Transcriber’s Notes

This e-text is based on ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine,’ from August, 1913. The table of contents, based on the index from the May issue, has been added by the transcriber.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been retained, but punctuation and typographical errors have been corrected. Passages in English dialect and in languages other than English have not been altered. In some cases, such as in ‘[Fresh Light on Washington]’ (p. 635), errors seem to be introduced deliberately; here, the text has been retained as printed in the original.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Plates in tint, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. C. Merrill and H. Davidson

“AND ‘INASMUCH,’ HE SAID. JUST THAT—‘INASMUCH.’
SO THAT’S HOW I HAPPENED TO GO INTO NURSING”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

MIDSUMMER HOLIDAY NUMBER

THE CENTURY MAGAZINE

VOL. LXXXVI

AUGUST, 1913

NO. 4

Copyright, 1913, by THE CENTURY CO. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

VERSE

THE WHITE LINEN NURSE

HOW RAE MALGREGOR UNDERTOOK GENERAL HEARTWORK FOR A FAMILY OF TWO

BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

Author of “Molly Make-Believe,” etc.

IN THREE PARTS: PART ONE

THE White Linen Nurse was so tired that her noble expression ached.

Incidentally her head ached and her shoulders ached and her lungs ached, and the ankle-bones of both feet ached excruciatingly; but nothing of her felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression. Like a strip of lip-colored lead suspended from her poor little nose by two tugging, wire-gray wrinkles, her persistently conscientious sick-room smile seemed to be whanging aimlessly against her front teeth. The sensation was very unpleasant.

Looking back thus on the three spine-curving, chest-cramping, foot-twinging, ether-scented years of her hospital training, it dawned on the White Linen Nurse very suddenly that nothing of her ever had felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression.

Impulsively she sprang for the prim white mirror that capped her prim white bureau, and stood staring up into her own entrancing, bright-colored Nova Scotian reflection with tense, unwonted interest.

Except for the unmistakable smirk which fatigue had clawed into her plastic young mouth-lines, there was nothing special the matter with what she saw.

“Perfectly good face,” she attested judicially, with no more than common courtesy to her progenitors—“perfectly good and tidy-looking face, if only—if only—” her breath caught a trifle—“if only it didn’t look so disgustingly noble and—hygienic—and dollish.”

All along the back of her neck little sharp, prickly pains began to sting and burn.

“Silly—simpering—pink-and-white puppet!” she scolded squintingly, “I’ll teach you how to look like a real girl!”

Very threateningly she raised herself to her tiptoes and thrust her glowing, corporeal face right up into the moulten, elusive, quicksilver face in the mirror. Pink for pink, blue for blue, gold for gold, dollish smirk for dollish smirk, the mirror mocked her seething inner fretfulness.

“Why, darn you!” she gasped—“why, darn you—why, you looked more human than that when you left the Annapolis Valley three years ago! There were at least tears in your face then, and cinders, and your mother’s best advice, and the worry about the mortgage, and the blush of Joe Hazeltine’s kiss.”

Furtively with the tip of her index-finger she started to search her imperturbable pink cheek for the spot where Joe Hazeltine’s kiss had formerly flamed.

“My hands are all right, anyway,” she acknowledged with vast relief. Triumphantly she raised both strong, stub-fingered, exaggeratively executive hands to the level of her childish blue eyes, and stood surveying the mirrored effect with ineffable satisfaction. “Why, my hands are—dandy!” she gloated. “Why, they’re perfectly dandy! Why, they’re wonderful! Why, they’re—” Then suddenly and fearfully she gave a shrill little scream. “But they don’t go with my silly doll-face,” she cried. “Why, they don’t! They don’t! My God! they don’t! They go with the Senior Surgeon’s scowling Heidelberg eyes. They go with the Senior Surgeon’s grim, gray jaw. They go with the—Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?”

Dizzily, with her stubby finger-tips prodded deep into every jaded facial muscle that she could compass, she staggered toward the air and, dropping down into the first friendly chair that bumped against her knees, sat staring blankly out across the monotonous city roofs that flanked her open window, trying very, very hard, for the first time in her life, to consider the general phenomenon of being a trained nurse.

All about her, as inexorable as anæsthesia, horrid as the hush of tomb or public library, lurked the painfully unmistakable sense of institutional restraint. Mournfully to her ear from some remote kitcheny region of pots and pans a browsing spoon tinkled forth from time to time with soft muffled resonance. Up and down every clammy white corridor innumerable young feet, born to prance and stamp, were creeping stealthily to and fro in rubber-heeled whispers. Along the somber fire-escape just below her windowsill, like a covey of snubbed doves, six or eight of her classmates were cooing and crooning together with excessive caution concerning the imminent graduation exercises that were to take place at eight o’clock that very evening. Beyond her dreariest ken of muffled voices, beyond her dingiest vista of slate and brick, on a far, faint hillside, a far, faint streak of April green went roaming jocundly skyward. Altogether sluggishly, as though her nostrils were plugged with warm velvet, the smell of spring and ether and scorched mutton-chops filtered in and out, in and out, in and out, of her abnormally jaded senses.

Taken all in all, it was not a propitious afternoon for any girl as tired and as pretty as the White Linen Nurse to be considering the general phenomenon of anything except April.

In the real country, they tell me, where the young spring runs as wild and bare as a nymph through every dull-brown wood and hay-gray meadow, the blasé farmer-lad will not even lift his eyes from the plow to watch the pinkness of her passing. But here in the prudish brick-minded city, where the young spring at her friskiest is nothing more audacious than a sweltering, winter-swathed madcap who has impishly essayed some fine morning to tiptoe down street in her soft, sloozily, green-silk-stockinged feet, the whole hobnailed population reels back aghast and agrin before the most innocent flash of the rogue’s green-veiled toes. And then, suddenly snatching off its own cumbersome winter foot-habits, goes chasing madly after her in its own prankish, varicolored socks.

Now, the White Linen Nurse’s socks were black, and cotton at that, a combination incontestably sedate. And the White Linen Nurse had waded barefoot through too many posied country pastures to experience any ordinary city thrill over the sight of a single blade of grass pushing scarily through a crack in the pavement, or a puny, concrete-strangled maple-tree flushing wanly to the smoky sky. Indeed, for three hustling, square-toed, rubber-heeled city years the White Linen Nurse had never even stopped to notice whether the season was flavored with frost or thunder. But now, unexplainably, just at the end of it all, sitting innocently there at her own prim little bedroom window, staring innocently out across indomitable roof-tops, with the crackle of glory and diplomas already ringing in her ears, she heard instead, for the first time in her life, the gaily daredevil voice of the spring, a hoidenish challenge flung back at her, leaf-green, from the crest of a winter-scarred hill.

“Hello, White Linen Nurse!” screamed the saucy city Spring. “Hello, White Linen Nurse! Take off your homely starched collar, or your silly candy-box cap, or any other thing that feels maddeningly artificial, and come out! And be very wild!”

Like a puppy-dog cocking its head toward some strange, unfamiliar sound, the White Linen Nurse cocked her head toward the lure of the green-crested hill. Still wrestling conscientiously with the general phenomenon of being a trained nurse, she found her collar suddenly very tight, her tiny cap inexpressibly heavy and vexatious. Timidly she removed the collar, and found that the removal did not rest her in the slightest. Equally timidly she removed the cap, and found that even that removal did not rest her in the slightest. Then very, very slowly, but very, very permeatingly and completely, it dawned on the White Linen Nurse that never while eyes were blue, and hair was gold, and lips were red, would she ever find rest again until she had removed her noble expression.

With a jerk that started the pulses in her temples throbbing like two toothaches, she straightened up in her chair. All along the back of her neck the little blond curls began to crisp very ticklingly at their roots.

Still staring worriedly out over the old city’s slate-gray head to that inciting prance of green across the farthest horizon, she felt her whole being kindle to an indescribable passion of revolt against all hushed places. Seething with fatigue, smoldering with ennui, she experienced suddenly a wild, almost incontrollable, impulse to sing, to shout, to scream from the house-tops, to mock somebody, to defy everybody, to break laws, dishes, heads—anything, in fact, that would break with a crash.

And then at last, over the hills and far away, with all the outraged world at her heels, to run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and laugh, till her feet raveled out, and her lungs burst, and there was nothing more left of her at all—ever, ever, any more!

Discordantly into this rapturously pagan vision of pranks and posies broke one of her room-mates all a-whiff with ether, a-whir with starch.

Instantly with the first creak of the door-handle, the White Linen Nurse was on her feet, breathless, resentful, grotesquely defiant.

“Get out of here, Zillah Forsyth!” she cried furiously. “Get out of here quick, and leave me alone! I want to think.”

Perfectly serenely the new-comer advanced into the room. With her pale, ivory-tinted cheeks, her great limpid, brown eyes, her soft dark hair parted madonna-like across her beautiful brow, her whole face was like some exquisite composite picture of all the saints of history. Her voice also was amazingly tranquil.

“Oh, fudge!” she drawled. “What’s eating you, Rae Malgregor? I won’t either get out. It’s my room just as much as it is yours. And Helene’s just as much as it is ours. And, besides,” she added more briskly, “it’s four o’clock now, and, with graduation at eight and the dance afterward, if we don’t get our stuff packed up now, when in thunder shall we get it done?” Quite irrelevantly she began to laugh. Her laugh was perceptibly shriller than her speaking-voice. “Say, Rae,” she confided, “that minister I nursed through pneumonia last winter wants me to pose as ‘Sanctity’ for a stained-glass window in his new church! Isn’t he the softy?”

“Shall you do it?” quizzed Rae Malgregor, a trifle tensely.

“Shall I do it?” mocked the new-comer. “Well, you just watch me! Four mornings a week in June at full week’s wages? Fresh Easter lilies every day? White silk angel-robes? All the high souls and high paints kowtowing around me? Why, it would be more fun than a box of monkeys. Sure I’ll do it.”

Expeditiously as she spoke, the new-comer reached up for the framed motto over her own ample mirror, and yanking it down with one single tug, began to busy herself adroitly with a snarl in the picture-cord. Like a withe of willow yearning over a brook, her slender figure curved to the task. Very scintillatingly the afternoon light seemed to brighten suddenly across her lap. “You’ll Be A Long Time Dead!” glinted the motto through its sun-dazzled glass.

Still panting with excitement, still bristling with resentment, Rae Malgregor stood surveying the intrusion and the intruder. A dozen impertinent speeches were rioting in her mind. Twice her mouth opened and shut before she finally achieved the particular opprobrium that completely satisfied her.

“Bah! you look like a—trained nurse!” she blurted forth at last with hysterical triumph.

“So do you,” said the new-corner, amiably.

With a little gasp of dismay, Rae Malgregor sprang suddenly forward. Her eyes were flooded with tears.

“Why, that’s just exactly what’s the matter with me!” she cried. “My face is all worn out trying to look like a trained nurse! O Zillah, how do you know you were meant to be a trained nurse? How does anybody know? O Zillah! save me! Save me!”

Languorously Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work and laughed. Her laugh was like the accidental tinkle of sleigh-bells in midsummer, vaguely disquieting, a shiver of frost across the face of a lily.

“Save you from what, you great big overgrown, tow-headed doll-baby?” she questioned blandly. “For Heaven’s sake, the only thing you need is to go back to whatever toy-shop you came from and get a new head. What in creation’s the matter with you lately, anyway Oh, of course you’ve had rotten luck this past month but what of it? That’s the trouble with you country girls. You haven’t got any stamina.”

With slow, shuffling-footed astonishment Rae Malgregor stepped out into the center of the room. “Country girls!” she repeated blankly. “Why, you’re a country girl yourself.”

“I am not,” snapped Zillah Forsyth. “I’ll have you understand that there are nine thousand people in the town I come from, and not a rube among them. Why, I tended soda-fountain in the swellest drug store there a whole year before I even thought of taking up nursing. And I wasn’t as green when I was six months old as you are now.”

Slowly, with a soft-snuggling sigh of contentment, she raised her slim white fingers to coax her dusky hair a little looser, a little farther down, a little more madonna-like across her sweet, mild forehead, then, snatching out abruptly at a convenient shirt-waist, began with extraordinary skill to apply its dangly lace sleeves as a protective bandage for the delicate glass-faced motto still in her lap, placed the completed parcel with inordinate scientific precision in the exact corner of her packing-box, and then went on very diligently, very zealously, to strip the men’s photographs from the mirror on her bureau. There were twenty-seven photographs in all, and for each one she had there already cut and prepared a small square of perfectly fresh, perfectly immaculate, white tissue wrapping-paper. No one so transcendently fastidious, so exquisitely neat in all her personal habits, had ever before been trained in that particular hospital.

Very soberly the doll-faced girl stood watching the men’s pleasant paper countenances smoothed away one by one into their chaste white veilings, until at last, quite without warning, she poked an accusing, inquisitive finger directly across Zillah Forsyth’s shoulder.

“Zillah,” she demanded peremptorily, “all the year I’ve wanted to know, all the year every other girl in our class has wanted to know—where did you ever get that picture of the Senior Surgeon? He never gave it to you in the world. He didn’t, he didn’t! He’s not that kind.”

Deeply into Zillah Forsyth’s pale, ascetic cheek dawned a most amazing dimple.

“Sort of jarred you girls some, didn’t it,” she queried, “to see me strutting round with a photo of the Senior Surgeon?” The little cleft in her chin showed suddenly with almost startling distinctness. “Well, seeing it’s you,” she grinned, “and the year’s all over, and there’s nobody left that I can worry about it any more, I don’t mind telling you in the least that I—bought it out of a photographer’s show-case. There, are you satisfied now?”

With easy nonchalance she picked up the picture in question and scrutinized it shrewdly.

“Lord! what a face!” she attested. “Nothing but granite. Hack him with a knife, and he wouldn’t bleed, but just chip off into pebbles.” With exaggerated contempt she shrugged her supple shoulders. “Bah! how I hate a man like that! There’s no fun in him.” A little abruptly she turned and thrust the photograph into Rae Malgregor’s hand. “You can have it if you want to,” she said. “I’ll trade it to you for that lace corset-cover of yours.”

Like water dripping through a sieve the photograph slid through Rae Malgregor’s frightened fingers. With nervous apology she stooped and picked it up again, and held it gingerly by one remote corner. Her eyes were quite wide with horror.

“Oh, of course I’d like the—picture well enough,” she stammered, “but it wouldn’t seem—exactly respectable to—to trade it for a corset-cover.”

“Oh, very well,” drawled Zillah Forsyth; “tear it up, then.”

Expeditiously, with frank, non-sentimental fingers, Rae Malgregor tore the tough cardboard across, and again across, and once again across, and threw the conglomerate fragments into the waste-basket. And her expression all the time was no more, no less, than the expression of a person who would vastly rather execute his own pet dog or cat than risk the possible bungling of an outsider. Then, like a small child trotting with great relief to its own doll-house, she trotted over to her bureau, extracted the lace corset-cover, and came back with it in her hand, to lean across Zillah Forsyth’s shoulder again and watch the men’s faces go slipping off into oblivion. Once again, abruptly, without warning, she halted the process with a breathless exclamation.

“Oh, of course this waist is the only one I’ve got with ribbons in it,” she asserted irrelevantly, “but I’m perfectly willing to trade it for that picture.” She pointed out with unmistakably explicit finger-tip.

Chucklingly, Zillah Forsyth withdrew the special photograph from its half-completed wrappings.

“Oh, him?” she said. “Oh, that’s a chap I met on the train last summer. He’s a brakeman or something. He’s a—”

Perfectly unreluctantly Rae Malgregor dropped the fluff of lace and ribbons into Zillah’s lap and reached out with cheerful voraciousness to annex the young man’s picture to her somewhat bleak possessions. “Oh, I don’t care a rap who he is,” she interrupted briskly; “but he’s sort of cute-looking, and I’ve got an empty frame at home just that odd size, and mother’s crazy for a new picture to stick up over the kitchen mantelpiece. She gets so tired of seeing nothing but the faces of people she knows all about.”

Sharply Zillah Forsyth turned and stared up into the younger girl’s face, and found no guile to whet her stare against.

“Well, of all the ridiculous, unmitigated greenhorns!” she began. “Well, is that all you wanted him for? Why, I supposed you wanted to write to him. Why, I supposed—”

For the first time an expression not altogether dollish darkened across Rae Malgregor’s garishly juvenile blondness.

“Maybe I’m not quite as green as you think I am,” she flared up stormily. With this sharp flaring-up every single individual pulse in her body seemed to jerk itself suddenly into conscious activity again, like the soft, plushy pound-pound-pound of a whole stocking-footed regiment of pain descending single file upon her for her hysterical undoing. “Maybe I’ve had a good deal more experience than you give me credit for,” she hastened excitedly to explain. “I tell you—I tell you, I’ve been engaged!” she blurted forth with a bitter sort of triumph.

With a palpable flicker of interest Zillah Forsyth looked back across her shoulder.

“Engaged? How many times?” she asked bluntly.

As though the whole monogamous groundwork of civilization was threatened by the question, Rae Malgregor’s hands went clutching at her breast.

“Why, once!” she gasped. “Why, once!”

Convulsively Zillah Forsyth began to rock herself to and fro.

“Oh, Lordy!” she chuckled. “Oh, Lordy! Lordy! Why, I’ve been engaged four times just this past year.” In a sudden passion of fastidiousness, she bent down over the particular photograph in her hand and, snatching at a handkerchief, began to rub diligently at a small smutch of dust in one corner of the cardboard. Something in the effort of rubbing seemed to jerk her small round chin into almost angular prominence. “And before I’m through,” she added, at least two notes below her usual alto tones—“and before I’m through, I’m going to get engaged to every profession that there is on the surface of the globe.” Quite helplessly the thin paper skin of the photograph peeled off in company with the smutch of dust. “And when I marry,” she ejaculated fiercely—“and when I marry, I’m going to marry a man who will take me to every place that there is on the surface of the globe. And after that—”

“After what?” interrogated a brand-new voice from the doorway.

It was the other room-mate this time. The only real aristocrat in the whole graduating class, high-browed, high-cheek-boned, eyes like some far-sighted young prophet, mouth even yet faintly arrogant with the ineradicable consciousness of caste, a plain, eager, stripped-for-a-long-journey type of face—this was Helene Churchill. There was certainly no innocuous bloom of country hills and pastures in this girl’s face, nor any seething small-town passion pounding indiscriminately at all the doors of experience. The men and women who had bred Helene Churchill had been the breeders also of brick and granite cities since the world was new.

Like one vastly more accustomed to treading on Persian carpets than on painted floors, she came forward into the room.

“Hello, children!” she said casually, and began at once without further parleying to take down the motto that graced her own bureau-top.

It was the era when almost everybody in the world had a motto over his bureau. Helene Churchill’s motto was “Inasmuch As Ye Have Done It Unto One Of The Least Of These, Ye Have Done It Unto Me.” On a scroll of almost priceless parchment the text was illuminated with inimitable Florentine skill and color. A little carelessly, after the manner of people quite accustomed to priceless things, she proceeded now to roll the parchment into its smallest possible circumference, humming exclusively to herself all the while an intricate little air from an Italian opera.

So the three faces foiled each other, sober city girl, pert town girl, bucolic country girl, a hundred fundamental differences rampant between them, yet each fervid, adolescent young mouth tamed to the same monotonous, drolly exaggerated expression of complacency that characterizes the faces of all people who, in a distinctive uniform, for a reasonably satisfactory living wage, make an actual profession of righteous deeds.

Indeed among all the thirty or more varieties of noble expression which an indomitable Superintendent had finally succeeded in inculcating into her graduating class, no other physiognomies had responded more plastically perhaps than these three to the merciless imprint of the great hospital machine which, in pursuance of its one repetitive design, discipline, had coaxed Zillah Forsyth into the semblance of a lady, snubbed Helene Churchill into the substance of plain womanhood, and, still uncertain just what to do with Rae Malgregor’s rollicking rural immaturity, had frozen her face temporarily into the smugly dimpled likeness of a fancy French doll rigged out as a nurse for some gilt-edged hospital fair.

With characteristic desire to keep up in every way with her more mature, better educated classmates, to do everything, in fact, so fast, so well, that no one would possibly guess that she hadn’t yet figured out just why she was doing it at all, Rae Malgregor now, with quickly reconventionalized cap and collar, began to hurl herself into the task of her own packing. From her open bureau drawer, with a sudden impish impulse toward worldly wisdom, she extracted first of all the photograph of the young brakeman.

“See, Helene! My new beau!” she giggled experimentally.

In mild-eyed surprise Helene Churchill glanced up from her work. “Your beau?” she corrected. “Why, that’s Zillah’s picture.”

“Well, it’s mine now,” snapped Rae Malgregor, with unexpected edginess. “It’s mine now, all right. Zillah said I could have him. Zillah said I could—write to him—if I wanted to,” she finished a bit breathlessly.

Wider and wider Helene Churchill’s eyes dilated.

“Write to a man whom you don’t know?” she gasped. “Why, Rae! Why, it isn’t even very nice to have a picture of a man you don’t know.”

Mockingly to the edge of her strong white teeth Rae Malgregor’s tongue crept out in pink derision.

“Bah!” she taunted. “What’s nice? That’s the whole matter with you, Helene Churchill. You never stop to consider whether anything’s fun or not; all you care is whether it’s nice.” Excitedly she turned to meet the cheap little wink from Zillah’s sainted eyes. “Bah! What’s nice?” she persisted, a little lamely. Then suddenly all the pertness within her crumbled into nothingness. “That’s—the—whole trouble with you, Zillah Forsyth,” she stammered—“you never give a hang whether anything’s nice or not; all you care is whether it’s fun.” Quite helplessly she began to wring her hands. “Oh, how do I know which one of you girls to follow?” she demanded wildly. “How do I know anything? How does anybody know anything?”

Like a smoldering fuse the rambling query crept back into the inner recesses of her brain, and fired once more the one great question that lay dormant there. Impetuously she ran forward and stared into Helene Churchill’s face.

“How do you know you were meant to be a trained nurse, Helene Churchill?” she began all over again. “How does anybody know she was really meant to be one? How can anybody, I mean, be perfectly sure?” Like a drowning man clutching out at the proverbial straw, she clutched at the parchment in Helene Churchill’s hand. “I mean—where did you get your motto, Helene Churchill?” she persisted, with increasing irritability. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll tear the whole thing to pieces.”

With a startled frown, Helene Churchill jerked back out of reach.

“What’s the matter with you, Rae?” she quizzed sharply, and then, turning round casually to her book-case, began to draw from the shelves one by one her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, Robert Browning. “Oh, I did so want to go to China,” she confided irrelevantly; “but my family have just written me that they won’t stand for it. So I suppose I’ll have to go into tenement work here in the city instead.” With a visible effort she jerked her mind back again to the feverish question in Rae Malgregor’s eyes. “Oh, you want to know where I got my motto?” she asked. A flash of intuition brightened suddenly across her absent-mindedness. “Oh,” she smiled, “you mean you want to know just what the incident was that first made me decide to devote my life to humanity?”

“Yes,” snapped Rae Malgregor.

A little shyly Helene Churchill picked up her copy of Marcus Aurelius and cuddled her cheek against its tender morocco cover.

“Really?” she questioned with palpable hesitation—“really, you want to know? Why, why—it’s rather a—sacred little story to me. I shouldn’t exactly want to have anybody—laugh about it.”

“I’ll laugh if I want to,” attested Zillah Forsyth, forcibly, from the other side of the room.

Like a pugnacious boy’s, Rae Malgregor’s fluent fingers doubled up into two firm fists.

“I’ll punch her if she even looks as though she wanted to,” she signaled surreptitiously to Helene.

Shrewdly for an instant the city girl’s narrowing eyes challenged and appraised the country girl’s desperate sincerity. Then quite abruptly she began her little story.

“Why, it was on an Easter Sunday, oh, ages and ages ago,” she faltered. “Why, I couldn’t have been more than nine years old at the time.” A trifle self-consciously she turned her face away from Zillah Forsyth’s supercilious smile. “And I was coming home from a Sunday-school festival in my best white muslin dress, with a big pot of purple pansies in my hand,” she hastened somewhat nervously to explain. “And just at the edge of the gutter there was a dreadful drunken man lying in the mud, with a great crowd of cruel people teasing and tormenting him. And because—because I couldn’t think of anything else to do about it, I—I walked right up to the poor old creature, scared as I could be, and—and I presented him with my pot of purple pansies. And everybody of course began to laugh—to scream, I mean—and shout with amusement. And I, of course, began to cry. And the old drunken man straightened up very oddly for an instant, with his battered hat in one hand and the pot of pansies in the other, and he raised the pot of pansies very high, as though it had been a glass of rarest wine, and bowed to me as reverently as though he had been toasting me at my father’s table at some very grand dinner. And ‘Inasmuch,’ he said. Just that—‘Inasmuch.’ So that’s how I happened to go into nursing,” she finished as abruptly as she had begun. Like some wonderful phosphorescent manifestation her whole shining soul seemed to flare forth suddenly through her plain face.

