THE
BEST SHORT STORIES
OF 1919

AND THE

YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

EDITED BY

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN

EDITOR OF "THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1915"
"THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1916"
"THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1917"
"THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1918," ETC.

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1918, by Margaret C, Anderson, Charles Scribner's Sons, Smart Set Company, Inc., and The Century Company.

Copyright, 1919, by The Boston Transcript Company.

Copyright, 1919, by The Century Company, Harper & Brothers, The Bellman Company, The Pictorial Review Company, The Ridgway Company, The Curtis Publishing Company, The American Hebrew, and The McCall Company.

Copyright, 1920, by Gulielma Fell Alsop, Sherwood Anderson, Edwina Stanton Babcock, Djuna Barnes, Frederick Orin Bartlett, Agnes Mary Brownell, Maxwell Struthers Burt, James Branch Cabell, Horace Fish, Susan Glaspell Cook, Henry Goodman, Richard Matthews Hallet, Joseph Hergesheimer, Will E. Ingersoll, Calvin Johnston, Howard Mumford Jones, Ellen N. La Motte, Elias Lieberman, Mary Heaton O'Brien, and Anzia Yezierska.

Copyright, 1920, by Small, Maynard & Company, Inc.

TO

ANZIA YEZIERSKA

BY WAY OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Grateful acknowledgment for permission to include the stories and other material in this volume is made to the following authors, editors, and publishers:

To the Century Company, Miss Margaret C. Anderson, Editor of The Little Review, Harper & Brothers, The Bellman Company, The Pictorial Review Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, The Ridgway Company, The Curtis Publishing Company, The Smart Set Company, Inc., The Editor of The American Hebrew, The McCall Company, Miss G. F. Alsop, Mr. Sherwood Anderson, Miss Edwina Stanton Babcock, Miss Djuna Barnes, Mr. Frederick Orin Bartlett, Miss Agnes Mary Brownell, Mr. Maxwell Struthers Burt, Mr. James Branch Cabell, Mr. Horace Fish, Mrs. George Cram Cook, Mr. Henry Goodman, Mr. Richard Matthews Hallet, Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer, Mr. Will E. Ingersoll, Mr. Calvin Johnston, Mr. Howard Mumford Jones, Miss Ellen N. La Motte, Mr. Elias Lieberman, Mrs. Mary Heaton O'Brien, and Miss Anzia Yezierska.

Acknowledgments are specially due to The Boston Evening Transcript for permission to reprint the large body of material previously published in its pages.

I shall be grateful to my readers for corrections, and particularly for suggestions leading to the wider usefulness of this annual volume. In particular, I shall welcome the receipt, from authors, editors, and publishers, of stories published during 1920 which have qualities of distinction, and yet are not printed in periodicals falling under my regular notice. Such communications may be addressed to me at Bass River, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

E. J. O.

CONTENTS[1]

INTRODUCTION

I should like to take the text for my remarks this year on the American Short Story from that notable volume of criticism, "Our America" by Waldo Frank. For the past year, it has been a source of much questioning to me to determine why American fiction, as well as the other arts, fails so conspicuously in presenting a national soul, why it fails to measure sincerely the heights and depths of our aspirations and failures as a nation, and why it lacks the vital élan which is so characteristic of other literatures. We know, of course, that we are present at the birth of a new national consciousness in our people, but why is it that this national consciousness seems so tangled in evasion of reality and in deep inhibitions that stultify it? Mr. Frank suggests for the first time the root of the cancer, and like a skilful surgeon points out how it may be healed. His book is the first courageous diagnosis of our weakness, and I think that the attentive and honest reader will not feel that he is unduly harsh or spiritually alienated from us. Briefly put, he finds that our failure lies in not distinguishing between idealism in itself and idealization of ourselves. We regard a man who challenges our self righteousness and self admiration as an enemy of the people. What we call our idealism is rooted in materialism and the goal we set ourselves virtuously is a goal of material comfort for ourselves, and, that once attained, perhaps also for others.

"No American can hope to run a journal, win public office, successfully advertise a soap or write a popular novel who does not insist upon the idealistic basis of his country. A peculiar sort of ethical rapture has earned the term American.... And the reason is probably at least in part the fact that no land has ever sprung so nakedly as ours from a direct and consciously material impulse...."

Mr. Frank goes on to point out that because our dreams are founded on a material earth, they none the less have a hope of heaven, and that the American story is really a debased form of wish fulfilment. "While the American was active in the external world—mature and conscious there—his starved inner life stunted his spiritual powers to infantile dimensions.... What would satisfy him must be a picture of the contents of real life, simplified and stunted to the dream-dimensions of the infant. And with just this sort of thing, our army of commercialised writers and dramatists and editors has kept him constantly supplied.

"There is nothing more horrible than a physically mature body moved by a childish mind. And if the average American production repels the sensitive American reader the reason is that he is witnessing just this condition.... The American is aware of the individual and social problems which inspire the current literatures of Europe. He is conscious of the conflicts of family and sex, of the contrasts of poverty and wealth. Of such stuff, also, are his books. Their body is mature: but their mental and spiritual motivation remains infantile. At once, it is reduced to an abortive simplification whereby the reality is maimed, the reader's wish fulfilled as it could only be in fairyland. But the fairyland is missing: the sweet moods of fairyland have withered in the arid sophistications of American life.... And yet the authors of this sort of book are hailed as realists, their work is acclaimed as social criticism and American interpretation. And when at times a solitary voice emerges with the truth, its message is attacked as morbid and a lie.

"It is easy to understand how optimism should become of the tissue of American life. The pioneer must hope. Else, how can he press on? The American editor or writer who fails to strike the optimistic note is set upon with a ferocity which becomes clear if we bear in mind that hope is the pioneer's preserving arm. I do not mean to discredit the validity of hope and optimism. I can honestly lay claim to both. America was builded on a dream of fair lands: a dream that has come true. In the infinitely harder problems of social and psychic health, the dream persists. We believe in our Star. And we do not believe in our experience. America is filled with poverty, with social disease, with oppression and with physical degeneration. But we do not wish to believe that this is so. We bask in the benign delusion of our perfect freedom.... Yet spiritual growth without the facing of the world is an impossible conception."

Mr. Frank instances the case of Jack London as an example of how inhibition may crush an artist, while rewarding him with material success. "The background of this gifted man was the background of America. He had gone back to primal stratum: stolen and labored and adventured. Finally, he had learned to write. Criticism grew in him. He pierced the American myths. He no longer believed in the Puritan God.... But what of this experience of passion and exploration lives in his books? Precisely, nothing. London became a 'best-seller.' He sold himself to a Syndicate which paid him a fabulous price for every word he wrote. He visited half the world, and produced a thousand words a day. And the burden of his literary output was an infantile romanticism under which he deliberately hid his own despair. Since the reality of the world he had come up through was barred to his pen, he wrote stories about sea-wolves and star-gazers: he wallowed in the details of bloody combat. If he was aware of the density of human life, of the drama of the conflict of its planes, he used his knowledge only as a measure of avoidance. He claimed to have found truth in a complete cynical dissolution. 'But I know better,' he says, 'than to give this truth as I have seen it, in my books. The bubbles of illusion, the pap of pretty lies are the true stuff of stories.'"

You may say that this is a hard saying. Perhaps it is. But as I was writing this morning, I received a letter from which I shall quote as a living human document. It came to me from an American short story writer whose work I have not had occasion to mention previously in these studies. This artist has done work which ranks with the very best that has been produced in America, but it very seldom finds its way into print for the very reasons that Mr. Frank has mentioned. There is no compromise in it. It offers us no vicarious satisfaction of our self esteem. "I have only a blind, consuming passion of ideas. And this blind passion of ideas drove me and hounded me till I had to tear loose from everything human to follow it. For two years I lived in savage isolation. I thought myself strong enough to live alone and think alone, but I am not. What writes itself in me is too intense for the light weight American magazines. My last story took me months to write and I had to ruin it by tacking on to it a happy ending or starve."

Now you may say that the writer of this letter should not have isolated himself from humanity. But in reality he did not. His stories are instinct with the very pulse of humanity. The American editor fears their reality, and so the writer really found that humanity had turned from him. Meanwhile, the unpublished work of this writer, who is dying, is America's spiritual loss. In the same way America lost Stephen Crane and Harris Merton Lyon and many another, and is losing its best writers to Europe every day. This annual volume is a book of documents, and that is my excuse for quoting from these two writers. You will find the indictment set forth more fully by a master in a recent novel, "The Mask," by John Cournos, another writer whom America has lost as it lost Whistler and Henry James.

It is not easy to play the part of Juvenal in this age, and I shall not do it again, but it is because my faith in America is founded on her weaknesses as well as her strength that I make this plea for sincerity and artistic freedom. America's literature must no longer be the product of a child's brain in a man's body, if it is to be a literature, and not a form of journalism.

To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists, may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in formulæ, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than dead criticism, as all dogmatic interpretation of life is always dead. What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is the fresh, living current which flows through the best of our work, and the psychological and imaginative reality which our writers have conferred upon it.

No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination than we display at present.

The present record covers the period from November, 1918, to September, 1919, inclusive. During these eleven months, I have sought to select from the stories published in American magazines those which have rendered life imaginatively in organic substance and artistic form. Substance is something achieved by the artist in every act of creation, rather than something already present, and accordingly a fact or group of facts in a story only attain substantial embodiment when the artist's power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth. The first test of a short story, therefore, in any qualitative analysis is to report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected facts or incidents. This test may be conveniently called the test of substance.

But a second test is necessary if the story is to take rank above other stories. The true artist will seek to shape this living substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skillful selection and arrangement of his material, and by the most direct and appealing presentation of it in portrayal and characterization.

The short stories which I have examined in this study, as in previous years, have fallen naturally into four groups. The first group consists of those stories which fail, in my opinion, to survive either the test of substance or the test of form. These stories are listed in the yearbook without comment or a qualifying asterisk. The second group consists of those stories which may fairly claim that they survive either the test of substance or the test of form. Each of these stories may claim to possess either distinction of technique alone, or more frequently, I am glad to say, a persuasive sense of life in them to which a reader responds with some part of his own experience. Stories included in this group are indicated in the yearbook index by a single asterisk prefixed to the title.

The third group, which is composed of stories of still greater distinction, includes such narratives as may lay convincing claim to a second reading, because each of them has survived both tests, the test of substance and the test of form. Stories included in this group are indicated in the yearbook index by two asterisks prefixed to the title.

Finally, I have recorded the names of a small group of stories which possess, I believe, an even finer distinction—the distinction of uniting genuine substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with such sincerity that these stories may fairly claim a position in our literature. If all of these stories by American authors were republished, they would not occupy more space than five novels of average length. My selection of them does not imply the critical belief that they are great stories. A year which produced one great story would be an exceptional one. It is simply to be taken as meaning that I have found the equivalent of five volumes worthy of republication among all the stories published during the eleven months under consideration. These stories are indicated in the yearbook index by three asterisks prefixed to the title, and are listed in the special "Rolls of Honor." In compiling these lists, I have permitted no personal preference or prejudice to consciously influence my judgment. To the titles of certain stories, however, in the "Rolls of Honor," an asterisk is prefixed, and this asterisk, I must confess, reveals in some measure a personal preference, for which, perhaps, I may be indulged. It is from this final short list that the stories reprinted in this volume have been selected.

It has been a point of honor with me not to republish an English story, nor a translation from a foreign author. I have also made it a rule not to include more than one story by an individual author in the volume. The general and particular results of my study will be found explained and carefully detailed in the supplementary part of the volume.

As in past years it has been my pleasure and honor to associate this annual with the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews Hallet, Wilbur Daniel Steele, and Arthur Johnson, so it is my wish to dedicate this year the best that I have found in the American magazines as the fruit of my labors to Anzia Yezierska, whose story, "Fat of the Land", seems to me perhaps the finest imaginative contribution to the short story made by an American artist this year.

Edward J. O'Brien.

Oxford, England,
October 29, 1919.

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1919

Note.—The order in which the stories in this volume are printed is not intended as an indication of their comparative excellence; the arrangement is alphabetical by authors.

THE KITCHEN GODS[2]

By GULIELMA FELL ALSOP

From The Century

The lilies bloomed that day. Out in the courtyard, in their fantastic green-dragoned pots, one by one the tiny, ethereal petals opened. Dong-Yung went rapturously among them, stooping low to inhale their faint fragrance. The square courtyard, guarded on three sides by the wings of the house, facing the windowless blank wall on the fourth, was mottled with sunlight. Just this side of the wall a black shadow, as straight and opaque as the wall itself, banded the court with darkness; but on the hither side, where the lilies bloomed and Dong-Yung moved among them, lay glittering, yellow sunlight. The little box of a house where the gate-keeper lived made a bulge in the uniform blackness of the wall and its shadow. The two tall poles, with the upturned baskets, the devil-catchers, rose like flagstaffs from both sides of the door. A huge china griffon stood at the right of the gate. From beyond the wall came the sounds of early morning—the click of wooden sandals on cobbled streets and the panting cries of the coolies bringing in fresh vegetables or carrying back to the denuded land the refuse of the city. The gate-keeper was awake, brushing out his house with a broom of twigs. He was quite bald, and the top of his head was as tanned and brown as the legs of small summer children.

"Good morning, Honorable One," he called. "It is a good omen. The lilies have opened."

An amah, blue-trousered, blue-jacketed, blue-aproned, cluttered across the courtyard with two pails of steaming water.

"Good morning, Honorable One. The water for the great wife is hot and heavy." She dropped her buckets, the water splashing over in runnels and puddles at her feet, and stooped to smell the lilies. "It is an auspicious day."

From the casement-window in the right balcony a voice called:

"Thou dunce! Here I am waiting already half the day. Quicker! quicker!"

It sounded elderly and querulous, a voice accustomed to be obeyed and to dominate. The great wife's face appeared a moment at the casement. Her eyes swept over the courtyard scene—over the blooming lilies, and Dong-Yung standing among them.

"Behold the small wife, cursed of the gods!" she cried in her high, shrill voice. "Not even a girl can she bear her master. May she eat bitterness all her days!"

The amah shouldered the steaming buckets and splashed across the bare boards of the ancestral hall beyond.

"The great wife is angry," murmured the gate-keeper. "Oh, Honorable One, shall I admit the flower-girl? She has fresh orchids."

Dong-Yung nodded. The flower-girl came slowly in under the guarded gateway. She was a country child, with brown cheeks and merry eyes. Her shallow basket was steadied by a ribbon over one shoulder, and caught between an arm and a swaying hip. In the flat, round basket, on green little leaves, lay the wired perfumed orchids.

"How many? It is an auspicious day. See, the lilies have bloomed. One for the hair and two for the buttonholes. They smell sweet as the breath of heaven itself."

Dong-Yung smiled as the flower-girl stuck one of the fragrant, fragile, green-striped orchids in her hair, and hung two others, caught on delicate loops of wire, on the jade studs of her jacket, buttoned on the right shoulder.

"Ah, you are beautiful-come-death!" said the flower-girl. "Great happiness be thine!"

"Even a small wife can be happy at times." Dong-Yung took out a little woven purse, and paid over two coppers apiece to the flower-girl.

At the gate the girl and the gate-keeper fell a-talking.

"Is the morning rice ready?" called a man's voice from the room behind.

Dong-Yung turned quickly. Her whole face changed. It had been smiling and pleased before at the sight of the faint, white lily-petals and the sunlight on her feet and the fragrance of the orchids in her hair; but now it was lit with an inner radiance.

"My beloved Master!" Dong-Yung made a little instinctive gesture toward the approaching man, which in a second was caught and curbed by Chinese etiquette. Dressed, as she was, in pale-gray satin trousers, loose, and banded at the knee with wide blue stripes, and with a soft jacket to match, she was as beautiful in the eyes of the approaching man as the newly opened lilies. What he was in her eyes it would be hard for any modern woman to grasp: that rapture of adoration, that bliss of worship, has lingered only in rare hearts and rarer spots on the earth's surface.

Foh-Kyung came out slowly through the ancestral hall. The sunlight edged it like a bright border. The doors were wide open, and Dong-Yung saw the decorous rows of square chairs and square tables set rhythmically along the walls, and the covered dais at the head for the guest of honor. Long crimson scrolls, sprawled with gold ideographs, hung from ceiling to floor. A rosewood cabinet, filled with vases, peach bloom, imperial yellow, and turquoise blue, gleamed like a lighted lamp in the shadowy morning light of the room.

Foh-Kyung stooped to smell the lilies.

"They perfume the very air we breathe. Little Jewel, I love our old Chinese ways. I love the custom of the lily-planting and the day the lilies bloom. I love to think the gods smell them in heaven, and are gracious to mortals for their fragrance's sake."

"I am so happy!" Dong-Yung said, poking the toe of her slipper in and out the sunlight. She looked up at the man before her, and saw he was tall and slim and as subtle-featured as the cross-legged bronze Buddha himself. His long, thin hands were hid, crossed and slipped along the wrists within the loose apricot satin sleeves of his brocaded garment. His feet, in their black satin slippers and tight-fitting white muslin socks, were austere and aristocratic. Dong-Yung, when he was absent, loved best to think of him thus, with his hands hidden and his eyes smiling.

"The willow-leaves will bud soon," answered Dong-Yung, glancing over her shoulder at the tapering, yellowing twigs of the ancient tree.

"And the beech-blossoms," continued Foh-Kyung. "'The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof.'"

"The foreign devil's wisdom," answered Dong-Yung.

"It is greater than ours, Dong-Yung; greater and lovelier. To-day, to-day, I will go to their hall of ceremonial worship and say to their holy priest that I think and believe the Jesus way."

"Oh, most-beloved Master, is it also permitted to women, to a small wife, to believe the Jesus way?"

"I will believe for thee, too, little Lotus Flower in the Pond."

"Tell me, O Teacher of Knowledge—tell me that in my heart and in my mind I may follow a little way whither thou goest in thy heart and in thy mind!"

Foh-Kyung moved out of the shadow of the ancestral hall and stood in the warm sunlight beside Dong-Yung, his small wife. His hands were still withheld and hidden, clasping his wrists within the wide, loose apricot sleeves of his gown, but his eyes looked as if they touched her. Dong-Yung hid her happiness even as the flowers hide theirs, within silent, incurving petals.

"The water is cold as the chill of death. Go, bring me hot water—water hot enough to scald an egg."

Foh-Kyung and Dong-Yung turned to the casement in the upper right-hand wing and listened apprehensively. The quick chatter of angry voices rushed out into the sunlight.

"The honorable great wife is very cross this morning." Dong-Yung shivered and turned back to the lilies. "To-day perhaps she will beat me again. Would that at least I had borne my lord a young prince for a son; then perhaps—"

"Go not near her, little Jewel. Stay in thine own rooms. Nay, I have sons a-plenty. Do not regret the childlessness. I would not have your body go down one foot into the grave for a child. I love thee for thyself."

"Now my lord speaks truly, as do the foreign devils to the shameless, open-faced women. I like the ways of the outside kingdom well. Tell me more of them, my Master."

Foh-Kyung moved his hands as if he would have withdrawn them from his apricot-colored sleeves. Dong-Yung saw the withheld motion, and swayed nearer. For a moment Dong-Yung saw the look in his eyes that engulfed her in happiness; then it was gone, and he looked away past her, across the opening lily-buds and the black rampart of the wall, at something distant, yet precious. Foh-Kyung moved closer. His face changed. His eyes held that hidden rapture that only Dong-Yung and the foreign-born priest had seen.

"Little Jewel, wilt thou go with me to the priest of the foreign-born faith? Come!" He withdrew his hand from his sleeve and touched Dong-Yung on the shoulder. "Come, we will go hand in hand, thou and I, even as the men and women of the Jesus thinking; not as Chinese, I before, and thou six paces behind. Their God loves men and women alike."

"Is it permitted to a small wife to worship the foreign-born God?" Dong-Yung lifted her eyes to the face of Foh-Kyung. "Teach me, O my Lord Master! My understanding is but young and fearful—"

Foh-Kyung moved into the sunlight beside her.

"Their God loves all the world. Their God is different, little Flower, from the painted images, full of blessings, not curses. He loves even little girl babies that mothers would throw away. Truly his heart is still more loving than the heart of a mother."

"And yet I am fearful—" Dong-Yung looked back into the shadows of the guest-hall, where the ancestral tablets glowed upon the wall, and crimson tapers stood ready before them. "Our gods I have touched and handled."

"Nay, in the Jesus way there is no fear left." Foh-Kyung's voice dropped lower. Its sound filled Dong-Yung with longing. "When the wind screams in the chimneys at night, it is but the wind, not evil spirits. When the summer breeze blows in at the open door, we need not bar it. It is but the summer breeze from the rice-fields, uninhabited by witch-ghosts. When we eat our morning rice, we are compelled to make no offering to the kitchen gods in the stove corner. They cannot curse our food. Ah, in the Jesus way there is no more fear!"

Dong-Yung drew away from her lord and master and looked at him anxiously. He was not seeing her at all. His eyes looked beyond, across the fragile lily-petals, through the solid black wall, at a vision he saw in the world. Dong-Yung bent her head to sniff the familiar sweet springtime orchid hanging from the jade stud on her shoulder.

"Your words are words of good hearing, O beloved Teacher. Nevertheless, let me follow six paces behind. I am not worthy to touch your hand. Six paces behind, when the sun shines in your face, my feet walk in the shadow of your garments."

Foh-Kyung gathered his gaze back from his visions and looked at his small wife, standing in a pool of sunshine before him. Overhead the lazy crows flew by, winging out from their city roosts to the rice-fields for the day's food.

"Tea-boiled eggs!" cried a vender from beyond the wall. A man stopped at the gate, put down his shoulder-tray of food, and bargained with the ancient, mahogany-scalped gate-keeper. Faint odors of food frying in oil stole out from the depths of the house behind him. And Dong-Yung, very quiet and passive in the pose of her body, gazed up at Foh-Kyung with those strange, secretive, ardent eyes. All around him was China, its very essence and sound and smell. Dong-Yung was a part of it all; nay, she was even the very heart of it, swaying there in the yellow light among the lily-petals.

"Precious Jewel! Yet it is sweeter to walk side by side, our feet stepping out into the sunlight together, and our shadows mingling behind. I want you beside me."

The last words rang with sudden warmth. Dong-Yung trembled and crimsoned. It was not seemly that a man speak to a woman thus, even though that man was a husband and the woman his wife, not even though the words were said in an open court, where the eyes of the great wife might spy and listen. And yet Dong-Yung thrilled to those words.

An amah called, "The morning rice is ready."

Dong-Yung hurried into the open room, where the light was still faint, filtering in through a high-silled window and the door. A round, brown table stood in the center of the room. In the corner of the room behind stood the crescentic, white plaster stove, with its dull wooden kettle-lids and its crackling straw. Two cooks, country women, sat in the hidden corner behind the stove, and poked in the great bales of straw and gossiped. Their voices and the answers of the serving amah filled the kitchen with noise. In their decorous niche at the upper right hand of the stove sat the two kitchen gods, small ancient idols, with hidden hands and crossed feet, gazing out upon a continually hungry world. Since time was they had sat there, ensconced at the very root of life, seemingly placid and unseeing and unhearing, yet venomously watching to be placated with food. Opposite the stove, on the white wall, hung a row of brass hooks, from which dangled porcelain spoons with pierced handles. On a serving-table stood the piled bowls for the day, blue-and-white rice patterns, of a thin, translucent ware, showing the delicate light through the rice seeds; red-and-green dragoned bowls for the puddings; and tiny saucer-like platters for the vegetables. The tea-cups, saucered and lidded, but unhandled, stood in a row before the polished brass hot-water kettle.

The whole room was full of a stirring, wakening life, of the crackling straw fire, of the steaming rice, all white and separate-kerneled in its great, shallow, black iron kettles, lidded with those heavy hand-made wooden lids, while the boiling tea water hissed, and spat out a snake of white steam.

With that curious democracy of China, where high and low alike are friendly, Dong-Yung hurried into her beloved kitchen.

"Has the master come?" asked the serving maid.

"Coming, coming," Dong-Yung answered. "I myself will take in his morning rice, after I have offered the morning oblations to the gods."

Dong-Yung selected two of the daintiest blue-and-white rice-pattern bowls. The cook lifted off the wooden lid of the rice-kettle, and Dong-Yung scooped up a dipperful of the snow-white kernels. On the tiny shelf before each god, the father and mother god of the household, Dong-Yung placed her offering. She stood off a moment, surveying them in pleased satisfaction—the round, blue bowls, with the faint tracery of light; the complacent gods above, red and green and crimson, so age-long, comfortably ensconced in their warm stove corner. She made swift obeisance with her hands and body before those ancient idols. A slant of sunshine swept in from the high windows and fell over her in a shaft of light. The thoughts of her heart were all warm and mixed and confused. She was happy. She loved her kitchen, her gods, all the familiar ways of Chinese life. She loved her silken, satin clothes, perfumed and embroidered and orchid-crowned, yet most of all she loved her lord and master. Perhaps it was this love for him that made all the rest of life so precious, that made each bowl of white rice an oblation, each daily act a glorification. So she flung out her arms and bent her head before the kitchen gods, the symbol of her ancient happiness.

"Dong-Yung, I do not wish you to do this any more."

Dong-Yung turned, her obeisance half arrested in mid-air. Foh-Kyung stood in the doorway.

"My lord," stammered Dong-Yung, "I did not understand your meaning."

"I know that, little Flower in my House. The new meaning is hard to understand. I, too, am but a blind child unused to the touch of the road. But the kitchen gods matter no more; we pray to a spirit."

Foh-Kyung, in his long apricot-colored garment, crossed the threshold of the kitchen, crossed the shadow and sunlight that striped the bare board floor, and stood before the kitchen gods. His eyes were on a level with theirs, strange, painted wooden eyes that stared forth inscrutably into the eating centuries. Dong-Yung stood half bowed, breathless with a quick, cold fear. The cook, one hand holding a shiny brown dipper, the other a porcelain dish, stood motionless at the wooden table under the window. From behind the stove peeped the frightened face of one of the fire-tenders. The whole room was turned to stone, motionless, expectant, awaiting the releasing moment of arousement—all, that is, but the creeping sunshine, sliding nearer and nearer the crossed feet of the kitchen gods; and the hissing steam fire, warming, coddling the hearts of the gods. Sun at their feet, fire at their hearts, food before them, and mortals turned to stone!

Foh-Kyung laughed softly, standing there, eye-level with the kitchen gods. He stretched out his two hands, and caught a god in each. A shudder ran through the motionless room.

