The Best Short Stories of 1915, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

by Unknown

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1915

THE WATER-HOLE[1]

By MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT
From Scribner’s Magazine

Some men are like the twang of a bow-string. Hardy was like that—short, lithe, sunburned, vivid. Into the lives of Jarrick, Hill, and myself, old classmates of his, he came and went in the fashion of one of those queer winds that on a sultry day in summer blow unexpectedly up a city street out of nowhere. His comings excited us; his goings left us refreshed and a little vaguely discontented. So many people are gray. Hardy gave one a shock of color, as do the deserts and the mountains he inhabited. It was not particularly what he said—he didn’t talk much—it was his appearance, his direct, a trifle fierce, gestures, the sense of mysterious lands that pervaded him. One never knew when he was coming to New York and one never knew how long he was going to stay; he just appeared, was very busy with mining companies for a while, sat about clubs in the late afternoon, and then, one day, he was gone.

Sometimes he came twice in a year; oftener, not for two or three years at a stretch. When he did come we gave him a dinner—that is, Jarrick, Hill, and myself. And it was rather an occasion. We would procure a table in the gayest restaurant we could find, near, but not too near, the music—Hill it was who first suggested this as a dramatic bit of incongruity between Hardy and the frequenters of Broadway—and the most exotic food obtainable, for a good part of his time Hardy, we knew, lived upon camp fare. Then we would try to make him tell about his experiences. Usually he wouldn’t. Impersonally, he was entertaining about South Africa, about the Caucasus, about Alaska, Mexico, anywhere you care to think; but concretely he might have been an illustrated lecture for all he mentioned himself. He was passionately fond of abstract argument. “Y’ see,” he would explain, “I don’t get half as much of this sort of thing as I want. Of course, one does run across remarkable people—now, I met a cow-puncher once who knew Keats by heart—but as a rule I deal only with material things, mines and prospects and assays and that sort of thing.” Poor chap! I wonder if he thought that we, with our brokering and our writing and our lawyering, dealt much with ideas! I remember one night when we sat up until three discussing the philosophy of prohibition over three bottles of port. I wonder how many other men have done the same thing!

But five years ago—no, it was six—Hardy really told us a real story about himself. Necessarily the occasion is memorable in our recollections. We had dined at Lamb’s, and the place was practically empty, for it was long after the theatre hour—only a drowsy waiter here and there, and away over in one corner a young couple who, I suppose, imagined themselves in love. Fancy being in love at Lamb’s! We had been discussing, of all things in the world, bravery and conscience and cowardice and original sin, and that sort of business, and there was no question about it that Hardy was enjoying himself hugely. He was leaning upon the table, a coffee-cup between his relaxed brown hands, listening with an eagerness highly complimentary to the banal remarks we had to make upon the subject. “This is talk!” he ejaculated once with a laugh.

Hill, against the combined attack of Jarrick and myself, was maintaining the argument. “There is no such thing as instinctive bravery,” he affirmed, for the fifth time at least, “amongst intelligent men. Every one of us is naturally a coward. Of course we are. The more imagination we’ve got the more we can realize how pleasant life is, after all, and how rotten the adjuncts of sudden death. It’s reason that does the trick—reason and tradition. Do you know of any one who is brave when he is alone—except, that is, when it is a case of self-preservation? No! Of course not. Did you ever hear of any one choosing to go along a dangerous road or to ford a dangerous river unless he had to—that is, any one of our class, any man of education or imagination? It’s the greater fear of being thought afraid that makes us brave. Take a lawyer in a shipwreck—take myself! Don’t you suppose he’s frightened? Naturally he is, horribly frightened. It’s his reason, his mind, that after a while gets the better of his poor pipe-stem legs and makes them keep pace with the sea-legs about them.”

“It’s condition,” said Jarrick doggedly—“condition entirely. All has to do with your liver and digestion. I know; I fox-hunt, and when I was younger—yes, leave my waist alone!—I rode jumping races. When you’re fit there isn’t a horse alive that bothers you, or a fence, for that matter, or a bit of water.”

“Ever try standing on a ship’s deck, in the dark, knowing you’re going to drown in about twenty minutes?” asked Hill.

Hardy leaned forward to strike a match for his cigarette. “I don’t agree with you,” he said.

“Well, but—” began Hill.

“Neither of you.”

“Oh, of course, you’re outside the argument. You lead an adventurous life. You keep in condition for danger. It isn’t fair.”

“No.” Hardy lit his cigarette and inhaled a puff thoughtfully. “You don’t understand. All you have to say does have some bearing upon things, but, when you get down to brass tacks, it’s instinct—at the last gasp, it’s instinct. You can’t get away from it. Look at the difference between a thoroughbred and a cold-blooded horse! There you are! That’s true. It’s the fashion now to discount instinct, I know; well—but you can’t get away from it. I’ve thought about the thing—a lot. Men are brave against their better reason, against their conscience. It’s a mixed-up thing. It’s confusing and—and sort of damnable,” he concluded lamely.

“Sort of damnable!” ejaculated Hill wonderingly.

“Yes, damnable.”

I experienced inspiration. “You’ve got a concrete instance back of that,” I ventured.

Hardy removed his gaze from the ceiling. “Er—” he stammered. “Why, yes—yes. That’s true.”

“You’d better tell it,” suggested Hill; “otherwise your argument is not very conclusive.”

Hardy fumbled with the spoon of his empty coffee-cup. It was a curious gesture on the part of a man whose franknesses were as clean-cut as his silences. “Well—” he began. “I don’t know. Perhaps. I did know a man, though, who saved another man’s life when he didn’t want to, when there was every excuse for him not to, when he had it all reasoned out that it was wrong, the very wrongest possible thing to do; and he saved him because he couldn’t help it, saved him at the risk of his own life, too.”

“He did!” murmured Hill incredulously.

“Go on!” I urged. I was aware that we were on the edge of a revelation.

Hardy looked down at the spoon in his hand, then up and into my eyes.

“It’s such a queer place to tell it”—he smiled deprecatingly—“here, in this restaurant. It ought to be about a camp-fire, or something like that. Here it seems out of place, like the smell of bacon or sweating mules. Do you know Los Pinos? Well, you wouldn’t. It was just a few shacks and a Mexican gambling-house when I saw it. Maybe it isn’t there any more, at all. You know—those places! People build them and then go away, and in a year there isn’t a thing, just desert again and shifting sand and maybe the little original old ranch by the one spring.” He swept the table-cloth with his hand, as if sweeping something into oblivion, and his eyes sought again the spoon. “It’s queer, that business. Men and women go out to lonely places and build houses, and for a while everything goes on in miniature, just as it does here—daily bread and hating and laughing—and then something happens, the gold gives out or the fields won’t pay, and in no time nature is back again. It’s a big fight. You lose track of it in crowded places.” He raised his head and settled his arms comfortably on the table.

“I wasn’t there for any particular purpose. I was on a holiday. I’d been on a big job up in Colorado and was rather done up, and, as there were some prospects in New Mexico I wanted to see, I hit south, drifting through Santa Fé and Silver City, until I found myself way down on the southern edge of Arizona. It was still hot down there—hot as blazes—it was about the first of September—and the rattlesnakes and the scorpions were still as active as crickets. I knew a chap that had a cattle outfit near the Mexican border, so I dropped in on him one day and stayed two weeks. You see, he was lonely. Had a passion for theatres and hadn’t seen a play for five years. My second-hand gossip was rather a godsend. But finally I got tired of talking about Mary Mannering, and decided to start north again. He bade me good-by on a little hill near his place. ‘See here!’ he said suddenly, looking toward the west. ‘If you go a trifle out of your way you’ll strike Los Pinos, and I wish you would. It’s a little bit of a dump of the United Copper Company’s, no good, I’m thinking, but the fellow in charge is a friend of mine. He’s got his wife there. They’re nice people—or used to be. I haven’t seen them for ten years. They say he drinks a little—well, we all do. Maybe you could write me how she—I mean, how he is getting on?’ And he turned red. I saw how the land lay, and as a favor to him I said I would.

“It was eighty miles away, and I drifted in there one night on top of a tired cow-horse just at sundown. You know how purple—violet, really—those desert evenings are. There was violet stretching away as far as I could see, from the faint violet at my stirrups to the deep, almost black violet of the horizon. Way off to the north I could make out the shadow of some big hills that had been ahead of me all day. The town, what there was of it, lay in a little gully. Along its single street there were a few lights shining like small yellow flowers. I asked my way of a Mexican, and he showed me up to where the Whitneys—that name will do as well as any—lived, in a decent enough sort of bungalow, it would seem, above the gully. He left me there, and I went forward and rapped at the door. Light shone from between the cracks of a near-by shutter, and I could hear voices inside—a man’s voice mostly, hoarse and high-pitched. Then a Chinaman opened the door for me and I had a look inside, into a big living-room beyond. It was civilized all right enough, pleasantly so to a man stepping out of two days of desert and Mexican adobes. At a glance I saw the rugs on the polished floor, and the Navajo blankets about, and a big table in the centre with a shaded lamp and magazines in rows; but the man in riding-clothes standing before the empty fire-place wasn’t civilized at all, at least not at that moment. I couldn’t see the woman, only the top of her head above the back of a big chair, but as I came in I heard her say, ‘Hush!—Jim!—please!’ and I noticed that what I could see of her hair was of that fine true gold you so seldom find. The man stopped in the middle of a sentence and swayed on his feet, then he looked over at me and came toward me with a sort of bulldog, inquiring look. He was a big, red-faced, blond chap, about forty, I should say, who might once have been handsome. He wasn’t now, and it didn’t add to his beauty that he was quite obviously fairly drunk. ‘Well?’ he said, and blocked my way.

“‘I’m a friend of Henry Martin’s,’ I answered. ‘I’ve got a letter for you.’ I was beginning to get pretty angry.

“‘Henry Martin?’ He laughed unsteadily. ‘You’d better give it to my wife over there. She’s his friend. I hardly know him.’ I don’t know when I’d seen a man I disliked as much at first sight.

“There was a rustle from the other side of the room, and Mrs. Whitney came toward us. I avoided her unattractive husband and took her hand, and I understood at once whatever civilizing influences there were about the bungalow we were in. Did you ever do that—ever step out of nowhere, in a wild sort of country, and meet suddenly a man or a woman who might have come straight from a pleasant, well-bred room filled with books and flowers and quiet, nice people? It’s a sensation that never loses its freshness. Mrs. Whitney was like that. I wouldn’t have called her beautiful; she was better; you knew she was good and clean-cut and a thoroughbred the minute you saw her. She was lovely, too; don’t misunderstand me, but you had more important things to think about when you were talking to her. Just at the moment I was wondering how any one who so evidently had been crying could all at once greet a stranger with so cordial a smile. But she was all that—all nerve; I don’t think I ever met a woman quite like her—so fine, you understand.”

Hardy paused. “Have any of you chaps got a cigarette?” he asked; and I noticed that his hand, usually the steadiest hand imaginable, trembled ever so slightly. “Well,” he began again, “there you are! I had tumbled into about as rotten a little, pitiful a little tragedy as you can imagine, there in a God-forsaken desert of Arizona, with not a soul about but a Chinaman, a couple of Scotch stationary engineers, an Irish foreman, two or three young mining men, and a score of Mexicans. Of course, my first impulse was to get out the next morning, to cut it—it was none of my business—although I determined to drop a line to Henry Martin; but I didn’t go. I had a talk with Mrs. Whitney that night, after her attractive husband had taken himself off to bed, and somehow I couldn’t leave just then. You know how it is, you drop into a place where nothing in the world seems likely to happen, and all of a sudden you realize that something is going to happen, and for the life of you you can’t go away. That situation up on top of the hill couldn’t last forever, could it? So I stayed on. I hunted out the big Irish foreman and shared his cabin. The Whitneys asked me to visit them, but I didn’t exactly feel like doing so. The Irishman was a fine specimen of his race, ten years out from Dublin, and everywhere else since that time; generous, irascible, given to great fits of gayety and equally unexpected fits of gloom. He would sit in the evenings, a short pipe in his mouth, and stare up at the Whitney bungalow on the hill above.

“‘That Jim Whitney’s a divvle,’ he confided to me once. ‘Wan of these days I’ll hit him over th’ head with a pick and be hung for murther. Now, what in hell d’ye suppose a nice girl like that sticks by him for? If it weren’t for her I’d ’a’ reported him long ago. The scut!’ And I remember that he spat gloomily.

“But I got to know the answer to that question sooner than I had expected. You see, I went up to the Whitneys’ often, in the afternoon, or for dinner, or in the evening, and I talked to Mrs. Whitney a great deal; although sometimes I just sat and smoked and listened to her play the piano. She played beautifully. It was a treat to a man who hadn’t heard music for two years. There was a little thing of Grieg’s—a spring song, or something of the sort—and you’ve no idea how quaint and sad and appealing it was, and incongruous, with all its freshness and murmuring about water-falls and pine-trees, there, in those hot, breathless Arizona nights. Mrs. Whitney didn’t talk much; she wasn’t what you’d call a particularly communicative woman, but bit by bit I pieced together something continuous. It seems that she had run away with Whitney ten years before—Oh, yes! Henry Martin! That had been a schoolgirl affair. Nothing serious, you understand. But the Whitney matter had been different. She was greatly in love with him. And the family had disapproved. Some rich, stuffy Boston people, I gathered. But she had made up her mind and taken matters in her own hands. That was her way—a clean-cut sort of person—like a gold-and-white arrow; and now she was going to stick by her choice no matter what happened; owed it to Whitney. There was the quirk in her brain; we all have a quirk somewhere, and that was hers. She felt that she had ruined his career; he had been a brilliant young engineer, but her family had kicked up the devil of a row, and, as they were powerful enough, and nasty enough, had more or less hounded him out of the East. Of course, personally, I never thought he showed any of the essentials of brilliancy, but that’s neither here nor there; she did, and she was satisfied that she owed him all she had. I suppose, too, there was some trace of a Puritan conscience back of it, some inherent feeling about divorce; and there was pride as well, a desire not to let that disgusting family of hers know into what ways her idol had fallen. Anyway, she was adamant—oh, yes, I made no bones about it, I up and asked her one night why she didn’t get rid of the hound. So there she was, that white-and-gold woman, with her love of music, and her love of books, and her love of fine things, and her gentleness, and that sort of fiery, suppressed Northern blood, shut up on top of an Arizona dump with a beast that got drunk every night and twice a day on Sunday. It was worse even than that. One night—we were sitting out on the veranda—her scarf slipped, and I saw a scar on her arm, near her shoulder.” Hardy stopped abruptly and began to roll a little pellet of bread between his thumb and his forefinger; then his tense expression faded and he sat back in his chair.

“Let me have another cigarette,” he said to Jarrick. “No. Wait a minute! I’ll order some.”

He called a waiter and gave his instructions. “You see,” he continued, “when you run across as few nice women as I do that sort of thing is more than ordinarily disturbing. And then I suppose it was the setting, and her loneliness, and everything. Anyway, I stayed on, I got to be a little bit ashamed of myself. I was afraid that Mrs. Whitney would think me prompted by mere curiosity or a desire to meddle, so after a while I gave out that I was prospecting that part of Arizona, and in the mornings I would take a horse and ride out into the desert. I loved it, too; it was so big and spacious and silent and hot. One day I met Whitney on the edge of town. He was sober, as he always was when he had to be; he was a masterful brute, in his way. He stopped me and asked if I had found anything, and when I laughed he didn’t laugh back. ‘There’s gold here,’ he said. ‘Lots of gold. Did you ever hear the story of the Ten Strike Mine? Well, it’s over there.’ He swept with his arm the line of distant hills to the north. ‘The crazy Dutchman that found it staggered into Almuda, ten miles down the valley, just before he died; and his pockets were bulging with samples—pure gold, almost. Yes, by thunder! And that’s the last they ever heard of it. Lots of men have tried—lots of men. Some day I’ll go myself, surer than shooting.’ And he let his hands drop to his sides and stared silently toward the north, a queer, dreamy anger in his eyes. I’ve seen lots of mining men, lots of prospectors, in my time, and it didn’t take me long to size up that look of his. ‘Aha, my friend!’ I said to myself. ‘So you’ve got another vice, have you! It isn’t only rum that’s got a hold on you!’ And I turned my horse into the town.

“But our conversation seemed to have stirred to the surface something in Whitney’s brain that had been at work there a long time, for after that he would never let me alone about his Ten Strike Mine and the mountains that hid it. ‘Over there!’ he would say, and point to the north. From the porch of his bungalow the sleeping hills were plainly visible above the shimmering desert. He would chew on the end of a cigar and consider. ‘It isn’t very far, you know. Two days—maybe three. All we need’s water. No water there—at least, none found. All those fellows who’ve prospected are fools. I’m an expert; so are you. I tell you, Hardy, let’s do it! A couple of little old pack-mules! Eh? How about it? Next week? I can get off. God, I’d like money!’ And he would subside into a sullen silence. At first I laughed at him; but I can tell you that sort of thing gets on your nerves sooner or later and either makes you bolt it or else go. At the end of two weeks I actually found myself considering the fool thing seriously. Of course, I didn’t want to discover a lost gold-mine, that is, unless I just happened to stumble over it; I wanted to keep away from such things; they’re bad; they get into a man’s blood like drugs; but I’ve always had a hankering for a new country, and those hills, shining in the heat, were compelling—very compelling. Besides, I reflected, a trip like that might help to straighten Whitney up a little. I hadn’t much hope, to be sure, but drowning men clutch at straws. It’s curious what sophistry you use to convince yourself, isn’t it? And then—something happened that for two weeks occupied all my mind.”

Hardy paused, considered for a moment the glowing end of his cigarette, and finally looked up gravely; there was a slight hesitation, almost an embarrassment, in his manner. “I don’t exactly know how to put it,” he began. “I don’t want you chaps to imagine anything wrong; it was all very nebulous and indefinite, you understand—Mrs. Whitney was a wonderful woman. I wouldn’t mention the matter at all if it wasn’t necessary for the point of my story; in fact, it is the point of my story. But there was a man there—one of the young engineers—and quite suddenly I discovered that he was in love with Mrs. Whitney, and I think—I never could be quite sure, but I think she was in love with him. It must have been one of those sudden things, a storm out of a clear sky, deluging two people before they were aware. I imagine it was brought to the surface by the chap’s illness. He had been out riding on the desert and had got off to look at something, and a rattlesnake had struck him—a big, dust-dirty thing—on the wrist, and, very faint, he had galloped back to the Whitneys’. And what do you suppose she had done—Mrs. Whitney, that is? Flung herself down on him and sucked the wound! Yes, without a moment’s hesitation, her gold hair all about his hand and her white dress in the dirt. Of course, it was a foolish thing to do, and not in the least the right way to treat a wound, but she had risked her life to do it; a slight cut on her lip—you understand; a tiny, ragged place. Afterward, she had cut the wound crosswise, so, and had put on a ligature, and then had got the man into the house some way and nursed him until he was quite himself again. I dare say he had been in love with her a long while without knowing it, but that clinched matters. Those things come overpoweringly and take a man, down in places like that—semitropical and lonely and lawless, with long, empty days and moonlit nights. Perhaps he told Mrs. Whitney; he never got very far, I am sure. She was a wonderful woman—but she loved him, I think. You can tell those things, you know; a gesture, an unavoidable look, a silence.

“Anyway, I saw what had happened and I was sorry, and for a fortnight I hung around, loath to go, but hating myself all the while for not doing so. And every day Whitney would come at me with his insane scheme. ‘Over there! It isn’t very far. Two days—maybe three. How about it? Eh?’ and then that tense sweep of the arm to the north. I don’t know what it was, weariness, disgust, irritation of the whole sorry plan of things, but finally, and to my own astonishment, I found myself consenting, and within two days Whitney had his crazy pack outfit ready, and on the morning of the third day we set out. Mrs. Whitney had said nothing when we unfolded our intentions to her, nor did she say anything when we departed, but stood on the porch of the bungalow, her hand up to her throat, and watched us out of sight. I wondered what she was thinking about. The Voodoos—that was the name of the mountains we were heading for—had killed a good many men in their time.”

