THE
BRIARY-BUSH

A Novel

By

Floyd Dell

New York

Alfred · A · Knopf

1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY

ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

S. A. TANNENBAUM, M.D.,

EXPLORER OF THE DARK

CONTINENT OF THE MIND

“Oh, the briary-bush

That pricks my heart so sore!

If I ever get out of the briary-bush

I’ll never get in any more!”

—Old Song

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE: COMMUNITY HOUSE

BOOK TWO: CANAL STREET

BOOK THREE: WOODS POINT

BOOK FOUR: FIFTY-SEVENTH STREET

BOOK FIVE: GARFIELD BOULEVARD

BOOK SIX: WILSON AVENUE

Book One

Community House

I. Felix Decides to Change His Character

1

CHICAGO!

Felix Fay saw with his mind’s eye the map on the wall of the railway station—the map with a picture of iron roads from all over the middle west centering in a dark blotch in the corner.

He was sitting at a desk in the office of the Port Royal Daily Record, writing headings on sheaves of items sent in by country correspondents.

John Hoffman has finished his new barn.

Born to Mr. and Mrs. Elbert Hayes last Wednesday a fine ten pound boy.

Miss Edythe Brush has returned to the State Normal for the fall term.

And so on.

Felix wrote at the top of the page, Wheaton Whittlings. A rotten heading—but it would have to do. He yawned, and then stared unseeingly at the next page.

He was not thinking about those news-items. He was thinking about Chicago....

A year ago, he had determined to leave Port Royal forever—and go to Chicago.

But here he was, still!

2

He had hoped, a year ago, to find, in the excitement of a new life in Chicago, healing for the desperate hurts of love. If only he had gone then!...

But he hadn’t had the money to buy a railway ticket.

He had taken this job on the Record, and settled down to life in Port Royal again as a reporter.

His twenty-first year had gone by.

The hurts of love, so intolerably hard to bear, had healed.

After all, Joyce Tennant had loved him; nothing could ever take away his memories of those starlit evenings on the river, and in the little cabin on their lonely island. She had loved him, she had been his. There was comfort in that thought.... The hurts of love had healed.

But the hurts of pride remained. Loving him, she had chosen to marry another. That wound still ached....

She had seen him all along for what he was—a moonstruck dreamer! She had thought him the fit companion of a reckless love-adventure—that was all.

Her scorn, or what seemed to him her scorn, mirrored and magnified by the secret consciousness of his own weakness, came to assume in his mind the proportions of a final and universal judgment.

A dreamer? And a dreamer only? His egotism could not endure the thought.

The shadow-world of ideas, of theories, of poetic fancies, amidst which he had moved all his life, was not enough. He must live in the real world.

Chicago became for him the symbol of that real world. It was no longer a place of refuge—it was a test, a challenge. He would go there not as a moonstruck dreamer, but as a realist, able to face the hard facts of life.

He would become a different person.

He was tired of being Felix Fay the fool, the poet, the theorist. He would rather be anybody else in the world than that Felix Fay whose ridiculous blunderings he knew by heart.

He could imagine himself in Chicago, a changed person—a young man of action, practical, alert, ruthlessly competitive....

Dreaming of success in Chicago, he sat idly at his desk in Port Royal.

3

It was late in the afternoon. No one was left in the office but himself and Hastings, the city editor.

“Fay!”

He looked up. The city editor beckoned him over.

“Look at this.”

Hastings held in his hand the sheaf of items from Wheaton, over which Felix had casually written a heading half an hour before. Felix held out his hand and took them. Something was wrong. He looked anxiously at the items, written in grey pencil on coarse paper in a straggling hand. The page uppermost was numbered “3.” He had hardly glanced at it. Evidently he had overlooked something.

It caught his eye instantly—the second item from the top:

A man named Cyrus Jenks, known as Old Cy, committed suicide last night by hanging himself in the barn. He was a well-known village character, chiefly noted for his intemperate habits. The inquest will be held today. His one good trait was his devotion to his old mother, who died recently. He was her illegitimate child. She was one of the Bensons, who until her disgrace were one of the principal families in the county. Her father was Judge Benson. The family moved to North Dakota years ago, and left her here in the old family home, where she lived alone with her son until she died. Before hanging himself Old Cy set fire to the house, and it was partly burned. Since the old lady’s death he had received several offers for the place, but refused to sell, and said that no one should ever set foot in his mother’s house. The incident is causing much local comment.

Felix drew a long breath. He certainly had overlooked something! He could see that story, with its headlines, on the front page of the Record—rewritten by himself. It was just the kind of story that he could handle in a way to bring out all its values. And he had had it in his hands—and had let it pass through them, buried in a collection of worthless country items!

“The postmistress at Wheaton,” Hastings was saying gently, “is not supposed to know a front-page story. You are supposed to know—that is the theory on which you are hired.”

Felix did not reply. There was nothing to be said.

Hastings was looking at him thoughtfully. “I don’t know what’s got into you, Felix,” he said. “I thought you were going to make a good newspaper man. And sometimes I think so still. But mostly—you aren’t worth a damn.”

“Yes, sir,” said Felix. “—I mean, no, I don’t think I am, either.”

He was going to be fired.... Well, he deserved it. He ought to have been fired long ago. And he was rather glad that it was happening.

Hastings was rather taken aback. “Well,” he said, “frankly, I was going to let you go. But—well, there’s no harm done this time; we’d already gone to press when that stuff came in. Of course, I don’t say that your—your letting it get by was excusable. In fact, I simply can’t understand it. But—if you realize—”

So he was not going to be fired after all! Felix was unaccountably sorry.

“If you think you can pull yourself together—” said Hastings. “I’d hate to have you leave the Record. I’ve always—”

Felix felt desperate. He knew now why he wanted to be fired. It would give him the necessary push into his Chicago adventure. He would never have the courage to leave this job, and venture into the unknown, upon his own initiative. He didn’t have any initiative.

“I don’t think it’s any use, Mr. Hastings,” he said, “keeping me on the Record.”

Hastings stared at him incredulously.

“I mean,” Felix went on hastily, “I’ve got in a rut. I go through my work mechanically. I don’t use my brains. I’m dull. And it’s getting worse. I simply can’t take any interest in my work.”

“You mean you want to be fired?” Hastings asked severely.

It was absurd. In fact, it was preposterous. This was not the way to do it at all. But it was too late now.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Well, then, you are.” Hastings looked coldly at the ungrateful and rather sheepish-looking youth standing before him. “Have you got another job?” he asked suspiciously.

“No—I’m going to Chicago to look for one.”

As soon as he said that, he wished he hadn’t. It committed him to going. He couldn’t back out now. He had to go.

“And I haven’t any money except my pay-check for this week.”

He hadn’t thought of that before. How could he go without money?

“Will you lend me fifty dollars?”

It had slipped out without his intending it. Felix blushed. He was certainly behaving like a fool. After proving himself to Hastings an utter incompetent, to ask him for money.... He would go on a freight train....

“Fifty—what are you talking about? Chicago!” Hastings was embarrassed, too. “Why—why—yes, I can lend you some money, if you really want it.... Chicago—I don’t know but what you’re right, after all.... When are you going?”

Felix was trying to think now before he spoke. He just managed to check himself on the point of saying, “Tonight!”

All this was happening too swiftly. He needed time to consider everything, to make his plans. A month would be none too much.

“Next m—Monday,” he said.

4

When Felix left the office he went home by a round-about way which took him up through one of the quiet residential streets of the town. He turned a corner, and walked slowly down past a row of cheerful little houses set back within well-kept lawns. There was nothing magnificent or showy about these houses—they did not betoken any vast prosperity or leisure, but only a moderate comfort and security. They might perhaps suggest a certain middle-class smugness; but even that was no reason why Felix should have looked at them from under his slouching hat-brim with such a grimace of hostility. As he neared a particular one of these houses, he walked faster and bent his head, casting a furtive glance at its windows. But there was no one to be seen at those windows, and so Felix looked again and slowed his step a little. In front of the house he paused momentarily and looked at it with an apparently casual glance.

He had gone past that house, in this manner, a dozen times in the past year, savoring painfully each time the hard, unmistakable, disciplinary fact that there, contentedly under that roof, the wife of its owner, lived Joyce—his Joyce of only a year ago. He had come, now, to read that lesson in realism for the last time.

He did not want to see the girl who had taught him that lesson. He only wanted to look at this house in which she lived as another man’s wife.

But, as he walked on past, he did see her. She was standing on the little side verandah. And in the vivid picture of her which Felix’s eyes caught before he looked hastily away, he saw that she had a baby in her arms.

She was looking down at the baby, shaking her head teasingly above it so that stray locks of her yellow hair touched its face. It uttered a faint cry, and she shook her curly head again, and looked up, smiling.

But she did not see Felix. She was looking down the street past him. She was waiting for someone—for the owner of this house, her husband; waiting for the man who was the father of her child.

This Felix saw and felt with a bewildered and hurt mind in the moment before he turned his eyes away to stare at the sidewalk in front of him. He walked on, and in another moment he must perforce enter the field of her vision as he passed along the street in which her eyes were searching for another man. He braced himself, threw his head back, and commenced to whistle a careless tune.

If she saw him, if she noted the familiar slouch of his hat as he passed out of her sight, she would never know that he had seen—or cared.

II. “Bon Voyage!”

1

THE family were apparently not at all surprised when, at the supper-table, Felix announced his sudden decision.

“Well, I knew you’d be going one of these days,” his brother Ed remarked.

That seemed strange to Felix, who had kept his Chicago intentions carefully to himself all that year....

And his brother Jim, who was working again in spite of his lameness, was quite converted from his supper-table querulousness by the announcement. “When I was in Chicago—” he said, and told stories of the Chicago of ten years ago, where he had tried briefly to gain a foothold. It remained in his mind, it seemed, not as a failure, but as a glorious excursion....

Alice, Ed’s wife, was enchanted. Her cheeks glowed, and she asked endless questions. It appeared that none of them had the slightest doubt of Felix’s ultimate, and splendid, success. It really seemed as if they envied him!

And all the while, Felix was thinking what an ironic spectacle he would present if he returned home in a month or two. He clenched his fists under the table-edge, and swore to himself that he would never—never—make that confession of failure....

“You must write to your mother and tell her all about it, Felix,” said Alice.

His mother and father were down on the farm in Illinois where Mrs. Fay had lived as a little girl. She had never adjusted herself to town life; nor had her husband. They were best content in the country, where she could grow flowers in the front yard and he could fatten and butcher and salt down a couple of hogs for the winter.... Their only grievance was that their children found so little time to come and visit them. Ed usually came once a year, in the slack season, and Jim when he needed a rest; but Felix, it seemed, was always too busy....

“Why bother her about my going to Chicago?” Felix grumbled.

“Why, Felix!” Alice reproached him. She could never understand why it was so hard for him to write to his mother.

“I don’t want her worrying about me,” Felix explained uncomfortably.

“She won’t worry about you,” Alice insisted. “She’ll be proud of you!”

Felix wondered if people always had to lie to themselves about their prospects before they could do anything.... Perhaps he ought to lie to himself; but he preferred to face the facts as they were. He would have to embellish them a little, however, in writing to his mother....

When supper was cleared away, and Jim had gone out to sit on the front steps, and Ed and Alice were in the front room playing one of the newest records on the phonograph, Felix wrote briefly and shyly to his mother—explaining that he was fairly certain to get something to do in Chicago very quickly.... And then, by way of savouring in advance the grim realities of his adventure, he wrote a long letter to Helen Raymond in New York—a letter in which he made clear the wild recklessness of his plans. He felt that the woman who had befriended him when she was the librarian at Port Royal and he a queer boy who worked in a factory and wrote poetry, would understand this newest folly of his.

But what a waste of time, writing letters, when he had only six days left in which to prepare for going to Chicago!... He determined to use those remaining days very carefully and sensibly.

He bought a street map the next morning, and went home to study it. But it was hard to give it due attention at home. His sister-in-law was mending and pressing his clothes, and collecting and inspecting his shirts, and talking excitedly about his trip. “If you run short of money, Felix, you just write to us for it. Ed and I will see that you get it somehow.” Felix was fiercely resolved not to be a burden to them after he went to Chicago, and these offers made him uncomfortable. Why should Alice be so interested in this expedition of his anyway? She was as concerned about it as though it were she herself who was going. She wanted to know his plans; and when he did not seem to have any, she persisted in trying to make them for him.

He was not going to get any opportunity to study that street map at home. He decided that he would go and spend a few days at his friend Tom Alden’s little place in the country, where he would find a more congenial atmosphere.

2

Too congenial! Tom was the same perfect companion of an idle hour—instinctively expert in gilding that idleness with delightful talk until it ceased to seem mere idleness—the same old Tom that Felix had loafed away long evenings with last summer, when they were supposed to be writing novels. Tom was still desultorily working upon his novel; but he put it aside to walk in the woods and talk with Felix about Chicago. It was not, however, of the grim Chicago which loomed in Felix’s mind, that Tom talked.

Tom, as Felix now realized, was a romantic soul. Chicago had been to him a series of brilliant vacation-trips, a place of happy occasional sanctuary from the dull realities of middle-class life in Port Royal: an opportunity for brief, stimulating human contacts, not at all a place to earn a living in.

Lying in the cool grass beside the creek where he and Felix had spent so many illusioned hours a summer ago, he talked with dreamy enthusiasm of genial drunken poets and philosophers and friends met at the Pen Club—and of their girl companions, charming and sophisticated, whose loves were frank and light-hearted.

Felix walked up and down impatiently. A year ago he too had dreamed of Tom’s Chicago—

“Midnights of revel

And noondays of song!”

But he knew better now. He could imagine the Pen Club, with its boon-companionship of whiskey and mutual praise. These, he told himself, were the consolations of failure. He might, he reflected grimly, have to fall back on these things at forty. But in the meantime he would try to learn to face reality.

And those light Chicago loves—he suspected that the romantic temperament had thrown a glamour over these also. He was not going to Chicago for Pen Club friendship nor the solace of complaisant femininity.... While Tom Alden reminisced of glorious nights of talk and drink and kisses, Felix was brooding over a scene inside his mind which he called Chicago—a scene in which the insane clamour of the wheat-pit was mingled with stockyards brutality and filth. This was what he must deal with....

“What’s on your mind?” Tom asked.

“Nothing. Except—I came here to study my street map, and I haven’t looked inside it.”

“Never mind your street map just now,” Tom said. “We’re going to the station to meet Gloria and Madge.”

Madge was a cousin of Tom’s, and Gloria her especial—and beautiful—friend. They were just back from a trip abroad, and Tom had asked them out to dinner to hear what they had to tell.

“You mustn’t be prejudiced against Gloria because of her eyelashes,” Tom urged. “She has rather a mind, I think.”

So Felix, reluctantly, went along to the station.

Tom jested at his reluctance. “Why, are you afraid of becoming entangled in Gloria’s celebrated eyelashes?”

“No, I’m not afraid of that,” Felix said.

Tom laughed and put his hand on Felix’s shoulder.

“Think, they bring us news of the great world: London! Paris! Doesn’t that stir you?”

“No,” Felix retorted, “for I don’t believe it. They bring back what they took with them.”

“Wait and see! I hear rumours that Gloria has become fearfully cosmopolitan.”

When Gloria and Madge stepped from the train, it was evident, even to so careless an observer as Felix, that they had been at least outwardly transformed. Every woman in Port Royal was wearing the wide-flaring “Merry Widow” hat; and these girls wore small close-fitting hats—Gloria’s being a jaunty little flower-confection, and Madge’s a tiny straw turban set off by a perky feather.

“Dear old Tom,” said Gloria, embracing him affectionately. “Too busy to come to town to see old friends, so old friends have to come see him. Busy writing great novel?”

“More or less,” Tom answered, and they started back up the road. “How’s Europe?”

“We tore ourselves from the arms of doting relatives to come and tell you—When one’s been all over the world, what’s a few miles more? ... even when it means getting one’s new Paris shoes all dusty! Have you noticed them, Tom?” She paused on one toe and looked down sidewise admiringly at her foot.

“I noticed a generally exotic effect,” Tom admitted.

“Tan suede!” Gloria explained. “And then, our blouses. Something quite new. And—but mustn’t talk to great philosopher about such frivolous things. Must talk about art and socialism. There are lots of socialists over there, in France and Germany—and even in England!”

“So you found that out,” Tom observed. “Now I suppose you regard socialism as quite respectable.”

“Oh, most respectable. But just as hard to understand as ever! Though I was able, when I talked to some of them at the Countess of Berwick’s tea, to appear quite intelligent on the subject, on account of having listened to you. I used ‘proletarian’ and ‘proletariat’ without once getting them mixed.”

“The Countess of Berwick! Our little Gloria flew high, didn’t she?”

“Oh, all sorts of people go to the Countess of Berwick’s teas. You’ve only to be reputed ‘interesting,’ and you get invited everywhere. And how do you suppose I got into the ‘interesting’ class? Not by my gifts of intellect, Tommy. But—you know, they expect Americans to behave queerly. They’re disappointed if we don’t. There was an American poet over there, a tame professor poet, and they were disappointed because he didn’t come to dinner in boots and spurs and a red shirt or something. So I bethought myself—and got invited. You know my baby-talk? I brought it out and polished it up for the occasion. You should have heard me! Baby-talking to England’s brightest and best. And they fell for it. They consider it oh, so American! I nearly set a fashion in London, Tommy. Me, having been brought up in Miss Pettit’s most exclusive school, and taught to act like a lady, and then making a hit in London with bad manners. The baby-talk wasn’t all. Daughter of American Plough Magnate Puts Feet on Table and Tells Naughty Stories—that sort of thing. They like it.”

“You mustn’t believe her, Tom,” Madge interrupted. “She didn’t do any such thing.”

“Tom understands me,” Gloria laughed. “Exaggeration for effect. Just like in a novel. If you put my London visit in a novel, Tom, you’d have me putting my feet on the table, wouldn’t you?”

“But my imagination,” said Tom, “would balk at the picture of you telling naughty stories.”

“Oh, but Tom, I’ve been to Paris since you used to know me, and I’ve become very, very wicked. Don’t contradict me, Madge. I’ve got to persuade Tom that I got some benefit out of my year abroad. Yes, Tom, you’ve no idea how broad-minded Paris has made me. Why, if somebody should mention a man’s ‘mistress’ to me now, I wouldn’t shudder and turn pale. I would probably say, ‘Dear me, has he only one?’ That’s what Paris has made of me. I’m brazen, Tom—brazen.”

They reached the house, and there they chattered on till dinner, and through dinner, and after dinner in Tom’s living room—Felix playing a silent part, and inwardly contemptuous of Gloria’s assumed sophistication. Gloria made a few attempts to draw him into the conversation, but these being resisted, she devoted herself to Tom. Growing confidential, she told him the newest fashions in French lingerie—Madge protesting only slightly, for after all, wasn’t Tom her cousin? and Felix didn’t count. “They’re still wearing muslin over here,” said Gloria, “while we, Tom dear, come from Paris intimately attired in georgette and chiffon—if you know what that means. All the difference in the world, I can assure you! One’s Puritanism goes when one puts on chiffon next to one’s skin. And think, Tom, I never dreamed, all my poor wasted life in Iowa, that nightgowns could be anything but white muslin. Well, you should see the lovely nighties that Madge and I brought home. You’d never guess the colour.... Lavender! Why, the social circles of Port Royal are rocking with it! A blow, Tom, at the very foundations of middle-class morality. Lavender nighties!”

“I do think,” Tom said, “that what people wear makes a difference in their attitude toward life.”

“Oh, I can feel the difference already. My Presbyterian conscience shrivelled up and perished at the touch of that pagan garment. My whole attitude toward life has changed.”

Felix shrugged his shoulders by way of expressing his unbelief in the paganism of lavender nightgowns.

“What are they writing in Paris now?” Tom asked.

“Well, Tom, I admit I was surprised at first. I never dreamed that even the French could be so—French. But I got used to it. I like it now. Even Madge likes it. She makes me translate the wickedest passages for her.”

“I don’t any such thing,” Madge objected.

“What is there so wicked in those passages?” asked Felix, speaking for almost the first time.

Gloria considered him for a moment before replying. “Nothing really wicked at all,” she said. “Wicked only according to our stupid Anglo-Saxon notions. Simply frank, that’s all.”

“I wonder,” said Felix, “if they are really more frank than English novels—the best of them. Defoe and Fielding were rather frank, you know.”

