THE EMPEROR OF ELAM
AND OTHER STORIES

OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

CONSTANTINOPLE OLD AND NEW
STAMBOUL NIGHTS
PERSIAN MINIATURES

THE
EMPEROR OF ELAM
AND OTHER STORIES

BY
H. G. DWIGHT

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1920

Copyright, 1908, 1920, by
Doubleday, Page & Company

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian

Copyright, 1903, 1904, by Charles Scribner’s Sons
Copyright, 1904, by The Associated Sunday Magazines
Copyright, 1904, 1905, by Dodd, Mead & Company, and
George H. Doran Company
Copyright, 1905, by The Outlook Company
Copyright, 1905, 1906, by Smart Set Company, Inc.
Copyright, 1909, by The Sunset Magazine
Copyright, 1916, 1917, 1918, by The Century Company
Copyright, 1918, by Edward J. O’Brien
Copyright, 1918, by Small, Maynard & Company, Inc.

TO
J. R. M. TAYLOR
COLONEL, UNITED STATES ARMY,
HISTORIAN OF THE PHILIPPINES:
ARCH IRONIST,
EX-EDITOR OF “THE INFANTRY JOURNAL,”
LATE LIBRARIAN OF THE ARMY WAR COLLEGE, WASHINGTON,
SOMETIME MILITARY ATTACHÉ AT THE AMERICAN EMBASSY, CONSTANTINOPLE,
MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF THE CINCINNATI,
INSTIGATOR OF OR ACCOMPLICE IN TOO MANY OTHER ACTIVITIES HERE TO BE NAMED;
WHO YET FOUND TIME TO INVENT ONE, NOR THE LEAST SEDUCTIVE, OF THE ENSUING FABLES, AND WHO COURTEOUSLY PUT IN THE WAY OF HIS COLLABORATOR TWO OF THE MOST EXASPERATING AND PROFITABLE EXPERIENCES OF A CAREER BY NO MEANS BARREN OF SUCH ACCIDENTS:

WITH THE COMPLIMENTS
OF HIS OBLIGED AND ADMIRING FRIEND
THE AUTHOR.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Of the stories in this collection, three originally appeared in The Century Magazine (“Like Michael,” copyright, 1916; “The Emperor of Elam,” copyright, 1917; “The Emerald of Tamerlane,” copyright, 1918), two each in The Bookman (“Unto the Day,” copyright, 1904; “Studio Smoke,” copyright, 1905), in Scribner’s Magazine (“The Bathers,” copyright, 1903; “Henrietta Stackpole Rediviva,” copyright, 1904), and in The Smart Set (“Susannah and the Elder,” copyright, 1905; “The Undoing of Mrs. Derwall,” copyright, 1906), and one each in The Associated Sunday Magazines (“Martha Waring’s Elopement,” copyright, 1904), in The Outlook (“The Pagan,” copyright, 1905), in Short Stories (“Castello Montughi,” copyright, 1908), and in The Sunset Magazine (“The Bald Spot,” copyright, 1909).

It may be added that the names of three of these stories are not the ones first copyrighted and that at least two of them have been completely recast, while not one of them has been left untouched in its earliest state. The writer nevertheless takes this occasion to express to the editors and publishers of the above periodicals, as well as to Mr. W. J. O’Brien and to Messrs. Small, Maynard and Company—who made use of “The Emperor of Elam” in The Best Short Stories of 1917—his thanks both for their former hospitality and for their present courtesy in permitting him to reassemble his work. Nor would this small payment of indebtedness be complete without mention of Colonel J. R. M. Taylor, who wrote the first draft of “The Emerald of Tamerlane,” and who generously allows it to be reprinted over the signature of his collaborator.

CONTENTS

LIKE MICHAEL

THE EMPEROR OF ELAM AND OTHER STORIES

LIKE MICHAEL

I

What was he like?

H’m! That’s rather a large order. What are people like, I wonder? Some of them are like dogs. There are plenty of poodles and bull pups walking around on two legs. Some of them are like cats. Some of them are like pigs. A few of them are like hyenas. More of them are like fishes in aquariums. A lot of them are like horses—of all kinds, from thoroughbreds and racers to those big, honest, comprehending, uncomplaining creatures that drag drays. But I have a notion that most of them are like you and me.

What are we like, though? If we happen to be like Greek gods—which we don’t!—if we have red hair or vampire eyes or humps on our backs, if we harpoon whales or compose operas or put poison in our mother-in-law’s soup, it is possible to make out for us a likely enough dossier. Yet how far does that dossier go? It tells less than a tintype at a county fair. Vamp eyes or godlike legs, even the ability to compose operas, have nothing to do with the way we react when we inherit a billion dollars or lose our last cent, when our wives get on our nerves or the boiler of our ship blows up at sea. And what on earth are you to say about people like Michael, who are neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, good nor bad? Or people whose wives never get on their nerves and whose boilers never blow up? They have their dossier all the same. Why not? They do nine-tenths of the work of the world. They lay its stones one upon another. They commit their share of its follies, suffer their share of its sorrows, and pay more than their share of the bill.

What was Michael like? My good man, you loll there with your ungodlike leg over the arm of your chair and you blandly propose to me the ultimate problem of art! One would think you were Flaubert—or was he Guy de Maupassant?—who made it out possible to tell, in words that have neither line nor colour, that are gone as soon as you have spoken them, how one grocer sitting in his door differs from all other grocers sitting in doors. I have spent hours, I have lost nights, over that wretched grocer; and I haven’t learned any more about him than when I began: except to suspect that Maupassant—or was it Theophile Gautier?—wanted to be Besnard and Rodin too. I grant you that no grocer looks precisely like another. But that isn’t Maupassant’s business—to tell how a grocer looks. The thing simply can’t be done. Nor is it enough for your grocer to sit in his door. He must say something, he must do something, or words won’t catch him. And then how do you know why he said or did that particular thing, or what he would say or do at another time?

And you have the courage to ask me, between two whiffs of a cigarette, what Michael was like! How the deuce do I know? I never had anything particular to do with him. He was like fifty million other people with lightish hair and darkish eyes and youngish tastes, whom neither their neighbours nor their inner devil have beaten into distinction. If I tried to tell you what a man like that is like, I would land you in more volumes than “Jean Christophe.” I can only tell you what he was like at two very different moments of his life, in two entirely different places.

Perhaps you are naturalist enough to construct the rest of him out of that. I, for one, am not. But it’s astounding how little we know about people, really, and how childishly we expect miracles of each newcomer. It isn’t as if anybody ever did anything new. How can they? Nobody is radically different from anybody else. The only thing is that some of us are a little harder or a little softer, some of us are longer-winded or shorter-winded, some of us see better out of our eyes or have less idea what to do with our hands. That isn’t all, though. There are other things, outside of us, for which we are neither to blame nor to praise—the houses we happen to be born in, the winds that blow us, arrows that fly by day and terrors that walk by night. And then there are other people. They come, they go, they get ideas into their heads, they put ideas into ours. It may be pure bull luck whether you are a grocer sitting in your door for a Maupassant to scratch his head over, or something more—definite, shall we say?

Michael, now: why should a man like that disappear? Would you disappear? Would I disappear? Why on earth should Michael have disappeared? Surely not for the few thousand dollars that disappeared at the same time. Nothing was the matter with him. He had a good enough job. He was married to a nice enough girl. He would have prospered and grown fat and begotten a little Michael or two to follow in his footsteps. But those reaping and binding people take it into their heads to send him over there, and he suddenly vanishes like a collar-button in a crack. And we all make a terrific hullabaloo about it—when the thing to make a hullabaloo about is that one man may get all geography to reap and bind in, while another may never get outside his valley.

The thing in itself was infinitely simpler than one of Michael’s confounded reapers and binders.

II

I suppose you know Aurora—Mrs. Michael as was? I began stepping on her toes at dances twenty years ago, and I believe I could tell you what she is like. This country is a factory of Auroras. Dozens of her pass under that window every day, all turned out to sample as if by machinery, all run by the same interior clockwork, all well made, well dressed, well educated—in the American sense; also well able to milk a cow or to carry one on their backs, but preferring to harangue clubs all day, to dance all night, in any case to circumvent the ingenuity of life in playing us nasty tricks. They won’t do anything they don’t like, and they shut their eyes to the dark o’ the moon.

Just what Aurora wanted of Michael, I can’t say. As the poet hath it, there is a tide in the affairs of women which, taken at the flood, leads God knows where. But these things are not so awfully mysterious. There was a period in Aurora’s history when, it being reported to her that the simple Michael had likened her eyes to Japanese lanterns, she was not displeased. And I have been told on the best authority that even a suffragette may not be averse to having her hand held. Whether Michael first grabbed Aurora’s or whether Aurora first grabbed Michael’s doesn’t much matter. There came a later period when they were both able to recall that historic event with considerable detachment.

Aurora likewise lived to learn that there are other ways of circumventing the tricks of life than by reaping and binding. She thirsted for higher things, for wider horizons, than those of Zerbetta, Ohio. Above all human trophies she burned for two which cohabit not too readily under one roof—Culture and Romance. So when Michael was unexpectedly ordered to the East she accompanied him only as far as Paris.

My relations with her, I regret to say, were such that she did not confide to me what she thought when Michael failed to turn up again. You can easily perceive, however, that Michael translated, Michael probably murdered, Michael made, at all events, for once in his life, mysterious, was a very different pair of sleeves from the Michael she had not considered important enough to see off on his Orient Express. Aurora was never the one to miss that. It put her in the papers. It made her a heroine. It invested her with the romance for which she yearned. It also invested her with extremely becoming mourning. Yet I fancied once or twice that I detected in her a shade of annoyance. She was capable of choosing an occultist for her second husband, but in the bottom of her heart she hated people to be as indefinite as Michael. She naturally did not like, either, a rumour of which she had caught echoes, that Michael had run away from her.

Well, when Aurora heard that I was going to Constantinople, she asked me to find out what I could. It was quite a bit afterward, you know, and she had already entered the holy bonds of wedlock with her occultist. But she couldn’t quite get over that exasperating indefiniteness of Michael’s. She wanted to put a tangible tombstone over him—with a quatrain of her own composition, and the occultist’s symbol of the macrocosm. Wayne, too—Michael’s uncle, and one of the reaping and binding partners—suggested that I quietly look about once more. What the partners principally minded, of course, was their money. Yet it wasn’t such a huge sum, and Michael really did them a good turn after all, the ironic dog. They could well afford the fat reward they offered. They got no end of free advertising, you know, what with the fuss the State Department made, and all. People who had sat in darkness all their lives, never having heard of a reaper and binder, suddenly saw a great light when the Bosphorus was dragged and Thrace and Asia Minor sifted for an obscure agent of reapers and binders.

Such are the advantages of getting yourself robbed and murdered, as compared to those of working your head off to keep your job. Michael, to be sure—I ended by finding out all about Michael, long after I had given him up. It was nothing but an accident. I wonder, though, that we go on believing there’s anything in this world except accident. And the beauty of this accident is that I can’t claim that reward I need so much—one of the beauties. It was altogether, for Aurora and Michael even more than for me, such a characteristic case of missing what you look for and finding what you don’t.

I never told Wayne. I never told Aurora. I never intended to tell you. Another accident! But isn’t it aggravating how one’s best stories always have to be kept dark?