"It is wickedness!" The porcelain dish fell from the hand of the cook, and a thousand rice-kernels, like scattered pearls, ran over the floor.

"A blasphemer," the fire-tender whispered, peering around the stove with terrified eyes. "This household will bite off great bitterness."

Foh-Kyung walked around the corner of the stove. The fire sparked and hissed. The sunshine filled the empty niche. Not since the building of the house and the planting of the tall black cypress trees around it, a hundred years ago, had the sunlight touched the wall behind the kitchen gods.

Dong-Yung sprang into life. She caught Foh-Kyung's sleeve.

"O my Lord and Master, I pray you, do not utterly cast them away into the burning, fiery furnace! I fear some evil will befall us."

Foh-Kyung, a green-and-gold god in each hand, stopped and turned. His eyes smiled at Dong-Yung. She was so little and so precious and so afraid! Dong-Yung saw the look of relenting. She held his sleeve the tighter.

"Light of my Eyes, do good deeds to me. My faith is but a little faith. How could it be great unto thy great faith? Be gentle with my kitchen gods. Do not utterly destroy them. I will hide them."

Foh-Kyung smiled yet more, and gave the plaster gods into her hands as one would give a toy to a child.

"They are thine. Do with them as thou wilt, but no more set them up in this stove corner and offer them morning rice. They are but painted, plastered gods. I worship the spirit above."

Foh-Kyung sat down at the men's table in the men's room beyond. An amah brought him rice and tea. Other men of the household there was none, and he ate his meal alone. From the women's room across the court came a shrill round of voices. The voice of the great wife was loudest and shrillest. The voices of the children, his sons and daughters, rose and fell with clear childish insistence among the older voices. The amah's voice laughed with an equal gaiety.

Dong-Yung hid away the plastered green-and-gold gods. Her heart was filled with a delicious fear. Her lord was even master of the gods. He picked them up in his two hands, he carried them about as carelessly as a man carries a boy child astride his shoulder; he would even have cast them into the fire! Truly, she shivered with delight. Nevertheless, she was glad she had hidden them safely away. In the corner of the kitchen stood a box of white pigskin with beaten brass clasps made like the outspread wings of a butterfly. Underneath the piles of satin she had hidden them, and the key to the butterfly clasps was safe in her belt-jacket.

Dong-Yung stood in the kitchen door and watched Foh-Kyung.

"Does my lord wish for anything?"

Foh-Kyung turned, and saw her standing there in the doorway. Behind her were the white stove and the sun-filled, empty niche. The light flooded through the doorway. Foh-Kyung set down his rice-bowl from his left hand and his ivory chop-sticks from his right. He stood before her.

"Truly, Dong-Yung, I want thee. Do not go away and leave me. Do not cross to the eating-room of the women and children. Eat with me."

"It has not been heard of in the Middle Kingdom for a woman to eat with a man."

"Nevertheless, it shall be. Come!"

Dong-Yung entered slowly. The light in this dim room was all gathered upon the person of Foh-Kyung, in the gleaming patterned roses of his gown, in his deep amethyst ring, in his eyes. Dong-Yung came because of his eyes. She crossed the room slowly, swaying with that peculiar grace of small-footed women, till she stood at the table beside Foh-Kyung. She was now even more afraid than when he would have cast the kitchen gods into the fire. They were but gods, kitchen gods, that he was about to break; this was the primeval bondage of the land, ancient custom.

"Give me thy hand and look up with thine eyes and thy heart."

Dong-Yung touched his hand. Foh-Kyung looked up as if he saw into the ether beyond, and there saw a spirit vision of ineffable radiance. But Dong-Yung watched him. She saw him transfigured with an inner light. His eyes moved in prayer. The exaltation spread out from him to her, it tingled through their finger-tips, it covered her from head to foot.

Foh-Kyung dropped her hand and moved. Dong-Yung leaned nearer.

"I, too, would believe the Jesus way."

In the peculiar quiet of mid-afternoon, when the shadows begin to creep down from the eaves of the pagodas and zigzag across the rice-fields to bed, Foh-Kyung and Dong-Yung arrived at the camp-ground of the foreigners. The lazy native streets were still dull with the end of labor. At the gate of the camp-ground the rickshaw coolies tipped down the bamboo shafts, to the ground. Dong-Yung stepped out quickly, and looked at her lord and master. He smiled.

"Nay, I do not fear," Dong-Yung answered, with her eyes on his face. "Yet this place is strange, and lays a coldness around my heart."

"Regard not their awkward ways," said Foh-Kyung as he turned in at the gate; "in their hearts they have the secret of life."

The gate-keeper bowed, and slipped the coin, warm from Foh-Kyung's hand, into his ready pocket.

"Walk beside me, little Wife of my Heart." Foh-Kyung stopped in the wide graveled road and waited for Dong-Yung. Standing there in the sunlight, more vivid yet than the light itself, in his imperial yellow robes, he was the end of life, nay, life itself, to Dong-Yung. "We go to the house of the foreign priest to seek until we find the foreign God. Let us go side by side."

Dong-Yung, stepping with slow, small-footed grace, walked beside him.

"My understanding is as the understanding of a little child, beloved Teacher; but my heart lies like a shell in thy hand, its words but as the echo of thine. My honor is great that thou do not forget me in the magnitude of the search."

Dong-Yung's pleated satin skirts swayed to and fro against the imperial yellow of Foh-Kyung's robe. Her face colored like a pale spring blossom, looked strangely ethereal above her brocade jacket. Her heart still beat thickly, half with fear and half with the secret rapture of their quest and her lord's desire for her.

Foh-Kyung took a silken and ivory fan from an inner pocket and spread it in the air. Dong-Yung knew the fan well. It came from a famous jeweler's on Nanking Road, and had been designed by an old court poet of long ago. The tiny ivory spokes were fretted like ivy-twigs in the North, but on the leaves of silk was painted a love-story of the South. There was a tea-house, with a maiden playing a lute, and the words of the song, fantastic black ideographs, floated off to the ears of her lover. Foh-Kyung spread out its leaves in the sun, and looked at it and smiled.

"Never is the heart of man satisfied," he said, "alone. Neither when the willow fuzz flies in the spring, or when the midnight snow silvers the palms. Least of all is it satisfied when it seeks the presence of God above. I want thee beside me."

Dong-Yung hid her delight. Already for the third time he said those words—those words that changed all the world from one of a loving following-after to a marvelous oneness.

So they stepped across the lawn together. It was to Dong-Yung as if she stepped into an unknown land. She walked on flat green grass. Flowers in stiff and ordered rows went sedately round and round beneath a lurid red brick wall. A strange, square-cornered, flat-topped house squatted in the midst of the flat green grass. On the lawn at one side was a white-covered table, with a man and a woman sitting beside it. The four corners of the table-cloth dripped downward to the flat green grass. It was all very strange and ugly. Perhaps it was a garden, but no one would have guessed it. Dong-Yung longed to put each flower plant in a dragon bowl by itself and place it where the sun caught its petals one by one as the hours flew by. She longed for a narrow, tile-edged path to guide her feet through all that flat green expanse. A little shiver ran over her. She looked back, down the wide graveled way, through the gate, where the gate-keeper sat, tipped back against the wall on his stool, to the shop of the money-changer's opposite. A boy leaned half across the polished wood counter and shook his fist in the face of the money-changer. "Thou thief!" he cried. "Give me my two cash!" Dong-Yung was reassured. Around her lay all the dear familiar things; at her side walked her lord and master. And he had said they were seeking a new freedom, a God of love. Her thoughts stirred at her heart and caught her breath away.

The foreigners rose to greet them. Dong-Yung touched the hand of an alien man. She did not like it at all. The foreign-born woman made her sit down beside her, and offered her bitter, strong tea in delicate, lidless cups, with handles bent like a twisted flower-branch.

"I have been meaning to call for a long time, Mrs. Li," said the foreign-born woman.

"The great wife will receive thee with much honor," Dong-Yung answered.

"I am so glad you came with your husband."

"Yes," Dong-Yung answered, with a little smile. "The customs of the foreign born are pleasant to our eyes."

"I am glad you like them," said the foreign-born woman. "I couldn't bear not to go everywhere with my husband."

Dong-Yung liked her suddenly on account of the look that sprang up a moment in her eyes and vanished again. She looked across at the priest, her husband, a man in black, with thin lips and seeing eyes. The eyes of the foreign woman, looking at the priest, her husband, showed how much she loved him. "She loves him even as a small wife loves," Dong-Yung thought to herself. Dong-Yung watched the two men, the one in imperial yellow, the one in black, sitting beside each other and talking. Dong-Yung knew they were talking of the search. The foreign-born woman was speaking to her again.

"The doctor told me I would die if I came to China; but John felt he had a call. I would not stand in his way."

The woman's face was illumined.

"And now you are very happy?" Dong-Yung announced.

"And now I am very happy; just as you will be very happy."

"I am always happy since my lord took me for his small wife." Dong-Yung matched her happiness with the happiness of the foreign-born woman, proudly, with assurance. In her heart she knew no woman, born to eat bitterness, had ever been so happy as she in all the worlds beneath the heavens. She looked around her, beyond the failure of the foreign woman's garden, at the piled, peaked roofs of China looking over the wall. The fragrance of a blossoming plum-tree stole across from a Chinese courtyard, and a peach-branch waved pink in the air. A wonder of contentment filled Dong-Yung.

All the while Foh-Kyung was talking. Dong-Yung turned back from all the greenness around her to listen. He sat very still, with his hands hid in his sleeves. The wave-ridged hem of his robe—blue and green and purple and red and yellow—was spread out decorously above his feet. Dong-Yung looked and looked at him, so still and motionless and so gorgeously arrayed. She looked from his feet, long, slim, in black satin slippers, and close-fitting white muslin socks, to the feet of the foreign priest. His feet were huge, ugly black things. From his feet Dong-Yung's eyes crept up to his face, over his priestly black clothes, rimmed with stiff white at wrist and throat. Yes, his face was even as the face of a priest, of one who serves between the gods and men, a face of seeing eyes and a rigid mouth. Dong-Yung shuddered.

"And so we have come, even as the foreign-born God tells us, a man and his wife, to believe the Jesus way."

Foh-Kyung spoke in a low voice, but his face smiled. Dong-Yung smiled, too, at his open, triumphant declarations. She said over his words to herself, under her breath, so that she would remember them surely when she wanted to call them back to whisper to her heart in the dark of some night. "We two, a man and his wife"—only dimly, with the heart of a little child, did Dong-Yung understand and follow Foh-Kyung; but the throb of her heart answered the hidden light in his eyes.

The foreign-born priest stood up. The same light shone in his eyes. It was a rapture, an exaltation. Suddenly an unheard-of-thing happened. The outside kingdom woman put her arms around Dong-Yung! Dong-Yung was terrified. She was held tight against the other woman's shoulder. The foreign-born woman used a strange perfume. Dong-Yung only half heard her whispered words.

"We are like that, too. We could not be separated. Oh, you will be happy!"

Dong-Yung thought of the other woman. "In her heart she is humble and seemly. It is only her speech and her ways that are unfitting."

"We are going into the chapel a moment," said the priest. "Will you come, too?"

Dong-Yung looked at Foh-Kyung, a swift upward glance, like the sudden sweep of wings. She read his answer in his eyes. He wanted her to come. Not even in the temple of the foreign-born God did he wish to be without her.

A coolie called the foreign-born woman away.

The priest, in his tight trousers, and jacket, black and covered with a multitude of round flat buttons, stood up, and led the way into the house and down a long corridor to a closed door at the end. Dong-Yung hurried behind the two men. At the door the priest stood aside and held it open for her to pass in first. She hesitated. Foh-Kyung nodded.

"Do not think fearful things, little Princess," he whispered. "Enter, and be not afraid. There is no fear in the worship of Jesus."

So Dong-Yung crossed the threshold first. Something caught her breath away, just as the chanting of the dragon priests always did. She took a few steps forward and stood behind a low-backed bench. Before her, the light streamed into the little chapel through one luminous window of colored glass above the altar. It lay all over the gray-tiled floor in roses and sunflowers of pink and gold. A deep purple stripe fell across the head of the black-robed priest. Dong-Yung was glad of that. It made his robe less hideous, and she could not understand how one could serve a god unless in beautiful robes. On the altar beneath the window of colored flowers were two tall silver candlesticks, with smooth white tapers. A wide-mouthed vase filled with Chinese lilies stood between them. The whole chapel was faintly fragrant with their incense. So even the foreign-born worshipers lit candles, and offered the scent of the lilies to their spirit God. Truly, all the gods of all the earth and in the sky are lovers of lit candles and flowers. Also, one prays to all gods.

The place was very quiet and peaceful, mottled with the gorgeous, flowerlike splashes of color. The waiting candles, the echoes of many prayers, the blossoms of worship filled the tiny chapel. Dong-Yung liked it, despite herself, despite the strangeness of the imageless altar, despite the clothes of the priest. She stood quite still behind the bench flooded and filled with an all-pervading sense of happiness.

Foh-Kyung and the black-robed priest walked past her, down the little aisle, to a shiny brass railing that went like a fence round before the altar. The foreign-born priest laid one hand on the railing as if to kneel down, but Foh-Kyung turned and beckoned with his chin to Dong-Yung to come. She obeyed at once. She was surprisingly unafraid. Her feet walked through the patterns of color, which slid over her head and hands, gold from the gold of a cross and purple from the robe of a king. As if stepping through a rainbow, she came slowly down the aisle to the waiting men, and in her heart and in her eyes lay the light of all love and trust.

Foh-Kyung caught her hand.

"See, I take her hand," he said to the priest, "even as you would take the hand of your wife, proud and unashamed in the presence of your God. Even as your love is, so shall ours be. Where the thoughts of my heart lead, the heart of my small wife follows. Give us your blessing."

Foh-Kyung drew Dong-Yung to her knees beside him. His face was hidden, after the manner of the foreign worshipers; but hers was uplifted, her eyes gazing at the glass with the colors of many flowers and the shapes of men and angels. She was happier than she had ever been—happier even than when she had first worshiped the ancestral tablets with her lord and master, happier even than at the feast of the dead, when they laid their food offerings on the shaven grave-mounds. She felt closer to Foh-Kyung than in all her life before.

She waited. The silence grew and grew till in the heart of it something ominous took the place of its all-pervading peace. Foh-Kyung lifted his face from his hands and rose to his feet. Dong-Yung turned, still kneeling, to scan his eyes. The black-robed priest stood off and looked at them with horror. Surely it was horror! Never had Dong-Yung really liked him. Slowly she rose, and stood beside and a little behind Foh-Kyung. He had not blessed them. Faintly, from beyond the walls of the Christian chapel came the beating of drums. Devil-drums they were. Dong-Yung half smiled at the long-known familiar sound.

"Your small wife?" said the priest. "Have you another wife?"

"Assuredly," Foh-Kyung answered. "All men have a great wife first; but this, my small wife, is the wife of my heart. Together we have come to seek and find the Jesus way."

The priest wiped his hand across his face. Dong-Yung saw that it was wet with tiny round balls of sweat. His mouth had suddenly become one thin red line, but in his eyes lay pain.

"Impossible," he said. His voice was quite different now, and sounded like bits of metal falling on stone. "No man can enter the church while living in sin with a woman other than his lawful wife. If your desire is real, put her away."

With instant response, Foh-Kyung made a stately bow.

"Alas! I have made a grievous mistake. The responsibility will be on my body. I thought all were welcome. We go. Later on, perhaps, we may meet again."

The priest spoke hurriedly.

"I do not understand your meaning. Is this belief of such light weight that you will toss it away for a sinful woman? Put her away, and come and believe."

But Foh-Kyung did not hear his words. As he turned away, Dong-Yung followed close behind her lord and master, only half comprehending, yet filled with a great fear. They went out again into the sunshine, out across the flat green grass, under the iron gateway, back into the Land of the Flowery Kingdom. Foh-Kyung did not speak until he put Dong-Yung in the rickshaw.

"Little Wife of my Heart," he said, "stop at the jeweler's and buy thee new ear-rings, these ear-rings of the sky-blue stone and sea-tears, and have thy hair dressed and thy gowns perfumed, and place the two red circles on the smile of thy cheeks. To-night we will feast. Hast thou forgotten to-night is the Feast of the Lanterns, when all good Buddhists rejoice?"

He stood beside her rickshaw, in his imperial yellow garment hemmed with the rainbow waves of the sea, and smiled down into her eyes.

"But the spirit God of love, the foreign-born spirit God?" said Dong-Yung. "Shall we feast to him, too?"

"Nay, it is not fitting to feast to two gods at once," said Foh-Kyung. "Do as I have said."

He left her. Dong-Yung, riding through the sun-splashed afternoon, buying colored jewels and flowery perfume and making herself beautiful, yet felt uneasy. She had not quite understood. A dim knowledge advanced toward her like a wall of fog. She pressed her two hands against it and held it off—held it off by sheer mental refusal to understand. In the courtyard at home the children were playing with their lighted animals, drawing their gaudy paper ducks, luminous with candle-light, to and fro on little standards set on four wheels. At the gate hung a tall red-and-white lantern, and over the roof floated a string of candle-lit balloons. In the ancestral hall the great wife had lit the red candles, speared on their slender spikes, before the tablets. In the kitchen the cooks and amahs were busy with the feast-cooking. Candles were stuck everywhere on the tables and benches. They threw little pools of light on the floor before the stove and looked at the empty niche. In the night it was merely a black hole in the stove filled with formless shadow. She wished—

"Dong-Yung, Flower in the House, where hast thou hidden the kitchen gods? Put them in their place." Foh-Kyung, still in imperial yellow, stood like a sun in the doorway.

Dong-Yung turned.

"But—"

"Put them back, little Jewel in the Hair. It is not permitted to worship the spirit God. There are bars and gates. The spirit of man must turn back in the searching, turn back to the images of plaster and paint."

Dong-Yung let the wall of fog slide over her. She dropped her resistance. She knew.

"Nay, not the spirit of man. It is but natural that the great God does not wish the importunings of a small wife. Worship thou alone the great God, and the shadow of that worship will fall on my heart."

"Nay, I cannot worship alone. My worship is not acceptable in the sight of the foreign God. My ways are not his ways."

Foh-Kyung's face was unlined and calm, yet Dong-Yung felt the hidden agony of his soul, flung back from its quest upon gods of plaster and paint.

"But I know the thoughts of thy heart, O Lord and Master, white and fragrant as the lily-buds that opened to-day. Has thy wish changed?"

"Nay, my wish is even the same, but it is not permitted to a man of two wives to be a follower of the spirit God."

Dong-Yung had known it all along. This knowledge came with no surprise. It was she who kept him from the path of his desire!

"Put back the kitchen gods," said Foh-Kyung. "We will live and believe and die even as our fathers have done. The gate to the God of love is closed."

The feast was served. In the sky one moon blotted out a world of stars. Foh-Kyung sat alone, smoking. Laughter and talk filled the women's wing. The amahs and coolies were resting outside. A thin reed of music crept in and out among the laughter and talk, from the reed flute of the cook. The kitchen was quite empty. One candle on the table sent up a long smoky tongue of flame. The fire still smoldered in the corner. A little wind shook the cypress-branches without, and carried the scent of the opened lilies into the room.

Dong-Yung, still arrayed for feasting, went to the pigskin trunk in the corner, fitted the key from her belt into the carven brass wings of the butterfly, and lifted out the kitchen gods. One in each hand, she held them, green and gold. She put them back in their niche, and lifted up a bowl of rice to their feet, and beat her head on the ground before them.

"Forgive me, O my kitchen gods, forgive my injurious hands and heart; but the love of my master is even greater than my fear of thee. Thou and I, we bar the gates of heaven from him."

When she had finished, she tiptoed around the room, touching the chairs and tables with caressing fingers. She stole out into the courtyard, and bent to inhale the lily fragrance, sweeter by night than by day. "An auspicious day," the gate-keeper had said that morning. Foh-Kyung had stood beside her, with his feet in the sunshine; she remembered the light in his eyes. She bent her head till the fingers of the lily-petals touched her cheek. She crept back through the house, and looked at Foh-Kyung smoking. His eyes were dull, even as are the eyes of sightless bronze Buddhas. No, she would never risk going in to speak to him. If she heard the sound of his voice, if he called her "little Flower of the House," she would never have the strength to go. So she stood in the doorway and looked at him much as one looks at a sun, till wherever else one looks, one sees the same sun against the sky.

In the formless shadow she made a great obeisance, spreading out her arms and pressing the palms of her hands against the floor.

"O my Lord and Master," she said, with her lips against the boards of the floor, softly, so that none might hear her—"O my Lord and Master, I go. Even a small wife may unbar the gates of heaven."

First, before she went, she cast the two kitchen gods, green and gold, of ancient plaster, into the embers of the fire. There in the morning the cook-rice amahs found the onyx stones that had been their eyes. The house was still unlocked, the gate-keeper at the feast. Like a shadow she moved along the wall and through the gate. The smell of the lilies blew past her. Drums and chants echoed up the road, and the sounds of manifold feastings. She crept away down by the wall, where the moon laid a strip of blackness, crept away to unbar the gates of heaven for her lord and master.

AN AWAKENING[3]

By SHERWOOD ANDERSON

From The Little Review

Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes and thick lips. She was tall and strong. When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists. She worked in the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Nate McHugh and during the day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of the store. She was the daughter of Henry Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Winesburg, Ohio, and lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end of Buckeye Street. The house was surrounded by pine trees and there was no grass beneath the trees. A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from its fastenings at the back of the house and when the wind blew it beat against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal drumming noise that sometimes persisted all through the night.

When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable for his daughter, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his power over her. The bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become shabby with age. At night when he returned to his home he donned another black alpaca coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the streets. He had invented an arrangement of boards for the purpose. The trousers to his street suit were placed between the boards and the boards were clamped together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped the boards with a damp cloth and stood them upright behind the dining room door. If they were moved during the day he was speechless with anger and did not recover his equilibrium for a week.

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter. She, he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of the girl's mother and hated him for it. One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the mud she smeared the face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers and then went back to her work feeling relieved and happy.

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George Willard, a reporter on the Winesburg Eagle. Secretly she loved another man, but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby, bartender in Ed Griffith's Saloon, and went about with the young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings. She did not think that her station in life would permit her to be seen in the company of the bartender, and she walked about under the trees with George Willard and let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very insistent in her nature. She felt that she could keep the younger man within bounds. About Ed Handby she was somewhat uncertain.

Handby, the bartender, was a tall broad-shouldered man of thirty who lived in a room upstairs above Griffith's saloon. His fists were large and his eyes unusually small but his voice, as though striving to conceal the power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.

At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle in Indiana. When sold the farm brought in eight thousand dollars which Ed spent in six months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home town with awe. Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving carriages through the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose wardrobes cost him hundreds of dollars. One night at a resort called Cedar Point he got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing. With his fist he broke a large mirror in the wash-room of a hotel and later went about smashing windows and breaking chairs in dance halls for the joy of hearing the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in the eyes of clerks, who had come from Sandusky to spend the evening at the resort with their sweethearts.

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in spending but one evening in her company. On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer's livery barn and took her for a drive. The conviction that she was the woman his nature demanded and that he must get her, settled upon him and he told her of his desires. The bartender was ready to marry and to begin trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but so simple was his nature that he found it difficult to explain his intentions. His body ached with physical longing and with his body he expressed himself. Taking the milliner into his arms and holding her tightly, in spite of her struggles, he kissed her until she became helpless. Then he brought her back to town and let her out of the buggy. "When I get hold of you again I'll not let you go. You can't play with me," he declared as he turned to drive away. Then, jumping out of the buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands. "I'll keep you for good the next time," he said. "You might as well make up your mind to that. It's you and me for it and I'm going to have you before I get through."

One night in January when there was a new moon George Willard, who was, in Ed Handby's mind, the only obstacle to his getting Belle Carpenter, went for a walk. Early that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck's pool room with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town butcher. Seth Richmond stood with his back against the wall and remained silent, but George Willard talked. The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys and they talked of women. The young reporter got into that vein. He said that women should look out for themselves that the fellow who went out with a girl was not responsible for what happened. As he talked he looked about, eager for attention. He held the floor for five minutes and then Art Wilson began to talk. Art was learning the barber's trade in Cal Prouse's shop and already began to consider himself an authority in such matters as baseball, horse racing, drinking and going about with women. He began to tell of a night when he with two men from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the County Seat. The butcher's son held a cigar in the side of his mouth and as he talked spat on the floor. "The women in the place couldn't embarrass me although they tried hard enough," he boasted. "One of the girls in the house tried to get fresh but I fooled her. As soon as she began to talk I went and sat in her lap. Everyone in the room laughed when I kissed her. I taught her to let me alone."

George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main Street. For days the weather had been bitter cold with a high wind blowing down on the town from Lake Erie, eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the wind had died away and a new moon made the night unusually lovely. Without thinking where he was going or what he wanted to do George went out of Main Street and began walking in dimly lighted streets filled with frame houses.

Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he forgot his companions of the pool room. Because it was dark and he was alone he began to talk aloud. In a spirit of play he reeled along the street imitating a drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in shining boots that reached to the knees and wearing a sword that jingled as he walked. As a soldier he pictured himself as an inspector, passing before a long line of men who stood at attention. He began to examine the accoutrements of the men. Before a tree he stopped and began to scold. "Your pack is not in order," he said sharply. "How many times will I have to speak of this matter? Everything must be in order here. We have a difficult task before us and no difficult task can be done without order."

Hypnotized by his own words the young man stumbled along the board sidewalk saying more words. "There is a law for armies and for men too," he muttered, lost in reflection. "The law begins with little things and spreads out until it covers everything. In every little thing there must be order, in the place where men work, in their clothes, in their thoughts. I myself must be orderly. I must learn that law. I must get myself into touch with something orderly and big that swings through the night like a star. In my little way I must begin to learn something, to give and swing and work with life, with the law."

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his body began to tremble. He had never before thought such thoughts as had just come into his head and he wondered where they had come from. For the moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been talking as he walked. He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and when he walked on again spoke of the matter with fervor. "To come out of Ransom Surbeck's pool room and think things like that," he whispered. "It is better to be alone. If I talked like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they wouldn't understand what I have been thinking down here."

In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a section in which lived day laborers. As the time of factories had not yet come the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on the railroads. They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar for the long day of toil. The houses in which they lived were small cheaply constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back. The more comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little shed at the rear of the garden.