Gloria shrugged her pretty shoulders. “If there was anything like that in Defoe and Fielding, it escaped my innocent young mind when I read them.” She turned again to Tom. “They omit nothing—Nothing!”

“You excite my curiosity,” Tom said sceptically. “Please describe more specifically the Nothing which they omit.”

Gloria laughed, and sketched lightly and brightly the plot of one of the most outrageous new French novels—extreme, she admitted, even for France. “Every other chapter,” she said, “is one which the boldest English novelist would leave to your imagination. In this story, here it is, with, I assure you, a wealth of detail.”

“A wealth of words, rather, I suspect,” said Tom. “The same words that have done duty in the same French novels for a generation: volupté—exquise—baiser—baiser.... The same old thing, so far as I gather from your description, Gloria. That kind of eloquent rhetoric isn’t frankness,—at least not the kind of literary frankness that Felix and I are interested in.”

“Forgive me, Tom!” said Gloria, with mock humility. “My mistake! Here I have been going across the ocean in search of sensation, and all the while the real shock was waiting for me right here at home. In your novel you have doubtless outdone the puny efforts of these mere foreigners. What do they know about frankness? I abase myself, and repent in dust and ashes!”

“I really do think,” said Tom, “that you imagine the truth can be told only in French.”

“I suppose I was guilty of that foolish error. But I pine for enlightenment. Give me the truth—the Truth!—in my own native tongue!”

Tom shook his head. “I didn’t say I had tried to tell it.”

“Oh, don’t disappoint me that way, Tom. Surely you are not going to let these Frenchmen put it over on you! Don’t say that!”

“Well,” Tom said gravely, “Felix has a chapter in his novel here—I found the manuscript in my desk and was just reading it again the other day—that I think goes a little beyond anything I have ever seen in any French novel.”

Gloria turned to Felix and stared. “Well!” she cried. “America is saved! Will you read it to us, Mr. Fay?”

“No,” he said.

“Oh, why not!”

“Don’t want to.”

“I think you show a lack of confidence in us, Mr. Fay. Here we put ourselves in your hand. We open our hearts to you. We conceal nothing. And you sit there with a masterpiece of literary frankness up your sleeve, and refuse to read it. I don’t think it’s fair.”

Felix was silent. He really wanted to read that chapter. He was proud of it. But he must not become interested in novel-writing again. It would distract his mind too much from the Chicago adventure. That unfinished novel ought to remain in that drawer in Tom’s desk until he had made good in Chicago.

“I don’t believe it’s so frank, after all,” said Gloria, returning to the attack. “That’s why you’re afraid to read it. You’re afraid of disappointing our expectations.”

Felix looked at her defiantly.

“All right, I will,” he said.

“Oh, this is worth coming back for.”

He rose and went to Tom’s room. He returned, a little doubtfully, with the manuscript. “I want to say first of all that there is nothing intentionally shocking about this chapter. It simply aims to tell how people really behave under circumstances usually glossed over with romantic phrases.”

At any rate, Gloria would understand; so why should he hesitate?

He began to read. From the first page, he was aware of a transformation in the atmosphere of the occasion. Gloria, who had been leaning forward with dramatic eagerness, became rigid in her attitude, and her humorous smile seemed to have become tensely frozen in its place. Madge had picked up a magazine, opened it to a picture, and continued to look at the picture while listening alertly, with an air of being at a key-hole. Tom continued gravely smoking his pipe, apparently oblivious of any constraint upon the others. After a little, Gloria carefully relaxed her attitude, and leaned back, looking above Felix’s head, with an impassive face and arms straight at her sides. Felix defiantly read on.

He knew there was nothing really shocking about the chapter—at least, to an enlightened and adult mind such as Gloria’s. It did not occur to him that in its local colour and middle-western psychology, there was something—not present in the most highly flavoured French romance—to disturb the pretences and awake the painful and ashamed memories of a middle-western mind: something sufficiently near to the unromantic truth of Gloria’s own secret life, perhaps, to evoke in her an hysterical disgust.... He only knew that the situation was becoming uncomfortable, and that he was sorry he had ever got into it.

He finished the chapter. There ensued a painful silence.

“Very remarkable writing indeed, Mr. Fay,” was all the comment the young woman back from abroad had to offer. Evidently what was delightfully daring in Paris was something else in Port Royal on the Mississippi....

Felix, not knowing quite what to think, went to put his manuscript away. Surely Gloria could not have been really shocked!... When he returned, they were all talking with animation about something else.... Presently it was time for the girls to leave. “I hear you’re going to Chicago soon,” Gloria said sweetly to Felix. “Bon voyage!”

“I have made a fool of myself again,” Felix said to himself bitterly.

3

The next day, and the next, Felix and Tom talked again about Chicago; but not in the realistic vein Felix would have preferred. Tonight he must go back to town; he had already stayed too long—he was falling into his old habit of day-dreaming about the future.... That chapter had set him off. Gloria had been—well, startled and impressed, to say the least. That chapter was good. Perhaps he was destined to help bring back to English fiction its lost candour, the candour of the Elizabethans and Defoe and Fielding.

But no, he must not think about such things now. He would have no time for writing, for a long while, in Chicago. He would be too much immersed in the struggle for existence. If he were to write novels, he ought to stay in Port Royal. Yes, he might take the civil service examination and get a quiet job in the post-office that would give him time to think and dream and write....

He sprang up. He knew quite well what this meant. Cowardice! If he got into the post-office, he would stay there forever.... He started abruptly toward the house, leaving Tom in the midst of an anecdote of old Chicago days.

He had left the map on Tom’s desk. His novel was in that same desk. If he started reading that novel again, he might decide to stay in Port Royal and finish it. He wondered whether the map or the novel would claim him when he sat down at that desk. Five minutes at that desk might decide his whole future for him....

He went into Tom’s room, went over to the desk—and from a letter lying open beside the pen-tray there flashed up to him his own name, Felix Fay ... with a fringe of words about it.

Those words startled him, and he bent over the letter to make sure that they were really there; he read them, and turned to see the signature—it was that of Madge Alden; and then he sat down in Tom’s chair and read slowly that paragraph of three sentences.

“Is that nasty young man Felix Fay really a friend of yours? I think he’d better leave Port Royal quick. The story of that horrible chapter is all over town and—well, if you knew the things Gloria is saying about him!”

So Gloria had betrayed him to Port Royal.

4

He sank back in his chair, amazed at his sensations. He had never thought any written words could affect him like that. He had never cared what people thought....

It was absurd. He felt as though a cannon-ball had gone through his abdomen. He sat there, weak, stunned, gasping for breath—with a mind curiously detached, floating somewhere above that stunned body, wondering.... It was curious that anything in the world could hurt so much.

Then, in a rush, all his energy seemed to come back, flooding and filling his body—as if to provide him the strength with which to return blow for blow. And that superfluity of strength was worse than the weakness had been—for there was no one, nothing to fight. Words out of the air had hurt him, and he could not fight back.

The emotion which flooded him ebbed at last, leaving him in a curious mood of utter coldness. The thought came into his mind: “Nothing that ever happens to me can hurt me after this—nothing.”

He opened the drawer. He wanted to see that unfinished novel. He wanted to know what it was really like. He felt capable of judging it calmly.

He turned the pages here and there, reading at random, now with affection and now with contempt, making up his mind.... He suddenly realized that he was feeling ashamed of it all. He did not realize that this new humiliation, at the hands of a girl, had awakened painful memories of the love-affair which he had celebrated in this novel, and which had ended so differently in real life from the way it was to end in this book; he only knew that he was ashamed.

The style, he said to himself, was bad—very bad.

He forced himself to read again the chapter which had caused all the trouble. It made him smile painfully. Why, this bald and painstaking frankness of his was not courageous, it was merely comic!... He turned the pages again. This stuff was not a novel.

He had been an idler, a dreamer, a fool....

And suddenly he remembered something—a scene from a long time ago: it was in school, and the principal was looking over a boy’s shoulder at a piece of paper upon which, day-dreaming of his future, the boy had written: “Felix Fay, the great novelist....”

He heard the principal telling that boy to write those words on the blackboard, to show the class what he had been doing instead of attending to his lessons. He saw the boy, pale and trembling, rise and face a hundred curious, staring eyes....

Felix had not recalled that scene for years; it had hurt too much. But now it was no longer painful. He saw the scene for the first time impersonally; and he felt that the principal had been right....

Gazing down at the manuscript in his hand, he pronounced sentence upon it in the words in which the principal had once condemned that boy. “This is what is known as egotism,” he whispered.

He rose, stuffed the pages into Tom’s fireplace and set fire to them with a match. Then, while the record of all his futile dreaming went up in smoky flame, he turned back to the desk, sat down, and bent over the microscopic squares and confused lettering of the street-map of Chicago.

III. Plans

1

COMING home, Felix found a letter from Helen Raymond, congratulating him on his decision to go to Chicago, and enclosing two letters of introduction, one of them to an editorial writer on an afternoon paper, the other to some one at a settlement house.

Helen was, he perceived, like Tom, a romanticist. She would be quite capable of believing that these little pieces of paper assured him a welcome in Chicago!... She had, with a kind of pathetic maternal fussiness, taken his destinies in charge; and Felix rather wished she hadn’t. She had even directed him as to which train he should take on Monday—apparently confident that some one, in response to her suggestion, would be at the station to meet him. As if people in Chicago had time for such amenities!

It was in the mood of one who goes alone against the enemy, that Felix took the train to Chicago. And armed with a paper sword! For so it was that he thought of his letters of introduction. Of what use were letters of introduction in Chicago? Well he knew how unconscious Chicago would remain of the arrival of one more poor struggler. His coming might mean everything to him, but it meant nothing at all to Chicago. That was the obvious truth, and why not face it?

2

On the train he took out his money and counted it again, though he knew quite definitely how much he had. But it was reassuring to feel the crisp bills in his hand. Well, he would not starve for three or four weeks anyway. He considered the advisability of putting away separately enough to pay his fare back home, but decided against it. “I am not going back home,” he said to himself.

He went over his plans once more. From the station he would go to a certain cheap hotel that Tom had suggested. Tom had stayed there once when he was nearly broke. Then he would look about for a cheap room. That secured, he would spend a day wandering about the city and familiarizing himself with its streets. The third day he would go to look for a job. And the fourth day—and all the other days—he would continue to look for a job: until he got one.

There was no use in going over his plans any more. He took a book from his suitcase to read.

He had taken along only one book.... He had smiled ironically when choosing it, remembering the old literary discussions as to what book one would choose to have along when cast away on a desert island. Here was a more practical problem: what book one should choose for solace when cast alone into the midst of a complex and difficult civilization. On a desert island one would want something to remind one of people, of civilization—perhaps Henry James; or more likely the Arabian Nights. But for his Chicago campaign he had chosen H. G. Wells’ “First and Last Things.”

He opened the book and began to read.... He discovered after a while that he had been reading the same sentence over and over:

“It seems to me one of the heedless errors of those who deal in philosophy, to suppose all things that have simple names or unified effects are in their nature simple and may be discovered and isolated as a sort of essence by analysis.”

Under ordinary circumstances that sentence was doubtless perfectly clear; but on the train to Chicago it was strangely hard to understand. And when he recalled his wandering thoughts, put aside his emotions of expectation and fear, and looked at the sentence again, its meaning was singularly comfortless. That simple things are not so simple after all—yes, that was just the trouble!

Going to Chicago, for instance. Thousands of young men did it every year; his journey was merely one of the items of those broad sociological generalizations which the university extension lecturers were fond of uttering. From the outside it was simple enough. It had apparently been taken for granted by his family and friends for the last two or three years that Felix would go to Chicago. Certain people, it seemed, inevitably went. Being one of those people, he had gone.

But why?

He restlessly put aside the book and stared out the window. Why? He hadn’t the least idea, and he rather wished he were back in Port Royal, with time and leisure to work out the answer to that question satisfactorily....

“Going to Chicago?”

It was a genial elderly man in the seat opposite asking the question—a plump man with a little pointed beard sprinkled with grey, and laughing wrinkles about his eyes. He leaned forward in a friendly manner.

“Yes,” Felix answered.

“First time?” the man asked shrewdly.

“Yes,”—and Felix wondered why it should be the first time. Why, living only five hours away from Chicago, had he never gone there to reconnoitre, to learn to find his way about, to get the lay of things? It had been stupid of him not to.

“I came to Chicago for the first time forty years ago,” the elderly man was saying. “And I was just about as scared as you are.” He laughed kindly, and tapped Felix’s knee. “But I needn’t have been. Chicago’s a fine town. No place better for a young man to go. You don’t need to worry, my boy. Chicago’s on the lookout for bright young people.”

Yes—but that was just what was bothering Felix Fay. He was afraid he was not a bright young person in the ordinary meaning of the term.

The man entered upon a lively account of his early struggles and successes in the hides and leather business.

“What’s your line?” he suddenly asked, smiling.

“I—write,” Felix said, embarrassed. “I want to get a job on a newspaper.” How remote that seemed from the hides and leather business!

“Well, we’ve got some fine newspapers in Chicago. I read the Tribune myself. I always turn first thing to the funny column. I miss it when I’m out of town—doesn’t seem like breakfast is complete without it.” He paused, with a reminiscent air. “But none of them are as good as ’Gene Field used to be! My, how I did enjoy the things he wrote. I know a man who used to know him right well, too; tells stories about him. ’Gene was a great old boy.” He sighed.

Felix was startled. He had not suspected that in the hides and leather business there was room for this quaint literary sentimentalism....

“What’s your name?” Felix told him. “Mine’s Anderson—John Anderson. I’m getting off here at Elgin. You might come and see me at my office in Chicago some time, and tell me how you’re getting along. I’ll give you my card.... Well, Mr. Fay, you drop in any time—or ring me up—and we’ll go out to lunch. I’ll take you to a nice chop-house. Maybe,” he grinned, “you’ll need a good meal, now and then, before you get started. You just ring me up!” He shook hands warmly, took down his big suitcase, and left the train.

3

Felix frowned. It was pleasant, of course, to be so genially treated by a stranger. But he must not get any false ideas of Chicago from this incident. He would think twice about accepting Mr. John Anderson’s invitation to come and see him; and he would certainly not come if he were in need of a meal; probably Mr. Anderson would have forgotten all about him by the next day, anyway. He put away Mr. Anderson’s card in the pocket in which his letters of introduction were stored. Again he frowned, took out his letters of introduction, looked at them, and put them back. He could forget Mr. Anderson’s card, but what could he do with those letters of introduction?

They were in a way a serious embarrassment. Helen would expect him to make use of them.... He could see himself presenting his letter to Mr. Blake at the Community House, and being regarded with puzzled surprise. “What does he want of us?” Mr. Blake would be asking himself....

Well, what did he want of them? Nothing.

He had a great notion to tear those letters up and throw them away before he had made a fool of himself with them....

4

Chicago! Endless blocks of dwellings, a glimpse of great buildings, and then the dusky gloom of a huge station. He seized his suitcase, descended from the train, and heard his name called questioningly.

He turned to meet a smiling, straw-haired youth, who shook his hand, and relieved him of his suitcase. “I’m right? Helen gave me a good description, and I was sure it was you! My name is Blake—Will Blake. Well, how’s Port Royal? And my friend Hastings of the Record? And Judge Beecher and Rabbi Nathan, Dr. Truesdale and the rest of ’em? I know Port Royal quite well, I’ve lectured there so much. And Helen tells me you’re the reporter that gave our series such good stories.”

Felix bewilderedly recognized this affable youth as the university instructor whose lectures in the extension series on sociological problems he had attended and reported; and he realized that between Port Royal and Chicago, so remote in his imagination, there were at least some few human links. Even so, this struck him as being in the nature of a remarkable coincidence.

Meanwhile, Felix had been escorted to a street-car. It was dusk, and the streets were crowded. But Blake’s friendly questioning served to distract his attention from the bewildering hugeness of the city. With but the slightest opportunity for feeling his individual insignificance against this new background of rushing, roaring life, he was talked half way across Chicago to a place where, at an intersection of busy and dirty little streets, rose a gracious and homelike building. “This is Community House,” said Blake. “I’ll take you right up to your room, and you can meet the Head and the residents at dinner.”

Left alone in the room—where, as his escort had casually assured him, he was to stay until he had made other plans—Felix strove to regain his sense of the verities.

He knew already of the existence, and the purposes, of Community House. It was one of those institutions which he had discussed, knowingly and scornfully, in the Socialist local back in Port Royal—it was one of the “bourgeois-idealistic” attempts to obscure, by means of a futile benevolence, the class-struggle between the rich and the poor....

His actual feeling, however, was one of gratitude toward the cheerful shelter of this little room. He went to the window. It was strangely exhilarating to look out over the smoke and grime of this tumble of roofs, from the window of a room so instantly and pleasantly his own.

He had a curious feeling of ease and security—a feeling which he strove to repress....

Secure, and at ease—that seemed indeed a foolish way for one to feel who was about to commence the grim battle of life in Chicago!

IV. Surprises

1

DURING those first days Felix was trying hard—too hard!—to adjust himself to the world of reality: which after all has its kindly aspects.

The second day, Felix set out to explore Chicago. He had conned on the map and fixed in his mind the location of various streets; but as the points of the compass seemed, when once he had left Community House, to have got strangely twisted, these preliminary lessons were confusing rather than otherwise. After a brief survey of the loop district, he found himself looking from the steps of the public library, at Michigan Avenue, and beyond that the lake.

Summer had just turned into autumn; it was a cool day, and there was a light wind glancing over the surface of the water. Felix drew a long breath, and looked down the Avenue. Only a few people were on the sidewalk at that hour, but those few, with their air of infinite leisure, gave it the quality of a boulevard. Along the smooth roadway, still wet from a rain which had fallen during the night, a few motor cars skimmed by; and the people in them seemed to have that same air of careless light-hearted enjoyment of life. To the south, great clouds of white steam arose from beside a black shed which Felix guessed to be an Illinois Central station, and floated airily across to blur the outlines of the buildings that faced the Avenue. Felix stood still, wondering at himself. There was something odd about this: Chicago seemed beautiful! But doubtless that notion merely proved him to be what he was, a boy from the country.

Half ashamed of the thrill which he got out of this sight, he crossed to the building on the lake front which must be the Art Institute. But he found its pictures dull in comparison with the one he had left outside. He went back to the street, and sniffed eagerly at the wind from off the lake. He was experiencing a curious emotional release in the presence of its vastness. Not only himself, but Chicago, suddenly seemed small at its side. A city perched on the edge of a huge inland sea!

And then, convinced that his mood was an unrealistic one, he took the south side elevated to the stockyards.... In its gruesome realities he would find an antidote to this romanticism.

He was one of a long queue of visitors who were led from one building to another and lectured at and shown the sights. After an hour he had seen nothing sufficiently gruesome to be exciting, and he was becoming annoyed with his fellow-visitors. They stared at the workers with a kind of dull unimaginative pity. Felix resented those stares. He felt that he understood these workers; had he not been one of them himself in factory days at Port Royal! There was something indecent in this gaping and pointing. He dropped out of line and went away.

He had missed the great scene, still to come—the cattle-killing. But he reflected that he was a butcher’s son. This was merely a slaughter-house on a grand scale. He had nothing new to learn from the stockyards....

2

But he was inevitably depressed by his day of confused sight-seeing; the hugeness of the city had in the end made him feel useless and helpless. It was a relief to meet again at dinner the pleasant men and women residents of Community House who had been so gracious to him the evening before.

His shyness had lifted sufficiently the previous evening to let him engage in a lively argument. There had been something very gratifying to him in the way they listened to what he said—without agreement, to be sure, but on terms of interested equality. It had made him feel at home; and it was only afterward, in his room, that he had realized the duty of guarding himself against these easy reassurances. He told himself that these people were all engaged in trying to obscure the grim realities of life. But he must not let himself be deceived. Their friendliness was well-meant; but it had to be discounted.... It was all too well calculated to soothe a bruised egotism, to relax a mood of stern self-abasement—to make an impressionable young man forget that he was a mere unconsidered atom in a cruel chaos. This easy hospitality could not be the truth about Chicago. It was a mask, behind which the real Chicago hid its terrible, grim face....

The argument last night had been about literature and the way it was taught in the schools. Concerning school methods of dealing with poetry Felix had been particularly scornful. Tonight Blake took up the argument again, and Felix explained himself vigorously. Only those who could do a thing, he insisted, were capable of really understanding it; and it did not matter that they did it badly—so long as they thereby came to understand it creatively.