Hardy took a long and thoughtful sip from the glass in front of him before he began again. “I’ve knocked about a good deal in my life,” he said; “I’ve been lost—once in the jungle; I’ve starved; I’ve reached the point where I’ve imagined horrors, heard voices, you understand, and seen great, bearded men mouthing at me—a man’s pretty far gone when that happens to him—but that trip across the desert was the worst I’ve ever taken. By day it was all right, just swaying in your saddle, half asleep a good part of the time, the smell of warm dust in your nose, the three pack-mules plodding along behind; but the nights!—I tell you, I’ve sat about camp-fires up the Congo and watched big, oily black men eat their food, and I once saw a native village sacked, but I’d rather be tied for life to a West Coast nigger than to a man like Whitney. It isn’t good for two people to be alone in a place like that and for one to hate the other as I hated him. God knows why I didn’t kill him; I’d have to get up and leave the fire and go out into the night, and, mind you, I’d be shuddering like a man with the ague under that warm, soft air. And he never for a minute suspected it. His mind was scarred with drink as if a worm had bored its slow way in and out of it. I can see him now, cross-legged, beyond the flames, big, unshaven, heavy-jowled, dirty, what he thought dripping from his mouth like the bacon drippings he was too lazy to wipe away. I won’t tell you what he talked about; you know, the old thing; but not the way even the most wrong-minded of ordinary men talks; there was a sodden, triumphant deviltry in him that was appalling. He cursed the country for its lack of opportunity of a certain kind; he was like a hound held in leash, gloating over what he would do when he got back to the kennels of civilization again. And all the while, at the back of my mind, was a picture of that white-and-gold woman of his, way back toward the south, waiting his return because she owed him her life for the brilliant career she had ruined. It made you sometimes almost want to laugh—insanely. I used to lie awake at night and pray whatever there was to kill him, and do it quickly. I would have turned back, but I felt that every day I could keep him away from Los Pinos was a day gained for Mrs. Whitney. He was a dangerous maniac, too. The first day he behaved himself fairly well, but the second, after supper, when we had cleaned up, he began to fumble through the packs, and finally produced a bottle of brandy.

“‘Fine camping stuff!’ he announced. ‘Lots of results for very little weight. Have some?’

“‘Are you going to drink that?’ I asked.

“‘Oh, go to the devil!’ he snapped. ‘I’ve been out as much as you have.’ I didn’t argue with him further; I hoped if he drank enough the sun would get him. But the third night he upset the water-kegs, two of them. He had been carrying on some sort of weird celebration by himself, and finally staggered out into the desert, singing at the top of his lungs, and the first thing I knew he was down among the kegs, rolling over and over, and kicking right and left. The one that was open was gone; another he kicked the plug out of, but I managed to save about a quarter of its contents. The next morning I spoke to him about it. He blinked his red eyes and chuckled.

“‘Poor sort of stuff, anyway,’ he said.

“‘Yes,’ I agreed; ‘but without it you would blow out like a candle in a dust storm.’ After that we didn’t speak to each other except when it was necessary.

“We were in the foot-hills of the Voodoos by now, and the next day we got into the mountains themselves—great, bare ragged peaks, black and red and dirty yellow, like the cooled-off slake of a furnace. Every now and then a dry gully came down from nowheres; and the only human thing one could see was occasionally, on the sides of one of these, a shivering, miserable, half-dead piñon—nothing but that, and the steel-blue sky overhead, and the desert behind us, shimmering like a lake of salt. It was hot—good Lord! The horn of your saddle burned your hand. That night we camped in a canyon, and the next day went still higher up, following the course of a rutted stream that probably ran water once in a year. Whitney wanted to turn east, and it was all a toss-up to me; the place looked unlikely enough, anyway, although you never can tell. I had settled into the monotony of the trip by now and didn’t much care how long we stayed out. One day was like another—hot little swirls of dust, sweat of mules, and great black cliffs; and the nights came and went like the passing of a sponge over a fevered face. On the sixth day the tragedy happened. It was toward dusk, and one of the mules, the one that carried the water, fell over a cliff.

“He wasn’t hurt; just lay on his back and smiled crossly; but the kegs and the bags were smashed to bits. I like mules, but I wanted to kill that one. It was quiet down there in the canyon—quiet and hot. I looked at Whitney and he looked at me, and I had the sudden, unpleasant realization that he was a coward, added to his other qualifications. Yes, a coward! I saw it in his blurred eyes and the quivering of his bloated lips—stark dumb funk. That was bad. I’m afraid I lost my nerve, too; I make no excuses; fear is infectious. At all events, we tore down out of that place as if death was after us, the mules clattering and flapping in the rear. After a time I rode more slowly, but in the morning we were nearly down at the desert again; and there it lay before us, shimmering like a lake of salt—three days back to water.

“The next two days were rather a blur, as if a man were walking on a red-hot mirror that tipped up and down and tried to take his legs from under him. There was a water-hole a little to the east of the way we had come, and toward that I tried to head. One of the mules gave out, and staggered and groaned, and tried to get up again. I remember hearing him squeal, once; it was horrible. He lay there, a little black speck on the desert. Whitney and I didn’t speak to each other at all, but I thought of those two kegs of water he had upset. Have you ever been thirsty—mortally thirsty, until you feel your tongue black in your mouth? It’s queer what it does to you. Do you remember that little place—Zorn’s—at college? We used to sit there sometimes on spring afternoons. It was cool and cavern-like, and through the open door one could see the breeze in the maple-trees. Well, I thought about that all the time; it grew to be an obsession, a mirage. I could smell the moss-like smell of bock beer; I even remembered conversations we had had. You fellows were as real to me as you are real to-night. It’s strange, and then, when you come to, uncanny; you feel the sweat on you turn cold.

“We had ridden on in that way I don’t know how long, snatching a couple of feverish hours of sleep in the night, Whitney groaning and mumbling horribly, when suddenly my horse gave a little snicker—low, the way they do when you give them grain—and I felt his tired body straighten up ever so little. ‘Maybe,’ I thought, and I looked up. But I didn’t much care; I just wanted to crawl into some cool place and forget all about it and die. It was late in the afternoon. My shadow was lengthening. Too late, really, for much mirage; but I no longer put great stock in green vegetation and matters of that kind; I had seen too much of it in the last two days fade away into nothing—nothing but blistering, damned sand. And so I wouldn’t believe the cool reeds and the sparkling water until I had dipped down through a little swale and was actually fighting my horse back from the brink. I knew enough to do that, mind you, and to fight back the two mules so that they drank just a little at a time—a little at a time; and all the while I had to wait, with my tongue like sand in my mouth. Over the edge of my horse’s neck I could see the water just below; it looked as cool as rain. I was always a little proud of that—that holding back; it made up, in a way, for the funk of two nights earlier. When the mules and my horse were through I dismounted and, lying flat, bathed my hands, and then, a tiny sip at a time, began to drink. That was hard. When I stood up the heat seemed to have gone, and the breeze was moist and sweet with the smell of evening. I think I sang a little and waved my hands above my head, and, at all events, I remember I lay on my back and rolled a cigarette; and quite suddenly and without the slightest reason there were tears in my eyes. Then I began to wonder what had become of Whitney; I hadn’t thought of him before. I got to my feet, and just as I did so I saw him come over the little rise of sand, swaying in his saddle, and trying, the fool, to make his horse run. He looked like a great scarecrow blown out from some Indian maize-field into the desert. His clothes were torn and his mask of a face was seamed and black from dust and sweat; he saw the water and let out one queer, hoarse screech and kicked at his horse with wabbling legs.

“‘Look out!’ I cried, and stepped in his way. I had seen this sort of thing before and knew what to expect; but he rode me down as if I hadn’t been there. His horse tried to avoid me, and the next moment the sack of grain on its back was on the sands, creeping like a great, monstrous, four-legged thing toward the water. ‘Stay where you are,’ I said, ‘and I’ll bring you some.’ But he only crawled the faster. I grabbed his shoulder. ‘You fool!’ I said. ‘You’ll kill yourself!’

“‘Damn you!’ he blubbered. ‘Damn you!’ And before I knew it, and with all the strength, I imagine, left in him, he was on his feet and I was looking down the barrel of his gun. It looked very round and big and black, too. Beyond it his eyes were regarding me; they were quite mad, there was no doubt about that, but, just the way a dying man achieves some of his old desire to will, there was definite purpose in them. ‘You get out of my way,’ he said, and began very slowly to circle me. You could hardly hear his words, his lips were so blistered and swollen.

“And now this is the point of what I am telling you.” Hardy fumbled again for a match and relit his cigarette. “There we were, we two, in that desert light, about ten feet from the water, he with his gun pointing directly at my heart—and his hand wasn’t trembling as much as you would imagine, either—and he was circling me step by step, and I was standing still. I suppose the whole affair took two minutes, maybe three, but in that time—and my brain was still blurred to other impressions—I saw the thing as clearly as I see it now, as clearly as I saw that great, swollen beast of a face. Here was the chance I had longed for, the hope I had lain awake at night and prayed for; between the man and death I alone stood; and I had every reason, every instinct of decency and common sense, to make me step aside. The man was a devil; he was killing the finest woman I had ever met; his presence poisoned the air he walked in; he was an active agent of evil, there was no doubt of that. I hated him as I had never hated anything else in my life, and at the moment I was sure that God wanted him to die. I knew then that to save him would be criminal; I think so still. And I saw other considerations as well; saw them as clearly as I see you sitting here. I saw the man who loved Mrs. Whitney, and I saw Mrs. Whitney herself, and in my keeping, I knew, was all her chance for happiness, the one hope that the future would make up to her for some of the horror of the past. It would have been an easy thing to do; the most ordinary caution was on my side. Whitney was far larger than I, and, even in his weakened condition—I was weak myself—stronger, and he had a gun that in a flash of light could blow me into eternity. And what would happen then? Why, when he got back to Los Pinos they would hang him; they would be only too glad of the chance; and his wife?—she would die; I knew it—just go out like a flame from the unbearableness of it all. And there wasn’t one chance in a thousand that he wouldn’t kill me if I made a single step toward him. I had only to let him go and in a few minutes he would be dead—as dead as his poor brute of a horse would be within the hour. I felt already the cool relief that would be mine when the black shadow of him was gone. I would ride into town and think no more of it than if I had watched a tarantula die. You see, I had it all reasoned out as clearly as could be; there was morality and common sense, the welfare of other people, the man’s own good, really, and yet—well, I didn’t do it.”

“Didn’t?” It was Jarrick who put the question a little breathlessly.

“No. I stepped toward him—so! One step, then another, very slowly, hardly a foot at a time, and all the while I watched the infernal circle of that gun, expecting it every minute to spit fire. I didn’t want to go; I went against my will. I was scared, too, mortally scared; my legs were like lead—I had to think every time I lifted a foot—and in a queer, crazy way I seemed to feel two people, a man and a woman, holding me back, plucking at my sleeves. But I went. All the time I kept saying, very steady and quiet: ‘Don’t shoot, Whitney! D’you hear! Don’t shoot or I’ll kill you!’ Wasn’t it silly? Kill him! Why, he had me dead ten times before I got to him. But I suppose some trace of sanity was knocking at his drink-sodden brain, for he didn’t shoot—just watched me, his red eyes blinking. So! One step at a time—nearer and nearer—I could feel the sweat on my forehead—and then I jumped. I had him by the legs, and we went down in a heap. He shot then; they always do! But I had him tied up with the rags of his own shirt in a trice. Then I brought him water in my hat and let him drink it, drop by drop. After a while he came to altogether. But he never thanked me; he wasn’t that kind of a brute. I got him into town the morning of the second day and turned him over to his wife. So you see”—Hardy hesitated and looked at the circle of our faces with an odd, appealing look—“it is queer, isn’t it? All mixed up. One doesn’t know.” He sank back in his chair and began to scratch, absent-mindedly, at a holder with a match.

The after-theatre crowd was beginning to come in; the sound of laughter and talk grew steadily higher; far off an orchestra wailed inarticulately.

“What became of them?” I asked.

Hardy looked up as if startled. “The Whitneys? Oh—she died—Martin wrote me. Down there, within a year. One would know it would happen. Like a flame, I suppose—suddenly.”

“And the man—the fellow who was in love with her?”

Hardy stirred wearily. “I haven’t heard,” he said. “I suppose he is still alive.”

He leaned over to complete the striking of his match, and for an instant his arm touched a glass; it trembled and hung in the balance, and he shot out a sinewy hand to stop it, and as he did so the sleeve of his dinner jacket caught. On the brown flesh of his forearm I saw a queer, ragged white cross—the scar a snake bite leaves when it is cicatrized. I meant to avoid his eyes, but somehow I caught them instead. They were veiled and hurt.

[1] Copyright, 1915, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright, 1916, by Maxwell Struthers Burt.

THE WAKE[2]

By DONN BYRNE
From Harper’s Magazine

At times the muffled conversation in the kitchen resembled the resonant humming of bees, and again, when it became animated, it sounded like the distant cackling of geese. Then there would come a pause; and it would begin again with sibilant whispers, and end in a chorus of dry laughter that somehow suggested the crackling of burning logs.

Occasionally a figure would open the bedroom door, pass the old man as he sat huddled in his chair, never throwing a glance at him, and go and kneel by the side of the bed where the body was. They usually prayed for two or three minutes, then rose and walked on tiptoe to the kitchen, where they joined the company. Sometimes they came in twos, less often in threes, but they did precisely the same thing—prayed for precisely the same time, and left the room on tiptoe with the same creak of shoe and rustle of clothes that sounded so intensely loud throughout the room. They might have been following instructions laid down in a ritual.

The old man wished to heaven they would stay away. He had been sitting in his chair for hours, thinking, until his head was in a whirl. He wanted to concentrate his thoughts, but somehow he felt that the mourners were preventing him.

The five candles at the head of the bed distracted him. He was glad when the figure of one of the mourners shut off the glare for a few minutes. He was also distracted by the five chairs standing around the room like sentries on post and the little table by the window with its crucifix and holy-water font. He wanted to keep thinking of “herself,” as he called her, lost in the immensity of the oaken bed. He had been looking at the pinched face with its faint suspicion of blue since early that morning. He was very much awed by the nun’s hood that concealed the back of the head, and the stiffly posed arms and the small hands in their white-cotton gloves moved him to a deep pity.

Somebody touched him on the shoulder. “Michael James.”

It was big Dan Murray, a gaunt red farmer, who had been best man at his wedding.

“Michael James.”

“What is it?”

“I hear young Kennedy’s in the village.”

“What of that?”

“I thought it was best for you to know.”

Murray waited a moment, then he went out, on tiptoe, as everybody did, his movements resembling the stilted gestures of a mechanical toy.

Down the drive Michael heard steps coming. Then a struggle and a shrill giggle. Some young people were coming to the wake, and he knew a boy had tried to kiss a girl in the dark. He felt a dull surge of resentment.

She was nineteen when he married her; he was sixty-three. Because he had over two hundred acres of land and many head of milch and grazing cattle and a huge house that rambled like a barrack, her father had given her to him; and young Kennedy, who had been her father’s steward for years, and had been saving to buy a house for her, was thrown over like a bale of mildewed hay.

Kennedy had made several violent scenes. Michael James remembered the morning of the wedding. Kennedy waylaid the bridal-party coming out of the church. He was drunk. “Mark me,” he had said, very quietly for a drunken man—“mark me. If anything ever happens to that girl at your side, Michael James, I’ll murder you. I’ll murder you in cold blood. Do you understand?”

Michael James could be forgiving that morning. “Run away and sober up, lad,” he had said, “and come up to the house and dance.”

Kennedy had gone around the countryside for weeks, drunk every night, making threats against the old farmer. And then a wily sergeant of the Connaught Rangers had trapped him and taken him off to Aldershot.

Now he was home on furlough, and something had happened to her, and he was coming up to make good his threat.

What had happened to her? Michael James didn’t understand. He had given her everything he could. She had taken it all with a demure thanks, but he had never had anything of her but apathy. She had gone around the house apathetically, growing a little thinner every day, and then a few days ago she had lain down, and last night she had died, apathetically.

And young Kennedy was coming up for an accounting to-night. “Well,” thought Michael James, “let him come!”

Silence suddenly fell over the company in the kitchen. Then a loud scraping as they stood up, and a harsher grating as chairs were pushed back. The door of the bedroom opened and the red flare from the fire and lamps of the kitchen blended into the sickly yellow candle-light of the bedroom.

The parish priest walked in. His closely cropped white hair, strong, ruddy face, and erect back gave him more the appearance of a soldier than a clergyman. He looked at the bed a moment, and then at Michael James.

“Oh, you mustn’t take it like that, man,” he said. “You mustn’t take it like that. You must bear up.” He was the only one who spoke in his natural voice.

He turned to a lumbering farmer’s wife who had followed him in, and asked about the hour of the funeral. She answered in a hoarse whisper, dropping a courtesy.

“You ought to go out and take a walk,” he told Michael James. “You oughtn’t to stay in here all the time.” And he left the room.

Michael James paid no attention. His mind was wandering to strange fantasies he could not keep out of his head. Pictures crept in and out of his brain, joined as by some thin filament. He thought somehow of her soul, and then wondered what a soul was like. And then he thought of a dove, and then of a bat fluttering through the dark, and then of a bird lost at twilight. He thought of it as some lonely flying thing with a long journey before it and no place to rest. He could imagine it uttering the vibrant, plaintive cry of a peewit. And then it struck him with a great sense of pity that the night was cold.

In the kitchen they were having tea. The rattle of the crockery sounded very distinctly. He could distinguish the sharp, staccato ring when a cup was laid in a saucer, and the nervous rattle when cup and saucer were passed from one hand to the other. Spoons struck china with a faint metallic tinkle. He felt as if all the sounds were made at the back of his neck, and the crash seemed to burst in his head.

Dan Murray creaked into the room. “Michael James,” he whispered, “you ought to take something. Have a bite to eat. Take a cup of tea. I’ll bring it in to you.”

“Oh, let me alone, Daniel,” he answered. He felt he would like to kick him and curse him while doing so.

“You must take something.” Murray’s voice rose from a whisper to a low, argumentative sing-song. “You know it’s not natural. You’ve got to eat.”

“No, thank you, Daniel,” he answered. It was as if he were talking to a boy who was good-natured but tiresome. “I don’t feel like eating. Maybe afterward I will.”

“Michael James,” Murray continued.

“Well, what is it, Daniel?”

“Don’t you think I’d better go down and see young Kennedy and tell him how foolish it would be of him to come up here and start fighting? You know it isn’t right. Hadn’t I better go down? He’s at home now.”

“Let that alone, Daniel, I tell you.” The thought of Murray breaking into the matter that was between himself and the young man filled him with a sense of injured delicacy.

“I know he’s going to make trouble.”

“Let me handle that, like a good fellow, and leave me by myself, Daniel, if you don’t mind.”

“Ah well, sure. You know best.” And Murray crept out of the room.

As the door opened Michael could hear some one singing in a subdued voice and many feet tapping like drums in time with the music. They had to pass the night outside, and it was the custom, but the singing irritated him. He could fancy heads nodding and bodies swaying from side to side with the rhythm. He recognized the tune, and it began to run through his head, and he could not put it out of it. The lilt of it captured him, and suddenly he began thinking of the wonderful brain that musicians must have to compose music. And then his thoughts switched to a picture he had seen of a man in a garret with a fiddle beneath his chin.

He straightened himself up a little, for sitting crouched forward as he was put a strain on his back, and he unconsciously sat upright to ease himself. And as he sat up he caught a glimpse of the cotton gloves on the bed, and it burst in on him that the first time he had seen her she was walking along the road with young Kennedy one Sunday afternoon, and they were holding hands. When they saw him they let go suddenly, and grew very red, giggling in a half-hearted way to hide their embarrassment. And he remembered that he had passed them by without saying anything, but with a good-humored, sly smile on his face, and a mellow feeling within him, and a sage reflection to himself that young folks will be young folks, and what harm was there in courting a little on a Sunday afternoon when the week’s work had been done?

And he remembered other days on which he had met her and Kennedy; and then how the conviction had come into his mind that here was a girl for him to marry; and then how, quietly and equably, he had gone about getting her and marrying her, as he would go about buying a team of horses or make arrangements for cutting the hay.

Until the day he married her he felt as a driver feels who has his team under perfect control, and who knows every bend and curve of the road he is taking. But since that day he had been thinking about her and worrying and wondering exactly where he stood, until everything in the day was just the puzzle of her, and he was like a driver with a restive pair of horses who knows his way no farther than the next bend. And then he knew she was the biggest thing in his life.

The situation as it appeared to him he had worked out with difficulty, for he was not a thinking man. What thinking he did dealt with the price of harvest machinery and the best time of the year for buying and selling. He worked it out this way: here was this girl dead, whom he had married, and who should have married another man, who was coming to-night to kill him. To-night sometime the world would stop for him. He felt no longer a personal entity—he was merely part of a situation. It was as if he were a piece in a chess problem—any moment the player might move and solve the play by taking a pawn.

