gone to pieces this day. I had failed the woman I love. In bitter, jealous anger I had failed her.

I had discovered in myself the meanest of qualities—suspicion. And utter selfishness.

A dozen times in those hours of my revulsion Crocker might have come to kill her—and I not at hand.

It was not until I entered the hotel and observed the sleepy quiet of the office and lounge that I was reassured. I could not bring myself to go upstairs, for she had made it so heartbreakingly plain that she would not see me. But surely all was well, as yet. Had there been trouble, there would be signs of it here.

I wondered if she had gone out for her customary afternoon walk. This thought bothered me. For then she would be coming back. I could not escape seeing her. Now, I wanted to see her, and I did not want to see her. I seemed to have reached a point, at last, where I knew that I would not go to pieces again. But this was only while I was reasonably sure that I could avoid her. If I were to meet her face to face, to look again into her great blue eyes with the long, long lashes, perhaps to clasp her hand, I knew that I could not be sure of anything. Once that magic were to surge again in my heart, my reason would fly.

Such were the facts of that strange revulsion which pointed out to me for the first time a pitiful flaw in my character. I failed Heloise when her need of me was most desperate. And nothing but luck (as we term it) saved her from the worst possible consequences of my weakness.

It was the first time in my life that I had been put to a rough, hard test. And—the flaw.

I deduce from this fact the conclusion that the sheltered life, with its corollary of so-called right living, permits no true demonstration of character. That fine quality is found in the open, where men (and women) breast the rough tide of life, and blunder, and struggle, and suffer.

I paced our little street, from the hotel entrance to the glacis, until twenty minutes of six. Heloise did not appear; so doubtless she was safe in her room. Crocker did not appear; so doubtless he was still drunk, over at the Wagon-lits.

I wondered a good deal about Sir Robert.

Finally he entered our street in a rickshaw. I stood squarely in the doorway of the hotel as he stepped down and paid off his coolie. He looked about him with quick, furtive glances as he crossed the walk. His eyes were tired, but heady and bright. There were spots of color on his cheeks.

He had to pass so near to me that he could have touched me. I was staring right at him, expectantly. I wanted to meet his eye, to make him meet mine.

But he cut me. It was the direct cut, such as only an Englishman can administer.

He went on into the building. I hesitated but a second, then turned abruptly and followed him.

He was at the desk, getting his mail.

I came to a stop behind him, and fingered a magazine that was on a table there. It was my intention to make him speak.

The manager came forward from an inner office, brushing his clerk aside. He said something—several sentences—in a low voice and with a hesitating, apologetic manner; then he handed Sir Robert a paper.

The old man adjusted his monocle, lifted the paper, and read it. Then, slowly, he crumpled it in his unsteady fingers and dropped it on the counter.

“You contemptible scoundrel!” he said, with one sharp glance at the manager.

“But it is that I do not want to turn out the lady—to the street,” the manager struggled to explain.

But Sir Robert walked away—into the lounge, where he beckoned a waiter and deliberately ordered his tea.

I stood there for a few moments, I think, quite motionless. Was it possible that—

It was Heloise's bill for two weeks.

I stepped up to the desk, and asked for the manager. He came out to me.

“I heard you speak of turning out a lady,” I said, looking straight at him. “What did you mean by that?”

He hesitated, then reached into his pocket and produced that identical crumpled ball of paper that Sir Robert had let fall on the counter. He spread it out, and smoothed down the wrinkles. “Perhaps,” he murmured, “I have make the mistake. It is too bad to think that the lady she can not—”

I snatched up the paper. It was Heloise's bill, for two weeks.

I paid him right then and there—in gold.

He muttered a jumble of apologies.

I cut him short. “You have made a mistake,” I said. “Now have the kindness to keep your head shut, will you!”

He bowed himself back into his little den. I turned and found Sir Robert looking straight at me, from his chair. I must admit that his eyes never wavered. And there, for a long, tense moment we stared at each other like the enemies we were. Then I walked out to the doorway to resume my watch.

What a fox he was! Even in his desperate, terror-stricken pursuit of Heloise, he had deftly avoided entangling himself before an outsider. And he had extricated himself, as if by instinct, from the slightest financial risk in the matter. I knew then that this old man would give nothing save as a quid pro quo.

In a moment more I quite forgot him. I stood there in the little street, looking at the shopkeepers in their doorways sipping their bowls of tea after the rush and turmoil of the day. But I don't think I saw anything clearly; I remember some such scene, and know that I must have observed it at this time.