A red-haired young woman at the further end of the long table was the only one who appeared to take his arguments with any seriousness; at least he thought he saw approval in her eyes. The others, or so it seemed to him, were only politely amused at the intensity of his feelings on the subject. But when he had concluded his argument, the motherly-looking woman at the head of the table said, “Perhaps if Mr. Fay feels like that, he will be willing to undertake a class in English literature twice a week for us. Mr. Hays, who has had the class, is leaving town. You’ll have a chance, Mr. Fay, to try out your theories on twenty very interested young people—who I’m sure would be glad to learn to produce literature as well as to appreciate it. I think, myself, there’s something to your theory—though I don’t hold much by theories any more. I think a great deal depends on the enthusiasm with which they are carried out. I’m sure you will make an enthusiastic teacher—I only hope you won’t become too quickly discouraged. Do you think you’d like to try it?”

Gracious and even flattering as this offer was, yet the challenge in it rather staggered Felix. He had not expected to be called upon to prove the correctness of his theory in actual practice; he had never supposed that he would ever have the opportunity. Teaching was a province sacred to those who themselves had been elaborately taught—certainly not to be intruded upon by a youth who had never finished high school! Yet, if he believed in his own theory, he ought to be willing to put it to the test. He ought to take up this challenge. But did he dare risk a humiliating failure? And then his eyes met those of the red-haired girl down at the other end of the table; and he knew that she expected him to do it.

“Thank you for the chance,” he said. “I’ll be glad to.”

The talk swept on to other things, leaving him a little dazed. He had been quite casually accepted as one whose abilities might be of value; he had astonishingly become a part of this institution; and upon no false pretences—for in his argument he had candidly exposed the deficiencies of his formal schooling. These people were willing to try him out. And they went on talking as though nothing strange had occurred.... The loneliness and helplessness in which he had been submerged by his day of sight-seeing, ebbed away.

“Won’t you tell me something more about your idea? It’s very interesting to me, because I’m in charge of a group of children who are doing plays.”

The red-haired girl was speaking to him as they drifted out of the dining-room. She was a slender young person, of about twenty-five years, with an interestedly impersonal manner. She turned to a young man at her other side, an affected-looking young man, with a wide black ribbon depending from his nose-glasses, and said: “Paul, is your model set ready? Let us have a private view of it.”

“Charmed,” the young man replied, in a mincing accent. Felix disliked him at once.

“Paul,” the red-haired girl explained, turning back to Felix, “is our scenic genius. He makes the most wonderful little sets out of painted cardboard, and then we go and spoil them trying to carry them out in our theatre. He won’t even come and look at them when they’re finished—don’t you think that’s unkind?”

“Oh, please don’t say that, Miss Prentiss!” the young man protested, still in that tone which seemed to Felix unnatural and “prissy.” At the foot of the wide stairs he halted, and put a finger to his lips. “I don’t know really whether I ought to show you the set—just yet. It’s not quite—”

“I’m sure it’s perfectly all right,” the girl said firmly, and proceeded up the stairs. To Felix she continued over her shoulder: “It’s a set for our ‘Prince and Pauper’. I’m mad to see what it’s like. Paul ought to do something quite stunning with it.”

“But I’ve only got one scene done, you know,” Paul objected. “And even that’s uncertain, you understand; the idea for the whole thing—” he waved his hands helplessly; Felix noted that they were graceful hands and beautifully manicured—“hasn’t quite come yet!”

He paused again, doubtfully, but the girl ran relentlessly up the stairs. On the top floor she stopped in front of a door. “Now don’t make any excuses, Paul, but just let us in.”

Paul obediently opened the door, snapped on the lights, and they entered a room of which the walls were covered with tattered Persian rugs, the shelves sprinkled with curious bronze figures, and the floor, along one wall, lined with a row of books. In the centre of the room was a drawing-table, littered with scraps of gold and silver paper, coloured crayons, and tiny bottles of coloured inks. In the corner with a wire running down from the electric fixture in the ceiling, was a pot of glue. Felix walked over to the wall, glanced down at the row of books on the floor, and noted a set of the Yellow Book and an odd volume of the Savoy.

Paul had taken up a small model of a stage-set and was looking at it anxiously.

“Oh,” the girl cried, “let me see!”

He put it into her hands, sat down at the drawing-table, jumped up and turned on the current under his pot of glue, and sat down again, intent upon a pasteboard figure which he had taken from the tiny stage.

“Dear me, this is all wrong,” he said in distress, stripping the tinsel from the figure. “How could I?”

“Look,” the girl said to Felix, beckoning him with her head. “This is the palace scene. See—”

“Do take it over to your room to explain it,” Paul said petulantly. “You distract me.”

“Come,” said the girl, and they entered the room on the other side of the hall. But in a moment Paul had followed them anxiously. “I must tell you that the colours here are not right,” he said, hovering over the model, which the girl had set down on her table. “No blues—no blues at all! blues go in the next scene. Nothing but red and gold and black. And this arch will be different—more sombre. The throne higher—dwarfing the human figures. Very high—twenty inches, an inch to the foot, twenty feet high!”

“But Paul,” said the girl, “you know our proscenium-arch is only twelve feet high!”

“I can’t help that, my dear young woman,” the young man replied with hauteur. “I know well enough that you’ll ruin my beautiful scene. But in my mind—Oh, pewter platter!” His voice, uttering this preposterous exclamation, had become shrill, and he dashed to the door. “My glue-pot!” he cried, and disappeared.

The girl sat down and began to laugh. “Isn’t he funny?” she said.

“Funny?” Felix echoed dubiously.

“But he does make nice stage-pictures anyway,” she said.

Felix looked at the model. “But are these airs natural to him, or is he just putting them on to impress people? Where is he from?”

“Guess!”

Felix thought he saw a light. “London?”

The girl laughed again. “Arkansas,” she said.

“What!”

“Yes, just as he is now, from Arkansas—glasses, accent, Yellow Book and everything. I’ve a kind of notion why it is, if you’d like to hear it.”

“I would.”

“Then make yourself comfortable.” She motioned toward the couch, which with its pillows was the only suggestion of ease in her rather bare and workmanlike room; a writing-table, a typewriter on its stand, and a long shelf of books, gave it an air quite different from the room across the hall. She drew over a chair for herself in front of the couch.

“Don’t blame him,” she said. “We’re all a little like that—I mean, queer. I’m sure I seem quite as queer as that to my family down in Springfield. If you live in Arkansas, and want to make lovely stage-pictures, you are a freak; or you become one trying to keep from being dull like everybody else. It’s inevitable.”

“You frighten me,” Felix said soberly. “Am I a freak? I suppose I am—but somehow I don’t like the idea.”

“Do you want to make a million dollars?”

“No, not at all.”

“Then of course you’re a freak.” She laughed cheerfully.

“And what does Chicago think of—of us?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s all right. Chicago is beginning to realize that it needs us. Chicago wants to be a metropolis. And all the stockyards in the world won’t make a metropolis. Enough of us, given a free-hand—can. And Chicago knows it. Just now we are at a premium here. We can be as crazy as we like!”

“I wonder?”

“You ought to have known the scenic genius who preceded Paul. Dick Bernitz, his name was. He was a wild one. Gloom—despair—and, as it turned out, drugs. He came from Nevada. He affected evening clothes—wanted to wear them all day long, in fact! Baudelaire was his god. We were too tame for him. He left us, and starved and froze somewhere in the slums—still in his evening clothes; and got pneumonia and died. And Dick was—just a nice boy who wanted to do beautiful pictures and poems. Nevada did that to him.”

“But—why blame Nevada?”

“His father was in real-estate. He wanted Dick to sell real-estate.”

“Well, and after all, why not? One must do something ordinary—to make a living.”

“Why didn’t you do something ordinary? Why did you come to Chicago?”

Felix was silent.

“I’ve kind of got you bothered, haven’t I?” said the girl maliciously.

“You’ve given me something to think about.” He rose.

“But I haven’t asked you yet what I was going to. Will you do a play for us?”

“I can’t do plays!”

“Oh, yes, you can. You write poetry and stories and things, don’t you?”

“Do I give myself away as plainly as that?”

The girl laughed. “You ought to know that an institution like this is a gathering place for idealists of all sorts and kinds. I know the chief varieties, and you aren’t any of the sociological sorts, so you must be one of the artist kind. Besides, didn’t I hear you talk at dinner?”

Felix grinned shamefacedly. “I didn’t disguise myself very well,” he admitted. “But anyway—”

He walked impatiently across the little room. His mind was in a state of strange upheaval. All his ideas about Chicago and himself were being upset. He ought not to listen to this girl. He must not let her confuse his plans. In particular he must not become interested in writing. He had put all that aside for the present.

His lips twisted in an uneasy grimace. Why, at this moment, when his mind must be braced to meet the impact of realities, should he let himself be drugged with the opium of dreams?

Already, at her mere word, the old numbing desire had come in a new guise—a vague, feverish yearning toward the puppet-world of the stage: fascinating half-formed ideas for plays rose like bubbles in his mind.

It was a feeling like home-sickness.

He must not indulge it. Of course, it would be fun to write a play for this girl, and help invent scenery and costumes for it. But that was not what he had come to Chicago for. He must put aside all enthusiasms which had no relation to the world of work-a-day reality. The very fact that he was so much interested in the idea proved that it was wrong....

He saw now that it was foolish to have ever come to this place—this refuge for idealists and dreamers. The thought of hunting up a new lodging that night suggested itself; but of course it would be hard to find another place half so comfortable—and he must consider his very limited finances....

“Anyway,” he said, pausing in front of the girl, “I won’t write you a play!”

“Oh, yes you will!” she said.

A knock, and the door burst open, and Paul rushed in with a new-made cardboard figure, dressed in gold tinsel. “At last!” he cried, holding it up. “This will be the key-note of the play!”

“Splendid!” cried the girl, glancing at it. “And now I’m going to take Mr. Fay down and show him our theatre.”

As they went out, Felix noted on her door a card which revealed that her first name was Rose-Ann. It seemed a singularly fitting name for her, somehow.

V. The Struggle for Existence

1

A STRANGE and perturbing girl!... He had not believed, he wished not to believe, what she had told him—that one could be fool and dreamer and yet make terms with Chicago.

But in the course of a few weeks it began to seem as if she were right.

Felix’s other letter of introduction was to Mr. Clive Bangs, editorial writer on the Evening Chronicle. Very diffidently, after having made futile inquires at other newspapers during the week, he went one afternoon to present the letter.

Some one in the front office said, “Back there under the mezzanine—the first office to the right.” He found a little built-in coop, and opened the door. The space inside was crowded with desks and tables, the floor littered with papers, the air filled with cigarette smoke. Through the windows, facing on an alley overhung by tall buildings, no sunlight came, and electric lamps on the desks pierced holes of light through the twilight atmosphere. At one of the desks a plump man lounged, smoking a cigarette. A long, lean man in shirt-sleeves was pounding a typewriter. A surly-looking young man with a careless Windsor tie, and a lock of hair that fell over one eye, sat at a third desk, reading a book.

The plump man looked up with a good-humoured smile, and Felix approached him, saying, “Mr. Bangs?” The plump man waved a hand towards the surly-looking youth. “That’s Mr. Bangs,” he said.

Mr. Bangs looked up, frowned at Felix, and said, “You want to see me?” He jumped up, and indicated a chair vaguely. “Wait a minute,” he said, and taking up a typewritten sheet from his desk went hurriedly out of the office.

Felix looked at the chair. It was piled high with exchanges, so he remained standing. The plump man continued to smoke dreamily. The long, lean man thoughtfully wrote on. Felix waited. Mr. Bangs did not return.

It was, Felix felt uncomfortably, just what he had expected—it was silly to have come here with that letter.

He glanced down at the desk, saw the book which Mr. Bangs had been reading, noted the name on the cover, and picked it up with a sudden interest. He looked at the title page, the date; and then turned the leaves, tenderly, affectionately....

He had quite forgotten Mr. Bangs, and the nature of his errand.

Mr. Clive Bangs, having handed the typewritten sheet to the foreman of the composing-room, walked back slowly. He knew very well who his visitor was. Helen’s letter announcing his arrival was in his pocket. “He is,” Helen had written him, “just as crazy as you are, Clive!” But he distrusted Helen’s judgment.... It was one thing to welcome to Chicago one more of the too few sophisticated spirits of the mid-west; it was another to have on his hands some pale, gawky, helpless youth who had been falsely encouraged by country librarians in the notion that he could write! What seemed a prodigy out in Iowa might be merely one of the army of unemployed and unemployable here in Chicago. Clive had tried to help these prodigies before; and he knew that a painful addiction to the style of Ruskin, combined with egotism and a total lack of ideas, was no easy malady to cure. He rather flinched from the prospect of taking Helen’s protégé in hand.... But, still—“crazy as you are”—Helen might know what she was talking about.

Stopping in the doorway, Clive looked at his problem in person. He had picked up that book—that H. G. Wells book.... Those were the days just before “Tono-Bungay,” and the name of H. G. Wells was as yet cherished by only a few enthusiasts. Besides, this was the least known of H. G. Wells’ writings, and one who might have heard of Wells as a writer of pseudo-scientific yarns would be puzzled by it. Clive stood for a moment trying to gauge the quality of Felix Fay’s response to the volume in his hand; then he went up to him.

Felix awoke to find Mr. Bangs standing beside him, and looking at him quizzically.

“I see you’re looking at my latest Wells find,” said Mr. Bangs.

“The first English edition! Where did you pick it up?” Felix asked. “In a second-hand store?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Bangs. “Forty cents! At Downer’s.”

Felix laid the book down reverently. “I wonder,” he said, “if they have any other Wells’ things there. There’s one of his books I’ve never been able to come across anywhere—‘The Island of Doctor Moreau.’ Do you know it?”

“I have the only copy I’ve ever seen in Chicago,” said Clive Bangs. “I’ll lend it to you.”

“I wish you would,” Felix said gratefully. “I found ‘The Time Machine’ in an old junk-shop in Port Royal last summer, and that made ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ the only thing of Wells’ I hadn’t read—I suppose you know ‘Kipps’? And ‘Love and Mr. Lewisham’?”

Mr. Bangs nodded. “This book,” he said, indicating the volume on the desk, “isn’t so well known as it might be.” He took a cigarette and passed Felix the box with an unconscious gesture.

Clive Bangs had ceased to judge this young man. He had accepted him. After all, how many people were there in Chicago who had read “First and Last Things”? So it was, once upon a time, when two men met who had both read an obscure book of poems about Wine and Death by one Edward Fitzgerald.

Felix lighted his cigarette from Clive Bangs’ match. “I brought my copy to Chicago with me,” he said. “It’s the only book I did bring.”

Clive Bangs looked at his watch and picked up his hat. Suddenly Felix remembered, and put his hand, embarrassedly, in his pocket for his letter of introduction.

Clive Bangs laughed. “Never mind!” he said. “I know who you are. Come on, let’s have a drink.”

A few minutes later they were sitting in a barroom called “The Tavern,” ordering ale with bitters, which Clive Bangs recommended as the specialty of the place.

“So you are Helen’s wild young man from Iowa!” said Clive. “I wish Helen were here, and we three would get drunk together.”

Felix was startled at the idea of Helen, the beautiful and condescending goddess of the library-shrine of his youth, getting drunk....

Clive laughed. “Oh,” he said, “I mean on ideas. Though for my part, after a hard day’s work, it takes a little alcohol to put the practical part of my mind asleep and set free my imagination. My mind is disposed in layers. After the first drink I cease to be interested in politics and social reform. After the second I forget the girl about whom I happen to be worrying at the time. And with the third drink, I enter the realm of pure theory.”

The tall glasses of ale were set before them.

“Here’s to Utopia!” said Clive.

2

It was only when Felix had warmly parted from his new friend, and agreed to come over the next noon for lunch and a visit to Downer’s, that he realized—with some chagrin—that he had failed to say anything to Mr. Clive Bangs about getting a job as a reporter on the Evening Chronicle.

In fact, he had fallen very neatly into the trap prepared for him by his own fatal temperament. He had given himself away at the very start. And Bangs, who appeared to indulge some theoretical and visionary traits as a relaxation to the sober work of helping get out a great daily newspaper, had enjoyed his moon-calfishness: but to what end?

Going back to his room at Community House, Felix gravely and dispassionately considered the question of what impression he had made. “On the one hand,” he said to himself, “it is doubtless true that Mr. Bangs must enjoy coming across another person who shares his own literary tastes. But, on the other hand, these tastes are in the nature of an avocation for him, and my possession of them proves nothing whatever as to my fitness for a newspaper job. Suppose he had happened to be enthusiastic about Japanese prints; suppose he had just bought a Kiyonaga, and I had looked at it and praised it; he would have been pleased to find some one who knew the difference between a Kiyonaga and a Kunisada—but would he have thought that a reason for helping me to get a newspaper job? I’m afraid not.”

Felix was pleased with the coolness of his reasoning under circumstances where another person might have built up vain hopes. And in any event, Clive Bangs was a friend; and friendship had a value of its own. He would not embarrass Clive Bangs with any requests for help; he would take what their friendship had to give, and be glad of it.

Accordingly, it was without any ulterior motive that he went to lunch with Bangs next day. Again they talked literature and ideas; they explored Downer’s together, and Felix picked up a second volume to complete his Muses’ Library edition of the poems of John Donne: and they strolled back to the office of the Chronicle, where Felix became acquainted with the other editorial writers.

The long, lean man was a New Englander named Hosmer Flint; he corresponded very much to Felix’s idea of what the editorial writer of a great daily newspaper should be, for he had a mind incredibly stored with statistics of all kinds. The other was the chief editorial writer—a man of fifty, plump and dimpled, with a childlike charm of manner which made it natural for every one to call him “Willie”—his other name being Smith.

Willie Smith genially expressed to Felix the hope that there might be something for him on the Chronicle, and when the managing editor happened in he introduced Felix to him casually as a young man who was looking for a newspaper job; but Felix understood that this was simply Willie’s good nature, and refused to take the possibility seriously. He found his new acquaintances agreeable to talk to, however, and fell into the habit of dropping into the editorial office in the slack part of the afternoon, for a half-hour’s talk. Having no economic reason for pretending to be anything but himself in their presence, he talked about the things that really interested him—socialism and anarchism and life and art.

He permitted himself these idle pleasures only after hours dutifully spent in annoying the editors of five or six other papers with a brisk and efficient presentation of his usefulness. He had to appear so preternaturally capable and alert on these occasions that it was a relief to be able to throw off the disguise and loaf and invite his soul in the editorial room of the Evening Chronicle. It was, as he sometimes reproachfully told himself, a concession to his inborn weakness, and just so much time lost from his task of getting a newspaper job.

3

But one could not look for a job all the time. It was with only slight compunction that he fell into the custom of spending his evenings in the company of Rose-Ann—sometimes talking in her room, sometimes in Paul’s watching him invent his beautiful and fantastic toy-scenery, and again in the tiny Community Theatre, helping them make costumes and build stage-sets.

It was, it seemed, to the fascination of the tiny theater itself, as much as to Rose-Ann’s persuasions, that he presently succumbed, and found himself writing a little play for a group of children—a play about the further adventures of the Pied Piper and the boys and girls who followed him into the mountain.... He felt rather like one of those children himself, lured by some irresistible music away from the daylit world of ambition into the hollow hill of fantasy.... Rose-Ann approved the play enthusiastically, and the children of her group, assigning the parts among themselves, began spontaneously to learn it by heart.

Meantime, rehearsals of a sort were going on for the “Prince and Pauper.” Rose-Ann had her own way of teaching. She became, it seemed, herself a child, and was accepted by the others as such; they quarreled and made up with her, kissed her and made faces at her and petted her, exactly as if she were one of themselves; and Felix, watching these scenes, wished that he, too, had that capacity for childlikeness, so that he could join in the fun on such terms of innocent intimacy. But he felt dreadfully grown-up and awkward, and Rose-Ann, on her knees amid her playmates, laughing and talking and acting one part or another with the utter abandon of childhood’s “pretending”—she was the youngest of them all; indeed, she seemed more than anything else a delightful doll—a marvellous talking and laughing doll of gold and ivory.

Mrs. Perkins—big, fat, comfortable Mrs. Perkins, still young-looking though reputed to be a grandmother, who lived in the neighborhood and came to the theater to sew costumes for them, and whom everybody, without any disrespect, called “Perk”—beckoned him over one day to her corner as he stood admiring Rose-Ann with her children, and whispered to him:

“You just feel like putting her in your pocket and carrying her off, don’t you?”