III

So the romantic Aurora, as I told you, sat in Paris like a true American wife, inviting her soul in the Louvre—both musée and magasins—while the humdrum Michael set forth for that bourne whence he was not to return, with his reaper and binder under his arm. What he did with it doesn’t matter. In fact I believe he did very little with it. He wasn’t born to reaping and binding. Reaping and binding had been thrust upon him—by the uncle to whom he applied at a desperate moment for a job. Like most of us, you see, he didn’t know what he wanted. I’m not sure he ever found out. Aurora, however, must have helped him in a back-handed way to find out that he hadn’t got what he wanted. And so did that sudden journey of his. He had never been anywhere before in his life.

I make fun of poor Aurora, who after all had perhaps divined in poor Michael, at the flood of her tide, what she was really after. But I found it rather quaint, I must confess, that he, the reaper and binder of Zerbetta, Ohio, should be caught by Stambul. Yet why not? I myself am unaccountably moved by reapers and binders, by motors and dynamos and steam engines, by all manner of human ingenuities of which I know nothing and could never learn anything. Why should not Michael have been moved by things as foreign to him? Moreover has there not always been in the Anglo-Saxon some uneasy little chord that has made him the wanderer and camper-out of the earth, that nothing can twitch like the East?

Michael took an astonishing fancy to that bumpy old place, and to those mangy dogs and those fantastic smells and those inconvenient costumes and those dusty Bazaars and all the trash that is in them. He bought quantities of it. Rugs and brasses and I don’t know what uncannily kept turning up long after he had dropped through his crack. Aurora received them tearfully as tributes to herself, and I believe they paved the way for her next experiment. Michael’s successor is an antiquary as well as an astrologer, and he keeps an occult junk-shop on a top floor in Union Square.

That junk, as it happened, was just what played so fateful a part in Michael’s adventure. He bought a good deal of it from a certain antiquity man who knew English better than any one else Michael ran across in the Bazaars. Finding Michael a promising customer, the antiquity man said he had better stuff stored away in a khan outside the Bazaars. And Michael, of course, was delighted to go and look at it. Do you wonder?

The khan was one of those old stone houses in Mahmud Pasha that have a Byzantine look about them, with their string-courses of flat bricks, the heavy stone brackets of their projecting upper storeys, the solid iron cages of their windows, and their arched tunnels leading into courts within courts, where grape-vines grow and rugs lie fading in the sun. The antiquity man took Michael up some stone stairs into one of the galleries overlooking a court, and then into a series of dirty little stone rooms full of all sorts of queer-looking boxes and bundles. And some of the boxes and bundles were opened with great ceremony, and Rhodian plates were brought forth for Michael to admire—Persian tiles, Byzantine enamels—You know the sort of thing.

Michael, our reaper and binder, liked it. I can’t say how intelligently he liked it; but he had discovered a new world, and he liked it well enough to go back again and again. I must confess that I don’t recollect very much about it, myself. I do remember, though, that the most outlandish-looking people—Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Persians, Tartars, Heaven knows who—carry on outlandish-looking activities there. Any number of forges and blow-pipes flare in those dark stone rooms, where goldsmiths and silversmiths make charms, amulets, reliquaries, little Virgins to hang around your neck, little votive hands and feet to hang on icons, silver rings for Turks who think it wicked to wear gold, and filigree chains, pendants, and lamps in the Byzantine tradition. That’s where most of the antiques sold in the Bazaars come from. And devilishly well-made a lot of them are, too. I know a Byzantine gold chalice in a museum in England, decorated with St. Georges of the tenth century, that came out of that khan not twenty years ago! Admirable coins and gems come from there too, to say nothing of Tanagra figurines. Did you ever hear of a Chalcedonian figurine? Not many other people have, either. But plenty of real ones used to be dug up on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus; and clever Greek potters copy them and rename them for tourists. However, it isn’t all fake. There are real artists in those dark little stone rooms. And there are real antiques—some of them stored away, some of them undergoing a final dilapidation to suit them for the critical eye of fake collectors.

Michael liked it all so much that he spent more time in that extraordinary maze than was good for his reapers and binders. The people got to know him by sight, and they let him rummage around by himself.

IV

He turned up one afternoon to look at some pottery, and the antiquity man happened to be out. Michael was therefore given coffee and left more or less to his own devices. Nobody could talk to him, you see, and the antiquity man was coming back.

Michael prowled mildly about, finding nothing much to look at but packing-cases and kerosene tins—those big rectangular ones that everybody in the Levant hoards like gold. He presently recognised, however, on top of a pile of boxes, a basket that he had seen at the antiquity man’s shop in the Bazaars—a basket, with an odd little red figure in the wicker, containing embroideries. He managed to get it down, and found it unexpectedly heavy. It turned out to be full this time of broken tiles. He poked them over. Each bit was worth something—for a flower on it, or an Arabic letter, or a glint of Persian lustre. But as he poked down through them, what should he come across but some funny-looking metal things: some round, some square, some with clockwork fastened to them. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder if bombs looked like that! He proceeded, very gingerly, to replace the bits of tile.

Just then he became aware that the antiquity man had come in quietly and was looking at him.

“What the devil have you got here?” asked Michael, with a laugh. “An ammunition factory?”

The antiquity man shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

“I have better than that. I have a Rhages jar for you to look at, if you will come this way.”

A Rhages jar! I don’t suppose Michael had ever until that moment heard of a Rhages jar. However, he followed the antiquity man into another room even more crowded with boxes and tins; and there, to be sure, the Rhages jar was put into his hands. But the place was so dark he could hardly see it.

“If you will excuse me another moment,” said the antiquity man, “I will get a light.”

He was gone, as he said, only a moment. When he came back a servant followed him, carrying a candle—a big porter whom Michael already knew by sight, in baggy blue clothes and a red girdle. Michael nodded to him, and the man salaamed. Then the antiquity man pointed out to Michael, by the light of the candle, the beauties of the Rhages jar. As he did so another man came in, an older man with a grizzled beard. He gravely saluted Michael and took the candle from the porter, who went out. The porter very soon returned, however. This time he carried a tray on which was one of those handleless little cups of Turkish coffee in a holder of filigree silver. The antiquity man set down the Rhages jar.

“Won’t you have a cup of coffee?” he said, making a sign to the porter.

“No, thank you,” replied Michael. That was one thing about Stambul he didn’t altogether like—that eternal sipping of muddy coffee.

“Oh, but just one!” insisted the antiquity man. “Why not?”

“I’ve had one already,” answered Michael. “I’m not used to it, you know. It keeps me awake.”

The antiquity man smiled a little.

“But not this coffee,” he said. “I think you will find that it does not keep you awake.”

It began to come over Michael that there was more than the coffee which he didn’t like. Was it the air in that stuffy dark little stone room? Was it the way in which the three men looked at him? Was it that basket of broken tiles?

“No thanks,” he said. And he added: “Let’s go out where we can see. It’s too hot in here, too.”

He looked around for the door. He couldn’t see it from where he stood. The antiquity man said something, and the porter stood aside. Michael stepped past him, around some big boxes. The door was there. Michael suddenly heard it click; but in front of it a fourth man stood in the shadow. He did not move when Michael stepped forward. He stood there in front of the door, with his hands in his coat pockets. Michael was quite sure he didn’t like that.

“Pardon,” he said, “I want to go out.”

The man shook his head. At a word from the antiquity man, however, he moved aside, keeping his hands in his pockets. Michael reached out for the door. It was locked.

He liked that least of all. He had a sudden impulse to pound the door, the man beside him. Yet the next moment he was ashamed of it. He turned around. The others had come forward, around the boxes—the antiquity man, the big porter with the tray, the old man carrying the candle. In the light of it Michael looked at the other one, the one who had shut the door. He was young and very dark, with a scar across his chin. Michael looked at them all. What in the world had come over them? Could it be that they took that basket of tiles too seriously? Could it be that they, too, were not what they seemed, that under their first friendliness were black and uncanny things? All the old wives’ tales that Westerners hear of the East came vaguely, yet disquietingly, back to him. It was with an effort that he folded his arms and turned to the antiquity man.

“Your methods of doing business,” he remarked, “strike me as being rather peculiar.”

“It is a peculiar business,” said the antiquity man.

“Is it your idea that people should be forced to buy Rhages jars whether they want them or not?”

“The Rhages jar is not for sale,” replied the antiquity man.

“O!” exclaimed Michael. “Then what is the matter? What are you after?”

“Not your money,” said the antiquity man. “Please believe that, sir. And please believe that we are very sorry. It is—what shall I say?—what we call here kismet, fate. If you had not chanced to notice that basket, if you had not taken it down and examined it, nothing would have happened.”

“What have I to do with that?” burst out Michael. “Is it my fault if you put baskets where people can see them and then go away? Am I responsible for your carelessness?”

“Your question, sir, is unfortunately most just. But that is a part of the kismet—that having been careless ourselves, we are obliged to make you pay for it.”

“Well, how am I going to pay?” demanded Michael. “Spend the rest of my life in here?”

The antiquity man hesitated before answering.

“Yes, sir,” he said at last, softly. And he added: “Will you have your coffee now?”

Michael could hardly take it in. What did the fellow mean? Then something in the way the antiquity man looked at him made him remember about the coffee—that it would not keep him awake. For the life of him he could not help glancing down at it. How was it that he didn’t happen to drink it when they first brought it in? And if he had—He stared at the stuff in its pretty silver holder. Behind it something bright caught a flicker from the candle—a knife in the porter’s girdle. Why not? They all carried them. Yet his eye travelled to the pocket of the dark young man by the door. All of a sudden Michael knew as well as if he saw it that there was a revolver in that pocket, and that the young man had his finger on the trigger. Michael’s eyes travelled on, up to the eyes of the young man, to the eyes of them all. What strange, glistening, dark eyes they all had, too dark to see into! He found all of a sudden that he felt a little cold. He was even afraid for a moment that he was going to tremble....

What really preoccupied him, though, was how the thing had happened. How could such a thing happen so suddenly? It had all been perfectly simple and natural—his work for his firm, his journey abroad, his coming to Constantinople, his prowling in the Bazaars, his happening to buy a gimcrack of the antiquity man, his introduction to this queer old place, his pawing over those broken tiles. It was all so simple. It would, at any step, have been so easy to avoid. And it was so unjust, it was so fantastically unjust. How could things end as incredibly as that? How could he let them end like that? He was one, and they were four; and they were armed, and he was not. But he wouldn’t take it sitting down. The Anglo-Saxon in him stiffened his back and set his teeth. He began looking around stealthily, at the bare stone walls, at the littered floor, for something to get hold of. He would show them yet....

“You must not think,” said the antiquity man, “that we have no sympathy for your position. But do not think, either, that any—any display of the emotions will help you. No one can possibly hear.”

That was the moment when Michael found it hardest to keep his head. If he had been a little younger he probably would not have kept his head. “Display of the emotions”! But he realised at last that for some incomprehensible reason they meant business. He hoped his emotions did not display themselves in his voice.

“Look here,” he said. “I see you aren’t pick-pockets, and I see that by accident I have discovered something you do not wish known. Well, if you had kept quiet I might never have thought of that basket again. Or I might now try to buy your Rhages jar—for any figure you might name. As it is, I give you my word of honour that never so long as I live will I breathe a word to any human being. You know me. Don’t you believe what I say? But if you don’t I will sign my name to any document you care to draw up. If you ever hear of my breaking my word, I am willing to take the consequences.”