Realities had taken on a dim, unearthly quality. Occasionally a sound from the kitchen would strike him like an unexpected note in a harmony; the whiteness of the bed would flash out like a piece of color in a subdued painting.

There was a shuffling in the kitchen and the sound of feet going toward the door. The latch lifted with a rasp. He could hear the hoarse, deep tones of a few boys, and the high-pitched sing-song intonations of girls. He knew they were going for a few miles’ walk along the roads. He went over and raised the blind on the window. Overhead the moon showed like a spot of bright saffron. A sort of misty haze seemed to cling around the bushes and trees. The out-houses stood out white, like buildings in a mysterious city. Somewhere there was the metallic whir of a grasshopper, and in the distance a loon boomed again and again.

The little company passed down the yard. There was the sound of a smothered titter, then a playful resounding slap, and a gurgling laugh from one of the boys.

As he stood by the window he heard some one open the door and stand on the threshold.

“Are you coming, Alice?” some one asked.

Michael James listened for the answer. He was taking in eagerly all outside things. He wanted something to pass the time of waiting, as a traveler in a railway station reads trivial notices carefully while waiting for a train that may take him to the ends of the earth.

“Alice, are you coming?” was asked again.

There was no answer.

“Well, you needn’t if you don’t want to,” he heard in an irritated tone, and the speaker tramped down toward the road in a dudgeon. He recognized the figure of Flanagan, the football-player, who was always having little spats with the girl he was going to marry. He discovered with a sort of shock that he was slightly amused at this incident.

From the road there came the shrill scream of one of the girls who had gone out, and then a chorus of laughter. And against the background of the figure behind him and of young Kennedy he began wondering at the relationship of man and woman. He had no word for it, for “love” was a term he thought should be confined to story-books, a word to be suspicious of as sounding affected, a word to be scoffed at. But of this relationship he had a vague understanding. He thought of it as a criss-cross of threads binding one person to the other, or as a web which might be light and easily broken, or which might have the strength of steel cables and which might work into knots here and there and become a tangle that could crush those caught in it.

It puzzled him how a thing of indefinable grace, of soft words on June nights, of vague stirrings under moonlight, of embarrassing hand-clasps and fearful glances, might become, as it had become in the case of himself, Kennedy, and what was behind him, a thing of blind, malevolent force, a thing of sinister silence, a shadow that crushed.

And then it struck him with a sense of guilt that his mind was wandering from her, and he turned away from the window. He thought how much more peaceful it would be for a body to lie out in the moonlight than on a somber oak bedstead in a shadowy room with yellow, guttering candle-light and five solemn-looking chairs. And he thought again how strange it was that on a night like this Kennedy should come as an avenger seeking to kill rather than as a lover with high hope in his breast.

Murray slipped into the room again. There was a frown on his face and his tone was aggressive.

“I tell you, Michael James, we’ll have to do something about it.” There was a truculent note in his whisper.

The farmer did not answer.

“Will you let me go down for the police? A few words to the sergeant will keep him quiet.”

Michael James felt a pity for Murray. The idea of pitting a sergeant of police against the tragedy that was coming seemed ludicrous to him. It was like pitting a school-boy against a hurricane.

“Listen to me, Dan,” he replied. “How do you know Kennedy is coming up at all?”

“Flanagan, the football-player, met him and talked to him. He said that Kennedy was clean mad.”

“Do they know about it in the kitchen?”

“Not a word.” There was a pause.

“Well, listen here, now. Go right back there and don’t say a word about it. Wouldn’t it be foolish if you went down to the police and he didn’t come at all? And if he does come I can manage him. And if I can’t I’ll call you. Does that satisfy you?” And he sent Murray out, grumbling.

As the door closed he felt that the last refuge had been abandoned. He was to wrestle with destiny alone. He had no doubt that Kennedy would make good his vow, and he felt a sort of curiosity as to how it would be done. Would it be with hands, or with a gun, or some other weapon? He hoped it would be the gun. The idea of coming to hand-grips with the boy filled him with a strange terror.

The thought that within ten minutes or a half-hour or an hour he would be dead did not come home to him. It was the physical act that frightened him. He felt as if he were terribly alone and a cold wind were blowing about him and penetrating every pore of his body. There was a contraction around his breast-bone and a shiver in his shoulders.

His idea of death was that he would pitch headlong, as from a high tower, into a bottomless dark space.

He went over to the window again and looked out toward the barn. From a chink in one of the shutters there was a thread of yellow candle-light. He knew there were men there playing cards to pass the time.

Then terror came on him. The noise in the kitchen was subdued. Most of the mourners had gone home, and those who were staying the night were drowsy and were dozing over the fire. He felt he wanted to rush among them and to cry to them to protect him, and to cower behind them and to close them around him in a solid circle. He felt that eyes were upon him, looking at his back from the bed, and he was afraid to turn around because he might look into the eyes.

She had always respected him, he remembered, and he did not want to lose her respect now; and the fear that he would lose it set his shoulders back and steadied the grip of his feet on the floor.

And then there flashed before him the thought of people who kill, of lines of soldiery rushing on trenches, of a stealthy, cowering man who slips through a jail door at dawn, and of a figure he had read of in books—a sinister figure with an ax and a red cloak.

As he looked down the yard he saw a figure turn in the gate and come toward the house. It seemed to walk slowly and heavily, as if tired. He knew it was Kennedy. He opened the kitchen door and slipped outside.

The figure coming up the pathway seemed to swim toward him. Then it would blur and disappear and then appear again vaguely. The beating of his heart was like the regular sound of a ticking clock. Space narrowed until he felt he could not breathe. He went forward a few paces. The light from the bedroom window streamed forward in a broad, yellow beam. He stepped into it as into a river.

“She’s dead,” he heard himself saying. “She’s dead.” And then he knew that Kennedy was standing in front of him.

The flap of the boy’s hat threw a heavy shadow over his face, his shoulders were braced, and his right hand, the farmer could see, was thrust deeply into his coat pocket.

“Aye, she’s dead,” Michael James repeated. “You knew that, didn’t you?” It was all he could think of saying. “You’ll come in and see her, won’t you?” He had forgotten what Kennedy had come for. He was dazed. He didn’t know what to say.

Kennedy moved a little. The light from the window struck him full in the face, and Michael James realized with a shock that it was as grim and thin-lipped as he had pictured it. A prayer rose in his throat, and then fear seemed to leave him all at once. He raised his head. The right hand had left the pocket now. And then suddenly he saw that Kennedy was looking into the room, and he knew he could see, through the little panes of glass, the huge bedstead and the body on it. And he felt a desire to throw himself between Kennedy and it, as he might jump between a child and a threatening danger.

He turned away his head, instinctively—why, he could not understand, but he felt that he should not look at Kennedy’s face.

Over in the barn voices rose suddenly. They were disputing over the cards. There was some one complaining feverishly and some one arguing truculently, and another voice striving to make peace. They died away in a dull hum, and Michael James heard the boy sobbing.

“You mustn’t do that,” he said. “You mustn’t do that.” And he patted him on the shoulders. He felt as if something unspeakably tense had relaxed and as if life were swinging back into balance. His voice shook and he continued patting. “You’ll come in now, and I’ll leave you alone there.” He took him under the arm.

He felt the pity he had for the body on the bed envelop Kennedy, too, and a sense of peace came over him. It was as though a son of his had been hurt and had come to him for comfort, and he was going to comfort him. In some vague way he thought of Easter-time.

He stopped at the door for a moment.

“It’s all right, laddie,” he said. “It’s all right,” and he lifted the latch.

As they went in he felt somehow as if high walls had crumbled and the three of them had stepped into the light of day.

[2] Copyright, 1915, by Harper and Brothers. Copyright, 1916, by Donn Byrne.

CHAUTONVILLE[3]

By WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
From The Masses

They said that the Russian line was a hundred miles long. I know nothing about that, but I know that it extended as far as the eye could reach to the east and west, and that this had been so for many weeks. But time, as it is known in the outer world, had stopped for us. It was now November, and we had been without mails since late in August. Three days of hideous cold had come without warning, and before the snows, so that there was a foot of iron frost in the ground. This had to be bitten through in all our trench-making, and though we were on the southern slopes of the Carpathians, timber was scarce. At each of our recent meetings with the Austrian enemy, we had expected to feel the new strike—the different resistance of German reinforcement.

A queer sense had come to us from the Austrians. I had thought of it many times and others had spoken the same: that it didn’t matter greatly to them. They gave us fierce fighting, but always when we were exhausted and insane with our dead—they fell away before us. This had happened so often that we came to expect it, our chief puzzle being just how long they would hold out in each battle. Especially when our brigade was engaged, and we had entered into an intensity that was all the human could endure, I would almost stop breathing in the expectancy of the release of tension before us. When it did not come, I invariably found afterward that I was out of perspective with the mainline, on account of the fierceness of our immediate struggle. We were but one snapping loop of the fighting—too localized to affect the main front. The Austrians gave all in a piece, when they drew back.

Days were the same, a steady suffering. I did not know before what men could stand. We had weeks of life that formerly I would have considered fatal to adventure with through one night or day—exposure, fatigue, famine—and over all the passion for home, that slow lasting fire. I began to understand how the field-mice winter—how the northern birds live through, and what a storm, on top of a storm, means to all creatures of the north country that are forced to take what comes, when the earth tilts up into the bleak and icy gray. We forget this as men, until a war comes.

But all measuring of the world had ceased for our eyes. A man must have emotions for this, and we thought our emotions dead. I wonder if it can be understood—this being shaken down to the end, this facing of life and death without a personal relation?... Crawling out of the blanket in the morning, I have met the cold—such a shock throughout, that it centered like a long pin driven in the heart. I have seen my friends go, right and left on the field—those who helped tend the fire the night before—and met their end and my own peril without a quickened pulse. Of course, I knew something was changed for me, because I had not been this way. I had even lost the love of courage—that quality of field-work that used to raise my hair, so high and pure did it seem to my eyes.... But the night came, when I heard a little man mumbling over the fire to the effect that he hated it all—that the Little Father was making monkeys of us all—and a thrill shot over me, so that I knew I was alive. Yes, there was something to that.

“Sh-shh—” said I. Two others drew near, as if a bottle had been opened. And Firthus, my closest friend, gripped my arm, leaving a blue welt where his thumb had pressed.

“It’s as bad to say ‘sh-sh—’ as to say what he said,” Firthus whispered.

Yes, even in the coldness, there was a thrill to that. Perhaps we thrill at the first breath of that which is to come and change us over.

... For three days they had given our part of the line a different and extraordinary resistance, so that for three nights we camped in the same place. A valley was before us, and the infantry had tried to cross again and again, always meeting at a certain place in the hollows an enfilading fire from the forward low hills. We could not get enough men across to charge the emplacements.... We were mid-west of the west wing, it was said; and word came the third day that we were holding up the whole line; that the east was ready to drive through, in fact, was bending forward; that the west was marking time on our account—and here we were keeping the whole Russian invasion from spending the holidays in Budapest.

On that third day I was dispatching from brigade-headquarters to the trenches. The General and his staff stood in a shepherd’s house in the midst of a circle of rocks. Waiting there I began to understand that they were having difficulty in forcing the men forward in the later charges. The lines could see their dead of former advances, black and countless upon the valley snow. This was not good for the trenches.

... Now I realized that they were talking of Chautonville, the singer, the master of our folk-songs. We had heard of him along the line—how he had come running home to us out of Germany at the last moment in July—literally pelted forth, changed from an idol into an enemy and losing a priceless engagement-series on the Continent. He had not been the least bewildered, as the story went, rather enjoying it all.... They had monopolized him at the central headquarters, so that we had not heard him sing, but the gossip of it fired the whole line—a baritone voice like a thick starry dusk, having to do with magnolias and the south, and singing of the Russia that was to mean the world. Somehow he had made us gossip to that extent. So I was interested now to hear the name of Chautonville, and that he was coming.

He was to sing us forward again. There was a pang in that, as I craned forward to look at the valley. It was not for our entertainment, but to make us forget our dead, to make us charge the valley again over our dead—it being planned that a remnant might make the crossing and charge the emplacements.... He came—a short barrel of a man and fat. They had kept him well at the Center. He was valuable in the hospitals, it was said.

The least soldierly kind of a man I had seen in many days, save the Brigadier—so white and fat was Chautonville, the top of his head small, his legs short and thick, hands fat and white and tapering, a huge neck and chin with folds of white fat under it—a sort of a perfect bird dressed for present to the Emperor. Chautonville was big-eyed with all this—large, innocent brown eyes—innocent to me, but it was the superb health of the creature, his softness, clearness of skin and eye, that gave the impression to us, so lean and stringy. For his eyes were not innocent—something in them spoiled that. We were worn to buckskin and ivory, while here was a parlor kind of health—so clean in his linen, white folds of linen, about his collar and wrists. His chest was a marvel to look at—here in the field after weeks in the Carpathians. We were all range and angles, but this was a round barrel of a man, as thick as broad, his lips plump and soft, while we for weeks had licked a dry faded line, our faces strange with bone and teeth.

“What is it?” he asked the General.

I thought of a little doctor, called by others after consultation—an extra bit of dexterity required, this being the high-priced man. There was that indoor look of a barber about him, too.

The General explained that a new charge was to be ordered—that three had failed—that the men (while not exactly rebellious) faltered before the valley a fourth time this day—that the failures were costly in men—in short, that the inspiration of Chautonville was required now to sing them and the reserves across.... The Austrians would quickly give way, if the valley were passed.... Then the thousands would flood up the slopes and—Budapest and holidays.

“You want me to sing to them for courage—as it were?” Chautonville questioned.

I had marked his voice. I saw now that he needed all the thickness of throat and bust—that he used it all. I hoped they would not send me away with a message....

“You want me to walk up and down the trenches?”

“Yes, singing.”

He puffed his cheeks and blew out a long breath—as if enjoying the effect of the steam in the icy light.

“Are they under fire?” he asked.

“You see them from here—how silent they are! The enemy does not fire until we reach the valley.”

So he made no bones about his fears. Nothing of the charge would be required of him. He could withdraw after his inspiration.... Hate was growing within me. God, how I came to hate him—not for his cowardice—that was a novelty, and so freely acknowledged, but because he would sing the men to their death. This was the tame elephant that they use to subdue the wild ones—this the decoy—the little white bastard.

“Very well, I will walk up and down the trenches, singing—” He said it a bit cockily.

I was in no way a revolutionist, yet I vowed some time to get him, alone.... I seemed to see myself in a crowded city street at night—some city full of lights, as far as heaven from now—going in with the crowd under the lights—to hear him sing. There I could get him.... Not a revolutionist, at all; no man in the enlisted ranks more trusted than I; attached for dispatch-work at brigade-headquarters; in all likelihood of appearance so stupid, as to be accepted as a good soldier and nothing more.... Now I remembered how far I was from the lights of any city and crowded streets—here in the desperate winter fighting, our world crazed with punishment, and planning for real fighting in the Spring. The dead of the valley arose before my eyes.... Perhaps within an hour my room would be ready. Still I should be sorry to pass, and leave Chautonville living on.

They beckoned me to his escort. I followed, hoping to see him die presently. This new hope was to watch him die—and not do it with my hands. Yes, I trusted that Chautonville would not come back from the trenches.

The pits stretched out in either direction—bitten into the ground by the most miserable men the light of day uncovered—bitten through the snow and then through a thick floor of frost as hard as cement. I heard their voices—men of my own country—voices as from swooning men—lost to all mercy, ready to die, not as men, but preying, cornered animals—forgotten of God, it seemed, though that was illusion; forgotten of home which was worse to their hearts, and illusion, too. For we could not hold the fact of home. It had proved too hard for us. The bond had snapped. Only death seemed sure.

Chautonville opened his mouth.

It was like sitting by a fire, and falling into a dream.... He sang of our fathers and our boyhood; the good fathers who taught us all they knew, and whipped us with patience and the fear of God. He sang of the savory kitchen and the red fire-lit windows (bins full of corn and boxes high with wood); of the gray winter and the children of our house, the smell of wood-smoke and the low singing of the tea-kettle on the hearth.

And the officers followed him along the trenches, crying to us, “Prepare to charge!”

He sang of the ice breaking in the rivers—the groan of ice rotting in the lakes under the softness of the new life—of the frost coming up out of the fallows, leaving them wet-black and gleaming-rich. He sang of Spring, the spring-plowing, the heaviness of our labor, with spring lust in our veins, and the crude love in our hearts which we could only articulate in kisses and passion.

A roar from us at that—for the forgotten world was rushing home—the world of our maidens and our women.... He sang of the churches—sang of Poland, sang of Finland—of the churches and the long Sabbaths, the ministry of the gentle, irresistible Christ, of the Mary who mothered Him and mothered us all.

We were roaring like school-boys now behind him—the officer-men shouting to us to stand in our places and prepare to charge.

... He was singing of the Spring again—of the warm breath that comes up over the hills and plains—even to our little fields. On he went singing, and I followed like a dog or a child—hundreds of others following—the menacing voices just stabbing in through the song of open weather and the smell of the ground.... My father had sung it to me—the song of the soil, the song from the soil. And the smell of the stables came home, and the ruminating cattle at evening, the warm smell of the milking and the red that shot the dusk.... My mother taking the pails in the purple evening.

And this about us was the soldiery of Russia—the reek of powder, the iron frost, and the dead that moved for our eyes in the dip of the white valley. And each of us saw our field, our low earth-thatched barns, and each of us saw our mothers, and every man’s father sang.... We cried to him, when he halted a moment—and our hearts, they were burning in his steps—burning, and not with hatred.

Now he sang of the Springtime—and, my God—of our maidens! On the road from her house, I had sung it—coming home in the night from her house—when, in that great happiness which a man knows but once, I had leaped in the softness of the night, my heart traveling up the moon-ray in the driven flame of her kiss. (She did not sleep that night, nor I, for the husk of the world had been torn away.) ... He sang our maidens back to us—to each man, his maiden—their breasts near, and shaken with weeping. They held out our babes, to lure us home—crying “Come back!” to us....

And some had not seen the latest babe at her breast; and some of us only longed for that which we knew—the little hands and the wondering eyes at her skirts—hands that had helped us over the first rough mysteries of fatherhood.

And now I glimpsed the face of Chautonville in the mass—the open mouth. It was not the face that I had seen. For he had lied to me, as he had lied to the officers, and this was the face of an angel, and so happy. Long had he dreamed and long had he waited for this moment—and happy, he was, as a child on a great white horse. He was not singing us across the red-white valley. He was singing us home.

Then I heard the firing, and saw the officers trying to reach him, but we were there. We laughed and called to him, “Sing us the maidens again!”... “For I have a maiden—” a man said.... “Sing us the good Christ.” ... “For I was called to the ministry—” another cried.... “Sing of the Spring and the mothers at the milking—” for we all had our mothers who do not die.... He was singing of our homes in the north country—singing as if he would sing the Austrians home—and the Germans—and would to God that he had!

Then his voice came through to us—not in the great dusky baritone of song, but like a command of the Father: “Come on, men, we are going home!”

... But I could not go. A pistol stopped me. So I lay on my elbow watching them turn back—a little circle of hundreds eager to die for him. All who had heard the singing turned homeward. And the lines came in from the east and from the west and deluged them.... Propped on my elbow, I saw them go down in the deluge of the obedient—watched until the blood went out and blurred the picture. But I saw enough in that darkening—that there was fine sanity in their dying. I wished that I could die with them. It was not slaughter, but martyrdom. It called me through the darkness—and I knew that some man’s song would reach all the armies—all men turning home together—each with his vision and unafraid.

[3] Copyright, 1915, by The Masses. Copyright, 1916, by Will Levington Comfort.

LA DERNIÈRE MOBILISATION[4]

By W.A. DWIGGINS
From The Fabulist

On the left the road comes up the hill out of a pool of mist; on the right it loses itself in the shadow of a wood. On the farther side of the highway a hedgerow, dusty in the moonlight, spreads an irregular border of black from the wood to the fog. Behind the hedgerow slender poplar trees, evenly spaced, rule off the distance with inky lines.

A movement stirs the mist at the bottom of the hill. A monotonous rhythm grows in the silence. The mist darkens, and from it there emerges a strange shadowy column that reaches slowly up the hill, moving in silence to the sombre and muffled beating of a drum. As it draws nearer the shadow becomes two files of marching men bearing between them a long dim burden.

The leaders advance into the moonlight. Each two men are carrying between them a pole, and from pole to pole have been slung planks making a continuous platform. But that which is heaped upon the platform is hidden with muddy blankets.