Felix grinned at her. “How do you know?” he whispered back. Yes, she was a wonderful little toy-girl, less and more than human, that one wanted to hold and touch and play with, and take home to keep! But how did she, old Granny Perk, know how a young man felt about it!

“Oh, I know!” and Perk smiled her comfortable smile. “I was a girl myself once. Little Miss Rosy-Posy knows just how nice she looks to you, and don’t you doubt it!”

Yes, perhaps Rose-Ann did like to be looked at and enjoyed by some one who was not a child. She seemed to be teasing him with her presence—to be saying, “Don’t you want to come and play with me, too?”

He had tried to tell Clive about Rose-Ann, but his first words, “a girl over at Community House,” had apparently evoked in Clive’s mind the picture of a misguided spinster of forty whose repressed maternal instincts were finding satisfaction in the running of other people’s lives—a creature against whom he proceeded to warn Felix in humorous terms. “She will manage you, Felix,” he said, “—for your own good. Now it’s all right to be managed by a woman, so long as it is for her benefit. You can at least complain about it. But when you’re managed for your own good, you are helpless.”

Felix objected to this notion of Rose-Ann, but Clive asked her age. And Felix said he didn’t know, but that she was a little older than himself.

“A little older than you. I thought so,” said Clive. “Beware!” There was no use talking to Clive about girls, anyway; it was a subject upon which he was frequently bitter and always absurd. Felix had told Rose-Ann a little about him, and she had said, “He’s been hurt by some girl.” Doubtless that was true. And Felix felt a certain satisfaction in the inward comparison of this creature of Clive’s distorted fancy with the real and delightful Rose-Ann—whom even as Clive talked he could see in memory, with himself standing by and caressing with his gaze every swift movement of that delicate and supple doll-body of hers.

“You’re all wrong,” he said to Clive. “She’s a pagan.”

“Yes,” said Clive scornfully, “one of those settlement-house pagans.”

Felix only laughed.

All this, however, was not getting a job. By desperate economies, as his money dwindled, he was managing to hold out. But he could not hold out forever. Clive had asked him one day if he needed money, and he had answered evasively. There was no use starting that sort of thing.

He had to get a job.

But it looked as though he were not going to get a job. There seemed to be no use trying to impress city editors with his efficiency. There had been a vacancy on a morning paper, and another young man—with, so far as Felix could tell, no better qualifications than his own—had been selected. That discouraged him. Doubtless these city editors could see through his pretences....

4

And then one afternoon when he dropped in at the Chronicle office, Clive asked him if he was ready to go to work Monday morning: he had been taken on as a reporter.... He would get, Clive told him, twenty dollars a week to start with. Clive told him this in a pleased but casual way, as though it were something long arranged between Felix and himself which had just been ratified by the higher powers. So Clive had been working for him all along!

“Go and tell Harris you’ll be on deck,” said Clive. Harris was the city editor. “And better speak to the Old Man, too.” The Old Man was the managing editor, Mr. Devoe. Felix had never supposed for a moment that these personages had him under consideration.

He presented himself before both of them, not knowing what to say. Apparently it was not necessary to say anything. Both of them were busy—too busy, Felix hoped, for them to notice how dazed he was.

“All right, Fay, you’ll be here Monday morning at eight o’clock,” said the city editor.

“I suppose Mr. Bangs told you that we’re going to start you off at twenty dollars?” said Mr. Devoe. “We can do a little better later, perhaps. It’s up to you.” Mr. Devoe looked at him severely—or kindly, Felix was not sure which—over his glasses, and turned back to his desk.

“Yes, sir,” said Felix.

Willie Smith patted him on the back. “Glad you’ve got it,” he said.

“Take it easy,” Clive told him. “A newspaper job in Chicago is just like a newspaper job anywhere else.”

Well! So at last, somehow, the devil only knew how, he had gained a foothold in Chicago.

He discussed the event with Rose-Ann that evening. She laughed at his surprise. “How do you suppose people get jobs?” she demanded. “You were going at it in precisely the right way. I knew from what you told me they were going to take you.”

Felix had already begun to worry about the future. “I don’t know where any place is,” he said. “I must dig up my street-map.”

“Oh, throw that street-map away,” said Rose-Ann. “I’ll give you a guide to Chicago that’s much more useful.” She went to her shelf and took down a little book. “Here!”

It was the “Bab Ballads.” Felix looked puzzled.

“If you can write a play that will please children, you can write to please the people of Chicago. They’re children, too,” she said.

Felix slipped the book in his pocket and went to his room and his street-map. She had too much confidence in him. Only he himself knew what a fool he was. He had got this job under false pretences.

VI. A Guide to Chicago

1

AND yet it seemed that Rose-Ann knew him better than he knew himself.

On Monday morning the city editor gruffly assigned him a desk. He hated to sit there idle, and he had thrown away his morning paper. Finding that he still had Rose-Ann’s little book in his pocket, he took it out and read in that. Presently the city editor called his name. He rose, putting the book back into his pocket. His first test had come.

“Go over to the Annex and see if you can get something about the Taft-Roosevelt situation from—” and he named a distinguished political personage.

“Where?” Felix asked.

“At the Annex.”

(But what in the world was the Annex? From the tone in which its name had been uttered by the city editor, Felix was aware that it was some place that he ought to know all about. Some place that anybody who had ever dreamed of being a reporter on a Chicago paper would of course know all about! But what was it? The Annex to what?... By a violent mental effort he came to the conclusion that it must be a hotel; probably one of Chicago’s most famous hotels! and here he had been in Chicago a month, and didn’t know where it was. Idiot!)

“Yes, sir,” said Felix to the city editor, and went out and asked the policeman on the nearest corner.... It was horribly obvious to him, at that moment, that he was too ignorant of plain everyday reality ever to hold this job.

2

He came back, having failed to get the interview.... He had been given half an hour by a delightful old gentleman at the Annex; half an hour in which to try to get some kind of quotable political comment on a situation in which everybody was interested, from a man who, if any one, knew what the situation really was. And every question had been turned aside so cleverly, so smoothly, so genially, that under other circumstances it would have been a pleasure to see it done. The old gentleman had been the soul of courtesy; he seemed to enjoy talking to his young questioner; doubtless because it was so easy to put him off the track.

At first Felix’s questions had been straightforward; and the evasiveness of the replies had disconcerted him. He framed his questions more shrewdly; but the old gentleman answered them with the same bland courtesy and to precisely the same effect. Felix kept on for a while, doggedly. And then gradually he realized—what, he told himself scornfully, he should have known from the very start, that he had been sent out on a futile quest. If there had been the slightest chance of getting anything out of this old gentleman, the best reporter on the staff would have been sent—not the newest and greenest cub.

He was angry—at himself, for having tried so naïvely to do the impossible; at the city editor, for not giving him a real assignment; at the tradition of “news,” which, having attached a fictitious importance to the subject of politics, was wasting his time and the old gentleman’s in this solemnly idiotic fashion.

“Is there anything else I could tell you about?” the old gentleman asked blandly.

“You have been very kind—” said Felix.

“Oh, not at all,” said the old gentleman. “Nothing pleases me more than to give information to a young seeker after truth.”

“There is one thing I would like to know,” said Felix. “Who struck Billy Patterson?”

This insulting question—insulting precisely because it was silly, because it threw the whole earnest interview suddenly into the key of farce—did not for an instant shake the old gentleman’s aplomb. He appeared to reflect gravely, with finger-tips delicately joined and head cocked on one side, in his characteristic gesture. He smiled faintly, and spoke.

“You have trenched,” he said, “upon an important public issue, and one not lightly to be discussed—a question of deep interest to hundreds of thousands of our fellow-countrymen. In fact, I have seldom been in any gathering of true Americans, when this question has not been raised. Who struck Billy Patterson? Again and again have I heard men ask each other that question. And how seldom, if ever, has the reply been satisfactory! No, I say frankly to you, the reply has not been satisfactory. And so the question remains—like Banquo’s ghost, it will not down. Careless and unthinking statesmen may try to lead the people astray with talk of minor issues, such as the tariff, imperialism, and the conservation of natural resources, but the heart of the American people remains true. When the shouting and the tumult dies, and the senators go back to Washington, common men look at each other and ask, Who struck Billy Patterson? It is a question that searches to the very vitals of our polity. We boast of our unexampled freedom, our magnificent opportunities; and rightly so. But justice, even-handed and sure, is the true foundation of a lasting prosperity. We know this, and we are humble before the Muse of History. Be it said in our behalf that others have not had to prod at our sleeping consciences. It is not because of outside criticism that we trouble ourselves over this matter. The Frenchman and the Turk do not point the finger of scorn at us; and even our brothers across the sea, speaking our own language, are probably ignorant of William Patterson’s very name. But we do not forget. And whatever happens, so long as this question remains unanswered, I venture to predict that no other issue will usurp its place; and on the heart of the last American will be written the solemn words: Who struck Billy Patterson? Is there anything else?”

So the old gentleman could play that game, too!

“Well,” said Felix, “I was going to ask you if—if you thought McPhairson Conglocketty Angus McClan got a square deal, but—”

The old gentleman shook his head, still smiling.

“I really don’t think it would be proper,” he said, “for me to discuss the internal affairs of the British Empire.”

“And Noah’s Ark,” said Felix. “If you could express an opinion—”

“It might be construed as a reflection upon the naval policy of the new administration.”

“And as to what became of little Charley Ross?”

“That,” said the old gentleman, “is something the national committee would prefer to remain, for the present, a secret.”

Felix was beaten.

“Thank you,” he said, and went away.

“Got anything?” the city editor asked, when Felix came up to his desk to report.

“Not a thing.” Felix said.

The city editor grunted, reached out for a typewritten sheet on the hook, and seemed to dismiss the matter from his mind.

Felix went back to his desk and sat there idly. He took out Rose-Ann’s little book from his pocket, and read in it. And then suddenly he put a sheet of paper in his machine and commenced to write.

Confound it, if what Rose-Ann said about the people of Chicago was so, they would enjoy the true story of that interview. It was funny. Funny just because it was silly. But it was so preposterously the opposite of what he had been sent to find out—it seemed a deliberate mockery of the traditional and legitimate curiosity of the public. If he ventured to show it to the city editor, it would probably be his last assignment.

Recklessly, he wrote it.

The city editor strolled to the water-tank, and back, wiping his lips. He saw Felix writing, came over, put a hand on his shoulder, and asked, “What are you writing?”

Well, he was lost. There was no backing out now. He handed over the first sheets.

“Thought you didn’t get anything,” the city editor remarked.

“I—didn’t,” said Felix.

“Where’s the rest of it?”

Felix wrote the last sentence, and surrendered the page.

“He said this?” asked the city editor, pausing for a moment. Felix nodded. “Just like the old bird, too,” the city editor muttered, and went on reading. He read to the end, and then read the first page again, and then smiled amiably. “And you didn’t know you had a story!” he said.

“Well,” said Felix, still incredulous. “I didn’t think—”

“You’re sure you’ve got it right?” the city editor asked, rubbing his chin.

“Every word,” said Felix, earnest in behalf of his veracity.

“H’m,” said the city editor. “With a little fixing up, I think we’ve got a nice little story here.” He carried it into the managing editor’s room.

And to Felix’s great astonishment the story, with a few changes, was printed on the first page, under a solemnly ironic heading.... They were laughing about it in the editorial room when he ventured in that afternoon to see Clive. “So you had a story and didn’t know it!” Willie said delightedly.

“Never mind,” Clive told him, “you’ve made a hit with Harris by letting him discover the story for himself.” Clive really seemed to think he had played a kind of trick on Harris. “The regular cub trick,” said Clive.

Felix showed the story to Rose-Ann that night.

She was pleased, but not surprised. “It’s exactly the sort of thing I expected you to do,” she said.

He was tempted to tell Rose-Ann the truth about it; but he decided not to. Let her keep on believing in him—while she could!

VII. Work and Play

1

FELIX kept the little book in his desk, cultivated what he called the “Bab Ballad manner,” and waited, sceptically, to see how long his luck would last. In three weeks he was given a raise. But even this did not quite convince him.

It had been too easy—too astonishingly easy. It had come about, not because of any change in his character, not because he had ceased in some miraculous way to be a moon-calf, but precisely because he was just as much a moon-calf as ever. That was why he was compelled to suspect the authenticity of his good fortune.

“Stop worrying,” Clive told him one day at lunch. “What in the world are you afraid of?”

“That I’ll wake up,” said Felix.

“You’ll wake up, all right,” said Clive, “to discover that you’re being underpaid and overworked just like everybody else. You know, you go along looking as if you had had a telegram saying that your rich uncle in Australia had died and left you a million dollars, and you didn’t know whether to believe it or not. No one would guess to look at you that this remarkable good fortune of yours simply consists of eight or ten stiff hours a day for twenty-five dollars a week.”

This, to Felix, seemed an understatement of the merits of the situation. For one thing, he had become very much attached to Clive, whose odd, whimsical, theoretical conversation had a tang of its own; and this job on the Chronicle yielded him the opportunity to enjoy Clive’s company, though now on somewhat restricted terms.

Since Felix had become a reporter, taking his place as it were in the ranks of a lower caste, he had begun to feel that his visits to the editorial room were a kind of special privilege, which he endeavored to justify by an occasional piece of writing suited to the editorial page—some entertaining account of things seen in Chicago, the by-products of his work as a reporter. Or, more likely, things not seen at all, but pieced together out of his memory and hung on the slightest thread of contemporary incident.... Once he attended a meeting of “aurists,” and, with a reference to that meeting as a starting point, meandered through a column of odd and curious lore about ears: the ear as the organ of stability, by means of which we are enabled to stand upright—with the story of the little crustacean which puts sand in its ears, and upon whom some scientist played a mean trick, substituting iron filings for the sand-grains, and then applying a magnet overhead, with the result that the crustacean swam contentedly upside down!... In short, anything that happened to interest him!

He discovered that these writings gave him a special standing among his fellow-reporters. They had never ventured to aspire to the editorial page. Nor would Felix have ventured, except that he knew from loafing about the editorial room how welcome was an occasional column from the outside. He still felt himself to be an intruder into a superior realm, and he was grateful for those times, once or twice a week, when Clive stopped beside his desk and suggested that they lunch together.

He had wondered at first how it was that Clive Bangs, with a passion for ideas as intense as the one Felix had long been endeavoring to overcome within himself, should be a successful editorial writer on Chicago’s most conservative and respectable paper—and, for that matter, the valued committeeman of two or three eminently practical and sober reform organizations! Clive was not merely a moon-calf like himself; he was at the same time a quite sane and work-a-day young Chicagoan.

The thought of such an adjustment to the world fascinated and tantalized Felix. It held out for him the possibility of getting along successfully without going through any such violent psychic revolution as he had demanded of himself, Clive was inwardly an Anarchist, a Utopian, a theorist and dreamer of the wildest sort; and outwardly something quite other.

That outward quality was what Felix envied in Clive—that practical adaptability to the world, so far beyond anything that seemed possible for Felix himself to achieve. He would have given much for Clive’s ease of manner, his ability to meet ordinary people on their own ground—as for instance in discussing the Yale-Harvard game with a college boy and an instant later local politics with a “reform” alderman who stopped in turn by their table in the City Club. At such a moment Felix was struck dumb; he felt like a child in the presence of grown-up people. Clive seemed to him an infinitely superior being.

And yet this practical adaptability to human occasions was a trait upon which Clive himself seemed to set no value. His easy worldliness—as Felix thought it—was only one side of his character; and he preferred to indulge the other side—the side that was fantastically idealistic.

Perhaps it was because Felix had felt obliged to carry all his theories into practice, that some bounds had been set to his theorizing. No such bounds existed for Clive Bangs. The most extreme ideas that Felix had ever timidly cherished with regard to some free and happy society of the future, were commonplaces to Clive. His speculations roved boldly into Platonic, Nietzschean, and H. G. Wellsian spheres, and dwelt there as among solid realities.

They talked chiefly of love—of love in the future.

Sometimes Felix, too much allured and disturbed, had to protest that these were, after all, only dreams. One day at lunch Clive discoursed on freedom in love until Felix felt constrained to point out that human nature being what it is, jealousy—whether one liked it or not—was nevertheless a fact.

“Oh, yes,” Clive laughed. “I realize that the red-haired young woman at the settlement would find it difficult not to be jealous! In that sense, of course jealousy is a fact, and has to be taken into consideration. But we are free men at present, dealing with ideas, not with Jane and Sue—and as free men we are at liberty to inquire what kind of fact jealousy is. Witchcraft, too, was a fact—soberly attested by the greatest thinkers of the age. Anybody who didn’t believe in witchcraft was crazy, just like you and I. And jealousy is the same kind of fact—a socially-created fact. People are persuaded that it exists—that under certain circumstances it must exist. That’s all. How would I know when to be jealous, except that I am carefully taught what my rights of possession are and when they are infringed? It’s the old barbaric code, still handed down in talk and writing. And that’s why I am interested in the development of a new kind of talk and writing.”

It was specifically as this “new kind of talk and writing” that Clive discussed modern literature. He repudiated any preoccupation with literature as an art. It was to him a kind of social dynamics. It had been used to build up through the ages a vast system of “taboos”—and now it was being used to break them down again. In this work of social iconoclasm the chiefs were H. G. Wells, Shaw and Galsworthy—with Meredith as a breathless and stammering forerunner and Hardy as a blind prophet....

“Do you suppose the public knows what they are really up to?” Felix asked doubtfully.

“No. And it would hang them if it did. But fiction cuts deeper than any kind of argument. And it’s doing its work. Wait ten years.... The new younger generation won’t be like us, Felix—content to orate about these matters at luncheon. They will despise us, Felix! They will say we did nothing but talk.”

“Quite right, too,” said Felix.

“They will have heard our talk—talk—talk, and they will be sick of it. They will be all for action. And you and I, Felix, who will then be respectably married, you to your settlement Egeria and I to God knows whom, will be shocked at the younger generation. We will remember how prayerfully we planned to be unconventional, in what a mood of far-seeing social righteousness we went about breaking the commandments, and how, after all, we stopped on the way to discuss the matter more thoroughly, and ended by never doing anything at all—and we will be disgusted by the light-minded frivolity of those youngsters. Even our novels—instead of corrupting the youth of the land as we hope!—will probably be regarded by them as hopelessly old-fashioned. If we ever actually write them....”

When he had reached that point in the discussion, Clive would become silent and sullen. “If I only had the energy to write!” he would complain bitterly.

He had been brooding over a novel for four years, and had not yet written a word of it.... They had long talks about that unwritten novel which was to corrupt the younger generation.

2

At Community House, Felix was having difficulties with his class. Not that they were lacking in enthusiasm; on the contrary, their enthusiasm carried him in directions where he had no intention of going. At the outset, he had conceived English composition to be a simple matter. Perhaps it might have been for children; but these young people of eighteen were already convinced of its difficulties, and haggled over semicolons. They wanted to know the “rules” by the observance of which one became a good writer!

Felix presently gave up prose as too hard to teach, and started in upon verse, with greater success. Yet when it came to explaining why love and rove are technically correct rhymes, and young and son no rhymes at all, he was nonplussed. Very soon the class had hit upon a mode which was neither verse nor prose—a kind of free verse. It was quite other than Felix had any wish to encourage anybody to write. He doubted if the writing of free verse would ever enable them to appreciate the Ode to a Nightingale. But he was helpless in the situation, and could only let them go ahead.

His conception of verse was precisely that it was not free; he had thought that the pains and pleasures of rhyme and metre would give them a creative understanding of English poetry. This free verse of theirs seemed to him utterly unrelated to the tradition into which he sought to give them an insight. It was very free verse indeed—it mixed its metaphors recklessly, it soared into realms of vague emotion. And when its meaning was at all clear, it carried the burden of a hopeless reproach against circumstance, and a plaintive yearning for it knew not what. Felix fiercely disliked this plaintive hopelessness, and preached scornfully at his class. They seemed to be impressed; but they continued as before.

“I can’t believe you really feel like that,” he said to a merry-faced young Jewess who had just read aloud a poem full of world-sorrow.

She looked offended. “But I do!” she cried. “If you only knew!” and she put her hand expressively to her bosom.

“My God!” he said. “What a broken-hearted crowd!”

There was a quick burst of laughter, and then a girl spoke up. “But Mr. Fay, do you not think we feel?”