At this the old man spoke for the first time. Michael could not understand what he said. He did not even recognise the language in which the old man spoke. He had a curiously deep voice. The antiquity man answered incomprehensibly. Then he turned back to Michael:

“I do believe what you say. I do not question your word of honour. But, unfortunately, we cannot take any chances—even the most remote. And impressions, you know, even the strongest of them, like love and grief, have a way of losing their force. Suppose we let you go. There might come very naturally a time when your recollections of this incident would lose their intensity, or when you would regard your promise as less important than you do now. Why not? Life is like that. Life would be intolerable if it were not like that. Things happen, and then other things happen. I have not the honour of any great acquaintance with you, but it is conceivable that you might sometime be offered wine which you could not refuse, or that a beautiful woman might make an impression on you, or that a company of distinguished men might be relating interesting experiences; and before you knew it the story of this afternoon would slip from you. Or you might dream aloud. You might have a fever. These possibilities, I admit, are very remote, or the probability of any harm resulting to us. Still, you never can tell. Stories have a strange way of travelling. Sometimes they travel from New York to Constantinople. We have known cases. For that reason we—have prepared that cup of coffee. We must secure ourselves against one chance in a thousand.”

Michael saw it. He was like that. He had that fatal little flaw of the artist, of being able to see the other side. He saw it then as distinctly as he saw the four dark faces, the candle burning quietly in the dark little room, the dark shapes and shadows of the boxes. He wondered what dark strange thing was hidden here—that meant so much to these men. He wondered about the men themselves, whom he had taken so casually.

“Your life, of course,” the antiquity man went on, “is very precious to you. That we perfectly understand. While life is seldom satisfactory, it contains, after all, a great deal for one still as young as you. And one always hopes—often with reason. We ask you to believe that we understand that. We also ask you to believe that no one of us has any personal reason for wishing you harm. We excessively regret the necessity of asking you to drink that cup of coffee. We shall continue all our lives to regret it. Nevertheless, you can perhaps understand that there may be reasons why even your life is of less moment to us than the possibility of your some day forgetting for an instant the promise you now so sincerely make.”

Michael still saw it. He saw, too, what had been growing steadily clearer, that this was an antiquity man among antiquity men. But what he saw best of all, through that portentous candle-light, was a sudden mirage of the summer sun—out of which he had stepped so lightly. He saw it so vividly that his voice had in it a thickness he didn’t like:

“I understand. But there are chances and chances. For instance, can a man disappear like that, even in Constantinople, and no questions be asked? When I fail to go back to my hotel, to pay my bill, will they say nothing? When I fail to go back to my country will my friends say nothing? Of course not! There will be a row. It may not be to-morrow, it may not be the next day. I do not pretend to be a person of importance. But sooner or later questions will be asked. And sooner or later you will have to answer some of them. What will you say then?”

“We have thought of that,” answered the antiquity man. “We can see that if it is dangerous to let you go from here, it is also dangerous to let others come to look for you here. But by the time they come, they will at least find no baskets of broken tiles.” He gave Michael a moment in which to take it in. “If the matter be at last traced to us, it will be a simple one of robbery and murder. For that reason we shall have to keep whatever valuables you may have. We are very sorry that we shall not be able to send them back to your family.”

“My money belongs to my firm, not to my family,” protested Michael. “If you keep it, you will take not only my life, but my honour. It certainly will not be to your interest to prevent them from thinking that I have stolen it and run away.”

“You are right,” replied the antiquity man. “But I do not need to tell you that human actions are usually misunderstood. Even you, perhaps, do not understand that our own motive is not an interested one. There is only One who understands. I may point out to you, however, that we run the risk of suffering from a similar imputation. It will probably be thought that we have killed you for your money. And you must realise that in that case I, perhaps all of us, stand an excellent chance of following you—wherever you go. But that chance we take more willingly than the other.”

He said it simply, without gestures, without airs. Michael could not help seeing it and rising to it. He even could not help liking the antiquity man. Evidently it was not a common affair in which he had happened to tangle himself....

He saw it, but somehow he felt his sense of reality slipping. He had often wondered, vaguely enough, as one does when the sun is warm about one and the end of life is very far off and incredible, what the end of life would be like—how it could come, whether he would make a fool of himself. But of all the possibilities he had imagined, he had never imagined this little stone room in Stambul, and this candle, and these shadows, and these four inscrutable dark faces of men whom he did not know. Was he making a fool of himself now to say, as he did, thickly:

“Give me your cup of coffee.” He tried to clear his throat. “But you might at least tell me first what all this fuss is about. Or are you afraid I shall tell them in the next world?”

He saw a light in the antiquity man’s eye. The old man saw it, too. There ensued a conversation between them, in which the young man, his hand still in his pocket, joined. The porter stood statuesque, with his tray of poisoned coffee. Michael, left to himself, began to feel his sense of reality come back.

“Look here,” he said, “my coffee is getting cold.”

The antiquity man smiled.

“My friend here”—he pointed to the old man—“has made a suggestion. He seems to have taken a fancy to you. In fact I may assure you that we are all pleased at the way you have received the very disagreeable things we have unfortunately had to say to you. Some men, in the circumstances, would have been abject. You might have begged, bribed, wept, fainted, what do I know? We have seen—And we feel sure, as we did not at first, that you did not come here on purpose to find—that basket of tiles.”

He narrowed his eyes a little as he looked at Michael, making another of his eloquent pauses. Michael didn’t like it, but he couldn’t help asking:

“Well, what is your suggestion?”

“Are you willing,” asked the antiquity man, slowly, “to change your religion?”

“Change my religion?” echoed Michael, uncomprehendingly. “I’m afraid I haven’t much religion to change.”

“All the better,” returned the antiquity man. “So it is with most people of intelligence. If, however, you were willing to change your religion, if you were also willing to change your language, your name, your home, your wife even, for others as different from them as can be conceived, if you could bring yourself to make that sacrifice and to become one of us, it would not be necessary for you to drink that cup of coffee.”

Michael saw it. He caught his breath. But—

“I must ask you to decide quickly,” continued the antiquity man. “We all have affairs. And if it should become necessary for us to answer those questions of which you spoke, it would be better for witnesses to be able to say that we were not in here too long this afternoon.”

Michael saw that, too. And all the blood in him quickened at the chance of life. Life! His life had not been such a success. Why not wipe the slate clean and start over again? It ironically came to him that Aurora would call that romance—to be cornered here like a rat in a trap while four men he didn’t know stared at him with a candle! But why, on the other hand, should he give in to them? That was cowardice, even if it was irony, too—to die for what he didn’t want and didn’t believe in.... The immensity of the dilemma was too much for him. Irresistible force, immovable obstacle—that flashed inconsequently into his head. Was the light going out? The room grew darker. He tried again to clear his throat. It suddenly came to him that he didn’t even know who these people were, and what they wanted him to become....

The antiquity man reached forward, lifted the coffee-cup out of its silver holder, and dropped it on the stone floor. Michael stared down stupidly at the bits of broken porcelain. They were like the bits of broken tiles. He wondered if his trousers were spattered....

The young man took his hand out of his pocket and opened the door.

V

How do I know? I don’t. I only know what Michael told me. Which wasn’t much. He was like that, you see! Then he was too mortally afraid of its getting back here. He wouldn’t open up as little as he did till he heard Aurora had married again! And here you ask who and when and where and why. O Lord! If you would only let a man tell his story and stop when he is through!

However, even you must know that Constantinople enjoys quite a reputation for liveliness, of sorts, and that it was particularly lively just before and just after the German War. It was then that I got out there, as a courier—while the armistice was on. Although it was a good bit after the episode of the coffee cup, I saw quite a number of people who remembered Michael. Of course a good many other people and things had disappeared since his day—including, I suppose, the antiquity man and his bombs. A few Turks or Tartars might have told me something about that, if they lived to tell tales. But of course I had yet to hear about the antiquity man—the interesting part of him, I mean. And witnesses had seen Michael drive away from the khan in a closed carriage.

What no witness had seen was the number of the carriage, or the door it drove to. And they told me another yarn about a carriage driving full tilt at dusk into the open draw of the Bridge. I asked myself if poor old Michael were still sitting in it. That version, at any rate, is the one now accepted by Aurora. She has given up her tombstone and her quatrain. She perceives that it isn’t every lady who can boast one husband at home among the stars and another sitting in a brougham at the bottom of the Golden Horn.

So I gave Michael up. Perhaps I did it the more easily because there were so many other things to think about: couriering, relieving, reporting—any number of odd jobs connected with all that mess out there. They took me hither and yon about the Balkans and the Black Sea, on errands that might have sounded quite fantastic before the war plunged thousands of unsuspecting people into adventures a hundred times more so. And one day I landed in Batum.

Everybody who lives in Batum swears it’s the dreariest hole on the face of the earth. An English officer I met even sighed piteously to me over the lost delights of Aden! However, I found Batum very amusing, with its higglety-pigglety air of somebody having stirred up a piece of Turkey with a piece of Russia and having turned the mixture out to cool in a corner of the Riviera. To be sure, there are rather too many Georgians and Lazzes and other queer customers prowling around; and the Hôtel de France does too little to live up to its name. Also, that cooling process will evidently take time. But the setting of cloudy white peaks and a misnamed sea is quite worthy of the Riviera. And I must insist that the Boulevard is a really perfect little park. You should see how close the palms and the cypresses march to the white shingle.

Well, I was warming a tin chair in that park one afternoon, watching the operatic crowd, admiring the great wild hills of their Caucasus through their mannered cypresses, listening to the incantation of their Black Sea through their Glinka, and thinking of nothing in particular, when I suddenly made two discoveries. One was that that Coon song we used to sing about “Lou, Lou, I love you” came out of Life for the Czar. The other was that Michael, our vanished reaper and binder, far from having disappeared in the Golden Horn with Aurora’s phantom coupé or from having otherwise evaporated, sat solid and sunburned in another tin chair of the Boulevard, eyeing me. To be sure he was moustached, uniformed, medalled, booted, disguised as a kind of bastard Cossack with all manner of strange accoutrements and insignia. But it was Michael. What is more he presently grinned, albeit a trifle sheepishly, pulling up his tin chair beside mine.

“I was afraid you were going to be melodramatic,” he said. “As it is, let’s have a chat.”

We had a chat. Tin chairs in parks always remind me of that chat. At the time I thought it the most interesting chat I ever had. That was before I proposed to Alice.

“I suppose they think I took the money, eh?” Michael finally asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “They think you took the money.”

“H’m. I’ve made it up to them without their knowing. So that’s all right. And—what about Aurora?”

I told him about Aurora. He was longer with his “H’m” that time. Do you know? I believe the fellow was human enough to be jealous of an astrologer whom he didn’t envy! However, he ended by letting out another:

“So that’s all right.”

“And you?” I ventured.

He didn’t say anything at first. He sat there fingering his gewgaws and staring at the sea.

“How’s a man to know whether he’s all right or all wrong?” he finally demanded.

“Hell!” objected I. “It isn’t your fault if you happen to be sitting in Batum instead of in Zerbetta—or at the bottom of the Golden Horn. You couldn’t have invented such an end for yourself if you had tried till you were black in the face. That antiquity gang is responsible, not you. But I bet—”

But I concluded not to. As for Michael, he continued to study the afternoon blue of the sea. Down the edge of it a steamer trailed a long dark line of smoke toward the West.