With honest perplexity Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work.

“So that’s how you happened to go into nursing?” she quizzed impatiently. Her long straight nose was all puckered tight with interrogation. Her dove-like eyes were fairly dilated with slow-dawning astonishment. “You—don’t—mean,” she gasped—“you don’t mean that just for that?” Incredulously she jumped to her feet and stood staring blankly into the city girl’s strangely illuminated features. “Well, if I were a swell like you,” she scoffed, “it would take a heap sight more than a drunken man munching pansies and rum and Bible texts to—to jolt me out of my limousines and steam-yachts and Adirondack bungalows.”

Quite against all intention, Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth’s clashed together in the irremediable antagonism of caste, the plebeian’s scornful impatience with the aristocrat equaled only by the aristocrat’s condescending patience with the plebeian.

It was no more than right that the aristocrat should recover her self-possession first.

“Never mind about your understanding, Zillah dear,” she said softly. “Your hair is the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life.”

Along Zillah Forsyth’s ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red began to show. With much more nonchalance than was really necessary she pointed toward her half-packed trunk.

“It wasn’t Sunday-school I was coming home from when I got my motto,” she remarked dryly, with a wink at no one in particular. “And, so far as I know,” she proceeded with increasing sarcasm, “the man who inspired my noble life was not in any way particularly addicted to the use of alcoholic beverages.” As though her collar was suddenly too tight, she rammed her finger down between her stiff white neck-band and her soft white throat. “He was a New York doctor,” she hastened somewhat airily to explain. “Gee! but he was a swell! And he was spending his summer holidays up in the same Maine town where I was tending soda-fountain. And he used to drop into the drug store nights after cigars and things. And he used to tell me stories about the drugs and things, sitting up there on the counter, swinging his legs and pointing out this and that—quinine, ipecac, opium, hashish—all the silly patent medicines, every sloppy soothing-syrup! Lordy! he knew ’em as though they were people—where they come from, where they’re going to, yarns about the tropics that would kink the hair along the nape of your neck, jokes about your own town’s soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you yell for joy. Gee! but the things that man had seen and known! Gee! but the things that man could make you see and know! And he had an automobile,” she confided proudly. “It was one of those billion-dollar French cars, and I lived just round the corner from the drug store; but we used to ride home by way of—New Hampshire.”

Almost imperceptibly her breath began to quicken.

“Gee! those nights!” she muttered. “Rain or shine, moon or thunder, tearing down those country roads at forty miles an hour, singing, hollering, whispering! It was him that taught me to do my hair like this instead of all the cheap rats and pompadours every other kid in town was wearing,” she asserted quite irrelevantly; then stopped with a furtive glance of suspicion toward both her listeners and mouthed her way delicately back to the beginning of her sentence again. “It was he that taught me to do my hair like this,” she repeated, with the faintest possible suggestion of hauteur.

For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her cheek a narrow streak of red began to show again.

“And he went away very sudden at the last,” she finished hurriedly. “It seems he was married all the time.” Blandly she turned her wonderful face to the caressing light. “And—I hope he goes to hell,” she added.

With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene Churchill reached out an immediate conscientious hand to her.

“O Zillah,” she began, “O poor Zillah dear! I’m so sorry! I’m so—”

Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah Forsyth ignored the proffered hand.

“I don’t know what particular call you’ve got to be sorry for me, Helene Churchill,” she drawled languidly. “I’ve got my character, same as you’ve got yours, and just about nine times as many good looks. And when it comes to nursing—” Like an alto song pierced suddenly by one shrill treble note, the girl’s immobile face sharpened transiently with a single jagged flash of emotion. “And when it comes to nursing? Ha! Helene Churchill, you can lead your class all you want to with your silk-lined manners and your fuddy-duddy book-talk; but when genteel people like you are moping round all ready to fold your patients’ hands on their breasts and murmur, ‘Thy will be done,’ why, that’s the time that little ‘Yours Truly’ is just beginning to roll up her sleeves and get to work.”

With real passion her slender fingers went clutching again at her harsh linen collar. “It isn’t you, Helene Churchill,” she taunted, “that’s ever been to the Superintendent on your bended knees and begged for the rabies cases and the small-pox! Gee! you like nursing because you think it’s pious to like it; but I like it because I like it!” From brow to chin, as though fairly stricken with sincerity, her whole bland face furrowed startlingly with crude expressiveness. “The smell of ether,” she stammered, “it’s like wine to me. The clang of the ambulance gong? I’d rather hear it than fire-engines. I’d crawl on my hands and knees a hundred miles to watch a major operation. I wish there was a war. I’d give my life to see a cholera epidemic.”

As abruptly as it came, the passion faded from her face, leaving every feature tranquil again, demure, exaggeratedly innocent. With saccharine sweetness she turned to Rae Malgregor.

“Now, little one,” she mocked, “tell us the story of your lovely life. Having heard me coyly confess that I went into nursing because I had such a crush on this world, and Helene here brazenly affirm that she went into nursing because she had such a crush on the world to come, it’s up to you now to confide to us just how you happened to take up so noble an endeavor. Had you seen some of the young house doctors’ beautiful, smiling faces depicted in the hospital catalogue? Or was it for the sake of the Senior Surgeon’s grim, gray mug that you jilted your poor plowboy lover way up in the Annapolis Valley?”

“Why, Zillah,” gasped the country girl—“why, I think you’re perfectly awful! Why, Zillah Forsyth! Don’t you ever say a thing like that again! You can joke all you want to about the flirty young internes,—they’re nothing but fellows,—but it isn’t—it isn’t respectful for you to talk like that about the Senior Surgeon. He’s too—too terrifying,” she finished in an utter panic of consternation.

“Oh, now I know it was the Senior Surgeon that made you jilt your country beau,” taunted Zillah Forsyth, with soft alto sarcasm.

“I didn’t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine,” stormed Rae Malgregor, explosively. Backed up against her bureau, eyes flaming, breast heaving, little candy-box cap all tossed askew over her left ear, she stood defying her tormentor. “I didn’t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine,” she reasserted passionately. “It was Joe Hazeltine that jilted me; and we’d been going together since we were kids! And now he’s married the dominie’s daughter, and they’ve got a kid of their own ’most as old as he and I were when we first began courting each other. And it’s all because I insisted on being a trained nurse,” she finished shrilly.

With an expression of real shock, Helene Churchill peered up from her lowly seat on the floor.

“You mean,” she asked a bit breathlessly—“you mean that he didn’t want you to be a trained nurse? You mean that he wasn’t big enough, wasn’t fine enough, to appreciate the nobility of the profession?”

“Nobility nothing!” snapped Rae Malgregor. “It was me scrubbing strange men with alcohol that he couldn’t stand for, and I don’t know as I exactly blame him,” she added huskily. “It certainly is a good deal of a liberty when you stop to think about it.”

Quite incongruously her big childish blue eyes narrowed suddenly into two dark, calculating slits.

“It’s comic,” she mused, “how there isn’t a man in the world who would stand letting his wife or daughter or sister have a male nurse; but look at the jobs we girls get sent out on! It’s very confusing.” With sincere appeal she turned to Zillah Forsyth. “And yet—and yet,” she stammered, “and yet when everything scary that’s in you has once been scared out of you, why, there’s nothing left in you to be scared with any more, is there?”

“What? What?” pleaded Helene Churchill. “Say it again! What?”

“That’s what Joe and I quarreled about, my first vacation home,” persisted Rae Malgregor. “It was a traveling salesman’s thigh. It was broken bad. Somebody had to take care of it; so I did. Joe thought it wasn’t modest to be so willing.” With a perplexed sort of defiance she raised her square little chin. “But, you see, I was willing,” she said. “I was perfectly willing. Just one single solitary year of hospital training had made me perfectly willing. And you can’t un-willing a willing even to please your beau, no matter how hard you try.” With a droll admixture of shyness and disdain, she tossed her curly blond head a trifle higher. “Shucks!” she attested, “what’s a traveling salesman’s thigh?”

“Shucks yourself!” scoffed Zillah Forsyth. “What’s a silly beau or two up in Nova Scotia to a girl with looks like you? You could have married that typhoid case a dozen times last winter if you’d crooked your little finger. Why, the fellow was crazy about you. And he was richer than Crœsus. What queered it?” she demanded bluntly. “Did his mother hate you?”

Like one fairly cramped with astonishment, Rae Malgregor doubled up very suddenly at the waist-line, and, thrusting her neck oddly forward after the manner of a startled crane, stood peering sharply round the corner of the rocking-chair at Zillah Forsyth.

“Did his mother hate me?” she gasped. “Did—his—mother—hate me? Well, what do you think? With me, who never even saw plumbing till I came down here, setting out to explain to her, with twenty tiled bath-rooms, how to be hygienic though rich? Did his mother hate me? Well, what do you think? With her who bore him—her who bore him, mind you—kept waiting down-stairs in the hospital anteroom half an hour every day on the raw edge of a rattan chair, waiting, worrying, all old and gray and scared, while little, young, perky, pink-and-white me is up-stairs brushing her own son’s hair and washing her own son’s face and altogether getting her own son ready to see his own mother! And then me obliged to turn her out again in ten minutes, flip as you please, ‘for fear she’d stayed too long,’ while I stay on the rest of the night? Did his mother hate me?”

As stealthily as an assassin she crept around the corner of the rocking-chair and grabbed Zillah Forsyth by her astonished linen shoulder.

“Did his mother hate me?” she persisted mockingly. “Did his mother hate me? My God! Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn’t hate us? Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn’t look upon a trained nurse as her natural-born enemy? I don’t blame ’em,” she added chokingly. “Look at the impudent jobs we get sent out on! Quarantined up-stairs for weeks at a time with their inflammable, diphtheretic bridegrooms while they sit down-stairs brooding over their wedding teaspoons! Hiked off indefinitely to Atlantic City with their gouty bachelor uncles! Hearing their own innocent little sister’s blood-curdling death-bed deliriums! Snatching their own new-born babies away from their breasts and showing them, virgin-handed, how to nurse them better! The impudence of it, I say, the disgusting, confounded impudence—doing things perfectly, flippantly, right, for twenty-one dollars a week—and washing—that all the achin’ love in the world don’t know how to do right just for love!” Furiously she began to jerk her victim’s shoulder. “I tell you it’s awful, Zillah Forsyth,” she insisted. “I tell you I just won’t stand it!”

With muscles like steel wire, Zillah Forsyth scrambled to her feet, and pushed Rae Malgregor back against the bureau.

“For Heaven’s sake, Rae, shut up!” she said. “What in creation’s the matter with you to-day? I never saw you act so before.” With real concern she stared into the girl’s turbid eyes. “If you feel like that about it, what in thunder did you go into nursing for?” she demanded not unkindly.

Very slowly Helene Churchill rose from her lowly seat by her precious book-case and came round and looked at Rae Malgregor rather oddly.

“Yes,” she faltered, “what did you go into nursing for?” The faintest possible taint of asperity was in her voice.

Quite dumbly for an instant Rae Malgregor’s natural timidity stood battling the almost fanatic professional fervor in Helene Churchill’s frankly open face, the raw scientific passion, of very different caliber, but of no less intensity, hidden craftily behind Zillah Forsyth’s plastic features; then suddenly her own hands went clutching back at the bureau for support, and all the flaming, raging red went ebbing out of her cheeks, leaving her lips with hardly blood enough left to work them.

“I went into nursing,” she mumbled, “and it’s God’s own truth—I went into nursing because—because I thought the uniforms were so cute.”

Furiously, the instant the words were gone from her mouth, she turned and snarled at Zillah’s hooting laughter.

“Well, I had to do something,” she attested. The defense was like a flat blade slapping the air.

Desperately she turned to Helene Churchill’s goading, faintly supercilious smile, and her voice edged suddenly like a twisted sword.

“Well, the uniforms are cute,” she parried. “They are! They are! I bet you there’s more than one girl standing high in the graduating class to-day who never would have stuck out her first year’s bossin’ and slops and worry and death if she’d had to stick it out in the unimportant-looking clothes she came from home in. Even you, Helene Churchill, with all your pious talk, the day they put your coachman’s son in as new interne and you got called down from the office for failing to stand when Mr. Young Coachman came into the room, you bawled all night. You did, you did, and swore you’d chuck your whole job and go home the next day if it wasn’t that you’d just had a life-size photo taken in full nursing costume to send to your brother’s chum at Vale! So there!”

With a gasp of ineffable satisfaction she turned from Helene Churchill.

“Sure the uniforms are cute,” she slashed back at Zillah Forsyth. “That’s the whole trouble with ’em. They’re so awfully, masqueradishly cute! Sure I could have gotten engaged to the typhoid boy. It would have been as easy as robbing a babe. But lots of girls, I notice, get engaged in their uniforms, feeding a patient perfectly scientifically out of his own silver spoon, who don’t seem to stay engaged so specially long in their own street clothes, bungling just plain naturally with their own knives and forks. Even you, Zillah Forsyth,” she hacked—“even you, who trot round like the ‘Lord’s anointed’ in your pure white togs, you’re just as Dutchy-looking as anybody else come to put you in a red hat and a tan coat and a blue skirt.”

Mechanically she raised her hands to her head as though with some silly thought of keeping the horrid pain in her temples from slipping to her throat, her breast, her feet.

“Sure the uniforms are cute,” she persisted a bit thickly. “Sure the typhoid boy was crazy about me. He called me his ‘holy chorus girl.’ I heard him raving in his sleep. Lord save us! What are we to any man but just that?” she questioned hotly, with renewed venom. “Parson, actor, young sinner, old saint—I ask you frankly, girls, on your word of honor, was there ever more than one man in ten went through your hands who didn’t turn out soft somewhere before you were through with him? Mawking about your ‘sweet eyes’ while you’re wrecking your optic nerves trying to decipher the dose on a poison bottle! Mooning over your wonderful likeness to the lovely young sister they never had! Trying to kiss your finger-tips when you’re struggling to brush their teeth! Teasin’ you to smoke cigarettes with ’em when they know it would cost you your job!”

Impishly, without any warning, she crooked her knee and pointed one homely, square-toed shoe in a mincing dancing step. Hoidenishly she threw out her arms and tried to gather Helene and Zillah both into their compass.

“Oh, you holy chorus girls!” she chuckled, with maniacal delight. “Everybody all together, now! Kick your little kicks! Smile your little smiles! Tinkle your little thermometers! Steady, there! One, two, three! One, two, three!”

Laughingly, Zillah Forsyth slipped from the grasp.

“Don’t you dare ‘holy’ me!” she cried.

In real irritation Helene released herself.

“I’m no chorus girl,” she said coldly.

With a shrill little scream of pain, Rae Malgregor’s hands went flying back to her temples. Like a person giving orders in a great panic, she turned authoritatively to her two room-mates, her fingers all the while boring frenziedly into her temples.

“Now, girls,” she warned, “stand well back! If my head bursts, you know, it’s going to burst all slivers and splinters, like a boiler.”

“Rae, you’re crazy,” hooted Zillah.

“Just plain vulgar—loony,” faltered Helene.

Both girls reached out simultaneously to push her aside.

Somewhere in the dusty, indifferent street a bird’s note rang out in one wild, delirious ecstasy of untrammeled springtime. To all intents and purposes the sound might have been the one final signal that Rae Malgregor’s jangled nerves were waiting for.

“Oh, I am crazy, am I?” she cried, with a new, fierce joy. “Oh, I am crazy, am I? Well, I’ll go ask the Superintendent and see if I am. Oh, surely they wouldn’t try and make me graduate if I really was crazy!”

Madly she bolted for her bureau, and, snatching her own motto down, crumpled its face securely against her skirt, and started for the door. Just what the motto was no one but herself knew. Sprawling in paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face down to the wall for three tantalizing years.

“No, you don’t!” Zillah cried now, as she saw the mystery threatening meanly to escape her.

“No, you don’t!” cried Helene. “You’ve seen our mottos, and now we’re going to see yours!”

Almost crazed with new terror, Rae Malgregor went dodging to the right, to the left, to the right again, cleared the rocking-chair, a scuffle with padded hands, climbed the trunk, a race with padded feet, reached the door-handle at last, yanked the door open, and with lungs and temper fairly bursting with momentum, shot down the hall, down some stairs, down some more hall, down some more stairs to the Superintendent’s office, where, with her precious motto still clutched securely in one hand, she broke upon that dignitary’s startled, near-sighted vision like a young whirlwind of linen and starch and flapping brown paper. Breathlessly, without prelude or preamble, she hurled her grievance into the older woman’s grievance-dulled ears.

“Give me back my own face!” she demanded peremptorily. “Give me back my own face, I say! And my own hands! I tell you, I want my own hands! Helene and Zillah say I’m insane! And I want to go home!”

Like a short-necked animal elongated suddenly to the cervical proportions of a giraffe, the Superintendent of Nurses reared up from her stoop-shouldered desk-work, and stared forth in speechless astonishment across the top of her spectacles.

Exuberantly impertinent, ecstatically self-conscious, Rae Malgregor repeated her demand. To her parched mouth the very taste of her own babbling impudence refreshed her like the shock and prickle of cracked ice.

“I tell you, I want my own face again, and my own hands!” she reiterated glibly. “I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders—and the other human expressions,” she explained. “And the nice, grubby country hands that go with that sort of a face.”

Very accusingly she raised her finger and shook it at the Superintendent’s perfectly livid countenance.

“Oh, of course I know I wasn’t very much to look at; but at least I matched. What my hands knew, I mean, my face knew. Pies or plowing or May-baskets, what my hands knew my face knew. That’s the way hands and faces ought to work together. But you—you with all your rules and your bossing, and your everlasting ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’ you’ve snubbed all the know-anything out of my face and made my hands nothing but two disconnected machines for somebody else to run. And I hate you! You’re a monster! You’re a—Everybody hates you!”

Mutely then she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and waited for the Superintendent to smite her dead. The smite, she felt sure, would be a noisy one. First of all, she reasoned, it would fracture her skull. Naturally then, of course, it would splinter her spine. Later, in all probability, it would telescope her knee-joints. And never indeed, now that she came to think of it, had the arches of her feet felt less capable of resisting so terrible an impact. Quite unconsciously she groped out a little with one hand to steady herself against the edge of the desk.

But the blow when it came was nothing but a cool finger tapping her pulse.

“There! There!” crooned the Superintendent’s voice, with a most amazing tolerance.

“But I won’t ‘there, there!’” snapped Rae Malgregor. Her eyes were wide open again now, and extravagantly dilated.

The cool fingers on her pulse seemed to tighten a little.

“’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!” admonished the Superintendent’s mumbling lips.

“But I won’t ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’” stormed Rae Malgregor. Never before in her three years’ hospital training had she seen her arch-enemy, the Superintendent, so utterly disarmed of irascible temper and arrogant dignity, and the sight perplexed and maddened her at one and the same moment. “But I won’t ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’” Desperately she jerked her curly blond head in the direction of the clock on the wall. “Here it’s four o’clock now,” she cried, “and in less than four hours you’re going to try and make me graduate, and go out into the world—God knows where—and charge innocent people twenty-one dollars a week, and washing, likelier than not, mind you, for these hands,” she gestured, “that don’t coördinate at all with this face,” she grimaced, “but with the face of one of the house doctors or the Senior Surgeon or even you, who may be ’way off in Kamchatka when I need him most!” she finished, with a confused jumble of accusation and despair.

Still with unexplainable amiability the Superintendent whirled back into place in her pivot-chair, and with her left hand, which had all this time been rummaging busily in a lower desk drawer, proffered Rae Malgregor a small fold of paper.

“Here, my dear,” she said, “here’s a sedative for you. Take it at once. It will quiet you perfectly. We all know you’ve had very hard luck this past month, but you mustn’t worry so about the future.” The slightest possible tinge of purely professional manner crept back into the older woman’s voice. “Certainly, Miss Malgregor, with your judgment—”

“With my judgment?” cried Rae Malgregor. The phrase was like a red rag to her. “With my judgment? Great heavens! that’s the whole trouble! I haven’t got any judgment! I’ve never been allowed to have any judgment! All I’ve ever been allowed to have is the judgment of some flirty young medical student or the house doctor or the Senior Surgeon or you!”

Her eyes were fairly piteous with terror.

“Don’t you see that my face doesn’t know anything?” she faltered, “except just to smile and smile and smile and say ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Yes, sir’?” From curly blond head to square-toed, common-sense shoes her little body began to quiver suddenly like the advent of a chill. “Oh, what am I going to do,” she begged, “when I’m ’way off alone—somewhere in the mountains or a tenement or a palace, and something happens, and there isn’t any judgment round to tell me what I ought to do?”

Abruptly in the doorway, as though summoned by some purely casual flicker of the Superintendent’s thin fingers, another nurse appeared.

“Yes, I rang,” said the Superintendent. “Go and ask the Senior Surgeon if he can come to me here a moment, immediately.”

“The Senior Surgeon?” gasped Rae Malgregor. “The Senior Surgeon?” With her hands clutching at her throat she reeled back against the wall for support. Like a shore bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree stripped in one second of its leafage, she stood there, utterly stricken of temper or passion or any animating human emotion whatsoever.

“Oh, now I’m going to be expelled! Oh, now I know I’m going to be expelled!” she moaned listlessly.

Very vaguely into the farthest radiation of her vision she sensed the approach of a man. Gray-haired, gray-suited, as grayly dogmatic as a block of granite, the Senior Surgeon loomed up at last in the doorway.

“I’m in a hurry,” he growled. “What’s the matter?”

Precipitously Rae Malgregor collapsed into the breach.

“Oh, there’s nothing at all the matter, sir,” she stammered. “It’s only—it’s only that I’ve just decided that I don’t want to be a trained nurse.”

With a gesture of ill-concealed impatience the Superintendent shrugged the absurd speech aside.

“Dr. Faber,” she said, “won’t you just please assure Miss Malgregor once more that the little Italian boy’s death last week was in no conceivable way her fault—that nobody blames her in the slightest, or holds her in any possible way responsible?”

“Why, what nonsense!” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “What—”

“And the Portuguese woman the week before that,” interrupted Rae Malgregor, dully.

“Stuff and nonsense!” said the Senior Surgeon. “It’s nothing but coincidence, pure coincidence. It might have happened to anybody.”

“And she hasn’t slept for almost a fortnight,” the Superintendent confided, “nor touched a drop of food or drink, as far as I can make out, except just black coffee. I’ve been expecting this breakdown for some days.”

“And—the—young—drug-store—clerk—the—week—before—that,” Rae Malgregor resumed with singsong monotony.

Bruskly the Senior Surgeon stepped forward and, taking the girl by her shoulders, jerked her sharply round to the light, and, with firm, authoritative fingers, rolled one of her eyelids deftly back from its inordinately dilated pupil. Equally bruskly he turned away again.

“Nothing but moonshine!” he muttered. “Nothing in the world but too much coffee dope taken on an empty stomach—‘empty brain,’ I’d better have said. When will you girls ever learn any sense?” With search-light shrewdness his eyes flashed back for an instant over the haggard, gray lines that slashed along the corners of her quivering, childish mouth. A bit temperishly he began to put on his gloves. “Next time you set out to have a ‘brain-storm,’ Miss Malgregor,” he suggested satirically, “try to have it about something more sensible than imagining that anybody is trying to hold you personally responsible for the existence of death in the world. Bah!” he ejaculated fiercely. “If you are going to fuss like this over cases hopelessly moribund from the start, what in thunder are you going to do some fine day when, out of a perfectly clear and clean sky, security itself turns septic, and you lose the President of the United States or a mother of nine children—with a hang-nail?”

“But I wasn’t fussing, sir!” protested Rae Malgregor, with a timid sort of dignity. “Why, it never had occurred to me for a moment that anybody blamed me for anything.” Just from sheer astonishment her hands took a new clutch into the torn, flapping corner of the motto that she still clung desperately to even at this moment.

“For Heaven’s sake, stop crackling that brown paper!” stormed the Senior Surgeon.

“But I wasn’t crackling the brown paper, sir! It’s crackling itself,” persisted Rae Malgregor, very softly. The great blue eyes that lifted to his were brimming full of misery. “Oh, can’t I make you understand, sir?” she stammered. Appealingly she turned to the Superintendent. “Oh, can’t I make anybody understand? All I was trying to say, all I was trying to explain, was that I don’t want to be a trained nurse—after all.”

“Why not?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, with a rather noisy click of his glove fasteners.

“Because—my face is tired,” said the girl, quite simply.

The explosive wrath on the Senior Surgeon’s countenance seemed to be directed suddenly at the Superintendent.

“Is this an afternoon tea?” he asked tartly. “With six major operations this morning, and a probable meningitis diagnosis ahead of me this afternoon, I think I might be spared the babblings of an hysterical nurse.” Casually over his shoulder he nodded at the girl. “You’re a fool,” he said, and started for the door.

Just on the threshold he turned abruptly and looked back. His forehead was furrowed like a corduroy road, and the one rampant question in his mind at the moment seemed to be mired hopelessly between his bushy eyebrows.