With his head filled with resounding thoughts George Willard walked into such a street on the clear January night. The street was dimly lighted and in places there was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay about him there was something that excited his already aroused fancy. For a year he had been devoting all of his odd moments to the reading of books and now some tale he had read concerning life in old world towns of the middle ages came sharply back to his mind so that he stumbled forward with the curious feeling of one revisiting a place that had been a part of some former existence. On an impulse he turned out of the street and went into a little dark alleyway behind the sheds in which lived the cows and pigs.

For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange new thoughts that came to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure in the clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The poor little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the women clad in cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off to the stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs barking and the children crying—all these things made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness, oddly detached and apart from all life.

The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts, began to move cautiously along the alleyway. A dog attacked him and had to be driven away with stones and a man appeared at the door of one of the houses and began to swear at the dog. George went into a vacant lot and throwing back his head looked up at the sky. He felt unutterably big and re-made by the simple experience through which he had been passing and in a kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them into the darkness above his head and muttering words. The desire to say words overcame him and he said words without meaning, rolling them over on his tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of meaning. "Death," he muttered, "night, the sea, fear, loveliness." George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that all of the people in the little street must be brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had the courage to call them out of their houses and to shake their hands. "If there were only a woman here I would take hold of her hand and we would run until we were both tired out," he thought. "That would make me feel better." With the thought of a woman in his mind he walked out of the street and went toward the house where Belle Carpenter lived. He thought she would understand his mood and that he would achieve in her presence a position he had long been wanting to achieve. In the past when he had been with her and had kissed her lips he had come away filled with anger at himself. He had felt like one being used for some obscure purpose and had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he thought he had suddenly become too big to be used.

When George Willard got to Belle Carpenter's house there had already been a visitor there before him. Ed Handby had come to the door and calling Belle out of the house had tried to talk to her. He had wanted to ask the woman to come away with him and to be his wife, but when she came and stood by the door he lost his self-assurance and became sullen. "You stay away from that kid," he growled, thinking of George Willard, and then, not knowing what else to say, turned to go away. "If I catch you together I will break your bones and his too," he added. The bartender had come to woo, not to threaten, and was angry with himself because of his failure.

When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran hurriedly upstairs. From a window at the upper part of the house she saw Ed Handby cross the street and sit down on a horse block before the house of a neighbor. In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his head in his hands. She was made happy by the sight and when George Willard came to the door she greeted him effusively and hurriedly put on her hat. She thought that as she walked through the streets with young Willard, Ed Handby would follow and she wanted to make him suffer.

For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter walked about under the trees in the sweet night air. George Willard was full of big words. The sense of power that had come to him during the hour in the darkness of the alleyway remained with him and he talked boldly, swaggering along and swinging his arms about. He wanted to make Belle Carpenter realize that he was aware of his former weakness and that he had changed. "You will find me different," he declared, thrusting his hands into his pockets and looking boldly into her eyes. "I don't know why but it is so. You have got to take me for a man or let me alone. That's how it is."

Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the boy. When George had finished talking they turned down a side street and went across a bridge into a path that ran up the side of a hill. The hill began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upwards to the Winesburg Fair Grounds. On the hillside grew dense bushes and small trees and among the bushes were little open spaces carpeted with long grass, now stiff and frozen.

As he walked behind the woman up the hill George Willard's heart began to beat rapidly and his shoulders straightened. Suddenly he decided that Belle Carpenter was about to surrender herself to him. The new force that had manifested itself in him had he felt been at work upon her and had led to her conquest. The thought made him half drunk with the sense of masculine power. Although he had been annoyed that as they walked about she had not seemed to be listening to his words, the fact that she had accompanied him to this place took all his doubts away. "It is different. Everything has become different," he thought and taking hold of her shoulder turned her about and stood looking at her, his eyes shining with pride.

Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her upon the lips she leaned heavily against him and looked over his shoulder into the darkness. In her whole attitude there was a suggestion of waiting. Again, as in the alleyway, George Willard's mind ran off into words and, holding the woman tightly, he whispered the words into the still night. "Lust," he whispered, "lust and night and women."

George Willard did not understand what happened to him that night on the hillside. Later, when he got to his own room, he wanted to weep and then grew half insane with anger and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and was sure that all his life he would continue to hate her. On the hillside he had led the woman to one of the little open spaces among the bushes and had dropped to his knees beside her. As in the vacant lot, by the laborers' houses, he had put up his hands in gratitude for the new power in himself and was waiting for the woman to speak when Ed Handby appeared.

The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to take his woman away. He knew that beating was unnecessary, that he had power within himself to accomplish his purpose without that. Gripping George by the shoulder and pulling him to his feet he held him with one hand while he looked at Belle Carpenter seated on the grass. Then with a quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger man sprawling away into the bushes and began to bully the woman, who had risen to her feet. "You're no good," he said roughly. "I've half a mind not to bother with you. I'd let you alone if I didn't want you so much."

On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene before him and tried hard to think. He prepared to spring at the man who had humiliated him. To be beaten seemed infinitely better than to be thus hurled ignominiously aside.

Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each time the bartender, catching him by the shoulder, hurled him back into the bushes. The older man seemed prepared to keep the exercise going indefinitely but George Willard's head struck the root of a tree and he lay still. Then Ed Handby took Belle Carpenter by the arm and marched her away.

George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes. As he crept down the hillside his heart was sick within him. He hated himself and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation. When his mind went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was puzzled, and stopping in the darkness, listened, hoping to hear again the voice, outside himself, that had so short a time before put new courage into his heart. When his way homeward led him again into the street of frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that now seemed to him utterly squalid and commonplace.

WILLUM'S VANILLA[4]

By EDWINA STANTON BABCOCK

From Harper's Magazine

The letter came while Mr. Pawket was chopping wood. His ax rested on a stump and piles of white chips breathed fragrance around him as he stood watching the buckboard of the Rural Free Delivery wind down the country road.

The Rural Free Delivery consisted of a white horse, a creaking buckboard, and a young woman of determined manner. A Rough Rider's hat sat with an air of stern purpose on the Rural Free Delivery's dark head, and a pair of surgeon's gauntlet gloves heightened her air of official integrity.

As the buckboard approached the group of tulip-trees opposite Mr. Pawket's residence he shoved back his hat and pulled a blue-spotted handkerchief out of his hip pocket; passing the handkerchief over his face, he greeted the Rural Free Delivery:

"Hot enough fer yer?"

It was really not so very hot, but if Mr. Pawket had not asked this question he would have felt lacking in geniality. He did not, however, go forward to intercept possible mail. There was the little iron box with his name on it nailed to the tulip-tree; there was the red signal to be adjusted. It pleased Mr. Pawket to realize that the government had all this planned out for his special convenience and he was careful not to upset régime. He watched the Rural Free Delivery climb down from the buckboard, go to the little box on the tree, deposit one letter, lock the box, and set up the signal. When the ceremony was concluded Mr. Pawket came out from behind the barn. Walking with the heavy, bent-kneed tread of the life-long farmer, he leaned upon the bars by the cow-sheds.

"Many gitten 'em to-day?" he inquired.

The Rural Free Delivery climbed back into the buckboard; she pulled on the gauntlets, replying with black-eyed reserve:

"Finn's folks had two—a asthma circler and a letter from that son they thought was drownded. Mis' Sweetser's got a paper—- the one her daughter is a manicurer sends her. And there's a box yet for the Grant girl—her graduatin'-dress, I expect—seems she's too high-toned to wear anything but machine-made."

The Rural Free Delivery whipped up the white horse and the stern contours of the Rough Rider hat disappeared down the winding, shadowed road. At last Mr. Pawket, rousing from the reverie induced by news of the resurrection of Finn's boy, took down the bars and crossed the road to the post-box. Dragging from his pocket a cluster of huge barn keys, he sought among them for the infinitesimal key of the box. This small key had the appearance of coquetting with Mr. Pawket—it invariably disappeared behind the larger keys and eluded his efforts to single it out; it seemed to him flirtatious, feminine; and as he stood like an old Druid invoking the spirit of the tulip-tree, he addressed this small key with benevolent irony.

"You'm a shrimp, that's what you are," Mr. Pawket said to the key. "Nothin' but a shrimp.... Why in tarnation don't they have a key you can see?... I'd hate to lose you on a dark night, I would," eying the key severely.

But the shrimp key at least did its work, and Mr. Pawket with unconcealed feelings of wonder and concern drew forth from the box the letter. It was a large, rich-looking letter. The envelope was thin and crackly, embossed with purple designs of twisted reptiles coiling around a woman's face, and in one corner were small purple letters forming the words "Hotel Medusa." The handwriting on the envelope was bold and black, and the dark seal bore impress of a small winged form that Mr. Pawket took to be a honey-bee. He regarded the letter suspiciously, studying it from every position as he entered the kitchen door.

"Say, Mother, here's a letter. What'll I do with it?"

Mrs. Pawket came sighing from the washtub. She wrinkled her forehead as one harried by the incessant demands of the outside world. Wiping her hands on her wet apron, she took the letter, regarding it contemptuously.

"Leave it be on the parlor mantel," advised Mrs. Pawket. "The twins is comin' up the road. I can hear them hollerin' at that echo down by the swamps. Leave it be; they'll attend to it."

Mr. Pawket, having carried out this injunction, stood by the door considering whether it was worth while to go back to his chopping. The sun was in the middle of the sky; he sniffed odors of the kitchen and discerned a rich atmosphere known to his consciousness as "dinner-time."

"Now I'm here I may as well stay," he remarked to his wife. He sat heavily down in a Turkey-red-covered rocking-chair, quoting facetiously:

"Ef yer never want to be sad and sorry
Just keep away from hurry and worry."

"The Rural says Finn's folks has heard from that young feller was drownded."

Mrs. Pawket raised a disapproving face from contemplating a small kettle of Irish stew, remarking, severely: "Much the Rural knows about it. She's into everybody's business."

Mr. Pawket demurred. "Well, carr'in' the mail and all, she's liable to sense a good deal. Some says she's always been foreknowledged. 'Twuz the Rural foretold the blizzit last winter; 'twuz the Rural found out Hank Jellaby's nephew was married. Wasn't it her knowed all the time who sot Mullins's barn afire? There's a good many depends on the Rural for keeping up with things."

Soon the sun was a green glare through the tulip-trees; that meant it was half past twelve, and the twins raced in. They were hoarse from intriguing with the echo in the swamp; but as they entered the gate (careful to swing it the wrong way and squeeze through) they discussed a tingling problem in mental arithmetic.

"If Mrs. Fenton gave her son two wapples" (snuffle), "and her nephew one naple" (snuffle), "and two wapples to her son's friend, reservin' one napple for herself and conservin' four rapples for the household, what would be the sum of these given napples multiplied by four?"

Reciting this appalling chorus, the twins faced their grandfather, who, poising his battered sun-hat on his knees, from the depths of his arm-chair looked proudly, if fearfully, upon them.

"Say, Gramp', kin' you answer it?" demanded the twins.

Standing before him in the kitchen doorway, they mouthed it, curly-headed, croaking synchronous challenge. They scraped their shoes on a scraper near the door; one peered furtively under a covered dish on the table while the other washed hands and face in a tin basin under the grape-arbor. Together they made strange "snorting" noises of repressed masculinity as, seizing knife and fork from the pile in the center of the table, they took seats, elbows on plates, instruments waving in air.

"Kin you answer it?"

Mr. Pawket hedged. He also drew a chair up to the table and, spearing a slice of bread with his knife, bent bushy brows.

"'Kin I answer it?' Well, that's a nice question. Would yer teacher like me to answer it? No, he wouldn't. It's for your learnin', ain't it? Not for mine. I'm all finished with them conundrums. Of course," went on Mr. Pawket, airily—"of course I never done figurin' like that when I was a boy. Them apples, now. Seems to me it all depends on the season. Ef the lady was a widder, like as not she was took advantage of. I mistrust she wouldn't be no judge of apples; not bein' a farmer, how could she know that there's years when apples is valleyble, and other years when you insult the pigs with 'em? But then—you talk about apples—Well, as for a fine apple, whether it's Northern Spy or Harvest Moon...." Thus Mr. Pawket skilfully directed the conversation into channels more familiar.

At last the twins, in a fine, concerted action of chewing, balanced large slices of buttered bread on the flats of their hands, eyed their grandparents, and, after swallowing with peculiar heavy efforts of the epiglottis, remarked, simultaneously:

"Willum is comin' home."

Mr. Pawket started. He reached for his spectacles, solemnly polished them, and put them on. Mrs. Pawket, bearing a large leaning tower of griddle-cakes toward the table, halted as one petrified.

The twins bent over their plates, humped their shoulders, observing, "That's what they all say down to the Center."

"Mr. Sykes heard it into the feedstore."

"Mis' Badger says it."

"They was all talkin' about it into the undertaker's."

"He's going to build a new house."

"His wife thinks she's goin' to like it here."

Mr. Pawket took off his spectacles. His wife! Willum with a wife?

The twins, now devouring griddle-cakes, turned on him with unmoved faces.

"It's going to be a show-place. The butcher can tell yer all about it—a grand house like a big railroad station, all gold pipes and runnin' water."

One twin turned the syrup-jug upside down; there ensued a slight scuffle between the two, each ardently attempting to hold his plate under the golden falling globules.

"They'm goin' to have five ottermobiles, and one for the cook to run herself around in; there's goin' to be one room all canary-birds, and there's goin' to be a g'rage with painted winders and a steeple like a church."

Mrs. Pawket sat down. She fanned herself with her apron.

"Set up to the table and eat, Mawther," feebly advised Mr. Pawket.

The twins, rapidly and scientifically consuming griddle-cakes, jaws working, unemotional eyes watching the effect of their statements, continued:

"They goin' to build on Cedar Plains."

"She's got the ideers."

"He's got the money."

"Just their ice-box alone is goin' to cost 'em two hundred dollars."

Mr. Pawket, with sudden irritation: "Now, now, now, that ain't sensible, that ain't. Willum had ought to have talked it over with me. I'd like to 'a' reasoned with him. I could have showed him catalogues.... And them two buildin' on Cedar Plains—it's onreasonable. It'll come hard on his wife. She won't have no near neighbors; and look at how far they'll have to go for weddin's and fun'rals and all."

Mrs. Pawket, suddenly bethinking her, rose and went into the "front" room, or parlor, where, from a large mantelpiece ranged with sugary-looking vases stuffed with brilliantly dyed grasses she plucked the recently arrived letter. Looking at it upside down and with nonchalance of disapproval, she put the letter before the twins, commanding:

"Do as Grammar tells you and read it."

"That's right," said Mr. Pawket, spooning up gravy. He retucked a kitchen towel in his neck, approving: "I don't know but what we ought to read it. There may be sumpin' in it somebody wants we should know."

The twins handled the letter casually; they attacked the superscription with glib unconcern.

"Hot-hell Medusa." began one twin, confidently.

He was instantly corrected by the other twin. "Yah—it is not Hot-hell—it's Hotel Medusa, It'ly. Yah!"

"It'ly? It'ly?" mused Mr. Pawket. "Well, I made out the I T, all right. Now I ought to 'a' guessed the rest, It'ly bein' a place I'm familiar with."

The twins were in conference.

"Medusa—you know who she was," remarked the elder twin by four seconds.

"Don't, huh? Snakes for hair—hey? Look at you and you turn into stone—hey?"

"Shut up! She did not!"

"Shut up! She did!"

But the other twin busied himself with the post-mark.

"A. Malfi," he painfully deciphered....

"Say, Gramp', what's a Malfi?"

His brother remained engrossed with the embossed head of Medusa.

"Snakes for hair—turned 'em to stone—cut off her head," he chanted, in blissful retrospect.

Mr. Pawket, reaching across the table, seized this student by the collar. "Now, now, now! Whose head you cuttin' off?"

"Hern," explained this bloodthirsty twin. "She was a bad woman."

"Hey! Hey! Hey!" roared Mr. Pawket, with sudden severity. "None of that talk here! You mind your own business, young man. Don't you give us none of that gab." He turned to Mrs. Pawket: "What did I say about that new young feller that's come to teach school? He ain't here for no good—that's what I said!" Mr. Pawket studied the face on the envelope with a sort of curious horror, concluding, "Ef she's what you say she is, see to it that you don't take no more notice of her capers."

The twins now registered aggrieved expressions; they scratched curly heads with perturbed spoons. "Medusa's hist'ry." They roared it in hurt explanation.

After some discussion of the curious anatomical outline of the supposed honey-bee on the seal, Mrs. Pawket finally slit the envelope with a dinner-knife, and the twins, holding the letter between them, gave a dashing, if slightly incorrect, reading.

"Amalfi—It'ly—Hotel Medoosa.

"Dear Mr. and Mrs. Pawket,—This letter is from William Folsom, the little orphan boy for whom you did so much. What do you think? This boy who boarded with you summers is coming back to America with his wife, an Italian lady you are both sure to love! On account of unforeseen business necessity, Mrs. Folsom and I are forced to give up our charming ... vill ... villain ... villy...."

Here one twin ran down. The other twin looked over his brother's shoulder, breathing thickly.

"Vanilla," he chewingly instructed.

"Vanilla ... our charming vanilla, and on account of recent dev-dev-devil-elope-ments we are leaving It'ly at once. You remember the fine old property my father owned, called Cedar Plains? As I remember, it was not far from your farm where I spent so many happy summers. It is on Cedar Plains that Mrs. Folsom and I plan to erect our new home, an I ... talian van ... vill ... v...."

"Vanilla." This time it was Mr. Pawket who blandly supplied the word.

"I shall count on you as good friends and neighbors and I am anxious to have my wife meet you. We have placed the building of our new home in the hands of an architect friend of mine who is to be on the spot until all is completed. Our beloved household furnishings have already been shipped to America and we are living for the present in this hotel. We shall come home by a somewhat cir-cus-to-us route, not arriving until our new home is ready for us. Won't you two good friends take Mr. Badgely as a boarder, and do give him that stunning old room I used to have?

"With the kindest good wishes to you both,

"Your boy,

"William Folsom."

The twins, having completed what had been for them a daring undertaking, now looked about for release from an atmosphere grown suddenly boresome. The elder by four seconds went to the door and, affecting intense maturity, spat out from it. The younger, dipping his head in the water-butt near the leader, took a small comb from his pocket and, using the disturbed water-butt as a mirror, began parting into ideal smoothness his upward-turning locks.

The first twin, seeing his brother's back turned, dug into his pockets and, having brought out with an air of modest pride a fish-line, a morsel of gingerbread, a bit of resin, human tooth, part of a human bone, a kitten's skull, a chewed piece of gum, and an incredibly besmirched Sunday-school card, extracted from these omens a large rusty screw, which he proffered to his grandmother, muttering, "For your Everything Jar." With a sudden shame at having been seen sympathizing with the interests of a woman, this twin then seized his hat and fled whooping down the road to school, followed by his brother, who, holding between his vision and the sun a small bit of crimson glass, exulted in the contemplation of a deep red universe.

Mrs. Pawket, bundling the dinner-dishes into a pan and pouring hot water from the teakettle over them, sighed. Mr. Pawket, having again retired to the Turkey-red-covered chair, watched his wife somewhat dazedly; he was still thinking of the contents of "Willum's" letter.

"Comin' home by a cir-cus-to-us route," he soliloquized ... "and devil-elopements. I suppose he knows what he's doin', but it all sounds kindy resky to me. Did you get it that A. Malfi was his wife's maiden name? Don't it sound sorter like a actress to you? One of them sassy, tricky furriners, I'll bet. 'N' a vanilla—what call has Willum got to build a vanilla, his age? A mansion, now—I could onderstand how the boy would hanker for a mansion—he always had big feelin's, Willum had—but a vanilla! Say, you ever seen one of them there contraptions?"

Mrs. Pawket, washing the dishes, hung up the soap-shaker and cast her eyes upward as in an effort of memory. She reached for a dish-towel, replying, somewhat evasively, "Where my mother come from they had 'em a-plenty; there was one on every street."

Her husband regarded her with deep respect. "Ye don't say?"

Mrs. Pawket squeezed out the dishmop with a thoughtful air; she cast a hasty, authoritative glance at the range, banging the door shut with a decision that made Mr. Pawket jump as she snapped:

"Just the same, this here ain't no place for a vanilla. A vanilla around these parts would be the same as if you was to wear your Sunday silk hat out a-plowin'. They hain't got good judgment, them two hain't."

The old farmer regarded his wife with serious attention. Lighting his pipe, he lay back in the Turkey-red chair, puffing in silence. At last he laid the pipe down and, laboriously pulling off his boots, hummed an air which had for its sole motif the undynamic suggestion:

"By and by
By and by
By and by. By and by. By and by."

At last the thumping of stocking feet ceased with the drone of the drowsy voice; a bit of sunlight filtering first through the tulip-trees, then through the little low kitchen window, let it be seen that Mr. Pawket had lapsed into slumber. His wife looked at him with an expressionless face. Wringing her hands out of the dish-water, she carried the pan to the door; with contemptuous words of warning to some chickens near by, she flung the contents on the grass. Going further into the door-yard she dragged up some bleached clothing and stuffed it into a clothes-basket. Choking the range full of coal, wrenching into place a refractory coal-scuttle, she turned the damper in the stove-pipe and set the stove-plates slightly a-tilt. Then she seized the tin wash-basin, and, setting up a small mirror against the window, loosened her hair and dragged her face and head through a severe toilet whose original youthful motive of comeliness had been lost in habitual effort of tidiness. This done, Mrs. Pawket donned a clean white apron and draped around her neck a knitted orange tie which she pinned with a scarlet coral breast-pin.

Having thus dressed for the afternoon and for the feared, desired, but seldom experienced visitation called "company," Mrs. Pawket took from her pocket the screw her grandson had bestowed upon her. Suddenly, with the expression of one who in the interests of art performs dangerous acrobatic feats, she dragged a chair in front of a cupboard. Climbing, with many expressions of insecurity, on this chair, Mrs. Pawket reached a bony hand into the cupboard, groping on the top shelf for an object which her fingers approached tremulously. This object with considerable care Mrs. Pawket brought down to earth and set upon the kitchen table. It was a short, stumpy bowl or jar, upon which curious protuberances of all kinds clustered. The protuberances encircled the jar in something like the way fungus circles a tree hole, in strange and various patterns.

Mrs. Pawket, the light deepening in her eyes, took from her apron pocket the screw; holding it very daintily in one work-worn hand, with the other she dove into further recesses and produced, wrapped in an oily bit of newspaper, a large lump of putty.

Now a solemn ritual began. Breaking off a bit of the putty, Mrs. Pawket welded it on the jar near the other protuberances; while the putty was soft she fixed in it the screw, arranging that implement by a method best calculated to display its screw characteristics. Then Mrs. Pawket's eyes grew darker, a flush came into her wrinkled cheeks; she wrung the moisture from her brow in a sort of agony of creative pleasure. As one who performs an action sacred in its heightened detachment and mechanical efficiency, she rummaged with desperate insistence on another and higher shelf of the cupboard, this time bringing forth a very small vial of gilt varnish and an equally small paint-brush with which to apply it. Mrs. Pawket then observed that her hand was shaking and chid herself severely:

"Look at me! Soon as I see how pritty this here Everything Jar is gettin' to be, I go and get excited. If I'm goosefleshed now, what'll I be when the Everything is finished?"

But the Everything Jar was a long way from finished and the unsatisfied ache of the creative artist made heavy Mrs. Pawket's breast. She surveyed the ceramic, half-erupt with a medley of buttons, screws, safety-pins, hooks, knobs, all covered with their transforming gilt, and tried to imagine how it would seem to have it completed. Then the ultimate anxiety beset her—when completed, should the Everything be bestowed upon the minister's family or—this a recent and daring inspiration—should it be conferred upon Willum's wife, the mistress of the proposed vanilla? Mrs. Pawket was fairly tortured by uncertainty. She shook the sleeping Mr. Pawket by the shoulder.

"Say, look at the Everything. I just now put on that last screw. Ain't it handsome?"

As he blinked at the fantastic jar gleaming with golden excrescences, a deep sense of beauty thrilled Mr. Pawket.

"Hey, Maw," he chuckled. "That's the best yet. My! ain't it pritty? It beats that lamp-shade ye made out er the tinfoil. Now the question is, who ye goin' to give it to?"

"It's fer the vanilla," returned Mrs. Pawket, calmly.

Mr. Pawket put up his hand and wrung out his ear; he thought he could not have heard aright; such aplomb, such dashing assurance as was his wife's! His gray beard vibrated with curiosity.

"For the vanilla," the artist repeated, firmly. "I take it Willum's wife won't be too proud to accept a notion or two fer her parlor. 'Tain't likely that she, being so long in a furrin country, has had much chance to go through the stores and pick out bric-à-brac. I don't know but what she would be thankful for an ornament or so."

"Ornaments?" Mr. Pawket dwelt reverently upon the word. "Ornaments? I dunno but what you got it right, though I wouldn't never have thought of it myself." He leaned over the table the better to gloat upon the golden jar. "Well," he summed up—"well, wimmen do beat all for mind-readin'. First she sets up house-keepin', it's ornaments she's goin' to hanker fer—something fer the center-table most likely; and here you, who she 'ain't never see, stands all ready with an Everything fer her!"

A few days after the excitement produced by Willum's letter the architect arrived. He was a tall, old-young man with the preoccupied air of having reduced all human existence to exact diagrams. He was, however, strangely intoxicated by the quiet and beauty of his country surroundings. On the evening of his arrival he installed himself happily in the spare room of the Pawkets' farm-house, acting, as Mrs. Pawket marveled, as "if he hadn't never lived up in them classy city beehives."

Mr. Badgely, however, seemed to the farmer and his wife unnaturally ecstatic over the ordinary manifestations of the physical universe. He would stand for hours looking off over soft sunrise country; he would hang over the bars by the cow-sheds, staring down the red road or gazing pensively up at the ancient outlines of the Pawkets' homestead. When the old farmer went up to him with knockkneed, rheumatic tread, inquiring, "Well, how goes it?" the architect would reply:

"Oh, heavenly! Such depth! Such substance! Such integrity!"

When Mr. Pawket, fearing such brain lesions as he could not diagnose, saw that these epithets were directed toward his own home in its tulip-tree setting, he would range himself alongside of the architect, eye his residence critically, and expectorate as he avowed:

"It wants roofing. Come vacation I'm goin' ter put the twins to scrapin' them pesky mossback shingles; then I may go with the tide and buy me a fancy tin roof."