“I suppose I could go back home if I really wanted to,” he said, “now that my antiquity man has pulled off his republic. Yet after all, what good would it do? You can see for yourself—The worst of it, though, is that I don’t really want to. You get interested in people, you know, in spite of yourself—even when they have Jew noses and jabber Armenian. I’d like to see their show through. Then they’ve been no end decent to me. I’ve a vine and fig tree of my own—up Ararat way! I have a house to live in, and a horse to ride, and a wife to beat. I do it, too. I’ve learned that much,” he pronounced darkly, in a tone that struck me at first as irrelevant. On consideration, however, I decided it wasn’t. “Anyhow,” he went on, “I’m alive; and I can’t say I’m sorry. The funny thing about it is that I never knew it till I came so near stepping off. I’ve had some pretty narrow squeaks since then, too. And my chances of dropping in my boots are still a lot brighter than yours. All the same, it’s better than peddling those damned hay-rakes. But once in a while,” the inconsequent devil blurted out, “I come down here and listen to the band.”

Now can you imagine a man being like that? But if you ever breathe a word to a living soul—!

HENRIETTA STACKPOLE REDIVIVA

Thanks to Henry James—on whom be peace—I am a man without a trade. One by one he used to appropriate my most precious models until I came to await each new book with a curiosity which no disinterested reader could imagine. A surprising number of his so-called creations—how little did he create them only he and I could tell!—I knew long before knowing him. Roderick Hudson, for instance, I met at a villa in the Euganean Hills, and regarded as my peculiar prey, in days before the precipice. And, indeed, he has not gone over it yet; but it is only a question of time. The Princess Casamassima, too, is an old friend of mine who oscillates between Paris and Constantinople. She is shortly to be married, I hear, and that is a turn unkinder than any Mr. James has done me. Then there is Osmond. Often as I have seen him, though, he would probably tell you that he dared say but didn’t really recollect. They will never admit that they are fathomable, those people. As for Madame Merle, I believe I have met her once only. Christopher Newman, however, and the Baroness Münster, and Gordon Wright, and poor little Maisie—But I might go on indefinitely, picking out persons of my acquaintance whom Mr. James in some unaccountable way discovered first.

Still, in spite of this purely accidental disadvantage under which I suffer, it must be said that the printed fortunes of these friends of mine afford me, in many cases, a pleasure superior to that of actual intercourse. I have to confess, too, that Mr. James has not seldom lent me the key to mysteries of character which would have remained inscrutable but for his elucidation. It has even happened, furthermore, that an introduction from him has been so complete that when later I came to meet the person in real life it was like being at a play which one has seen before. I knew in advance exactly what to expect.

A cognate case was my encounter with Henrietta Stackpole, the spirited journalist in “The Portrait of a Lady.” As I did not recognise her at first sight, it is quite possible that the reader may fail to do so. Indeed, some to whom I tell the story roundly declare they do not believe a word of it. I can only insist that it happened years and years ago, at a far less sophisticated period of our history; that the name on the card was unmistakable; and that Henrietta was a caprice, if you will, but a perfectly credible one, of a rapid and uneven civilisation.

My second introduction to her came about in this wise. I was staying at the time in Venice—a city in which it has been my good fortune to spend much of my life and in which I would count it perfect happiness to spend the whole. A prevalence of rainy scirocco had for two or three days diminished the enchantments of the summer lagoon. It was therefore natural, on the morning in question, that I should have gone unconsciously to that place which is always aglow when the world is grey, which is always warm when the wind is cold, which is always cool when the sun is hot—the miraculous church of St. Mark’s. There I established myself at the base of my favourite pier and proceeded to the familiar enjoyment of sensations which this is not the place to describe.

Presently there crossed my line of vision a lady. This was not in itself a phenomenon so extraordinary. St. Mark’s, like other churches, usually contains more women than men; in the course of a year I doubt not that more Americans enter it than Italians; and of American travellers, young women—to use the phrase in its most generous sense—vastly outnumber persons of other descriptions. Indeed, it is a tradition implanted in the European mind only more ineradicably by the doughboys of 1918 that ours is a land of Amazons, whence the few indispensable males are seldom allowed to escape. There crossed my line of vision, then, a damsel of my own nationality. A certain peculiarity attached to her from the fact that she carried no Baedeker. Nor did she appear to have ties with any person or group of persons provided with a copy of that useful work. What particularly attracted my attention to her, however, was a large silver ornament which she bore on a revers of her tailor-made costume. It represented—so far as I could make out—a human head and bust, supported in heraldic and highly decorative manner by fluttering streamers and extended wings. In those distant days there was no cavalry of the clouds, to suggest a winged admirer in the Air Service. So, knowing that my countrywomen are insatiable collectors of the curious and the antique, I wondered if this young lady had picked up in the Spadaria some quaint bit of chasing and had adopted this means of transporting it to her hotel.

As if to satisfy my curiosity, the young person obligingly proceeded to seat herself near me on the bench at the foot of the pier. I was thus enabled to devote, at closer range, a covert examination to her treasure. The human representation I accordingly discovered to be that of Col. William Jennings Bryan, as set forth by a legend on the fluttering streamers, which contained further expressions with regard to free silver and crosses of gold. I could not easily decipher them without appearing to transcend the bounds of delicacy.

The completeness of my disillusionment, and the fact that a young and measurably attractive woman should prefer ornaments of free silver to crosses of gold—for which latter I have an especial fancy—led me to consider my companion with more attention than it might perhaps be decorous for a stranger to betray. Her attire was that of a well-to-do person, and she might have passed for one of good taste but for the ornament to which I have referred. That she was of alert mind was evident from the incisive way in which she looked about and then used her pencil upon a small pad, as one making a sketch. I must confess that I had some curiosity to see how St. Mark’s would look to a virgin of political mind, and I was so rude as to let my eye rest for a moment upon her paper. To my surprise I discovered that she was not sketching at all—or that, if she did so, it was with words, and in some dialect to me perfectly unintelligible. The characters with which she rapidly covered her pad resembled those of the Arabic more nearly than anything else with which I was acquainted, unless they had about them something of Scandinavian runes. Altogether I was completely mystified. For whatever traits may distinguish the American girl upon her travels, linguistic facility is not one of them.

As we sat thus in uncommunicative companionship, there approached us that familiar genius of St. Mark’s, the blue and ancient sacristan who rattles the collection box. Me he knew of old as a wanton gentleman much given to passing half hours in the golden church at the side of young and otherwise unprotected ladies. At least I am sure he can have attributed to me no motive other than that which was likely to bring so many whispering couples of his own nationality. Accordingly he approached us with a smile of recognition and held out toward the person at my side one of those cards with which he is so inexhaustibly provided, representing the Nicopeian Madonna. The admirer of Colonel Bryan looked dubiously upon this offering. Finally, however, she was won over by the old man’s irresistible smile and accepted the papistical emblem. No sooner had she done so than the sacristan, as is his wont, produced the collection box, which from force of habit he had kept behind him. At this the young woman tried to hand back the card. But the old man was occupied in passing the box to me, as in such cases was also his wont. And from force of habit I dropped in a coin. At which the cheerful ancient bent his efforts in other directions.

The girl turned instantly to me, opening at the same time the business-like black leather chatelaine which hung at her side.

“How much was it?” she inquired.

“My dear young lady,” I said, “it was nothing at all. I beg of you to put away your purse. Those cards are distributed free. I merely put something in because the old man and I are friends.”

She looked at me a moment with some intensity, and then snapped her bag. It occurred to me that her mind would sound like that—when she made it up, as we say.

“How do you and the old man happen to be friends?” she demanded rather abruptly. “Do you live here?”

“Yes,” I answered, expressing the will for the deed.

“You speak English very well,” she commented, regarding me much as if I had been a Bearded Lady, or a glove worn by Gustavus Adolphus.

“Thank you!” I exclaimed. “That is a great compliment, for I was born in Vermont.”

I suspected that my interlocutress did not altogether appreciate this point. She continued to regard me with such fixedness that I had an immediate intuition of what she was about to say. She would require of me to inform her why I lived abroad when I was privileged to dwell in a country so far superior to every other, and however ingenious might be my pretence she would put me in the wrong. My intuition, however, as too frequently is the case, was mistaken. The young lady opened once more her chatelaine bag, drew forth the receptacle from which she had endeavoured to reimburse my expenditure in her behalf, and produced a neatly printed card which she handed to me. Upon this I read the legend:

Miss Henrietta C. Stackpole
THE OMAHA REVIEWER

I stared at this name in speechless amazement. I had supposed Henrietta long married to Bantling, and by this time the mother of an infinite progeny. And Omaha! But, as I have intimated, much has happened since 1881. And before I could frame some manner of remark, my companion again addressed me:

“I wish you would give me some information.”

“I shall be only too delighted, my dear Miss Stackpole!” I assured her effusively. “I have heard so much about you. This is my name”; and I offered her my card in return.

“Where have you heard about me?” she demanded in surprise.

“Why, from Mr. James,” I replied.

“Mis-ter James?” she repeated in deep mystification. “I don’t remember any Mr. James. Oh, do you mean Mr. Reuben James, of Topeka?”

“No, Mr. Henry James, of London,” I told her.

“I don’t know any Mr. Henry James,” she declared decisively. “He must have seen my letters in the Reviewer.”

“Oh, of course!” I uttered, with considerable confusion. “I beg your pardon. I thought——You see——What information can I give you?”

“Well, would you mind telling me if this is really Venus?” she asked confidentially, sketching a circle in the ambient air.

I regarded my companion with no little uncertainty. What finesses might lurk behind so intriguing a question?

“Ve——?” But even as I began to repeat the name, it flashed into my thick head that so had a gentleman from California once denominated to me some egregious Venice of his native State; and my eyes opened very wide. “Why, yes,” I replied, hesitating. “That is, if ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is Shakespeare. I rather like the water, myself.”

While she neither agreed with nor challenged this remark, I observed that it produced a visible satisfaction in her. And she went on:

“I want to find out all about it. There’s simply no end of things I want to ask—for my letters, you know. I write for a syndicate as well as for the Reviewer, and you’re the first person I’ve met that I can really talk to. I hardly know where to begin. What is this big building next door, for one thing? It’s awfully queer looking.”

“It is rather queer,” I admitted. “The Patriarchate, I suppose you mean? In the Piazzetta dei Leoncini?”

“I don’t know any names, but I mean the checker-board one, with piazzas all around and a picket fence along the top.”

“Oh!” I ejaculated, staring at her very hard. “That is the Doges’ Palace.”

“What palace? These I-talian names are too much for me.”

“Call it the Ducal Palace, then,” I answered, experiencing a profound sensation. The young lady thereupon applied herself anew to her pad; and it dawned upon me that her strange alphabet might be that of stenography. “I should think that you would find a Baedeker convenient,” I added, discovering that the intensity of my gaze had drawn Miss Stackpole’s eye.

“Oh, I guess I’m bright enough to get around by myself, thank you!” she rejoined with some irony. “I’ve travelled enough. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Europe, either—though it’s the first I’ve been to Italy.”

“Oh, indeed! How I envy you! Think of coming to Italy for the first time!”

There was something of voracity in the eagerness with which I turned upon her. This was really too good to be true. It was incomparable. When had anybody ever come to Italy before without knowing exactly what was expected of them? To my astonishment, however, and no small dismay, the eyes of Henrietta suddenly began to swim.

“You wouldn’t envy me,” she said with a catch in her voice, “if you knew how disappointed I was, and what I’ve been through.”