For the thought of Heloise, penniless in this sorry, shabby place, was almost more than I could endure. Though I had wondered, and even worried, about her finances, somehow I had not thought of her condition as utterly desperate.

I don't know what she would say—or think; for she would say little—if she knew that I had paid the account for her. Even yet, I have not told her. I have got to tell her, but I see that it is going to be difficult, I must think out some way of broaching the subject. Perhaps I shouldn't have done it. Or perhaps a more tactful man would have found some less crude way of managing it. I can't say as to this.

Standing there, I suddenly remembered that odd little scene of the preceding evening that I had witnessed from the stairway—the manager in her room talking to her, and Sir Robert outside, at his own door, listening.

He had known of this trouble. His knowledge of it had held him here to annoy her with skilfully aimed persistence. She had been unwilling to come to me. She had not known what to do. She had been helpless.

Oh, the thoughts that raced through my mind as I stood there in the doorway! And the pictures that my heated fancy contrived! I wanted to rush up those stairs and make her speak to me. It was all I could do to fight this impulse. I knew that I was going to do this, sooner or later; but I knew too that I could hold out a little longer. For I must not thrust myself, an ungoverned, passion-shaken man, into her trouble.

If Sir Robert had gone up, I am sure I would have followed him. But he did not. He sipped his tea for a long time, and nibbled his toast. I could look in through the doorway and see him. Then he tried to read. Then he wandered about the lounge, like a tortured ghost of passions that had died with his prime. Once he came to the hall and stood irresolute at the foot of the stairs, twisting his monocle in his shaking fingers.

But then he saw me standing there like a sentry. And he walked hurriedly back into the lounge.

So the time dragged on. When I looked again at my watch it was five minutes of eight. It was time for Sir Robert's dinner. Few things in life. I knew, were more Important to him. Perhaps he would go over to the Wagon-lits for it. Anyway, unless he had some definite knowledge of Crocker's whereabouts, he would not wait about here much longer, for he was a coward; his assurance had been undermined by the consciousness of his own guilty intentions. That much I had seen twenty-four hours and more earlier, when he warned me about Crocker.

But he did not go to the Wagon-lits. He went, instead, into the dingy dining-room of our own hotel. And I kept my watch, out there at the street door. A little later it occurred to me that I had seen no tray going up the stairs.

I stepped in and ordered the manager to send up a waiter to number eighteen. There seemed to be no use in holding back now. So far as that manager was concerned, I had crossed the line—both for myself and Heloise. And he, at least, would say nothing. His poor mind was already full of such unpleasant secrets as he imagined mine to be.

The waiter went up, and in a moment returned. The manager stepped out to me.

“The lady she does not answer to the waiter's knock,” said he, all concern and deference.

I could only bite my lip, and try to think, and then turn away from him.

Pretty soon Sir Robert came out from the dining-room, and made straight for the stairs. He was walking slowly and rather uncertainly. It seemed to me that he was a good deal bent. When he reached the hall, I observed that the spots of color had left his cheeks. His face, indeed, was pasty white.

I stepped inside and tried to make him face me. But he cut me again, magnificently. He reached for the railing, and slowly mounted the stairs.

Deliberately I followed. So we went up to the second floor—he fumbling along just ahead of me, I holding back.

I stood behind him while he unlocked his door. But weak as he was physically, he never once let down in his attitude of ignoring my existence. I am not so certain that he is a coward. I am certain only that the human creature is extremely complex, extremely difficult to classify and formulate.

He went in, and made an effort to shut the door in my face. But I caught it on my elbow, and followed him in, closing it behind me.

He sank into a chair, and looked up at me. Now, at last he had to speak.

“Well—” he asked, “what is it? Why do you come in here?”

I kept my voice well in hand. Heloise must not hear this.

“To ask you several questions,” I replied. “Where is Crocker?”

“At the Wagon-lits—still drunk.”

“You know this?”

“I saw him, only a few hours hack. Went to his room, in fact.”

He was speaking, I have realized since, with some physical effort; but his mind was steady enough. He seemed to be simply making the best of it, since he had been unable to keep me out by force.

“He is not likely to be up and about before the morning?” said I.

“He is certain not to. But they stopped selling him liquor this afternoon. I learned that from the manager. So he will be nervous to-morrow. And probably dangerous. Undoubtedly dangerous.” His eyes flitted about the room, and then I saw that his baggage, all packed excepting one bag, was still there. “So I will leave him to you. I take the Tientsin train early to-morrow. And alone, I regret to add.”

This stung, but I held myself in control.