Mr. Badgely would sweep him with an unseeing look. He would stretch five very long fingers toward the façade of the farm-house, muttering, "Of course not the dormers; they obtrude, I think, and the note is pseudo-foreign. We should try to evolve something absolutely American, don't you think? But the pilasters, the door paneling, positively Doric in their clean sobriety! The eastern development, now; there may have been reason for the extreme slant toward the east—it orients well, but with a certain shock...."

"Shock? I guess yes," Mr. Pawket would reply. "'Twuz struck by lightnin', tore down considerable." Then Mr. Pawket would remember that Willum had asked him to be all the help he could to the architect, so he would cast his eyes up to the sun as one who dovetails multitudinous engagements, remarking: "What say we go down to Cedar Plains now? Fool around a little. Kindy block the thing all out, as it were."

Once Mr. Pawket had added, "Ef we can't do nothin' else, you can tell me ef you want any of them trees left a-standin'."

The dreaming architect had turned on him like one under sudden electric compulsion; he shook himself into unbelievable alertness.

"The—er—trees? Left standing?"

Mr. Pawket smiled indulgently. He scratched a match on the seat of his overalls and lighted his pipe, answering between puffs: "I guess you 'm new to the business, ain't ye? Don't ye know, boy, the fust thing ye do when ye set out to build a house is to lay all the trees low? Some does it with dunnamite; some does it with mules and swearin'—anything to root out the pesky things."

An extraordinary look of terror had swept the architect's face.

"Nervous," noted Mr. Pawket, "nervous! Maw'll have to feed him up with buttermilk and put drops into his coffee. Them city people is always nagged into nerves." The old man continued in fatherly fashion:

"Now, you wantin' to make all clear for anything as sizable as a vanilla, fust thing we do is to 'scratch off the trees.' I can git you plenty fellers handy with ax and saw, but when it comes to them cussed roots, why, then, you 'm goin' to want dunnamite."

The architect bowed his head thoughtfully. As the two took the little bronzed path leading to the natural park-land dark with tapering cedars, he gave a puzzled look at the old farmer. At last he seemed struck by an idea and said, slowly:

"Do you know, Mr. Pawket, we architects are often a little vague; we need so much to—er—confer—and—er—ahem!—consult. Now, really, I should be so interested. Just what are your personal preferences with regard to the construction of an Italian villa?"

Mr. Pawket was for the moment slightly dazed. He surmised that the question placed him somewhat at a disadvantage; yet, somehow, it seemed to him that he knew a good deal about Italian villas. Gathering together certain impressions derived from the conversation of the twins, from a picture seen on a calendar, from the one lurid film of his experience, and from certain opulent descriptions of the building of the Tabernacle, it seemed to him that he knew a little something about occult species of architecture. He not immodestly presented his ideas.

"I take it"—squashing ruminatively through puddles—"I take it that the vanilla idee is kinder intricate, ain't it?—somethin' fancy and grand like a castle? Two or three cupolos, er course, and all run around with stoops and balconies; marble staircases inside." Mr. Pawket added this carelessly as one used to the larger handling of details. "High sideboards set out in silver in the dinin'-room—a reel handsome phonnygraft into the front room and statoos on the gateposts."

The architect receiving this preliminary sketch with such silent respect, Mr. Pawket gained courage and resumed:

"Wall-papers I ain't so sure about." The old farmer took out a large clasp-knife and, paring his thumb-nail, continued, somewhat loftily: "I presume that is as the lady of the house commands. Some favors blue, but there's a many as is great hands for red. I see a house once had dead animals, stuffed codfish, and shot ducks all over the wall-paper into the dinin'-room; 'twuz reel tony! As fer the yard—well, I mistrust that Willum, bein' sociable and always interested into the open air, would want circular seats around whatever trees was left standin'. Ye could paint 'em red, white, and blue, ye know. And he'd like a pond, maybe, with a white swan shovin' back and forth."

At last came the day when vans of imported laborers arrived and began quick breaking of ground and laying of foundations on Cedar Plains. Parts of the superb heating system, the installing of which was the architect's special care, numerous white bath-tubs—these things were deposited before the eyes of the excited Mr. Pawket, who, in the absence of the owner of the proposed villa, felt that he must be very vigilant in overseeing. Every day the old man appeared at Cedar Plains, boots spattered, overalls greased and clayey, making his anxious comments to the architect, who received them thoughtfully, with the air of putting all suggestions into immediate execution.

So the building of the "vanilla" proceeded, but it proceeded under the stigma of an outraged countryside. The "show-place" confidently predicted seemed not to evolve; outside of insane expenditures for heating and bathing and the sanitary care of laundry and food, there were few evidences that the villa was to be magnificent. Development after development not only puzzled the neighboring farmers, but incensed them. Men driving by "Willum's vanilla" pointed it out, tongue in cheek, with derisive whip; their women folks, veiled and taciturn, leaned forward in curious wonder to condemn silently. Such complacent agriculturists as owned "ottermobiles" came from miles away to view the thing; they halted their machines by the roadside and went in parties up through the tapering cedars to where stood the slowly rising square white walls, which they stared at with patronizing guffaws. It was the fashion for the youth of Brook Center to spend Sunday afternoons down in Cedar Plains, where among the dark trees they found the rosy trail of arbutus; where strawberries hung in the rank green grass, and where, of autumn days, wandering over the sweet stubble, they confessed to each other those innocent melancholies of beings that have never known sorrow.

On the edge of the plains where the russet path met the highway was an old well. Here the brooding boys and girls were accustomed to bring their loves and quarrels; here they hoisted the bucket from its glittering black depths, poured water on tight bunches of anemone, fern, and Dutchman's breeches, took long, gasping country drinks, and played all the pranks youth plays when relaxed beside its subtle, laughing ally—water. As the Sunday sun went down the boys and girls discussed the strange phenomenon of the new house whose enigmatic walls gleamed through the fields of their once free rovings. They uttered dark hearsay: "Some says them two is crazy; that's why they been chased out er It'ly." The twins, playing stick-knife in the soft turf that edged the road, flatly contradicted this:

"They are not crazy, neither; they 'm as common sense as you are."

"Well, ef they ain't crazy, why they goin' to have stone floors? Why they got them big old stone jars that come yesterday? Why ain't they goin' to have no stair carpets? Why ain't they goin' to have no window-curtings?"

"They are, too, crazy, and they gone and built that old vanilla right on where we used to pick checkerberries, and he's goin' to put a outlandish Dago top right on this here well, the kind they have in It'ly where they all wear rags and eat lemon-skins."

"Nobody won't keep me from drinkin' out of this well when it's got a Dago top."

"Nobody won't never stop me from goin' on Cedar Plains if I've got a mind ter. I got as good a right as they got."

"I'd just as soon heave a rock right now at that there vanilla. I don't care for it. I ain't afraid of no tin-faced I-talian dudes."

At last came a letter announcing the proposed arrival of the villa furniture. The buckboard with the white horse halted again under the tulip-tree and this time Mr. Pawket with unwonted sense of haste intercepted the letter. The Rural, whose Rough Rider hat was now discarded for a black-velvet tam-o'-shanter adorned with a coquettish pink rose, rigidly resigned it to his eager grasp.

Mr. Pawket, for all his preoccupation, was not blind to the pink rose; he quickly got its sense and made the usual deduction.

"When does the weddin' take place?" he asked, facetiously.

The rigidity around the corners of the Rural's mouth did not lessen as she replied with the evasion Brook Center found piquant, "Next day after Never."

Having successfully warded off inquiry as to personal plans, the Rural returned to her rightful prerogatives of newsmonger, demanding:

"How's Mis' Pawket's Everything gittin' along? I got a couple shoe-buttons fer her. She'd better hurry up and finish it; I hear there is four more in town startin' Everything Jars. Seems there's a sort of rivalry of who's goin' to be the first to get a Everything into the vanilla."

A look of calamity shaded Mr. Pawket's face, but he accepted the two shoe-buttons with dignified reserve.

"All she needs now is a harness buckle and a couple peanut-shells," he explained, nonchalantly. "I can get them fer her easy enough; the twins have been helping her some, one with a sinker and the other with a hook and eye. 'Tain't likely any one can git their jar in afore hern. I wouldn't advise nobody to nerve themselves up to it. There's been rumors," added Mr. Pawket, gravely—"there's been rumors as some one is tryin' to git up a rockery fer the vanilla. Now I wouldn't advise 'em to. The lady will want to tinker with that herself. But if everybody is itchin' to help, why don't they take up a nice collection er white door-knobs to trim up the garden paths?"

The mail maiden smiled a contemptuous smile; her black eyes held like sediment the look of repudiation.

"Ah, door-knobs!"—scornfully. "What's the use Of givin' up your curios and souvenirs to folks like that? They don't know how to appreciate it! I got a better use for my door-knobs. They 'm peculiar, them two is; they don't know nothin'. You heard that about the bedrooms, I presume?"

Mr. Pawket, a worried look settling on his kind face, peered up at the Rural; he took off his sun-hat and fanned himself with it.

"The bedrooms?" he questioned, falteringly. "D' ye mean that comical cage-like where they goin' to sleep outdoors?"

The Rural smiled scornfully; she adjusted the pink rosebud with a haughty, gauntleted hand.

"I mean the walls," shortly. "Plaster walls. Yes, sir, that's what I mean and I know what I'm talkin' about—rough walls, plaster, like a cellar. I know what I'm talkin' about, for it's my intended has the job; he's 'most crazy about it, my intended is, it's gone all over the Center and every one laughin' and teasin' him about it.... She's wrote it herself in a letter with that same honey-bee onto the envelope. 'I want the bedroom walls to be rough plaster,' that's what she's went and wrote, 'of a pale yellow colorin' Mr. Badgely will choose. Please allow him to mix the color' (ain't it awful?) 'and put it on very rough' (she says). 'I want the grain especially coarse and rich' (she says). 'Coarse and rich'!" The Rural lifted dramatic eyes, inquiring again, "Ain't that terrible?"

Mr. Pawket hesitated. An idea of loyalty possessed him; he made a feeble attempt at seeming to support the unknown lady's taste.

"Er course, as I look at vanillas—" he began, weakly.

But the Rural interrupted him with a vicious clip of her lean brown jaws. "Vanillas?" with scornful inflection. "Vanillas?" She lashed the white horse into a sprawling stagger as she snapped, "She don't know nothin' about vanillas!" and rattled confidently away, calling back, scornfully; "She don't know nothin'; she 'ain't never had no instruction; she don't reelize that there's such things as wall-papers. 'Coarse and rich,'" sneered the Rural. She peered back over her trim young shoulder, adding: "They say their furniture has come. Everybody is down to the junction, studyin' it. I'm glad it ain't mine."

It was true that the furniture had arrived. Braving the vicissitudes of sea routes; badly shipped by an Italian warehouse, and roughly handled at an American port, still the furniture had arrived. It had been dumped out of its crated cars at the little Brook Center station. To the lover of Flemish and Spanish carving, to the connoisseur of Genoese cabinets and Italian intarsia, to the student of time-fumed designs and forms, the coming of this furniture might well have been an event; for by a freak of destiny, on the little platform of an obscure country junction were assembled the hoardings of centuries of tradition, the adored heirlooms of a long line of ancestry. One huge case, half wrecked, showed the gleam of Florentine brasses; another, crated and roped, revealed faded Genoese brocades; slender broken legs and edges of carved flaps protruded from battered sheathings. To some minds all this might have spelled a certain sort of poetry; to the curious group assembled at the junction it spelled eccentricity and, what was worse, a fixed and immoral shabbiness of existence!

The junction agent pointed out a half-crated table standing by itself; it looked inconceivably old and was of a timber unknown to Brook Center. Its rickety four legs, wrapped separately, tapered off into carvings of opulent nymphs and the wild, laughing faces of dryads and fauns—these legs were observed by the curious groups at the junction to be badly worn and honeycombed with worm-holes.

"For the vanilla," it was whispered from one to another; the junction agent, hand over mouth, bowed himself backward in mirth. "They say it's all from her home, and this is the dinin'-room table. My! My! My! ain't it awful, all them old, ancient things?"

Mr. Pawket, affecting a connoisseurship unconsciously copied from the architect, bent over the table, examining it; with vague puzzlement he passed his hand over its cut and hacked surface—surface on which hundreds of monks of the time of Clement III had whetted their restless knives.

"I don't onderstand it; I don't onderstand it"—the old farmer feebly shook his head—"unless it's she ain't used to nothin' better and he's kep' his mouth shut. 'Twould be like Willum to pertend he didn't care; he was always biddable. M' wife could feed him anythin' from pot-cheese to pork; he was always a great hand to keep the peace."

The junction master watched in leering silence the brittle collection of household fittings being lifted into carts. "Well, I guess I'm glad it ain't me is goin' to have 'em for neighbors," he observed, feelingly. "They 'll fall back on you a good deal, one thing and another; they 'm pretty well broken down in pocket—you can see that."

Mr. Pawket in dumb disappointment climbed up into his wagon and stooped to take the reins. For a few moments he chewed violently with his front teeth before he spat desperately into the junction geranium-bed, asserting with dignity:

"Oh, I guess you got no call to worry. 'Tain't as if they didn't have no friends in this country. Willum's sort of son to me, my own boy bein' long dead. Ef the worst comes to the worst I don't know but what I could make a fist to help him out. Whoa, there!" Mr. Pawket, rising in his seat, backed his team truculently. "Ef anythin's needed," he observed, superbly, "I shall see to it myself—'twould n't take me long to buy him a dining-room table and a few little fixin's so's he could hold up his head in the world."

All the way home Willum's friend pondered the thing. Once when the horses stopped to drink at a wayside trough he slapped his knee fiercely and said: "That's the ticket! Yes, sir, that's the size of it!" At dinner, after the twins had taken their departure, he suggested his plan to his wife; to his immense relief she met the thing in his own spirit.

"A golden-oak dinin'-table, anyway," argued Mr. Pawket. "One or two fancy fixin's so they can hold up their heads in the world."

"And shut people's mouths," agreed his wife. "That hotel-keeper's girl, now, I never see any one more sassy—she with an Everything only half done and sayin' she's goin' to be the first to get one into the vanilla, and yet talkin' something terrible behind them and their furniture's backs."

"How's your Everything?" asked Mr. Pawket, suddenly; a grim determination shot into the eyes under his hairy brows.

For answer his wife rose. Unwrapping some white mosquito-netting, she presented to view a large, bulbous object encircled with protuberances, excrescenced with golden knobbiness—this object, strangely sticky, smelled something like bananas; it was the Everything, completed and unveiled. Mr. and Mrs. Pawket gazed upon it in silent admiration. As they stood lost in contemplation of its conglomerate goldiness, there came the sound of a sprightly whistle and light step, and the architect appeared in the doorway.

Mr. Badgely had by this time become an intimate member of the farm household. The two old people beamed upon him; Mr. Pawket waved him excitedly toward the table, announcing:

"Well, sir, it's finished. Take it or leave it; I don't know as you could find one any handsomer."

Mr. Badgely started theatrically. He was clad in white flannels and a white silk shirt; a golden-brown tie matched the brown of a dreaming fire in his eyes, and there were brown silk socks upon his shapely calf-skinned feet. The Pawkets, even in their absorption, noted that, if not really young, the architect suggested something very like youth. His dapper figure now bent reverently over the kitchen table on whose red-and-white-checkered cloth reposed the gold jar; he drew a long breath.

"The—er—Everything!" he murmured. After a long and careful scrutiny of the golden object, he turned to Mr. Pawket.

"Really—it—it defies description—it is so—er—genuine! I confess I never have seen anything quite like it—anywhere. Mrs. Pawket, I do congratulate you."

"There's a rage for 'em now," explained Mr. Pawket, proudly, "but 't was she started the first one. She began the hull thing; we was foolish enough to mention ourn to the hotel-keeper's daughter, and now, as fur as I can gather, there's six Everythings started right here in Brook Center."

Mr. Badgely showed deep emotion. "Really, six Everythings? You surprise me. I had no idea the community boasted such—er—creative feeling."

The old farmer looked at the young man, then at his wife. "Tell him what you goin' to do," he commanded. Mrs. Pawket, however, twisted nervously at the end of the white mosquito-netting and said she felt too shy. Mr. Pawket with manly decision relieved her of the burden of explanation.

"Seems she's had it in her mind to finish that there Everything in time to have it on the center-table in the vanilla," he said; "and now she's gone and got me so het up with interest that I got to take a hand, too. Now, fer instance, the furniture—" The old man hitched himself nearer to the architect, saying in sepulchral tones of parental anxiety: "'Tain't fer me to interfere, but I seen the stuff. I been down to the junction and see what they got. Well, say, ain't it pitiful, all that old, ancient furniture?"

Mr. Badgely nodded his head with another sort of concern. "Perfectly rotten carelessness. But I've sent to town for a corking man who handles these things; he's coming out to-morrow with his staff. After all, it's merely a question of understanding period, and American restoration is diabolically clever."

But the old farmer waved the younger man grandly aside. "That's as may be; that's as may be," he said, hastily. "Put it in the kitchen or use it in the g'rage—I ain't one to advise waste; but see here, my young man"—he stared impressively into the architect's face—"I knowed Willum's folks. I know what he's used to and what he's got a right to expect. Ef he's lost money, that ain't none of my business, and ef he's married an Eyetalian, that ain't no reflection on her. As I take it, they 'm all sorter down at heel in It'ly, and it seems they got now so they don't know no better. But I knowed Willum's folks. I know he should hold up his head in his own country."

A faint color stole into Mr. Pawket's gray-bearded face. Mrs. Pawket's eyes were fixed admiringly on her husband. Mr. Badgely bent his head in respectful listening. Mr. Pawket struck an attitude close to the Everything Jar. He was glad that the twins, with their habit of shrewd analysis, were not there as he said:

"I ain't rich—but," with a significant cough, "I ain't no one to stand by and see the hull Center pokin' the finger er shame at Willum and his furniture. The vanilla ... well, what's done is done, and it can't be helped: seems it's what they set their hearts on and some folks like to be strange-appearin', but the furniture—well, it don't suit, that's all! Willum's the kind should have what 's all the go—plush and satin and chenille-like." The old farmer looked at the architect meaningly; he felt himself suddenly a man of the world; he stood almost straight in his wrinkled boots, looking around the little kitchen fiercely and roaring: "Golden oak or bird's-eye maple! I got catalogues. Spare no expense. Get him what he needs. I'll back you!"

It was a moment full of significance. The architect, a man of many subtle perceptions, was quite aware of it. He himself had been worried over the general attitude of the country community toward the villa, which, he could see, had deeply disappointed and mortified anticipation. Rumors had reached him that the neighborhood not only repudiated the new building on the grounds of general distaste, but that a movement of ostracism had begun by which the intents and purposes of the occupants of the villa were to be balked and frustrated. Brook Center, so Mr. Badgely had divined, was keen for patronizing the newly arrived Italian lady with gifts of decorated umbrella-stands, lamp-shades, and door-mats; but, on the other hand, it had severely decided not to be patronized by the expected householders. Supplies of milk and cream could not be promised; fresh eggs, it appeared, were needed for home consumption; pranks were planned by the young people to further humiliate the supposedly downtrodden and financially embarrassed Willum. There had even been talk of filling up the well—now topped by a graceful Italian canopy—with mud and stones; and one enterprising spirit had already chalked upon the bucket, "We don't want no Dagos to Brook Center." In short, it had begun to seem to the architect that the immediate atmosphere was unpropitious for a serene home-coming. Now, as he faced the eager old farmer, something like a solution dawned on him.

"Er—expense"—the architect repeated Mr. Pawket's word—"er—do I understand, sir, that besides that very rare and (ahem!) imposing specimen of Mrs. Pawket's handiwork—this Everything Jar—do I understand you to mean that you are so good as to wish to assist in the—er—interior furnishings?"

The old farmer eyed him with delight.

"That's the ticket," he roared. "You got it right; you're the man for my money." He struck an attitude of almost intoxicated satisfaction, roaring again: "Golden oak, that's what; none too good for such as him. Get him what he's used to. Him with that old, ancient furniture!" Mr. Pawket pressed a roll of extremely faded one-dollar bills into the architect's hand, repeating: "A golden-oak set fer the dinin'-room. I know where they have it slick and shinin'. Take yer catalogue and make yer pick. Cost! By the great gander! what do I care fer cost?" A fervor like that of a whirling dervish seized the old farmer. "Golden oak!" he roared. Red-plush parlor suite." His gaze, falling upon the Everything, became radiant. He hitched his suspenders with broad effects of swagger, repeating once more, "It's what he's used to and the best ain't too good for how he was brought up."

At last arrived the morning of the day when the owners of the villa were expected, and it found the architect in a curious mixture of dread, amusement, doubt, and eagerness. The villa, its tiled roof melting softly through the filed tapers of dark cedars, was, he knew, what it should be. He walked about the winding drives, his eyes dwelling upon clumps of imported cypress and rare fruit-trees, his approving glance sweeping over vistas landscaped by his own art, which clever art had set stone benches in lovely little dells or by pools where a mossy nymph sprayed the surrounding ferns.

Everything was as it should be. The walls of the white villa would soon be softened by young vines newly sprouting; the terraces had stretches of arcades and flowers; large terra-cotta pots filled with acacias and oleanders massed well against the white of the steps and the blue of the country sky. The whole scene was almost Italian—sunny, graceful, restful. The architect smiled happily and knew himself justified of his undertaking.

But within—within, where most he had dreamed mellowness—where most he had desired the sense of ripe and harmonious surroundings? Oh, the thing was too horrible, too outrageous! Could they possibly understand? Could William Folsom and this Italian wife of his ever be made to see how unavoidable, inevitable it had all been? Badgely, anxiously gnawing his lower lip, shook his head. "I'm a fool," he muttered; "and yet I vow I know of no other way. Talk about vendettas! they are queer here, really queer—if one were sufficiently to antagonize them!..."

The architect directed his steps to the big stucco garage, still a little raw-looking with its green shutters and tiles; there he encountered the head of the workmen who were engaged in restoring the much-suffering villa furniture. The alert, gray-clad man met him at the door and shook his head deprecatingly.

"Don't ask me about those heavenly things!" He waved despairing hands. "They are too lovely. I've been quoting Tasso to that little signorina of a writing-desk. But, dear man, we can't possibly install any of it for at least a month. These things are exquisite, priceless, but so antique they've got to be mothered like babies. The chests are about the only things in condition, and they've lost their hinges and I've got to have the lovely brasses copied."

Stepping into the smartly cushioned car, Mr. Badgely sat himself down. He gave the order dreamily. With a perturbed yet dauntless expression he lay back on the soft cushions, gazing up to the whirling green of the trees as the car flew along the country road.

"It all depends on her—it really all depends upon her. If she's the real thing she'll understand and play the game; if she isn't—" He shook his head, put one long leg over the other, and groaned.

When, however, the train stopped at the Brook Center Junction and William Folsom, laughing, waved his hat, Mr. Badgely drew a long breath of relief, for at Folsom's side stood a tall, graceful cosmopolite, a being dark-eyed, daring, with the keen, lovable face of the aristocrat of the spirit—in short, a perfection of feminine understanding in very assured tailoring.

"She'll do," the architect told himself. His greetings were suave and deliberate, but of necessity, almost before the car sprang away from the junction, he began to explain that which was heavily on his mind. William Folsom leaned back in the car, his shining eyes dwelt upon old landmarks; he chuckled as he listened.

"You see, dear lady, your welcome is to be of the people—the forestiere—I wonder if I can make you understand in so short a time as we have? The entire countryside is at the villa now; they all told me they were coming to greet you—so"—he shot a look at Folsom—"I invited them."

The owner of the vanilla gave a mild war-whoop. "Oh, I say, this is enchanting! Badgely, old chap, I can picture your sufferings." Then, with a droll look at his wife: "She understands, bless her! She isn't the idol of her own town for nothing!" Folsom turned and sketched the architect's perturbation to his wife.

"Have the goodness to mention the—er—Everything," insisted Mr. Badgely, grimly. "Have you ever seen one? No? Well, then, you needn't be so funny." He added desperately: "They are there now arranging the—er—golden oak and the (ahem!) the red-plush suite." He shuddered, reiterating: "Really, Billy, the thing was necessary. I didn't dare refuse. You've no idea how these people are antagonized by an Italian villa. It seems sort of shameful to them. They foam at the mouth. Why, unless I had been tactful you'd have had vendetta and Mafia and everything else wished on you."

Mrs. Folsom tried to comprehend. "The poor Littles!" She had a marvelous voice full of bird-like stirrings. Then she looked thoughtfully at the architect. "But we will say to them 'Forget it,'" adding, with a little pride, "I am learning William's slangs."

"Dear old gump, you forget that I was brought up in this very neighborhood." Folsom soothed the despairing architect, but he laughed immoderately. "His precious artistic sensibilities are having perfect duck fits," he shouted. "He's as mad as a wet hen."

But Mrs. Folsom leaned back, taking fresh breaths of air. "This is a green country," she announced, "and you have a little brown brook that winds, and great trees like cathedrals. Do you think that with all this around me I shall be staying to the salon remarking continuously upon the Jar of Everythings?"

Both men laughed and the architect kissed her hand.

When the car swept around the white shell drive and halted by the lower terrace, Folsom, with a whoop like a boy, sprang out; he ran joyfully forward, for there stood the old couple whose faces, to his home-coming sense, seemed like those of parents. Mr. Pawket trembled slightly; he stood high-collared and coattailed, upon the glittering steps. Mrs. Pawket, in black silk, clove to his arm. The twins, in the heated wretchedness of Sunday clothes, stepped forward, and in the interests of sentiment stuck forth two wads of tightly bound pink roses. The Rural, blushing in a costume of very bright blue, wearing elbow mitts, and carrying a pink feather fan, introduced a sweet-smelling young man as "my intended."

Among the small groups of peering and excited neighbors was Mr. Fripp, the junction agent.

"Seems there's a good deal of excitement in the air. We 'ain't all been out like this sence the mad dog was shot down to Galloway's." When this gentleman was presented to Mrs. Folsom he drew himself up, looked at her suspiciously, and said, "Pleased to meet you." He cast the eye of a worldling over her quiet traveling costume and retired to nudge the Rural and remark: "Well, I see the furniture money 'ain't been spent on her back."

The lady of the vanilla looked about her with pure happiness. She met all introductions radiantly, sniffing rapturously at the twins' roses, lifting first one, then the other stodgy bunch.

"But you are all so kind!" The clear voice rippling with novelty and excitement gave a sense of thrill to the occasion. The mistress of the vanilla held Mrs. Pawket's perspiring hand.

"To know this lady—like the mother of Weeliam—and Mr. Pawket, my first American of the famous farmer trrribes!"