“Lord!” he exclaimed a bit flounderingly, “are you the nurse that helped me last week on that fractured skull?”

“Yes, sir,” said Rae Malgregor.

Jerkily the Senior Surgeon retraced his footsteps into the office and stood facing her as though with some really terrible accusation.

“And the freak abdominal?” he quizzed sharply. “Was it you who threaded that needle for me so blamed slowly and calmly and surely, while all the rest of us were jumping up and down and cursing you for no brighter reason than that we couldn’t have threaded it ourselves if we’d had all eternity before us and all hell bleeding to death?”

“Y-e-s,” said Rae Malgregor.

Quite bluntly the Senior Surgeon reached out and lifted one of her hands to his scowling professional scrutiny.

“God!” he attested, “what a hand! You’re a wonder. Under proper direction you’re a wonder. It was like myself working with twenty fingers and no thumbs. I never saw anything like it.”

Almost boyishly the embarrassed flush mounted to his cheeks as he jerked away again. “Excuse me for not recognizing you,” he apologized gruffly, “but you girls all look so much alike!”

As though the eloquence of Heaven itself had suddenly descended upon a person hitherto hopelessly tongue-tied, Rae Malgregor lifted an utterly transfigured face to the Senior Surgeon’s grimly astonished gaze.

“Yes, yes, sir!” she cried joyously; “that’s just exactly what the trouble is; that’s just exactly what I was trying to express, sir: my face is all worn out trying to ‘look alike.’ My cheeks are almost sprung with artificial smiles. My eyes are fairly bulging with unshed tears. My nose aches like a toothache trying never to turn up at anything. I’m smothered with the discipline of it. I’m choked with the affectation. I tell you, I just can’t breathe through a trained nurse’s face any more. I tell you, sir, I’m sick to death of being nothing but a type. I want to look like myself. I want to see what life could do to a silly face like mine if it ever got a chance. When other women are crying, I want the fun of crying. When other women look scared to death, I want the fun of looking scared to death.” Hysterically again, with shrewish emphasis, she began to repeat: “I won’t be a nurse! I tell you I won’t! I won’t!”

“Pray what brought you so suddenly to this remarkable decision?” scoffed the Senior Surgeon.

“A letter from my father, sir,” she confided more quietly—“a letter about some dogs.”

“Dogs?” hooted the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. A trifle speculatively for an instant she glanced at the Superintendent’s face and then back again to the Senior Surgeon’s. “Yes, sir,” she repeated with increasing confidence, “up in Nova Scotia my father raises hunting-dogs. Oh, no special fancy kind, sir,” she hastened in all honesty to explain, “just dogs, you know; just mixed dogs, pointers with curly tails, and shaggy-coated hounds, and brindled spaniels, and all that sort of thing; just mongrels, you know, but very clever. And people, sir, come all the way from Boston to buy dogs of him, and once a man came way from London to learn the secret of his training.”

“Well, what is the secret of his training?” quizzed the Senior Surgeon with the sudden eager interest of a sportsman. “I should think it would be pretty hard,” he acknowledged, “in a mixed gang like that to decide just what particular game was suited to which particular dog.”

“Yes, that’s just it, sir,” beamed the White Linen Nurse. “A dog, of course, will chase anything that runs,—that’s just dog,—but when a dog really begins to care for what he’s chasing, he—wags! That’s hunting. Father doesn’t calculate, he says, on training a dog on anything he doesn’t wag on.”

“Yes, but what’s that got to do with you?” asked the Senior Surgeon, a bit impatiently.

With ill-concealed dismay the White Linen Nurse stood staring blankly at the Senior Surgeon’s gross stupidity.

“Why, don’t you see?” she faltered. “I’ve been chasing this nursing job three whole years now, and there’s no wag to it.”

“Oh, hell!” said the Senior Surgeon. If he hadn’t said “Oh, hell!” he would have grinned. And it hadn’t been a grinny day, and he certainly didn’t intend to begin grinning at any such late hour as that in the afternoon. With his dignity once reassured, he then relaxed a trifle. “For Heaven’s sake, what do you want to be?” he asked not unkindly.

With an abrupt effort at self-control Rae Malgregor jerked her head into at least the outer semblance of a person lost in almost fathomless thought.

“Why, I’m sure I don’t know, sir,” she acknowledged worriedly. “But it would be a great pity, I suppose, to waste all the grand training that’s gone into my hands.” With sudden conviction her limp shoulders stiffened a trifle. “My oldest sister,” she stammered, “bosses the laundry in one of the big hotels in Halifax, and my youngest sister teaches school in Moncton. But I’m so strong, you know, and I like to move things round so, and everything, maybe I could get a position somewhere as general housework girl.”

With a roar of amusement as astonishing to himself as to his listeners, the Senior Surgeon’s chin jerked suddenly upward.

“You’re crazy as a loon!” he confided cordially. “Great Scott! If you can work up a condition like this on coffee, what would you do on malted milk?” As unheralded as his amusement, gross irritability overtook him again. “Will—you—stop—rattling that brown paper?” he thundered at her.

As innocently as a child she rebuffed the accusation and ignored the temper.

“But I’m not rattling it, sir!” she protested. “I’m simply trying to hide what’s on the other side of it.”

“What is on the other side of it?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

With unquestioning docility the girl turned the paper around.

From behind her desk the austere Superintendent twisted her neck most informally to decipher the scrawling hieroglyphics. “Don’t Ever Be Bumptious!” she read forth jerkily with a questioning, incredulous sort of emphasis.

“Don’t ever be bumptious!” squinted the Senior Surgeon perplexedly through his glass.

“Yes,” said Rae Malgregor, very timidly. “It’s my motto.”

“Your motto?” sniffed the Superintendent.

“Your motto?” chuckled the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, my motto,” repeated Rae Malgregor, with the slightest perceptible tinge of resentment. “And it’s a perfectly good motto, too. Only, of course, it hasn’t got any style to it. That’s why I didn’t want the girls to see it,” she confided a bit drearily. Then palpably before their eyes they saw her spirit leap into ineffable pride. “My father gave it to me,” she announced briskly, “and my father said that, when I came home in June, if I could honestly say that I’d never once been bumptious all my three years here, he’d give me a heifer. And—”

“Well, I guess you’ve lost your heifer,” said the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

“Lost my heifer?” gasped the girl. Big-eyed and incredulous, she stood for an instant staring back and forth from the Superintendent’s face to the Senior Surgeon’s. “You mean,” she stammered—“you mean that I’ve been bumptious just now? You mean that, after all these years of meachin’ meekness, I’ve lost?”

Plainly even to the Senior Surgeon and the Superintendent the bones in her knees weakened suddenly like knots of tissue-paper. No power on earth could have made her break discipline by taking a chair while the Senior Surgeon stood, so she sank limply down to the floor instead, with two great solemn tears welling slowly through the fingers with which she tried to cover her face.

“And the heifer was brown, with one white ear; it was awful’ cunning,” she confided mumblingly. “And it ate from my hand, all warm and sticky, like loving sand-paper.” There was no protest in her voice, or any whine of complaint, but merely the abject submission to fate of one who from earliest infancy had seen other crops blighted by other frosts. Then tremulously, with the air of one who just as a matter of spiritual tidiness would purge her soul of all sad secrets, she lifted her entrancing, tear-flushed face from her strong, sturdy, utterly unemotional fingers and stared with amazing blueness, amazing blandness, into the Senior Surgeon’s scowling scrutiny.

Plates in tint, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. C. Merrill and H. Davidson

“‘DON’T EVER BE BUMPTIOUS!’ SQUINTED THE SENIOR SURGEON PERPLEXEDLY THROUGH HIS GLASS”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

“And I’d named her for you,” she said—“I’d named her Patience, for you!”

Instantly then she scrambled to her knees to try and assuage by some miraculous apology the horrible shock which she read in the Senior Surgeon’s face.

“Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn’t scientific,” she pleaded desperately. “Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn’t scientific at all; but up where I live, you know, instead of praying for anybody, we—we name a young animal for the virtue that that person seems to need the most. And if you tend the young animal carefully, and train it right, why—it’s just a superstition, of course, but—Oh, sir,” she floundered hopelessly, “the virtue you needed most in your business was what I meant! Oh, really, sir, I never thought of criticizing your character!”

Gruffly the Senior Surgeon laughed. Embarrassment was in the laugh, and anger, and a fierce, fiery sort of resentment against both the embarrassment and the anger, but no possible trace of amusement. Impatiently he glanced up at the fast-speeding clock.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, “I’m an hour late now!” Scowling like a pirate, he clicked the cover of his watch open and shut for an uncertain instant. Then suddenly he laughed again, and there was nothing whatsoever in his laugh this time except just amusement.

“See here, Miss—Bossy Tamer,” he said, “if the Superintendent is willing, go get your hat and coat, and I’ll take you out on that meningitis case with me. It’s a thirty-mile run, if it’s a block, and I guess if you sit on the front seat it will blow the cobwebs out of your brain—if anything will,” he finished not unkindly.

Like a white hen sensing the approach of some utterly unseen danger, the Superintendent seemed to bristle suddenly in every direction.

“It’s a bit irregular,” she protested in her most even tone.

“Bah! So are some of the most useful of the French verbs,” snapped the Senior Surgeon. In the midst of authority his voice could be inestimably soft and reassuring; but sometimes on the brink of asserting said authority he had a tone that was distinctly unpleasant.

“Oh, very well,” conceded the Superintendent, with some waspishness.

Hazily for an instant Rae Malgregor stood staring into the Superintendent’s uncordial face. “I’d—I’d apologize,” she faltered, “but I don’t even know what I said. It just blew up.”

Perfectly coldly and perfectly civilly the Superintendent received the overture.

“It was quite evident, Miss Malgregor, that you were not altogether responsible at the moment,” she conceded in common justice.

Heavily then, like a person walking in her sleep, the girl trailed out of the room to get her coat and hat.

Slamming one desk-drawer after another, the Superintendent drowned the sluggish sound of her retreating footsteps.

“There goes my best nurse,” she said grimly, “my very best nurse. Oh, no, not the most brilliant one,—I didn’t mean that,—but the most reliable, the most nearly perfect human machine that it has ever been my privilege to see turned out, the one girl that, week in, week out, month after month and year after year, has always done what she’s told, when she was told, and the exact way she was told, without questioning anything, without protesting anything, without supplementing anything with some disastrous original conviction of her own. And look at her now!” Tragically the Superintendent rubbed her hand across her worried brow. “Coffee you said it was?” she asked skeptically. “Are there any special antidotes for coffee?”

With a queer little quirk to his mouth, the gruff Senior Surgeon jerked his glance back from the open window where, like the gleam of a slim tomboyish ankle, a flicker of green went scurrying through the tree-tops.

“What’s that you asked?” he quizzed sharply. “Any antidotes for coffee? Yes, dozens of them; but none for spring.”

“Spring?” sniffed the Superintendent. A little shiveringly she reached out and gathered a white knitted shawl about her shoulders. “Spring? I don’t see what spring’s got to do with Rae Malgregor or any other young outlaw in my graduating class. If graduation came in November, it would be just the same. They’re a set of ingrates, every one of them.” Vehemently she turned aside to her card-index of names, and slapped the cards through one by one without finding one single soothing exception. “Yes, sir, a set of ingrates,” she repeated accusingly. “Spend your life trying to teach them what to do and how to do it, cram ideas into those that haven’t got any, and yank ideas out of those who have got too many; refine them, toughen them, scold them, coax them, everlastingly drill and discipline them: and then just as you get them to a place where they move like clockwork, and you actually believe you can trust them, then graduation day comes round, and they think they’re all safe, and every single individual member of the class breaks out and runs amuck with the one daredevil deed she’s been itching to do every day the last three years! Why, this very morning I caught the president of the senior class with a breakfast tray in her hands stealing the cherry out of her patient’s grape-fruit, and three of the girls reported for duty as bold as brass with their hair frizzed tight as a nigger doll’s. And the girl who’s going into a convent next week was trying on the laundryman’s derby hat as I came up from lunch. And now, now—” the Superintendent’s voice became suddenly a little hoarse—“and now here’s Miss Malgregor intriguing to get an automobile ride with you!”

“Eh?” cried the Senior Surgeon, with a jump. “My God! is this an insane asylum? Is it a nervine?” Madly he started for the door. “Order a ton of bromides,” he called back over his shoulder. “Order a car-load of them, fumigate the whole place with them, fumigate the whole damned place!”

Half-way down the lower hall, all his nerves on edge, all his unwonted boyish impulsiveness quenched nauseously like a candle-flame, he met and passed Rae Malgregor without a sign of recognition.

“God! How I hate women!” he kept mumbling to himself as he struggled clumsily all alone into the torn sleeve lining of his thousand-dollar mink coat.

Like a train-traveler coming out of a long, smoky, smothery tunnel into the clean-tasting light, the White Linen Nurse came out of the prudish, smelling hospital into the riotous mud-and-posie promise of the young April afternoon.

The god of hysteria had certainly not deserted her. In all the full effervescent reaction of her brain-storm, fairly bubbling with dimples, fairly foaming with curls, light-footed, light-hearted, most ecstatically light-headed, she tripped down into the sunshine as though the great harsh granite steps that marked her descent were nothing more nor less than a gigantic old horny-fingered hand passing her blithely out to some deliciously unknown Lilliputian adventure.

As she pranced across the soggy April sidewalk to what she supposed was the Senior Surgeon’s perfectly empty automobile, she became aware suddenly that the rear seat of the car was already occupied.

Out from an unseasonable snuggle of sable furs and flaming red hair a small peevish face peered forth at her with frank curiosity.

“Why, hello!” beamed the White Linen Nurse. “Who are you?”

With unmistakable hostility the haughty little face retreated into its furs and its red hair.

“Hush!” commanded a shrill childish voice. “Hush, I say! I’m a cripple and very bad-tempered. Don’t speak to me!”

“Oh, my glory!” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “Oh, my glory, glory, glory!” Without any warning whatsoever, she felt suddenly like nothing at all, rigged out in an exceedingly shabby old ulster and an excessively homely black slouch-hat. In a desperate attempt at tangible tomboyish nonchalance, she tossed her head, and thrust her hands down deep into her big ulster pockets. That the black hat reflected no decent featherish consciousness of being tossed, that the big threadbare pockets had no bottoms to them, merely completed her startled sense of having been in some way blotted right out of existence.

Behind her back the Senior Surgeon’s huge fur-coated approach dawned blissfully like the thud of a rescue-party.

But if the Senior Surgeon’s blunt, wholesome invitation to ride had been perfectly sweet when he prescribed it for her in the Superintendent’s office, the invitation had certainly soured most amazingly in the succeeding ten minutes. Abruptly now, without any greeting, he reached out and opened the rear door of the car, and nodded curtly for her to enter.

Instantly across the face of the Little Crippled Girl already ensconced in the tonneau a single flash of light went zigzagging crookedly from brow to chin, and was gone again.

“Hello, fat Father!” piped the shrill little voice. “Hello, fat Father!” So subtly was the phrase mouthed, to save your soul you could not have proved just where the greeting ended and the taunt began.

There was nothing subtle, however, about the way in which the Senior Surgeon’s hand shot out and slammed the tonneau door bang-bang again on its original passenger. His face was crimson with anger. Bruskly he pointed to the front seat.

“You may sit in there with me, Miss Malgregor,” he thundered.

“Yes, sir,” crooned the White Linen Nurse.

As meek as an oiled machine she scuttled to her appointed place. Once more in smothered giggle and unprotesting acquiescence she sensed the resumption of eternal discipline. Already in just this trice of time she felt her rampant young mouth resettle tamely into lines of smug, determinate serenity. Already across her idle lap she felt her clasped fingers begin to frost and tingle again like a cheerfully non-concerned bunch of live wires waiting the one authoritative signal to connect somebody, anybody, with this world or the next. Already the facile tip of her tongue seemed fairly loaded and cocked like a revolver with all the approximate “Yes, sirs,” and “No, sirs,” that she thought she should probably need.

But the only immediate remarks that the Senior Surgeon addressed to any one were addressed distinctly to the crank of his automobile.

“Damn a chauffeur who gets drunk the one day of the year when you need him most!” he muttered under his breath, as with the same exquisitely sensitive fingers that could have dissected like a caress the nervous system of a humming-bird, or reset unbruisingly the broken wing of a butterfly, he hurled his hundred and eighty pounds of infuriate brute strength against the calm, chronic, mechanical stubbornness of that auto crank. “Damn!” he swore on the upward pull, “Damn!” he gasped on the downward push, “Damn!” he cursed and sputtered and spluttered. Purple with effort, bulging-eyed with strain, reeking with sweat, his frenzied outburst would have terrorized the entire hospital staff.

With an odd little twinge of homesickness, the White Linen Nurse slid cautiously out to the edge of her seat so that she might watch the struggle better. For thus, with dripping foreheads and knotted neck-muscles and breaking backs and rankly tempestuous language, did the untutored men-folk of her own beloved home-land hurl their great strength against bulls and boulders and refractory forest trees. Very startlingly, as she watched, a brand-new thought went zigzagging through her consciousness.

Was it possible, was it even so much as remotely possible, that the great Senior Surgeon, the great, wonderful, altogether formidable, altogether unapproachable Senior Surgeon, was just a—was just a—

Stripped ruthlessly of all his social superiority, of all his professional halo, of all his scientific achievement, the Senior Surgeon stood suddenly forth before her a mere man, just like other men. Just exactly like other men? Like the sick drug clerk? Like the new-born millionaire baby? Like the doddering old Dutch gaffer? The very delicacy of such a thought drove the blood panic-stricken from her face. It was the indelicacy of the thought that brought the blood surging back again to brow, to cheeks, to lips, even to the tips of her ears.

Glancing up casually from the roar and rumble of his abruptly repentant engine, the Senior Surgeon swore once more under his breath to think that any woman sitting perfectly idle and non-concerned in a nine-thousand-dollar car should have the nerve to flaunt such a furiously strenuous color.

Bristling with resentment and mink furs, he strode around the fender and stumbled with increasing irritation across the White Linen Nurse’s knees to his seat. Just for an instant his famous fingers seemed to flash with apparent inconsequence toward one bit of mechanism and another. Then, like a huge portentous pill floated on smoothest syrup, the car slid down the yawning street into the congested city.

Altogether monotonously in terms of pain and dirt and drug and disease the city wafted itself in and out of the White Linen Nurse’s well-grooved consciousness. From every filthy street corner sodden age or starved babyhood reached out its fluttering pulse to her. Then as suddenly sweet as a draft through a fever-tainted room, the squalid city freshened into jocund, luxurious suburbs, with rollicking tennis-courts, and flaming yellow Forsythia blossoms, and green-velvet lawns prematurely posied with pale exotic hyacinths and great scarlet splotches of lusty tulips.

Beyond this hectic horticultural outburst the leisurely spring faded out again into April’s naturally sallow colors.

As glossy and black as an endless type-writer ribbon, the narrow, tense state road seemed to wind itself everlastingly in and in and in on some hidden spool of the car’s mysterious mechanism. Clickety-click, click, clack, faster than any human mind could think, faster than any human hand could finger, hurtling up hazardous hills of thought, sliding down facile valleys of fancy, roaring with emphasis, shrieking with punctuation, the great car yielded itself perforce to fate’s dictation.

Robbed successively of the city’s humanitarian pang, of the suburb’s esthetic pleasure, the White Linen Nurse found herself precipitated suddenly into a mere blur of sight, a mere chaos of sound. In whizzing speed and crashing breeze, houses, fences, meadows, people, slapped across her eyeballs like pictures on a fan. On and on and on through kaleidoscopic yellows and rushing grays the great car sped, a purely mechanical factor in a purely mechanical landscape.

Rigid with concentration, the Senior Surgeon stared like a dead man into the intrepid, on-coming road.

Intermittently from her green plushy lap-robes the Little Crippled Girl struggled to her feet, and, sprawling clumsily across whosever shoulder suited her best, raised a brazenly innocent voice, deliberately flatted, in a shrill and maddeningly repetitive chant of her own making, to the effect that

“All the birds were there,

With yellow feathers instead of hair,

And bumblebees crocheted in the trees—

And bumblebees crocheted in the trees.

And all the birds were there,

And—and—”

Intermittently from the front seat the Senior Surgeon’s wooden face relaxed to the extent of a grim mouth twisting distractedly sidewise in one furious bellow:

“Will—you—stop—your—noise—and—go—back—to—your—seat!”

Nothing else happened at all until at last, out of unbroken stretches of winter-staled stubble, a high, formal hemlock hedge and a neat, pebbled driveway proclaimed the Senior Surgeon’s ultimate destination.

Cautiously now, with an almost tender skill, the big car circled a tiny, venturesome clump of highway violets and crept through a prancing, leaping fluff of yellow collie dogs to the door of the big stone house. Instantly from inestimable resources a liveried serving-man appeared to help the surgeon from his car, another to take his coat, another to carry his bag.

Lingering for an instant to stretch his muscles and shake his great shoulders, the Senior Surgeon breathed into his cramped lungs a friendly impulse as well as a scent of budding cherry-trees.

“You may come in with me if you want to, Miss Malgregor,” he conceded. “It’s an extraordinary case. You will hardly see another one like it.” Palpably he lowered his already almost indistinguishable voice. “The boy is young,” he confided; “about your age, I should guess, a college foot-ball hero, the most superbly perfect specimen of young manhood it has ever been my privilege to behold. It will be a long case. They have two nurses already, but would like another. The work ought not to be hard. Now, if they should happen to—fancy you!” In speechless expressiveness his eyes swept estimatingly over sun-parlors, stables, garages, Italian garden, rapturous, blue-shadowed mountain view, every last intimate detail of the mansion’s wonderful equipment.

Like a drowning man feeling his last floating spar wrenched away from him, the White Linen Nurse dug her fingernails frantically into every reachable wrinkle and crevice of the heavily upholstered seat.

“Oh, but, sir, I don’t want to go in!” she protested passionately. “I tell you, sir, I’m quite done with all that sort of thing. It would break my heart. It would—oh, sir, this worrying about people for whom you’ve got no affection, it’s like sledding without any snow! It grits right down on your naked nerves. It—”

Before the Senior Surgeon’s glowering, incredulous stare her heart began to plunge and pound again, but it plunged and pounded no harder, she realized suddenly, than when in the calm, white hospital precincts she was obliged to pass his terrifying presence in the corridor and murmur an inaudible “Good morning” or “Good evening.” “After all, he’s nothing but a man, nothing but a man, nothing but a mere, ordinary, two-legged man,” she reasoned over and over to herself. With a really desperate effort she smoothed her frightened face into an expression of utter guilelessness and peace, and smiled unflinchingly right into the Senior Surgeon’s rousing anger as she had once seen an animal trainer smile into the snarl of a crouching tiger.

“Th—ank you very much,” she said: “but I think I won’t go in, sir, thank you! My—my face is still pretty tired.”

“Idiot!” snapped the Senior Surgeon as he turned on his heel and started up the steps.

From the green plushy robes on the back seat the White Linen Nurse could have sworn that she heard a sharply ejaculated, maliciously joyful “Ha!” piped out. But when both she and the Senior Surgeon turned sharply round to make sure, the Little Crippled Girl, in apparently complete absorption, sat amiably extracting tuft after tuft of fur from the thumb of one big sable glove, to the rumbling, singsong monotone of “He loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not.”

Bristling with unutterable contempt for all femininity, the Senior Surgeon proceeded on up the steps between two solemn-faced lackeys.

“Father!” wailed a feeble little voice. “Father!” There was no shrillness in the tone now, or malice, or any mischievous thing; just desolation, the impulsive, panic-stricken desolation of a little child left suddenly alone with a stranger. “Father!” the frightened voice ventured forth a tiny bit louder. But the unheeding Senior Surgeon had already reached the piazza. “Fat Father!” screamed the little voice. Barbed now like a shark-hook, the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon’s dormant sensibilities. As one fairly yanked out of his thoughts, he whirled around in his tracks.

“What do you want?” he thundered.

Helplessly the Little Girl sat staring from a lackey’s ill-concealed grin to her father’s smoldering fury. Quite palpably she began to swallow with considerable difficulty. Then as quick as a flash a diminutively crafty smile crooked across one corner of her mouth.

“Father,” she improvised dulcetly—“Father, may—may I sit in the White Linen Nurse’s lap?”

Just for an instant the Senior Surgeon’s narrowing eyes probed mercilessly into the reekingly false little smile. Then altogether brutally he shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t care where in thunder you sit,” he muttered, and went on into the house.

With an air of unalterable finality the massive oak door closed after him. In the resonant click of its latch the great wrought-iron lock seemed to smack its lips with ineffable satisfaction.

Wringing suddenly round with a whish of starched skirts, the White Linen Nurse knelt up in her seat and grinned at the Little Crippled Girl.

“Ha, yourself!” she said.