The uniforms of the men—of various sorts, indicating that they are from many commands—are in shreds and spotted with stains of mould and earth; their heads are bound in cloths so that their faces are covered. The single drummer at the side of the column carries slung from his shoulder the shell of a drum. No flag flies from the staff at the column’s head, but the staff is held erect.

Slowly the head of the line advances to the shadow of the wood, touches it and is swallowed. The leaders, the bare flag-staff, the drummer disappear; but still from the shade is heard the muffled rhythm of the drum. Still the column comes out of the mist, still it climbs the hill and passes with its endless articulated burden. At last the rearmost couple disengages itself from the mist, ascends, and is swallowed by the shadow. There remain only the moonlight and the dusty hedgerow.

From the left the road runs from Belgium; to the right it crosses into France.

The dead were leaving their resting places in that lost land.

[4] Copyright, 1915, by W.A. Dwiggins.

THE CITIZEN[5]

By JAMES FRANCIS DWYER
From Collier’s Weekly

The President of the United States was speaking. His audience comprised two thousand foreign-born men who had just been admitted to citizenship. They listened intently, their faces, aglow with the light of a new-born patriotism, upturned to the calm, intellectual face of the first citizen of the country they now claimed as their own.

Here and there among the newly made citizens were wives and children. The women were proud of their men. They looked at them from time to time, their faces showing pride and awe.

One little woman, sitting immediately in front of the President, held the hand of a big, muscular man and stroked it softly. The big man was looking at the speaker with great blue eyes that were the eyes of a dreamer.

The President’s words came clear and distinct:

You were drawn across the ocean by some beckoning finger of hope, by some belief, by some vision of a new kind of justice, by some expectation of a better kind of life. You dreamed dreams of this country, and I hope you brought the dreams with you. A man enriches the country to which he brings dreams, and you who have brought them have enriched America.

The big man made a curious choking noise and his wife breathed a soft “Hush!” The giant was strangely affected.

The President continued:

No doubt you have been disappointed in some of us, but remember this, if we have grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought some of it with you. A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not in him. A man does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in, and if some of us have forgotten what America believed in, you at any rate imported in your own hearts a renewal of the belief. Each of you, I am sure, brought a dream, a glorious, shining dream, a dream worth more than gold or silver, and that is the reason that I, for one, make you welcome.

The big man’s eyes were fixed. His wife shook him gently, but he did not heed her. He was looking through the presidential rostrum, through the big buildings behind it, looking out over leagues of space to a snow-swept village that huddled on an island in the Beresina, the swift-flowing tributary of the mighty Dnieper, an island that looked like a black bone stuck tight in the maw of the stream.

It was in the little village on the Beresina that the Dream came to Ivan Berloff, Big Ivan of the Bridge.

The Dream came in the spring. All great dreams come in the spring, and the Spring Maiden who brought Big Ivan’s Dream was more than ordinarily beautiful. She swept up the Beresina, trailing wondrous draperies of vivid green. Her feet touched the snow-hardened ground and armies of little white and blue flowers sprang up in her footsteps. Soft breezes escorted her, velvety breezes that carried the aromas of the far-off places from which they came, places far to the southward, like Kremenchug and Kerch, and more distant towns beyond the Black Sea whose people were not under the sway of the Great Czar.

The father of Big Ivan, who had fought under Prince Menshikov at Alma fifty-five years before, hobbled out to see the sunbeams eat up the snow hummocks that hid in the shady places, and he told his son it was the most wonderful spring he had ever seen.

“The little breezes are hot and sweet,” he said, sniffing hungrily with his face turned toward the south. “I know them, Ivan! I know them! They have the spice odor that I sniffed on the winds that came to us when we lay in the trenches at Balaklava. Praise God for the warmth!”

And that day the Dream came to Big Ivan as he plowed. It was a wonder dream. It sprang into his brain as he walked behind the plow, and for a few minutes he quivered as the big bridge quivers when the Beresina sends her ice squadrons to hammer the arches. It made his heart pound mightily, and his lips and throat became very dry.

Big Ivan stopped at the end of the furrow and tried to discover what had brought the Dream. Where had it come from? Why had it clutched him so suddenly? Was he the only man in the village to whom it had come?

Like his father, he sniffed the sweet-smelling breezes. He thrust his great hands into the sunbeams. He reached down and plucked one of a bunch of white flowers that had sprung up overnight. The Dream was born of the breezes and the sunshine and the spring flowers. It came from them and it had sprung into his mind because he was young and strong. He knew! It couldn’t come to his father or Donkov, the tailor, or Poborino, the smith. They were old and weak, and Ivan’s dream was one that called for youth and strength.

“Ay, for youth and strength,” he muttered as he gripped the plow. “And I have it!”

That evening Big Ivan of the Bridge spoke to his wife, Anna, a little woman, who had a sweet face and a wealth of fair hair.

“Wife, we are going away from here,” he said.

“Where are we going, Ivan?” she asked.

“Where do you think, Anna?” he said, looking down at her as she stood by his side.

“To Bobruisk,” she murmured.

“No.”

“Farther?”

“Ay, a long way farther.”

Fear sprang into her soft eyes. Bobruisk was eighty-nine versts away, yet Ivan said they were going farther.

“We—we are not going to Minsk?” she cried.

“Ay, and beyond Minsk!”

“Ivan, tell me!” she grasped. “Tell me where we are going!”

“We are going to America.”

“To America?”

“Yes, to America!”

Big Ivan of the Bridge lifted up his voice when he cried out the words “To America,” and then a sudden fear sprang upon him as those words dashed through the little window out into the darkness of the village street. Was he mad? America was 8,000 versts away! It was far across the ocean, a place that was only a name to him, a place where he knew no one. He wondered in the strange little silence that followed his words if the crippled son of Poborino, the smith, had heard him. The cripple would jeer at him if the night wind had carried the words to his ear.

Anna remained staring at her big husband for a few minutes, then she sat down quietly at his side. There was a strange look in his big blue eyes, the look of a man to whom has come a vision, the look which came into the eyes of those shepherds of Judea long, long ago.

“What is it, Ivan?” she murmured softly, patting his big hand. “Tell me.”

And Big Ivan of the Bridge, slow of tongue, told of the Dream. To no one else would he have told it. Anna understood. She had a way of patting his hands and saying soft things when his tongue could not find words to express his thoughts.

Ivan told how the Dream had come to him as he plowed. He told her how it had sprung upon him, a wonderful dream born of the soft breezes, of the sunshine, of the sweet smell of the upturned sod and of his own strength. “It wouldn’t come to weak men,” he said, baring an arm that showed great snaky muscles rippling beneath the clear skin. “It is a dream that comes only to those who are strong and those who want—who want something that they haven’t got.” Then in a lower voice he said: “What is it that we want, Anna?”

The little wife looked out into the darkness with fear-filled eyes. There were spies even there in that little village on the Beresina, and it was dangerous to say words that might be construed into a reflection on the Government. But she answered Ivan. She stooped and whispered one word into his ear, and he slapped his thigh with his big hand.

“Ay,” he cried. “That is what we want! You and I and millions like us want it, and over there, Anna, over there we will get it. It is the country where a muzhik is as good as a prince of the blood!”

Anna stood up, took a small earthenware jar from a side shelf, dusted it carefully and placed it upon the mantel. From a knotted cloth about her neck she took a ruble and dropped the coin into the jar. Big Ivan looked at her curiously.

“It is to make legs for your Dream,” she explained. “It is many versts to America, and one rides on rubles.”

“You are a good wife,” he said. “I was afraid that you might laugh at me.”

“It is a great dream,” she murmured. “Come, we will go to sleep.”

The Dream maddened Ivan during the days that followed. It pounded within his brain as he followed the plow. It bred a discontent that made him hate the little village, the swift-flowing Beresina and the gray stretches that ran toward Mogilev. He wanted to be moving, but Anna had said that one rode on rubles, and rubles were hard to find.

And in some mysterious way the village became aware of the secret. Donkov, the tailor, discovered it. Donkov lived in one half of the cottage occupied by Ivan and Anna, and Donkov had long ears. The tailor spread the news, and Poborino, the smith, and Yanansk, the baker, would jeer at Ivan as he passed.

“When are you going to America?” they would ask.

“Soon,” Ivan would answer.

“Take us with you!” they would cry in chorus.

“It is no place for cowards,” Ivan would answer. “It is a long way, and only brave men can make the journey.”

“Are you brave?” the baker screamed one day as he went by.

“I am brave enough to want liberty!” cried Ivan angrily. “I am brave enough to want—”

“Be careful! Be careful!” interrupted the smith. “A long tongue has given many a man a train journey that he never expected.”

That night Ivan and Anna counted the rubles in the earthenware pot. The giant looked down at his wife with a gloomy face, but she smiled and patted his hand.

“It is slow work,” he said.

“We must be patient,” she answered. “You have the Dream.”

“Ay,” he said. “I have the Dream.”

Through the hot, languorous summertime the Dream grew within the brain of Big Ivan. He saw visions in the smoky haze that hung above the Beresina. At times he would stand, hoe in hand, and look toward the west, the wonderful west into which the sun slipped down each evening like a coin dropped from the fingers of the dying day.

Autumn came, and the fretful whining winds that came down from the north chilled the Dream. The winds whispered of the coming of the Snow King, and the river grumbled as it listened. Big Ivan kept out of the way of Poborino, the smith, and Yanansk, the baker. The Dream was still with him, but autumn is a bad time for dreams.

Winter came, and the Dream weakened. It was only the earthenware pot that kept it alive, the pot into which the industrious Anna put every coin that could be spared. Often Big Ivan would stare at the pot as he sat beside the stove. The pot was the umbilical cord which kept the Dream alive.

“You are a good woman, Anna,” Ivan would say again and again. “It was you who thought of saving the rubles.”

“But it was you who dreamed,” she would answer. “Wait for the spring, husband mine. Wait.”

It was strange how the spring came to the Beresina that year. It sprang upon the flanks of winter before the Ice King had given the order to retreat into the fastnesses of the north. It swept up the river escorted by a million little breezes, and housewives opened their windows and peered out with surprise upon their faces. A wonderful guest had come to them and found them unprepared.

Big Ivan of the Bridge was fixing a fence in the meadow on the morning the Spring Maiden reached the village. For a little while he was not aware of her arrival. His mind was upon his work, but suddenly he discovered that he was hot, and he took off his overcoat. He turned to hang the coat upon a bush, then he sniffed the air, and a puzzled look came upon his face. He sniffed again, hurriedly, hungrily. He drew in great breaths of it, and his eyes shone with a strange light. It was wonderful air. It brought life to the Dream. It rose up within him, ten times more lusty than on the day it was born, and his limbs trembled as he drew in the hot, scented breezes that breed the Wanderlust and shorten the long trails of the world.

Ivan clutched his coat and ran to the little cottage. He burst through the door, startling Anna, who was busy with her housework.

“The Spring!” he cried. “The Spring!”

He took her arm and dragged her to the door. Standing together they sniffed the sweet breezes. In silence they listened to the song of the river. The Beresina had changed from a whining, fretful tune into a lilting, sweet song that would set the legs of lovers dancing. Anna pointed to a green bud on a bush beside the door.

“It came this minute,” she murmured.

“Yes,” said Ivan. “The little fairies brought it there to show us that spring has come to stay.”

Together they turned and walked to the mantel. Big Ivan took up the earthenware pot, carried it to the table, and spilled its contents upon the well-scrubbed boards. He counted while Anna stood beside him, her fingers clutching his coarse blouse. It was a slow business, because Ivan’s big blunt fingers were not used to such work, but it was over at last. He stacked the coins into neat piles, then he straightened himself and turned to the woman at his side.

“It is enough,” he said quietly. “We will go at once. If it was not enough, we would have to go because the Dream is upon me and I hate this place.”

“As you say,” murmured Anna. “The wife of Littin, the butcher, will buy our chairs and our bed. I spoke to her yesterday.”

Poborino, the smith; his crippled son; Yanansk, the baker; Dankov, the tailor, and a score of others were out upon the village street on the morning that Big Ivan and Anna set out. They were inclined to jeer at Ivan, but something upon the face of the giant made them afraid. Hand in hand the big man and his wife walked down the street, their faces turned toward Bobruisk, Ivan balancing upon his head a heavy trunk that no other man in the village could have lifted.

At the end of the street a stripling with bright eyes and yellow curls clutched the hand of Ivan and looked into his face.

“I know what is sending you,” he cried.

“Ay, you know,” said Ivan, looking into the eyes of the other.

“It came to me yesterday,” murmured the stripling. “I got it from the breezes. They are free, so are the birds and the little clouds and the river. I wish I could go.”

“Keep your dream,” said Ivan softly. “Nurse it, for it is the dream of a man.”

Anna, who was crying softly, touched the blouse of the boy. “At the back of our cottage, near the bush that bears the red berries, a pot is buried,” she said. “Dig it up and take it home with you and when you have a kopeck drop it in. It is a good pot.”

The stripling understood. He stooped and kissed the hand of Anna, and Big Ivan patted him upon the back. They were brother dreamers and they understood each other.

Boris Lugan has sung the song of the versts that eat up one’s courage as well as the leather of one’s shoes.

“Versts! Versts! Scores and scores of them!
Versts! Versts! A million or more of them!
Dust! Dust! And the devils who play in it
Blinding us fools who forever must stay in it.”

Big Ivan and Anna faced the long versts to Bobruisk, but they were not afraid of the dust devils. They had the Dream. It made their hearts light and took the weary feeling from their feet. They were on their way. America was a long, long journey, but they had started, and every verst they covered lessened the number that lay between them and the Promised Land.

“I am glad the boy spoke to us,” said Anna.

“And I am glad,” said Ivan. “Some day he will come and eat with us in America.”

They came to Bobruisk. Holding hands, they walked into it late one afternoon. They were eighty-nine versts from the little village on the Beresina, but they were not afraid. The Dream spoke to Ivan, and his big hand held the hand of Anna. The railway ran through Bobruisk, and that evening they stood and looked at the shining rails that went out in the moonlight like silver tongs reaching out for a low-hanging star.

And they came face to face with the Terror that evening, the Terror that had helped the spring breezes and the sunshine to plant the Dream in the brain of Big Ivan.

They were walking down a dark side street when they saw a score of men and women creep from the door of a squat, unpainted building. The little group remained on the sidewalk for a minute as if uncertain about the way they should go, then from the corner of the street came a cry of “Police!” and the twenty pedestrians ran in different directions.

It was no false alarm. Mounted police charged down the dark thoroughfare swinging their swords as they rode at the scurrying men and women who raced for shelter. Big Ivan dragged Anna into a doorway, and toward their hiding place ran a young boy who, like themselves, had no connection with the group and who merely desired to get out of harm’s way till the storm was over.

The boy was not quick enough to escape the charge. A trooper pursued him, overtook him before he reached the sidewalk, and knocked him down with a quick stroke given with the flat of his blade. His horse struck the boy with one of his hoofs as the lad stumbled on his face.

Big Ivan growled like an angry bear, and sprang from his hiding place. The trooper’s horse had carried him on to the sidewalk, and Ivan seized the bridle and flung the animal on its haunches. The policeman leaned forward to strike at the giant, but Ivan of the Bridge gripped the left leg of the horseman and tore him from his saddle.

The horse galloped off, leaving its rider lying beside the moaning boy who was unlucky enough to be in a street where a score of students were holding a meeting.

Anna dragged Ivan back into the passageway. More police were charging down the street, and their position was a dangerous one.

“Ivan!” she cried, “Ivan! Remember the Dream! America, Ivan! America! Come this way! Quick!”

With strong hands she dragged him down the passage. It opened into a narrow lane, and, holding each other’s hands, they hurried toward the place where they had taken lodgings. From far off came screams and hoarse orders, curses and the sound of galloping hoofs. The Terror was abroad.

Big Ivan spoke softly as they entered the little room they had taken. “He had a face like the boy to whom you gave the lucky pot,” he said. “Did you notice it in the moonlight when the trooper struck him down?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I saw.”

They left Bobruisk next morning. They rode away on a great, puffing, snorting train that terrified Anna. The engineer turned a stopcock as they were passing the engine, and Anna screamed while Ivan nearly dropped the big trunk. The engineer grinned, but the giant looked up at him and the grin faded. Ivan of the Bridge was startled by the rush of hot steam, but he was afraid of no man.

The train went roaring by little villages and great pasture stretches. The real journey had begun. They began to love the powerful engine. It was eating up the versts at a tremendous rate. They looked at each other from time to time and smiled like two children.

They came to Minsk, the biggest town they had ever seen. They looked out from the car windows at the miles of wooden buildings, at the big church of St. Catharine, and the woolen mills. Minsk would have frightened them if they hadn’t had the Dream. The farther they went from the little village on the Beresina the more courage the Dream gave to them.

On and on went the train, the wheels singing the song of the road. Fellow travelers asked them where they were going. “To America,” Ivan would answer.

“To America?” they would cry. “May the little saints guide you. It is a long way, and you will be lonely.”

“No, we shall not be lonely,” Ivan would say.

“Ha! you are going with friends?”

“No, we have no friends, but we have something that keeps us from being lonely.” And when Ivan would make that reply Anna would pat his hand and the questioner would wonder if it was a charm or a holy relic that the bright-eyed couple possessed.

They ran through Vilna, on through flat stretches of Courland to Libau, where they saw the sea. They sat and stared at it for a whole day, talking little but watching it with wide, wondering eyes. And they stared at the great ships that came rocking in from distant ports, their sides gray with the salt from the big combers which they had battled with.

No wonder this America of ours is big. We draw the brave ones from the old lands, the brave ones whose dreams are like the guiding sign that was given to the Israelites of old—a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night.

The harbor master spoke to Ivan and Anna as they watched the restless waters.

“Where are you going, children?”

“To America,” answered Ivan.

“A long way. Three ships bound for America went down last month.”

“Ours will not sink,” said Ivan.

“Why?”

“Because I know it will not.”

The harbor master looked at the strange blue eyes of the giant, and spoke softly. “You have the eyes of a man who sees things,” he said. “There was a Norwegian sailor in the White Queen, who had eyes like yours and he could see death.”

“I see life!” said Ivan boldly. “A free life—”

“Hush!” said the harbor master. “Do not speak so loud.” He walked swiftly away, but he dropped a ruble into Anna’s hand as he passed her by. “For luck,” he murmured. “May the little saints look after you on the big waters.”

They boarded the ship, and the Dream gave them a courage that surprised them. There were others going aboard, and Ivan and Anna felt that those others were also persons who possessed dreams. She saw the dreams in their eyes. There were Slavs, Poles, Letts, Jews, and Livonians, all bound for the land where dreams come true. They were a little afraid—not two per cent of them had ever seen a ship before—yet their dreams gave them courage.

The emigrant ship was dragged from her pier by a grunting tug and went floundering down the Baltic Sea. Night came down, and the devils who, according to the Esthonian fishermen, live in the bottom of the Baltic, got their shoulders under the stern of the ship and tried to stand her on her head. They whipped up white combers that sprang on her flanks and tried to crush her, and the wind played a devil’s lament in her rigging. Anna lay sick in the stuffy women’s quarters, and Ivan could not get near her. But he sent her messages. He told her not to mind the sea devils, to think of the Dream, the Great Dream that would become real in the land to which they were bound. Ivan of the Bridge grew to full stature on that first night out from Libau. The battered old craft that carried him slouched before the waves that swept over her decks, but he was not afraid. Down among the million and one smells of the steerage he induced a thin-faced Livonian to play upon a mouth organ, and Big Ivan sang Paleer’s “Song of Freedom” in a voice that drowned the creaking of the old vessel’s timbers, and made the seasick ones forget their sickness. They sat up in their berths and joined in the chorus, their eyes shining brightly in the half gloom:

“Freedom for serf and for slave,
Freedom for all men who crave
Their right to be free
And who hate to bend knee
But to Him who this right to them gave.”

It was well that these emigrants had dreams. They wanted them. The sea devils chased the lumbering steamer. They hung to her bows and pulled her for’ard deck under emerald-green rollers. They clung to her stern and hoisted her nose till Big Ivan thought that he could touch the door of heaven by standing on her blunt snout. Miserable, cold, ill, and sleepless, the emigrants crouched in their quarters, and to them Ivan and the thin-faced Livonian sang the “Song of Freedom.”

The emigrant ship pounded through the Cattegat, swung southward through the Skagerrack and the bleak North Sea. But the storm pursued her. The big waves snarled and bit at her, and the captain and the chief officer consulted with each other. They decided to run into the Thames, and the harried steamer nosed her way in and anchored off Gravesend.