“I know you feel unhappy. But don’t you ever feel anything else? Don’t you ever have a good time? Or don’t you think good times are worth writing about?”

“Did Keats and Shelley write about their good times?” asked an ironical youth.

“Yes,” said Felix defiantly. “They wrote about lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon, and skylarks, and things like that; and they loved them to begin with—that was why they wrote about them. Don’t you love anything—anything that is right on hand to be loved—babies, or pet kittens, or pretty clothes, or pretty girls? Are you always pining for something you haven’t got?”

“Always!” two or three of them responded impressively in chorus.

“The desire of the moth for the star,” the ironical young man contributed.

“See here,” said Felix. “Shelley was a young aristocrat with an income, living luxuriously in Italy, and he could afford to be unhappy.” They laughed, but Felix went on earnestly. “He could afford to be devoted to something afar from the sphere of his sorrow, because his sorrow consisted of the fact that after eloping with two girls, he couldn’t elope with a third and have a perfectly clear conscience. Added to the fact that he knew, if he did, he would be tired of her in a few weeks anyway. He had tried it before, and he knew. That was what Shelley’s sorrow was all about, and if any one here present is in the same situation, I grant that he is entitled to feel that the desire for happiness is the desire of the moth for the star. But for ordinary mortals like ourselves, happiness is no such impossible thing. It is not the desire of the moth for the star, but—” he hesitated, and the ironical youth broke in with:

“The desire of the moth for the candle-flame!”

“And suppose that it is!” said Felix. “What is life anyway, except a burning of ourselves up in action? Only I don’t see why you prefer such tragic figures of speech. Why not—”

The ironical youth interrupted again: “The desire of the caterpillar for the cabbage-leaf!”

“I give you up!” said Felix.

But he learned from Rose-Ann that his class was considered by the residents a real success. And fat old Mrs. Perk, one evening at the tiny theatre, said to him: “I hear you’re making poets out of the boys and girls. They say you’re a grand teacher!”

It was very odd: it seemed to make no difference that they could not take what he wanted to give them, or that he did not want to give them what they were getting; the class was a success anyway!

“Who was telling you?” he asked.

“That David Arenstein,” she told him. “The one that always used to be talking about committing suicide.” David was the ironical youth who had quoted Shelley at him. “But he’s far from committing suicide now—” and she smiled her comfortable smile. “He’s going to be married. Oh, yes, he comes and tells me all his troubles.”

Felix laughed. “I hope he doesn’t hold me to blame!”

She shook her head. “Well, you’ll be getting married yourself, pretty soon, I suppose?”

He did not venture to challenge her as to whom. But he said, “What in the world makes you think that?”

“Oh,” she said, “young folks do, sooner or later, I’ve noticed.”

3

It was nonsense, of course. He was in no position to think about such things, at all. And as for Rose-Ann, he had in the course of weeks become as it were acclimated to her loveliness, so that it no longer tormented him as at first. He was secretly proud of his imperturbability. And if Rose-Ann’s companionship had lately grown more disturbing than ever, it was for a very different reason. It was because of her flattering and at the same time annoying expectations of him as an artist—a poet—a creator. He attempted to deny any pretensions of this sort; he tried to evade any discussion of art at all. But they had formed the habit of going to the theater together, and he found it impossible to resist talking with her about how plays should be written.

“Why don’t you write a really-and-truly play?” she asked, one night on their way back to the Community House.

He attempted to turn the question aside. “Hawkins is writing one, according to office gossip,” he said. Hawkins was the young dramatic critic of the Chronicle.

“Well, if Hawkins can write a play—!” she said.

“All right,” he assented cheerfully, “I’ll wait and see if Hawkins can!”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You know what I think, Felix?”

“I never have any idea what you’re going to think. What is it this time?”

“I think you’ve had your feelings hurt, somehow, back where you came from. In regard to writing. Something has made you afraid to show what you can do.”

There was something quaintly maternal in her manner which almost took the sting out of that word afraid. But Felix hardened. “Well, why don’t you write a play?” he countered.

“Don’t be brutal, Felix. You know—and I know—that I’m not up to it. I can do little things. I can’t do a big thing. And you can.”

“It’s nice of you to be so sure, Rose-Ann. But I’m not. Or rather, I’m pretty sure I can’t. So there.”

“Why do you say that? It’s not true, and you know it.”

He wished Rose-Ann had not become so serious. They were walking home through one of the first winter snows. A little while ago she had thrown a fluffy snowball at him, and threatened to wash his face, reproaching him for not being enough of a child. This was even more embarrassing. He had an absurd fear that she would commence to talk to him about his soul.... This was coming dangerously near to it. He scuffed up the soft snow with his feet, while she looked sidewise at him waiting for a reply.

“Rose-Ann, you make me uncomfortable,” he said at last. “This business of having some one ‘believe’ in you isn’t what it’s cracked up to be in the romances. It—it’s a damned nuisance. I’d be perfectly happy if you didn’t come to me with your preposterous demands. I’m not the young genius in ‘The Divine Fire.’ I’m a reporter on a Chicago newspaper. Of course I want to write a play. Every young reporter wants to, I suppose. And of course, since you insist upon it, I think I could. But what of that? Every young reporter thinks the same thing.”

“Why this pretence of modesty, Felix? You’re scared, that’s all.”

“Scared of what?” he demanded angrily.

She answered slowly, as though she had just discovered the reason. “Of letting people know your real ambitions.”

“Of making a silly fool of myself,” he muttered.

“But where’s the harm?” she continued. “Suppose they did know? Suppose everybody knew all your secret dreams? Would that be so terrible? Do you think everybody is watching you, ready to laugh at you? You’re afraid of being laughed at, that’s the trouble.... Well, I know your secret, Felix, and I don’t laugh.”

He shrugged his shoulders. It was intolerable that she should think she knew his secret. “What if I do want to write plays? I want to write novels, and poems, and lots of other things. And if I had nothing else to do, perhaps I’d try my hand at them all. But my main concern now is to make a living.”

“Still worried about your job? Not really?”

“Yes, really. How do I know how long this fool stunt of mine is going to please the Chronicle? I haven’t done a single piece of straight reporting since I’ve been on the paper. And I know no more of the real Chicago—”

“Felix, you are absurd!”

VIII. Rose-Ann Goes Away

1

ROSE-ANN had suddenly become a problem. In spite of everything he was falling in love with her. He criticized her to himself, harshly. She was a daughter of the bourgeoisie—a sort of madcap and runaway daughter, it was true, adventuring by herself in Chicago for a while, but destined, he told himself, after the flare of this rebellion had burned itself out, to return to the bourgeois fold. What else could she do? She was not an artist—or not enough of an artist—to face the world alone. She wrote a little, cleverly, but with no sustained strength; and what she wrote was inferior to what she thought and felt. She was one of those people who might have been, and never would be, writers; and the reason was, as Felix saw it, in her bringing up. Some softness had intervened between her and reality; she could see reality truly, far more truly than he could; but its sharp edges had never hurt her, it seemed; her mind had never been rowelled by the spur of painful experience. That was it. She had never been hurt enough; and one who has not been hurt has no need of the artist’s revenge—the act of re-creation by which he triumphs over pain. She had disliked her world; not profoundly, but a little; and she had changed it sufficiently by the mere act of coming to Chicago and living in a settlement house and playing with costumes and scenery. That would content her—would more than satisfy her rebellious impulses. She talked of herself as one of the “queer” people of the settlement; but she wasn’t. She would go back, and this period of her life would provide her a fund of humorous reminiscence at bourgeois dinner parties in Springfield, Illinois, where she would be, no doubt, quite a figure. Paul, with his “pewter-platter” manner, Dick, the boy who had fled from Community House and died of pneumonia in the slums, and himself, would quaintly adorn her reminiscences.... So Felix argued against her to himself; and it was easy enough to say all these things about her when she was not there to deny them by her every word and gesture.

In her presence he could not think these things. She was a seeker like himself—imperfect like himself, but utterly sincere—a comrade in the very simple and obvious adventure of making the most out of life.... Why was he so suspicious of her? Was it because he had vaguely heard that her people were well-to-do? She was not to blame for that! She was herself. There seemed no reason to distrust her.

But these arguments sufficed to discourage any tendency to romanticize her. She was less a wonderful person to him now than a dangerous person. Dangerous only in the sense that she might make a fool of him. Her friendliness was almost more than mere friendliness, and it took an effort to adjust himself to it. If he had been less susceptible, he might have taken the relationship more easily for what it was. If, for example, he could only have put his arm around her shoulder with an authentic brotherliness! But he was afraid to. No, there was the possibility of his making a romantic damned fool of himself about her, and being laughed at—or perhaps gently chided, it was hard to tell which would be worse. He could run the risk of that; or he could stiffly keep his distance, and suffer an occasional sisterly caress without returning it. He preferred to keep his distance.

Yet there were times when all this seemed an absurd affectation. They would be sitting, he sprawled on her couch and she rather primly upright in her chair, discussing something, when suddenly it would occur to him that they were only pretending to be adults, only making-believe at this intellectual game—that they were really only boy and girl, with the ancient and traditional interest of boy and girl in each other. He would watch her as she bent forward, with her curious little eager frown, intent upon making herself clear; and then he would note his own attitude, tense with apparent interest in what was being said. “Hypocrites!” he would address himself and her in his mind. “I want to kiss you—and you want to, too. And we don’t. Isn’t it absurd!” And meantime he answered her arguments aloud. “Little liar!” he would be saying to her in his mind, “If I came over and put my arms about you—!” But he remained where he was.... And then, as suddenly, that tender and humorous insight into the situation would vanish, and she would appear to him an alien—an interesting young woman, but a complete stranger—and he would be glad he had not done anything silly.

2

Then, in the midst of the preparations for the Christmas performance of “The Prince and the Pauper,” when everything was being rushed to its conclusion, and everybody interested in the play was sitting up all night to work on costumes or scenery, and the children were forgetting their lines or getting them mixed with lines rashly learned from Felix’s Pied Piper play, there came an interruption.

One evening Rose-Ann did not come down to dinner, and he heard one of the residents say something about somebody in Springfield being ill, and Rose-Ann’s being called home.

Knocking at her door, he found Rose-Ann packing and dressing for the journey. Her mother was ill. She was taking the train for Springfield in half an hour.

“Can I help you?”

“You can see me to the train if you want to. Come back in about ten minutes and I’ll be ready.”

He had the feeling that this was the last he would see of her....

She explained the situation as they taxied in to the station. Her mother’s illness, she was sure, was nothing serious. She was annoyed at being telegraphed for. It would upset the plans for the Christmas play. Miss Clark would be put in charge of her group, and spoil everything. The telegram was just a trick to get her back home for the holidays. And yet—“Curious!” she said, “I never get along with my mother, and I don’t believe there’s anything the matter with her, and yet I’m as worried over this telegram as if I were the most dutiful daughter in the world.... The worst of going back home is, I shall be with the whole family—especially my brothers. They’ll want me to stay there. They don’t approve of my being alone in Chicago. They’re just using mother as a means of getting me into their clutches. They’ve tried it before. And when I find that it’s simply mother’s annual ‘spell,’ I’ll tell them all what I think of them and Springfield and the furniture business—and come back. I’ve made these flying trips three times now.... And yet I am worried.”

Felix reflected that she would never get free from these family claims—that whatever she tried to do, she would be always called back to Springfield, and would obey the call. She would spend her whole life in a vain attempt to be something besides a daughter and sister of people who were inimical to all her wishes; until finally she surrendered to them.... He had the sense of hiding these hostile feelings from the swift friendly glance with which she looked to him for sympathy.

They had just time to catch the train. Felix gave her suitcase to the porter, and she took his hand. “Be good while I’m gone, Felix,” she said. “Don’t do anything awfully foolish. Good-bye.” She leaned to him and kissed him—a timid little kiss. And then they were clinging to each other in a stunned and breathless embrace, as if they had been flung violently into each other’s arms; they kissed, with a rude, strong, almost painful passion,—a kiss that hurt and could not hurt enough to satisfy them, and then become infinitely tender. It was a kiss that sought to annihilate time and space, to make them remember it and what it meant forever.

“’Bo-o-o-ard!” said the conductor, and took Rose-Ann’s elbow and put her firmly on the step. She turned and smiled back at Felix, and the train started.

Book Two

Canal Street

IX. How to Spend One’s Evenings

1

FELIX began the task of forgetting—a task for youth in its most fantastically stern mood:—of trying to forget that unforgettable moment on the station platform with Rose-Ann. Or at least, to behave as though it had not occurred. For he was convinced that neither of them had intended it to occur.

It was obviously an accident—the mere mood of parting. It had meant nothing. It must be ignored.

But it was hard to ignore. It was a moment to which memory would recur. It dramatized vividly for him the fact—to which he sought to adjust himself—of Rose-Ann’s absence.

Rose-Ann’s absence made a great deal of difference, it seemed—and not only to himself. What she had predicted in regard to her dramatic class came true very quickly. Under Miss Clark’s fussy direction, all the fun was taken out of the work for everybody. Mrs. Perk looked on the altered face of things with an air of wry disapproval, and whispered to Felix, “Oh, it’s not the same place at all any more!” The children were listless. Paul froze into a silent rage at some unfortunate remark of Miss Clark’s about his scenery and left Community House, and Felix began to stay away from the rehearsals altogether.

He wrote these things to Rose-Ann, and received brief replies which showed how remote all these matters had now become to her. He accepted the probability that Springfield had captured her for good and all this time. It was true that she always inquired in a friendly way about the things in which they had both been interested; but these weekly inquiries were tinged with a kind of faint retrospective glamour, as though to her these interests were already invested with the pathos of distance. She was evidently saying good-bye to her moment of freedom.

Felix did not tell her how much he missed her. He was rather ashamed of the fact. There was something intellectually disgraceful about a state of dependence upon one person for companionship....

It was true, he had Clive. But he had been neglecting Clive, and now Clive had other concerns. Clive had several times urged him to come out over the week-end to Woods Point, where he was undertaking to spend the winter in his summer cottage, and Felix had always had some engagement with Rose-Ann which prevented his going. Now, when he would be glad to accept such an invitation, it was not renewed; Clive, it appeared, was so much interested in some girl that he had no time to spare for Felix. And Clive was the only person about the office that he cared for; at Community House since Rose-Ann had gone, there was no one. He wished that he had taken the trouble to make a few more friends. It made all the difference in the world to have some one to talk to at the day’s end, some one to share one’s thoughts with....

Suddenly he began to find Community House intolerable. He spent his evenings looking for a place to live. Certainly he could not be less lonely anywhere else! And one evening, on Canal Street, in a dingy building which had apparently once been a residence and was now rented out room by room, he found a tiny hall-room on the third floor which he had not the excuse of not being able to afford. He made some explanation for leaving Community House—which it seemed was not needed, for room there was much in demand—and moved at once into his new home.

It was a room about eight by eleven feet, hardly holding the cot-bed, table and chair, which constituted its furnishing. He improvised a shelf above the tiny radiator in the corner for his half-dozen books.... And for one evening he was happy, in being away from Community House, in being in a place of his own, in having in some way established his independence.

And then loneliness descended upon him in a black mist, obliterating the clear outlines of the actual world. He managed to get through the day’s work somehow, and then he wandered about hopelessly, unseeingly, the victim of a longing that made the very act of breathing a pain; a longing that he could not understand—for what was Rose-Ann to him?

2

He dined in various restaurants in the loop, in the vague hope of finding some one to talk to.

One evening, as he stood in a restaurant looking about for an empty table, he heard his name called. A young man, sitting alone, was beckoning to him. It was Eddie Silver, a reporter of whom Felix had been hearing much of late.

“Come over and congratulate me,” he said, grinning, “I’ve just been fired!”

“Really? What for?” Felix asked.

“Coming down to the office crazy drunk,” said Eddie Silver proudly. “Sit down.”

Felix had heard of Eddie Silver’s epic drunkennesses. Another thing he had heard was that Eddie Silver wrote poetry.... This was not so rare a thing among Chicago reporters as Felix would have supposed. Two in every dozen young reporters, as Clive had said, were poets of a sort. But, as Clive had added, it was always of a tame and colourless sort. Eddie Silver was not tame and colourless, whatever his poetry might be. Or rather there was nothing tame about the Eddie Silver legend—though its hero had appeared to Felix, whenever they met, to be the gentlest soul alive.

Eddie Silver was having a dinner which consisted mostly of cocktails; but he showed no signs of any of the alcoholic belligerency for which he was famed; he seemed, on the contrary, likely to burst into tears at any moment. He was in a soft poetic mood. He talked about poetry. He tried to recite it. But the lines kept getting mixed up.

“Come on over my place,” he said, “we’ll read some Swinburne.”

He took Felix to a large furnished room a little to the north of the loop, and propping himself on a couch with pillows, read “Poems and Ballads” in a sonorous and unintelligible manner until midnight. He invited Felix to come back the next evening for more Swinburne, and Felix went away feeling that the legend had rather over-emphasized the belligerent side of Eddie Silver’s character.... He came the next evening, which was spent in precisely the same manner, ending with an invitation to come in tomorrow evening for still more Swinburne.

Felix wondered if Eddie Silver read Swinburne every night.

Coming the third time, he found Eddie Silver’s room occupied by half a dozen young men all more or less drunk.

“C’m’ on in!” Eddie Silver called from the couch, where he sat propped with pillows as before, with a book in one hand and a glass in the other. “On’y two bo’l’s o’ Swinburne left!”

He rose, and poured a glassful of whiskey for Felix.

Felix looked at the huge drink with an involuntary gesture of dismay.

“’S all right,” said Eddie Silver. “Nas’y stuff, I know! But you take it ’n’ you’ll feel better right away!”

Felix had never been drunk. He had never wanted to be drunk. But it occurred to him that now was the proper time to have that experience.

He looked about the room. All these half dozen people were in that state, so eloquently described by the poets, of being “perplexed no more with human and divine.”

One of them was telling an incoherent story, and two others were laughing in the wrong place and being told indignantly that that wasn’t the point at all. Another was singing to himself, and not doing it very well. Poor devil! he probably wanted to sing and nobody would let him except when he was drunk. And still another was arguing with Eddie Silver, who paid no attention to him whatever, about somebody named John. “John means well,” he explained, with the air of one who understands all and forgives all. “John just don’t know how, that’s all! But he means well.”

Felix considered. Did he really wish to join them in that state, so merely ridiculous when viewed from the outside? Yet they were doubtless happy, in some way which he, in his inexperience, knew nothing about. Well, he would try it. He would get drunk.

And he might as well do it quickly.

He drank half the glassful down, choked, and was slapped on the back. He waited.

He was surprised, and a little disappointed, to find that it had no further effect than the same gentle exhilaration he had experienced from an evening’s slow sipping of his friend Tom Alden’s Rhine wine. That was not what he wanted. That was not enough. He braced himself, and drank the rest of the glassful.

Some hours later he was awakened from a deep and peaceful sleep on the floor of the bathroom by two of his companions, and walked out of the house.... He felt refreshed by the night air, and remembered a discussion about Chicago, and of slapping somebody’s face. He did not remember being knocked down—several times, they said. By a man named Smith. He did not remember Smith.

“And every time,” they told him gleefully, “you got up and solemnly slapped his face again. You said you wouldn’t allow anybody to talk that way about Chicago.... And you kept calling him ‘McFish.’”

His companions were taking him home. He thanked them extravagantly, and tried to give them directions, but they explained that they lived in the same building he did—a fact which at the time he found very puzzling. Nevertheless they affirmed that it was so.

He got up two flights of stairs without assistance, and opened his door, but immediately became overcome with sleep, and sank on the couch. They pulled off his shoes and left him....

At seven o’clock in the morning he awoke, located himself after a momentary wonderment and shook his head. No headache! That was strange! Apparently he was not going to suffer the traditional aftermath.... He went to take a cold bath, and returning found one of his companions of the night before in the hall. “How do you feel?” He felt fine. He had some breakfast at the nearest restaurant, and went to work.

X. The Detached Attitude

1

HIS kindly neighbors, who lived in the big room at the back next to his own, were Roger Sully and Don Carew, so he learned from the inscription on their mail-box in the entrance. He went in that evening after dinner to thank them.

He was surprised to find, in this dingy building, so charming a room—strikingly in contrast to his own bare and cheerless one. Across one wall a blazing splash of colour—some kind of foreign-looking dyed-stuff—and a few brilliant cushions on the couch, warmed the place and made him forget what seemed the bleak chill of all the rest of the world.