“I had hopes that the lady would leave with me,” he added. “I would have done very well by her. Extravagantly well. For she is, I may say, a person of unusual charm. But now, of course, that you are openly paying her bills, I leave the field to you.”

I kept my hands close at my sides, and stood straight there before him.

“I gave you some advice the other day, my boy,” he continued. “Bear it in mind. The woman is helpless. I confess I don't see what on earth she can do. For she is a highly impractical little thing She has very little idea of the value of money. I offered more than I had any business to—offered to send her back to Europe and help her along with her studies. It seemed the only way to reach her, don't you know—the line of her ambition, and therefore her weakest point. I used all the familiar arguments. And God knows most of them are true enough—that private morality is of no consequence in an operatic career, that a woman need conform to suburban standards only if she is seeking a suburban success. I pointed out notorious episodes in the lives of great women performers whom we all admire, women of unquestioned position. But do you know, my boy, not one of these arguments appeared to reach her at all. She is to me, I must say, an extraordinary contradiction. Here she is, deserted and destitute on the China Coast, where a woman can not travel alone for a day without advertising herself as a marketable commodity; and yet, so far as I can see, she is, in a sense, a good woman. Really, it was n't until I pointed out the wreckage she was making of your life, and the service she could do you by accepting my money and getting away from you, that she would so much as listen to me—”

He looked up at me, and his voice trailed off into silence.

But I did nothing, except to say, in a voice that I knew to be my own because he was no longer speaking and there was certainly no other person in the room—

“So you talked of me!”

He bowed.

“You are frank, Sir Robert.”

He waved his hand. “Why not?” Then he went on. “The most puzzling point in her puzzling story is that part relating to the other man—the one that brought her out here. She makes no effort to justify her actions, as we expect a woman to do when she has gone wrong in the eyes of men.”

“Oh—so you asked her about that?”

“Yes.” He indulged in a wry, fleeting smile. “I brought up everything—used all my logic, Eckhart. I was, like you, a fool to want her at all with that crazy husband so close on her heels; but I did want her, and I worked hard for a few hours.” He sighed. “Do you know, all she has to say of the man with whom she traveled from New York clear to Peking, is—' That was a dreadful mistake. I was n't the sort of woman he thought me.' And when I spoke sympathetically of his cruelty in deserting her, she quietly informed me that he did nothing of the kind.... What do you say to that, my boy? She left him!”

He was quite warmed up to his story now. He even chuckled.

“What do you say to that, young man? This exceedingly attractive young person, very nearly penniless, quite unhampered by practical experience, turns the man off, refuses his money, and starts out to face life—in Peking—alone and without so much as a plan of action! It is pitiful, of course. It is tragic. But it does stir the fancy. Now, doesn't it?”

“I don't know,” I said slowly, “why I don't beat you to death.”

His face, I thought, grew even whiter. But his eyes met mine.

“I know why,” he replied deliberately. “Because a gentleman does not commonly enter the room of another gentleman for any such unmannerly purpose.”

I bowed a sort of assent to this. He really had me there.

“Besides, Eckhart,” he added, “while you have a perfect right to call me a fool, you certainly can't say that, as life runs, my attitude has been unnatural. The woman deliberately broke with life. As a result of her own acts, she is now outside the pale of decent society.”

“Outside—where we men are,” said I, very sad and bitter.

He sniffed, rather contemptuously. He thought my observation too obvious.

I added, as I turned toward the door—

“And at that, after your own tribute to the essential fineness of her character, your notion of 'decent society' sounds highly technical to me, Sir Robert. Good-by to you. You will forgive me for saying that I shall be very glad when you are gone.”

He did not reply. But as I laid my hand on the knob of the door, I caught a low exclamation behind me that seemed to have both pain and surprise in it.

I looked back. He had sunk down in his chair. One side of his face, the left side, had twitched upward so that there was a distinct slant to his mouth and an observably deep, curving line extending from the left lower corner of his nose.

“Are you ill?” I asked, after a moment.

He slowly shook his head. “Something snapped, I thought,” he replied, rather huskily. “But I am all here, evidently.”

“I shall be glad to call a doctor.”

“Thank you—it is quite unnecessary. If you will be so good as to have the manager send me a competent body servant, it will be sufficient.”

“But you may need medical attention.”

“Then it will not be difficult to reach McKenzie, over at the Legation. I won't trouble you further—beyond that matter of the servant.”

I bowed and went out, closing his door behind me.

I stood there for a moment in the hall. It seemed a very long time since I had seen Heloise or heard from her. And now, thanks to that old man, I had a new set of mental pictures to touch my spirit, and stir me, and rouse feelings so subtle, so haunting, so poignant, that I could hardly bear them. Yet, I thought, these are my new mental companions, these thoughts and feelings and partly distinct, partly elusive, mind pictures, and it is with them I have got to live for the rest of my life.