An examination was made, and the agents decided to transship the emigrants. They were taken to London and thence by train to Liverpool, and Ivan and Anna sat again side by side, holding hands and smiling at each other as the third-class emigrant train from Euston raced down through the green Midland counties to grimy Liverpool.

“You are not afraid?” Ivan would say to her each time she looked at him.

“It is a long way, but the Dream has given me much courage,” she said.

“To-day I spoke to a Lett whose brother works in New York City,” said the giant. “Do you know how much money he earns each day?”

“How much?” she questioned.

“Three rubles, and he calls the policemen by their first names.”

“You will earn five rubles, my Ivan,” she murmured. “There is no one as strong as you.”

Once again they were herded into the bowels of a big ship that steamed away through the fog banks of the Mersey out into the Irish Sea. There were more dreamers now, nine hundred of them, and Anna and Ivan were more comfortable. And these new emigrants, English, Irish, Scotch, French, and German, knew much concerning America. Ivan was certain that he would earn at least three rubles a day. He was very strong.

On the deck he defeated all comers in a tug of war, and the captain of the ship came up to him and felt his muscles.

“The country that lets men like you get away from it is run badly,” he said. “Why did you leave it?”

The interpreter translated what the captain said, and through the interpreter Ivan answered.

“I had a Dream,” he said, “a Dream of freedom.”

“Good,” cried the captain. “Why should a man with muscles like yours have his face ground into the dust?”

The soul of Big Ivan grew during those days. He felt himself a man, a man who was born upright to speak his thoughts without fear.

The ship rolled into Queenstown one bright morning, and Ivan and his nine hundred steerage companions crowded the for’ard deck. A boy in a rowboat threw a line to the deck, and after it had been fastened to a stanchion he came up hand over hand. The emigrants watched him curiously. An old woman sitting in the boat pulled off her shoes, sat in a loop of the rope, and lifted her hand as a signal to her son on deck.

“Hey, fellers,” said the boy, “help me pull me muvver up. She wants to sell a few dozen apples, an’ they won’t let her up the gangway!”

Big Ivan didn’t understand the words, but he guessed what the boy wanted. He made one of a half dozen who gripped the rope and started to pull the ancient apple woman to the deck.

They had her halfway up the side when an undersized third officer discovered what they were doing. He called to a steward, and the steward sprang to obey.

“Turn a hose on her!” cried the officer. “Turn a hose on the old woman!”

The steward rushed for the hose. He ran with it to the side of the ship with the intention of squirting the old woman, who was swinging in midair and exhorting the six men who were dragging her to the deck.

“Pull!” she cried. “Sure, I’ll give every one of ye a rosy red apple an’ me blessing with it.”

The steward aimed the muzzle of the hose, and Big Ivan of the Bridge let go of the rope and sprang at him. The fist of the great Russian went out like a battering ram; it struck the steward between the eyes, and he dropped upon the deck. He lay like one dead, the muzzle of the hose wriggling from his limp hands.

The third officer and the interpreter rushed at Big Ivan, who stood erect, his hands clenched.

“Ask the big swine why he did it?” roared the officer.

“Because he is a coward!” cried Ivan. “They wouldn’t do that in America!”

“What does the big brute know about America?” cried the officer.

“Tell him I have dreamed of it,” shouted Ivan. “Tell him it is in my Dream. Tell him I will kill him if he turns the water upon this old woman.”

The apple seller was on deck then, and with the wisdom of the Celt she understood. She put her lean hand upon the great head of the Russian and blessed him in Gaelic. Ivan bowed before her, then as she offered him a rosy apple he led her toward Anna, a great Viking leading a withered old woman who walked with the grace of a duchess.

“Please don’t touch him,” she cried, turning to the officer. “We have been waiting for your ship for six hours, and we have only five dozen apples to sell. It’s a great man he is. Sure he’s as big as Finn MacCool.”

Some one pulled the steward behind a ventilator and revived him by squirting him with water from the hose which he had tried to turn upon the old woman. The third officer slipped quietly away.

The Atlantic was kind to the ship that carried Ivan and Anna. Through sunny days they sat up on deck and watched the horizon. They wanted to be among those who would get the first glimpse of the wonderland.

They saw it on a morning with sunshine and soft winds. Standing together in the bow, they looked at the smear upon the horizon, and their eyes filled with tears. They forgot the long road to Bobruisk, the rocking journey to Libau, the mad buckjumping boat in whose timbers the sea devils of the Baltic had bored holes. Everything unpleasant was forgotten, because the Dream filled them with a great happiness.

The inspectors at Ellis Island were interested in Ivan. They walked around him and prodded his muscles, and he smiled down upon them good-naturedly.

“A fine animal,” said one. “Gee, he’s a new white hope! Ask him can he fight?”

An interpreter put the question, and Ivan nodded. “I have fought,” he said.

“Gee!” cried the inspector. “Ask him was it for purses or what?”

“For freedom,” answered Ivan. “For freedom to stretch my legs and straighten my neck!”

Ivan and Anna left the Government ferryboat at the Battery. They started to walk uptown, making for the East Side, Ivan carrying the big trunk that no other man could lift.

It was a wonderful morning. The city was bathed in warm sunshine, and the well-dressed men and women who crowded the sidewalks made the two immigrants think that it was a festival day. Ivan and Anna stared at each other in amazement. They had never seen such dresses as those worn by the smiling women who passed them by; they had never seen such well-groomed men.

“It is a feast day for certain,” said Anna.

“They are dressed like princes and princesses,” murmured Ivan. “There are no poor here, Anna. None.”

Like two simple children, they walked along the streets of the City of Wonder. What a contrast it was to the gray, stupid towns where the Terror waited to spring upon the cowed people. In Bobruisk, Minsk, Vilna, and Libau the people were sullen and afraid. They walked in dread, but in the City of Wonder beside the glorious Hudson every person seemed happy and contented.

They lost their way, but they walked on, looking at the wonderful shop windows, the roaring elevated trains, and the huge skyscrapers. Hours afterward they found themselves in Fifth Avenue near Thirty-third Street, and there the miracle happened to the two Russian immigrants. It was a big miracle inasmuch as it proved the Dream a truth, a great truth.

Ivan and Anna attempted to cross the avenue, but they became confused in the snarl of traffic. They dodged backward and forward as the stream of automobiles swept by them. Anna screamed, and, in response to her scream, a traffic policeman, resplendent in a new uniform, rushed to her side. He took the arm of Anna and flung up a commanding hand. The charging autos halted. For five blocks north and south they jammed on the brakes when the unexpected interruption occurred, and Big Ivan gasped.

“Don’t be flurried, little woman,” said the cop. “Sure I can tame ’em by liftin’ me hand.”

Anna didn’t understand what he said, but she knew it was something nice by the manner in which his Irish eyes smiled down upon her. And in front of the waiting automobiles he led her with the same care that he would give to a duchess, while Ivan, carrying the big trunk, followed them, wondering much. Ivan’s mind went back to Bobruisk on the night the Terror was abroad.

The policeman led Anna to the sidewalk, patted Ivan good-naturedly upon the shoulder, and then with a sharp whistle unloosed the waiting stream of cars that had been held up so that two Russian immigrants could cross the avenue.

Big Ivan of the Bridge took the trunk from his head and put it on the ground. He reached out his arms and folded Anna in a great embrace. His eyes were wet.

“The Dream is true!” he cried. “Did you see, Anna? We are as good as they! This is the land where a muzhik is as good as a prince of the blood!”

The President was nearing the close of his address. Anna shook Ivan, and Ivan came out of the trance which the President’s words had brought upon him. He sat up and listened intently:

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter’s evening. Some of us let those great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them, nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.

The President finished. For a moment he stood looking down at the faces turned up to him, and Big Ivan of the Bridge thought that the President smiled at him. Ivan seized Anna’s hand and held it tight.

“He knew of my Dream!” he cried. “He knew of it. Did you hear what he said about the dreams of a spring day?”

“Of course he knew,” said Anna. “He is the wisest in America, where there are many wise men. Ivan, you are a citizen now.”

“And you are a citizen, Anna.”

The band started to play “My Country, ’tis of Thee,” and Ivan and Anna got to their feet. Standing side by side, holding hands, they joined in with the others who had found after long days of journeying the blessed land where dreams come true.

[5] Copyright, 1915, by P.F. Collier and Son, Incorporated.Copyright, 1916, by James Francis Dwyer.

WHOSE DOG—?[6]

By FRANCES GREGG
From The Forum

“Hey—there’s ladies here, move on—you!” The tone was authoritative and old John, the village drunkard, crouched away.

“I warn’t doin’ nothin’,” he clutched feebly at the loose hanging rags that clothed him, “only wanted to see same’s them. Guess this pier’s big enough to hold us all.”

“Halloo, John, have a drink?” A grinning boy held a can of salt water toward him.

The quick maudlin tears sprang to the old man’s eyes. “Little fellers,” he muttered, “little fellers, they oughtn’t ter act that way.”

“Give him a new necktie, he’s gotta go to dinner with the Lodge.” A handful of dank sea-weed writhed around the old man’s neck. “That’s a turtle, that is,” the boy went on, the need for imparting information justifying his lapse from ragging the drunkard. “There—swimming round—it’s tied to that stake. You orter’ve seen it at low tide when it was on the beach. It weighs ninety pounds.”

“I seen a turtle onct,” the drunkard quavered. “It was bigger’n that. En they tied it to a stake—en it swam round—en it swam round—.” His sodden brain clutched for something more to say, some marvel with which to hold the interest of the gathered boys. It was good to talk. If only they would let him talk to them. If only they would let him sit on the store porch and smoke and gossip. He wouldn’t be the town disgrace—

“Well—go on—what’d’t do?”

“Hey you!”—the boys were interrupted by the authoritative voice—“I told you to move on, didn’t I—now if I tell you again I’ll run you in. D’yer hear? What you boys let that old bum hang around you for anyway. What’s he doin’ here?”

“Aw, he’s fun. He warn’t doin’ nothin’. He was just awatchin’ it swim. It’s tied to that post. It don’t come up no more.”

“Watchin’ it swim, eh, was he? A’right. Whose dog is it?” The officer turned and sauntered away.

Sudden horror seized the old man. The liquor seemed drained out of his veins: his brain worked almost quickly. “Whose dog—whose dog? Say!” he darted after the retreating boys. “Say—that ain’t no dog—is it—no dog? Tied up like that to drown—say—”

“Aw—keep off—I told you onct—it’s a turtle for the Lodge dinner.” The boy shook himself free.

The old man stood a moment, shaken. His pulpy brain worked dimly toward the conception of the pain that was consuming him. “Whose dog—” that man had asked—and he hadn’t meant to help it—“whose dog!” They could do it—tie up a dog to drown in sight of people—like that—cruel. He saw the policeman coming toward him again. In a sudden frenzy he clutched his tattered garments about him and began to run, to run toward the end of the pier.

The boys raced after him. “What yer gonter do?” they shouted. “What yer gonter do?”

The old man turned and looked at them a moment with twitching features. “I’m gonter die,” he said.

“Come on, you fellers—come on—the drunk’s gonter dive—come on—he’s cryin’!”

There was a splash. A surge of green filth and mud spread and dyed the water. A row of expectant heads leaned over the rail. “Say—he ain’t come up.” They waited.

The policeman strolled leisurely down in response to their repeated cries. “Who ain’t come up? What, him—the drunk?” The officer leaned lethargically over the rail. “What’m I gonter do? Why, leave ’m. He ain’t got no folks gonter sit up nights waitin’ fer ’m. Now you young ones go along home to your suppers,” he indulgently commanded, “and you little fellers, if you want crabs, be ’round here early. By to-morrow this place will be fairly swarmin’ with them.”

[6] Copyright, 1915, by Mitchell Kennerley.

LIFE[7]

By BEN HECHT
From The Little Review

The sun was shining in the dirty street.

Old women with shapeless bodies waddled along on their way to market.

Bearded old men who looked like the fathers of Jerusalem walked flatfooted, nodding back and forth.

“The tread of the processional surviving in Halsted Street,” thought Moisse, the young dramatist who was moving with the crowd.

Children sprawled in the refuse-laden alleys. One of them ragged and clotted with dirt stood half-dressed on the curbing and urinated into the street.

Wagons rumbled, filled with fruits and iron and rags and vegetables.

Human voices babbled above the noises of the traffic. Moisse watched the lively scene.

“Every day it’s the same,” he thought; “the same smells, the same noise and people swarming over the pavements. I am the only one in the street whose soul is awake. There’s a pretty girl looking at me. She suspects the condition of my soul. Her fingers are dirty. Why doesn’t she buy different shoes? She thinks I am lost. In five years she will be fat. In ten years she will waddle with a shawl over her head.”

The young dramatist smiled.

“Good God,” he thought, “where do they come from? Where are they going? No place to no place. But always moving, shuffling, waddling, crying out. The sun shines on them. The rain pours on them. It burns. It freezes. To-day they are bright with color. To-morrow they are gray with gloom. But they are always the same, always in motion.”

The young dramatist stopped on the corner and looking around him spied a figure sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of a building.

The figure was an old man.

He had a long white beard.

He had his legs tucked under him and an upturned tattered hat rested in his lap.

His thin face was raised and the sun beat down on it, but his eyes were closed.

“Asleep,” mused Moisse.

He moved closer to him.

The man’s head was covered with long silky white hair that hung down to his neck and hid his ears. It was uncombed. His face in the sun looked like the face of an ascetic, thin, finely veined.

He had a long nose and almost colorless lips and the skin on his cheeks was white. It was drawn tight over his bones, leaving few wrinkles.

An expression of peace rested over him—peace and detachment. Of the noise and babble he heard nothing. His eyes were closed to the crowded frantic street.

He sat, his head back, his face bathed in the sun, smileless and dreaming.

“A beggar,” thought Moisse, “asleep, oblivious. Dead. All day he sits in the sun like a saint, immobile. Like one of the old Alexandrian ascetics, like a delicately carved image. He is awake in himself but dead to others. The waves cannot touch him. His thoughts, oh to know his thoughts and his dreams?”

Suddenly the eyes of the young dramatist widened. He was looking at the beggar’s long hair that hung to his neck.

“It’s moving,” he whispered half aloud. He came closer and stood over the old man and gazed intently at the top of his head.

The hair was swaying faintly, each separate fiber moving alone....

It shifted, rose imperceptibly and fell. It quivered and glided....

“Lice,” murmured Moisse.

He watched.

Silent and asleep the old man sat with his thin face to the sun and his hair moved.

Vermin swarmed through it, creeping, crawling, tiny and infinitesimal.

Every strand was palpitating, shuddering under their mysterious energy.

At first Moisse could hardly make them out, but his eyes gradually grew accustomed to the sight. And as he watched he saw the hair swell like waves riding over the water, saw it drop and flutter, coil and uncoil of its own accord.

Vermin raised it up, pulled it out, streaming up and down tirelessly in vast armies.

They crawled furiously like dust specks blown thick through the white beard.

They streamed and shifted and were never still.

They moved in and out, from no place to no place, but always moving, frantic and frenzied.

An old woman passed and with a shake of her head dropped two pennies into the upturned hat. Moisse hardly saw her. He saw only the palpitating swarms that were now facing, easily visible, through the gray white hair.

Some ventured down over the white ascetic face, crawling in every direction, traveling around the lips and over the closed eyes, emerging suddenly in thick streams from behind the covered ears and losing themselves under the ever moving beard.

And Moisse, his senses strained, thought he heard a noise—a faint crunching noise.

He listened.

The noise seemed to grow louder. He began to itch but he remained bending over the head. He could hear them, like a faraway murmur, a purring, uncertain sound.

“They’re shouting and groaning, crying out, weeping and laughing,” he mused. “It is life ... life....”

He looked up and down the crowded burning street with its frantic crowd, and smiled.

“Life,” he repeated....

He walked away. Before him floated the hair of the beggar moving as if stirred by a slow wind, and he itched.

“But who was the old man?” he thought.

A young woman, plump and smiling, jostled him. He felt her soft hip pressing against him for a moment.

A child running barefoot through the street brushed against his legs. He felt its sticky fingers seize him for an instant and then the child was gone. On he walked.

Three young men confronted him for a second time. He passed between two of them, squeezed by their shoulders.

A shapeless old woman bumped him with her back as she shuffled past.

Two children dodged in and out screaming and seized his arm to turn on.

The young dramatist stopped and remained standing still, looking about him.

Then he laughed.

“Life,” he murmured again; and

“I am the old man,” he added, “I ... I....”

[7] Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson.Copyright, 1916, by Ben Hecht.

T.B.[8]

By FANNIE HURST
From The Saturday Evening Post

The figurative underworld of a great city has no ventilation, housing or lighting problems. Rooks and crooks who live in the putrid air of crime are not denied the light of day, even though they loathe it. Cadets, social skunks, whose carnivorous eyes love darkness, walk in God’s sunshine and breathe God’s air. Scarlet women turn over in wide beds and draw closer velvet curtains to shut out the morning. Gamblers curse the dawn.

But what of the literal underworld of the great city? What of the babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the Subway trackwalker, purblind from gloom; the coalstoker, whose fiery tomb is the boiler room of a skyscraper; sweatshop workers, a flight below the sidewalk level, whose faces are the color of dead Chinese; six-dollar-a-week salesgirls in the arc-lighted subcellars of six-million-dollar corporations?

This is the literal underworld of the great city, and its sunless streets run literal blood—the blood of the babes who cried in vain; the blood from the lungs of the sweatshop workers whose faces are the color of dead Chinese; the blood from the cheeks of the six-dollar-a-week salesgirls in the arc-lighted subcellars. But these are your problems and my problems and the problems of the men who have found the strength or the fear not to die rich. The babe’s mother, who had never known else, could not know that her cellar was fetid; she only cried out in her anguish and hated vaguely in her heart.

Sara Juke, in the bargain basement of the Titanic Department Store, did not know that lint from white goods clogs the lungs, and that the air she breathed was putrefied as from a noxious swamp. Sometimes a pain, sharp as a hatpin, entered between her shoulder blades. But what of that? When the heart is young the heart is bold, and Sara could laugh upward with the musical glee of a bird.

There were no seasons, except the spring and fall openings and semi-annual clearing sales, in the bargain basement of the Titanic store. On a morning when the white-goods counter was placing long-sleeve, high-neck nightgowns in its bargain bins, and knit underwear was supplanting the reduced muslins, Sara Juke drew her little pink knitted jacket closer about her narrow shoulders and shivered—shivered, but smiled. “Br-r-r! October never used to get under my skin like this.”

Hattie Krakow, roommate and co-worker, shrugged her bony shoulders and laughed; but not with the upward glee of a bird—downward rather, until it died in a croak in her throat. But then Hattie Krakow was ten years older than Sara Juke; and ten years in the arc-lighted subcellar of the Titanic Department Store can do much to muffle the ring in a laugh.

“Gee, you’re as funny as your own funeral—you are! You keep up the express pace you’re going and there won’t be another October left on your calendar.”

“That’s right; cheer me up a bit, dearie. What’s the latest style in undertaking?”

“You’ll know sooner ’n me if—”

“Aw, Hat, cut it! Wasn’t I home in bed last night by eleven?”

“I ain’t much on higher mathematics.”

“Sure I was. I had to shove you over on your side of the bed; that’s how hard you was sleeping.”

“A girl can’t gad round dancing and rough-housing every night and work eight hours on her feet, and put her lunch money on her back, and not pay up for it. I’ve seen too many blue-eyed dolls like you get broken. I—”

“Amen!”

Sara Juke rolled her blue eyes upward, and they were full of points of light, as though stars were shining in them; and always her lips trembled to laugh.

“There ain’t nothing funny, Sara.”

“Oh, Hat, with you like a owl!”

“If I was a girl and had a cough like I’ve seen enough in this basement get; if I was a girl and my skirtband was getting two inches too big, and I had to lie on my left side to breathe right, and my nightie was all soaked round the neck when I got up in the morning—I wouldn’t just laugh and laugh. I’d cry a little—I would.”

“That’s right, Hat; step on the joy bug like it was a spider. Squash it!”

“I wouldn’t just laugh and laugh, and put my lunch money on my back instead of eggs and milk inside of me, and run round all hours to dance halls with every sporty Charley-boy that comes along.”

“You leave him alone! You just cut that! Don’t you begin on him!”

“I wouldn’t get overheated, and not sleep enough; and—”

“For Pete’s sake, Hat! Hire a hall!”

“I should worry! It ain’t my grave you’re digging.”

“Aw, Hat.”