Against all possible expectancy, the Little Crippled Girl burst out laughing. The laugh was wild, ecstatic, extravagantly boisterous, yet awkward withal, and indescribably bumpy, like the first flight of a cage-cramped bird.

Quite abruptly the White Linen Nurse sat down again, and began nervously with the wrist of her chamois glove to polish the slightly tarnished brass lamp at her elbow. Equally abruptly after a minute she stopped polishing and looked back at the Little Crippled Girl.

“Would—you—like—to sit in my lap?” she queried conscientiously.

Insolent with astonishment, the Little Crippled Girl parried the question.

“Why in thunder should I want to sit in your lap?” she quizzed harshly. Every accent of her voice, every remotest intonation, was like the Senior Surgeon’s at his worst. The suddenly forked eyebrow, the snarling twitch of the upper lip, turned the whole delicate little face into a grotesque but desperately unconscious caricature of the grim-jawed father.

As though the father himself had snubbed her for some unimaginable familiarity, the White Linen Nurse winced back in hopeless confusion. Just for sheer shock, short-circuited with fatigue, a big tear rolled slowly down one pink cheek.

Instantly to the edge of her seat the Little Girl jerked herself forward.

“Don’t cry, Pretty!” she whispered. “Don’t cry! It’s my legs. I’ve got fat iron braces on my legs, and people don’t like to hold me.”

Half the professional smile came flashing back to the White Linen Nurse’s mouth.

“Oh, I just adore holding people with iron braces on their legs,” she affirmed, and, leaning over the back of the seat, proceeded with absolutely perfect mechanical tenderness to gather the poor, puny, surprised little body into her own strong, shapely arms. Then dutifully snuggling her shoulder to meet the stubborn little shoulder that refused to snuggle to it, and dutifully easing her knees to suit the stubborn little knees that refused to be eased, she settled down resignedly in her seat again to await the return of the Senior Surgeon. “There! there! there!” she began quite instinctively to croon and pat.

“Don’t say ‘There! there!’” wailed the Little Girl, peevishly. Her body was suddenly stiff as a ramrod. “Don’t say ‘There! there!’ If you’ve got to make any noise at all, say ‘Here! here!’”

“Here! here!” droned the White Linen Nurse. “Here! here! here! here!” On and on and interminably on, “Here! here! here! here!”

At the end of about the three hundred and forty-seventh “Here!” the Little Girl’s body relaxed, and she reached up two fragile fingers to close the White Linen Nurse’s mouth. “There, that will do,” she sighed contentedly. “I feel better now. Father does tire me so.”

“Father tires you?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. The giggle that followed the gasp was not in the remotest degree professional. “Father tires you?” she repeated accusingly. “Why, you silly Little Girl, can’t you see it’s you that makes father so everlastingly tired?” Impulsively with her one free hand she turned the Little Girl’s listless face to the light. “What makes you call your nice father ‘fat father’?” she asked with real curiosity. “What makes you? He isn’t fat at all. He’s just big. Why, whatever possesses you to call him ‘fat father,’ I say? Can’t you see how mad it makes him?”

“Why, of course it makes him mad,” said the Little Girl, with plainly reviving interest. Thrilled with astonishment at the White Linen Nurse’s apparent stupidity, she straightened up perkily, with inordinately sparkling eyes. “Why, of course it makes him mad,” she explained briskly. “That’s why I do it. Why, my parpa never even looks at me unless I make him mad.”

“’S-’sh!” said the White Linen Nurse. “Why, you mustn’t ever say a thing like that! Why, your marma wouldn’t like you to say a thing like that.”

Jerking bumpily back against the White Linen Nurse’s unprepared shoulder, the Little Girl prodded a pallid finger-tip into the White Linen Nurse’s vivid cheek. “Silly pink-and-white nursie!” she chuckled, “don’t you know there isn’t any marma?” Cackling with delight over her own superior knowledge, she folded her little arms and began to rock herself convulsively to and fro.

“Why, stop!” cried the White Linen Nurse, “now you stop! Why, you wicked little creature, laughing like that about your poor dead mother! Why, just think how bad it would make your poor parpa feel!”

With instant sobriety the Little Girl stopped rocking, and stared perplexedly into the White Linen Nurse’s shocked eyes. Her own little face was all wrinkled up with earnestness.

“But the parpa didn’t like the marma,” she explained painstakingly. “The parpa never liked the marma. That’s why he doesn’t like me, I heard cook telling the iceman once, when I wasn’t more than ten minutes old.”

Desperately, with one straining hand, the White Linen Nurse stretched her fingers across the Little Girl’s babbling mouth. Equally desperately, with the other hand, she sought to divert the Little Girl’s mind by pushing the fur cap back from her frizzy red hair, and loosening her sumptuous coat, and jerking down vainly across two painfully obtrusive white ruffles the awkwardly short, hideously bright little purple dress.

“I think your cap is too hot,” she began casually, and then proceeded with increasing vivacity and conviction to the objects that worried her most. “And those—those ruffles,” she protested; “they don’t look a bit nice being so long.” Resentfully she rubbed an edge of the purple dress between her fingers. “And a little girl like you, with such bright-red hair, ought not to wear purple,” she admonished with real concern. “Now, whites and blues, and little soft pussy-cat grays—”

Mumblingly through her finger-muzzled mouth, the Little Girl burst into explanations again.

“Oh, but when I wear gray,” she persisted, “the parpa never sees me; but when I wear purple he cares, he cares most awfully,” she boasted with a bitter sort of triumph. “Why, when I wear purple, and frizz my hair hard enough, no matter who’s there, or anything, he’ll stop right off short in the middle of whatever he’s doing, and rear right up so perfectly beautiful and mad and glorious, and holler right out, ‘For Heaven’s sake, take that colored Sunday supplement away!’”

“Your father’s nervous,” suggested the White Linen Nurse.

Almost tenderly the Little Girl reached up and drew the White Linen Nurse’s ear close down to her own snuggling lips.

“Damned nervous,” she confided laconically.

Quite against all intention, the White Linen Nurse giggled. Floundering to recover her dignity, she plunged into a new error. “Poor little dev—” she began.

“Yes,” sighed the Little Girl, complacently, “that’s just what the parpa calls me.” Fervidly she clasped her little hands together. “Yes, if I can only make him mad enough daytimes,” she asserted, “then at night, when he thinks I’m asleep, he comes and stands by my cribbyhouse like a great black shadow-bear, and shakes and shakes his most beautiful head and says, ‘Poor little devil! poor little devil!’ Oh, if I can only make him mad enough daytimes!” she cried out ecstatically.

“Why, you naughty little thing!” scolded the White Linen Nurse, with an unmistakable catch in her voice. “Why, you naughty, naughty little thing!”

Like the brush of a butterfly’s wing, the child’s hand grazed the White Linen Nurse’s cheek.

“I’m a lonely little thing,” she confided wistfully. “Oh, I’m an awfully lonely little thing!” With really shocking abruptness the old malicious smile came twittering back to her mouth. “But I’ll get even with the parpa yet,” she threatened joyously, reaching out with pliant fingers to count the buttons on the White Linen Nurse’s dress. “Oh, I’ll get even with the parpa yet!” In the midst of the passionate assertion her rigid little mouth relaxed in a most mild and innocent yawn.

“Oh, of course,” she yawned, “on wash-days and ironing-days and every other workday in the week he has to be away cutting up people, ’cause that’s his lawful business; but Sundays, when he doesn’t really need to at all, he goes off to some kind of a green, grassy club all day long and plays golf.” Very palpably her eyelids began to droop. “Where was I?” she asked sharply. “Oh, yes, ‘the green, grassy club.’ Well, when I die,” she faltered, “I’m going to die specially on some Sunday when there’s a big golf game, so he’ll just naturally have to give it up and stay home and amuse me—and help arrange the flowers. The parpa’s crazy about flowers. So am I,” she added broodingly. “I raised almost a geranium once. But the parpa threw it out. It was a good geranium, too. All it did was just to drip the tiniest-teeniest bit over a book and a writing and somebody’s brains in a dish. He threw it at a cat. It was a good cat, too. All it did was to—”

A little jerkily her drooping head bobbed forward and then back again. Her heavy eyes were almost tight shut by this time, and after a moment’s silence her lips began moving dumbly like one at silent devotions. “I’m making a little poem now,” she confided at last. “It’s about—you and me. It’s a sort of a little prayer.” Very, very softly she began to repeat:

“Now I sit me down to nap,

All curled up in a nursie’s lap.

If she should die before I wake—”

Abruptly she stopped and stared up suspiciously into the White Linen Nurse’s eyes. “Ha!” she mocked, “you thought I was going to say, ‘If I should die before I wake,’ didn’t you? Well, I’m not.”

“It would have been more generous,” acknowledged the White Linen Nurse.

Very stiffly the Little Girl pursed her lips. “It’s plenty generous enough when it’s all done!” she said severely. “And I’ll thank you, Miss Malgregor, not to interrupt me again!” With excessive deliberateness she went back to the first line of her poem and began all over again:

“Now I sit me down to nap,

All curled up in a nursie’s lap.

If she should die before I wake,

Give her—give her ten cents, for anybody’s sake!”

“Why, that’s a—a cunning little prayer,” yawned the White Linen Nurse. Most certainly of course she would have smiled if the yawn hadn’t caught her first. But now in the middle of the yawn it was a great deal easier to repeat the “very cunning” than to force her lips into any new expression. “Very cunning, very cunning,” she kept crooning conscientiously.

Modestly, like some other successful authors, the Little Girl flapped her eyelids languidly open and shut for three or four times before she acknowledged the compliment. “Oh, cunning as any of ’em,” she admitted offhandishly. Only once again did she open either mouth or eyes, and this time it was merely one eye and half a mouth. “Do my fat iron braces hurt you?” she mumbled drowsily.

“Yes, a little,” conceded the White Linen Nurse.

“Ha! they hurt me all the time!” gibed the Little Girl.

Five minutes later, the child who didn’t particularly care about being held, and the girl who didn’t particularly care about holding her, were fast asleep in each other’s arms, a naughty, nagging, restive little hornet all hushed up and a-dream in the heart of a pink wild-rose!

Stalking out of the house in his own due time the Senior Surgeon reared back aghast at the sight.

“Well, I’ll be hanged!” he muttered. “Most everlastingly hanged! Wonder what they think this is? A somnolent kindergarten show? Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!”

Awkwardly, on the top step, he struggled alone into his cumbersome coat. Every tingling nerve in his body, every shuddering sensibility, was racked to its utmost capacity over the distressing scenes he had left behind him in the big house. Back in that luxuriant sick-room, youth incarnate lay stripped root, branch, leaf, bud, blossom, fruit, of all its manhood’s promise. Back in that erudite library, culture personified, robbed of all its fine philosophy, sat babbling illiterate street-curses into its quivering hands. Back in that exquisite pink-and-gold boudoir, blonded fashion, ravished for once of all its artistry, ran stumbling round and round in interminable circles like a disheveled hag. In shrill crescendos and discordant basses, with heart-piercing jaggedness, with blood-curdling raspishness, each one, boy, father, mother, meddlesome relative, competent or incompetent assistant, indiscriminate servant, filing his separate sorrow into the Senior Surgeon’s tortured ears.

With one of those sudden revulsions to materialism which is liable to overwhelm any man who delves too long at a time in the brutally unconventional issues of life and death, the Senior Surgeon stepped down into the subtle, hyacinth-scented sunshine with every latent human greed in his body clamoring for expression before it, too, should be hurtled into oblivion. “Eat, damn you, and drink, damn you, and be merry, damn you, for tomorrow even you, Lendicott R. Faber, may have to die!” brawled and rebrawled through his mind like a ribald phonograph tune.

At the edge of the bottom step a precipitous lilac branch that must have budded and bloomed in a single hour smote him stingingly across his cheek. “Laggard!” taunted the lilac branch.

With the first crunching grit of gravel under his feet, something transcendently naked and unashamed that was neither brazen sorrow nor brazen pain thrilled across his startled consciousness. Over the rolling, marshy meadow, beyond the succulent willow-hedge that hid the winding river, up from some fluent, slim canoe, out from a chorus of virile young tenor voices, a little passionate love-song, divinely tender, most incomparably innocent, came stealing palpitantly forth into that inflammable spring world without a single vestige of accompaniment on it!

“Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here,

And Love is Lord of you and me.

There’s no bird in brake or brere,

But to his little mate sings he,

‘Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here,

And Love is Lord of you and me!’”

Wrenched like a sob out of his own lost youth, the Senior Surgeon’s faltering college memories took up the old refrain:

“As I go singing, to my dear,

‘Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here,

And Love is Lord of you—and me!’”

Just for an instant a dozen long-forgotten pictures lanced themselves poignantly into his brain: dingy, incontrovertible old recitation-rooms where young ideas flashed as bright and futile as parade swords; elm-shaded slopes where lithe young bodies lolled on green velvet grasses to expound their harshest cynicisms; book-history, book-science, book-economics, book-love,—all the paper passion of all the paper poets swaggering imperiously on boyish lips that would have died a thousand bashful deaths before the threatening imminence of a real girl’s kiss! Magic days, with youth the one glittering, positive treasure on the tree of life, and woman still a mystery!

“Woman a mystery?” Harshly the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon’s brain. Croakingly in that instant all the grim, gray scientific years re-overtook him, swamped him, strangled him. “Woman a mystery? O ye gods! And youth? Bah! Youth! A mere tinsel tinkle on a rotting Christmas-tree!”

Furiously with renewed venom he turned and threw his weight again upon the stubbornly resistant crank of his automobile.

Vaguely disturbed by the noise and vibration, the White Linen Nurse opened her big drowsy blue eyes upon him.

“Don’t—jerk it so!” she admonished hazily; “you’ll wake the Little Girl!”

“Well, what about my convenience, I’d like to know?” snapped the Senior Surgeon, in some astonishment.

Heavily the White Linen Nurse’s lashes shadowed down again across her sleep-flushed cheeks.

“Oh, never mind about that,” she mumbled non-concernedly.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, wake up there!” bellowed the Senior Surgeon above the sudden roar of his engine.

Adroitly for a man of his bulk he ran around the radiator and jumped into his seat. Joggled unmercifully into wakefulness, the Little Girl greeted his return with a generous, if distinctly non-tactful, demonstration of affection. Grabbing the unwitting fingers of his momentarily free hand, she tapped them proudly against the White Linen Nurse’s plump pink cheek.

“See, I call her ‘Peach’!” she boasted joyously, with all the triumphant air of one who felt assured that mental discrimination such as this could not possibly fail to impress even a person as naturally obtuse as a father.

“Don’t be foolish!” snarled the Senior Surgeon.

“Who? Me?” gasped the White Linen Nurse, in a perfect agony of confusion.

“Yes, you,” snapped the Senior Surgeon, explosively, half an hour later, after interminable miles of absolute silence and dingy yellow field-stubble and bare, brown alder-bushes.

Truly out of the ascetic habit of his daily life, “where no rain was,” as the Bible would put it, it did seem to him distinctly foolish, not to say careless, not to say out and out incendiary, for any girl to go blushing her way like a fire-brand through a world so palpably populated by young men whose heads were tow, and whose hearts indisputably tinder rather than tender.

“Yes, you!” he reasserted vehemently, at the end of another silent mile.

Then plainly begrudging this second inexcusable interruption of his most vital musings concerning spinal meningitis, he scowled his way savagely back again into his own grimly established trend of thought.

Excited by so much perfectly good silence that nobody seemed to be using, the Little Crippled Girl ventured gallantly forth once more into the hazardous conversational land of grown-ups.

“Father,” she experimented cautiously with most commendable discretion.

Fathoms deep in abstraction, the Senior Surgeon stared unheeding into the whizzing black road. Pulses and temperatures and blood-pressures were seething in his mind; and sharp sticks and jagged stones and the general possibilities of a puncture; and murmurs of the heart and râles of the lungs; and a most unaccountable knock-knock-knocking in the engine; and the probable relation of middle-ear disease; and the perfectly positive symptoms of optic neuritis; and a damned funny squeak in the steering-gear.

“Father,” the Little Girl persisted valiantly.

To add to his original concentration, the Senior Surgeon’s linen collar began to chafe him maddeningly under his chin. The annoyance added two scowls to his already blackly furrowed face, and at least ten miles an hour to his running time, but nothing whatsoever to his conversational ability.

“Father,” the Little Girl whimpered with faltering courage. Then panic-stricken, as wiser people have been before her, over the dreadful spookish remoteness of a perfectly normal human being who refuses either to answer or even to notice your wildest efforts at communication, she raised her waspish voice in its shrillest, harshest war-cry.

“Fat Father! Fat Father! F-A-T F-A-T-H-E-R!” she screeched out frenziedly at the top of her lungs.

The gun-shot agony of a wounded rabbit was in the cry, the last gurgling gasp of strangulation under a murderer’s reeking fingers, catastrophe unspeakable, disaster now irrevocable.

Clamping down his brakes with a wrench that almost tore the insides out of his engine, the Senior Surgeon brought the great car to a staggering standstill.

“What is it?” he cried in real terror. “For God’s sake, what is it?”

Limply the Little Girl stretched down from the White Linen Nurse’s lap till she could nick her toe against the shiniest woodwork in sight. Altogether aimlessly her small chin began to burrow deeper and deeper into her big fur collar.

“For God’s sake, what do you want?” demanded the Senior Surgeon. Even yet along his spine the little nerves crinkled with shock and apprehension. “For God’s sake, what do you want?”

Helplessly the child lifted her turbid eyes to his. With unmistakable appeal, her tiny hand went clutching out at one of the big buttons on his coat. Desperately for an instant she rummaged through her brain for some remotely adequate answer to this most thunderous question, and then retreated precipitously as usual to the sacristy of her own imagination.

“All the birds were there, Father!” she confided guilelessly.

“All the birds were there,

With yellow feathers instead of hair.

And bumblebees crocheted in the trees.

And—”

Short of complete annihilation, there was no satisfying vengeance whatsoever that the Senior Surgeon’s exploding passion could wreak upon his offspring. Complete annihilation being unfeasible at the moment, he merely climbed laboriously out of the car, re-cranked the engine, climbed laboriously back into his place, and started on his way once more. All the red, blustering rage was stripped completely from him. Startlingly rigid, startlingly white, his face was like the death-mask of a pirate.

Pleasantly excited by she didn’t know exactly what, the Little Girl resumed her beloved falsetto chant, rhythmically all the while with her puny iron-braced legs beating the tune into the White Linen Nurse’s tender flesh.

“All the birds were there,

With yellow feathers instead of hair.

And bumblebees crocheted in the trees,

And—and—all the birds were there,

With yellow feathers instead of hair.

And—”

Frenziedly as a runaway horse trying to escape from its own pursuing harness and carriage, the Senior Surgeon poured increasing speed into both his own pace and the pace of his tormentor. Up hill, down dale, screeching through rocky echoes, swishing through blue-green spruce-lands, dodging indomitable boulders, grazing lax, treacherous embankments, the great car scuttled homeward. Huddled behind his steering-wheel like a warrior behind his shield, every body muscle taut with strain, every facial muscle diabolically calm, the Senior Surgeon met and parried successively every fresh onslaught of yard, rod, mile.

Then suddenly in the first precipitous descent of a mighty hill, the whole earth seemed to drop out from under the car. Down, down, down, with incredible swiftness and smoothness, the great machine went diving toward abysmal space! Up, up, up, with incredible bumps and bouncings, trees, bushes, stone walls went rushing to the sky!

Gasping surprisedly toward the Senior Surgeon the White Linen Nurse saw his grim mouth yank round abruptly in her direction as it yanked sometimes in the operating-room with some sharp, incisive order of life or death. Instinctively she leaned forward for the message.

Not over-loud, but strangely distinct, the words slapped back into her straining ears:

“If it will rest your face any to look scared, by all means do so. I’ve lost control of the machine,” called the Senior Surgeon, sardonically, across the roar of the wind.

The phrase excited the White Linen Nurse, but it did not remotely frighten her. She was not in the habit of seeing the Senior Surgeon lose control of any situation. Merely intoxicated with speed, delirious with ozone, she snatched up the Little Girl close, close to her breast.

“We’re flying!” she cried. “We’re dropping from a parachute! We’re—”

Swoopingly, like a sled striking glare, level ice, the great car swerved from the bottom of the hill into a soft rolling meadow. Instantly from every conceivable direction, like foes in ambush, trees, stumps, rocks reared up in threatening defiance.

Tighter and tighter the White Linen Nurse crushed the Little Girl to her breast. Louder and louder she called in the Little Girl’s ear.

“Scream!” she shouted. “There might be a bump! Scream louder than a bump! Scream! Scream! S-c-r-e-a-m!”

In that first overwhelming, nerve-numbing, heart-crunching terror of his whole life as the great car tilted up against a stone, plowed down into the mushy edge of a marsh, and skidded completely round, crash-bang into a tree, it was the last sound that the Senior Surgeon heard—the sound of a woman and child screeching their lungs out in diabolical exultancy!

(The second instalment of this three-part serial story will be published in the September CENTURY.)

A DOUBLE STAR

BY LEROY TITUS WEEKS

GIVE me Love’s password—fearless I’ll face God.

Love spoke the word when bloomed the primal soul;

It freed the Son of Man from Death’s control.

All paths of life its happy feet have trod:

Love dons the wooden shoe to moil and plod,

It crowns Madonna with the aureole,

By every hovel takes its golden toll,

And walks the royal court in velvet shod.

Two lovers be who drank pain to the lees

Yet o’er all lovers else exalted are;

Twin luminaries in the heaven, these,

In Love’s bright galaxy a double star:

And when Love whispers softly—“Héloïse!”

The firmament will echo—“Abélard!”

ROMAIN ROLLAND

AUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE”

BY ALVAN F. SANBORN

“Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”—Rolland.

ROMAIN ROLLAND is to-day a world celebrity. On June 5 he was awarded the “Grand Prix” of the French Academy.

Jean-Christophe, the dominant figure of the enormous work which Rolland was a score of years in writing, and nearly half a score in publishing, is gradually becoming a household name upon two continents.

“Jean-Christophe” is the detailed life of a man from the cradle to the grave, a prose epic of suffering, a narrative of the evolution of musical genius, a pæan to music, and a critique of composers, the history of an epoch, a comparative study of the civilizations of France and Germany, an arraignment of society, a discussion of vexed problems, a treatise on ethics, a “barrel” of sermons, a storehouse of dissertations, and a blaze of aspirations. It is also, the protestations of the author to the contrary notwithstanding, a novel, but a novel at once so earnest and so austere that it has performed the miracle of imparting to Anglo-Saxons a belief in French seriousness. Edmund Gosse pronounces it “the noblest work of fiction of the twentieth century,” and George Moore, “one of the most remarkable novels France ever produced.” It has also been characterized by American critics as “an epoch-making departure in fiction,” “the greatest literary work that has come out of France since Zola.”

“FROM behind the house mounts the murmuring of the river,” is the opening phrase of the first volume of “Jean-Christophe.” The last chapter of the last volume represents St. Christopher crossing the river, with “the Child, the day that is to be,” upon his shoulder; and beneath all the intervening pages the river flows, emerging ever and anon with whisperings, babblings, and gurglings, with purlings, trillings, and trumpetings, with roarings, swishings, and swashings, with plashings, splashings, and crashings. “There are human lives,” says Romain Rolland, “that are placid lakes; others are great, open skies wherein the clouds sail; others, fertile plains; others, jagged peaks. Jean-Christophe has always seemed to me to be a river.”

This preoccupation with the river, amounting almost to an obsession, is probably due to the prominence of water in the landscape in which Romain Rolland’s early years were passed. Clamecy, the little town of the Morvan in which he was born (January 29, 1866), is situated on the Nivernais Canal, in the angle formed by the junction of the rivers Beuvron and Yonne. The volume entitled “Antoinette” is replete with memories of the scenes of his childhood. In it he has described lovingly and charmingly not Clamecy itself, but a representative community of the same province, which is one of the most heavily wooded, as well as one of the most picturesque, of France, and little infested by tourists; and he has portrayed a family which, despite deliberate and ingenious disguises, bears a close resemblance to his own.

Furthermore, the refined and altogether lovable Olivier Jeannin is more like Romain Rolland than is his hero, the often insupportable Jean-Christophe Krafft, whom his creator, unwittingly perhaps, made something of a cad and a good deal of a boor, a “fresh,” bumptious fellow, always going about with a chip on his shoulder, looking for trouble.

Plate in tint, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

ROMAIN ROLLAND, AUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE.”