The stranger's insecurity of English had its immediate triumph. The countryside had expected that she would chatter Italian like a predatory organ-grinder, but around this picturesque naïveté they clustered as they would around a lost child. Jessica Folsom met the architect's eyes triumphantly, but he edged to her side and bent to whiff the roses, muttering, "The worst is yet to come."

However, the slender figure of Mrs. Folsom drifted from one to the other of her welcomers, unembarrassed, friendly, appealing. She put them immediately at their ease as she announced:

"We shall all at once have tea. On the terrace—my little festa! I, who find the home of my fathers in your new green country." A lovely color coming into her dark face, she burst into undulating Italian. "The first Dago she's spoke sence she's got here," commented Mr. Fripp, in an undertone. Once more he creaked up to the mistress of the villa, saying, loudly:

"Too bad about the furniture!"

The new-comer turned upon the junction agent liquid, long-lashed eyes. "Ah the garnitures of Bella Fortuna, they have been—how do you say it, Weeliam?—dislocated, smashed in traveling the great waves." She appealed anxiously to the junction agent. "I fear they are in great distress of breaking, but"—a light came into the appealing dark eyes—"but in your so practical country shall we not find the new?"

Mrs. Pawket, hearing this, suddenly nudged her husband, and Mr. Pawket realized that his moment had come. He took one or two ponderous steps forward, wiping his brow, clearing his throat. In his buzzing brain he sensed a great occasion, like a wedding or a funeral. He got a glimpse of Mrs. Pawket nodding her head urgently and mouthing his words after him as he roared:

"That's as may be; that's as may be." Again Mr. Pawket cleared his throat. He felt, as he afterward expressed it, "like he was grindin' a corn-hopper with nothing into it." Suddenly his gaze fell upon Willum, his boy, now a glad-looking man with a tender light in his eyes and his arm around his dark-eyed wife. This, Mr. Pawket felt, was as it should be. It gave him sudden eloquence.

"I dunno," he said, and he bent a severe eye upon the Rural, Mr. Fripp, and the hotel-keeper's daughter—"I dunno but what we was gettin' a little sour-hearted, here in Brook Center. There has been some spites and a good many mean doin's and sayin's—namin' no names. What we didn't have was big feelin's. Everybody was nesty and nifty, and we all thought we know'd it all; but it seems that yet for all we didn't know much about vanillas nor that they could turn out so purty as this here vanilla has gone and turned."

William Folsom poked the architect in the ribs. "Hear! Hear!" he murmured, in a subdued voice.

Mr. Pawket mildly waited for these asides to conclude before he resumed: "Howsomever, it seems that one dear to us"—he fixed his eyes on Willum, but in spite of him his gaze wandered off to Willum's lady—"one dear to us has got back from foreign lands and built a vanilla." The old farmer turned to Mrs. Folsom with a burst of eloquence. "Sence that has happened, by gum! our whole lives is changed and we know more about It'ly than I ever thought we should; and so with regards to this here new vanilla house and a few little presents and one thing and another, why, all I can say is, Mrs. Folsom, we've gone and did as we'd be done by."

There was something very like a cheer at the conclusion of these remarks. Meanwhile, at a sign from the architect, the great carved doors of the villa swung open and the little group pressed in.

They stepped into the cool, dim court with its paved floors and delicately woven stairways. Mrs. Folsom clasped her hands with pleasure over a wide window-seat which gave on a western slope where the gold sun was speared by the tall black trees. But Folsom, to whom the architect gave a nervous cue, hurried to the sala da mangiare, and thrust back its sumptuous Genoese curtains.

There under the iron candelabra of the Medicis stood a shining table of varnished splendor; on it, as if hoping to deaden its aggressive luster, was a marvelous strip of Paduan lace, while around its stodgy newness were six smug chairs of a very palpable "golden oak." Folsom threw up his hands in apparent joy and astonishment.

"Great Harry!" The young man's voice was extraordinarily exalted. He bent over and touched the varnished surfaces with a reverent hand. "A perfectly new dining-table—a present—a complete set of absolutely unused chairs! Oh, I say! This won't do—it's preposterous! Somebody has been getting gay." The young man first looked suspiciously at the architect, then turned and with severe eyes surveyed Farmer Pawket's shamefaced elation.

"So it's you, sir," he said. "Now look here!" Folsom strode up and put his firm hand on the old man's chest. "Brace up and tell what you know about this. Look me in the eye and tell me you didn't do it. No, you can't hide behind Mother Pawket." Folsom's grave glance reduced Mrs. Pawket to a helpless flutter. "She's probably put you up to it; she's a designing woman." Folsom went eagerly over to the dark-eyed Italian lady. "Jessica dearest, look at all this. Golden oak. Store furniture, by Jove! Mr. Pawket's gift to you and me."

The lady of the vanilla did not betray Mr. Badgely's hope of her. Widening her lovely eyes at the rich solidities before her, she slipped to the old man's side and seized his hands. A strange sense of fog enveloped Mr. Pawket; he stole a scared glance sidewise at the Rural. "It was all for me," the vibrant voice insisted. "This Weeliam he is favorito—he thinks the whole world is for his gift; but kind Signor Pawket thinks only of me; he knew"—with exquisite slow arrangement of accents—"how interested and happy I should be to at once understand the practical American ways—and he knew, with such understanding, how I must save and guard the poor destructed—what you call them?—foornitures, of my own people."

"Now, now, now!" protested Mr. Pawket, feebly.

Mr. Fripp, however, nodded to the Rural. "Well, it seems she knowed all the while that that there furniture warn't no good."

At last, at the architect's somewhat desperate solicitation, they all turned their steps to the salon. Mr. Badgely, making pathetic dumb-show, dragged William Folsom to the rear.

"Nerve yourself," he whispered, "nerve yourself. I'm afraid it's going to be worse than I feared. It seems that there were actually six of them—only one is not quite finished. The competition was very tense—and they all arrived in my absence. Old man, hold me! I'm about all in!"

Mr. Folsom, with appropriate concern, put his arm about his friend. Together they braced to meet any shock. When at last they lifted their eyes it was to stand locked in awe and admiration. Over the shoulders of the group in front of them they could see into the salon. It was furnished with a sofa and six chairs upholstered in scarlet plush. There was also a center-table on which was spread a red plush cover. On this table, each with a card tied with a ribbon bow and bearing the name of its maker, stood ranged in solid splendor six golden "Everythings."

A NIGHT AMONG THE HORSES[5]

By DJUNA BARNES

From The Little Review

Toward dusk, in the summer of the year, a man dressed in a frock coat and top hat, and carrying a cane, crept through the underbrush bordering the corral of the Buckler farm.

As he moved small twigs snapped, fell and were silent. His knees were green from wounded shrubbery and grass, and his outspread hands tore unheeded plants. His wrists hurt him and he rested from time to time, always caring for his hat and knotted yellow cane, blowing through his moustache.

Dew had been falling covering the twilight leaves like myriad faces, damp with the perspiration of the struggle for existence, and half a mile away, standing out against the darkness of the night, a grove of white birches shimmered, like teeth in a skull.

He heard the creaking of a gate, and the splashing of late rain into the depths of a dark cistern. His heart ached with the nearness of the earth, the faint murmur of it moving upon itself, like a sleeper who turns to throw an arm about a beloved.

A frog began moaning among the skunk cabbages, and John thrust his hand deep into his bosom.

Something somnolent seemed to be here, and he wondered. It was like a deep, heavy, yet soft prison where, without sin, one may suffer intolerable punishment.

Presently he went on, feeling his way. He reached a high plank fence and sensing it with his fingers, he lay down, resting his head against the ground.

He was tired, he wanted to sleep, but he searched for his hat and cane and straightened out his coat beneath him before he turned his eyes to the stars.

And now he could not sleep, and wondered why he had thought of it; something quick was moving the earth, it seemed to live, to shake with sudden immensity.

He heard a dog barking, and the dim light from a farm window kept winking as the trees swung against its square of light. The odor of daisies came to him, and the assuring, powerful smell of the stables; he opened his mouth and drew in his moustache.

A faint tumult had begun. A tremor ran under the length of his body and trembled off into the earth like a shudder of joy,—died down and repeated itself. And presently he began to tremble, answering, throwing out his hands, curling them up weakly, as if the earth were withholding something precious, necessary.

His hat fell off, striking a log with a dull hollow sound, and he pressed his red moustache against the grass weeping.

Again he heard it, felt it; a hundred hoofs beat upon the earth and he knew the horses had gone wild in the corral on the other side of the fence, for animals greet the summer, striking the earth, as friends strike the back of friends. He knew, he understood; a hail to summer, to life, to death.

He drew himself against the bars, pressing his eyes under them, peering, waiting.

He heard them coming up across the heavy turf, rounding the curve in the Willow Road. He opened his eyes and closed them again. The soft menacing sound deepened, as heat deepens, strikes through the skin into the very flesh. Head on, with long legs rising, falling, rising again, striking the ground insanely, like needles taking terrible, impossible and purposeless stitches.

He saw their bellies, fawn colored, pitching from side to side, flashing by, straining the fence, and he rose up on his feet and silently, swiftly, fled on beside them.

Something delirious, hysterical, came over him and he fell. Blood trickled into his eyes down from his forehead. It had a fine feeling for a moment, like a mane, like that roan mare's mane that had passed him—red and long and splendid.

He lifted his hand, and closed his eyes once more, but the soft pounding did not cease, though now, in his sitting position, it only jogged him imperceptibly, as a child on a knee.

It seemed to him that he was smothering, and he felt along the side of his face as he had done in youth when they had put a cap on him that was too large. Twining green things, moist with earth-blood, crept over his fingers, the hot, impatient leaves pressed in, and the green of the matted grass was deathly thick. He had heard about the freeness of nature, thought it was so, and it was not so.

A trailing ground pine had torn up small blades in its journey across the hill, and a vine, wrist-thick, twisted about a pale oak, hideously, gloriously, killing it, dragging it into dust.

A wax Patrick Pipe leaned against his neck, staring with black eyes, and John opened his mouth, running his tongue across his lips snapping it off, sighing.

Move as he would, the grass was always under him, and the crackling of last autumn's leaves and last summer's twigs—minute dead of the infinite greatness—troubled him. Something portentous seemed connected with the patient noises about him. An acorn dropped, striking a thin fine powder out of a frail oak pod. He took it up, tossing it. He had never liked to see things fall.

He sat up, with the dim thunder of the horses far off, but quickening his heart.

He went over the scene he had with Freda Buckler, back there in the house, the long quivering spears of pot-grass standing by the window as she walked up and down, pulling at them, talking to him.

Small, with cunning fiery eyes and a pink and pointed chin. A daughter of a mother who had known too many admirers in her youth; a woman with an ample lap on which she held a Persian kitten or a trifle of fruit. Bounty, avarice, desire, intelligence—both of them had always what they wanted.

He blew down his moustache again thinking of Freda in her floating yellow veil that he had called ridiculous. She had not been angry, he was nothing but a stable boy then. It was the way with those small intriguing women whose nostrils were made delicate through the pain of many generations that they might quiver whenever they caught a whiff of the stables.

"As near as they can get to the earth," he had said and was Freda angry? She stroked his arm always softly, looking away, an inner bitterness drawing down her mouth.

She said, walking up and down quickly, looking ridiculously small:

"I am always gentle, John—" frowning, trailing her veil, thrusting out her chin.

He answered: "I liked it better where I was."

"Horses," she said showing sharp teeth, "are nothing for a man with your bile—poy-boy—curry comber, smelling of saddle soap—lovely!" She shrivelled up her nose, touching his arm: "Yes, but better things. I will show you—you shall be a gentleman—fine clothes, you will like them, they feel nice." And laughing she turned on one high heel, sitting down. "I like horses, they make people better; you are amusing, intelligent, you will see—"

"A lackey!" he returned passionately throwing up his arm, "what is there in this for you, what are you trying to do to me? The family—askance—perhaps—I don't know."

He sat down pondering. He was getting used to it, or thought he was, all but his wordy remonstrances. He knew better when thinking of his horses, realizing that when he should have married this small, unpleasant and clever woman, he would know them no more.

It was a game between them, which was the shrewder, which would win out? He? A boy of ill breeding, grown from the gutter, fancied by this woman because he had called her ridiculous, or for some other reason that he would never know. This kind of person never tells the truth, and this, more than most things, troubled him. Was he a thing to be played with, debased into something better than he was, than he knew?

Partly because he was proud of himself in the costume of a groom, partly because he was timid, he desired to get away, to go back to the stables. He walked up to the mirrors as if about to challenge them, peering in. He knew he would look absurd, and then knew, with shame, that he looked splendidly better than most of the gentlemen that Freda Buckler knew. He hated himself. A man who had grown out of the city's streets, a fine common thing!

She saw him looking into the mirrors, one after the other, and drew her mouth down. She got up, walking beside him in the end, between him and them, taking his arm.

"You shall enter the army—you shall rise to General, or Lieutenant at least—and there are horses there, and the sound of stirrups—with that physique you will be happy—authority you know," she said shaking her chin, smiling.

"Very well, but a common soldier—"

"As you like—afterward."

"Afterward?"

"Very well, a common soldier."

He sensed something strange in her voice, a sort of irony and it took the patience out of him:

"I have always been common, I could commit crimes, easily, gladly—I'd like to!"

She looked away. "That's natural," she said faintly, "it's an instinct all strong men have—"

She knew what was troubling him, thwarted instincts, common beautiful instincts that he was being robbed of. He wanted to do something final to prove his lower order; caught himself making faces, idiot faces, and she laughed.

"If only your ears stuck out, chin receded," she said, "you might look degenerate, common, but as it is—"

And he would creep away in hat, coat and cane to peer at his horses, never daring to go in near them. Sometimes when he wanted to weep he would smear one glove with harness grease, but the other one he held behind his back, pretending one was enough to prove his revolt.

She would torment him with vases, books, pictures, making a fool of him gently, persistently, making him doubt by cruel means, the means of objects he was not used to, eternally taking him out of his sphere.

"We have the best collection of miniatures," she would say with one knee on a low ottoman, bringing them out in her small palm.

"Here, look."

He would put his hands behind him.

"She was a great woman—Lucrezia Borgia—do you know history—" She put it back again because he did not answer, letting his mind, a curious one, torment itself.

"You love things very much, don't you?" she would question because she knew that he had a passion for one thing only. She kept placing new ladders beneath his feet, only to saw them off at the next rung, making him nothing more than a nervous irritable experiment. He was uneasy, like one given food to smell and not to taste, and for a while he had not wanted to taste, and then curiosity began, and he wanted to, and he also wanted to escape, and he could do neither.

Well, after he had married her, what then? Satisfy her whim and where would he be? He would be nothing, neither what he had been nor what other people were. This seemed to him, at times, her wish—a sort of place between lying down and standing up, a cramped position, a slow death. A curious woman.

This same evening he had looked at her attentively for the first time. Her hair was rather pretty, though too mousy, yet just in the nape of the neck, where it met the lawn of the collar it was very attractive. She walked well for a little woman too.

Sometimes she would pretend to be lively, would run a little, catch herself at it, as if she had not intended to do it, and calm down once more, or creeping up to him, stroking his arm, talking to him, she would walk beside him softly, slowly, that he might not step out, that he would have to crawl across the carpet.

Once he had thought of trying her with honesty, with the truth of the situation. Perhaps she would give him an honest answer, and he had tried.

"Now Miss Freda—just a word—what are you trying to do. What is it you want? What is there in me that can interest you? I want you to tell me—I want to know—I have got to ask someone, and I haven't anyone to ask but you."

And for a moment she almost relented, only to discover that she could not if she had wished. She did not know always what she meant herself.

"I'll tell you," she said, hoping that this, somehow, might lead her into the truth, for herself, if not for him, but it did not. "You are a little nervous, you will get used to it—you will even grow to like it. Be patient. You will learn soon enough that there is nothing in the world so agreeable as climbing, changing."

"Well," he said trying to read her, "And then?"

"That's all, you will regret the stables in the end—that's all." Her nostrils quivered. A light came into her eyes, a desire to defy, to be defied.

And then on this last night he had done something terrible, he had made a blunder. There had been a party. The guests, a lot of them, were mostly drunk, or touched with drink. And he too had too much. He remembered having thrown his arms about a tall woman, gowned in black with loose shoulder straps, dragging her through a dance. He had even sung a bit of a song, madly, wildly, horribly. And suddenly he had been brought up sharp by the fact that no one thought his behavior strange, that no one thought him presumptuous. Freda's mother had not even moved or dropped the kitten from her lap where it sat, its loud resolute purr shaking the satin of her gown.

And he felt that Freda had got him where she wanted him, between two rungs. Going directly up to her he said:

"You are ridiculous!" and twirled his moustache, spitting into the garden.

And he knew nothing about what happened until he found himself in the shrubbery crawling toward the corral, through the dusk and the dampness of the leaves, carrying his cane, making sure of his hat, looking up at the stars.

And now he knew why he had come. He was with his horses again. His eyes, pressed against the bars, stared in. The black stallion in the lead had been his special pet, a rough animal, but kindly, knowing. And here they were once more, tearing up the grass, galloping about in the night like a ball-room full of real people, people who wanted to do things, who did what they wanted to do.

He began to crawl through the bars, slowly, deftly, and when half way through he paused, thinking.

Presently he went on again, and drawing himself into the corral, his hat and cane thrown in before him, he lay there mouth to the grass.

They were still running, but less madly, one of them had gone up the Willow Road leading into a farther pasture, in a flare of dust, through which it looked immense and faint.

On the top of the hill three or four of the horses were standing, testing the weather. He would mount one, he would ride away, he would escape. And his horses, the things he knew, would be his escape.

Bareback, he thought, would be like the days when he had taken what he could from the rush of the streets, joy, exhilaration, life, and he was not afraid. He wanted to stand up, to cry aloud.

And he saw ten or twelve of them rounding the curve, and he did stand up.

They did not seem to know him, did not seem to know what to make of him, and he stared at them wondering. He did not think of his white shirt front, his sudden arising, the darkness, their excitement. Surely they would know, in a moment more.

Wheeling, flaring their wet nostrils, throwing up their manes, striking the earth in a quandary, they came on, whinnied faintly, and he knew what it was to be afraid.

He had never been afraid and he went down on his knees. With a new horror in his heart he damned them. He turned his eyes up, but he could not open them. He thought rapidly, calling on Freda in his heart, speaking tenderly, promising.

A flare of heat passed his throat, and descended into his bosom.

"I want to live. I can do it—damn it—I can do it. I can forge ahead, make my mark."

He forgot where he was for a moment and found new pleasure in this spoken admission, this new rebellion. He moved with the faint shaking of the earth like a child on a woman's lap.

The upraised hoofs of the first horse missed him, but the second did not.

And presently the horses drew apart, nibbling here and there, switching their tails, avoiding a patch of tall grass.

LONG, LONG AGO[6]

By FREDERICK ORIN BARTLETT

From The Bellman

When the brakeman swung back the door and with resonant indifference shouted in Esperanto "Granderantal stashun," Galbraithe felt like jumping up and shaking the man's hand. It was five years since he had heard that name pronounced as it should be pronounced because it was just five years since he had resigned from the staff of a certain New York daily and left to accept the editorship of a Kansas weekly. These last years had been big years, full of the joy of hard work, and though they had left him younger than when he went they had been five years away from New York. Now he was back again for a brief vacation, eager for a sight of the old crowd.

When he stepped from the train he was confused for a moment. It took him a second to get his bearings but as soon as he found himself fighting for his feet in the dear old stream of commuters he knew he was at home again. The heady jostle among familiar types made him feel that he had not been gone five days, although the way the horde swept past him proved that he had lost some of his old-time skill and cunning in a crowd. But he did not mind; he was here on a holiday, and they were here on business and had their rights. He recognized every mother's son of them. Neither the young ones nor the old ones were a day older. They wore the same clothes, carried the same bundles and passed the same remarks. The solid business man weighted with the burden of a Long Island estate was there; the young man in a broker's office who pushed his own lawn mower at New Rochelle was there; the man who got aboard at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street was there. There was the man with a Van Dyke, the man with a mustache and the fat, smooth-shaven man and the wives, the sisters and the stenographers of all these. They were just as Galbraithe had left them—God bless 'em.

Swept out upon Forty-second Street, he took a long, full breath. The same fine New York sky was overhead (the same which roofed Kansas) and the same New York sun shone down upon him (even as in its gracious bounty it shone upon Kansas). The thrill of it made him realize as never before that, though the intervening years had been good to him, New York was in his blood. His eyes seized upon the raw angular buildings as eagerly as an exiled hill-man greets friendly mountain peaks. There are no buildings on earth which look so friendly, once a man gets to know them, as those about the Grand Central. Galbraithe noticed some new structures, but even these looked old. The total effect was exactly as he had left it. That was what he appreciated after his sojourn among the younger cities of the West. New York was permanent—as fixed as the pole star. It was unalterable.

Galbraithe scorned to take cab, car or bus this morning. He wanted to walk—to feel beneath his feet the dear old humpy pavement. It did his soul good to find men repairing the streets in the same old places—to find as ever new buildings going up and old buildings coming down, and the sidewalks blocked in the same old way. He was clumsy at his hurdling, but he relished the exercise.

He saw again with the eyes of a cub reporter every tingling feature of the stirring street panorama, from gutter to roof top, and thrilled with the magic and vibrant bigness of it all. Antlike, men were swarming everywhere bent upon changing, and yet they changed nothing. That was what amazed and comforted him. He knew that if he allowed five years to elapse before returning to his home town in Kansas he wouldn't recognize the place, but here everything was as he had left it, even to the men on the corners, even to the passers-by, even to the articles in the store windows. Flowers at the florist's, clothing at the haberdasher's, jewels at the jeweler's, were in their proper places, as though during the interval nothing had been sold. It made him feel as eternal as the Wandering Jew.

Several familiar landmarks were gone but he wondered if they had ever been. He did not miss them—hardly noticed any change. New buildings fitted into the old niches as perfectly as though from the first they had been ordained for those particular spots. They did not look at all the upstarts that all new buildings in Kansas did.

He hurried on to Park Row, and found himself surrounded by the very newsboys he had left. Not one of them had grown a day older. The lanky one and the lame one and the little one were there. Perhaps it was because they had always been as old as it is possible for a boy to be, that they were now no older. They were crying the same news to the same indifferent horde scurrying past them. Their noisy shouting made Galbraithe feel more than ever like a cub reporter. It was only yesterday that his head was swirling with the first mad excitement of it.

Across the street the door stood open through which he had passed so many times. Above it he saw the weatherbeaten sign which had always been weatherbeaten. The little brick building greeted him as hospitably as an open fire at home. He knew every inch of it, from the outside sill to the city room, and every inch was associated in his mind with some big success or failure. If he came back as a vagrant spirit a thousand years from now he would expect to find it just as it was. A thousand years back this spot had been foreordained for it. Lord, the rooted stability of this old city.

He had forgotten that he no longer had quarters in town, and must secure a room. He was still carrying his dress-suit case, but he couldn't resist the temptation of first looking in on the old crowd and shaking hands. He hadn't kept in touch with them except that he still read religiously every line of the old sheet, but he had recognized the work of this man and that, and knew from what he had already seen that nothing inside any more than outside could be changed. It was about nine o'clock, so he would find Hartson, the city editor, going over the rival morning papers, his keen eyes alert to discover what the night staff had missed. As he hurried up the narrow stairs his heart was as much in his mouth as it had been the first day he was taken on the staff. Several new office boys eyed him suspiciously, but he walked with such an air of familiarity that they allowed him to pass unquestioned. At the entrance to the sacred precinct of the city editor's room he paused with all his old-time hesitancy. Even after working five years for himself as a managing editor, he found he had lost nothing of his wholesome respect for Hartson. The latter's back was turned when Galbraithe entered, and he waited at the rail until the man looked up. Then with a start Galbraithe saw that this was not Hartson at all.

"I—I beg pardon," he stammered.

"Well?" demanded the stranger.

"I expected to find Mr. Hartson," explained Galbraithe.

"Hartson?"

"I used to be on the staff and—"

"Guess you're in the wrong office," the stranger shut him off abruptly.

For a moment Galbraithe believed this was possible, but every scarred bit of furniture was in its place and the dusty clutter of papers in the corner had not been disturbed. The new city editor glanced suspiciously toward Galbraithe's dress suit case and reached forward as though to press a button. With flushed cheeks Galbraithe retreated, and hurried down the corridor toward the reportorial rooms. He must find Billy Bertram and get the latter to square him with the new city editor. He made at once for Billy Bertram's desk, with hand extended. Just beyond was the desk he himself had occupied for so long. Bertram looked up and then Galbraithe saw that it was not Bertram at all.

"What can I do for you, old man?" the stranger inquired. He was a fellow of about Bertram's age, and a good deal of Bertram's stamp.

"I'm looking for Billy Bertram," stammered Galbraithe. "Guess he must have shifted his desk."

He glanced hopefully at the other desks in the room but he did not recognize a face.

"Bertram?" inquired the man who occupied Bertram's desk. He turned to the man next to him.

"Say, Green, any one here by the name of Bertram?"

Green lighted a fresh cigarette, and shook his head.

"Never heard of him," he replied indifferently.

"He used to sit here," explained Galbraithe.

"I've held down this chair fifteen months, and before me a chump by the name of Weston had that honor. Can't go back any further than that."

Galbraithe lowered his dress suit case, and wiped his forehead. Every one in the room took a suspicious glance at the bag.

"Ever hear of Sanderson?" Galbraithe inquired of Green.

"Nope."

"Ever hear of Wadlin or Jerry Donahue or Cartwright?"

Green kicked a chair toward him.

"Sit down, old man," he suggested. "You'll feel better in a minute."

"Ever hear of Hartson? Ever hear of old Jim Hartson?"

"That's all right," Green encouraged him. "If you have a line in that bag you think will interest us, bring it out. It's against office rules, but—"

Galbraithe tried to recall if, on his way downtown, he had inadvertently stopped anywhere for a cocktail. He had no recollection of so doing. Perhaps he was a victim of a mental lapse—one of those freak blank spaces of which the alienists were talking so much lately. He made one more attempt to place himself. In his day he had been one of the star reporters of the staff.

"Ever hear of—of Galbraithe?" he inquired anxiously.

By this time several men had gathered around the two desks as interested spectators. Galbraithe scanned their faces, but he didn't recognize one of them.

"Haven't got a card about your person, have you?" inquired Green.

"Why, yes," answered Galbraithe, fumbling for his case. The group watched him with some curiosity, and Harding, the youngest man, scenting a story, pushed to the front. With so many eyes upon him Galbraithe grew so confused that he couldn't find his card case.