Roger, it appeared, was the fat little man with the air of distinction, who was making coffee in a glass bulb over an alcohol lamp. Don, a long and bony youth, was stretched at ease in a big chair.

“Have some coffee with us,” said Roger. “It will be good coffee, I promise you. And good coffee,” he went on in his gently modulated voice, “is one of the few really important things in life.”

“And a cigarette,” said Don, rising to offer him a box of queer-looking Russian things with long pasteboard mouthpieces. As he offered the cigarettes with one hand, he raised the other and ran his long fingers through his fair tousled hair, reducing it to a state of more picturesque disorder. He made this gesture continually, not in mere nervousness but as if he were caressing something he liked.

The coffee was very good, and Felix drank it gratefully. The two hosts drank it as though it were a rite, Felix observed, a veritable and solemn ceremonial. They smoked cigarettes the same way—slowly, as if tasting each inhalation with a devout palate. And aside from these rather solemn sensory enthusiasms, they maintained a slightly bored air.

They referred to the incident of the night before as if it had happened a thousand years ago. It did not appear to interest them in the least, and Felix found it difficult to identify them with the delightedly chattering companions who had escorted him home—until something that was said seemed to break the spell, and Roger leaned forward eagerly and demanded:

“Yes—now why did you call him McFish? Have you any idea?”

“Yes—why?” echoed Don, also alert.

Felix did not know, and could not imagine why anybody should care to probe the secret of a mere drunken mistake in nomenclature.... The McFish incident reminded them of some equally esoteric mistake made upon some similar occasion, and they spent an hour in a quite excited discussion of psychic revelations which seemed to Felix both immaterial and irrelevant. He went away feeling as though he had stepped by inadvertence into a chapter by Henry James, and he decided not to come again.

But he did drop in a few evenings later, in sheer boredom, and drank their coffee, and found that upon occasion they could tell a really amusing story—or was it rather that he had begun to understand the point of view from which they found things amusing?

One phrase in their talk, solemnly uttered, caught his fancy. He had seen it in books, but as used by them it seemed to have a special significance.

“The detached attitude?” he repeated inquiringly.

They smiled a little pityingly at him, and explained. The detached attitude was the proper state of mind for an artist. It was an attitude toward life which painters had learned, but which writers generally had forgotten and must re-learn if they were ever to make writing a true art again. The Greeks had the detached attitude. Flaubert had it.... And obviously Don and Roger also had it.

Felix suspected that it might be simply another name for boredom, but he did not venture to say so.

The artist, they went on—one taking up the argument languidly where the other left off—should strictly avoid personal experience. He should hold himself austerely aloof from participation in human affairs....

“But I thought,” said Felix, “that what the artist was supposed to need was experience!”

“A vulgar error,” said Roger scornfully.

“What an artist needs,” said Don, “is background.”

And background, Felix gathered from their further explanations, was something one got by being in many different places without ever settling down and belonging to any one place—by merely being there and, as Roger put it, “looking on disinterestedly while other people passionately and ridiculously did things.”

The idea rather appealed to Felix.... He secretly wished he had stood by and looked on while the others got drunk that night. He regretted his participation in that scene—regretted it in spite of the absence of any of the traditional unpleasant after-effects. He wished he had remained austerely aloof from the human activities of that occasion. What, after all, was the use of passionately hitting somebody in the face if you couldn’t remember afterward what it was all about?... He was inclined to think that Roger and Don were right; it was not the meaningless raw material of experience that one needed, but some calm, fixed point of view from which to look on and understand it.

Did they have such a point of view? He began to respect and envy them.

2

It was strange—he said to himself—that he should continue to be so upset by Rose-Ann’s absence! He realized grudgingly and unwillingly how much the centre of his Chicago she had been. Without her companionship, his life seemed to have lost its significance.

His class at Community House had come to seem a nuisance, his newspaper work mere empty trickery. And there was nothing in the outside world to turn to, no cause that seemed worth serving. Socialism—it was too Utopian. Social reform—perhaps that was not Utopian enough. The art of writing—no, he must not think of that.... He found in his life nothing to give it meaning.

Rose-Ann’s letters increased his sense of futility. They were friendly letters, telling of her mother’s illness, which it seemed was sufficiently real this time, and of her encounters with a family of aggressively brotherly brothers; and to these letters he had responded in equally friendly terms.

That was the trouble. He did not want to write friendly letters.... He wanted to write angry letters. He wanted to tell her to stop writing to him—to let him alone, and let him forget her, as she would soon forget him. He wanted to say: “You know, and I know, that your moment of freedom, and all it promised, is over for good now. Springfield has got you, you belong to your family again, you will never come back except as the wife of some fat Springfield manufacturer, to see the sights, or go to the theater with him and show off your new gowns, and—yes, you will come to Community House, and visit your old class, and as you go away you will say to your husband, ‘I used to know such a quaint and interesting boy here—I wonder what has become of him!’ And your fat husband will put his fat cigar into the other corner of his fat mouth, and say, ‘Yes, I suppose it’s a good thing your folks got you back to Springfield when they did!’ But he will be wrong, at that; Springfield is your natural habitat, you would have gone back there anyway....”

He wanted to write absurd things like that to her. Instead, he wrote friendly letters, “frank” and comradely and cool, in the tone in which their whole relationship had been couched from the first, up to that insane moment on the station platform....

He was ashamed of himself for thinking so much about her. Of course he was not in love with her! He was merely lonely.

Clive was still preoccupied with that troublesome girl to whom he had darkly and allusively referred in their infrequent luncheons together.

He needed other friends. He called on Roger and Don one Sunday afternoon, and they were primping to go out to a tea, and urged him to come along. “It’s at Doris’s—you know Doris, don’t you? Doris Pelman. You’ll like her.”

Doris Pelman’s apartment, somewhere on the north side, was like Don’s and Roger’s in having a certain impressive charm which consisted precisely in its being un-homelike. It was meant, somehow, to be looked at, rather than lived in. The chairs were thin-legged and rickety, but doubtless genuine antiques; the rugs were hung on the walls instead of on the floor; and on the walls, too, were dim Chinese paintings to whose beauty Felix was dense; yet altogether the place had an effect of being somewhere quite out of the world, and Felix liked it for that.

He was introduced at once to half-a-dozen young men and women, and in the course of the afternoon to half-a-dozen more. The young men greeted Don and Roger with a languid enthusiasm, and the young women with a sort of boisterous camaraderie. Felix was struck by something at once delicate and artificial about these young men, something which he had at first noted and then became oblivious to in Roger and Don. Among them, he felt somehow coarse and brutal.... He had an impulse to swear, or spit on the floor.

Don and Roger and two other young men were talking about travel. A nostalgia for foreign parts seemed to afflict them all. They had, it seemed, been everywhere in Europe; and most of them knew, with an especial and fond intimacy, the geography of France, Italy, and Spain. They had all been somewhere, if not East of Suez, at least somewhere exotically remote, last year; and they were going somewhere even more strange and distant, next year. With Don and Roger the question was, Tunis or Tahiti?—they could not decide which.

Felix had accepted this travel-mania as part of Don’s and Roger’s interesting scheme of life. Sometimes he had even envied them, for they boasted that they did all this travelling “on their wits”; they insisted that one could go anywhere and live well, without money—and Felix had felt rather ashamed of his own singular lack of nomadic enterprise. But today he felt annoyed with them. He remarked to himself that though he had not ostensibly travelled, he had actually spent his life in changing his place of habitation, from house to house and from town to town; and even if these places were only the same middle-western town all over again each time, yet he felt that he had never stayed long enough to get really acquainted with it! He observed aloud, challengingly, that he thought one might stay in a city like Chicago the whole of one’s life without quite exhausting its interest.

The four young men raised their eyebrows, and uttered impressively the names of the great capitals of Europe; and even more unctuously the names of little out-of-the-way foreign towns of which he had never heard.

“The trouble with writers,” Don remarked—he and Roger paid Felix the compliment of regarding him as a fellow-writer—“is that they try to write before they have sufficient background.”

Evidently, Felix reflected, Don and Roger had not made that mistake! They had been acquiring background for years, according to their own testimony—Roger for some ten years, and Don for perhaps five. And neither of them had, so far as he could discover, written anything yet!... And when would they begin, with so much background still left to be acquired? Tunis and Tahiti!

He turned impatiently to the young women.... They seemed at first much more congenial spirits. And yet there was something odd about them, too—something odd in their very friendliness. His hostess, Doris Pelman, a strikingly handsome girl, tall and fair, was the one with whom he had what most nearly resembled a conversation—a thing difficult enough to achieve at a tea. What immediately impressed him was that she did not seem at all conscious of her looks—she might, from her behaviour, not have been possessed of any; or rather, the mysterious barrier across which two strangers, man and woman, must communicate, seemed not to be there for her; she was apparently unaware of herself and him, in a way that even old Mrs. Perk, a grandmother, never could be. There was in her manner an utter absence of shyness, an apparent perfect ease in this contact of personalities. But in her easy unembarrassed friendliness there was something steely and aloof—a fundamental untouchableness. She talked fluently, about his work and hers—she was an interior decorator, it appeared,—about the new books and plays, and, with an especial zest, about people.... A peculiar zest, too: she had a way, which at first gave him an uncanny feeling, of talking about human beings as though they were insects. The only things of which she spoke with visible affection were the fabrics and materials of her profession—and art in general.

But they were all, he felt, rather like this. The tea had become a kind of family gathering, in which only Felix felt out of place. Dusk fell, tall candles were lighted, and everyone became anecdotal. It would seem that they had spent their lives in collecting these anecdotes, and they related them and heard them with an inexhaustible relish—each one being rehearsed at full length with a loving care for the minutest psychological details. Some of these stories were apparently precious gems in their collection, worthy of being taken out and enjoyed over and over again. Other stories they laughed over uproariously, chokingly, helplessly—though to Felix the point of these seemed frequently rather obscure, and seldom very funny.

He went away feeling surprised, and not knowing quite whether he was disappointed or grateful at the absence of any challenge in these new feminine acquaintanceships. He had never consciously realized, except now in its absence, that undercurrent of vague questioning, at once delightful and disconcerting, as to just what there might be in a new “friendship”—what rich and beautiful possibilities it might hold in store: all the familiar and foolish day-dreaming that follows the most casual meeting of masculine with feminine youth. But here there was no question whatever; imagination took no hold on this extraordinarily self-possessed, this imperturbable young womanhood.... Here was, indeed, the “detached attitude”!

XI. An Adventure in Philosophy

1

HE had not confided to Rose-Ann the fact of his change of residence—though he had asked her to address him in care of the Chronicle. But after some hesitation, he did write to her an account of some of the new impressions of Chicago which that change of residence had yielded. He did so with the feeling, which he could not logically defend, that these things concerned her equally with himself. He told her of Don and Roger, of Doris Pelman, and the detached attitude. “Adventures in philosophy,” he called them; and he added:

“These people find life ugly, I think, and so they avoid and evade it. That is what I seem to myself to be doing at present, too. But I am not like them—I cannot just look on and be amused. Only I want to live my life understandingly—and I seem to have lost my bearings.”

A boyish letter, he thought, having sent it; and he was glad enough that her reply made no mention of its contents—being, in fact, only a brief, hurried uncommunicative note of acknowledgement. But its briefness did not hurt him; by the time it came she was an utter stranger to him again. He glanced at her note, threw it in the waste-basket, and went on writing some meaningless story for the Chronicle.... After all, he had one thing left—a certain pride in his work: though it was all of no consequence, he knew whether it was good or bad—nothing could take that away from him....

2

And then at another of Doris Pelman’s teas he began another “adventure in philosophy.”

He had been invited to come again. It appeared that these teas were an institution. He came, out of curiosity, and left early; and as he went out into the hall he was joined by a young man who had come late, and who had sat in the corner silently and with an expression of weary gloom. He was a short, thick-set young man with curly black hair and heavy lips. He had interested Felix as possibly—he thought certainly—the only person there besides himself who did not feel at home in that group.

Outside the apartment door, he turned to Felix with an expression of extreme distaste.

“La-de-da!” he said with a glance backward in the direction of the company they had just quitted. Felix smiled sympathetically.

“You know, those aesthetic birds,” the young man went on, as they descended the stairs, “—they make me sick.” They emerged upon the sidewalk. “Come on,” said the young man, “I know where there’s a real party going on tonight, with some real girls. We’ll get some grub, and then we’ll take it in. D’you ever eat at George’s? It’s a Greek place on Clark street, just north of the loop. Not bad at all.—I know you,” he added. “You work on the Chronicle. You don’t know me, but you ought to—I’m a pretty good scout. My name’s Budge—Victor Budge. I’m studying at Rush.”

“At what?” Felix interjected.

“Rush—Rush Medical College. Going to be one of the best little surgeons that ever cut out a gizzard.” He gave a dramatic flourish of his hand, as if wielding a scalpel. “But that’s not all. I write, too. In me you behold the world’s greatest novelist, living, dead, or unborn. Well may you be amazed—though I must say that you take the news rather calmly. I’ll tell you about it. I have a theory about art—just like those birds in there; only I’ve got the correct dope. The trouble with art is that it’s too detached from life. My idea is that the artist—the writer—has got to belong to the world he lives in—has got to be a part of it. That’s why I’m going to be a surgeon. With a simple twist of my accomplished wrist, and a four years’ course in human guts, I shall be able to make an honest living, and write on the side. Like Chekhov. I never read anything he wrote, but I understand he’s some writer. Yes, believe me, I shall put it all over these literary fakers!—You know Roger Sully?”

“Yes—and Don. The others I’ve merely met.”

“Well, they’re always gassing about where they’ve been—London, Paris, and places you never heard of. They’ve made a business of bumming all over the world. And they call that learning to write!”

“Acquiring background,” assented Felix.

“That’s the word. And avoiding anything that resembles real work. They have an elaborate code of morals about not working. It’s a point of honor with them not to work in an office, not to have any job that requires regular hours, and not to stick at anything longer than a month or so. A job, says Roger, is fatal to the spirit of art! Can you beat that?”

“But how do they get along?” asked Felix. He had wondered, for in his visits to the Sully-Carew apartment there had never been any mention of the manner of their subsistence.

“Oh, odd jobs on trade papers, publicity stuff—anything. Or nothing. Mostly nothing right now, I guess. People can live quite a while on coffee and cigarettes, and an occasional invitation to dinner. And when they’re short of cash, they can warm themselves with memories of the equator, I suppose.”

They reached the little basement restaurant, and entered. “I’ll order for you, if you don’t know the grub,” said Victor Budge. “This is on me anyway. One lamb kapama, one shish kebab, lots of olives, some red ink, two baklavas, and Turkish coffee.... Yes, the ripe olives, of course.”

The olives were put before them. “Those remind me of Roger,” said Victor Budge. “We were having dinner here one night, and he lifted one olive up, like this, delicately—poor devil, I’ll bet he hadn’t had a square meal for a week—and said, ‘When I shut my eyes and taste one of these salty olives, I am back on the Mediterranean, in a boat with a lateen sail!’ What do you know about that!”

Felix found himself rather sympathizing with Roger, and resenting the vulgarity of outlook of this young man, which like his vulgarity of speech, seemed deliberate and forced....

The food came, and Victor Budge served it. “I’m a realist,” he said. “When I’m hungry, I know it. I don’t pretend that I like olives because they remind me of the Mediterranean: grub is grub—you need it, and you’ve got to have it. And if you take life simply and realistically, it’s not hard to get all you want of it. What’s the use of starving in a garret? You and I know what life is like, and that it’s a pretty good old game if you play it like everybody else does. Be like other folks! Why should an artist feel that he has to be so damn refined and superior? What’s good enough for ordinary people is good enough for me. I don’t believe in this artistic belly-aching-around about how coarse and vulgar life is. Take things as you find ’em, and don’t bawl for the moon. That’s what I say.”

In spite of the way Victor Budge put this philosophy—its boisterousness somehow smacked of an inner lack of conviction, as though he were arguing to convince himself—yet there seemed to be sound sense in it. That, after all, was what Felix himself was trying to do—be like other people.... Yes, Victor Budge was right.

“Have some more red ink? Plenty more in George’s cellar.—And girls, for instance. Now I don’t have any use at all for this—this eternal poetizing about them! What’s a girl, after all? The same kind of critter we are! I don’t find ’em mysterious—and I don’t go ’round grouching about ’em, either. Girls and me have always got along perfectly well. Because I don’t expect them to be something else than what they are—Helen of Troy and the Blessed Damozel and all that sort of rot. I don’t go up to them asking, ‘Are you my long-lost ideal?’ They don’t want to be anybody’s long-lost ideal. They want to be taken for what they are! Isn’t it so?”

“I don’t know,” said Felix, humbly.... Yes, doubtless there was something unrealistic in his attitude toward girls—something that he must get over.... “I’m afraid I don’t know very much about girls. You may be right.”

“Of course I’m right,” affirmed Victor Budge. “It stands to reason that there isn’t just one girl in all the world for you or me.” Which, while perhaps not a logical sequitur to Victor Budge’s previous remarks, was precisely what Felix had been trying to convince himself of....

“That,” said Victor Budge, “that sort of silly nonsense in people’s heads is what makes them go around making themselves miserable, because they haven’t yet found the one and only. I guess if a man was cast away on a desert island with a girl, he’d find she was his one and only quick enough! Of course, if you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life with her, you’ll want somebody who knows what you’re talking about, and all that sort of thing! But when all you want is an evening’s good time, what difference does it make to you whether she’s read the latest book by Henry James? There are some damn fine girls that couldn’t tell Henry James from Jesse James, and you darn well know it!”

Yes, Felix thought, books are not the only things worth knowing; there is life itself. And he had certainly never intended to spend his days in Chicago without seeing anything of girls. To be sure, he did not want to fall in love—and he knew himself to be at this period in a dangerously susceptible mood. But must he be such a fool as to fall in love with the first girl he kissed? It was time for him to learn to be like other people—to take such things more lightly. If he could find the kind of solace which Victor’s words suggested ... and a part of his mind leaped to welcome the thought of that release from the torment of loneliness. He envisaged in fantasy a “real” girl, ready to put aside the hypocritic disguises of civilization and reveal herself as what she was—a splendid young animal whose touch was joy.... As this warm vision flashed and faded in his mind, he turned to Victor Budge and asked:

“Where is this party you’re taking me to tonight?” For the idea of these Arabian Nights come true in Chicago, seemed a little surprising. But doubtless there were many things that he did not know.

“Did I say party? Well, you know what I mean,” said Victor Budge, not without embarrassment. “It’ll be a real party, all right, before we get through! We’ll start down in Jake’s place, and take in the whole district.”

Felix flushed slowly, a painful flush of anger and shame that seemed to spread all through his body. Anger and shame at his own credulity. Arabian Nights, indeed! He laughed, loudly—at himself.

A picture came into his mind, compounded of things he had read, and the brief glimpses of actuality with which his curiosity had been satisfied and sickened back in Port Royal on the Mississippi—of the tawdry, dirty, dull, the incredibly dull, the joyless, loveless, hard, empty life of—as it was sometimes called—joy.... The stupid women, the foolish men, the mechanical noise and laughter, the boozy humour, the touch of stale, jaded, weary flesh.... And this was what Victor Budge was talking about—this was the subject upon which he had expended so much vulgar eloquence!... This, then, was Victor Budge’s realism. This was what he called a real party; and those were what he called “real girls”.... That was what he meant by taking things as one found them, and not bawling for the moon.

Victor Budge was staring at him. “What’s eating you?” he asked.

Felix laughed again. “Well,” he said, “I’ve some aesthetic theories of my own which make it impossible for me to accept your invitation. What’s good enough for other people isn’t good enough for me. I don’t want to take life simply and realistically. I’m going off to starve in my garret and write poems to Helen of Troy and the Blessed Damozel!”

XII. Bachelor’s Hall

1

HE had decided to write—what, he did not know yet: and it did not matter: something, anything, a play, a poem, a story—whatever came into his head, good or bad. It would occupy his time.

He spent a happy evening buying the materials of writing at a stationery store. He bought a dozen penholders, a quantity of his favourite stub pens, two bottles of a thick black indelible ink, half a ream of good thin bond paper, a great blotting-pad and a whole stack of small blotters. That afternoon he had bought a copy of Roget’s “Thesaurus,” without which the literary life is mere vexation; and a good, fat, reliable little dictionary with “derivations.” Going to his room, he lighted the gas, arranged these materials on his little table, gazed at them with pleasure—and realized that he had forgotten to buy an eyeshade. He went back to the stationery store, and returned with a half-dozen eyeshades of the best pattern, the kind that do not saw the ears or get tangled in the hair. It appeared to him also that the gas-light really would not do; he must get a kerosene student’s lamp; it would be a nuisance to keep it filled and trimmed, and the chimney clean—but the literary life has its inevitable penalties.... He would get a student’s lamp and a gallon can of kerosene tomorrow.