“I ain’t got your dolly face and your dolly ways with the boys; but I got enough sense to live along decent.”

“You’re right pretty, I think, Hat.”

“Oh, I could daub up, too, and gad with some of that fast gang if I didn’t know it don’t lead nowheres. It ain’t no cinch for a girl to keep her health down here, even when she does live along decent like me, eating regular and sleeping regular, and spending quiet evenings in the room, washing-out and mending and pressing and all. It ain’t no cinch even then, lemme tell you. Do you think I’d have ever asked a gay bird like you to come over and room with me if I hadn’t seen you begin to fade like a piece of calico, just like my sister Lizzie did?”

“I’m taking that iron-tonic stuff like you want and spoiling my teeth—ain’t I, Hat? I know you been swell to me and all.”

“You ain’t going to let up until somebody whispers T.B. in your shell-pink ear; and maybe them two letters will bring you to your senses.”

“T.B.?”

“Yes—T.B.”

“Who’s he?”

“Gee, you’re as smart as a fish on a hook! You oughtta bought a velvet dunce cap with your lunch money instead of that brown poke bonnet. T.B. was what I said—T.B.”

“Honest, Hat, I dunno—”

“For heaven’s sake! Too Berculosis is the way the exhibits and the newspapers say it. L-u-n-g-s is another way to spell it. T.B.”

“Too Berculosis!” Sara Juke’s hand flew to her little breast. “Too Berculosis! Hat, you—you don’t—”

“Sure I don’t. I ain’t saying it’s that—only I wanna scare you up a little. I ain’t saying it’s that; but a girl that lets a cold hang on like you do and runs round half the night, and don’t eat right, can make friends with almost anything, from measles to T.B.”

Stars came out once more in Sara Juke’s eyes, and her lips warmed and curved to their smile. She moistened with her forefinger a yellow spit curl that lay like a caress on her cheek. “Gee, you oughtta be writing scare heads for the Evening Gazette!”

Hattie Krakow ran her hand over her smooth salt-and-pepper hair and sold a marked-down flannellette petticoat.

“I can’t throw no scare into you so long as you got him on your mind. Oh, lud! There he starts now—that quickstep dance again!”

A quick red ran up into Miss Juke’s hair and she inclined forward in the attitude of listening as the lively air continued.

“The silly! Honest, ain’t he the silly? He said he was going to play that for me the first thing this morning. We dance it so swell together and all. Aw, I thought he’d forget. Ain’t he the silly—remembering me?”

The red flowed persistently higher.

“Silly ain’t no name for him, with his square, Charley-boy face and polished hair; and—”

“You let him alone, Hattie Krakow! What’s it to you if—”

“Nothing—except I always say October is my unlucky month, because it was just a year ago that they moved him and the sheet music down to the basement. Honest, I’m going to buy me a pair of earmuffs! I’d hate to tell you how unpopular popular music is with me.”

“Huh! You couldn’t play on a side comb, much less play on the piano like Charley does. If I didn’t have no more brains than some people—honest, I’d go out and kill a calf for some!”

“You oughtta talk! A girl that ain’t got no more brains than to gad round every night and every Sunday in foul-smelling, low-ceilinged dance halls, and wear paper-soled slippers when she oughtta be wearing galoshes, and cheesecloth waists that ain’t even decent instead of wool undershirts! You oughtta talk about brains—you and Charley Chubb!”

“Yes, I oughtta talk! If you don’t like my doings, Hattie Krakow, there ain’t no law says we gotta room together. I been shifting for myself ever since I was cash-girl down at Tracy’s, and I ain’t going to begin being bossed now. If you don’t like my keeping steady with Charley Chubb—if you don’t like his sheet-music playing—you gotta lump it! I’m a good girl, I am; and if you got anything to in-sinuate; if—”

“Sara Juke, ain’t you ashamed!”

“I’m a good girl, I am; and there ain’t nobody can cast a reflection on—on—”

Tears trembled in her voice and she coughed from the deep recesses of her chest, and turned her head away, so that her profile was quivering and her throat swelling with sobs.

“I—I’m a good girl, I am.”

“Aw, Sara, don’t I know it? Ain’t that just where the rub comes? Don’t I know it? If you wasn’t a good girl would I be caring?”

“I’m a good girl, I am!”

“It’s your health, Sara, I’m kicking about. You’re getting as pale and skinny as a goop; and for a month already you’ve been coughing, and never a single evening home to stick your feet in hot water and a mustard plaster on your chest.”

“Didn’t I take the iron tonic and spoil my teeth?”

“My sister Lizzie—that’s the way she started, Sara; right down here in this basement. There never was a prettier little queen down here. Ask any of the old girls. Like you in looks and all; full of vim too. That’s the way she started, Sara. She wouldn’t get out in the country on Sundays or get any air in her lungs walking with me evenings. She was all for dance halls, too, Sara. She—she—Ain’t I told you about her over and over again? Ain’t I?”

“Sh-h-h! Don’t cry, Hat. Yes, yes; I know. She was a swell little kid; all the old girls say so. Sh-h-h!”

“The—the night she died I—I died too; I—”

“Sh-h-h, dearie!”

“I ain’t crying, only—only I can’t help remembering.”

“Listen! That’s the new hit Charley’s playin’—Up to Snuff! Say, ain’t that got some little swing to it? Dum-dum-tum-tee-tum-m-m! Some little quick-step, ain’t it? How that boy reads off by sight! Looka, will you? They got them left-over ribbed undervests we sold last season for forty-nine cents out on the grab table for seventy-four. Looka the mob fighting for ’em! Dum-dum-tum-tee-tum-m-m!”

The day’s tide came in. Slowly at first, but toward noon surging through aisles and round bins, upstairs and downstairs—in, round and out. Voices straining to be heard; feet shuffling in an agglomeration of discords—the indescribable roar of humanity, which is like an army that approaches but never arrives. And above it all, insistent as a bugle note, reaching the basement’s breadth, from hardware to candy, from human hair to white goods, the tinny voice of the piano—gay, rollicking.

At five o’clock the patch of daylight above the red-lighted exit door turned taupe, as though a gray curtain had been flung across it; and the girls, with shooting pains in their limbs, braced themselves for the last hour. Shoppers, their bags bulging and their shawls awry, fumbled in bins for a last remnant; hatless, sway-backed women, carrying children, fought for mill ends. Sara Juke stood first on one foot and then on the other to alternate the strain; her hands were hot and dry as flannel, but her cheeks were pink—very pink.

At six o’clock Hattie Krakow untied her black alpaca apron, pinned a hat as nondescript as a bird’s nest at an unrakish angle and slid into a warm gray jacket.

“Ready, Sara?”

“Yes, Hat.” But her voice came vaguely, as through fog.

“I’m going to fix us some stew to-night with them onions Lettie brought up to the room when she moved—mutton stew, with a broth for you, Sara.”

“Yes, Hat.”

Sara’s eyes darted out over the emptying aisles; and, even as she pinned on her velveteen poke bonnet at a too-swagger angle, and fluffed out a few carefully provided curls across her brow, she kept watch and, with obvious subterfuge, slid into her little unlined silk coat with a deliberation not her own. “Coming, Sara?”

“Wait, can’t you? My—my hat ain’t on right.”

“Come on; you’re dolled up enough.”

“My—my gloves—I—I forgot ’em. You—you can go on, Hat.” And she must burrow back beneath the counter.

Miss Krakow let out a snort, as fiery with scorn as though flames were curling on her lips.

“Hanging round to see whether he’s coming, ain’t you? To think they shot Lincoln and let him live! Before I’d run after any man living, much less the excuse of a man like him! A shiny-haired, square-faced little rat like him!”

“I ain’t neither, waiting. I guess I got a right to find my gloves. I—I guess I gotta right. He’s as good as you are, and better. I—I guess I gotta right.” But the raspberry red of confusion dyed her face.

“No, you ain’t waiting! No, no; you ain’t waiting,” mimicked Miss Krakow, and her voice was like autumn leaves that crackle underfoot. “Well, then, if you ain’t waiting here he comes now. I dare you to come on home with me now, like you ought to.”

“I—you go on! I gotta tell him something. I guess I’m my own boss. I got to tell him something.”

Miss Krakow folded her well-worn hand bag under one arm and fastened her black cotton gloves.

“Pf-f-f! What’s the use of wasting breath!”

She slipped into the flux of the aisle, and the tide swallowed her and carried her out into the bigger tide of the street and the swifter tide of the city—a flower on the current, her blush withered under the arc-light substitution for sunlight, the petals of her youth thrown to the muddy corners of the city streets.

Sara Juke breathed inward, and under her cheaply pretentious lace blouse a heart, as rebellious as the pink in her cheeks and the stars in her eyes, beat a rapid fantasia; and, try as she would, her lips would quiver into a smile.

“Hello, Charley!”

“Hello yourself, Sweetness!” And, draping himself across the white-goods counter in an attitude as intricate as the letter S, behold Mr. Charley Chubb! Sleek, soap-scented, slim—a satire on the satyr and the haberdasher’s latest dash. “Hello, Sweetness!”

“How are you, Charley?”

“Here, gimme your little hand. Shake.”

She placed her palm in his, quivering.

You of the classes, peering through lorgnettes into the strange world of the masses, spare that shrug. True, when Charley Chubb’s hand closed over Sara Juke’s she experienced a flash of goose flesh; but, you of the classes, what of the Van Ness ball last night? Your gown was low, so that your neck rose out from it like white ivory. The conservatory, where trained clematis vines met over your heads, was like a bower of stars; music; his hand, the white glove off, over yours; the suffocating sweetness of clematis blossoms; a fountain throwing fine spray; your neck white as ivory, and—what of the Van Ness ball last night?

Only Sara Juke played her poor little game frankly and the cards of her heart lay on the counter.

“Charley!” Her voice lay in a veil.

“Was you getting sore, Sweetness?”

“All day you didn’t come over.”

“Couldn’t, Sweetness. Did you hear me let up on the new hit for a minute?”

“It’s swell, though, Charley; all the girls was humming it. You play it like lightning too.”

“It must have been written for you, Sweetness. That’s what you are, Up to Snuff, eh, Queenie?” He leaned closer, and above his tall, narrow collar dull red flowed beneath the sallow, and his long white teeth and slick-brushed hair shone in the arc light. “Eh, Queenie?”

“I gotta go now, Charley. Hattie’s waiting home for me.” She attempted to pass him and to slip into the outgoing stream of the store, but with a hesitation that belied her. “I—I gotta go, Charley.”

He laughed, clapped his hat slightly askew on his polished hair and slid his arm into hers.

“Forget it! But I had you going—didn’t I, sister? Thought I’d forgot about to-night, didn’t you? and didn’t have the nerve to pipe up. Like fun I forgot!”

“I didn’t know, Charley; you not coming over all day and all. I thought maybe your friend didn’t give you the tickets like he promised.”

“Didn’t he? Look! See if he didn’t!”

He produced a square of pink cardboard from his waistcoat pocket and she read it, with a sudden lightness underlying her voice:

HIBERNIAN MASQUE AND HOP
Supper Wardrobe Free
Admit Gent and Lady Fifty Cents

“Oh, gee, Charley! And me such a sight in this old waist and all. I didn’t know there was supper too.”

“Sure! Hurry, Sweetness, and we’ll catch a Sixth Avenue car. We wanna get in on it while the tamales are hot.”

And she must grasp his arm closer and worm through the sidewalk crush, and straighten her velveteen poke so that the curls lay pat; and once or twice she coughed, with the hollow resonance of a chain drawn upward from a deep well.

“Gee, I bet there’ll be a jam!”

“Sure! There’s some live crowd down there.”

They were in the street car, swaying, swinging, clutching; hemmed in by frantic, home-going New York, nose to nose, eye to eye, tooth to tooth. Round Sara Juke’s slim waist lay Charley Chubb’s saving arm, and with each lurch they laughed immoderately, except when she coughed.

“Gee, ain’t it the limit? It’s a wonder they wouldn’t open a window in this car!”

“Nix on that. Whatta you wanna do—freeze a fellow out?”

Her eyes would betray her.

“Any old time I could freeze you, Charley.”

“Honest?”

“You’re the one that freezes me all the time. You’re the one that keeps me guessing and guessing where I stand with you.”

A sudden lurch and he caught her as she swayed.

“Come, Sweetness, this is our corner. Quit your coughing there, hon; this ain’t no T.B. hop we ’re going to.”

“No what?”

“Come along; hurry! Look at the crowd already.”

“This ain’t no—what did you say, Charley?”

But they were pushing, shoving, worming into the great lighted entrance of the hall. More lurching, crowding, jamming. “I’ll meet you inside, kiddo, in five minutes. Pick out a red domino; red’s my color.”

“A red one? Gee! Looka; mine’s got black pompons on it. Five minutes, Charley; five minutes!”

Flags of all nations and all sizes made a galaxy of the Sixth Avenue hall. An orchestra played beneath an arch of them. Supper, consisting of three-inch-thick sandwiches, tamales, steaming and smelling in their buckets, bottles of beer and soda water, was spread on a long picnic table running the entire length of the balcony.

The main floor, big as an armory, airless as a tomb, swarmed with dancers.

After supper a red sateen Pierrette, quivering, teeth flashing beneath a saucy half mask, bowed to a sateen Pierrot, whose face was as slim as a satyr’s and whose smile was as upturned as the eye slits in his mask.

“Gee, Charley, you look just like a devil in that costume—all red, and your mouth squinted like that!”

“And you look just like a little red cherry, ready to bust.”

And they were off in the whirl of the dance, except that the close-packed dancers hemmed them in a swaying mob; and once she fell back against his shoulder, faint.

“Ain’t there a—a upstairs somewheres, Charley, where they got air? All this jam and no windows open! Gee ain’t it hot? Let’s go outside where it’s cool—let’s.”

“There you go again! No wonder you got a cold on you—always wanting air on you! Come, Sweetness; this ain’t hot. Here, lemme show you the dip I get the girls crazy with. One, two, three—dip! One, two, three—dip! Ugh!”

“Gee, ain’t it a jam, though?”

“One, two, three!”

“That’s swell, Charley! Quit! You mustn’t squeeze me like that till—till you’ve asked me to be engaged, Charley. We—we ain’t engaged yet, are we, Charley?”

“Aw, what difference does that make? You girls make me sick—always wanting to know that.”

“It—it makes a lot of difference, Charley.”

“There you go on that Amen talk again. All right, then; I won’t squeeze you no more, Stingy!”

Her step was suddenly less elastic and she lagged on his arm.

“I—I never said you, couldn’t, Charley. Gee, ain’t you a great one to get mad so quick. Touchy! I only said not till we’re engaged.”

He skirted the crowd, guiding her skillfully.

“Stingy! Stingy! I know ’em that ain’t so stingy as you.”

“Charley!”

“What?”

“Aw, I’m ashamed to say it.”

“Listen! They’re playin’ the new one—Up to Snuff! Faster! Don’t make me drag you, kiddo. Faster!”

They were suddenly in the center of the maze, as tight-packed as though an army had conspired to close round them. She coughed and, in her effort at repression coughed again.

“Charley, I—honest, I—I’m going to keel. I—I can’t stand it packed in here—like this.”

She leaned to him, with the color drained out of her face; and the crowd of black and pink and red dominos, gnomes gone mad, pressed, batted, surged.

“Look out, Sweetness! Don’t give out in here! They’ll crush us out. Ain’t you got no nerve? Here; don’t give out now! Gee! Watch out, there! The lady’s sick. Watch out! Here; now sit down a minute and get your wind.”

He pressed her shoulders downward and she dropped whitely on a little camp chair hidden underneath the balcony.

“I gotta get out, Charley; I gotta get out and get air. I feel like I’m going to suffocate in here. It’s this old cough takes the breath out of me.”

In the foyer she revived a bit and drank gratefully of the water he brought; but the color remained out of her cheeks and the cough would rack her.

“I guess I oughtta go home, Charley.”

“Aw, cut it! You ain’t the only girl I’ve seen give out. Sit here and rest a minute and you’ll be all right. Great Scott! I came here to dance.”

She rose to her feet a bit unsteadily, but smiling.

“Fussy! Who said I didn’t?”

“That’s more like it.”

And they were off again to the lilt of the music but, struggle as she would, the coughing and the dizziness and the heat took hold of her and at the close of the dance she fainted quietly against his shoulder.

And when she finally caught at consciousness, as it passed and repassed her befuddled mind, she was on the floor of the cloak room, her head pillowed on the skirt of a pink domino.

“There, there, dearie; your young man’s waiting outside to take you home.”

“I—I’m all right!”

“Certainly you are. The heat done it. Here; lemme help you out of your domino.”

“It was the heat done it.”

“There; you’re all right now. I gotta get back to my dance. You fainted right up against him, dearie; and I seen you keel.”

“Gee, ain’t I the limit!”

“Here; lemme help you on with your coat. Right there he is, waiting.”

In the foyer Sara Juke met Charley Chubb shamefacedly.

“I spoilt everything, didn’t I?”

“I guess you couldn’t help it. All right?”

“Yes, Charley.” She met the air gratefully, worming her little hand into the curve of his elbow. “Gee! I feel fine now.”

“Come; here’s a car.”

“Let’s walk up Sixth Avenue, Charley; the air feels fine.”

“All right.”

“You ain’t sore, are you, Charley? It was so jammed dancing, anyway.”

“I ain’t sore.”

“It was the heat done it.”

“Yeh.”

“Honest, it’s grand to be outdoors, ain’t it? The stars and—and chilliness and—and—all!”

“Listen to the garden stuff!”

“Silly!”

She squeezed his arm and drew back, shamefaced. His spirits rose.

“You’re a right loving little thing when you wanna be.”

They laughed in duet; and before the plate-glass window of a furniture emporium they must stop and regard the monthly-payment display, designed to represent the $49.50 completely furnished sitting room, parlor and dining room of the home felicitous—a golden-oak room, with an incandescent fire glowing right merrily in the grate; a lamp redly diffusing the light of home; a plaster-of-Paris Cupid shooting a dart from the mantelpiece; and, last, two figures of connubial bliss, smiling and waxen, in rocking chairs, their waxen infant, block-building on the floor, completing the picture.

“Gee, it looks as snug as a bug in a rug! Looka what it says too: ‘You Get the Girl; We’ll Do the Rest!’ Some little advertisement, ain’t it? I got the girl all right—ain’t I, hon?”

“Aw!”

“Look at the papa—slippers and all! And the kid! Look at the kid, Sweetness.”

Her confusion nearly choked her and her rapid breath clouded the window glass.

“Yeh, Charley! Looka the little kid! Ain’t he cute?”

An Elevated train crashed over their heads, drowning out her words; but her smile, which flickered like light over her face, persisted and her arm crept back into his. At each shop window they must pause, but the glow of the first one remained with her.

“Look, Sweetness—Red Swag, the Train King! Performance going on now. Wanna go in?”

“Not to-night. Let’s stay outside.”

“Anything your little heart de-sires.”

They bought hot chestnuts, city harbingers of autumn, from a vender and let fall the hulls as they walked. They drank strawberry ice-cream soda, pink with foam. Her resuscitation was complete; his spirits did not wane.

“I gotta like a queen pretty much not to get sore at a busted evening like this. It’s a good thing the ticket didn’t cost me nothing.”

“Ain’t it, though?”

“Look! What’s in there—a exhibit?”

They paused before a white-lighted store front and he read laboriously:

FREE TUBERCULOSIS EXHIBIT
TO EDUCATE PEOPLE HOW TO PREVENT CONSUMPTION

“Oh!” She dragged at his arm.

“Aw, come on, Sweetness; nothing but a lot of T.B.’s.”

“Let’s—let’s go in. See, it’s free. Looka—it’s all lit up and all; see, pictures and all.”

“Say, ain’t I enough of a dead one without dragging me in there? Free! I bet they pinch you for something before you get out.”

“Come on, Charley; I never did see a place like this.”

“Aw, they’re all over town.”

He followed her in surlily enough and then, with a morbid interest, round a room hung with photographs of victims in various emaciated stages of the white plague.

“Oh! Oh! Ain’t it awful? Ain’t it awful? Read them symptoms. Almost with nothing it—it begins. Night sweats and losing weight and coughing, and—oh—”

“Look! Little kids and all! Thin as matches.”

“Aw, see, a poor little shaver like that! Look! It says sleeping in that dirty room without a window gave it to him. Ugh, that old man! ‘Self-indulgence and intemperance.’ Looka that girl in the tobacco factory. Oh! Oh! Ain’t it awful! Dirty shops and stores, it says; dirty saloons and dance halls—weak lungs can’t stand them.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Aw, look! How pretty she is in this first picture; and look at her here—nothing but a stack of bones on a stretcher. Aw! Aw!”