"I'm sure I had it with me," he apologized.

"Remember where you were last night?" inquired Green.

"Just got in this morning," answered Galbraithe. "I—here it is."

He drew out a card and handed it to Green. The group gathered closer and read it.

"Harvey L. Galbraithe, Trego County Courier."

Green solemnly extended his hand.

"Glad to meet you, Mr. Galbraithe. Up here on business, or pleasure?"

"I used to work here," explained Galbraithe. "I came up on a vacation to see the boys."

"Used to work on this sheet?" exclaimed Green, as though doubting it.

"I left five years ago," answered Galbraithe.

"Holy Smoke!" exclaimed Green, with a low whistle. "You are sure some old-timer. Let's see—that's over fifteen hundred days ago. When did you come on?"

"Just before the Spanish War," answered Galbraithe eagerly. "Hartson sent me to Cuba."

Harding came closer, his eyes burning with new interest.

"Gee," he exclaimed, "those must have been great days. I ran across an old codger at the Press Club once who was with Dewey at Manila."

He spoke as Galbraithe might speak of the Crimean War. He pressed the latter for details, and Galbraithe, listening to the sound of his own voice, allowed himself to be led on. When he was through he felt toothless, and as though his hair had turned gray.

"Those were the happy days," exclaimed Harding. "The game was worth playing then—eh, old man?"

"Yes," mumbled Galbraithe. "But don't any of you know what has become of Hartson?"

"Haydon would probably remember him—"

"Haydon?" broke in Galbraithe. "Is he here?"

He looked wistfully about the room to the corner where the exchange editor used to sit.

"He died last spring," said Green. "Guess he was the last leaf on the tree."

"He came on five years ahead of me," said Galbraithe. "He and I did the barrel murders together."

"What was that story?" inquired Harding.

Galbraithe looked at Harding to make sure this was not some fool joke. At the time nothing else had been talked of in New York for a month, and he and Haydon had made something of a name for themselves for the work they did on it. Harding was both serious and interested—there could be no doubt about that.

The details were as fresh in Galbraithe's mind as though it were yesterday. But what he was just beginning to perceive was that this was so because he had been away from New York. To those living on here and still playing the old game that story had become buried, even as tradition, in the multiplicity of subsequent stories. These younger men who had superseded him and his fellows, already had their own big stories. They came every day between the dawn and the dark, and then again between the dark and the dawn. Day after day they came unceasingly, at the end of a week dozens of them, at the end of a month hundreds, at the end of a year thousands. It was fifteen hundred days ago that he had been observing the manifold complications of these million people, and since that time a thousand volumes had been written about as many tragedies enacted in the same old setting. Time here was measured in hours, not years. The stage alone remained unchanged.

Galbraithe made his feet, so dazed that he faltered as with the palsy. Harding took his arm.

"Steady, old man," he cautioned. "You'd better come out and have a drink."

Galbraithe shook his head. He felt sudden resentment at the part they were forcing upon him.

"I'm going back home," he announced.

"Come on," Harding encouraged him. "We'll drink to the old days, eh?"

"Sure," chimed in Green. The others, too, rose and sought their hats.

"I won't," replied Galbraithe, stubbornly, "I'm going back home, I tell you. And in ten years I'll be twenty-five years younger than any of you."

He spoke with some heat. Harding laughed but Green grew sober. He placed his hand on Galbraithe's arm.

"Right," he said. "Get out, and God bless you, old man."

"If only Haydon had been here—" choked Galbraithe.

"I expect he's younger than any of us," replied Green, soberly. "He's measuring time by eternities."

Galbraithe picked up his bag.

"S'long," he said.

He moved toward the door, and the entire group stood stock still and without a word watched him go out. He moved along the narrow corridor and past the city editor's room. He went down the old stairs, his shoulders bent and his legs weak. Fifteen hundred days were upon his shoulders. He made his way to the street, and for a moment stood there with his ears buzzing. About him swarmed the same newsboys he had left five years before, looking no older by a single day. Squinting his eyes, he studied them closely. There was Red Mick, but as he looked more carefully he saw that it was not Red Mick at all. It was probably Red Mick's younger brother. The tall one, the lanky one and the little lame one were there, but their names were different. The drama was the same, the setting was the same, but fifteen hundred days had brought a new set of actors to the same old parts. It was like seeing Shakespeare with a new cast, but the play was older by centuries than any of Shakespeare's.

Galbraithe hailed a taxi.

"Granderantal stashun," he ordered.

Peering out of the window, he watched the interminable procession on street and sidewalks. He gazed at the raw angular buildings—permanent and unalterable. Overhead a Kansas sun shone down upon him—the same which in its gracious bounty shone down upon New York.

DISHES[7]

By AGNES MARY BROWNELL

From The Pictorial Review

"Well, I guess that's the last of that!" Myra Bray said grimly, and blinked at the smashed fragments of the cup.

It had been so fragile, that even the sound of its breaking was thin and evanescent like a note blown, not struck. Now as it lay on the floor, it seemed dwindled to nothing more than the fine gilt stem that had been its handle, and irregular pinkish fragments like fallen petals.

"Myry Bray! Butterfingers!" Myra apostrophized herself, and darted a quick, sidelong glance in the direction of old Mrs. Bray, her mother-in-law.

It had been old Mrs. Bray's cup. This was old Mrs. Bray's house. When Myra married Marvin Bray it had been with the understanding that they must make their home with his mother, now that Nellie was gone.

Old Mrs. Bray said nothing. The pink cup had belonged to Nellie; Marvin's had been blue. They had been old-time Christmas gifts; and they had never been used. They were too fine to use. All those years they had stood side by side on an upper shelf of the safe, along with the majolica pickle-dish, the cracker-jar that Abbie Carter had painted in a design of wheat-heads, the lemonade-set that George's wife had presented upon the occasion of a visit, and a collection of little china souvenirs—trays and miniature pitchers with "Souvenir of the Springs" inscribed upon them.

"At least the saucer's safe," ventured Myra, after a pause. She had only just come to live with old Mrs. Bray. She wondered how she would take it. "Well—might's well sweep up the muss!"

Old Mrs. Bray spoke. Myra thought she detected a quiver in her voice:

"Pick 'em up," her mother-in-law directed, "and put 'em here in my apron." Myra obeyed. Old Mrs. Bray gathered up her apron and went away to her room. She did not emerge till nearly supper-time.

Once Myra had gone to her door. It was inhospitably closed. Myra thought she detected a faint chinking sound. "Now I wonder"—thought Myra—"is she agrievin' or asulkin'? I'd ruther it was asulkin'—an old pink chiny cup! I'd buy her another, only I s'pose it wouldn't make it up to her—Nellie's and all. Mebbe if I hurried and put off my waist, I could finish up her challis. She don't need the challis, and I do the waist. But mebbe it might take her mind off—losin' Nellie and then losin' the cup. I expect that come hard to Mother Bray."

Myra smoothed her hair and put on a fresh afternoon percale. To see Myra with her thin brown face, her slicked-back black hair which showed white threads like ravellings, in her afternoon house-dress of gray percale, one would never have taken her for a bride. Yet Myra had a very bridal feeling, sitting in her own home, with her own sewing, instead of running the machine in the shop, as she had done before her marriage. That it was, in reality, her husband's mother's home, and her husband's mother's sewing, scarcely altered the case. It was home, not shop. She had been married in August, when work fell slack. Now it was October. She had not broken anything until to-day.

Myra sewed and rocked and looked up at the framed portraits of Marvin and Nellie and Frank as children—the girl in queer plaid, and a locket; the boys in gilt-braided suits. Old and crude as the drawing was, it had a look of them—that steady, serious look of Marvin which he had never lost, and Nellie's—bold and managerial. Frank had died. Poor mother. She had known trouble.

At five, old Mrs. Bray came stiffly out. She had a curious, secretive air, not in the least mournful nor accusative, as Myra had feared. Myra held up the dress—a soft, gray challis with lavender pipings. Old Mrs. Bray's eyes widened like a pleased child's.

"Want to try it on?" suggested Myra.

"It ain't done!"

"To the last hook." She began to assist her mother into the new dress.

Mrs. Bray was a pretty old woman. There was about her an effect of fragile bloom like that of her old cup. In her gray-and-lavender she was like a quaint pastel.

"There!" cried Myra, standing off to view the effect.

"I ain't agoin' to take it off!" declared old Mrs. Bray suddenly; and waited for the remonstrance.

Nellie had always said: "Why, mother! Of course you'll take it off right away! Wear your good clothes out at home!"

To her surprise, Myra assented. "Keep it on, and let Marvin see how fine you look."

"Wun't you need me about supper?"

"Now you just set and let me get supper alone to-night."

"I'll set the table," decided old Mrs. Bray. "I guess just laying plates won't hurt it none."

Myra set about her biscuits. Marvin had to have his hot bread. Suddenly she heard a little splintering crash, followed by a whimpering wail—"Myry! Oh, Myry! I've broke the sasser!" The last remnants of Nellie's saucer, with their pink, fluted edges like ravished petals, lay spread out at old Mrs. Bray's feet.

"Now ain't that just too bad! (I s'pose she was touching it, for old times' sake—and her trembly old fingers and all, she let it slip.) Never mind, Mother; you got the blue one yet. And mebbe that saucer can be mended—"

Her mother with a jealous sweep of old hands, gathered up the fragments of the broken saucer. "I don't want mended dishes," she said resentfully, and went stiffly away to her room.

That night, when they were alone, Myra told Marvin about Nellie's cup and saucer. "And I just know she's akeeping of the pieces, and amourning over them," she finished. "Such things get to have associations. I 'most wish it had been your cup that got broke. She's got you, and Nellie's gone."

"Gone—what's a hundred miles!"

"I'm afraid she misses Nell."

"Now don't you go getting notions in your head. Nell was a master hand for work, but she didn't keep things up a mite better than you—not so good, to my notion. You're restfuller. Nell couldn't rest herself nor let anybody else. Nell couldn't atouched them biscuit—fact!"

"I try to keep things up as much like Nell as I can. I'd ruther use white table-cloths myself, but Nell always used the checkered. And my own chiny set the folks gave me—but I know Mother'd feel strange without her old white ones. There's lots of pretty chiny in the safe, but Nell always used it so careful. I've never used a piece. And yet, just adustin' that pink cup I had to go and drop it! I don't s'pose it was ever drunk out of."

"What's the good," argued Marvin, "of having things too fine to use?"

"You and me, Marvin, think the same about them things. But Nell and Mother—they're different."

"You're a good woman, Myry."

It pleased Myra to be told that she was good, and that her biscuits surpassed those of the capable Nell. But such compliments, for all their practicality and worth, sent no flush to her sallow cheek.

In her woman's magazine, which came to her monthly, lovers (and more rarely, husbands) were always breathing into the heroine's ear, "I love you. How beautiful you are!" or sentiments in that tenor. Marvin had not told her he loved her. He had asked her seriously and respectfully to marry him, when it became apparent that the efficient Nell was about to wed. And he had never told her that she was beautiful. She could not have believed him if he had.

Two days after the accident to the pink cup, the majolica pickle-dish was found shattered in front of the safe, when Marvin came out to start the kitchen fire. No one could account for its being there. The safe doors were ajar, and they decided that the majolica dish must have got pushed too near the edge of the shelf, and that a sudden jar had dislodged it. The safe doors were never remembered to have been left open before; the majolica dish had always sat well back; and nothing more jarring than Marvin's step disturbed the habitual quiet of the house. Still, how else account for it? "Mebbe Tom leaped up and done it," suggested old Mrs. Bray. The sleepy Tom, a handsome Tiger-stripe, sunk in bodily comfort, seemed to eye her reproachfully. He had not leaped in years.

Old Mrs. Bray carried away with her the fragments of the majolica pickle-dish and that afternoon, and other afternoons, she passed in the solitary privacy of her room.

Still her retirement seemed to work her no ill. From these solitary vigils she always emerged dressed in her gray-and-lavender. Ordinarily the ladies Bray wore percale on week day afternoons—fresh ones, but prints for all that. That had been Nell's way. Although old Mrs. Bray had a closet hung with good wool dresses, and even one festival silk.

Myra's trousseau had been so simple as scarcely to deserve the name. She had been married in a neat, dark suit, turned out in the shop where she had been employed for more than seven years. Myra had been "on skirts" for most of the seven years; and her dress had been almost a uniform—skirt and blouse. But she had secretly sewed for herself another sort of dress—house-dresses for the afternoon, of inexpensive, but delicate and light-colored fabrics, made a little "fussy." These she never wore. Old Mrs. Bray never wore fussy clothes; and it had not been Nell's way. The gray-and-lavender challis had been in the nature of an experiment. Old Mrs. Bray was plainly pleased; but she rarely wore it. She said it would make it common.

So the Brays, as in Nellie's régime, continued to wear the common gray percales, and to eat off the common white crockery. And with a strange, bewitched pertinacity, the fine, decorative bits of china, shut away on their upper shelf in the safe continued to get themselves broken.

Once it was one of the glasses of George's wife's lemonade-set. These glasses had ornate gilt bands about the brim, and painted flowers upon the side. Taking down the set one day, to show George's wife's gift to a caller (gifts were never gifts in fee simple in the Bray household. Always part possession seemed vested in the donor) old Mrs. Bray let slip one of the glasses. The fragments lay in a path of sun, struck through and through with light, they seemed to possess a strange, new iridescence.

"Now ain't that too bad!" sympathized the caller. "Spoils the whole set. You want to get every bit of that glass up and in the ash-can. Glass is awful to grind in."

Old Mrs. Bray gathered up the pieces. They sent out strange gleams like rude gems. Myra and the caller watched sympathetically the eager abruptness of her departure.

"Your mother-in-law is some shaky," observed the caller. "She hadn't ought to go to handle such delicate things."

"I expect she won't come out again," Myra said. "It always makes Mother feel bad to break things."

Old Mrs. Bray did not come out again till after the caller had departed. She had on her gray-and-lavender dress. "Always when Mother breaks a dish seems like she goes and puts on her gray-and-lavender," thought Myra; but she only said, "You look nice in that dress, Mother."

"I know I do," returned old Mrs. Bray serenely, "but I don't aim to make it common, Myry."

At holiday time, Nell and her husband came for a visit. Nell immediately proceeded to take the reins of government. She was a big, good-looking woman, younger than Myra. She had a large, well-modeled face with bloomy cheeks, golden brown eyes, fringed thick as daisies, and crisply undulating waves of dark hair. She disposed of their greetings in short order, retired to her old room to change into serviceable work things, and issued her ultimatum.

"Now don't go to any fuss, Myry. John and me ain't company. Treat us like the family. You've changed the roaster, ain't you, Myry? This ain't near so good a place for it. I've brought you one of my hens, Mother—all dressed and ready. We'll have it for dinner. Now Myry, don't you go to getting out a white table-cloth. Get one of them red-checkered ones. I s'pose those are your weddin' dishes—well, leave 'em be, now you got them down. But we won't use 'em common—the old white ones is plenty good enough. Folks that use their best every day has got no best. You might get the potatoes on now, Myry."

"Let me finish settin' the table, Myry," pleaded old Mrs. Bray. A moment later there was a crash, "Oh, Nellie! Oh, Myry! I didn't go to do it! My arm breshed it."

"Marvin's souvenir pitcher his Aunt Mat give him one Fair time! It must a' be'n fifteen year old!"

"I didn't go to do it!" quavered old Mrs. Bray.

"Who ever heard of such a thing? Of course you didn't do no such crazy thing! But that don't save its being broke. Here—let me sweep it up."

"Don't you sweep them pieces up!" shrilled her mother.

This voice of high command on the part of her little old subservient mother gave Nell pause. She stood, dust-pan in hand, looking down upon that stiffly stooping figure garnering into her gathered apron a little heap of splintered china.

"Mother must be getting childish," Nell said to Myra, when old Mrs. Bray had trotted stiffly away with her spoils.

Myra did not reply. She hoped Nell would not discover that ravished shelf of prized old china.

"Well—Nell got ye in hand?" inquired Nell's husband, John Peebles, at dinner. The good-natured wink which accompanied the words, the hearty voice and friendly manner, robbed the words of offense. They seemed rather a humorous gibe directed against Nell. These two got along excellently well. There was about John Peebles an effect of tender strength, re-assuring and at the same time illuminating—responsive to weakness, but adamant to imposition. Even the managerial Nell had not succeeded in piercing that armored side of him—his 'thus far and no further.'"

"Aw—you!" said Nell, adoringly.

"I bet Nell's met her boss!" grinned Marvin. "He don't go so fur as to beat ye, does he, Nell?"

"Smarty!" returned Nell. Her eyes crinkled up at the corners. She had met her match, and she knew it and gloried in it. But she didn't want any sass from the family.

She had none. They submitted without demur. The dish-pan sunned in the old place. The towels dried along a line of her own stretching. "John and me don't mean to make you any work," she assured them. They made no work. It seemed there had never been so much leisure.

"Myry," inquired Nell, "where's that other glass that goes with George's wife's lemonade-set?"

"Oh, it must be 'round som'ers," Myra returned vaguely.

"Round som'ers! Why ain't they all together?" Nell prodded in further search.

"Where's my pink gilt cup and saucer Aunt Em gimme one Christmas?"

"Ain't it there?" ventured Myra, with a cowardly shrinking from confession, not so much on her own account as for old Mrs. Bray. There was the majolica pickle-dish, the gilt, beflowered lemonade-glass, Abbie Carter's cracker-jar, certain of the fragile souvenir pin-trays stacked in a corner of the shelf.

"Here's Marvin's blue one. It's funny where them things can be. I always kept them here together, on this shelf."

"They're som'ers," Myra repeated vaguely.

Old Mrs. Bray had sat throughout this conversation, making buttonholes in a new gray percale. Once, when Nell was back at the sink, she reached out a wavering, fat old arm, and gave Myra's apron-string a tug, as a bad child pulls a cat's tail in a sort of impish humor. Her eyes, blue and shining as a child's saucer, looked very wise. A little laugh clucked in her throat.

"Mother—you feel chilly? You want to keep out of drafts," cautioned Nellie from the sink.

"Never felt more chipper!" averred old Mrs. Bray.

She had not spent an afternoon in her room since Nell's arrival. To-day, however, after dinner, she withdrew with an air of intending to remain there for some time. She took her buttonholes with her. It was likely that Nell could not content herself until she had searched every cupboard and pantry for the missing treasure.

"I declare—it is the beatin'est thing! Whatever can have become of them?" she apprized Myra. "You find much time to read, Myry?"

Myra found time to read her woman's magazine from cover to cover, in the course of the month. Some things she read more than once—those frankly impossible stories in which the heroines were always beautiful and always loved. Myra had never known a heroine; the women of her acquaintance were neither beautiful nor adored; and were probably quite comfortably unaware of this lack.

"I'm getting notional," Myra accused herself fearfully. The Family Doctor Book, a learned and ancient tome, confirmed these suspicions. It treated of this, and related matters, with a large assurance, like a trusty confidant.

"Funny how long Mother stays in her room!" wondered Nell.

"Mebbe she's fell asleep. Old people need all the sleep they can get. It's mostly so broken."

"I'm agoing to see!" deposed Nell.

Myra had never invaded that withdrawn privacy. But Nell, with her grenadier step, went swiftly and threw open the door.

"What on earth! Mother!"

Old Mrs. Bray's voice streamed quavering out, "Oh, Nellie! Don't scold me! Myry!—"

Somehow Myra was there—past the affronted Nell in the door. In the instant silence they made a strange tableau.

Old Mrs. Bray in her fine gray-and-lavender gown was seated before her little wash-hand-stand. The floral pitcher in its floral bowl had been set to one side on the floor. What covered the towel-protected top of the stand, was Nellie's looted treasure.

There were the fragments of the pink cup and saucer; the leaf-green and brown majolica bits that had been the pickle-dish; the iridescent curved sides of George's wife's lemonade-glass; Aunt Em's shattered souvenir pitcher; Abbie Carter's cracker-jar with its smashed wheat-heads. Myra only looked bewilderedly; but on Nell's gaping face apprehension succeeded stupefaction and dissolved in its turn into a great brimming tenderness.

"Scold you, Mother? Oh, Mother—what must you think me! (Oh, poor Mother—poor Mother—she's gone daft!)"

"I always admired pretty broken bits of chiny," old Mrs. Bray confessed. "But the pitcher was a accident—reely it was, Nellie. I never went to let that fall. My arm breshed it. But the sasser and the pickle-dish and George's wife's lemonade-glass and Abbie Carter's cracker-jar—I done them apurpose. And I can't say I regret the pitcher, nuther."

"Yes, Mother! Yes, yes! It's all right; I understand. (Myry, don't you leave her! I thought she was gettin' childish, but Oh—to think—I'll have John go for Doc Bradley right away. Let 'er amuse herself—but don't you leave her alone a minute! Poor Mother! Poor old Mother! Aplayin' with broken chiny dishes!)"

"What's Nell awhisperin' to ye?" inquired old Mrs. Bray, sharply. "There's nothin' to whisper about as I know. Did ever you see anything purtier than this pink chiny piece, Myry? It broke so clean, and curved as a petal. And this here piece of George's wife's lemonade-glass—it's handsome as a brooch. See how the flower come out! Why, Myry, I've set here and fairly eat off these dishes!"

"Yes, Mother. But sha'n't we put them up now! Some one might drop in—Nell bein' here."

She could not bear that Marvin and John and the doctor should see this pitiful child's play.

Old Mrs. Bray assented with the utmost good nature. She drew up a box of lacquer and proceeded to lay her china service carefully and dextrously away. She set the box quite openly along the shelf beside her bonnet-box and the snug, little brown round pasteboard roll that held her little old round muff. Presently they heard steps in the sitting-room. Some one had dropped in—but it was only Marvin and John and old Doc Bradley.

Marvin's face held a look of scared apprehension; John's withheld judgment; Nell was frankly red-eyed. She had been walking fiercely back and forth in the yard unable to face again that piteous picture.

The only unclouded faces there were Doc Bradley's and old Mrs. Bray's. She gave him a shrewd look. He returned it in kind. "So—o—" said old Mrs. Bray, noting their various scrutiny. There was even an effect of state about her as she settled herself in her special rocker. But she said, quite simply and conversationally,

"Do you want I should tell you about them dishes?"

"Well—it was thisaway. And understand—I don't blame nobuddy. Folks are different. I always loved pretty dishes, but I never got to use 'em. First on account of you being little"—she eyed Nellie and Marvin with benignant allowance—"and after that, because of Nell always bein' agen' using things common. She's like her father. He was thataway. He was a good man, but he 'lowed good things shouldn't be used common. And then when Myry come with her purty weddin' dishes and all, I'd hoped she'd be sort o' different—more like me. But seem like she favored Nell. But I'd never thought of breakin' them if it hadn't a be'n for the pink cup. That give me the idee. That very night I broke the sasser to it. I figured I'd get the use of them dishes some way."

Old Mrs. Bray clucked pleasantly, and resumed.

"I'd always wanted to wear one o' my good dresses afternoons, too. Well—Myry made me one. And she was reel good about wantin' me to wear it common. I had a good man. I've had good children. I've lived a long life. But two things I wanted, I never had—pretty dishes to use, and to be dressed up afternoons. Myry makin' me that dress turned my head, I reckon. And the pink cup finished it."

"I take the full blame. It was me done both—broke the cup and sewed the dress"—spoke up Myry. "And it's you I favored all along, Mother. If you knew how I've honed to set the table with my weddin' dishes. And I could show you—I've got some things you've never seen—house-dresses—pink—sprigged—"

"Meanin' no offense, Nellie—and Marvin—you can't help bein' like your pa. I guess I'm just a foolish old woman."

"We're all like we're made," sounded the oracular accents of Mr. Peebles. "Joke's on you all right, Nell."

"I guess I'm it," she admitted cheerfully.

Doc Bradley looked sharply at Myra when she let him out. Perhaps he noted the pathos of that thin face; those speaking eyes, that seemed to confess a secret longing.

"If you should feel the call, just break a few dishes on your own account!" he advised her. "I like to see folks get what they want. If they want it bad enough, they'll get it." He thought it might be a dress, perhaps—something pretty. Women in Myry's case have odd notions.

Myry had an odd notion. She wanted to be told that she was beautiful and loved.

"You little black stringy thing!" she told herself fiercely. "He's fond of you. And good to you. He's like his pa; he won't show it common. And anyways—you beautiful!"

But every month she read, with a new and avid interest, those far-fetched, extravagant tales of beautiful and beloved women.

During the remainder of Nell's stay, old Mrs. Bray and Myra felt a certain delicacy about inaugurating the use of the white cloths, the wedding china, and the pretty bits on the safe-shelf. But when the Peebles's visit was over, the table achieved a patterned whiteness and a general festive appearance. Old Mrs. Bray donned the gray-and-lavender every afternoon, and Myra bloomed out in pink print. She scarcely ever went abroad now, but for all that, her world was infinitely widened. Once Marvin, dangling from two spread fingers a tiny yoke, inquired doubtfully, "Do you think it's big enough to go round his neck?"

He was always urging her to have help in, and not to tire herself out. But curiously, he never noted the pink print any more than if it had been dull slate. That had not been his pa's way; and it was not his way. But he was good to her. What more could a woman ask?

After Nell came, he felt aggrieved—quite useless and in the way. The women were always displaying things—digging them out from the bottoms of drawers—clouds of soft, white things, with here and there a rift of color in tassel or tufting.

There came a night when he sat alone. In the beginning, he had tried to read—he picked up her woman's magazine, eyeing it curiously, that these silly, floppy sheets should hold, as they did, women's eyes. There were pictures in it—always pictures—pictured embraces, with words beneath. "How beautiful you are! I love you—I love you! How beautiful you are!" Always harping on the same thing—love and beauty. As if life were a sentimental thing like that!

He flung it down. How could he stay his mind on such stuff, when Myry—when Myry—

Nell, important and managerial, occasionally came out and elbowed him about in some mysterious search. At such times, old Mrs. Bray, done up for the night in a highly flowered and mantle-like garment, came creeping inquiringly in.

"Now, Nell—you know what Myry told ye—if you was to fergit now—"

"All right, Mother. I won't forget."

"You know where to find 'em—"

"Yes, I know where to find 'em."

"Now, Nell, I promised Myry—"

"What did you promise Myry?" Marvin flared in sudden jealousy. Both women eyed him, as from a great and unattainable height. Then Nell's capable back disappeared beyond Myry's door; and his mother's little old grotesque and woolly figure was swallowed up by the black hall.