He sat down again at the little table, fitted a stub pen into his penholder, lighted a match, and held the steel point in the blaze, to burn off the oil and take out the temper, making it soft and flexible and easy to write with. He uncorked the ink, wiped out the neck of the bottle with a blotter, and dipped his pen in. Yes, the pen held a full sentence’s-worth of ink, as it should. There was nothing the matter with the pen. He took a sheaf of paper from the great pile on the back of the desk, laid it at the proper angle, adjusted his chair, dipped the pen again, poised it above the virgin paper—and remembered that he had only two cigarettes left in the box. One cannot do a good night’s writing without plenty of cigarettes. He went down to the cigar store and returned with five boxes.

Once more he dipped his pen, lifted it ...

An hour later he roused himself from the vague waking dream in which his mind had been immersed. The sheet of paper was covered with lines and circles, stars, geometrical figures, childish pictures of houses with smoke coming out of the chimneys, illegible words, his own initials, and crude attempts to draw the outline of a girl’s arm; and amidst all this, carefully obliterated, so that he could hardly recognize it himself, the name—Rose-Ann, Rose-Ann, Rose-Ann....

He tore the sheet into tiny fragments, brushed them to the floor, and then got down on his hands and knees and carefully picked them up. He must remember to buy a wastebasket for his room tomorrow. He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. He would go in and see Roger and Don; if they were staying up late, they might offer him some coffee.

Roger was lying on the couch reading Flaubert’s “La Tentation de la Saint Antoine,” and Don was sitting in an easy chair reading Flaubert’s “Bouvard et Pecuchet.” They looked up, bade him come in, and went on calmly with their reading. Felix took down a book from the shelf—one of the later works of Henry James—and yawned over it.... Perhaps he had better go to bed after all.

At that moment there was a stumbling up the stairs, and a loud banging at the door.

“That’s Eddie Silver,” said Roger, in a resigned tone.

Felix jumped up and opened the door, and Eddie Silver entered, shouting, “Hello!”—at the same time playfully thrusting against Felix’s stomach an automatic revolver made of tin. But Felix did not know that it was a toy.

He stepped back hastily, with a queer feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“The fool’s got a revolver!” said Roger.

“Here, give me that,” said Don, going over and trying to snatch it.

“Let him alone——he’s drunk,” said Roger.

“No——not drunk!” protested Eddie Silver. “Don’t say I’m drunk!” He tearfully extended his hands in pleading, with the revolver dangling from a finger. “But—” and he beamed at them suddenly——“going to get drunk! Going——” He noticed the revolver, put it carefully in one overcoat pocket, and took out of the other a quart bottle. “Get some glasses, Rojjie!” And taking off his overcoat, with the revolver still in its pocket, he bundled it up and tossed it over into the corner of the room.

There was a moment in which everybody—except Eddie—held himself tense in expectation of a bullet. Then Don started across the room toward the overcoat.

“No, Don—no!——You le’ tha’ o’co’ ’lone. ’S my bes’ o’co’!” And then, very clearly enunciated, “Hurry up with those glasses!”

Felix followed Roger over behind the screen which masked their simple culinary arrangements. “We’ve got to get him drunk enough to get that gun away from him,” whispered Roger.

It took another bottle of whiskey, procured by Don and paid for by Felix, and four hours of time, to kill Eddie Silver’s jealous watchfulness of that overcoat in the corner. Eddie, with a maudlin efficiency, divided his attention between the overcoat and the whiskey. His conversation for the last three of the four hours consisted of a promise to tell them something. “Wo’n’ tell ’nybo’ ’n worl’ ’cep’ you,” he kept saying.

It appeared to have to do with himself and some girl——but whether it was in the nature of a crime or a joke they could not tell, because sometimes he laughed and again he cried about it. But as often as he started to tell what it was, he became diverted, and told instead about somebody else and somebody else’s girl. He confessed many follies that night, but not his own.

At three o’clock, just when he seemed to be really on the point of making that long-delayed confession, he suddenly commenced to laugh. “’Minds me Cli’ Bangs!” he said. “Know Cli’ Bangs?” And becoming articulate again he went on, “I’ll tell you a funny story about him. He’s got a—(come on, everybody have another little drink!)—house out in the country. I te’ you ’bou’ tha’ h-house!”

And with vague relapses into the muffled speech of drunkenness, and startling recoveries of clearness, but always with a thread of coherence, he told the story of Clive Bangs’ house. At times Roger, watchfully listening, had to serve as official interpreter; Roger understood the locutions of drunken speech as if they were a foreign language in which he was versed. And Felix, half-ashamed to listen, but curious, heard it to the end.

It seemed that Clive had built—or rebuilt—that house in Woods Point for a girl he was in love with at the time, years ago, five or six or seven years ago. But, said Eddie Silver, he had neglected to tell the girl that he was in love with her. And so, about the time the house was finished, she married somebody else. Or at least, became engaged to some one else, whom she eventually did marry. The point of this story—to Eddie it was an exquisitely funny story—was that Clive Bangs had kept the house a secret from her, because he wanted it to be a surprise. And it was this secrecy of his which had convinced her that he had another sweetheart; so that, in pique, she became engaged to the other man.

“Cli’s li’l’ secret!” said Eddie Silver, infinitely amused. “Do’ pay to have se-secrets. Tha’s why I go’ tell my li’l’ secret.”

But again he wandered from the point, much to Don’s and Roger’s disappointment.

This painful story about his friend stirred Felix deeply. He felt that it was true—true in essence, however fabricated in detail; it seemed to him indecent to have this stolen glimpse into the secret of Clive Bangs’ heart—and yet he was glad he had heard the story. Yes, it must be true. Rose-Ann had put it in a phrase: “Some girl has hurt him.” And this—this ridiculous and pathetic incident, too ridiculous ever to confess, a secret that must be buried deep and forgotten—was the reason for Clive’s being what he was.... And suddenly Felix understood why that story had moved him so:—for had he not been as ridiculously, as pathetically hurt, in his own episode of moon-calf-love back in Port Royal? And was that incident, too, to affect his whole life, remaining untold, unconfessed, poisoning his courage and his faith?

He jumped up, went to his room, altogether wide awake, and commenced to write—the story of his folly in Port Royal. He commenced it as a letter to Rose-Ann. He did not consider whether he would ever dare to send it to her. He only knew that it must be written so.

An hour later he paused, tired out—and remembered Eddie Silver’s revolver. After all, that was perhaps a life-and-death matter, and this wasn’t. He went back to Don’s and Roger’s room.... Eddie Silver’s confession was again on the point of becoming definite.

“Tell you all about it,” said Eddie. “Lis’n!”

They leaned forward to hear, but Eddie’s head dropped on his arms, and he was asleep.

“Damn!” whispered Roger.

Felix slipped quietly over to the woolly heap in the corner and reached into one pocket and then the other. He found something strangely light to the touch. He pulled it out and gazed at it angrily. A tin revolver!

“F’lix!”

Eddie suddenly awake, was calling to him.

“Go ge’ ’no’er bo’l’ Swinburne!”

Felix looked at his watch. If he went to sleep now, he would never wake up in the morning in time to go to the office. He might as well keep awake the rest of the night. “Make some coffee,” he said to Roger, “and I’ll get some more whiskey for this crazy loon.”

2

That sort of thing—he reflected next evening, when he turned in immediately after dinner—was not the sort of thing he had expected of his Canal street home. He had thought of it as being a quiet backwater, out of reach of the tides of life. And if Eddie Silver was going to come there!... He fell asleep, only to be awakened by the cry,

“F’lix! Oh you F’lix!” and a pounding on his door. “G’ up! We’re having li’l’ Swinburne party!”

Felix lighted a match. It was one o’clock. How had that madman got into the house at this hour? Anyway, there was no sleeping now. Besides, he had had six hours’ sleep.

He rose and dressed, and went into the other room. “Make me a little coffee, Roger,” he pleaded.... And an hour later he managed to slip away, and went back to his room and wrote feverishly on his letter—the letter which he would never send—to Rose-Ann ... falling asleep with his head on the table, and only waking in time to get to the office, without breakfast.

The third evening Eddie Silver came again, and this time Felix felt himself too tired to write, and drank whiskey with the rest. In the morning he was apparently none the worse, except that he had no appetite for anything except a cup of coffee and a cigarette. In the afternoon, for lack of sufficient sleep, he needed more coffee. And of course, the more coffee one drank, the less one seemed to need real food, so that dinner, too, consisted exclusively of coffee. And then he could not sleep, and sat up half the night writing. Fortunately, Eddie Silver did not come again for a while, so there was a lull in the fever of existence. But it took days to get back to normal habits of eating and sleeping again.

And Felix, in the meantime, had commenced, for the sake of companionship and good coffee, to take his dinners with Don and Roger in their room, taking his turn in providing them. These meals were of a delicatessen sort, sometimes chosen because the ingredients reminded Don and Roger of Spain or Italy, and sometimes because they made an interesting colour scheme.

For a while their evenings were quiet. Felix would labour upon that endless letter to Rose-Ann—who had by now come to seem to him an unreal figure, an invention of his own fancy; only becoming real again for a moment, a moment only, when he saw on his desk at the office an envelope addressed to him in her large undisciplined handwriting. Within that envelope would be a friendly note, saying nothing; and he would reply in kind.

One day he dropped in at the little Community Theatre to see how things were getting on; Rose-Ann in her latest note had expressed some curiosity about her old class and its new teacher. He found old Mrs. Perk there.

“It’s pretty bad,” Mrs. Perk whispered. “They don’t like the new one at all. And they miss you, too.” Which somehow pleased him very much, even though he suspected it to be only an old woman’s flattery.

“And how do you like your new place? You don’t look very well fed. No, it’s no use; men can’t keep house by themselves. You’ll have to wait till Miss Rosy comes back, and be taken care of right!”

“I’m afraid Miss Rosy will never come back,” said Felix.

“Don’t you bother yourself about that!—Here, thread this needle for me, with your young eyes.... Why, I asked her for a piece of the wedding cake, the very day she went away so sudden. She’ll be back all right!”

So old Mrs. Perk had been joking with Rose-Ann, too—about him. Felix wondered how she had taken it....

“No, your bachelor hall won’t last much longer, I can promise you that.”

He laughed and went away, amused at the quaint pseudo-wisdom of the old. She thought she knew all about him and Rose-Ann. Two young things hopelessly in love, but too shy to tell each other so! And in this situation the inconveniences of bachelor’s hall would operate as a deus ex machina, driving him in despair and her in pity into each other’s arms—and matrimony!

How simple it all seemed to her! And how complex it all was in reality!

Mrs. Perk had the old-fashioned-woman’s naïve confidence in the importance of woman’s cooking; for that matter, how did she know that Rose-Ann could cook? Most probably she couldn’t! Girls like Rose-Ann didn’t nowadays.... And besides, how could Mrs. Perk be expected to understand the pleasures of a man living alone, free, able to keep what hours he chose—the sheer lazy charm of a masculine establishment, however inefficient!

Yes, Felix really enjoyed this happy-go-lucky kind of existence. As long as there was plenty of good coffee, and cigarettes, nothing else mattered very much—not even Eddie Silver.

He had commenced to come again. At first his visits were welcome as a relief from the monotony of Canal street life. But he was becoming a nuisance.... He would come in at all hours, but preferably when they had just gone to bed—pounding on the doors until they awoke and let him in. If the hall-door downstairs chanced to be locked, he would stand in the street and call to them, and throw pebbles—or dollars—against their front windows.... They would be drifting peacefully into dreams when something would wrench violently and painfully at their attention—they would try to ignore it and go on dreaming, but it would come again, determined, familiar, insistent—and they would reluctantly awake enough to become conscious of a voice in the street calling out their names. “Don! Roger! F’li-i-ix!”

“It’s that damned Eddie Silver!” they would groan, and finally somebody, with a brain aching for sleep, would stumble down the stairs and let him in.

“Wake up there, F’lix—I brought you nice li’l’ bo’l’ Swinburne!” he would call, rattling Felix’s doorknob, until he rose and joined in the festivities.

So strong is the power of association that Felix came to loathe the poetry of Swinburne—it had the smell of whiskey on it....

It was increasingly hard to keep awake in the afternoons, however much he drugged himself with coffee. Getting up in the morning became a tragedy—his whole being cried out for the sleep he could not have. Sometimes during the day, in the midst of a story, his mind would suddenly go blank for a minute. His appetite failed, and there were pains in his stomach that nothing but whiskey would relieve. He caught a bad cold, and had a cough that would not go away. And then, one morning in the eighth week of his stay in the Canal street menage, he found himself too ill to go to the office.

3

Roger and Don ministered to him with hot coffee, and called in a doctor who lived in the same building. The doctor had long white locks that fell picturesquely about the collar of his coat. He stuck a thermometer in Felix’s mouth, took out his watch and held Felix’s wrist, then shook his head gravely.

“What do you want to do with him?” he asked.

“We can’t very well take care of him here,” said Don.

“Any folks in town?” asked the doctor.

“No.”

“H’m. How about the County Hospital? They’ll look after him all right.”

“I suppose that is the correct thing to do with a sick person,” said Roger.

“H’m. Yes.... Has to be pretty serious, though, to get him in.”

“Well,” asked Roger, “how serious is it?”

“H’m. Can’t tell just yet. May be very serious—may not be. Better not take any chances.... Well, what do you want to do? County Hospital?”

Roger and Don looked at each other. Felix tried to get the thermometer out of his mouth so as to protest, but commenced to cough instead.

“Yes,” said Roger, “County Hospital.”

“All right,” said the doctor cheerfully, pulling his thermometer out of Felix’s mouth and putting it in his pocket without looking at it, “I’ll diagnose pneumonia. Where’s the telephone? I’ll call up the hospital right away, and stay here till they come.”

So Felix was taken to the County Hospital—first addressing to Rose-Ann a large envelope in which he put his long, unfinished letter, and giving it to Don to mail.... And at the hospital, after the doctor got round to him, the night nurse told him that there didn’t seem to be anything the matter with him except a bad cold, but the doctor thought he ought to stay in bed a week and rest up.

“He says you need to make up about a month’s sleep, and get some of that booze out of your system.” She grinned at him sympathetically, “You ain’t used to it, are you?”

He rather wished, since he wasn’t going to die after all, that he hadn’t sent Rose-Ann that foolish letter. Still—he didn’t care. He couldn’t care very much about anything. He was weak, and tired, and very sleepy.

XIII. In Hospital

1

THE ward in which Felix lay was a great room with a hundred beds in it, only a few feet apart.

It was a restful place, after Canal street. Even the delirium of a man on the other side of the room was, after the first night, easy to disregard. Those yells had no relation to Felix’s life; at least, they were not Eddie Silver’s yells. He did not have to wake up and join in any painful festivities with that man.... In their utter aloofness from his own life, those yells seemed actually soothing, and he went to sleep to their music as to a lullaby.

2

Every morning, at five o’clock, he was awakened, and a cup was put to his lips. It was merely hot tea with milk and sugar in it; but Felix had never tasted any drink so good as this—so invigorating, so life-giving, so nourishing.... A wonderful drink! And when he had drained the last drop, he sank back again into a drowsy slumber like that of childhood.

It was so good to know that he did not have to get down to the office at eight o’clock. He could just stay in bed all day, and sleep, and sleep, and sleep.

His friends came ... bringing him messages from still other friends. He never had any idea that he had so many friends in Chicago. He was touched by their remembering him, and caring about him. People from the settlement, and the boys from the office. Clive came the first day, bringing word that Mr. Devoe, the managing editor, was anxious about him. His pay, Clive assured him, would go on just the same while he was sick.... It seemed quite wonderful. Felix had never realized how good people were....

His friends brought books for him to read. Clive brought him “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” which he had long ago promised to lend him. Paul came with a slender volume entitled “The Complete Works of Max Beerbohm.” Roger brought him “The Confessions of a Young Man,” and Don appeared with Dowson’s poems. Eddie Silver did not come, though Felix rather expected him to bring a volume of Swinburne....

Very nice of them, too, to think up such exotic and sophisticated books for him to read—a tribute, doubtless, to his superior tastes. But he felt, as he glanced languidly into their pages, that these were not just the kind of books a sick person wants to read. He wished somebody would bring him the Saturday Evening Post—or the Bab Ballads.

3

But it was all right—he didn’t want very much to read, anyway. It was pleasanter to lie and day-dream—or watch the pretty head-nurse, who was exactly like a pretty nurse on the cover of a magazine—or think. He had a lot of time to think, now. Hours. Funny, how one never seemed to get time to think, outside of a hospital.

His thoughts were slow and long, reaching to places where it seemed he had not been in thought for a great while. Really, a hospital was a fine place. People ought to go there once a year for a long, long week of thinking. These thoughts of his own, for instance—how glad he was about them! They would make a great difference in his life, once he got out of the hospital....

The only trouble was that when he did get out of the hospital, he never could remember what any of those thoughts were.... They had vanished, leaving apparently no trace upon his mind. And that seemed queer, too. Thoughts that took such hours upon hours to think, and that seemed so wonderful at the time, oughtn’t to disappear like that....

The only thought that remained was a very small and insignificant thought, not worthy of being remembered. It was not really a thought at all, but only a memory: it went back to the time when he was a little boy in Maple, and there was a syringa bush in front of the house, growing up to the second-story window; and he would lean out of the window to see the bird’s nest in the syringa bush, and smell the perfume of the syringa blossoms; and he would watch the mother-bird, sitting on her speckled eggs and looking back at him with bright, sharp eyes, not at all afraid of him.... Out of all those profound thoughts, that was all he could ever remember.

4

On Saturday morning, his fifth day at the hospital, Clive came, bringing Felix his pay-envelope from the Chronicle.

“When do you get out?” he asked.

“Some time today,” said Felix. “The doctor has to formally discharge me, or something. This afternoon, I guess.”

“Well, come out to my place in Woods Point, and rest up for a week before you go back to the office.... I’ll have something special for dinner tonight in your honour. I have a neighbour woman come in, you know, to cook for me whenever I dine at home; you needn’t be afraid you’ll have to depend on my culinary abilities. All right? Good!... I must get to the office now and finish some work. Oh, I forgot, here’s a letter for you. Good-bye—see you this afternoon!”

The letter was from Rose-Ann.

“I couldn’t write,” it opened abruptly, “till today. Mother died Sunday. There is something very strange about death—you can’t quite believe it, or adjust yourself to it. I’ve had all sorts of queer feelings about it all. But I know now why people go through the ceremonial of funerals—it always seemed to me absurd before. But in some queer pagan way it seems to make up for all one’s ingratitude to the dead—for all the things you’ve forgotten, and only remember when it’s too late. It is, as people say, ‘all you can do.’ And in some queer way, it suffices. It enables you to think of other things again—to go back to ordinary life.

“I shan’t have to ever quarrel with my brothers again now—that’s one of the other things I think of. I mean—I’ve a tiny legacy, enough at any rate to make me independent of them forever. Father was very nice to me—I don’t think I’ve ever told you about my father; he’s a clergyman, and I suppose perhaps I didn’t want to be known as a clergyman’s daughter. But he does understand me.

“Felix, I am worried about you. I suppose it’s absurd, but I keep thinking you’re in trouble of some kind. And your letters tell me nothing at all—except—But we will talk about that when I see you.

“I’m coming back to Chicago as soon as ever I can.”

Book Three

Woods Point

XIV. Heart and Hand

1

ROSE-ANN came to the hospital that afternoon—when he first saw her, she was walking down the aisle with the young hospital doctor, and he was pointing casually in Felix’s direction. She nodded, said something to the doctor, and ran quickly over to Felix’s bedside.

“Are you really all right, Felix?” she asked, sitting down on the bed and taking both his hands.

He spoke without premeditation: “Oh, Rose-Ann, I’m so glad you’ve come!”

“Why?” she asked breathlessly.

“Because I love you,” he said. It was an immense relief to have said it.

“Do you?” she said. “I’m so glad.” They looked at each other a moment, and then she bent and kissed him softly.