I listened. She was in there, surely, behind that closed door. The transom was closed, too. I could hear no sound.

I decided then to make her speak to me. And it seemed to me that now I could give without asking.

My hopes for myself were running as high as that—to give without asking, and to reassure her poor tortured spirit by so appearing and acting that she would know, through her fine intuition, that I had risen to this point.

I ran downstairs and told the manager of Sir Robert's request. I also suggested that in my judgment medical care was indicated. He looked puzzled, and a thought worried, that little French manager; as if unable to determine whether I had killed Sir Robert or had suddenly become his friend.

Then I came back upstairs and entered my own room. I turned on the light.

I stepped softly to the shrunken door, and listened. For a moment I thought I heard nothing; then my heart gave a leap, for her bed began creaking as if she were tossing restlessly upon it.

She was in her room. However desperate, however tortured of spirit, she was there!

She made a sound—a sort of moan.

I tapped on the door.

She was silent.

I opened the door an inch. Her room was dark. Without looking in, I placed my mouth close to the opening, and said—

“Oh—Heloise!”

That was all. I had thought to conceal my own emotions. I had thought to speak gently, kindly—in a way that would make her feel me there as a steady, helpful friend. But my voice suddenly choked. And all I could say was, “Oh—Heloise!”

She did not reply.

I waited there. I felt that I must not intrude. I could not think just what would be best to do.

Then she tossed again, restlessly. And she moaned, with a sort of muffled shudder in her voice, as if she had set her teeth and was fighting with all her waning strength to keep from making a sound.

I could n't stand it. I opened the door. The light from my room fell across her bed and showed her there, her lovely arms outside the coverlet, her dark hair, in a thick, long braid, lying on the pillow and across her shoulder.

Still she did not' speak. I entered (thinking vividly of that first time that I had ventured unasked into this dingy little room that was the only place in the world she could call, even momentarily, her own ). I went straight to the bed. I took one unresisting hand in mine, and gazed down at her during the moment that my eyes were accustoming themselves to this dimmer light.

She rolled her head weakly around on the pillow, and looked up at me.

Then I saw that she was very white. Her eyes were shining at me out of great, dark circles. There were marks of pain, of physical suffering, on her dear face, such as I had never before seen there. Hitherto she had merely been sad.

I sank down, sitting on the edge of the bed. I could not say anything. I stroked her wrists. I gently smoothed her forehead and temples and cheeks. Her skin was cool, almost cold, to the touch.

Her great eyes sought mine. Weak and ill as she was, I knew that she was looking into my soul, and studying it, perhaps wondering about it.

At least, now, there would be no more evasion between us. I felt that. Whatever she might say to me, when she should feel able to talk, would come directly from the most sacred depths of her consciousness. We had never been so close. Even at that sad moment, the thought thrilled me.

I had to turn away.

Then I saw that her bureau, over which she and I had once expended, ages ago, an absurd amount of energy, had been moved, and stood squarely across the hall door.

Now, why had she done that?

I was still stroking her forehead and temples, trying to control the fever that was in my veins, trying to think clearly.

I looked again at her.

She made an effort to smile at me. There was infinite sadness in that effort.

Suddenly she turned toward me, on her side, hiding her face from me, pillowing it on my hands, which she held close, if weakly, with her own cold hands. And again that low, pitiful sound escaped her lips.

“I wanted to die,” she breathed. “I wanted to die! Why did n't you let me die!”

My heart stood still.

I turned her face to mine, and bent low over her.

“What have you done?” I asked her.

She shook her head, almost convulsively, and tried to hide her face again.

“What, have you done?” I asked.

I looked more closely at the bureau, dreading what I might see upon it. But there were only the famihar little toilet accessories that I had seen there before. My eyes searched about among them, while I sat there on the bed, while she continued to press my hands, with her own cold ones, against her face.

Then I looked down. On the floor, almost at my feet, was a glass with a little water in it. Near by was a small brown medicine bottle, with beaded edges. The cork was out. A little cotton lay by it.

I picked up the bottle, and turned it over.

It was labeled:

“Poison.” And beneath this, “Morphia,

“Heloise!” I cried. I made her look at me. “Heloise, child! You don't mean—you have n't—”

Her head moved between my hands; and I knew she was trying to nod an affirmation. Then she struggled again to turn her face from me, but so weakly that I held it there without much difficulty. I fear I was employing more strength than I realized.