She turned away a moment, as if to look at the great swinging lamp in the form of a branching cross; but I knew she was brushing her hand across her eyes. An unaccountable contrition swept over me. I responded, as sympathetically as I knew how:

“I beg your pardon, Miss Stackpole! I’m so sorry. I am sure you must have been unfortunate.”

“I have been!” she exclaimed, turning to me again. “I——” She stopped short a moment. Then—“You probably think I’m queer, telling you all these things; but you’re the first American I’ve seen for ’most a week.”

“The pleasure is mine, I assure you!” I declared. “It is even longer since I have seen one.” I failed to add what she might have found complimentary, that seeing Americans was not what I came to Venice for, and that I usually took pains to avoid them.

“Well,” she exclaimed, “it just does me good to talk to you.”

“Have you been here long?” I delicately suggested.

“Well, it seems as if it had been forever, but I guess it’s only about two days.” Miss Stackpole herself was evidently more mysterious than her little pad. In spite of my sympathy for an unfortunate lady I felt again an extreme curiosity to hear the story of an original one. Before I had quite made up my mind, however, as to how I might serve God and Mammon with equal zeal, Miss Stackpole’s overburdened heart solved the difficulty. “I’ve been in London all summer,” she volunteered, “reporting the coronation. But I got all het up, and so I broke off and went to Switzerland. I lost big money by it, too. I can afford it, though, and I got a lot better.”

“I hope you are feeling quite right now,” I interposed.

“So far as my digestion goes, yes, thank you!” she returned. “Well, I was just about ready to go back, when I heard some people in the hotel one night talking about Venice—if that’s the way they pronounce it here. They’d left the day before, they said, and they were going on, saying how grand it all was. And the more I listened to them the more it seemed as if I must come down here. Somehow I had no idea it was that near. I’ve always wanted to see the place ever since I read about it in geography at school. There was a picture of it, and underneath it said: ‘Venice, a city of northern Italy, situated upon 117 small islands in the Adriatic Sea.’ I thought that was just wonderful—a hundred and seventeen small islands! And I made up my mind then that whenever I got the chance I’d come here. So I started right off the next day. I knew all about the I-talians, though, and I just made up my mind I’d get ahead of them. I wasn’t going to land in their country at night, and get robbed or stabbed or something. There was a real nice German in the car, and I found out from him which was the last station in Switzerland and I got out there.”

“Oh, my poor lady!” I cried. “You don’t mean to say that you spent the night at Chiasso instead of going on to Milan?”

“That’s exactly what I did, if that’s the way you pronounce it; but I don’t believe Italy itself could have been any worse. The hotel was just the limit, and they charged me more than Claridge does—in London, you know. However, I managed to get on to Milan the next day. And I like to have been there yet.”

“What was the matter?” I inquired.

“Why, when we had to change cars I couldn’t make anybody understand a thing, and they were all so black and horrid and murderous-looking that I ’most wished I’d never tried to come. I was afraid they hadn’t put me in the right car, either; and I hadn’t much idea how far it was, and at every station I’d start up and look for the name because I couldn’t understand a word the conductor said. But as long as I didn’t see those hundred and seventeen small islands I felt pretty sure I was right to stay in the car. Once I almost got out, when we came to some water with mountains all around—as blue as blue! But there didn’t seem to be any islands, and we went on and on, and it grew dark, and by and by it began to rain and I didn’t know what I should do—everything looked so watery and islandy outside. Then the train stopped and a man opened the door, and when I asked him if ’twas Venus he just took my grip and dumped it out. I was that mad I would have put it right back in. When I got out, though, I saw we were at the end of the line—wherever that might be. So, as it was pretty late to start off anywheres else, I thought I might as well try my luck and find out afterwards whether it was Ve—Venice or not. But I don’t believe I ever would, for sure, if I hadn’t met you.”

“Beata Vergine!” I murmured. “Can these things be?” Then aloud: “Why, you seem to have got on very well, Miss Stackpole, for one who didn’t know the language.”

“Well, I always did manage to find my way around pretty well,” she admitted. “But I never had a time like this before. The getting here was bad enough, but after I got here it was worse. I followed the people out of the station and I looked all around for a hotel ’bus. That’s what I always do—get into the slickest one I see, and then I land at a good hotel. But I couldn’t find a single one. There were just those queer boats. A good many people seemed to be getting into them, too; but I didn’t like to, everything was so dark and the men looked so horrid. I didn’t know where to tell them to go, either. Then I saw some more people making for a little steamer, and I almost thought I’d try that. But I hadn’t any idea where it might take me, and I thought it was safer to stick to dry land. A whole lot of the dreadfullest men kept saying things to me, though, and tried to grab my grip, and I just about wished I was dead. But I set my teeth and held on hard and said over some things in good United States, and then I began hunting for a decent-looking hotel near by. It seemed as if I was sure to strike some big street if I just walked on perfectly straight. That’s what I always do when I get lost. But I couldn’t go straight, to begin with. I just kept going round and round in the worst little alleys that landed me up against a stone wall or at the edge of the water or in some creepy place where it was as much as my life was worth to take another step. I got so tired and scared I could have laid right down in the street and cried.

“I’d made up my mind that I’d find a hotel, though, and I did. I finally went up to a man that looked something like a policeman, and I showed him my bag, and said ‘Hotel’ real loud, several times. He understood anyway, for he called a man with a brass check on his arm, and said something, and waved me along quite polite. I was pretty scared, because I didn’t know but what the man would take me off into one of those creepy places and cut my throat. Nobody would ever find out. I was too done up to mind, though. I just followed along, and by and by we came to a cute little street that wasn’t much bigger than the others; but it was real bright, with stores, and lots of people walking, and so we came at last to a hotel. It wasn’t a bit like the kind of hotels I go to. I knew this was Italy, though, and you couldn’t expect much, and I was that tired I would have slept on an ash heap.”

“I wonder what hotel it was,” I said.

“It’s just near here,” replied my companion. “I’ve got the name on a card, so I can show it to people if I get lost.”

She resorted once more to her chatelaine bag and produced a card on which I read the réclame of a very grubby little inn occasionally patronised by travellers anxious to practice an extreme economy. The sole recommendation of the place is its antiquity. There is not a window in it, I believe, or, if such conveniences exist, their prospect is of the narrowest and dingiest calli.

“They told me it was the oldest and best in town,” said Miss Stackpole. “One of them knows a little English.”

“Well, it is conveniently located,” I assured her. “I hope they have treated you right.”

“No!” Her voice died, and this time her eyes flooded so quickly that I saw a splash before she could turn. “You must think me a goose for going on like this,” she said, raising her handkerchief. “But it does seem good to find someone who isn’t trying to do me out of my bottom dollar.” And presently: “How can you live here, among such people?”

The Venetians are with me a very tender point. I have so long been a victim both of their wiles and of their charm! But in the end it is the charm that I remember.

“My poor Miss Stackpole,” I replied, “you have been unfortunate. If some of them are pretty bad, so are some people everywhere. And they improve on acquaintance. Still, of course, it is the place that catches one. Don’t you delight in it, now that you’ve seen it?”

Henrietta cast her eyes doubtfully about.

“This church is pretty fine, though they do let it run down the worst way. Just look at the floor! And the square out there—it’s queer, but it’s nice; especially looking off toward the water. But it isn’t a bit what I thought. Those hundred and seventeen small islands now—I sort of saw them lying around in the sea, with palms and temples and things. Don’t you know? I never expected these horrid slimy little canals, and backyard alleys instead of streets, and such awful shiftless tumble-down houses.”

I gazed at Henrietta aghast. Then I protested:

“But don’t you think many of the little alleys delightful? And the squares, and the palaces, and the carved windows and balconies, and the bridges, and the shine of green below them, and the pictures, and everything?”

Henrietta shook her head sadly.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been around any, except just about here. I’m afraid. I don’t know why. I’ve never felt that way before. But the little alleys are so treacherous-like, and the people look so horrid, and it has rained all the time, and—oh dear, I just wish I’d never come!”

For a moment I thought that the dikes were down and we were lost. But even as my knees began to knock, Henrietta pulled herself together, dried her eyes for the last time, and said:

“Now I feel a lot better—now that I’ve told you all about it. Supposing you go ahead and tell me all about things. I’m going to make this trip pay for itself, if it doesn’t pay me.”

Could Henrietta have read my heart at that moment she might have made a Bantling out of me before I knew what she was up to. The idea of this poor girl so realising the dream of her childhood—of her stumbling blind into the loveliest city in the world, and falling among thieves, and miraculously escaping everything that there was of enchantment—moved me idiotically. And not only did the pathos of Henrietta move me. I was jealous for the honour of my chosen city, whose peerless charms I have been ready ever to maintain against any champion and all.

“My dear Miss Stackpole,” I cried, “you have been unlucky! But you must let me help you to put things right. I shall be your guide, if you don’t mind. And first of all you must change your hotel. I know of one which is just the place. Nobody will rob you there, and everybody speaks English, and you will meet any number of Americans, and your windows will open into the Grand Canal.”

“What is that?” inquired Henrietta, grasping her pencil.

“Madre di Dio!” I gasped. “Why, that is Venice!” This was a banality justified by my companion’s predicament. “Haven’t you been in a gondola yet? A gondóla?,” I emended hastily, detecting a cloud in Henrietta’s eye. “One of those boats?”

“No,” she answered. “They looked so queer; and then I didn’t know as I’d ever get back.”

“My dear lady!” I groaned. “This is too much! Come out with me this instant to row in a gondola. You haven’t seen the fingernail of Venice yet!”

Henrietta looked at me.

“You’re very kind,” she said slowly. “I don’t know but what I will, later on. Just now, though, I want you to tell me about things. I do want to get those letters done. They are, pretty near.” I suppose my face must have betrayed something, for she went on: “Perhaps you think it’s funny for me to write letters before I’ve seen much. But I’m made that way, you know. I really don’t need to see a place to tell about it. When I go into it, it sort of comes over me what sort of a place it is, and I just sit down and write it up as if I’d been all over. You might not think so to hear me talk. I’m not much on talking, same as business men who keep stenographers aren’t much on writing. But I can write two articles about the same thing, and you’d never guess they were by the same person till you came to the name at the end.”

I gazed at Henrietta with deepening interest.

“I hope you will send me your Venetian letters when they come out,” I ventured.

“I will,” declared she courteously.

She thereupon proceeded to ply me with questions the most diverse, the which for brevity’s sake I forbear to transcribe. Each was more amazing than the last, and when finally I found myself escorting her to her hotel, I wondered whether, after all, the rôle of Bantling would suit me. Nevertheless, I had an extreme curiosity to hear her comments upon those aqueous aspects of Venice which had as yet remained concealed from her. I also took occasion to stop at Zanetti’s and purchase a copy of Baedeker’s “Northern Italy,” which I begged of Henrietta to accept as a loan. I knew she would accept it on no other terms, and I assured her that she would find it invaluable in putting her notes into permanent form. She, thanking me warmly for my manifold kindnesses, declared that she would be delighted to accompany me in a gondola at three o’clock, when her letters would surely be ready for the post.

When I called for her at the time appointed, the porter informed me that the signorina had departed on the half-past-two train. In the face of my incredulity he then produced the new Baedeker and the following note:

Dear Friend!

I must beg your pardon for giving you the mitten, especially after you had been so polite. But I finished my letters much sooner than I expected, thanks to your book, and after looking same over there really did not seem to be much use in staying on. So, as I have already found Venice disappointing, and as I heard there was a train to Paris this afternoon, I decided to avail myself of the opportunity.