“Come on!”

“Courage is very important, it says. Consumptives can be helped and many are cured. Courage is—”

“Come on; let’s get out of this dump. Say, it’s a swell night for a funeral.”

She grasped at his coat sleeve, pinching the flesh with it, and he drew away half angrily.

“Come on, I said.”

“All right!”

A thin line filed past them, grim-faced, silent. At the far end of the room, statistics in red inch-high type ran columnwise down the wall’s length. She read, with a gasp in her throat:

1. Ten thousand people died from tuberculosis in the city of New York last year.
2. Two hundred thousand people died from tuberculosis in the United States last year.
3. Records of the Health Department show that there are 31,631 living cases of tuberculosis in the city of New York.
4. Every three minutes some one in the United States dies from consumption.

“Oh, Charley, ain’t it awful!”

At a desk a young man, with skin as pink as though a strong wind had whipped it into color, distributed pamphlets to the outgoing visitors—a thin streamlet of them; some cautious, some curious, some afraid.

“Come on; let’s hurry out of here, Sweetness. My lung’s hurting this minute.”

They hurried past the desk; but the young man with the clear pink skin reached over the heads of an intervening group, waving a long printed booklet toward the pair.

“Circular, missy?”

Sara Juke straightened, with every nerve in her body twanging like a plucked violin string; and her eyes met the clear eyes of the young clerk.

Like a doll automaton she accepted the booklet from him; like a doll automaton she followed Charley Chubb out into the street, and her limbs were trembling so she could scarcely stand.

“Gotta hand it to you, Sweetness. Even made a hit on the fellow in the lung shop! He didn’t hand me out no literachure. Some little hit!”

“I gotta go home now, Charley.”

“It’s only ten.”

“I better go, Charley. It ain’t Saturday night.”

At the stoop of her rooming house they lingered. A honey-colored moon hung like a lantern over the block-long row of shabby-fronted houses. On her steps and to her fermenting fancy the shadow of an ash can sprawled like a prostrate human being.

“Charley!”

She clutched his arm.

“Whatcha scared about, Sweetness?”

“Oh, Charley, I—I feel creepy to-night.”

“That visit to the Morgue was enough to give anybody the blind staggers.”

Her pamphlet was tight in her hand.

“You ain’t mad at me, Charley?”

He stroked her arm, and the taste of tears found its way to her mouth.

“I’m feeling so sillylike to-night, Charley.”

“You’re all in, kiddo.”

In the shadow he kissed her.

“Charley, you—you mustn’t, unless we’re—engaged.” But she could not find the strength to unfold herself from his arms. “You mustn’t, Charley!”

“Great little girl you are, Sweetness—one great little girl!”

“Aw, Charley!”

“And, to show you that I like you, I’m going to make up for this to-morrow night. A real little Saturday-night blow! And don’t forget Sunday afternoon—two o’clock for us, down at Crissey’s Hall. Two o’clock.”

“Two o’clock.”

“Good!”

“Oh, Charley, I—”

“What, Sweetness?”

“Oh, nothing; I—I’m just silly to-night.”

Her hand lay on his arm, white in the moonlight and light as a leaf; and he kissed her again, scorching her lips.

“Good night, Sweetness.”

“Good night, Charley.”

Then up four flights of stairs, through musty halls and past closed doors, their white china knobs showing through the darkness, and up to the fourth-floor rear, and then on tiptoe into a long, narrow room, with the moonlight flowing in.

Clothing lay about in grotesque heaps—a woman’s blouse was flung across the back of a chair and hung limply; a pair of shoes stood beside the bed in the attitude of walking—tired-looking shoes, run down at the heels and skinned at the toes. And on the far side of the three-quarter bed the hump of an outstretched figure, face turned from the light, with sparse gray-and-black hair flowing over the pillow.

Carefully, to save the slightest squeak, Sara Juke undressed, folded her little mound of clothing across the room’s second chair, groping carefully by the stream of moonlight. Severe as a sibyl in her straight-falling night-dress, her hair spreading over her shoulders, her bare feet pattered on the cool matting. Then she slid into bed lightly, scarcely raising the covers. From the mantelpiece the alarm clock ticked with emphasis.

An hour she lay there. Once she coughed, and smothered it in her pillow. Two hours. She slipped from under the covers and over to the littered dresser. The pamphlet lay on top of her gloves; she carried it to the window and, with her limbs trembling and sending ripples down her night robe, read it. Then again, standing there by the window in the moonlight, she quivered so that her knees bent under her.

After a while she raised the window slowly and without a creak, and a current of cool air rushed in and over her before she could reach the bedside.

On her pillow Hattie Krakow stirred reluctantly, her weary senses battling with the pleasant lethargy of sleep; but a sudden nip in the air stung her nose and found out the warm crevices of the bed. She stirred and half opened her eyes.

“For Gawd’s sake, Sara, are you crazy? Put that window down! Tryin’ to freeze us out? Opening a window with her cough and all! Put it down! Put—it—down!”

Sara Juke rose and slammed it shut, slipping back into the cold bed with teeth that clicked. After a while she slept; but lightly, with her mouth open and her face upturned. And after a while she woke to full consciousness all at once, and with a cough on her lips. Her gown at the yoke was wet; and her neck, where she felt it, was damp with cold perspiration.

“Oh—oh—Hattie! Oh—oh!”

She burrowed under her pillow to ease the trembling that seized her. The moon had passed on, and darkness, which is allied to fear, closed her in—the fear of unthinking youth who knows not that the grave is full of peace; the fear of abundant life for senile death; the cold agony that comes in the night watches, when the business of the day is but a dream and Reality visits the couch.

Deeper burrowed Sara Juke, trembling with chill and night sweat.

Drowsily Hattie Krakow turned on her pillow, but her senses were too weary to follow her mind’s dictate.

“Sara! ’Smatter, Sara? ’Smat-ter?” Hattie’s tired hand crept toward her friend; but her volition would not carry it across and it fell inert across the coverlet. “’Smatter, dearie?”

“N-nothin’.”

“’Smat-ter, dear-ie?”

“N-nothin’.”

In the watches of the night a towel flung across the bedpost becomes a gorilla crouching to spring; a tree branch tapping at the window an armless hand, beckoning. In the watches of the night fear is a panther across the chest sucking the breath; but his eyes cannot bear the light of day, and by dawn he has shrunk to cat size. The ghastly dreams of Orestes perished with the light; phosphorus is yellowish and waxlike by day.

So Sara Juke found new courage with the day, and in the subbasement of the Titanic store the morning following her laughter was ready enough. But when the midday hour arrived she slipped into her jacket, past the importunities of Hattie Krakow, and out into the sun-lashed noonday swarm of Sixth Avenue.

Down one block—two, three; then a sudden pause before a narrow store front liberally placarded with invitatory signs to the public, and with a red cross blazoning above the doorway. And Sara Juke, whose heart was full of fear, faltered, entered.

The same thin file passed round the room, halting, sauntering, like grim visitors in a grim gallery. At a front desk a sleek young interne, tiptilted in a swivel chair, read a pink sheet through horn-rimmed glasses.

Toward the rear the young man whose skin was the wind-lashed pink sorted pamphlets and circulars in tall, even piles on his desk.

Round and round the gallery walked Sara Juke; twice she read over the list of symptoms printed in inch-high type; her heart lay within her as though icy dead, and her eyes would blur over with tears. Once, when she passed the rear desk, the young man paused in his stacking and regarded her with a warming glance of recognition.

“Hello!” he said. “You back?”

“Yes.” Her voice was the thin cry of a quail.

“You must like our little picture gallery, eh?”

“Oh! Oh!” She caught at the edge of his desk and tears lay heavy in her eyes.

“Eh?”

“Yes; I—I like it. I wanna buy it for my yacht.”

Her ghastly simulacrum of a jest died in her throat; and he said quickly, a big blush suffusing his face:

“I was only fooling, missy. You ain’t got the scare, have you?”

“The scare?”

“Yes; the bug? You ain’t afraid you’ve ate the germ, are you?”

“I—I dunno.”

“Pshaw! There’s a lot of ’em comes in here more scared than hurt, missy. Never throw a scare till you’ve had a examination. For all you know you got hay fever, eh! Hay fever!” And he laughed as though to salve his words.

“I—got all them things on the red-printed list, I tell you. I—I got ’em all, night sweats and all. I—I got ’em.”

“Sure you got ’em, missy; but that don’t need to mean nothin’ much.”

“I got ’em, I tell you.”

“Losin’ weight?”

“Feel.”

He inserted two fingers in her waistband.

“Huh!”

“You a doctor?”

He performed a great flourish.

“I ain’t in the profesh, missy. I’m only chief clerk and bottle washer round here; but—”

“Where is the doctor? That him reading down there? Can I ask him—I—Oh! Ain’t I scared!”

He placed his big, cool hand over her wrist and his face had none of its smile.

“I know you are, little missy. I seen it in you last night when you and—and—”

“My—my friend.”

“—your friend was in here. There’s thousands come in here with the scare on, and most of ’em with a reason; but I picked you out last night from the gang. Funny thing, but right away I picked you. ‘A pretty little thing like her’—if you’ll excuse me for saying it—’a pretty little thing like her,’ I says to myself. ‘And I bet she ain’t got nobody to steer her!’”

“Honest, did you?”

“Gee, it ain’t none of my put-in; but when I seen you last night—funny thing—but when I seen you, why, you just kinda hit me in the eye; and, with all that gang round me, I says to myself: ‘Gee, a pretty little thing like her, scared as a gazelle, and so pretty and all; and no one to give her the right steer!’”

“Aw, you seen me?”

“Sure! Wasn’t it me reached out the pamphlet to you? You had on that there same cutey little hat and jacket and all.”

“Does it cost anything to talk to the doctor down there?”

“Forget it! Go right down and he’ll give you a card to the Victoria Clinic. I know them all over there and they’ll look you over right, little missy, and steer you. Aw, don’t be scared; there ain’t nothing much wrong with you—maybe a sore spot, that’s all. That cough ain’t a double-lunger. You run over to the clinic.”

“I gotta go back to the store now.”

“After store, then.”

“Free?”

“Sure! Old Doc Strauss is on after five too. If I ain’t too nervy I’m off after six myself. I could meet you after and we could talk over what he tells you—if I ain’t too nervy?”

“I—”

“Blaney’s my name—Eddie Blaney. Ask anybody round here about me. I—I could meet you, little missy, and—”

“I can’t to-night, Mr. Blaney. I gotta go somewheres.”

“Aw!”

“I gotta.”

“To-morrow? To-morrow’s Sunday, little missy. There’s a swell lot of country I bet you ain’t never seen, and Old Doc Strauss is going to tell you to get acquainted with it pretty soon.”

“Country?”

“Yes. That’s what you need, outdoors; that’s what you need, little missy. You got a color like all indoors—pretty, but putty.”

“You—you don’t think there’s nothing much the matter with me, do you, Mr. Blaney?”

“Sure I don’t. Why, I got a bunch of Don’ts for you up my sleeve that’ll color you up like drug-store daub.”

Tears and laughter trembled in her voice.

“You mean that the outdoor stuff will do it, Mr. Blaney?”

“That’s the talk!”

“But you—you ain’t the doctor.”

“I ain’t, but I ain’t been deaf and dumb and blind round here for three years. I can pick ’em every time. You’re taking your stitch in time, little missy. You ain’t even got a wheeze in you. Why, I bet you ain’t never seen red!”

“No!” she cried, with quick comprehension.

“Sure you ain’t!”

More tears and laughter in her voice.

“I’m going to-night, then—at six, Mr. Blaney.”

“Good! And to-morrow? There’s a lot of swell country and breathing space round here I’d like to introduce you to. I bet you don’t know whether Ingleside Woods is kindling or a breakfast food—now do you?”

“No.”

“Ever had a chigger on you?”

“Huh?”

“Ever sleep outdoors in a bag?”

“Say, whatta you think I am?”

“Ever seen the sun rise, or took the time to look up and see several dozen or a couple of thousand or so stars glittering all at once?”

“Aw, come off! We ain’t doing teamwork in vaudeville.”

“Gee, wouldn’t I like to take you out and be the first one to make you acquainted with a few of the things that are happening beyond Sixth Avenue—if I ain’t too nervy, little missy?”

“I gotta go somewheres at two o’clock to-morrow afternoon, Mr.—Mr. Blaney; but I can go in the morning—if it ain’t going to look like I’m a freshie.”

“In the morning! Swell! But where—who—” She scribbled on a slip of paper and fluttered it into his hand. “Sara Juke! Some little name. Gee! I know right where you live. I know a lot of cases that come from round there. I used to live near there myself, round on Henry Street. I’ll call round at nine, little missy. I’m going to introduce you to the country, eh?”

“They won’t hurt at the clinic, will they, Mr. Blaney? I’m losing my nerve again.”

“Shame on a pretty little thing like you losing her nerve! Gee! I’ve seen ’em come in here all pale round the gills and with nothing but the whooping cough. There was a little girl in here last week who thought she was ready for Arizona on a canvas bed; and it wasn’t nothing but her rubber skirt-band had stretched. Shame on you, little missy! Don’t you get scared! Wait till you see what I’m going to show you out in the country to-morrow—leaves turning red and all. We’re going to have a heart-to-heart talk out there—eh? A regular lung-to-lung talk!”

“Aw, Mr. Blaney! Ain’t you killing!”

She hurried down the room, laughing.

At Sharkey’s on Saturday night the entire basement café and dance hall assumed a hebdomadal air of expectancy; extra marble-topped tables were crowded about the polished square of dancing space; the odor of hops and sawdust and cookery hung in visible mists over the bar.

Girls, with white faces and red lips and bare throats, sat alone at tables or tête-à-tête with men too old or too young, and ate; but drank with keener appetite.

A self-playing piano performed beneath a large painting of an undraped Psyche; a youth with yellow fingers sang of Love. A woman whose shame was gone acquired a sudden hysteria at her lone table over her milky-green drink, and a waiter hustled her out none too gently.

In the foyer at seven o’clock Sara Juke met Charley Chubb, and he slid up quite frankly behind her and kissed her on the lips. At Sharkey’s a miss is as good as her kiss!

“You—you quit! You mustn’t!”

She sprang back, quivering, her face cold-looking and blue; and he regarded her with his mouth quirking.

“Huh! Hoity-toity, ain’t you? Hoity-toity and white-faced and late, all at once, ain’t you? Say, them airs don’t get across with me. Come on! I’m hungry.”

“I didn’t mean to yell, Charley—only you scared me. I thought maybe it was one of them fresh guys that hang round here; all of ’em look so dopey and all. I—you know I never was strong for this place, Charley.”

“Beginning to nag, are you?”

“No, no, Charley. No, no!”

They drew up at a small table.

“No fancy keeling act to-night, kiddo. I ain’t taking out a hospital ward, you know. Gad, I like you, though, when you’re white-looking like this! Why’d you dodge me at noon to-day and to-night after closing? New guy? I won’t stand for it, you know, you little white-faced Sweetness, you!”

“I hadda go somewheres, Charley. I came near not coming to-night, neither, Charley.”

“What’ll you eat?”

“I ain’t hungry.”

“Thirsty, eh?”

“No.”

He regarded her over the rim of the smirchy bill of fare.

“What are you, then, you little white-faced, big-eyed devil?”

“Charley, I—I got something to—to tell you. I—”

“Bring me a lamb stew and a beer, light. What’ll you have, little white-face?”

“Some milk and—”

“She means with suds on, waiter.”

“No—no; milk, I said—milk over toast. Milk toast—I gotta eat it. Why don’t you lemme talk, Charley? I gotta tell you.”

He was suddenly sober.

“What’s hurting you? One milk toast, waiter; tell them in the kitchen the lady’s teeth hurt her. What’s up, Sweetness?” And he must lean across the table and imprint a fresh kiss on her lips.

“Don’t—don’t—don’t! For Gawd’s sake, don’t!” She covered her face with her hands; and such a trembling seized her that they fell pitifully away again and showed her features, each distorted, “You mustn’t, Charley! Mustn’t do that again, not—not for three months—you—you mustn’t.”

He leaned across the table; his voice was like sleet—cold, thin, cutting:

“What’s the matter—going to quit?”

“No—no—no!”

“Got another guy you like better?”

“Oh! Oh!”

“A queenie can’t quit me first and get away with it, kiddo. I may be a soft-fingered sort of fellow, but a queenie can’t quit me first and get away with it. Ask ’em about me round here; they know me. If anybody in this little duet is going to do the quitting act first it ain’t going to be you. What’s the matter? Out with it!”

“Charley, it ain’t that—I swear it ain’t that!”

“What’s hurting you, then?”

“I gotta tell you. We gotta go easy for a little while. We gotta quit doing the rounds for a while till—only for a little while. Three months he said would fix me. A grand old doc he was!

“I been to the clinic, Charley. I hadda go. The cough—the cough was cuttin’ me in two. It ain’t like me to go keeling like I did. I never said much about it; but, nights and all, the sweats and the cough and the shooting pains was cutting me in two. We gotta go easy for a while, Charley; just—”

“You sick, Sara?” His fatty-white face lost a shade of its animation. “Sick?”

“But it ain’t, Charley. On his word he promised it ain’t! A grand old doc, with whiskers—he promised me that. I—I am just beginning; but the stitch was in time. It ain’t a real case yet, Charley. I swear, on my mother’s curl of hair, it ain’t.”

“Ain’t what? Ain’t what?”

“It ain’t! Air, he said, right living—early hours and all. I gotta get out of the basement. He’ll get me a job. A grand old man! Windows open; right living. No—no dancing and all, for a while, Charley. Three months only, Charley; and then—”

“What, I say—”

“It ain’t, Charley! I swear it ain’t. Just one—the left one—a little sore down at the base—the bottom. Charley, quit looking at me like that! It ain’t a real case—it ain’t; it ain’t!”

“It ain’t what?”

“The—the T.B. Just the left one; down at—”

“You—you—” An oath as hot as a live coal dropped from his lips and he drew back, strangling. “You—you got it, and you’re letting me down easy. You got it, and it’s catching as hell! You got it, you white devil, and—and you’re tryin’ to lie out of it—you—you—”

“Charley! Charley!”

“You got it, and you been letting me eat it off your lips! You devil, you! You devil, you! You devil, you!”

“Charley, I—”

“I could kill you! Lemme wash my mouth! You got it; and if you got it I got it! I got it! I got it! I—I—”

He rushed from the table, strangling, stuttering, staggering; and his face was twisted with fear.

For an hour she sat there, waiting, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes growing larger in her face. The dish of stew took on a thin coating of grease and the beer died in the glass. The waiter snickered. After a while she paid for the meal out of her newly opened wage envelope and walked out into the air.

Once on the street, she moaned audibly into her handkerchief. There is relief in articulation. Her way lay through dark streets, where figures love to slink in the shadows. One threw a taunt at her and she ran. At the stoop of her rooming house she faltered, half fainting and breathing deep from exhaustion, her head thrown back and her eyes gazing upward.

Over the narrow street stars glittered, dozens and myriads of them.

Literature has little enough to say of the heartaches and the heartburns of the Sara Jukes and the Hattie Krakows and the Eddie Blaneys. Medical science concedes them a hollow organ for keeping up the circulation. Yet Mrs. Van Ness’ heartbreak over the death of her Chinese terrier, Wang, claims a first-page column in the morning edition; her heartburn—a complication of midnight terrapin and the strain of her most recent rôle of corespondent—obtains her a suite de luxe in a private sanitarium.

Vivisectionists believe the dog is less sensitive to pain than man; so the social vivisectionists, in problem plays and best sellers, are more concerned with the heartaches and heartburns of the classes. But analysis would show that the sediment of salt in Sara Juke’s and Mrs. Van Ness’ tears is equal.

Indeed, when Sara Juke stepped out of the street car on a golden Sunday morning in October, her heart beat higher and more full of emotion than Mrs. Van Ness could find at that breakfast hour, reclining on her fine linen pillows, an electric massage and a four-dollar-an-hour masseuse forcing her sluggish blood to flow.

Eddie Blaney gently helped Sara to alight, cupping the point of her elbow in his hand; and they stood huddled for a moment by the roadway while the car whizzed past, leaving them in the yellow and ocher, saffron and crimson countryside.

“Gee! Gee-whiz!”

“See! I told you. And you not wanting to come when I called for you this morning—you trying to dodge me and the swellest Indian summer Sunday on the calendar!”

“Looka!”