FROM A PORTRAIT DRAWING BY GRANIÉ

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

In the Morvan, the physical type of the Gauls remains exceptionally pure, and of this type Romain Rolland is an almost perfect specimen. He is tall, he is spare; he is very blond, and his eyes are very blue. Despite a tendency to pallor and a slight stoop, he appears to be of the wiry breed that is capable of doing a great deal of hard work without excessive fatigue; but those who should know affirm that his “fine faculties were imprisoned by nature in a feeble and ailing body,” and that he has always been a close approach to an invalid in consequence. His demeanor is austere, and he is prone to long silences; but when he breaks his silences, he breaks them with a vengeance, like a pent-up torrent sweeping away a dam, and one sees that his austerity is only a cloak for sensitiveness, for passion, and for a mighty kindliness. He is an ideal comrade, a loyal friend, and a sort of patron saint or father confessor of young or struggling writers who have “the root of the matter” in them. For instance, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, having fallen under the spell of Dostoyevsky, was so oppressed by the pessimism of the great Russian that he was made nearly ill and was tempted to renounce all endeavor. Rolland, by tactful and tender encouragement, rescued him from this slough of despond, restoring to him his lost interest in life and art. The result was the beautiful sylvan novel, “Monsieur des Lourdines,” one of the sweetest and purest works of the last few years, which, without this intervention, probably never would have been written.

Rolland’s father was a notary, descended from notaries, and his mother was the daughter of a magistrate, descended from magistrates, who were related to Guillaume and Guillaume-Henri de Lamoignon, first President of the Parliament of Paris (seventeenth century) and Chancellor of France (eighteenth century), respectively. At a very early age the boy studied music with his mother, who was an accomplished musician, and as soon as he dreamed of the future at all, he dreamed of a musical future. When he had exhausted the educational possibilities of Clamecy, whose communal college corresponds roughly with the average American high school, his parents, fearing to allow him to shift for himself, probably because of his delicate constitution, broke up their Nivernais establishment, and went with him to Paris, the father, with a self-sacrifice verging on heroism, exchanging the prestige of being one of the first citizens of a town to which he was devotedly attached for the effacement of a modest clerkship in the capital. In Paris, Romain entered, first, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and, later, at twenty, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, matriculating at the latter not in the department of letters, to which his tastes inclined him, but in that of history and geography, a concession, no doubt, to the father, who would have liked to see his son in the Ecole Polytechnique.

The choice was fortunate, since it put him under the tutelage of the historian Gabriel Monod, who possessed a fine personality and was a stimulating teacher, exerting a salutary moral as well as intellectual influence upon his pupils, in whom he inspired a sort of filial affection.

While at the Ecole Normale, Rolland was profoundly impressed by Wagner and by Tolstoy. In October, 1887, he was the happy and proud recipient of a letter from Tolstoy, saluting him as “Dear Brother,” which he published later, preceded by a fervid introduction, in “Les cahiers de la quinzaine.” “I loved Tolstoy profoundly,” he says in this introduction, “and I have never ceased to love him. For two or three years I lived enveloped in the atmosphere of his thought. I was certainly more familiar with his creations, with ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Anna Karénina,’ and ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,’ than with the works of any of the great French writers. The goodness, the intelligence, the absolute truthfulness, of this great man, were for me the surest of guides in the midst of the moral anarchy of the time.”

Shortly after being graduated from the Ecole Normale, Rolland was admitted to the French School of Archæology and History at Rome. Although prejudiced against Italy from his boyhood, he surrendered promptly and unconditionally not only to the splendor of the art enshrined in its monuments and museums, but to the ineffable charm of its landscape and its sky. “He took his revenge for the asceticism of the gray visions to which he had hitherto been condemned.... He was as a new man beginning life over.”

During his stay in Rome, he became a great favorite of the aged Fräulein Malwida von Meysenbug, an extraordinary woman, who had known intimately and shared the hopes of all the European revolutionary movements from 1848 to 1870. Fräulein von Meysenbug’s “Memoirs,” wherein she gives her impressions of her illustrious friends, Kossuth, Mazzini, Hertzen, Ogareff, Garibaldi, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, Wagner, Lenbach, Liszt, Nietzsche, and Ibsen, contains this reference to the protégé of her declining years: “I find in this young Frenchman Rolland the same idealism, the same lofty aspiration, the same profound understanding of all the great intellectual issues that I have found in the superior men of other nationalities.”

To this period of Rolland’s life belong a number of historical plays,—“Les Baglioni,” “Le siège de Mantoue,” “Niobé,” “Caligula,” “Jeanne de Piennes,” “Orsino,”—which Fräulein von Meysenbug, not an entirely impartial judge, pronounced admirable, but which thus far their author has not seen fit to give to the world. They were inspired in a certain degree by Shakspere. “Despite Tolstoy, Wagner, etc.,” Rolland wrote to a friend, “Shakspere is the one artist I have most constantly preferred from my childhood. And if the Shakspere of the historical dramas is not the only Shakspere I love, he is at least the Shakspere who has influenced me most directly by opening up to me the horizons of this new artistic world and providing me with incomparable models.”

When Rolland returned to France, he had become not only an archæological and historical pundit, but under the influence of the ardent humanitarian Von Meysenbug and of the advanced artists, agitators, and reformers who gravitated about her, an insurgent and just a bit of a fanatic. He was consumed with generous ardor to edify and elevate his compatriots, who seemed to him crushed and degraded by subserviency to convention and tradition.

Thenceforth his every act was to be combative, was to possess an unequivocal social significance, was to count, if not for revolution, at least for radical reform. His thesis for the doctorate, “The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama,” sustained before the faculty of the Sorbonne, June 19, 1895, was the first dissertation on music ever presented to that conservative body. It was intended as a protest against the disdain with which music, in contradistinction to painting, sculpture, and architecture, had always been treated by the university, and was a move to secure for music the consideration it deserves.

Rolland’s next moves were the organization (1898) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales of a department of music, in opening which he delivered a pithy and brilliant address on the place of music in general history; the unobtrusive but bold transformation (1903) of the course on the history of art, with which he had been intrusted by the Ecole Normale (in 1897), into a course on the history of music; and the stubborn maintenance of this iconoclastic orientation after the absorption of the Ecole Normale by the Sorbonne.

Rolland was also the leading spirit of a movement, so impassioned that it amounted to a veritable crusade, for the democratization of the drama, “for the creation,” to employ his rather ambitious phraseology, “of a new art for a new world.” He aspired to replace the contemporaneous stage by a stage more human and fraternal, that should edify and improve the masses on one hand, and emancipate and develop art on the other, and to found “a theater of, by, and for the people,” that should “share the bread of the people, their restlessness and anxieties, their battles and their hopes,” and that should be for them “a fountain-head of joy and of life.” In March, 1899, he signed, with Lucien Besnard, Maurice Pottecher, Louis Lumet, and Gabriel Trarieux, a somewhat turgid manifesto which ended thus: “Make no mistake. It is no mere literary experiment we are proposing. It is a question of life or death for art and for the people. For, if art is not opened to the people, it is doomed to disappear; and if the people do not discover the pathway of art, humanity abdicates its destinies.” To this propaganda, Rolland contributed a volume entitled “Le théâtre du peuple,” which contained both eloquent and grandiloquent passages, and a virile and highly colored, if slightly declamatory, tetralogy of the Revolution,—“Le quatorze juillet,” “Danton,” “Les loups,” “Le triomphe de la raison,”—designed to “resuscitate the forces of the past, reanimate its capacities for action, and rekindle the national faith and heroism with the flames of the republican epoch, in order that the work interrupted in 1794 may be resumed and completed by a people more mature and more fully aware of its destiny.” “Danton,” “Les loups,” and “Le triomphe de la raison” were given two or three performances each by dramatic societies of one sort or another; and “Le quatorze juillet” was finally produced by a regular theater (La Renaissance), but its run was short.

Rolland was a vehement Dreyfusard, with a special enthusiasm for Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart. “He who can see injustice without trying to combat it is neither entirely an artist,” he observed, in this connection, “nor entirely a man”; and he protested vigorously against the British invasion of the Transvaal with a play, dedicated to “Civilization” and entitled “Le temps viendra,” in which he makes one of the characters say: “Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”

Sadly disillusioned by the triumph of might over right in South Africa, by the altogether shameless manner in which the righteous indignation of the sincere Dreyfusards was exploited by the professional politicians, and by the failure of his efforts to regenerate the stage, Rolland found fresh force and new courage in a study of the lives of heroes, the men who were great of heart in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, the noble souls who suffered for the sake of right; and always a propagandist, he straightway endeavored to found a cult of heroism, to persuade his fellows “to read in the eyes” of those sanctified by suffering, and in the histories of their careers, that “life is never greater, more fruitful, and more blessed than in affliction.” To this end he wrote a series of biographies of heroes (“Beethoven,” “Michelangelo,” “Tolstoy,” “Millet,” “Handel,” “Hugo Wolf,” etc.), which he presented to the French public and to the rest of the world with these ringing words: “The air is heavy about us. Old Europe is waxing torpid in an oppressive and vitiated atmosphere. A materialism devoid of grandeur cumbers thought and fetters the action of governments and of individuals. The world is dying of asphyxia in its prudent and vile egoism. The world is stifling. Fling the windows wide open! Let the free air rush in! Let us inhale the vivifying breath of the heroes!”

“Jean-Christophe,” which is a ten-volume biography of an imaginary hero, synthesizes and supplements the “Théâtre du peuple” and the heroic biographies. It is, like them, an act of propaganda, conceived in a similar spirit of revolt, and animated by a similar desire to help people “to live, to correct their errors, to conquer their prejudices, and to enlarge from day to day their thoughts and their hearts.” “I was isolated,” writes Rolland, regarding the origin of this now famous work; “I was stifling, like so many others in France, in a hostile moral atmosphere; I wanted to breathe, I wanted to react against a sickly civilization, against a thought corrupted by a false élite.

“I wanted to say to this élite: ‘You are liars! You do not represent France!’ And for that I needed a hero of pure eyes and of pure heart, with a soul sufficiently unblemished to have the right to speak, and with a voice strong enough to make itself heard.”

The veritable drubbing the fourth volume of “Jean-Christophe” gives Germany was inspired by sympathy, not by antipathy; it was the rod, so to speak, indispensable to the salvation of the child. “I am not in the least an enemy of Germany,” Rolland wrote in a personal letter bearing the date of September 12, 1907, “and the best proof is that I have chosen a German for my hero. The absolute sincerity, the creative energy, and the moral rigidity of Christophe offset his rather severe criticisms of his countrymen. No German can love more than I the Germany of Goethe and of Beethoven. But I believe that the Germany of to-day is sick; and, in her interest, some one must have the courage to say so. You may be sure that Christophe, at present in Paris, will be as hard upon my compatriots as he has been upon his own.”

This prediction was amply verified, as we know, by Volume V, “La foire sur la place,” which, in its turn, proceeded not from malevolence, but from a deep-rooted determination to “battle for the life and the honor of the race”; not from anti-patriotism, but from the high and pure form of patriotism that wishes its country to be blameless. “Whosoever has divined the soul that animates the body of this people, which does not want to perish, can and must boldly lay bare its vices and its follies, in order to combat them—in order to combat especially those who exploit them and who live off them. To struggle is even to inflict pain that good may come.”

The entire ten volumes preach that all things work together for good to the persons or the peoples who hitch their wagons to the stars.

Incidentally, Rolland seems also to teach in “Jean-Christophe” that the Gallic ideal and the Germanic ideal, “the vast culture and the combative reason of France” and “the inner music and the feeling for nature of Germany,” have everything to gain by joining forces.

Romain Rolland has not solved the riddle of existence. His works are less a revelation than an inspiration; he is a well-nigh peerless kindler of ambition of the higher order. He has not done much toward making life comprehensible, but he has done a good deal, and possibly this is better, toward making it livable, at least for those who have renounced trying to comprehend it. He aids and encourages the downcast or despairing not with tenets of philosophy or religion,—dogmas are his bête noire,—but with stories of heroic souls whose example arouses them to a consciousness of their own capacity for virtue, inspires them with faith in themselves and in the future, and shows them how blessedness may be wrought out of wretchedness. It is the old, old, but always new, message of joy through sanctified suffering.

“Seek not happiness, seek blessedness. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein whoso walks and works it is well with him!” thundered the British worshiper and biographer of heroes, Carlyle.

The French biographer and worshiper of heroes expresses essentially the same thought in slightly different terms:

And the little fifteen-year-old Puritan heard the voice of his God.

“Go on, on and on, never stopping to rest.”

“But where shall I go, Lord? Whatever I do, wherever I go, is not the result always the same, is not the end always there?”

“Go die, you who are doomed to die! Go suffer, you who are doomed to suffer! You do not live to be happy. You live to accomplish my Law. Suffer! Die! But be what you should be—a Man!”

Romain Rolland, at forty-seven, has proved himself a man of great heart and of pure conscience, one of the heroic beings “forged upon the anvil of physical and moral suffering,” who dares “to look anguish in the face and venerate it”; one of the choice spirits who, seeing the world as it is, still loves it. Intoxicated with proselyting zeal, he has not thus far deigned—more’s the pity!—to become the supreme literary artist such a well-nigh flawless gem as his “Beethoven,” the best pages of “Jean-Christophe,” and his less known works, show that he can be if he will. But signs are not wanting of a growing sympathy with the sanity, the symmetry, and the harmony of classic art. His latest volume, “La nouvelle journée,” is instinct with a yearning for serenity that may lift him ultimately to a place beside the undisputed masters. It does not yet appear what he will be. He himself affirms that his work has only just begun. The time may not be far distant when, like Christophe toward the end of his career, he will blush at his former lack of orderliness and measure; when, imposing upon himself a rigid discipline, he will resolve “to be the king” of his tumultuous temperament; when his literary creations will take on, as did the mature musical creations of his hero, calmer, cooler, purer, serener forms. The torrent gradually loses its boisterousness as it approaches the sea.

In any event, Rolland’s splendid sincerity guarantees that he will not be the slave of his record. “As for me,” he declares in the farewell to Christophe with which he prefaces “La nouvelle journée,” “I bid adieu to my past soul; I cast it away like an empty husk. Life is a succession of deaths and resurrections. Let us die, Christophe, to be born again!”

SKIRTING THE BALKAN PENINSULA

FROM TRIEST TO CONSTANTINOPLE

SIXTH PAPER: STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES

BY ROBERT HICHENS

Author of “The Spell of Egypt,” “The Holy Land,” “The Garden of Allah,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY JULES GUÉRIN

STAMBOUL is wonderfully various. Compressed between two seas, it contains sharp, even brutal, contrasts of beauty and ugliness, grandeur and squalor, purity and filth, silence and uproar, the most delicate fascination and a fierceness that is barbaric. It can give you peace or a sword. The sword is sharp and cruel; the peace is profound and exquisite.

Every day early I escaped from the uproar of Pera and sought in Stamboul a place of forgetfulness. There are many such places in the city and on its outskirts: the mosques, the little courts and gardens of historic tombs; the strange and forgotten Byzantine churches, lost in the maze of wooden houses; the cemeteries, vast and melancholy, where the dead sleep in the midst of dust and confusion, guarded by giant cypresses; the lonely and shadowed ways by the walls and the towers; the poetic glades and the sun-kissed terraces of Seraglio Point.

Santa Sophia stands apart from all other buildings, unique in beauty, with the faint face of the Christ still visible on its wall, Christian in soul, though now for long dedicated to the glory of Allah and of his prophet. I shall not easily forget my disappointment when I stood for the first time in its shadow. I had been on Seraglio Point, and, strolling by the famous royal gate to look at the lovely fountain of Sultan Achmet, I saw an enormous and ugly building, decorated with huge stripes of red paint, towering above me as if fain to obscure the sun. The immensity of it was startling. I asked its name.

“Santa Sophia.”

I looked away to the fountain, letting my eyes dwell on its projecting roof and its fretwork of gold, its lustrous blue and green tiles, splendid ironwork, and plaques of gray and brown marble.

It was delicate and enticing. Its mighty neighbor was almost repellent. But at length—not without reluctance, for I feared perhaps a deeper disappointment—I went into the mosque by the Porta Basilica, and found myself in the midst of a vast harmony, so wonderful, so penetrating, so calm, that I was aware at once of a perfect satisfaction.

At first this happy sense of being completely satisfied seemed shed upon me by shaped space. In no other building have I had this exact feeling, that space had surely taken an inevitable form and was announcing itself to me. I stood beneath the great dome, one hundred and seventy-nine feet in height, and as I gazed upward I felt both possessed and released.

For a long time I was fully aware of nothing but the vast harmony of Santa Sophia, descending upon me, wrapping me round. I saw moving figures, tiny, yet full of meaning, passing in luminous distances, pausing, bending, kneeling; a ray of light falling upon a white turban; an Arab in a long pink robe leaning against a column of dusky-red porphyry; a dove circling under the dome as though under the sky. But I could not be strongly aware of any detail, or be enchanted by any separate beauty. I was in the grasp of the perfect whole.

The voice of a child disturbed me.

Somewhere far off in the mosque a child began to sing a great tune, powerfully, fervently, but boyishly. The voice was not a treble voice; it was deeper, yet unmistakably the voice of a boy. And the melody sung was bold, indeed, almost angry, and yet definitely religious. It echoed along the walls of marble, which seemed to multiply it mysteriously, adding to it wide murmurs which were carried through all the building into the dimmest, remotest recesses. It became in my ears as the deep-toned and fanatical thunder of Islam, proclaiming possession of the church of Divine Wisdom which had been dedicated to Christ. It put me for a time definitely outside of the vast harmony. I was able at last to notice details both architectural and human.

Santa Sophia has nine gates leading to it from a great corridor or outer hall, lined with marble and roofed with old-gold mosaic. As you enter from the Porta Basilica, you have an impression of pale yellow, gold, and gray; of a pervading silvery glimmer; of a pervading gleam of delicate primrose, brightly pure and warm. You hear a sound of the falling of water from the two fountains of ablution, great vases of gray marble which are just within the mosque.

Gray and gold prevail in the color scheme, a beautiful combination of which the eyes are never tired. But many hues are mingled with them: yellow and black, deep plum-color and red, green, brown, and very dark blue. The windows, which are heavily grated, have no painted glass, so the mosque is not dark. It has a sort of lovely and delicate dimness, as touching as the dimness of twilight. It is divinely calm, almost as nature can be when she would bring her healing to the unquiet human spirit. We know that during the recent war Santa Sophia was crowded with suffering fugitives, with dying soldiers and cholera patients. I feel that even upon them in their agony it must have shed rays of comfort, into their hearts a belief in a far-off compassion waiting the appointed time to make itself fully manifest.

The great dome is of gold and of either black or very deep blue. Myriads of chandeliers, holding tiny glass cups, hang from the roof. Pale-yellow matting covers the plain of the floor. The silvery glimmer comes from the thousands of cups, the primrose gleam from the matting. The walls are lined with slabs of exquisite marble of many patterns and colors. Gold mosaic decorates the roof and the domes. Galleries, supported by marble arcades, and leaning on roofs of dim gold, run round a great part of the mosque, which is subtly broken up and made mysterious, enticing, and various by curved recesses of marble, by innumerable arches, some large and heavy, some fragile and delicate, by screens, and by forests of columns. Two-storied aisles flank the vast nave, through which men wander, looking almost like little dolls. So huge is the mosque that the eyes are deceived within it, and can no longer measure heights or breadths with accuracy. When I first stood in the nave I thought the chandeliers were hanging so near to the ground that it must be dangerous for a tall man to try to pass underneath them. They are, of course, really far higher than the head of a giant.

In Santa Sophia intricacy, by some magical process of genius, results in simplicity. Everything seems gently but irresistibly compelled to become a minister to the beauty and the calmness of the whole: the arcades of gray marble and gold; the sacred mosaics of holy Mary and the six-winged seraphim, which still testify to another age and another religion; the red columns of porphyry from Baalbec’s Temple of the Sun; the Ephesus columns of verd-antique; the carved capitals and the bases of shining brass; the gold and gray pulpit, with its long staircase of marble closed by a gold and green curtain, and its two miraculously beautiful flags of pearly green and faint gold, by age made more wonderful than when they first flew on the battle-field or were carried in sacred processions; the ancient prayer-rugs fixed to the walls; the sultan’s box, a sort of long gallery ending in a kiosk with a gilded grille, and raised upon marble pillars; the great doors and the curtains of dull-red wool; the piled carpets, which are ready against the winter, when the cool yellow matting is covered up; the great green shields in the pendentives, bearing their golden names of God and His prophet, of Ali, Osman, Omar, and Abu-Bekr. Everything slips into the heart of the great harmony, however precious, however simple, even however crude. There are a few ugly things in Santa Sophia—whitewash covering mosaics, stains of fierce yellow, blotches of plaster—which should be removed. They do not really matter; one cannot heed them when one is immersed in such almost mysterious beauty.

IN THE CEMETERY OF EYUB, ON THE GOLDEN HORN

PAINTED FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN

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Men and birds are at ease in Santa Sophia. Doves have made their home in the holy place. They fly under the long arcades, they circle above the galleries, they rest against blocks of cool marble the color of which their plumage resembles. And all day long men pass in through the gateways, and become at once little, yet strangely significant in the vastness which incloses and liberates them. They take off their shoes and carry them, or lay them down in the wooden trays at the edges of those wide, railed-in platforms covered with matting, called masbata, which are characteristic of mosques, and which are supposed to be for the use of readers of the Koran, and then they are free of the mosque. Some of them wander from place to place, silently gazing; others kneel and pray in some quiet corner; others study or sing or gossip or sink into reverie or slumber. Many go up to the masbata, take off their outer garments, and hang them over the rails, hang their handkerchiefs beside them, tuck their legs under their bodies, and remain thus for hours, staring straight before them with solemn eyes, as if hypnotized. Children, too, go to the masbata, settle cozily down, and read the Koran aloud, interspersing their study with gay conversation. On one of them I found my singing boy. Small, fanatical, with head thrown back and the fez upon it, he defiantly poured forth his tune, while an older companion, opposite to him and looking not unlike an idol in its shrine, stared impassively, as if at the voice.

Santa Sophia is mystical in its twilight beauty. Its vastness, its shape, its arrangement, its beautifully blended colors, the effects of light and of sound within it, unite in creating an atmosphere that disposes the mind to reverie and inclines the soul to prayer. Along the exquisite marble walls, in the mellow dimness, while Stamboul just outside is buying and selling, is giving itself to love and to crime, the murmur of Islam’s devotion steals almost perpetually, as mysterious as some faint and wide-spread sound of nature. The great mosque seems to be breathing out its message to the Almighty, and another message to man. The echoes are not clear, but as dim as the twilight under the arches of marble and beneath the ceilings of gold. They mingle without confusion in a touching harmony, as all things mingle in this mosque of the great repose.

And yet not all things.

One day I saw standing alone in the emperor’s doorway a child in blood-colored rags. The muezzin had called from the minaret the summons to the midday prayer, and far off before the mihrab, and the sacred carpet on which the prophet is said to have knelt, the faithful were ranged in long lines: pilgrims on the way to Mecca; Turks in quilted coats and in European dress; two dervishes with small, supple limbs and pale faces smoldering with reverie; and some hard-bitten, sun-scorched soldiers, perhaps bound for the battle-fields of the Balkan War. Moving almost as one man, they bent, they kneeled, they touched the floor with their foreheads, leaned back, and again bowed down. Their deep and monotonous voices were very persistent in prayer. And the echoes, like secret messengers, bore the sound along the arcades, carried it up into the vast space of the dome, under the transverse arches and the vaulted openings of the aisles, past the faint Christ on the wall, and the “Hand of the Conqueror,” with horrible outspread fingers, the Sweating Column, and the Cradle of Jesus, to the child in the blood-red rags. He stood there where Theophilus entered, under the hidden words, “I am the Light of the World,” gazing, listening, unaware of the marvelous effect his little figure was making, the one absolutely detached thing in the mosque. The doves flew over his head, vanishing down the marble vistas, becoming black against golden distances. The murmur of worship increased in power, as more and more of the faithful stole in, shoeless, to join the ranks before the mihrab. Like incense from a thurible, mysticism floated through every part of the mosque, seeming to make the vast harmony softer, to involve in it all that was motionless there and all that was moving except the child in the emperor’s doorway, who was unconsciously defiant, like a patch of fresh blood on a pure-white garment. The prayers at last died away, the echoes withdrew into silence; but the child remained where he was, crude, almost sinister in his wonderful colored rags.

Close to Santa Sophia in the Seraglio grounds is the old Byzantine church of Saint Irene, now painted an ugly pink, and used by the Turks as an armory and museum. It contains many spoils taken by the Turks in battle, which are carefully arranged upon tables and walls. Nothing is disdained, nothing is considered too paltry for exhibition. I saw there flags riddled with bullets, but I saw also odd boots taken from Italian soldiers in Tripoli, caps, belts, water-bottles, blood-stained tunics and cloaks, saddles, weapons, and buttons. Among relics from Yildiz Kiosk was a set of furniture which once belonged to Abdul-Hamid, and which he is said to have set much store by. It shows a very distinctive, indeed, a somewhat original taste, being made of red plush and weapons. The legs of the tables and chairs are guns and revolvers. As I looked at the chairs, I could not help wondering whether ambassadors were invited to sit in them, after they had been loaded to their muzzles or whether they were reserved for subjects whom the ex-sultan suspected of treachery. Near them were several of Abdul-Hamid’s favorite walking-sticks containing revolvers, a cane with an electric light let into the knob, his inkstand, the mother-of-pearl revolver which was found in his pocket, and the handkerchief which fell from his hand when he was taken prisoner by the Young Turks, who have since brought their country to ruin.