“How much did you take?” I said. “Tell me—quickly.”

“I don't know,” she whispered. “The bottle was full. I took them all.”

“That is impossible,” I argued, foolishly. “Two grains would have killed you. One grain, even.”

“I took them all,” she repeated. “I wanted so to die. I thought for a while that I was dying. Then I became dreadfully ill. I have been so ill, Anthony!”

All at once a note of relief had come into her voice—as if it meant something to her, after all, to have me there with her, and to be able to talk with me.

I felt that. But it was not the time to think of myself.

I stood up. But she clung to one of my hands, and I had to bend a little. I was trying to think—What do they give for morphine poisoning? What are the antidotes?... Stimulants, surely.

I had some strychnine in my little medicine-chest. I gently withdrew my hand, and went into my room to look for it.

I felt uncertain about this treatment, for I am no physician. But it might be that there was no time to lose. She was weak, and extremely nervous. The coldness of her hands led me to believe that at some moment after she took the drug her heart action must have all but stopped.

Standing there, in my disordered room—for my steamer trunk was open, my clothes still lay in rumpled heaps on the bed, the cluttered bureau drawers stood about on chairs and on the table—I made up my mind to give her the strychnine. I did not realize then that there were physicians to be had. I felt only our remoteness from the conveniences of civilized life, here in this little hotel in the Tartar City.

It would doubtless have been better to administer the stimulant by the hypodermic syringe. But I had none. So I refilled her glass with water, gave her two of my strychnine pills, and raised her head while she sipped the water.

I do not recall now whether or not she resisted this treatment. I think she did, a little. But she was so completely exhausted, in body and spirit, by all she had gone through, that she really could do nothing but follow my instructions.

Then I rang for a boy—from my own room. It was getting pretty late in the evening; but I made him fetch me a large pot of black coffee.

I lifted her, and slipped the two pillows behind her that I had brought in from my own bed, and made her as nearly comfortable as I could. When the coffee came I poured out three cups of it, one after another, and stood over her while she drank them. She protested, every moment, but I paid no attention to her words, just held the cup to her lips until it was empty and then refilled it twice.

This done, I put the tray in my own room, and did what little I could to make her room more attractive to the eye. I moved the bureau from the hall door to its place against the side wall, the place it had occupied ever since she and I had moved it for the last time away from the door that connected our rooms. I even straightened out the various articles on the bureau.

And all this time I felt her great, weary eyes following me about, the room. She was distinctly relieved, I thought, at the sharp way in which I had taken command of her life. Poor child, she had tried hard enough to end that life. She had passed through the valley, of the shadow. And now, cheated yet relieved, she leaned on me.

Since that hour my mind has dwelt on the horrors she must have lived through that day. (She did not finally take the morphia until sometime after five in the afternoon.) She says nothing about the day; and of course I ask no questions. But she was there in her room through the noon hours and all the afternoon. And when I asked her if she slept at all the preceding night—the night that I sat up, without even undressing—she said no.... But I think it is better for me not to dwell on this.

I walked over to the window to let the night air in on her, and perhaps also to think.

Suddenly I recalled that there was a telephone downstairs. How stupid of me not to have thought of it before!

And Sir Robert had spoken of a physician at the British Legation. I should have remembered that! But on second thought, I could not bear to think of calling in Sir Robert's man.

However, medical advice of some sort I must have. I knew nothing of the action of morphia on the system. She might be sinking at this moment.

I stepped back to the bedside and stood over her.

She did not look worse to me. It might have been only the temporary effect of the strychnine and coffee, but there certainly appeared to be a hint of color in her cheeks.

“I am going downstairs to telephone for a doctor,” I said, taking her hand. Her fingers twined weakly around mine, and clung a little. “Will you lie quietly here until I come back?”

“I don't want a doctor,” she breathed. “I'm much better.”

I paid no attention to this. “And will you promise me never to—not to”—my voice was unsteady—“not to take any more of that dreadful stuff?”

“I could n't,” she replied, in that maddeningly unsatisfactory way of answering serious questions that women appear to have. “There is n't any more.”

I think I compressed my lips over this. But I went right downstairs.

The manager was in his little den behind the hotel office. I beckoned him out, and asked about physicians.

His eyes sought my face. But I told him nothing.

With his assistance—for the telephone service of Peking is not that of New York or Chicago—

I called up an English medical mission that was not far from the hotel.

The head physician had gone to bed. At first they refused to disturb him. But I insisted.

It was half an hour before he arrived. I drew a chair to Heloise's bedside, talking with her and rubbing her head and her forearms while we waited.