They were presently aware of the smiling doctor standing beside the bed. Rose-Ann turned to him.

“I want to take him away,” she said.

“You’re welcome to him,” said the doctor. “He’s perfectly well.”

“Can he leave—right away?”

“This moment, if you like.”

“Good. I’ll go and call a taxi. Be ready as soon as you can, Felix.”

“But where are we going,” Felix asked. He did not want to go back to the settlement, which he felt that he had in a way deserted; and he had an idea that Rose-Ann would not let him go back to Canal street.

“I don’t know. I forgot—” said Rose-Ann, sitting down on the bed again with a helpless air. Then she burst out laughing. “I was going to take you home—I was under the impression for the moment that we were married!”

“We can get married,” said Felix, uncomfortably, feeling that an important matter was being disposed of rather cursorily.

She laughed again. “We can, yes. And I’m afraid that is what is going to happen to us; aren’t you, Felix?”

The doctor smiled and left them.

“I know,” she said. “It’s an unfair advantage to take of an invalid. But what else can we do?”

“I only want to be sure—” said Felix.

“Of what?”

“You read my letter, didn’t you—that terribly long letter, about that girl back in Iowa....”

“Yes, dear.”

“Well, you can see from that—I mean, I’m afraid you will think I’m not the sort of person who—”

“Who what, Felix?”

“Who makes a good husband. But, Rose-Ann—”

“Oh, I know that, Felix dear. And—I don’t want a good husband. I want you.”

“But—” He wanted to tell her that that was all over now—that he would try to be all that she wished....

“I understand,” Rose-Ann was saying. “You told me in that letter that there was something in you that rebelled against reality. Irresponsible—unstable—you used those words. ‘Too unstable for ordinary domestic happiness,’ I think you said. Well ... who wants ordinary domestic happiness?”

“But,” Felix said earnestly, raising himself up on one elbow, “a girl wants—more than an interesting lover. She wants ... some certainties in her life. A home, children, and the promise of security for them. I—”

He wanted to be brave—to offer those certainties. But it was too rash, too bold a promise. How did he know he could fulfil it?

“I’d have to become very different, wouldn’t I?” he said hesitantly.

Rose-Ann spoke very quietly. “I don’t want you to be different, Felix. I’m not that girl back in Iowa. I’m—me. I don’t want to be supported—I don’t need to be; I told you I’ve a tiny but sufficient income of my own now. And I don’t want the kind of home you speak of, Felix—I want to go on living my own life outside the home. And—I think, Felix ... that perhaps there are enough children in the world without—without vagabonds and dreamers like us taking on such—interesting but unnecessary—responsibilities.... I really don’t want us to be married at all, Felix; but I’m not brave enough to dispense with the—rigmarole. I want you to have your freedom, and I mine. I don’t ask any promises of you—any at all. I know what we are like. Freedom—for each other and ourselves—that’s what we want, Felix. Isn’t it?”

2

He pressed her hand, and remained silent. He had not dreamed of this....

“Isn’t that what we want, Felix?” she asked softly.

“I guess so,” he replied dully, looking away from her.... He knew he ought to be grateful to her; but he was sad rather, with the wish that he had had the courage to promise rash, mad, impossibly beautiful things.

Instead, he was to give her—uncertainty, insecurity....

Did she understand?

“Do you remember,” he asked, staring outward as if into the darkness, “what Garibaldi offered his soldiers? ‘Danger and wounds’”—

He paused. “That seems a queer sort of offer for a man to make to the girl he loves,” he said grimly. “But, Rose-Ann—”

“I enlist,” she said softly.

They pressed each other’s hand, looking away from each other, silently each in a separate world of dream. Then she smiled, coming back a little bewildered to the world of immediate fact. “I must call that taxi,” she said.

XV. Pre-Nuptial

1

THE streets outside were full of dirty melting snow, and there was a cold drizzly rain falling.

“We still don’t know where we are going,” said Rose-Ann, as they stood in the doorway, waiting for the taxi. “Isn’t it amusing? What are we going to tell the driver?”

“City Hall, what else?” said Felix.

Rose-Ann shrugged her shoulders. “It’s an abode, a place of residence—a home, if you like—some place to take you besides Community House or that dreadful place that I’ve heard about on Canal Street: it’s that I’m thinking of, rather than the legal process. It’s rather absurd, isn’t it, that neither of us has anything resembling a home! We just are vagabonds, that’s a fact.... And—somehow I don’t want to be married at the City Hall and have a fat alderman offer to ‘kiss the bride.’ ... If you don’t mind, I want some place to go where we can have a moment to consider what to do. After all, even vagabonds have their self-respect to take care of! Let’s not be rushed into an ugly and stupid performance that has no significance or beauty for either of us. I want to have something to say about the way I get married! And if there isn’t some way of getting married that’s our way, so that we don’t have to feel like fools and cowards, why—” she finished in a mournful voice, “I think I’d rather not be married at all.”

Felix patted her arm reassuringly. “That’s all right,” he said. “I know what we’ll do. We’ll go to Clive’s place.”

“Clive Bangs? Up at Woods Point?”

“Yes.” And he told her of Clive’s invitation. “You needn’t worry, it’s not a bachelor’s den, it’s a real house, with all the appurtenances thereto appertaining, and a woman to come in to do the cooking. And we’ll be married there. Clive will help us arrange it.”

The taxi had swung up beside the curb. Rose-Ann still hesitated a moment, then said, “All right!” and climbed in.

“Northwestern station!” said Felix to the driver.

“No!” said Rose-Ann. “To Community House first!—If I’m to be married, Felix, at least I must change my clothes; there’s no need for me to be married in this”—and she looked down at the grey suit she was wearing. “I’m just as I came from the train.”

“All right,” said Felix. “But let’s not stop there long. And—I do hope they won’t suspect what we are up to ... it will be rather a give-away, our dashing in together and out again!”

She laughed. “You mean it will look like an elopement? Well, you can wait for me in the taxi.”

He waited, impatiently, smoking a cigarette, for what seemed a long time. At last she came, dressed now in some soft creamy thing under her grey cloak, and carrying a suitcase.

“I think one person suspected me,” she said.

“Mrs. Perk?”

“Yes. Old women think they know so much, don’t they? Why should she imagine—? just because I—! It’s my own fault, for making a last sentimental visit to the theatre. But I wanted to—sort of—say good-bye!”

At the station, Rose-Ann hesitated again, and urged Felix at least to call Clive up and tell him they were coming. Felix refused. “Let’s make it a surprise,” he said.

“I don’t know!” Rose-Ann said, when they were aboard the train. “To tell the truth, I’m a little afraid of your friend Clive.”

“Afraid of him?”

“I mean—I’m in awe of him, a little.”

“Nothing awe-ful about Clive. He’s a nice fellow. I’ve always wanted you to meet him.”

“I wondered why you kept us so carefully apart,” said Rose-Ann. “I thought perhaps you felt that I didn’t measure up to his specifications. Do you think I will?”

He laughed tenderly, and looked at her. She was very sweet, and, it seemed, very tired despite the buoyant vivacity that always made her lovely. “You are wonderful,” he said. “But,” and he put his arm about her, to the amusement of two adolescent girls across the aisle, “it doesn’t make any difference what anybody in the world thinks about you, except me!”

“How possessive you are, of a sudden!” said Rose-Ann. But she relaxed deep within his caressing and protecting gesture, and closed her eyes.

He looked down, touching softly with his glance the delicate surface of her cheek as it slanted away from the high cheek-bones, and the forehead half hidden under the drooping tangle of red gold hair. Yes, she was very tired, and strangely enough he was glad to have her so, glad to feel her restless and vivid life relax to peace in the shelter of his arm. She had gone through a good deal of late; he thought of her home, and of that death-bed from which she had come, and the jarring family hostilities only half-repressed by the solemnity of that scene; it was strange to think of her—this lovely child made for happiness—emerging from those troubled shadows....

She was free now. And he too was free—free from dubieties and hesitations, strange and foolish suspicions of her—free from fear. How simple everything was, after all! By what strange ways they had come, to find each other—not knowing until this last moment the real meaning of their lives....

2

“It’s beginning to snow again,” said Rose-Ann, rousing herself and looking out of the window. And then—“What have you told Clive Bangs about me?”

“Not very much,” he confessed. “I suppose because of Clive’s manner about his own girls—or girl, I should say; it’s been a particular one for a long time now. He alludes to her, discusses her in an impersonal way, but he has never even told me her name. A queer sort of futile secrecy—Which reminds me of a curious story about him.” And he told her Eddie Silver’s drunken tale of the building of the house.

“This house we are going to?”

“Yes—if the story’s true.”

“So that’s why he became a woman-hater.”

“Perhaps not quite so bad as that. I should say it made him a Utopian.”

“It’s the same thing,” said Rose-Ann. “It’s curious,” she added, “how many men nowadays—particularly interesting men—are afraid of women; afraid that being really in love will ruin their career, commercialize their art, or something—Are you afraid of me, Felix?”

“Not any more,” he laughed.

“Why, were you ever?”

“Afraid you didn’t really care for me,” he said.

“Yes, you were rather shy! But I liked you for it. And it was just as well, until I had made up my own mind.”

“How did you come to make up your mind? Why did you decide to marry me?”

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes, tell me.”

“It was partly your love-letters—”

“Did I write love-letters to you? I suppose I did—but I tried awfully hard not to!”

“Beautiful love-letters! And then—being at home: that more than anything else made me realize that I was in love with you. I had thought so before, but then I was sure of it. And—well, it seemed stupid not to make something of our two lives. Why should we keep on being afraid to try?...”

“Were you afraid, too, Rose-Ann?”

“Yes. But I’m not any more. We’re going to be very happy, and you’re going to be a very great man and write wonderful things....”

He stirred uneasily. “Don’t put our happiness on that basis, please. Suppose I don’t write wonderful things!”

“But you will!”

He sighed. “That makes me realize that I am a little afraid of you, Rose-Ann. Afraid you will make me have a career!”

“Don’t you want a career? I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to.”

“That’s just it. I’m afraid you are going to make me do all the things I do want to! Things I would otherwise just dream of doing!”

“Is that prospect so terrifying?”

“Yes, rather.”

“Poor dear!” She pressed his hand in hers. “I suppose I am a terrible person. I can’t do the things I want to do myself; and so I’m going to insist on your doing them—is that it?”

“I have the feeling that you expect a terrible lot from me,” he said.

“It’s true—I do think you’re rather a wonderful person.”

“I wish you wouldn’t!”

“I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help it, Felix. You’ll have to take me, enthusiasm and all, my dear! For I’m in love with you, and I do think you are going to be a great man, and I shall continue to, no matter how miserable it makes you feel—so there! I won’t marry a commonplace man, and you’ll have to agree to let me think you out of the ordinary, or the marriage is off!” She tilted her chin defiantly.

“All right, Rose-Ann,” he said. “You may think me as wonderful as you like, if only you’ll not say so out loud. Praise upsets me. I thrive only on contumelious blame! So if you want to put me at my ease, tell me something bad about myself.”

“That’s easy enough,” she said. “You’re quite the shabbiest-looking man that ever went to his own wedding, vagabond or not. You seem to have packed off to the hospital in your oldest shirt—look at those cuffs!” Felix looked at them, and pulled down his coat-sleeves over their frayed edges. He looked at his dusty shoes, and tucked them out of sight under the seat.

“Does Felix feel himself again?” she asked maliciously.

“Quite,” he said. “Now I know it’s true I’m going to be married.”

XVI. Clive’s Assistance

1

THE snow had fallen more and more heavily while they were on the train, and the air was crisp when they emerged into the dusk at Woods Point. “I think I’m going to like my wedding,” said Rose-Ann.

They found a car at the nearest garage to take them to Clive’s place, some two miles away. The driver halted at the edge of a steep ravine that cut down toward the lake. He pointed over to the gleam of a lighted window. “There it is,” he said. “And here’s the path. It goes right along the edge of the ravine, but Mr. Bangs keeps it pretty clean of snow, and there’s a railing by the worst places. I guess you can make it all right. Everybody seems to.” He backed the car about, and left them.

Recent footprints, not yet quite obliterated, defined the path for them. They went up toward the house, laughing. Rose-Ann had urged him again at the station to call Clive up and tell him they were coming, and again he had refused. Now, as they edged the ravine, holding on to the railings that guarded the most precarious moments of the path, they were feeling a little foolish and very happy about their adventure. It was thus, they read plainly in each other’s eyes, that they should be married.

A little out of breath at the end of the path, they faced a suddenly opened door, and Clive standing there, laughing and puzzled as he tried to make them out. “Felix?” he said. “And who else?”

“And Rose-Ann!” cried Felix. “We’ve come to Woods Point to be married!”

“No!” cried Clive, astonished, unconsciously blocking the doorway.

“Yes!” said Felix gaily.

Clive laughed. “Welcome!” he said, ushering them inside. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have met you at the station and guided you to the house. You weren’t afraid of breaking your neck?” And then, as Rose-Ann emerged from her snowy cloak, he took her hand. “So this is Rose-Ann! I’m delighted. You know, Felix isn’t very good at descriptions, and I never got the right idea of you at all.”

Felix felt vaguely annoyed. All this was beside the point.

“I suppose we can get married here, can’t we?” he asked.

Clive looked at him, and then back at Rose-Ann. “How solemn you both are!” he said. “Why, I really believe—Felix, what is this about getting married?”

“That’s what we’ve come for,” said Felix patiently.

“You mean—” Clive appeared incredulous.

“I mean, married. Preacher! License! Ceremony! Didn’t you ever hear of anybody getting married before?”

“Not really?”

“Yes, really. And right away. Tonight. Is your mind capable of taking all that in, or must I spell it out for you. You seem dazed.”

This was not exactly the reception he had expected for his news.

“I’m more than dazed. I’m shocked,” said Clive. He turned again to Rose-Ann. “Tell me—when did this—when did you children decide on this rash deed?”

“This afternoon,” said Rose-Ann. “It is rash, isn’t it? Do you really think we shouldn’t?”

Felix made an impatient movement. What difference did it make what Clive Bangs thought?

“Come in by the fire,” said Clive. “You—you bewilder me, you two.”

He put a hand, with some kind of vague paternal gesture, on Rose-Ann’s shoulder. “In here”—and he showed them into a room where a coal fire glowed in an open Franklin stove. He arranged three big chairs. “Sit there.... Bad weather outdoors.”

“No,” said Rose-Ann, “it’s beautiful! It’s snowing....”

“I’ll get you something warm to drink,” and Clive left them.

They sat there a moment, silent.

“Do you—do you think—?” Rose-Ann began in a troubled voice.

“I think Clive is a little upset,” he said. “Poor devil!”

“You don’t—?” She stopped again.

“What?” he asked dreamily, reaching out and finding her fingers as they drooped over the arm of the chair.

“Nothing,” she said.

Presently he looked up, and met her eyes. A look he had never seen before glowed in them, and it was as if she had shown him some secret part of herself always hidden before. That look seemed to reveal to him, as if for the first time, dazzlingly, by the real truth of their love. It was as if everything they had said to each other had been in some way false and evasive. This was the truth—this ultimate surrender, this faith-beyond-reason, this something deeper than pride and joy in her eyes. He was strangely exalted. He thought: “This—this—is marriage....”

In an instant the revelation had passed. Rose-Ann bent down swiftly to shake out a fold in her skirt—and to hide that revealing look, it seemed. Clive was at the door, coming in with their hot drinks.

“And now,” said Clive, settling down comfortably in the third big chair, “tell me about it.”

2

Rose-Ann looked at Felix.

“We’re going to be married, that’s all,” said Felix.

“Yes,” said Clive reflectively, “people do.”

“You think we oughtn’t to?” asked Rose-Ann.

Clive rubbed his chin. “I really think it is my duty to make one last, however futile, attempt to dissuade you!”

“Why?” asked Felix.

“Because,” said Clive smiling, “you are so obviously in love with each other now—so obviously happy, just as you are.”

“And you think marriage will spoil that?” Rose-Ann asked.

Clive regarded them. “Well,” he said, “how many people do you know whose marital happiness you would be willing to take as your own?”

They were silent, Felix annoyed.

“I’ don’t know anybody whose happiness I would want,” said Rose-Ann at last. “But—”

“But you hope to have something different, and very much better,” said Clive gently, as if speaking to a child.

“I suppose it’s foolish,” said Rose-Ann.

“I don’t see anything foolish about it,” said Felix defiantly. “What’s your objection to marriage?”

Clive turned upon him with mild surprise. “Is this the young man with whom I have had a number of luncheon discussions—in which, if I remember rightly, you spoke eloquently on this same subject?”

Rose-Ann turned to Felix inquiringly. “I don’t think you’ve ever told me your views of marriage, Felix,” she said.

Clive laughed. “That is what is known in fiction as a sardonic laugh,” he observed. “I trust you recognized it. I will repeat it for you: Ha, ha! Now, Mr. Fay, is your opportunity to explain to your prospective bride your views of marriage.”

Felix flushed. “As a matter of fact, Rose-Ann and I have discussed them,” he said.

“‘Relic of barbarism,’” quoted Clive with gentle malice.

“Of barbarism?” Rose-Ann repeated, puzzled.

“Clive and I have the habit of orating to each other on these subjects,” said Felix, “at lunch and whenever we haven’t anything better to do.”

“I’ve heard of those luncheon discussions,” said Rose-Ann, “and wished I could have been present. I’d like to hear you,” she said, looking at Clive and then back to Felix. It was, subtly, her defiance to Clive.

“Our discussions,” said Felix, “are devastatingly theoretical. We are accustomed to refer to everything we don’t like as a relic of barbarism. Marriage, for instance.... It’s essentially an intrusion by the Elders of the Tribe into the private affairs of the young. The Old People always think they know what is best. Originally, of course, their power to rule the lives of the young was far greater. Rose-Ann and I wouldn’t have been allowed to select a mate for ourselves. The choice would be made for us by the Elders; in their infinite wisdom they would choose for her a lord and master, and she would settle down at once to her proper womanly business of cooking his meals and bringing up his babies. Me they would doubtless have mated with some possessive young hussy who would efficiently smother and drug to sleep with her own physical charms any desire of mine for an impersonal intellectual life. And thus we would both have been made safe and harmless—Rose-Ann with her cooking and babies, and I with my harem of one. Both of us tied down body and soul, and thus presenting no menace to established institutions!”

He was speaking quickly, with a feeling that it was all very absurd, this speech-making at large upon a subject which interested them now only in its specific and unique aspects. “But times have changed,” he went on. “This form of tribal control now exists only as a rudimentary survival—a custom to which one must superficially conform, and nothing more. So long as Rose-Ann and I are allowed to choose each other, and decide for ourselves how we are going to live, we can very well permit the Tribe to come in, in the person of its official representative, for ten minutes, and ratify our choice!... There, those are my views, expressed in the uncouth intellectual dialect which Clive and I affect in these discussions. That’s just the way we talk.”

“Very clever,” said Clive. “You shift your ground easily....”

“A wedding is an awfully tribal thing, isn’t it?” said Rose-Ann soberly. “Especially,” she added more cheerfully, “the old-fashioned kind. With the families and all. And the usher asking you which side you are on, the bride’s or the groom’s! I went to one when I was back in Springfield.”

“I went to one,” said Clive, “once upon a time, in Chicago.... I had a sense of the girl’s having been recaptured by her family, after a temporary escape—recaptured and subdued. In her white veil, at her father’s side, coming down the aisle, she was so unlike the free wild thing I had known.—Somehow it seemed like a funeral to me—a triumphant and solemn burial of her individuality. I remember that I went away from church saying over to myself that little poem of Victor Plarr’s, that ironic little funeral poem—do you know it? It begins—

“Stand not uttering sedately

Trite, oblivious praise above her—

Rather say you saw her lately

Lightly kissing her last lover!”

They laughed, interrupting Clive as he began on the next stanza, and then they stopped, waiting for him to go on. They exchanged a swift glance, wondering if this was the girl of the story they had heard.

“I forget just how it goes,” he said confusedly. “But it ends something like this—

“She is dead: it were a pity

To o’erpraise her, or to flout her.

She was wild and sweet and witty—

Let’s not say dull things about her.”

Having finished, he began to poke the fire.

“A lovely poem,” said Rose-Ann softly.

“But,” said Felix vigorously, “it doesn’t discourage me a bit. I think Rose-Ann can be just as wild and sweet and witty after marriage as before. Her individuality, if that is what you’re worrying about, is not in the least danger of being buried by marriage.”