In a series of galleries, under arches and ceilings of yellow and white, stands, sits, reclines, and squats, in Eastern fashion, a strange population of puppets, dressed in the costumes of the bygone centuries during which Turkey has ruled in Europe. Those fearful ex-Christians, the Janizaries, who were scourges of Christianity, look very mild now as they stand fatuously together, no longer either Christian or Mussulman but fatally Madame Tussaud. Once they tucked up their coats to fight for the “Father” who had ravished them away from their fathers in blood. Now, even the wicked man, who flees when no one pursueth, could scarcely fear them. Near them the chief eunuch, a plump and piteous gentleman, reclines absurdly upon his divan, holding his large black pipe, and obsequiously attended by a bearded dwarf in red and by a thin aide-de-camp in green. The Sheik ul Islam bends beneath the coiled dignity of his monstrous turban; a really lifelike old man, with a curved gray beard and a green-and-white turban, reads the Koran perpetually; and soldiers with faces made of some substance that looks like plaster return blankly the gaze of the many real soldiers who visit this curious show.

One day, when I was strolling among the puppets of Saint Irene, some soldiers followed me round. They were deeply interested in all that they saw, and at last became interested in me. Two or three of them addressed me in Turkish, which, alas! I could not understand. I gathered, however, that they were seriously explaining the puppets to me, and were giving me information about the Janizaries, and Orkhan, who was the founder of that famous corps. I responded as well as I could with gestures, which seemed to satisfy them, for they kept close beside me, and one, a gigantic fellow with pugnacious mustaches, frequently touched my arm, and once even took me by the hand to draw my attention to a group which he specially admired. All this was done with gravity and dignity, and with a childlike lack of self-consciousness. We parted excellent friends. I distributed cigarettes, which were received with smiling gratitude, and went on my way to Seraglio Point, realizing that there is truth in the saying that every Turk is a gentleman.

Tint plates made for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson and H. C. Merrill

THE ROYAL GATE LEADING TO THE OLD SERAGLIO

FROM THE PAINTING MADE FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN

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Upon Seraglio Point I found many more soldiers resting in groups by the edge of the sea, upon the waste ground that lies at the foot of the walls, beyond the delightful abandoned glades that are left to run wild and to shelter the birds. If you wish to understand something of the curious indifference that hangs, like moss, about the Turk, visit Seraglio Point. There, virtually in Stamboul, is one of the most beautifully situated bits of land in the world. Though really part of a great city, much of it has not been built upon. Among the trees on the ridge, looking to Marmora and Asia, to the Bosporus and the palaces, to the Golden Horn, Galata, and Pera, lie the many buildings and courts of the Old Seraglio, fairy-like in their wood. The snowy cupolas, the minaret, and towers look ideally Eastern. They suggest romantic and careless lives, cradled in luxury and ease. In that white vision one might dream away the days, watching from afar the pageant of the city and the seas, hearing from afar the faint voices of the nations, listening to strange and monotonous music, toying with coffee and rose-leaf jam in the jewel-like kiosk of Bagdad, and dreaming, always dreaming. There once the sultan dwelt in the Eski-Serai, which exists no longer, and, there was built the great Summer Palace, which was inhabited by Suleiman I and by his successors. Hidden in the Old Seraglio there are many treasures, among them the magnificent Persian throne, which is covered with gold and jewels. Beyond this neglected wonder-world the woods extend toward the waters—hanging woods by the sea; and the Turks care nothing about them. One may not wander through them; one may not sit in them; one may only look at them, and long to lose oneself in their darkness and silence, to vanish in their secret recesses. The Turk leaves them alone, to rot or to flourish, as Allah and nature will it.

On the third of Stamboul’s seven hills stands the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, all glorious without, as Santa Sophia is not, but disappointing within, despite its beautiful windows of jeweled glass from Persia, and the plaques of wonderful tiles which cover the wall on each side of the mihrab. Somber and dark, earth-colored and gray, dark green and gold, it has a poorly painted cupola and much plastered stone, which is ugly; but there is fascination in its old dimness, in its silence and desertion. More than once I was quite alone with it, and was able, undisturbed, to notice its chief internal beauty—the exquisite proportions which trick you at first into believing it to be much smaller than it is.

When seen from without, it looks colossal. It is splendid and imposing, but it is much more, for it has a curiously fantastic and, indeed, almost whimsical charm, as if its builder, Sinan, had been a playful genius, full of gaiety and exuberance of spirit, who made this great mosque with joy and with lightness of heart, but who never forgot for a moment his science, and who could not be vulgar even in his most animated moments of invention. Massiveness and grace are blended together in this beautiful exterior. Round the central dome multitudes of small domes—airy bubbles thrown up on the surface of the mosque—are grouped with delightful fantasy. Four minarets, the two farthest from the mosque smaller than their brethren, soar above the trees. They are gray, and the walls of the mosque are gray and white. In the forecourt there is a fine fountain covered with a cupola; the roof of the cloisters which surround it is broken up into twenty-four little domes. A garden lies behind the mosque, and the great outer court is planted with trees.

In the garden are the turbehs, or tombs, of Suleiman the Magnificent and of Roxalana, “the joyous one,” that strange captive from Russia, who by her charm and the power of her temperament subdued a nation’s ruler, who shared the throne of the sultan, who guided his feet in the ways of crime, and who to the day of her death was adored by him. For Roxalana’s sake, Suleiman murdered his eldest son by another wife, and crept out from behind a curtain to look upon him dead; and for Roxalana’s sake that son’s son was stabbed to death in his mother’s arms. Now the fatal woman sleeps in a great octagonal marble tomb near the tomb of her lord and slave.

An atmosphere of peace and of hoary age broods over these tombs and the humble graves that crowd close about them. Mulberry-trees, fig-trees, and cypresses throw patches of shade on the rough gray pavement, in which is a small oval pool, full of water lest the little birds should go thirsty. A vine straggles over a wall near by; weeds and masses of bright yellow flowers combine their humble efforts to be decorative; and the call to prayer drops down from the mighty minarets to this strange garden of stones, yellow flowers, and weeds, where the lovers rest in the midst of Stamboul, which once feared and adored them. They were two criminals, but there was strength in their wickedness, strength in their pride and their passion. Romance attended their footsteps, and romance still lingers near them.

One morning, as I sat beneath the noble fig-tree which guards Roxalana’s tomb, and listened to the voice of the muezzin floating over old Stamboul, and watched the birds happily drinking at the edge of their little basin in the pavement, I thought of the influence of cities. Does not Stamboul forever incite to intrigue, to lawlessness, to bloodshed? The muezzin calls to prayer, but from old Stamboul arises another voice, sending forth an opposing summons. Suleiman heard it echoed by Roxalana and slew his son; Roxalana heard and obeyed it; and how many others have listened and been fatally moved by it! It has sounded even across the waters of the sea and over the forests of Yildiz, and Armenians have been slain by thousands while Europe looked on. And perhaps in our day, and after we are gone, old Stamboul will command from its seven hills, and will be horribly obeyed.

I shall always remember, among many less famous buildings, the small mosque of Rustem Pasha near the Egyptian bazaar, with its beautiful arcade and its strangely confused interior, full of loveliness and bad taste, of atrocious modern painting and oleographic horrors, mingled with exquisite marble and perfect tiles. The wall of the arcade gleams with lustrous faience, purple and red, azure and milk-white, and with patterns of great flowers with green centers and turquoise leaves. I recall, too, the Mosaic Mosque, once the church of the monastery of the Chora, which stands on a hill from which Stamboul looks like a beautiful village embowered in green, cheerful and gaily fascinating. The church is ugly outside, yellow and lead-colored, with a white plaster minaret, and it is surrounded by wooden shanties like booths; but its mosaics are very interesting and beautiful, and its chief muezzin, Mustafa Effendi, is a delight in his long golden robe and his yellow turban.

Mustafa Effendi was born near Brusa in Asia Minor, but for forty-two years he has held the office of chief muezzin at the Mosaic Mosque, on which all his thoughts seem centered. He speaks English a little, and has an almost inordinate sense of humor. As he pointed out the mosaics to me with his wrinkled hand, he abounded in comment, and more than once his thin voice was almost overwhelmed by ill-suppressed laughter. He seemed specially entertained as he drew my attention to two birds on the wall—“Monsieur Peacock and Madame Peahen,” and he was obliged to abandon all dignity and to laugh outright when we came to a company of saints and angels.

The most sacred mosque in Turkey lies outside of Stamboul, at Eyub, far up the Golden Horn and not very distant from the “sweet waters of Europe.” In it, on their accession, the sultans are solemnly girded with Osman’s sword instead of being crowned. Eyub is a place of tombs. Chief eunuchs and grand vizirs sleep near the sea in great mausoleums inclosed within gilded railings, and some of them surrounded by gardens; on the hillside above them thousands of the faithful rest under cypresses in graves marked by dusty headstones leaning awry.

The center, or heart, of Eyub is a pleasant village, which gathers closely about the mosque, and is full of a quietly cheerful life. Just beyond the court of the mosque is a Turkish bath, where masseurs, with shaven heads and the usual tuft, lounge in the sunshine while waiting for customers. Near by are many small shops and cafés. In one of the latter I ate an excellent meal of rice and fat mutton, cooked on a spit which revolved in the street. If you stray from the center of the village toward the outskirts, you find yourself in a deserted rummage of tombs, of white columns, white cupolas, cloisters, rooms for theological students, mausoleums of white and pink marble. No footsteps resound on the pavement of the road, no voices are heard in the little gardens, no eyes look out through the railings. As I wandered through the sunshine to the small stone platform where the sultan descends from his horse when he comes to be girded with the sword, I saw no sign of life; and the only noise that I heard was the persistent tap of a hammer near the sea, where his Majesty is building an imperial mosque of white stone from Trebizond.

Presently, growing weary of the white and silent streets of the tombs, I turned into a narrow alley that ran by a grated wall, above which great trees towered, climbing toward heaven with the minaret of the Mosque of Eyub, but failing in their journey a little below the muezzin’s balcony. They were cypresses, and creepers climbed affectionately with them. Just beyond them I came into the court of the mosque, and found myself in the midst of a crowd of pilgrims before the tomb of Abu Eyub, which is covered with gilding and faience. Near it is a fountain protected by magnificent plane-trees which are surrounded by iron railings decorated with dervish caps.

THE MOSQUE OF SULEIMAN AT CONSTANTINOPLE

PAINTED FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN

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I had been told more than once that the Christian dog is unwelcome in Eyub, and I was soon made aware of it. In the façade of the tomb there is a hole through which one can look into the interior. Taking my turn among the pilgrims, I presently stood in front of this aperture, and was about to peep in discreetly when a curtain was sharply drawn across it by some one inside. I waited for a moment, but in vain; the curtain was not drawn back, so at last I meekly went on my way, feeling rather humiliated. A Greek friend afterward told me that an imam was stationed within the tomb, and that no doubt he had drawn the curtain against me because I was an unbeliever.

Duly chastened by this rebuff, I nevertheless went on to the mosque, and was allowed to go in for a moment on making a payment. The attendant was very rough and suspicious in manner, and watched me as if I were a criminal; and the pilgrims who thronged the interior stared at me with open hostility. I thought it wiser, therefore, to make only a cursory examination of the handsome marble interior, with its domes and semi-domes, and afterward, with a sense of relief, took my way up the hillside, to spend an hour among the leaning gravestones in the shade of the cypresses. Each stone above the grave of a man was carved with a fez, each woman’s stone with a flower; and tiny holes formed receptacles to collect the rainwater, so that the birds might refresh themselves above the dust of the departed.

The great field of the dead was very tranquil that day. I saw only two closely veiled women moving slowly in the distance and an old Turk sitting with a child, at the edge of the hill before a café.

On the bare hill to my left I saw the white gleam of the stones in a Jewish cemetery; and, beneath, the pale curve of the Golden Horn, ending in the peace of the desolate country. Red-roofed Eyub, shredding out into blanched edges of cupolas and tombs by the sultan’s landing-place, marked the base of the bill; and, beyond, in the distance, mighty Stamboul, brown, with red lights here and there where the sun struck a roof, streamed away to Seraglio Point. The great prospect was closed by the shadowy mountains of Asia, among which I divined, rather than actually saw, the crest of Olympus.

In these Turkish cemeteries there is a romantic and poignant melancholy such as I have found in no other places of tombs. They breathe out an atmosphere of fatalism, of bloodless resignation to the inevitable. Their dilapidation suggests rather than mere indifference a sense of the uselessness of care. Dust unto dust, and there an end. But far off in Stamboul the minarets contradict the voices that whisper over the fields of the dead; for the land of the Turk is the home of contradictions, and among them there are some that are welcome.

To rid myself of the clinging impression of sadness that stole over me among the cypresses of Eyub, later in the day I took a boat to the shore of Asia, and visited the English graveyard at Haidar Pasha, where long ago Florence Nightingale established her hospital for soldiers wounded in the Crimean War, and where now Germans have built an elaborate station from which some day we shall be able to set out for Bagdad. Already smart corridor cars, with white roofs and spotlessly clean curtains, and with “Bagdad” printed in large letters upon them, are running from the coast to mysterious places in the interior of Asia. In the excellent restaurant beer flows freely. If the mystic word “Verboten” were not absent from the walls, one might fancy himself in Munich on entering the station at Haidar Pasha. On the hill just above the station lies the English cemetery, a delightful garden of rest, full of hope and peace. It is beautifully kept, and contains the home of the guardian, a British soldier, who lives with his wife and daughters in a cozy stone bungalow fronted by flower-beds and trees. Close to his house is a grave with a broken column, raised on a platform which is approached by three steps and surrounded by a circular grass-plot. Here I found a serious Montenegrin, one of the workers in the cemetery, busily employed. He had spread sheets of paper all over the grass-plot, and up the steps of the grave, and had scattered above them a great mass of wool which suggested a recent sheep-shearing. When I came up he was adding more wool to the mass with a sort of grave ardor. I asked him what the wool was for and why he was spreading it out. He glanced up solemnly and replied:

“It is for my bed. I live in that shed over there, and am preparing my mattress for the winter.”

And he continued quietly and dexterously to scatter the wool over the tomb.

The cemetery, which looks out over the sea and the beautiful shores of Europe, is full of the graves of soldiers who died of wounds received in the Crimean War, or of maladies caught in camp and in the trenches. Among them lie the bodies of many devoted women who worked to allay their sufferings.

Bent perpetually on escape from the uproar of Pera, in which at night I was forced to dwell, I made more than one excursion to the walls and the seven towers of Stamboul. There are three sets of walls, the land, the sea, and the harbor walls. The Seven Towers, Yedi Kuleh, are very near to the Sea of Marmora, and are now unused and deserted, the home no longer of imprisoned ambassadors, of sultans, and vizirs, but of winds from the islands and from Asia, of grass, yellow wild-flowers, and the fallen leaves of the autumn. When I went there I was alone save for one very old man, the peaceful successor of the Janizaries who long ago garrisoned this marvelous place of terror and crime. With him at my heels I wandered among the trees of the deserted inclosure, surrounded by gray and crenelated walls, above which the towers rose up grimly toward the windy sky; I penetrated through narrow corridors of stone; I crawled through gaps and clambered over masses of rubble and fallen masonry; I visited tiny and sinister chambers inclosed in the thickness of the walls; peered through small openings; came out unexpectedly on terraces. And the old man muttered and mumbled in my ears, monotonously and without emotion, the history of crime connected with the place. Here some one was starved to death; here another was strangled by night; in this chamber a French ambassador was held captive; the blood of a sultan dyed these stones red; at the foot of this bit of wall there was a massacre; just there some great person was blinded. And, with the voice in my ears, I looked and I saw white butterflies flitting, with their frivolous purity, among the leaves of acacia-trees, and snails crawling lethargically over rough gray stones. Near the Golden Gate, where an earthquake has shaken down much of the wall, and the Byzantine dove of carved stone still remains—ironically?—as an emblem of peace, was a fig-tree giving green figs; Marmora shone from afar; in the waterless moat that stretches at the feet of the walls the grasses were waving, the ivy grew thick, here and there big patches of vegetables gave token of the forethought and industry of men. And beyond, stretching away as far as eye could see, the cemeteries without the city disappeared into distances, everywhere shadowed by those tremendous, almost terrible, cypresses that watch over the dead in the land of the Turk.

Beauty and sadness, crime and terror, wonderful romance, and a ghastly desolation, seemed brooding over this strange region beyond the reach of the voices of the city. Even the ancient man was silent at last. He had recited all the horrors his old memory contained, and at my side he stood gazing with bleary eyes across the moat and the massy cypresses, and with me, he turned to capture the shining of Marmora.

On the farther verge of the moat three dogs, which had somehow escaped the far-flung nets, wandered slowly seeking for offal; some women hovered darkly among the graves; a thin, piercing cry, that was not without a wild sweetness, rose to me from somewhere below. I looked down, and there, among the rankly growing grasses of the moat, I saw a young girl, very thin, her black hair hanging, and bound with bright handkerchiefs, sketching vaguely a danse du ventre. As I looked she became more precise in her movements, and her cries grew more fierce and imperative. From some hovel, hidden among the walls, other children streamed out, with cries and contortions, to join her. For here among the ruins the Turkish Gipsies have made their home. I threw down some coins and turned away. And as I went, returning through the old places of assassination, I was pursued by a whining of pipes and a thrumming of distant guitars. The Gipsies of old Stamboul were trying to lure me down from my fastness to make merry with them among the tombs.

(Conclusion.)

Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

MOSQUE OF SANTA SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE

FROM THE PAINTING MADE FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN

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OXEN BREAKING HOMESTEAD LAND IN CANADA

IF CANADA WERE TO ANNEX THE UNITED STATES

HOW RAE MALGREGOR UNDERTOOK GENERAL HEARTWORK FOR A FAMILY OF TWO

HER TRADE DEPENDENCE AND HER POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE

(“THE TRADE OF THE WORLD” PAPERS)

BY JAMES DAVENPORT WHELPLEY

Author of “The Commercial Strength of Great Britain,” “Germany’s Foreign Trade,” etc.

WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

IN the year 1899 a Canadian election agent, who had long been identified with the fortunes of the Liberal party, was a visitor in Washington. He expressed a wish to meet the late President McKinley, whose pleasing personality then pervaded the White House. “Nothing easier,” said his American friend, and an appointment was made forthwith. The President greeted the Canadian visitor with that charming air of particular interest and personal pleasure for which he was famed, and the conversation quite naturally drifted into political channels. The Canadian was soon put at ease, and in the course of the interview said: “This is a very great occasion for me, Mr. President. I had looked forward to it as a remote possibility, but one which would mark a red-letter day in my life. I have felt that I wanted above all things during my visit here to shake hands with a man in whom the American people had so much trust that they placed fifty million dollars in his hands, and told him to go ahead and spend it as he thought would best serve the country in the controversy with Spain. It was a wonderful evidence of trust and confidence, Mr. President; and I am proud to meet the man who was deemed worthy of it by a great, intelligent, and modern nation.”

The President’s face glowed with pleasure as the compliment passed, and he made modest and fitting reply. The Canadian then added: “But I want to say, Mr. President, that I consider it a most terrible waste of money. What do you get for it? Porto Rico, the Philippines, and a few other odds and ends, to say nothing of the loss to the American nation of many lives, the disturbance to business, and a thousand other evils that follow a war. I can tell you of a much better plan for increasing the wealth, size, population, and strength of this country. Give me two million dollars to spend in the next Canadian election, and I will guarantee the peaceful annexation of Canada to the United States. And look what you get!”

President McKinley was apparently much amused, and accepted the statement in the spirit in which it was made; that is to say, the suggestion was so far removed from the domain of the real as to prevent it from being seriously discussed. If it is possible in these days, however, for influences of various kinds emanating from the United States to turn the scale in a Canadian election against freer commercial relations between Canada and the United States, it is not impossible that this practical Canadian politician spoke with greater knowledge and greater seriousness than he received credit for. It must be remembered that at that time there were avowed “annexationists” in Canada, and a party in favor of closer commercial relations with the United States was strongly intrenched in power with the Canadian voters.

When the Canadian Parliament, representing as it does, in the degree in which such bodies do represent, the Canadian people, votes $35,000,000 as a contribution to England’s navy, the consideration of Canada as a nation is forced upon the world. It is not that Canada has need of the British navy any more than she needs a chain of forts along her southern border. It is because of the spirit of independence of natural laws of transportation, economics, and all other things that flow along the line of least resistance, shown by this act of fealty to an idea which might naturally have lost its vividness in crossing three thousand miles of water. England never did much to strengthen the tie between herself and Canada, and even now does little but talk. This talk is inspired by an awakening sense of the absolute necessity of oversea dominions to maintain the greatness of “little England” in the face of rivals becoming more formidable at an amazing rate. There is more human nature in the revival of Canadian loyalty to England, England’s greater appreciation of Canada, and a joint cold shoulder to the United States, than there is statesmanship or economic wisdom. The natural routes of trade and commerce in Canada lead to the south; the character and social conditions of the people are North American, not English. The temperate zone of the North American continent, along the northern fringe of which lies Canada, is all one country in its aspirations and material progress.

GRAIN-ELEVATORS IN PRINCE ALBERT, CANADA

NEW GRAND TRUNK PACIFIC ELEVATOR AT FORT WILLIAM, ONTARIO

I remember sitting in a London club one day at the time of the jubilee of the late Queen Victoria. Near me sat two Canadian army officers who were with the contingent of troops sent to the celebration in England. They were tall, raw-boned, leathery-skinned youths of the type now known to Europe as American. Seated in the club window, quietly and observantly watching the passing crowd, one of them suddenly blurted out to the other, “Well, there’s one thing I’ve learned on this trip, if nothing else.”

“What’s that?” inquired the other.

“Well I’ve learned that I am not an Englishman, as I’ve always supposed myself to be. I’m a Canadian. We don’t know them, and they don’t know us; and what is more, while we are interested enough to try to know them, they just don’t care one way or another. Our point of view is different; and I’m going back home more of a Canadian than I ever was.”

When the Hon. William S. Fielding, formerly Canadian Minister of Finance, introduced his now famous budget to the Canadian Parliament several years ago, in which Canada virtually declared a tariff war upon Germany, he said quite frankly that the important feature of this action was not the apparent hostility to Germany, but that such hostility might serve as a warning to the United States and to England. In brief, it was notice to the mother country that Canada was quite able and ready to act for what she might consider her best interests in fiscal matters, regardless of the wishes, feelings, or dictation of her august parent.

Canada has given to English goods preferential duties a third less than those assessed against the goods of other countries; in times of recent trouble she has given men and money; and now comes a contribution to the expense of British armament amounting to nearly five dollars per capita for every man, woman, and child in the dominion. In return, England has talked of preferential customs duties, but cannot give them; she has talked of changing the law under which a Canadian citizen is not necessarily a citizen of England, but has not done so; she has talked of an armed defense, which is not needed and never will be, for, unlike Australia, the Canadians are protected from all possible enemies by the mere facts of geographical isolation and the presence to the south of a great and powerful nation which would in her own interest, if for no other reason (and there are others), permit no foreigner to alienate a square yard of Canadian soil. England must have the products of Canadian soil, and English emigrants would go to Canada in no greater or lesser numbers if the political tie between the two countries were sundered. As a matter of fact, English immigrants are accorded the same treatment by Canada as those from other lands, and are not as welcome, because of the kind that England has sent.

The ties between five sevenths of the people of Canada and the people of England are those of tradition, sentiment, and blood, while the like ties of the other two sevenths are to France and the United States. It may be true that such ties constitute a tangible force, but that is a matter open to debate, and not to be settled until it comes to a question of international disputes. The ties between Canada and the United States are those compelling bonds of geographical and economic likeness, reciprocity of needs and markets, natural routes for trade and transportation, sympathetic financial exchanges, individual investments one within the confines of the other, to say nothing of the fact that more than a million Canadian-born—a number equaling one seventh of the present population of Canada—have found homes and profitable occupation in the United States, within easy hailing distance of their native land; and in that land are perhaps half a million or more people who were born in the United States.

At the general election in 1912, nearly half of the Canadian people voted in favor of closer trade relations with the United States. A newly elected Democratic Congress in the United States has signified its intention of not repealing the Canadian Reciprocity Act, and there are Canadians who believe the day will come, and at no very distant date, when Canada will yet enter the door thus left ajar, and absorb to herself a share of the forces for expansion and growth of industry which are urging her neighbor to the tremendous pace of the present day.

DISKING AND HARROWING BY STEAM IN CANADA

Contractors take outfits of this sort into the newer districts, and for a small charge “break” the homesteaders’ virgin land.