Thanking you again,
Sincerely,
Henrietta C. Stackpole.

THE PAGAN

I

I never knew him, myself. That is, in the ordinary way of acquaintance. It was not that I avoided him. It was, rather, that I was young, and shyer than I might have admitted, and too self-conscious on the point of quid pro quo. Time has happily made me less squeamish about standing to people in that relation which is not rare in this complicated world, of finding them more interesting than they do me. Even then, though, making people out was for me the chief business of life. Whereas he seemed to live in a world by himself. At any rate he was far more fiercely individual than I, who am Jesuit enough to get on with anybody. Another point, however, was that I went to Marshbury those three times only, for short periods and at long intervals. The wonder was that he had made for me so complete a picture as he did. But I think I never saw anyone else so well through the eyes of others. That is probably why I have never been back. There was something final about that slab of grey granite.

Mary Bennett was my principal source of information. Everyone in the village had his quota to contribute, for that matter. But as Mary was Marvin’s “help,” and as I boarded with Mary’s mother, I enjoyed exceptional opportunities. Yet now that I say it, I realise how indirectly it is true—how little Mary ever told me in so many words. She was a solid young person of seventeen when I first knew her, really not bad to look at, and much better than gold, but of a—what shall I call it? Indeed, I myself was taken in at first. I used to wonder how much help the girl could be. I was slower then to see how factitious a part speech plays in the economy of life. However, when I heard of the strange being to whom Mary ministered, I prepared to be bored. I expected the conventional ogre of the country village.

How he got that way—to dip into the dictionary of the place—nobody knew. He was born and brought up in the village, like his fathers before him for two hundred years. Moreover most of them had been divines, as the phrase pleasantly goes, and had passed down the thunders of Sinai from one quaking generation to the next. He certainly had enjoyed every advantage. But as for Marvin, he would none of them. It was an insoluble mystery. Mary was the first to suggest that a circumstance of his early youth might be connected with it—and a stepmother. I rather balked at that. I have my own ideas concerning stepmothers. But when I heard about this one—! Marvin had come home from school one afternoon when he was fourteen or so, it seemed, and to his astonishment had found the house empty. The only thing in it was his little trunk, neatly packed and corded, standing near the door. There was also a note, on the trunk. Reminding him that he was now a man and had a man’s part to play in the world, this missive assured him that whom the Lord loved he chastened, urged him to gird up his loins accordingly, and concluded by announcing that, for reasons too sad and too numerous to mention, the time had come for stepmother and stepson to part. That, opined Mary, was in itself sufficient to harden a lad’s heart—particularly in view of certain adventures which were known to have succeeded the abandonment. Mrs. Bennett, however, did not countenance her daughter’s weakness. “Sary Marvin,” contended that matron, “certainly don’ her share—pore onfort’nit critter—toward bringin’ up Matthew’s boy.” And the way he had got on in the world ought not only to have vindicated the justice of his stepmother’s confidence in him, but to have convinced him beyond all shadow of doubt that the Lord did provide.

Be that as it might, Matthew’s boy was certainly provided for. It was but another discredit, however, in the eyes of his contemporaries. To live without toil was as open an invitation to Satan as it was an unseemly example to the community. And, beyond a mere exhibition of sinful pride, it was positively a manner of bearing false witness. For there were many and many that had more than he, and were not above earning their daily bread. To be sure, there was no infallible means of knowing just how much Matthew’s boy had. He who was the opposite of his neighbours in so many respects perversely robbed the local bank of a considerable business, and kept his money in Boston—where it made no difference to anybody. And his cheques were so irregular, and to such varying amounts, that the village financiers had never made up their minds whether Henry Marvin had ten thousand dollars or ten million.

But there were ways, I learned, by which you could tell. For instance, Henry, he didn’t take the newspapers and magazines. And everybody that was half-way respectable subscribed to the Marshbury Messenger. Henry didn’t seem to care much about reading, except a few musty old things of his own that were better left unread, most likely. Nor did he avail himself of the other means of culture which were open to the village. He didn’t even patronise the lecture course. Such attractions as they had, too—Dr. Waterman, the great Baptist minister from York State, who lectured on “Oceans of Pearls,” so beautifully that you’d never know he was a Baptist; and the Orpheus Male Quartette; and the Ladies’ Band, from Germany; and all sorts of things! Altogether Henry didn’t spend much that anybody could see, and he probably had less then he’d like to make out, with that proud way of his of doing nothing. And nobody knew, hinted my hostess darkly, how he came by what he had, either.

I am a scandalous gossip myself, and always encourage other people in it. If one may put it without circumlocution, there are few more precious sources of copy. I must say, however, that the Bennetts did not at first profoundly interest me with their revelations. I did not even experience any unusual sensation when I was told of Marvin’s prime enormity, that he did not go to church. It was perhaps that in a slightly wider orbit I had happened to hear of such cases before. I had discovered that it by no means argues an original spirit to discontinue that for which one has no inclination. And the mere doing or not doing what everybody else does will rarely suffice to portray a man. The traits of life lie deeper than that. The only thing about it that struck me was that Mrs. Bennett called Marvin, in consequence of his delinquencies, “a perfect pagan.” And I put it down in my notebook as another instance of the common use in New England of the most unexpected words.

But I did prick up my ears at last. It was one day when I expressed wonder—a purely conversational wonder, let me confess in passing—that Marvin should continue to live in a community with which he no longer had any tie of blood or sympathy. Mrs. Bennett thereupon informed me that Mary had more than once asked him that very question—so far as I could make out, she enjoyed strangely unconscious terms of familiarity with him—and that he always told her it was because of the brook. He lived, it seemed, on the farm of his fathers, down near the Poorhouse; and a brook ran through the place, inconveniently cutting off a piece of the orchard just behind the house. The noise of it would drive you silly, said Mrs. Bennett—especially in the spring. It never could make too much noise for Marvin, though. He always made out that there was some girl in it, singing to him.

That brook, and that singing girl, caught me! The rest of it might have belonged to any retiring old gentleman who was afraid of or bored by his neighbours—not that Marvin was so old, though, I came to find out. But this was of a distinguishing quality. And it started me off on trails of curiosity which rather indecently made up for my previous indifference. I would have given a good deal to meet the man. There was no one, however, through whom the thing could be brought about in the ordinary way of the world, and to approach him directly was more than I dared. It was not merely that he was older than I. He suddenly gave me an impression of being more genuine; and I was ashamed to go to him with no better excuse than a summer boarder’s inquisitiveness. So I had to content myself with getting at him through other people’s versions.

It grew into quite a little game just to make out the deviation of each particular compass, and then to chart the probable course. In the general opinion, I quickly found, Marvin was mad. It was all that saved him from open persecution. Could a person be regarded as responsible who insisted that he heard voices in running water, and who told the minister to his face that there was more religion in an apple orchard than in a church? And there were things queerer still, intimated Mrs. Bennett. Mary could tell about them.

What Mary could tell, what Mary did tell, most of all what Mary did not tell, would make a story by itself! It was such a case of the unconscious diversity between character and opinions. I gathered that among the reasons why the girl was allowed to serve one so manifestly in league with evil was the hope that her influence might be edifying. Certainly it was for me, during the daily catechisms which she underwent at the hands of her family. These, I was informed in private, were intended to lay bare any incipient work of contamination. Marvin’s money was a welcome addition to the family exchequer, but of course it could not be accepted if the girl were coming to any harm. There was special danger, said Mrs. Bennett, that Mary might contract habits of intemperance. Marvin himself drank, and there was no telling but what he would attempt as well the corruption of his handmaid. He was as odd about his drinking as he was about everything else, it seemed. A particular upon which my informant dwelt was that Marvin, instead of patronising the drug-store like those who had legitimate uses for strong waters, obtained his supply from Boston, as he did his money. But there was something odder still. The man had actually set up a regular bar in his house, in a small entry between the sitting-room and dining-room. He kept it stocked with liquids of strange colours, and he had counters which he could let down across the doorways.

“An’ he’ll be in the settin’-room,” went on Mrs. Bennett, “an’ he’ll suddenly get up an’ say, ‘Good-evenin’, Jack; can you fix me up a nice dry Martini?’—or somethin’ or other like that. Mary’s heard him lots o’ times. He don’t mind her bein’ ’round. An’ then he’ll walk around outside, through the hall, into the dinin’-room, an’ so to the other door of the entry. An’ he’ll say, same as if he was answerin’ himself, ‘Sure, Cap! I guess we can to-night.’ An’ then he’ll pour out his liquor, an’ put it down on the counter, an’ walk around outside to the settin’-room again. An’ then he’ll take up the stuff he left on the counter, and taste it, an’ say, ‘That’s a good one you made me to-night, Jack,’ an’ he’ll drink it up just as if he was in company. He never seems to get real drunk, though, so far as anybody can make out. An’ he never tries to make Mary take any. He just tells her he’d agree to do all the drinkin’ if she’d only do the mixin’ for him, an’ that she’d save him a power o’ steps if she’d only help him play his game.

“She’s don’ her best to stop it, but it ain’t no use. She just stood up to him one day an’ quoted Scriptur’. Wine is a mocker, she said; strong drink is ragin’, said she, an’ whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. An’ there’s a whole lot more in Proverbs about they that tarry long at the wine, an’ look upon it when it is red, an’ what not. But Henry, he took her right up. ‘Yes,’ he pops out, ‘an’ what else does it say? Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more!’ Did you ever hear the likes of that?”

I had to admit, on the whole, that I never did.

II

It is strange how small a residue will be left by how large a volume of life. Experiences that run through weeks and months can be summed up at last in an epigram. Not that I am one, let me say in passing, who is given to that form of expression. The thing done has for me no such interest as the thing doing—to dip again into that dictionary. Yet the rest of my summer in Marshbury added very little to the picture which I have begun to sketch. I had had my impression. I merely spent my time turning it over, taking it in. And the most curious thing was that, savouring the impression as much as I did, I could go away and think no more about it. I went away, and I stayed away three years. The attractions of Italy for the time outweighed all others. But after my “beaker full of the warm South,” I had a whim to go back to Marshbury. To speak in homely terms, I suppose it was on the same principle that one likes a cold shower after a hot scrub. At any rate, I am never so fond of the North as after a prolonged sojourn in the South, or of America as after Europe. And the picture of my pagan came to me again more strikingly than ever—that picture which would have been so impossible in the country from which I returned, which was so of the soil of that to which I went back. To Marshbury, therefore, I proceeded; and, of course, for old times’ sake, I put up at Mrs. Bennett’s. Indeed I could not put up anywhere else. They were all so a part of the impression.

As for that, however—! I was not in the least prepared for the changes it had undergone. I must even confess that I was at first a little disappointed. I somehow felt that Marshbury had not honourably kept its tryst with me. So does one insist on opposing one’s childish singleness of idea to the richness of life! The background, to be sure, was exactly as I remembered it. The hills looked just as they had from the time of the Flood. So, I felt certain, did the houses and the people. By whom I mean the lay figures, the supernumeraries. And Mrs. Bennett herself, who was no supernumerary, was good enough to spare a shock to my sensibilities. But that only made Mary seem the more unnatural. She had suffered one of those metamorphoses to which the young are so peculiarly susceptible—and which, apparently, no amount of experience can ever teach their absent elders to foresee. The curious thing about it was that I could trace, after the event, how impossible it would have been for her to turn out otherwise. Even through her solidest days she had always been prettier than she could help. It was only natural that she should have grown up into a handsome dignity that barely fell short of beauty and stateliness. And while she was little freer of words than she ever had been, she no longer gave one the feeling that she stood in want of them. Altogether she distinctly left me staring.