She gave every evidence of rather rapid improvement. She was weak, of course; and so nervous that her body would twitch for no reason, and the slightest unexpected sound would give her a start. But the pupils of her eyes, that had been very small, were widening out to something like their normal size. And behind the gaze that she kept turning to me and the occasional faint suggestion about her mouth of a gentle but sad and enigmatic smile, I felt, even then, that she was doing some sober thinking.

After a time she said:

“I have clung to one thought to-day. My life has been all a blunder. But it has helped a little to know that you have your scales, Anthony—and that you would n't have them except for me.”

I went limp at this. For it had made me feel sound and strong to be caring for her, and now her words plunged me back into the depths of that dreadful day. I dropped my chin on my hands.

“Anthony!” said she. “What is it?”

I could only shake my head.

“But you have the scales, Anthony?”

I shook my head again.

She came up on her elbow—all weak and shaking. She had on that gray silk kimono that I love—the one with the wistaria blossoms embroidered on it. I felt her eyes searching my thoughts, and I could only look at the soft gray blossoms on her sleeve and study out the pattern.

“Anthony,” she was saying, with something of that musical “edge” in her voice—“Anthony, what have you done?”

I told her. I even moved my chair aside and let her gaze past me and through the open doorway into my room, where she could see bits of the broken cylinders scattered about the floor.

Was I pleading the cause of my love for her, of my—yes—of my desire for her, in thus giving way to the unexpected impulse to have her see those broken cylinders with her own eyes? God pity me, I do not know! All I am sure of is that I suddenly wanted her to know all about those miserable, weak hours of mine. And a strange, tremulous hope was fluttering to life in my heart. It was possible that we should again work together, she and I!

This hope fluttered and grew. I felt my heart beat more quickly, and a touch of that odd dryness in the throat that comes to me when Heloise and I are close, when I touch her hand or her sleeve and know at the same moment that she is thinking of me and that her feelings are in some mysterious way interwoven with mine.

I recall that I moved forward on my chair I moved still farther, and sat on the edge of the bed. I slipped my arm behind her head. I drew her lovely, dark head against my breast. I bent over and kissed her fragrant hair and rubbed my cheek against it.

I was stroking her hair and her soft cheek. I bent lower and kissed her forehead. Then I kissed her cheek.

I could not help it. I did not know I was going to do it. I know now that she had stopped resisting before this. She let me kiss her.

Slowly this fact made itself felt in my mind and in my heart. She had let me kiss her, but she had been unable to respond. And I remembered what she had said, hours or years ago, and the poignant sadness of it—

“Something has died in me. I don't believe I can ever love a man again.”

I lowered her head against the pile of pillows. I held the thick braid of her hair for a moment, then let it fall over her shoulder. I looked into her eyes, hoping against hope that I might find a responsive light there.

Then I sank back on my chair, and covered my face with my hands.

She reached out and laid her hand on my arm.

For a little time we sat that way. I could not look at her. I could not say anything. I was glad of the gentle touch of her hand.

It was she who broke the silence.

“Oh, Anthony,” she breathed. “If I only could!”

Then we were still again.

But this would not do. I was all egotism—I, who had so wished to help her.

Finally I looked up, and took her hand in mine and stroked it. I even smiled at her. At least, it seemed to me that I smiled.

It was one of those moments that come, in our times of greatest bewilderment, when for a space we see clearly. I suddenly felt that I could think again.

“I don't know what is to become of us, Heloise dear,” I said. “You have been close to the end of your life. But I think that you will have to let me help you. For I know now that I shall not want to live unless I can help you. And I shall not leave you alone in Peking. I think you will have to bear with me, at least until I can know that you have got back into the current of your life and work.”

She compressed her lips, and her dear eyes glistened. Then I felt her fingers tighten around mine.

“Anthony,” she said, low and uncertain, “I would do anything. I would love you if I could. I would go to you without love if I thought I could make you happy, or even help you. You gave me hope by helping me to work. Now, in spite of the dreadful facts of my life that I know so well to be true, you are stirring me to hope again. But all the time I know that the dreadful facts are there, that they will be there when this hope is faded.”

“I think,” said I, “that we can triumph over those dreadful facts.”

“Oh, Anthony,” she murmured, “if you only knew how dreadful they are. I wondered before whether I ought to tell you. I lay awake here night after night, trying to think it out—whether I ought to tell you. And then even worse news came. It was too much for me. I gave up, Anthony. It seemed to me, only a few hours ago, that the kindest thing I could do—the kindest thing I could do to you, dear—would be to leave this world. I brought only trouble into it. I thought it would be best to leave it.”