From a photograph by Notman, Montreal

ASBESTOS-MINE IN THEDFORD, CANADA

Notwithstanding the inability of England to give, and her readiness to take, the people of Canada have heroically set themselves to the task of directing their national growth along the lines of strongest resistance. They will not succeed in the end; but this conclusion does not detract from world-wide interest in the struggle, or from the significance and interest of the results of this Canadian policy, which, as stated, originates more in the qualities of human nature than from the observance of economic laws and an attempt to take advantage thereof. The logical course of events, following the coöperation of human endeavor and natural laws, would be the unification of the North American continent, politically, industrially, commercially, and financially. That this will come sooner or later is inevitable. In the meantime, to maintain a political sympathy with an Old World and a more or less indifferent parent community, to confine transportation, industry, and social existence to lines laid east and west, and at the same time to maintain the somewhat strained pose of an independent nation, is the task the majority of the Canadian people have set for themselves.

This self-styled nation is making a brave show at an ambitious task. A splendid national and independent spirit has arisen, and natural resources are being developed and farmed to the utmost. It has probably surprised the Canadians themselves to realize the present power of their word in affairs of the British Empire, a result not due so much to the weight of Canadian counsels as to the development of international affairs in Europe, but none the less gratifying to Canadian pride. For the first time in history the Canadian Government now finds itself in a position where its demands upon the mother country are not only listened to with respectful consideration, but are granted without much ado. Had it not been for Canadian insistence, backed up by the coöperation of other British possessions, the protest of the British Government over the action of Congress in the matter of the Panama Canal tolls would not have been so insistent; notwithstanding the alarm felt in England over the proposed reciprocity between Canada and the United States, the British Government was forced to leave the matter entirely in the hands of Canada, breathing a sigh of intense relief when it was found that the event was at least postponed. In many other cases where a few years ago all negotiations concerning Canadian affairs would have been conducted as between the United States and England, the latter country more recently has remained a passive and subservient listener, standing ready to carry out the wishes of Canada when the negotiations came to an end.

From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood

VIEW ON THE NEW WELLAND SHIP CANAL, WHICH CONNECTS LAKE ONTARIO WITH LAKE ERIE

Politically, therefore, Canada has finally won for herself the position of a virtually independent nation, self-governed and self-contained except for the form of obtaining the now ever-ready acquiescence of the mother country in her final dealings with foreign nations.

This was made possible by the very reasons which will forever bar Canada from a like industrial, commercial, financial, or social independence. The geographical and economic dependence of Canada upon the United States forced England to proceed carefully in dealing with Canadian affairs, to prevent alienation and possible final separation by the wish and necessities of the Canadian people. This attitude is an acknowledgment in itself of the independence of Canada from Great Britain and her tendencies in other directions. However, to say that Canada never can achieve the full measure of her material greatness as an independent nation takes nothing from her present power or her splendid progress. In fact, the greater the latter, the more evident will be the need to extend her southern boundaries.

If the position were reversed from what it is to-day, and the proposition were to be submitted to the Canadian people whether or not they would annex the United States, the vote would be virtually unanimous in favor of such annexation. The economic results would be the same as if the United States annexed Canada; the people of the whole continent would move forward at the same pace now observed in the expanding industry and internal power of the United States.

The reasons of Canada’s handicap lie in a lack of geographical and economic balance. From a material point of view, the country is not self-contained. An artificial barrier extends across its southern boundary, forcing transportation to follow unnatural lines and rolling back the tide of Canadian productive industry upon itself. Rivers, lakes, and valleys flow north and south. Eastern and western Canada are separated by twelve hundred miles, more or less, of almost totally infertile country. The snow and ice of winter point to the southern route as the natural outlet for traffic during certain seasons of the year. The population is not sufficient to absorb the products of huge mills, big enough to manufacture at a price which makes possible competition with Europe and countries elsewhere. The greatest and highest-priced marts of the world are across that theoretical line drawn upon the map and existing only as an idea in the minds of the people, a stimulus to local patriotism, and a hindrance to development in most directions. Her people are barred from the best in material prosperity, the best in the arts, in music, and literature, because these things come only where human beings congregate in sufficient numbers to make it possible to support them; and the cities of Canada never can reach that point of development where such will be possible so long as the pass to the south is blocked by even an idea.

With the aid of foreign capital, seven eighths of which, by the way, is Scottish, not English, Canada has built her railways, her mills, and established her banks; with the aid of subsidies she has made possible her manufactures and even her news agencies. Her per capita national debt is the largest in the world, a token in this case of amazing energy, courage, and enterprise, and not of fruitless wars or unproductive extravagance. The units of Canadian population are highly prosperous and intelligent, and possess a purchasing power superior to nearly every other community in the world. The profit of to-day, however, has come, first, from the rapidly increasing land values, and, second, from the fatness of virgin lands. There will be an end to this in its earliest and simplest forms. The profits upon the land have been largely taken; and while the virgin land is still yielding to the plow and numberless thousands of acres are still untouched, the nuggets lying on the ground have been closely gleaned, and more scientific, systematic, and expensive effort is necessary to reap the harvest yet available.

Land values in the Canadian towns and cities have reached the danger-point, and in some cases have exceeded it. There is an old and long-established law that land is worth only what it will produce, be it cash or produce for cash, and that in the end all values flow to this level. The material development of Canada will proceed upon sure lines, for it is based upon that measure of all values, the products of the earth; but the rate of development cannot be hurried beyond a certain point, and this, while satisfactory enough in itself, will not be at the pace the enthusiasts would have us believe. The same story has been written of the western United States, and as the conditions are virtually the same, history will repeat itself. Canada has this advantage, and that is the increasing population of the world and its increasing need or absorptive power, which is far greater to-day than in the decades when the western frontier of America was being pushed toward the Pacific coast.

With all this, the record of Canadian accomplishments is an amazing tale of wondrous energy and gigantic results. Put the figures of Canadian population, immigration, enterprise, and production side by side with those of the greater nations, and they are not large in comparison; but take them by themselves, as they stand, and they are pregnant with promise for the future of this land which stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is only estopped on the south by an imaginary line drawn just where a greater prosperity should begin, and limited at the north solely by the degree of cold and the length of winter that may control human endeavor in its strivings for material advance.

In some directions the science of government is more highly developed in Canada than in any other country in the world. A notable instance of this is in the administration and disposal of public land. Notwithstanding the vast area to be given away to settlers, there has been no prodigality or waste. The home-builder is the man that is wanted, and he is the only one who can secure title to arable land. The banking system is held to be superior to that of the United States; tenure in administrative and judicial office is based largely upon good behavior; immigration is restricted along protective lines; and the customs are administered with the least possible inconvenience to the importer or the traveler. In the endeavor to overcome the natural tendency of trade to flow north and south, and the limitations of her industrial present, Canada has been led into the doubtful byways of subsidy; but as the years progress and the country adjusts itself, there is a notable tendency to be more chary in creating industries that must be kept alive by direct gift; and those already enjoying these special privileges have been warned to prepare for the day when public opinion will demand that they stand or fall upon their own merits.

The figures of Canadian progress tell a story of wonderful energy, and in one particular they are especially interesting and significant. The population of Canada has not increased as might be expected, in view of her great industrial expansion. In fact, it has barely doubled in forty years. In the last four decades the population of the United States has grown about twenty-five per cent. in each succeeding ten years, while that of Canada has increased by thirty, eleven, twelve, and seventeen per cent. in the same periods. That is to say, while the population of Canada was doubling itself, that of the United States increased to two and a half times the number in 1871. In that same forty years, however, the productive and absorptive energies of the Canadian unit have increased enormously, until in these respects a point has been reached without parallel in any other country.

While, as stated, the population has about doubled in forty years, deposits in the post-office savings-banks have risen from $2,500,000 to $43,000,000; total bank deposits from $67,000,000 to $1,000,000,000; the national revenue from $20,000,000 to $118,000,000; expenditure for life-insurance from $1,800,000 to $20,000,000; the amount paid for mail and steamship subventions from $286,000 to nearly $2,000,000; the number of letters and post-cards handled by the post-office from 27,000,000 to 550,000,000; passengers on railways from 5,000,000 to 37,000,000; tons of freight hauled on railways from 5,000,000 to 80,000,000, and on canals from 3,000,000 to 43,000,000.

In that same time the national debt has increased from $77,000,000 to $508,338,592. The total mineral production has grown in value from the figure of 1886, when it was $10,000,000, to $107,000,000 in 1911. Coal production has increased in value from $3,000,000 to $30,000,000, and total foreign trade from $162,000,000 to $771,000,000.

There are in Canada to-day about 1,500,000 families, and only about 75,000 of these are without a dwelling to themselves—a great record of a home-building nation. There is now nearly a billion dollars invested in Canadian manufactures. Nearly 400,000 wage-earners have a payroll of about $150,000,000, and the product of their labor brings nearly the same amount of revenue to the nation as is invested in the productive plants. These figures are all the more extraordinary in that the figures of increase of population bear little relation thereto. It is the story of a great industrial awakening, following the discovery of latent natural resources which applied industry and intelligence have transmuted into wealth and profitable occupation for labor.

In the last ten years the population of Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon, has decreased by 9, 14, and 69 per cent., respectively. Some of this decrease has been caused by changes of political boundary-lines. Of the total increase in population nearly sixty per cent. has taken place in the four western provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba, the relative expansion of these provinces in number of inhabitants being 439 per cent., 413 per cent., 119 per cent., and 73 per cent., respectively. The total increase of population in the last decade was 1,834,000, and it was distributed as follows: 1,117,000 in the four western or agricultural provinces; 354,000 in Quebec; 340,000 in Ontario; and 54,000 in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. To the western provinces have gone the people seeking homes on the new lands, and to the lively towns and cities, which have become the centers of these great productive areas, have thronged laborers, purveyors to the wants of the settlers, those who offer facilities for the exchange of commodities, and the usual large percentage who, in a new country, live off the industry of others by taking advantage of the eagerness of would-be buyers and sellers to make quick bargains.

As in the history of every newly opened reserve of the world, fortunes have been made from a shoe-string by those shrewd enough to step in between the seller and the buyer in time to take a part of the profit to themselves. The man who buys acreage and sells town lots is the speculator who has made money the world over. The purchaser of the latter may in turn make profit for himself, but the cream has been taken by the prophet who can materialize the vision of the paved street across the plowed field or the prairie sod. All new or rapidly developing countries pass through this stage of swift encroachment of town upon country, and up to a certain point it remains legitimate and normal—that is to say, so long as it fills the measure of need. The momentum thus gained, however, has seldom failed to carry the movement beyond the legitimate, and numberless acres have been in turn sold for taxes, and the farmer’s plow has turned up the stakes which were to mark the lines of pretentious boulevards.

The time of reaction is one of danger and often of disaster. Western Canada has already passed through several periods of stress and trial of this character, and the early story of the now thriving city of Winnipeg is full of tragedy to those who were caught in the reactionary period of many years ago. After a certain time, however, these places find themselves, possibilities and impossibilities are recognized, and values assume true levels, which in many cases constantly but sanely keep pace in their rise with the development of tributary territory. It seems to be a truism that the prices of Broadway or the Strand could not be legitimately duplicated in Prairieville or Rocky Pass, but men surely sane and successful elsewhere apparently become intoxicated as they breathe the stimulating air of the Northwest, and blinded by the vision of the future, they buy or loan in haste not only their own money, but that of others, only to lose, and curse their temporary aberration in the calmness of second thought or the depressing incident of a “busted boom.” Optimism is the key-note of life in a new community, and the true story of the poor man who stumbled over a wheelbarrow-load of gold nuggets is the constant incentive to the weary prospector who is measuring his daily dole from his last sack of flour. It is a thankless task to measure real values in the Northwest at the moment, for no matter how high they may be placed, such measure meets with the approval of no one, neither of the man who has something to sell, nor of the man inclined to buy. The spirit of the gambler is in all human nature, and in none more than the frontiersman; and there is no check to its development in the high-strung, optimistic, and get-rich-quick communities living in the electric atmosphere of our far-flung Northwestern horizons.

Genuine opportunity abounds, and the keen, restless minds of those who blaze the way for the more conservative are impatient of suggested limitations. Perhaps it is just as well it is so, for in the end, while some are trampled under the car, the final adjustment yields no higher death-rate in hopes than in older communities, and in the younger aspirant for civic greatness there is real opportunity for all; whereas in the older settlements there is often opportunity for those alone who already have the power and the means to create it.

An increase of 354,000 in the population of Quebec during the last ten years means a large natural increase characteristic of the French-Canadian inhabitants, and a development of lumbering, mining, and fishing industries natural to any section of the world so easy of access and so rich in such resources. The population of Ontario, that stronghold of the British in Canada, has increased by 340,000. This is due to the development of manufacturing. Cheap power, raw material, and favorable natural location, with protection and bounty advantages, are being made use of by foreign capital. The recent decision of the United States Steel Corporation to build a $20,000,000 plant in Canada is no part of a boom; it is only the maturing of plans made long ago in view of future possibilities, and a realization that the time was now ripe to move. The building of this plant bears no relation to the bounty now given on Canadian manufactured iron, for that is too uncertain, too political, too subject to the popular whim, to base a great and permanent industrial enterprise upon. It is based entirely upon an economic situation deemed favorable to the establishment of an extensive and profitable industry.

The rush to the wheat-fields of the Canadian Northwest is easily understood. For twenty years Europe poured a great stream of intelligent, industrious farmers into the United States to take advantage of the free and arable lands. Not a few from eastern and central Canada crossed the line to the south for the same purpose. With the exhaustion of the more easily acquired lands, the tide turned more northward, and while the movement has not yet attained, and probably never will reach, the flood-tide witnessed in the agricultural immigration into the United States, the same forces are at work, and the same results will be achieved.

In the days when the grain area of the United States filled up with people, wheat was fifty cents a bushel or less, and “dollar wheat” was the dream of the grain-farmer. The dream has come true, and this increase in value has given the movement strength enough to overcome serious climatic differences and remoteness from markets; or, in brief, it has equalized the line of greater resistance. In the last ten years perhaps 750,000 people from the United States have gone to Canada, most of them seeking homes. On the whole, this immigration has been of a very desirable class, and it is estimated that these people have taken with them to their new homes an average of about a thousand dollars in money or property for every man, woman, and child, or total assets of about $750,000,000. Many a prosperous farmer, with perhaps a hundred and forty acres of land in Iowa, Illinois, or other good farming States, has thought about his family, and realized that at his death his property would have to be sold in order that each might get his share. He has found that by selling his valuable but comparatively small farm at a good figure he would have enough to improve and stock at least six hundred and forty acres of the Canadian Northwest, thus giving him ample land at some time in the future to divide among his children and leave each one with a workable portion. Canada has welcomed these settlers, as well she might. They have willingly become Canadians and are good citizens. Their influence will in time add insensibly to the force at work for the economic unification of the North American continent, though in the meantime they are as good Canadians as immigrants in the United States are good Americans, even in the first generation.

There is possibly about $2,000,000,000 of British and other European capital invested in Canada, but it takes little active part in influencing the country politically or otherwise in the direction of its progress. As a rule, the English send out their money in hopes of larger earnings than would be had at home—and to escape the income tax; France, for the income received therefrom; both people investing in listed securities rather than industrial adventures. It is not quite the same with $350,000,000 of American money that has found its way into Canadian investment. Much of this money is engaged in enterprises based upon Canadian trade, protected by Canadian tariff, benefited by Canadian bounties, and competitive with American capital at home. The force of this influence, taken with antagonisms of similar character originating south of the Canadian boundary, and the active aid of certain high-tariff enthusiasts in the United States, enabled the anti-reciprocity party in Canada to score over those in favor of closer commercial union between the two countries. It might not be comforting to the pride of Canadians to know or to have it said just how far these influences went in deciding the political fate of the dominion at the moment, and it might detract from the quality of the self-gratification of the English to know how this so-called manifestation of Canadian loyalty was really brought about. It is equally true that those in the United States who worked so long and so ardently for greater freedom of trade with Canada, believing it would result in great good for their own country as well as for Canada, are not inclined to cheerfulness when they realize just how much of their defeat they owe to the antagonistic influence of their own fellow-countrymen, directors of American industries which have grown into perhaps too great power in the nation through the willingness on the part of the American consumer to contribute liberally, so that all branches of human endeavor might prosper together in the general advance of the nation. Just how far the reaction in favor of reciprocity has gone in both countries since the last Canadian election, it is impossible to say. It is reasonable to assume that none who voted in favor of it has changed his opinion, and it is a matter of public and private record that a goodly number of those who voted against it in Canada have changed their opinion since the smoke of battle cleared away and it has been possible to put a true value on the injudicious or untrue statements of politicians, be these of an allegedly humorous character or not. This question of the economic unification of North America is a living issue which will disappear from the national life of the two English-speaking countries only with a fulfilment of a commercial union virtually complete. When President Taft authorized his secretary of state to offer complete free trade to the Canadian Reciprocity Commissioners as a basis for negotiation, he was not suggesting the impossible; he was merely ahead of the times, for some day one of his successors in the White House will have the honor of carrying the suggestion into practical effect.

The period of great development in Canada began in the decade from 1891 to 1901, when the foreign trade of the country increased by about $170,000,000, or, in other words, doubled itself. In the following decade it increased by nearly $384,000,000, or nearly doubled itself again. A few figures show most strikingly how during the last twenty years the new Canada was begun and came into her own, for her foreign trade progressed as follows:

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1871

$74,173,618

$96,092,971

$170,266,589

1881

98,299,823

105,380,840

203,621,663

1891

98,417,296

119,967,638

218,384,934

1901

196,487,632

190,415,525

386,903,157

1911

297,196,365

472,247,540

769,443,905

In the last forty years Canada increased the export of the products of her mines from $3,700,000 to $43,000,000; fisheries from $4,000,000 to $16,000,000; forests from $23,000,000 to $46,000,000; animal products from $13,000,000 to $53,000,000; agricultural products from $10,000,000 to $90,000,000, and manufactures from $2,500,000 to $44,000,000. Her greatest gain in the export of any one item has been in wheat and wheat flour, for in 1871 the exports were valued at $3,560,000, while in 1911 the value reached about $60,000,000. The wheat production of the United States is about 620,000,000 bushels, valued at about $555,000,000. That of Canada is about 216,000,000 bushels, valued at about $140,000,000. The average yield an acre in Canada is more than twenty-one bushels to the acre, or more than seven bushels an acre greater than the yield to the south. In 1912, Canada had 32,500,000 acres planted in field crops, 10,000,000 of which were in wheat, and nearly 10,000,000 in oats.

For the last forty years the foreign trade of Canada has been distributed among the four principal nations as follows:

UNITED KINGDOM

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1873

$68,522,776

$38,743,848

$107,266,624

1883

52,052,465

47,145,217

99,197,682

1893

43,148,413

64,080,493

107,228,906

1903

58,896,901

131,202,321

190,099,222

1911

109,936,462

136,965,111

246,901,573

UNITED STATES

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1873

$47,735,678

$42,072,526

$89,808,204

1883

56,032,333

41,668,723

97,701,056

1893

58,221,976

43,923,010

102,144,986

1903

137,605,195

71,783,924

209,389,119

1911

284,934,739

119,396,801

404,331,540

GERMANY

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1873

$1,099,935

$76,553

$1,176,488

1883

1,809,154

133,697

1,942,851

1893

3,825,763

750,461

4,576,224

1903

8,175,604

1,819,223

9,994,827

1911

10,047,340

2,663,017

12,710,357

FRANCE

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1873

$2,023,288

$31,907

$2,055,195

1883

2,316,480

617,730

2,934,210

1893

2,832,117

264,047

3,096,164

1903

6,580,029

1,341,618

7,921,647

1911

11,563,773

2,782,092

14,345,865

The two great traders with Canada are the United States and Great Britain. More than ten years ago Canada gave to certain classes of imports from England a special reduction of duties amounting on an average to about 30 per cent. These special favors are doubtless responsible for a part of the large and sudden increase of imports from England in the last decade. What would have happened to British trade in Canada without these tariff concessions is not a cheerful subject for discussion among British manufacturers, for even with it the Canadian exports to England form the large part of such increase of trade, as has been noted. Trade between England and Canada has increased as a whole by about 140 per cent.; but while imports from England have risen in forty years from less than $70,000,000 to about $110,000,000, exports to England have risen from less than $40,000,000 to about $140,000,000. In the same forty years exports from the United States to Canada have increased from about $48,000,000 to about $285,000,000, while imports from Canada have gone from $42,000,000 to about $120,000,000, or a total gain of about 350 per cent. This has been accomplished without tariff concessions on either side, in fact in the face of considerable antagonism.

The reasons for American success in the sale of manufactured goods in Canada in competition with other nations favored, as in the case of England, with lower customs duties, are not entirely geographical. Not only are many of the largest Canadian industrial plants of American origin, or even branches of American institutions, but American capital is interested in the success of many others. In a report to his Government the British trade commissioner for Canada says: “The geographical advantage of our American rivals is fully realized, but the lesson pressed home is that they are more aggressive in trade methods, spend more money in selling their goods, are quicker to make any suggested change in patterns, smarter in business methods and in design of goods, and quicker in delivering.”

England’s trade with Canada is based upon the necessities of the mother country in the matter of food supply and raw materials; hence the increasing Canadian export of the products of the farm and forest. In supplying the needs of Canada, the British manufacturer meets in competition the best equipped of all American industries—those which deal in building supplies of all descriptions, machinery, and railway equipment. English trade in Canada will continue to increase, but any hope on the part of Europe to oust the United States from the lines chosen is doomed to disappointment. Even with free trade within the British Empire, the situation might not change materially, though it might lead to a greater investment of American industrial capital in Canada, a course of events that would in time militate even more strongly against British trade supremacy than does the present situation, for competition would then come from within instead of from without. The development of Canada is the only measure of the future of American trade in Canada in nearly every direction, and the only way in which Canada can share fully in this rising tide of industrial activity is to make a flank attack upon the “friendly enemy” by permitting a freer exchange of commodities than is now allowed, to which the United States stands already committed. This would mean an increase in Canadian production and population such as has never been recorded.

From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood

THE ST. LAWRENCE AS SEEN FROM THE CITADEL IN QUEBEC

It is not within the scope of this article to treat of other than the material side of Canadian development, and yet such treatment leaves much unsaid that has a direct bearing upon the present and future of this old-new country, which is rapidly coming into its own. Commercial and industrial development have been rapid, and yet there is another Canada including within itself all the activities of human thought. Literature, art, and science are making amazing strides, stimulated by the optimism that pervades the life of this Northern land. Long before preferential tariffs or reciprocity treaties with Canada were seriously discussed by foreign nations as being of real advantage to them, Canada had made her impress upon the life of the world through the genius of her sons and daughters. In fact, the bygone days of calm contentment with things as they were, acceptance of a position in the world’s affairs as that merely of a colony of a far-distant country, gave time for introspection and the cultivation of the graces of the mind. In those days were laid the foundations of Canada’s great institutions, her schools, her libraries, her universities, and her laboratories. Still further back in history were enacted the heroic deeds of her soldiers and her pioneers, which have yielded to the Canadian people a pride of race all their own, and made easy the adoption at a later date of the so-called new national policy to which the people now pin their faith.

There is no rivalry between the United States and Canada. The interests of the two peoples are identical; the needs of both countries can be filled one by the other. No thought of conquest originates south of the Canadian boundary, and no thought of surrender from within. The resources of Canada, developed to their utmost, are only supplementary to the needs of the people of the whole continent; and to the south lie the great masses of population which are increasing in density at such a rate as to invite the prediction that before many years have elapsed it will require the highest potential energy of both peoples to supply their actual wants. The extension of American trade in Canada cannot be checked by laws or restrictions; the expansion of American markets for Canadian produce will be measured only by the ability to supply.

A MESSAGE FROM ITALY

BY MARGARET WIDDEMER

THERE was a white bird lighted on the sill

That sang of Italy.

All day the great bands whirled along the mill

And pale girls languidly

Wound the long skeins that do not ever end,

And nothing saw or heard,

Only one heart flew back to sun and friend

And freedom with the bird.

Doves by the broken fountain in the square

Cooed at her small brown feet.

There was wide sky and love and laughter there,

And the soft wind was sweet;

The long days ran, like little children, free

In that blue, sunny air,

Life did not labor hushed and measuredly,

There was not gold or care.

The close heat pulsed, unsweetened by the sun,

And the blind walls again

Penned her to tasks unending, unbegun,

Monotony and pain;

But all that day her feet paced with gay will,

Her child-heart circled free.

There was a white dove lighted on the sill

That cooed of Italy.

Plates in tint, engraved for THE CENTURY by C. W. Chadwick and H. Davidson

DRAWN BY W. T. BENDA

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

THE IMPRACTICAL MAN

BY ELLIOTT FLOWER

Author of “Policeman Flynn,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY F. R. GRUGER

“I AM sorry to inform you,” said Shackelford, the lawyer, “that you have been to some trouble and expense to secure a bit of worthless paper. This—” and he held up the document he had been examining—“is about as valuable as a copy of a last week’s newspaper.”