“Wait! We ain’t started yet, if you think this is swell.”

“Oh! Let’s go over in them woods. Let’s.” Her lips were apart and pink crept into her cheeks, effacing the dark rims of pain beneath her eyes. “Let’s hurry.”

“Sure; that’s where we’re going—right over in there, where the woods look like they’re on fire; but, gee, this ain’t nothing to the country places I know round here. This ain’t nothing. Wait!”

The ardor of the inspired guide was his, and with each exclamation from her the joy of his task doubled itself.

“If you think this is great, wait—just you wait. Gee, if you like this, what would you have said to the farm? Wait till we get to the top of the hill.”

Fallen leaves, crisp as paper, crackled pleasantly under their feet; and through the haze that is October’s veil glowed a reddish sun, vague as an opal. A footpath crawled like a serpent through the woods and they followed it, kicking up the leaves before them, pausing, darting, exclaiming.

“I—Honest, Mr. Blaney, I—”

“Eddie!”

“Eddie, I—I never did feel so—I never was so—so—Aw, I can’t say it.” Tears sprang to her eyes.

“Sure, you never was. I never was, neither, before—before—”

“Before what?”

“Before I had to.”

“Had to?”

“Yeh; both of them. Bleedin’ all the time. Didn’t see nothing but red for ’leven months.”

“You!”

“Yeh; three years ago. Looked like Arizona on a stretcher for me.”

“You—so big and strong and all!”

He smiled at her and his teeth flashed.

“Gad, little girl, if you got a right to be scared, whatta you think I had? I seen your card over at the clinic last night, and you ain’t got no right to have that down-and-out look on you had this morning. If you think you got something to be scared at you looka my old card at the clinic some day; they keep it for show. You oughtta seen me the day I quit the shipping room, right over at the Titanic, too, and then see whether you got something to be scared at.”

“You—you used to work there?”

“Six years.”

“I—I ain’t scared no more, Eddie; honest, I ain’t!”

“Gee, I should say not! They ain’t even sending you up to the farm.”

“No, no! They’re going to get me a job. A regular outdoor, on-the-level kind of a job. A grand old doc, with whiskers! I ain’t a regular one, Eddie; just the bottom of one lung don’t make a regular one.”

“Well, I guess not, poor little missy. Well, I guess not.”

“Three months he said, Eddie. Three months of right livin’ like this, and air and all, and I’ll be as round as a peach, he said. Said it hisself, without me asking—that’s how scared I was. Round as a peach!”

“You can’t beat that gang over there at the clinic, little missy. They took me out of the department when all the spring water I knew about ran out of a keg. Even when they got me out on the farm—a grown-up guy like me—for a week I thought the crow in the rooster was a sidewalk faker. You can’t beat that, little missy.”

“He’s a grand old man, with whiskers, that’s going to get me the job. Then in three months I—”

“Three months nothing! That gang won’t let you slip back after the three months. They took a extra shine to me because I did the prize-pupil stunt; but they won’t let anybody slip back if they give ’em half a chance. When they got me sound again, did they ship me back to the shipping department in the sub-basement? Not muchy! Looka me now, little missy! Clerk in their biggest display; in three months a raise to ninety dollars. Can you beat it? Ninety dollars would send all the shipping clerks of the world off in a faint.”

“Gee, it—it’s swell!”

“And—”

“Look! Look!”

“Persimmons!” A golden mound of them lay at the base of a tree, piled up against the hole, bursting, brown. “Persimmons! Here; taste one, little missy. They’re fine.”

“Eat ’em?”

“Sure!”

She bit into one gently; then with appetite.

“M-m-m! Good!”

“Want another?”

“M-m-m—my mouth! Ouch! My m—mouth!”

“Gee, you cute little thing, you! See, my mouth’s the same way too. Feels like a knot. Gee, you cute little thing, you—all puckered up and all.”

And he must link her arm in his and crunch-crunch over the brittle leaves and up a hillside to a plateau of rock overlooking the flaming country; and from the valley below, smoke from burning mounds of leaves wound in spirals, its pungency drifting to them.

“See that tree there? It’s a oak. Look; from a little acorn like this it grew. See, this is a acorn, and in the start that tree wasn’t no bigger than this little thing.”

“Quit your kiddin’!” But she smiled and her lips were parted sweetly; and always unformed tears would gloze her eyes.

“Here, sit here, little lady. Wait till I spread this newspaper out. Gee! Don’t I wish you didn’t have to go back to the city by two o’clock, little lady! We could make a great day of it here, out in the country; lunch at a farm and see the sun set and all. Some day of it we could make if—”

“I—I don’t have to go back, Eddie.”

His face expanded into his widest smile.

“Gee, that’s great! That’s just great!”

Silence.

“What you thinking of, little lady, sitting there so pretty and all?”

“N-nothing.”

“Nothing? Aw, surely something!”

A tear formed and zigzagged down her cheek.

“Nothing, honest; only I—I feel right happy.”

“That’s just how you oughtta feel, little lady.”

“In three months, if—aw, ain’t I the nut?”

“It’ll be a big Christmas, won’t it, little missy, for both of us? A big Christmas for both of us; you as sound and round as a peach again, and me shooting up like a skyrocket on the pay roll.”

A laugh bubbled to her lips before the tear was dry.

“In three months I won’t be a T.B., not even a little bit.”

“Sh-h-h! On the farm we wasn’t allowed to say even that. We wasn’t supposed to even know what them letters mean.”

“Don’t you know what they mean, Eddie?”

“Sure I do!” He leaned toward her and placed his hand lightly over hers. “T.B.—True Blue—that’s what they mean, little lady.”

She could feel the veins in his palm throbbing.

[8] Copyright, 1915, by The Curtis Publishing Company. Copyright, 1916, by Fannie Hurst.

MR. EBERDEEN’S HOUSE[9]

By ARTHUR JOHNSON
From The Century

It loomed there, high and large, uncompromised by the gloom of mist about it, unruffled by the easterly gusts that bent the two rows of larches which stretched in deliberate diagonal lines from the street to the corners of its grim façade. Hastings could hear the beating of the sea; it was probably in that chaos of space behind the house. As he stood leaning against one of the tall gate-posts and surveying the scene, he began to feel, almost in spite of himself, in sympathy with it.

A motor drew up near where he stood. Instinctively his attention was directed from it to the green Georgian portal, which at the moment was drawn in to permit somebody to pass out. She was in glaring contrast to her setting; she was fresh and lovely, young and fashionable-looking. She paused on the wide stone step, glanced up at the sky, opened her umbrella, and briskly proceeded down the avenue to the gate. Within a few yards of it she raised her eyes from the puddled gravel and started back at sight of him.

“Jack!” she cried out. “How did you get here? Why didn’t you tell me? I am this minute on my way to meet you.”

“I’m admiring your summer home, Julia—Julia dear,” he said to her, a little constrained. “It’s sad and desolate, and everything that I suppose you want it to be. I expected to hate it. I thought that having spent most of my life away from all this, I should have lost every scrap of—tolerance for New England. But ever since I set foot in Rockface—”

“When did you, Jack?” she demanded.

“An hour ago. I’ve been in the strangest mood ever since.”

“Come, now, and tell me about it,” she suddenly saw the need to say, walking away from him to dismiss the grinning chauffeur.

Hastings lingered alone in the hall.

“It’s much nicer by the fire,” Julia called to him impatiently from the next room. And he followed the sound of her voice; he moved slowly over to a chair, opposite her own, and sat down, forgetting to talk. “I vow I’m amused,” she exclaimed, “at the way you take it. You’ve made letters full of fun of me for settling my parents ’on that ugly little Massachusetts point’; you’ve laid it all down to my ‘Middle-Western love of Puritan relics’ and ‘Eastern culturine,’ and scorned my ‘romantic inexperience’; and here you come, redolent of Europe, to be as much impressed by our choice as if you were a Montana school-girl!” He smiled back, but it was obvious that he hadn’t heard a word. “What’s the matter with you, Jacky?” she asked interestedly; “had a bad journey?”

He tried to concentrate his faculties on looking genial and at the same time intelligent.

“It was just like me, Julia,” he began, the ghost of cheerfulness on his face. “I took the earliest sort of train, instead of the one I telephoned you I’d take. You see, to have landed at night, after all the years—think of it! And then to go walking around by myself, seeing things crop suddenly up that I hadn’t thought of since—well—scarcely since I was born. No wonder I couldn’t sleep. This morning, like a stranded idiot, I got out at that little way-station of yours, and realized for the first time that I didn’t have a blessed idea where you lived.”

“Rockface is about as enormous as a biscuit. Anybody could have told you.”

“That’s the strangest part of it,” recollected Hastings. “You see, I had a curious hunch about it; I felt a little forsaken. I was actually surprised and irritated that somebody—I didn’t know who—wasn’t waiting to meet me.

“There was something about the place, Julia,” he gravely pursued, “made me feel justified in thinking a hospitable welcome was due me ... Oh I don’t mean because you were here! But—well—the veil of sea-turn that half-hid the buildings across the square made me feel the need of some kind of greeting—I expected one!—right on the spot! Can you understand? And—instead—the cold east wind blew round me as if I were an outcast.

“I stole down the first crooked street I came to. I stared at the house-fronts, at the little square panes of the sagging window-sashes, at the dingy doors, with those short, steep flights of steps leading down to the side-walks.”

Julia sobered to a tentative frown. Jack’s eyes were bigger than usual, and he did look, notwithstanding the feverish flush on his cheeks, rather fagged. How she had been counting the days for him to come! It didn’t seem possible that the visit which he had been promising for so long to make her should have finally materialized. Wasn’t it really an indication,—she pondered while again happily she sized up the situation,—if he took so much trouble for her, that he did, after all, care more perhaps than she had sometimes thought? But what an extraordinary meeting it had been! He had at once launched forth on this extreme discourse. She sat back, and let her eyes rest on him with amused tolerance, her smile attentively adjusted to suit his mood; for her moment’s anxiety vanished at further sight of his strong, broad shoulders and the handsome appearance he made in her favorite high-back chair, his firm hands grasping the arms of it.

“You’ve stayed away from America too long,” she said carelessly; “Paris is bad for you.”

He leaned forward, his delicately modeled cheekbones emphasized by the firelight, his hair becomingly awry.

“I knew it would all be as it was,” he went inspiredly on. “There was a thick clump of hedge, cold and dreary in the mist, that awoke pictures of a prison I used to dread the sight of when I was—I don’t know how old. Once I partly thought I must be dreaming; so I put out my hand and touched the wet, sodden picket of an old fence. I looked suspiciously behind me. But there was only an old man behind, fully two hundred yards away. Then the idea came to me that it would be a relief to talk to somebody; I hadn’t interchanged a word with any one since I got off the ship. All kinds of impressions, you see, had been accumulating, and they thronged like phantoms about me.

“I wanted to hear myself speak—to see if I could. So I turned, and waited for him to come. The rain was dripping all around; there wasn’t another sound anywhere. Now, this is the queerest thing of all: what do you think I said to him?” Jack leaned forward, his eyes darting intensely over her face. “I said: ‘Can you tell me the way to Mr. Eberdeen’s house?’”

“Mr.—Eberdeen’s house!” She stood abruptly up. “Who—who told you,” she gasped, “that this was Mr. Eberdeen’s house?”

He stood up, too, stepping back from her. “You must have told me,” he said, aware of his quivering lips, “in one of your letters. The name came to me—”

“I never told you,” she stated emphatically, “I never told any one—for—for—why did you ask such a question of that old man?”

His gaze wandered.

“My throat felt parched from disuse. It took a distinct effort to make the words sound articulate.

“‘Sure, now,’ answered the old man, while I was still puzzling to explain to myself the question I had asked him, ‘but never have I heard it called that—not since my father died from the cold he caught drivin’ the mare up from Portsville. Ther’ was a time, in the days when they talked of it bein’ ha’nted, you’d hear folks call it Eberdeen Manor; but not—no, and my father likely’s been dead these forty years now—never, Mr. Eberdeen’s house!”

“‘Mr. Eberdeen—there was such a person, then?’

“‘There’ll be a time, me boy, when they’ll doubt yerself was a living thing.’ He straightened his bent body reprehensibly; he shook his head. ‘Walk back to the next corner,’ he muttered, ‘and turn to yer left. It’ll be down there ber the cliffs, if nobody’s stolen it. Somebody’ll sure ’nough be there ter point it out to yer.’

“‘I’m a stranger,’ I apologized; ‘I really didn’t know.’

“‘Know!’ he shouted. ‘Who was it owned the land this ’ere street runs over? Who built it? Who was it paid fer the church on the hill? Who did fer the sick, and gave to the poor, and got nothin’ hisself fer the trouble but grief and loneliness and a broken heart? Wher’ did yer come from?’

“And he surveyed me, as if the mere fact of his seeing me for the first time made him doubt my intentions. Still I stood there waiting.

“‘What was he like? What did he do? Who was he?’ I couldn’t help flinging out in my wonderment.

“‘As good’s’ll ever come back from wher’ yer’ve been, or ’ll pray fer the like of yer, I reckon. Judge not, I tell yer, that yer be not yerself judged.’

“I tried to smile at the old man.

“‘Good-day to yer,’ he grumbled, and walked back in the direction from which he had come. I watched until he was lost in the thickness.”

Julia looked at Hastings in astonishment. Just another glimmer of anxiety crossed her mind; but any foolish worry she might have had for him was merged in her consciousness of something indeed more staggering.

“Do you think,” she brooded, “that it can be true—that—that the house is—was—haunted?”

“I had,” Jack unresponsively continued—“I couldn’t help it—on the way a queer loathing of the little village. The gaunt house-fronts obtruded themselves so obstinately, so self-satisfiedly, like anemic country parsons, with their eyes close together, giving me a mean, soulless stare. Every object testified to its lack of any temperamental share in the joy of living. The emptiness of the streets seemed pitiless; their narrowness was oppressive.”

“I love every inch of it,” said Julia, defiantly.

Hastings was silent. He looked at the dry, colorless walls, covered with circuitous lines of crackling old paint.

“Was this furniture here, Julia?” he asked.

“Not this,” she exclaimed with pride.

“No wonder,” he argued half to himself, “that the next generation preferred black walnut, even with all its grapes and gewgaws! Horrible as it was, it wasn’t so orthodox and priggish and mirthless as what came before.”

He strayed out into the hall again; he viewed its stateliness, its expurgated elegance. “Well, this has got me, Julia—seriously,” he said with a surprised realization that she was standing beside him. “It’s—it’s immense.”

“Oh, that,” she cried out, “from you!” And slowly she stepped closer to say something to him; but she thought better of it. “Don’t you think,” she just let slip, “I’ve made it look at least—well—old?”

“As only a Westerner could want to make it look.” His sense of humor affectionately covered any lack of enthusiasm.

“Come, Jacky,” she urged at last, “I’ll show you all of it before lunch is ready.”

The stairs rose straight in the rear of the hall, directly opposite the main entrance, with its border of finely traceried windows, branching squarely to right and left two thirds of the way up. By the first door above the side whither Julia conducted her guest she stepped fondly back and announced:

“This, Jack, is your room. I hope you will like it.”

“Yes,” he murmured, distractedly gazing about him.

Despite the freshness of everything, despite the new woolen carpets, with their correct geometric designs, ones Julia had had copied from some battered relics which she had somehow acquired, despite the new chintzes and the recently refinished furniture so deliberately assembled there for the first time, despite the spickness and spanness of each suitably collected detail of the room’s decorations, a musty smell in the air caught his breath. The floor swooped reminiscently down toward the right; the boards of it made a stifled creak as he stepped across them. He himself was a little unsteady. The window gave on impenetrable fog. Hastings threw up the sash and peered out into the dampness; he heard the sound of unseen boats groping their ways through the distance; the water lapped and laved below him.

“Jack!” Julia called.

He turned to her, dazed, smiling in that way he had of trying to conceal his consciousness of inattention.

“Of course, it seems plain and spare and—rather humble, after Europe. I know that.”

As if directed by her words, his eyes swept rapidly over the room.

“It’s no use, Julia,” he answered; “if you’re New England to the core, you can’t get free of it. I’d like every drop of New England blood drained out of me, and something—say Hebrew or—or Middle-West,” he laughed, “substituted in place of it. To you this is ‘pretty’ and ‘cozy’ and—and ‘cheerful’; to me—well, it’s like an orgy of blue laws; it’s the personification of witch-lore—like self-inflicted penance for I don’t know what.” He glanced at her in excitement, shifting his hands uneasily in and out of his pockets.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I had thought, nevertheless, that you might like it.”

“Like it?” he echoed. “That’s the trouble. I wish I weren’t so full of the meaning of it all. Can you fancy how a monk might feel, who’d been away on a vacation, just getting back to his cell? Like it? I can’t help liking it. It’s my proper setting; I see that fast enough. But I’ve come back to find how inexorable and harsh and catechismical it is, and naturally I resent being what I am. Oh—” he broke off, suddenly realizing the folly of his harangue, and after another moment he added: “It’s delightful, Julia dear, really. If only all the Westerners could come to New England and revive it—and all the New-Englanders move West and revive themselves!”

They went on from room to room.

“You Westerners,” Hastings reiterated—“oh, I don’t just know what the difference is, for you’re New England, too. Only you’ve got so much else mixed up with it. You’ve become free-lances; your more recent, less bigoted adventures have made you forget.”

“What?” asked Julia, indignantly.

But he was at a loss, as he looked about him, to explain, however much each new survey of the scene convinced him. “Here,” he muttered, “everything has been steeping so long in the attenuated resolutions that drove us to come; everything is still conscientiously soaked—saturated—in the barren memory of it.”

“You’re not,” said Julia, testily, to draw him out. “Precious little of it you’ve had! Two years at a school! You’re more foreign than you are New England. Remember—your—”

“Yes. I don’t forget I’ve one foreign ancestor to boast of, and bless Heaven for it! How my great-grandmother ever happened to marry—see this! “Hastings went on, incoherently catching her arm and waving his other over the exquisite array of her “colonial” chamber. “Now, this, to you, is—well—it’s as ‘amusing’ as if you’d tried to furnish a room to imitate one in Cinderella’s palace, as ‘interesting’ as if you’d done it Louis Sixteenth, or—or—its meaning is hardly more personal to you than the room you furnished in Munich that winter.”—She blushed admiringly at memory of their first meeting.—“The problem appealed to you, and you made it charming. But to me—”

“You really hate it,” said Julia, determined to face the facts.

“I really love it,” he retorted sadly, “the way you couldn’t help loving a parent, even though you mightn’t believe in him.”

“Jack,” she characteristically cried out to him again, “there is one thing more that I hardly dare show you then. You’ll think me such a fool. I—”

A servant appeared to announce that luncheon was ready.

“Don’t say anything to them against it,” she told him on the way down.

That wasn’t, however, what made him silent during the meal. He took little part in the conversation except when Mr. and Mrs. Elliott plied him with questions, which he then found himself answering with only unsatisfactory vagueness—answers that he could do nothing, not even when Julia flew tenderly to his rescue, to make any better. Yes, he liked the house, he said gravely. It was a nice old house. And he thought how murky, despite its new coats of cleaning, was that far corner up near the ceiling. No, he wasn’t sorry, he responded, that he had left the École des Beaux Arts to devote all his time to painting; it was the one thing he was suited for. Yes, his foreign great-grandfather had been a portrait-painter. He couldn’t remember what his name was. Tremaine? Henry Tremaine. That was it. Julia was looking hard at him. She was gazing down at her plate. He knew he had eaten nothing. He could not eat. No, he wasn’t at all hungry. Why was it so chilly? he thought. Doubtless he had picked up a germ. The house, he muttered to himself, was on his nerves. It was so everlastingly gloomy! Julia had reinhabited it too authentically. “Eberdeen Manor”—“Mr. Eberdeen’s House.” What names!

An hour afterward he told Julia he was dead sleepy and that, contrary to all his habits, he was going up-stairs to take a nap. Dinner was at seven? All right, he would be in better shape by then. He felt wretchedly, but he didn’t say so.

Out in the hall he paused a moment at the foot of the wide lower staircase. The ticking of a good many clocks came to him from different parts of the house; they seemed to focus their monotonous activity especially on his hearing. Extraordinary recollections swept him. He remembered having heard an old nurse, Sarah Teale, describe how her aunt once rushed out the back door right in the midst of frying doughnuts, and was instantly stricken with paralysis on account of it. There was a low groaning; a moan floated to him from somewhere above. Bravely he forced himself to climb the stairs toward it. He turned the knob. The door stuck. He shook it again, and it yielded.