And she by no means put an end to it when, in response to my inquiry as to whether she still went to Mr. Marvin’s, she replied:

“Yes. He’s got a girl now. He says she’s the one who used to sing to him in the brook.”

This statement surprised but did not enlighten me. I did not know whether to understand that the Pagan employed a maid or was somehow in possession of a daughter. It appeared, however, that the latter was the case. And it furthermore appeared—at least to my subliminal consciousness—that in Mary a tacit forbearance with her master’s failings, as being more of the head than of the heart, was less unquestioning than it had been. It may have been that I saw more than there was. I generally do. At any rate, when it occurred to me to ask whether Marvin still kept up his bar, I certainly touched something. I could see it in the way Mary told me that everything had changed since the girl came. I felt for her. I felt, that is, as if some bungler had got hold of my rather original little sketch and had finished it off in the conventional old fashion.

Marvin had a child. That was the bare fact. But the full story I did not get then. Nor, for that matter, do I suppose I ever shall. I did pick up one thing and another, though, and the result of my pickings I shall now attempt to set forth. It will take less time if I do it in my own way. Particularly as I have no love for the dialect in which my information came to me. If Truth lie within that pale, let me forever go without!

The affair must have caused a good deal of scandal at the time. Marshbury took even less pride in the possession of a Potter’s Field than in its lack of tenants. And when a strange woman turned up from somewhere, and had the ill grace to die in the Poorhouse, people felt that their good intentions had been imposed upon. Although they did grant that it was the best thing the woman had ever done.... But the worst of it was that a shock-headed little girl of nine or ten was left on the Overseers’ hands—a small imp into whom her mother’s devil had returned with seven wickeder than himself. It took no time at all for the matron of the Poorhouse to shake her head and sigh: “Blood will tell!” Indeed, she openly expressed surprise that the Most High in his mercy had neglected to take the child unto himself at the same time as the mother. It certainly would have saved Mrs. Lovejoy an infinity of trouble. The mischief that child was not up to! She was as unmanageable as quicksilver. Her worst trick though, was running away; and she had a passion for playing in the brook of which no amount of whipping could cure her. Time and again the countryside was beaten by night, the brook dragged from one end to the other, only to have her turn up safe and sound and very hungry, without any idea where she had been or what anxiety she had caused. Nothing ever happened to her, either. It was so notorious that Mrs. Lovejoy would often have been glad to let her go, just to have the child off her mind.

It did not take this inquiring young lady long to discover Marvin. Two causes operated powerfully toward that effect. The first of them was that she had been warned against him, as being the nearest and most dangerous of her neighbours. The second was that her brook ran through his orchard. Accordingly she waded singing upon him one day as he sat with his book under an apple-tree.

“Well!” he exclaimed, as the childish voice suddenly stopped and he looked up to find a bare-legged little apparition holding scant skirts in both hands above the water. “Who are you?”

“I’m Sassy,” she answered, taking him in with big black eyes. “That ain’t my real name, though. The old woman says it ain’t Christian. My real name’s Daphne.”

“Well, well!” ejaculated Marvin. “Mary!” he called to that young woman, who happened to be out at the pump, “here’s the naiad of the brook come to pay me a visit!” And to the child, who balanced herself on a smooth stone while she splashed an overhanging branch with her foot: “What old woman is that?”

“Mis’ Lovejoy,” answered she of the unruly hair.

“Lovejoy,” repeated Marvin. “Love-Joy. That’s a nice name.” He was a little at a loss for something to say. “Is she your mother?”

“Huh!” cried the child. “It may be a nice name, but it’s all that’s nice about her. She’s just as horrid as she can be. I hate her. She ain’t my mother a bit. It ’most seems as if I never had any.” And she began to visit upon the water a series of spiteful kicks that spattered even Marvin’s page.

“Oh!” said he.

The two then looked at each other for a minute. But it was the child who spoke first.

“What do you do?”

“What do I do?” queried Marvin, puzzled. “I don’t do much of anything that I know of.”

“I mean what do you do that’s bad?” promptly returned the child. “They told me I mustn’t ever speak to you, because you’re bad. I’m bad too. That’s why I came.”

“Oh!” laughed Marvin. “Supposing you tell me what you do.”

“Lots of things—tear my clothes, and muddy my shoes, and sit in the grass, and climb trees, and slap, and kick, and run away whenever I get a chance. Most of all, though, I play in the brook. Are you as bad as that?”

Marvin held out his hand.

“Just about!” he told her. “But don’t run away from here yet a while, Daphne—or turn into a laurel. We have too many things to talk about, you and I.”

So it was that Daphne and the Pagan first cemented the bonds of friendship. In the eyes of the unappreciative community that harboured them, however, it was but another point against them both. If Marvin had known what pangs his small ally was compelled to endure in his behalf, he would long before have done what he did. For, as Mrs. Lovejoy had ever been one to live up to her word, Daphne spent an increasing portion of her days in cupboards. She likewise became an expert on the elastic properties of different domestic woods, and subsisted chiefly on bread and water. But when not otherwise engaged she spent all her time at Marvin’s, to the despair and dismay of all in authority above her. “Birds of a feather!” they ominously whispered. Until at last things got too serious for whispers, and Mrs. Lovejoy took matters into her own hands.

It must have been quite a scene. The rumour of it still filled Marshbury at the time of my second visit. Mary Bennett had been washing windows in the kitchen, and I got the most authentic details. It seemed that Mrs. Lovejoy swooped down like the wolf on the fold, one afternoon when Daphne was missing, and discovered the two, as she expected, in earnest colloquy. She did not wait for preliminaries. I must say I rather admire it, too—that trait which will seek the point at any cost, without fear or favour.

“I don’t know what you find in that child,” she said to Marvin—“born of a common woman of the street that’s buried in the Potter’s Field, and as full of Satan as an onion is of smell! But when we’re trying to do our best for her, it seems too bad that you should come along with your heathenish notions and just undo everything. I’ll thank you to keep them to yourself. Sassy, you come along with me.”

“I won’t!” declared the child, roundly. And she ran for refuge into Marvin’s arms.

Well, she stayed there. Of course there was a tremendous row. Mrs. Lovejoy stormed, and Daphne cried, and Marvin manœuvred rather helplessly between. And the upshot of it was that Mrs. Lovejoy retired ignominiously from the field, leaving her adversary the somewhat astonished possessor of an infant. Not that his title was uncontested. Mrs. Lovejoy’s last word had been that she would put the matter before the Overseers, and she did. If she was a harsh woman, she was, according to her lights, a just one. She did what she thought best in circumstances which she was not subtle enough to understand. Sassy was an intolerable incubus to her, but for the good of Sassy’s immortal soul she thought the waif should be saved from Marvin. After much parleying, however, it was concluded to let the child stay. She had been given her chance. The community had done its duty. And its representative, in the person of Mrs. Lovejoy, realised that, after all, there was a limit to the endurance of flesh and blood. It would therefore perhaps be allowable to let the orphan go into hands that were ready to care for her. The community promised itself that, under this provision for the material aspect of the case, it would keep a watchful eye on the child’s moral welfare.

I am not sure that the community did not envy for Marvin a little moral discipline in the contract which he so unexpectedly undertook. Certainly there were distinct elements of humour in the situation. To drop an incorrigible youngster into the arms of a man who knew no more about children than he did about the fourth dimension, and who had risen in the morning without the faintest notion of adopting one, might suggest very dubious results. But the brilliant success of the experiment only served to let in a little light on the ignorance of bachelors and the incorrigibility of waifs. The pair entered upon a life which became no less amazing to themselves than to the community at large. People could not imagine where the two discovered the secrets of virtue and good humour with which they suddenly blossomed forth. It amounted to another proof of their innate perversity.

At all events, for the first time in many days both of them were happy. They paddled unmolested in their brook. They invented solemn mysteries about their relation to it. They climbed their apple-trees. They dug their garden. They kept house—without a bar. They told stories. They explored the countryside for leagues around. Altogether they used to make me wish, when I came to meet them on the hills, that I could be a pagan too.

III

That opportunity, however, did not come to me. The same train of circumstances which forced me to leave Marshbury sooner than I expected kept me away from it for the next seven or eight years. But even though the impression which I have been recording had lost a little of its early piquancy in becoming more human, there was something about that quiet corner of New England which always stayed with me. In crowded streets I thought of its open valley. Through the chatter of drawing rooms I heard its running water. Among people sophisticated to the vanishing point I remembered Mrs. Bennett and Mary.

So, when the propitious moment arrived, I went back to them. There was, I fear, a touch of the practical even in my sentiment. I had started to scribble a New England novel and I wanted to be quiet. I therefore thought to kill the most birds with one stone by returning to Marshbury. Be that as it may, when I drove in toward the town it was with an unaffected thrill that I suddenly recognised the old feeling of the river road. I scarcely know how to express it. There are indefinable states of emotion, as distinct in their quality as odours or colours. And only the surroundings which awakened them first can, if ever, awaken them again. This, I suppose, is the ground of that principle of conservatism in man which can never reconcile itself with the flux of the world.

My last visit ought to have prepared me for changes. The drive, however, upset the inner counsels with which I had fortified myself—and Mrs. Bennett. She, immortal woman, was identically the same being whom I had known eleven years earlier. Even Mary had not changed so much between twenty and twenty-eight as she had between seventeen and twenty—although it was curious to me that the effect of time should be so much more visible in the one better able to resist it! The strong colour of her girlhood had softened into that delicate bloom which few but nuns can wear. And there was something about her eyes that intrigued me. But I did not wonder long. I had other sensations to take account of. For in my ointment of happiness at getting back I suddenly discovered a very large and buzzing fly.

Not that the Reverend James Wentworth could precisely be compared to that humble creature. I had come, though, to look upon the Bennetts as my private property, upon their paradise as open to myself alone. And to find it invaded by the new minister put my nose distinctly out of joint. Particularly as I perceived that my hostess fancied herself and me greatly honoured by such fellowship. Of course I could not be nasty about it. In other circumstances, in fact, I might have appreciated it as much as anybody. For I have an odd sympathy for young clergymen. Without knowing very well how much they deserve it, I always look upon them as among the few really romantic people of the world—the people who follow an inner light, regardless of rival luminaries. But the Reverend James, alas, was of those who carry the theory to its logical conclusion. He was inalienably assured that his own inner light was the sole reflection of Truth, and that all men else—with whom he happened to differ—pursued false fires.

It was a tremendous disillusionment, this unexpected change of milieu. I had two ideas of leaving on the spot. The new atmosphere, charged with latent argument, was the medium in which I breathe least easily. Being, however, more or less of a Jesuit, as I have intimated, I merely fumed within—and took copious notes. I promised myself that the Reverend James should one day affront a wider audience in the panoply of fiction. It was doubtless a lame enough compromise. I have always envied those single temperaments that can identify themselves with one side of a cause. For myself, I am unable to do it. I suppose I do not take things seriously enough, or people. They come to me as cases rather than as questions. I have no sense of responsibility about them. At any rate, the case of the Reverend James I proceeded to accept as an element of my Marshbury impression. Little did I foresee how sharply it was to throw into relief the other case with which I had so long been occupied!