It is possible that Shackelford really regretted the necessity of conveying this unpleasant information to Peter J. Connorton, Cyrus Talbot, and Samuel D. Peyton; but, if so, his looks belied him, for he smiled very much as if he found something gratifying in the situation.

Connorton was the first to recover from the shock.

“Then it’s a swindle!” he declared hotly. “We’ll get that fellow Hartley! He’s a crook! We’ll make him—”

“Oh, no,” interrupted Shackelford, quietly, “it’s no swindle. According to your own story, you prepared the paper yourself and paid him for his signature to it.”

“We paid him twenty-five thousand dollars for his patent,” asserted Connorton.

“But you didn’t get the patent,” returned Shackelford. “He has assigned to you, for a consideration of twenty-five thousand dollars, all his rights, title, and interest in something or other; but the assignment doesn’t clearly show what. There are a thousand things that it might be, but nothing that it definitely and positively is. Very likely he doesn’t know this, but very likely somebody will tell him. Anyhow, you’ve got to get clear and unquestioned title before you can do anything with the patent without danger of unpleasant consequences.”

Deeper gloom settled upon the faces of the three, and especially upon the face of Connorton, who was primarily responsible for their present predicament.

“What would you advise?” asked Connorton at last.

“Well,” returned the lawyer, after a moment of thought, “you’d better find him. As near as I can make out, he had no thought of tricking you.”

“Oh, no, I don’t believe he had,” confessed Connorton. “I spoke hastily when I charged that. He’s too impractical for anything of the sort.”

“Much too impractical, I should say,” added Talbot, and Peyton nodded approval.

“In that case,” pursued the lawyer, “you can still clinch the deal easily and quickly—if you get to him first. I see nothing particularly disturbing in the situation, except the possibility that somebody who is practical may get hold of him before you do, or that he may learn in some other way of the value of his invention. Do you know where he is?”

“No,” answered Connorton. “That’s the trouble.”

“Not so troublesome as it might be,” returned the lawyer. “He is not trying to hide, if we are correct in our surmise, and his eccentricities of dress and deportment would attract attention to him anywhere. I have a young man here in the office who will get track of him in no time, if you have nothing better to suggest.”

They had nothing better to suggest, so Myron Paulson was called in, given a description of Ira Hartley, together with such information as to his associates and haunts as it was possible to give, and sent in quest of news of him.

“Meanwhile,” observed the lawyer, “I’ll prepare something for his signature, when we find him, that will have no loopholes in it.”

IRA HARTLEY, as the lawyer had said, was not a hard man to trace. He was tall and slim, wore a flaring bow tie, a wide-brimmed slouch hat, clothes that hung loosely upon his spare frame, and smoked cigarettes in a long reed holder. Add to that some eccentricities of speech and manner, and it will be readily apparent that he was not likely to be forgotten by those he encountered.

Paulson learned in brief time that he had gone to Detroit. No one knew for what purpose, whether he intended to remain there or go elsewhere, or, in fact, anything about it, except the bare fact that he had left for Detroit. Certain of his acquaintances understood that it was in connection with some great and long-cherished plan that was suddenly made financially possible; but they had no idea of the nature of the plan.

Paulson, of course, would follow at once, and Connorton regretfully decided to go with him. Connorton, being large and slow, fond of ease and of good things to eat, disliked to have the routine of his life disturbed; but he blamed himself for their very unpleasant predicament, and, aside from his own financial interest in the affair, he was desirous to do everything possible to protect his associates and secure to them the promised profit. Besides, he knew Hartley, and Paulson did not; so it might easily happen that his presence would be helpful, if not absolutely necessary, when the inventor should be overtaken.

The lawyer prepared the necessary papers, as far as he could with the information at hand; but he was not altogether satisfied. The inventor alone could supply some minor points that he would like to incorporate in them; so he suggested that they bring Hartley back, if possible.

“If you can’t do that,” he instructed, “get his signature, properly witnessed and acknowledged, to the assignment of patent, and let it go at that. I could clinch it a little tighter if I could have a talk with him, but it isn’t really necessary.”

“Suppose something should happen to him before we get it?” suggested Connorton.

“You’d lose the patent,” returned the lawyer, calmly. “Title to that still rests in him, and it would naturally go to his heirs if anything should happen to him before it is legally transferred to you.”

“Guardian to a lost lunatic!” grumbled Connorton. “A nice job!”

Still grumbling, he left with Paulson for Detroit. He had no idea of acting in any other than an advisory capacity during the search, of course. He was on hand to take charge of the negotiations at the proper time; but until that time should arrive he purposed remaining in some convenient hotel while Paulson did the scouting. Fortunately, owing to the inventor’s striking personality, Paulson’s task was not difficult.

“Gone to Toronto,” was the report he made to Connorton, a few hours after their arrival in Detroit. “Stopped at the Cadillac, but left there yesterday.”

“Sure it was Hartley?” queried Connorton.

“No doubt about it,” replied Paulson. “Everybody remembers him, for he hired a cab, put the cabby inside, and did the driving himself—said he wanted to see something of the town.”

“That was Hartley, all right,” Connorton admitted, dislodging himself regretfully from the comfortable lobby chair he was occupying, “and I suppose we’ll have to hustle along after him. I don’t see why he has to be so infernally restless, though.”

Again, at Toronto, Connorton had reason to complain of Hartley’s restlessness. His name was on the register of the King Edward Hotel when they arrived there; but he had lingered no longer than in Detroit, and they were still a day behind him.

“Sure it was our Hartley?” asked Connorton.

“No doubt about it,” Paulson replied. “He showed up here with a dunnage bag instead of a trunk, and they took him for an immigrant and were going to throw him out.”

“Must be our man,” agreed Connorton. “That’s just the kind of fool thing he’d do.”

“Made some trouble at the bar,” added Paulson, “by insisting that they should put the seltzer and lemon-peel in his highball glass first and add the whisky afterward—said it improved the flavor to have a highball made that way.”

“That’s Hartley,” asserted Connorton, positively. “Where did he go from here?”

“North Bay.”

“Where’s that?”

“About two hundred and fifty miles due north.”

Connorton became suddenly perturbed, not to say excited. “Great Scott!” he exclaimed, “he’s heading for the wilderness!”

Connorton was sufficiently troubled now to forget temporarily his love of ease. He could imagine nothing that would take Hartley to that region except some crazy hunting or mining scheme, both of which had elements of danger. Wherefore they must follow quickly, no matter how unpleasant the outlook.

But Hartley was not at North Bay, and had not stopped there. That was easily settled, for it was not so large a place that a man of his personality could possibly escape observation.

“More uncertain than a flea!” grumbled Connorton. “Probably dropped off somewhere down the line.”

“Or went on up the line,” suggested Paulson. “Perhaps the ticket-man will know.”

The ticket-man did. They would have saved time if they had asked him in the first place instead of making their inquiries at the hotel.

“Sure I saw that sombrero-covered toothpick,” said the ticket-man. “He asked me if this was the open season for Indians and moose.”

“That’s Hartley,” sighed Connorton. “He’s as likely to shoot one as the other. What did he do then?”

“Bought a mackinaw that would dazzle your eyes and a ticket to Temagami and went on with the train—said the Indians were too tame for real sport here. I couldn’t see what he wanted of a mackinaw in summer, but he said he liked the color scheme.”

“What’s Temagami?” asked Connorton.

“Temagami Forest Reserve.”

“I knew it,” groaned Connorton. “Headed for the wilderness!”

IRA HARTLEY lay stretched in front of a camp-fire on the shore of Lake Wausauksinagami. It had been necessary to cover two portages and three lakes to reach this spot; but it certainly gave him the seclusion that he sought. No human habitation marred the shore-line of the lake, although another camp-fire, seen faintly between two of the many islands, showed that he was not in sole possession. The other camp, however, was several miles away, so he was quite alone, except for Joe Lightfoot, his Indian guide; and supreme content was reflected in face and pose.

True, he had not caught many fish, owing to his own inexpertness with rod and line rather than to any lack of fish to be caught; but this was a matter of indifference to him. He had promised himself this outing long before. He had no particular reason for wanting it, except that he had heard so much of the joys of life in the open that he had resolved to try it as soon as opportunity offered; but that was enough for one of his whimsically impulsive nature, and an increasing desire to try it had influenced him to some extent in closing with Connorton in the matter of his invention. He liked to be alone; and surely one could ask for nothing better in such circumstances than an Indian guide who spoke tersely when he spoke at all.

The Indian, having cleaned up after supper, squatted with his pipe a little distance from the fire. Back of him was the shelter-tent under which Hartley slept, and back of that lay the forest. On the other side of the fire, the lake shimmered in the moonlight and the water rippled soothingly on the shore. So restfully beautiful was the scene that it affected the spirits of both white man and red, and they smoked in silence for some time.

“Joe,” remarked Hartley at last, “this fosters a tranquillity that makes me think I’d like to live here all the time. I’ve never seen or felt anything just like it.”

A part of this comment was beyond Joe, but he caught the main idea. “Spoil quick,” he suggested.

“Yes, that’s true, too,” admitted Hartley. “The white man certainly does spoil nature wherever he settles. I suppose I’d build a cabin first, which wouldn’t be so bad; then I’d think I had to have a bungalow, which would be crowding things a little; next I’d want a two-story house and a steam-launch, and after that I’d put in a telephone and move back to the city. Yes, you’re right, Joe: no white man could settle here without spoiling it. But it just suits my humor now. If anybody comes to disturb us, Joe, do me the favor of throwing him into the lake.”

Joe, being a man of few words, merely grinned, but a moment later he held up his hand for silence.

“Canoe coming,” he announced.

“Nonsense!” returned Hartley, after vainly trying to catch some sound other than that of the rippling water and the rustling leaves.

“Canoe coming,” repeated Joe, positively.

A few minutes later even Hartley’s ears caught the swish of a paddle; and far out on the lake a black spot could be seen in the silvery path of the moonlight on the water.

“You’re right, Joe, as usual,” he conceded; “but,” he added whimsically, “don’t forget your duty—into the water he goes! I will not be disturbed!”

In brief time a canoe, containing three men and a larger stock of supplies than Connorton had thought it possible to get into so small a space, shot plainly into view. Connorton himself, anxious and uncomfortable, occupied a position on some boxes and bags amidships; Paulson was in the bow, and the guide, Jim Redfeather, was in the stern.

A shelving rock, which ended abruptly in deep water a few feet from shore, offered the best landing-place for a heavily laden canoe, and the Indian brought it alongside that point.

Hartley sauntered wearily down to meet his unexpected and unwelcome guests.

“My goodness, Hartley!” exclaimed Connorton, the moment he saw the inventor, “I’m glad we’ve found you at last! We’ve had a devil of a time doing it.”

“If it was so difficult,” murmured Hartley, “why didn’t you give it up?”

“Too important,” replied Connorton. “Help me out, and I’ll tell you about it. I’m pretty near done up.”

With some difficulty, the large man was transferred from the canoe to the rock, and, to one who knew him in the city, he was certainly an extraordinary spectacle. He was dirty, disheveled, and badly sunburned, having acquired dirt on the portages and blisters on the water. Moreover, the khaki suit that he wore was too small, the derby hat seemed sadly out of place, and his position in the canoe had so cramped him that he walked like a cripple.

“Had to sleep under the stars last night,” he complained, after introducing Paulson. “Thought we’d locate you the first day, but you’d gone farther than we expected. Never had such an experience! But that fire looks good to me,” he added. “Let’s get next to it and come down to business.”

Hartley laid a detaining hand on his arm. “I’m not in the humor for business to-night,” he objected. “Let us look out over the moonlit lake—”

“Damn the lake!” exploded Connorton. “I’ve had enough of it. Let’s get down to business. It will take but a few minutes to explain—”

“To-morrow,” insisted Hartley. “I may be in the humor for business to-morrow; but to-night I must insist—”

Now, whether Joe had taken Hartley’s whimsical instructions to “throw him into the lake” seriously or not never will be known, for the Indian is not loquacious; but it is a fact that, assisting in unloading the canoe, he bumped into Connorton at this moment, and Connorton, being close to the outer edge of the shelving rock, went backward into the water with a loud splash.

He came up spluttering and floundering like an animated bag of meal, and Hartley and Paulson quickly pulled him back on the rock. Then they rushed him to the fire.

“Got a change of clothing, Mr. Connorton?” asked Hartley, solicitously.

“Change of clothing!” sputtered Connorton. “Change of clothing here! Why don’t you ask me if I’ve got a dress suit?”

“Too bad!” commented Hartley. “I haven’t anything extra either, and it wouldn’t fit you if I had. But you’ll be all right in a blanket, I guess. Just get those wet clothes off now.”

Connorton objected. His undraped figure was something to cause laughter rather than command respect, and he had no desire to make any more of a spectacle of himself than he was already. But Hartley was insistent, Paulson urged, and the combination of wet clothing and chill night air made him shiver. So he presently found himself posing under protest as a large and rather flabby cherub.

It was not dignified. Even when Hartley draped a blanket over him, it was not dignified. He was quite sure the apparently stolid Indians were chuckling inwardly, and he distinctly heard Joe refer to him as Big Splash. If he had only known it, Joe had thus christened him and always thereafter thus referred to him. He did not know it, but, even so, it would have delighted his soul to take an ax to Joe. Never before had he had so murderous an impulse.

There could now be no serious discussion of business before morning, of course. A large, fleshy man, attired in nothing but a blanket, is not exactly in a situation to talk business to advantage. He is too much of a joke. Hartley frankly treated him as a joke, although Paulson was respectful and sympathetic.

“I am sure,” said Hartley, “that you will feel better to-morrow for your bath to-night. Just stick your little pink tootsies up to the fire—”

“Shut up!” exploded Connorton.

“Oh, that’s no way to talk to your host,” complained Hartley. “It has a tendency to make a man peevish; and you don’t want me to be peevish, do you?”

Connorton did not; and he realized that it would be the part of wisdom to hold his temper in check. “I beg your pardon, Hartley,” he said. “It’s not your fault, of course, but I’ve endured such unspeakable horrors during the last few days that my nerves are all on edge.”

“That’s better,” commended Hartley. “You shall have a nice highball for that; and then we’ll tuck you in your little bed and sing you to sleep.”

BIG SPLASH, as Joe called him, was awakened in the morning by the sound of a big splash, and he shuddered. It made him think of the great splash of the night before. Looking out from under the canvas, however, he discovered that this splash was made by Hartley, who was enjoying an early swim.

Connorton’s clothes, still damp, hung from the branch of a tree near at hand, but he did not wait to put them on. He recalled the fact that he had a very deep and special interest in the life of Hartley, and Hartley was recklessly splashing about beyond the end of the shelving rock, where the water was deep. Wherefore, wrapping his blanket about him, Connorton hurried down to the rock and pleaded with the inventor to come out.

“What for?” asked Hartley.

“You might drown,” replied Connorton. “I can’t swim, so I couldn’t help you.”

“Bosh!” returned Hartley. “This is fine! Better come in yourself and get freshened up for the day.”

But Connorton would not, and neither would he abandon his station on the rock, even to dress, until Hartley came out. He could at least summon the guides to the rescue if the foolhardy man should be in danger. So he stood there, looking more like a distressed Indian squaw than a white man, until Hartley left the water.

“He needs me,” reflected Hartley; “he needs me very, very much! Else why this anxiety for my safety? And,” he added whimsically, “I can see much sport ahead, whatever his purpose may be.”

Connorton did not lose much time in throwing light—at least some light—upon this purpose.

“I want you to go back with me at once—to-day,” he said, when they were at breakfast.

“Oh, you want me to go back with you,” repeated Hartley. “Why?”

“Well, there’s a little something wrong with the assignment of patent,” explained Connorton, “and I want to get it fixed up.”

“Couldn’t that wait until I returned?” asked Hartley.

“Why, yes, it could,” admitted Connorton, “but there was a risk. If anything happened to you, you know, it might be serious.”

“Yes,” agreed Hartley, “it would be serious.”

“To us, I mean,” explained Connorton.

“Oh, to you!” commented Hartley. “Why not to me?”

“Why, it would naturally be serious to you, of course,” returned Connorton; “but that’s your own lookout.”

“True, quite true,” rejoined Hartley. “But this is business, you know,” he added, “and I never discuss business in the morning. It makes me nervous.”

“Oh, thunder!” expostulated Connorton.

“Really quite nervous, I assure you,” insisted Hartley. “I’m hardly responsible for what I do when I’m annoyed that way.”

“Now, look here,” urged Connorton in desperation, “I want to go back now—just as soon as we can get ready—and I’ll give you five hundred to go with me.”

“But this is morning,” objected Hartley, “and I never discuss business in the morning.”

“A thousand,” added Connorton.

“Makes me nervous—quite irresponsible,” murmured Hartley, rising.

Very deliberately he walked down to the shelving rock, across it, and stepped, clothes and all, into ten feet of water.

“Help! Help!” screamed Connorton, rushing to the rock. “Save him!”

The two guides and Paulson came down and tried to pull the inventor out, but he objected.

“Take him away!” he gurgled, as his head bobbed up out of the water and almost immediately disappeared again.

“Save him! Save him!” cried Connorton, frantically jumping up and down on the rock.

“Big Splash make crazy man!” commented Joe.

“Better this than him!” gurgled Hartley, again coming up. “Take him away!”

Joe unemotionally prodded Connorton in the stomach, whereupon that gentleman grunted, doubled over, and backed away. Joe prodded him again and again, thus driving him back to the tent. Then Hartley permitted himself to be pulled out of the water; but it was some time before he would let Connorton come near him.

“You see what you’ve done!” he said reproachfully, when he finally did consent to resume intercourse with his visitor. “I warned you, too. Now we can’t talk business before to-morrow.”

“Oh, come!” expostulated Connorton.

“Not until to-morrow,” insisted Hartley. “You’ve got me all upset for to-day.”

Connorton hesitated; but he was desperate now, so at last he drew from his pocket the assignment of patent, somewhat blurred by contact with the water. Even if the notarial seal were lacking, it would make things a little safer if he could get that signed.

“Just put your name to that,” he urged, “and I won’t say another word about business until to-morrow.”

Hartley’s only reply was to start again for the lake.

“Come back! Come back!” cried Connorton. “I won’t mention business again to-day.”

Hartley returned and stretched himself out in the sun to let his clothes dry.

“We’ll stay in camp to-day?” suggested Connorton, hopefully.

“Wouldn’t do at all!” replied Hartley. “We must fish, if only as an excuse for coming.”

Pursuant to this idea, Hartley presently set out with Joe. Connorton, after a little hesitation, followed with the other guide, leaving Paulson in camp. Connorton felt that he could not rest easy unless he had this reckless man directly under his observation all the time; and the reckless man was not unmindful of this espionage.

“Joe,” said the reckless man, when he saw that Connorton was following, “we won’t do much fishing to-day, but we’ll have some sport, just the same. The fish are here all the time, but Connorton isn’t. And Connorton, Joe, is afraid something is going to happen to me. That being the case, let us enjoy ourselves! Let us lead him afar on land and sea, and tramp him over portages, and make him miss his dinner, and give him a real good time generally. Of course, Joe, it is downright cruel to make a man like Connorton miss a meal, but let us be downright cruel! Proceed, Joe!”

Joe proceeded, and that he acted up to his instructions was proved by the many and bitter things that Connorton said about “that crazy inventor” in the course of the day—the hardest day of his life, he afterward asserted.

But Hartley was not satisfied. “I think, Joe,” he complained, as they were returning to camp in the late afternoon, “that this is beginning to pall a little on Big Splash. Too much work and too little excitement. He needs a thrill, Joe, to revive his interest in the proceedings. Let us give him the thrill. Let us alarm him. Let us make him think that he is going to lose little Willie, the human prize! I have several thrills in mind, Joe, but let us begin mildly. Will you oblige me by rocking the boat, so to speak. Not too much, you know, for I have no wish to go into the drink again, and that’s what would probably happen if I tried to do it myself.”

Joe replied with a grunt, as usual; but presently the canoe began to take a most erratic course and to betray alarming symptoms of crankiness. The Indian seemed to be doing his utmost to steady it, and several times prevented an upset by throwing his weight in just the right direction; but the more he strove the worse it rocked.

Connorton was frantic. He lost his head completely as he saw the apparent danger of Hartley, and screamed and shouted and swore as his own guide paddled up, to be on hand in case they capsized.

“Make him go splash once more?” suggested Joe, as the other canoe came near.

“No,” returned Hartley, magnanimously. “He has had his bath, and we will not be so cruel as to insist upon another just now.”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” screamed Connorton. He had already suffered so much that he felt that he could watch Hartley drown with actual joy; but he could not lose half a million dollars in that spirit.

“Yes, stop it, Joe,” instructed Hartley. “It is time to give him another diversion. Don’t you suppose we could get lost, Joe? He is a rather stout person, and he impresses me as a man who needs exercise. I think he rides in an automobile too much when at home. A nice, long walk through the forest, where it is not too easy going, would do him a world of good; and it might take his mind off business matters if we happened to get lost. Try it, Joe. He’ll follow, for he’s fearful that something may happen to little Willie.”

The Indian made for a portage, and, arriving there, left the canoe on the shore and plunged into the forest.

Connorton and his guide followed, of course. Connorton had great difficulty in following, for a stout man with flabby muscles is at a disadvantage in the forest; but he followed. A man will follow half a million dollars a long, long way and over all sorts of obstructions. And there was plenty to tax temper, muscle, and wind. Joe saw to that. Joe was glad to see to it; he would willingly have seen to it without pay, and might even have paid for the privilege of seeing to it, if that were necessary.

“Better get lost now, Joe,” Hartley finally suggested.

Joe immediately began to show signs of bewilderment. He stopped and looked about him anxiously. He started in one direction, retraced his steps, and tried another. He came back a second time and made another new start.

Connorton’s guide, Jim, interpreted this correctly without half trying. He knew that he was not lost, that he could not possibly be lost in that locality, but that he was going through all the motions of being lost. There was, therefore, some reason for it. Jim may or may not have guessed the reason, but he played up to Joe’s lead.

“What’s the matter?” asked Connorton, anxiously, as he noticed these strange actions.

“Him lost,” replied Jim.

“Lost!” exclaimed Connorton. “A guide lost! Well, that’s a good joke! How about you?”

“Me lost too,” replied the Indian, imperturbably. “Sit down and let Joe find way out.” And he seated himself placidly on a log.

“You lost, too!” cried Connorton in consternation. “Good Lord! Lost in an impenetrable forest, with two fool Indians and a crazy man! Oh, if I ever get out of here alive there isn’t money enough in the world to bring me back! Here!” he thundered at the placid Jim, “what you loafing there for? Get up and help Joe find a way out! Hustle, too! I’ll bet we starve to death,” he added gloomily to himself. “I’m starving already.”

Late that evening two stolid Indian guides and two very weary white men got back to the camp, where Paulson was anxiously waiting for them. One of the white men, although weary, seemed to be quite happy, even going so far as to release an occasional chuckle. The other was exhausted almost to the point of collapse, and nothing but groans were heard from him.

“Do you know, Connorton,” remarked the first white man, as they left their respective canoes and walked slowly toward the camp-fire, “I don’t believe you think any more of money than I do of my life—really, I don’t.”

Connorton had not the spirit to reply.

SUPPER, although lacking the viands that would have appealed to Connorton in more favorable circumstances, tasted unusually good to him that evening; and he was disposed to give thanks that he was still alive rather than complain of what he had suffered. But he had acquired a great fear of Hartley’s impulsive vagaries.

“May I speak briefly of business?” he asked, as they sat by the fire.

“To-morrow,” returned Hartley.

“If you would permit me,” urged Connorton, “I think I could make the matter clear to you in a very few minutes.”

“It is really quite important, Mr. Hartley,” put in Paulson, “and I would suggest that you let Mr. Connorton explain.”

The inventor frowned, and looked down at the shelving rock.

“No, no,” expostulated Connorton, hastily; “don’t do that again, Hartley! Keep away from the lake! I won’t say a word without your permission.”

“Oh, very well,” agreed Hartley. “I’ve been pretty badly upset to-day. You have annoyed me persistently—ruffled my artistic temperament. Indeed, I have been strongly tempted, Mr. Connorton, to let Joe take you out and drown you, as he wished to do. Joe doesn’t like to be disturbed any more than I do; and it is so easy for a man to be accidentally drowned up here, especially a man who can’t swim.”

Connorton’s eyes reflected a sudden great fear, and his face became white.

“However,” pursued Hartley, calmly, “you don’t know any better, so I shall try to forgive you. I shall even permit you to speak briefly—very briefly—of business, for we might as well get that out of the way, I suppose. But don’t let Joe hear you.”

Connorton assured himself that Joe was beyond earshot, and then produced the assignment of patent. “It’s a trifle,” he explained, “a mere formality.”

“Ah, yes,” returned Hartley; “you followed me into the wilderness for a trifle.”