Again he took up the magazine. Again looked at the picture. Again, scarcely seeing them, he read the words. Again he sat; and again Nell elbowed him importantly, and his mother in her snail-like wrappings, came creeping in to remind Nell—

When Doc Bradley came out, at first he thought the man, sprawled loosely in the chair, must be asleep—till he lifted his eyes. They were sleepless and inflamed like a watch-dog's.

"Hold on! Wait a minute! Nell's boss now. You don't want to go in looking that way—you'd skeer 'im!"

"What'll I say?" inquired Marvin hoarsely; "Myry's a good woman—she 's been a good wife to me—too good—"

"Tell 'er something she don't know! Say something fond-like and foolish."

"You can come in now," granted the lofty Nell.

Somehow, old Mrs. Bray had preceded him. But he never saw her. He never even saw the managerial Nell. He saw his wife's face, looking so little and white from out a ruffled lace cap. There were circles of ruffles about her thin wrists. There was a lace ruffle in the neck of her gown. For these were Myry's coronation robes; it was about this adorning that old Mrs. Bray had continuously cautioned Nell. Nell, in that smug, proprietary manner of hers, had turned back a blanket—enough to show the tiny yoke which he had dangled, and the neck which it encircled, and the red and wrinkly head on top of that—-

Like a well-conned article of catechism, words came to Marvin—words he could never have got from his pa.

"Oh, Myry—I love you! How beautiful you are!"

A strange cosmetic glowed on Myra's white cheek. Happiness is the surest beautifier. He might never say it again. It was not likely that he would. He favored his pa. But she had had her great moment—her beautiful and beloved moment. She smiled drowsily up at old Mrs. Bray, beaming beneficently above; and remembered, in an odd flash, the pink china cup. This was her cup—full and running over.

"Come on out now, and let her sleep," ordered the dictatorial Nell. "Who'd a' thought, now, Myry had her little vanities? That lace cap now, and them ruffles—for Marvin! Some folks has the strangest notions."

"'Tain't notions!" protested old Mrs. Bray.

"Oh, yes, it is! And all right, if you feel that way—like you and your dishes, now."

"Myry and me both is powerful set on dishes," exulted old Mrs. Bray.

THE BLOOD-RED ONE[8]

By MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT

From Scribner's Magazine

It was a February evening, so it seems, about five o'clock, and old Mr. Vandusen, having left his hat and ulster in the coatroom, had retraced his steps along the entrance hall of the St. Dunstan Club to the wide doorway that led into the first-floor library. He usually sought the library at this time of day; a little group of men, all of whom he knew well, were as a rule to be found there, and they were friendly, not overly argumentative, restful. Now he paused between the heavy portières, partly drawn aside, and peered for a moment into the room. The light from the hall behind him made a pool of faint illumination at his feet, but beyond that there was only a brown darkness, scented with the smell of books in leather bindings, in which the figures of several men, sprawled out in big chairs before the window, were faintly visible. The window itself, a square of blank fog-blurred dusk, served merely to heighten the obscurity. Mr. Vandusen, a small, plump shadow in the surrounding shadows, found an unoccupied chair and sank into it silently.

"And that's just it," said Maury suddenly, and as if he was picking up the threads of a conversation dropped but a moment before; "and that's just the point"—and his usually gentle voice was heavy with a didacticism unlike itself—"that affects most deeply a man of my temperament and generation. Nemesis—fate—whatever you choose to call it. The fear that perhaps it doesn't exist at all. That there is no such thing; or worse yet, that in some strange, monstrous way man has made himself master of it—has no longer to fear it. And man isn't fit to be altogether master of anything as yet; he's still too much half devil, half ape. There's this damned choked feeling that the world's at loose ends. I don't know how to put it—as if, that is, we, with all the devilish new knowledge we've acquired within the past fifty years, the devilish new machines we've invented, have all at once become stronger than God; taken the final power out of the hands of the authority, whatever it is, toward which we used to look for a reckoning and balancing in the end, no matter what agony might lie between. Perhaps it's all right—I don't know. But it's an upsetting conclusion to ask a man of my generation offhandedly to accept. I was brought up—we all were—to believe in an ordered, if obscure, philosophical doctrine that evil inevitably finds its own punishment, and now—!"

"But—" began Tomlinson.

Maury interrupted him. "Yes, yes," he said, "I know all that; I know what you are going to say. I am perfectly aware of the fact that the ways of Nemesis are supposed to be slow ways—exceedingly. I am aware of the fact that in the Christian doctrine the process is not usually completed until after death, but nowadays things are different. How, since all else moves so swiftly, can a just God afford any longer to be patient? Time has been obliterated in the last four years; space and centuries telescoped; the sufferings of a century compressed into a few cycles of months. No, there is something wrong, some break in the rhythm of the universe, or those grotesque ghouls who started the whole thing, those full-bodied, cold-blooded hangmen, who for forty years have been sitting back planning the future of men and women as they planned the cards of their sniggering skat games, would awake to a sun dripping blood." He paused for a moment. "And as for that psychiatric cripple, their mouthpiece," he concluded sombrely, "that maimed man who broods over battle-fields, he would find a creeping horror in his brain like death made visible."

"And you think he will not?"....

In the darkness Mr. Vandusen suddenly sat up very straight and tried to pierce with his eyes the shadows to the right of him.

Again the chair creaked.

"And you think he will not?" asked the voice again.

The words fell one by one into the silence, like stones dropped into a pool by a precise hand. As the ripples of sound they created died away in the brown dusk, the room seemed for a moment to hold a hushed expectation that made ordinary quiet a matter of movement and sound. From the drab street outside the voice of a newsboy, strident and insistent, put a further edge to the sharp minute. "N'extra!" he shouted. "N'extra! 'Nother big raid on west'n front!"

It was Torrance who asked the question. "What—" he said. "But, but—why—!" And then his wheezing inarticulateness broke like a dislocated bellows.

Mr. Vandusen, leaning forward in his chair, did not realize at the time the unreasonableness of the sharp blaze of irritation that at the interruption burned within him. It was not until much later, indeed, that he realized other odd circumstances as well: Torrance's broken amazement, for instance; the silence of Maury, and Wheeler, and, above all, of Tomlinson. At the moment he realized nothing, except an intense curiosity to hear what the man who had just sat down next to him had to say. "An extraordinary voice! Altogether extraordinary! Like a bell, that is, if a bell could by any chance give a sense of an underlying humor." And yet, even considering all this, when one is old and has heard so many voices—But here he was quite rigid in the darkness. "Do be quiet!" he whispered sharply. "Can't we be quiet!"

"Thanks!" said the voice, with its cool, assured inflections. "There is nothing so very extraordinary. Men's brains are not unalike. Merely—shall I go on?"

And before Mr. Vandusen's hurried assent could be uttered, the quiet tones assumed the accent of narration. "Good," they said. "Very well, then. But first I must ask of you a large use of your imagination. I must ask you, for instance, to imagine a scene so utterly unlike this February night that your eyes will have to close themselves entirely to the present and open only to my words. I must ask you to imagine a beech forest in early November; a beech forest dreaming beneath the still magic of warm, hazy days; days that come before the first sharp cold of winter. Will you imagine that?"

"Yes!" murmured Mr. Vandusen; and he noticed that the other men did not answer at all.

"The mild sunlight," continued the voice, "filters through the naked boughs and touches the smooth silver trunks and the moss about their feet with a misty gold as iridescent as the wings of dragonflies. And as far as you can see on every side stretch these silver boles, dusted with sunlight; in straight lines, in oblique columns, until the eye loses itself in the argent shadows of the distance.

"In the hidden open places, where the grass is still green toward its roots, wild swine come out of the woods and stare with small red eyes; but save for the crackling of the twigs beneath their feet it is very quiet. Marvellously so. Quiet with the final hush of summer. Only rarely a breeze stirs the legions of the heaped-up gray leaves, and sometimes, but rarely, one hears far off the chattering of a squirrel. So!—that is my forest.

"Through it runs like a purple ribbon a smooth, well-kept road. And it, too, adds to the impression of stillness, as the untenanted handiwork of man always does. On the rolled, damp surface are the marks of the cloven feet of the swine.

"Now there is a snapping of dead wood, a rustling of leaves, and an immense tusker—a grizzled leader of a herd—comes ponderously through the sun-dappled aisles to the edge of the road. For a moment he stands there, secure and unperturbed, and then suddenly he throws up his head, his little eyes wide and startled, and, wheeling, charges back to where his satellites are browsing. There is a breathless scurrying of huge bodies; then utter silence again, except that far away a limb cracks. But only for a moment is the road deserted. It seems as if the shadow of the great tusker was still upon it when, beyond the bend, a horn, sweet as a hunting-horn, blows once, twice, ends in a fanfare of treble notes, and a long, gray motor-car sweeps into view, cutting the sunlight and the pooled shadow with its twinkling prow. Behind it is another, and another, and another, until six in all are in sight; and as they flash past one has a glimpse, on the seats of the landaulets, of a number of men in long cloaks and helmets; big and little men; fat men and sharp-featured; elderly men and young men, and particularly of one man, in the second car from the front, who looks straight ahead of him and is not interested in the chatter of his companions. He is a stern man, rather terrible, and his face wears a curious pallor. On the crest of a wooded slope, a quarter of a mile away, the giant boar sniffs the odor of the gasolene and delicately wrinkles his nose.

"And this," said the voice, "this convoy of motor-cars, these horns, almost as gay as the hunting-horns of former days, was, as you have guessed, The Maimed Man—as you choose to call him—come back to a hunting-lodge to rest, to slip from his shoulders for a while, if he could, the sodden cloak he had been wearing for the past three years and as many months.

"It was dark when they came to the hunting-lodge, a long, two-storied building of white plaster and timber-work above. The sun had been gone a while beyond the low hills to the west, and in the open place where the house stood only a remnant of the red dust of the sunset still floated in the pellucid air. Here the beeches gave way to solid ranks of pines and firs, and the evening sweetness of these fell upon the senses like the touch of cool water upon tired eyes. The headlights of the motor-cars cut wide arcs of blinding light in the gathering darkness. One by one the cars stopped before the entrance with throbbing engines and discharged their loads. The short flight of stairs became for a few minutes a swaying tableau of gray cloaks. There was a subdued ringing of spurs. The lamps from within the doorway touched the tips of the helmets so that they twinkled like little stars.

"The Maimed Man descended slowly and passed between his waiting suite. The scent of the pines had stirred his heart with memories. He was thinking of the last time he had been here, years before—well, not really so many years before, only four years, and yet it seemed like a recollection of his boyhood. He paused inside the threshold to remove his cloak. A hand, with a curious lack of duplication to it, stretched itself forward. The Maimed Man turned abruptly to see a servant with one arm bowing toward him. For a moment he paused, and then:

"'You are wounded?' he asked, and, although nothing was further from his desire, his voice had in it a little rasping sound; anger it seemed, although it might very well have been fear.

"The man turned a brick-red. He had never quite been able to recover from the feeling that in some way to be crippled was a shameful thing. He had been very strong before.

"'At Liège, your Majesty,' he murmured. 'In the first year.'

"'Always the left arm,' said The Maimed Man. 'Always the left. It seems always so.' But now he was angry. He turned to one of his suite. 'Can I not escape such things even here?' he asked. He went up without further words to his rooms. From his study a long door of glass opened onto a balcony. He remembered the balcony well. He opened the door and stepped out. The twilight had gone now. The night was very still and touched with a hint of crispness. Stars were beginning to show themselves. The black pines that came down to the edge of the clearing were like a great hidden army."

There was a little pause.

"And so," said the voice, "I can come now almost at once to the first of the two incidents I wish to tell you. I choose only two because there is no need of more. Two will do. And I shall call the first 'The story of the leaves that marched.'

"The warm days still held, and at the hunting-lodge there was much planning to keep things moving and every one busy and content. But secret planning, you understand. The Maimed Man is not an easy person for whom to plan unless he thinks that he has the final decision himself. There were rides and drives and picnics and, in the afternoons, usually a long walk, in which the older and stouter members of the suite either stayed at home or else followed painfully in the rear of their more active companions. The Maimed Man is a difficult person to keep up with; he walks very fast across country, swinging his stick, choosing, it would seem, the roughest ways. It is almost as if he wished to rid himself of others; and he is inordinately proud of his own activity. It was a curious sight to see his straggling attendants, spread out through the silver vistas of the beeches, like earnest trolls, all in one way or another bent upon a common end. And I suppose it was on account of this trick of The Maimed Man that one afternoon, toward dusk, he found himself almost completely alone, save for myself, who managed somehow to keep step, and a silent huntsman in gray who strode on ahead with the quiet, alert step of a wild animal.

"It was very still. There was no breeze at all. Not a sound except the sound of the dead leaves beneath our feet; and The Maimed Man was not, as was his usual wont, talking. Indeed, he seemed very preoccupied, almost morosely so. Every now and then he cut with his stick at a bush or a yellowed fern as he passed. Presently the trees opened upon a little glade swimming in sunlight. And then there was a brook to cross, and beyond that a gentle slope before the trees began again. The sunlight was pleasantly warm after the coolness of the forest, and the slope, with its soft dried grass, seemed an inviting place to rest. The Maimed Man continued until he had reached the farther belt of trees, and then he turned about and faced the sinking sun, that by now was changing itself into a nebulous radiance on the horizon. The forest stretched in gentle billows as far as the eye could see.

"'We will stop here,' said The Maimed Man, 'until the others catch up. Lazy-bones! If they had one-half the work to do that my poorest man has to the south they would not lose their legs so readily.' Then he sat down and lit a cigarette. I sat beside him. Farther up on the slope, in the shadow of the trees, sat the huntsman. We waited. The sun burned away its quivering aura and began to sink blood-red below the hills. Long shadows fell, penetrated with the dancing flecks of twilight.

"'Here they come!' said The Maimed Man suddenly. 'I see gray moving. There—below there, amongst the trees!' He pointed with his cane. Far back in the secret aisles of the forest across the brook there did indeed seem to be a movement. The Maimed Man half arose to his feet. 'I will shame them, the lazy-bones,' he said, and then he sat down again, with an odd, soft collapse.

"For, you see, it was very still, as I have said. Not a trace of wind. The forest seemed to be slumbering. And yet there had come out of it, and across the open place, and up the slope, so that it touched the hair and chilled the cheek, something that was not wind and yet was like it. A little clammy cat's-paw. So! And then was gone. And on its heels came the leaves. Yes, millions of them. But not blown; not hurriedly. Very hesitatingly; as if by their own volition. One might have said that they oozed with a monstrous slowness out from between the crepuscular tree-trunks and across the open space toward the brook. Gray leaves, creeping forward with a curious dogged languor. And when they came to the brook they paused on its farther edge and stopped, and the ones behind came pushing up to them. And looking down upon them, they might have been the backs of wounded men in gray, dragging themselves on their knees to water....

"I don't know how long this moment lasted—minutes perhaps; perhaps no longer than the drawing in and letting out of a breath. It was broken by the figure of a man—an upstanding man, this time—who stepped out of the forest opposite and, halting for a moment on the edge of the clearing, looked up to where The Maimed Man was sitting. Then he signalled to some one behind him, and presently one by one the figures of the belated suite appeared. They formed themselves in a little group and with some precision marched across the clearing. As they trampled upon the stricken leaves by the brookside the fixed stare in The Maimed Man's eyes faded, and he watched them with a rigid attention. Shortly they came to where he had got to his feet. A huge elderly man with a red face led them.

"'But your Majesty,' he objected, 'it is not fitting. You should not leave us in this way. Even here, is it altogether safe?'

"The Maimed Man did not answer. Covertly and with a sly shamefacedness, unlike himself, he was trying to read the expression in the huntsman's face. But that faithful fellow's eyes were bland. There was no sign that he had seen anything out of the ordinary....

"There is no need," said the voice, "for delay. From this to the second incident I would describe to you is only a step. I shall not go into details. For these I can safely trust to your imaginations. And yet I would not, of course, have you gather that what I have just told you is without background—was out of a clear sky. Naturally, it was not; it was a cumulation, an apex. Such things do not happen altogether suddenly. There is a nibbling away at the banks, a little rivulet here and there, and then, all at once, a torrent like a hunted river under the moon. I called the first apex 'The story of the leaves that marched'; I shall call the second 'The mist that came up suddenly.'

"Two weeks had passed; quiet days, slow weeks, quiet and slow as the sunlight through the trees. The two doctors at the hunting-lodge, round, sharp-spoken men, with big, near-sighted spectacles, rubbed their hands together and nodded with certainty when they held their daily consultations. 'He is improving rapidly,' they said. 'The lines in his face are going. A little more exercise, a little more diversion—so!' They imagined crosses on their chests.

"Have you ever known mist on a moonlight night in a forest? Not a woods, not an open country with timber scattered through it, but a real forest; so limitless, so close-pressing, that one has the same sense of diminished personality and at the same time the same sense of all obstructions cleared away between oneself and the loneliness of the universe that one has at sea. As if, that is, you found yourself, a mere shadow in the darkness, kneeling close before an altar on which blazed, so that you could not altogether raise your head, the magnificence of a star. But mist in a moonlight forest is even more disembodying than mist on a moonlight sea. There are the dark masses of the trees, showing every now and then above the changing wraiths of white, and the summits of half-seen hills, to give an impression of a horizon near yet seemingly unattainable.

"They had finished supper in the great oak-ceilinged room down below, where a fire burned in the stone embrasure, and the soft lights of candles in silver candelabra made only more tenebrous the darkness overhead. The Maimed Man leaned back in his chair and peered with narrowed eyelids through the smoke of his cigar at the long table stretching away from him. For a moment he felt reassured; a hint of the old assurance that had once been one of his greatest gifts. It was partly a physical thing, stirring in his veins like the cool blood that follows the awakening from healthy sleep. The sight of all these friends of his, these followers of his, with their keen, sunburnt faces, or their wrinkled and wise ones—! Surely he occupied a position almost unassailable; almost as unassailable as that of the God of Force whose purposes of late had at times puzzled him in a new and disturbing way—. What nonsense! He gripped power as securely as he could grip, if he wished, his sword. What strength in heaven or earth could break a man's will, provided that will had been sufficiently trained? He felt pleasantly tired from the walk of the afternoon; he thought that he would go up to his rooms for a while, perhaps write a personal letter or two, afterward come down again for a game of cards. He stood up; the long double lines of men at the table rose with him, as a unit, at attention. The Maimed Man looked at them for a prolonged second, his heart stirred with pride; then he wheeled about and departed.

"In his workroom above, two secretaries were writing at a table under the rays of a green-shaded lamp. They jumped to their feet as he entered, but he waved them aside.

"'I shall return in a moment,' he said. 'First I wish to finish my cigar.'

"He opened the glass door onto the balcony, but, as it was cool, he stepped back and asked for his military cloak. When this was adjusted, he stepped once more into the moonlight.... And then, suddenly, there was no moonlight at all, or just the faintest glimmer of it, like light seen through milky water. Instead, he had stepped into a swirling vapor that in an instant lost him completely from the door he had just left; a maelstrom of fog, that choked him, half blinded him, twisted about him like wet, coiling ropes, and in a dreadful moment he saw that through the fog were thrust out toward him arms of a famine thinness, the extended fingers of which groped at his throat, were obliterated by the fog, groped once more with a searching intentness.

"'God!' said The Maimed Man. 'God!'—and fought drunkenly for the wall behind him. His hands touched nothing. He did not even know in which direction the wall lay. He dreaded to move, for it seemed as if there was no longer a railing to save him from falling. There was no solidity anywhere. The world had become a thing of hideous flux, unstable as when first it was made. Gelid fingers, farther reaching than the rest, touched the back of his neck. He gave a hoarse, strangled cry and reeled forward, and fell across the balustrade that came up out of the mist to meet him. And slowly the mist retreated; down from the balcony and across the open place beneath. A narrow line of dew-brightened grass appeared and grew wider. The tops of the trees began to show. But The Maimed Man could not take his eyes off the mist, for it seemed to him that the open place was filled with the despairing arms of women and of children, and that through the shifting whiteness gleamed the whiteness of their serried faces. Behind him was the warm glow of the room, shining through the glass doors. But he did not dare go in as yet; it was necessary first to control the little flecks of foam that despite his endeavor still wet his lips. For you see," said the voice, and in the darkness its accents took on a slow, rhythmical sombreness, like the swish of a sword in a shuttered room, "this was far worse than the leaves. For, after all, the dead are only the dead, but to the living there is no end."

At least a minute—fully a minute—must have passed, a minute in which the brown shadows of the library, held back for now this long while by the weaving magic of the voice, stepped forward once more into their places, while Mr. Vandusen waited for the voice to continue. Then the spell broke like a shattered globe, and, with a sudden realization of many things, he leaned forward and felt the chair to the right of him. There was no one there. He paused with his hand still on the leather seat. "Would you mind telling me," he asked, and he found that he was speaking with some effort and with great precision, "if any of you know the gentleman who has just left?"

"Left?" said Tomlinson sharply.

"Yes—left."

Tomlinson's voice was incredulous. "But he couldn't have," he insisted. "From where I am sitting I would have seen him as he reached the door. Although, if he really is gone, I can say, thank the Lord, that I think he's a faker."

On silent feet young Wheeler had departed for the hall. Now he returned. "It may interest you to know," he said, "that I have just interviewed the doorman and the boy who is stationed at the steps leading back, and they both say no one has come in or out in the last half-hour."

Suddenly his careful voice rose to a high note. "What the devil—!" he sputtered. He strode over to the electric switch. "For Heaven's sake, let's have some light," he said. "Why do we always insist upon sitting in this confounded darkness?"

THE WEDDING JEST[9]

By JAMES BRANCH CABELL

From The Century

I. Concerning Several Compacts

It is a tale which they narrate in Poictesme, telling how love began between Florian de Puysange and Adelaide de la Forêt. They tell also how young Florian had earlier fancied other women for one reason or another; but that this, he knew, was the great love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his life lasted.

And the tale tells how the Comte de la Forêt stroked a gray beard and said:

"Well, after all, Puysange is a good fief—"

"As if that mattered!" cried his daughter, indignantly. "My father, you are a deplorably sordid person."

"My dear," replied the old gentleman, "it does matter. Fiefs last."

So he gave his consent to the match, and the two young people were married on Walburga's eve, on the last day of April.

And they narrate how Florian de Puysange was vexed by a thought that was in his mind. He did not know what this thought was. But something he had overlooked; something there was he had meant to do, and had not done; and a troubling consciousness of this lurked at the back of his mind like a small formless cloud. All day, while bustling about other matters, he had groped toward this unapprehended thought.

Now he had it: Tiburce.

The young Vicomte de Puysange stood in the doorway, looking back into the bright hall where they of Storisende were dancing at his marriage feast. His wife, for a whole half-hour his wife, was dancing with handsome Etienne de Nérac. Her glance met Florian's, and Adelaide flashed him an especial smile. Her hand went out as though to touch him, for all that the width of the hall severed them.

Florian remembered presently to smile back at her. Then he went out of the castle into a starless night that was as quiet as an unvoiced menace. A small and hard and gnarled-looking moon ruled over the dusk's secrecy. The moon this night, afloat in a luminous, gray void, somehow reminded Florian of a glistening and unripe huge apple.

The foliage about him moved at most as a sleeper breathes as Florian descended eastward through the walled gardens, and so came to the graveyard. White mists were rising, such mists as the witches of Amneran notoriously evoked in these parts on each Walburga's eve to purchase recreations which squeamishness leaves undescribed.

For five years now Tiburce d'Arnaye had lain there. Florian thought of his dead comrade and of the love which had been between them—a love more perfect and deeper and higher than commonly exists between men; and the thought came to Florian, and was petulantly thrust away, that Adelaide loved ignorantly where Tiburce d'Arnaye had loved with comprehension. Yes, he had known almost the worst of Florian de Puysange, this dear lad who, none the less, had flung himself between Black Torrismond's sword and the breast of Florian de Puysange. And it seemed to Florian unfair that all should prosper with him, and Tiburce lie there imprisoned in dirt which shut away the color and variousness of things and the drollness of things, wherein Tiburce d'Arnaye had taken such joy. And Tiburce, it seemed to Florian—for this was a strange night—was struggling futilely under all that dirt, which shut out movement, and clogged the mouth of Tiburce, and would not let him speak, and was struggling to voice a desire which was unsatisfied and hopeless.

"O comrade dear," said Florian, "you who loved merriment, there is a feast afoot on this strange night, and my heart is sad that you are not here to share in the feasting. Come, come, Tiburce, a right trusty friend you were to me; and, living or dead, you should not fail to make merry at my wedding."

Thus he spoke. White mists were rising, and it was Walburga's eve.

So a queer thing happened, and it was that the earth upon the grave began to heave and to break in fissures, as when a mole passes through the ground. And other queer things happened after that, and presently Tiburce d'Arnaye was standing there, gray and vague in the moonlight as he stood there brushing the mold from his brows, and as he stood there blinking bright, wild eyes. And he was not greatly changed, it seemed to Florian; only the brows and nose of Tiburce cast no shadows upon his face, nor did his moving hand cast any shadow there, either, though the moon was naked overhead.

"You had forgotten the promise that was between us," said Tiburce; and his voice had not changed much, though it was smaller.

"It is true. I had forgotten. I remember now." And Florian shivered a little, not with fear, but with distaste.

"A man prefers to forget these things when he marries. It is natural enough. But are you not afraid of me who come from yonder?"

"Why should I be afraid of you, Tiburce, who gave your life for mine?"

"I do not say. But we change yonder."

"And does love change, Tiburce? For surely love is immortal."

"Living or dead, love changes. I do not say love dies in us who may hope to gain nothing more from love. Still, lying alone in the dark clay, there is nothing to do as yet save to think of what life was, and of what sunlight was, and of what we sang and whispered in dark places when we had lips; and of how young grass and murmuring waters and the high stars beget fine follies even now; and to think of how merry our loved ones still contrive to be even now with their new playfellows. Such reflections are not always conducive to philanthropy."

"Tell me," said Florian then, "and is there no way in which we who are still alive may aid you to be happier yonder?"

"Oh, but assuredly," replied Tiburce d'Arnaye, and he discoursed of curious matters; and as he talked, the mists about the graveyard thickened. "And so," Tiburce said, in concluding his tale, "it is not permitted that I make merry at your wedding after the fashion of those who are still in the warm flesh. But now that you recall our ancient compact, it is permitted I have my peculiar share in the merriment, and I drink with you to the bride's welfare."