That had evidently grown more crucial with the years—Marvin’s case. For Daphne was dead. She had been dead almost four years, it seemed. And in circumstances—One could not expect anything but scandal where such people were concerned, Mrs. Bennett told me. The only decent thing about it was that she and the child had died together. Anybody might have known that she would go wrong. It was what she was born to. She had done it before one could turn around, and just for a good-for-nothing young scamp she hardly had time to get acquainted with. Old Marvin, however, had refused to turn his face from her. He had only kept her the more carefully, and had been inconsolable since. Mary had never known him so queer. But—

Yes, it was evident that there was a “but.” There were things of another, a darker, kind: things which were not so easy to put into words. Between Mary’s eyes and her mother’s mysterious shrugs it was much as ever that I succeeded in getting at what the business was about. If it had not been for the plain-spoken Mr. Wentworth—! There was a strangeness to the thing, though, when I got it. There was a strangeness which I never dreamed eleven years before. It was only the stranger for the apparently conventional touches which my impression had in the meantime received. But as I write of it I realise Mrs. Bennett’s difficulty in speaking to me. It was not a thing that you could say in so many words and then go out of the room. You had to know the place, the people, the circumstances. It was so largely an effect of relativities, and of relativities different for each person whom they touched.

It all began with Daphne’s death. Then Marvin, who for seven years had been as much like other people as he could be, said Mrs. Bennett, suddenly turned more eccentric than ever. He refused to let the girl be buried like a Christian, in the cemetery. Of course she wasn’t one; but it was queer that he should be the first to say so. He said the place for her was between him and the water, and he made them dig a grave in his own orchard—on a sort of little mound there was beside the brook. If it had been anybody else, the Selectmen would have stopped him. But seeing it was that girl—! And instead of getting her a proper tombstone, which he could well afford and which everybody supposed he would do, considering the store he set by her, he just planted on her grave a sprig of lambkill.

That was natural enough in a way, opined Mrs. Bennett. People like to put flowers on graves. But lambkill! Laurel, he called it. He said that was Daphne’s tree. It was all a part of some heathenish business they had had between them. Mary thought he got it out of his books. Anyway, he spent all his time taking care of it. Of course it’s right to keep graves looking tidy. But you don’t build little green-houses over the flowers in winter. Neither do you get up in thunder-storms, in the middle of the night, to go out and attend to them. If the Lord intends things to be taken care of, he takes care of them, in spite of thunder-storms.

The strangest part of it, though, was something more unnatural still—something almost supernatural. The laurel sprig had followed for a time the ordinary course of cuttings; had by sheer force of tenderness been kept alive, and had at last developed into a healthy little plant that could live alone. But then of a sudden it received a new and secret impulse. It began to grow as no laurel had ever grown before. There was nothing like it in the whole country. It outdistanced at a bound the humble shrubs from which it sprang, and bade fair to rival even the great mountain laurel of the woods. And such flowers as it bore—such deep and burning clusters as never would have passed for cousins, even, to the faint-flushed wax of the lambkill!

The thing was unnatural enough in itself, Heaven knew. But Marvin made it a scandal. It hardly needed Mrs. Bennett to make it plain. He insisted that Daphne had turned into a laurel, after all. He called the bush by her name. He spent all his time listening to the growing whisper of its leaves. He said the strangest things to Mary about it—things stranger than any he had told her in the days when he used to say that there was a girl singing to him in the brook. A cult so extraordinary was not one to pass unnoticed. Even if Mr. Wentworth had not been in the village to formulate the moral issues of the case, the miraculous laurel waved there on its mound, more indecently conspicuous every day to those who passed on the road. An uneasiness spread among them. It was a reproach to Church and State alike that such things should go on in their midst. It corrupted youth and was an offence to age. Something should be done.

Mr. Wentworth, accordingly, did it. He, like Mrs. Lovejoy of old, went straight to Marvin. And again I could not help admiring the simplicity of that attack. I almost wished, too, that I might have been present at the encounter. It must have been such a contrast of types as one does not often witness in this half-way world. But it was not difficult to gather what happened. It was wonderful how little Mary said, and how much she expressed! Almost as wonderful were the volubility, the excitement, with which Wentworth came back from his interview.

“He is an enemy of God!” cried the minister. “He professes to believe in God; but ‘he that is not with me is against me.’ He has faith neither in heaven nor hell. He denies the sacredness of Scripture. He says a soul is nothing but a word—that there is as much soul in a ruby or a rose as there is in himself! And the kind of immortality he looks forward to is worse than none. He is a perfect pagan!”

The table rang with it for days. Of course it was Mary who supplied the necessary additions to the story. Incidentally, albeit unconsciously, she likewise supplied additions to her own story of which I had begun to feel a certain lack. Marvin had received his caller courteously, it seemed; had even consented, with a new quietness that had come upon him, to listen to Wentworth’s exhortations. But the poor zealous young man finally lost his head and allowed himself to say that they both knew where Daphne had gone, and it wasn’t heaven either. Well, the minister departed rather suddenly, and Marvin went out to his laurel tree.

With all this going on at the table, I found it hard to keep up my Jesuitism. I was more than ever caught by the case of this pagan who was the legitimate child of a New England village. It was such a strange example of the protean perversity of things to melt into one another. Then the poetry of it simply undid me. I sat there smugly writing New England novels, but I could never have imagined anything like this. And the trains it started off—! Had that little tree indeed despoiled the secrets of the grave? Had some taproot, blindly groping through the dark soil, become a channel whereby was made manifest the alchemy of the earth? Was the laurel literally a transfiguration? Might it be proof of the infinite resource of life that that unhappy heart which life had broken should at once forget its pain and dishonour and be transmuted into beauty?

To me more than ever the wind and the waters spoke mysteriously. For me more than ever was there a kinship between crystal and plant and creature transcending the jealous immortality of man. There was neither superiority nor inferiority. It was all part of the unceasing life of the earth—of that deathless ebb and flow which draws the ancient elements again and again into new combinations, which always has wrought with the same ones and always must, in changing forms of beauty and wonder.

And I came the nearest ever to seeking Marvin’s acquaintance. He made me think of what Pater says of Leonardo, who “seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice silent for other men.” I was interested to the verge of indiscretion. I even went so far, I must confess, as to walk oftener than elsewhere on the Poorhouse road—whence could be seen the sacred laurel above its little stream. It was indeed a prodigy. Such blossoms I never saw in my life. It turned one’s head to see them there, aflame among their glossy green, with the brook skirling below. Mary told me that Marvin would never pick them. Indeed he never picked any flowers now, she said. It began the spring after Daphne died, when the trailing arbutus came out. She had brought him some, one day, thinking to please him. But he asked her not to do it again. It hurt them, he said. And they were Daphne’s cousins, the arbutus....

I do not know how far I might have gone. But there came a day when all hope of acquaintance was suddenly cut off. There came a day! I shall never forget it. I had been on a long walk in the country. My book was stuck, and I knew of old that the only way to unstick a book is to let it alone. So I walked miles and miles in one of those delicious New England afternoons of early summer when the air is an elixir of eternity. It made me think of the Pagan and it quickened in me a growing sense that the earth existed as a whole and endured as a whole; that men were but one phase of its immense secret energy whose so-called consciousness had unbalanced them a little, was merely another mode of an energy more astounding still, as light and heat are but two modes of vibrations which possess others undreamed. It was for this reason, perhaps, that I came home by the Poorhouse road.

As I rounded the turn by the orchard I looked as usual toward the laurel tree. To my surprise, I saw figures moving on the mound; and there was a cart tied at the gate. It was so out of the ordinary that I stopped in spite of myself. Then I suddenly discovered that the laurel was gone! I could not believe my eyes. The thing was too inconceivable. It was to me as if I had stumbled upon a scene of murder. In the first horror of it, in the certainty that something terrible had happened, I forgot my habit of taking no personal part in that village drama. My unuttered feeling for Marvin caught me like a hand and led me, choking, toward the mound.

All I had eyes for at first was the laurel. It lay inert on the ground, that a few hours before had waved so royally aloft; and already the magic flowers looked a little wilted in their green. Beside it crouched Marvin. He said nothing; but the inarticulate sounds that came from him were the most piteous I ever heard. And the way he caressed his stricken beauty was more than one could bear to see. No lover could more tenderly, more passionately, address the limbs of his dead. He straightened out contorted twigs. He lifted petals from their contact with the ground. Now and again he put his hand to the poor sawn trunk, whence a little pale moisture was oozing, as if to stanch a mortal flow. And all the while he kept by him the severed knot of the root, with its one thick stem that had been broken off deep in the ground.

After the first instant the indecency of looking at such a spectacle overwhelmed me. I turned away. I noticed Mary then for the first time. Two men whom I recognised as farm-hands of the Bennetts were also there, and another whom I did not know. And Wentworth. Wentworth! All the shock of the moment suddenly flared into my long latent dislike of the man.

“Are you responsible for this?” I almost shouted at him.

I could have killed him, and he knew it. Yet that certainty of right and wrong which is the power of his type did not desert him. I had a sub-conscious appreciation of it, so keen is my accursed sense of such things, even in my fury.

“Yes, sir,” he answered. “I am!” Oh, he was not afraid or ashamed! He was of the stuff that has kindled fires and fed them since the world began. And he went on as if he had been in his pulpit—or at the stake: “I have wished that this parish should administer both rebuke and reparation. I have long regretted that heathen rites should be tolerated in a Christian community—as also that a proper charity should not be shown to all, irrespective of creed. I therefore took steps, after asking counsel of God, to attain both ends. I cut down this tree because it was a public scandal, an occasion of stumbling to Christians and sinners alike. The very children of our village were beginning to be infected by its heresy. And I shall adorn the house of God with these spoils, thus to expiate a sin and to consecrate anew a work of God which has been devoted to unholy uses. But I have not wished to be hasty in the matter, to be needlessly harsh and wounding. Furthermore, it has been my desire to make good a neglect which has rested too long on the Christian conscience of this community. I have accordingly taken steps to mark with fitness the last resting-place of an unfortunate young woman who apparently from her birth was more sinned against than sinning.”

He pointed behind him. Where the laurel had been I saw now a slab of grey granite. And cut into it I read these words:

DAPHNE MARVIN
1894-1911
“He that is without sin among you,
let him first cast a stone at her.”

WHITE BOMBAZINE

I

And, like all serious patrons of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, we devoted our last afternoon to the Spring Academy. Of course it turned out to be as academysh as ever, and the medals had as usual gone to people who deserved them less than I. We therefore amused ourselves by playing our favourite Academy game. The Academy game consists in stalking haughtily by the obvious pictures, eyes averted and noses on high, and in darting with delight upon some forlorn hope, worrying over it until everybody else comes to stare—when you silently steal away. The success of this game, I must admit, depends largely upon Nick. For he has inches, hath Nick, and an air that overalls cannot bottle up.

We had thus decoyed the multitude from the first Hallgarten picture to a skied futurism that nobody could make head or tail of, and were casting eagle eyes about for our next pounce, when what should I spy but the familiar signature of Zephine Stumpf! I was feeling silly anyway, and the sudden recollection of Zephine was too much for me. I collapsed on to a sofa.

“What is it?” asked Nick, ready for the coming pounce.

I could only wag my head hysterically and wave at the wall in front of us. It was enough for Nick, however, who always had superhuman intelligence and a catalogue.