She paused. She looked past me, toward the window. Her brows were knit. She was very sober. And her reticence, that I had always felt, was gone. She continued:

“And now I've made a failure even of that. And here I am again, disturbing your life, a burden—”

I leaned forward and took her other hand and looked at her. She faltered. She stopped. I held her two hands firmly. For a moment I considered telling her that I knew her story. Then I knew that I could n't tell her. To-morrow, perhaps; but not now. This hour was hers and mine. Crocker had no place in it. I would not so much as have his name spoken. Further than this, my mind, that had failed me so miserably of late, was working again; and a plan was forming there.

I could not yet see all the way. But from moment to moment I could feel my habitual confidence in my mental processes coming back to me. I was beginning to believe, as I always used to believe, that I should prove equal to the situation, as it might develop. And the first thought of renunciation was coming to me like a clear light.

It is obvious, of course (even in this tense moment the fact became reasonably clear to me) that where personal desire is the major premise, logic is impossible.

It was time I came; in some degree to my senses.

She must have seen something of all this in my face, when I bent forward and took her two hands so firmly and looked into her eyes.

“Heloise dear,” I said, “you are not going to die. You are going to live. For the present you are going to let me help you start at rebuilding your life. You will do this because I love you, and because it is unthinkable that I should not help you. One way or the other”—I repeated this phrase with a peculiar emphasis that, I could see, puzzled her—“one way or the other I am going to help you. It may be that I can never stir you to love me. I shall do this if I can, Heloise; but it may be that I shall not succeed. I am glad that I have”—my voice broke here, so confusing is love—“have kissed you, but I shall not kiss you again. Not again, dear. We shall work this out, however. You and I, one way or the other, we shall work it out.”

“But Anthony,” said she. “You must let me tell you! It is—I am not free—there is—”

“You shall not tell me to-night,” I said to her. “You shall tell me nothing. I will not permit it. I will not listen. Free or bound, however dreadful the facts may seem—these things are nothing. Nothing!” My voice rose a little, I fear, at this point. “They can not possibly concern us now, you and me. For one way or the other—”

“But, dear, you don't understand—you don't know!”

“I know enough,” said I. “I know all that need concern me and the woman I love more than my life, more than my work, more than everything else in the world and the sky.”

She seemed almost to shudder at this.

“Anthony! Please, dear!” She was whispering these broken sentences. “This is all wrong! Please!”

Her voice trailed off. I was still bending forward, all eager and flushed with the great thoughts that were stirring within me. Her eyes seemed almost to cling to mine. She stirred a little, but did not turn away. Her hands were still in mine.

It seemed to me that I ought to surrender her hands and sit back in my chair.

Her eyes were glistening wet, the outlines of her mouth softened from the sadness that had been there. It almost seemed to me that she was drawing me forward with her hands.

Certainly something—some quality of the spirit, perhaps, was draw ing me nearer and nearer to her. I knew that my head was bending closer. I thought of resisting, but I did not resist.

My lips met hers.

Her hands slipped out of mine, and slowly—oh, so slowly!—slid up on my shoulders.

Then her arms were about me, and my arms were about her; and our hearts were beating together, very fast.

“Listen!” she whispered, all breathless, turning her head.

Some one was knocking at my door.

I stood up, irresolute. I was bewildered. She looked wan and weak, lying back there against the pillows. I was choking back the sobs that nearly came.

“Oh, Heloise,” I managed to say. “I meant not to. Forgive me, dear!”

But she was not looking at me. “See who it is,” was all she said.

So I went through to my own room, closing the connecting door behind me. I hurriedly brushed my hair, then opened the door.

It was the physician from the English mission. He was a young man, who looked at me coolly and with some curiosity.

I told him what had happened.

He weighed the morphine bottle in his hand, and pursed his lips over it.

“She must have taken between ten and twenty grains of the stuff,” said he, musingly.

“That, of course, is incredible,” said I.

He shook his head and replied in a casual tone for which I hated him.

“Oh, no. An overdose will act that way with some people. The system simply refuses to assimilate it or even retain it.”

I reported to him what I had done. He then went in and looked at Heloise and asked a few questions.

Occasionally his eyes flitted about the shabby room. Then he would dart little glances at her and at me.

He was a depressing person, this young physician. It was clear enough the impression he got of us.

Heloise felt it keenly. I saw that little droop of sadness coming about her mouth.

Then he told me that I had done about everything he could have done, that she would be all right in a day or so, and that she had had a rather lucky escape.