"I drink," said Florian as he took the proffered cup, "to the welfare of my beloved Adelaide, whom alone of women I have really loved, and whom I shall love always."

"I perceive," replied the other, "that you must still be having your joke."

Then Florian drank, and after him Tiburce. And Florian said:

"But it is a strange drink, Tiburce, and now that you have tasted it you are changed."

"You have not changed, at least," Tiburce answered, and for the first time he smiled, a little perturbingly by reason of the change in him.

"Tell me," said Florian, "of how you fare yonder."

So Tiburce told him of yet more curious matters. Now the augmenting mists had shut off all the rest of the world. Florian could see only vague, rolling graynesses and a gray and changed Tiburce sitting there, with bright, wild eyes, and discoursing in a small chill voice. The appearance of a woman came, and sat beside him on the right. She, too, was gray, as became Eve's senior; and she made a sign which Florian remembered, and it troubled him. Tiburce said then:

"And now, young Florian, you who were once so dear to me, it is to your welfare I drink."

"I drink to yours, Tiburce."

Tiburce drank first; and Florian, having drunk in turn, cried out: "You have changed beyond recognition!"

"You have not changed," Tiburce d'Arnaye replied again. "Now let me tell you of our pastimes yonder."

With that he talked of exceedingly curious matters. And Florian began to grow dissatisfied, for Tiburce was no longer recognizable, and Tiburce whispered things uncomfortable to believe; and other eyes, as wild as his, but lit with red flarings from behind, like a beast's eyes, showed in the mists to this side and to that side, and unhappy beings were passing through the mists upon secret errands which they discharged unwillingly. Then, too, the appearance of a gray man now sat to the left of that which had been Tiburce d'Arnaye, and this new-comer was marked so that all might know who he was; and Florian's heart was troubled to note how handsome and how admirable was that desecrated face even now.

"But I must go," said Florian, "lest they miss me at Storisende and Adelaide be worried."

"Surely it will not take long to toss off a third cup. Nay, comrade, who were once so dear, let us two now drink our last toast together. Then go, in Sclaug's name, and celebrate your marriage. But before that let us drink to the continuance of human mirth-making everywhere."

Florian drank first. Then Tiburce took his turn, looking at Florian as Tiburce drank slowly. As he drank, Tiburce d'Arnaye was changed even more, and the shape of him altered, and the shape of him trickled as though Tiburce were builded of sliding fine white sand. So Tiburce d'Arnaye returned to his own place. The appearances that had sat to his left and to his right were no longer there to trouble Florian with memories. And Florian saw that the mists of Walburga's eve had departed, and that the sun was rising, and that the graveyard was all overgrown with nettles and tall grass.

He had not remembered the place being thus, and it seemed to him the night had passed with unnatural quickness. But he thought more of the fact that he had been beguiled into spending his wedding-night in a graveyard in such questionable company, and of what explanation he could make to Adelaide.

II. Of Young Persons in May

The tale tells how Florian de Puysange came in the dawn through flowering gardens, and heard young people from afar, already about their maying. Two by two he saw them from afar as they went with romping and laughter into the tall woods behind Storisende to fetch back the May-pole with dubious old rites. And as they went they sang, as was customary, that song which Raimbaut de Vaqueiras made in the ancient time in honor of May's ageless triumph.

Sang they:

"May shows with godlike showing
To-day for each that sees
May's magic overthrowing
All musty memories
In him whom May decrees
To be love's own. He saith,
I wear love's liveries
Until released by death.
"Thus all we laud May's sowing,
Nor heed how harvests please
When nowhere grain worth growing
Greets autumn's questing breeze,
And garnerers garner these—
Vain words and wasted breath
And spilth and tasteless lees—
Until released by death.
"Unwillingly foreknowing
That love with May-time flees,
We take this day's bestowing,
And feed on fantasies
Such as love lends for ease
Where none but travaileth,
With lean, infrequent fees,
Until released by death."

And Florian shook his sleek, black head. "A very foolish and pessimistical old song, a superfluous song, and a song that is particularly out of place in the loveliest spot in the loveliest of all possible worlds."

Yet Florian took no inventory of the gardens. There was but a happy sense of green and gold, with blue topping all; of twinkling, fluent, tossing leaves and of the gray under side of elongated, straining leaves; a sense of pert bird-noises, and of a longer shadow than usual slanting before him, and a sense of youth and well-being everywhere. Certainly it was not a morning wherein pessimism might hope to flourish.

Instead, it was of Adelaide that Florian thought: of the tall, impulsive, and yet timid, fair girl who was both shrewd and innocent, and of her tenderly colored loveliness, and of his abysmally unmerited felicity in having won her. Why, but what, he reflected, grimacing—what if he had too hastily married somebody else? For he had earlier fancied other women for one reason or another: but this, he knew, was the great love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his life lasted.

III. What Comes of Marrying Happily

The tale tells how Florian de Puysange found Adelaide in the company of two ladies who were unknown to him. One of these was very old, the other an imposing matron in middle life. The three were pleasantly shaded by young oak-trees; beyond was a tall hedge of clipped yew. The older women were at chess, while Adelaide bent her meek, golden head to some of that fine needle-work in which the girl delighted. And beside them rippled a small sunlit stream, which babbled and gurgled with silver flashes. Florian hastily noted these things as he ran laughing to his wife.

"Heart's dearest!" he cried. And he saw, perplexed, that Adelaide had risen with a faint, wordless cry, and was gazing at him as though she were puzzled and alarmed a very little.

"Such an adventure as I have to tell you of!" said Florian then.

"But, hey, young man, who are you that would seem to know my daughter so well?" demanded the lady in middle life, and rose majestically from her chess-game.

Florian stared, as he well might.

"Your daughter, madame! But certainly you are not Dame Melicent."

At this the old, old woman raised her nodding head.

"Dame Melicent? And was it I you were seeking, sir?"

Now Florian looked from one to the other of these incomprehensible strangers, bewildered; and his eyes came back to his lovely wife, and his lips smiled irresolutely.

"Is this some jest to punish me, my dear?" But then a new and graver trouble kindled in his face, and his eyes narrowed, for there was something odd about his wife also.

"I have been drinking in queer company," he said. "It must be that my head is not yet clear. Now certainly it seems to me that you are Adelaide de la Forêt, and certainly it seems to me that you are not Adelaide."

The girl replied:

"Why, no, messire; I am Sylvie de Nointel."

"Come, come," said the middle-aged lady, briskly, "let us have an end of this play-acting! There has been no Adelaide de la Forêt in these parts for some twenty-five years, as nobody knows better than I. Young fellow, let us have a sniff at you. No, you are not tipsy, after all. Well, I am glad of that. So let us get to the bottom of this business. What do they call you when you are at home?"

"Florian de Puysange," he answered speaking meekly enough. This capable large person was to the young man rather intimidating.

"La!" said she. She looked at him very hard. She nodded gravely two or three times, so that her double chin opened and shut.

"Yes, and you favor him. How old are you?" He told her twenty-four. She said inconsequently: "So I was a fool, after all. Well, young man, you will never be as good-looking as your father, but I trust you have an honester nature. However, bygones are bygones. Is the old rascal still living, and was it he that had the impudence to send you to me?"

"My father, madame, was slain at the Battle of Marchfeld—"

"Some fifty years ago! And you are twenty-four. Young man, your parentage had unusual features, or else we are at cross-purposes. Let us start at the beginning of this. You tell us you are called Florian de Puysange and that you have been drinking in queer company. Now let us have the whole story."

Florian told of last night's happenings, with no more omissions than seemed desirable with feminine auditors.

Then the old woman said:

"I think this is a true tale, my daughter, for the witches of Amneran contrive strange things, with mists to aid them, and with Lilith and Sclaug to abet. Yes, and this fate has fallen before to men that have been over-friendly with the dead."

"Stuff and nonsense!" said the stout lady.

"But, no, my daughter. Thus seven persons slept at Ephesus, from the time of Decius to the time of Theodosius—"

"Still, Mother—"

"And the proof of it is that they were called Constantine and Dionysius and John and Malchus and Marcian and Maximian and Serapion. They were duly canonized. You cannot deny that this thing happened without asserting no less than seven blessed saints to have been unprincipled liars, and that would be a very horrible heresy—"

"Yet, Mother, you know as well as I do—"

"And thus Epimenides, another excellently spoken-of saint, slept at Athens for fifty-seven years. Thus Charlemagne slept in the Untersberg, and will sleep until the ravens of Miramon Lluagor have left his mountains. Thus Rhyming Thomas in the Eildon Hills, thus Ogier in Avalon, thus Oisin—"

The old lady bade fair to go on interminably in her gentle, resolute, piping old voice, but the other interrupted.

"Well, Mother, do not excite yourself about it, for it only makes your asthma worse, and does no especial good to anybody. Things may be as you say. Certainly I intended nothing irreligious. Yet these extended naps, appropriate enough for saints and emperors, are out of place in one's own family. So, if it is not stuff and nonsense, it ought to be. And that I stick to."

"But we forget the boy, my dear," said the old lady. "Now listen, Florian de Puysange. Thirty years ago last night, to the month and the day, it was that you vanished from our knowledge, leaving my daughter a forsaken bride. For I am what the years have made of Dame Melicent, and this is my daughter Adelaide, and yonder is her daughter Sylvie de Nointel."

"La! Mother," observed the stout lady, "but are you certain it was the last of April? I had been thinking it was some time in June. And I protest it could not have been all of thirty years. Let me see now, Sylvie, how old is your brother Richard? Twenty-eight, you say. Well, Mother, I always said you had a marvellous memory for things like that, and I often envy you. But how time does fly, to be sure!"

And Florian was perturbed.

"For this is an awkward thing, and Tiburce had played me an unworthy trick. He never did know when to leave off joking; but such posthumous frivolity is past endurance. For, see now, in what a pickle it has landed me! I have outlived my friends, I may encounter difficulty in regaining my fiefs, and certainly I have lost the fairest wife man ever had. Oh, can it be, madame, that you are indeed my Adelaide!"

"Yes, every pound of me, poor boy, and that says much."

"And that you have been untrue to the eternal fidelity which you swore to me here by this very stream? Oh, but I cannot believe it was thirty years ago, for not a grass-blade or a pebble has been altered; and I perfectly remember the lapping of water under those lichened rocks, and that continuous file of ripples yonder, which are shaped like arrow-heads."

Adelaide rubbed her nose.

"Did I promise eternal fidelity? I can hardly remember that far back. But I remember I wept a great deal, and my parents assured me you were either dead or a rascal, so that tears could not help either way. Then Ralph de Nointel came along, good man, and made me a fair husband, as husbands go—"

"As for that stream," then said Dame Melicent, "it is often I have thought of that stream, sitting here with my grandchildren where I once sat with gay young men whom nobody remembers now save me. Yes, it is strange to think that instantly, and within the speaking of any simple word, no drop of water retains the place it held before the word was spoken; and yet the stream remains unchanged, and stays as it was when I sat here with those young men who are gone. Yes, that is a strange thought, and it is a sad thought, too, for those of us who are old."

"But, Mother, of course the stream remains unchanged," agreed Dame Adelaide. "Streams always do except at high water. Everybody knows that, and I see nothing remarkable about it. As for you, Florian, if you stickle for love's being an immortal affair," she added, with a large twinkle, "I would have you know I have been a widow for three years. So the matter could be arranged."

Florian looked at her sadly. To him the situation was incongruous with the terrible archness of a fat woman.

"But, madame, you are no longer the same person."

She patted him upon the shoulder.

"Come, Florian, there is some sense in you, after all. Console yourself, lad, with the reflection that if you had stuck manfully by your wife instead of mooning about graveyards, I would still be just as I am to-day, and you would be tied to me. Your friend probably knew what he was about when he drank to our welfare, for we should never have suited each other, as you can see for yourself. Well, Mother, many things fall out queerly in this world, but with age we learn to accept what happens without flustering too much over it. What are we to do with this resurrected old lover of mine?"

It was horrible to Florian to see how prosaically these women dealt with his unusual misadventure. Here was a miracle occurring virtually before their eyes, and these women accepted it with maddening tranquillity as an affair for which they were not responsible. Florian began to reflect that elderly persons were always more or less unsympathetic and inadequate.

"First of all," said Dame Melicent, "I would give him some breakfast. He must be hungry after all these years. And you could put him in Adhelmar's room—"

"But," Florian said wildly, to Dame Adelaide, "you have committed the crime of bigamy, and you are, after all, my wife!"

She replied, herself not unworried:

"Yes, but, Mother, both the cook and the butler are somewhere in the bushes yonder, up to some nonsense that I prefer to know nothing about. You know how servants are, particularly on holidays. I could scramble him some eggs, though, with a rasher. And Adhelmar's room it had better be, I suppose, though I had meant to have it turned out. But as for bigamy and being your wife," she concluded more cheerfully, "it seems to me the least said the soonest mended. It is to nobody's interest to rake up those foolish bygones, so far as I can see."

"Adelaide, you profane equally love, which is divine, and marriage, which is a holy sacrament."

"Florian, do you really love Adelaide de Nointel?" asked this terrible woman. "And now that I am free to listen to your proposals, do you wish to marry me?"

"Well, no," said Florian; "for, as I have just said, you are no longer the same person."

"Why, then, you see for yourself. So do you quit talking nonsense about immortality and sacraments."

"But, still," cried Florian, "love is immortal. Yes, I repeat to you, precisely as I told Tiburce, love is immortal."

Then said Dame Melicent, nodding her shriveled old head:

"When I was young, and served by nimbler senses and desires, and housed in brightly colored flesh, there were many men who loved me. Minstrels yet tell of the men that loved me, and of how many tall men were slain because of their love for me, and of how in the end it was Perion who won me. For the noblest and the most faithful of all my lovers was Perion of the Forest, and through tempestuous years he sought me with a love that conquered time and chance; and so he won me. Thereafter he made me a fair husband, as husbands go. But I might not stay the girl he had loved, nor might he remain the lad that Melicent had dreamed of, with dreams be-drugging the long years in which Demetrios held Melicent a prisoner, and youth went away from her. No, Perion and I could not do that, any more than might two drops of water there retain their place in the stream's flowing. So Perion and I grew old together, friendly enough; and our senses and desires began to serve us more drowsily, so that we did not greatly mind the falling away of youth, nor greatly mind to note what shriveled hands now moved before us, performing common tasks; and we were content enough. But of the high passion that had wedded us there was no trace, and of little senseless human bickerings there were a great many. For one thing"—and the old lady's voice was changed—"for one thing, he was foolishly particular about what he would eat and what he would not eat, and that upset my house-keeping, and I had never any patience with such nonsense."

"Well, none the less," said Florian, "it is not quite nice of you to acknowledge it."

Then said Dame Adelaide:

"That is a true word, Mother. All men get finicky about their food, and think they are the only persons to be considered, and there is no end to it if once you begin to humor them. So there has to be a stand made. Well, and indeed my poor Ralph, too, was all for kissing and pretty talk at first, and I accepted it willingly enough. You know how girls are. They like to be made much of, and it is perfectly natural. But that leads to children. And when the children began to come, I had not much time to bother with him; and Ralph had his farming and his warfaring to keep him busy. A man with a growing family cannot afford to neglect his affairs. And certainly, being no fool, he began to notice that girls here and there had brighter eyes and trimmer waists than I. I do not know what such observations may have led to when he was away from me; I never inquired into it, because in such matters all men are fools. But I put up with no nonsense at home, and he made me a fair husband, as husbands go. That much I will say for him gladly; and if any widow says more than that, Florian, do you beware of her, for she is an untruthful woman."

"Be that as it may," replied Florian, "it is not quite becoming to speak thus of your dead husband. No doubt you speak the truth; there is no telling what sort of person you may have married in what still seems to me unseemly haste to provide me with a successor; but even so, a little charitable prevarication would be far more edifying."

He spoke with such earnestness that there fell a silence. The women seemed to pity him. And in the silence Florian heard from afar young persons returning from the woods behind Storisende, and bringing with them the May-pole. They were still singing.

Sang they:

"Unwillingly foreknowing
That love with May-time flees,
We take this day's bestowing,
And feed on fantasies—"

IV. YOUTH SOLVES IT

The tale tells how lightly and sweetly, and compassionately, too, then spoke young Sylvie de Nointel:

"Ah, but, assuredly, Messire Florian, you do not argue with my pets quite seriously. Old people always have some such queer notions. Of course love all depends upon what sort of person you are. Now, as I see it, mama and grandmama are not the sort of persons who have real love-affairs. Devoted as I am to both of them, I cannot but perceive they are lacking in real depth of sentiment. They simply do not understand such matters. They are fine, straightforward, practical persons, poor dears, and always have been, of course, for in things like that one does not change, as I have often noticed. And father, and grandfather, too, as I remember him, was kind-hearted and admirable and all that, but nobody could ever have expected him to be a satisfactory lover. Why, he was bald as an egg, the poor pet!"

And Sylvie laughed again at the preposterous notions of old people. She flashed an especial smile at Florian. Her hand went out as though to touch him, in an unforgotten gesture. "Old people do not understand," said Sylvie de Nointel in tones which took this handsome young fellow ineffably into confidence.

"Mademoiselle," said Florian, with a sigh that was part relief and all approval, "it is you who speak the truth, and your elders have fallen victims to the cynicism of a crassly material age. Love is immortal when it is really love and one is the right sort of person. There is the love—known to how few, alas! and a passion of which I regret to find your mother incapable—that endures unchanged until the end of life."

"I am so glad you think so, Messire Florian," she answered demurely.

"And do you not think so, mademoiselle?"

"How should I know," she asked him, "as yet?" He noted she had incredibly long lashes.

"Thrice happy is he that convinces you!" says Florian. And about them, who were young in the world's recaptured youth, spring triumphed with an ageless rural pageant, and birds cried to their mates. He noted the red brevity of her lips and their probable softness.

Meanwhile the elder women regarded each other.

"It is the season of May. They are young and they are together. Poor children!" said Dame Melicent. "Youth cries to youth for the toys of youth, and saying, 'Lo! I cry with the voice of a great god!'"

"Still," said Madame Adelaide, "Puysange is a good fief."

But Florian heeded neither of them as he stood there by the sunlit stream, in which no drop of water retained its place for a moment, and which yet did not alter in appearance at all. He did not heed his elders for the excellent reason that Sylvie de Nointel was about to speak, and he preferred to listen to her. For this girl, he knew, was lovelier than any other person had ever been since Eve first raised just such admiring, innocent, and venturesome eyes to inspect what must have seemed to her the quaintest of all animals, called man. So it was with a shrug that Florian remembered how he had earlier fancied other women for one reason or another; since this, he knew, was the great love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his life lasted.

THE WRISTS ON THE DOOR[10]

By Horace Fish

From Everybody's Magazine

Between his leather easy-chair at one end of his drawing-room and the wall with his wife's portrait at the other, Henry Montagu was pacing in a state of agitation such as he had never experienced in his fifty years of life. The drawing-room was no longer "theirs." It was his—and the portrait's. The painting was of a girl who was not more beautiful in radiance of feature and lovable contour of body than the woman a generation older who had died two months ago.

Suddenly he stopped short in the middle of the room, his hands in his pockets. "My God!" he cried.

Then he shut his teeth on the words as sharply and passionately as he had uttered them, and raised one of his hands to his brow. There were drops of cold sweat upon it.

Mr. Montagu was a simple, selfish, good-natured business-man, never given to imaginative thoughts or to greater extremes of mood than the heights and depths of rising and falling stocks. Yet his experience of the last two hours had shown him to himself as a creature wretchedly inadequate to face the problem that confronted him—the simple problem of widowerhood.

He was not bitter at his wife's death. Not only did he consider himself too sensible for that, but he was too sensible. Death is an inevitable thing. And the one fact involving the simplicity of the problem was no more than many another man had borne without a thought—his childlessness.

Yet as if the whole two months in their strangeness their sad novelty, had been concentrating their loneliness for an accumulated spring at him, the last two hours had driven home to him that this secondary fact had not been inevitable, that what he was suffering to-night could have been avoided.

He had not wished to have children, and neither had the beautiful woman whose painted spirit smiled down so pitilessly now on his tragedy of jangled nerves and intolerable solitude. Deliberately and quite frankly, without even hiding behind the cowardly excuse of the tacit, they had outspokenly chosen not to.

After his desperate exclamation, he had laughed and thrown himself into his chair. He had forced the laugh, seeking to batter down with it a thrill that was akin to fright at an abrupt realization that in those two dreadful hours he had done three unprecedented things. He had spoken aloud there by himself, an action he had always ascribed exclusively to children and maniacs; he had harbored absurd temptations; and finally he had ejaculated "My God!" which he had thought appropriate to a man only in the distresses of fiction or after complete ruin on the Stock Exchange.

That exclamation had sprung from him when he had caught himself thinking how gladly he would give half his fortune if he could have a companion, even his butler, for the rest of the evening, his whole fortune, exactly as if he had died, if he could but have a son to give it to.

That freedom from care, which they had chosen to call freedom from responsibility, had been their mutual property, but to-night, in his hopeless solitude, it seemed that he was paying the whole price for it. She had met the unknown, but with the known—himself, her whole life—beside her, and her ordeal was over. His, he felt now, was worse, and already beginning. After all, he reflected, there was a certain rough justice in it; the one spared longer in the world of bodily people bore, in consequence, the reverting brunt of their double selfishness. But the remnant of life seemed a poor thing to-night. The further it stretched, in his suddenly stirred imagination, the poorer, the emptier, it seemed.

And having stirred, after a whole lifetime of healthy sleep, his imagination gripped him in a strong and merciless embrace. It seemed to twist him about and force him to look down the vista of the coming years and at all their possibilities, even the desecrational one of marrying again and calling into life the son that he had never wanted before. At the thought, he flushed with the idea that the portrait's eyes were reading his face, and compelled himself to look bravely at it; but as he met the lovely eyes strange questions darted into his brain: whether he would not rather have been solely to blame; whether his all-possessive love of her would not be more flawless now if she had been a flawless eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if some warm tint from a Renaissance Madonna had mellowed the radiant Medici Venus who smiled from the frame. He was seized by a desire to turn the gazing picture to the wall.

Half-way across the room, he checked the impulse with a gasp of self-disgust, but with hands raised involuntarily toward it he cried:

"Oh, why didn't we?"

As he stood trembling with his back to it, the second absurd temptation of the night assailed him—to dash on his hat and go to Maurice's, a restaurant of oblique reputation to which his wife had once accompanied him out of curiosity, and which, in a surprising outburst of almost pious prudery, she had refused to visit again. Nor had she ever allowed him to go thereafter himself, and though she had made no dying request of him, he knew that, if she had, that would have been it.

In his shaken state the thought of his one club, the Business Men's, was repugnant. Maurice's, expansive, insinuating and brilliant, called to his loneliness arbitrarily, persistently. But with a glance over his shoulder at the portrait, he put the thought away. Then, straightening up, he walked to his chair again, sat tensely down, and faced the long room and his childish terror at its emptiness.

Innocent as had been his impulse toward Maurice's and full as was Broadway with places as glittering and noisy, his morbid duty to debar that one resort seemed to him to condemn him to the house for the night. Why was it the butler's night out? Even to know that he was below stairs—Would other nights be like this? Every night—The possibility turned him cold. His thoughts were racing now, and even as he gripped the arms of the chair a still worse terror gripped his mind. His loneliness seemed to have become an actual thing, real as a person, a spirit haunting the luxurious, silent house. He was facing the door, and its heavy mahogany, fixing his attention through his staring gaze, seemed to be shutting him alone with the dead. Save for his trembling self and his wife's painted eyes, the big room was lifeless. It was beyond the closed door that his imagination, now running beyond control, pictured the presence of his frightful guest—his own solitude, coming in ironical answer to his craving for companionship.

Were those live eyes of the dead creating his sense of an impending life in the house? Was it his wife, who, never having created a child for him, was forcing on him now a horrible companion? Again he started desperately toward the picture, again he caught himself, again he cried, "My God!" and faced his terror passionately, facing too, this time, the closed door.

"You fool! You fool!"

His voice sounded weak and strange to him as if indeed some one else had spoken. The paralyzing thought that such a mood of panic could be the beginning of real madness had shaken his voice and his whole body, and again Maurice's, now as a positive savior, rushed into his mind. But he threw the idea of refuge contemptuously away. He would stand his ground and not leave the house that night; yet even as he stood, he asked himself if this was not because he feared to open the door.

With a gasp, he drew himself up in the center of the room, and in a surge of determined anger, with his eyes on the door, facing it as he would have faced an enemy before he attacked, he deliberately gave his mind to his fear, letting it sweep through him, trying to magnify it, reading every horror that he could into the imagined presence that he intended to dispel, and then, tormenting himself with slow steps, he walked to the door, reached his hand to the knob, and opened it.

Though his mouth opened for a cry of terror, no sound came from him as he staggered back, and a waiting figure pitched into the room, rushed wildly past him with a whimper like that of a wounded animal, and flung itself, face forward, into the empty chair.

As if through the same doorway that had given entrance to the desperate wretch, his terror seemed to leave him. While he stood gasping, with pounding heart, staring at the limp, shuddering manhood that had hurled itself into his home, Henry Montagu suddenly felt himself a man again.

With the cold plunge of his senses into rationality, they told him that he was in the presence of some fatal and soul-sickening tragedy, yet this horror that had dashed into the hollow privacy of his house was at least real to him. Overwhelmed as he was by the frightful appearance of the young man, who was now weeping abandonedly, he had no fear of him, and his first act was a practical one—he swiftly, quietly closed the door. It was done in an instinct of protection. It would be useless to question him yet, but that he was a fugitive, and from something hideous, Montagu took for granted.

He stood looking across the room at his outlandish guest, trying to docket the kaleidoscopic flock of impressions that had flown into his mind from the instant he swung back the door. Though noble, even splendid in its slender lines, the youth's figure had half-fallen, half-sprung through the doorway, animal-like. There had not been even a ghost of sound in the hallway, yet it was as if he had been in the act of hurtling himself against the closed door, hammering at it with upraised hands. Mr. Montagu had been horrified by it instantaneously, as by a thing of violence with every suggestion of the sordid, but the poor sobbing fellow who now lay in the chair with his arms and head drooping over the big leather arm seemed to him as immaculately dressed as himself. Remembering the fleeting posture at the door, his eyes went involuntarily to the hanging, graphic hands. In the light of his reading-lamp they gleamed white, and as he watched, his heart sinking with pity at their thinness, two slow red drops rolled from under the cuffs down the palms, and fell to the floor.

"Good God!" breathed Henry Montagu.