He left a little medicine, and went away. We both felt that he did not care to have us call him again; and we each knew that the other felt this, though we did not put it in words.

Finally I said, after I had sat by her for a time in moody silence—

“It is very late, dear. I rather think you will sleep to-night, in spite of the coffee and all.”

“Yes,” she said, “I think I will. And you, Anthony”—she caught my hand—“I don't like to see you look so tired.”

“I shall sleep,” I replied. Then I kissed her forehead, and went into my own room, leaving the door ajar in order that I might hear if she called.

We did sleep, both of us. At least, she says she did. And she looked rested this morning, when I took the breakfast tray from the waiter and carried it to her. She was up, and dressed.

I have realized since that I did not succeed at all in my efforts to hide the serious mood that took possession of me from the moment I woke. She caught it. Every now and then she flashed an odd, puzzled glance at me.

Finally, when we had finished and I had put the tray in my room, she broached the subject that was uppermost in both our minds.

“Before we go any farther, Anthony dear, I am going to tell you—”

I stopped her.

“But Anthony, you must let me speak. You are giving up everything for me, and you don't even know—”

“I know all I wish to know now, dear.”

“But this is very important. I can't forgive myself, when I realize that you don't know what I have done—”

I could n't stand this. I simply took her two shoulders in my hands and made her look squarely at me; and I spoke with a sudden uprush of feeling.

“Dear, dear girl,” I said, “I'm not interested in what you have done. I am interested in what you are.”

“But Anthony, if I am not worthy—”

It hurt me to hear her speak in this way. I was thinking swiftly, bitterly, of certain episodes in my own life. I was thinking of the men I knew, and what they had done. I thought of Crocker and his outrageous code. I thought of my own latest episode of the sort—with the little girl at “Number Nine”—and of the queer masculine twist in my own thinking that had led me to consider myself “unmanly” because I had run away from that girl when she wanted me to stay.

No, I could not bear to have her speak or even think so of herself. So I said, still holding her there before me:

“Men are accustomed to judge women, Heloise. You say that I must know what you have done. Has it occurred to you that I ought to tell you—very humbly, dear—what I have done?”

She looked really puzzled at this.

“Why,” she said, “I don't know—I never thought. T have always heard that men were—well, different.”

“You have heard that—from men,” I replied sadly, and turned away.

She caught my arm. “But apart from all that, Anthony,” she broke out, “there is one thing that you must let me say. You must!” She hesitated, caught her breath, then plunged desperately along with it. She was not looking at me now. Her color was rising; and her voice low.

“I have—a—husband—” she said.

“Yes.” I interrupted her. “I am going to talk to him now.”

I went straight into my own room and got my hat and stick.

She followed me as far as the doorway. I saw her leaning there, all limp and white.

“You knew!” she was murmuring, as if to herself. “You knew!”

“I don't believe I shall need my overcoat,” said I, glancing out at the sunlight on the roofs. God knows why I said just that at such a moment. I added—

“Wait here, Heloise. It will be all right. But the time has come to stop drifting. We are going to stop drifting now, you and I—and he. Good-by, dear, for now.”

I knew I must hurry. I simply could not talk this out with her now. I felt that I could not endure it. I doubted if she could. Besides it would get us nowhere so long as the question of Crocker himself should be left unsettled to menace our two lives.

I opened the door.

She came on into the room, reaching her hands out toward me. She seemed actually weak, trembling.

“Oh—Anthony!” she breathed, staring at me with something that was almost fascination in her eyes, as if she were now seeing me for the first time.

I could not trust myself at all. I hurried out, closing the door behind me. I ran down the stairs.

It was the thought of the telephone that had come to me with such force on the preceding evening. I knew now that it was not necessary to keep up this terrible waiting for him. It would be easy enough to call him up; then I could go to him and still feel that I was not leaving Heloise at the mercy of a chance visit from him while I was away.

It took a long time for them to get him to the telephone, over there at the Wagon-lits—fifteen or twenty minutes, I should say.

Finally I heard his voice.

“How are you, Eckhart?” he said, in the easy, offhand way that men employ one with another. “How have you been?”

I thanked God, under my breath, that he was in condition to talk. I simply could not have endured further delay.

“I've been all right,” said I. “I want to see you, Crocker, in regard to a very important matter.”

“Surely. Any time you say.”

“Suppose I come right over there to the Wagon-lits.”

“All right. I'll wait for you in my room. Good-by.”

“Good-by, Crocker.”

Then I went out into the little Chinese street, and once again headed toward the big hotel in the Legation Quarter.

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